Month: August 2007

We went to Greenbelt this weekend; we used to go as students but this was our first time with children. In case you don’t know, Greenbelt is a Christian festival that includes performing arts (music, visual arts, anything else), spirituality (prayer, services, talks about things) and a concern for the poor. So describing it as The Christian Glastonbury is a fairly rough approximation.

I’ll get all the bad bits out of the way first. The journey there was pants – lots of Bank Holiday motorway traffic in hot weather. There were queues for most things – to get onto the site itself (about an hour for us, longer for others), to go to the loo, to get into see things. I forgot to turn off the mobile notifications from Twitter, and my mobile’s battery was slowly dying so I kept it turned off most of the time and when I turned it back on I had 28 text messages to get rid of. At times we suffered from tired and grumpy children and tired and grumpy parents – this put a dampener on the Sunday morning service more than I was expecting.

The worst bit was losing K for about 10 minutes, which seemed like ages at the time. We had just come out of the just-before-bedtime activity and Katy was elsewhere with A. K wandered on ahead like he often does and is usually OK, but a steward popped up and asked us to evacuate to one of the stages. By the time he’d finished talking to me K had disappeared! It was dark, loads of people were milling around being evacuated and J and L were starting to panic about K. We went from steward to steward and eventually found K in tears with one of them. There were two ways down from where we had separated and K had taken one and us the other. After much cuddling things were better, plus I got L into a carrier on my back so I could the boys’ hands. Shortly afterwards Katy and A appeared as they had been evacuated too.

That’s all the bad stuff, but there were many good things too – some were things we chose and planned, but many were just random nice things. For instance we were walking back to the tent one night and two blokes dressed as knights (shields, cloaks, armour, lances) suddenly used the metal hand rail that went down the middle of the bridge we’d just crossed into a jousting rail and jousted with each other! Marvellous. Apparently they were dressed like that all weekend, which has style. In the queue for something I had an interesting conversation with an ex-soldier who’s now in army recruitment and does citizenship courses for recruits based on what the British Army did in Sierra Leone and a few other places. He’s possibly going to do one on Afghanistan but will avoid Iraq for a long time.

There was a very impressive children’s festival, which looked after 700 children at a time. The boys enjoyed themselves, as did L although she was unhappy for the first few minutes when we left her (she didn’t like sharing toys – she’s not been to nursery school!).

Katy managed to rekindle something from her youth and take part in a scratch panto. There were more people than parts, so you had to follow who was wearing the narrator’s hat, who was wearing Aladdin’s costume etc. rather than following people. Katy narrated while cuddling A and did a good job (oh no she didn’t, oh yes she did).

It was nice to be with other people (the Raines, the Stepping off the Path crew and Jo and Bill), and we bumped into several sets of friends who happened to also be there. One couple live in Cheltenham and told us how much the floods had affected the area – they’d been without water for 8 days, and the local swimming pool will be out of action for a year. The rough edges to the organisation of the festival were probably very small given the problems they must have had.

The children saw their first proper live music – the band were obviously enjoying themselves which was great, and the children liked it although it was too loud. That was followed by an excellent production of Return to the Forbidden Planet, which was too loud for A so I took her for a walk. Katy had to explain why one of the crew members was referred to as only Redshirt but apparently it was very good. I wandered about with A, and stumbled upon the main stage where Chas ‘n’ Dave were performing – class.

We went to a couple of Godly Play (Montessori meets Sunday School) sessions, including a very good one about Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah and their child that they named Laughter (Isaac). Raine Major did a very good play dough sculpture of Abram building an altar out of stones (see Flickr) and L got me to help to do a collage of a butterfly (of course).

I managed to get to a late night Taizé service, and hear a talk by Mark Yaconelli entitled How to Ensure Your Funeral is Well Attended. It was a very good talk and was based on things like how the 10 Commandments seem to give equal importance to not killing people and taking a day off, giving time for God to catch up with you, being transformed by his love to love other people. Apparently Desmond Tutu taught a course at a theological training college in America and said that everyone was going to get an A for the course, and that they would just sit around and tell each other stories about God’s love, because if you didn’t have God’s love penetrated down into the marrow of your bones, how could you share it with others? When the students protested about his giving everyone an automatic A he said “God has amazingly low standards”. It was especially moving as I’d heard his late father many times at Greenbelt and it was Mark’s first visit to what his dad called his spiritual home.

