Stu-dent!!!!

It's all go today! Pens and paper poised, I've taken on far too much information and forgotten much of it already. I've just about understood how to book my daily lunch via a complex system of coloured index cards and paper clips. I have advised a fellow novice on where to buy a bike, cycled the wrong way up one way streets and have endured/enjoyed an hour of Greek, during which we did not recite the Greek Alphabet once.

So repeat after me - Alpha, Beta, Gamma.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking at rather expensive jackets in a shop. I was reminded in no uncertain terms that those jackets wouldn't go with anything I owned and Why Do You Think You Need A Jacket Anyway You Aren't A Jacket Sort Of Person. So I let it lie quietly for a couple of weeks. Before I know it, Suitable Jackets are being procured on A Well Known Internet Auction Site, and the vicarofdidley now has a choice of two jackets, both of which are very Cambridgey and one of which debuted at Greek this afternoon. I feel like a real student now, cycling along with one button done up.

And finally, an absence of promotion for a product which won't be receiving publicity on this blog. I received a spam e-mail asking me to promote a product for - (cough) - male enhancement. The deal offered was that if I wrote a favourable review on the Vicar of Didley's blog I would receive a free trial of the product. My moral dilemma lasted for approximately one micro-second. Funds aren't that tight yet.....

21 years and 1 day on

It's 21 years and a day since I first started college at Brighton, and now I'm back, albeit in Cambridge. Last time I'd just finished my A-levels and changed tack from Pharmacy to Electronics on the basis of my results. This time I have been intending to do the course for 4 or 5 years, rather than 4 or 5 weeks.

And finally it's all about to happen. I've collected my keys to the college today, found out what a High Tea is, lost a parachute game, and met more than a few people.

I've already got a feeling for what the first day in a new parish must be like - I can only remember about 10% of the people by the time I get home!

I know that the next few weeks are going to be a blur. My timetable for the next couple of weeks includes a lot of foundation courses, and it looks like there will be a few decisions to be made about exactly which modules I want to study. Last time I just followed the timetable and was meant to turn up to everything. This time the advice is "Don't try to do everything".

Tasha and I have spent the last 18 weeks in close proximity since I left work at the end of May, and it will be nice for both of us to have something else to do with our time, although the calendar for this week already seems so full that I'm not sure if we'll actually see much of each other at all - by the time we are both back home together after college/childrens activities/SpiceGirls/somethingelse we could be lucky to get any sense out of each other. Especially as I'll be thinking in Greek.....

Are we nearly there yet?

It's Thursday today, Friday is 'our' last quiet day of normality together before life is never quite the same again, my sister is visiting on Saturday, and college starts on Sunday.

That's a bit of an odd day to start term, until I remind you that this is a Theological College, then it starts to make a bit of sense. One major difference between theological colleges and regular colleges is that they are a community in the real sense of the word - families have a part to play as well as me. Sunday kicks off with an informal meeting of students and families (a bouncy castle on the college quadrangle - whatever next?), followed by 'High Tea' and a short All-Age Worship, which means there will be a few people trying to make a good impression whilst trying to work out the rules for how long you let your toddler explore the chapel before rugby tackling him.

So Sunday is fairly laid back. But then it really gets busy. I received the calendar for the Michaelmas Term today (that's not churchy language, it's Cambridge speak for 'Autumn') and needed to read it through about three times before I'd worked out what events I am required to take part in (as opposed to those I would like to take part in, or those that Tasha won't let me out for). After that I went through it with an orange highlighter pen to make it perfectly clear, and concluded that it would have been easier to mark those things I'm not doing! Either that or start off with an orange piece of paper.
And that doesn't include lectures. The timetable is yet to come.

The important thing is that I take a calendar and diary along on Monday (no pen?), and try to keep up with everything that will be thrown at me. As long as I turn up to everything IN CAPITAL LETTERS I'll be fine. That's only 11 things in the first week, along with 2 Greek sessions per day. The returning students tell me it'll be Christmas before my feet touch the ground again....

Cows, Optional Traffic Lights and Buses

You might be surprised to hear that I haven't started college yet. I'd dearly love to, but term doesn't start until Sunday (28th Sept). And apparently when it starts it's intense. So in another week's time I might be moaning that instead of being underloaded I'm distinctly overloaded.

I'm on target to finish my reading list. Just the last half of John's Gospel (reading it through in one sitting didn't quite work out today), one chapter of 'How to read the Bible' and 2 chapters of Greek left. Tasha starts her digital photography course tomorrow, so I'll probably manage all that in the morning.

