Anyway the beautiful creature to which I refer is our drama group Weekenders. I started the group in the Spring of 2002 so we have been running for slightly longer than the 3 years I gave it at the outset. Throughout that time Pete and I have been the permanent fixtures and Katy, Becky, Rachel, John and, latterly, Charis have ably assisted us along the way. We have survived a venue change midway through, I say survived in actual fact I think that gave us a new lease of life to keep going.

The high points have been many. The best nights were always the unplanned, impromptu ones, the worst the well planned badly received ones. We have put on a number of pantomimes, we’ve created music videos, we’ve done dance routines and we’ve sung songs. My personal favourite moment was when we rehearsed a short play we created that used the slight bleakness of The Smiths classic How Soon is Now to convey the crushing hopeless loneliness that young people can feel when they feel like outsiders. We contrasted that using Gene’s ‘Olympian’ (‘I wanted to be there with you for I can only be normal with you’) to suggest the euphoric feeling of finding yourself with trusted friends who sustain, support and affirm you. When I think back to the rehearsal of that, not the final performance which was good but not as good, it brings a lump to my throat and it is all I can do to not cry such was the power and beauty of the performance.

And that really was the essence of what we were trying to do. We created a space, a place where kids could come along and try to find themselves in a supporting, non-judgemental environment. Where they can be as ‘normal’ as they want to be. I think we succeeded largely. Yes there were some that didn’t get it and they didn’t last long but in the main they did and when they all did together the feeling was like no other.

So why am I ending it? Well to be honest those great nights aren’t really happening any more. 9 years is a long time and we are tired of doing it.

What will I do now? Still not sure, I do want to write up our BCLC exploits as I think there are some very valuable things we learned from doing that whole thing but I do need to work with people in some context.

Perhaps I will find my inner clown at last and take him on the road.

Strike another match go start anew….

It is probably very apt that I keep going off the Street and then coming back as the show itself is not averse to revisiting fertile storyline ground. At the moment we have Kevin and Sally in marital dispute, we have Leanne Battersbee and Nick Tisley revisiting their old romance (Nick to Peter Barlow last night: “first love, you don’t forget that”, not even, it would seem when the man you fell in love with metamorphosises more often than Dr Who), we have Peter Barlow getting on and off the wagon more often than a rag and bone man on a council estate, we have John/Colin, fresh from prison for kidnapping Rosie Webster, on a Harold Shipmanesque killing spree, we have Tracy Barlow generally being horrid. Honestly you can stop watching for a year or two then tune back in and after a few moments working out X has left Y and moved in with Z you could be right back where you were,

One of my favourite programmes at the moment is Charlie Brooker’s How TV Ruined Your Life (best line, to the ‘Dorrito gang’, ‘just eat your crisps and f**k off’) where he argues, with his usual blend of wit and force of personality, that TV has completely distorted our view of the world. This is a view I  share, we have an idealised, stylised view of everything that bears little resemblance to our actual experience and yet we fall for the ‘dream’ every time.

And so it is with Corrie, every time I see Sally and Kevin split up I hope that one day they may be reconciled (like the Jews and the Arabs?), I hope that Peter can beat his demons and stay off the booze and that one day Tracy will actually say something nice with some sincerity.

If there is one great thing about a programme like Coronation Street it has to be the message that redemption is possible no matter how much you screw things up.

And so I will stick with it in the forlorn hope that one day they will actually give the role of Nick Tilsley to someone that can act.

It was a long time before we realised that dad was ill.

Not the illness that took him from us 12 days ago, I knew almost from the first time we saw him lying in bed in the home that he was going to struggle to get through what turned out to be a severe infection in his chest.

Nor, even, his first brush with major illness when he had prostate cancer. When you can’t pee after going out for a few beers with your sons then a) you know something is wrong and b) it’s very hard to keep quiet about it.

