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Games Without Frontiers

Posted on 25 February 2024 by rpg

My enthusiasm for sport has always surpassed my ability. Except for soccer. At school, me and John Grant would always play in defence and hope the ball never came our way. I still don’t see the point of that one.

But I enjoyed cricket and tug-of-war (I wasn’t very heavy but I had brains and understood the importance of rhythm), and hockey and swimming, and above all, rugby.

We’re fortunate now to live right next door to not one but two rugby grounds, and a year and a half ago I got around to signing away our Sunday mornings to take Joshua to rugby training.

It’s been a ‘journey’, but the squad is finally coming together, and in their little matches Joshua is showing flashes of genius, not to mention grit and determination—and kittens for his mother.

He had 2 days with Saracens coaches at half term, along with four of his squad-mates, and it might have made a difference.

He’ll also happily sit and watch the 6 Nations, cheering along whoever is playing (let’s not mention the Calcutta Cup though), and even though he was cheering for France at the outset was quite devastated when Paolo Garbisi’s rushed penalty bounced off the posts.

He’s also discovered that he can swim. He’s been having lessons since he was 5 or 6, but something has suddenly clicked, to the extent that when his primary school trust organized (I use the term loosely) a gala at the Olympic Park in Stratford, and his school only had four swimmers for a 5-lap relay, he was chosen to swim twice and helped the team to a silver medal—the only podium slot his school managed that day.

So he’s not just smart and handsome, but athletic too. Probably all due to his mum, again.

Posted in 15MinutePost, Joshua, offspring, proud dad, rugby, swimming | Comments Off on Games Without Frontiers

What (and How) Should We Teach our Children?

Posted on 23 February 2024 by Athene Donald

In the world of social media and ChatGPT, a post-Covid world and a world where climate change and war put everything and everyone under new strains and worse, what should our students – at school or university – be taught and (not necessarily quite the same thing) learn? Two recent papers raise these issues, with a looking-to-the-future slant.

“In the past 14 years of Conservative government, the focus of the education system has been on the narrow task of getting children through exams, with little thought as to whether it will adequately prepare children to navigate this transformed world.”…. Half (50%) of Britons think that schools are not preparing students for the world of work. 50% think that schools are failing to prepare children for life in general.”

So says a Labour Together newsletter reporting on a recent polling of parents carried out in December, designed to go along with their new report Broad and Bold: Building a Modern Curriculum. The argument of this report comes firmly down on the side of “learning a broader range of knowledge and skills in different contexts is a better bet for the future. More, in this case, does indeed mean more. Breadth matters…”.

This is very much the line the Royal Society has been taking for a number of years, with its push for a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’. This philosophy, if not this phrase, certainly dates back to their Vision for Science and Mathematics Education project report from 2014 (a report I was associated with), when the overarching vision was described as ‘All young people study mathematics and science up to the age of 18’. The Government has indeed recently made a push for everyone to study maths to 18 although, as has been frequently pointed out, there aren’t the teachers to provide this. However, their concept of the Advanced British Standard, currently out for consultation, doesn’t really amount to significant broadening of education post-16, nor does it address anything that happens before that age. It really isn’t possible to introduce a meaningful post-16 baccalaureate style education without thinking about a child’s learning and progression throughout their school days from first entry. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda. For any Government, let alone one shortly to face a General Election, rethinking the entire education system is a big ask.

Simon Margison, in his lecture this month to the Centre for Global Education, highlighted a different problem within our education, specifically higher education, saying:

“education focused solely on productivity and employability, now dominates policy and public debate in many countries concerned about graduate under-employment…governments more confidently press for the remaking of higher education by pushing the sphere of work back into education and measuring education in vocational economic terms, installing extrinsic job preparation inside the intrinsic core of higher education….The bottom line is that neo-liberal policy does not see higher education as personal formation in knowledge as optimal for productivity and growth.”

So, we face a problem both at school and university, a tension between knowledge and skills, which the appearance of AI on the map, hallucinating or not, brings into sharp focus. Do we teach deep disciplinary knowledge, the memorising and regurgitating of facts in exams that have been standard for decades? Do we assume that is unnecessary because Google and ChatGPT have all the answers and simply teach life-skills such as team working and project management? Clearly that would be unwise. I am reminded of an exchange I had with Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education at the time, regarding careers advice at school, in which he told me that ‘any self-respecting 16 year old can find all they need to know on the web.’ I would have liked to dispute that then (but was swiftly shut up) and I would still dispute it now: the web is great if you know exactly what question to ask and can spot ‘fake news’ when it provides garbage. Otherwise, human intervention – about careers or so much else – is really necessary.

