Christmas cards for busy people

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. (Charles Dickens)

The simplest solution to Christmas cards for busy people is the ecard. 3 or 4 clicks, type in a few email addresses, or even upload a csv file, and bingo – all your nearest dearest and those you feel obliged to remember have got a card. Personalised of course. But not all that personal.

Environmentally speaking ecards are better than traditional Christmas cards, but they are not sustainable. At least not sustainable if you bring community as well as carbon into the equation.

The wonderful site Generous demonstrates a commitment to sustainability that is as much about being responsible with your time and compassion as your consumption. Their seasonal actions suggest recycling cards, or making your own from old wrapping paper and cards from years gone by (but keep track so it doesn’t simply return to sender); but not sending ecards.

Homemade Christmas cards, or those from recycled card which are themselves recyclable or reusable is a better solution; particularly because the person receiving it knows you held it, signed it, addressed it and  – unless you know you’re one of those they’re obliged to remember – wanted you to be remembered.

But what if you are simply too busy to send Christmas cards? here are a few suggestions:

1. Make a list of the people you really do want to send something personal to (it may only be short) and then make time. You can buy charity Christmas cards online (they’re mostly FSC rather than recycled, but it’s a start); or don’t worry about the card, make it a letter.

2. Write them while commuting – this is only really possible if you’re one of those people with the really long train journeys, where you get on so early you do get a seat…

3. Jot down what special message(s) you might write in each card while commuting – use your notes app on your mobile or scrawl across your freesheet.

4. Send a Christmas email. This is not the same as an ecard and make sure it doesn’t seem like it either. Use your commuting time to either draft it or write and send the real thing.

5. Phone people instead.

6. Save your ecards for the people you merely need to appease or pay lip service to, and in so doing make your list of things to do smaller…

7. Visit the Christian Solidarity Worldwide website and find out about people around the world for whom a card or a letter really does matter. It might prompt you to consider how busy you really are.

NB. I have a small pile of Christmas cards which I wrote, addressed and stamped last year but missed the posting date. This year I will not let myself be so negligent…. I will make time!

the gender agenda

another excellent insight from my friend Asbo Jesus

I met up with a good friend this week who, along with her fiance, is a doctor. They are both currently working out what their speciality should be. 100 years ago it might have been expected that she specialise in being a nurse and he a doctor. After all, it is in women’s nature to nurture and men’s to play God. She says, her tongue so firmly in cheek it might need a non-gender specific doctor to extract it.

My friend’s fiance is at the moment on a surgical rotation, helping to perform sex reassignment surgery. It is a fascinating procedure, especially when described over pepperoni pizza. Most fascinating to me is the idea that people go through life feeling as if they are the wrong gender.

But what is gender? If we look to the bible, being a woman seems not just to be about having girly parts but about acting the part of a woman. It is being a good wife, it is wearing adornments (or long hair, depending on your reading of Paul), it is perfoming the female mitzvah expected of you. And now, all the evolution and growth in the Christian church allowing women to preach and be ordained has left men in the unclear.

Being a man is to be a good husband, to earn the money (although the good wife in Proverbs 31 helps to bring in the bacon) to teach. To, you know, be a man. But what does that mean?

At this time in history: when the sales of men’s cosmetics has grown massively in the last few years and guys are unafraid to use hair straighteners or profess to not liking football; when women are established in the workplace and working their way up the hierarchy; when women are also in the pulpit and potentially working their way up the church establishment; when stereotypes are falling like leaves in an autumn breeze, does your gender mean your parts or the part you play?

And at this time in history, when the sexual organs people are born with can be surgically altered, what on earth can the bible possibly have to say? In Acts 8 Philip meets with and evangelises the Ethiopian eunuch. He teaches from Isaiah 53, which damns the position of the eunuch to one without justice and without hope because he cannot have descendents. In fact the eunuch may not have a clearly defined gender but he does have a clearly defined role – he was in charge of the treasury of the Queen of the Ethiopians – and more than that, he is baptised and welcomed into the Kingdom of God, afforded hope and salvation.

I think that worrying whether women or men play out their role according to gender and expectation is an outmoded attitude. I think that defining people by their sexual organs (or sexuality) is short-sighted. I think that the Church has a long way to go before gender and sexuality play the lesser role that they should.

it’s life, gym, but not as we know it

the entrance pods to “the gym”, my new place of exertion

It had to happen. My wonderful former gym, the Central YMCA, is too far from home and my new work and so I had to leave. But 5 months down the line and I’m puffing like a smoker off a long-haul flight as I walk up the escalator.

And so I have joined The Gym. This is the new no-frills gym experience, which is a convenient five minute shuffle from work.

The Gym membership can be bought online and cancelled as quickly; like employment at Foxtons. It is cheap and it is efficient.

