One Man and His Blog

My computer, on the other hand, is thoroughly dead, hence the lack of any blogging or commenting in the last couple of weeks. I have much I’d love to share with you, but I don’t want to waste all of my housemate’s computer’s battery, so I’ll just have to try and remember it all when I’m up and running again.

I’m missing you all.

"I know all about hip hop – I’m from Croydon."

So, in the last 96 hours, I have:
been to cell.
done a Monty Python double header (Life Of Brian and Holy Grail) at my mate Shelle’s house.
been out for lunch and after-work drinks for a colleague’s leaving do.
been to see Me Mate Dave and a few other folks I know playing an acoustic night at my local.
been to a wedding in Cambridgeshire.
planned and led youth at church this morning.
been treated to a roast dinner at S&D’s place.
not had enough sleep.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to hang out with some friends who are over from the States for Ex-Housemate Dude’s wedding next weekend.

Other than that, not much to report really.

You know some days you kind of wish you had more hours in your day to do all the things you don’t have time to do, but you’re also glad you don’t because doing everything you’re already doing is knackering enough and adding any more to the set-up would just be way too much?

Still, soon going to have a five-day weekend… just eight other days to go first.

OK, so my friend’s wedding yesterday was the main reason for visiting my parents. But over the weekend I have also achieved the following:

- Seen (and more importantly heard) my dad singing in a choral concert.
- Spent a bit of time with Tina and Spike, who were also visiting over the weekend.
- Enjoyed one of mum’s Sunday lunches (the roast beef / Yorkshire pudding combo).
- Had some serious conversations about serious things.
- Been to the pub to catch up with some old friends, wherein I had some rather less serious conversations.
- Won two quid from a music quiz on the pub quiz machine, with the added satisfaction that the touchscreen allowed us to all have a go at punching Dr Fox in the face every time he appeared.
- Eaten too much.
- Read a whole two chapters of a book (this is actually quite an achievement for me, as I’m usually incapable of returning to a book after I’ve read the first chapter, even if I really enjoyed it and wanted to read more – I don’t know why it is, I just don’t get round to it).
- Bought some pants (as in the English meaning of "pants", not the American one).

All in all, a good weekend. Especially the Dr Fox-punching. I bet he never even went to medical school…

I’m back home this weekend for a friend’s wedding. Well, when I say "back home" I actually mean "back where I grew up". It hasn’t really felt like home for a few years now, and I think this weekend I’ve been realising why.

For one thing, the place has changed. When I was a kid, it was a nice, friendly village, and maybe it still is, but to me it doesn’t feel that way anymore. The enormous (and poorly laid out) Tesco makes it feel more like an out-of-town shopping centre, and I just don’t see that same sense of community spirit I remember from back in the day. Of course, this is only based on me coming here for maybe two or three weekends a year, so it may not be that accurate, but that’s just how it feels.

The other thing, though, is that I’ve moved on. One of the things I love about Birmingham is the fact that there’s so much there. If you want to go clubbing, go shopping, go to a museum, sit in a park, watch some sport, see a band, go for a pint or numerous other activities, there’s somewhere on your doorstep where you can do that. The old village offers little in the way of entertainment (although shopping and drinking are noticable possibilities), and if I were to come back here permanently I would really miss that.

But coming back for a couple of days has been good, especially as I’ve been able to catch up with some people I haven’t really hung out with in years. The wedding itself was great and very personal, with the groom’s father (who was assistant minister at the church for a few years) conducting the service in his trademark laidback comical style. It was also the first wedding I’ve ever been to where the bride and groom played in their own worship band – for the last few songs the pianist was joined by the bride on vocals, the groom on drums, the best man on guitar and the groom’s brother / chief usher on bass. After a seemingly endless round of photos (again, taken by a friend who’s a keen photographer, rather than a hired-in type) we popped next door for the reception; a small and low-key affair, with all the food provided by people from church and some kindly volunteers serving it all. And the evening do, with another two mates DJing, was really fun too. The whole day just felt like a lovely family get-together – which, after all, is pretty much what a wedding should be.

What I think I’ve realised, then, is that while I’m never likely to come back and live here, I’m quite looking forward to visiting my friends around these parts. I don’t miss the place, but I certainly miss a lot of the people. For me, that’s the way community still exists here.

…and the other problem is, if you’re an impatient "are we nearly there yet?" type in your journey with God, you may find yourself wanting to wrestle the steering wheel from Him and drive it yourself. Until, of course, you realise that you don’t actually know where you’re going.

The problem with being on a journey with God, is that every time I ask "are we nearly there yet?" He says "no".

I am not at work today, owing to a sleepless night of nasty tum and bum problems. And we’ll leave it there.