We met yet more students yesterday, at the SpiceGirls pre-term 'barbecue' which was at Ridley Hall. Isaac disappeared into a clump of trees and spent a couple of hours rebuilding a tree-house, whilst we got on with meeting people, or re-meeting them! I met my 'staircase steward' and got acquainted with my study. I should explain that every student has a study (shared with somebody else, for whom it may also be a home/bedroom) and these studies are on staircases. The staircases are used as a convenient way to lump us together for prayer and study groups. There are 8 staircases, A through to H, and I'm part of staircase C. Which explains why my room is on staircase A!

And what a room it is! Ridley Hall has so many students this year that they're really pushed for accommodation, so they're having to use rooms that they don't usually use. Staircase A doesn't actually have any bedrooms on it, but the Lecture Hall, Library, Centre for Youth Ministry, and a couple of tutor's rooms. My study is up several flights of stairs, past the North Pole and a bit higher. It's worth it for the view though, and being near the Library I'm not likely to have too much noise from the neighbours. And in a cupboard there's another flight of stairs which appears to go out onto the roof, but that way is padlocked, and I'm not going to risk being kicked out by breaking that!

I don't officially have access until next weekend, and maybe by then there will be a desk and chair in there!

It seemed to take forever to get across Cambridge from our house by bike - even when trying to take the 'quiet' route there's a couple of major roads to cross, which was a bit of a nightmare trying to navigate a route for the first time with an 8 year old trying to go in random directions. So I still had no idea how long it would take me to get to college, which is why I had a little reconnaissance mission this evening.

Quiet route there - 18 minutes. On the way I ambled left and right through the back streets of southern Cambridge, cycled through a herd of cows (yes, this is in a city!), crossed a few streams, could have picked a few pots of brambles (as indeed people were doing yesterday in the middle of a cycle lane!!). Nice, but a bit slow, and I have to keep weaving around pedestrians where we share paths.

Direct route back - 12 minutes. Via the Cambridge Ring Road (which is somewhat less than it sounds!). This way I discovered that diesel still smells, traffic lights appear to be optional for many cyclists, and that I can travel faster than a double decker bus. Horrible, but very useful if I'm running late!

So, nearly there. Things start on Sunday, with a High Tea followed by a short service. Then Monday it's paper and pens time.

Cyclical

Sometimes these entries will have a reflective spiritual air to them, sometimes they won't - I don't want every entry to be like a sermon else I won't have anything left for real sermons. Today's entry is most definitely not spiritual - I'm going to talk about bikes, and possibly have a bit of a rant by the time I get to the end.

I spent quite a lot of time yesterday looking up cycle routes - I didn't actually go anywhere near my bike, but was stuck firmly to the laptop, on www.camcycle.org.uk, the website of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign. I was interested in finding out the best way to get to college without getting squished, and I spent hours on there finding the best combination of fastest/slowest/shortest. It's easily the best website I've found for giving directions - all the car orientated ones (TheAA, multimap, streetmap etc) have a tendency to express their directions in ways that a driver wouldn't (have you ever told somebody to drive 47 yards, blend straight left ahead and turn into the A14?). This one is straightforward and I can mail in suggestions for improvements where I don't agree with it! However, it's no use to you if you're not a cyclist in Cambridge.

What does amaze me is just how many people in Cambridge do cycle, and how good the provision is for cyclists. The people who run that website would like it to be even better, and they do a good job of pointing out where councils/builders/developers could be a bit more thoughtful (e.g. painting a cycle lane that's actually narrower than a set of handlebars!).

I'm already using the bike as my primary option, and I haven't put any diesel in the car for over 3 weeks. At this rate it's going to be about 2 months between tanking up. OK, so Cambridge is flat, but Ferndown (where we came from) is pretty flat too. The fact that your town has one or two slight rises is no excuse for not cycling.

One area where it's particularly noticeable - schools. At our primary school most parents seem to walk or cycle with their children - there are few cars outside the school gates (and little parking for them anyway!). I haven't seen a Pointless Chelsea Tractor at a school since we left The Beautiful South. At the secondary school I haven't seen a parental car at all! All seem to walk, bike or bus in.

Oh, and Cambridge thinks it's congested. Let me tell you that if I took a wrong turn in Ferndown between 8 and 9am it could take me 15 minutes to get through a set of traffic lights. Mostly because dear little Johnny was being ferried to school half a mile from his house when he could walk it in less time. In Cambridge they think its congested if they have to wait more for more than two changes of the lights, and they're threatening a congestion charge. Of course I'm sure that this would then fund future improvements to cycle routes.....