However, it is undoubtedly the case that we need to think harder about the content of our curricula, at school and university, to rebalance how we teach fact versus understanding, all coupled with a good dose of life-skills. Sadly, this debate is too often mired in political dogma as well as the genuinely massive challenge that a rethink would bring. England is a real outlier in terms of the breadth (or more accurately, narrowness) of its post-16 curriculum. The changes to Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence were intended to provide breadth (the Scottish system was anyhow broader than England’s) and, according to the Scottish Government at the time of introduction, ‘provide a holistic, competency-based curriculum for those aged 3-18 years aims to prepare children and young people for the workplace and citizenship in the 21st Century’. Instead, it seems to have led to a decline in standards and a narrowing not broadening of subject-study at the later years. According to a 2023 Nuffield Foundation report there is

“Significant evidence of the existence of a culture of performativity in many schools, encouraging the instrumental selection of content and/or organisation of curriculum provision to maximise attainment in the Senior Phase.”

English politicians can point to this as demonstrating the unwisdom of changing the ‘Gold Standard’ A-level system.

Nevertheless, perverse incentives imposed by any government, as in English league tables of schools, constant harping on about ‘mickey-mouse’ degrees and using salary post-degree as a measure of success, may all be defeating the purpose of educating, as opposed to training, students at both school and university. I have no confidence we are providing the education our future citizens need in science – or languages or even literacy and numeracy – to face the 21st century, but feel the debate is hardly started. It is to be hoped the next Government will take on this challenge. Starting with early years, as Bridget Philipson has made clear would be her own priority if she becomes the next Secretary of State for Education, is no bad thing. If children (many still badly affected by the pandemic) don’t learn the basics at primary school, it is all but impossible for them to thrive thereafter. The more so if they come from a less-than-privileged background. There is a lot of work to be done.

Posted in broad and balanced, curriculum, Curriculum for Excellence, education, Simon Margison | Comments Off on What (and How) Should We Teach our Children?

Family Tree

Posted on 18 February 2024 by rpg

We’re blessed to have a larger-than-usual garden (for these parts). Legend has it that when they built this development at the arse-end of the 1980s, what-was-to-become our plot was down for 2 (or even 3) houses, but they didn’t get planning permission for that, so we ended up with double the regulation size garden.

It’s not some manicured mansionly acre, but a rising jumble of joyousness and birdsong and weeds and flowers and  trees. Definitely trees. You can’t have too many trees, we say to ourselves, more frequently than is perhaps healthy.

And we can always find space for one more, although I’ve been saying “But we don’t have room” for at least the past 6 saplings we’ve put in.

We planted a walnut tree about five years ago, and we’ve had one nut off it (and the squirrels [fuckersfluffy-tailed tree rats] have had two). It’s somewhat shaded by the vast and mighty laurel out the front of the property, which we don’t want to do anything with because the robins and sparrows and blackbirds live there. But that’s not conducive to walnuts growing quickly.

Jenny says “Maybe we should have another one, in the back garden where it’s sunny.” So she bought me one for Valentine’s day, and now we have another tree.

Squeezed between the less-good cherry, one of the magnolias, and the path.

I’m sure it’ll like it here.

Posted in 15MinutePost, nature, Silliness, walnut | Comments Off on Family Tree

No News Is Good News

Posted on 18 February 2024 by Henry Gee

During a group discussion at work (as you both know, by day I’m with the Submerged Log Company) a colleague noted that among the various things one wouldn’t be allowed do with human subjects, one would be to deprive them of access to the news for five years.

Five years without the news, I thought. Bliss! Sign me up!

That was when I decided to  make myself nayesrein (I’ve just made that word up), so since 15 February I have stayed away from all sauces tzores sources of news, whether broadcast, print or online. I can choose not to watch TV news, or look at news websites, and when the aggressively inoffensive burble of BBC Radio 2 that’s usually on at home is interrupted by a news bulletin, Mrs Gee either switches it off, or I fire up Queen’s Greatest Hits from my iPhone into my bluetooth-equipped hearing aids. If in the supermarket, I avert my eyes from the come-on headlines on the news stand.

