Category: Uncategorized

This weekend was good fun. On Saturday, Phil’s parents came up to help us with the garden. We planted a few new shrubs and things, including some Seedums (if that’s how you spell it) and a Cotinus (again, not sure about spelling). We also planted a couple of little trees which I’m not even going to attempt to spell, but they’re basically miniature fruit trees! We have one apple tree and one plum tree. I’ve got some photos of all of them on my PC which I shall upload to Flickr later.

In the evening we relaxed a bit, and watched “Thank God You’re Here” (which I’ve mentioned here before…)

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then came back home for lunch. In the afternoon we went for a rather nice walk around Bourne Mill, but this time I brought the camera! There will be some photos of that on Flickr later on as well.

In the evening we went to the lent service at St Albright’s. It was the second in a seven-part series, led by Andy Saville, on the “I Am”s of Jesus – this one was on “I Am the Light of the World”. It was very good!

Afterwards we came back home to have dinner and we watched ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’ followed by ‘Run, Fatboy, Run’ (which I’ve just bought on DVD). Run, Fatboy, Run is a really good film, it was definitely worth buying!

And, that’s just about everything for this weekend. All for now…

When I say “Meese”, I of course mean the plural of ‘Moose’.

Apparently a man was nearly killed by a falling moose.

The article does not specify whether the moose had a mighty mullet or was minging, but I believe it to be unlikely…

There’s been a bit of a debate recently about the blasphemy laws in this country. Various people have weighed in on both sides, with MPs wanting the law abolished but certain members of the Christian community wanting the ban to remain.

My opinion is that the law should be repealed. I think it’s pointless: who is it protecting? People who are not Christians have absolutely no obligation to abide by Christian rules. Of course, I believe that in a perfect world everybody would be Christian, but we’re not living in a perfect world and forcing people to not ‘blaspheme’ would do very little to help the reputation Christians already have!

The law these days seems to accomplish nothing except curtailing freedom of speech and should be abolished. If Christianity is so weak that we feel we need to defend it in the courts of this country, we have already lost. What we Christians need to be doing is showing people the grace and love of God, not hounding the BBC for showing the Jerry Springer opera!

I think it’s probably safe for me to mention now — I have a new job! It’s a software development role with a company based in Chelmsford. I’m starting there on 3rd March, my last day with my current company will be 29th Feb (although I’ve got the last week off on holiday, so I’ll have a week off before starting there 🙂

Aaaanyway. As for the weekend – on Friday evening we went out for dinner at Prezzo. The meal was delicious! – I can highly recommend the honeycomb cheesecake!

Afterwards we went back home and watched Spider-Man 3. It was a very interesting film actually, dealing with some quite ‘Christian’ themes — mainly revenge and forgiveness. It’s a shame that they didn’t do more with it though, it was all set within a very secular humanist “you can choose to be better if you want to be” kind of framework. Still had some good moments in it though. And I think it was probably the funniest out of the three Spider-Man movies so far — when Peter Parker turns to the ‘dark side’, he becomes absolutely hilarious.

On Saturday, we did a bit of shopping in the morning, and then in the afternoon met up with Alex and Elisa at the Playhouse for lunch. Then in the evening we went to a concert at Ipswich Corn Exchange with Matthew and Ellie. Matthew has already written a review of the evening, so I will just add that we had a great time and I’d definitely love to hear the Rachmaninov again!

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon we had our next-door-neighbour round for tea. Afterwards, I went to a Lenten course at St Albright’s Church in Stanway. It was the first part of a lenten series on the “I Am”s of Jesus – this one was about “I Am the Bread of Life” from John 6. Andy Saville from Fordham was supposed to be preaching, but unfortunately he wasn’t well enough, so the rector at St Albright’s had to step into the breach – but he did very well given the circumstances! I’m quite looking forward to the rest of this series – Phil and I have decided that although we’re not going to give anything up for lent, we will go to these services and prepare for Easter that way.

Well, I think that pretty much sums up our weekend, all for now!

I haven’t mentioned much about Torchwood recently – I just wanted to catch up on the past couple of episodes! I thought last week’s episode (“To the Last Man”) was really good. It was what Torchwood does best: looks at characters and how the rift actually affects people, rather than some gung-ho all-guns-blazing kind of thing.

This week’s episode “Meat” was pretty good as well, although wasn’t quite up to last week’s standard. About half-way through I felt like they were trying so hard to create drama, but I just couldn’t quite feel it! Nevertheless, I did quite enjoy it – I think I’m beginning to sympathise with the characters a bit more, which means I don’t worry about the plot holes so much. Although I’m still not sure about them all being randy 100% of the time – the show would be a lot better still without all the sexual tension! Relationships yes, sex no. Or at least, not the way they’ve been portraying it in Torchwood, no.

Ah well, let’s just hope that Torchwood keeps getting better and better, if current trends continue the rest of the series is set to be pretty good!

One of the predictions which Zeth made last month was that ‘Social Networking will become a protocol’.

I think that was half right: it’s not a protocol, it’s an API, developed by Google (of course).

Not that I think it’s a bad idea, mind, but I do wonder how long this social networking thing is going to last. There was an article on The Register recently about Facebook, in which they surmised that a lot of people use Facebook regularly for 4-5 months but then get bored with it and only check in from time to time if they get messages or the like. That seems to tally with my experience – I do log into Facebook daily, but only just to have a quick check of what’s going on!

