Storyteller’s World

Mad scientist talks about The Periodic Table - a series of videos from the University of Nottingham.

I thought I’d read some Darwin, in anticipation of next year’s bicentenary, and chose to start with The Voyage of HMS Beagle which I thought might be most accessible.

It turns out to be an altogether charming read. Not so much for the naturalistic descriptions of landscape and wildlife, some of which is kind of over my head (though in a similar vein to White’s Natural History of Selborne.) What I find more interesting is the description of life in South America in the 1830s, when life for the colonists was very much a frontier existence.

And then there’s the humour, like this little touch about the mastodon skeleton he discovered in the cliffs by the river:

We started by moonlight and arrived at the Rio Tercero by sunrise. This river is also called the Saladillo, and it deserves the name, for the water is brackish. I stayed here the greater part of the day, searching for fossil bones. Besides a perfect tooth of the Toxodon, and many scattered bones, I found two immense skeletons near each other, projecting in bold relief from the perpendicular cliff of the Parana. They were, however, so completely decayed, that I could only bring away small fragments of one of the great molar teeth; but these are sufficient to show that the remains belonged to a Mastodon, probably to the same species with that which formerly must have inhabited the Cordillera in Upper Peru in such great numbers. The men who took me in the canoe said they had long known of these skeletons, and had often wondered how they had got there: the necessity of a theory being felt, they came to the conclusion that, like the bizcacha, the mastodon was formerly a burrowing animal!

… The one that described itself on the label as:

the hydration drink

Alison took this photo of me on West Matagorda Bay with brother-in-law Mike’s camera last Friday. About 45 minutes after this idyllic stillness of water, we were running before an incoming storm, which delivered 3 inches of rain on us before we made it back to the landing slip.

Wet…

That’s what America feels like.

This is the first time I’ve been here, that I’ve been able to get a bit of a feel for the place: previous two visits have both been for NOBS conferences, where I just flew in to Atlanta, got a cab to the conference venue and flew out again.

This time I’ve really been able to enjoy the experience of speaking the same(-ish) language, at the same time as having almost no understanding of how things work. Even the taps (faucets) in the bathrooms (washrooms?) have different ways of working. How do you get hot water? It’s an exciting venture of discovery, every new place you go - even here in my sister’s home. My favourite of all washrooms in Chicago was one where you held your hands under the paper towel dispenser and it automatically delivered a swadge of towel into your hands. Sure beats hot air. And it’s even more fun than the taps you don’t have to turn on at all because they have sensors underneath. (Do you remember the first time you used one of those, and you spent minutes looking at them, trying to work out how to turn them on? Sort of trying to loiter coolly in the vicinity, till someone else came along who’d been there before?) There’s again so much in the modern world that makes me feel like a visitor from another age or culture.

This morning I googlemapped the address where we’re staying, and find they already have street view of this suburban street; so you can look at Jan’s house and go for a virtual walk along the road. Spooky.

No blogging of recent days (or weeks?) as we have been recovering from the effects of The Wedding, and then living through Alison’s last Summer School of the Oxford Ministry Course, and rushed preparations on her return, for our transatlantic jaunt. And here I am, blogging from Houston.

We’ve just spent six days in Chicago, attending the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. My first time here, after years in which the ambassador at Church House has been trying to persuade me to go. As far as I could see, it was too expensive (even with the diocese paying half), not my kind of thing at all, and during the summer holidays anyway. But last year I watched a DVD of one of the talks and decided it wasn’t too bad after all.

Bishop Alan has blogged about the Summit itself; for me, the Willow Creek experience has just been bewildering, fascinating, challenging, giving me so much stuff to ponder and process. Plus, all the experience of visiting Chicago, and surviving several days of eating, American style.

And today we’ve flown down to Houston to spend a week’s holiday with sister Jan and brother-in-law Mike. (”It’ll be hot in Houston”, everyone said. It is: 93 degrees. Fortunately, it is cool in the house, with fans and air conditioning.)

That’s all for now: food will soon be on the table. We are eating red snapper, caught yesterday in the Gulf of Mexico.

From the Book of Numbers (which, in what passes for a theological librarian’s joke, is shelved between the commentaries on the Book of Leviticus and the Book of Deuteronomy):

Fifty-nine is a number with good royal connections, for it is the number of kings and queens of Sweden, and also the number of years George III of England reigned.

Fifty-nine is also the number of:
countries in the world that drive on the left
days in the rotation of the planet Mercury
minutes from the opening bell to the finish of a fifteen-round boxing match
percentage of nitrogen in a fart
square miles of the British Virgin Islands
tons of Berlin Wall shipped to the US in the year following its demolition.

It’s also a prime number.

And it’s how old I am - today.

FreeWestPapua.org - For a Free and Independent West Papua - Benny Wenda brings West Papuan Cry for Freedom to world-wide Anglican Communion at Lambeth Conferenc

We’re getting a few more of the pictures through, and it’s wonderful to relive The Day by looking at them, when The Day itself was just such a blur of excitement, meeting and conversation and celebration.

Tui just looked so happy all day, and it shows in the photos.

Handsome couple.

Radiant bride.

Lucky man.

One of the weepiest bits was their first dance. They’d asked the best man and bridesmaid to join them on the floor pretty quickly, but in fact no one did: it was as if there was just something magically romantic about this couple, and no one wanted to move to start dancing - we were just wrapped up in watching them.

Not a whole lot of blogging recently; we’ve had a lot to do, not least with getting ready for Tui’s wedding which took place yesterday.

crunklygill has posted some of her photos on flickr - the first on the internet.