Earlier experiments with abstention from news (for a day or two, such as over a weekend) show that lack of exposure to news does improve my mood.

Consider: most of what news editors choose to report of world events is dreadful, and what makes it worse is that there is very little you can do about it. That doesn’t stop one being personally affected by the news. Ever since Recent Events in the Middle East, there has been a sharp rise in anti-semitism, evidenced with such strength of feeling and in such a large swath of the population that Jews like me feel, to say the least, intimidated. In short, it’s a downer.

How long will I abstain from news?

I don’t know yet. Some news has already leaked through (the death of a Russian opposition politician) but perhaps some crosstalk is inevitable. It reminds me of Anathem, a fine novel by Neal Stephenson, of a secluded order of monks whose members can choose to shield themselves from the outside world for a day, a year, ten years, a hundred years … even ten thousand years. I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep it up for that long.

I have a feeling that the world would be a far better place if we went back to a kind of world in which news came to us once a day, via a radiogram, at 9pm, and read by Alvar Liddell. Failing that one could get it from The Times, two days later.

Perhaps, you might argue, constant exposure to news should make for a more informed electorate. On the other hand, I am not at all sure that exposure to the news on demand, at any hour – any minute – of the day or night, is really healthy. And that’s aside from the invariable spin that news editors choose to put on the news, at times simply by choosing to include one item rather than another. It’s no wonder that fake news and conspiracy theorists have thrived in such a news-soaked atmosphere.

Hey, I have an idea. Wouldn’t it be great if the whole country, or even the whole world, simply refused to access any news site, or buy any newspaper, or listen to or watch news broadcasts, for a short while, such as a week, and do something more useful instead such as go for a walk? It would do wonders for our mental health.

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In which we fast-forward

Posted on 18 February 2024 by Jennifer Rohn
A grassy lawn with spring flowers

Once more, with feeling

The phrase bleak midwinter was first coined by the English poet Christina Rossetti in 1872 and went viral when composer Gustav Holst incorporated her text into a carol a few decades later. Although the words are clearly meant to evoke the “hard as iron” feel of Christmas, I have always associated bleak midwinterism with January and February, the period after the festivities have ended but before the first spring bulbs begin to bloom. In this dormant, liminal period, the world is gripped in darkness and all hope seems very far away.

I used to struggle quite a bit during the bleak midwinter, but it’s been increasingly less problematic; this year, the period has lost its bite altogether. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have happened at all. Maybe it’s because of the mild winters we’ve been having, which keep the roses blooming into late December, coaxing up freakishly early snowdrops at the same time. The cow parsley sent up green fronds in January, alongside the rusty-red quince blossoms and lemon-yellow false oxlips; February has brought the crocuses and daffodils, hyacinths and hellebores, all compressed into one wave and heedless of the proper unfolding order of things. We may yet get a cold snap or even a dusting of snow, but to all intents and purposes, some celestial force has zapped us straight from New Year’s Day to spring.

I am not complaining. But at the same time I am hardly sure what to do with this sense of peace and contentment which normally needs to be awaited, longed for, somehow earned.

Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening | Comments Off on In which we fast-forward

2023 – Top Ten, plus one

Posted on 18 February 2024 by Richard Wintle

In a surprising twist, here are my top 10 photographs from 2023… only a couple of months into 2024! As usual, they also live in a Flickr set that you can explore here.

Craig McRae, Royal Agricultural Winter Fair (November)
RAWF 2023
One of a number of performers to appear on the OLG Entertainment Stage during the ten days of The Royal. The foreground blur is courtesy of a display case of award-winning foodstuffs – specifically, maple syrup bottles.

Avalon Stone, Maxwell’s, Waterloo, Ontario (February)
Avalon Stone, Maxwell's, Waterloo Ontario
Avalon is a singer I first met in 2022, as one of the artists participating in the Canadian Musicians Co-Op. This show was from a large club about an hour away from where I live, with Avalon on a bill with three other local bands. If it looks like she’s ripping the roof off the club with her voice – she is. Blues-rock at its best.

Roo the Rooster (May)
His Name is Roo
Another local vocalist. Legend has it that this brave fellow chased off a coyote. I certainly wouldn’t mess with him.

