OddBabblings

Oddbabble Splits in Two

2011-08-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

I know it's irritating when people do this, but I'm moving my blog. In fact I'm splitting it in two. All the Christian stuff is going here (including all the Christian stuff to date), and all the random stuff is going here (including all the random stuff to date). As a special introductory treat, the Christian one has the 2nd part to the Delight Yourself in the Lord post, and the daft one has a poem about needing a wee.

I'm splitting the stuff up because I thought it made more sense to have one blog for one thing. If someone reads my stuff because they enjoy thinking through how Christianity works in the real world, they may find it irritating to be interrupted by posts about cheese, Germans or poo. If someone reads my stuff because they enjoy thinking through cheese, Germans or poo, they might find it irritating to be affronted with a post about the Christian response to suffering. If you enjoy both, they will be clearly linked to one another so you can easily follow both. If you are friends with me on Facebook, they will both be fed to my Notes feed (once I figure out how to do that).

This also hopefully marks a fresh start when I will be blogging regularly again - going through my old posts has inspired me by reminding me that I agree with everything I say. If I wasn't me, I'd totally read both my blogs. I invite you to dig through the archives if you need distraction from something you ought to be doing instead.

Oddbabble: Signing off from here and regretting going over to WordPress because it is much less geared towards people who can't do stuff on computers.

A Plea for Compassion for the Addicted

2011-07-25T02:04:00.000-07:00

I was sad to hear the news of Amy Winehouse's death. Sad that a life had been cut short so young. Sad that a raw and rare talent would not develop any further. Mostly sad for her grieving parents facing one of the worst pains a human can endure: outliving their child.

I had assumed that this response would be fairly universal, so in my naivety I was shocked to read comments, some from friends, implying that her death was deserved, self-inflicted, or that somehow because she was a celebrity and an addict, her death wasn't even a tragedy.

I find this lack of compassion very hard to understand. I can only make sense of it by putting it down to ignorance. Ignorance, thankfully, is curable. Here is a very short blog post* to make absolutely no difference to that ignorance because no-one will read it, but one which will make me feel a little better for having written it.

When a person becomes addicted to something, whether that is to a substance like alcohol or drugs, or a behaviour like gambling, sex or self harm, it is in simple terms, a coping strategy. A way of self-medicating against some kind of pain. It is not simply a case of someone choosing not to say no to something naughty but nice when they really ought to, like a greedy child who keeps eating too many sweets.

Let me help you to stand in the shoes of an addicted person. Imagine the thing in your life that brings you the most comfort and peace. The thing, behaviour or person in your life that helps to make things feel OK for a bit. That thing will necessarily be very precious to you. That is your coping strategy. If your strategy is harm free then you are blessed. Not everyone has access to those things though, and some of those things are not powerful enough to do any good for some people.

Now imagine or remember the most painful emotional thing you have ever experienced. Mix that feeling together with your greatest fear. Multiply it by maybe 10 (or more if you've lived a fairly charmed life) and then imagine it's a permanent feeling that won't go away.

What will you do to help make that feeling less horrible for you? I'm guessing you'll reach for that trusted thing, behaviour or person. I'm guessing that won't solve the problem but that it will bring you some comfort. It'll make the pain a little more bearable. It might numb that feeling a bit or help you to forget it for a while.

Now imagine that whenever you used that thing (hugged that person, bent that ear, read, listened, ran, whatever) you experienced some negative pay-off. It wasn't as bad as that awful feeling but it was still significant enough to be concerning or debilitating in a way that made your friends concerned about you.

So your friends tell you that you have to give up your special, comforting thing. You try because you know your friends are right, but the trouble is they don't understand how terrifying it is when that feeling comes back. That horrible pain that won't go away. They don't understand the courage that it takes to face that feeling is more than most people will have to muster in a lifetime, and that that courage has to be taken every time you say no to that comforting thing. Every time, you are having to be brave enough to face your most terrible fears and feelings, and there is no-one that can do it for you.

People spoke of Amy (and others like her) as having a choice to say no to her addiction. Some choices are harder than others. Yes, there is some weakness involved in not saying no, but do you judge the lamb in the jaws of the wolf for being weak? How many wolves have you had to fight?

I don't know what Amy or any other addict was numbing or hiding or self-medicating. Often the addict doesn't know themselves. We can be fairly sure though, that if we have never found ourselves needing to cut, shoot-up, gamble until we have nothing left or drink ourselves unconscious, then we have probably never felt the things that those people are afraid of facing.

To that, our response should be gratitude for our own blessed lives, sheer admiration for anyone who has the courage to say no to the comfort and yes to riding out the pain, and compassion for those who weren't brave or strong enough to make that 'choice', when we have never had to test our own courage that way.

Oddbabble: They tried to make her go to rehab but she wanted to concentrate more on working with children for the time being.

*It is of course not a comprehensive study on the complexities and variations of addiction, but rather an exercise in teaching compassion by seeing things from the inside through creative means.

Delight yourself in the Lord...Part 1

2011-05-17T12:54:00.000-07:00

For the first several years as a Christian I used to indulge in a secret fantasy that I rarely admitted to anyone. I used to dream that somehow, I would receive a telegram from heaven saying "No-one's Home". I would dream about how my life would be different if I wasn't a Christian, and wish I wasn't so darned wholeheartedly convinced that it's actually true.

Recently I found my mind slipping once again in the direction of wondering how my life would be if I wasn't a Christian and I realised something that worried me at first. I realised that my life wouldn't look all that different if I got that telegram. It worried me because I thought "This is not a good sign. There ought to be a real, measurable difference between the life and values of a Christian and someone who is not" and began the usual panic that regularly befalls the over-sensitive Christian, wondering if I had ever been born again at all.

However, as I thought it through I realised that it was not because my life hadn't changed since I'd become a Christian (that genuinely would be a reason for alarm bells to ring, as a Christian life without regeneration and transformation is one that needs to be examined). The difference was that I had changed from a position of hating God's laws to loving them and agreeing with them. Psalm 119:97 says "Oh how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long." I realised I had come to a point where that had actually begun to make sense to me. Along with the verse below that stares me in the face every morning when I eat my breakfast:

"Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart" Psalm 37:4

I used to look at the verse and think "I know what the desires of my heart are, and I'm 100% sure God isn't about to give me any of those." What I didn't realise is that God doesn't deny us our desires, but he changes what our desires are in the first place. If I got that telegram, my life wouldn't look much different because I am convinced of the rightness of the way that God says life should be lived, to the extent that it would remain right even if it was earthly, not heavenly wisdom.

What this means in practice is that I am now a far more 'cheerful giver'. It's much easier and more pleasant to give a gift that's deserved, that the recipient has asked for to someone you love than it is to give something you love, to someone you bitterly resent for asking for it. Even and especially if the gift is very, very expensive. Either way the recipient gets the gift, but the latter is far more civilised for all involved.

Of course I am not saying that everything I do is in agreement with God and I am almost indistinguishable from the living Lord Jesus himself. All I am saying is that for far more things than before, when I do, think or say something that is wrong, I agree that it was wrong. I guess you could say it's like growing out of adolescence. As a teenager it drove me mad that my parents told me what I could and couldn't do. I was a comparatively obedient teenager but my obedience was not in line with my desires or personal judgement. As an adult, I'm still tempted to do many of the things the teenaged me was fond of, but I am able to see for myself why those things are not what's best for me. There's no-one making me make those choices anymore, but now I choose to make them (most of the time). The results are almost the same but there are far fewer tantrums and slammed doors.

This in turn made me realise something else - something that totally crushed my pride. You can read about that in Part 2...

Oddbabble: Thinks that serialising her posts will increase her readers exponentially.

The Emperor's New Clothes Are All a Size Zero

2011-05-17T12:46:00.001-07:00

This is an article I wrote for a zine called Fatty. I would like to precede it with the disclaimer that I am not talking about people who are unhealthily overweight, and I am certainly not making a comment about eating disorders which are another thing entirely. This is just about stupid women. Enjoy.

There has been a peculiar spell cast over Western society. Not the good sort like your kind, fat, fairy Godmother might cast. It bears more the mark of your archetypal scrawny witch. It’s a powerful spell that infiltrates women’s minds, men’s trousers, our purses, our time, our conversations and many, many miles of tedious print on the pages of glossy magazines.

I work in primary schools – an environment almost entirely populated by females. In every staff room I walk into I hear the conversational evidence of this spell’s effects. There are unspoken, unbroken rules about what you may eat, your attitude to it and how you may talk about it. There is a strict script in which women must agree that calorific or fatty foods are ‘naughty’ or ‘wicked’. A tacit assumption that any pleasure derived from eating must be paid for with guilt. And an apparently unshakeable rule that all women MUST be thinner than they currently are, regardless of their shape, size or weight, and with absolutely no connection whatsoever with their level of health. I hear conversations governed by these rules replicated over and over in every school I visit. Each word of it drips with socially constructed, oppressive lies that have been repeated so many times in so many ways that it has become accepted as Unquestionable Truth.

The last time I was in a school staff room at lunch time, I was invited to join in with one of these scripts with a woman I hadn’t met before. She was the dance teacher and she was eating a low fat yoghurt. I refused to follow the script at every opportunity. The conversation went as follows:

Dance Teacher: “I’m trying to eat this slowly but it’s so difficult.”

Me: “Why are you trying to eat it slowly?”

DT: “So I don’t eat as much!”

Note her surprise that I didn’t already know one of the Universal Laws of Eating for Women.

Me: OK.

No, I am not going to say “What are you talking about! You don’t need to lose weight, you’re so skinny!” because (a.) this would mean I believed it was a compliment to call someone skinny (b.) I would be stating the eye-bleedingly obvious to completely deaf ears rendering the statement pointless (c.) it is a very core conversational rule and therefore I must break it and (d.) because it would trigger the inevitable cyclical exchange “No, I’m not skinny you are!” followed by “Don’t be ridiculous, you’re the thin one here!” followed by very slight variations of the same until one of us dies.

DT: “I keep trying to eat less but I just keep getting hungry.”

Me: “I guess that’s your body telling you that you’ve burned some energy and it needs replacing.”

DT: “But I haven’t burned any energy!”

I say nothing, thinking that this strikes me as extremely unlikely given that her job title dictates that she has spent the morning dancing and attempting to keep control of 30 or so small children.

DT: “It was awful last week, my husband gave me a whole box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day.”

I know I am expected to agree that this experience is worthy of the word “awful”, but I will not concede. Instead I say the logically more appropriate:

“How lovely of him.”

DT: “It was terrible though, they were these really rich, delicious truffle things. I ate loads of them.”

Again, I am aware that I am required to declare that something “rich” and “delicious” is lamentable and that she is to be pitied above all women. Instead I venture the controversial:

“They sound gorgeous, lucky you.”

She gives up at this point because it’s clear to her that I don’t understand The Rules, not to mention the fact that as we are speaking, I am stuffing my face with normal food at normal speed, without apologising or self flagellating.

As the Emperor in the fairy tale parades around as a naked imbecile, the crowds congratulate his apparel so many times that even they become convinced that there are enviable fabrics and stitches in front of them. As women nod and agree with each other that these are The Rules, they forget that there may be another way of looking at themselves. They are voluntarily living in a prison where the door isn’t even locked.

I'm Sorry I'm a Christian

2011-05-17T12:34:00.000-07:00

For those one or two readers who are not friends with me on Facebook, or who missed this first time around:

I'm not clever enough to work out how to add the actual video here, but please follow this link for the rest of this post to make sense.

A friend, responded with this:

"That's powerful stuff. Challenging but quite negative. Does it describe how you feel about Christians you know?"

This was my response:

I posted it because a lot of people I've spoken to see Christians in this way, so I think it's healthy for Christians and non-Christians to hear something like this. This is the reality of the context that we're witnessing into - when I say "I am a Christian" these are the assumptions that people may make about me. Though this is more about the people with the loudest voices or the biggest placards than individual Christians I might know personally, I do think it's important to acknowledge that these are things that sincere and often genuine Christians have done, and I think there’s a place for saying sorry for being part of the same body that has done these things. Not for the sake of being negative, but to have some authenticity about our failures and hypocrisy and to point out, as the poet does, that this was not how Jesus conducted himself. I long for people to associate the word Christian with Jesus’ radical indiscriminate love and compassionately spoken truth but the tragic reality is that many people don’t. I am a part of the reason for this too.

Some Lessons I've Learned Lately about Love

2010-11-21T03:55:00.000-08:00

A friend told me this story about himself.

He had just started at Bible college and after the first lecture he went up to his professor and said "This book tells me I'm going to hell because I'm gay. Tell me why."

There are 101 things his professor could have said to him. A professor of theology might have turned to several passages in the Bible, and begun some kind of exegesis. What he said was this:

"This book tells you that God loves you."

That was all that he said. He didn't add anything to that, or explain it, or give a caveat or a reference or anything else. He didn't need to because his sermon was completely self-contained and accurate. My friend was blown away by this and completely transformed - it hit him right between the eyes that he would always have this bottom line: God loved him. No ifs, no buts, no ands. God loves him.

So my friend's professor taught me a wonderful, simple lesson about love.

The Bible college was a residential one and my friend had to share a room, like many other students. He was sharing with a young man who thought he knew a lot about a lot of things. Reader, you may have met one or two young men like him. The room mate shared a lot of opinions about homosexuality that hurt my friend, for example that it he would never let a child of his go to a Sunday school class that my friend was teaching, because my friend was not safe to be in contact with children.

When I hear people say things like this, my reaction is to first get very angry and then to write them off. I define that person as ignorant and hateful and resolve to no longer be in contact with them. But my friend is different to me because he had learned a very simple lesson about love that had changed his life. My friend was angry with him and told me that often it was very hard for him not to punch his room mate in the face. I empathised. But, he said, but he also knew that he was loved. And that made it difficult for him to hate. He was so convinced and changed by this heart knowledge of his status as an unconditionally loved person, that his instinct to love this person was stronger than his instinct to hate him. Not because he thought he ought to love him as 'the right thing to do' but because his knowledge that he was loved compelled him to love this guy, and to keep coming back to this point again and again, even though he was hurt by him again and again.

I was bowled over by this.

It highlighted a couple of important things for me. The first is that although I completely agree with my friend's professor, I think I don't really believe it for myself deep down. I understand that I am loved by God and that there is a full stop at the end of that sentence, and no other sentence is needed. But I always like to add my own but, or my own and. God loves me but he also hates me a bit and expects me to do more than I ever possibly can and when I don't, he hates me a bit. But yes, he loves me. Or God loves me and it's because I don't do this thing. Or God loves me and it's because I am so this and so that. I think the fact that my friend didn't add his own but or and, is the reason why his life was changed by it and he was able to love his enemy. I think my buts and ands are what makes me withdraw from my enemies and write them off.

So the second thing I realised is that my dogged refusal to accept this unconditional love thing has meant that I'm very bad at loving. Because loving means staying and not running away. I am about to join a new church and I've realised that part of the reason I've taken so long to choose one is because I don't want to take the painful risk of committing to love. I have been hurt by a lot of people similar to my friend's room mate and I have seen a lot of friends hurt by his kind and my instinct is to think that Christians are often not very nice so I'll withdraw. But I also know that being part of a church means that I am called to love people - that's sort of the point of it. And some of those people will think they know a lot about a lot of things and will say things and they will hurt me and I want to be someone who stays and loves them. And the reason I want to do that is because it's sinking in that I am loved and then there is a full stop. And that full stop is starting to make me want to be brave and love others with my own full stop. I think that's probably a better attitude to join a church with than the one I've had of late.

Here is a link that has helped me to soak in the full stop: Everyone everywhere needs to know this.

Unjust Desserts

2010-11-05T10:40:00.000-07:00

Anticipation can be a delicious thing. Especially in the context of one of my favourite hobbies: eating.

I love those moments between savouring the savoury and knowing there'll soon be the sweet full stop of a pudding. There is only one thing that can ruin these wonderful few moments and that is the fury, rage, sorrow and injustice I experience when someone misinterprets the remit 'pudding' to include the revolting non-dessert that is crumble. It's a lot like waking up with a buzz of excitement on the morning of your birthday, only to have your parade rained on by being given a cow for someone in Africa as your main gift. Yes, broadly speaking it is a present. Yes, morally speaking I should be pleased. But there doesn't seem to be any chocolate happening here and that's really my point.

Allow me to explain.

The definition of a pudding is something sweet and delicious. In order to achieve the status of sweet deliciousness, one or more of the following must be present as a primary ingredient: custard, chocolate, cream. Did you see boiled up old fruit there? No. Did you see broken old bits of biscuit? No. All crumbles are therefore wrong, but there is nothing quite so heinous as the inclusion of leaf stalks into a pudding. That's what rhubarb is friends. It's a little known fact that most of a rhubarb plant is actually poisonous. That's God's way of warning us that eating it is wrong.

Somebody give me a custard injection.

Oddbabble: When she's queen the dictionary and the law will reflect these truths.

Swedish Smedish

2010-11-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

The first part always lures me into a false sense of joy because I will be eating Very Cheap Meatballs with lovely gravy, chips and some sort of jam on the side. That's all I really want from life generally. So with stomach full, I go to pick up the one wardrobe that I have already chosen from the catalogue in the comfort of my own home.

I just need one thing.

But hang on, there's a cuddly scorpion that's only 39p, so I'd better get 5. And something which makes my cupboards seem bigger. And a set of wine glasses. And a watering can. And, and...

OK, now I really do have everything I need, I just need to get to the bit where the flatpacks are kept. But there is a couple walking in front of me veerryyy slowly with a wide trolly and wider bottoms. I will have to stay behind them at their pace until I get to a junction because the path is very narrow and my only alternative is to clamber over the fitted kitchen. They are very slow. They are very wide.

Eventually I duck past but am soon met by another obstacle. A fueding couple who are blocking my path by holding oversized soft furnishings. "I don't want to make a SCENE David." "I'm not making a scene, I just don't think those will go with the curtains, and I don't think you really see the seriousness of that."

I would love to stay and see how this develops but I want to GET OUT but I am on a seemingly never-ending winding narrow path peopled by wide couples or arguing couples or other people blocking me in equally inconsiderate ways.

And I still haven't seen my wardrobe even though I've been through 3 wardrobe sections (or have I been to the same wardrobe section 3 times?).

I decide to ask a member of staff for help. There are none. I continue to search and eventually approach someone.
Me: Hi, I wonder if you can help me?
Employee (without looking up): Yeah?
Me: I'm looking for the Bonky Wardrobe.
Employee: You'll need to check the catalogue.
Me: Great, where can I find a catalogue?
Employee: On that stand over there.
Me: Ah, I did just check there, there aren't any.
Employee: That one over there then.
Me: Oops, none there either!
Employee: Sorry, can't help then.

Undeterred I continue to wind my way around the endless pathway until I locate the Bonky Suite, and copy down the corresponding code to find the flatpack. I can now get to the flatpack bit, but I have been here for 15 hours so my energy is beginning to flag, plus I have been carrying 35 unneccessary essentials with me for the entire duration.

I locate the flatpack I need and am physically unable to move it at all.

I ask for help and a kind employee takes it to the till. I pay and hand over my loyalty card which is scanned.

Me: This doesn't seem to have made any difference to my bill.
Cashier: No, it just gives you a free cup of tea in the canteen you were in 15 hours ago.

The employee helps me to wheel the flat packs to my car, taking me past the returns area. The facial expressions and body language of the people there make it resemble a waiting room for a doctors' surgery where there is only one doctor who is only in on an unspecified day and you are not allowed to know which one.

The flat pack will not fit in my car.

There is one thing (except the meatballs, and the joy of assembling the furniture once it's home) that redeems this company. That thing is Anna. Try saying these things to her: 'You are pretty.' 'Will you go out with me?' 'Are you married?' I love the way she becomes so anxious - it's OK, I'm not really interested in you, you're a picture! And I love the way she pronounces Ikea! If you can make her say anything else amusing, do let me know.

Oddbabble: Can't tell her Bonky from her Shlonky.

Ladies Who Lunch

2010-11-05T09:07:00.000-07:00

Pam -Soozie-Doreen-Jean

Pam: Helloooo, and welcome to LADIES WHO LUNCH!
Audience of middle-aged women: Wooooo!!
Pam: We've got a fantastic show for you today. We'll be discussing 'Does my bum look big in this?' 'Should I dump my man?' and a Serious Political Debate!
Audience: Wooooo!!
Pam: OK, so let's start with our first topic. Ladies, do you ever worry about the size of your bum?
Jean: OMG are you joking?
Audience: Wooooo!!
Jean: I mean, if panties could talk!
Other panel members: Hahaha! What is she like?!
Jean: I remember a time when I said to my boyfriend, 'does my bum look big in this?' and he said, wait for it girls, he said 'well you know what you always say to me darling, size does matter!'
Audience (hysterical at the mention of a slight penis innuendo): WOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Pam: Hahahaha. What about you Doreen?
Doreen: I love my bum I've always been happy with my bum. I think all women who don't like their bums are stupid and fat anyway. It's obvious that the answer is to eat fewer pies.
Jean: Doreen, how can you say that?! What about all the wine you drink?
Audience: Wooooo!!
Pam: I do have to admit ladies, we did have a couple of bevvies last night!
Doreen: A couple? Only if you mean the equivalent of newly weds' body weight!
Audience: Woooo!!
Jean: What is she like?!
Pam: OK girls enough about drinking and bums...
Audience: Wooooo!!
Pam:...it's time for our Serious Political Debate!
Doreen: Oh I don't know, I've got such a headache from all the wine last night!
Soozie: She's an alcoholic!!
Audience: Woooo!!
Pam: Now now girls. Our topic today is 'Should the government be making so many cuts?' What do you think girls?
Jean: No way! They're just making cuts all over the place! It's awful! They should be giving us money, not taking it away. How are we meant to pay for things?
Doreen: It's ridiculous. I grew up with nothing as a kid. We all had to drink rain water from the gutter and eat out of bins. But it's not as bad as it is now. It's awful.
Pam (reading from an autocue): But how else will the government tackle the deficit.
Panel: ...
Soozie:....well, I mean, they have to make some cuts I guess...
Doreen: As long as they don't tax alcohol!
Audience: Woooo!
Soozie: Yeah, or penises!
Audience: Wooo!!!
Pam (fanning herself): Well ladies I'm afraid that's all we have time for today! But tune in tomorrow for more topics relevant to ladies today! Bye!!

