Sunday 30th November, 2008: the First Sunday in Advent.

My brother has developed a family tradition whereby he will, on roughly this Sunday, haul his fiancee to my parents’ house and put up their Christmas tree. If you haven’t seen my mother’s tree, look out your window :) It stands about seven feet tall in a low-ceilinged room, and I don’t know how many lights are on it — possibly more than are on the tree outside City Hall. (Actually, given the feebleness of that tree, I wouldn’t be surprised.) My father likes to joke that if you listen carefully you can hear the wheel in the electricity meter speeding up.

The evening, including a visit to see my gran in the City Hospital, was a reminder that alongside the liturgy, the longing and the waiting in darkness, this joy and these lights are also true markers of the season, and — if I can say it — offer a little taste of Kingdom. There is room for laughter in the observance, an accompaniment to the hope of the day.

Never having adequately got my head around Myers-Briggs, I hereby propose a new psychometric test:

Which Hitchhiker’s Guide is the best?

Answer the question by selecting a form or an individual book, and find your personality-type below.

The radio show, but only the Primary and Secondary phases.

You’re a traditionalist. You know that there are many new and supposedly wonderful things in the world, but it’s better to stick with what you know well. You may be of a certain age, and you sometimes miss the carefree days of your youth.

The radio show, the whole thing.

You wouldn’t describe yourself as a risk-taker, but your friends will say you’ve been known to take a chance or two. Of those friends, some will enjoy your sense of humour, while others aren’t so sure. You like to see things through to completion, and prefer to make a good go and get it done rather than be paralyzed by a futile search for perfection.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the novel.

You like to know where everything is, and you value simplicity. The people around you have learned that you don’t handle surprises very well, but they’re perfectly happy to treat you kindly and look out for you.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the novel.

Quality matters to you, but sometimes you’ll let it slip in the name of excitement. Similarly, although you tend towards an analytical approach to life, you have been known to jump to some very unusual conclusions. It seems to have worked okay for you so far.

Life, the Universe and Everything, the novel.

You’re a little bit surreal in your approach to life, perhaps as a result of an experience with hallucinogens. Nonetheless, you know exactly where you’re going in life, even if no-one else does. This knowledge makes you a little bit smug, but in an endearing way.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the novel.

You’re a bit of a hippy, and a romantic at heart. You wish for everyone to have a happy ending, but you know deep down that that’s terribly unlikely. Still, you hope.

Mostly Harmless, the novel.

The diametric opposite of Type SLATFATF, you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. After all, life is suffering, isn’t it? You remember a time when you were less negative about everything, but you’re a little bit ashamed of that past self.

The text-based adventure game.

Given to extraordinary bursts of imagination, you still like to suffer. With a tendency to make life difficult for yourself, pain is a strange pleasure to you.

The BBC TV series.

You grew up on Doctor Who and like your entertainment made up in dreary cardboard. Slightly morose, you tend to just get on with things without getting terribly worked up about them. You are very probably English.

The 2005 film.

It’s nice to see some young ‘uns packing towels. Welcome to the family — just be sure to mind your manners, and don’t assume that you know what you’re talking about quite yet.

(A note on method: this is based on the forms of Guide that I’m familiar with. Given the uniquely multi-media nature of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed some. You now where the comment form is if you want to expand the test.)

If you’re not familiar with the term (although I suspect anyone who reads blogs knows what it means) podcasts are regular (or not) audio recordings that you can subscribe to using iTunes or other podcast-aware software, or even any old RSS reader, so that you receive new episodes automagically. The idea is then to listen to them however you like. My preference is while I’m driving (which doesn’t work so well for the video variety, but there’s only one of those that I subscribe to).

As for content, if you can think of it there’s probably a podcast out there. It ranges from something very akin to the ‘radio’ shows my brother and I used to record to cassette and demand our parents listen to, back well before our voices broke, to language resources, content from various radio stations, comedians known and unknown, current affairs, punditry, sermons from the services of countless churches… Masses of stuff. If you use iTunes, I suggest you look up the music store and have a browse.

The ones I listen to are dominated by tech topics: the Guardian’s Tech Weekly is pretty poor, but an easy listen, I’m a big fan of MacBreak Weekly and (slightly less so) of This Week in Tech from Leo Laporte’s TWiT network, various web-y and developer-y shows and some general gadget punditry.

I also track the sermon audio from a couple of churches, and a few of the ‘casts put out by BBC Radio 4 — a tremendous amount of BBC content is available, occasionally marred by rights issues forcing music to be omitted.

I used to subscribe to many more, but I only spend so much time in the car when I can listen. That, plus my relatively recent discovery of audiobooks (something else I dismissed as pointless until I actually tried it), means that I’ve had to dramatically reduce the subscription list.

Even so, I’m always interested in new discoveries, so if you have any recommendations then please let me know.

(An aside on audiobooks: while I love to read, and could accurately be described as being a bit ‘funny’ about books, I’ve discovered that there can be something seemingly more immediate, more visceral, about the text read aloud. It’s worth exploring.)

As a sort of ongoing companion to this post, I thought it would be fun to revisit these albums and see if they still stood the listen.

The first is Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette. This disc is at the top of the pile as I suspect that most people who were listening to music around the time of its release have a copy somewhere, and because I hadn’t listened to it at all in a very long time.

When I went back to it, I expected the album to be a great disappointment. My ears and tastes have grown up a fair bit since 1995, so I was ready to be quickly tired of the radio-friendly angry-grrl-rocker bit. And no, it didn’t last, but for a time I was singing along on the motorway.

Jagged Little Pill is track after track of undemanding aural fluff, and sometimes that’s what’s needed, but I don’t expect to return to it again for another spell of years.

