Mustard Seed Shavings - the book



Click on the book to pre-order from Bible Reading Fellowship



Due to be published on March 18th.

Soundtracks

There's a line in one of our old Christmas news letters that goes:

Mummy is the dog being sick again?
No Jon, that's Daddy's new record.

So I guess I'm the last one to talk about the soundtrack of my life but this is about the music of my house. 'Your house makes funny noises' said a guest at today's Quiet Day.

Indeed it does. I noticed it when I moved in four and a bit years back but now it's just normal. The expansion and contraction of the various joints in the frame of the house as temperature changes. The whoosh of the heating system. The normal working noises of a fridge with a personality defect. The feet of birds on the conservatory roof, trying to get traction.

We all live in noise environments which are, to us, reassuring. Holiday cottages are often hard to sleep in because the background noise is unfamiliar. As soon as we recognise the soundtrack - that click was because the heating was meant to come on then - we feel comfortable.

Changing the noise makes our lives rattle.

I use music like a dog marks its territory. I like it to soak into the walls. But when the sound system goes to silent I find the cracking of my cooling bricks and mortar a comfort. The reassuring melody of normality which a quiet day reveals more clearly than others.

Have you read?

I am old enough, just about, to remember the days when, if you began a sentence with 'Have you read' (Or indeed 'Have you heard' or 'Have you seen') the answer would be positive more often than not. There was a smaller pool of popular culture in which we all fished.

By the 1990s it seemed that you could go round the dinner table and no two people had over-lapping taste to discuss.

There are exceptions. One of my sons sees one or two new films a week so if I have seen something I know I can talk about it with him. Others know that I will have an opinion on an alarming selection of contemporary music apart from squeaky warbly bing bong, or opera as I think it is known colloquially.

So what a joy it was today to find a clergy colleague with whom I am reading, listing his authors read for pleasure and finding some overlap. Philip Roth, Jonathan Raban, Douglas Coupland; we both love them. Today we got to grips with Tom Wright's Virtue Reborn - excellent hour. More often than not, I love my job.

A Kick in the Knee

In her own way Mrs M decided to make my earlier post about pain in the night a self-fulfilling prophecy. Last night she had a back spasm and kicked me in the bad knee. You can't begin to imagine the contortions necessary to get from her side of the bed to kick me on the further-away knee.

Still (which we weren't) I commend the dance we then carried out as one partner back-stretched and the other knee massaged both screaming the while. It needs a name I feel. You may laugh now.

Church on the Move?

I have published on Trendleblog details of the idea, announced this morning, that Trendlewood Church might change meeting place. Find it here.

Brief Medical Update

Well ladies, gentlemen and those at that awkward in-between stage, I am back at my desk after my recuperation. I sneaked in a quick church meeting to get the hang of it again last Wednesday. Yesterday was a duty day although sorting out the @htnailsea emails took care of most of the morning after an early staff meeting and then it was (cue atmospheric doom music) Deanery Chapter.

I still have a fair few emails to go so sorry if you're waiting.

Today is Cafe Create. Having fallen off the mountain, I appear to have avoided the nursery slopes and will be retraining whilst dangling from a precarious rope. Cafe Create normally involves a lot of physical work so if you can drop by for an hour or two at 4-6pm to shift and carry that would be well groovy. Tonight we will have poetry, story-telling and live music. Be there.

I have remastered driving. Emergency stops are not accompanied by screams.

My knee is doing well and the exercise regime seems to be working. By and large I have not been in pain except for something I do in bed when I'm asleep which is agony but by the time I have got down off the ceiling I have lost track of what I just did to hurt so. I'd blame Mrs Mustard but this morning she had already got up when it happened. If she was standing over me with a hammer saying 'that's for the last 37 years you bastard' it would at least be an explanation. Stitches come out on Monday.

I can climb stairs almost properly and have walked a mile. Not bad for eight days after invasive surgery under general anaesthetic. It will be a while before I know the operation has been a complete success but optimism would not be out of place at this stage.

Changing Things

Why is it OK for a surgeon to perform a sex-change operation, but not OK for a psychiatrist to try to 'turn' a consenting homosexual?

