Completing the circle

When I first started taking photographs back in my teenage years, everything was black and white. There was colour photography of course, but not if you wanted to process at home in your own darkroom. Gradually, colour processing did become available and many of us migrated to the world of colour.

Digital, of course, is naturally a colour medium, so colour has become the default setting for the majority of today's digital photographers. But recently I have been asking myself why; what would happen if I decided to work almost entirely in black and white again? Sure, my files would still come out of the camera in colour, but that is quickly removed - the bigger challenge is to think in black and white when taking the picture.

I like the way that black and white can bring out the drama in a picture. The colour version of the blacksmith is a nice picture but nowhere as dramatic as this black and white.

Black and white also helps emphasise shape and tonality without the distractions of colour. Both these first two photos were taken at Iron Ridge Quarry, an interesting sculpture park in the Hurunui.

Back in Oxford, the old West Oxford Hotel has now been refurbished and rebranded as  the "Rustic Country Hotel".

So, perhaps it's time to close the gate on colour for a while and explore the world of black and white once more. Guess that means I've come full circle.

My kinda church

Recently, in an online faith community I frequent, there has been much discussion on the subject of church attendance. Perhaps surprisingly for an online community, the vast majority of participants are committed church attendees, a number being actively involved in the life of their churches well beyond basic Sunday attendance. I have been like that too. But part of the discussion included this blog post in which the writer promotes the view that it's not possible to be a Christian unless you regularly go to church. Allow me to disagree.

But, before I disagree, it must be said that there are ideas about being a Christian and what church is that do support that blog writer's point of view. If by 'church' you mean an institutional church and if by 'Christian' you mean a member of an institutional church then, of course, Christianity and church attendance are inextricably entwined. But, I submit, Christianity is not an institutional thing, it's about a person, an individual we call Jesus Christ, and to be a Christian is nothing more nor less than being a follower of Jesus Christ.  'Church,' in this context is the universal fellowship of Christian believers and not the building down the road.  In this understanding, we create a serious problem if we attempt to make being Christian dependent on institutional church attendance.

Of course, none of that precludes church attendance. But it does tell us that our Christianity can't be confined to a church nor defined by our attendance at a church.  Christianity is a lived faith, not an institutionalised belief system. At its core, Christianity is a faith where our relationship with God is mediated by only one person - the Christ who makes us Christian (and not only in language terms). Where the institutional church and its professional clergy do have an important role to play, is in guiding us flock of Christians towards a spiritually mature participation in the Kingdom of God. Historical power structures may have made it otherwise in the past but here, in the twenty-first century, the institutional church must take up the role of servant-guide and foot-washer if it is to avoid a slide into irrelevance. (I loved that the Pope modeled this over Easter.)

And here's the thing; you couldn't keep me away from a church that was interested in helping me and everyone else to become better at this Christian thing. Not better Anglicans or Catholics, not better Baptists or Pentecostals, nor better Methodists or Adventists (the list goes on) - just better Christians, lovers of God and our fellow human beings. Religious dogma doesn't fix social injustice, it doesn't heal the sick nor bind up the broken hearted. I need to know how to pick up my cross and carry it as Christ said I should. Where is the church that's more interested in those things than the state of its roof, the sex of its ministers or whether the weekly tithe will cover the bills? Take me to that church.

Raise a glass to the new Google Calendar

It had largely slipped under my radar, but Google calendar for Android and iOS has matured into a very capable calendar app. Although I had been using the Google cloud to look after my calendar and to-do list for several years, I found their mobile calendar app to be lacking in features. Consequently, our family had been using 'Sunrise' to grab and share our Google data. Now, with Sunrise about to be abandoned by Microsoft, we needed an alternative and, during my searching, I looked again at Google Calendar. Has it changed or what!

The new Google Calendar has a clean and uncluttered design that some people may think looks a bit basic. The widget (shown here), for example, has no settings, it's simply a list of coloured cards - one for each calendar or reminder entry. This simplicity is carried through to the design of the main app which supports views for month, week, 3 day and day views. In addition, there is a 'schedule' view, which is basically a continuous list of event and reminder cards with day and date markers (similar to the widget). I find myself working in schedule view most of the time. A neat feature  of all the views (on a phone) is the transition from holding the phone in portrait to landscape mode - whatever view you happen to be in in portrait, it switches to a week view in landscape - a nice quick way of getting to the week view.