The next day...

Pam: Helloooo, and welcome to LADIES WHO LUNCH!
Audience of middle-aged women: Wooooo!!
Pam: We've got a fantastic show for you today. We'll be discussing 'Fad diets' 'Is my boyfriend cheating?' and a Serious Political Debate!
Audience: Wooooo!!
Pam: And as it's Soozie's birthday today, we'll also have a random semi-naked man bringing in a cake!
Audience (several of whom have passed out): WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
Pam: OK girls, let's start with Fad Diets. Have any of you tried to lose weight?
Soozie: I'm starting my diet tomorrow!
Doreen: That's what she always says!
Audience: *Falls about in apoplectic laughter*
Doreen: I'm on a wine diet!
Jean: What is she like?! She's hungover again!!
Pam: Oh wait, who's this I see coming in with a cake?
Audience: *Screams hysterically at oiled pretty boy who is blatantly homosexual*
Pam: Happy birthday Soozie, just a little suprise for you. It was either that or a sausage!
Audience: Woooooo!!
Jean: Yes, or a little package!
Audience: Wooooooooooooo!!
Doreen! Or a big one!
Everyone falls about lauging until the credits roll.

The next day...

Pam: Helloooo, and welcome to LADIES WHO LUNCH!
Audience of middle-aged women: Wooooo!!
Pam: We've got a fantastic show for you today. We'll be discussing 'How do I get rid of my cellulite?' 'How do I know if he's the one?' and a Serious Political Debate!
Audience: Wooooo!!

You get the idea...

Another Post On Suffering

2010-09-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

At the risk of repeating myself (I've gone over similar lines here) allow me to bang a drum I like to reprise every now and again. And allow me to do it again in a couple of posts' time. Thanks.

Unfortunately for any small group or Bible study I may grace with my presence, I am that irritating token person who always points out the unresolvable, willfully invisible elephant in the passage, just when we all thought we were agreeing pleasantly and coming to the same comfortable conclusions as usual.

On one such occasion the study was on Matthew 7 and I pointed out 2 uncomfortable realities, one of which I will now unpack.

I pointed out that when our Father gives out his gifts, he doesn't do so equally. He gives much blessing to some, and little blessing to others. To some he gives much suffering, to others much less.

One person's response was this; "This is true, but when I've spoken to people who have suffered, their experience of Jesus has been all the sweeter."

I gave a silent reply because of my hideous combination of a wildly emotional histrionic drama queen trapped inside the body of a painfully self-conscious, cringingly English woman. One who knew she had already rocked the boat too many times that evening to add an embarrassing, tearful rebuke (plus, well, my period was due, so the whole thing would have been monstrously amplified and very un-Bible-study-ish).

What I wanted to say was this:

How many suffering people have you actually spoken to in real life? Because what you're saying actually sounds like what you imagine suffering people to say while you are trying to square this difficult circle in your head. Yes, there are wonderful Christian examples like Brother Yun, who are able to count their suffering as a blessing but dare I say it, he is an exceptional man - a true hero of the faith. How many ordinary people with everyday ordinary unequal sufferings have you actually had an authentic conversation with?

Let me give you an example. My own sufferings are very, very small compared to a lot of people. Nevertheless as many readers know, my testimony is mostly not exactly jolly. I was asked for it by someone on the board of a well-known evangelical conference, only to have it returned to me with this feedback - "Thanks for your story. Do you think you could add a sentence or two just mentioning how God made up for what you've sacrificed in other ways?".

My answer was that no, I was not going to bolt on a contrived happy ending. My story is my story and actually, God has not 'made up for it'. There isn't an automatic equilibrium in my life - or anyone else's - which means that bad stuff is always weighed up somewhere with good so it all comes out equal and fair in the end.

Life is not fair people!

Life is not equal!

Even, *gasp* for Christians!

It may well be that my friend had spoken to a lot of suffering Christians and that they gave in to the pressure to give a happy ending and added an experience that was not really felt. Going back to the previous example of Habakkuk in my last rant about this (see the link at the start), sometimes, there really are NO FIGS! Sometimes we don't get peaches to make up for the lack of figs! The right Christian response, as in this passage, is to trust God anyway. To trust that there will be figs and peaches overflowing when we die, yes, but that in this life, some get crops of figs, some get none.

Sometimes that lack of figs creates a 'Heavenly Man' type of Christian. Sometimes it creates an OddBabble type of Christian who is far less heroic in response to her far, far, far lesser sufferings, who actually has a pretty impoverished faith in response, which actually a lot of the time is holding on by a thread, and a lot of the time, the One holding on to the thread is not her.

I am not wishing for fewer Heavenly Men, or for less joy in suffering or for less discipline in blessing-counting. God knows these are all things I desperately need to learn from in my life. I know that part of my response here comes from a gross lack of godliness and I'm not boasting in that.

All I wish for is a bit of honesty and authenticity. Sometimes (often, in my experience) the best response to someone's suffering is not to look for the silver lining, or to make one up when there isn't one, but actually just to weep and grieve with them while they are in their cloud and give them the balm of acknowledging that being in a black cloud just feels shit right now.

Scarecut #2

2010-06-02T12:47:00.000-07:00

Today I got my hair cut - an acutely anxiety provoking activity which I wrote about once before here.

I don't have too much to add to what I said then, except to say that all my worst nightmares came true on this occasion.

Kayla, ever the professional, smilingly said the following: "I'm just gonna pop a tissue on you there because I seem to have taken the top off a bleeding sore on your head with my comb."

I took in the scene in the mirror before me: Kayla smilingly holding a blooded tissue above my head, my own blushing, horrified face, and the face of the woman next to me which read "OMG, that woman has actually got leprosy?"

Oddbabble. Glamour is her middle name.

Miscellany

2010-04-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

A collection of oddbabblings, anecdotes and misdemeanors from the last few months...

On Becoming a Grown-up

I recently had to attend my first multi-disciplinary meeting in my newish job. This meant that I had to persuade other adults that I am competent and professional, whereas thus far, I have only had to convince 6-11 year old children, who are frankly gullible. I was very disappointed therefore, to find that during my cycle ride in, a piece of debris flew into my eye, meaning that I was compulsively winking throughout the meeting. The middle-aged women around the table must have thought I was either some kind of creepy flirt, or unusually moved (I was also crying, but only out of one eye), or secretly trying to tell all of them something that they couldn't quite decipher. Either way, it wasn't how I had hoped it would go.

Cheap Seats

Someone I know was delighted to have been given tickets to go and see the famous Riverdance show. Unfortunately, the seats were in a very poor position, meaning she could only see the dancers from the waist up. Thus she was able to watch hours of people wobbling everso slightly while looking straight ahead and holding their arms tightly by their sides.

Unprofessional Footwear

Since I am a counsellor, a friend bought me socks with the following statements on them, to help my clients to know that I'm really there for them:
"I'm not listening!"
"I understand, I just don't care"

Autocounsellor

After a particularly long day (in fact, almost a duplicate of the one described in my last post) I was waiting to be picked up from a distant station, looking at some trees with lights that flashed in different patterns - some fast, some slow, some sporadic. I found myself auto-empathising and thinking "I see, so you're flashing quite fast now. Perhaps you're feeling quite frantic? OK, and slower, yes. I sense there's a calmness between us now." I genuinely had these actual thoughts about lights on trees. That's tiredness.

Sweet Nothings

Oddbabble: I love you.
Companion: Wow, I think I have 5 layers on today.

Evidence for my Sanity

Genuine quotes from the 'Stickers Are Evil' group on Facebook:

"Stickers are the most disgusting thing in the world, I want to be sick if I am near them."

"yess! finally stickoraphobians unite! i get teased so much but really, IT'S A REAL THING! i demand some friggin respect..."

"i really hate stickers! they make me vomit and cry, ewwwww!!!!!!! ;("

"no way!!! i thought i was on my own. they make me sick! especially when they are curled up. makes my stomach chern!!!"

"The sight of a sticker peeling off with fuzz from a shirt stuck to it makes me nauseous. And little kids with stickers on their faces. It makes me gag EVERY time. I never can understand how ANYONE allows stickers to touch them."

"Stickers make me vomit too!!! I think they are the nastiest things ever. I have to cut off the stickers from apples, I can’t peel them off. I usually buy apples without stickers so I don’t have to deal with gagging when i see the sticker."

"stickers r fricken disgustingg, especially the thought of getting them in my hair, it makes me cringe just to think about it"

I have to stop now because I'm making myself feel sick, but I think I've made my point. I am right.

Childhood Sweethearts

These are the names of the teddys I had when I was a little girl. They seemed genuinely straightforward and logical to me at the time:

Fat
Pepper
Tray
Petrol Girl
Terrorhawksstayonthischannelthisisanemergency
Kevvy Boobs

Bum Geography

During the snowy season, I fell flat on my bum. The bruise the next day was in the shape of a perfect map of Australia, complete with New Zealand next to it, to scale.

Travel Sickness

Has anyone been to Gatwick Airport recently? While waiting for a delayed plane, I was horrified to be 'entertained' by The Gatwick Factor (like the X Factor, but cleverly renamed, and without any of the elements of enjoyment). They piped it out so loudly that there was literally no escape as we were already airside. I had to endure an elderly lady singing Hey Big Spender, complete with 'sexy' dancing. Old lady, I do not want to know with whom you may or not pop your cork. Frankly, I don't want to think about your cork at all.

Oddbabble: Writes this kind of crap down in her little book.

A Day in the Life

2009-11-20T12:48:00.000-08:00

I was going to write this as a Facebook update, but it was too long, so it's going here:

Today I left the flat at 8:30 am and returned home at 8:30 pm. During that time I took 6 buses, 5 trains, 3 tubes and 1 DLR, and walked many miles pulling a wheely shopper containing 13 books, 4 large puppets, 16 finger puppets, some plasticine, some art materials, loads of sheets of important paper and some miscellaneous objects.

I gave 100% of my concentration and empathy counselling 3 troubled children and 3 troubled adults, and was a client myself in an expensive, tearful session.

Of these 12 hours, I was paid for 3, and spent 72% of that wage doing the above.

I am tired. I am post CYFA camp tired. Brother, sisters, do you hear me? Holler!

The Signs of Ageing

2009-10-13T12:51:00.001-07:00

Two things happened this week that made me feel like a 70 year old woman.

The first is that I purchased my very first wheely shopper, pictured below.Isn't it just sex on wheels though? If you look very closely, you will see that it has a cylindrical side pocket for accomodation of a walking stick!

In my defence, I bought it as a convenient way to lug tons of toys around the primary schools that I work in. I thought the children would find the ladybirds appealing, and hoped it might earn me the nickname "The Ladybird Lady". I'll let you know.

The second geriatric incident was when I lost my bicycle glove. I lamented to my friend on the phone how I am always losing things like that and will have to buy yet another pair.

It wasn't until several HOURS later, that I discovered upon looking at my reflection in a mirror, that it was in fact caught in my hair.

If I'm like this now, I dread to think what I'll be like when I really am a crazy old woman.

Let's celebrate Crash.

2009-09-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

I recently went to a 'Taster Day' for an institute of higher education which will remain nameless. It was one of those places that only I seem to find myself in.

Firstly, all the walls were painted. When I say painted, I'm not talking two coats of magnolia, I mean that they were actual paintings. So in one room you were in a forest, complete with sky and clouds on the ceilings. In the toilets, each cubicle was wrapped in climbing plants and flowers. I got an incling that this wouldn't be a run of the mill evening.

I took my seat ready for a lecture, and the speaker was a big burly man with a beard. The kind of man who you just dip in your pockets and give your purse and keys to, while reciting your pins and passwords, because it makes the whole inevitable stabbing thing quicker and more painless. I was surpised therefore, when he opened his mouth to sound almost exactly like Michael Jackson, but with about an inch thick layer of camp smeared on top.

"And so, we made some creations from lego, always trains. Always drawings of trains. Where are the trains going? Of course, I realised, they were trains to nowhere. Sometimes they crashed, and you know what? We celebrated Crash. Crash is OK"

Perhaps you re-read that in an attempt to understand it and make some sense of it. You were right the first time - it's just bollocks.

We then moved to an area of the room where there was a bit more space, and were asked to take off our shoes. This was a clear signal to me that we were about to do something physical and public and embarassing and insane.

I was right.

9 adults then unquestioningly skipped about the room pretending variously, to be walking on a hot pavement, cooling ourselves in a puddle, splashing, jumping, looking at things that weren't there in rapt wonder. Yada yada yada.

I'm sure you can imagine, this is exactly the kind of situation where I feel most comfortable and at ease, lacking in all self-consciousness or desire to run away as fast as I can (which, if anyone has seen me run, would not put much space between me and Fat Michael Jackson anytime soon).

Next we had to paint our feelings. Of course. I did some trees.

FMJ "Now, I want you to choose an object, or rather, let the object choose you".

A rubber snake chose me.

I then had to give my object a voice, and tell this story to my neighbour, who silently nodded while remembering what she had read that Freud thinks about snakes, and judging me.

We then had a group interview, which went something like this:

FMJ: Why are you here today?
Candidate no. 1: I'm here because I'm on a journey? And the experience I've had today has just been really amazing because I've really been in my body?

Everyone nods (except me).

Candidate no 2: Yes, it was incredible how released I was in the act of using the paints. My emotions just flowed out of me. I just feel really....centred?

Everyone nods (except me).

Me: I'm here because I'd like to do my job better.

Everyone looks at me. When they realise that's all I'm going to say, we move on.

FMJ: Can you tell me about some of the neuroses you developed in childhood, and how you address them as an adult?

As you may imagine, everyone did. At very great length and in painful and alarming detail. Everyone except me.

The next day I received a letter saying that I had not been accepted for a place, but that they would consider me after a year of humanistic psychotherapy.

Which makes complete sense, because the obvious conclusion to draw from all of this is that I am mentally ill and need help to get a better grip of reality.

Some Stupid Things I've Done Recently

2009-07-04T08:39:00.000-07:00

Stupid Thing #1 - Revealing Too Much Too Soon

I was at a training day recently, and had lunch with a stranger who had been my partner in one of the morning exercises. My first mistake was this:

Lunch Companion: That's my bike there.
Me/Total Freak Wierdo: Oh right. What's it's name?
LC: ....it doesn't have a name.

I should have stopped here but..:

M/TFW: Mine's called Lola.
LC:....OK.

I had managed to recover a little after this, talking about normal things and not revealing any further my habit of personifying inanimate objects, but then two little beetles crawled onto my arm - we were eating our lunch outside:

M/TFW: Oh look! They're crawling up my arm!
LC: Yes, they like you don't they. (Note how her tone has begun to change to one usually reserved for children or the unstable).
M/TFW: They do, and I like them too.
LC: I'm a nature lover too. I was watching an ant crawl up my arm the other day...
M/TFW: Oh! oh! Oh! I LOVE ants! I have ants as pets. They're the most amazing creatures ever. Look, I've got an ant badge on my bag. I love watching them go about their business. The other day I was watching one and she was having a chat with another one...

I won't go on. I could hear myself and wanted to stop, but somehow I couldn't. She excused herself shortly after this. Note to self: at least try to pretend that you are a socially acceptable person during the first hour of meeting someone.

Stupid Thing #2 - Exaggerated Startle Reflex

I walked out onto my balcony and yelped when I saw that someone else was on my 1 metre by one metre outside space. It was my own reflection in the window.

Stupid Thing #3 - Paying Someone £92 for 3 Second's Work

I called in an electrician. Next time I'll flip the switch myself.

Stupid Thing #4 - Wearing a Skirt on a Bicycle

It was hot. Not hot enough however, to have the hem of my skirt tickling my nostrils, and revealing to Central London my black girl boxers covered in bees with Bee Mine written around the top (I know. Sexy.).

Stupid Thing #5 - Delayed Homeward Journey

I got on the bus on the wrong side of the road and got a hot sweaty lift to a place further away from my destination than I had begun.

Stupid Thing #6 - Over Enthusiastic Hugging

My friend came over and I ran out to hug her, swearing loudly in her ear as the door slammed behind me leaving my keys and my mobile on the other side.

How I've managed to hold down a job and not get arrested for anything so far is beyond me.

Amen, Elaine

2009-06-29T10:31:00.000-07:00

"Deeply satisfying human intimacy, whether in marraige or outside, is in the end not dependent on copulation but on a faithful sharing of our hearts and lives with those whom we love, and a longing for their well being and peace. For it is then that God can be God and love be a gift."

Elaine Storkey in The Search For Intimacy

Jesus: Gay Icon?

2009-06-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article in the paper entitled 'What Makes A Gay Icon?' with the tag line "Talent? Non-conformity? A touch of angst? And do they even have to be gay...?"

Lord Alli (whoever he is) chose Diana, Princess of Wales as his gay icon, for the following reasons: "Princess Diana continues to live on as an icon in many different ways: fashion icon, charity icon, feminist icon, British icon. Her place as a gay icon however, was cemented by a single moment during a visit to a Chain of Hope centre in April 1987. Taking the hand of an Aids sufferer, she shattered the widely held belief that physical contact alone could lead to the contraction of Aids, and offered hope and comfort to those in the gay community infected with HIV."

Does this remind you of anyone?

"A man with leprosy came and knelt before [Jesus] and said, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said.
Matthew 8:2-3

It strikes me that just as Jesus was prepared to touch the 'untouchables' then, he would be doing the same if he came today. He'd be openly touching and loving AIDS sufferers, which according to Lord Alli, would make him a gay icon.

I don't think Jesus would spend much energy removing that label from himself, because he was well used to being associated with those whose names were used as swear words. "You Samaritan" was perhaps the equivalent of "you queer!" or "that is so gay". I feel sure that if Jesus were around on earth today, he would be hanging around with homosexual people, not caring what it made people assume about him, and pissing off a lot of today's 'religious' people, just as he pissed off the pharisees back then.

"While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and "sinners" came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"
Matthew 9:10-11

One reason why I'm writing on this topic today, is in solidarity with the Bridging the Gap blog (that I've mentioned before here). Today they are doing a thing called synchroblog, which I don't really understand technically, but I've figured out enough to know that they want lots of people to link relevant posts to their blog today to get people reading and talking about it.

I think what they are doing at Bridging the Gap is really important for the church. They are Christians reaching out to gay people by genuinely listening and loving instead of condemning and ostracising. They hold a conservative view of what the Bible says about homosexual practice but they are committed to open, genuine and grace filled dialogue with those Christians who have reached a different theological conclusion.

The homosexuality debate is one that is tearing the church in two at the moment, and Bridging the Gap provide one voice that is attempting to bring back unity, without compromising their own convictions. This is a difficult and messy task which often leaves them in a kind of limbo land where they are criticised from every side by those who can only cope with reductionist, black & white views.

I passionately applaud their work and feel that their attitude could be transposed to so many other issues in the church today too. Do consider joining me in engaging with their dialogue which is often challenging and humbling. They've helped me re-think some of my own attitudes in a way that I think has been very healthy, both for me and for those I interact with.

Check them out here.

A Couple of funny links...

2009-06-11T01:58:00.000-07:00

An Hilarious Video

God Texts the Decalogue

The Shack

2009-03-29T16:27:00.001-07:00

Recently I posted the following apparently innocuous statement as my facebook status: "OddBabble wants to talk about The Shack." The following documents the surprising response:

Susanna Adlem at 18:20 on 27 March
I didn't love it, still reading it though.

Kevin Hargaden at 20:03 on 27 March
I'm in London in a few weeks. Fancy a chat then?

Louiz Kirkebjerg Nielsen at 20:43 on 27 March
I love it love it. Talk to me about it when you have time. x Louiz

Tanya Marlow at 21:49 on 27 March
i half loved it

Rachel Anne Burns at 00:46 on 28 March
haven't read it, though initially wanted to. This and other reviews pretty much some it up for me and I'm happy to leave it alone, wondering why so many Christians pursue a desire to read what is heresy when the bible gives a much more complete picture of who God is and of the nature of and answer to suffering.http://theologynetwork.org/christian-beliefs/the-holy-spirit-and-christian-living/starting-out/the-shack--good-news-or-bad-story.htm

Rosalie Lewis Garwood at 02:02 on 28 March
It's a shame that you haven't read this yourself, Rachel. Why would you form an opinion on something you don't know anything about. What about those who mock the Bible and say it isn't God's Word? Do you go along with that too? I have two copies of this book oh my desk and am in the process of reading it. Here is another website you can check out. Maybe it will give you a more balanced view of it.http://godmessedmeup.blogspot.com/2008/01/shack-book-review.html

Rachel Anne Burns at 08:55 on 28 March
I've read the review, but I found nothing in it that would cause me to change my opinion. Should I read pornography in order to form a balanced opinion on it if it's something I know nothing about?

Kevin Hargaden at 09:47 on 28 March
So the Shack is like porn? This is a new kind of argument right here. Your ideas intrigue me Rachel. Can I subscribe to your newsletter?