No, I am talking about the illness that very slowly, day by day almost, took a little bit of him away from us. We didn’t spot dad’s alzheimers  for some time. Mum kept telling us, ‘there’s something wrong with dad’ but we dismissed her with assurances that it was ‘just dad’ and ‘he never listens anyway’. It soon became impossible to ignore. Despite his attempts at denial, his actions gave him away.

I was lucky enough to play alongside dad on his last round of golf. He has always had a passion for the sport and he loved playing but as good as he was, even in his hey-day, he would have struggled to get round with the 3 drivers and a pitching wedge that he considered the ideal club selection for that particular course. Like I said, it was becoming impossible to ignore.

Dad had taken up golf after his retirement from full employment. I have been asked a number of times in the past week what his last job was. I don’t tell them what that was, not because I am ashamed that he ended up a labourer at a factory. Indeed I had nothing but admiration and respect or the way dad humbled himself to take that job; working for the people he once saw as his peers and regularly spent his lunchtimes sharing a pint or two when he was a salesman. And it is as a salesman that I will always think of him.

I say he took up golf in retirement, this isn’t strictly true as he had played a lot earlier in his life. Too much for the family and he was forced to choose between golf and us. He chose us. He just stopped playing golf and never seemed to miss it. He did the same with smoking, eventually. One day he decided that he would stop and he did. If he set his mind against something, it tended to stay set.

Another sport Dad was passionate about was football and his love of Manchester City has been passed down through the generations. Not that we had a great deal of choice in the matter. I recall once announcing that I had decided to support United, only to later rescind the claim after being ignored completely in the intervening hour. So quite how Michael got away with it is something of a mystery to me.

Undoubtedly it is be because he is a grandchild. Dad was never the Werthers Original stereotypical Granddad but the mutual affection between him and all his grand children was always a joy to see.

Dad’s own father died when dad was only 14 and  I imagine it was tough to take on the mantle of man of the house. As the youngest member of the family dad, by all accounts, had spent most of his early life teasing his 4 older sisters; a large, poorly lit house in West Didsbury would have been fertile ground for a mischievous young lad keen to startle and scare his siblings whenever the opportunity  arose.  When he wasn’t teasing his sisters dad would be with his friends at the local youth club, St. Luke’s, where he met mum. As youngsters we would often travel with mum and dad to the lake district where they would show us the places they went youth hostelling in their late teens and early twenties and I remember seeing lots of pictures of groups of young, fresh faced  hikers – one of whom bore more than a passing resemblance to dad – but with hair.

I often wondered whether dad’s parenting style owed anything to the fact that he lost his father at such a young age. But parenting isn’t something you can readily learn, sometime you just have to trust your instincts and get on with it, and dad, like most dad’s, did the best he could. Not that we always appreciated that effort. When dad curtailed my fledgling criminal career by instructing the local constabulary to leave me in the cell to stew a while following a rather inept shoplifting spree at the tender age of 9, I struggled to foresee the good that would do me. There were times when he just got it plainly wrong, hanging up the phone and informing friends that no one called ‘Nige’ or ‘Ste’ lived at our house when they rang to speak to us was a particular annoyance and I am sure that Ian, as the eldest, locked horns with dad a number of times that I was too young to know about.

If there is one thing that has remained consistent and constant throughout dad’s life it is his sense of humour. We have received a lot of cards since his death and most allude to it. Even when a lot of who he was was disappearing he still retained this essential part of him. That was largely how dad communicated. I don’t ever recall being hugged by dad but I do remember being on the end of his favoured gestures of affection – the dreaded ‘love tap’ (“it’s only a love-tap what’s up with you”) after which you felt…, well you knew you had been ‘tapped’, if not altogether loved, or the, possibly even more dreaded, squeeze of the leg just above the knee. You generally had to be family to be fortunate to be in receipt of one of these, for everyone else you got his jokes.

Dad loved a good joke, perhaps this was from his selling days – as Dale Carnegie would have put it, he knew how to win friends and influence people with a well placed light-hearted remark or funny story. Dad also loved a bad joke and probably lost as many friends when the remark was not so well placed.