This was apparently (and I'm quoting the Guardian's diarist Hugh Muir here) tweeted by Conservative MEP Roger Helmer. Helmer is an avid twitterer and you can follow him at @RogerHelmerMEP. Try and put aside any knee-jerk reactions you might have against a Conservative MEP. The idea that he would be a homophobic second-rater is simply blind prejudice.

Let's get in touch with our inner Baggini and treat the comment fairly. Which means analysing the question.

That surgeon will not have had one chat with a patient and gone for the scalpel. Previous, lengthy psychological consultancies will have taken place. Surgeons cannot carry out random sex-change operations on a whim. None of the consultants carrying out such procedures, I'm sure, will have gone into the discussions with their patient with any particular outcomes in mind.

But we do know of counsellors, mainly those who approach their work from a faith perspective, who go into consultation with gay patients holding the view that re-orientation is the most desirable outcome.

So the flaw in the question, I think, is the comparison of a last-resort procedure with one which we know some people discuss as only-resort or first-resort.

It is also the case that Helmer has form. We can suspect that the comment was deliberately phrased as it was to make mischief. But whether or not that was the case we do well to answer questions as clearly and carefully as possible. If we credit mischief-makers with the best possible motives and simply answer the question we will train ourselves the better to answer genuine questions when they arise.

I would be quite happy to concede that for some patients, for whom sexuality is a grey area, therapy which helps identify a preferred orientation even if such preference is marginal might be beneficial. Note the words 'some' and 'might.'

The answer, widespread across Twitter, that Helmer is an idiot, will not do. This doesn't mean he isn't.

Worms and Defence Mechanisms

A news item on Radio 4's Today programme was interestingly reported just now. To summarise, a parasite which feeds on caterpillars has the effect of turning the host red. This appears, research shows, to deter predators from eating the caterpillar. Birds are suspicious of food that is the wrong colour. Aren't we all?

The thing I found interesting in the piece is that the reporter said something to the effect that this is the first time a parasite has been found to protect itself in such a way.

And that language is to endow a minuscule, parasitic worm with the power of self-defence as if it meant it, consciously. The rest of the report was full of similar language.

More likely is that evolution will have ensured that only those parasitic nematodes which caused the unexpected side-effect survived. The rest got eaten by birds.

How we anthropomorphise.

Four Lions

You can pretty much guarantee that if a film has Chris Morris' name amongst the credits it will be a movie with a target. In Four Lions the radicalised Muslims, with the exception of Omah their leader, are all special needs cases. Lest we feel complacent, and laugh at these too much, the police are portrayed as trigger-happy and unconcerned they may have killed an innocent victim as long as they can resolve whether a Wookie is a bear or not. Innocent witnesses are too easily fobbed off and a next-door neighbour fails to notice the bomb-making equipment on the table. Yupp. We're laughing at our own inadequacies as potential witnesses of an atrocity.

It's very funny but, as ever with Morris, it makes a point . Even a stupid suicide bomber can get lucky. And there is something really creepy about the way Omah's culturally-western family accept the fate to which he has committed himself.

Satire. It's complicated. Laugh and learn.

Shutting Down

It is observed that the body has a tremendous capacity, when placed in a situation of emergency, to shut down support to all but essential systems. Thus a person who is about to be shot will lose bladder control.

Since having my knee surgery on Thursday, and despite the fact that I have been reading and watching films and TV since, I seem to have lost the capacity to say anything interesting (don't heckle) apart from reporting on my progress while my body concentrates on getting better. Clever body.

So I continue to be well on the mend and need to remind myself that recuperation will be slow. I will get back to my pre-operative state quickly but it will be a while until I get back the movement in my knee I lost eleven months ago when I tore the cartilage in the first place. I need to be a patient patient. Over enthusiastic exercise in the first two weeks after surgery, although feeling possible, will not be helpful.

The surgeon gave me a sick note for three weeks 'in case you need it.' Being a vicar is slightly less physically demanding than being a furniture remover (although they never told me at college how much furniture I would end up moving over the next twenty six years) so I will be back at light duties after a week.

For this week it's reading and movie watching and a test of the recovery will be whether or not I have anything intelligent to say by way of review or comment.

Knee Fixed

Routine surgery found the partial cartilage tear that everyone had suspected and fixed it. Was up and about within 40 minutes of coming round from a general anaesthetic and home within a couple of hours. Delighted to report that the nausea I have experienced on previous occasions with generals was simply not there. I guess technology has moved on.

