On Placement

With all the academic side of life finished until the end of September you could be forgiven for thinking that I'm going to be doing nothing for 3 months.

Wrong!

One course requirement is for me to spend four weeks hanging out with a friendly vicar, to really find out what life in a vicarage is like. You might think it's a bit late for that - vicarage life is going to happen anyway, but some people are still not quite sure what they want to do after ordination. The huge majority will go into a parish life, but others may be considering chaplaincy work, or other roles within the church. This month is a good time to find out how much you like day to day parish work; it's also a chance to do stuff you haven't done before.

So I'm spending a month with James (vicar) and Paul (curate) at St Andrews Histon and St Andrews Impington. As a former scientist I'm tempted to write that as an equation, to save use of multiple 'St Andrews', thus: St.Andrews (Histon and Impington), but that would require it to be the same St Andrews, which it's not. There are two of them. And I've now written more words than I would have saved. Enough rambling.

Starting last Tuesday I've been cycling a 10 mile round trip from my house to Histon, and spending large parts of the day accompanying James and Paul as they do their work. A cafe church ('Essence'), a home communion, a hospital visit and another home visit are among the highlights. This week holds the prospect of some schools work, a playgroup and some evening meetings, whilst also trying to maintain some semblence of family life.

Along the way I'm looking out for interesting situations to comment on, as I'll have to do a presentation and an essay on the placement when I get back to Ridley in September.

And as if the cycle ride wasn't enough I rounded off the week with a Men's Group cycle ride. I've done on of those before, in Ferndown, but that gentle 8 or 9 mile ride had nothing on this Cambridge epic. I never thought I'd cycle from the extreme north of Cambridge (Histon) to the extreme south (Grantchester), but I have now, and done the return trip too! 17.3 miles! Add to that the 10 miles for me to get to and from home and I was ready for bed on Friday night.

The Great Blessing

It's been a funny old week.

This week's intensive course was 'Race Awareness'. It was a good course, aimed at making us aware of the issues facing ethnic minorities in this country. And it did that. It's just a pity it took 2.5 days to do so.

With that out of the way I could now focus on 2 things - firstly Greek (our teacher Mark was pleased to recall a conversation with a startled member of staff who was surprised that we'd all passed our pre-Christmas test and there had been no dropouts all term!).

Secondly my 'Life and Service' essay on 'the Dulles Model of Church'. I'm convinced there's a spelling mistake and there should be an extra 't' on the end of that second word. Some guy called Dulles analysed loads of churches and decided that a good church has a balance of 5 elements. I've got to analyse a church I am familiar with against this model and given that I'm not intimately familiar with that many churches I've picked on one in Ferndown. Against some definitions I have to decide to what extent does it identify as an institution (partial tick), as a mystical communion (partial tick), as a sacrament (tick), as a servant (tick), as a herald (tick). 1000 words written this afternoon, another 1000 needed before Thursday.

And on Thursday afternoon a regular meeting of the students where the most exciting things we could find to talk about was whether it was OK to wear academic robes in college. Passions rose high but I couldn't get excited about it. It's like those meetings we used to have at work where some executive had travelled halfway across the world to talk to us about the state of the business and somebody would ask a question about the repainting of the bike sheds....

Back to the title. Tuesday night was Federation Worship, and this week it was the turn of the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies (IOCS) to lead. IOCS are the only people who seem to be quite distinctive about the style of worship that they share with us - all other houses of the Federation seem to dumb down their distinctiveness for public consumption, but IOCS doesn't hold back. 55 minutes of incense, recited and intoned liturgy, choral led responses, and much sprinkling of water, as we celebrated the Great Blessing of the Waters (i.e. Jesus' baptism).

It was one of those occasions which I'll remember for a long time as it was so different from my normal experience, but I'm quite happy for it to remain an occasional experience - it's a bit too late for me to defect, and I can't chant well enough.

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.