A huge improvement is the integration of 'reminders' into the calendar. Reminders are not the same as the to-do items in Google's desktop calendar and won't appear in that list. Google has obviously decided to focus on a more generic reminder system that operates across platforms, devices and other apps. For example, you can set a reminder on a note in Google Keep, or an email in Inbox on your tablet, and it will magically appear as a reminder in Google Calendar on your phone. Neat. In fact, reminders are always in your face - they appear in Calendar, Inbox, and Google Now - no more forgetting! Google promises that reminders will also be coming to the desktop app soon, and I look forward to that.

Of course, all the normal settings for repeats on both events and reminders are available and new entries are made by touching the '+' badge that floats in the bottom right of the Calendar screen. All up, it's pretty obvious how things work and the app just gets out of the way and lets you get on with organising your life; something some of the other available calendar tools could well take note of.

So, if you need an excuse to have a drink, the new Google Calendar could be it. Cheers.

Flagging the flag

It's time New Zealand had a new flag but ...

Flags are important; you don't get to change them every five minutes. So, when we do change our flag, for most of us it will be our 'forever' flag. The single flag on offer next month (above left) is nice, but is it a lasting design? Will we be looking at it in 20 years time and wondering who on earth thought that was a good idea? Will our kids find it an embarrassment? It looks to me like a flag that's trying too hard.

The process we went through to get here could have worked, but the Flag Consideration Panel didn't do a good job. Of the four options they gave us (out of the long list below) three were based on the silver fern and one had a koru design. The one koru design offered, was a bland black and white version - by no means the best of the many koru designs offered to the panel. The panel should have offered us the best four flags presented to them but they didn't. One doesn't need to be a cynic to think that the deck was being stacked in favour of a fern. Perhaps the subsequent furore, and inclusion, of the red peak flag, was tacit recognition of the Panel's bias.

Given the limited, carefully chosen choices, available in the first referendum, it was hardly a surprise that a fern came out in front, and hardly surprising it was a Karl Lockwood design (they were indeed the best of the ferns, in my opinion). At the end of the day, the main choice was between a red or black top left colour. Black won.

So here we are at a choice, to keep the current flag or adopt the black, blue and white fern. The fern is OK, but does anyone really think it's the best we can do, or even the best in the panel's long list (below)? If so, then by all means vote for it. As for me, I think we deserve better. I think we have been denied better and, if we can't have the best, then I'll be voting to stick with our existing flag. That way we might get another chance in maybe five years to choose our forever flag - one we can be truly proud of.

Is that you, Pastor?

When I got a Facebook message from our Pastor, I was a little surprised. When he said that he was in the Ukraine, I was even more surprised. When he started asking for money, the cerebral alarm bells became deafening. This is how it panned out ...

Next time I won't request verification so quickly, after giving me a totally fictitious address, the scammer blocked me before I could tell him that he needed to get on his knees and repent :-)

Bringing it home

When I bring home a photograph, I bring home something that has accurately mapped the shapes, colours and light that I saw earlier - arrangements of photons, stored up and measured out with a mathematical precision that has its own corpse-like beauty.

Lying on the mortuary slab of the computer screen, the photograph looks like the scene I saw before, but it has no life - it sits there silent and still; life reduced to numbers.

It's the work of a taxidermist to bring apparent life to dead creatures: It's the work of a photographer to bring the appearance of life to the maths of dead photons.

Back inside

Today we went to visit the reopened Christchurch Art Gallery. This is one of those buildings I love as a building; the art adds an extra dimension but the building itself is somewhere I just love to be. I think it has something to do with the ribbed facade; it's like being inside the body of something alive, looking out on the rest of the world. And alive it is with people young and old scuttling about enjoying the space.

There were some interesting exhibits, including this sweet landscape made from coloured sugar (the picture shows only a small part).

And the yellow room which provides a transition space or just a place to sit if you need to recover from sensory overload.

But, as I said at the beginning, whatever the exhibition it's the building that always attracts me and, after five years of being closed for repairs, it was good to get back inside.

The pie transporter

So, there I was today, sitting in Oxford's "Sheffield Pie Shop" and tucking into to one of their, rather tasty, apricot pies when I had one of those strange flashbacks to the mid-1960s. In the wink of an eye, I traversed 50 years of apricot pie eating to arrive at the classic apricot pie - Lyons Individual Apricot Pies.

