The Atheist Church

A few months ago I went to visit my sister in Bristol. It was an enjoyable, though tiring trip (as it was sunny we spent quite a bit of the time walking around the city). We played scrabble with her friends, cooked and ate (well, she cooked, and I ate), and saw the charmingly quirky film The 100-year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared.

The last day of my visit was a Sunday, and my sister had a treat in store for me. She had decided that we should pop along to the Bristol branch of The People's Assembly. I had no idea what this could be, and when I asked her for an explanation she told me that it was an 'athiest church' (but not to tell our mum that we would be going). Intrigued by this description, and even more so by my sister's injunction against familial publicity of our outing, I was keen to accompany her on what turned out to also be her first visit to site of non-religious congregation.

The first thing I was surprised to find was that the 'service' was being held in a church, which didn't strike me as a particularly atheist. We arrived, as is customary when our family attends church, fifteen minutes late. Atheist or religious, we certainly weren't going to break the long tradition of late church attendance! We arrived then, as a woman was stood in front of the assembled congregation just finishing reading a passage from a book. Thus far, so much like regular church, I thought to myself. I later learned that the book was Little House on the Prairie. This was followed by some teenagers who told us about the campaign which they had been successfully waging to increase awareness of FGM in institutions, particularly schools, in Bristol. The 'atheist church' line, although amusing did not at this point strike me as a particularly relevant tag at this point, though when the girls sat down and we all got up to sing, I could suddenly see why the comparison might be made. The song was Bob Dylan's The times they are a changin. The congregation sang with gusto. Change, it turned out was the theme of today's meeting. After the sing-a-long we were told that we would have five minuted to mingle with others in the congregation, to talk to people we had never met before (in my case everyone bar my sister), and that we should tell them about a change we had made in the last year, and a change that we wanted to make. I got talking to a nice chap who had, if I recall correctly, come up from Cornwall for the day. When I told him that I had come down from St Andrews he was immediately interested, as he said he had performed poetry there in the Byre theatre some years ago. It turned out that he was to be the next act on, so to speak.

I can't swing

So, back at university, and as usual I have joined various different clubs, to try various different things that I have never done before (or at least have barely tried before). In the past at uni I have joined such clubs as fencing, ten-pin bowling and the university radio station. This time I thought I'd try my hand at squash, and as well as joining the pool club, have been attended several swing dance classes. The pool club night clashes with the swing dance classes though, so as yet I haven't been. I've never been a dancer, but swing seemed like it might be fun and good exercise. Plus I felt that I had reached an acceptable level of incompetence in my attempts to learn salsa, and was thus clearly ready to move onto another dance.

My first swing taster session was of all abilities. I accompanied some of the fellow postgrads living in my building to the student union, where the event would be taking place. Half our number left as we approached the door, after deciding that the dancing looked a little too serious for them (they were there mostly for alcohol, and had come in fancy dress as 1920s gangsters, I think). Taking my life into my hands though I entered, and undeterred by my natural lack of rhythm or any ability to move in time to the music, I tried to follow the steps of the people around me. Except I wasn't following their steps. I was floundering. This was much to the exasperation of the two girls I had accompanied and who took it in turns to show me some steps. By the end - after another girl had shown me some more steps and I was feeling a little more confident, I felt ready to begin beginner's classes a couple of days later. The class started with the teachers telling everyone to "pulse". We jumped up once, landed on our feet with our knees bent, and I began to bounce up and down as I believed was expected of me. By the end of the class, after we had been shown some steps and I had danced with an array of women, I felt embarrassed by my lack of ability, and continual mistakes, but with the expectation that many of the other men probably felt the same way. Undaunted by my incompetence, I again returned to the class today. Despite lacking any ability to move in time to the music, I felt that by the end of the class I had got the hang of one or two of the steps and in the freer session at the end of the class I attempted them over and over again with every girl I danced with. I felt out of my depth but was nonetheless enjoying myself until I came to dance with a French girl, one of the girls I had accompanied to the first session. "I don't know what you're trying to do" she seemed to scream at me time after time, and in no time I was ready to leave the dance floor. I'm hoping that none of the students from my tutorial classes were learning swing, and were treated to the embarrassment of my dancing. I think I might give the pool club try next time (or maybe just get on with writing my thesis). 

The Giant and the Church

My mum regularly attends a local pentecostal church, and has done since before I was born, the village where my parents currently live having been the locality in question from around my third birthday onwards. Every Sunday that I am staying at home with them my mum asks me if I am going to attend church with her, and from a sense of guilt at the disappointed noises which follow when I say no, I sometimes acquiesce.