So thank for your prayers. My knee is a bit sore (but nothing like as bad as I expected) so I'll be resting it up for a few days within an exercise regime.

Until tomorrow.

Knees

Just so's you all know, tomorrow I'm going to be off sick for a bit. This will be the fourth time in my life I've entered hospital feeling by and large OK and will come out feeling grim. It's all for the best as I'm having my torn knee cartilage repaired. It's eleven months since I tore it.

When I was fourteen I had an operation on my left knee which necessitated four days in bed, ten days in hospital and three months on crutches. I still have the three inch scar. Complete success though. Left knee still works fine. Tomorrow I will be, all being well, in hospital for five hours and will only have a small scar. On my right knee. Surgeons please note.

For those who like the three syllable extravaganza that is surgery description:

The procedure - Knee Arthroscopy - unspecified therapeutic endoscopic operations on semilunar cartilage.

If I don't come round from the anaesthetic Mrs M is vegetarian but she does eat fish.

Don't you love that sneaky word 'unspecified.'

Biblical Names

My sons have Hebrew names - Benjamin and Jonathan. I still like the names and I still like the sons. Bit of a result.

Although we chose the names because we liked them, and because they seemed to match the features we looked at some-weird-how, we didn't go too much by the meanings of the names.

Benjamin, for instance, means favourite son. Well I suppose he was for 28 months or so. Jonathan means 'gift of God.' Thanks God. Another favourite son. Now I have two. They have 'favourite son' competitions and make claims to that post when they have done something special. All in fun.

Ben claims he has won every year except 1982 (when Jon was born) and 2005 (when Jon graduated). As wise parents we choose never to comment. If they want to try to outdo each other in being nice to us that's OK.

Thing I just realised. The story of Joseph is the story of Jacob showing favouritism to his favourite son, thus causing jealousy (Genesis 37). But Jacob had eleven other sons. One of whom was called. Yeah, Benjamin.

The meaning of your name? Over-rated. The qualities you inhabit your name with? Priceless.

Up

The 2009 animated Disney film Up is a delightful way to spend 90 minutes. Beginning with a child seeking adventure it follows Carl (for it is he) and, in one of the most moving opening sequences to any film I have ever seen, catalogues the reasons why it is never quite the right time to head off to South America to see the much-anticipated Paradise Falls.

Eventually, old, crippled, grey and frustrated at the encroachment of the city to his front garden Carl, a retired balloon salesman, attaches helium balloons to his house and heads off in the direction the film title suggests.

Are you having a mid-life crisis? Are you old and grey and feel you've never chased your dreams? Is there something that holds a call over your life which you haven't yet done? Are you Abram in disguise?

You will laugh and cry (if I'm anything to go by) but it's terrific family entertainment. And if you do decide to fly your house away just watch for the fat kid hiding under the veranda. You don't always get to choose who you share your adventures with.

Watch the trailer here.

How Not to Hurry

You've probably seen those optical illusion puzzles where two lines of the same length are made to look different because of the angles of the lines adjoining them. Forget for the moment that any lines in two dimension, however different, could be the same length in three. It's a parallax thing, about which see football posts and goal-line discussion technology discussions passim.

A car pulls up at a pelican crossing and the passenger uses the opportunity to get out. As he gets out the lights change. The guy makes no attempt to adjust the speed of egress. Without looking as if he is hurrying he reaches the kerb and the car pulls off before any driver behind has become impatient enough to honk. He hurried without looking hurried. He did it in an 'I'm chilled' way. I expect you can work out his skin colour. Not all black people are cool. That would be a racist statement. But this one was and more black people than white seem able to pull off the hurrying-without-rushing thing. It can make you feel impatient with them because they don't seem to have made an effort.

Other individuals, and I've often seen this with people crossing the road in front of a car, break into an apparent jog which makes no discernible difference to their pace. Some women achieve this without bending their arms. The non-hurry-run. It makes you feel better about them but changes nothing. I expect Michael McIntyre could do a good impression of it.

One of the many things I'm going to apparently do, rather than really do which would involve effort, is to make it look as if I am doing less than I am rather than more than I am. It's going to be a black year. An optical illusion year. The length of the lines will not be changing.

Why Women Confuse Me Part 467

St: Shall we try and get up and out in 40 minutes now?
Mrs M: When are we timing that from?

