Well, its official. At a short service after the Archdeacons' Visitation (yes, two of them - Bournemouth and Winchester) in Chandlers Ford this evening I am now, officially, the youngest serving churchwarden in the Diocese. How bizarre.
That honour also singled out my predecessor - and he is four ears younger than me.

Ha ha ha ha A Freudian slip. I wrote "ears" when obviously I meant years - but the AD of Bournemouth does have the biggest ears any man has ever been blessed with…

Though my colleague found it rather boring - and pretty much the same as last year - I am still being carried along on a wave of enthusiasm and found the whole experiencing very rewarding. The experience of a midweek service is a very refreshing one.
I really don't think this feeling can be anything other than a genuine 'calling'. It feels so right that I should have been brought here, now to serve the church in this way, and sitting in prayer tonight with 200 others I felt confident, warm and open. And yet also, perhaps for the first time, I have become aware that even this move into His light is just another step in some greater direction. I hesitate to consider where it may lead me, but as I look around and into the future, I wonder if there isn't a minister in me?
It's a strange, at the moment undefined blur of a feeling.

There is just so much more to this than the minutii of last night's Building Committee meeting for instance, and the complex issues of Church Centre Management. It seems almost certain now that we are set to lose our administrater within the next few months - perhaps just in time for our Mission Audit which begins in the summer!!!! Aaaaagh... but then the Holy Spirit is bringing on other people all the time and we should not despair.
It is a sign that He is at work, moving obstacles out of our path and turning them into strengthening, bond-making challenges.
It was encouraging to see Mr vicar at the Building Group meeting in the Old Church last night. He has never attended before. And on Monday, though I wasn't there, he made his first appearance in five years at a Fete planning meeting. Prior to that he's done the chefs on Friday, and the website workshop before that.
Said tonight that e just feels carried along at the moment, and is keen to support all the positive things that are going on here.

And to think, we are threatened with Pastoral re-organisation within the next couple of years as well.

I've just watched this through again (twice, on a loop).
It is, quite simply, incredible.

Left me breathless.
Is there anyone, anywhere doing anything like this stuff?

To my mind, this DVD encapsulates what I understand John Foxx to be about - there are so many ideas and images flowing through the pieces that seem to focus and reflect perfectly elements of just about everything he has ever done.
When I first heard the album I was blown away, but with the visuals it moves into a different dimension all together. I am more convinced than ever that the last track, Metanym, really brings us full circle and leads back into tracks like Glimmer and Mr No, which sent out the roots that became Tiny Colour Movies; I hear the soundtrack to the Quiet Man story, with its blurred girls and figures with no outlines; even the very the last image brings together fragments of the sleeve art for the John's later singles (from TGS and IMW) - Rauschenburg meets Duchamp, meets, well, who exactly? Surely everyone, and yet nobody I know...

And its not just the sound. The images too, moving and breathing on the screen as if liquid, seem to come alive in exactly the way that stone doesn't. Walls and statues are introduced by us to gardens, not to wild places. They don't occur naturally. The Garden isn't a wild place, it is an organised, managed environment that represents man's attempt to structure and organise his surroundings. Without constant attention, they become wild, neglected. The figures abandoned within them are people from our past, the invisible women, overgrown by time and displaced into memory. And yet we can still catch glimpses of them, now and again. They are moments in time that transcend time, moving like smoke. Non linear. As you watch, the stone faces and walls become organic - the fusion of formal carving and unchecked vegetation, of motion and stillness, is simultaneously calming and threatening, confusing and reassuring. One becomes the other in such a way that I'm not sure quite how I can listen to the music on its own again. But when I do, I expect to find something else entirely!

My favourite tracks are now Spiral Overture, Serene Velocity, Fog Structures and Metanym - and here's another fascination of it: while the whole offers so much more than its component parts, that doesn't undermine or in any way detract from the intense beauty of those unique pieces. I have often wondered why all the Cathedral Oceans pieces are in fact individual (quite short) tracks and don't just dissolve into one another like the images do? Watching it again now I begin to understand. If they were not separate entities, the interaction between them would not be so magical and they would each lose something.

Somewhere in my overgrown, rambling logic lies the key to this deeper understanding. It remains lost, but isn't it akin to the way people work: alone, in societies and in crowds? Whole philosophies evolve from this kind of perception, and its then you realise how little you understand of it after all. Which by itself adds to my belief that this is an artwork of fundamental significance.

© birdsong 2007