CofE - put the cat out when you close up

Today saw the beginning of the end of the Church of England, in an act of assisted suicide. Today the Church of England moved closer to Islam than to the rest of the Christian community worldwide, and delivered a massive Christmas present to secularism. The Church of England can no longer claim any moral authority. It has made itself a laughing-stock. Despite the overwhelming support of clergy and lay members for women bishops (all but two dioceses in the provinces of Canterbury and York voted overwhelmingly in favour), the House of Laity voted against, and diocesan representatives on General Synod will now have to explain themselves to the diocesan synods that elected them.

Where did the rot start setting in?  With hindsight, that’s an easy one. It started when parishes were asked whether they were in favour of the episcopacy being opened to women. Parishes which had had experience of women clergy were overwhelmingly in favour. A few, which had only ever known the ministry of male clergy, were opposed. In any other circumstances that would have sounded warning signals and questions about methodology. Is a vote from a PCC which had never experienced the ministry of women clergy as valid as a vote from a PCC which had? Did male clergy in these anti parishes allow their PCC to make up their own minds, or was there a bit of gentle nudging?

But the result was what we have today. Enormous efforts have been made over the years to placate what was in reality a small (and possibly ill-informed) minority. Flying bishops were introduced, but that didn’t work. The Church split itself apart grovelling to a few people who preferred their Church to stay in the 1stC AD, when women didn’t have a voice.

Our own Bishop John, Bishop of Burnley, implacably opposed to women clergy, produced a report a few months ago about the future of the Church of England. Declining numbers of stipendiary clergy, closure of churches and merging of parishes, dependence on lay ministry: all the usual sanctimonious guff.  How can the same head hold such violently opposing views, or was he just doing what he was told? His flock are entitled to be told. Heavens above, we’ve managed to incorporate Darwinism into mainstream (as opposed to loony) Christianity despite the diehards and flat-earthers, but it seems we can’t accommodate half of the human population, the ones without penises. It’s against Scripture, see?

A new argument (at least one I hadn’t heard before) was introduced into the debate a few days ago. Apparently God didn’t create the sexes equal, but complementary. Now this is a very dodgy argument indeed, because not only does it wrench theology out of the New Testament and slap it back into Genesis and myth, but it tends to confuse somewhat the ethical – and linguistic – arguments for and against same-sex ‘marriages.’ The Church today lost its way in that argument. Actually it’s far worse than that: the Church lost something else today – the plot.

And today is the first time in my life when I am ashamed to be a member of the church I was brought up in

Police Commissioners? Pure spin

I was one among the 85% or so voters to ignore the much-trumpeted introduction of police commissioners in yesterday's elections. I stayed at home. My main reason for treating the whole unnecessary cock-up with contempt is the abuse of language, the spin, that proponents of this completely nonsensical notion have used in an attempt to have their way. It would be 'more democratic' than present arrangements, they claim. I, for one, would be interested to see what evidence they can produce in support.

Existing police authorities are already made up of elected representatives, with most of them consisting of nine local councillors and eight independent members, at least one of whom should be a magistrate.

How oversight of a police force can be considered  'more democratic' when exercised by one elected person than by nine eludes me, but then 'democracy' is a slippery word that can be given all kinds of spin.

Policy Exchange is a think-tank, one of the bodies supporting the introduction of US-style police commissioners. The quality of its thinking might be suggested by the quality of its language of advocacy in one of today's national newspapers:

Policy Exchange conducted a questionnaire of Chief Constables (half of whom responded) for an upcoming paper, Policing 2020.

In it we asked Chiefs what they thought of the support they received from care homes. Not a single Chief was content with the support they received from them.

One police force had 3,500 missing people in 2009-10, costing them £3.3 million. Over three quarters of this demand came from care homes, with 2.5% of individuals creating 26% of the demand and single care homes being responsible for over 100 missing people reports a year.

Despite the obvious benefits of proactive intervention with the few individuals and care homes that created most of the demand, there was instead an over reliance on the police.

Care homes were calling the police if a child was just 10 minutes late for a meeting and generally negating their responsibilities in loco parentis.

Police and Crime Commissioners should be their police force’s greatest advocate and change this, by using their powerful media and political clout to encourage police partners, wherenecessary, to raise their game.

Clear? If this was part of an essay submitted in an English language exam its author would have been given a fail. Yet this bureaucratic bilge comes from one of the bodies that advises government. It's enough to make you weep, that and the fact that £75m of our money has been wasted on a stupid political stunt.

Coach holidays - the Knowledge

In our household we try to do a couple of coach trips a year. We do self-catering as well, and sometimes we even Go Abroad, but we like coach trips best because they are so educational. 

The last trip was even more educational than usual. At the end of the holiday, before being allowed out of your hotel and while Reception is discreetly checking that you have remembered to pay your colossal bar bill, you have to hand in a completed report form on which you have ticked little boxes in answer to questions such as “Did you find the facilities in your room...excellent?...brilliant?...fantastic?”

We’re not very good at ticking little boxes, which might be why we didn’t make it to university. We prefer narrative reports. So this is what we learned on our last Educational Coach Holiday.

1) the most interesting people are always on the other coach (your coach is full of [see Appendix A])

1a) and you only meet at breakfast and dinner, when you enjoy the maitre d’s special entertainment, sliding the poached egg into the lady’s lap, and

1b) not tasting the wines that have just been run out of.

2) All coach trips, whatever their destination (Braemar, Polperro, Scarborough, the Scilly Isles, Llandudno) always have a visit to a shop that turns heather into feather boas or old flagstones into spectacular swimwear. It is a little-known fact that these shops are actually owned by the coach companies, who have cunningly established them at points exactly halfway between any two holiday destinations, thus giving honest employment to starving people who would otherwise have to become hotel entertainers rather than attempt to scrape a bare living from the stony soil of Glen47milesfromanywhereelse.

