Third best church

As David reports, I discovered the other day that my blog was receiving traffic from Church Weblogs.

It’s a site that keeps a track of Christian blogs – including those where there are lots of bloggers in particular churches. I’ve also received a very nice email from Mike, the brains behind it, explaining his desire to discover more about the global church via the medium of blogs.

It seems we at St Silas are the third biggest bloggers out there, and the biggest in the UK. Albeit in pure quantity terms, rather than quality. Although frankly I reckon the deep thought, reflection and debate amongst the St Silas bloggers is significant too.

But the more my blog is taken as a “Christian blog”, the more self-conscious I become about the label. I’m no theologian, and most of what I write about Christianity raises either laughs or hackles, often both, so this is probably not a good example of a Christian blog.

In any case, I always thought this was a blog written by someone who just so happened to be a Christian. My apologies, for intance, if you came here looking for spiritual nourishment, and found only mullets.

Maybe I need to get more profound. Although I doubt it would suit me…

Goodbye

Fear not, I’m not going anywhere. As far as I know, anyway.

Goodbye is the title of Ulrich Schnauss’s new album, due to be released later this month.

The German music producer is not too well-known, and I only discovered him through Niall. But he has fast become one of my favourite artists thanks to two absolutely sublime albums.

Ulrich Schnauss’s sound is chilled and almost delicate – soft beats, catchy melodies, and long, slow, carefully built-up tunes that are soothing, relaxing, and the perfect thing to play late at night or on a quiet sunny afternoon. The music varies between cheerful and downbeat, and is always thoughtful without being overcomplicated.

The tracks on his first album, Far Away Trains Passing By, all contain rhythms similar to that of a train, so the music is evocative of journey and adventure, making it ideal to listen to while travelling.

It’s been a while since his most recent album, A Strangely Isolated Place, so it’s good news that his third album is finally coming, along with an EP called Quicksand Memory. Just so long as once Goodbye is out, he himself isn’t leaving any time soon.

I’ll review Goodbye and Quicksand Memory as soon as Mr Amazon magics them to my door. I can’t wait.

Nova Scotia

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading Nova Scotia, a collection of what describes itself as “Scottish speculative fiction”.

It’s a compilation of short stories from the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror and alternative history, written by various names in Scottish literature most of whom I had never heard of.

I must confess I am not a huge reader of fiction, and bought the book mainly for its very funky cover.

The stories are diverse, ranging from magic, fairies and witches through to thought-provoking predictions of the near future, but all of them have some sort of roots in Scotland – either holding up a mirror to our country and its values, imagining an alternative version of Scotland, or describing the unreal lurking very close to the surface of the country we think we know well.

Disappointingly, I only liked a little over half the contributions. Many were plodding, confusing, pretentious, or based on premises I found too divorced from our reality to be able to relate to or enjoy – possibly due to my inexperience of reading such genres.

Some, however, were a delight, with fantastic concepts, beautiful language, and gripping characters skilfully packed into barely a few pages each.

One story tells the delightful short tale of the fight against a huge, carnivorous monster discovered in a pond in a Glasgow park. Other stories I enjoyed or found thought-provoking contained imaginations about things like the spread of Christianity to alien races, outwitting the Devil over a pint, and an Island-meets-1984-style story about our conceptions of the reality we exist in.

Perhaps my favourite was a sad, seemingly eco-minded, tale of a group of strange insect-like creatures, declining in the face of scarce resources and an increasingly hostile environment. This surprising and imaginative tale was written in a beautiful, haunting style, although its placing at the end of the compilation left the whole book with an unnecessary downbeat end – a shame given the positive and aspirational tone of the introduction and most of the stories.

But it was well worth the purchase – with so many stories contained in Nova Scotia, there’s bound to be at least one or two to get everyone either thinking or smiling.

101 Things To Do When It’s Too Hot In Church

Glasgow is in something of a heatwave, which as you may know is not my favourite sort of weather.  It was good to be back in church tonight, although it was oppressively hot in the building, and I think I irritated everyone sitting near me by generating quite a breeze when I kept wafting my pink paper (that’s the intimation sheet, just to clarify) in my face in an attempt to cool down.

While sweating my way through David’s excellent sermon on Romans 8, and when I should have been focussing on Jesus, the heat got me thinking.  What can we do in church when it gets too hot?  There must be plenty of things.

101 things, in fact…

1. Ask to get baptised in order to cool off.
2. Post a sign outside saying “Welcome to Hell”
3. …or one saying “You think it’s hot in here?”
4.  If it’s communion, ask for your wine with ice.
5. Count the understains among the congregation.  Especially if it’s a charismatic church.
6. Announce that you’ll only give to the offering if there’s ice creams given out in return.
7. Convert to Catholicism so you can justify throwing holy water over the congregation to cool them down.
8. Sing loud enough to lift the roof.  Literally.
9. Mould the intimation sheet into an attractive Japanes-style fan.  If you have a pen, decorate it. Ask your neighbours to mark it out of ten.
10. Tear up your Bible and do a test to find out which book makes the most effective fan.

