This is a song I began to write at Spring Harvest last year.  On Sunday I included it in the worship songs and taught it to the congregation, as it seemed to fit well with the theme, and it seemed to go down well!  It was actually the first time anyone had heard it, my wife included, so it was good to get it out at last and being useful.  I even had a lady ring me up this evening asking for the words, because she’d found it really inspiring!  That’s such a huge encouragement for a songwriter.  Not that I seek attention or praise, but that God is working through my offering and allowing my gift to bear fruit.  Halleluia!

So, here are the words to the song, “Jesus your name is higher”.  I don’t have the music written out yet, but when I do I’ll try and make sure that finds its way onto here too.   (more…)

Here’s a confession – I’ve not been blogging as much recently as I should have been.  The reason?  Twitter.

I use my blog to tell people what I’ve been doing recently.  My readers are usually friends and family, unless a passer-by happens to stumble across something via Google that interests them.  My posts are generally about things I’m interested in, things I’ve done, things I meant to do but didn’t, or things that I want to rant about.

But now I’ve fallen in love with Twitter, my Twhirl client always running on my desktop, ready to accept my latest status update as and when I feel led to bend the world’s ear with my 140 characters of insight.  No logging in, no pressure to write unnecessary paragraphs of fluff, just a short blast of information.  No time like the present.  The result is that I feel like I’ve told the world what’s going on, despite the noticeable absence on my blog.  So I apologise that I’ve not posted more here in recent weeks.  Blame Twitter for being so darn addictive.

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H is for “Hello stranger”

Second Life.  Remember that?  It was all the rage a few years back, when it pioneered the idea of a virtual reality platform for online community and economy, and if I recall correctly there was a lot of hype around at the time.  Of course, I’m no sheep, so I steered clear of it at the time.  After all, I wasn’t a loner with no ‘real’ friends, so I had no need for an additional life to maintain.

So why is it that I downloaded the software last week?  Why have I been wandering around the Second Life worlds, exploring interesting locations, listening to music, chatting to people, dancing…?  I guess part of the cause is how cut off I’m feeling at the moment, having moved away from my circle of friends.  Sure, we’re living in a land of bliss, surrounded by beautiful countryside, the smell of cow dung floating on the breeze, and glorious hills to gaze at.  But we don’t know anyone.  Well, not many, and not as well as our ‘old’ friends.  I miss AM and Sarah, and the Phil(l)s, and my youth group at church, and my badminton partner, and all those other ex-uni folks who dropped in all the time.

Which leads me to an interesting muse.  What makes a friend?  And why is it important?

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G is for Guitar and “Get a life”

Many of you will know that I am a keen musician.  I blame this partly on my parents, who insisted on taking me to a brass band concert before I was even born.  I didn’t stand a chance.  Church helps too, there’s always music there.  And so it was that I started taking up musical instruments left right and centre, starting with the piano, moving on to cello, and not stopping thereafter.  The list isn’t exactly endless, but it’s fairly sizeable.  The main problem with this, though, is being able to afford the instruments themselves, which don’t come cheap, especially if you want something decent.  So for many years I have had to get by without certain things, in some cases just the accessories, but in some cases the instruments themselves.  I’ve never owned a saxophone, for instance, much as I’d love to.

My first bass guitar was a pink (probably used to be red, but faded in the sun) Squier with a warped neck, which made playing anything but open strings uncomfortable and bone-jarringly out of tune.  Still, for £100 it wasn’t bad, considering it came with a whopping 80 watt amp.  The bass was replaced several years ago, thankfully, with a wood body Aria (I’d give the actual model, but since it’s a “Research and Development” model I think it’s more of a one-off, so comparing it to the mass-produced model that resulted from it might not actually be particularly useful).  The Aria is a dream to play, and has a lovely warm tone to it.  The amp, however, was always pretty ropey, so it wasn’t a huge tragedy when it stopped working.  It was something electric, I know that much, and it just played a very loud humming noise while it was turned on.  So I left it turned off, gathering dust in the garage.  Until just before we moved, when I took it to the dump.  Sad, but somehow very therapeutic at the same time.

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Firstly, a big congratulations to Ian and Lucy! Welcome to the club of married-folk…

It was a superb day, bathed in glorious sunshine and with not a hitch in sight. Other than that of Ian and Lucy, of course. Getting hitched, I mean. The service at St Botolph’s church in Colchester was lovely, with plenty of warmth and a sense of the usual level of excellence that tends to follow Ian around. Everything had been intricately planned and was well executed from start to finish. Ian and his two best men looked very smart, though respectfully upstaged by Lucy’s gorgeous wedding dress, and the bridesmaids’ dresses were sumptuous too.

I actually sang in the choir too, which was good fun. In the invitation to the wedding Ian and Lucy had asked whether anyone would like to sing in the service as part of the choir, and following my offer I was sent music for the two pieces we were to sing during the communion and signing of the register. They were both beautiful pieces, though both unknown to me. Thankfully my voice was in good nick that day, and despite not sight-singing anything for years I managed to get to grips with both by singing along to YouTube the day before. The acoustics in the church are fantastic, so the choir sounded superb.

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They say time flies when you’re having fun.  My recent absence from this blog is testament to the additional truth that actually time flies regardless.  True, I have had a lot of fun recently, but it has been mixed with periods of busyness too, the combination of which has meant that finding time to sit down and rant about it here has been quite difficult.  Nevertheless, the time has now been found, and here I sit to write a conspicuously verbose update.  In case such lengthiness should put you off, I’m dividing this blog into subheadings, to make the sheer quantity of text a little more bite-sized and easier to digest.  If you haven’t the time to read it all, I completely understand.  Just bear in mind that I went to the effort of writing it.  So there.

So, first of all, a general introduction.  Many things have happened since my last blog post, including (but not exclusively): two trips to theatres, some significant developments on the business front, a somewhat extended birthday, Neddy going to the garage a couple of times, a couple of additions to the Dawkins household, an above-average number of requests to lead worship, and a general realisation that Ellie and I are taking over our church.  That’s quite a lot to write about.  I’ll try to keep some of it brief.  Just to demonstrate that, you’ll notice the lack of information in the spaces between words.  Every little helps.

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