The Grace Pages

Another Christmas came and went...

It wasn't a bad Christmas this year. Christmas afternoon was quiet. My sister was having dinner with her new partner's family, and her three kids were off with their dad, so it was just me and my parents here. Mom had her most relaxing Christmas in years - we forewent the turkey and she made crab-stuffed plaice with some sort of cheese/wine sauce. One thing I wasn't prepared to miss out on was the candied sweet potatoes, my favourite Christmas dish, so we had those and some honey-glazed roasted parsnips and a few other bits. It was lovely.

Along with the turkey, I also forewent church on Christmas Eve. The last two years I had very bad experiences at Midnight Mass, due to my anxiety disorder, so I decided I would be easy on myself and stay at home this year. The association in my mind tends only to make it a stressful occasion. Missing Christmas Day was no big deal, as I haven't been to church on Christmas Day since I was about six.

I hope you, dear readers, have enjoyed a merry Christmas, and I wish you all the best for the New Year.

It's the most ironic time of the year

I don't know whether it's just me, but the Lord seems to have a habit of flagging up the irony of the whole thing at this time of year. You can pretty much guarantee that however well things are going  for me the rest of the year, by the time Christmas comes around, something has happened to turn life sour. This year it's to do with the bank and the phone call they made me earlier this week. The timing made it a phone call worthy of Ebenezer Scrooge.

This isn't a sympathy drive, by the way. This is just a reflection on how irony -- the main theme of my life, as I've probably said several times -- is central to the Christmas story. The beginnings of Jesus' life (setting aside arguments over how historically reliable the gospel account is) are every bit as ironic as the end of his life. What could compare to the irony of a crucified Messiah? Try the King of the Universe born into a trough and receiving a bunch of sheepherding peasants as his first guests.

I think it's the irony of the gospel that has kept me clinging to it despite change of mind I've been through the last few years. It's an irony that resonates with me and is true to my experience -- that riches come out of great poverty, and life comes out of death. Hell, if I didn't believe all that, what hope would I have when the shit hits the fan? To me, death is just a precursor of resurrection.

One of my enduring Christmas memories is of standing in the middle of a hospital ward, in only my dressing gown and slippers, reading John Betjeman's poem Christmas to a dozen old ladies. It was another of those ironic festive moments -- me spending the week before Christmas 2001 in hospital (gallstones, *ouch*) with a bunch of old dears for company. I love the way Betjeman (right) encapsulates the irony and the meaning of Christmas in the last few verses. I'll leave you with them as I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year.

And is it true? and is it true?
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.

My passionate online affair

One of my alltime favourite blogs is Creating Passionate Users. It's full of tons of useful advice for just about anyone with a product. Its founding principle is that people will use your product if you can make them passionate about it. One thing that the folks at CPU have often pointed out is that if you can make your users passionate about your product, they will forgive you anything. They will overlook the occasional glitch or failure, because they're committed. They'll defend your product to the hilt.

One company that has been great at this has been Google, although I don't want to speak too soon, because the whole enterprise could easily go the way of Microsoft and become as reviled as it is powerful. AppleMacs have the same devout following. Another is Mozilla Firefox, which has its users eating out of the palm of its hand.

I speak from experience, because I have been engaged in an intensely passionate love affair with the Firefox browser for about six months now, and it shows no signs of letting up. Even when it does crazy things like it has been doing all week, Firefox is still my friend, and I won't hear people badmouthing it. It's been freezing up on me periodically for about the last ten days, but still it reigns supreme over every other browser, in my heart at least. The Mozilla team have successfully created a passionate user out of me.

The CTU crew have also made me a passionate user of their blog. Hell, they've even got me giving them free advertising like this. You're doing something right when your users want to go out for free and evangelize on behalf of your product. Check it out.

Hey diddle dee dee, a writer's life for me

Ah, deadlines --  the bane of the writer's life! After six months carving out a career in freelancing, I am now getting down to the real nitty-gritty of the writing life, with three deadlines all coming more or less at the same time. Sometime in the next three days I have to write 6,000 words about leaving fundamentalism, anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words on Hammer horror films and about 1,000 words on upcoming video game releases. It's varied, I'll give it that. Hopefully I'll find time to gather some local news, too, and at least make it sound interesting (Exclusive: Town Hall gets new lick of paint, etcetera etcetera, You heard it hear first etcetera etcetera).

Writing has great benefits, not least the fact I'm self-employed and can manage my own time and space. On the other hand, the greatest benefit can also become the greatest drawback, since it is far too easy to slip into bad habits and a total lack of routine and discipline. I think I may need M Scott Peck at this time in my life. Delayed gratification and all that.

If you'd asked me this time last year what I'd be doing now, this would definitely not be the answer. I was depressed, as I had been for years, but didn't realize it. I was stuck in a teaching career that kept me whirling in a constant spiral of anxiety. I was spending the first few hours of every morning on the verge of tears and worrying about people dying and crazy, irrational things liike that, and stopping on the way to work to gag and vomit. And I really didn't realize I was all that stressed. Fancy that.