Newgarden vs. Rahal, Honda Indy Toronto (July)
Honda Indy Toronto 2023
Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden gets past Graham Rahal of Rahal Letterman (yes, that Letterman) Lanigan Racing at turn 5 of the Streets of Toronto IndyCar circuit. The race was won, in a bit of a surprise, by first-time-winner Christian Lundgaard, also driving for RLL.

Bull Riding, Royal Rodeo (November)
RAWF 2023
One of the highlights of the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair is the Royal Rodeo on the last day – and one of the highlights of the rodeo is the bull riding. The riders are equal parts brave, athletic, and completely unhinged – but undeniably fun to watch.

The Petras, backstage, Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto (September)
The Petras, Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto
It may be an indication that you’ve reached a certain age, when your best friend from high school’s daughter finds herself in her band’s big-city debut. In this case, at the legendary Horseshoe Tavern on Toronto’s trendy Queen Street West. Close your eyes backstage and you might imagine being back in the days when The Rolling Stones, The Police, The Pixies, or a host of other bands played here. Open them again and you’d see The Petras, kicking back before headlining the evening. Read more about the Horseshoe’s storied history here.

Daniella Kistemaker, Orillia Opera House (August)
Canadian Musicians Co-Op - Orillia 2023
Another co-op performer – isolated in this photograph but actually on stage with a full-on rock band. Yes, there is such a thing as rock-and-roll harp, and Daniella is one of its ambassadors.

“Don’t Call Me At A Party” single release – Liam Benayon, Cameron House back room, Toronto (April)
Liam and fans
Another independent musician at another storied Queen Street West venue. Liam packed out the back room (possibly slightly exceeding its allowable capacity) to debut his new single. I’ve photographed Liam on a few occasions, and he always brings a ton of energy to the stage, as well as some truly impressive hooky pop songwriting. And when you know the artist, you can sometimes hop up on stage for this kind of post-performance photo.

Farriers, Royal Horseshoeing Classic, Toronto (November)
RAWF 2023
For the first time, this horseshoeing competition made its way to The Royal, and I hope it comes back. The challenge is to fabricate a horseshoe to exacting specifications, starting with a steel bar, in only an hour. It’s great fun to watch and visually very striking – even if my clothes and all my camera gear smelled like forge smoke by the end of it.

Feura, Queens Hotel, Barrie, Ontario (October)
Feura - Queens Hotel, Barrie
Yet another co-op musician, although in this case I met Feura initially through another favourite co-op performer (and, because everything must be connected, Liam Benayon was also at that show). Fast forward 16 months or so and here’s Feura again, bringing their high-energy, politicized, pop-punk music to the stage, opening for two other bands (one screamo metal, the other ska-punk). Feura has rapidly become my favourite act to photograph live, because of the amazing energy of their live show.

Bonus – Northern watersnake (Nerodia sipedon sipedon) (August)
Northern watersnake (Nerodia sipedon sipedon)
Common in this part of the world, these snakes get to be about a metre long, and are well known for their curiosity about people. It’s not unusual to find one swimming up to you while you’re taking a dip in a lake, just to take a look and see what you’re made of. This particular one was sunning itself on the dock at the cottage, and very obligingly posed for a photo or two. You can read a little more about these snakes here, if you like.

And that’s it! Heavily biased towards live music and The Royal, with a taste of motorsport in there (because why wouldn’t there be?). And a rooster and a snake, because I like them. 2024’s photographic journey is off to a very slow start, unfortunately… with only some from the very earliest few minutes of the year so far. Time to pick up some cameras and get out shooting again!

MTAV NYE 2023

Posted in concert photography, Hobbies, Music, nature, Photography, racing | Comments Off on 2023 – Top Ten, plus one

Hunstanton Sand

Posted on 11 February 2024 by Athene Donald

I’ve just started reading a book called The Spirit of Enquiry by Susannah Gibson, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, an interesting society of which I was once a committee member (as well as a prize-winner). I am struck by the fact that the building where my GP’s surgery now hangs out, was actually purpose-built for the Society, something I had not appreciated before. The room where I’ve sat around waiting for Covid vaccinations was once their Reading Room, at a time when that was quite a novel concept (the College Libraries were only available to current members, and not MA’s still resident in the city, for instance). Having found this a fascinating book, written by someone attached to this University’s History and Philosophy of Science Department, I am pleased to have been invited to the book launch of Gibson’s next book. Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement is due out at the end of this month.