Although the big Sunday service wasn’t perfect (for reasons above, plus the sermon was fairly feeble, and we hadn’t managed to meet up with the Raines, J+J or J+B), it did have some lovely bits. We were in groups of about 15, and each group had a bag of goodies and tied to the top was a red (bio-degradable) helium balloon. During the prayers these were all (about 1,000 of them) released together which was beautiful, a bit like the bouncing balls advert for Sony TVs and many more than Nena managed :). I was too busy enjoying the moment to take advantage of the photo opportunity.

The Sunday service included Communion (bread and wine were in the goody bags), and as it wasn’t a Methodist-only event the wine was real wine. We normally let the children take the bread and sometimes they also ask to have the wine (sorry if this causes you problems – yes, they don’t understand the miracle of grace but then I’m not sure if any adult does properly either – see the earlier remark about God’s standards), and when we pointed out to them that this was real wine they all wanted to try it. Watching their faces was amusing, and I think they’re happier with our alcohol-free non-conformity. Afterwards J asked “was this an Anglican service then?” and I explained what ecumenism was, and how Jesus asked us to be Christians and not to be Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist etc, and how it’s great that things like Greenbelt are just people getting on with following God. Despite all the hassles and so on, the weekend did give me much food for thought and show me things I need to change.

There were all sorts of other things which I’ll whizz through. I was mooching around the music shop tent and some blokes happened to be just about to give a hang drum performance – a beautiful sound. There was an excellent area called Messy Space which aimed to be like your living room – lots of toys to play with, dressing up costumes, some bean bags and children’s books to read, a slightly strange storyteller popped up occasionally, and a face painter (mmm… face paint + camping) plus a fair trade cafe, a lovely cool floor and proper toilets :).

There was a room to just sit and be quiet in, with candles, pictures on the walls and some Tavener music playing. I found it lovely, but J and Katy tried it as well as found Björk warbling in Greek and English too weird! Much more up J’s street (and all the other children’s) was Fischy Music and playing and colouring in a DFID tent.

Something I did while we walked about was spot interesting T-shirts. The good ones that I can remember are:

• 667 – The neighbour of the beast
• God loves everyone, but I’m his favourite
• Below a picture of Tardis, with Winnie poking his head around the door: Dr. Pooh
• My other body is a temple
• Below a picture of a TV: Live outside the box
• Below a picture of a fork with a little green blob on one prong: Give peas a chance
• Below a picture of Big Bird, the Cookie Monster etc: Representing the Street

I haven’t got the time or inclination to do this justice, so here’s a stream of consciousness description. There are lots of photos on Flickr! We went on both days (last year we did just one) and met up with the Beans and Dave, J and E which was very nice.

They built a built a tithe barn from kit of labelled wooden parts, and a castle my chest height out of foam blocks the size of brieze blocks. (J got the idea of staggering the blocks “to make it strong, like a house”). It was very impressive, with crenelations, towers, buttresses and a lintel over the doors. Once it was built they tried to demolish it by throwing bean bags at it – good fun.

The Romans (Ermine Street Guard) were as impressive as last year – they cover the period of when the Romans invaded Britain. There were also some other Roman re-enactors from the end of the Roman period looking a lot less impressive (although just as authentic I expect). No fancy segmented armour, plumed helmets and rectangular shields – they looked more like Anglo-Saxons as things had gone downhill due to the empire crumbling.

Some random Norse and Norman fighting over Dublin, and British and German WW1 planes fighting overhead which was much less jingoistic than last year. I was glad to see German WW2 re-enactors (Brits pretending to be German) as well as the US Marines to balance things out a bit.

There was some drumming, singing, dancing, and playing [very] old board games – ancient Egyptian to Tudor. Plus some colouring, making knights helmets (with working visor) out of black sugar paper and paper fasteners – v. impressive.

A man and woman talked about Roman make up while the woman applied it to the man. White lead foundation, charcoal for eye lashes, fake eyebrows from mouse fur, lanolin (straight from the unwashed wool into some water) for hair, orange eyeshadow… Almost like clowns in a circus!

