YORK - Icelandic Interlude in Verse Four

This week's great British trip was up to York. Former home of the Vikings, current home of the Jorvik Viking Centre and, uh, will no doubt have some more Vikings in the future. Maybe they'll invade again one day? Currently it's also home to Jo and Matt; long time readers may remember the joy their bouncy castle wedding brought me last year and how it offset the pain of getting there and away by rail (similar pains were had this time around, with a 'four engine blowout' between Oxford and Banbury on the way up. I'd blame Jo and Matt for this but, really, it has nothing to do with them. It's just *the way trains are*)

York, for those who are not familliar, is in Yorkshire. Which is a county up in the north of England and a very, very long way away from anywhere where I might be living. It is also, I have discovered, very cold in August. And frightning that is since I was always the great achiever when it came to living in cold climates (possibly due to a time living in my first house in Norwich when Lois and I couldn't work out how to turn the heating on for a week) and now I can't even cope with a little no-sun and howling wind. Nevermind, though, because York is enormously pretty, has a beautiful river and lots of green bits.


Jo on the York walls circa 2004 because I forgot to bring my camera this time. Jo has often been scared and confused by my method of putting photographic subjects to one side (in the name of "art", people) and so I have many hundreds of photos of her leaning into shot like this, lest I chop her out...

Matt and Jo have my favourite type of house. That is the one which has stuff in it. I have lived in houses with both stuff and no stuff (the latter because my mother appears to have an allergy) and I very much prefer the former. What is the point of acquiring a large collection of bricks and mortar arranged with wood into room and living space format if one does not put things in it? The only exceptions to this rule should surely be exhibition halls and, as I've never been into an exhibiton and I didn't find cold, sterile and draughty, I'd argue that even this is an unsatisfactory usage of space.

So there was stuff, there was some frisbee action and there was plenty of tea and there were DVD and video moments of related joy. For anyone who misses the seminal British soap opera Night and Day or the cruelly axed CBS series Now and Again, you have friends here. Also, one of the long running preoccupations of this blog has finally come to an end. We watched Serenity and it did, indeed, turn out to be glorious. But, then, I've been telling you all that for over a year, now.

A lovely week, with lovely people in a lovely place. Aside from some niggles with the cold, a pub quiz we didn't win (although we didn't get a single film question wrong. These things make me happy) And marks deducted for the pub which promised us a cheap tea and doughtnut combination and which then refused to serve us... at three o'clock (for the trans-Atlantic types; this is quintissential British tea time) If that sort of thing isn't already illegal then it jolly well should be.


Proper Yorkshire field. In the middle of proper Yorkshire. Different from any other field you might see anywhere else in the world. Really.

The rest of my life is currently consumed with the ever more complicated business of deciding a job I might like to do, hunting for it and then going through the dehumanising process of applying for it. Job applications are one of the fundamental areas in life which could turn even the most mild mannered of us into beret wearing philosophy spouting gits. They ask for individuality, they make all sorts of noises about what *you* might bring to a role but, when it comes down to it, everyone produces exactly the same application and more or less looks for the same answers. I feel my individuality slipping away from me, one person specification at a time...

Actually, the real reason why this business is more complicated than usual at the moment is all down to me and the fact I can never do these things simply. I had resolved to move back to Bristol and simply concentrate my search and, although this might very well happen fairly soon, there are still some other ideas in my orbit which stop me from being as decisive as maybe I should be. Because if they align right, they could be very exciting.

Until then, I was struck by something my favourite man-about-Bristol, Matt C, blogged this week about how although many of us are called to serve in some capacity, few will actually do it working for a church or charity and few *should* do it. This is something I used to rant and rave about an awful lot when I was trying to figure out ways of doing some service and do something interesting and inspiring without getting stuck in a church ghetto or failing to have decent adventures at the same time (see that whole year where I went away and did non-mission volunteer work in some vaguely exotic places, for example) I'm a big fan of church people taking all these brilliant ideas about working and serving others and being all humble but dynamic about it *out* of the church and into the real world. Because, really folks, the world needs you in it more than the church does. And you need to spend more time with non-church people. Really, I can tell.

So, why is it that practically every job I've thought about applying for or had dangled in front of me recently *is* within a church? Why am I, someone who set myself up to be the antithesis of this culture, suddenly finding that all the things I want to do are back inside of it? Am I suddenly giving up? Stopping having adventures and trying to retreat to the safe place where the nasty non-Church people can stop scaring me with all those sex, drinking and fixed rate mortgage things? It's my quandry of the month and I'm not sure of the answer. But I'm finding it has something to do with my insistance on wanting to do a job, at least for the moment, which is directly about serving and reaching out to the poor and all that jazz. And, for someone in my position, it seems that poorly paid jobs within the sphere of the Church are one of the clearer ways of doing that. Perhaps it's just a matter of language - because I find the vocabulary used by various Church type jobs describing action and adventure hits me far harder than the management speak used elsewhere. We all may moan about it being a ghetto; but the reason that ghettos are what they are is because everyone there is speaking a similar language, right?

For the moment, it seems, I'm firing my applications off in that direction. And maybe that's where I'll be. At least until I've worked out how to understand the vocabularly of the rest of the working world and get myself into the positions there where I can make a difference and enjoy what I do. I suspect that when that happens, I'll be becoming a teacher.

A quick final word on Snakes on a Plane, the fabulous film title and trailer which, sadly, turned out not to be just a great pitch but has just been released as a proper film. Sad because, although I'll see it out of my love for trash of all varieties, I just can't believe that any film could ever be as good as that title. In that vein, I suspect the more interesting legacy from this reptilian extravaganza will be the multitude of spoof campaigns for spoof films punning on the title. So far I've seen trails on YouTube for Snakes on a Train (predictable), Snakes on a Bike (interesting), Planes of a Snake (I like it) and, my personal favourite, Snakes on Claire Danes ("That's it! I want these so-called snakes out of my so-called life!") Frankly, even if the film had never seen the light of day, the fabulous title was and the ease of video sharing were all that were necessary for the imaginations of geeks everywhere to run wild. Hurrah for that.