I’ve finally grabbed a chance to scan the rest of the pictures from our trip to Dublin in September. On the Monday evening, while my wife was studying in our hotel room, I took a walk with a camera. It must have been somewhere just before 9 o’clock, and the staff at M&S Simply Food were tidying up. This was my view in the window.
Stu recently posted in defence of the BBC, reminding me of I Believe in the BBC from a few years ago.
I’m not given to fervent nationalistic (with a small N :-) pride, but I have often thought that the BBC is one of the high points of life in the UK, and something to be proud of — kind of like that other great and maligned semi-public body, the NHS. (Yes. I said it.)
Both receive constant scrutiny and criticism, often inspired by their fairly direct reliance on money straight out of the pockets of people like you and me, but both do a generally good job and enrich the lives of countless people, including me. In the case of the BBC, its reach is global.
I took a moment to tally up all the different ways I consume BBC content: RSS feeds from its news website, the website itself, radio (Radio Ulster and Radio 4) in the car, television as it’s broadcast (BBC 1, 2, 3, 4, News), TV and radio via iPlayer, podcasts based on various radio shows. Not bad for my 140 quid.
Of course the content of the programming can vary in quality, but much of it is excellent and it provides a great range of different kinds of content. The licence fee is controversial, but it works, and I suppose that not having to rely on revenue from advertising frees the BBC in many ways.
I suppose what I’m saying is let’s not take it for granted; where else can you find the pure entertainment of Stephen Fry visiting every state in America?
Another pic from our few days in Dublin in September.
There you go, then. Barack Obama has been named President-Elect of the United States of America. Of course we over here are removed from the whole thing, but there’s no escaping the significance of a change in the leadership of the States for the rest of the world. Just look around you at all the ways America influences life here.
There’s a definite sense of hope pervading the blogs and tweets today, with the occasional flash of cynicism recalling the rapid tarnishing of New Labour. It’s easy to be cynical, isn’t it? We tend not to admit to hope — it makes us feel naive — yet hope is also the riskier attitude, leaving us vulnerable to disappointment.
I think I’m happy that Obama is on his way in. For balance I’ll mention that John McCain has generally struck me as good spud (an assessment reinforced by the graciousness of his concession speech this morning), although elements of his campaign and campaign team certainly gave me pause.
Barack Obama seems to bring the inspirational back to politics. At some point over the last decades we became very suspicious of politicians and rhetoric, but I hope the new President-Elect can overcome that suspicion. I actually think he might be able to.
On holiday last week we spent some time with friends whose church has been talking around the idea of a possible future church plant in Glasgow Harbour, a newish development by the Clyde.
As we talked, and as we had a look around by the new blocks of flats, I noticed the similarity in intent between Glasgow Harbour and the much talked-about Titanic Quarter development in Belfast.
Both are marked by a very upwardly-mobile, idealised dream of stylish waterfront living, and both question any ideals we might have about what it means to live in community with others: next door, locally, and across the city.
If you want to talk at length about the potential impact Titanic Quarter will have on the wider area around East Belfast, crookedshore is your man, but as I talked with our friend last week I got a little disturbed by the way TQ’s cousin at Glasgow Harbour is shaping up.
The development is sold as a heavily media-inspired lifestyle. The financial cost alone is worth questioning, but as we talked and teased and picked at questions about the place of church in such an environment — even more essentially, what church could possibly look like in that environment — we wondered at how everything about the place seems designed to minimize personal contact.
If you have the money you can have your own designated underground space in which to park your sports car; from there you’ll get into the keypad-protected elevator that takes you to within yards of the door of your self-contained apartment. Access to the buildings is on the waterfront, shielded from the city behind by the rest of the development and by the Clydeside Expressway. You’re obviously intended to arrive and leave by car — public transport’s only half a mile away, but look at all that prestige parking space. It will be interesting to see how the public green space around about is developed and used; you could call me skeptical.
In an environment like this, which seems to make any form of local community difficult, what for church?
If church sits somewhere between expressing existing community and inspiring and coalescing something new and greater, how can this be fulfilled in Glasgow Harbour? Surely such a disconnected and closeted lifestyle will be damaging for those who choose to live there; it’s already too easy to draw away behind doors, screens and keyboards…
It is clear, and here again we touch on our conversations of last week, that it will require some creative thinking about what church might look like, but also perhaps a recapturing of the very basic notion of a group people choosing to be together, sharing what they have in common and what they don’t, without too many of the religious extras by which we’ve become distracted.
When we drove around Glasgow Harbour last Thursday evening, it felt half-finished: hoardings still surround building sites, scaffolding still waits, a significant number of windows are still dark. It felt bleak, like something out of near-future dystopian fiction, but hopeful — wanting to be bright and joyful. The only way to satisfy that hope will be a stirring to communal living which challenges much of the philosophy behind the place, a call to something more real, more immediate than the smiling models and stock photography of slick marketing.
How do you market that? More, how do you make it happen?
I usually make it a practice not to post about movies within too few hours of seeing them, but it’s November :-) I’m just through the door from Quantum of Solace, the new Bond flick.
After the pure brilliance of Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s second turn as 007 is rather a let-down. I’ve heard comment that the plot is hard to follow; not really — just that there isn’t much there to follow. Instead, it’s a poor excuse to squander some beautiful locations on some alright action (cheesy intercuts with background action twice: Palio di Siena and Tosca).
The film does have its moments, and the filmmakers actually manage to make Quantum a reasonably sinister evil organisation, but I hope they bring it out into the light a bit more in the next film. Craig is a bit less three-dimensional than in Casino Royale, but I’d still rate him as Bond; unfortunately Olga Kurylenko didn’t really live up to her billing, but that’s more down to the character she was given to work with, and it would have been nice to see a little more of Miss Strawberry Fields (a name that provides one of the many nods to the Bond films of old). Judi Dench has, by now, made M her own, but she didn’t seem altogether involved in this one.
Unusually for Bond, Quantum of Solace follows directly on from Casino Royale, and sets up the next film as well. That, plus the grittier feel and more bluntly applied violence, shows that someone has been watching Jason Bourne at work, and that’s no bad thing. Fortunately it hasn’t gone too far: Bond is still distinctly Bond.
Not all bad, not all good. Here’s hoping this is the weak second film of a storming trilogy.
Loads of stuff this time round.
We are, once again, staying with our board gamer friends. Fun :) And,
yes, this is a feeble first post for NaBloPoMo ’08…
As Stephen has pointed out, it’s nearly November. Which makes it NaBloPoMo time again.
I’ve had a go at this for the last couple of years, and I’ve been talking a lot recently about how I want to write more, so here we go again.
You’d think I’d learn, wouldn’t you?
I’m quite glad the clocks go back tonight.
The plan had been for us to by now be pleasantly settled in central Scotland for a week of visiting friends. The weather, in its interaction with ferry services, decreed otherwise. Now we’re (hopefully) on a boat at half seven in the morning. Getting a spot on that boat entails being at the port as early as possible — hence my eager anticipation of that extra hour.
We called down to the port this afternoon to check out which sailing we’d have the best chance of getting on. The young lady behind the desk was on the receiving end of some astonishing abuse, as if the delays and cancellations were down to her whim rather than that of the wind. She looked quite relieved when I was perfectly happy to go away and come back tomorrow.
I appreciate the frustration of not knowing when you’ll get home, but why take it out on the messenger? To her credit, she remained calm and civil throughout. Me, I’m happy to be sure the weather isn’t too much for the boat I’m riding.
Do me a favour: play nice out there.