A Year in Illness 2

A few days ago I posed the question, here, that I wondered for how many days of last year I would have described myself as feeling healthy. I made a note in the corner of my diary at the end of every day as to what, if anything had been troubling me or if my health was good. Here are the results:

129 Good
  88 Knee trouble
  69 Mouth ulcers or sore mouth
  38 Cold, fever, chest infection or post viral
  14 Eczema
    6 Stiff neck
    5 Insect bites
    4 Bad back
    3 Ear trouble
    3 Infected finger
    2 Headaches
    2 Toothache
    1 Allergy
    1 Ganglion

Now here's some things:

1. I tore a cartilage in February and am awaiting knee surgery. It troubled me all the rest of the year but only in a noteworthy way, or as the most serious problem, on 88 days. That should be 88 better days in 2011.

2. I would say that last year I was fit and healthy by and large. This raises the question, 'What does it mean to be fit and healthy?' I had three colds last year but don't really remember being ill with them apart from two or three days. The worst health days I can recall were the few days in Gozo when I had insect bites and the period after I did my back (as a recovering disc-slipper I get scared when I do my back).

3. Some days I had more than one thing wrong with me but I've noted the thing I diaried as the lead problem

4. I'm not continuing with the experiment. It would look like OCD.

So all very interesting. What started as a piece of research for a talk on healing (what does it mean to be well?) all got a bit out of hand. Enough.

Happy Epiphany

Happy Epiphany everyone. Just before Christmas I was wandering around Dursley, as you do, and came across a lovely little fair-trade shop from where I purchased a wooden tradecraft nativity set. I have never had one in the house; they are either cringy or ostentatious. This is neither, in my view.

The year to come promises to be eventful in the life of our little church at Trendlewood. There are many words and prophecies about the future (idiot Tilley, prophecies about the past would be a sight easier) which are all unerringly positive.

In fact I am so surrounded by people sharing things God has been telling them (I love the way he never seems to tell me) that I feel as if I am wandering through a giant allegory at the moment. Yesterday I heard of someone in our parish called Mary who was pondering the significance of the appearance of an angel to one of her relatives. No really. I couldn't make this stuff up.

But today is Epiphany and, since someone has already asked and doubtless others will, it means appearing, appearance or coming. It is Greek in origin, from two Greek words. Epi = to; phainein = to show (source, Chambers etymological English dictionary).

Today the term comes to mean the '...sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something' (Wikipedia). This was indeed what the Gospel writers wanted to say about Jesus; that there was a moment when both the poor (shepherds) and the wealthy (magi) comprehended the significance.

I wrote about this last year when I was obviously feeling a little more aggressive. How time mellows us?

Today it was a joy to move the magi over and place them in the scene, notwithstanding the clear biblical material that says they visited Jesus in a house, not a stable. By the way Jesus stabilised the world. Ever noticed that? Hope this year you get wise to it.

2010 Postscript

A very good morning to you and a happy birthday to Mrs Mustard who has been packed off to work to escape her husband's one-day-a-year company at breakfast, smelling sweet and with a better-than-usual packed lunch. Did you know Mrs M eats the same thing for breakfast and lunch, five days a week every week of the year except hols? Not today.

But it is time for a brief review of the year, a matter which MSS prefers to leave until all other reviewers have written theirs in the period 26-31/12 in case they manage to remind it of something it might have forgotten.

My favourite award is always album of the year and this would have been walked most years by a new Faithless album but, if truth be told, The Dance was only great and not quite outstanding. Never mind. There's always the wonderful Kieran Hebden whose Fourtet project consistently excites me. There is Love in You would also have been my album of the year if it was not for Steve Mason. The distinctive-voiced former Beta Band vocalist's solo album Boys Outside was tuneful,  haunting, somewhat enigmatic and delightful company on several journeys. The album that keeps on giving. Big acknowledgment to Wrongtom's Roots Manuva remix Dippy Writer.

Book of the year award is often a sad acknowledgement that I read no new books and merely caught up. That would be true of fiction this year as I read no books published in 2010. My favourite novel was Magnus Mills' brief The Maintenance of Headway (2009) which will be of interest to anyone who ever took a trip on a 1970s nationalised bus service.

