After my slightly disastrous attempt at marmalade (it was more like treacle!!) I decided to have a go at chilli jam, which has been much more successful and is much quicker to make! You need:

8 red peppers , deseeded and roughly chopped
10 red chillies , roughly chopped (this actually makes it very hot so maybe less??)
finger-sized piece fresh root ginger , peeled and roughly chopped
8 garlic cloves , peeled
400g can cherry tomatoes
750g golden caster sugar
250ml red wine vinegar

Put the peppers, chillies, ginger and garlic in the food processor and blend. Next, throw it all in a saucepan with the remaining ingredients and bring to the boil. When it is boiling, let it simmer for 50 minutes. After this time it should be sticky. Stir for a further 10-15 minutes so it doesn’t burn to the bottom of the pan.

Sterilise some jars in the oven and then pour your yummy jam into the jars (should make 4 smallish jars).

Tadaaaaa!!

Now for some pretty fabric toppers…

Every year, regency buildings are (dis)graced with the arrival of seagulls, wanting to make nests in the chimneys. As a result, you get very little sleep for a good proportion of the year!! At around 4am you hear the “Waaaaaaarrrgggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg WARGWARGWARGWARGWARG!!!!” etc as they wake up.

Seagulls are fiercely protective of their young and will swoop at anyone who passes too close to a nest. Leaving home in the morning is like a game of Pac-man, as you have to stick to a network of available streets whilst avoiding flying objects!!

BBlerrrgghhhhH!

There is a cool app on the iPhone called Small Planet. You take an area of Google Streetview and it will make it into a small planet!

Planet Pink Sky:

I am completely hooked on a little iPhone app called Instagram (as you will know, from some of my photos).  It combines my love of retro-style photography with social networking.  It incorporates details from many cultures which I find absolutely fascinating.  What I love about IG, is that everybody on there is really positive and encouraging.  Everyone supports each other and there are some hugely talented people out there.

We must never forget to innovate, but also to support innovation and to celebrate it.  The use of the# tag is becoming more and more prevalent in modern day internet usage.  Its purpose is to create a link between many different strands. This device was pioneered by Twitter, amongst others.

I was genuinely moved, when I saw a new #tag appear on IG entitled #prayforjapan, following the horrors of the huge earthquake and tsunami.

It is so easy to get caught up in tradition and a sense of ‘religion’ when it comes to prayer.  When broken down, prayer involves expressing to God what is in our hearts.  This is often through worship/thanks, contemplation, reflection, asking for forgiveness and asking for help.

Religion and routine dictate to us that this involves ‘saying stuff’ to God and perhaps closing our eyes and putting our hands together. It is easy to say to someone “we are all praying for you” but just imagine if you could visualise it? Wouldn’t it be so much easier to see, to feel and to understand?  A picture paints 1000 words, so rather than 4992 prayers, what if, as a resident of Japan, you SAW those prayers?  This is exactly what IG has achieved.

If you click on someone’s tag #prayforjapan, the most powerful set of 4992 images (and counting, fast!) come up. 4992 people who have sat and prayerfully contemplated the plight of this country,  taken their cameras and thoughtfully created an image that visualises their prayer.

Some images are really simple, like a post-it note saying “love and prayers to Japan”.  Someone had written “Pray for Japan” in the sand on a beach in America (quite symbolic, given that it was a tsunami that hit as well as an earthquake).  Some prayers had no words, but were a desperate cry for help.These images were from the Japanese, showing the destruction all around them.  Other members from Japan left messages saying “Japan thanks you for your prayers”.

Some images were really moving.  One showed some broken wooden boards, focussing on a tiny little plant growing through a knot in the wood to symbolise hope and new life.  Someone else had made some origami birds in bright colours, which simply said “pray”.  Many had found red on a white background to symbolise the flag and others had photographed blossom, as cherry blossom is a prevalent feature in Japanese art.  Another had taken a photo of Hokusai’s wave (1830ish), which is possibly the most famous piece of Japanese art in history. Many surmised that this could be a tsunami near Mount Fuji, although popular opinion suggests that it is actually a “wave of the open sea” (translated from some of the Japanese title notes).  There were also pictures of children praying, world flags congregated together and one flag simply said “the sun will shine again”.