Badger Burns at 22:24 on 29 March
lol Kev, there was a link pasted of a fair review but did you visit it?The point merely is why put your head under a steam roller just to see what happens

Badger Burns at 22:34 on 29 March
and taking my own medicine now :pI have just read the site suggested by Rosalie. The title of the blogspot kinda put me off kilter immediately. My growing frustration about the book is that whenever any criticism is levelled at it the counter argument that is offered is that it is a work of fiction.My huge criticism of the author and /or publishers is that they are saying that the book is being used massively by God.I dont understand why God would endorse a book saying that Jesus does not want people to become Christians and that we limit God to the pages of the Bible.A book that He Himself chose to 'limit' himself by in describing himself.

My response to all of this is as follows:

I am someone who holds the Bible in the very highest regard: I consider it to be the words breathed of the God who made the universe. I consider it to be infallible. I consider it to be the only and true epistemological, ontological, philosophical, theological, stuffofeverydaylifeological authority.

Yet I see no contradiction between holding this view and believing that as His created creatures create and interact, God provides echoes, glimpses, shadows, pictures, parables and whispers that point to Himself and His character. In this way I can glimpse God in lots of places which are not the Bible.

For example, I was reading about how ants (the most amazing creatures on earth) exist as a superorganism. They interact like one huge insect whose different limbs perform different roles, each for the benefit, growth and nurturing of that wider body. What a helpful analogy for the way Christ longs for the church to function, I thought to myself.

Or there is the Ani DiFranco song which has the line: "What kind of paradise am I looking for? I've got everything I want, but still I want more." Wow, that really reminds me of how much I strive and drive myself in all kinds of ways, but never find myself satisfied by it. She's got it right that I'm looking for a paradise, except that it really exists in heaven, I thought to myself.

Or there is the Victor Hugo novel Les Miserables, and the musical of the same name, in which Jean Valjean, having stolen the silverware of the benevolent bishop who had offered him shelter when no-one else would, finds himself rescued by that same bishop when JV is caught, by claiming to the cops that the silverware was a gift, offering his two silver candlesticks as well, chastising him to the police for leaving in such a rush that he forgot these most valuable pieces. What a clear and creative picture of God's grace in not giving us the punishment we deserve, and heaping blessings on us instead, I thought to myself.

Or there's the work of fiction, The Shack, which is a made up story, but which explicitly seeks to think creatively about God and offers a view of Him, a shadow, a human thought, about something against the backdrop of the final authority of the Bible.

Sure, there are things that William P. Young (is this just actually Will Young having a laugh at us all?) says that I don't agree with and that I don't think are particularly biblical. So, I ignore those things and read on, remembering that The Shack is not the Bible - the Bible is. I'm happy to disagree with one or two lines of a work of fiction.

I should perhaps come clean here and admit that I have a soppy subjective reason for liking The Shack. There's a scene in it where the protagonist spills out his rage towards God about the suffering he has experienced, screaming passionate, bitter and tear-drenched words to a God who responds, not with wrath or retaliation, but by inviting him in to eat a specially cooked dinner.

There may have been a clue [a few posts ago] that I had one or two issues with God that I was pretty hung up about myself. This little passage in this novel reminded me that God knows those angry thoughts already, that good relationships mean communication, not sulking, and that God is gracious, kind, patient, generous, merciful, gentle and compassionate.

This led to a dramatic and renewed intimacy with God that any friend has when they finally admit what's on their mind, make up, & get back to the business of enjoying the relationship. If it's not God who brought that reconciliation about with His daughter, I don't know who did. God can use flawed books that get things wrong, just as he uses flawed people, like me, who get things wrong.

I could easily have spotted any of those things in the Bible, but that same holy book tells me that Jesus calls his followers [sheep]. That's to help us remember that we're often stupid, slow, myopic and in need of a shepherd. Sometimes this sheep needs a bit of outside help to point me back to the Word that is true and reliable. Sometimes God uses flawed, imperfect means to point us back to His perfect Self.

It strikes me as a shame, a real shame, if we close our eyes to the many and wonderful ways that God shows himself through all kinds of creative endeavours, simply because the person creating it sometimes (always, in some way) gets bits of it wrong. We are throwing the God-glimpse baby out with the wider cultural bath water.

Yes, I do get the fact that Young seems to be setting the book up as some kind of new Christian manifesto, and that this means we might handle it differently to a secular song or book about ants. But I still don't feel it's necessary to go to the extreme of saying that by reading it I am expressing a desire to water down the Bible as my ultimate authority. If we are thinking Christians, surely we can read, listen, view anything through the lens of Scripture, discard the parts that contradict it, and rejoice in the creaturely things that help point us back to our, and their, Creator.

I doubt this post will have changed anyone's minds on this, but the joy of a blog is that I get to rant uninterrupted for a while and bask in the warmth of my own opinion before the comments begin to pile up...

Peter & Pam: An Update

2009-03-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

Peter and Pam were a much more tenatious couple than I gave them credit for, it seems. After letting their twigs blow away in the wind, I think their conversation actually went a bit more like this:

Peter: Ha! She thinks that'll stop us does she? Stupid, stupid human. She doesn't realise the pigeons rule the world. I'll just put some more twigs in this plant pot instead.
Pam: But what if she moves them too?
Peter: Then I'll put them in that bucket, or that watering can, or in her bed.
Pam: Wow Peter, we really do rule the world.
Peter: Yes. Or rather, I rule the world. Now I've got you up the duff I'm going to leave you to bring the kids up in this plant pot while I impregnate some more birds and ruin another human's life by preventing her from going on her own balcony in the lovely spring sunshine. You make sure you do your thing of flying in her face if she tries anything.
Pam: But Peter, I thought you loved me!
Peter: Hahahaha!
Pam:!
Peter: Don't worry, I'll be back. I need to make sure this whole balcony is covered in pigeons. Hahahahahaha!

And so you are up to date. Pam was obedient to Peter's request that she fly into my face if I try to go on the balcony. Well, in reality she just flew in the other direction, but because my balcony is quite small, it had the effect of me screaming and running inside my house. I mean proper, Penelope Pitstop screaming.

Pigeons really do rule the world. Or at least my balcony.

Counselling: Spiritually Irresponsible?

2009-03-22T17:07:00.001-07:00

Another post with a link to another blog post .

I would like to continue the discussion there, but I think the comments section of a post that is now a few posts old might mean fewer readers.

In response to the last comment by Clairebo , I think I need to clarify the question I am asking. I am not saying that everyone needs to have 'Evangelist' as their full job title - of course I am recognising that there are many necessary and noble roles in a society (and a Kingdom). It's also true that most of those still leave room for evangelism among colleagues etc. so a surgeon is not muted from verbal proclaimation of the gospel.

I suppose I am thinking more precisely about the fact that as a counsellor, those verbal opportunities are not there - in fact to take an opportunity in that way would have me listed in the back pages of the BACP journal for professional misconduct. Counselling is also often an isolated role, particularly in private practice where I may not have any other colleagues with whom to verbally proclaim. It's this aspect of the work that I am wrestling with, rather than the nature of the role itself.

If that makes any sense at all, I'd appreciate others' thoughts...

The Importance of Stories

2009-03-21T14:38:00.000-07:00

Read this (if you like)

This is a link to a post on a blog I discovered recently that seeks to bridge the gap (hence the name) between Christians and gay people, and also does a very good job at showing grace to the spectrum of gay christians, christians with a view on gay people and gay people with a view on christians. It sums up the point I have reached recently on not just this issue, but many others.

I like the fact that it acknowledges that we don't all have to agree with each other, but that we should listen to one another if we claim to love people. It's been a journey for me to get to this point and I'm still on that journey, having started from a postion of being quite defensively scared to hear different views. I hope I'm learning, like the writer of this post, to show more grace to those whose views are different to mine.

I think it's a viewpoint that would serve a lot of us well to keep in mind whoever we are, and whatever issue we are thinking through. It's a messy and not clear-cut route, but it seems to me that's what life is like anyway, so we might as well live in the reality of that.

I Did a Bad Thing

2009-03-10T05:39:00.000-07:00

I hate pigeons.

I hate the way that they refuse to respect me - when I'm walking or driving or cycling, they don't fly out of my way in fear as they should, but saunter in front of me so that I have to avoid them.

I hate the fact that they so adamently refuse to die, wandering around London with gangrenous stumps instead of legs, or bulbous puss-filled sores, as if it didn't hinder them in the least.

I hate the fact that they wake me up in the morning making a sound like someone having bad sex who can't be bothered anymore to try to sound like they enjoy it.

At a previous address I lived next door to an old lady who was obsessed by her hatred of pigeons. She had several nesting in her roof and every day she powerhosed them away before scrubbing at the encrusted faeces on the walls and patio. Whenever I spoke to her (as infrequently as I could manage) the subject was pigeons and how passionately she hated them. I thought she was just a mad old woman, but recently, I think I am turning into her.

I was furious to find that two of the winged vermin had decided to start living on my balcony. I had visions of opening my balcony door to an ocean of pigeon poo and rabid pecking each morning, with an ever increasing chorus of their cheap porn moanings.

I followed my usual morning ritual of opening my balcony door cursing them them and then glaring at them angrily as they perched on the opposite building, clearly ready to return the moment I stepped back inside. I investigated the balcony and discovered that behind a deckchair propped against the wall, they had begun to build a nest. In my rage, I lifted my deckchair away and exposed the nest to the elements. Ha! That'll get rid of them! Hahahaha!

I closed the door and got that sinking feeling you get when you have been very, very bad.

That little nest was made up of a pathetic little collection of twigs that they had been gathering for weeks (there isn't much flora in Peckham). They had begun to fashion it into a little circle.

There were two of them. One must have been the mummy and one must have been the daddy. They were husband and wife pigeons, trying to build a home for themselves because they were ready to have some babies. They were young and in love and this was a very special time for them. Then I, like a big devlish brute, trampled on their world because of my own selfish needs.

They must have flown back this morning to find that their home had been destroyed. "Oh Peter, our home! Our lovely home that we made ourselves! Where will our babies be born? Our beautiful unborn pigeon babies - the fruit of our innocent pigeon love!" Says the mummy pigeon. "We must accept our fate Pam. We are only pigeons. We are the least loved of all the flying animals. Just pigeons Pam, just pigeons. We are lucky we still have 3 stumps between us. We deserve no better." replied the daddy pigeon.

I heard them this morning. Was it just me, or was their cooing more like weeping?

Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread

2009-02-03T07:03:00.000-08:00

The above is the genuine title, and below is a genuine paragraph from an article in the Journal of Analytical Psychology:

Although his subsequent development has been clouded by a series of losses and sudden changes of caregivers, P has maintained an unexpected desire to relate, showing considerable innate resilience. When feeling endangered, P had developed a defensive olfactive container using his bodily smell and farts to envelop himself in a protective cloud of familiarity against the dread of falling apart, and to hold his personality together.

Just For Today...

2009-01-26T07:44:00.001-08:00

I am in the middle of Massive Faith Crisis #234534. It's one of the deeper, more long lasting ones of its kind. It has been triggered off partly by some current painful events, partly by the same old unresolved things which crouch and wait to bite me on the arse again purely to compound new things, and partly by the inexplicable crap I observe in the lives of people I love.

It is largely fuelled along by that 3 letter word which is ubiquitous inside the walls of my skull, and behaves a bit like an itch deep inside the unreacheable depths of a plaster cast, which no ruler or other long slim tool can ever seem to reach: Why.

Last night I read this in an otherwise toecurlingly annoying book which I am too embarrassed to admit the title of. It is noteworthy that the following is a quotation from someone else:
"If you belive God is obligated to explain Himself to us, you ought to examine the Scripture...[It] tells us we lack the capacity to grasp God's infinite mind or the way He intervenes in our lives. How arrogant of us to think otherwise! Trying to anyalyze His omnipotence is like an amoeba attempting to comprehend the behaviour* of man."
To illustrate his point he directs us to Sciptures such as these:
"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter."
"The secret things belong to the LORD our God."
"As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understnad the work of God, the Maker of all things."
"'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the LORD. 'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.'"
...What this means...is that many of our questions - especially those that begin wht the word why - will have to remain unanswered for the time being."

I find this utterly unsatisfactory. I hate not getting what I want, especially when what I want is answers. So in the shower this morning I said Angry Ranting Prayer #1089610596810652, expressing this.

If I was a charismatic Christian I would say: And God answered by saying 'Just for today, trust Me'.
If I was not a charismatic Christian** I would say: And after I had finished praying I rememberd the film I had watched last night, "Things We Lost in the Fire". It was quite an unremarkable film, but it featured Narcotics Anonnymous meetings. One of the things that members of NA, AA or GA famously say is "Just for today: I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle all my problems at once." followed by lots of other 'Just for todays'.

I have no idea what it's like to be driven by the physical desire for a chemical fix, but I do know that part of what makes these times so torturous for me, is the constant pressing and fingering in my head of the whys and whatifs. I feel as if I'll never get any peace unless I get a resolution for them. In the past I have always felt I have found answers and was surrounded by people who had enough certainty to keep me going. Now that this is no longer true, that lack of resolution threatens to drive me in directions I never thought I would or could go, just to get some peace. The guy in the film said he had a recurring dream of having a bag of junk in one hand and money for his next fix in the other, which gave him a feeling of perfect peace. But he was saying this at the NA meeting, because he had chosen not to go down that route, but instead, 'Just for today...'

So just for today, instead of choosing my own kind of bag of junk, I will say that Jesus is real, Jesus is Lord, and Jesus is right.

"You do not want to leave too, do you?" Jesus asked the Twelve.
Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God." John 6:67-69.

*American spellings corrected.
**Come on, you don't expect me to know what kind of Christian I am at this point do you?

Scarecuts

2008-12-29T13:25:00.000-08:00

There is nothing that makes me feel less like a woman than getting my hair cut.

I try to do it as infrequently as I possibly can but today the wild tresses were shorn.

Here are the myriad reasons why I hate it so:

As soon as I walk in my appearance is being judged by the kinds of girls who used to cause me acute misery by doing exactly the same when I was at school.
I am then handed one of the magazines I avoid every other day of the year because they contain hundereds of pictures of women I will never be like.
While I am waiting I am forced to eavesdrop on conversations between hairdressers and clients which flow easily and are relaxed and imply that the client is having a good time. I am painfully aware of the contrast that is about to unfold when it is my turn.
Next the stylist comes over, stands behind me at the mirror and begins to finger my limp hair which has not been cut for 1 to 2 years, and asks me about my usual 'routine'. I blush and stutter as I try to find an answer other than "I just get out of bed and leave it. I don't even own a hairdryer and I don't care if I can't find my brush."
Having got over this hurdle and endured my sense of feminity shrinking to the size of a pea with every second that her judging, girly eye fixes mine, with her shiny hair and her makeup and her pretty little shoes and her stupid bra that is not an industrial one like mine and her knowledge of fashion and boys, she asks me the dreaded question; "And what can I do for you today?"
I have an image in my mind of myself as a foxy, funky woman with a daring style that suits my face, that I am able to maintain with skillful manipulation of dryer and 'product'. But I must have been absent during that life skills class where they teach you the language to describe such things. Believe me, I have tried many times, with many different hair dressers to ask for what I want, but somewhere along the line it always seems to translate in their ears as one of the following:

Make me look like my mother please.
Make me look like my grandmother please.
Make me look like my father please.
Make me look like my hamster please.
Make me look like I am going to an 80s party please.
Make me look like I am going to a 70s party please.
Make me look like I am going to a halloween party please.

Or on this particular occasion:

Make me look like Long Distance Clara from Pigeon Street please.

7. Next I have my hair shampooed and am led back in front of the mirror. Readers, very few of you will have ever seem me with wet, brushed hair and there is a reason for that. I have an inordinately large forehead and very thin hair so I look like an egg. A blushing, insecure egg in a room full of girly girls who have perfect hair and can see me. And I am sitting in front of a mirror.

8. My next crippling inadequacy to be exposed is my complete inability to engage in small talk. I was also absent from that life skills class. No, I am not going anywhere nice on my holidays, and if I was, I would not know how to answer that question in a way that did not end after the first, dull sentence. I can't comment on the magazine I am reading because I don't understand it. I can't comment on what you are doing because, as has already been painfully established, I don't have the vocabulary. I can't think of anything to say because there is a loud voice in my head saying; "You don't belong here! All the women are laughing at you and your split ends! Your stylist has never met anyone with less oestrogen! She also thinks you are fat and a bad dancer! She can tell just by looking at you that you don't know how to walk in high heels! She has the power to change your appearance in a completely unpredictable way and there is nothing you can do about it! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA!" Would you be able to talk about the weather with all that going on?

9. I am now forced to watch as my dignity is removed hair by hair. It is too late. She is doing things with instruments and hair products that cost more than my mortgage, that I know I will never be able to replicate (and so does she).

10. The haircut is finished. I hate it and I hate myself. She shows me what it looks like from the back. Even worse. She asks me if I like it. "Yes, it's great! Thanks so much Donna!" I pay £43 for the priveledge of a sinking heart, a sticky mess on my head and feeling like Madonna would feel if she went to a National Chastity Convention.

Rootbabe Quotes #1

2008-12-26T10:09:00.000-08:00

Rootbabe is my friend. She is strange. Not in the contrived way that some people are ("I'm mad I am!") but in a completely effortless, delightful way.

Here are two pieces of evidence:

Me: I'm feeling pretty sad today. It's possible that I might cry for no reason.
Rootbabe: OK. Today I watched a TV programme where thousands of children died of a disease.

Me: Do you know what my first pet was?
Rootbabe:...I want to say whale...

10 Ways God Has Changed My Life in 10 Years

2008-12-26T10:02:00.000-08:00

This list was given to me as a Born Again Birthday gift from Anna, who led me to Christ 10 years ago on the 31st of October 1998 (The following posts are also ones that Anna has helped me to compile, knowing that I love lists so, especially when they are about me).

He has taken me from death to live. I was His enemy, now I am His child.
He has changed who I am as a person - I am more joyful and peaceful than I was then ("I in my Saviour am happy and blessed").
I have improved in my ability to relate to people (she means that I was socially retarded when I was 19).
My relationships with my family have been transformed.
My relationships with men have been transformed.
I have learned to be content, even in pain.
I've become an evangelist (she says, since the first day of my conversion).
I have found my niche as a counsellor.
I am still me (strange, really funny, and radical) but I am more me (Ephesians 4).
I really know and have experienced, that God's ways are best.

A List

2008-12-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

Things I hate (as observed by Anna).

Stickers

Posh, mysogynist men

Social ettiquette - RSVPs, small talk etc.

Nauseating couples

Sport

Having to talk to children in front of thier parents

Logistical arrangements

Tidying up

Michael Winner

Smugness

Standing at conference stalls

Boring people

BMW & Mercedes drivers

Why I Am Strange

2008-12-26T09:24:00.000-08:00

One day after church, Bell and I were discussing the people we knew who were strange. I was suggesting people, and she kept saying "No, he's not strange, he's weird." Or, "No, she's not strange, she's clinically insane." We struggled to define the word strange until Bell said; "Well, you're strange." I was delighted! I asked her to justify it. What follows are her observances, and then Anna's, on the same worthy subject.

Observed by Bell:

I wear lots of bright colours all at the same time.
I love presents but hate opening them.
I love offal.
I have strange toilet fetishes [see here]
I always have an old cabbage in the fridge (it's true, I do! A different one each time she looks!)
I'm a deep thinker but I love things like Big Brother and have Jesus' on Wheels.
I am innately childish.
I am good at singing but I'm too embarrassed to sing.
I give people names from Jesus (Croissant, ShoeKeeper, Tiny Dancer, Melon Raider etc.)
I like stones being thrown at my bottom.
I've got a music degree but I can't sing and clap at the same time.
All of my shoes are really badly broken and stored on a hat rack which is on the floor.
I own enough pants to wear one a day for 3 months without washing them.
I hate hot weather but live in a flat which is like a sauna.
I have a very strange phobia.
I do utterly inaccurate impersonations of people.
Being called strange causes me inexpressible delight.

Observed by Anna:

I have a friend called Croissant.
I find single words out of context funny (eg. Paper. Hahahah!)
I think my cuddly toys are real.
I am simultaneously very introvert and very extrovert.
I am actually obsessed with flatulence.
I am very messy indeed, but my CD collection is perfectly alphabetised and each disc has the title at perfect right angles to the edge of the case, and all my knickers are folded perfectly in a special way.
I carry around a book in which to write lists (like this one, the previous post and the one after this one).
I say words funny (see following post).
I laugh much longer than anyone else if I find something funny. This often means that I will still be laughing when the subject matter in the conversation has moved on to much more somber things.
If a car horn beeps I go 'excuse me' as if it was my bum, and think I am being funny and original every time.
I can never remember what I have just done, or what I am supposed to be doing next.
I suddenly make loud, isolated, completely random sounds.
Sometimes I sway.

Of Limited Interest to Others...

2008-12-26T09:14:00.000-08:00

Words that Witsy and I always have to say in a certain accent:

Fanny - 1940s English (Feyaneya)
Fancy - 1040s English (Feyanseya)
I appreciate that - Australian (Oi aprayshayayt thit)
I did not know that - American (I diyad nat know thayat)
Cushion - Brian Sewel (Cusssyon) See also Efficient, Tissue, Delicious.
Juice - Gruff Northern (Jowse)
Twenty - Some sort of Northern with dropped Ts (Twe'-e)
Purse - Scottish with rolled Rs, but very clipped (Purrrs)
Dirty - As above (Durrrti)
Photocopyer - Geordie (For'door'cob'ear)
Local - Geordie (Lor'-el)

A Horrifying Discovery

2008-12-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone didn't believe that the story in [this post] was actually true, check out this email that I just received from Witsy:

Barney - I was trying to kill a bit of time at work and was reading through your blog and chuckling about the crazy blue-haired woman in Belle and Herbs. I clicked on the link to remind myself of the embarrassment. To my horror, there is a video on the website and WE'RE ON IT!!!!!!!!!

http://www.skimstone.org.uk/

Go to 'Portfolio' and then click 'Cold Coffee'. The video is just over 3 mins long. WATCH IT ALL and look out for our cringing faces!!!

