It is Saturday night; in fact the twelfth night after Christmas day, and so – according to Google – the time to take down Christmas decorations.\u00a0 It is slightly surprising that\u00a0the Church of England press office does not issue a formal letter to the press, reminding everyone.\u00a0 Sadly the ecclesiastics of today tend to have other things on their mind.\u00a0 In its place, a google search reveals confusion.<\/p>\n
My own Christmas tree has disappeared into the loft for another year.\u00a0 How quickly the Christmas season is over!\u00a0 On Monday I must go back to work on a client site.\u00a0 It’s a total mess over there – worse than I have ever seen – so how long I will last there remains to be seen.\u00a0 It will take all my energies just to remain.\u00a0 If this is what God wants me to do at this time, however, I am willing.\u00a0 I must bring it to the Lord in prayer, as we must all.\u00a0 I must make sure to leave, however, before it becomes too much.<\/p>\n
My paper trimmer, that I use to cut off the gluey edge next to the spine of a book, has given up the ghost.\u00a0 The thousand pages of Tissington Tatlow’s Story of the Student Christian Movement<\/em> were too much for it, it seems; and it died.\u00a0 I must get another.<\/p>\n I had intended to chop up and scan Douglas Johnson’s Contending for the faith<\/em>, the history of the Intervarsity Fellowship (now UCCF), but found myself reading it instead and growing interested.\u00a0 One episode took place at Edinburgh University, where the EUCU (Edinburgh University Christian Union) faced a takeover bid from the SCM in 1951.\u00a0 On searching the web about this, I was surprised to find a detailed account from someone involved\u00a0whom I have actually met at the Oxford Patristics Conference and corresponded with about Tertullian!\u00a0\u00a0 He was, of course, on the side of the resistance.\u00a0 I’ve written to ask for more details.\u00a0 It’s a long time ago, but Christian Unions in universities\u00a0still face malicious opposition from time to time.\u00a0\u00a0It’s useful to recognise some of the standard ploys.<\/p>\n A few of the books on my “out” shelf have proven more interesting a second time around.\u00a0 Maybe I should have another go at the Mystery of Mar Saba<\/em>.<\/p>\n Over Christmas a\u00a0friend lent me (by post) the autobiography of Emerson Lake and Palmer keyboardist, Keith Emerson, entitled Picture of an Exhibitionist<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0I’ve read the corresponding rather sober book by Greg Lake.\u00a0 Emerson’s book\u00a0was intended, I think, to show what a wild man he was in the 60’s with The Nice and in the 70s with ELP.\u00a0\u00a0To my surprise\u00a0it was\u00a0a sad\u00a0story, of a lost soul who lived a rather wretched life. Thus he tells us how his creative\u00a0ability ended when he started using cocaine.\u00a0 All the “groupies” that the music press journalists loved were in reality just prostitutes.\u00a0 Many of them were diseased, and so were the “roadies” and musicians.\u00a0 Indeed ELP actually went on tour with bags of condoms and packs of anti-biotics!\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 There was little glamorous about the life described.\u00a0 It was a vision of hell, as perhaps so much of the showbiz world really is, if we but knew.<\/p>\n Onward!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is Saturday night; in fact the twelfth night after Christmas day, and so – according to Google – the time to take down Christmas decorations.\u00a0 It is slightly surprising that\u00a0the Church of England press office does not issue a formal letter to the press, reminding everyone.\u00a0 Sadly the ecclesiastics of today tend to have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18870\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}