No. I’m still travelling both for work and for pleasure. It’s just that this blog is neglected. I repent and promise myself again to get to writing. Taking up from April, the next big journey after the walk round Arundel was to Singapore for my work. Despite the horribly long air journey, I enjoy Singapore. The warm, damp air reminds me of Seychelles, where wife and I spent our earliest married years. We took our firstborn at 9-weeks old and our second son was born there. After the air, that similarities end. Singapore has a reputation for being a controlled society. The end result is a clean, crowded, safe-feeling, prosperous, and–yes–regulated society. A Swedish colleague and I walked from our hotel into town to eat. The traffic flowed, drivers obeyed traffic signals. The pavements were crowded with young people looking healthy, well off and enjoying themselves. We heard that the Christian church in Singapore is thriving. I’m glad that the prosperity is being moderated by spiritual growth. Materialism, like a nuclear reactor, needs moderating with other, spiritual influences to avoid melt down. Local TV was fun. In Thailand once I saw a cooking programme on preparing rats. My stomach turned when I saw a dozen tails hanging over the side of the wok. In Singapore I was caught up with a TV soap whose daily tensions grew in the fertile soil of loves gained and lost, flirtations with dishonesty and manipulation, a son watching his father regret infidelity and longing for his parents to be reconciled. I was sorry to leave.
I Still Miss NEO
On leaving paid work I decided to move into the world of Apple and leave the frustrations of Windows and PCs behind, but I still miss one program that is fantastically helpful. It only works with Outlook and it’s the Nelson Email Organizer, or NEO. At heart NEO is a set of instantly updated indexes of email messages; in reality it speeds the retrieval of any email instantly. And that’s what I miss. Apple’s Mailemail client is good and has many strengths, but I still struggle to find that email I know I had from old Jones… The trouble is Outlook is such a greedy space gobbler I am glad to have left it behind, with its proprietary file structures and arrogant remoteness from other worthy email clients with whom it refuses to speak nicely. But NEO…
20 March 2009
Really?
Just had an email from a web-site that holds thousands of sermons, the vast majority of which I have never listened to, nor will I imagine. There’s a little graphic from a church in South Carolina, called Faith Free Presbyterian Church, a name that is crying out for a clarifying hyphen to eliminate the ambiguity. Or, are they just being honest?
7 March 2009
A Discovery
Since retiring from Feba my only journey has been to Derbyshire for a holiday with my wife, Marian, last November (2008). We noticed how beauty, hills and proximity to wealth in cities made the proportion of 4x4s higher than in other places. Steep hills and a wintery imagination made Imagine this in the snow! a holiday catch phrase. The snow in February justified these beasts’ existence, though. A different journey this morning: Exploring the word outwith. Grace Community Church *, my home church, will welcome a new pastor in April. He’s Scottish and has lived in France for 15 years, giving him challenges to begin to think again in English and get used to southern English ways. Erwin used outwith in one sermon at GCC. Another GCC member, also a Scot, used outwith since, whetting my curiosity. A Google search reveals this to be a word in current use in Scotland, even in a government web site about home schooling–children being educated outwith school, as it reads. Outwith means beyond or outside, just like the older meaning of without. In the Victorian hymn There Is a Green Hill Far Away Without a City Wall, the hill is outside the city wall, as later editions of the hymn have it, not a plot subject to possible enclosure. It’s good to be on the journey still.
5 March 2009
* GCC closed down for good some time after I left it. Now the Church of England is where I hang my spiritual hat.
Did The Journeys Stop?
End of a Long Journey
Last evening my former company had an evening to celebrate my retirement. Since summer 2007 I have worked half time with them, having reached pensionable age then. Val and Jacqui organised it all, inviting former colleagues and current staff. We had a great time. My boss, John, is leaving one month later so we celebrated his time, too. That fact allowed him to steal a response I would have loved to make–that he hardly recognised the nice chap the speakers were talking about. Despite my memory now bringing back fine detail from the distant past and failing to match that for more recent events, I didn’t remember some of the incidents recalled by others. Regrettably, I do remember times when I was arrogant and boorish. Thirty five years with one company is a long time, unusual in Britain these days where it is better to have multiple entries in one’s CV. The long spell hides that I have, in fact, held many different positions with a variety of responsibilities. For 27 years they required international travel, explaining the title of this blog and my rather feeble attempts to write about some of the journeys. Now the frequency of travel will diminish, but the free bus pass will enable local travel in these days of green concerns. For me, the 35 years have gone by very quickly and left me with a brilliant set of memories of people, places and experiences. My colleagues gave me a 500GB computer hard disk to use as a back up facility for a new laptop just purchased. Converting good memories into computer files is impossible; if it were, 500GB would barely contain them all.
1 November 2008