The Spirit of Enquiry starts off describing what motivated Victorian natural philosophers in Cambridge, led by Adam Sedgwick and John Henslow, to feel such a society was necessary. The latter was a botanist. Indeed, he was Professor of Botany although, late in life, apparently a very delinquent one. The former was Professor of Geology, and spent time walking the cliffs at Hunstanton examining the strata. These are fine cliffs, tending to erosion like so much of the East coast, cliffs I have visited just for the pleasure of visiting the seaside, but also (in my much earlier life) for ornithological ventures in the cold of winter. My most recent interactions with Hunstanton’s beaches are, however, more closely allied to my Physics: Hunstanton sand.

The last lecture course I taught before I retired from the Physics Department was the first year Waves and Quantum Waves. It was an unsatisfactory course in many ways, as I was required to include a great deal of classical optics (stuff such as the Lensmaker’s equation, for instance), when the students wanted to be let loose on the quantum material, which consequently got very squeezed. The syllabus was not of my making. However, in an earlier incarnation of this course, when the classical waves part was taught at a more advanced level (and without the optics material) and there was more time to think deeply about implications of some of the topics, I had a lecture demonstration I loved involving Hunstanton sand. And I know it was Hunstanton sand because it came in the sort of shaker good cooks use to spread flour on the worktop to stop pastry sticking, to which an ancient luggage label was attached reading ‘Hunstanton sand’. Although I doubt this went back to Sedgwick’s time, indeed the Cavendish Laboratory only opened in 1874, it certainly gave the impression of being very venerable. It came along with a heavy brass plate about 30cm wide (probably in reality it was a foot square), an example of a Chladni’s plate.

If you look on the web for what the point of a Chladni’s plate is, you will find all kinds of neat videos demonstrating how it can be used to show a pattern of standing wave nodes by plugging a sand-covered plate into a frequency generator: at appropriate frequencies, when the wavelength is some suitable fraction of the length of the side of the plate, standing waves are set up. It is indeed a beautiful way of revealing complex patterns, building on the mathematics of standing waves in two dimensions (which is what I was teaching). But the demonstration I gave was more arresting and memorable, I think, even if also more risky. With a device to generate a wide range of frequencies, it is easy to dial up the exact frequency you know will give the desired pattern. No risk there at all. But perhaps students remember things that don’t go according to plan rather more than something they can find easily on YouTube. That was at least my motivation in doing things the hard way.

The third item of this ancient lecture demonstration consisted of a bow. It was an utterly appalling bow, if you were a string player, with no tension in the hair remaining after all these years, and no way of increasing it except by manually holding it taut. I suspect it once had been a double bass bow as it was quite short. (As an ex-viola player, upon occasion I took in my own bow to make life easier, given that mine was in rather better shape.) Instead of electrically generating different frequencies to set up the standing waves, the original demonstration design relied on ‘playing’ the plate with the bow.

There were some marks scribed on the plate to indicate where the bow should be placed to get the appropriate resonance, but they were pretty approximate. Consequently, in my experience, it was necessary to move the location of the bow back and forth a little to find the place where the plate ‘sang’ – which it would most pleasingly when I got it right. A beautiful harmonic would be forthcoming, echoing round the lecture theatre (large: I used to lecture to well over one hundred students). More than once I got a spontaneous round of applause when this happened. Every year (at least five I think) bar one, I managed to find the sweet spot. Sometimes, I even risked finding a higher harmonic to show how the sand bounced around until it found the new pattern of nodal lines. It was immensely satisfying – apart from that one year when, try as I might, I never quite got it and the standing wave pattern on the plate was blurred, the true note transformed into a messy noise.

All in all, it was far more satisfactory, for me and, I hope, for the students, than simply playing a video of someone else’s experiment uploaded onto YouTube. Every year, at the end of the lecture, I would try to return my Hunstanton sand to the flour shaker. This was a messy enterprise, but I felt the sanctity of this particular ancient sand in its luggage-labelled container. Who knows who’d made the trip out to Hunstanton to collect it? After the end of the lecture, the kit would be replaced in some wooden cabinet in the Cavendish Museum. I wonder if any of this will survive the move to  the third incarnation of the Cavendish in the soon-to-be-finished (but who knows quite when, building work being what it is) Ray Dolby Centre, otherwise known as Cavendish III. I lectured in the so-called New Cavendish, its second home; the equipment no doubt was first used in the original Cavendish on Free School Lane (a brief history can be found here).

