April Bulletin

Groooooooooooooooooooooan….The older I get the less able am I to experience pain with grace. I got what ever’s going around recently. Then John got it. We’re both over the worst, but neither of us are ready to party. I also had the strange experience of being bitten by a “non poisonous” spider a couple of weeks ago. I’d hate to see what happens when one is bitten by the real thing, because the friendly bite (get it… you know, like friendly fire) resulted in the left hand side of my body doing strange things – like I couldn’t sleep on my left side because my left hip was so sore… that sort of thing. Bur speaking of parties…..
25th celebration
Our 25th went off well on 29th March. There were actually three celebrations in one. Helen of Elanora turned … um… twenty something … a couple of days before; and Andy and Denis got together in the same year as John and I. So most of the usual suspects came and some others who couldn’t come emailed us on the day. Many thanks for your presence and your presents. I know we would not have thanked you enough on the day, so I hope mentioning it now proves we remember that we got them. You know we always say you shouldn’t have, and mean it, but when someone insists, we are grateful. A very special thanks to Helen who took over in the kitchen and put stuff that John had prepared in the oven. Pictures of the party on Flickr on the link that follows. Regrettably, the camera made itself temporarily unavailable for a good part of the afternoon (in other words, I put it down somewhere and forgot where it was) consequently not everyone who attended appears in the pictures.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7899872@N08/sets/72157604308325818/

New laptop
John has a new best friend. He bought a lap dancer recently. Um, that should be a lap top (or note book if one’s keeping up with the terminology). He’s spent a lot of time communing with it. So now all he has to do is coax it into writing all those essays for him that are part of his Advanced Diploma in Ceramics. One of them is 5000 words.

Movie talk
We saw a couple of good DVDs last month: Bonhoeffer; and Veronica Guerin. The first is about the role of a German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the assassination plots against Hitler before and during the Second World War. It’s a very moving account of how a pacifist reconciled himself with the need for violence, and how he almost got away with it; and the vindictive reprisals of the Gestapo who executed him fifteen days before the end of the war, knowing that it was all over bar the … well, bar the hanging. The punch line moment is so understated that it’s almost possible to miss. Which, of course, is the point. Justice is anything but glamorous. The second is similar in many ways. It is about an Irish journalist who took on organised crime and almost got away with it. Though she was murdered on the road, her campaign, courage, refusal to be intimidated even after being brutally bashed, galvanised the Irish government to pass some of the most effective anti-corruption legislation in the western world. And the icing on the cake: all but one of the people who were involved in her murder were convicted and gaoled. The one who got away is doing a Tony Mokbel in Spain and will get his – unless he does a Christopher Skace.

Bobby Flynn Concert
We went to a concert in Bangalow on Friday 4/4/08. The star of the show was Bobby Flynn. Well, actually, Bobby Flynn and Omega 3. The show would not have had the impact it had without what would normally be called the backing group. It’s too long a story to tell here, but it’s written up on the blog -
http://twogreytoes.blogspot.com/search/label/Arts%20commentary

Job Hunting
For reasons too painful to think about I am in the job market again. It has been an interesting vindication of my job as a Job Search Trainer. One of the key messages was about canvassing. 70% of people in the workforce did not apply for advertised jobs but made themselves known to potential employers. I sent a dozen canvassing letters and got three responses. Even though I should have expected such a result it came as a surprise. The crisis I now have to resolve is what do I do if I get offered a job, because it was actually a bit of a dog chases car exercise. Ever wondered what a surprise it would be, not least to the dog, if one ever caught a car by the wheel and stopped it in its tracks? [just kidding, of course]

Love your enemies
You may recall my saying in an earlier bull tin that I have planned a number of Adult and Community Education courses, one of which is called Love your Enemies. When researching it recently I came across a lecture by James Alison called Love your enemies – within a divided self. The first ten or so paragraphs, in which he talks about a new field of research into how we develop our sense of who we are, would be of interest to anyone and is worth knowing about even if some would not want to read the rest of the article – which goes on to explore what it might mean to love one’s enemies. If you wonder why such matters have to be discussed in religious language, I’m here to tell you that the point of my course is to find a way to do otherwise. But I would like to say to anyone who is willing to take the risk of reading something that might lie outside of your normal frame of interests, you will not be disappointed if you read the whole article. You will not necessarily be convinced, but at least you will have seen just how critically informed and accessible, not to mention relevant, theology can be.

Here are links to three of James Alison’s articles. The first one is the lecture mentioned above. The other two will help to explain why I might be on the verge of un-lapsing – if you get what I mean.
http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng50.html
http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng52.html
http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng27.html

We wish you all a very splendid and happy un-birthday, and hope that Santaclause is a daily, rather than merely annual, contributor to your well being – or sense of well being, depending on your philosophical preferences and or sensory proclivities. And on the day on which a thousand ideas bloom, may you find a chicken in every pot. And never mind that the foregoing makes no sense at all. It is enough to wonder, silently or out aloud as you ……