Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make
movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art
as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence,
a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be
expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on
everything to prove its Orthodoxy.
-- Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things
This is a picture of Lionel, my Useless Blob.
He's really here, jumping up and down. To adopt your own Useless Blob, click on him.
![[christian fandom]](http://www.valdyas.org/~irina/blog/graphics/page/cf125x125.gif)
2004-06-14
We’ve rented a holiday house in Germany. In Steinbach-Hallenberg, in fact, a little town in the middle of nowhere^WThüringen in the former German Democratic Republic.
Now to get there. By train: it has a station, that’s one of the reasons we picked it. (Other reasons are that it’s in the middle of the woods, in hilly country, not really developed for tourism yet, and it has a beautiful ruined castle.)
I went to vote for Europe. I’ve skipped European elections in the past, but this time there was the little matter of the software patents (scroll down until you find the article with the picture of the demonstration, I don’t know how to link to something that doesn’t have an intro), and the fact that more and more European regulations affect me directly. And then there are the silly regulations, like this one that tries to treat mountain climbers like construction workers, and regulations about food and other pieces of culture that make all of the EU more and more the same. And the lack of opposition against over-the-top US air travel security; one reason that wherever else I go, I won’t go to the United States soon unless I absolutely have to.
I’ve run out of story in the main story at eighty-something thousand. Part of it isn’t really the main story, so I think it’s about seventy thousand all told.
Jilan has killed Lyan, though he doesn’t find out until later: he thinks he’s only knocked him out. I don’t want an interminable Beethoven ending complete with the Scouring of Ildis. I wrote some of the Beethoven stuff anyway, because I want it to exist in order to zap it in the revision. It also needs to exist as background and characterisation, of course.
There’s soccer going on. I doubt I would even know — except for the thumps and cries from next door, the wall is thin and the TV is loud — if it weren’t for the decorations. Whole streets have suddenly sprouted bright orange and red-white-and-blue vegetation, an orgy of patriotism.
Now I don’t mind patriotism, I’m fond of the queen, I think flags are festive, I rather like red, white and blue and I have nothing against lions, but orange hurts my eyes and I detest soccer. More to the point, I detest soccer madness. And I resent the tacit assumption that one is interested. The fact that I have to defend my lack of interest and my ignorance. Let people play soccer all they want, but I wish they wouldn’t force it on us.
Not much has come of my resolution to take pictures of the tree on the first Sunday of every month. These were taken on the Thursday after Easter. It’s June when I write this and the tree is about due for a new picture in full summer dress, but in mid-spring it’s already impressive enough.
Our priest being away, we had a substitute, a US army chaplain stationed in Belgium. The choirmistress didn’t honour my wish to sing the responses in English, so Father David spoke (or rather sang, in a pleasant high voice, with more tune to it than we’re used to) English and we sang in Dutch. Halfway through the vigil my reflexes kicked in (“speak what’s spoken to you”) and I sang one “Lord—” before catching myself at it and going back to “ontferm U”.