As I said, apart from hitting each other soundly round the ‘lug-hole’ or nearly crippling them, we have never been a family given to great displays of emotion, the depth of feeling we hold for each other can be found in the warmth of the humour we share. And so it was that we were telling funny stories from our past sat around his hospital bed whilst the life slowly crept from his body, not because we didn’t care but because we cared too much and only really had those words and that language to show it and to share it.

And so, finally, I hope that you will often recall your friend, husband, brother, father, granddad, uncle, Trevor, and when you do you will picture him, telling a funny story or laughing generously at a joke of yours, and you will end up, as he invariably wanted you to – with a smile on your face.

I should be posting a lot more as I am starting to get a sense of where I want to go on my personal journey of faith and where we want to go as a family. For me, this is likely to be the last year of Weekenders, or rather the last year of my involvement in it. Would be great to think that it will live on beyond my tenure but I can’t see it, Katy is hoping to go to Uni and Pete has never shown any real interest in leading the group.

I have been doing a lot of juggling this summer, trying to perfect some tricks and just get more solid with it. This has reminded me of my earlier ideas to take up some sort of clown persona and go out and ‘do my thing’ to schools/church groups etc. So I think I will be some sort of vagabond, name wise, and my main message will be that you have to get the basic things right in your life. If you get your relationships with yourself, those around you and God in balance then you can go on to live a pretty good life. Of course that is 3 elements which, by an amazing coincidence, is exactly how many things I can juggle competently!!

Once I have the act thought through more I will video it and post its development on here somewhere.

For the family, we have been looking for somewhere we can belong. Somewhere we can put our faith up to some rigorous intellectual challenges as well as build some significant relationships with our friends, both old and new. Not managed it yet. We tried Sanctus but it didn’t work because of their location and focus on the city centre. Anne tried the Baptist church, which was lovely and is probably somewhere we will do the major religious festivals, but that was too much like a step backwards after all we have done with BCLC. Katy has been keen on SOS at our former church but I do not want  to go back there.

So we must look to something new. My latest idea is to organise a ‘retreat’ style weekend away, somewhere we can exercise mind, body and heart. Our plan is to invite all our favourite people from all the things we have attended over the years (Swanwick, Greenbelt, church etc.) along with friends with whom we have never had a spiritual connection before, to a weekend of yoga, meditation, eating, worship, drinking, walking, playing. The idea would be to get ‘specialists’ to help with the planning (e.g. Bob and Cath could organise a walk, Pete could do some games, Stuart could do some worship etc. etc., you get the idea)

A lot to work out but we are keen to try to get it going. Will it be what we are looking for? Who can say?

This year was better though because we volunteered to help in the Christian Aid Cafe. Really nice to work with some young people that are just embarking on, or just returning from,  their gap-year with Christian Aid and to meet all the people coming in for a brew.

This is the latest offering from the Sanctus people in Manchester city centre and is aimed at young families. Sanctus has always intrigued be but at the same time has scared me off a little in the way it describes itself as being for city centre types who live the city life and want a city style spiritual activity. I am not a city type (apart from my football allegiance obviously) so whilst the idea of it appealed to me, I thought I would get fingers pointed at me and I would be escorted to the train station and sent packing on the first train back to suburbia.

That didn’t happen, at least not this week, even when I confessed to not living in the city during the many conversations I had with Al and the rest of the people there.

The great thing was this felt so much like the early days of BCLC, it was a tad shambolic at times, but no one was expecting anything different, I don’t think anyone was expecting anything to be honest.

Speaking to Al and his wife Sarah afterwards it was really interesting to hear them speak of people not being building centric and looking at the whole of the city as a series of potential locations for things to happen.

Early days but I think I could get quite attached to this activity for a bit and in Al I think I have found someone in the clergy (he is a Methodist minister) who actually gets what is happening and, more importantly, what people of faith (not necessarily churches) need to do to share their stories with the wider community.

