The Roots of Happiness

Daily Mail

Hello newspapers of the world.My name is Katherine Wales. You take photos of me all the time. This week, you were all charming enough to print lots of photos of me showing my grey roots and pointing out that I might be letting myself go a bit since the birth of baby George. Some papers even had helpful hints about how to keep on top of this terrible problem.
Let me just tell you a little bit about the way we roll at the moment here at Wales Towers. I have a baby boy. An astonishing, loud, demanding baby boy. And you never did see anything more beautiful - ever. He is our obsession. He has changed everything. I love his chubby arms and legs and the way they look like they have elastic bands on his wrists and ankles . I love the way his head smells and how his head goes a bit wobbly when I pick him up. I spend hours with him in my arms, just holding him close to me - just because I want to. In fact, because I almost feel it is impossible to do anything else.
My chap feels the same as me. Whenever we can, we bring him into bed with us in the mornings and we lie there and play with him. The chap likes to blow bubbles on his belly. It makes both of them laugh like drains. I like to secretly bite my baby's bottom. My mum told me I would want to and I do. If we are feeling really silly, we get my eyeliner and draw a little monocle on him or put a paper hat on him. Because, God willing, he will one day be king, but for now he is ours - mine - and we can just play at it. He is exhausting, frustrating,  scary and fifteen types of wonderful.
So by all means point out my roots. Send me helpful advice. Suggest ways that I can improve myself for the consumption of the masses. It's just that I think you may have confused me with someone who gives a monkeys. 

Not just bouncy

So last Sunday night, we are at church and singing this song, I'm usually a bit allergic to songs that invite God round and tell him he's welcome and offer him Victoria sandwich and a cup of tea. As if you would. As if. Still this is alright.

I remember once that a girl told me that she never sang songs about inviting the Holy Spirit to meetings and asking him to overwhelm us and fill us and things - just in case the Holy Spirit took up the invite. She told me that the last thing she wanted was the meeting to be all full of "happenings" and people falling over and  BOOM - Benny Hinn's your uncle. You get the idea. Because of this, she didn't really bother much with the Holy Spirit. 

Now that's an opinion you may or may not agree with. If I'm brutally honest, I have to say that I have been in meetings when I can hear Mrs Sketchley's voice rising an octave and I know we are going to be there an extra half an hour because that seems the polite thing to do, although really most people would be happier if we just put it to bed and went home. However, I think it is also essential to give the Holy Spirit some elbow room in our meetings and supply an atmosphere which allows receptive listening to anything God is trying to say.

I think what is even more important is that this approach to the Holy Spirit sells him a bit short. It's all about much more than bouncy, singy meetings. Being overwhelmed by the Spirit is about much more than Sunday at Seven and lying down. I think that we need to be overwhelmed to function as any kind of half decent Christian. Left to my own devices, I will never be kind enough, or love enough or have enough self-control. Yet they are fruits of the Spirit and only with enough Spirit in me, will I begin to show them. So even if you struggle with what someone with a stern face once called the "new performance culture around the Holy Spirit" Christians need the Holy Spirit - on Mondays, when work is making you entertain axe-murderer fantasies, On Wednesdays, when that woman won't get off the phone and on Thursday night when sleep won't come because you are so worried. Without the  intervention of the Spirit - even in the most undramatic way - I know I have no chance of living the God filled life.

Galatians 5:22-24
But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

Bullied

Just a brief rant, I have books to read and Rachel Riley and Pasha to worry about on Strictly so I can't stop. BUT, can I just say to M & S and Boots with your three for two Christmas offers and Argos with your Christmassy aliens that look a bit like little sperms and Aldi with your Christmas themed emails etc etc......

I will do Christmas when I am good and ready. If I were a betting woman, I would say that would probably be around December time - if only to fall in with hundreds of years of tradition. I am not afraid that things will run out. I see no reason to stuff my freezer at this stage. If the apocalypse happens between now and December and there are no sprouts in the shops, we will eat chips or cute little sausages on sticks. We will live. 

We all have a vague idea about Christmas presents but I see no reason to panic buy. The world is full of enough electrical gadgets to choke a pig so I doubt that we will run out. I love Christmas. I am a Christian. For me, Christmas celebrates that extraordinary time when God's amazing rescue plan began to form into a living human and I am very glad about that. But you are ruining it! I am sick of how pushy and steam-rollery you are about it. The decorations are up in the shops. By the beginning of December, we will either be completely sick of them or not even noticing them.

When the time is right I will be singing carols, watching "Nativity!" ( Things are really COOL in Nazareth - sing along) and  looking uncertainly into a box of tangled Christmas lights with the best of them. BUT NOT YET. STOP BULLYING ME. Thank you. 