3) People who travel on coach trips are deemed to be addicted to a) bingo and b) country & western music, and hotels are obliged to provide both or the coach company won’t use them. The intellectual effort required of participants in a) is exhausting, so an entertainer is always on hand to provide b) until well after closing time. And as people who travel on coach trips are also deemed to be stone-deaf, the entertainment is provided at colossal volume and can be clearly heard several streets away. Indeed, some travellers, denied the solace of sleep because the noise keeps making the wardrobe fall over, take rugs and a thermos flask and camp out several streets away (this does not work in Torquay, of course, because the noise from the entertainment in the hotel several streets away is far, far worse.)

Appendix A

i)  crisp-eaters. The first indication of the presence of a crisp-eater is a rustling sound. Slumbering heaps stir uneasily. Then the pure recirculating air of the coach is invigorated by the initial bag-opening aroma of sweaty socks, followed immediately by an assortment of ponging vapours; of salt and vinegar; prawn cocktail; cheese and onion; sea-salt and mangold-wurzel; goat and cranberry; and dead dog and lavatory cleaner. The second indication, assaulting the ears instead of the olfactory organs, is a sound rather like that of an ice-breaker working its methodical way through a Norwegian fjord in January. At this point the entire coach is awake.

ii) coughers, sneezers and snufflers, working on the principle that a filthy cold shared is a filthy cold halved, or better. ‘You need a holiday’, the doctor said. ‘A change of air will do you the world of good.’ And keep me and my colleagues in business, he mutters under his breath. In the good old days he would have recommended a walk to the end of the pier. And then, similarly sotto voce, jump off.

iii) people who have paid extra for the front seats, the ones with a view of the windscreen wipers or the driver’s sunblind, and insist that their right of occupancy extends to the feeder coaches and the optional tours. This is why you will often see a coach with 16 or 17 people stubbornly occupying the front seats and refusing to budge, even for a comfort stop. Some coaches are provided with a side door to allow the rest of the passengers to disembark without being suspected of waiting to pounce on a potentially vacated front seat and thus risking ritual disembowelling.

iv) people whose wet coats smell of dog

v) hotties and coldies. In general it is hotter at the back of the coach than at the front, where the door is. When the coach is stationary, as it often is for a couple of hours at roadworks, internal temperatures equalise, but the moment the coach starts again all the hot air rushes to the back. And whatever the inside temperature is, it is always a) too hot and b) too cold. Lively discussions ensue when some brave soul asks for the heating to be turned up/down.

Next holiday we’re going to stay at home, play country & western music very loud and lob poached eggs into each other’s lap. Apart from the washing-up it’ll be as good as a coach trip, and a lot less expensive.

Jam Jars - the Musical

The scene – a dusty office in the grandly titled Health & Environment Dept in your local town hall. Walter (49) is an Environmental Health Officer, or EHO. Priscilla (17) is on work experience.

Priscilla           Please, Sir, could you find me something to do? I’m dead bored.

Walter            “Do?” What d’you mean, “do”? You’ve been making the tea. What more do you want?

Priscilla            Well, it’s just that I haven’t learnt anything here, yet. And I’ll be expected to...

Walter             You are on Work Experience, young lady. You are not expected to learn anything, but to Experience Work.

Priscilla           But I haven’t seen any work going on, and I’ll have been here for three months next Tuesday. I mean, aren’t you supposed to be going out and inspecting things? Like premises? I quite fancy inspecting premises. It sounds really, like, cool. I’d like to close something down. That would be a real work experience, closing something down. Like for example Premises. If they, were, you know, a bit dodgy, with people snuffing it all over the place from E-coli thingies, you know.

Walter             First thing, young lady: put that kettle on again. And we don’t have time to go around inspecting premises. Good heavens, do you know how many Premises there are? Probably hundreds. Inspect one and we’d have to inspect all of them, and then where would we be? Masses of paperwork, and most of the time it would be raining.  And talking of paperwork, have you finished the filing? I know the system’s hard to understand, but that’s the whole point. It’s hard work finding anything in the files. It can take days. I go home sometimes and I say to the wife, I say, Hilda, that’s the wife, I say to her, we found that file I was telling you about on Sunday, and she’s as thrilled as I am, bless her.

Priscilla           I think I will put the kettle on. Excuse me.

Walter             Where’s the wretched girl’s file? Heavens, it’s on my desk. That will never do. Still, might as well have a shufti for a refresh. [he reads the file. Stasis, apart from occasional expressions of disbelief, such as ‘bloomin’ Ada’ . Then he reads aloud]

                        Baccalaureate, Sorbonne. Huh, bloody foreigners. Tripos, Cambridge, at 13. Load of tripe, more like. [pause, as he skims through several pages of CV]. What’s this? Summer job at Pizza Parlour? That’s better. Much, much better.

Priscilla           (enters, with tea tray.) I’ve brought you some ginger biccies. They were in the EHO tin in the kitchen. They’re a bit soft, but I’ve rubbed the green furry bits off. Shall I pour?

Walter             Ah! Tea and biccies! Pour away, girl. Excellent!

                        Now then. I’m at conference this afternoon with the mayor. You can’t reach me because the Golf Club don’t allow mobile phones on the links. But when you’ve done the washing-up and the filing you might have a look at this. It’s a bit old, but there might be some juice in it yet. It’s Euro directive 1935/2004...

Anyway, must rush. Lock up when you go, won’t you?

Priscilla goes off to the kitchen for a moment, but returns immediately.