My days of undergraduate lecturing are over. I’m sure, just as I participated in the translation of delivery style from blackboard and chalk, to writing on an overhead projector, to prepared overheads, to powerpoint which may, for all I know, be superseded by a further electronic transformation, I fear too many demonstrations will be called up from the web. I loved my old-fashioned experiment, even as I also used more modern approaches too. The latter is certainly more likely to be fail-safe. So, happy memories of Hunstanton sand.

 

Posted in Adam Sedgwick, Chladni's plate, Communicating Science, lectures, standing waves | Comments Off on Hunstanton Sand

Heart of Glass

Posted on 11 February 2024 by rpg

Had I not been out the front of the house, watching Joshua earning some pocket money by washing the car,  I’d probably have sent the milk round sales droid on his way. But I was, and we talked, and seduced by the idea of reducing plastic use and a faint tang of nostalgia I signed us up to the thrice-weekly delivery schedule.

We talked about cars—the droid was thinking about learning to drive and we covered insurance and no-claims bonuses. He said that driving on the left wasn’t a problem because they drive on the left ‘back home’. “Oh,” I said, having already established that he lives the other side of the M25 and he didn’t know our area, “Where’s home?”.

“Mozambique”—which surprised me. I’d expected him to have been from Manchester or somewhere equally exotic.

But here we are, and I’ve been teaching Joshua the ways of the foil top, about how you have to hold the sides and not the milky surface, and indeed how to open the bottle. He is discovering the joys of either gently inverting the bottle with your thumb protecting the lid, or else having creamy milk on his Weetabix.

Got a lotta bottle

Do you want it pasteurized cos pasteurized is best?

The milk is delivered into an enclosed porch, so it’s unlikely he’ll see what happens when the local blue tits get thirsty, or even how the foil lid can be pushed up when it gets really cold. But soon he’ll get used to the new normal and maybe in time forget what plastic milk bottles look like.

Posted in 15MinutePost, Joshua, milk, Nonsense | Comments Off on Heart of Glass

What do you do when God comes for your LinkedIn?

Posted on 9 February 2024 by Erika Cule

My Father’s house has many rooms

2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.

In September 2022, The Guardian published an article Divine comedy: the standup double act who turned to the priesthood. The article sketches out what happened when two university friends of the author became Christians. Both friends explore whether or not they had a vocation to the priesthood.

I remember this passage:

Recently Jack has started picturing his life as a great house comprised of many rooms. There are rooms for your friendships, your love life, your career, rooms that you put signs outside declaring: I do not want this changed by my religion. Gradually, though, God starts knocking on the doors of more rooms, asking to join you in there, too. “And it’s difficult and painful and annoying,” he told me.

Born-again blogging

19 Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, 20 for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.

If you become a practicing Christian as an adult, there is a process of coming out to go through. Whilst God rifles through all of those rooms in your life, forcing you to come out to yourself over and over, the question arises of who to tell. In the years before I made any sort of commitment to Jesus, I observed I was being told stories of faith, commitment and conversion by friends and colleagues. The colleague who video-called me up from abroad and confessed she had gotten baptised; the friend I met through Imperial who talked about the tension between her faith and her work, and later took me to her place of worship; a colleague and friend who said he would pray for me when I was going through the divorce.

Telling people mattered. I needed to explain that something significant was happening, a bit change. I was nervous coming out on the blog. If you recall this blog was born under New Atheism – close inspection reveals that the blog launched the day after the launch of the fundraiser for the Atheist Bus Campaign. In the blogging community of the time, I remember vociferous and to me somewhat stupid seeming below-the-line arguments loosely centred on faith. I was terrified of a hostile reaction to a position I did not yet know how to defend.

Atheist bus campaign

A straw man argument if I ever saw one.

So when I cited Jerry Coyne in the first blog post in the Faith category, I did not tag him on the socials lest I brought forth an argument I was ill equipped for.

But bit by bit over the past year or so, God has taken over my web presence just like He is working on the rest of me. Priest friends warned me that Anglican Clergy Twitter is a tough space but I have seen worse in those early science blogging days.

