The lack of pictures here is very galling, and normal service will be resumed asap. There are some great ones of mince-pie-with-Humber-Bridge, Humber-Bridge-mud-in-the-gloaming etc languishing on the camera. I'm supposed to be looking for a new laptop, but have no idea how to choose one. (I'm of the idea that Bluetooth is what you get from eating bilberry pie, and more recently, drinking red wine.) They don't seem to be marketed at people like me who would like some freebie such a lovely pair of scissors to add to the (at least) 25 I already have. Come on, you lot at Sony, Toshiba etc, turn your minds to some truly sensational pack of coloured pencils for me.
I was looking around this morning while in bed, and found a blog with a section on reading stuff about bohemia. It contained this line:
"Oh no! I am feeling like a book blogger who has slept through her alarm, turned her face down into the warm pillow and lazily allowed for the languishing of good books. I have many excuses, but I won’t bore you with them: I am just late in posting."
I had no idea that bloggers had to stick to a timetable, though I do know the feeling of having the face in the warm pillow [pause]; yes, I can recommend it.
But Hannah Stoneham's book blog really is excellent. http://hannahstoneham.blogspot.com/search/label/Bohemia
She's everything I'm not. (She's the young relative of a friend). She says her blog is about 'the book-less-read', which I misunderstood at first and thought it meant no books were needed for this kind of reading. (That would be bookless-read.) But she really does read, and if there's any novel etc you'd like a review on, she's probably done it. She obviously takes the art seriously and puts her stuff out there regularly and on time.
Not-reading but crocheting the other day in the living-room-cum-nursery, I overheard something on Cee-beebies, you know, BBC kiddie telly channel, and I thought I heard the words 'The Virgin'. Of course I knew I hadn't, but I wished I had. It set me off on one of my thoughts about how in the wish to avoid propaganda or favouring one religion over another, the media just backs off from everything* to do with religion, and the upshot of this is:
1) All religious people are viewed as potential or actual proselytisers.
2) All religious people are viewed as fundamentalists.
3) The next generation will suffer, as most will not have much knowledge of anything biblical except through determined book-larning, and so their understanding of literature with its many allusions to such will suffer.
It's like a kind of allergy to religious people.
Wouldn't it be good if children's programmes contained easy and relaxed references to the main characters in around six of the world's major faiths? I know they are taught about these in RE, but I'm talking about taking a more relaxed attitude to people of faith, and letting our stuff slosh around in a more organic way. Some of us are attached to our faith not through some 'firm belief' in this or that doctrine, but because we feel that the raw materials it offers - literature, music, liturgy etc - cause true and helpful thoughts and feelings to spring up. The faith is inspiring, whether we regard its 'stuff' as inspired or not. I live blithely in this kind of attitude. It's distressing when I'm assumed to be part of some fist-banging group of hard-line believers. I'm fearful lest the kind of allergy I describe above is actually instrumental in attracting more fist-bangers to the faiths.
I tend to say I'm not spiritual, but I am religious. I love the physical trappings, the characters, the existence of awkward bits like Psalm 109**; it's the only way I can be in a faith at all.
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*OK then, this is a bit of an exaggeration; there are quite a lot of documentaries about religion. But one can be made to feel a bit like an insect under a microscope rather than as a thinking being. I remember a line in the Guardian in which a radio programme was reviewed, and in it Anne Karpf said, 'Surprisingly, the voice of sense came from the religious angle'. That was a turning point in my going right off the Guardian, and I now read 'The Week' and listen to Radio 3 news.
** I'm sure I'll say more about awkward psalms in the fulness of time; but just to say I like my religion warts and all as it seems more genuinely human; I don't have to want to pray it all.
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