I've just discovered - courtesy of an article in Le Nouvel Observateur: ‘Les intellos virent-ils à droite?’ on the move to the right among French intellectuals - this blog by Michel Onfray on the current presidential campaign.
Onfray is based in Caen, which I visit once a year en route to my annual retreat. He is rabidly anti-Christian: frère Dominique-Marie, the librarian at l'abbaye St. Martin de Mondaye, where I take my retreat, said that he used to meet with Onfray to debate with him.
Onfray is certainly no part of any drift to the right: he is supporting José Bové for President.
One of the most memorable meals Carys and I have ever had was at a Georgian restaurant in St Petersburg. What stands out in our minds is the bread and the dry white Georgian wine. That was in 2003, and since then we've not tasted either Georgian food or Georgian wine (despite consulting our friend Martin Brown, the owner of Wine Searcher - one of the world's top wine websites).
Until tonight, that is, when we visited ‘Mimino’, Kensington's own Georgian restaurant, for our Valentine Day dinner out. We probably wouldn't choose to go there had it not been for one magical memory from the past. But it was a good evening. We were mostly surrounded by Russian speakers - just a few English voices.
And they had Georgian wine, which clearly is now imported into this country - by a company called Europetrans Ltd, based in Poplar. We had a bottle of Vazisubani.
(‘Mimino’, I've discovered is the name of a 1977 film by Georgian director Georgi Daneliya.)
Yesterday, my Archdeacon came and spent around two hours talking with me. Not an everyday event in the life of a parish priest. But I've been working here in Kensington around six months now, and he wanted to see how I was getting on.
I found it hugely useful to get an informed outside perspective on what my priorities need to be. Several questions I've asked myself in quiet moments turned out to be key issues for him. A particular challenge is how to engage in mission in this corner of Kensington, when many who belong to the church don't live in the parish. Unusually, the church is situated in an area which is considerably more affluent than many members of the church.
This week's TLS has introduced me to UrbanDictionary.com. Read the extract here in my commonplace book.
I'm now reading the fourth section of David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, and the book is beginning to work its peculiar magic on me. Each story in the book features the preceding story as a text. Early on the effect is to think that we have moved from what we thought was real to something which actually is real. But by the time we reach the fourth story, we start to assume that it itself will become a text in the next story.
What's interesting about this game, of course, is that all the time we are reading a text, and trying hard to forget that's what we're doing. This text keeps reminding us. Looking ahead, I see that the book has the structure of a palindrome, with chapters mirroring each other in reverse order after we reach one central, solitary chapter. So it'll be interesting to see how the texts continue to relate to one another once we start going backwards in time.
This is mostly simply a memo to myself to find the time to watch a film short by Jake Paltrow, commissioned by the New York Times magazine. He gets Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Helen Mirren, Penelope Cruz and Leonardo DiCaprio to talk about the films which first had an effect on them. Jake Paltrow is the brother of the actress Gwyneth.
My friend David Henderson has just forwarded me a link to this video on YouTube: Introducing the Book. It made me laugh.
I'm preaching at St Mary Abbots in just under an hour. Last time I preached on the passage set for this evening, Matthew 6: 25 - end, the Vodafone mayfly ad was out in the cinema, and I thought it a perfect modern day parable of the kind Jesus used. So I'm using much of the same material, and it's given me a chance to look again at a very inspiring piece of advertising.
A new site I've discovered through Dave Taylor's blog is Audible, where you can download digital audio books from the web.
I've never been that interested in audio books before. But now I have an MP3 player and have begun to listen to podcasts of my favourite radio programmes, a whole new world is opening up to me.
I'm thinking more about the colours I use on my website and here's a great tool: the 4096 Color Wheel.
Just passing my cursor over it fills my head with new possibilities for this site.
One of the things I plan to use this blog for is to note new websites I've discovered, especially when I haven't yet decided which subject page to file them on.
Today's discovery is Dave Taylor's ‘Intuitive Life Business Blog’.