By the way.  Tom Hanks. Captain Philips. Fantastic. Very tense. Left teeth marks in the seat in front but still fantastic. 

Now I need to go and nurse my dog through his annual firework induced nervous breakdown. Goodbye.

Pool

Near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem there was a pool, in Hebrew called Bethesda, with five alcoves. Hundreds of sick people—blind, crippled, paralyzed—were in these alcoves. One man had been an invalid there for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him stretched out by the pool and knew how long he had been there, he said, “Do you want to get well?”

The sick man said, “Sir, when the water is stirred, I don’t have anybody to put me in the pool. By the time I get there, somebody else is already in.”

Jesus said, “Get up, take your bedroll, start walking.” The man was healed on the spot. He picked up his bedroll and walked off.

So thinking about this right. Just thinking. Don't feel the need to build a church round it or anything. For thirty-eight years you live paralyzed in this horrible place, surrounded by filth, sickness, moans and groans. You are alone, no-one to support you. You see your whole life ebbing away and there seems to be nothing you can do. You are tantalisingly close to the solution. If someone would just give you a hand into the pool. The pool is where it's at. You can almost touch the pool - only almost. Then you see Jesus. Jesus with his international galactic eye for the lost and the hopeless has zoomed in on you. Jesus knows what you need. He'll give you a leg up into the pool.

As usual, he doesn't do what you want straight away. He has a question. He asks if you want to get well. Well duh! But the question has focused your mind. Do you really want to see the change? How much? Your mind goes back to the pool. To the thing that you think will rescue you. You explain the situation. Tell him about the thirty eight years and how alone you are. But he doesn't give you a leg up. At least not one that you can see. And he doesn't seem that bothered with the pool. Doesn't he know about the pool? You thought everyone knew about the pool. Jesus says, you do it. Do it. You. No pool. So what are you going to do now? Get all upset about the lack of your special pool-shaped solution? Thirty eight years you have been going through this. Haven't you earned the pool?Or you could just do as he asks. Take a chance. So you respond. You DO something. And Jesus responds and you get up. You find you can. You couldn't before but now you can.

How much of it is up to us? To DO something. To respond the way Jesus asks rather than the way we have decided will make things right. Is something new needed? How much do we really want it? Like I said, just thinking.

Out and About

Theatre Royal Plymouth

On Friday, despite the threat of impending wind and rain based doom over the South West of England,  HOH and I ventured out to the ballet. We went to see Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, partly because we wanted to and partly because I didn't want to be the last person in the western world to go.
I have seen a bit of Bourne, I took FOW2 to The Nutcracker (which she could have taken or left to be honest.) HOH and I also went to see his version of Joseph Losey's The Servant - Play Without Words, which was fan yourself hot actually and I'm glad I didn't go with my nana.
Anyway, this Swan Lake was a sort of cross between a Grimm fairy tale, an astonishing feat of beautiful dance and er .. A Bronski Beat video. As you probably know, the "Big Thing" about Bourne's Swan Lake is that the swans are played by blokes rather than girlies. This has obvious repercussions when the Queen's son falls in love with the lead swan. I trust you are following my meaning here. 
My first mistake was not checking out the story before I went. I am too mean to pay £3.50 for a programme advertising lots of shops in Plymouth that I already know about so I went in completely ignorant. By the time I reached the interval - so many questions.
Who is he?
Is that his mother?
Why is he chasing the swans?
Is in love with a swan? Is that allowed?
Does he want a swan as a pet?
Wouldn't the Queen have something to say about that? Doesn't she own all the swans in England or something? 
When does Natalie Portman come on?

We had also managed to find ourselves sat next to a group of understudies on one side of us - all taut limbs, straight backs and spontaneous applause every five minutes - and a very charming old man on the other side who was struggling manfully with a cough and had to keep putting sucky sweets in his mouth. I tell you, the whole event could have been fraught with tension.

I have to report though that it was quite wonderful. Such amazing physicality, and beauty and humour and wonderful music which they managed to keep the spirit of despite moving so far away from what I suppose is the "Classic" version of the story. The scene in a club called "Swanks" where people managed to to do sixties dancing to a Tchaikovsky score was inspired and the startling finale make you leave the theatre feeling that you had been in the presence of something special. 

I came home and read the story and it all made a bit more sense - as much as any story about people being turned into swans ever makes sense - and although I did realise that the was also an agenda at play - I couldn't be bothered with that. I stood up at the end and clapped. All the theatre and me and the annoyingly lovely understudies. They were all very tall. I've seen Billy Elliot. I thought you couldn't dance the ballet if you were too tall. Another mystery that my lack of culture means I will never be able to solve.