Of non-fiction I loved Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity, John Lanchester's economics treatise Whoops! (hear him talk about it at the Bath Literary Festival next month), Cole Moreton's Is God Still an Englishman? and Andrew Rawnsley's The End of the Party. But for the brilliant, poignant and carefully argued analysis of the art of the intelligent stand-up my book of the year is Stewart Lee's How I Escaped My Certain Fate - The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian. Not for the easily, or even the uneasily, offended.

Some interesting films of which The Ghost and The Social Network were both good fun. The Hurt Locker was not this year but I saw it  for the first time this year and it was superb. Loved The Infidel (note to all big-budget comedy films - comedies should make you laugh) but give my award to a well-acted and easy-watching romcom (amazingly) Up in the Air. Maybe it came at the right time when I needed light-hearted cheering up at the movies but I loved it.

One or two other mentions. Facebook status update of the year from Joseph Clucas, 'If you have a parrot and you don't teach it to say, "Help, they've turned me into a parrot", you are wasting everybody's time.' (October 9th).

Innovation of the year - theipaper. A summary of everything you need to know with some full-length articles for just 20p. Finally convinced me to give up trying to read a broadsheet every day.

Gig of the year - I loved Shlomo's Friends at The Old Vic - a celebration of everything beatboxy - but for the sheer hell of the putting-on-a-show of it all thanks to The Pet Shop Boys for a great night out in Cardiff last July.

On TV I finally watched all the way through the five series of The Wire and loved every moment. On live TV both Springwatch and Autumnwatch entertained us, The Apprentice, the Masterchef franchise and even Strictly Come Dancing drew us in and Mad Men was a cut above.

In a year when politics was a bunch of cheating liars saying anything to get power and then spitting in our faces thanks to Boris Johnson and Ken Clarke for at least answering the question when asked.

Finally my own thanks to the lovely people of Holy Trinity and Trendlewood, Nailsea for turning the dream of not losing our parish's Old Rectory into reality through acts of extraordinary generosity and the lovely young adults who endured living in it for two years while we negotiated and kept it from vandalism and disrepair.

Lastly (never believe a preacher saying 'finally') thanks to Australia for being rubbish at cricket for a change and for telling the people of England that floods really aren't that bad here after all as long as snakes and gators don't move in to your bedroom. 3.6 earthquakes. No great shakes. We live in a green un... I mean and ... pleasant land. May goal-line technology make your 2011 a better year.

Sport Spin Spot

Whilst us Baggies are enduring a desperate run of results at the moment, how about this, from the BBC website after Fulham's 3-0 win yesterday?

'...the home side were happy to play out a convincing victory which leaves them in mid-table and leaves West Brom in freefall after five straight defeats.'

The table now reads:

Fulham played 21 points 22 position 13th
West Brom played 21 points 22 position 16th

9th place in the table is one win away for both of us.

Cricket news is better though. Well batted England.

Garden Bird Sightings 2010

Here are the results of a year's staring out of the window. I have listed the species (thirty one different ones) seen in, or immediately over, my garden in the last year. The number following is the most of that species seen at any one time, followed by the date on which that occurred:

Blackbird 5 (14/7/10)

Blackcap 2 (Several)

Black-headed Gulls 15 (8/1/10)

Blue Tit 3 (31/12/10)

Chaffinch 2 (25/12/10)

Coal Tit 2 (19/9/10)

Collared Dove 7 (10/9/10)

Common Gull 2 (27/11/10)

Crow 1 (30/3/10)

Dunnock 4 (27/5/10)

Fieldfare 3 (9/1/10)

Goldfinch 4 (29/12/10)

Great Tit 3 (21/5/10)

Green Finch 1 (27/11/10)

Herring Gull 3 (3/6/10)

Heron 1 (9/5/10)

House Martin 17 (1/9/10)

House Sparrow 14 (21/9/10) (23/11/10)

Jackdaw 2 (27/2/10) (19/3/10) (1/6/10)

Jay 2 (30/10/10)

Long-tailed Tit 5 (28/11/10)

Magpie 2 (28/4/10)

Pied Wagtail 2 (20/1/10)

Redwing 10 (9/1/10)

Robin 2 (21/1/10)

Song Thrush 2 (5/3/10)

Starling 36 (10/10/10)

Swallow 1 (15/5/10)

Swift 3 (26/5/10)

Wood Pigeon 3 (Several)

Wren 1 (Several)