Matt's Weblog

Last night's excitement was part 2 of the Alpha course: historical evidence for Christ. Nicky Gumball (or whatever his name is) did his Tony Blair imitation on the video and came up with a neat argument as to why Christ had to be god. However, it had two flaws:

a) It interpreted the Gospels as you would read a modern history, rather than as a gospel intended to convert and convince the unbeliever. A description of an event in the New Testament cannot be taken as meaning that that even happened as described.

b) It quoted C.S. Lewis who is, as Philip Pullman says, blatantly racist and sexist.

I remain unconvinced and unconverted (no big surprise there then).

What an utter waste of time. Val and I trotted off to Farnborough last night to try out the yoga class. I was expecting the normal routines of stretching, balancing (and consequent hopping), breathing and relaxation, ie all the usual stuff. But no, instead we get a pompous fool who's idea of a introductory yoga course is to talk for 55 minutes of the hour long lesson. It not as if he was even saying anything interesting.

We were treated to discourses on hyper-ventilation whilst diving, how doctors mislead you in what a deep breath means and how we didn't straighten our backs correctly when coming up from the single exercise that we did do (so why didn't you explain it properly before hand then you buffoon? You quite happily talked about everything else apart from the one thing that might have been of some interest). I'm sure he went on about other things as well but I'd taken up counting the Dalmations on the wall of the creche by then.

At the start of the lesson, he even had the cheek to say about people don't come back after the first week that if they can't be bothered to give up 5 hours (it was a 5 week course) of their time to learn about yoga then they're not sufficiently serious about it: that or you're a dull and boring teacher.

The mediocrity of the evening was only raised when we had to gently jump up and down on the spot and the woman across from me must have been wishing she'd remembered to put on her sports bra.

I stopped to talk to Richie last night (he's a homeless bloke I sometimes see on London Bridge on the way home from work). Normally, he's fairly laid back about his situation (or so he appears anyway) but it all seemed to be getting to him yesterday and he wanted somebody to talk to.

It turns out he was sleeping outside one of the London hospitals' when two of the security guards came out and decided to give him a kicking. He managed to get up with his back against a wall and a stick in his hand when the police rolled up. They decided he was clearly a threat to two big security guards with batons and arrested him.

Just to cheer him up, two more people mugged him the following day, cracking him up the side of his head with a stick and nicking the 6 quid he's managed to beg. It was still bleeding when I saw him.

He was due in court this morning and was going to end up in locked up until his trial unless he could give an address. Hence he was desperately begging to get enough money together to stay at a hostel for a couple of nights. That'd be long enough so he could give it as an address in court and stay out of prison.

He had enough money in the end. I saw him this afternoon and he was actually smiling about free to beg. As he said, he never thought he'd see the day when he'd be glad to see London Bridge again.

Today I have mainly been being passed around by BT to try and get my ADSL line sorted out. Mind you, this has been going on since the 13th so I wasn't optimistic. First of all a very nice man on the night shift apologises, tells me the fault has been closed by the engineers and asks me to phone back after 8am so they can get the engineers to reopen the problem.

I phone back at 8:30am. Matey refuses to help because I don't know the answer to the security question. Get put through to supervisor after some vigorous verbal exchange. Supervisor phones Manchester to log fault with engineers, puts me on hold and cuts me off.

I phone back and am promised the fault has been re-raised. Yeh right.

The Webcam is plugged back in again. http://80.6.46.199:8090/remote6/ for as long as my ip address doesn't change.

Well I've made it back from the Alpha course in one piece. Pretty much what I expected. We started off with a meal with everybody gathering in their own little groups which didn't help the conversation a great deal.

After eating the people on the beta course went off on their bit and we watched the introductory video. The bloke was just like Tony Blair, though nobody seemed to think this as amusing as me when I pointed it out afterwards.

Discussion after the video was split into two groups. There were four of us in our group on the course and 3 or 4 others there to guide the discussion. I think Bill and I were the only ones to have asked anything.

The answers they were giving were certainly interesting (there was a lot of talk about having a personal relationship with God): one woman tried to claim that all bad things that happen to you were due to human free will, thereby unconvincingly side stepping problem God being all knowing, all powerful, compassionate and still letting bad things happen.

Still, I'll be along next week; it gets me out of the house if nothing else.

Well actually about my twentieth attempt as I've been messing with the templates. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to put in there but I shan't let that stop me wittering on.

Tomorrow I'm off on an Alpha course, god knows why (presumably) as I'm not sure I do. Fiona has been on the course and seems to have been converted. I can't see that happening to me but I do get a free meal out of it. Bill's promised to be there as well so we'll have to see what it's like when we get there.