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Disappointingly, it doesn't show the mortifying special performance that we had at our own table, but it does show our combination of looking at the unbelievable freak show, and trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. It also shows numerous other people trying their best to ignore the performances. It even has an excerpt from the 'Fred Had a Muffin' song.

See, I DON'T make this stuff up.

Black, white and grey

2008-10-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Read [this] , then my comment in response, then the MSN conversation below (if you like. You can always navigate away from this page and read something else if you want, I'm not your mother.)

OddBabble says:
I've just left you another blog comment that doesn't make any sense
hoveactually says:
your comment made perfect sense! I think it's hard to explain though, I might draw a diagram explaining the large space between the question and the answer
hoveactually says:
cos it's something that's pretty fundamental but few people seem to understand
OddBabble says:
It only recently occured to me
OddBabble says:
I've only just started to realise that everything is not in fact black and white
OddBabble says:
it is a complete revelation to me!
OddBabble says:
I've noticed that human beings don't fit very well into that
hoveactually says:
not really...
hoveactually says:
being complex and messy and not at all black and white...
hoveactually says:
there are a few things that are pretty concrete but the living out practise of them is very messy and grey
hoveactually says:
I think that's the problem, people see the concrete realities and assume they fit neatly into black and white lives.. they don't cos we're not like that...
OddBabble says:
Yes! That's exactly it!!
hoveactually says:
Yes!
hoveactually says:
why doesn't everyone know this though..?
OddBabble says:
I don't know! I certainly didn't until about 2 weeks ago!
OddBabble says:
I think actually it's because that is really uncomfortable
OddBabble says:
and you touched on it when you said that it's really comfortable for the person giving the answers out, to have an answer.
OddBabble says:
I know that cos I've been that person for a long time
OddBabble says:
I do think, actually, that I've treated other people as if they don't fit into the black and white stuff (I hope)
OddBabble says:
but I'm not very good at applying it to myself.
OddBabble says:
Actually, the statement about other people above is possibly bollocks.
hoveactually says:
I don't think so... I always think you are someone who knows about the mess
OddBabble says:
Well that's good if so...
OddBabble says:
may I give you an example?
hoveactually says:
go ahead!
OddBabble says:
so like, i can believe that something is WRONG
OddBabble says:
but
OddBabble says:
it's confusing when I oops, go and do it anyway, and find that oh, it actually seems quite life-enhancing, positive and beautiful.
OddBabble says:
Going by a philosophy that everything is black and white means that I must have been wrong about the WRONG bit.
OddBabble says:
but actually, the WRONG bit is black and white, it's just that it doesn't deny that there are experiencially grey bits.
hoveactually says:
yes!
OddBabble says:
oh phew, I'm glad that makes sense!
hoveactually says:
which we don't really factor in in our discipleship talks/seminars/onetoones/hanging out with people
hoveactually says:
because it takes longer to talk about the realities rather than the simple packaged answer
hoveactually says:
and the realities are only learnt over many years of struggle
hoveactually says:
we've kind of lost the long term nature of life and God along the way i think...
OddBabble says:
Yes, and actually I think the result of that can be potentially spiritually dangerous for the hearers. Because experiencing the experiencially grey bits does make you doubt the black and white stuff you heard, and some people conclude that the world must all therefore be grey, so let us go forth and enjoy the freedom of its many shades!
hoveactually says:
yeah!
hoveactually says:
and lots of people throw out the black and white on the grounds that we can't be certain about anything, cos they've been burnt by the people who are way way to certain about EVERYTHING.
OddBabble says:
YES
hoveactually says:
sigh. the reality lives somewhere inbetween
hoveactually says:
dammit YES
OddBabble says:
haha
OddBabble says:
I think I'm going to blog this whole convo, after linking to your post. Do I have your permission?
hoveactually says:
yes please!
hoveactually says:
haha
hoveactually says:
I'm such a narcissitic one
OddBabble says:
Me too, but that's because I am wonderful.
hoveactually says:
lol
hoveactually says:
i think we should rule the world though
OddBabble says:
yes!
OddBabble says:
You, me and Witsy
hoveactually says:
brilliant!
hoveactually says:
it's such a good plan
hoveactually says:
nothing could go wrong
OddBabble says:
Nothing. That is a black and white fact.

Fois Grois

2008-09-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

The scene:
The office is in silence as Mike and OddBabble communicate via MSN, though they are sitting next to each other.

Mike gets on the floor on his knees, and pretends to eat corn off the ground.
OddBabble gets up, forces him upright, and mimes forcing something into his mouth violently.

The whole office ignores them and remains in silence, as they always do when this sort of thing happens.

Michelle's attention is caught by Mike lying on the floor laughing following above scene.

Michelle: "Did you fall off your chair Mike?"
Mike: "No, OddBabble was miming force feeding me until my throat burst."
Michelle: "..."
Mike: "So that we could make fois grois".
Michelle: "..."

Mike and OddBabble sit back on their chairs and the office descends into silence once more.

Love is...

2008-09-07T07:56:00.000-07:00

A friend was asking me about how I became a Christian & after I gave him a brief summary, he asked; "Has it made a big difference to your life?” “Yeah, totally” I replied. “I know that no matter what I do, I’ll always be loved.” He responded; “No matter what you do you’ll always be loved...that’s nice.”

I’ve reflected back on that conversation with frustration because I had managed to communicate so little about something so profound. The love I was lamely describing so blandly is not ‘nice’. Nice is tea with vicar and cucumber sandwiches. That's not the Christianity I gave my life for....

These are the things I wish I had said about why knowing that ‘no matter what I do I’ll always be loved’ really matters, and alters every aspect of my life:

When I really believe that I am unalterably loved, I have a deep core knowledge that I am OK. I’m freed from having to try to prove that to myself or to others through pretending I am cleverer, kinder, prettier, cooler, funnier, fitter, younger, older, richer or better than I really am. The limited levels of all of those that I do have are OK, because I am OK, because I am loved.

When I am reminded by friends of the truth that I am unchangeably loved, I have a solid foundation that will remain even if I lost my job, my home, my family, my friends, my dignity and even my earthly life. That means that when I am able trust in that love a little bit, I can hold all of those things a bit more loosely, which frees me to know that even if I lost everything, I could never lose everything.

When I do take a moment to think about this tenacious love, I can start to learn from it how to love other people. So when someone hurts me badly in a way I didn’t deserve, I can learn both how to forgive them when my instinct is revenge, as well as how much it costs to do that. I can learn that because I know how it feels to receive it.

I know how earthly love feels. More than once I have been in love and been the object of another’s adoration. I have also known the consistent and sacrificial love of a stable family. Those are wonderful, wonderful things, but anyone who has ever been involved in loving me on any level will know how slippery I perceive it. No matter how much love is told or demonstrated, I have a frustratingly reliable tendency to demand that it is proved again and again. God’s love is the only love that can permanently silence me in that, because it’s been proved once and for all by the irrefutable symbol of love – the cross of Christ.

You’ll notice that I started all of those first few paragraphs with qualifying sentences like ‘when I remember to’ or similar. That’s because often I forget about this love or what it really means, and behave in entirely opposite ways to the ones I describe. That’s why Jesus describes His followers as sheep: we are so easily distracted by the next dewy-sweet patch of grass that often we think that the grass is all that life is about & we forget about the Shepherd busily keeping the wolves away. The good thing is that even when I'm behaving like a stupid sheep, all of those things remain true. Sometimes I remember it and my whole view of myself and the world is turned upside down again.

‘Nice’ is not really the word, is it?

Pre Tricenarian Tension

2008-07-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

"Why God, why?! We had a deal! Let the others grow old, not me!" Joey Tribbiani in, 'The One Where They All Turn Thirty'.

It's just a number. 30. It's the one before 31 and the one after 29. But there is something about the looming of this particular number on the very near horizon, which is causing me to take a panoramic look at my life both retrospecively and speculatively, with mild horror. I call it PTT.

Things that have changed:
* I can no longer eat what I want and do no excercise without gaining weight.
* Eating healthily and doing excercise doesn't seem to make a lot of difference.
* If I stay up past midnight for one night, that's the whole week wrecked.
* I'm pretty sure I need glasses.
* I listen to Radio 4.
* When I listen to Radio 1, I haven't heard of any of the bands, and all the songs sound the same.
* Pop stars are all younger than me.
* I have recently had acutal, non-ironic conversations about the following: mortgages, stain removal and pensions.
* Recently, with a bit of spare cash, I treated myself to 'something for the kitchen'.
* I iron T-shirts. In fact I only bought an iron this year. In fact my mum bought it for me because she was furious to discover I had gone that long in my life without having to endure the chore that she had been chained to for years.
* My body is suddenly telling me urgently that I must procreate by any means necessary, even though prior to this, the idea has been of virtually no interest at all.
* Things that I have been fairly relaxed about having not achieved so far, suddenly seem so significant that I feel like a fundamental failure without them. For example:

* I am not married.
* I have no babies.
* I am not financially solvent.
* I am not above the first rung of a 'career'.
* I still don't know how to apply makeup.
* I still ring my mummy when I feel sad (whenever I think about any of the above).
* I am still a bit scared of thunderstorms.
* I still go home for Christmas.
* I still sleep in a single bed.
* I still get spots.
* I still have an extremely peurile sense of humour. For example, just writing the following words is my idea of sophisticated wit: willy, bum, fanny, fart, trump, tit, flange.
* I am still laughing about the above.

Help me. I never thought Thirty would happen to me.

You're Not Going to Believe This But...

2008-06-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

...It's happened again.

I really need to stop going to these arty~type places.

So I was in this bar with a friend having a normal beer. Nice. Normal. She had to go to the loo so I remained seated by myself at the bar while I waited for her. Now, sitting at a bar by oneself when one has a disposition like mine is already quite a vulnerable position to be in. But I remained there trying to be inconspicuous, as is my way.

Then something a bit odd happened.

A group of people at the bar began to shout thier drink orders to one particular bar maid. First ordinary drinks, and then cocktails: "Witch's Tit! Slippery Nipple! Sex on the Beach!" Etc. They shouted louder and louder while the bar maid repeated them back. I began to notice that there was a definate rhythm to this, and that yes, I was unwittingly part of another peculiar random art performance.

I was fairly happy watching this from the side, but after a few minutes of this something horrifying happened.

The bar maid got up onto the bar and began to tap dance, meaning that a spotlight was on her and the section of bar that I was sitting at alone, rapidly failing at trying to be inconspicuous.

Why do these sorts of things happen to me? I'm beginning to wonder if I am a part of some Trueman Show~esque world where utterly random things happen to me just to see if I go mad. I mean, did you read that sentence above? "The bar maid got up onto the bar and began to tap dance". All I wanted was a beer.

Geordie Adventure Part 2

2008-05-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

So Witsy and I went to our favourite cafe for a cup of tea and a sandwich. Just a brew, a snack and a chat. Perfectly normal, like we always do. Nice. Normal.

We ordered our food and then a man came around and gave us a menu saying "Here are some alternative things to order. It's all free". It became apparent upon looking at the menu that the 'dishes' on offer were in fact performances, and in fact, we had noticed some musical instruments being set up in the corner earlier. As I mentioned, we only went in for a cup of tea and a chat so we quickly chose something that seemed innocuous, something that sounded like it might be some kind of monologue that we could easily ignore.

We were just getting on with having our perfectly normal cup of tea when the first 'order' was announced. "Table 5, item 6" was an acoustic song about.....I'm sorry, I can't tell you. It was in English, yes, but it just made no sense. The only bit I understood was the chorus, for which the words were "Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm! Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm!" You'll have noticed the exclamation marks there. It was VERY enthusiastic, wide-eyed humming, and they tried to get us all to join in. The shame for them was, that this 'performance' had not been advertised so I don't think anyone was expecting to be entertained in this way. Most people were concentrating very hard on looking at their eggs and avoiding eye-contact at every possible cost. We only came in for a cup of tea. They got very much the same reaction when they sang the next song, with the lamenting chorus of "Fred had a muffin, Fred had a muffin, Fred had a muffin, but I had no hands" (honestly, I REALLY don't make this stuff up).

Next, our 'dish' was announced. Just as the announcement was made, we made a horrifying discovery. We had failed to notice until that moment that the word 'intimate' had been used to describe the performance we had chosen. Far from being something inconspicuous we could ignore, the woman came and sat AT OUR TABLE, while the whole of the rest of the cafe stared.

Now you need to know two things before I describe what she did. Firstly Witsy and I both have quite a low embarrassment threshold when it comes to this sort of thing. The words 'audience' and 'participation' when used together will always make me break out into a cold sweat and give me a bit of an upset tummy. This situation is highlighted further by the fact that I am very blonde and Witsy is very ginger, meaning that any internal experience of embarrassment is broadcast on our faces in the form of a beetroot red face.

The second thing you need to know is that the woman giving the performance was one of those people who have the bit of their brain missing that tells you that you should be embarrassed. Where most people would avoid running down the street naked shouting 'Onions!', people with this bit of their brain missing do it every Tuesday and can't understand why they keep getting arrested.

These two sorts of people are never a good mix, but the situation is surely at its worst when one of them is doing a dramatic monologue in a public place where there are Other People. She sat down at our table with a spoon and a box of ice cream and said to us in her loud, embarrassing drama-school voice "DO YOU LIKE ICE CREAM?" Witsy and I positioned our throbbing, scarlet faces behind our mugs and whimpered in unison "no" in a way that cried out 'Please don't make us participate! Please go away frightening lady!' But she didn't. She proceeded to say something which made NO sense about ice cream, while spooning it into her mouth, and thus inevitably spitting a lot of it back out at us.

Did I mention that she had blue hair?

She had blue hair, and massive glasses. So I was expected to sit in a crowded cafe while everyone looked at me, being spat at by a loud insane woman with blue hair and massive glasses without laughing was I?

I am proud to say, I ALMOST managed it. I concentrated VERY hard on not looking at Witsy, and on trying to listen to what she was saying, but every now and then it crept into my consciousness that I was in a crowded cafe being shouted at by a woman with blue hair and massive glasses, and my body did that school-assembly thing where the effort of not audibly laughing makes your whole body shake. I only did it 2 or 3 times, and only in short bursts. I think I did amazingly well. Unfortunately for the performers (and adding 97 fold to the toe-curlingness of it all) the whole thing was being filmed. I'm not sure our reaction provided the kind of footage they were looking for for their promotional material.

As soon as it was over I turned to Witsy to beg her to let us leave. Gladly, she went up to the till to pay. As she turned to return to our table she was horrified to find that her path was blocked by the next performance. The blue-haired lady was furiously hitting tables and crockery with a pair of wooden spoons while grinning. She did it in such a way that Witsy had to duck and swerve her way back to me to avoid being part of the installation. Just as we were scrambling desperately out of the door, Mrs Blue Hair had lifted up the receiver of a decorative phone on the wall and was shouting 'HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!' rhythmically into it while her companions continued to accompany her on the wooden spoons.

This ACTUALLY happened.

If you don't believe me, follow this link. She's there in all her blue glory. You'll notice from the photos that there is no-one left in the cafe.

Geordie Adventure Part 1

2008-05-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

Question: Who is the worst person to spend two and a half hours sitting next to on a train?
Answer: The man I spent two and a half hours sitting next to on a train.

I arrived at my packed train with my ticket in my hand, walking down the aisle towards my reserved seat. G36, G37, G38 (I wonder what that disgusting slobbery noise is) G39, G40 (and that rank smell) G41, GForty...oh. THAT's the source of both the sounds and the smell. My neighbour for the next 2.5 hours was noisily eating a KFC. When I say noisily, I don't just mean a couple of slurps here and there. I mean, imagine the sound of a big dog with a cold lapping up custard. Now you're close.

When he had finished his 'meal', he got out his reading material for the journey - that winner of many a journalistic award, The Daily Star. The 'headlines' were an exclusive interview with someone from Hollyoaks who had forgotten to get dressed, and something to do with Gazza. I felt like I was falling in love with him.

Then he made a little noise. It was a noise like, how can I describe it, like someone who has just noisily eaten a KFC has got a bit of chicken stuck somewhere near the back of thier grease-coated mouths, and they wish to extract it in order to masticate it once more. A sort of wet, sucking sound. Quite short and sharp, but nevertheless able to sound indescribably repulsive even in such a short space of time. The kind of little sound that makes me physically wince. Why am I describing this sound in such detail? Because my neighbour made the sound CONTINUOUSLY for two and a half hours at about 7 second intervals. There was something about the pitch and frequency of that sound, that even having Ruby on at FULL volume (to the extent that people turned round to see where the sound was coming from) I could STILL HEAR HIM! I am not exaggerating when I say that it made me want to cry.

All the while he was doing this, he also repeatedly pulled at the material by his lifted armpit (only the one facing me) as if wishing to air it, but in fact succeeding in wafting his stink my way, and punctuating his other bodily noises with a motif of intermittent belching, just in case I had forgotten EXACTLY what the KFC had smelled like.

Just when I thought I would faint with the effort of not smashing his face against the train window, he did something which really surpassed himself. He ripped up his train ticket into little bits and....I almost can't believe this...used it as an improvised tooth pick, before discarding the pieces at OUR feet.

Honestly, I don't make this stuff up. Did I mention the journey was two and a half hours?

Searching for God Knows What

2008-05-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

If you are one of those friends of mine who is not a Christian and who cannot understand why I would choose to believe such a thing, I would like you to read this book because it explains much better than I could, why.

I can pretty much nod to every opinion he articulates, and sometimes I did it so hard I thought my head might fall off.

He does write in an irritatingly chummy and mildly patronising way at times, especially at the beginning, but keep going with it - you'll get used to that and his content is real gold dust.

OddBabble Would Like to Announce...

2008-05-08T07:35:00.000-07:00

...that after 17 months and 23 interviews, she finally has landed herself a permanent (well, year's contract) full-time job!

It's a great start to a career in counselling, and the hours fit around going to Uni and doing a placement. Basically, it fits like a glove, and I am over the moon.

A Dream Come True...Almost

2008-04-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

As documented on a previous post, I have a bit of a soft spot for Mr Damien Rice. In my view, he should totally sack Lisa Hannigan and get me on board doing the harmonies. Since this is about as likely to happen as a piece of cheese becoming king of the universe, I settled for the next best thing; singing harmonies with a boy who looks a bit like a young Damien if you squint in the dark while looking through your fingers having drunk a litre of meths. Throw in the fact that he can sing and play like him, and my elbows start to go a bit funny. I want you to know that during this clip, I am almost beside myself with excitement. It was a bit of a disappointment to me therefore, when I watched it back and realised that I looked static and terrified, and as if I couldn't have been more bored if I was watching a documentary about forks. I apologise for this. Enjoy.

Reception Rage

2008-03-28T06:35:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I just had to get this off my chest.

I am on a switchboard. This means that my sole raison d'etre is to find out who your call needs to be forwarded to.

Scenario #1. This is how the conversation goes in reality, about 239420785 times a day:

Phone rings.

OddBabble: Good morning, [Name of organisation]

Member of Public: Hi, my name is Philancho Peristhwali and I live at 39 Bonkybrook Avenue, but I used to live in Slipsyhips Boulevard from 1990 to 2007. My mother has thyroid issues and has been to see Doctor Randyhosen. No, sorry, Doctor Bristletit. But Doctor Bristletit wasn't able to issue a prescription for my mother, who has a thyroid problem, because she needs a new medical card. Can I give you my postcode so that you can help me to get a new one?

OddBabble: Just hold the line one moment while I put you through to someone who can help you with that.

*Click*.

This is what goes on in my head, about 239420785 times a day:

Phone rings.

OddBabble: Good morning, I feel like dying.

Member of Public: Hi, my name is....

OddBabble: SHUT UP! SHUT UP! It is of NO relevance to me WHATSOEVER what your name is, where you live, who your mother is, who you doctor is or was, what your medical history or hers is or was. SHUT UP. I know you need a medical card, so just say so. Let me put you through to someone who gives a *Click*.

Scenario #2. This is how the conversation goes in reality about 239420785 times a day:

Member of Public walks into reception.

OddBabble is on the phone enduring monologue from Scenario #1.

MoP: Hi I'm here for a meeting concerning the managers and sub-managers of the regional directors for departmental departments.

OddBabble: I'll be with you in just a moment.

This is what goes on in my head about 239420785 times a day:

Member of Public walks into reception.

OddBabble is imagining above angry retaliation while enduring above monologue from Scenario #1.

MoP: Hi I'm here....

OddBabble: ARE YOU BLIND? I am holding a phone receiver to my face. Has it occured to you that there might be a reason for this? It is because I am in a phone call. PHONE, CALLLLLL. So shut up and wait. When I have finished I will pretend I care about your STUPID meeting, but I do NOT care and would like to be dead right now. I wish the same to you.

Scenario #3; Scarily close to many actual conversations:

MoP: The meeting I have come to attend is not on the schedule sheet.

OddBabble says: Oh dear. Would you like me to call someone for you?

