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As per my usual habit of combining two completely unrelated topics in one blog post, I’ve decided to talk about two things today. Firstly, politeness.

I’ve noticed a couple of examples of things recently which seem polite but, on reflection, perhaps are not. The first thing is, holding doors open. The general idea being that someone walking behind you will not have a door slammed in their face! That seems quite polite. But the problem comes with how far someone has to be behind you in order for you to hold the door open: a couple of steps? A few yards? Half a mile?! Personally I don’t like it when someone holds a door open for me and I’m a fair distance away. Being English, I feel compelled to run in order to not keep them waiting. It’s just an embarrasment factor we could all do without.

My new rule is, “hold the door open only if it will slam in someone’s face”. If not, then – well, working doors is not exactly rocket science. If I hadn’t been there to hold it open the other person would have had to open the door anyway. Obviously there are always exceptions (i.e. someone disabled or elderly may have difficulty opening doors) but that’s the general idea.

The second thing is, pouring out hot water from the kettle. At my workplace, we don’t have a massive office but it’s big enough that there are often a few people waiting around for the kettle to boil. Some people will fill up your cup with hot water for you when it has boiled. This is a nice thing to do, obviously… but I don’t generally do it. The problem is, people all like cups filled to different levels, and it seems a bit redundant to ask people how full they want it when they could have filled it to their own preference in practically the same amount of time.

Anyone else have little random things which seem polite but are actually not very?

The other thing is, Top Gear. I didn’t mention this the other day, but I was a bit disappointed by this week’s show. I just found it incredibly formulaic, I could virtually have predicted what was going to happen from the start:

1. Top Gear team go off somewhere to test drive cars (in this case, drive along the best driving road in Europe, or whatever it was)
2. They don’t bother preparing
3. They do stupid things such as buying a Dacia Sandero (can’t be bothered to look up spelling :p) and park it right behind a lorry;
4. Hilarity ensues.

I don’t know whether it was just me but, although the show was entertaining, it didn’t strike me as being as good as previous series. Still, let’s see what next week’s episode has in store!

It was a moderately busy weekend this time – but it should be the last busy weekend we have for a while (he says hopefully). On Friday evening I was leading at 21, but Laura was there this time so we didn’t have to do so much!

On Saturday we had a relatively free day. I spent a few hours throughout the day preparing my talk for the youth service. Apart from that we did a bit of shopping and enjoyed the sunshine! In the evening we relaxed, had a nice curry (from our Indian recipes book) and watched “Tropic Thunder”. I wasn’t that impressed with it to be honest… it was quite funny in parts, had some really great moments, but it’s not a real classic. It makes me glad that we have our easyCinema DVD rental service – we can just rent these DVDs we sort-of want to watch rather than shelling out for the cinema or buying DVDs! At a couple of quid a pop you can’t complain.

On Sunday morning we went to church, twice! And then came back for lunch, and watched the first half of the Wimbledon men’s final. It was brilliant – really tension making stuff, you just didn’t know who was going to win! Much better than the ladies final – I didn’t watch all of it, but the thing was… I just didn’t care who was going to win. Will it be Venus? Will it be Serena? I don’t know, who gives a fig?! Maybe I’m just cynical, but I find the whole Williams / Williams dominance of women’s tennis boring. You can just predict who’s going to be in the final.

To be fair, I find Federer’s domination of the game boring as well – but the final was an incredible match, especially given that I’d virtually written Roddick off before the tournament!

Anyway. We couldn’t watch the end of the match because we had to head off to Sunday@6 for the youth service (I think I would have found it difficult to get out of that one to be honest!). The talk went pretty well in the end – I had some positive comments at the end so it can’t have been that bad!

Afterwards we came back home and watched “Top Gear”. Bizarrely enough, I noticed some Green Wing music in Top Gear this time round, I don’t quite know why – the Green Wing music was composed specifically for the show! Still, was great fun to watch as ever. And that pretty much brings you up to date ;)

Well, this has been a rather eventful weekend! On Friday night, Laura and AJ (the youth leaders at Fordham) were both away so we had 21 to run ourselves. It went pretty well considering! The kids seemed to enjoy it. The only problem was, the burglar alarm went off half way through our game [I should hasten to add at this point that there were, predictably, no burglars. Still don't know why it went off]. We had to leave the building and have the talk outside… fortunately it was such a nice evening, this was possible!