As always, I will keep you posted.

Previously, I gather, he has done this in schools but this time he has taken on all ages from all areas of the town and merged them into a cohesive, and not unpleasant sounding, group of singers. The effect this has had on the town of South Oxhey was quite startling. Here we have a singing group that consists of what were 3 or 4 disparate (and previously non-existant) singing groups. The climax of the series was the South Oxhey Festival, a one day event on a bank holiday to which the whole town was invited to celebrate all that was good about South Oxhey and, of course, hear the choir sing.

To see the pride the partcipants and the watching crowd had in their town was inspiring.

To hear the comments about meeting new people and making new friends made me think back to my time at church. This is apposite as I was invited to a service this weekend on what is known as ‘(please, please, please) come back to church sunday (we’re desperate for people but not so much as we would actually change anything about the way we do anything to make it any more appealing in any way)’. The ‘church’  want us all to go back, to return to the fold. We know that you were led astray by the devil but God is still there every Sunday at the same time, doing the same things and he isn’t even a little bit miffed that you haven’t been in a while. So come on, come back and we’ll pretend it never happened, in fact we’ll pretend nothing ever happens, better still we will actually do nothing so we don’t even have to pretend.

I couldn’t help but contrast this notion of going back and returning to that of the choir going forward, trying something new, inspiring and leading people into new experiences. Experiences that enhance their life and build them spiritually and physically. Experiences that bring them together for the communal good. And with no agenda but that. You don’t have to believe, you just have to be.

The church is one of the few organisations that has the wherewithall to do something like Malone has done but it seems too content to sit on it’s collective big backside and ‘beg’ people to come back rather than get out there and do something for meaningful for them.

So, thanks, but no thanks, I won’t be going back any day soon.

I really cannot remember that last time I had to queue so much and I started the summer going to Glastonbury. The thing was, at Glastonbury (G), there were queues for the loos, that would be expected and it was much the same at Greenbelt (GB). The problem with GB was that everything that was even remotely popular had to be queued for, usually for about an hour prior to the item starting. I think the longest recorded queue from someone in our party was 2 and a half hours for Rob Bell.

At times the enforcement of the queueing was a little heavy handed. Take the 2nd Beer & Hymns session. When I went into the beer tent a good hour and a half before the planned start to have a quick beer with Dylan (whilst he ate our shared pancake) there were already quite a lot of people in there. We sat outside and watched the queue form. Meanwhile some of our friends and family arrived to meet up with us before we moved on to our next activity (we had already done the singing the day before) so I suggested they nip in through the side of the fence and join me whilst we waited for the others to arrive. Eventually the stewards realised that people were getting in this way so they posted someone to stop it. Consequently some of our friends were on the wrong side of the fence. When they wanted to go off and do other things I suggested their children came with us so I politely asked the steward if they could come in for a few minutes and sat with us, whilst I finished my drink.

‘No they can’t’ I was told, ‘we are at the legal limit for the number of people and we would be breaking the law if we let them in’. This was probably the case, there were probably more people in than should have been but there is no way they could have known how many more as there was no way they could have known how many were actually in there. There could have been a conversation here whereby they established how many children we wanted to bring in (2) and how long we would be staying for (5 minutes) but there wasn’t. So instead we asked if our child could nip out that way to be with his friends on the other side. ‘No he has to go through the front gate’, presumably so they could let someone in to keep the numbers precise. So I lifted him over the fence and off he went.

I finished my drink and we all moved off, no real harm done, some people were let in to the ‘space’ we had vacated and off we went to queue for something else. The whole thing tainted our weekend though when it really didn’t need to.

So a couple of questions for the GB organisers (lest they be reading this)

• Why were the most popular activities not put in venues that could accomodate the expected interest? e.g. Rob Bell had a 2-3 hour queue fro each of his sessions. Given that he is quite a popular character and he was featured prominently in the guide and he was recommended by a lot of people, why wasn’t he on the main stage?
• Why is there a fence round the beer tent?
• Why can’t the stewards use their common sense?
• Why wasn’t it really sunny?

