The Greatest Deanery Synod Ever?

Last night Michael Eavis was the guest of our Deanery Synod. This coup may have delivered the finest guest speaker a Deanery Synod may have ever had but I sort of felt that the definition of Deanery Synod - a group of people waiting to go home - came to the fore again. If we hadn't had him as our guest what would have been the point of meeting? The business of synod took about fifteen minutes at the end.

He came not because we have our tentacles stretching into the world of rock - that would be hard to imagine given the age make-up of our synod - but because our vice-chair is a farmer's wife and he is known through that connection.

That said, in terms of charisma, when a person has that much reputation, and is late, there is a rock-star sense that everything will start when he arrives. He arrived, wearing shorts on a cold February night, and carrying an enormous cake. A local rector, who had started the task of leading worship, had no choice but to give way until the fuss had died down. What happens to a person, when they cross that line into celebrity, that they have no realisation of what is going on in a room?

Anyway it turned out that Eavis, a member of Pilton Methodist Chapel, is a delightfully humble man, who wants to make the world a better place, wants more than anything else for it to be fair ('I hate my punters being ripped off by food concessions') but within that context wants to make a difference locally. He is proud of bringing £100m into the Somerset economy, of providing fair-rent housing locally for those who could not afford to live in and around Pilton and of providing contracts and employment. He employs fifty people now.

At 78 years of age he is still the hands-on, decision-making head of the festival, swimming every morning at 7.00 a.m. then breakfasting at 7.30 and talking to all the staff at 8.00. He makes a lot of decisions 'because somebody has to make the decisions'. He plans to go on for ten more years.

Asked about the music he says he loves it but is more a rock person than a dance, folk or jazz lover. 'There are twenty-five stages' he tells one questioner, gently.

He has a stutter, although it eases as he gets going.

Asked about the things left behind we are treated to the life story of a tent - the aluminium poles being sold for scrap, the canvas being baled and sold to China. We learn that the most amazing thing anyone has ever left behind is a T20 tractor. It was stored in a barn and claimed after ten years. Questions are begged. We learn that he '...has a lot of wellies - if you want wellies talk to me.'

During the festival the cows are put back in their winter accommodation for three weeks but they are given nicer things to eat to make it up to them. Fairness, even down to the way the animals are compensated, rings out of his testimony.

He describes himself as Methodist because there are no problems there about what you believe. 'We sing Wesley hymns and have a fundamental belief that there is something good going on out there.'

He sees the festival, which grew our of his love affair with a woman at the height of flower-power in the late 1960s, as a place where people can come and re-charge. One really gets the sense of his vision of  a place where the closest he can get to a Utopian vision is set out before people. Here we behave reasonably, look out for each other, trust each other and learn to get on.

It was good to hear him and to some extent the lack of slick, of public-speaking polish and a party-line to force down our throats helped us to warm to him. We didn't feel like a Deanery Synod most of whom wouldn't touch his festival with a barge pole but a group of interested and interesting individuals listening to each other. Good night out.

Marcus du Soutoy

I enjoyed Marcus last night. Few mathematics professors in my experience wear lime green trousers, pink velour trackie tops and yellow T-shirts with buzz cut, possibly bleached, hair. Weird but cool. Good communicator.

He gave a brilliant, one hour, illustrated lecture which should leave the few children who were there fascinated by numbers for the rest of their lives. Advice on choosing lottery numbers so you don't share the winnings, why footballs spin rapidly as they slow, number series, primes and movie clips.

'Is mathematics creativity or discovery,' someone asked. Good question, said Marcus.

Key message for me, 'Are you sure you're asking the right questions?' When maths gets complicated, mathematicians try to make sure they are asking the right questions. It enabled them to predict how the rarity of prime numbers expands (they get rarer the larger the number). You can say how many there will be without yet knowing a formula for finding the next one. I might not have put that right, not being a mathematician. There are prizes for finding big prime numbers. That's how hard it is, but you can programme your computer to do it during its down time.

I will try to go to more of this festival next year. The ticket cost £6.

Archbishop Rowan's York Sermon

Regular dropper-inners here will know that I stubbornly work my way through newspapers and magazines a few days, or months, behind the rest of the world. It's interesting how we have 24/7 news on radio, TV and t'internet so we use our hard copy for views, opinion and comment. Reading the news and comment after a brief delay is a good way of finding out if it was prescient or not. A great test of prophecy (ancient Chinese proverb say) is whether or not it comes true.

So I reached last Friday's Church of England Newspaper (mental note, column due soon, help) this morning and read the text of the Archbishop of Canterbury's pre-synod sermon. You can read it here.

I think it's astounding. His nuancing - I made that word up - is exemplary. You get the impression that every word he writes, and then speaks, has been lined up, put in place and without it the whole meaning of everything will change. Every word. He is good to listen to. Certainly better than to look at but that's my problem. I'd love him to read to me as I dropped off to sleep. But to read him you can but wonder at the struggle the text and he have shared to come out looking and sounding like this.

He may have made mistakes as a leader. Who knows? He may be a genius leader. I refer the right-honourable readers to the ancient Chinese proverb. But his text. Wow. A sample to end:

'We live under law, different kinds of law. The law of God, which is for our health, and the law we make for ourselves. We long to be masters of our future, and so we become the prisoners of our past. We long to take control of the world we're in. And because we are who we are, and our histories have been what they have been, we dig ourselves deeper and deeper into unfreedom.'

If that's not a thought for the day I don't know what is.