January 10th, 2010

So the idea of a blog is that I don’t think to much about what I’m going to write; I just go for it. So I’m going to try and finish this in less than 1o minutes. I apologise in advance for errors/pointlessness. I’ve got some stuff I’d like to tell you about, and I’ve thought about it on and off all week, about what I’d type here, but the ideas always seemed to come at an inopportune moment. And I’ve left my notebook downstairs….

Technically this is supposed to be about my writing. On that front, I’ve heard second-hand that Resurrection Men is ‘good’…. I didn’t get much more detail than that, so I’ll have to explore further when I next talk to the person myself. I’ve been trying to fit in a lot more reading this week; one of my new year’s resolutions is to read more stuff that’ll impact my life. So mostly ‘Christian’ stuff, but also being more careful about the secular stuff I pick up. I just finished a book I found in Oxfam called ‘An Investigation into the Lives of Jesus’ (Mark Tully) which was really interesting – it talked about Jesus as a Revolutionary figure…. Sorry, just going to turn off the Fugees, it’s distracting me….. That’s better. He’s not a Christian, and it’s a BBC book, so I was quite interested to the perspective he took. He made some good points about how we’ve ‘westernised’ Jesus to the point where we have no understanding of the context in which he existed. To quite honest, I was desperate to get through it as I wanted to get cracking on the latest Shane Claiborne beast (not started yet….). I also read ‘Drops Like Stars’ by Rob Bell – it’s a bit ‘coffee table’, but isn’t pretending to be anything other than that. It’s really just his musings about art, creativity and the impact of making something unique. Inspirational in some ways. Oh, and there was an interesting article in last Saturday’s Guardian written by a woman who had spent a year squatting and basically living for free. I’m not advocating squatting, but she talked a lot about a community-type model of living that was appealing – the stuff that appealed most to me, and would perhaps be the most achievable steps, were the things that she did for entertainment; discovering new skills, taking advantage of free stuff, spending more time chatting, etc. Click here to read it.

Besides reading in an attempt to make my own writing better I’ve been rediscovering some old albums; Super Furry Animals, Pigeonhed, The Bees, Fugazi and Will Haven have all been enjoyed (by me, anyway….). I also inroduced my class to the joys of Pearl Jam by performing a rendition of ‘Elderly Woman….’ on a battered 3/4 size nylon strung acoustic. They prefer ‘Run’ by Snow Patrol, though…..

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