My Powers are Middling

A velegoraptor

My son received a few new lego sets for Christmas and his birthday (including the impressive dinosaur to the right), so the sight of him scouring a tray full of bricks for a 4x1 black base has become a familiar site.  He's pretty good at finding things himself but every now and then there's a cry of:

"Dad I need your powers!"

because my little boy has discovered that I have a pretty impressive ability to find lego bricks.  And there certainly are a great variety of bricks on that tray; lego has got more complicated since the last time I was looking at it.  Of course you could stick to working only with the old style of bricks, but then you would be limiting what you can build. There's a famous quote that sums this up quite well:

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."  [Abraham Maslow]

What this is saying is that if you don't have many ways of dealing with problems, you have to use those ways even when they don't fit the problems very well  (It is a pretty famous quote, though I only just found out it originally came from a Management Psychologist; my normal source of pithy observations like this is the book of Proverbs in the Bible, but I'll say more about that in another post).  So if the only bricks you know about are the 4x2 and 2x2 Duplo style ones you're not going to make anything very sophisticated.  This applies to lots of other areas too, for example:

1. If your only solution to conflict is to take over and start ordering people around you can solve some problems, but you won't be much help with others.
2. If your only way to unwind is to have a drink, you will end up drinking (and probably drunk) at some inappropriate times.

There's a couple of areas of my life where I already have a few bricks, but I'd like to have a few more.  The two main ones are family culture and getting close to God.  By family culture I mean "the way we do things in our family".  There's some things about "the way we do things" that I'm really proud of: welcoming people, loving each other, playing together, keeping in touch with extended family.  But there's a lot that could be better.  On getting close to God I can say that there are times when I hear and feel God, but I can tell from reading the Bible and from looking at some of the people I know (like my Mum and Dad) that there's so much more.

So what bricks are in your lego box?  And what problems are you trying to use them to solve?

The Dickensionator

A Dickensian machine (found the picture here).

Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth. In honour of this occasion on BBC Radio 5 Live last night they were explaining how to use the Dickensian Name Generator.  I thought this was quite funny and couldn't find it anyway on the web so decided to put it up here.

What you need to do is this:

1. Take one of your great grandparents' first names as your first name.
2. Take the name of your primary school as your surname, after you've got rid of any extra words like "Saint", "Street" or "School".

I ended up with Charles Lindale which sounds quite Dickensian. Have a go yourself.

I've only read 4 or 5 of Dickens' books, unlike my Mum who's read everything he ever wrote, so I'm not an expert by any means. There are some things that other writers do better but his books are certainly full of colour, compassion, humour, great plots and great characters. And he's a very good observer of what it means to be English, which in turns out hasn't changed that much in 200 years:

1. Class distinctions.
2. Sceptical about the good intentions of politicians.
3. Law abiding.
4. Don't like showing emotion in public.
5. Fear of public embarrasment - won't talk about religion, sex or politics in public.
6. Bad at hospitality, but good at charity and compassion.
7. Endlessly creative at making money.
8. Confused about the distinction between British and English.

I'm not saying that all of these are good things.  As an English Christian I find myself fighting against some of my Englishness, particularly point 5.  Why is it that I find it so hard to talk to people about the things that are most important to me?

What do you think it means to be English (or do I mean British?  See point 8...)

Why write a blog?

Programmers like recursive pictures

This is a blog about blogging.  That might seem a little recursive (see picture on the right), but if you're reading this then you think it might be worth reading, so you might want to know about why I thought it was worth writing.


So why write a blog?  There are lots of other things I could be doing with my time: perfecting my skills and Super Monkey Balls Deluxe, learning to play the guitar, catching up on 19th century £1 classic novels.  Here are my three reasons:

1. Like everyone I think about life quite a bit.  It helps me to think more clearly if I can put my thoughts into words, and it forces me to be a bit more precise and disciplined about it if someone else might read those words.  So writing this blog helps me think.
2. I reckon that some of the thoughts and happenings I’ve gathered over the years are so valuable that I really would like to share them with a few more people.  Even if a few turns out to be 1, it would be well worth me writing this if a few more of my good friends had a chance to hear more of what’s in my head.  So reading this blog might help you think.
3. All my siblings and my Dad are now publishing online in some way and I don’t want to be left out J.

So that’s why I’m writing.  But why “treasure-hunter”?  Jesus talked about a man who had learnt about the kingdom of heaven as “bringing out of his storehouse new treasures as well as old”.  I like the idea of hunting for treasured chunks of wisdom and understanding about life, God, family, society and politics.  In my coming posts I hope to bring you treasures both new and old.