Priscilla (to audience)            

I was really sorry for ‘im, snuffing it like that on the eighteenth. Food poisoning, apparently. Odd, ‘cos he was so busy being busy that he’d only had a ginger biccy all day.

                        Now then. I’d better experience some work. So what’s this? European regulation 1935/2004...

                        [she sits in Walter’s chair, puts on his reading glasses and begins to make copious notes.]

Envoi: Thank heaven for the Wallies and the Prissies who rule our lives with such wisdom from their desks in the town hall

                       

The Great Jam Jar Panic of 2012

Shock horror. Mayday. Sacré bleu. Even the normally staid Church Times raised an eyebrow (5 Oct) at reports that the days of home-made jam, that stalwart of the produce stall at the church fete, could be numbered. Re-using food containers, it seems, could fall foul of European regulation 1935/2004 and/or 2003/2006. Apparently the WI have been bombarding the Food Standards Agency’s switchboard with anxious phone calls, and everybody’s in a right old tizz, including, predictably, the Daily Mail.

So let’s just all calm down a little, and see what all the fuss is about.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that even a bumblecrat would have the sense to look at prime sources before issuing panic edicts, but then you obviously don’t understand the way the bumblecratic mind works, and how it took eight years before somebody read the small print of regulation 1935/2004 and uttered the battlecry of the bumblecrat – “whey-hey guys,  look at this what I have just found. We’re back in business.”

There is absolutely nothing in these regulation to give the WI the wibbly-wobblies and cause the good ladies to fear the end of civilisation as we know it. They were sensible measures introduced as a precaution as new food packaging materials (mainly new forms of plastic) were being introduced. You can read the whole of the regulations here – they’re not secret:

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2004:338:0004:0017:en:PDF

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2006:384:0075:0078:EN:PDF

But if you are particularly busy, just read this bit, Article 3 of reg 1935/2004 -

(3) The principle underlying this Regulation is that any material or article intended to come into contact directly or indirectly with food must be sufficiently inert to preclude substances from being transferred to food in quantities large enough to endanger human health or to bring about an unacceptable change in the composition of the food or a deterioration in its organoleptic properties.

The significant words here are ‘sufficiently inert’, and certainly not ‘organoleptic properties’, which is scientist-speak for taste or smell, and of these two words ‘sufficiently’ is the one to focus attention on.

This European regulation was introduced to ensure that food packaging manufacturers and food processing companies only used packaging materials which were safe to use with the intended product, because in certain combinations of food and packaging, and some cooking processes, chemicals could migrate from the packaging and contaminate the food, causing people unfortunately to snuff it.

The other regulation, 2003/2006 [sic, 2006], is aimed at the manufacturers of food containers and labels. It was a bit of an afterthought, to make sure that any labels used on food containers didn’t have anything in the ink or adhesive that could migrate to the food, and, once again, cause people unfortunately to snuff it. And  the preamble specifically states that ‘the rules of Good Manufacturing Practice should be applied proportionately to avoid undue burdens for small businesses.’

But nowhere in these regulations will you find any mention of glass. There was no need to mention glass. Glass is about as inert a food containing material as it’s possible to be. About the only thing that can migrate to your WI marmalade is the pong of previous pickled onions, which no amount of sterilisation or cleaning seems to be able to get rid of. You can look at some of the research into the safety of glass as a food container material here:

http://www.feve.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=84:scientists-prove-health-and-safety-of-glass&catid=9&Itemid=29

The real danger in this European legislation is not what the legislation actually says, but how it is going to be interpreted by member states, and in the UK our bumblecrats love finding loopholes and exploiting them to the point of absurdity, and then passing the buck of further interpretation down the quango food chain until your local council feels obliged to ban something without really having any idea why it’s doing it, except that it seems like a Good Idea and gives people something to do to occupy the hours between nine and five.

There is, incidentally, a similar absurdity in the regulations governing the performance of recorded music in public places, including small church halls, that followed the imposition of of the PPL licence at the beginning of 2012. The reporting requirements – by volunteers – are beginning to impose a burden which is quite disproportionate to the money involved, which is quite literally pennies.

Legislation which is allowed to produce such ludicrous nonsense by the inexorable application of the principle of reductio ad absurdum by bumblecrats is ipso facto bad legislation, and it needs robust challenge.

Cold-calling

Yet another intrusive, uninvited phone call a few minutes ago. They run at about eight a day now. People called Gareth or Samatha calling from a hi-tech shed in the early hours, Bombay time, trying to sell us something we don't need or want.

This call wasn’t. It was from the market research company Populus. A refined English voice. And to my usual polite interjection – “may I stop you there – Telephone Preference Scheme” came the lofty response that really got my blood up “Ah, it doesn’t apply to us.”

Am I supposed to be flattered by having been ‘chosen’ to receive this phone call, irrespective of what I might have been doing at the time? What I was doing at the time, actually, was one of the seven creative, high-concentration, non-remunerated jobs that fill my waking hours (no, eight – I forgot blogging.) I am now so furious at having had my concentration interrupted that I won’t be able to finish that job tonight, which is why the unctuously persistent geezer who made the call got a strident earful.

Now Populus is a highly respected market-research organisation, with innumerable clients with fat wallets who hold market-research organisations like Populus in high esteem. Me, I’ve got farmer friends who would willingly grind up market research companies small and spread them on the fields where at last they might do some good.

Market research companies cull opinions, feed them into a computer, run a stats program on them, then get paid a fortune by a client who’s been found a niche for a Kate-flavoure breakfast cereal for cats called Kitticrunch (or something. They’re still working the clock round to refine the name.)

Populus, that most honourable and worthy company, is going to be a tag on this blog. Google will pick it up tomorrow.  I’ll settle for a grudging apology and a promise not to phone me ever again, though I’d rather cold-calling was made a capital offence as the social poison of the computer age.

