Carys and I yesterday became the proud owners of a Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Parking Permit.
What this means in practice is that instead of paying £2 into a parking meter every time we want to walk Ollie in Kensington Gardens, we can now park close to the perimeter of the parks in a residents' parking bay. And that when we offer our front drive to guests, we can now park our own car just around the corner, instead of trekking up to the church hall up in the heart of Kensington.
One of the most memorable films I've ever seen was The Commissar by the Russian director Alexander Askoldov. Carys loved the film and we've often talked about it and wished we could see it again. My guess is that we saw it in London around 1988 or 1989 (my guess is based on the film's 1988 success at the Berlin Film Festival).
Since the advent of the Web, I've occasionally searched for copies of the film, but in vain. Then last week, I had lunch with the film scriptwriter Mark Skeet (who is a parent at our church school). He suggested I look in Video City in Notting Hill. I have to confess I was sceptical.
But yesterday I found myself passing Video City, and not long after I entered, found a DVD of The Commissar on the shelves. Obviously, it happens recently to have been released on DVD. I immediately bought it as a present for Carys.
"Now recognised as a a classic of Russian cinema" claim the sleeve notes.
Ingmar Bergman died yesterday. He was one of the first serious film makers whose work I came across - possibly because Woody Allen was such a devotee.
I've just looked at our shelves and see we have three of his films - Fanny and Alexander, Winter Light and The Seventh Seal, which strangely I don't think I've ever seen. A few years ago, the NFT had a Bergman retrospective and I got to see quite a few of his other films then. I've seen Wild Strawberries two or three times, and it's that film for which I think I'll remember him - though Fanny and Alexander is delightful.
I love the days which bring an Amazon delivery. What arrived today was a manual to help me understand Dreamweaver.
I bought a copy of Dreamweaver a couple of months ago now, using money given to me as a leaving present by my last parish. I haven't yet had the time to use it. Everyone tells me it's complicated - to me it feels like entering another world.
When I first started this website, in the summer of 2002, I decided to build it using Microsoft FrontPage. In the long term, this turned out not to be a good way to manage the site. But possibly at that stage I wouldn't have even started on the site without some software to help me. And maybe I couldn't afford Dreamweaver back then as an ordinand.
After a while, I decided to code the site by hand in XHTML. Doing this has taught me the code and given me complete control over the site's content. But now I think the time has come to be more creative and adventurous with the site. And that's hard for someone like me, squeezing the work into my spare time, without a sophisticated piece of software like Dreamweaver.
One reassuring feature for me of Dreamweaver is that it doesn't mess around with hand-typed code (see this extract from my new manual). I've spent a lot of time trying to make sure my code displays very obviously the structure of my web pages and don't want all that work ruined.
Oh, and the manual is - Dreamweaver CSS - The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland.
The content of this website reveals quite a lot - too much perhaps - about the shape of my life. Sadly some of the richest and most interesting periods of my life have very few blog entries, as I simply can't find the time to write them. I would love to find the time for both.
Yesterday I created a new page - the 2007 index for my commonplace book. And what this reveals, again sadly, is just how little I have read this year compared with previous years. Life has been far busier. But this website is like a mirror showing me I need to be reading more.
Carys and I went out for an impromptu meal together this evening, at Il Portico restaurant, on Kensington High Street. If we walk north from Pembroke Road, through Pembroke Square and then Edwardes Square, the restaurant is just to the right.
We had a great time catching up with each other. The year is beginning to wind down - Tuesday was the first anniversary of my licensing here. We're beginning to look forward to our holiday - yesterday I booked the first leg of our travels, and on the way to the restaurant we agreed on a plan for the second leg.
We'd finished our meal and were getting ready to move on when I realised the man walking past with a group of friends was David Hockney, arguably this country's greatest living artist. I knew he lived in Edwardes Square, but it was my first sighting of him. Rather strange that it should be me who recognised him: normally Carys recognises faces, whilst I'm much stronger on voices. But I was unusally struck by this sighting - this from someone who just a week earlier was in a meeting sitting opposite Mariella Frostrup. Kensington is full of stars. But David Hockney leaves me quite awestruck.
I'm writing this entry at the site of one of the few big artistic epiphanies in my life. I'm at the Arnolfini Arts Centre in Bristol, waiting for my London train.
Back - I think - in 1983, I came here one Friday evening to see Andrei Tarkovsky's film Nostalghia. As I watched the penultimate scene in which a man three times tries to walk across a dried out pool with a lighted candle - a ten minute scene all done in one take - I decided this was probably the most boring film I'd ever watched. I left the Arnolfini regretting having wasted an evening.
But over that weekend, I found that scenes from the film kept returning into my head. I was fascinated by the contrast in the film between water and fire. And so on the Monday I decided to return to the Arnolfini and see the film for a second time. And I decided it was a great film, that I loved it, that it did something for me that film had never done before.
Since then, it's always been my favourite film. As it happens, I watched it the night before Easter Day 1997, the day I returned rather spectacularly to Christian faith (the film is, for me, dripping with spirituality). A few weeks ago I had a fairly relentless schedule one day and decided I needed to find something during the day that would feed my soul. I gave myself half an hour and watched the first scene and the last two scenes of Nostalghia. It was enough.
Seven New Wonders of the World, chosen by a global poll, are listed at the New 7 Wonders website.
Just discovered their website. One of those subjects which has always interested me, but in which I've invested little time or energy. So perhaps this is a good starting point.
What interests me is the way an understanding of the world which might be called minimalist - using Ockham's razor - can nevertheless find a place for emergent properties whose existence depends only on other entities and how they interreact.
Our monthly all-age service today. Already, by the start of July, numbers in this part of London are down to the 70s (they had been up in the 90s). Apparently some of the private schools have already broken up for the summer. I wonder if we need to rethink which week we hold the service. The problem is that once we're past April, services in May and June fall either during half term or over a bank holiday weekend. If July turns out to be a low month, we then have rather a large gap between April and mid-September, over a third of the year.
Having said that, there was once again a great buzz after the service.
This evening I led our monthly Taize service up at St Mary Abbots with our new deacon, Rachel Hawes, whose ordination I attended at St Paul's Cathedral yesterday evening. After the service I couldn't resist taking a peek at the baptism register. We are required to fill in the occupation of the parents of baptism candidates. The father of one of this morning's candidates has his occupation listed as ‘Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition’.