On Instagram, I follow churches and cathedrals, flooding my feed with photogenic buildings. When I joined Threads and BlueSky, craving a Twitter replacement, the first people I followed were – well, you lot. Thank you all for being there. And for not attacking me. I was scared of what I might lose.

Let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you

From The Methodist Covenant Prayer
…
Put me to what you will,
…
let me be employed for you,
or laid aside for you,
…

A Christian without a job feels like the oxymoron I am. I left the workforce when my health precluded; recovering, repent-and-believing, and returning to the job market happen for me in one and the same moment. But where was I headed? I set out with not a lot more than scripture to guide me:

5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
6 in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.

For the first half of 2023 I hedged my bets, applying in parallel for Church-based roles and stats ones. By the middle of the year, six interviews down and a corresponding half-dozen rejections in hand, I sacked off the stats thing for now and focus on doing the Church thing.

LinkedIn is my current least favourite social media platform, in part because it reminds me of the former career for which I continue to grieve. I thought I was going to leave LinkedIn when I decided to put a soft pause on my biostatistics career, but I have too many friends in my former colleagues on there. Even if scouring the LinkedIn job listings for the term Church leads mostly to jobs in Church Stretton.

My friends at St Mary’s placate me with tales of their own job hunting eras, trust in the Lord, and the multipurpose epithet wheeled out after every failed job interview

Rejection is God’s protection.

The bellringing crowd assign themselves as my cheer squad, not once questioning my change in direction. They take me to the pub and cajole me into not overthinking, telling me instead of Church job openings they have heard about. I double down on morning prayer and the gym, and give up trying to explain why I think I might be headed for ministry rather than the glorious career in middle management at Glaxo once understood by others to be my assured destiny.

My social media platforms fall one by one. I go from being a statistician with a tongue-in-cheek thread about church, to a Christian nostalgic for stats.

I face remarkably little pushback over my new worldview, online nor off. A few relatives struggle at first. I infer they are concerned I might be being drawn into some sort of cult. But they come around quickly. I think they can see the difference this is all making. I get little challenge from friends of friends, and my oldest friends draw close and defend me, caught up in excitement for me and fascination.

But now I need to out myself to LinkedIn, which at the time of writing is portraying me as a statistician-scientist with an oddly long CV gap. I have been stalling, thinking I will update my profile – or take it down entirely – when I finally land that church job. It is every bit possible I will get rerouted back to stats later. Roughly a third of clergy in the Church of England are self-supporting ministers and a proportion of those are bivocational, juggling another career alongside the ministry for which they do not get paid the equivalent of a salary. Conscious that some of my former colleagues are religious and unsure what they might make of it all, I write draft after draft in my mind. I am acutely aware of the ambiguity of my current situation. Leaning towards something light and humorous I call to mind the difference between the statistician joke and the church one. My working tagline, which I test out on my new profile on BlueSky:

Statistician for Jesus. What are the chances?

I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am

Revelation

His name will be on his servants foreheads, and they will worship him.
From Revelation 22:4 and The Brick Testament

Cutting deals with God is ineffective; threats of vengeance liable to backfire. Ask me how I know this.

Advice from a priest friend

Advice from a priest friend.

However, in ambivalence, it is hard not to think, teeth gritted

when I get to that house, with His many rooms, I’m gonna take my time and rifle through all of them. See how He likes it.

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A Place Called England

Posted on 4 February 2024 by rpg

I planted snowdrops in the green in the woods last Sunday morning, and this Saturday when we visited they were already demurely in bloom.

Snowdrops

The first fruits of them that sleep

We usually get one crazy forerunner between Christmas and New Year in our garden, but it’s not until the massed banks of praying white heads start to appear that we allow ourselves to believe that Spring is merely a Solstice away. There will be a hard frost, perhaps even snow, towards the end of the month, but you can’t stop it now.

We dropped into a new (to us) garden centre on the way home and I picked up a couple more asparagus roots. I’ve been trying for a few years to get a patch going, but after one very successful year it’s been a bit of a struggle. So I dug over the entire bed today, gently rescuing the alien-looking plants and sprinkling in blood and bone. I carefully replaced them, from large to small so I could keep track of which I expect to crop this year and which need nurturing carefully—adding the new ones on the end and telling them they’re going to like it here.

Asparagus bed

No slacking now, fellas.

Fingers crossed.

PS. If you’re wondering about the post title, check out Maggie Holland’s version. Perfection.

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