Knife wounds

While Justin has returned with Puffy the Puffin, I’ve returned with five mementos of the Faroe Islands. Three of them are bottles of very nice Faroese beer, and two of them are knife wounds.

For some reason the regular table knives we encountered in our apartment and in restaurants in the Faroes all had viciously sharp serated blades. I’ve no idea why – maybe it’s all the whaling they do. These knives would certainly cut through blubber because they sure as hell cut through my fingers.

Justin and Niall were lucky to escape the week unscathed, although why I was wounded but not my travelling companions, I am not sure. Maybe it was bad luck, or carelessness on my part. Or it could mean it’s the stigmata. Only in the wrong places, three-fifths incomplete, and a hundred percent less likely to spawn their own horror film.

The first cut is nearly a week old and is still in evidence, and the second – a chunk of my thumb cut out while washing up yesterday – bled a huge amount and is still very sore.

I’ll just about live, but I guess I’ll have the scars for a couple of weeks.

I wonder if the beer will last longer than that…

Lifting the curse of Toftir

Yesterday was the Scotland match, and thankfully the weather couldn’t have been a greater contrast to that of the Italy game – beautiful warm sunshine which we’ve learnt has been amongst the best weather in the Faroes for many years.

The Tartan Army provided another difference to the Italian fans earlier in the week. They were louder, more colourful, in greater number – there must have been perhaps a thousand in the stadium – and they made a much more substantial contribution to the licenced trade sector of the Faroese economy, filling just about every bar in the centre of Torshavn.

Sailing over to Toftir from Torshavn was a lively trip, with the Scotland fans in full voice and engaging in healthy banter with the bemused Faroese fans, whose only football chant seemed to be the somewhat optimistic “You’ll be rolling down the mountain when we win”.

And win they didn’t, with Scotland banishing the memories of two embarassing draws at the spectacular hilltop stadium. Two first half goals sealed the victory, although the Faroese played well towards the end of the match and were very unlucky not to score, hitting the woodwork twice.

Our week is drawing to a close as we head home tomorrow. It’s been a grand holiday in an absolutely lovely place. The people have been very friendly, freely engaging in conversation at bus stops or in pubs, far from the stereotype of Scandinavian reservedness I was expecting. The scenery has been lovely, the weather amazing, and I am even coming back with a healthy suntan. Not bad for a rocky outcrop halfway to Iceland.

Hello from the Faroes

Apologies for the lack of updates from the North Atlantic. There have been a few technical difficulties with our apartment’s internet connection and the owners have only now been able to fix it.

However, that was a lesser problem compared to the modest comedy of errors delivered by the somewhat disorganised Atlantic Airlines. On (very late) arrival in the Faroes on Friday we discovered that my luggage, and that of about a quarter of our fellow passengers, had not arrived.

That left me without any change of clothes, my waterproofs, my hat, gloves and scarf, my camera charger, and a large bottle of Cragganmore.

The lack of clothing was felt most acutely on Saturday night at the Faroes v Italy football match, where the uncovered stands were fully exposed to miserable rain and cold wind. With only a thin, light jacket and a hat borrowed off Justin, I (and my one set of clothes) got absolutely soaked through.

However there was a sliver lining to the thick, grey clouds, in that the Italians were playing in conditions they were completely unused to, and were lucky to leave with a 2-1 victory.

The visitors’ unconvincing performance nearly turned to humiliation – on two occasions in the dying minutes the home side almost drew level.

So what would surely have been one of the Faroes’ greatest results was not to be. But given that more or less any side in the world would see little shame in a 2-1 defeat to Italy, the reigning world champions, you can imagine the delight and pride amongst the Faroese crowd whose team was drawn from a population of less than 50,000. It’s a very strong warning to the Scots for Wednesday night.

Aside from the football, it’s been a lovely few days. The scenery is stunning (think Shetland with sharper edges), the people are friendly and generally speak excellent English, and Torshavn is an attractive, compact town with colourful houses and free buses.

Thankfully prices haven’t been too oppressive either, barely above the upper limit of what you’d pay for things in Scotland. And the weather, apart from during the Italy match, has been brilliant – occasional mist, but mostly very sunny, and rarely cold.

And the holiday took a turn for the better late last night when my missing bag arrived, via Copenhagen. I wasn’t sure which I was happier to see – my camera charger, a change of underwear or the whisky. Though after a celebratory dram, I’d firmly decided.

I’ll blog later on in the week no doubt, but in the meantime here are some photos.