OddBabble thinks: That is a statement. It is not a request for help, nor even an acknowledgment that I am a human being. What exactly was it that gave you the impression that I have any desire to help a rude man who fires axiomatic statements at me?

MoP: Yes.

OddBabble says: OK, do you have the name of someone I could contact?

OddBabble thinks: OK, there are two things missing here. The first is the word please. This is a word that people use as a suffix to a sentence in order to communicate that they appreciate they are asking something of someone that they do not have to give, and that they acknowledge the humanity of the person with whom they are speaking. The second thing missing is the name of a person to call. You see, I cannot read your mind and nor do I wish to. You are clearly a moron. The irony is that you think I am a moron, which is why you are speaking to me as if I am some blonde receptionist, just because I am a blonde receptionist.

MoP: No.

OddBabble Says: I need to know a name really, otherwise I can't help you.

OddBabble thinks: OK bye then. BYE. FROG OFF! Why are you still here? Why are you looking at me as if you expect me help you? Do you not understand how little I care?

MoP: Hold on let me think....Dave.

OddBabble says: OK. Do you have a surname?

OddBabble thinks: HOLD ON LET ME THINK? Is this the first time it has occured to you to do that? You would prefer to just stand there staring at me while I do all the running, rather than bother to come up with, what is that you say, DAVE? Do you seriously expect me to suddenly say, "oh Dave! Well why didn't you say?! Thanks so much for your accurate, precise and helpful information!"

MoP: No.

OddBabble says: Right, there are quite a few Dave's in this building! Do you perhaps have the name written down somewhere?

OddBabble thinks: Serioulsy, do you want me to murder you?

MoP: He works for the NHS.

OddBabble says: OK. Do you know what department?

OddBabble thinks: What exactly do you think you have just walked into, if it is not a 4 storey building full of people, all of whom fit the description you have just blessed me with?

MoP: No.

OddBabble says: OK, I'm not sure how I can help you then.

OddBabble thinks: I may actually cry.

MoP: But I need to get to my meeting.

OddBabble says: Right, yes. Do you have any other names of someone I could contact?

OddBabble thinks: Oh why didn't you say so?! You see, I thought this was all just for FUN!! Now I will reveal to you the information that I have been foolishly keeping a secret from you all this time!!

And so it goes on until the MoP realises he got the wrong building/day/receptionist.

What I Have Learned So Far...

2008-03-02T06:11:00.000-08:00

...on my esteemed MSc Course.

Humanistic/Person-Centred Counselling:

Counsellor: Hi Bob, welcome to our session. This time is yours, use it for whatever you need.

Client: Thanks. I'm feeling really low at the moment.

Counsellor: Mmmm.

Client: Yeah, I'm just feeling pretty sad a lot really.

Counsellor: Mmmm. You're feeling sad.

Client: That's right.

Counsellor: Mmmm. It's OK to feel sad Bob. Let's explore how it feels right now for you to be feeling sad right now.Etc. etc.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy:

Counsellor: Hi. What's the problem?

Client: Um, I'm feeling really low at the moment.

Counsellor: On a scale of 1 to 10, exactly how low would you say you were feeling?

Client: Um, I guess, a 9?

Counsellor: Right. By the end of the week I want you to get that down to an 8. Here is an exercise: Next time you find yourself feeling sad, give yourself a little slap and say "PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER BOB!".

Client: Um...

Counsellor: Trust me, this stuff really works.

Client: But I...

Counsellor: Sorry, times up.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy:

Counsellor: Hi Bob, I notice you chose to wear blue today. Interesting.

Client: Well, it's funny you should say that. I'm feeling quite blue.

Counsellor: Interesting.

Client: Yes, I'm really quite unhappy.

Counsellor: I notice you used the word unhappy there.

Client: Yes.

Counsellor: It's interesting you should choose that word, or rather, that that word should choose you. You see, the word 'unhappy' is an anagram of the word pypahun.

Client: I'm sorry, I'm not sure I follow...

Counsellor: Pypahun is an ancient word from yore, which has many meanings, but principally it describes someone who wishes to have sex with a family member.

Client: Oh...

Counsellor: It's clear from the way you are sitting that you have been fantasizing about your mother.

Client: Oh!

Counsellor: You are telling me you are unhappy but really you are communicating through the transference and countertransference, a repressed sexual desire which is linked to the way that your father looked at you when you were being potty trained...etc. etc.

*Disclaimer:May I point out that I am using the tool of caricature, and I am not trying to discredit my own future profession (well, maybe the psychodynamic bit). I would also like to point out that in my previous post I was using the tool of comedic licence, and I am not in fact late every day. This is just in case any potential employers, or reference writers, or lecturers should stumble across any of this. That is all.

Routine

2008-02-20T05:50:00.000-08:00

Up until now, I have always had a job which requires me to work mainly from home at quite random hours wearing whatever I like. For the first time, I now have to go to an office in smart clothes at the same time every day. I am still excited by this! I feel like part of the Real World. Since this is my blog and I can write what I like even if it's dull as dishwater, I am going dedicate a little moment or two, just to enjoy that routine.

Every day my radio alarm goes off at 6:45 for half an hour, allowing me to gently rise to consciousness. Each morning I listen to the presenters wondering what they look like, and decide I will stay in bed for 'just one more song'. When the alarm switches itself off, I switch the radio back on again for 'just one more song'. I will do this until they play Take That (which they do every day) when I am forced out of bed to save my ears.

I will then switch the shower on to warm up the water while I use the loo. Every morning I will forget that the seat is broken and I will suddenly slip to my left involuntarily exclaiming "WOO!" as I remember. I will look at the new seat to the left of the loo, wondering why I havn't fitted it yet, until I remember how much I love hearing guests involuntarily exclaim "WOO!", and I forget all about it again. I get into the shower for exactly 5 minutes minus loo time, because that is how long my crap shower will allow me hot water, thus I wish to avoid involuntarily exclaiming "GAAHH!!" as I am showered with icy water.

I put on my smart clothes, and consider putting my hair in plaits to avoid potential wildness. I conclude plaits are not appropriate so let nature do its random thing, not caring a fig.

As I leave the house, I switch on Ruby and have the daily dilema of whether to listen to the Willow Creek podcast, which will be edifying and spiritually enriching, or whether to listen to sweet, sweet music. It varies from day to day whether I select the aural equivalent of bran flakes or sugar puffs.

Depending on how many times I chose to stay in bed for 'just one more song' I will get a different bus with different collections of routine characters. If I am on time, the bus will be packed and will be driven by Angry Bus Driver. He will always shout at someone for something at every stop. Once he shouted at me. Invariably he will refuse to drive off until everyone complies with whatever he is angry about, so sometimes he makes everyone else on the bus angry too because he makes us all late. Perhaps that's why I never leave the flat on time.

If I am a few minutes late I will get on the bus which has Sleeping Fat Woman on it. She is always in the same seat (or, one and a quarter seats actually) always alseep, and always makes 'You're the One for Me, Fatty' by the Smiths come into my head for the duration of the journey. Now I think about it, I hope Sleeping Fat Woman is not in fact Dead Fat Woman....perhaps I should poke her tomorrow morning. Also on this bus is Fat Rick Astley. He is not Actual Rick Astley because he is not ginger enough. He is usually asleep too, which allows me to stare at him wondering what Actual Rick Astley is doing right now. Perhaps he is now behind the scenes in the music industry, or perhaps he is a generic person in an office, where each new employee exclaims "Hey, isn't that 80s Pop Legend Rick Astley?!" to which his colleagues reply in a bored and resigned way "Yeah" because Actual Rick Astley is actually just like the rest of us, and he refuses to sing 'Never Gonna Give You Up' on demand.

I get off the bus at the Guardian offices and think to myself "I must find out if you can still get hold of those Greek Myth booklets they gave away" and then instantly forget again. I look at my watch to do the impossible maths required for getting to work on time (10 minute walk in 4 minutes, or minus 6 minutes etc.). I arrive sweating and breathless saying to my colleague "Morning Emmanuel!" "Morning OddBabble" he replies, looking at his watch to see how many minutes late I am. "Sorry I'm late" I say. "You'll be alright" he replies with a laid back smile, which I return.

And thus, the day begins.

Worship While You Work Out

2008-01-30T05:48:00.000-08:00

Yes, this IS for real. I can taste a little bit of sick in the back of my throat.....

Gospel Aerobics

You Probably Had to Be There

2008-01-02T05:47:00.000-08:00

Witsy: This book is fascinating. One minute you're reading about the human anatomy, the next you're learning about the Coffin Fly.
Me: I definately don't want to hear about the Coffin Fly.
Witsy: Did you know that the Coffin Fly can survive its entire life on one human corpse?
Me: Did you hear what I just said?

They laugh like drains.

Christianity is Not a Panacea

2007-12-15T05:25:00.000-08:00

For the last few months, for one reason or another, I have been going through a Difficult Time. Friends have been great in varying measures and without them, I don’t know where I’d be.

However, I have been amazed at some of the beliefs that have been unearthed through friends trying to give me words of comfort.

Let me give you an example. One of the exhausting motifs of the last 12 months has been my relentless failure to find full-time employment following UCCF. The rollercoaster of hope built by getting to the interview stage (17 times now) followed by the plummet of disappointment when again I am thanked for applying and told that my performance at interview was exemplary, but that one other candidate was better qualified and had more experienced than me, has been wearing to say the least and has gently eroded my confidence and my bank balance.

More than one friend has said to me in response, ‘God has just the right job for you, you just haven’t found it yet’. This was said lovingly, and with a real desire to restore hope, and a genuine belief in its truth. But I am incredulous.

Where has the idea come from that for Christians, if we wait long enough, everything will turn out just fine? That a little while longer, or just that smidge more faith, will give us just the perfect little happy ending? When did we decide that Romans 8:28 was authored by Walt Disney?

Look around you at your Christian community – how many Hollywood endings do you see? How many people in perfect situations that are just right for them?

I’m not saying that life is a crock of crap for everyone, that’s clearly not true either, but neither is this idea that because we believe in God, we will either be free from the big pains of life, or the little irritating shitty little things that seem to happen for no reason, and that deny the description of ‘just right’ whatever sphere they happen to be in.

Perhaps the most eye-opening thing about hearing all this from some of my friends is that I have bought into it too. Even though I am one of the most cynical Christians I know, I’ve become aware that the reason my response to suffering (whether it’s small-scale but slowly draining like the job situation, or large-scale and heart-wrecking like my perpetual relationship situation) is rage. I am just so angry with God that all of this isn’t easier than it is. That now that I have given everything to him, I still have hot water that cuts out, or bills that I didn’t expect but can’t pay, or loneliness, or unemployment, or friends that cut themselves up literally and metaphorically, or that people die, or miscarry or get Alzheimer’s and there just isn’t anything I can do to help. Those things just don’t seem to fit.

Surely we should be able to say to those who are not Christians, ‘Look! Follow Jesus and you will have a life like mine!’ without feeling the need to shove all the pain and disappointment and unanswered prayer into some big cupboard that gets opened up when they’ve been a Christian a little while, and everything comes crashing down off the top shelf onto their heads.

We know that this should never be what we sell, that’s why we bang on about the evils of the prosperity gospel. We know that becoming a Christian is not about converting to a rosy life of ease and laughter, because we are happy to quote things about ‘taking up your cross’. We would all, and perhaps me especially, readily tell you that often in this life following Jesus means suffering.

So why am I so surprised and angry?

I have felt pressure from friends recently (and sometimes from my own internal promptings) to stop being so angry and disappointed and be thankful for what I’ve got. And it’s true that I have a great deal to be thankful for. The 365 project was very helpful for someone of my personality, and I’ve recently started it again over text with a friend, because it’s good for me to remember to be thankful everyday.

But I’ve also been told repeatedly that ‘Christians should be joyful’. My response to this has been further rage; at other Christians for not understanding my pain, and at God again, for not giving me something that is a clear expectation from scripture.

I have felt that the pressure to be thankful and to experience joy, comes from an expectation that I ought to shrink my disappointments, my pain and my genuine authentic responses.

I don’t think this is the answer.

God knows my true heart reaction to these situations, so pretending that my reactions are different is a waste of time. All through the Bible Christians have responded to suffering by spilling out their anger and tiny human understanding at him;

“How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
There is strife, and conflict abounds.
Therefore the law is paralysed, and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.”

Habakkuk 1:1-4 for example.

That is not slapping on a smile over the crap and saying that it’s all OK really because Jesus loves me. Habakkuk is a person with faith who just cannot see the mind of God in his mess and is authentically yelling out his fear and confusion to him. I am relieved that God puts passages like this in the Bible. It helps me not to be afraid that I will scare him off with my honesty.

So trying to pretend my problems are smaller than they are is not the answer here. Trying to pretend my response to them (to the pain and problems themselves as opposed to the bigger picture) is joy and gratitude is inauthentic. So what can I do?

I had a conversation with Priss last night about a comparatively small issue. She told me something she had recently learned and articulated;

“I was challenged to remember to make Jesus lord over everything. Wanting him first, even if that meant never having a well paid job or remaining single, not getting my own house, having no friends... etc.”

She shocked me with that. She shocked me by showing me how many millions of miles I am away from making a statement like that. That in fact I have managed to turn that attitude upside down. I realised that my misguided belief that God ought to give me everything I want because I’m his, had made me into this big greedy monster making demands, while God was my little servant, expected to feed me with things and if he didn’t, he incurred my rightful rage. What an ugly image.

Importantly, that does not mean that my needs and desires are not legitimate. It does not mean that my lack of them is not a real deficit. It does not mean that I ‘ought to be glad’ that things are hard.

It does not mean I should pretend that all of this is small.

It does mean I should remember that God is BIG.

Priss (and the Holy Spirit!) stretched my tiny butler God and showed me a glimpse of his greatness and his rightful place as Lord over everything. This is not then, a begrudging acquiescence that I have to submit to him, but a wonderful realisation that his bigness means that I can trust him to be big enough to carry me through the pain, the disappointment, all the rest.

Lately I’ve been trying to hold on to truths of him guiding me by his right hand, but I’ve been hating the places he’s taken me and wanted to shake myself free. I’ve now caught a glimpse of how powerful that right hand is. I hate to say it, but one of my most hated Christian kids songs has helped me here (I mostly hate it because English Christians seem to always insist on singing it inexplicably in an American accent. Since when did we worship Gad?):

Our God is a great big God
Our God is a great big God
Our God is a great big God
And he holds us in his hands.

This is TRUE and unbelievably for someone who hates kids songs, is a truth that helps me in the depths of my adult pain.

If Jesus is Lord of my life, I won’t demand from him. If he’s really Lord of all of it, I will trust him with it. I will not try to wriggle out of that great big hand, but I will rest in it. I might cry, I might shout, I might fall apart in the middle of it. But I will trust that it carries me, instead of assuming that it just pushes me where I don’t want to go, and takes away the things I want.

I have a long way to go still before I can say that this is how I am actually living my life, but at least I am on my way there. I feel I have a little way to go before I can say with authenticity that my response is joy, but at least I know that joy in suffering is possible (Romans 5 and countless others, promise me that) and so I can hope for that promise. Habakkuk begins with rage and confusion, but it ends like this:

“Though the fig-tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Saviour.

The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
He makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
He enables me to go on to the heights.”

I think I am somewhere between chapter 1 and chapter 3 of Habakkuk at the moment. I am feeling the loss of the olives, the sheep and the grapes. I am trying to learn not to expect them, while acknowledging the pain of their absence, and I am trying to learn and hold onto the hope, that the bigness of God will lead to joy in the heights, even if it takes me a little while to get there.

A Tribute to Relay

2007-12-05T10:48:00.000-08:00

This morning has been a tearful one for me, as it's the morning that some of my favourite ex-colleagues head off for Relay 1 - the first conference of the year for UCCF Relay Workers. I am tearful because I am not exaggerating to say that the Relay conferences (which I have done 3.5 times over) have been some of the best weeks of my life. As far as I'm concerned the Relay programme just gets it right. It is so soaked in grace that it's dripping it all over the floor and there is no greater foundation for, well, anything.

Grace means that the nervous ones on trains and in cars right now will learn that they have every right to be there even though they are all too aware of their inadequacies and failings. Grace means that the cocky ones on their way there will learn that they have no right to be there despite their achievements and talents, but that they're welcome anyway because it's God that's going to be doing the work. Grace means that each of these things are equally true the other way around too. Grace is that wonderful leveller and I so wish I could be there for a 4th time to watch it doing its work.

At my first Relay 1, I was in the first camp. That first conference was the first time I ever remember feeling accepted as I was, and seeing that acceptance rooted in the unchangeable truths of the gospel. It was the first time I really realised that I did have something to offer, and that God had given me gifts that were usable and relevant. That conference was the first time I heard the parable of the sower taught, and that teaching was what got me through years of disappointments in the FE ministry. It was a constant (thought sometimes quiet) reprieve, whispering "Just sow, and sow, and sow, and sow, and sow, and sow....."

As I've repeated the conferences from the other side, it's Relay more than anything else that has taught me again and again that Jesus is enough, Jesus is worth it, Jesus is all I need, Jesus is all there is. I remember making notes in a talk at my last Relay 1, thinking "THIS is what I'm doing wrong! This is the key to the Christian life!" and then realising that what was being taught once again was that old chestnut, grace. There really is nothing new to learn, and nothing else needed.
I am going to miss singing songs to God with a room full of people who really, really mean it. I am going to miss singing those songs around a bonfire in the dark with people who really, really mean it. I am going to miss getting deep into rich books like Ephesians, Colossians, Isaiah and Zephaniah in ways that I've never enjoyed so richly anywhere else. I am going to miss that feeling of hard-heartedness, cynicism and failure being washed away by truth. I am going to miss waking up each morning with my mates. I am going to miss baring my soul to the girls and seeing it change and free some of them. I am going to miss caring for my fellowship group and watching it grow and change from conference to conference. I am going to miss the staff meetings, mixing hilarious banter with real love and concern for the Relays and each other. I am going to miss the 'fun nights', the content of which I can't reveal on here in case future or present Relays read and have their surprises spoilt. I am going to miss crying almost the whole way through Relay 3 each year as I hear testimony after testimony of God holding on to Relay after Relay, even through pain and grief, but often through real joy and change. I am going to miss the secret Relay rituals. I am going to miss having best friends as colleagues. I miss it.

The word 'privilege' has become a cliche when describing ministry, but there is no other word to describe what it has been to be involved in something like Relay. It has been genuinely life changing, sanctifying and joy filling, and it has glorified Jesus in my life more than any other gift he has given me.

It's hard to see, this morning, what life will look like without Relay. I can remember writing a similarly gushing post about Anna moving out a year and a half or so ago, which was equally accompanied by sodden tissues and snot. It took a long time to learn to enjoy the change that that brought. As I'm in two jobs without colleagues, that don't quite make ends meet and don't really get me out of the flat much at the moment, I think it's going to be a long time before I enjoy the gap that's left from Relay. But there was a kind of mantra that we learnt at Relay conferences, and that is not going to expire.

God is still God, and the gospel is still true.

Poetic Procrastination

2007-08-23T10:42:00.000-07:00

During a near terminally boring quiet day at work, Witsy rescued me by setting me the following task:

"Write a poem on the theme of public transport including the words 'tripe', 'exorcist' and 'boobies'."

Here is the lyrical result:

Public Transport

London’s a vast complex maze

So to travel efficiently, pays

By rail track or gravel

It’s exciting to travel

In all kinds of different ways

It’s called ‘Public’ so on some occasions

You’ll meet people of different persuasions

A librarian, a flautist

A docTOR, and exORcist

Or Frenchmen, Mancunians or Asians

You may hear a Londoner gripe

About prices and other such hype

But that’s propaganda

See yourself, have a gander

You’ll see it’s a load of old tripe

There is only one warning I’ll say

Before sending you off on your way

Since you’re such a cutie

Cover boobies and booty

Or be tube-dwelling lecherous prey

OddBabble's School for Young Ladies #1

2007-08-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

How To Receive a Compliment from a Young Single Man

Actual conversation after a recent gig*

Young man I barely know: That was lovely OddBabble
OddBabble: Thanks
Young man: You sound a bit like Dido actually
OddBabble: WHAT?! I HATE DIDO! TAKE THAT BACK!
Young man: Oh...
OddBabble: TELL ME I SOUND LIKE JONI MITCHELL.
Young man: Um, I don't know who he is
OddBabble says: JUST SAY IT
Young man: Um...ysndlikjjjmmmmll
OddBabble says: THANKYOU!

They part company

*I mean actual. I haven't even added anything for comic effect. I ACTUALLY said all this.

My Husband, Mr Rice

2007-07-15T14:09:00.000-07:00

So I went to see him play last night as a birthday present from Peach. I had great seats, described as 'restricted view' but actually, they were above the side of the stage so I could see all the technical things that were going on - the sort of thing that makes the secret geek in me very happy. He came on, dressed all in white linen (in preparation for our after-show matrimonials, I assumed) and watched his vulnerable little back as he meandered around meaningfully on a grand piano before morphing it into a beautiful version of 9 Crimes. This began a whole section of some of his most beautiful, self-pitying, melancholic misery and I wondered if life could get any better than this. Then I heard a strange sound - dischordant, incongruous...a...ring-tone? The poor person must be so embarrassed to have left their phone on! Oh..they can't be, they're not...ANSWERING THIER PHONE? They can't be actually having a CONVERSATION?? Damien is singing his beautiful heart out about delicate looks and 'hurting parts of her garden' (I'm not sure what that means, but I think it's probably rude, and he's the only man who can make filthy things sound tragic. Reason #42203 why he is wonderful) and I am forced to listen to someone say in Trigger Happy TV style "I'm at the concert.....yeah....ooooh it sounds lovely dunn'it.....yeah I wouldn't mind 'avin 'im at the end of my bed *gaffaw*" I turned to her and said "Excuse me, do you think you could have your conversation later? I've paid for this ticket to hear Damien Rice, not to listen to your running commentary." In my head. In reality I glared at her with my best withering look, which 5 people down in a dark auditorium, did not seem to be having much effect on her. I remained silent and physically maimed her in my head.

