Sunday, August 26, 2007

Pressure

One of the side effects of being a regular blogger, living amongst a group of people who read but don't blog themselves or comment in great numbers, is hearing, 'I can't wait to read your blog tomorrow' after a corporate event.

It makes me realise what a fine line there is between being a chronicler of interesting observations and a gossip columnist.

Still there was plenty of material for thought and discussion yesterday at a wedding which brought together Somerset and California. As I said at the beginning of the service, the fact that some people were paying homage to beach culture by wearing thongs under their pants, needed translation. It's flip-flops and trousers round here. England and the US - two nations divided by a common language, as they say.

By the way should a person with two left feet wear flip-flips or flop-flops?

Anyway two thoughts:

1. Had a great 'blink' moment with one of the groomsmen. He said, 'Steve I'd like to talk to you more some time. I think you may be crazy but I'm prepared to risk it.' I love that meeting of souls you get when someone you bump into accelerates straight through all the preliminaries into potential life-long friend. That happened a few times yesterday which was special.

2. The Lakewood Conference Centre at Blagdon has the best view I've ever enjoyed when needing something to look at during the speeches. On our table my guess of 34 minutes was closest but still fell short. The view is a panorama from Cardiff Bay to the Mendips. Occasional movement provided by take-offs and landings at Bristol Airport and then early evening hot-air balloonists made it a bit like a giant screen-saver. Click on the link and the home page has about half the view.

3. Answering the question, 'How are you doing?' about ten times I realised I'm never quite answering the same to each person. In fact the process of answering the question is a helpful way to work out the answer and I'm grateful to those who asked and then listened to my bumblings. I think one conclusion is that I've met more engineers than philosophers, more craftspeople than artists and more do-ers than be-ers in the last ten months. I'm not really sure what that means and it certainly isn't a problem but perhaps there is a Nailsea artisan community hiding somewhere and I need to find it.

4. I seem to have stopped being any good at counting to two.

2 comments:

RuthJ said...

flip-flips. With two right feet he'd wear flop-flops. That's 'cos you march 'left, right'. Unless you want to make a point of being different!

Martin said...

Your inability to count means you are finally a vicar! This skill can be used to deliver a 3 point sermon in 26 points without realising it ;-)