In tribute to Arti’s daffodil poem, and as a celebration of the arrival of spring and (belatedly) St David’s Day, here is a beautiful poem about daffodils that I learned in childhood, courtesy of the late great Spike Milligan:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats aloft o’er dale and hills,
When all at once I came upon
My dog being sick on the daffodils.

Disclaimer: there now follows a particularly long and rambling (even by my usual standards) post. You may want to get a cup of tea before you start. Or, if you don’t much fancy reading a long rambling post, I’ll totally understand if you shut this now and go and do something else. Well, it’s not so much that I’ll understand, more that I won’t know any different. So, those of you who are still reading – are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

I am slightly angry right now, as my stupid computer is messing me about a lot. I’m not sure if it’s a connection problem, a battery problem or a bit of both, but basically the connection keeps being lost, which means the battery gets drained, and then the computer will suddenly switch itself off without warning. I’m monitoring the battery power level as I type, but that means if I suddenly see it’s close to dying, I may end this post abruptly to save me from losing the whole thing, as happened the other night. Also, there seemed to be a problem a couple of minutes ago with lots of keystrokes not registering, (which could have been me, although it’s not a problem I normally have) thus rendering much of what I was typing as unintelligible gibberish (which sounds more like my usual posting, I guess).

Anyway, I didn’t come here to whinge about that, I was mainly coming here to share what God’s been up to. The whole facebook fasting thing has been a bit more difficult the last couple of weeks, but I’ve realised in the last few days that God’s been able to do some big stuff as a result. So here’s a taster.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that, shortly after it started, I met Auntie Doris and we went out for a few months, before realising it wasn’t really working out and going our seperate ways. Since then, my love life has not been mentioned around these parts, largely because I haven’t really had one to speak of. Well, to cut a long story short: there was a girl I met some time back; we became friends; I really liked her and wanted to be more than friends; I became slightly less subtle in expressing this; and then a couple of weeks ago we had The Talk. That’s what the post before last was about. Basically, she’s told me she just wants to be friends, and as soon as we’d talked it all out and cleared the air, it was just like old times – all the tension and pressure was gone, and our friendship was back to how it was six months or so ago. I hadn’t realised how much my feelings were getting in the way of our friendship, and I guess I always knew that ultimately I wanted us to remain friends no matter what happened.

So that leaves me happy, but a little confused. I’d really tried to consult God at every stage in this story, and yet it hadn’t ended up the way I thought God had been planning. And now I’m asking Him again, what I should do next as regards relationship stuff, and it seems like the answer is: "Just sit and wait." It would be so tempting to just turn round to God and say, "OK, so if it’s not her… who’s next?" but that just wouldn’t be helpful right now. Of course, that also makes it a really crap time to be going to three weddings in the next three weeks, and particularly when you have at least one mischievous couple looking to matchmake their single mates. But I’m just going to try not to stress about it, and just trust God as much as I can.

On a similar theme, both of my regular readers will be aware that about once every six months, I go through a phase of bemoaning being unsettled in my job but unsure of what to do about it. Well, this week I’ve hit that point again. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I’ve never felt like the stuff I’m doing now (at its most simple, sitting in an office shuffling paper) is what I’m going to be doing for the next forty years, or however long I’ll have to keep working depending on what the retirement age is by that point. But I still don’t really know what I’d rather do. I’d love to find something that I’m really passionate about, whereas at the moment what I’m doing largely falls into the category of, "I can do it, and it pays the bills, but it doesn’t really excite me". So this week I’ve been talking to some people, and starting to pray it through again, and this morning I spoke to a very wise man at church who I really felt God had said I should talk to. This wise man prayed for me, and we felt God was saying that this is the start of a process, and in the same way that spring is starting to burst forth here in Britain, so God’s getting started on bringing new things through. Which is exciting, but also a bit frustrating, because I know how I work and I’ll just want it all to be sorted now. But of course, God doesn’t work that way. So again, I just have to trust Him and hang on through this process, however long it takes, and remember that He understands my frustration and is there with me through it all.

Anything else I need to tell you? Oh yeah, I realised on Thursday that it was my half-birthday. Now half-birthdays haven’t been relevant to me since I was about ten (or maybe ten-and-a-half) but somehow this year it’s different. I know ultimately nothing much is going to have changed when I hit the big 3-0, and it’s not actually that big a deal, but there’s still something about it, culturally, that makes it seem like A Big Thing. I suppose the bottom line of it is – I’m kind of realising now that I won’t have all the answers to everything I thought I would, but I know a man who does, and that’s good enough.

And that’s probably enough for now. Well done for making it all the way to here. I promise my next post will be much shorter, and hopefully involve less navel-gazing. Assuming the stupid computer doesn’t switch itself off permanently…