The boys’ favourite bit was the shows put on by BZents who well deserve the link. They tell stories by getting the children up to put on simple costumes and then repeat lines into the microphone, and then they narrate around it all. There is much bashing other child actors with foam truncheons and silly jokes. They did Robin Hood, Don’t Mess with Bess (Elizabeth I, including the Spanish Armada) and Horatio’s Last Hurrah (all of Nelson’s career). K was part of the English / British navy (with a sailing boat hat) and J was a Merry Man and part of the Spanish Navy.

There was a nice sepia sunset on the way home on Saturday, and then on Sunday night there was fantastic rainbow. It was double in places, and went all the way over from one horizon to the other. A very nice, enjoyable, educational and quite tiring weekend – definitely money well spent.

Before I ramble about the Festival of History at the weekend, here’s a little round up of what’s been happening. Most important: after much dribbling, chomping on fingers (hers and anyone else’s in reach), and a bit of grumbling, A has her first tooth!

Katy has managed to buy us an upright piano off eBay for £5.50, although the removal costs will be quite a lot more! It’s currently in a pub about 30 miles away and they don’t need it any more – should be arriving tomorrow. J and K have been having lessons from a friend, and they’re now at the stage that lack of access to a piano is holding them back.

Last week a colleague of mine showed me the piano tuning kit and fabulous book (written in the early 1900s, with a foreword about finding one’s calling in life etc.) that he had just bought to give him something to do and an in-tune piano while on holiday with his parents in a rented cottage (with probably dodgy piano) somewhere. It was a very interesting set of tools – each one obviously just right for some specialist job – and I hope I can persuade him to practice on ours.

Emma, W and E invited Katy and everyone else to a local country park last week for a mini beasts thing run by the park rangers. The weather was great and there was catching insects in big nets, looking up on charts, looking under little logs and having a great time (photos on Flickr). A return fixture planned for this week is likely to be rained off.

This is all jumbled up, as I remember it. Yesterday we did a bit of DIY – fitting a couple of capping strips to the garden fence. J helped to saw them to length, K was nail monitor, and I did manly wielding of the claw hammer. Katy is starting to turn our collection of soil-filled trugs into a raised bed; this has got as far as planting some carrot seeds which may have sprouted.

That reminds me of an interesting article I heard on the radio about druids (in this country) celebrating Lammas. What was interesting to me was that it was the start and end of the year to them, a time to reflect on the year just gone, what they had achieved or not, how they had reaped what they sowed and so on. We are so out of touch with the seasons – early summer used to be the lean time of the year when the harvest hadn’t yet arrived and the food stored from last year was running out. These days it just means that the apples in Tesco have to come from New Zealand rather than England :(. Anyway, I found it interesting how there are different ways you can choose to define when your year starts, depending on what’s important to you.

Talking of food, there has been some cooking, including J tackling meringues and A joining in by trying to chomp on wooden spoons. I finally got around to getting a chimney sweep to sort out our chimney as it was disgorging crud in the front room. Katy, J and K took some photos, which I think the sweep found bizarre but it’s not a boring everyday thing for us.

There have been occasional nice sunsets and fly pasts by flocks of geese in the dusk. I love the way they fly in a big V without being able to communicate with each other the finer points of aerodynamic theory or navigation. The whoosh of their wings and honking sound great on a quiet summer evening too.

Also there has been much Story of the World (basically catching up), some Pen Pals, phonics desk, reading aloud and being read to. L treated me to the actions for some silly songs she and Katy learned today which were fab.

At tea last night we were talking about spaceships and floating about, and I asked them why is there no gravity up in space. J came out with the rubber sheet analogy, which I think he’s seen in a museum somewhere. I was amazed, but then I suppose it’s a good picture that makes sense and is easy to remember once you’ve seen it. I only got as far as special relativity at college, so I know he’ll not get the general relativity behind it all from me!

K remembered about black holes and so we talked about the rubber sheet and them, and I mentioned how as you accelerated faster and faster as you fell in towards the black hole time would slow down (not your clock running slow, but the universe itself slows down). J said that your speech w-o-u-l-d s-l-o-w d-o-w-n t-o-o which I said is true, but your brain would slow down at the same time, so you would hear that your voice sounded normal. If you don’t have to worry about the equations and are young enough for bits of your brain to still be flexible, physics can be magical and weird rather than boring.