But we shall see.

A couple of posts ago I mentioned my new guitar. Well, I’ve been practising since then, and it’s starting to get to the stage where I can actually play songs! On the recommendation of Anne-Marie I started out with ‘Great is the Darkness’ (that only has three chords in it! – C, D and G).

Last night I decided to go through a few of my old Christian songs and see if I could play any of them. To my surprise, I could! A lot of Christian songs are written in similar keys and so use the same kind of chords. I also managed to play a few songs from my ‘Easy Guitar Songs’ book, which Phil also bought me for Christmas: ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles, ‘Twist and Shout’, also by the Beatles, and ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. Admittedly I can’t play any of them very well as yet, but it’s still early days as yet!

This is why I like learning the guitar: the payoff you get after a short time is much bigger than with the piano. When I started out learning piano, it took me ages before I could actually play anything ‘proper’ like that. Of course, I think once you’ve got past the ‘newbie’ phase, progressing on the guitar gets much harder – but at least early on you get to see results, which is a big plus in my book 🙂

Aaaanyway. Enough about the guitar, more about the weekend – which was fairly quiet! On Saturday we didn’t really do all that much. Went into town for a bit, bought a guitar strap… in the evening we watched some TV. The new show by Paul Merton on ITV (“Thank God You’re Here”) is fantastic — it’s a brilliant idea, and very very funny!

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and afterwards we went round to Roy and Janette’s for lunch (we are members of the same home group). We had a lovely time there, and finally came back at around 5:00. In the evening we watched ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’.

And I think that’s just about everything!

Excellent. Search for ‘Dangerous Cult’ on Google. Heck, I’ll even provide a link for you.

Done that? Good. In case it’s no longer working, the first result as of the time of writing was the Church of Scientology’s official website.

I don’t know whether this is part of the whole ‘war on scientology’ thing going on at the moment. Although I’m absolutely against scientology (it seems to have turned Tom Cruise into a babbling nutcase, although perhaps he was a babbling nutcase before getting into scientology), I don’t necessarily think this ‘war’ will help matters much. Some of the phrases uttered by people in the ‘Anonymous’ group look almost as insane as those made by Tom Cruise – saying things like “We are Legion” sounds to me like a slightly unhinged mind!

Ah well, I guess if a few scientologists realise the fact that they are in a dangerous cult, it won’t be a bad thing… speaking of cults, we had a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses come round the other week. They should be coming back this Saturday, so I’ve been looking at various websites to see what the best way of speaking to them is. The Christian Apologetics Research Ministry seems quite good.

I will report back after the weekend!

This weekend was a very enjoyable one! On Saturday, Phil’s parents came up for the day to help us with the garden. They brought with them a variety of shrubs and plants – as well as a couple of trees! – for us to plant in the garden. Although it’s still winter and they’re all rather bare at the moment, I think the garden looks much better for them! Also, I painted the shed green (amazing how much difference it makes!) and hoovered the car. It was quite a productive day, in general!

On Sunday, we went to church in the morning, and then went to lunch with some friends from church. It was a really nice day – the meal was lovely, and after dinner we went for a walk. It certainly didn’t feel like a January day, although it was perhaps a little on the chilly side!

We got back home in the early evening, and we had tea and watched ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’ which is a costume drama that I’m actually quite enjoying (but don’t tell anyone that!).

I think that brings you up to date!

Ok, I admit it: I enjoyed this week’s episode of Torchwood. I think it was an interesting idea, and it certainly had more of the ‘human element’ than Torchwood of last year (namely, I actually empathised with some of the characters!).

There were a few problems with it:

• Although Torchwood is outside the government / police, why do they have the power to hold anybody just on a whim? All that had happened was somebody got stabbed. What if (for example) there had been an invisible alien who did the stabbing? Ok, seems a bit ridiculous, but it’s possible. Cap’n Jack just leapt in and put that device on the woman with no definite proof – in my opinion, that was an incredible foolish and rash decision. But hey, we’re not really used to seeing good decisions from this team, so let’s just leave it and move on!
• No explanation was given as to why the Weevil cowered in front of her. Although this may be part of a story arc (the whole ‘already here’ line suggests they may make a comeback this series).
• So these… um, whatever you call them… are supposed to be data gatherers. How did they find out about the ten nukes, if it was “highly, highly, highly top-secret classified information”? Some form of hacking, I guess, but it’s not really explained.
• Speaking of the ten nukes — storing ten nuclear warheads in a disused mine shaft? That sounds like it comes from “Dodgy Film and Television Cliches 101”. Oh, and I must have missed the part where the explained why these people were going to blow up the nukes, seemed a bit strange to me?!
• Finally — what the heck is going on with Ianto’s character?!!! He’s gone from being mysterious (first part of series one) to wuss (second half of series one) to comedian!!! It’s as if the Torchwood writers don’t really know what to do with his character… completely bizarre.

Anyway, despite all of the above, I did enjoy the episode… why? Because they’re not taking it as seriously anymore. It’s no longer “Torchwood… Bitch”, it’s more a case of “Torchwood… Yeah, it is a bit silly, isn’t it?” They’ve lightened up the tone, and it’s working. I don’t care about plotholes so much anymore.

I think that’s enough about Torchwood for the time being at least!