I did enjoy my GB though, good to see some old friends and to make some new ones (Simon Thomas is on the christmas card list). I really enjoyed seeing and hearing Paul Cookson and Stewart Henderson, two poets that are very entertaining. I also thought that Dans le Sac vs Scrobious Pip were excellent. I would probably not seek out 100 Philistines Foreskins again though (no offence).

So will I be going next year (yes) will I grumble a bit about stuff (probably), still, when you get to 27 you do get a bit tetchy in your old age.

I haven’t been on here in a while and when I do return I like to see how many hits I have had and how they found me. It seems that some people came here via a page on the URC web site where they list what they like to call ‘URC bloggers’. So I popped over to see my blog in lights… but what’s this? I am nowhere to be seen!! Have I been removed, struck off the URC blog register!! What did I do to deserve this, has someone been monitoring my recent lack of church attendance, or worse, has someone actually read the bloody thing?

Anyway, whatever the reason, I thought it might be time for me to read a few of the blogs there and after 2 or 3 it struck me what the problem was with mine… I haven’t just got back from a recent trip to the holy land.

It would appear from my (limited) research that the main criterion for getting your voice heard in the URC these days is some holiday snaps from Palestine and a moving account of the terrible conditions in which the people live ‘where Jesus walked’ you encountered on your ‘journey’.

I can sort of see the point of going to Isreal from a historical and political perspective. The place is strewn with so many Biblical reference points and locations and absolutely littered with the tragic victims of an intrangable political situation. But really, it what way does it speak to ministers and religious leaders (on neither side of the political divide) taking time out from their thoroughly middle class, suburban, or even urban, situations?

So where am I holidaying? Well I am going on an epic odyssey to the spiritual home of my VW camper van – Cornwall. I shall be so tired from just waving at my fellow vdubbers on the road that I shall need a holiday, but not one in the ‘land where Jesus walked’, I prefer the land where he walks today.

Friday night at Weekenders and we had virtually everyone there. Some came back after a short layoff. It was supposed to be an exciting night, we were to announce the parts for the forthcoming production. However, we couldn’t. Or rather we weren’t allowed to because some of the little darlings were playing up bad style.

Now we run a fairly relaxed regime on a Friday night, we give the kids some space and, on the whole, they take that and enjoy themselves. They have always mixed well. That is until one of the regulars introduced some of his friends, local lads, who in turn introduced their friends. This was great, we have often worried that it can be a bit cosy at times and it needed a bit more edge to it. And that is what we got and have continued to get for the past couple of months and we have kept it together on the whole. Of course there have been disputes and a bit of ‘them and us’ between the originals and the newbies, but that was to be expected and we held it all together. Until Friday.

The real problem is that the lad who invited the local lads in fell out with them and what started as a bit of needle between him, his brother and these other lads quickly escalated into quite a lot of nastiness and some physical violence.

We had to take some action, the whole evening was being hijacked by a few mouthy types and it was becomeing distressing for quite a few there. So we excluded the troublemakers. It was the obvious thing to do, it was the only thing to do and yet it has troubled me from the moment the decision was taken.

And yet it shouldn’t really. We have always run the club for the kids, they are allowed to make the decisions and they impose their own limits and authority over the thing. That was something we were (and are) proud of, that’s how it worked. These new lads couldn’t cope with that privilege and responsibility.  I am sure that this isn’t their fault etc. and part of me feels rather mean to deny them the chance to experience what is essentially a great place for kids to spend their Friday nights. But they had a lot of chances and blew them all.

Some of them will never get what we do and the way we do it and we won’t see them again. Some, I suspect, will try to come back and we will have to make a call on whether we feel they can step up and join in on the same terms as the rest of the group.

I hope they can.