The highlight of the night was when he played Coconut Skins, with a long mad solo section at the end using lots of pedals (which I gleefully observed from my restricted view) even though it was an acoustic guitar, and ran it smoothly into one of my favourites, Woman Like A Man.

After this dirty acousitc noise-fest, he moved back into some of his slower ones (lets face it, most of them are) and another disturbing sound assaulted my ear, this time from my right. It began with an a-rhythmic tapping. The man next to me suddenly felt he wanted to express his enjoyment of the show by demonstrating his entire lack of musicality by TAPPING in an indescribably irritating way, with no apparent reference to the beat. I had to sit on my hands to prevent myself from restraining him physically. Unfortunately this was not the entire scope of his lack of talent. He also chose to share with me the fact that he was utterly tone deaf AND, joy of joys, he knew all the words to both albums AND the B sides! I turned to him and said "I'm sorry, would you mind not singing? It's just it's quite loud and I can't hear Damien properly. Thanks." In my head. In reality I sat siliently while imagining punching him in the face, cutting his hands off and stuffing dirty rags into his noise-emitting mouth while revealing the more unsavoury depths of my vocabulary. These feelings reached thier climax when Damien unplugged his guitar and sang Cannonball with no microphone into the audience. We needed to be so quiet to hear this raw and beautiful sound, so the wailing in my right ear, with the lyrics just SLIGHTLY and MADDENINGLY wrong in places, made me so enraged I actually thought my eyes might bleed.

Despite all of this, and my discovery that my black and sinful heart means that I would rather indulge my anger and imagine murder than actually draw attention to myself (*shame*), it was still one of the most amazing gigs I've ever been to. Every song was done in such a fresh way - different from the recordings but still retaining everything that makes you love the song. Even the lighting was perfect. Thank you Peach.

OddBabble sings!

2007-06-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

Click here to go to my new Myspace music site and help me to become an International Folk Bitch. If anyone has a myspace site themselves, please become my friend to help me look less pathetic. Ta.

Peckham's Got Talent?

2007-06-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

Shoekeeper 'n' me

Logic

2007-06-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

While reminiscing with my mum about my experiences in the FE colleges:

Mum: "I didn't know Bluebeard was bonkers."
OddBabble: "Of course he is! He's called Bluebeard because he's got a blue beard!"
Mum: "Well, I don't see why that should be my natural assumption. You also have a friend called Shoekeeper and as far as I know, he doesn't keep shoes."
OddBabble: "Good point!"

OddBabble likes to...

2007-05-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

1./ In her free time, OddBabble likes to dance, watch Lost and Grey's Anatomy, and spend time with her friends and family.
2./ OddBabble likes to spy on him from the darkness of her upstairs bathroom.
3./ Before her games OddBabble likes to relax and listen to music and indulge in her hidden talent: sewing.
4./ OddBabble likes to play on VMK. That's Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom.
5./ OddBabble likes to proofread the local paper.
6./ So, you know how OddBabble likes to do all these surveys and then post them up for everyone to read her answers, well for some reason, i always have to read...
7./ The newlywed OddBabble likes to buy furniture sight unseen, and, in return for Jeff's turning a blind eye to his girly house, he gets sex.
8./ Apart from writing, OddBabble likes to make/play games, beer, movies and a host of other things that cannot be talked about on a family website.
9./ Back from the challenge, pseudo celebrity OddBabble likes to quote Joe Walsh. "Everybody's so different; I haven't changed."
10./ After drinking a lot and expending a lot of...energy...OddBabble likes to get a snack to keep everything stable.

First 10 results after googling "OddBabble likes to"

Bricking It

2007-04-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

In two months, my contract will run out, and I’ll have the UCCF door closed behind me and bolted. At the moment I am trying hard to make sure that I can walk right into another one, but so far all I can see is wilderness.

Either way, it scares the living crap out of me.

Whatever happens to me on June the 18th will be something I’ve never done before. All my life I have either been a student, or someone who works with students. Each stage of my life has been a smooth transition from doing something I know, to doing something else I know from a different perspective. I can hardly imagine what it will be like to step off that treadmill to somewhere foreign.

I know that change has to happen, and I know that I don’t want to stay where I am, even if I had the choice to do so. Things are finishing where I am and it’s like trying to warm my hands on a fire that’s almost out. I know I need to get up and make a new one.

I know too, or at least have been reminded, that God is still there. I know he loves me and that he loves to bless me. That he knows me, knows what I love, what I'm good at, what I’m scared of, what my weaknesses are. He knows the right job for me, and he knows how to help me get it. There’s no rational reason why he would lead me to being a make-up artist, or historian or cricketer, or something else that I would hate and have no talent for. I know he’s not vindictive.

The thing that scares me is the truth that he does know what’s best for me better than I do, and that that sometimes means that it hurts. When I look back over my life, I can see why all the twists and turns have come about. I can see most of the time, what God was doing at each point, and why he did it. I can see where going his way saved me from disaster, and I can see where going mine dropped me right in it. I know that whatever he brings me will be what’s best. The Bible tells me so.

But my memory is not short enough to forget that learning those lessons was always painful. That being sanctified, being obedient, being disobedient, being pruned by the great keeper of the vine; that these things hurt.

I know it will hurt to say goodbye to my UCCF family – it’s hurting now!
I know it will hurt to change such well-worn routines, to leave behind esoteric words, mannerisms, intonations, uniforms, networks; all the ingrained things that come from being part of such a small and particular world as I have been a part of.
I know that the challenge of my sinfully putting my identity in my work and in my ‘status’ in having this job, will be a painful challenge. A disorientating challenge. An uncomfortably humbling challenge.
I know that my shyness and fear of entering a world where not everyone has known my name since before they met me, and the things I have done before will seem meaningless to them; I know that these things will erode my sense of identity even further.

It’s these things that I’m scared of, even if I’m led into the most OddBabbleshaped job I could dare to imagine. I know I need that challenge and I need the change. I just wish there was a quicker, less painful way to do it.

Philosophical Conundrum

2007-04-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

So I was told that rats made good pets. I thought that I would get two girl ones, and call them Pam and Barbara. Then I bought a book about rats and discovered that they wee on you carpet all the time and need constant attention and supervision. Bye bye Pam and Barabara.

My conundrum is this: By calling into existence the concept of Barbara and Pam, were there from that moment, two ACTUAL rats, who would in the future be named thus? If so, when I decided not to buy them, did they cease to exist? Have I murdered two theoretical rodents? Or have there, since their conception, been two rats, who I WOULD have bought, but now that I haven't, they are just called, say, Sylvia and Prunella?

It tortures me so.

Compromise

2007-04-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

When I go on holiday, I like to lie in in the mornings for as long as possible, before eating something delicious and slowly consuming cooling alcohol in the warm shade, reading a book, watching the locals or discussing Interesting Things with my companion. These long days might be punctuated by visits to local markets to look at cheap tat, or various activities involving staring at foreign people, or long periods of sitting down. In the evenings I like to eat more (especially whatever the locals eat, as I like to try new food), then drink more, and then dance.

I also enjoy playing catch.

When Witsy goes on holiday, she likes to get up at a reasonable hour so that she can make the most of the time she has away. She likes to look at places of historical interest and visit museums. When eating in foreign countries she likes to find a place where she can eat a cheeseburger. She likes to plan her activity-filled days in advance.

She also enjoys playing catch.

Witsy and I are holiday buddies.

We play a lot of catch.

You would think that two such vacationally incompatible people would be an unwise Holiday Buddy partnership, but that is because you do not know the magic of the Witsy/Barney combo, or how inexplicably and endlessley satisfying the ancient game of catch can be (especially with the Hi-Bounce Pinky, pictured).

The secret, is that relational magic word - compromise. It is perfectly possible and pleasant, for me to sit and read contemplative contemporary fiction in the grounds of a castle, where Witsy is running around reading placards & feasting on historical facts.

After a quick round of catch, it is perfectly acceptable and enjoyable for Witsy to go and take photos from several angles of some ancient sewage works (or something), while I sit and sip a Bacardi, listening to music and watching people go by.When ski-ing, in between games of catch, there's nothing wrong with me gliding along green runs looking at the pretty trees, and then having a little sit down, while Witsy bombs backwards down black runs across mountains spanning three countries.

See? Compromise.

Becci's Strange Dreamworld #1

2007-03-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

"Well...first of all you decided to go to taekwondo with me. When we got there it was at a swimming pool and everyone was walking round the edge and every now and again jumping in and getting out again and then walking around and continuing to walk around. Then we left and went to the changing rooms which were like little huts that you'd find in some foreign country. I can't describe them. Then we went back to your house where you were like this poor kid who had abusive parents and I relaised you needed to get out of there and it made me really sad. And you had all these brothers and sisters and then I realised you could leave because you were an adult, so we left and went to kath's house. When we got there her house was a crap-hole,so we were discussing that it needed decorating. So we decided to decorate it but Kath said we couldnt all live there whilst it was being done so you and her were like "we dont need Becci, lets get rid of her"
And i was sad.
You gave me a hug.
And then you grew a beard."

Oh Bother

2007-03-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

I am a Christian, and sometimes I swear.

I was in the car with Priss listening to Rootless Tree by Damien Rice the other day, and I warned her that it had some 'rude words' in it. Sure enough, Damien got very upset, and in the chorus screamed a broken; "F**k you! F**k you! F**k you, and all we've been through!" She asked me whether I thought that he would sing different words if he became a Christian. I think it would be a real shame if he did.

I am a person that loves language. I love words and I love people that really know how to use them. I love the precision of it - that there is usually a perfect word to express that exact thing that you want to say, and I love the giving and recieving of that precision when we communicate. Sometimes I think that exact word has to be a swear word.

Imagine if Damien sang; "Go away! Go away! Go away!" or similar. There just isn't another word or phrase that communicates the pain and rage that he feels towards this ill-loved woman, than the one he has chosen. Trying to put a more socially acceptable word in there is an attempt to sanitize language, but language is not supposed to be hygienic. It describes the world we live in and the world we live in is not pure and lovely. We need words to express that, or it's like pretending that we live in a Walt Disney Mary Poppins bubble.

The world is not 'messed up'. The world is f**ked up. A messed up world is one where some people get sad sometimes - the kind of thing we tell little children when we try to guard them from the truth. The reality is that we live in a fallen world which is ravaged by sin; every concievable thing is spoiled by it and not as it should be. Every single person is fighting a losing battle against themselves from which they are helpless without a saviour. The language we need to describe that is strong and offensive because that is the nature of the thing it describes. We need the visceral percussiveness of that word to say things which make us rage.

Of course there are contexts where this is not true. Of course that word can describe sexual violence, or can be used as a weapon against someone. What makes language wonderful is also what makes it dangerous; it is powerful. We can choose to use words rightly or wrongly, for good or for evil. There's a reason why I've used *s instead of letters, and that's because I want to be sensitive to people that don't agree with me. I'm aware of verses like Colossians 3:8 (But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander and filthy language from your lips) and Ephesians 4:29 (Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs) but surely this is about the context and the intent with which we use words. I don't think it means we speak in a watery way that doesn't express reality. I hope it doesn't mean that Christians don't have access to that precision of communication that others have.

Please don't hear me as saying that I think sermons should be peppered with swear words, or that Christians should regularly be effing all over the place. I know that there is a great inelegance in that, and a high potential for offending someone. I know there are few occasions when a swear word is the right word. All I'm saying is that we should not be afraid of certain words. They don't bite. They are just serving their function.

Anyone that doesn't agree with me can just....go away.

OddBabble's Strange Dreamworld #5

2007-02-15T12:56:00.000-08:00

So I'm a man and I'm heavily pregnant.
I am on my way to have a caesarean, presumably to prevent the baby from coming out of some unimaginable orifice.
It's a local anaesthetic, but I don't have the luxury of one of those merciful green screens to stop me from being able to view the internal contents of my own body. Thus I am conversing furiously with my 'birthing partners' (Witsy & B) demanding that they 'ASKMEANOTHERQUESTIONASKMEANOTHERQUESTION' the moment a silence lapses, since I know if I don't keep talking I will......look down.After a suprisingly short time I am cautiously standing up (still not wanting to look down, as i had a nasty feeling they'd forgotten to sew me up again) and the midwife comes over and says; 'here's your baby'.
I look, puzzled, into the black bucket full of blood and fat. "Where?" I ask."There." She says. As I look closer I can see a tiny, foetus sized creature with a hideously disproportionately large head which looks as if it is made of glittery suede.
You'd think I'd be disgusted but it has such a beautiful, serene, knowingly content smile on its face that I know I'm going to be the most loving daddy in all the world.

Sorry. Even I feel a little bit queasy now.

So anyway, back to me...

2007-02-11T12:37:00.000-08:00

What ever happened to lazy, egocentric blog posts? It's about time I brought them back into fashion! Found this on The Frightening Lisa Dickinson's blog, and thought I'd steal a bit of Me Time too.
Your Name:
My name:
Summarize me in three words:
Where did we meet:
Take a stab at my middle name:
How long have you known me:
When is the last time that we saw each other:
Do I drink?:
Do I smoke:
Am I happy:
Am I a good person:
What was your first impression of upon meeting me/seeing me:
What's one of my favorite things to do:
Am I funny:
How do you make me smile:
What's my favorite type of music:
Have you ever seen me cry:
Can I sing?:
What is the best feature about me:
Am I shy or outgoing:
Am I a rebel or do I follow the rules:
Do I have any special talents:
Would you call me preppy, average, sporty, punk, hippie, glam, nerdy, snobby, or something else (what):
I'm hot? Am I not? Go ahead, you can say ... :
Have you ever hugged me:
Kissed me?:
What is my favorite food:
Have you ever had a crush on me:
Am I dating anyone:
If there was one good nickname for me, what would it be:
What's your favorite memory of me:
Who do I like right now:
What is my worst habit:
If you and I were stranded on a desert island, what is the one thing I would bring?
Are we friends:
Do you want us to be more than friends?
Do I believe in God?
Am I family oriented?
Who is my best friend?
Will you repost this so I can do it?

Copy it, paste it in a comment, make me smile.

An Homage

2006-12-30T15:38:00.000-08:00

This is one of my favourite books of all time. I like it so much I wrote my ownhere.

OddBabble's 31 Songs

2006-12-28T11:50:00.000-08:00

The following post was originally a separate blog. It has been condensed into one post here.

For someone who loves music as much as I do, a book like '31 Songs' by Nick Hornby is almost too gorgeous to be true. It made me want to marry him after the first chapter (or at least take him out for a pint). It's such a simple idea; an eloquent and passionate man describes his 31 favourite or most significant songs for the pleasure of anyone who cares.

Songs are my language. When I hear something that cuts throgh the rest, I want to describe it, share it, play it, be its author, listen to it again and again on repeat. I'm jealous of Nick Hornby, because for him, he can describe why he loves his 31 songs and people will give a toss. I can think, optimistically, of about 3 people who might be interested in reading mine, and one of them is me.

However, I'm damned if I'm going ot let minority interest stop me. When I first decided to compile my own list, it excited me so much that I struggled to get to sleep that night (a rare complaint).

As with guests on 'Desert Island Disks' it's tempting to include songs which will make me look cool, or add the odd classical track to make me appear more culturally aware. I've been careful not to do that here. There are one or two deeply embarrassing songs on the list, but the truth is that I genuinely love them for one reason or another. Musical snobbery sucks. I've kept it real.

Some of the songs were chosen because they represent significant times or people in my life, some because they represent all that I love about a particular artist, and some are there simply for no other reason than that they are beautifully crafted songs. I've chosen to shun modesty by choosing 2 self-penned songs. I'm sure Hornby would have done the same if he were a songwriter. I've not done it to congratulate myself (they're not good enough for that), but just to be consistent; these songs too, have been significant in my life.

As with all of the constantly evolving lists in my head, they are in no particular order. I would find that impossible, like choosing which of my babies I loved the most. Instead I have grouped them together into vague catagories just to give them some sort of order. I've also set myself one or two ground rules. The first is to be ruthlessly honest about what I put in or leave out, putting in the songs that I really love, and not just the ones that would make an impressive or well balanced list. The second is that there must only be one song per artist in the list. This rule was tortuous to keep as I agonised, for example, over which song best represented all that I love about Damien Rice. I must have changed my mind about a dozen times. Not having this rule however, would have meant that the entire list would have consisted of songs by Tori, PJ and Eddi. That would be kind of missing the point really. The list can never be definative. When I first began to compile the list, I had never heard any Indigo Girls or Kate Rusby; artists who I would now say partly define my musical tastes.

I don't mind if you don't love every song I've chosen, but you will certainly get to know me better by listening to them and hearing why they are important. And they are important. I will never quite understand those people who are content only to listen to Christian music, or who only own about a dozen CDs. How do these people feel? How can they interpret the world? What do they do when they need to dance, sing along with the stereo turned so loud it feels like it's you that sings like Ella, or cry hearing the words of someone who understands? I guess they have other ways of doing those things, but these are mine.

3 comments:
Anne Witton said...
This is so great Barney!! I'm so excited because music means loads to me too. I own 13 of your 31 songs so I am listening to them at the appropriate time as I'm going through to get maximum pleasure from the whole experience!!
30 December 2006 13:38
Kath said...
Small amounts of wee are coming out in excitement. Can't wait to sit down with a cup of tea and read this properly when I'm back in the UK. Woop. Well done you. Have 1000 points.
04 January 2007 11:24
nayf said...
Hey, you great big fabulous looncake. I've finally finished reading this and it's by turns intrigued me (Gett Off), made me laugh (Cornflake Girl), given me nostalgia in the good way (Raw Funk) and the bad way (Creep), moved me nearly to tears (Enough, even though I've never heard it), made me browse iTunes a lot, *almost* like Shania Twain (ALMOST) and love you more (all of it). Maybe one day I'll tell you my 31, but I'll enjoy yours for now :)
08 January 2007 08:12

THE FLAGSHIPS

1 The Right Place EDDI READER

The flagships are the songs by artists that I love so much, that one song really isn't enough, but if I had to choose one this would be it. The Right Place is my favourite song of all time by, I think I do have to say, my favourite artist of all time. Eddi has just been so consistent throughout her career. Other musicians I love always have a bum album somewhere, but Eddi is just class. I made a compilation of her songs for a friend, and as we listened to it together the first few seconds of every song induced an "oh I love this one!" in me. I am a fan.

This song is just so perfectly crafted. It tells the story of a changed life and begins reminiscing about the old life. It builds, musically and lyrically to a glorious, joy-filled climax as she celebrates what she has now become, after waiting such a long time. It's a secular song about love changing someone's life but I can't help Christianising it and making it an anthem to a real new life: Five or ten lifetimes ago, there lived a girl that you don't know. She walked about and answered to my name. Oh, but let's not talk of strangers now, of where and when or why and how. I've turned around, and I'm looking at a new day. I've been in the wrong place, long enough to know, that I'm in the Right Place now.

It just doesn't get better than that.

2 Cornflake Girl TORI AMOS

I remember the first time I heard of Tori Amos, and it was when this song was announced on the radio. Randomly, I was in the back of my parents' car, waiting for my sister to come out of her bell-ringing session (when is the last time you heard an anecdote begin like that?) I remember thinking that Cornflake Girl was just the best song title I had ever heard of in my life. It seemed to me like the most fresh and innovative thing in popular music. When the song itself followed, it was like an epiphany to me. I just hadn't heard anything like it before at that time. I'd not heard a pop song that was based around a piano, but that still sounded like pop. I'd not heard lyrics that I didn't immediately understand. I didn't get this song instantly, like everything else I'd heard; it wasn't disposable. It needed my attention and I wanted to give it. This woman was clearly bonkers, and I wanted more of her.

That was the beginning of an obsession with Tori that made me the true definition of a fan. I spent all the money I had on everything she produced, and the woman could do no wrong for me. Every song she made was just head and shoulders above everything else I had heard in my life.

Peculiarly, I actually met her once completely by accident. I used to have a Saturday job in Boots when I was 16, and I loathed it beyond description. I used to day dream about Tori while I sat on my till bleeping soaps and tampons past. I was unaware at the time that there was a recording studio called Jacob's Studios in the town where I lived, or that Tori was mixing her 3rd album there. Of all the tills in all the Boots stores in all the world, she chose mine to buy her toiletries. One always imagines that when one meets one's hero, one will shake thier hand say some choice, but cool words of praise and leave with an autographed album. When you're me though, you go bright red, shake, sweat and stare in a horrifying way. Because I had been programmed like a robot using the Selling the Boots Experience customer service training programme, I was able to utter the pre-programmed words "do you need a bag?" She had about 15 items, and she looked at me like I was the biggest scarlet, sweating moron she had ever seen. "Yes" she said. And then, the immortal words "what do I owe you?" "What do you owe me? WHAT DO YOU OWE ME?? As if you owed me a thing Tori, you've given me so much, I couldn't begin to tell you!" I thought. And pointed to the total on the till. She paid, she left, I watched her go and the customer behind her swore at me for keeping her waiting.