Placed together, these images were incredibly powerful.  They were an image of prayer and solidarity.  I learnt something today and I am grateful. God bless Japan.

Some examples close up:

As an aside, wouldn’t it be a brilliant small group/cluster activity? To do a photo walk on a subject relating to prayer?

I laughed out loud when I saw this image on the Echo website…

This is an e-fit released by the police of two women wanted for stealing mascara in Cirencester (I don’t recall receiving such an exciting image when my iMac, a laptop and my camera were stolen from my office which was broken into three times but there you go).  It looks like something a child has drawn on MSPaint!!!  I used to get told off for doodling new hairstyles, blacked out teeth and moustaches on people in magazines and in newspapers by my parents, but I reckon even then I could have done a better job!  With all the technology and rendering that is around nowadays, I really think the teacher’s comment here would be “Could try harder” !!

I was particularly amused by the caption which reads: “Efits: These are not photographs but computer generated images” …REALLY?

Why is it, that when we hear a story about one person dying in tragic circumstances, it is really easy to feel the pain and empathise with the family and friends of the deceased, yet when a huge tragedy like Christchurch NZ happens and over one hundred people die, we think “Oh how terrible” but also feel pretty numb.  The day of the earthquake, I posted this on Pink Sky:

Pink Sky Offer love and prayers to everyone in New Zealand today. When one person dies in tragic circumstances it is easy to feel the pain. When many die, we must not be so overwhelmed that we forget each individual. Each has a story, a family, friends and dreams. God bless all who are suffering today. We stand by you.

And yet I am still troubled, by my apparent ambivalence to their circumstances.  The fact is, we do not have the capacity to feel (truly) as God feels.  We have to ‘cope’ and ‘get by’ and ‘move on’.  We are not directly involved, so we carry on with our own business.

Isn’t it funny though, that we always want goodness to occur in abundance.  When people go on mission, they often choose third world countries, or places where the ‘results’ will be high.  Or perhaps a place where we will come back from with loads of ‘amazing stories’.  What is our measure of ‘amazing’?  Abundance?  Success?

Have we ever considered that what we might consider to be a failure might actually be the start of something amazing?  Just because something didn’t go according to OUR plan, doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened according to God’s plan.  The more I look at Jesus, the more I realise that He focussed an awful lot on individuals.  Meeting people one at a time.

When Jesus called his disciples, he called each one by name, to follow him. He did not address a crowd of people and tell them to follow him.

When Jesus was walking amongst a noisy crowd, he noticed the one woman who touched his cloak.

When everyone was shouting and celebrating, Jesus wanted to go to tea with one tax collector.

When Jesus met the woman at the well he sat down and talked to her personally.

When Jesus addressed the crowds, he fed them using one boy’s food.

The good shepherd left 99 sheep to go and find one that was lost.

Perhaps we are supposed to feel empathy with the one who is lost to tragic circumstances, rather than try to put a blanket over an entire crowd and grieve for them all at once?  When you start to think of each person with their own story it is a lot easier to feel something for them.  Similarly, when we pray that our family and friends won’t be ‘lost to tragic circumstances’ spiritually, it seems better to pray for them as individuals so that we can really feel what we are praying.

I was astonished recently to discover that the highest percentage of atheists, agnostics and unbelievers is in Sweden!  (Perhaps we should go on mission there rather than Africa or wherever we were thinking of?!)  The fact is that if you went there, you might only see one person become a Christian.  The temptation is to think that it has been a failure, but biblically that is not so.  The Bible so often works in the opposite way to the way that we think.

The principle of individualism works in so many areas.  Not judging a book by its cover (each person is an individual), not basing faith on experience (each situation is individual), not making blanket statements (individual circumstances vary), not formulating ‘proof’ from evidential suggestion (individual circumstances vary) etc.

So I will repeat what I said earlier…

Pink Sky Offer love and prayers to everyone in New Zealand today. When one person dies in tragic circumstances it is easy to feel the pain. When many die, we must not be so overwhelmed that we forget each individual. Each has a story, a family, friends and dreams. God bless all who are suffering today. We stand by you.

This morning I managed to trap a nerve in my neck… What an idiot!!  I am off work and on strong painkillers and ibuprofen gel.  I then have to go for physio as it improves.  It is one of those stupid things that feels really unneccessary!!!