More to come…

I was going through my archives and realised that I never posted this photograph. It was taken in the multi-storey car park at Edinburgh Airport in the spring of 2006, very shortly after that car park was built, a quick shot with an old folding Polaroid packfilm camera (shot on Type 667, if you’re interested in such details).

I have a couple of those cameras lying around, to one of which I applied a very rough conversion to use modern batteries. The other is half-awaiting a more refined version of the same procedure.

I did go back and try to duplicate the shot with a ‘real’ camera (my wife’s 6×6 Bronica, if you must know), and I believe it’s one of a set of negatives that’s been waiting to be scanned ever since. Next time I get the scanner out I’ll have to find them.

This is my routine. Three days a week, at the moment, I find myself sitting in the car outside Belfast City Hospital; I’m waiting for my wife. While her work day notionally ends at 5 pm, the realities of caring for patients mean that while I may see her shortly after 5, it could be half an hour, an hour, sometimes much longer before she climbs into the seat beside me.

I could spend three or four hours in a week just sitting here, waiting.

There is a temptation to call this wasted time, time when I could handily be somewhere doing something, but these few hours are instead precious to me, and when other commitments (generally a work thing in the evening for one or other of us) mean that I’m not here to collect my wife, I miss this time.

With everything else calling for attention, when I sit here I don’t get the computer out; I rarely make a phone call; I don’t have the room to write comfortably. Instead, I can just sit.

It’s one of the few opportunities I get to read a book, or to relax with a puzzle played on the screen of my phone. I might listen to a podcast, or an audiobook run through the car stereo. I may even tap out a blog post, one letter at a time.

It doesn’t really matter what I do, just that this is the time in my day when nothing else can take my attention, purely by virtue of where I am. That’s precious.

It says something of me that I need circumstances to force this space on me before I can take these pleasures without guilt. Othertimes, that sneaking niggle is always there.

It’s almost Advent, a season of reflection and anticipation — both attitudes and activities that require space and time. The Mockingbird’s Leap (see the sidebar) is to be reconvened, a call to attention to the little graces that surround. That, too, requires the beat, the break in the scurry and hurry.

Rhythm is found as much in the spaces between the beats as in the beats themselves. There is a need to find that rhythm in a day, a week, a year.

I wrote here recently that Advent is my favourite season. It is for many reasons, but foremost are the quiet, the darkness, the anticipation and the yearning for what is to come, the presence of the fullness of life, of life itself.

I sit here waiting, in more ways than the obvious.

• A violinist and a dj collaborate on YouTube. It’s pretty cool.
• It’s amazing what you can do with make-up and photography. Slightly scary, too.
• A brief history of the LED. Fascinating. MAKE tends to provide some great content.
• The Ronster offered to educate me in the ways of Alan Moore. That’ll be my next few comic-type purchases, then.
• Stocki on liturgical worship and the younger generation. An interesting perspective, a useful corrective when it’s so easy to emphasise personal preference, and a hint at deeper shifts, too.

I’m inclined to describe his comment as containing a little of the prophetic — in the sense of the Biblical prophet speaking out to identify both what has gone wrong and what can put it right.

Alan cuts deep, identifying the inconsistencies in the actions of the Presbyterian members of the Mutual, whose Presbyterian identity is surely built around notions of grace, community and mutual concern.

Instead the mess at the Mutual has come about thanks to the same thing that has been happening on a global scale: “If I put my money over there then I might come out of things with just a few pennies more,” and we’d rather not think about the consequences of all this. The problem is that we’re all too connected to and dependent on each other for that to work…

That’s the background. Here’s the fun.

A series of books I haven’t read, by Stephenie Meyer, is starting to make it’s way to film; the first, Twilight, has hit cinemas in the States and will do so here around the middle of next month. It’s about a girl who falls in love with a vampire, and it all sounds very teenager-y angst-y: just the kind of thing that gives YA fiction a bad name.

Cue tension.

In the red corner we have the concerned Christians, represented by Jonathan McKee. (I used to follow quite closely what he wrote, but got a bit turned off when he relaunched his site and resources as The Source for Youth Ministry. The teeth were also a problem, although that shot shows them as a bit less extremely white than I recall.) Actually, I don’t want to slabber too much as what he’s been saying is generally of the “take care and make your own decisions” variety. I’ll never pretend that the media we expose ourselves to can’t influence us to a frightening degree (although I have a suspicion we get distracted by the bits that don’t pretend to be anything more than a good story and let a great volume of much more insidious material go past unchallenged), and that’s always good advice.

What I find amusing is the contrast between the counsel on McKee’s site and this outraged piece on io9.

Short version: in the blue corner we have a SF/fantasy blog up in arms over the books’ expression of the author’s Mormon morality:

The more you examine author Stephenie Meyer’s themes, the more obvious it becomes that her books are a thinly-veiled religious screed against teen sex.

…

Of course Meyer should be allowed to write her own values into Twilight and its sequels, but we are doing young readers a disservice by rubber-stamping these books without a forewarning of what lies within.

And it goes on.

Poor Stephenie Meyer. She seems a little bit out on her own.

Earlier this week, the interwebs were buzzing with the leak of a list of members of the British National Party. It didn’t take long for a police officer who was included in the list to be suspended and investigated.

How do you feel about this man’s employer specifying that he can’t be a member of a particular political party? Or, how do you feel about his membership of a certain party precluding him from serving as a police officer?

“Chief Constable Bernard Hogan-Howe has reiterated our position that membership of the British National Party is totally incompatible with the duties and values of Merseyside Police.

“We will not accept a police officer or police staff being a member of BNP.”

While I would be very surprised to find anything at all from the BNP I could agree with, I’m finding this question a bit tricky.