Success In The Ministry

 I dreamed that I'd started holding a midweek service at the church where I was serving as a curate. The first week we'd had seven people. The second week hundreds turned up, the enormous cathedral-sized church was full to bursting and the noise was so great that I lost control of the proceedings. But it didn't really matter. The service was now pretty much running itself. A girl in a surplice was giving a dramatic reading of something or other. Was it the epistle? Was it the gospel? I couldn't make out any of the words but she was doing it beautifully, so who cares.....

We ended with a procession round the streets- which I led.  As I came back to the building my boss (the vicar) opened the doors for me and I thought, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in."

Three Unconnected Paragraphs And A Picture

 The way to peel ginger is with a spoon. The rind slips off a treat and you waste far less than you would if you used a knife. I'm peeling ginger because I'm stewing rhubarb and rhubarb and ginger is a classic combination.

 YouTube, knowing I'm interested in T.E. Lawrence, punted me newsreel footage of his funeral. It was a simple interment in a village churchyard. No military pomp. No uniforms even. Winston Churchill was there. The commentator- speaking in those nasal clipped tones, reeking of emotional and sexual repression, that no-one uses anymore- called him a "great Empire-builder".  Lawrence would have suffered agonies of self-questioning if he he'd thought that anyone would sum up his legacy quite so gibly. The commentator's accent was so pronounced that I thought at first I was listening to someone for whom English was a second language; an Arab, perhaps. Anyway, the sun was shining so they had a nice day for it.

 I had reason this morning to take a look at the paintings of Wyndham Lewis. I like them. He'd got the hang of Cubism- and used its lessons intelligently. He also painted excellent portraits. He's been out of favour for ages because he once wrote a book calling Hitler a "man of peace"- an opinion he later revised. His blasting and bombardiering annoyed a lot of people- including the not-to-be-despised academic painter Augustus John- who resigned from the Royal Academy because it had accepted Lewis's portrait of Ezra Pound for its Summer Exhibition. Here's one of Lewis's pictures from the Great War. It's called "A Canadian Gun-pit."