The church is a modest affair, the building itself being of noticeably religious orientation only because of the somewhat mutilated cross on the outside of one wall neighbouring the main road. I say mutilated because the cross was "redesigned" some years ago by a chap with an evidently avantgarde approach to traditional religious symbols, who must have thought that the traditional cross in the shape of... well, a cross was a bit old hat and returned said item to the church with one of the arms lopped off, which he had replaced by a bird of some description, which I presume to be a dove.

But I digress slightly. Where was I? Oh yes, I was about to tell you about the interior of the church. Inside the church of course, are the church-goers, which at present seem to be in almost equal measures long-term residents of the village, recent arrivals from East London whose skin is a darker hue than is traditional in these parts, and residents of the local care home for people with various interesting disorders, such as autism and downs syndrome. My brother being one of the current residents, I visited the venerable institution on my return from Bolivia. My brother has a flat which is slightly detached from the main building, but which one has to access through the larger building on entering and leaving. On the way out with mum on this particular occasion a colossus bounded down the stairs, and warmly greeted myself and said parent, asking after my brother and shaking me a bit too firmly by the hand. Upon reaching the street I asked my mum if this goliath (he was comfortably seven feet tall, probably seven and a half) was an inmate or a warden, and was somewhat taken aback when she told me that he was in fact one of the inmates. I asked her what he was in for, and was told that "he has a growth problem". I thought for a moment before asking "is that it?", and my mum replied that he has been interred because of fears that he might get taken advantage of because of his height.

But anyway, back to the church. So this morning my mum and I enter the church and sit down behind the giant. I attempt to focus my sore eyes. Before leaving the house I had been staring into them with the aid of a mirror, after becoming rather fascinated with the pigmentation of and shapes within my iris, and then attempting to discover whether through prolonged gazing of this sort I'd be able to detect a dilation of my pupils. I think I may have strained my eyes in doing so, but I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that they now feel right as rain. The service took the usual form, a bit of singing, some relation from various members of the congregation about how they wish to praise and thank God for something or other that has happened to them or their relatives that week, and then pastor giving a rambling sermon. This was of course interspersed with the intake of bread and ribena and the saying of prayer. When it came to the segment of the service in which audience members share their anecdotes I was prepared - for the first time! - to share something. After listening to an old woman relate how God had enabled her - or it may have been a relative - to recover from some life-threatening illness or other, and then a teenager filling us in on a similar tale, I got up to tell the assembled masses of how pleased and thankful I was that God had, in the form of the financial advisor at the university's student services department, sent some money my way. Obviously, being English and thus having to suffer the unfortunate affliction of irony dripping from every word that I utter, this was a difficult thing to. While the previous two speakers had been holding the congregation's attention, I had been inwardly preparing myself be repeating the mantra "don't try to be funny" to myself. I've sometimes thought it surprising that Christianity ever took off at all in this country, since being religious seems to require levels of sincerity so clearly incompatible with the English psyche. Which is ironic really, since God himself is, of course, an Englishman. After I had sat down, one of the other congregation members took the floor to inform us that he didn't really have anything to say, but wanted to sing, and then began a little ditty which I had never heard before and wondered whether he was improvising. There was just time before continuing the show for my mum to step up, say she was glad that I had spoken because if I hadn't she would have told to story of my windfall herself, and then to thank God for providing the half a duck my dad had spotted in the reductions counter at the supermarket the other day.

When the sharing of personal stories was over with, and we got on with some good old singing, Goliath turned around to me and enquired as to my footballing affiliation. Upon informing him that I was a West Ham fan, he put his hand up for a high five and I winced at the force of impact as his palm hit mine. I don't know if he is a regular attendee. He would certainly be useful to have in the company should productions of the life of King David be performed.

How not to respond in a job interview

My downfall in job interviews in general that I am far too honest (a good example of this is when I was being interviewed for an Assistant Warden job at university a few years ago, and upon being asked why I was interested in the role, responded that it was because of the free accommodation). The following are some of the responses which I gave to questions in a recent interview for a job teaching English as a Foreign Language in London.

On being asked what I know about the company, I told the interviewer something like: "To be honest, I looked at the company's website when I applied for the job (a couple of weeks previously), and I don't know if I can remember anything now". Her response was "well, that's honest, I suppose". Upon realising (as the words left my mouth) that I had shot myself in the foot, I attempted to recite to her the school's social programme, which I had seen on the wall of reception on the way in. I suppose I was hoping that I'd at least get some brownie-points for short-term memory and observation skills.

She asked me what kind of a teacher I am. I told her I was a "facilitator" - the first word that entered my head, without being able to tell her what I meant by the description, and instead gibbered somewhat.