Now for the cons…

The Gym tracks you every step of the way – those pods in the photo can only be opened by your unique 8-digit pin number. It’s like entering the set of a 1980s sci-fi movie, as the door swooshes open. The walls are white, the furniture chrome, the pipes uncovered, and everywhere is gym equipment, like a weight-lifter’s wet dream, huddled in packs or garrisoned in rows.

It feels like any possibility for a soul has been stripped from the place to make room for an absence of frills. It is to the world of exercise what commuting is to the world of travel: a means to an end.

I wrote a while back about the fact there is a chapel at the Central YMCA gym. While this is a deviation from the normal way of modern gyms, it represents the potential for places where people find exercise, where it is about a journey rather than a destination. I wonder whether i can try to find my own journey at The Gym, or whether I will have to settle for trying to become a little less unfit.

Finding God in Creation on the Night Bus

I have no photo this time. My Night Bus friend was worried that his girlfrind would see a photo of him up somewhere other than facebook, where he refuses to have his photo posted. I did not press the issue.

It was very late, or early, depending on which way you view the hour. Camberwell Green was well lit and my bus was refusing to appear from the gloaming. Three N35s came and went, all full, all going to Clapham Junction. “What the hell is in Clapham Junction?” I and the 2 other guys at the bus stopped laughed. You gotta laugh, right? Especially when you’re cold, tired and your bus won’t come.

Only one of my new companions got on the same bus as me and we took our new-found conviviality to the top deck. We got chatting and in the course of conversation I talked a little of commuting, of whether it is a thing or a place or a way of being that can ever reflect the Kingdom of God.

That phrase: The Kingdom of God, got Sahil thinking. He said to me, “You know that phrase ‘active listening’ rather than ‘passive listening’ where you’re just waiting to say your next thing, I think I was doing that. Say it again.” And so I did.

He got more engaged in the conversation at that point and told me that in the Ethiopian bible, in the equivalent book of Genesis, it says:

And so God made all of creation and is known through his creation.

Now, I have not had a chance to look this up yet, but I don’t think I want to. It’s too simple and beautiful as it was said. At this point we were approaching my stop and so I had to take my leave, but both I and Sahil left that conversation and left that night bus having felt challenged and inspired.

It is moments like that, when a commuter sheds the closed-off face and the isolating tools of the trade – book, iPod, attitude – that we might imagine God could be seen through his creation. That the night bus is worth riding.

What point are we trying to make?

Young man in tshirt on Victoria Line.

I didn’t get his name, but he did let me photograph his tshirt. How amenable and how compliant Americans are.

In a charity tshirt myself, I asked him what his meant. He replied that he had bought it online. There was no context to it, not even an “I thought it seemed cool”. It was a slogan with no future. For him at least.

Me, I thought I was sitting opposite a radical-something. I read into it a new campaign for taking back the power, a new-Christian zionism that I only had to Google – once out of the signal-free tube zone; an empowering of the i-generation in monochrome style (helvetica, of course).

I had high hopes for this chance encounter. I thought that such a provocative and cheesy tshirt slogan had to be the work of an NGO or a QuaNGO or a RiNGO or a charismatic John Doe. Instead it was a $15 online purchase worn by someone without the wit or inclination to let it become something he could ascribe to as a free-willed citizen of the people.

But it did make me wonder whether it matters what the wearer thinks, when people around will always have their own interpretation. Assuming, that is, that they even notice.

crossing the police line

I had to cross the police line this morning.

But before I could cross I had to give my name, my address and my reason for passing.

In the road parallel to ours, a young man had been shot last night. This morning every road leading out from the site was cordoned off, their occupants not free to go about their business.

I don’t know if they have found the man who did the shooting. I hope they do and that they shut him away for several years in a place where he can learn empathy, life skills and qualifications for future work, so that when he emerges he can re-enter society without feeling the need to shoot people. That is, if society lets him.

But that’s far in the future. A future that I hope won’t mean more police lines and less freedom.

What concerns me is that I did not challenge the police officer’s questioning of me. Perhaps because I needed to get to work and decided this was not the best time for rebellion. But when is? And at what point do the requests of our protectors and politicians become so normal that rebellion becomes too difficult to contemplate?

Sensible people would suggest that I pick my battles. But sensible people do not start revolutions. They may take up the slack once change has happened – bringing the necessary bureacracy to a once vibrant and charismatic regime.

Should I have refused to give my details? Or should I post a petition to number10.gov.uk, start a campaign, blog about it?

I fear that bit by bit I am allowing my freedom to be stolen for the sake of tenuous security. I worry that I am allowing my fears to be manipulated for the sake of others’ love of power. I am considering not crossing the police line…

Nothing that can’t be fixed

I haven’t written for a while because I have recently moved somewhere without a BT line. My landlord – bless him – thought he had it installed. But since he only did the flat up and never actually lived there, he was none the wiser.