So my message to you, dear readers, is "don't be so flipping lazy". Walk or bike if you can.

Meet the teacher

Poor Isaac. We met with Ridley students last night, and two of my lecturers were there too. It took him a while to work it out, but eventually he asked "are you Daddy's teacher then?". Isaac couldn't cope with the fact that Daddy was not only spending social time with his teachers, but actually getting on quite well and laughing and joking with them at the same time. Apparently you are not meant to like your teachers and are to run home as swiftly as possible at the end of school to minimise the contact time. I'll make a note of that.

In another conversation I put my foot in it - spent a good 20 minutes talking to somebody before asking him if the bank work he had just mentioned was a summer job and how he managed to mix it with his college commitments. At which point his wife stepped in, pointing out that she was the ordinand, not he. Suddenly much of the preceding 20 minutes made sense. Must remember that I have to adjust back to a world where ladies are the norm rather than the exception.....and then help them in their campaign to get clerical shirts that aren't just men's shirts in pink and yellow!

Back to school – part 1

(written offline, Wednesday 3rd Sept)

Tuesday 2nd September dawned miserable and rainy. Not quite as perfect a start to the new school year as you would hope, given that nobody in this house is going to school in the car these days.

Isaac’s school is a five minute walk just around the corner - not even worth getting in the car for - when it rains the closest you can park to the school is our house!

Beth will be cycling – except for the first few days I’ll be going with her until she’s confident that she knows the way there and back. I of course have to pedal a strategic distance away from her, and hang back an unembarassing few yards from the school gate at the end of the day.

By 9.15 on that first day there were two parents back at home wondering what to do next. You see, I left work 14 weeks ago, and since then I’ve either been busy fixing and decorating a house or getting ready to move out of it or unloading it this end, and Tasha has been working and doing similar preparatory work. Now that we’ve got all that done there’s a slight “what do we do now” atmosphere until I start college.

We drank a bit of tea, and Tasha wore one of those horrible ‘I hope my babies are alright at school’ expressions for the following 6 hours.

So I made a proper start on my reading list. The boundaries of it are a bit fuzzy – i.e. ‘make sure you are familiar with the broad outline of the whole Bible, and the main contents of the New Testament’. But the specifics are that I have to:
· Read a 900 page novelisation of the Bible (‘The Book of God’ by Walter Wangerin – a brilliant way of effectively skim reading the whole thing). I've been attacking this at 30 pages a day for the last fortnight and I'm halfway through already.
· Read “How to read the Bible for all its worth” – another book teaching me to do what it says on the can. However, having made a start on this it’s not just a case of reading 13 chapters and filing the book away. For the first time in my life I’m actually looking up all the references and making notes as I go along, so it’s a slow old process. Especially when one of those references is the whole book of 1 Corinthians, 15 chapters itself. That put me behind a little on my planned progress for the first session...
· Read each gospel in a single sitting. I hope that means 4 sittings!
· Make my way through six chapters of ‘Learn New Testament Greek’. Even with the accompanying CD this is a tricky matter. I’m a scientist, not a linguist and I really could do with more than a disembodied voice to help me through those early chapters. I’m hoping that the promised pre-term starter course materialises. The only slight advantage I might have is that electronics and maths uses most of the Greek alphabet in equations. I’ve never put them together in words and sentences though peeps.

So having planned all that out on a piece of paper, I now have a feeling that it might just be possible to wade my way through all that in the next 26 days before college starts (notice that I’m counting in days not weeks or months now!). I’m not sure how those people who will be working right until a few days before starting college will find time to do this.

At the end of the school day both new students returned home, and both had had a good day. In a surprising turn of events Beth had made 5 friends and Isaac none yet (although he had talked to a lot of people in class he hadn’t found anybody to play with at break times). We were expecting it to be the other way round. By the following day he had made two friends - Matthew and Raven (yes, that's his real name!) and had been to Sainsburys to buy a class cactus which is called Johnny Depp.

And in other news, the shed doors arrived several days after the shed and our broadband modem appeared today (but isn't yet activated).

Meet the Spice Girls

(written offline, Thursday 28th Aug)

I met the Spice Girls today. OK, so it wasn’t those Spice Girls. It was Becca Spice and Jane Spice and I now seem to be married to Tasha Spice.