In the meantime, would all you faceless people I don’t know, and don’t want to know, please stop invading the privacies of my home and my mind? And stop stealing my time? My time is precious to me, even if it’s just an exploitable commodity to you.

 

 

Soundcards & other matters

I bought a new laptop a couple of years ago and put a favourite bit of software kit on it - Magix. I've been using it for years to clean up old LPs and tapes and make CDs of them. But this expensive bit of kit didn't work on the new laptop. It could only find the built-in microphone, and as we all know, sticking your lappie next to your Dansette doesn't exactly produce high quality audio. So I gave up.
It was only when broadband failed on the PC that the lappie came back into use, because the WAN signal was still there. I can listen to sound samples on the lappie; I can watch and listen to Youtube videos, but I can no longer capture the audio signal, even for wholly legal purposes.And it has taken me two years to find out why.

The big record and film companies have apparently been twisting rhe arms of soundcard manufacturers because of piracy, and soundcard manufactures have touched their forelocks and put cards into computers whose full functionality is denied to all but the most determined, and you have to turn to third parties to twig what's going on, for you won't find it in your computer's documentation. And when you've forked out £300 or £400 for a new lappie you are entitled to feel a bit miffed when excellent software has been lying unused and apparently unusable on your hard drive for a couple of years.

But here's the good news. You can restore the functionality of your soundcard, and when you know how it takes only seconds.

The starting point is the excellent wiki provided by Audacity (digital recording and processing software - and it's free, though you don't need it to read the wiki.).

How you restore the functionality you've been cheated out of depends on your operating system, but for Windows 7 users with a Realtek soundcard it's a cinch.

In the very bottom corner of your screen, next to the time/date stuff, is a speaker icon. R-click it.and select Recording devices. Then in the pane that opens, R-click in the white space. You should see what's been disabled or disconnected by default, and you can re-enable them.

Whether you should have to do this to get full value out of something you've paid for, and intend to use for entirely legal purposes is, of course, a very different issue.

Topless photo of the Duchess of Cambridge

It's about time subs and telly newsreaders did a course in remedial English.

Here's what they've been panting for - one of the topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge.

Happy now?

Surplus tomatoes, and what to do with them

An e-mail today from one of my favourite food websites -

http://www.about.com/food/

- Jessica Ann Mola on the art of canning (or as we say in the UK, bottling) garden surpluses.

Think I can add to her suggestions for preserving tomatoes, though - make your own passata from the summer/early autumn glut.

2 to 3lb ripe tomatoes, halved (more if your pan will hold more)
a dash of olive oil
a dash of water
clove of garlic, minced
herbs and spices at will (eg basil, rosemary, thyme)
salt and black pepper (optional)




heat the olive oil in a large pan, add garlic, then the tomatoes and a dash of water to get them started. Bring to a simmer over gentle heat, stirring all the time, then cover, turn heat to low and allow to stew for an hour or so.  Strain off to remove seeds and skins and other solids, then return to the pan and reduce for another half-hour or so. Cool to room temperature. In the meantime line a couple of rectangular cake tins or baking trays with clingfilm, pour in the passata to a depth of 1cm or 1/2 inch, and freeze. When frozen, remove from the tins, carve into slabs with a breadknife, and pack in freezer bags, separating the slabs with greaseproof paper. Label, and return them to the freezer. Use in Italian dishes, or as the basic for winter soups.


Or here's a recipe for a real winter-warmer - spicy red tomato and onion soup.

2lb very ripe tomatoes, halved
4-5 cloves garlic, crushed
2-3 red onions, cut into chunks
3-4 bay leaves
lashings of olive oil
1 red pepper, flesh cut into rough chunks
(a pinch of chili power - optional)
salt & black pepper
1 litre boiling water




There is no finesse about this hearty soup. Pre-heat oven to 220C (ish). In a roasting pan toss all ingredients together with the olive oil, sprinkle with the salt and pepper, then roast for 45 minutes or so. Turn oven down to medium, and roast for another 15 minutes. The aim is to get the tomato skins starting to blacken and the onions cooked through.


Remove from the oven, and pour over about 1 litre of boiling water.


Allow to cool a bit.


Whizz a jugful at a time coarsely in a food processor/blender and strain. Freeze in wax cartons, or reheat to serve, with a swirl of single cream and a sprig of fresh basil in each bowl. Serve with warmed crusty rolls or bread. 

R,R,R and - oops

Good (for some people) to see education secretary Michael Gove insisting that children should be tested on the fundamentals of grammar and punctuation before they move into secondary education.


Not so good, though, for the leader of the biggest teaching union, the NASUWT (an anagram of  'Aw, nuts!', you might notice), who believes it to be an attack on teachers. It couldn't possibly be that a lot of teachers don't have enough of a grasp of the fundamentals of the structure of English to be able to teach them, having been trained during the decades when such things were considered irrelevant.


Good, too, that employers complain that they are forced to provide school-leavers with remedial tuition in the three Rs. They might also like to add History to RRR, for Mr Gove, in a separate volley against school governing bodies, says


“We cannot have a 21st century education system with governance structures designed to suit 19th century parochial church councils.”

Oops, 0/10 for history, Mr Gove. Parochial church councils weren't introduced until 1921.

Women bishops in the CofE

Do you agree that ordained women in the Church of England in the 21st Century should be eligible for the episcopacy?

If so, please sign this petition
When this post was written earlier today the number of petitioners was 660. You can check the present total in the graphic (it is always slightly in arrears.)

Change.org|Online Petition Form

I know my rights, guv

It is not unreasonable that creative people should receive financial reward for their efforts (or the economy of Jersey would collapse - but that's the subject of a future post.) After all, we wouldn't want to see Andrew Lloyd Webber or Lady Gaga languishing in a garret, now would we? (the question is rhetorical.)