How strange, to invest so much time and effort into something that will only return financial benefits. Like someone marrying a person for their money… they may go through the motions of intimacy, but it’s really the lucre that signifies the return.

A water pipe burst a few weeks ago. The street looked like this:

The road was chaos. Diversions and grumbles on the buses. Although I did love the fact I could cross the road every morning and evening without any risk of being knocked over. As my flatmate said, it looked like the carnage you’d expect after Godzilla had burst through the tarmac.

But within 10 days it had become this:

It is amazing how much a council can achieve when the alternative affects so many bus routes, commuter journeys and general quality of life. I can’t imagine how much flac the poor traffic guys at Lambeth Borough Council had been taking.

But when the cause and effect is so obvious, it’s easy to fix it. Contractors and foremen with scheduled hours of darkness were able to clear the road and fix the problem.

That’s not good enough though. If a mess as dreadful as this one could be fixed in such a short space of time, why are other issues in the borough so difficult to resolve?

inspired by constraint

Brixton High Street at night

Not tried poetry in a long time. Not since reading my adolescent angst back to haunt me 10 years ago. But felt inspired on my way home…

Seething beneath the surface
of my ability to express
it I grab hold of thoughts
and feelings and worry
the weary weight of me
begins my grip to slip from.
I let go.

And watch my hopeful creativity
drift like shadows of people
in half remembered dreams
when sheer terror brings
a consciousness to bear
that cannot distinguish between
the real the imagined.

Seat-bound and constrained
by horizons of rope and reason
ennui and fatigue
idealism and frustration,
I strain against the backrest
the armrest the windows
the outside world.

Home-bound and befuddled
I ponder on white wine and hummus
the things of the flesh
and ease and comfort,
away with the high flown
thoughts and wonders
seething beneath the surface.

Picking a fight with the corporation…

I am on my way to Edinburgh and will be coming back again tonight. Four and a half hours each way to write emails (wifi on the move: genius), catch up on work and generally sit back and enjoy the scenery.

I adore train journeys. I wouldn’t want to do this mammouth one too often but with internet access and my beloved Mac there’s no reason not to use the train table for Bohemian hot desking.

Only the organisation I now work for is crazy for domestic flights. Without exception everyone I have talked to about the work trip to Scotland has been expecting me to fly. And I refuse to. At the moment in a calm, happy and genial way… but I can already feel a fight brewing.

This train journey costs the same (give or take £5) as a flight and its connecting train would be, but I do have my Railcard to thank for that. Once you take into account time to board, the flight itself and any additional airport bruhaha the journey times are not so different. And I didn’t have to get up at 5am. I am also able to use the full 4.5 hours to do work, should I so wish.

But more than that, it is better for the environment and serves to minimise our profligate use of – and dependency on – oil. True, our train system is not as fast and efficient as it could be. In a recent open letter to President Obama, Michael Moore explained that the same high speed network in Japan would mean Americans could take the bullet train from New York to LA in 17 hours. Rather than drive or, indeed, fly. We’re a smaller country so the times would be even less for significant journeys and I’m not sure what’s holding back this kind of investment across the UK.

Perhaps the powers that be argue supply and demand. For as long as flights are cheaper than train journeys, companies will suggest their staff take that option. Working for a charity I know that I am more accountable than most for the price of my expenses, but I cannot in good faith be one of those passengers whose loyalty secures a continued future for domestic flights.

I want to fight. Or rather, I don’t want to fight, and that is probably the wrong way to go about it, but I do want to make change. I think I might start with approaching train companies for a charity rate on train fares. Or I have to create a “train journeys are fun journeys” campaign for our Internal Communications. Either way, someone’s going to hate me.

You have to ride a lot of tubes before you find your Prince

As the girl behind me jumped between the closing doors with a tiny yelp of success her slip of a shoe fell behind, lost to the enemy gates closing with their familiar whoomph…

She let me take a photo of her mismatched feet. This was either a sign of her confused and frightened state or yet another person seeking their 15 minutes through any channel possible.

At the next stop she got off in order to go back one stop and hopefully find her shoe (or ballet pump, as Vogue would have us described the daily footwear of city professionals).

We joked briefly about the idea that her Prince had found the shoe and was waiting to be reunited with both its left compatriot and his true – if slightly frazzled – love. She was less convinced than I, but then I wasn’t going to test the theory. Too often romance is best left to the imagination, since real life is stuttery at best and icky at usual.

I believe to this day that this girl had simply travelled enough tubes to have eventually found her Prince, because fairy tales – somewhere along the industrialised way – must become urban myth.