These are the pies that started a 50-year addiction to apricot pies. These pies were so special that each one came wrapped in its own cardboard box and, despite the advertisement, cost 6d each, by the time I discovered them. The cunningly shaped corners ensured you never got one with broken pastry and the tangy filling was always discoverable on the very first bite.  There were other flavours, of course, including apple and strawberry, which sometimes substituted when the apricot pies were all sold out. But the apricot pie was the best - until they were discontinued in 1968. They were replaced by a round pie, the Harvest pie, which was only a 6/10 pie, unworthy to succeed the octagonal beauty of the original.

In case you doubt my claims on behalf of this pie, just type "Lyons individual fruit pies" into Google. This search will yield over 300,000 hits - 47 years after the last one was sold! These pies, which pre-date Google, the internet and even solid state computers are still being discussed in awe-filled terms, in 2015.

If you ever ate a Lyons apricot pie, then visit the Sheffield pie shop and be transported back in time ...

Content not to be haunted

A friend commented that, he tried to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack him at once.

It got me wondering, why do we feel the need to take (cope, handle, tackle) a day? Why does a day become an obstacle to be overcome, and several days seem like an impossible hurdle? Of course, as with my friend, health issues can make getting through each day difficult. But I wonder if sometimes our expectations about what each day should be like, are too idealistic, too demanding for our situation. Didn't the apostle Paul say that he had learned to be content whatever his condition? I wonder, when things get too much, if we are actually finding ourselves a little wanting in the 'contentment' department?

Many years ago, I made a conscious decision to try and cultivate contentment. Initially, I was concerned with possessions - I wanted to learn to be content with less; to live more simply. It wasn't easy to shift the goal-posts, it wasn't easy to detach from want, and less easy to let go of what I was already holding - even in an emotional sense. I don't think I was entirely successful, but I do now lead a simpler life.

A few years back, I got sick in a debilitatingly permanent way and, over time, another shifting of goal-posts occurred - a shifting of expectations about my senior years. I had to learn to be content within the limitations of my health. That didn't mean laying down and waiting to die, but it did mean not expecting too much of tomorrow. If the day turns out well, then I can grasp it and wring as much out of it as possible but, if it turns out to be a bad day, then I need to work with that; to go with the flow. As far as I know, this is the only way to embrace contentment in the midst of sickness and uncertainty.

Mentally planning tomorrow can upset contentment. If I plan tomorrow in anything but the most general of ways, then I set myself up for discontent should the day turn on me. Those who practise mindfulness or other meditative techniques understand the importance of the present moment, the 'now' in which we live. My diary contains plenty of future events which may or may not come to pass, but 'now' is the only reality; everything else, including all those future events, is imaginary - until and unless they become 'now'.

I like 'now'. Right now, I am being a writer. As a writer, I am feeling no more sick than the healthiest of you. Right now is good and I intend to experience every drop of its goodness while writing this and listening to Brooke Fraser. But, even if I were on my sick bed, it would still be for 'now'. Now is not tomorrow. Tomorrow is not 'now'; tomorrow is a dream; a spectre.  By living 'now' as fully as I am able, I can embrace contentment and prevent several days ganging up on me and haunting my life.

That sinking feeling ...

... when you are first told that one of your children has had a car accident, is only slightly tempered by the fact that it is their own voice that is breaking the news. Even so, it is another reminder of how tenuous our grip on life actually is - we like to pretend that life can be 'managed', that we can sanitise it from interruption - accidental or otherwise; that in short we can be 'safe'. It's a myth. Living is risky, sometimes dangerous. Even something like a sightseeing helicopter flight over a glacier can never be totally 'safe' (one crashed earlier this week).

Anyway, we got the call and a couple of anxious hours later child walks through the door looking a bit worse for wear, but still standing, still walking. Thank God.

Annette and I drive to the crash site to secure anything that may have been left in the car, and we find an unrepairable wreck. A list of things to be thankful for quickly begins to emerge:

• We are thankful that he was able to walk away from the mess and wasn't carried.
• Thankful that it wasn't the cast iron power pole that brought the car to a halt.
• Thankful that in crossing the road, he missed the oncoming traffic and that no one else was hit or hurt.
• Thankful that falling asleep at the wheel wasn't the result of hard partying, but from working 16 of the last 24 hours as a hospital nurse. 
• Strangely, I can't even feel mildly upset about the loss of the car; just thankful that it did its job of holding together well enough to protect the driver. It was a good car.

Life is very precious, abundant in its generality but unique in its individuality. There are no guarantees - every day is a gamble; a new hand of cards. Sometimes the only way to beat the odds is by knowing when to fold - please don't drive tired.