I must sign off. I am doing exactly what Scott Peck would advise me against -- blogging away and avoiding real work instead of getting the hard graft over with. Tsk.

Boom-boom! (T-ching!)

So I had to sit through half an hour of the worst comedian ever yesterday afternoon. 'The company' paid an extortionate amount per head for a charity Christmas dinner, and on comes this guy worthy of the seventies TV show The Comedians (left). He should have had one of those pink shirts with the frills down the front.

I don't mind 'offensive' comedy, per se, since offence can be good, and comedy is a great vehicle for it. But this guy just had tired old jokes I had heard before, and he kept apologizing for being "politically incorrect", and prefaced every joke with "I'm not being sexist, but..." and "I'm not being racist, but...". Truth is, he wasn't so much offensive as embarrassingly boring. To paraphrase Shirley Valentine, it was a good job we weren't having soup, or I'd have put me head in it and drowned meself.

When I were a lad

Watching this video made me reminisce about all the things that were popular when I was a wee kid. When I was a kid, I played with

He Man
Star Wars
Spirographs

On TV I watched

The A-Team
Streethawk
Knight Rider
Penelope Pitstop
The Littlest Hobo
The Degrassi Street Kids
The Red-Hand Gang
Chips
*Mr Rogers' Neighbourhood
*The Friendly Giant
Mr Dressup
The Smurfs
The Moomins
Rub-a-Dub-Dub
Grange Hill
Sesame Street
*The Electric Company
*Gilligan's Island

*US and Canada, for those confused Brits reading!

Films I watched were

Return of the Jedi
ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
Superman II
Popeye
The Black Stallion

Books I read were

Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy World
Oh, What a Busy Day!
Orlando and His Little-While Friends
Janet and John

I went to the shop and bought a penny mix when sweets were only a hapenny. I strutted round the playground with my arms over my mates' shoulders shouting, "Who wants to play..." until we had enough people for a really good beat-em-up game of Superman or Robin Hood or whatever that particular day's favoured superhero was.

While in some ways it's scary, in other ways I quite enjoy getting at the age where childhood feels like a long time ago. Of course, there are 40-somethings reading this who are astounded at (and really quite jealous of) how young I am!

Queer Eye, schmeer eye

Well done to the author of Proceed at Your Own Risk (he has a photograph and a biography up, but am I the only one who can't even find his actual name anywhere on the site?) for telling it like it is about the hideous Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

I've heard some folk talk about the guys on this show as if a gay man (an outrageously camp one, anyway) were some sort of neat fashion accessory -- and yet if you were to probe deeper, you'd find out they really believe all gays are on their way to an eternity in hell. PAYOR is onto something when he says that "Queer Eye reinforces the notion that we can only be accepted if we entertain and serve "the man.""

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Odds'n'sods

Wikipedia will no longer allow anonymous users to edit entries.

I was extremely giddy when at about 1 o'clock last night I came a cross a mention of Tony's blog in the Telegraph.

This music video is magical.

PS. Notice the new banner and sidebar?

Christmas pick no 3: Scrooge (1951)

My devastatingly honest verdict on watching this last night for the first time in a few years was that as a film, Scrooge is overrated. You only need to watch what David Lean did with Great Expectations and Oliver Twist to see what a truly great cinematic storyteller can do with Dickens, and director Brian Desmond Hurst (who?) is no match for Lean. It's flatly filmed, with only a few interesting flourishes.

However, there is a big but. A huge but. Alastair Sim cannot be overrated in the role of Scrooge. He is fantastic. He invests the character with all kinds of nuances and quirky mannerisms. He utterly makes Scrooge his own. His transformation at the end of the film had me smiling and laughing as I have at no other Scrooge.

And he is supported by the screen's finest Jacob Marley in the clanking and shrieking Sir Michael Hordern. I also enjoyed Kathleen Harrison's housekeeper, Mrs Dilber, and Mervyn Johns's  Bob Cratchit. The entire ensemble is what really makes this film.

I must confess, however, to having done something that will horrify the purists: I watched the colourized version of the film from 1990. What can I say? It came free with a newspaper last week. The colouring was awful and distracting, but I simply had to watch the film, and it was the only copy at hand. It's definitely time I invested in the DVD of the original black-and-white -- perhaps then I would be more convinced of the film's artistic merits. In the meantime, however, it is well worth watching for the sheer joy elicited by Alastair Sim and the rest of a sterling cast.

Cameron's first day on the job

So David Cameron is the new Tory leader. His performance in Prime Minister's Question Time today was interesting. He asked three questions in a row, all on education (wasn't it Blair who was all about "Education, education and education"?), and started off his career as opposition leader by stating how much he and Labour agree on education, and making promises to Tony that he would vote for his policies.

He was definitely trying to flag up his commitment to "consensus politics", a nice idea in theory. Still, I can't help wondering if this newfound enthusiasm for working together where there's agreement is really a reflection of the sad fact that there is increasingly little difference between New Labour and old Conservatism.