Meetings and Massage

I had a deep-tissue massage yesterday from Daz, a guy I met at my gym. He is a Sikh, very cute in a beary-sort-of-way, and a very good masseur. We bartered for it: I gave him an old hard drive and installed it in his computer as his own is crapping out. He gave me a very good deep-tissue massage. I really feel much better after these, and my back improves for days. Only problem is that he’s located far south of here and it’s a 1/2 hour trek to get there. This was my third, and I hope to have another after we get back from Singapore, if finances allow.

One of the things about being involved with the Church of England on a leadership level is that meetings are the bane of your existence. Someone once defined a Deanery Synod as “A group of Anglicans waiting to go home”. Unfortunately, as Lay Chair of the Southwark and Newington Deanery, there are lots of meetings that I “ought” to go to. This morning’s “ought” meeting was of the Anglican/Methodist group here in Southwark. A cooperation agreement has been signed nationally, and each diocese has to work out how it’ll be implemented there. There is only one Methodist church in our deanery, and I know nothing about them, but I went anyway. A group of very well intentioned Anglicans and even more well intentioned Methodists spoke of how wonderful it was to be church together (one trendy statement). Several people misused the word “mission” as a verb: “We should mission together in the inner city” (for example). Argh. I wasn’t very comfortable, as I’d neglected to go to the loo before entering the meeting room and I was on the inner end of a row. So I eschewed the coffee. The only redeeming factoid about the meeting is that I had a chance to buy a loaf of sourdough bread at Borough Market, next to the Cathedral. Sourdough bread always helps me remember and appreciate the year I lived in San Francisco.

This afternoon we went to the Serpentine Gallery to see an exhibition by an artist named Glenn Brown. His stuff is either very science fiction like (rocks floating around the canvas with cities built on them, always incorporating a sphere on a stalk in each city), or very surrealistic (he does faces with an odd swirling colour field on the face–the docent who was lecturing around us mentioned that it reminded him of decay–I’m glad we’d eaten before we went). HWMBO liked it a lot; I wouldn’t mind the sci-fi pictures but you can keep the rest of them.

Patronal Festival at St. Matthew’s at the Elephant tomorrow. Bishop Michael Doe, who is with the USPG will be celebrating and preaching. I didn’t get to wash the altar linens, unfortunately. I hope we have a few lavabo towels to substitute for purificators. I hope he doesn’t notice the wax stain on the altar cloth.

I realise that this livejournal sounds and reads a bit like Diary of a Nobody. I apologise for that. I suppose that settling into a routine and folowing it means that little or no exciting stuff happens to you. While I’m not eager for lots of exciting stuff to happen (plagues, pestilence, bad weather, and the like), it leaves me with mostly little events that no one else finds interesting or my own bloviation on the world at large. I suppose it’s not as bad as that mega-multi-volume diary left by a gentleman in the US who did almost nothing during his life. Many entries had to do with the quality of his bowel movements and the amount of urine he produced.

If I get to that point, I shall stop wasting electrons.

One Response to “Meetings and Massage”

  1. besskeloid says:

    I suppose it’s not as bad as that mega-multi-volume diary left by a gentleman in the US who did almost nothing during his life. Many entries had to do with the quality of his bowel movements and the amount of urine he produced.

    If I get to that point, I shall stop wasting electrons.

    No! That’d be excellent, especially with JPEGs!

    Glad you had a good rubdown.