1 comments:
Shell_morley@hotmail.com said...
he he he and you thought no one would read this. I am now on the Tori Amos web site listening to some tracks!
28 June 2007 08:19

3 There is a Light That Never Goes Out THE SMITHS

This was the first song I ever heard by the Smiths. I had no idea who they were, but the lyrics appealed to my dark worldview more than anything I had ever heard before. And if a double-decker bus crashes into us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die. And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us to die by your side well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine. I completely fell in love with his macarbre romanticism. I had more delights to come when I heard the wonderful, wonderful words to Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now: "In my life Why do I smile At people who I'd much rather kick in the eye ?" Genius! I had never heard people sing songs that tapped into my pessimism so perfectly, but that did it with such joy-filled music, that it made me laugh at the world instead of wish to leave it. Every word of Smiths Greatest Hits album is such bitter beauty, I don't think I will ever tire of it.

1 comments:
B said...
I guess you don't really want all my 'me toos' but I love this song too - how rare for us to agree on both artist AND song!xxB
19 January 2007 08:42

4 Wannabe SPICE GIRLS

When I had just turned 18 I went on holiday without my parents for the first time. We hired a caravan in Bognor and did all the things that teenagers so when adults are not around. The soundtrack to this was a pop single by a new all girl band called the Spice Girls. We played it several times each day and shouted along with the rap in the middle.

The Spice Girls just made consistently perfect pop. I love what Hornby says about people who dismiss pop, in the original 31 songs: "That's the thing that puzzles me about those who feel that contemporary pop (and I use the word to encompass soul, reggae, country, rock - anything and everything that might be regarded as trashy) is beneath them, or behind them, or beyond them - some preposition denoting distance, anyway: does this mean that you never hear, or at least never enjoy, new songs, that everything you whistle or hum was written years, decades, centuries ago? Do you really deny yourselves the pleasures of mastering a tune ( a pleasure, incidentally, that your generation is perhaps the first in the history of mankind to forgo) because you are afraid it might make you look as if you don't know who Harold Bloom is? Wow. I'll bet you're fun at parties."

5 Alarm Call BJORK

It's not that this song is one of the best or most significant in my life. I do love it, it is one of my favourite of her songs. But it is here because Bjork has to be on the list somewhere, because she is wonderful. Bjork is like....like.....nothing and no-one! That's why she's so brilliant! This song in particular has a lot of the elements that make me love her. It is bonkers (as is she) it is unashamedly optomist in a way that doesn't make me want to punch her, it is original and it has her unique littlegirlscarywoman voice that I love so much. "I'm no f***ing buddhist, but this is enlightenment!" she sings, about being on a mountaintop with a radio and 'good batteries'. She makes me believe that life really could be this simple and this wonderful.

6 Cannonball DAMIEN RICE

Damien's songwriting is so perfect I almost can't bear it. It was so difficult to choose one song to represent him, because O is just such a perfectly crafted album, with perfect song after perfect song.

Damien is the first man ever to enter my hallowed Top Five Artists of All Time list. That is a unique feat, but he deserves his place.

I don't know what to say, he is just immaculate.

7 Glory Box PORTISHEAD

Why didn't Trip-hop go anywhere? This song represents the whole of the Dummy album, and Maxinquay by Tricky, by being on my list. Once upon a time there were beats. Then someone invented these delicious, complex, original mixtures of samples and sounds and rhythms. Portishead put a woman with a voice like someone dying of a broken heart on top of it, and Tricky made a partnership with Martina Topley-Bird and topped thier beats with something that sounded like sex and danger and darkness. *Shiver*
There was a lot of crap that came out of the 90s musically (in my view) but THIS stuff, will always sound timeless and new to me.

8 Somewhere Over the Rainbow EVA CASSIDY

I saw a video of her singing this on Top of The Pops 2 one day. Of course I knew the song before, it's one of those songs that is just in the collective consciousness. But who knew that a song about happy little bluebirds, could be so genuinely heartbreaking? There is a Smack the Pony sketch where all these women are sat in an office with this on the radio in the background. One by one they each start crying (it's funnier than it sounds). That's what Eva can do. She doesn't write her own songs (as far as I know) but she is one of those musicians that makes everything she does sound world-class and brand new, even if it isn't.

9 You Know You're Right NIRVANA

It's not that I'm a massive fan of Nirvana. I do love Nevermind, and listened to it a lot as a teenager, but that's partly just because, well, that's sort of what is required. I'm not really a proper rock bitch, so it's not that electric guitars do it for me in the same way as it would someone who regularly frequents the mosh pit. But I do recongnise that there was something very special about Kurt Cobain. I think that the fact that I connect with Nirvana even though I am not a real rock fan, says even more in favour of his talent.

He was one of those people who found living very difficult. That seems a painfully obvious thing to say about someone who took thier own life, but it seems that he always felt that way. He loathed himself, and he loathed the sick world he found himself in, and he found a way to turn that into music in a way that I don't think anyone else has managed before or since. I personally think that this song, the last he recorded, did that the most perfectly. The lyrics are sarcastic and resigned; the sound of a man who has given up the fight. Why? The chorus tells us: "Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnn!!!!" That's why. There are all kinds of ridiculous theories about whether or not Cobain's death was really a suicide. Of course it was. Listen.

1 comments:
FloydTheBarber said...
i think thats my favourite Nirvana song...anyone who can make the word 'pain' last for four syllables is clearly worth paying attention to...
02 January 2007 16:06

10 Ghost INDIGO GIRLS

When my friend first played me Retrospective I couldn't believe that I'd got this far in my life without listening to the Indigo Girls. They are just as I imagined Rooted would sound (but we don't) except they are better, because I couldn't have imagined that well.

I was busy enjoying getting to know the album when I noticed the lyrics to Ghost. This is the first of several songs to appear on my list because it is an infinitely better version of a song I tried to write myself, in this case the cheery Until I Drown.

One of the things that makes the Indigo Girls unusual is that they don't co-write their songs. They each write thier own stuff and Emily's songs are totally different to Amy's. I have to admit that I often end up skipping Amy's, but Emily just writes beautiful song after beautiful song. Her lyrics are really poetry and her structures and melodies are unpredictably complex. My lyrics tend to be reported facts (I feel like this, this is how it feels to feel like this. Chorus.) Emily took exactly the same sentiments and made it into something beautiful, universal but personal, and original.

Everytime I listen to her songs I lament the years I wasted not listening to them. Part of the reason I love them is the fact that they are such a well kept secret. You tend only to have heard of them if you are connected to a certain sub-culture in some way. I realised my need to preserve this when I got a couple of thier albums for Christmas. My parents asked if I wanted to put one of them on the main stereo, but I resisted because I was afraid they would like them. They are special, they are for me and for my friends who see the world as I do. They are not for parents. It would be like your mum fancying your boyfriend. There are some things that they are just not allowed to appreciate.

1 comments:
Anonymous said...
i love that I had even a small part in your discovery of these lovely very dark blue ladies. And I am with you on the parent comment - I am an Indigo Girls evangelist, but only when that's appropriate!xx
19 January 2007 08:50

11 A Case of You JONI MITCHELL

Once upon a time I only had 3 PJ Harvey albums, and when I declared to a collegue at a record shop I worked at that she was one of my top 3 artists of all time, she scoffed, because I hadn't even heard her entire back catalogue. Well I scoff back! Joni Mitchell is here simply because of Blue and nothing else.

I bought Blue because Tori had covered this song. I found a treasury. Every song ever is about love, and this means that there are a hell of a lot of cliches out there. Joni found completely new and beautiful ways of saying exactly what everyone else has been saying since forever. How often have you compared your lover to a bottle of vintage wine, saying "you taste so bitter, so bitter and so sweet. And I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet."? Never. That's how often. That is because you are not Joni Mitchell. (If you are by the way (I did meet Tori in Boots, these things sometimes happen! Maybe she was googling herself!) Do leave a comment!).

THE MILESTONES

12 Raw Funk ODDBABBLE

In films, like for example Dead Poets' Society and Dangerous Lives, teachers are inspiring and instil a love of the subject that somehow manages to transcend all life's ills. In real life teachers are on the verge of a nervous break down and the pupils are so intent on self-harm and premature pregnancy that very little gets learned about anything (or was that just my school?). When I went on to college to study my A levels though, my music teacher came close to these fictional pedagoues. I was a painfully (and I mean painfully) shy 16 year old with very little self belief, and he made me feel like I could really be the best at something, and that that something (music) was the most important thing in all the world.

The place where this was most keenly felt was in the Alton College Jazz Band, which (I felt deeply at the time) was just the coolest thing to be a part of ever. We were 16 or 17, and we did gigs in pubs and were paid with a tab at the bar. Well I couldn't think of anything cooler. The guy waving his arms madly at the front was this legendary teacher. He had an unusual teaching method (which I would not wish to recommend) of being a total bastard. He spent most of the time telling us we were crap, and shouting at us for nothing. For example, I did a sax duet with someone at a concert and it went really well. He came up to us afterwards and said in a fury "I can't believe what I just saw out there!! You didn't bow!!" and went on in a tirade, the exact content of which I have mercifully forgotten, except that it all ended in tears. The thing was, he made us feel like music was so important, that he was (almost) right to shout at us like that. It was scarilege. And so the effect this had on me (and all of us) was not to go away with our tails between our legs, but to think I must do better!! This is too important not to do right!! And so we tried harder.

In the Jazz Band, there were two types of musician. There were those who took solos, and those who didn't. I didn't. I didn't know how! How are you supposed to just make stuff up on the spot?! What is a saxophonist supposed to do with a chord symbol?! Needless to say, I totally idolised the ones that could do it. One time in rehearsals, my teacher decided that we would try. He just pointed to someone, and you were expected to deliver. I was terrified - playing something without music felt like absailing without a rope, and the stakes were impressing my teacher, or being made to feel like I was nothing.

I jumped off the edge, and though I was no Charlie Parker, I did it, and I was in the right key, and he said I was soloing at the next gig. Can you imagine? No, but can you imagine though?? It was the most terrifying and exhilerating thing in the world to take a solo in a gig (which I did several times a night from then on) because I never knew what I would play until I'd played it, and the stakes (impressing or horrifying my teacher) were so high.

For the composition part of my A level I wrote a jazz suite for Jazz Band, and Raw Funk was one third of it. My teacher liked it enough to make it part of the repertoire and he gave me one of the solos in it. Whenever we played it, I mean, I just could not contain myself. My whole world at that time was that band and we were playing something I had written. I just couldn't have dreamed of anything better.

When I listen to it now, I find it embarrasingly derivative, and my solo leaves a lot to be desired, but it still makes me go a bit funny. I think the band is still going, but I don't suppose they play it anymore.

13 Crosstown Traffic JIMI HENDRIX

You're not supposed to like the music that your parents like, it's against The Rules. But The Rules didn't take into account that mine have such good taste. They introduced me to Ella Fitzgerald, The Carpenters, The Mamas & Papas, Queen, Steeleye Span, Dr Hook, Abba, musicals and Jimi Hendrix. Sod The Rules then.

I was a fairly surly, morose and uncommunicative teenager, and like many of my contemporaries my main vocabulary consisted of grunts and sulks. Jimi Hendrix is so special, not because of the legendary way he wealds his axe, but because he was my mouthpiece at that time between me and my Dad. We had a shared love and connection in this music that transended my monosyllabic wall. And it was a language just for us; not for me and mum, or me and my sister, or my sister and him. Only we understood it. He would say "can't you see my signals" and I would say "turn from green to red." And all was said that needed to be said.

14 Creep RADIOHEAD

I believe I have mentioned that I was not a happy teen. I believe I have mentioned that I like it when songs express the things I feel, better than I can express them. Imagine what it did to my head then, when I read the lyrics to Creep on the T-shirt of a girl at college. I felt like someone had reached into my miserable mind and set it to song. And believe me, I was a wierdo. I think that was the first time I had ever experienced that. Most of what people sang about when I was that age was beyond my current experience or imagining. I had never heard anything before that seemed to be about me and about how I felt about being me. Even though those feelings were very secret and private, they were written all over this girl's T-shirt. I wonder if that song by Roberta Flack/Fugees is about something similar? Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words.....I felt he'd found my letters and read each one out loud....Hmm, suddenly that song seems so profound to me!

15 You Do Something To Me PAUL WELLAR

I don't really like Paul Wellar's stuff much, but I heard his acoustic album Days of Speed and it did actually change my life because it reminded me that I loved the acoustic guitar - the playing of which gives me more pleasure than most other things in my life. Somehow, the stripping away of drums, Strats and bass, and leaving just one person and their naked instrument, can give profound new depth to a bunch of songs I never took any notice of before. I wanted to be able to do that thing. So I got my dusty guitar out and decided to push past the pain barrier and learn how to play barre chords. I bought myself Suki from e-bay, and discovered that even I could make these sweet sounds. I might never have got there if I had not heard this album.

THE BOOTY SHAKERS

16 Club Tropicana WHAM

I am a person in possesion of a meloncholy disposition, but I can usually have my mood lifted by certain people or certain things. One of the certain things is Wham. (Strictly, that should say Wham! as that is thier official band name, but the exclaimation mark would have made my sentence look amateurish.) Really, really good pop does exactly what it should do. It makes you forget that the world is sick, and makes you think that everything is going to be OK, so let's dance! This song achieves this by telling you about a place where the drinks are free, and all that is missing is the sea (but don't worry, you can sun-tan). What more could you want? Also, that bass-line! Have you ever heard anything like it??

17 Vogue MADONNA

I prefer Madonna as an icon rather than a singer. I think most of her music these days is quite forgettable, and people only buy it because she sings it. But I can remember getting a copy of Like A Prayer out of the library when I was at school, and thinking it was amazing. I just listened to it over and over again, and thought she was the most amazing woman on the planet. Every school kid has to find the music that their parents will hate, that's the Way of Things. My contemporaries had found Guns N Roses, and that certainly ticked that box, but Madonna meant more to me, because she was offensive, but she was a girl. She was my first parent-unfriendly rolemodel, and that means a lot to a girl. This song was not on the album I borrowed, but it is, in my opinion, the best song of her career by far. I don't exactly know what it is that makes it so great, and I'm scared to analyse it incase I rob it of its magic. But it is great, and it will never lose its greatness.

18 Gett Off - PRINCE

It's hard to describe the place that this has in my life.

When I was at school I was miserable. I hated everything about it, and the only thing I looked forward to was Friday night. Friday night, you may be surprised to learn, was choir night - I was in the Surrey County Girls' Choir. I did enjoy the singing, as I always have done, but it was the tea breaks that I lived for. I used to stand on the steps and tell funny stories to the other girls. Usually they were the same stories that were requested every week, each time with a little bit extra added or exagerated. But I loved being the centre of attention, and I loved making people laugh so much. For some reason, this particular thing is inextricably linked to this filthy Prince song. I think that part of one of my stories or performances must have meant singing it. I really can't remember why, but I know that it represents completely the feeling I used to get in those tea breaks at Surrey Girls'. So I love it. I also remember dancing to it on a chair in the kitchen of my halls of residence at university, because I was so over-joyed to hear it again.

19 Be Faithful FATMAN SCOOP & THE CROOCKLYN CLAN

Whenever I imagine myself having a great night out dancing, it is this bassline that comes into my head. To people who do not dance, this is just some rude man shouting, interspersed with some lady singing something meaningless. If you do dance, this is one of the rare anthems, like Crazy In Love by Beonce, that will rock any party, and will be the moment of the night that you will look back on as the moment you really got your groove and lost yourself to the music. Every time.

20 Don't Stop Til You Get Enough MICHAEL JACKSON

There is no very profound way to articulate why this song is so fantastic. It is so fantastic because it makes me want to dance so very badly, and dancing is one of the reasons why music is the best thing on God's earth, because dancing means you appreciate music with every bone of your body. It's as simple and as wonderful as that.

21 B-Line LAMB

I can't think of a better way to describe this than the way I described it on my very first Under A Bushell entry, so here it is: Sounds like a coiled spring that keeps on escaping and then being wound up again, and consequently makes me feel exactly like that when I listen to it. Impossible to listen to below full volume. Impossible not to dance to it even though it’s impossible to dance to.

22 Higher State of Consciousness JOSH WINK

When I was 16 my sister invited me up to visit her at university. She gave me a generous shot of Bacardi and took me to my first night club. This song was playing and I had never heard anything like it in all my life. It was the first time that I really ever let myself go on a dancefloor and this is really a great song to do that to for the first time. It is aural euphoria, climactic, basic instinct, animal music, and it drives me nuts every time I hear it. I really don't know what it is that makes a human being feel good when they move thier body in time to a beat. Musicologists have speculated that it has something to do with simulating the human heart-beat or something. I don't know. I just know that if I was set the task of teaching an alien what dancing was, I would stick this on the turntable, and they would get a little glimpse of what makes us human beings.

THE TEAR JERKERS

23 Who Will Sing Me Lullabies? KATE RUSBY

This is officially the saddest song I have ever heard in my life, and believe me, I am a connoisseur of the genre. If I had heard this song in the first two years of my becoming a Christian I probably would have done great harm to myself. It is actually so sad that I can't use it nestle into the warmth of self-pity when I am feeling sad and lonely, because its balm is just too powerful. It doesn't just say "there there, others have felt like you have, have a little cry", it says "you are right to be sad, because there is no hope for you. No hope. Die." There are times when it is not that helpful to induce these feelings in myself. That is not to say that it is an unlistenable song because it is beautiful and I listen to it often. I just have to make sure I was in a good mood to begin with and that I don't mind feeling sad for the rest of the day.

One of the things that makes Kate Rusby so great live, is that she is a naturally hilarious woman. So inbetween singing these aching songs, with a pure voice that was made for them, she will crack a gag to remind that it will all be alright in the end. She is my International Folk Bitch hero.

24 Leave Right Now WILL YOUNG

I have never heard a song that so directly described that way that I felt in a certain situation as this one. It was as if someone had transcribed the most difficult phonecall of my life and made it into song.

25 Dido's Lament HENRY PURCELL

I'm not a person who generally likes old things in any context, but the teacher I mentoined in the Raw Funk entry taught me to like baroque music. We did a production of Purcell's Dido & Aneaes and being in the chorus for that was one of the best experiences of my life. There is just nothing like being in an opera. Singing brilliant music in our breaks when all our contemporaries were just smoking or talking about crap in the canteen. Having our own costumes made, learning the stage directions, hearing the applause at the end. It was brilliant!

This particular song is the final song, and is just deliciously sad. Before I was a Christian I wanted it played at my funeral which is so incredably pompous I may pause to thank the Lord once again for saving me.

26 Heal Over KT TUNSTALL

I wrote a song called Hush, Hey which was for a friend who struggled a lot, and I wanted to express to her that I was always there for her and that I understood. I was fairly pleased with it lyrically, but musically it felt a bit like I'd come out with an elephant when I was trying to create a swan. Or something. A few months later I heard Heal Over and KT had already made the swan. The chords are delicious (and a pig to play, which makes it all the more intangible) and the words are just what I wanted to say. I love it because it's one of the songs I most wish I'd written.

27 Enough OddBabble

I'm not a very good songwriter. Some of my songs are good, but none of them will make me an International Rock Bitch. This pains me, but from time to time I think, sod it, and write a song anyway. Enough is the first song I ever wrote, and in my opinion it is miles better than anything else I've done, even though very few people seem to think much of it. It isn't complex, lyrically or musically. In fact it is very simple indeed, but it is the most heartfelt thing I have ever made. I have a recording of it that is embarrasing to listen to. I am singing very shyly and the recording is such bad quality that it sounds like the speakers are about to bust every time I hit a high note. But somehow this is the most authentic recording there will be of it, even when the Beatles reform and cover it in the future. I just love it because it's the only time I've ever felt that I said exactly what I wanted to say, and managed to match the music exactly to what was in my head.

Also, it made me cry when I wrote it, and it's made a couple of people cry when they heard it, so I must have done something right in my book.

28 This Mess We're In PJ HARVEY

It may be cheesy, but if you love music, every relationship you are in has to have an 'our song'. 'This Mess We're In' is the 'our song' for the most significant relationship of my life, and the title says it all really. I loved it before it had such personal significance for me. PJ Harvey is an awesome legend, and Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea is by far the best album of her career. This particular song has vocals by Thom Yorke, who is one of those artists who could sing 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', and without trying, make it sound like the most emotive poetry ever written.

The album happened to come out while I was in this relationship and many of the songs seemed to form a backdrop to the kinds of things we were feeling, but this one stood out. Some of the lyrics were fairly generic, but one or two of the lines made us catch our breaths, because they seemed to describe exactly what was going on, and what was going on had seemed so unique to us.

This is so often what I am straining for when I listen to music; someone to say the things I feel, but say them better than me. This song is so significant because it says some of the things I felt the deepest in all my life.

29 Hard To Get RICH MULLINS

I really found the Christian subculture a very difficult one to fit into when I became a Christian. One of the hardest things, was the fact that most of the Christians I met seemed to enjoy the anti-music that is produced by the majority of Chrisitan artists. Not only is ALL of it in the key of G, not only do Christian singers put on a special fake Christian-sub-culture accent, but they also all lyrically pretend that we do not live in the real world.

I'm all for praising God; he's wonderful, and sometimes that's all I can do. But there are times, and these times are plentiful, when it's hard to live and the reason it's hard is the cross I am taking up. There is nothing in the Bible which shys away from this fact, and the wonderful truth is that God is no less worthy of praise when this is most keenly felt.

It is these times; when I am on my knees, and all I can do is look heavenward, it is in these times that I feel I need some kind of music to express the things I cannot express. But all I can find is "lalala, we're so happy, cos Jesus is our friend! Lalala, Everything's great, so no need to bother learning a forth chord! Allelulia!" Frankly, that just doesn't cut the mustard for me.

