Most inconvenient...

Molly the rectory collie has decided to reach puberty this week - so we have something like three weeks of walking her on a lead, fighting off overly-interested dogs and generally not being able to do 'the usual' when it comes to dog ownership. She spent a bring-and-share lunch today cooped up in the rabbit run in the garden. It is a very big rabbit run!

But development, whether human or canine, is not designed for our convenience.

It's designed to make us grow, gain experience, achieve new levels and types of maturity.

So I suppose that's a good thing.

But it is all a bit inconvenient.

Holiday over...

A ragged end to a week's holiday, as we return and the answering machine and e-mails and lovely folk popping round seep back into life.
A week on a narrowboat, with a little sailing and a lot of just being, is a good holiday. Having no identity other than a person who's on a narrowboat. Or in the cinema. Or at the theatre. Or in the shops. All good things to be.
What did we do?
Sailing to Auchinstarry, to pump out and fill up, with a canalman who used to be broker in the city.
Sailing to Stockingfield Junction in Glasgow, through a pretty deprived area of the city (ah - I have story about that that I must re-tell here on day...).
Meeting eleven hired narrowboats with Swiss canal-buffs all 'doing' the Scottish canals.
Rekindling the children's dislike of clowns - and hopefully letting them glimpse what mime and performance art can actually do (ah - I must blog about minimalist performance art and liturgy sometime)
And coming back, ready for more - including tomorrow's baptism (ah - I must blog about baptism and witchcraft, when it feels right).
(and ah - I must change back the answering machine)
A good holiday!

Panorama

The view from a 20 minute walk up the hill - the Clyde Approaches past Cloch Point, looking up to Kilcreggan, Gourock and the Clyde itself.

A little minehunter is pootling down the river, dodging between the ferries and sailing boats.

...and the midges have started to go back to sleep for the autumn!

Standing up for yourself...

I turned away a funeral this week.

Well, I tried pretty hard to make it work - someone who was 'Church of England' (a thing maybe only admitted after death in the West of Scotland, or maybe very shortly before...) had shuffled off this mortal coil and wanted the 'right' funeral. So an Episcopalian priest was requested. We don't have a parochial system as such in our Anglican Province - canonical areas I suppose sum it up. The chap hadn't come to see us in life, but in death he was in 'my patch'...

The day was no good for me - not an unusual occurrence. My local retired colleague was away that day. My colleagues over the water in Greenock and Port Glasgow otherwise engaged. And at that point I ran out of Episcopalian ministers who were sensibly close.

Other days - no good for the family. Other options - church rather than crem - no good for the family.

Well, I hope the Church of Scotland funeral that the family get is OK for them - I'm sure it will be. The minister who has taken it on needs another funeral like a hole in the head, IMHO.

Questions for me - how important are funeral ministries for random people who decide they want something Anglican in a country where that's not the establishment?
Is it good to be importing into Scotland the English - the C of E will 'do' us when we die - that I lived with during my curacy, and I see my C of S colleagues doing for ordinary non-church going Scots?
Do we drop everything and mess up established community building activities (in my case a eucharist, and set of social & business meetings on 'my' island) to meet such a demand?

I very nearly started to cancel a regular service and shift meetings and plan complicated multiple ferry journeys, until I suddenly thought - no - this is not a priority.

But I am sorry for my C of S colleague who has to take on yet another funeral service. I wonder if ATBAB will be before or after Crimond...

The smell of yesteryear!

Smells can be so evocative – I’m sure I read somewhere or other that the parts of the memory that recall smells are about the most easily stimulated. The smell of tobacco that a parent smoked (a pipe tobacco in my case) or fresh flowers, or fragrant incense – they can all take us back instantly to a distant time and place, and leave the conscious mind fighting to understand why such a strong emotional response may have taken place.

I was taken aback today by just a smell-experience moment. The prosaic business of changing the handles on the doors of the cloakroom and cupboard in the rectory had finally reached the top of the ‘to-do’ list. The whole area has been very damp, so everything was in quite a sorry state. The handles were well and truly rusted on to the metal parts of the doors. So I cut them off, to let me put the new ones on.

The smell of the hot Bakelite as I sawed through the shafts of the door handles was an acrid, pungent smell, which transported me back thirty years or so – to when I was a keen young air cadet, eager to explore the exciting world of aviation, history, tradition and light blue uniforms. Climbing into the cockpits of Spitfires, or Vulcans, or Ansons. or Hunters or even Chipmunks – the propeller and jet planes of the 40s and 50s – one was engulfed in a world of battered leather seats, glove-polished control columns, white on black Smiths dials, inviting looking levels wrapped around each other to drive motors or raise wheels, black and yellow striped handles to eject or bale out, Perspex canopies with a view of the sky but none of the ground in front of you – and most of all, a smell of hot, electric Bakelite. The slightly rancid, ozone smell of that wonder material, the stuff of choice for everything before thermoplastics were developed, has remained lodged in a little corner of my brain.

The emotion of the memories? One of excitement, adventure, trepidation at the unknown. Now I live in a world where I have been a member of the RAF, and that is long, long past (twenty-one years, in a few weeks’ time) – and I have been many other things which are also past. But I loved that little thrill that was brought back, by the simple fluke of removing some ancient, rubbished relics of rectors past!

Riots...

Riots.

An inevitable way for a disempowered population to physically scream their rejection of the oppressive and unjust structures that are preventing them achieving happiness/productivity? The stuff of Marxist revolution in the 1970s, and of punk bands and civil disobedience?

Or (in 2011): dead-eyed, mob-like and opportunistic.

Liberation theology spilled out of the former - Christ as proto-Marxist, armed priests, Gutierrez, Moltmann getting a drubbing for being white and affluent. Exciting stuff, that has morphed into Christian Aid (Life before death), Tear Fund and all sorts of muscular amillenial Christian movements.

What will spill out of the latter? National Service returns (todays press)? What?? Really?? Other movements and initiatives to mend 'broken Britain'? Tough love and bigger batons?

What liberation theology might spill out of last week? I found myself preaching on Bute about God's love for ALL humanity - even rioters and politicians - but without an answer about how to make it work. God loves us all - but how can the lives be transformed, the caring, mutually supporting communities (dare one call them churches) be grown and nurtured to embrace and heal a broken society. Why should the vilified ones, whoever they are, even care?

One can see why the old 'end-times' - 'God will fix it' card is tempting.

How did I end, to my lovely small church on a riot-free Scottish island?

"That," I said, "is where WE come in."

Urban catwalk vs Bute chic

In Glasgow, Wellington, and his horse whose name I forget (Copenhagen, Wikipedia tells me), are decorated with that item of urban style - a traffic cone! With some physical challenge, usually alcoholically propelled, this has become so much the norm that photos like the one below (from rabbie.net) are more common than ones without a cone!

Carol Walker captures a similar fate for Lord Kelvin - is there any statue in Glasgow that avoids an orange fluorescent bunnet? She thinks not!

It even spreads to Perth - the mainland trend for statue decoration... xmarksthescot.com picks this one out, but fails to name it! (It's David Annand's sculpture with Willie Soutar's poem Nae Day Sae Dark engraved inside the ring)

But Bute has a different style for one of its stalwart citizens: Alexander Bannatyne Stewart, owner of Ascog Hall and "...at the time of his death Convener of the County of Bute, and took great interest in all things affecting the island. He was Commodore of the Bute Aquatic Club, and Flag Officer of the Royal Northern Yacht Club, whose regattas in Rothesay Bay generally terminated with magnificent displays of fireworks from Mr. Stewart's steam yacht." Quite a gentleman!

Today, he is mostly wearing a seagull...