The spouses group from Ridley Hall is called ‘SPICE’, and we went along to a family morning out at the Milton Maize Maze just north of Cambridge (highly recommended especially if you have young children). There I met a current student. To spare his blushes I shall only refer to him as Mr C. Mr C, who has just finished his first year and is about to start his second and final year. We had a good chat about the course content, the necessity and usefulness of the Greek lessons, and workload in general. At one point he stopped me and asked whether I was doing the Diploma or the Degree course. I should explain that if you are over 30, you are only sponsored by the church for 2 years. Also if you already have a degree you don’t need to get another one. Mr C, like me, seems to fall into both of these categories. However, unlike me, Mr C didn’t read the college literature and application forms properly and upon arrival found himself doing the accelerated degree in those 2 years. I’m working on the basis that one degree is enough, even if it is in Electronics Engineering. If I really enjoy the academic side I can always do more study at a later date and turn it into a degree. Won’t make a jot of difference to the colour of my dog collar or my salary though, and this way I might just get a bit of free time to do some punting in Cambridge.

p.s. Isaac overheard us talking about the Spice Girls and now wants to know when he's going to meet them. I think we have our wires crossed.

Just popping out for a quick spin dear...

(written offline, Saturday 22nd Aug)

I was closer to those of you in Ferndown than you realise yesterday. As in I was back. Already. And it wasn’t because of a passport problem at the Cambridge border post.

We moved in on Thursday 14th, and by Monday 18th we had got to that point where the pile of boxes-to-be-unpacked was smaller than the pile of dirty washing – which was basically 7 days worth of clothes for a family of four. Something would have to be done. So we popped the first load into the washing machine. This is the washing machine that was already in the Cambridge house. The one left behind by the landlord and subsequently used by all tenants since. I knew things weren’t going to be good when a shriek up the stairs informed me that whilst the machine was filling up with water and it was making the right sort of noises, it certainly wasn’t going round and round like a good washing machine should. And it wasn’t draining at all. To cut quite a long story short I spent much of that day investigating, cleaning solidly clogged-and-limescaled filters and U-bends, restoring rubber belts to the right location, and getting quite frustrated. Not the landlord’s problem you see, as the property is officially ‘unfurnished’. If anything goes wrong with non-structural things the landlord has no obligation to fix them (that will also work in my favour as a landlord!). And his line was ‘you can fix it or dump it’. So by Monday night everybody was happy. I’d fixed the machine, Tasha’s washing was going round, and the spin cycle sounded like we had a jet engine in the kitchen.

The peace lasted until Friday - 4 loads later. We could see limescale and various other deposits appearing on our load of white bedding as it went merrily round. Then it stopped going round. Then it started smoking. Then Tasha started shouting and I quite quickly switched it off. I suppose if it had actually caught fire it could have put itself out, but I didn’t want to find out.
At this point we’d had enough. It was going to the tip. But what were our options for a new machine. £200 for a new one, but when? Or half a tank of diesel (which is not yet £200) and a guaranteed replacement later the same day? I took the former option, and jumped in the car to Ferndown, to collect the machine which we had left there!

After one service station lunch, two cans of Red Bull, the M25 on August Bank Holiday Friday, a spiritual conversation and a plate of Bolognese with a former neighbour*, I was back in Cambridge nine hours after setting out.

And the load of white bedding? Had been safely rinsed and had dried in the sunshine, and was back on the bed ready for the tired driver upon his return.

What lengths do you go to to keep peace in your house? And what lengths did Jesus go to to keep peace in his world?

*'Dogs Without Collars' – if you want to know why you’ve been banned from Canford School I have the answer!

P.S. I wrote this a few days ago but only just posted it. In the meantime I’ve discovered that the lawnmower (left on a similar basis to the washing machine) is unsafe to use. Guess what? There’s a perfectly good one in a shed in Ferndown.

Back online....

I've been seemingly silent since August 20th. This is not due to a lack of wanting to write, but we've been waiting for our broadband to be installed. That fiinally happened today.

Internet cafes are OK, but you have to pay nearly the same per hour as I'll be paying Virgin per month. We had lunch at Starbucks the other day before we discovered their WiFi wasn't free, and when I tried the local McDonalds their WiFi was down. However, on the upside I've discovered Starbucks do sell a lovely frappi-mokka-choppa-cinno coffee with a caramel topping - the first time I've ever had a coffee that didn't need any extra sugar in it. And probably the last time I'll be able to afford it for a couple of years.

Incidentally I think I got better technical support from the McDonalds front-of-house staff than I ever got from the IT helpdesk at work.....

So later on today I'll be posting a couple of articles I wrote in the quiet period.