But there does come a point at which the administrative costs of putting another 4p into Cliff Richard's pension fund become disproportionate, and point to the absurdity inherent not in the law of intellectual property itself, but in the application of that law to the bitter end.

The big record companies, fed up with the loss of revenue from P2P networks, are targeting churches and hairdressing salons because they are easy prey. The PPL licence was introduced on 1 January 2012 - if you play a CD or a cassette or even an MP3 in your place of work (or parish hall) you now have to cough up to keep a few dozen people in luxury for the rest of their lives. Oh, and you'll need a PRS licence as well. PRS splits your 4p two ways - 2p to Sir Andrew, and the other 2p to his publisher and record label (let them squabble over the proceeds.)

Copyright enforcers are the new brigands. That they have the law behind them means little - so do the outfits that clamp your car and demand a ransom for its release. Put a CD or a tape on in your rest room in your tea-break, or in your loo, you girls who work in hairdressing salons, and you can expect a visit from the heavies - you're playing music, and a member of the public with acute hearing could hear it - so cough up, or we break both yer arms.

The reporting requirements for small rural churches are now such as to inspire the ghost of Charles Dickens to pick up the quill again. They make the law, and certainly the application of it, look a ass. The combined PPL/PRS licence now threatens to make every keep-fit group hiring a church hall keep records of needle time across hundreds of recording labels. Not quite accurate records, of course, but approximate.

In this first year of reporting we, the church officers responsible for reporting our various hall user groups' needle time once we've collated them, only have to supply approximate percentages in four categories - Christian, classical, choral and modern pop, a ludicrous categorisation which could only have been put in place by a more than usually intelligent aardvark. That's a relief in a way, because I don't get paid by CCLI to do their tax-collecting work for them. But I am accountable to my PCC, and I am a charity trustee because I'm a member of that PCC.

So I think I am probably obliged by my trusteeship to ensure that none of our licence money goes to CD labels that haven't actually been played. Good stewardship, the Charity Commission calls it.

And that rather stands the reporting requirement on its head. CCLI should be producing the evidence that none of our church money has been paid to somebody who didn't deserve it, even if was only a fraction of a penny. For justice to be done, every group that plays music during its activities in a church hall will need a needle-time recordist who is also an expert in copyright law. Then they will know, and Sir Cliff will know, that that extra penny in his royalties that cost £25 to raise, by volunteer tax collectors, was raised lawfully.

Think I'll put a CD of Bach organ music on now to clear my head. It's 51 years old, this recording. It's the one we put on in church when it's open, so that metal thieves will think there's somebody in there, and go away. It's also out of copyright, ho-ho. Sorry, Sir Andrew. Sorry, Sir Cliff. Sorry, Your Ladyship. 

combined cost to our small rural parish church of CCLI copyright licences, PPL and PRS licences this year - £300, all but a penny or two.

Lord Lloyd-Webber's personal fortune - according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2012 - is £590,000,000, give or take a bob or two. That's more than three times what David Beckham has amassed by kicking balls round fields.

The Gove Bible

I've now had an opportunity to handle one of the copies of the Bible that the present Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has caused to sent to every school in the land, including primary schools. It is a beautiful object, bound in red, the pages with silvered edges, protected by a sturdy slip case, and some philanthopists have had to fork out a bob or two to meet the £375,000 bill.


But what edition of the Bible is it, you are entitled to ask. One in simple English appropriate for schoolchildren of all ages, with the juicier bits of the Song of Solomon discreetly reworded?


Is it eckerslike. It's a facsimile of the 401-year-old King James Bible, complete with the archaisms of the English of that period (modern editions of the King James Bible update spellings and character substitutions in the interests of greater readability.) As a bonus it also includes earlier forms of the lectionary, prescribing the readings for every day of the year.


It would be a marvellous tool for scholars - but for primary school kids? Even their teachers would be struggling with the orthography.


The clue is in the press release that went with the distribution. Apparently the King James Bible is an icon, in the debased set of resonances that that word now carries ('iconic' is used at least eight times in any single early evening TV news programme, so that it now means roughly 'mildly interesting'.)


An education secretary who compounds a bungled project with the language of spin is inviting ridicule when he makes portentous statements about the English of the KJV.

I do it my way

It's open season for prepositions in the newsrooms, it seems. Traffic reports on Radio Lancashire now suggest that we look to the roads, not at 'em. It could have been the sort of slip-up that anybody could make on air, I thought, until the lady said 'And now let's look to the trains.' Yes, indeed, let us look to the roads and the railways. They should certainly be treated with circumspection, being much in need of attention.

This was hard on the heels of an expert on something-or-other on Radio 3, a few minutes earlier. The 'coup de gras', he said, confusing his paté de foie with his grace. The 'blow of fat' ? I rather like it.

And there was me, thinking a 'coup de grace' was a lawnmower. You unlearn something every day when the wireless or the telly is on.

Lake Winderlake; Mount Snowmount...

Just a minor point, for news people ignorant of (or should that be 'over'?) the finer points of the language that pays their wages.

The '-mere' suffix in Windermere means 'lake', so 'Lake Windermere' is tautologous. The '-don' in Snowdon means hill, or mount, from Old English, so Mount Snowdon is similarly tautologous.  The suffix '-don' in OE also meant 'valley', which is logical enough if you're standing on your head while admiring Snowdon, or merely looking at it through the winder.

