I have just had one of those strange flashbacks…  School days:  We used to do a thing in the summer called Activities Week.  You spent the week doing all manner of exciting things ranging from horse riding to jeux sans frontier to making masks etc.  I got dumped on the poetry picnic because all the popular kids got ice skating, Alton Towers etc.  We had to go to the Rococo Gardens in Painswick to write Japanese haiku poetry.  I think it is a three line poem with 5 syllables, 7 syllables and 5 syllables.  Our teacher said “Walk into the gardens, take in the beautiful surroundings, then sit down and write about the first thing you see.”  So we all walked in and people started to write about the mist in the trees, the beautiful flowers and the sunshine.  I inhaled deeply, in a rather dramatic fashion, sat down by a pretty little pond hidden in the wall and saw…. A dead rabbit floating in the pond!!!

My poem:

Peter Rabbit’s dead
With no bullets in his head
He is in a pond.

!!!!!

They had to hang it on the wall alongside all of the beautiful Rococo garden poetry!!  So funny, but I did win a prize for the most morbid poem.

I have just been reading “WE-THINK” by Charles Leadbeater, as I research for my dissertation which looks into the whole notion of mass collaboration in generation Y and the future of branding.  I came across this corker of a quote:

“The more people contribute, the more we need to collaborate.  The more people use the web to say ‘I think…’ this, that and the other, the more we will need ‘We think…’ to create some order, to sort the wheat from the chaff.” P32

This talks about the millions of bloggers on the web and how, one blogger cannot easily change the course of history and overthrow government rulings etc.  It got me thinking and I wondered what it would look like if church leadership all over the country wrote a combined blog?   I think it would make great and reassuring reading for Christians all over the world.  It would be tricky in that the leaders who blogged would have to be ‘we-think-ers’ rather than “I think this and you think that-ers’as the design of the church is supposed to be unified through the Word and Spirit of God.

How about, if, for starters, Trinity staff team, or leadership team, wrote a blog?  What if they blogged the Bible to help people read it?  What if they shared their UNIFIED views on bishop messes and world poverty?  Would it not be more powerful that just reading Keith’s individual blog (which I love, by the way, don’t stop it!)?  It is interesting that the church is sobehind in unity.  “The church is one body”, the Bible tells us - the original ’social (read ’spiritual’) network’.  The internet is the most powerful networking tool that we have, unifying those with common ineterest and stance on matters political, social, economic… You name it.  Yet we have not managed to network the Word of God, the church or prayer very well using this tool in our hands.

This is a thought-in-progress, I am still thinking about the implications of the quote…

The other day when I was ill, my Mum and Tim came over and we played a very strange Monty Python-esque game called Hopla.  It was very strange and mildly amusing!

Yes, I did spend a few minutes of my precious time (ahem.. splutter…) putting glass pebbles and tealights in obsolete ‘kilner’ jar replicas to make unusual garden ornaments.

Maybe it is because I work from home, or maybe my neighbours (both sides) know something that I don’t about compulsive hammer usage and the resultant benefits, but whichever the explanation, they seem to use hammers all day, every day!  Weird.  And annoying.

In other news:

UGH….

I also need one which says “Your dissertation is 2% complete” !!

Last night I recived this picture from my brother via text with the words “the day the clocks stopped.”  No further explanation.

These workmen were using a digger like this one, but with a ‘picky-uppy-arm’ in order to lift up……. A PIECE OF KERB!!!!!!  It was about 2ft long and 0.5ft tall.  As we sat at the temporary traffic lights allowing them to delicately swing it from side to side (it looked ridiculous on the end of a digger) and lower it into the pavement, the mutiny boiled up inside me.  What has happened to real men??  Dustmen are not allowed to do anything with a wheely bin that they cannot move with two fingers, resulting in dust carts holding up reams of traffic.  Builders take 5x the amount of time to lower a tiny piece of kerb into a road hole because they have to use a digger, wasting tax payers money because the poor little darlings are not allowed to lift ‘heavy’ things.  THEY ARE BUILDERS!! Sort it out.

I am quite sure that flowers do not grow in these shades…  Especially the blue and green!

On our road, there are many cats.  Not only that, but they are quite communal.  They wonder in and out of the different houses, help themselves to a bit of food, say hello and wander off again.  Twinkle has been visiting the pirate for some time now and finally he has been given his own cat, which he calls Rambo.  Rambo is very cute, he has a quality moustache (seriously!  Check it out…)

The poor thing looks in a permanent state of confusion!  He wanders into our house sometimes, much to the intrigue of Twinkle and Monty.  Yesterday we had a visit from a large white and tabby cat who we call “MAGOW” due to the strange miaow that she makes!

With reference to my post below:  I read this quote on Keith’s blog and realised that perhaps I had given bishops a bad name.  This was not my intent, I respect those whom God has put in authority - they are our elders.  I just get frustrated.  Anyway, a bishop said this, which Keith has put on his blog and it is this that challenged my attitude:

“if we attempt this game of uprooting the unrighteous then, my dear sisters and brothers, none of us will remain. “