One Man and His Blog

…turns out THIS is actually my final blog entry of 2006. And rather than try to come up with something profound and deep about the close of the year, I’m going to quote (badly, from my feeble memory) from the bloke who I heard speaking in church today:

"There’s something about New Year that makes people look back at what’s happened, and think, ‘it’s a good time to make a fresh start, do things differently, and to stop doing things that are bad for us, that we don’t want to do anymore’. But the great thing is, God doesn’t wait for New Year – He gives us the chance to do that every day."

I know how many fresh starts I tend to need in an average year, and I’m glad God’s given me the option of up to 365 of them for 2007. I pray that I won’t need to use many of them, but I thank God that He offers them all to me.

As this might be the last opportunity I have to blog before the end of Sunday night, I’d like to wish you all a very happy one. Thank you, citizens of Wibsville, for welcoming me so warmly and supporting me so lovingly. God bless you all.

Cheers, and see you in 2007 (or possibly before…?).

Well, I’m back home, and have had a lovely relaxing afternoon, much of which was spent playing the popular game, "Where’s The Back Door Key?" (clue – not in the back door where it usually is). Eventual and rather unlikely answer – in the fruit bowl. Of course.

I have lots to do in the next couple of days, most of which I will probably spectacularly fail to get round to, as is always the way when I have lots to do and no one around to make me do it. My main objectives for tomorrow are:

Do some of the tidying my housemates and I didn’t get round to before we all went off for Christmas.
Go to the sales to buy a winter coat and some new shoes.
Buy some other stuff that I don’t really need while I’m there.
Make an appointment for a haircut on Friday.
Put some washing in.
Take it out and hang it up somewhere.
Take all my small change to the supermarket with the machine that turns it into "real money".

All of which shouldn’t be too difficult, as long as I can motivate myself to do at least some of them tomorrow, and then do some more on Friday. So if any of you spot me around these (or other online) parts tomorrow, do check what I’m doing and whether I should be doing it.

Addendum: just remembered something else I have to try to sort out tomorrow – collecting a parcel from the Royal Mail which is addressed to someone else, which Royal Mail want collected with ID by the person it’s addressed to, which is rather difficult as they’re on the other side of Europe for the foreseeable future. Hmmm, could be fun…

Having quoted Noddy Holder yesterday, I will today continue the seasonal theme with some words from John Lennon:

"A very merry Christmas,
And a happy New Year,
Let’s hope it’s a good one,
With plenty of beer."

Well, it was something like that anyway.

Merry Christmas, and thanks for reading.

I think this will be my last entry before Chrimble Day itself, so I shall wish a very merry Christmas to both of my readers. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading my random tosh of late, and I promise to provide more of it in 2007. Sorry.

OK, seriously, best seasonal wishes to all of you (some of you are already into Christmas Day itself, others have a while longer to wait), and in case you’re not going to be around again before the year’s out, enjoy your New Year celebrations and I’ll see you on the other side. For the rest of you, you don’t get rid of me that easily – I’ll still be about updating you on whatever other malarkey I can find to blather about.

*as Noddy Holder would say

Being back in The Old Village has made me realise how much has changed. For one thing, a quick trip to the pub last night made me realise how many of the youth group I used to lead are now not really youth any more. But more than anything else, I’ve been noticing how different the place has become when compared to what it was like when I was a child.

Of course, there may be a bit of rose-tinted spectacle action going on here, but I remember the days when I lived in a village with a shop. Now it’s more like an out-of-town shopping centre with a few houses tacked on the side. The old Tesco is now enormously sized and sells a million and one things you don’t really need to get on an average trip to the supermarket, and since I last popped by (in February I think) it’s been joined by a sizeable branch of Next. There are plenty of other, more specialised shops (estate agents, chippie, two mobile phone shops, dry cleaners etc), which is probably great news for people in the surrounding villages, but you can bet they wouldn’t be quite so keen if it was their doorstep that backed onto a colossal car park.

And, of course, mostly these days I only tend to be back here at Christmas, so I don’t get to see the place in summer, but the leafy areas and greenery I remember from my childhood seems to be all but gone too. It just looks quite run down, and a little depressing, to me at least. Yet, at the same time, I’ve been walking around today – going down to the ridiculously-oversized Tesco and the like – thinking how many good times I’d had here in the past, and that, even if a lot of things have changed so much that it’s nearly unrecognisable from the village of my younger days, I still feel quite a fondness for the place, warts and all.

Now you tell that to your young folk these days, and they won’t believe you…

I am at my parents’ for a few days over Christmas, and have come to the conclusion that either their five-year-old computer is starting to fall apart all together, or having broadband has made me so impatient that I can’t cope with a slow dial-up connection anymore. I think it’s probably a bit of both. But suffice to say, I’ll be popping up sporadically here in the next few days – largely because of various festivities, of course, but also because trying to do anything on t’internet here takes about three times as long as at home. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. Normal service will be resumed sometime around Wednesday.

I have now finished work until 2007. Excuse me while I go and do some kind of happy, excitable dance.

In the last few months, I have come to realise many things. In the last few minutes, I have come to realise another one. Namely – I don’t get denominations and movements within the church.

Now when I say this, I don’t mean that I don’t understand the concept, or why people start to think that their way of doing church is The Right Way. I just literally mean that when people talk about different denominations and church styles, I have no idea what any of them are. I couldn’t tell an evangelical from a post-evangelical, or a Methodist from a seventh day adventist, or a pentecostal from a whatever-other-denomination-or-movement-I’ve-missed. Quite simply, I don’t know which one of these, if any, I am, because I don’t really know what any of them are.

I suppose some of this is down to growing up in an ecumenical church which was equal parts Baptist, C of E, Methodist, URC and Quaker. The way it was all done, the different denominations’ practises were kind of amalgamated into the general worship style that evolved from that partnership, which was great. The only thing is that now, other than "a Christian", I couldn’t tell you what I am. I recently filled in a survey which asked me what denomination or church I belonged to. There was no "just a Christian, thanks" option, and no "I’m not entirely sure, but it’s probably one of these" option either. So I just left that bit blank in the end, and was quite relieved that I wasn’t then forced to provide an answer.

So what am I then? In a word: confused. In the last few months I’ve been increasingly encountering people who know which type of church setting they belong to and (not necessarily always in a bad way) vocalise aspects of that with great pride. Meanwhile, I sit in a corner thinking, "what’s wrong with just being a Christian?" I wonder if all our problems with disunity in the church wouldn’t be a lot less significant if we just thought of ourselves primarily as Christians and stopped trying to define ourselves by what type of Christian we are…

Sorry to ramble, just in an "externally processing" kind of mood tonight. I may come back tomorrow and wonder what on earth I was going on about, so don’t worry too much about it.

If you have friends who you haven’t spoken to in a while, who never seem to answer their phone or reply to your emails, you should get yourself a boyfriend or girlfriend (depending on your particular preference). Then, suddenly your long-lost friend will unexpectedly get in touch, just like that…