Well, just 4 days left of 2014 – seems like a reasonable point at which to have a look back over the year, and in particular how I did against my “hit list” which I posted way back in January.
Pocket Money – YES. System worked well.
Climbing – Not so good. Only 6 climbs, but I did lead a 6a clean in March.
Photography – Better than I thought, as I posted 146 photos (and counting, I guess), and did at least one most weeks. It’s really tailed off since September, when I started training. Only 33 photos since the start of September.
Cinema – I did go and see Catching Fire, which was fab, and I wanted to see Mockingjay pt 1 but missed it. We did get Netflix this year though, so I have been sneaking in the odd film via that medium.
Blogging – yes, well. The main casuality of this year. A paltry 9 posts (10, including this one). It might reach 12 by year end.
Roast app, TweetRate – neither.
Hospitality – not really any better, although we have had more people to stay this year.
40th – came and went really. I did have plans to get singing lessons, but all the stuff with my Mum meant I had to shelve this, and then didn’t have time before I started training.
My “rocks” are in much better shape, and it’s a tick across the board for them.
There have been some positive things too, which weren’t on my hit list, but might have been:
Being recommended for ordination training.
Starting ordination training.
Studying theology.
Some very cool baking – fire engine cake and meringue mushrooms in particular.
Wow – life has got busy since I started my ordination training in September!
The Yorkshire Ministry Course is really good – we’ve settled into a rhythm now, of Wednesdays and weekends, working our way through the New Testament and elements of Ministry and Mission. My fellow ordinands are awesome, and there are one or two in particular who are fantastic to be walking alongside, to help and be helped by.
What is particularly noticeable is that an awful lot of “normal life” has got squeezed out. I’m hugely enjoying the reading, writing, thinking, reflecting… but I also used to quite enjoy watching TV, reading for pleasure, taking photos, and blogging!
My personal tutor asked me what my amibition/target was for the first year of my training, and I must confess I haven’t really thought about this. My aim for the first term was, more or less, “survive” (or “pass”, if you prefer) – which seems to have happened. But I can recognise that the time has come to perhaps lift my head a bit, and start looking beyond the next essay deadline.
One of the peculiarities of the course is the diversity of pathways – of the c. 30 people in the first year, only two others are doing the same thing as me (the same modules, at the same time, and the same level, for the same duration). I barely understand the pathway I am on, and have given up trying to understand anyone else’s. It’s a lesson in patience, submission, and trust – we are told what we need to know by the time we need to know it, and that has to be enough.
I will blog more thoughts and little gems I’ve picked up another time, but I did at least want to write something (for the first time since June!!)
After being inspired by a request from Alex Cann (‘im off Stray FM) to suggest colourful songs for a playlist for the St Michael’s hospice Colour Rush on the 20th June, I’ve got all excited and decided to blog it!
Off the top of my head, we have a collection of singles:
“Fergus Sings the Blues”
“Black or White”
“Since You’ve been gone” (by Rainbow)
“Green Door”
“Red Red Wine”
“Itsy Bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini”
“The Race” (by Yello)
“Blue Suede Shoes”
“Summertime Blues”
“Blue Velvet”
“Black velvet”
“Pink Sunshine” (by Fuzzbox. Maybe a little obscure, but a fab track)
“Yellow submarine”
“Little Red Corvette”
“Raspberry Beret”
“Purple Rain”
“Purple Haze”
“Blue [da boo dee]”
“Blueberry Hill”
“Gold”
“Brown eyed girl”
“Brown girl in the ring”
“Painter Man”
“Golden Brown”
“True Blue” (knew there’d be one by Madge)
“Hazy shade of winter”
“Pink Cadillac”
“True colours”
“Warpaint” (Brook Bros)
“Blue Monday”> (New Order)
“White Lines (don’t do it)”
“Matchstick men” (just ‘cos they get painted!)
“Mr Blue Sky”
Some of these led me one to think about colourful artists – you could have anything by, Blue, Pink, Deacon Blue, Colour me bad, Hue and Cry, Red Hot Cilli Peppers, Black Lace, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Blue Pearl (Naked in the Rain!), Bluebells, Blues Brothers, Bobby Brown, James Brown, Sam Brown, Nenah Cherry (perhaps), Green Day, Simply Red,
I’m afraid I then decided to dig a little deeper – what about No. 1s? (some already mentioned above)
“She wears red feathers”, Guy Mitchell – 1953
“Moulin Rouge”, Mantovani – 1953
“Cherry pink and apple blossom white”, Perez Prado – 1955
“Rose Marie”, Slim Whitman – 1955
“Singing the Blues”, various (!) – 1956
“Blue Moon”, Marcels – 1961
“Lovesick Blues”, Frank Ilfield – 1962
“Little Red Rooster”, the Stones – 1964
“Paint it black”, and again – 1965
“Yellow Submarine”, Beatles – 1966
“Green green grass of home”, Tom Jones – 1966
“Silence is golden”, Tremeloes – 1967
“Whiter shade of pale”, Procol Harem – 1967
“Lily the pink”, Scaffold – 1968 and 69
“Yellow River”, Christie – 1970
“Band of gold”, Freda Payne – 1970
“Tie a yellow ribbon…”, Dawn et al- 1973
“Silver lady”, David Soul – 1977
“Green door”, Shakey! – 1980
“Red red wine”, UB40 – 1983
“Karma chameleon”, Boy George – 1983
“99 Red Ballons”, Nena – 1984
“Lady in Red”, Chris de Burgh – 1986
“True Blue” , Madonna- 1986
“itsy bitsy”, Bombalurina – 1990
“Any dream will do”, Jase – 1991 (honorary mention cos of the whole coat thing)
“Black or White”, Michael Jackson – 1991
“Come on you reds”, Man U FC(!) – 1994
“Men in black”, Will Smith, 1997
“Blue (da ba dee)”, Eiffel 64 – 1999
“Black coffee”, All Saints – 2000
“Five colours in her hair”, McFly – 2004
“The Rose”, Westlife – 2006
“Ruby”, Kaiser Chiefs – 2007
“Green Light”, Roll Deep – 2010
“Spectrum (say my name)”, Florence and the machine – 2012
And finally an honorary mention to some ska, and couple of classics:
This morning I said goodbye to my Mum. After 2 years of fighting against a failing body, she has finally gone home. You have probably realised that my last post was about her, but it seemed right to keep that one anonymous.