But then my friend played me this song. It really does say all the things that I pray so often in those times. It dares to ask the questions, even make the accusations that I want to make. It describes things that I really feel as a Christian, not just the things I think I ought to feel. And yet it is not irrevarent, because like the psalmists, in the end we still have to bow the knee because God is God: "And I know you bore our sorrows And I know you feel our painAnd I know it would not hurt any less Even if it could be explained And I know that I am only lashing out At the One who loves me most " And that is how it should be. And THIS is what I want to sing to God. The same things that the psalmists sang. My praise, my true praise, is to conclude that even in the midst of all this, you are still God, and I worship you, because you are so worthy of it.

30 I Have a Love/A Boy Like That LEONARD BERNSTEIN

It's odd how innocence masks things from you. I have been watching the video of West Side Story repeatedly since I was 8 years old. I loved the music and the dancing instantly, and was old enough to know to cry at the end, but I suspect that had more to do with the mastery of Bernstein's music, which would have sounded heartbreaking and bereft even if the people on the screen had been smiling and laughing. As I've watched it again as an adult, I now see things that were invisible to me then. I was horrified recently to discover that what was about to happen to Anita in Doc's store that night was a gang rape. I had never seen the racism between the gangs or the corruption of the police. I laughed at the instant depth of feeling between Tony and Maria, which before I had accepted without question.

I had always thought that this duet between Maria and Anita was an incredible piece of music. I have always loved musicals, but Bernstein's score is just in a completely different league to anything else in the genre. Even if the lyrics had been a shopping list, there is enough passion in the music of this song to make you feel like you've been wrung through the spectrum of human emotion by the end of it. When the song begins, I can't imagine a more perfect realisation of the grief-stricken rage that Anita is feeling as she realises what had just gone on in that bedroom. Then in contrast to this, the purity and simplicity of Maria's soprano cutting through it. She is saying that it really doesn't have to be so complicated. It's just love, isn't it.

Of course as a Christian I can't wholly buy into all the sentiments in this song; the idea that love is the only thing that matters is the kind of sentimentality that excuses infidelity and all kinds of other unlovely things. The song even contains the postmodern line "it's true for you, not for me" so I can't exactly say that it sums up my world view. But true as this is, I cannot help but resonate with what Maria is saying, and what Anita eventually acquiesces to by the end of the song. This idea that it's hard sometimes to really say that you're doing wrong when all you are doing is loving someone. It's one of the harder things to brush aside in the name of your morality, so Maria's arguement always has me sold in the moment of it. And even Anita can't resist, even though the love being spoken about has taken her own love away. It is the music which does this. The words are sentimentality, and it's too fantastic to believe that Anita's mind could be changed so completely if this were just a poem. But the music makes you believe it. And that's why music can be wonderful.

31 You're Still The One SHANIA TWAIN

I tried to deny it, but I can't, I love this song and I don't care who knows it. I love it because it celebrates fidelity; how many other pop songs can you think of with that as thier subject? I love it because of its unashamed romanticism; "we beat the odds together"! "I'm glad we didn't listen, look at what we would be missing"! Even though the whole world was against them, and the others were lined up to tell them it wouldn't work, love won out! *sigh* I love it because whenever Rooted play it, everyone starts swaying and singing along. I love it because it's the happy ending I want to believe is possible "you're still the one I kiss goodnight" even a cynical, miserable old bag like me.

3 comments:
Anne Witton said...
I love this song too for all the same reasons!! And I've never owned up to it before!I have also LOVED going on a musical journey through all the songs that have special significance for you. Thank you for sharing them. Xxx
30 December 2006 14:45
Sarah said...
yo OddBabble. I read your song list a couple of days ago when I should have been doing work. In fact I did still do it but I "You Tubed" every song and listened to them all (after reading your reasons behind them) whilst I worked. It was such a great way to spend a whole morning! Thanks so much for it. I loved that I could get to know your reasons behind them and it certainly made me smile. I'd love to do one myself but im not convinced it'd be a touch on yours! Thanks dude!
04 January 2007 09:58
B said...
Thanks so much for sharing your songs. I feel honoured that you have taken the time to write about them, and that you have been so complete in your honesty. Thank you!lots of loveBxx
19 January 2007 09:06

Smocks and Pantaloons

2006-12-27T15:34:00.000-08:00

I'm not very good at being a girl so I rarely go clothes shopping. This Christmas though, I was given money specifically to spend on clothes, and I was very strong; I didn't spend any of it on books or CDs.

I did remember why I don't like clothes shopping though. All the shops seemed to sell were smocks and pantaloons. Am I that out of fashion touch?

I did manage to spend all my money, but the majority of it was on duplicates of the same clothes I have been wearing for the last 10 years or so. I am very pleased with myself.

Ruby, Ruby

2006-12-02T15:27:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there was a little blonde geek who won a CD walkman in an essay writing competition. She only owned one CD at the time; Pornograffitti by Extreme, and she listened to it over and over again, retreating to her private, portable music world. There were few things that brought this tragic child more pleasure than her walkman, but as she began to add Guns 'N'Roses and The Fairer Sax to her CD collection, she began to dream bigger dreams.

If only there were a way to have ALL her metal and light jazz CDs in one place. If only there was a way of shuffling the tracks so that Axl Rose could blend seamlessly into 'Latin American Medly'. Her limited mind began to imagine a giant rucksack with a tiny man inside it to select tracks at random. Fortunately for her, Mr Apple was imagining too.

Cue Ruby, the most beautiful, anthropomorphic inanimate object I have ever met. She is all my childhood dreams rolled into one. So far, Ruby has eaten 13.1 DAYS worth of solid music, and I still have entire meals of Various Artists to feed her.

Ruby is a cheeky begger. I have set myself the inexplicable and masochistic rule, that I will never skip a track that Ruby sings when the 'what I am listening to' thing is on Messenger. So whenever she is singing via my computer, she will inevitably sing B*Witched, Aqua and PJ & Duncan.* When she sings to me in the car when we are alone together, she sings me a breathtaking mix which would make anyone listening in say "wow, she is so eclectic and hip!" of course, no-one ever IS listeing in. I can see a sadistic smile on her click wheel.

I could count - for a long time, and in great detail - all of the ways that I love Ruby, but I fear no-one would ever read my blog again, or I would get arrested for material idolatory. Allow this modest limerick to suffice:

How do I love thee?

Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints,

I love thee with the breath,Smiles, tears, of all my life!

and, if God choose,I shall but love thee better after death.

*Yes, I do own albums by each of these 'artists', but that is only because I worked in a record shop for many years and I got given them for free, and this information is strictly just between you and me. I just hope that none of you find out that I actually have BOTH B*Witched albums, and that I paid for one of them.

Cyber Dancing

2006-11-27T15:19:00.000-08:00

Nayf says:I should be dancing
OddBabble says:why?
Nayf says:I like dancing
OddBabble says:oh, ok!
Nayf says:And it would be more productive
Nayf says:Shall we dance, OddBabble?
OddBabble says:OK
OddBabble says:I'll just do up my trousers
Nayf says:Erm
OddBabble says:ready!
Nayf says:Good!
Nayf says:What style are we going for?
OddBabble says:You choose, dear
Nayf says:How about... LA SAMBA!
Nayf says:And... GO!
OddBabble says:woooooooooooohhhh!!
Nayf says:Woah!
Nayf says:You're amazing at this!
OddBabble says:I know!
Nayf says:How do you get your hips to DO that?!
OddBabble says:You're terrible, but it's still fun!
Nayf says:I'm still working on my footwork
OddBabble says:stop looking at them, give me those eyes!
OddBabble says:GIVE ME THOSE EYES!
Nayf says:*EYES*
OddBabble says:MUCH BETTER!
OddBabble says:NOW we're getting warm
OddBabble says:Wooooooooooooohhhhhhh!!
Nayf says:Yeah baby!
Nayf says:Actually, I'm feeling a bit too hot
Nayf says:*runs out of breath*
Nayf says:*DIES*
OddBabble says:oh well

Elementary theology

2006-11-27T15:18:00.000-08:00

I was on the phone to my sis one morn, and my baby niece was in the background chatting as usual, saying stuff like; "dah! bladdgllll-eeeeee" etc. Then I noticed her saying 'Allah! Allah!' I asked my sister if she had become a muslim. She said "well....I have noticed her moving her play matt so that it faces the same direction every day....."

I guess Allah is easier to pronounce than YAHWEH.

Ten years gone

2006-11-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there were 3 Goldsmiths freshers who, although it was 1996, should really have been arrested by the Fashion Police. These stylistically challenged teenagers were on thier way to Club Sandwich - the hottest night spot in South East London - where they were to spend every Wednesday night for the next 3 years. 10 years later these same girls (and thier similarly ageing friends) were to revisit their old haunt. They now look like this:
Now, I know they're not supermodels, but aren't we all glad that at some point in that decade SOMEONE showed them a mirror?
These are the lowlights of our 10 year Club Sandwich Reunion:

Watching a video of myself as a drunken non-Christian, wearing such embarrasingly dreadful clothes that the assembled company had to agree that we couldn't believe no-one took me (or, to be fair, a nameless friend wearing jeans with a waistline meeting her bosom. This was nineteen ninety six, not nineteen EIGHTY six.) aside and sorted me out, or indeed that anyone was prepared to talk to me at all.
Arriving at half past nine and finding that the only other people there were bar staff.
Glaring at the DJ as he played the second Arctic Monkey song. I mean who can dance to that?

These are the highlights:

Realising that I am no longer the girl on that video. In fact, IN FACT, I am a new creation.
As documented on my 365, the moment when as we got onto the bus in Peckham, Mad Clare asked "What's a kebab?" to which Tan dryly replied "the thing you're standing in".
The buzz of excitement as we walked up that familiar road leading up to the union door.
Our delight in finding that, although the rest of the union was uncharacteristically clean and sterile, the toilets were JUST as we remembered them - fit for sanitary condemnation. Ah, memories.
A moment when I looked up to find that the 6 of us were deep in conversation in pairs, talking about what was happening now, in 2006, and remembering that we weren't really in a time warp.
The moment when I HAD to get on the dancefloor because my all time favourite tune to dance to came on:Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough.
The moment when, although the DJ had systematically ignored all of our retro requests for the Spice Girls and Prodigy, he did actually play Jump Around by House of Pain. We did.
ALL the dancing.
Visiting that same old kebab shop afterwards. *Sigh*.
Waking up the next morning with my old mates, glad that they are still my old mates.

So, next stop 2016, when I can guarantee that the union toilets will be EXACTLY the same.

Signage

2006-11-03T15:07:00.000-08:00

OddBabble's Strange Dreamworld #4

2006-10-18T15:05:00.000-07:00

So I was walking through a crowded room holding a hoody on which I had had printed my own design (as if I would do such a thing! You can tell it's a strange dreamworld!). I saw Pod and suddenly felt embarrassed by the colour scheme I had chosen, and started to babble "yeah, so I just thought I'd put the brown ink in the border, against this brown background...." "Yeah?" said Pod. "Well, I think it's disgusting." He said unsmilingly, looking me in the eye. "OK!" I said, giving him one of those smiles you give someone which has a mixture of pity and fear, when you realise that at some point recently they had lost their minds. I walked away thinking "aren't you the moody one!"

NO.

2006-10-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Liturgical Dance Apparel. No.

MSN Procrastination

2006-08-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

OddBabble says:Today my pants have a bear on.
hoveactually says:have you named the animals on your pants?
OddBabble says:there's only one
OddBabble says:hold on, let me look
hoveactually says:lol
OddBabble says:He says his name is Pharrel
hoveactually says:aw
OddBabble says:I was quite surprised by that
hoveactually says:yeah
hoveactually says:does he like being on your pants?
OddBabble says:hold on, let me look
OddBabble says:he's not smiling
OddBabble says:but then, he hasn't got a mouth
hoveactually says:eek
hoveactually says:poor deformed bear
OddBabble says:he looks quite in proportion actually
OddBabble says:I don't think he's in any way disabled
hoveactually says:ok
OddBabble says:although, presumably, mute
OddBabble says:but who wants chattering knickers?
hoveactually says:yeah, that could get tricky.. especially some situations...
OddBabble says:the mind boggles....
hoveactually says:indeed.

2006-08-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

OddBabble: Kath?
Kath: Yeah?
OddBabble: What would you do if I woke up ham?
*Pause*
Kath: What?
OldBabble: What would you do if I woke up and I was made of ham?
*Pause*
Kath: I'd probably make you into a sandwich.
OddBabble: No!
Kath: What?!
OddBabble: I'd be hairy!
Kath: Would the hair be made of ham?
OddBabble: No. It would be like my hair now, it's just that I would be made of ham.
Kath: Oh.
*Pause*
Kath: I'd still make you into a sandwich.
*Long pause*
OddBabble: Kath?
Kath: Yeah?
OddBabble: What would you do if I woke up cheese strings?
Kath: I'd chuck you out.
OddBabble: No!
Kath: What?!
OddBabble: I can't help being cheese! What if I said, 'excuse me, I'm afraid I'm cheese strings'?Kath: If you said it like that, I'd let you stay. Now, we need to get going.
OddBabble: But I can't! I'm real a-peelable cheese!
Kath: I won't let anyone peel you.
OddBabble: Thank you.
*They depart*

Time for another serious post..

2006-07-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

"Oh, that marvel of conception as you stirred together
semen and ovum-
What a miracle of skin and bone,muscle and brain!
You gave me life itself, and incredible love.
You watched and guarded every breath I took.

But you never told me about this part."
Job 10:10-13 Message translation

I love the way that Job lets rip. He really just says it how it is right to God's face. His friends try to tell him 'the answers' but Job just says, "I don't know about any answers, I just know that this feels like crap, I don't like it, and God needs to know that."

I've just spent the last little while crying at God, telling him that the way he does things is stupid and that it would have been better if he'd never thought of us. I didn't use any of the "And Lord, Ijusreallywannapray" jargon or cliches and even found myself letting out a swear word. I know that God is OK with this, or else he wouldn't have let Job get in the Bible. I asked him all the 'whys' that have ever been in my head. I knew that there weren't going to be any answers, but also that it was good to ask.

Reading Job again reminded me that there is no answer to suffering. I especially want there to be an answer when my friends are suffering, because I want to be able to give it to them as a balm. I want to fix it and take it away. But the truth is, at the end of the day there is not any REASON for it. Kath will perennially be asking the same questions on her blog and talking about heaven. When she and I get together, there will always be some point in the day when we will ask each other the big questions, knowing that niether of us know the answer, but that it's good to ask.

God will always listen to me when I have these cyclical rants. He'll not drop The Answers down on a golden scroll carried by fat, ugly cherub babies (who ever decided that angels looked so repulsive?) and tell me to go forth and share it. But I'm assured that his silence does not mean indifference. He's not coldly saying "At the end of the day Stephanie, I'm God and you're not and that's that." Although that is true (and I'm grateful for it!). He also reminds me that he hasn't gone anywhere, he hasn't forgotten me, he's not gone deaf or blind, and he's not run out of COMPASSION. That's the thing, he actually gives a damn. So though I hate it, it's sort of OK that he doesn't tell me why, because I know that HE knows why, and so he must know why I can't know why. If you see what I mean?

What I'm trying to say is, that it's good to realise that no-one knows the answers, because if we did, we'd know that we'd got it wrong, because everything still sucks. But that still, it's good to ask.

Are You Branded? (Part 2)

2006-07-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

Having seen this surreal coincidence on Kath's blog, I was shocked to discover that my own niece has chosen to try to EAT the corporate colours, (flanked by her auntie's favourite orange, naturally). Perhaps it is a prophetic suckle??

John Wesley Doll

2006-07-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

I will not be blogging for a while, as I have been hospitalised, due to THIS.

The Answers

2006-07-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

...for anyone that cares...

1. Rich Mullins 'Hard to Get'
2. Tricky 'Black Steel'
3. Ben Folds 'The Luckiest'
4. Bjork 'Alarm Call'
5. Damien Rice 'I Remember'
6. Eva Cassidy 'I Wish I was a Single Girl Again'
7. KT Tunstall 'Heal Over'
8. Paul Wellar 'You Do Something To Me'
9. The Smiths 'There is a Light that Never Goes Out'
10. Suzanne Vega 'Gypsy'

Horrible

2006-06-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

I was just about to get into my car when I heard a woman from one of the flats in my building yelling. I looked up and she was holding a baby, must have been about 6 months to a year, I don't know much about these things. She was yelling: "She's going to die! She's going to die! She can't breathe!" There were people all around her, making phonecalls, trying to reassure her. The child was limp and grey, I'm sure she was already dead. I called up and offered to drive her to a hospital. I didn't know what else I could do, I wanted to do something, but there was nothing I could offer her. She didn't need my help, an ambulance was already on its way.

I left with a horrible sense that I had just brushed the fringe of the birth of someone's tradgedy. I had witnessed the panicked beginnings of some horrific grief that I can't even begin to imagine. It seemed so wierd that something so monumentally tragic could have just happened in the building where I live. And that things like that are probably happening around me all the time. There are stories like that behind many of the lights I see in the windows of tower blocks around Peckham.

It just occured to me that it's absolutely right to pray for the hastening of Jesus' return. I used to flinch from praying that, because I didn't want him to come back before the people I love know him. And whilst I still feel the pain of that fear, I've realised how selfish it is not to want Jesus to return soon. It's tantamount to saying that I want things like what I witnessed today to continue; that I want horrible things like death and suffering to carry on a little while longer, until I get my affairs sorted.

Someone asked me last week, what I like best about being a Christian. My answer was, that I can be sure that there will be an end to all this. That this is not all that there is. That we won't always have to live in a world where I can look up and see a grieving mother holding a dead baby. That God sees and weeps and cares about things like this, and has promised to come back and clean up the mess. That he will one day take me home to a place where all this CRAP is gone forever, and there will finally be a day when he will say 'enough!' I understand fully now, why Christians pray for this day to come soon.....

Clues

2006-06-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

OK, so the quiz is impossible. I knew the answers! I've decided to give you some cryptic clues to help you. I know it's possible with these because nayf managed to solve it.

1. Ragamuffin plays dating game
2. Difficult. Dark swag
3. This man likes origami. And rabbit's feet
4. Wake up frozen food lover!
5. This one's easy, you don't need a clue
6. DAISY CAVES regrets wedlock
7. Initially, this Scot has a nasty scab
8. This man was once fond of marmalade? He's forgotten what you do
9. These Joe Bloggs' talk about an eternal flame
10. A lady who once haunted your local diner, has a travelling friend

Good luck!

Hooray! A Pop Quiz!

2006-06-02T12:32:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me to make her a CD so that she could see what kind of music I like. What a glorious commission! Of course I made her 3 volumes. The first and 3rd are themed but the middle one is completely miscellaneous. I made her detailed sleeve notes. See if you can guess the song and artist from the descriptions I used. If I were you, I would be so excited by this, but alas, I can't join in!!

Tip: If you are a hardcore OddBabblings fan, you may find some clues to some of them in early posts....

1.)This is possibly the only Christian song I know that actually talks about what it's like to be a Christian. Or at least, what it's like to be OddBabble. I think this song is amazing, so honest and real. It's how I feel most of the time.

2.)Mmmm, this song is yum. It reminds me of being at Uni in my first year. If anyone comes into your flat while this is playing, they will think you are instantly cooler and more desirable, just from the ambiance you have created.

3.)BLANK is BLANK FRIEND's all time far and away favourite singer. This song is COMPLETELY a-typical of him. He's usual very cool. This is my favourite song of his though for the very reason that it isn't, it's just unashamedly sentimental, cos he really loves his lady. It appeals to my soppy side (which is about 98% of me.)

4.)I had to put a BLANK one on! This is my favourite BLANK song, it's so happy and optimistic! I love the line "I'm no ******* Buddhist, but this is enlightenment" and the detail of remembering to bring good batteries with her to the mountaintop.

5.)I know you say you hate BLANK, but I just can't accept that. Listen woman! This one in particular is AMAZING, because it's like a mini opera - it has scenes and plot and passion and, and listen to it, it's gorgeous! "Want you here tonight, want you here" Can you be so unfeeling?? If nothing else, you can enjoy the thought of BLANK FRIEND and I playing this together, with her hitting her bongos harder and harder and me screaming in the scary half "I whip myself SCORN SCORN SCORN!!"

6.)If I ever get married, I'm going to sing this to my husband.

7.)This is my favourite song of hers. It's one of those songs which in concept, is exactly like a song I wrote, but much better. I heard it after writing mine, and thought "THAT was what I meant to say!"

8.)The acoustic album that this comes from is the reason that I picked up the guitar again a few years ago. I am DEVOTED to the acoustic guitar (you may have noticed quite a lot of it appearing in the songs I like!) and he sure knows how to wield his axe! This song is just gorgeous. I can play it, but it sounds a bit weird when girls sing it.

9.)I just LOVE BLANK's lyrics! He says all the things I think but don't say out loud too often, because I don't want people to know how cynical I really am. He just doesn't care. I love the fact that such misery is set to such a subversively jolly tune too. I think he's a genius. This is the song that made me love BLANK - the first one I ever heard. I love the idea that you can make suicidal feelings romantic. Oh dear, I think I'm revealing a bit too much of my dark side...

10.)This needs no explaination, it's just gorgeous.

Enjoy guessing! Kath, you are not allowed to guess until some others have had a go. I know you'll be able to work most of them out! After a while I'll allow you to try!

The prize is a 'Believe' Mars Bar, cos we all know that eating a sugary snack high in saturated fats is going to help a load of boys kick a ball into a net. There will be 2 winners, Kath and whoever comes second.