I've taken the pledge, Your Honour

NHS - the No Hope Service

My medical record now shows that I am 5' 6" tall and weigh 13st 11lb, which makes me practically spherical, with a body mass index approaching infinity. Or zero - I never could get my head round reciprocals or metric units. No wonder my BP was up. 152/76, to be precise, systole exactly double diastole, which is handy to remember. I could do with losing a few pounds to bring me back into the appropriate percentile for my age, but I'm borderline. Tum turning into a corporation, but that's genetic. My dad's waist measurement was more than double his inside leg, which made his trousers roughly equilateral triangles in front or rear elevation.

It was my annual check-up at the asthma clinic a couple of days ago. In our village practice you are likely to go in for your check-up perfectly healthy and come out in a hearse, so I give the village practice a wide berth, and attend a branch in the next village, where patients are less likely to be verbally abused by Reception Gorgons under a sign that proclaims that the NHS does not tolerate abuse of its staff by patients, especially those who have still managed to stay alive, despite.

My asthma nurse knows absolutely everything about everything, because she follows a flow-chart on her screen which tells her what questions to ask. A bit like a call centre. If my answers don't fit the pattern they are ignored. In vain have I been saying for years that aftershaves and perfumes are far more likely to trigger severe asthma attacks in susceptible people than cigarette or pipe smoke. Two years ago it took one extremely intelligent nurse to spot an anomaly in my cholesterol readings, and submit a blood sample for analysis. Almost entirely good cholesterol. It's on my medical record. I shouldn't have to remember it - nurses with their faces turned to computer screens should see it, flashing on and off in red.

But that isn't really the point. When I got home from this 'check-up' which would have me on a diet of lettuce and statins in perpetuity I weighed myself. I am my usual 12st 5lb, not 13st 11lb.

I endured a 30-minute lecture from a nurse who can't convert kilograms to pounds.

God forbid that she ever prescribes me a painkiller. It would be a hundredweight of morphine, qid.

PS 3 July


Now have my own sphygmomanometer. Calibrated. BP consistently 138/60. When The Times has finished exposing rum practices in the banking industry and/or Jersey it might like to have a look at our village practice.

A dungarees thing

You can forgive children for not being fully clued-up on such things as geography and countries of the world and language and therefore making boo-boos in their compositions, for a little knowledge is, as the adage reminds us, a dungarees thing.


But we should be less inclined to forgive the writer of the following (who just happens, coincidentally, to be American, a fact hardly worth mentioning) in a best-selling thriller -


"It is so wonderful to make your acquaintance," he said with a faint Swiss accent.


No? Well, think about it.

Easter Sunday, the Pagan Festival

Easter blessings be upon all readers of this blog, and particular blessings on the traffic cop who, on this holiest day in the Christian year, was lurking behind a tree in the church grounds with his speed gun as the congregation – a very large congregation this morning - arrived to celebrate the Resurrection. Try explaining that to the children.

Tell me – do traffic cops and community bobbies ever talk to each other and do a bit of joined-up thinking?

Good Friday, the pagan festival

Just a quick en passant.


The ITV early evening programme which purports to keep us informed of what's going on - ITV national news and Granada Reports - regard Good Friday as a day for interminable reports about people who kick, throw or hit balls for a living.

But that Granada Reports should completely overlook Preston Guild and the Passion, or the significance of Good Friday for Christians, is utterly inexcusable. Perhaps there was an item, but it had to be dropped because they had visuals of smoke rising from a fighter jet crash in Virginia.

Granada Reports. What the eye can't feast itself on didn't happen. And they pretend it's a news programme.

April 1 Stainer

Radio 3 used to be worth listening to when it was the Third Programme, and later the Music Programme, but with Classic Eff 'Em snapping at its heels it had to go downmarket, which is why its schedules are now mainly full of trailers for forthcoming goodies uttered breathlessly by females with exaggerated vocal inflections, in the style of those deliciously OTT Eurotrash voice-overs from Maria McErlane, Davina McCall and Kate Robbins,  or tweets from the sort of twits who tweet and telephone conversations with astoundingly uninteresting people with adenoids living in Essex who are only too happy to relate their experiences in their infant school choir in 1927.

I've very nearly given up on Radio 3, though last week was very educational. It confirmed what I had always suspected - Schubert wrote far more music than it's decent to, and it shows.  A handful of songs which aren't all that bad, but more than 500 which mostly are; chamber music that's more chamber-pot than chamber music, a few masses that sound like Dvorak on syrup and the symphonies, not very well scored. He couldn't even be bothered to finish the last one. The only half-decent stuff he wrote was fugues, in which he is very nearly as accomplished as Max Reger, whose spiritual father also was JSB.

But yesterday, Palm Sunday, R3 put the clock back and pulled material from the European Broadcasting Union, and wow! They are doing wonderful things across the Channel, as well as in Japan, but you wouldn't know it if you listened to R3 regularly.

But the masterstroke, after a day of utterly breathtaking baroque and Bach, was the April Fool spoof - a performance of Stainer's Crucifixion in the Victorian style that had to be heard to be believed. The tenor had picked up the tremolo-on-one-note that Michael Ball relinquished for Sweeney Todd, and the baritone did a La Scala. I think they'd chucked rugs over the organ pipes, because they just sort of rumbled away below the threshold of hearing, and the chorus!  They must have spent weeks boning up on Victorian elocutionary practices, because I've never heard the word 'royal' sung with such a rich variety of mutating 'phthongs. Absolutely brilliant. We had to turn it off after twenty minutes, tears of mirth streaming down our faces, but it's there on iPlayer for a few days if you missed it.

You have to hand it to the Beeb - when they do do 1 April, they pull out all the stops.

Pronunciation of church Latin

Groan, groan. It happened again this evening. Somebody with a smattering of the Latin learned 50 years ago in school felt qualified to lecture an ad-hoc group of church choristers about how to pronounce the Latin in Ave Verum - the Elgar, actually, not the Mozart - absurdly the choir will be singing the Elgar in Latin, and the Mozart in its usual weak English translation (at the same service, I might add, as O sacred head, sore wounded is being sung in an appallingly cack-handed translation).

