Virtual Methodist

"A week is a long time in politics," Harold Wilson is reputed to have said 50 years ago... Time seems to have got faster in the subsequent half-century, and this past week has flown past, meaning that after promising further posts in a day or two, here I am not having posted anything in a week... But that week has seen a substantial range of political developments here in Northern Ireland... Including: Last Monday night Belfast City Council voted to extend a welcome to Pope Francis if there is a papal visit in the near future... This to the outsider may at first be seen as a step towards a more inclusive city, but Unionist councillors abstained in the vote, with the UUP's Jim Rodgers speaking out against the visit as he had done in the previous week's Belfast Telegraph, warning of possible trouble on the streets. Then throughout the week there has been a dingdong about Welfare Reform, with the DUP, from various angles( eg. here and here ), accusing Sinn Fein of ...

The first thing I heard as I woke up this morning was that the playwright Sam Thompson was being honoured by naming the new bridge from Victoria Park over to Airport Road after him. This bridge allows access by foot and bike to the Harbour Estate and Titanic Quarter, the erstwhile Shipyard where his most famous play "Over the Bridge" was set...  There is a certain appropriateness to this, but also some irony given that many of the issues that Sam Thompson raised in that play apply directly to the malaise affecting the loyalist community that lies in the shadow of the gantries of the remaining 2 shipyard cranes. To that end I offer this slightly revised reblog of one I produced in the wake of Martin Lynch's revival/revision of the play 3 years ago, looking at why I believe it is a crucially important play : The Physical Context - The Shipyard In a moment of unguarded honesty a few years ago, when Harland and Wolff was teetering on the brink of total closure...

This morning's Thought for the Day... For those who missed it and prefer to listen rather than read, you can find it here 25 minutes and 85 minutes in, and in the second case just after an interview with Linda Ervine, about the Irish language classes in East Belfast Mission, proving the power of education in all its forms to help us to understand one another and find a new way of relating to each other. It was encouraging to read over the weekend that a stand-off at Hazelwood College in North Belfast , between their management and the Belfast Education and Library Board is heading towards a resolution [although to later hear of the issue being dragged into the High Court didn't exactly fill me with joy.. . recourse to law rarely produces reconciliation...] I don’t know all the rights and wrongs, but it was not good to see children padlocked out of classrooms… Much worse however, were the threats supposedly made on Friday, by the so called Red Hand Defenders , ag...

I'm currently reading (among others) a local history of the area in which I minister, Dundonald, on the eastern outskirts of Belfast, entitled “The Most Unpretending of Places” . That is the origin of the grainy photograph at the head of this post, and according to the author, Peter Carr, it is a picture of some citizens of Dundonald signing the Ulster Covenant on the 12th September, 1912. Either the people of Dundonald were ahead of the curve and wanted to sign that document a fortnight before Edward Carson appended his signature to the top of it, or else the author got his dates wrong… It was on this day, September 28th 1912, that the majority of the adult Protestant population of Ulster signed a document known as the Solemn League and Covenant, in order to articulate their absolute opposition to the Home Rule Bill then being proposed by the British government. This piece of legislation would have left Ireland still firmly within the British Empire, but many within Ulster beli...

This morning's Thought for the Day offering... Well today the back pages of the newspapers have been filled with stories of my beloved Liverpool's all-too-late thrashing of a weakened Chelsea side . As  Jimmy Greaves used to say of to erstwhile Liverpool player Ian St. John, “It’s a funny old game, Saint…”  And throughout this season it has been just that… Though funny in the sense of strange, rather than “ha-ha”. It has been on the front page of the newspapers as much as on the back… Allegations of racist language being used by high profile premiership players caused huge repercussions, not only to  Liverpool, where it may have contributed to their lacklustre season, but also to the English national team, necessitating the  appointment of a new England manager,  leading in turn to controversy about misjudged jokes in the press about the speech impediment of appointee Roy Hodgson … We also had the seeming suicide of Welsh national manager Gary Speed , ...

In the midst of a busy Holy Week Sally and I were due to go to a film premier in the Thompson Dry-Dock, or Titanic Dock to give it it's popular title in this season of all things Titanic, to see the premiere of a film about the aforesaid big boat... Now given that  a) I'm just about sick to the back teeth with the Titanic,  b) Holy Week is clerical chaos,  c) My leg was hurting (Awww!) and  d) the weather had changed from being summer-like the previous week when we were invited, back to mid-winter by the Tuesday we were due to go... I was seriously thinking about crying off... But a friend we haven't seen for ages, who was acting in it, had kindly offered us the tickets, so I felt bad about even contemplating this... Then they moved the venue from the open-air to the Great Hall in Belfast City Hall, removing one of my gripes, and we made our way there in good time... And I was glad we had made the effort... The event, unusually, began with the audie...

