Gospel of St John

At St Augustine's Church on Saturday 9th May, I saw an amazing performance. A one-man show who had memorised the entire Gospel of St John - more than 20,000 words (of course, in order). Though of great familiarity, hearing the Gospel all in one go really strung the story together and originally it was emant to be heard than read (in the days when universal literacy was not even an aspiration, much less a given). The fact it was an actor who delivered the lines, meant that he got almost all the cadences right and different characters came to life (again) even though they all had the same American accent. A true performer, he enagaged the audience well, though if one is a bit shy a front-row seat was not the best place to sit for once, since he took in the first few rows as his disciples. His few props were judiciously used (for example, a chalkboard was marked with a cross and then hammered three times, before becoming the stone over the entrance to the tomb), though he must get through quite a few washbuckets on his tour, the way he treated this one. It was in two parts, the first and hour and twenty minutes, an interval of 15 minutes and then a concluding section of fifty minutes. The inexorable turn of events in the second part was especially compelling with it being delivered in full. It was a great piece of show that was spiritually and emotionally gripping and ultimately uplifting.

To boldy go back to the drawing board

Watched Star Trek on Tuesday. Don't need to distinguish it from the first motion picture because that was called Star Trek: The Motion Picture (as if the series it was based on was a series of stills). It was enjoyable as far as it went and some of the most interesting stuff was the characterisation while still on terra firma. The action was slam-bang, but the movie was at least 15-20 minutes too long and rather prosaic at the end, nothing really original. The enemy spaceship had a great outer appearance but was rather same-old, same-old inside. Moreover, the rogue Romulan commander was not really evil, but just had some anger management issues, which make his destruction of Vulcan irritating - not just because meddling with time should result in positive outcomes for a feel-good film, but also because his demise was not so special. When the Empire destroyed a planet in Star Wars Episode IV they got their comeuppance within the running time with the grievous blow of the destruction of the Death Star. Also, if the Vulcan singularity device creates black holes that transport things across time, then surely the villain will just reappear at another place in time. More pertinently, I want to know where that supernova fire that aged Spock managed to swallow up with a mini black hole went. For all that, it was good to see Leonary Nimoy in a meaty film role and it was great to see all the young stalwarts (and a youngish Captain Pike) in yet another origin story that has been released since Batman Begins. The international profiling was not in evidence here - indeed the Klingons (Soviet Russia) were only mentioned in passing and the Cardassians (1930s - early 1940s Germany) only had their sunrise cited on a cocktail menu. The Vulcans (Japanese post-war cerebral and passive) and Romulans (communist Chinese - impulsive and militaristic) were the only other alien races to be known by their names. J J Abhrams has done a great job, but next time he could employ some other screenwriters that the guys who made such a mess of the first live-action Transformers movie. Good, but not great. 3/5.

On another note, I was recently watching the throughly moderate Mission Impossible Two (another low note in John Woo's Hollywood sojourn) and during the climax of the film in the middle of a chase scene, ITV decided to go to the adverts. Admittedly, the tension wasn't great, but it's one of the basic rules of programming that you don't do that. Yesterday night, during the Champions League Final, they failed for most of the match to actually have the time and score in the corner of the screen. This is just rank incompetence. No wonder michael Grade failed to turn around the ship and is now leaving.

So predictions up the spout and all that about Alex Drake asking after Sam Tyler was all a red herring or was it? Was indeed that mystery man a figment of her imagination? Whether of not Keely Hawes meets John Simms in this series, I think he might have a role to play in series three (the final one) next year.

Just watched Ashes to Ashes Episode 4 on BBC I-player last night (because last Monday night I had a church PCC meeting to attend) and my suspicions about DI Drake's stalker are as good as confirmed as Sam Tyler kept being mentioned. Even though the preview of Ep 5 seemed to suggest it was a different man, I'm sure Keely Hawes will come across John Simms. I await tonight (my only free night until Friday) and what will follow. I still can't get over how empty the streets of London are.

All right on the night

Yesterday night, I popped down to the church St Mary Magdalene for QuizAid, a quiz night organised across the country to raise money through donations to Christian Aid. On my team were the people getting baptised and/or confirmed in a little over eight days time. Altaa stayed at home because she was tired.
Rosemary Hoare was the compere and, with her husband Richard, also dished out helpings of curry during the interval. A bod in Christian Aid had composed the questions and posted it off to Rosemary. Frankly, this anonymous person clearly has no knowledge of how to stage a successful quiz. In each round, the first five questions were reasonably easy, followed by a further five that were obscenely hard. Some of these riduclous questions concerned obscure 13th century Castilian kings (I hazarded a guess at Pedro the Cruel, but it was actually Frederick III), 16th century horticulturalists or the date of the abolition of slavery... in Ethiopia! Some of the maths questions mingled with the probability of picking a diamond suit from a pack of cards, to 150 degree interior angles of a polygon and working out how many sides it has. The prupose of a quiz should be a heady mix of some easy questions (to gift to the weaker teams) with stern, reasonably logical ones. A classic case of this here was the river that runs through Berlin (the Spree). No-one got it, our team put Wannsee, others put the Elbe, but it was a reference that someone could have picked up relatively easily over the course of their life rather than poring over a fifty year old dusty almanac. I joked that as it was a Christian Aid quiz night, maybe some of the answers would only be known by God.
We had fun though. I didn't think we would win, especially with those 'if onlys' (I changed my mind on a flag visual question from my gut instinct of Mali to the Central African Republic, because the colours on the pennant were of the pan-African movement and I felt Mali was too close to the orbit of the Arab world and would have gone for something more Muslim). Suzanne Pattle, our priest-in-charge seemed to know the words of Katy Perry's "I kissed a girl," however, even more scandalously she didn't know the name of the bitter herbs used during Passover. We were shocked. There were teams from all over North Gillingham, including from other churches, in total about a crowd of forty-five divided into six teams. As Rosemary read out the teams names from the bottom up, when she got to the last two, I was really happy that we were in the top two and had a shot at the prize, then she read out the second-placed team, 'compos mentis' - we were 'the non-conformists' - we burst out in celebration. Our prize was a bottle of wine each, rather high-end as a prize in such a quiz but most welcome. Not only that but we had won by a huge margin of five points over second place - out of 100, we had got 58 and a half points. So there was no need for a tie-breaker, but Rosemary used to it to hand out a bar of chocolate. To the nearest hundred thousand, what is the population of Denmark? I knew it was in the five million range and so I guessed, 5,500,000 and was spot on!
So after fearing the worst it turned out far better than we had hoped and all in a good cause too, during whcih much money was raised.