By the time she asked me to do a 5-minute demonstration lesson (which she gave me 5 minutes on my own with board pens and a piece of paper to prepare), I knew that the game was up. My mind went blank, and I spent 4 of the 5 minutes staring at the piece of paper without any idea of what I was going to do when she came back in to the room. The last minute I spent drawing a plan of town on the board, and when the interviewer returned, I proceeded to teach her an elementary level class of giving and asking for directions. It seemed to go OK, some things worked, and others I clearly could have done better, which was exactly the feedback I was given. If I was judged on the class alone then perhaps I would have been offered the job.

Before the interview was over, the interviewer had one final question for me. "Are you familiar with phonetic symbols?", she asked me. "With what?" was my devastating reply, somehow not having heard her words clearly. I don't think that then telling her that it was the way she pronounced "phonetic symbols" that was the problem helped my cause very much.

I wasn't surprised, a few days later, to receive an email telling me that "at this time [I] have not been successful in my application."

Conference

So yesterday I gave my first presentation of my research at a conference.  Writing the presentation was a great way for me to structure my own thoughts about the topic at hand into an argument, and perhaps just as importantly, to think about what I needed to present to an audience of people who had only a passing knowledge about Bolivia, in order for them to be able to understand what I was talking about.

Academic conferences are a great way to see cities around the country I might not otherwise travel to. This one was in Liverpool, and outside the conference at Liverpool University I managed to acquaint myself with the interiors of a couple of pubs. It was a three day conference, and my talk was on the last day, which was good because I got a chance to get to know my audience members before presenting my paper to them. Actually, I knew almost all of the audience members of my talk, the audience numbering only three (not including my fellow panel members). It was a slightly odd, but very stress-free way of giving a presentation, after having been rather nervous beforehand, and then spent the night before creating extra slides for my power point presentation, to find that the people listening to me would have been able to fit into the back of a taxi together.

After my presentation, I was then morally obliged to go and listen to the talks given to by the two women who had listened to me (though I would have gone anyway). After their presentation ended, we enjoyed a wine lunch which we then took with us to the following panel, and which made it rather difficult to follow the arguments of the presenters. Throughout the day - aided perhaps somewhat by the wine - I became more and more enamoured with a pretty blonde woman who had been nearly half of the audience for my presentation. Towards the end of the day, in a moment alone with her in one of the aforementioned pubs, I told her how incredibly pretty I thought she was, which she seemed to take with slight embarrassment. Five minutes later, a friend told me that the girl, in addition to being beautiful and charming, was also married. It felt like an unexpected (and unwanted) sign of my own ageing, that a woman I like is no longer unavailable merely because she has a boyfriend ('why do all the pretty girls seem to have boyfriends?' I often seem to have mused to myself), but rather because she has a husband. I'll have to start checking out women's fingers for rings, from now on, I suppose.

Time Travel

I'm now back in the UK from Bolivia and adjusting to the strangeness of life in Britain (e.g. neon lights everywhere; my first week back I waited for the bus on the wrong side of the road). While I was away in Bolivia for most of the previous eighteen months, my mum was supposed to clear out the house ready for my parents to try to move. I get back and nothing in the house has changed. My sister and I, finally fed-up with the prevaricating, decide to take matters into our own hands. Last weekend we stepped boldly into the world of the drawers in the hall; a world which, by the looks of its contents, no intrepid explorer had ventured into during the modern era. Catalogue after catalogue came tumbling out. Great Universal 1993 being the oldest. Oh, the shell suits! When we were finished, the two sets of of cheap draws were taken out into the garden and smashed up. A cathartic experience.

The next day, it was the turn of the wardrobe inside my brother's room. If the past is a foreign country, then perhaps I should have had my passport on me. Inside there were such treasures as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle kite-string, cassettes recorded at a meeting in 1982, and a 1980s style microphone. I was forced to repeatedly turn to my mum and ask her: "What is this?". At the bottom of the drawers was a West Ham United scarf knitted by my grandmother around 50 years ago, which I never remember seeing before, and which my dad said that he hadn't set eyes on for about the last 20 years. I managed to liberate many dozens of women's magazines held captive in the cupboard since the mid-90s, with one magazine (Best) having evidently been incarcerated since 1989. I was even joyously reunited with a Shoot magazine from 1988. The front cover of said magazine had the banner headline on the front cover: "Champions EVERTON", and below the title, on the right of a picture of Ian Rush playing for Juventus, we are teased by the intriguing words "Trevor Francis - Why he's angry".

Updates to follow on the rest of the de-cluttering project...