Don't these self-appointed didacts realise the extent of their own ignorance? In the age of instant Googling choir people and didacts need no longer remain in ignorance. There are millions of sites that explain the pronunciation of church Latin, so there's no excuse.

Here's a quick resumé.

Church Latin is not classical Latin, the language that some of us were lucky enough to get a couple of years  of in grammar schools (remember them?) Church Latin is a language created by the Church in about the 4thC AD. Its structure and its basic vocabulary is taken from classical Latin, but there the resemblance ends. How classical Latin might have been pronounced is irrelevant: Pope Pius X decreed (at the turn of the 19th/20thC) that henceforth church Latin would be pronounced as it was pronounced in Rome.

So, to cut a long story short, church Latin should be pronounced as though it were the Italian spoken in Rome (and not the Italian spoken in the south of Italy.) Choristers who know what they're doing make slight changes in pronunciation if they are singing a Latin text by a German composer, or an early French composer, and, if they are very, very clever, a Russian or Finnish composer, but the Italian of Rome is the default pronunciation.

The problem is that people who vaguely remember their schooldays Latin probably don't know any Italian, which is why they still think Ave Verum is pronounced Ah Way Way Rum and Virgine Weir-ghin-ay.

So - quis custodiet ipsos custodes? You might well ask.

---------------------------------

To read Pius X's words, and the reasoning, go here:

http://choirstalls.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/parish-mag-february-2009.html 

One body, one vote?

Someone chucked into the proceedings at PCC last night that there might be a ban on husbands and wives both being members (she’d read it or heard it somewhere. It’s great fun when people chuck in things like this, which they’re never able to give chapter or verse for – it wastes time wonderfully, generates heated argument, and saves everybody the trouble of having to worry about things like parish share, the leaky roof and requests for exhumations.) I can just about accept that somewhere, once, probably in the US of A*, some bright Herbert thought it would be a wizard wheeze to ban one of a married couple in case they started a domestic during a meeting. But let us for a moment suppose that this potty idea is true, and that diocese has decreed it.

For a start, in our household there would immediately be only one person working for the church, not two. Next there would be a legal challenge on one of two grounds – discrimination against married couples, and/or infringement of human rights and individual liberties, and that would go right up to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

And why just ban one of a married couple?  Would the ban extend to one of a cohabiting couple? Or one of a gay couple? Would a candidate have to declare the nature of his or her relationship with somebody, even a putative one, a sort of twinkle in the eye, in case that somebody had to be blacklisted?

And what would be the idea behind such a ban anyway? An assumption that husband and wife, or partners, think and vote in exactly the same way? Or that somehow a married couple is denying a place on PCC to somebody more worthy – a sort of National Church Service  bed-blocking? After all, worthy and well-qualified candidates are queuing up for the opportunity to serve, aren’t they?

My wife and I are different in many interesting ways, she being a woman and I not, and so we have come to an understanding.  I don’t run the Mother’s Union, and she doesn’t sing bass in the choir. But she is a member of PCC because she is secretary to deanery synod, and I am a member because I was elected to sit on deanery synod. We have full speaking and voting rights on PCC, although that might be because our PCC doesn’t actually have Standing Orders to say that we can't, and the rules of conduct are made [or made up] by the people with the longest memories – ‘we’ve always done it like that here.’

But try getting advice or even model standing orders out of diocese! Diocese people are very canny – they know very well that if PCC members were made fully aware of their legal responsibilities as trustees of a charity, and their possible personal liability if something went badly wrong, like sacking an organist who then goes to an employment tribunal and wins [case reports available on request] the PCC chairs would be empty.

But what I really, really want to know is this – which one of us in our household would fall victim to such a ban: me or my very independent and differently skilled wife? Because if PCC was minded to take this nonsense seriously, it wouldn’t see one of us for dust. Until the court case came up, that is.

*’A small Kentucky church finds itself at the epicenter of a battle over racism and the gospel. Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church, a small, 40-person congregation located in Pike County, Kentucky, is catching widespread grief over its recent decision to target interracial couples. The church has decided to forbid these couples from partaking in worship activities and will not allow them to become members...’

Read the full report here

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/kentucky-church-bans-interracial-couples-from-becoming-members-leading-worship/

April 2012 Choirstalls column, n't

Another sacrifice to the spike. This should have appeared in the April 2012 parish mag, but didn't.

Quite apart from the bling proudly displayed as choristers clink and clank their way back to their stalls after prizegiving, the annual RSCM festival service at Blackburn Cathedral has many other things to commend it, not least the fact that you don’t have to fork out a small fortune to be allowed in.

On a holiday last year we wanted to see the new font in Salisbury Cathedral, and in Annie marched, confident and unchallenged. I hesitated, and was lost. “Get in the queue, Sir,” a voice barked from the Box Office, meaning “Hand over your six quid or hop it.” I hopped it, I’m afraid, and waited without while Annie hobnobbed with vergers within, and it was while I was waiting and seething not a little that another brilliant idea landed - attendance cards! It is quite simple, and it works like this.

Every time you attend a service in your local parish church a sidesperson stamps your card. The idea is that you produce that card at the box office of any cathedral in the land, and if you’ve got enough points you’ll be whisked past the lady flogging tickets to sightseers asking what time the bar opens and straight into the VIP lounge for a small sherry with the Bishop, followed by a guided tour by the Dean himself. It won’t affect cathedral takings all that much, judging by the decline in regular church attendance. And choir persons are particularly privileged, ho-ho, being under a three-line-whip on every Sunday in the year – we can practically fill our cards in Holy Week alone.