The Great British Picnic - May 2nd

Due to work constraints, final preparations and lugging a big, heavy hamper up to and across London, Altaa and I, eventually pitched up in Hyde Park at the Diana Memorial just after 4 pm. As the noshing was scheduled to start at 12 noon, this seemed unconscionably late, but in the last few years I have forgotten the benefits of being fashionably delayed in arrival. The great organiser, Simon Savory, with Gemma Winter, only settled down at 2 pm with many of those I knew such as Ronnie and Henrietta getting there not much before us. I had decided it was best to go as the upper-crust rather than the salt of the earth, but it takes so much effort to look sophisticated. Casual cream jacket and slacks are fine, but my work shoes started to pinch after so mnay hours of continuous use and tramping around. Moreover, I took Simon's instrcution to bring a hamper at his word, borrowing a Christmas present my parents had. This was finely interwoven wood, whcih opened up to display flute glasses on the underside of the lid and space not only to place robust goodies, but also a cool bag where sherry and lemonade glass bottles could be laid without clinking ominously together. Furthermore, there was a drawer underneath storing plates and metal cutlery, the latter of which resided in a cloth bag. But fully laden it's something better transported by car than by foot (though in London where would one park?). The closest anyone at the picnic bash came to it, though, was a wicker basket overlaid with a blanket, so the kudos went to us.
I also rather zealously followed Simon's prescriptions for the food and drink suited to toffs. He provided a list of what we could bring; I tried to bring as much as possible off that list. This entailed: sherry, (pink) lemonade, satsumas, cherry tomatoes, Mr Kipling Battenburg cakes, (Lyons French) sponge cake, salmon sandwiches, macaroons; though I did skip on the Pimms, cucumber sandwiches and foies gras (among several items), but off my own bat, I brought strawberries in tupperware (but no cream - it's not Wimbledon yet!).
The Pincess of Wales Memorial wasn't as bad as the all the naysayers at its opening had suggested, but it was as aesthetically unchallenging as the People's Princess had been intellectually unchallenging, which isn't necessarily a negative - simple pleasures can be the most effective. However, the satisfaction derived more from the flowing water (nature's bounty, if artificially motivated) rather than the uninspired concrete canal created from the architect's mind. A functional grey concourse may be appropriate for cutting through Panama, but doesn't qualify so much as a beauty spot in a London park. Saying that, concrete is apposite to describe the person this site is remembering - to borrow a phrase from Suralan (Sugar) - thoroughly mixed but set in its ways.
It was pleasant to see Kersten, Natalia, Danni and, for the first time since uni, Naz Erten, along with Simon et al. Mr Goff, unsuprisingly, failed to make an appearance, Miriam and Mel too, but less expectedly. On both sides, sartorial efforts were impressive, though when a park attendant came around with bin bags, the chavs most ungraciously declined to place themselves inside. Picture fun and games occupied our attention amidst the general chat, including speaking silly accents while each reading a sentence from a Sherlock Holmes mystery, but the food fight was the best part as class war erupted, with Battenburg particularly an effective missile. With my cherry tomatoes, I had a ready source of ammo.
Around eight, as the sun drew in, a consensus emerged that the gatheirng needed a change of direction - some headed to clubs or betting shops. Altaa and I chose home, with a much more easier to carry hamper.

Predictions

Number One: Ashes to Ashes.
I believe that Keeley Hawes' character, DI Drake, will fiend that the crazy man who leaves roses for her, talks about the future and whose face we do not see is actually John Simm's character from Life in Mars. It may be something completely else, but that's what I think Series 2 of Ashes to Ashes will end.

Number Two: The Apprentice
I predict that Kate will win The Apprentice. Kate is smart and attractive, with her degree in psychology meaning she doesn't tend to alienate people. She may have been in the boardroom in the last round and had fallen for Philip who had so much brass neck he could equip an entire Greek phalanx of soldiers, but he's gone now, so there's no distractions for her. Prior to her showdown with Sir Alan, she was on a good run, being shifted from winning team to winning team. She reminds me of Lee in the last series.