It is fast approaching the centenary of the Titanic's departure from Belfast and its all too sudden sinking, and it is all over the TV, with ITV's dreadful costume drama (dubbed "Drownton Abbey" by one friend, and "Upstairs Drownstairs" by another) and the BBC doing a documentary about it with Len Goodman from Strictly Come Dancing... Is he going to do a quickstep on Queens Island?  And everywhere you look in Belfast at the moment some Titanic-themed event is taking place, with yesterday's dedication of the "Titanica" statue , outside the Titanic Signature Building, which is due to be opened on Saturday coming (and which I am looking forward to visiting as soon as possible thereafter), and today's ludicrous renaming of "Bridge End Halt" as "Titanic Quarter" even though it's a good mile walk from the heart of that particular developers' dream... Although it remains the only direct link between the Titani...

This is just a quick post, because I want to get it up before the event it refers to is over... Last night I had the privilege of attending performance of Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy" in the Belfast Synagogue as part of the 2011 Jews Schmooze Arts Festival. I was invited to go as part of the inter-faith panel invited to discuss the play afterwards. Our briefing was not to discuss the performance as such but the ideas that lie within the play, and I'll keep largely to that brief in this short post too... However, I would like to particularly commend the performances of Matt Faris as the psychiatrist/army veteran "Leduc" and James McAnespy as the artist "Lebeau". The former may have been a little too intense all the time for my liking, but these were the stand-out performances, in an ensemble of mixed skills and experience. Perhaps because of the varying levels of performance ability, the production itself was not of the highest standard, but ...

It was a late night last night due to my usual 11th night bonfire perambulations... and that, on top of a hectic week meant that I didn't rush out of bed to go and watch any of the Orange Parades. I would usually take some international volunteers to see one, which usually leaves my head spinning with a combination of flutes, drums and incessant questions, but this year I was spared all that, as someone else said they would take them. I did, however, have to deal with one Orange parade related question. I flicked on the BBC coverage of the Belfast parade, with its surreal commentary comparing it to various world-famous carnivals like Rio's Mardi Gras, or Notting Hill, without the slightest trace of irony. Whilst watching it, my eldest son emerged from his mini-aestivation and asked why all the Orangemen on parade had LOL on their collarettes and banners? He would, of course only use LOL in its text-speak sense of "Laugh out loud", a usage that I stubbornly refuse to a...

Over the weekend I got my Christmas present from my wife... No, it's not that the post is particularly bad here... it's because my Christmas present was a ticket to see Martin Lynch's adaptation of "Over the Bridge" by Sam Thompson, at the Waterfront Studio. This was a romantic gesture on her part, in that it was after the opening night of a production of the same play which I directed as a student in Edinburgh back in 1987, that she and I started going out together. I believe my opening gambit with her was "Do you fancy dandering down to the Scotsman with me?" as I was going down to pick up the reviews from the local paper... The reviews were middling, which sent me into a slough of despond, but she sought to pick me up, and so began a long and happy relationship... So this play is important to me... but not just for personal, sentimental reasons. Also because I think it is one of the most important pieces of theatre ever to be written and staged in Nor...

You might have hoped that we had got back to reality by now. REAL reality not the virtual kind or the bizarre variety offered up on TV. Britain’s got Talent may be over for another year, but we’ve still got the denouement of the Apprentice this week, "Celebrity" Masterchef returns next week and on Friday Big Brother is crawling out from the stone it’s been hiding under. I loathe Big Brother, and most other "reality" shows, although I am a big Apprentice fan and got sucked into BGT this year, but with all of these attention hungry behemoths, there is a tendency to get things totally out of proportion. Last week, in the run up to the final of BGT, despite plenty of other news to report, we had headlines about Susan Boyle cracking under the pressure (which sadly seem to have come true), while the tears of one (undeserving) child finalist prompted much wasted airtime about the cruelty of putting children in for such competitions. We need to get a grip… It’s ONLY a TV ta...

Is this, in the immortal words of REM, "The end of the world as we know it?" As I was heading to bed last night news was trickling through of the U.S. House of Representatives rejection of the US Treasury inspired White House plan for the bail-out of the US banking sector. It was rejected by 228 to 205 votes, despite supposed bi-partisan support for it, and in the aftermath of the vote there seems to have been a "what have we done?" moment . The rest of the world quickly worked out what they had done... and rapidly began dumping banking stocks all across global markets. This meant that banks already under threat because of the sub-prime crisis, the overall credit crunch and the recent spate of opportunistic short selling came under even greater pressure. yesterday probably saw the single greatest reorganisation of the banking system in history with many banks being nationalised or taken over. Wachovia, the fourth-largest US bank, was bought by larger rival Citigroup...