I was ticked off last month by the Editor-in-Chief for being longwinded (as if!) so this month’s column is correspondingly short. But I couldn’t let this snippet pass without a mention.

A new Methodist hymnal, Singing the Faith, was published earlier this year, and was reviewed in Church Times by Dr J R Watson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Durham.

The review is a masterpiece of the art of damning with faint praise, or so I read it. Dr Watson enumerates one or two good points, notes pointedly that the number of hymns by the Wesleys has been virtually halved, and concludes thus:

“It is to be hoped...that the music, and the best of the contemporary texts, will help to make this book successful with a new generation of Methodists, who will never know how much they have lost.”

Quite.

Copyright & Public Performance - church licences, PS

And while I’m on the subject.

Older hymn books use the convention of a double bar marking in the music to indicate line endings in the text, and that is designed to help choir persons navigate between the words and the music, which are sometimes widely separated. Now it often happens that a line ending occurs in the middle of a bar of music, so this helpful marking isn’t a real bar line at all, and as such it isn’t catered for by notation software. Sorry to be technical, but it has to be added as a graphic, and that takes time and care and prior consideration of the needs of singers.

It is a measure of the contempt that the editors of modern hymnals have for traditional church choirs that they don’t bother with such detail – indeed the editors of Complete Anglican Hymns Old And New go so far as to suggest that if choirs can’t cope with their music settings they should sing in unison.

Isn’t it time for a backlash against the twin forces of textual and musical rewritings, renewed copyrights and the implicit threat of legal action unless expensive licences are taken out?

With very few exceptions the best hymns and musical settings are long out of copyright, and (as Cathy of the Cathy Thinks blog linked below has suggested) with word processors and notation software easily available there is no reason why a church can’t create its own service sheets or even complete hymnals. with the advantage of getting back to original words, not the questionable rewritings that are now ubiquitous.

Against the cost of creating such local resources we can offset the cost of reproduction licences, and I note that in 2011 my church reprinted, under licence, the words of only two hymns. The cost of the licence that allowed us to do it?  Inclusive of VAT - £162.46.

Copyright & Public Performance - church licences

It's a pity that the editors of modern church hymnals and books of worship don't give as much attention to the quality of editing as they do to the copyright of their typography, and the intellectual property rights of their songwriters.

I have two copies of the SATB version of Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New, published by Kevin Mayhew Limited. The second version (and I am being very careful to avoid words with very precise meanings in the publishing world for the moment) contains quite a lot of corrections in the texts of hymns and in their musical notation compared with the first, but nowhere is there any acknowledgement of that fact. But it gets worse. In one hymn there's a different number of verses, and in the melody-only edition yet another. Topping up the collection of church hymnals because of wear and tear (the bindings are decidedly unstrong) means that the choir and congregation are singing from incompatible versions of the same hymn book.

To an ex-bibliographer and library cataloguer this hymnal is a nightmare, for it poses the question: when does a reprint become a new edition? The publishers evidently consider SATB version 2 to be a reprint, because it is given the same ISBN number as the first, and you have to look hard to be able to tell the two versions apart. It is, to put it mildly, a little bit naughty.

I have drawn attention to some of the most glaring mistakes in musical notation in this hymnal elsewhere in this blog, for example

http://choirstalls.blogspot.com/2008/12/orange-brick-revised.html

but now that copyright holders are becoming more aggressive in their assertion of their rights, let's just look at some of the difficulties that even those of us who want to stay on the right side of the law and not see ourselves and our fellow PCC members or our incumbent fined or banged up in chokey for the rest of their natural face.

The Music Reproduction Licence (MRL) from Church Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) allows a PCC to reproduce the in-copyright music of some hymns for use in, say, special orders of service, provided a copyright notice is given in a prescribed form. I have no problem with that.  But what if that music contains glaring errors? Is resetting it in a music notation program such as Sibelius, Finale, or Noteworthy and then including it in a special booklet ("for use in acts of divine worship, including weddings and funerals" - we have to say that, so that there is no misunderstanding) a breach of copyright?  If the music is actually out of copyright, no. But what if it is still in copyright? I imagine it would be no defence to say "but, your Honour, they'd put an A-flat when it should have been a G-sharp, so we just put it right."

In our churches nobody sets out with the deliberate intention to steal, but the presence of a photocopier in the church office is all too great a temptation for those ignorant of the law. In essence running off a dozen copies of a anthem from a borrowed volume from the RSCM is just as much theft as running a pirate DVD copying operation from the vicar's vestry: the only difference is scale - shoplifting v. armed robbery.

In a small rural parish the legal obligations of PCCs are fast outrunning the abilities of officers to cope, and diocese doesn't help when its officers put out circular letters suggesting that when a church buys a set of hymnals it acquires copyright in those hymnals. So to put the record straight I was to give a brief report to our Deanery Synod tomorrow, backed up by a fact-sheet giving brief details of and contact numbers for CCLI, CCL, MRL, CVL, PPL, PRS, Licensing Act 2003 permissions, Bodies of People Approvals, Grand Rights, and oh, a few other things, and what to do about them. All in one neat, brief document, using words gleaned from official publications and websites.

I sent a copy to CCLI, more out of courtesy than anything. A day before Synod I received an e-mail from CCLI saying that my fact-sheet had been referred to Upstairs, and I couldn't 'use' it until I'd been given clearance.

I think that's one for the Human Rights Court, me.

And while I'm at it, I'm going to write to the Bishops, and ask if they could please arrange for my pension  to be increased to £26,000 after tax - just to poverty level, I'm not greedy. I'm on about half that, and I'm working harder and for longer hours than ever I was when I was in paid employment.

Perhaps I should write a book of worship songs...