She didn’t have an easy ride in life, and more often than not was her own worst enemy. But being around her was always an adventure, and I have many many happy memories of my childhood. It’s fitting at one level that she passed away in Norfolk – so much happiness, misadventure, drama, and joy has taken place there – I can honestly say that I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood than every Easter and summer there.
My mum taught the importance of respect and a joyful approach to life. Of the importance of people, and how so many people need a touch of love. I owe her so much, she bought me up right.
She had a major stroke a couple of years ago, which robbed her of her mobility and speech, although she recovered a degree of both. She never got truly well though, and over the last 6-12 months has been steadily fading. I had the privilege of being by her side through the night last night, and commending her soul to Jesus. One of my sisters was holding her hand as she finally went home to Him this morning.
I had my first visit to an intensive care ward over the Easter weekend, visiting someone who was in there.
I was struck by how serene it is, and – obviously I guess – high tech. Each bed is surrounded by machinery – syringe drivers, drip stands, ventilators, and banks of monitors showing vital signs, etc. Despite this, it is all very quite and peaceful. The alarms on the machine are fairly subtle beeps, and the whole feel of the place was very open and calm. Nobody rushed around – the nurses going from around and about were walking. Even when someone did need attention it was all done in a calm and measured fashion.
I guess it’s partly that in intensive care, the machines are doing most of the work and everything is tightly controlled. The person who I was visiting was in an induced coma, with their breathing being done by a machine, and their heart rate and blood pressure controlled by drugs. Depsite all the tubes and wires, and the fact they were unconscious, there was a diginity and respect about it all, somehow. It was almost pleasant, bizarrely, to sit there for an hour or two, at their bedside, with the gentle bustle going on around us.
I have no doubt that there are moments of high drama and elevated activity, and of course heartache and death. But while I was in there, it either didn’t happen, or happened sufficiently discretely that I didn’t notice it.
It was also interesting to observe how different people deal with and responded to the situation. I personally felt drawn to be introspective, while others tried to externalise it. It is a bit like there was an emptiness, and you either choose to stare down it, or tried to fill it.
I guess as a part of my ministry I can expect a few more visits to intensive care (although hopefully not as a close relative), and at the moment it’s looking like the person I was visiting is at least heading towards the edge of the woods, if not out of them yet.
My new phone does instagram really nicely, and I’m finding myself taking more and more photos from within instagram.
In fact, most of this month’s “365” photos have been on my cameraphone. It’s actually quite nice to be removed from the technical quality constraints. My phone is never going to match the quality of my SLR, by any metric, so the attention is firmly forced onto subject and composition.
My 365s still tend to be the aspect ratio out of the phone, where instagram is square, but if this starts bothering me enough I’ll start uploading the square/processed crops.
One thing that is nice about the workflow is that my phone saves the pictures in the same date format as I use anyway, plus it gets uploaded to Dropbox, and hence pops into my desktop, for upload to Gallery.
My Instagram user name is eutonyjames if you want to give me a follow. Expect many more of this year’s photos to be from my phone!
Well, the exiting news from the household is that I have been recommended for ordination training in the Church of England!
I have felt that God was calling me to ordained ministry for many years. It has been a long and, at times, quite difficult journey. The process of discernment is long and thorough, and deeply searching. Those who were with me 8 years ago will know that this is not the first time that I have been an ordinand (i.e. someone preparing for ordination), but for various reasons we had with withdraw from the process last time.
If I’m honest, I think much of the Church of England is not in a great state. As has been said before, we generally put ecclesiology before missiology – or in other words think “The God of the Church has a Mission”, rather than “The God of Mission has a Church”. To my mind, the role of the church (any church) is to advance the Kingdom of Heaven, and as soon as buildings, committees, or structures start getting in the way of this, we need to take this very seriously. But I am also very excited about the other candidates who were at the same Panel – almost universally I came away thinking “Wow, you’d make a great minister.”
One of the interesting and exciting elements this time is that I will be staying on in my “day job” while I train and minister, at least at first. This gives an unique opportunity to work out theology and ministry in the context of a 9-5.
I’d also like to that this opportunity to say that I firmly believe that God has a specific calling on each of us who follow him, and the call to the cloth is no more or less a vocation than His other callings. It is, I conceed, a bit more public than most!
An exciting road lies ahead – the next 3 years (pre-ordination training) seem fairly clear, but after that.. Well, God knows!
As has been my wont in recent times, I like to list a list of ambitions for the coming year. I’m initially focussing on maintaining rather than improving this year!
So, this year, my ambitions are:
Devise a pocket money system.
Go climbing at least 8 times, and either manage another 6b+ top rope, or advance to 6a+ leading
Continue photography – post at least 100 photos across the year, no less than one a week, no more than one a day, including some on my photography hit list.
Go to the cinema at least once in my own right.
See “Catching Fire”
Continue blogging – at least 20 posts in 2014.
Write a JavaScript “Roast App”, where you put it in the target time and joint weight, and it will tell you what to do when.
Fix my TweetRate calculator to work with v1.1
Improve our hospitality, specifically having people round for meals more.