Anyway. On Saturday afternoon we headed out to a wedding. Unusually, it wasn’t of people we actually knew… at Ian and Lucy’s wedding last year we met a couple called Tim and Sue. They liked my DJing at the wedding, and got in touch earlier this year to ask whether I’d be up for DJing at their wedding. I said yes, and so on Saturday we went along to the wedding and then I DJ’d at the reception (note: it’s not usual practice for wedding DJs to go to the wedding service – but in this case, as Ian and Lucy were going and we were invited along, we thought it would be nice to go). Anyway, it seemed to go really well. I played most of the cheesy classics and at the end of the night there were still plenty of people dancing. In fact, I think people were a bit disappointed when it was all over – although I hasten to add I think that wasn’t just up to the disco. It was a lovely day in general – the first wedding I’ve been to where the wedding breakfast was a picnic outside!

On Sunday morning we went to church as per usual. Then in the afternoon we spent some much-needed time in the garden, relaxing and doing a lot of general tidying up which we’ve not had much time for recently. Then, we headed out to Sunday@6 which was a communion service – done in the early church style over a meal! It was really good actually – having communion in a meal style setting, as they would have done in the first 100 years or so of the church. I’d quite like to try it again.

Afterwards we had a quick music practice for next week’s youth service, and then we came back home to watch Top Gear. I thought it was really good this week – I can’t believe how much the insurance premiums are for 17 year old drivers! I thought it was bad for me, but some of the quotes they received were absurd – £8,000 was one! Come to think of it, I was first insured permanently when I was 20/21, so perhaps it was slightly cheaper for me – only around £1000 for my first year… I’m so glad I’m now over 25 and have a few years of no claims bonus!

This weekend was pretty much all taken up with the 21 Weekend Away! 21 is the 11-14s youth group at Fordham. On Friday night after work we drove down to Assington Hall (Assington is about half way to Sudbury from Colchester). The evening was mainly spent with setting up camp, then dinner, and then a wide game in a nearby forest.

After that we all came back to camp and went to bed… but not to sleep. Well, not in my case at least. I’m not very used to camping, so I didn’t find it very easy to get to sleep. And then I woke up early in the morning (about 4AM) due to the cold, and couldn’t get back to sleep again. I ended up going for a shower at 5:30AM – much earlier than I’d been hoping for! But I think a lot of other people were up and about, and actually some of us went to the football field and had a game before breakfast (which has got to be some kind of record for me – football before breakfast!)

Afterwards Laura did her talk on Galatians 1, and then we went out for the second part of the wide game in another nearby forest. This involved our team carrying Laura on a stretcher to the minibus… too complicated to explain here, but we really enjoyed it! Afterwards, we came back to the camp and had lunch. Then we all had a “team challenge” set of games, which were really fun. Then, it was my turn to do a teaching session on Galatians. I think it went pretty well, all told, although everyone was pretty tired due to getting no sleep the night before!

Anyway. After that we had some free time before the evening’s entertainment – “Assington’s Got Talent”! Which was great fun, although some of the talent entries were slightly dubious…

We all slept better on Saturday night, I think. I certainly got at least twice the amount of sleep, which I really needed! After breakfast we had our third and final teaching session from AJ, and then we did some archery. I’m useless at archery, I have decided – but I enjoyed trying! Then we had lunch, cleared up and left.

I think that’s pretty much a summary of the weekend away – I’ve probably missed out a few things but they’re the main details! When we got back home we pretty much crashed out. We did go to Sunday@6, though – and afterwards we came back home and got a take-away curry!

Oh, and Top Gear is back for another series. I can’t believe they revealed the identity of “The Stig”… although actually I don’t think he was the real stig. We’ll never know ;)

This weekend was a long one for us – we took Friday off work to do some Christmas shopping! It was actually quite a successful day – we managed to get most of our Christmas shopping done, although we do still have a few bits and pieces being delivered (hopefully before Christmas!).

On Friday evening Philippa travelled down to see her sister, so I watched “The Big Lebowski” which was an OK film. It wasn’t the best film ever, but it was quite entertaining for an evening. On Saturday, I did some food shopping in the morning and didn’t go out again all afternoon as the rain was pouring down! In the evening I went to La Tasca in Colchester with Dan, Alison, Caroline and Tom. That was a good evening – we had a variety of Tapas dishes, plus a paella for two shared between the five of us (they are absolutely huge!). Afterwards we went to the Twister for a quick drink before heading home. It was a very enjoyable evening, La Tasca is always nice and it was good to see a few people again who I haven’t seen in a while!

On Sunday we went to church as per usual. In the evening we had a take-away curry, and then Matthew came round and we watched Top Gear. It was good again this week, I can’t believe they managed to get that BMW all the way to the finish line! So that was also a nice evening… not a bad weekend really!

Just a shame that all weekends can’t be three days long – I could get used to four days work, three days off… ah well!