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Have spent a little time this week looking for o­n-line collaboration tools to use with the various committees that I am o­n. It is hard to find good cheap (ie free) tools. It is even harder persuading everyone o­n a group to change to o­n-line working. However, this way of doing things is here to…

Hard to believe that I am chosing Advent hymns o­nce again. Choosing hymns is hard most of the year, but not right now. Advent has good music and some very good hymns, but not many and it o­nly lasts four weeks. They slot in pretty easily.

A good meeting of the Book Club last night, discussing Iris Murdoch's The Bell. I am not sure that we ever decided what the Bell itself represented, if anything, but the conversation along the way was interesting.  I was the o­nly man there, as usual. Do men read fiction?Part of the discussion became focussed o­n…

For reasons too complicated to go into here, I need to revive computer programming skills that I last used 20 years ago. I have a particular task, to do with mapping the local council wards, which I think can o­nly be perfomed using Prolog. I was always fascinated with this logic based language but never terribly competent.…

I am interested in a metaphor that is doing the rounds at the moment. Clare Short has said that Tony Blair is now reaping the whirlwind. This is in relation to the terrorist attacks that seem to have become more likely since the war in Iraq.The metaphor comes from the Bible (Hosea 8:7) and is…

Two worlds collide in my weekend. To Perth today for a conference o­n the proposed new method of electing people for local, perhaps even national government, STV. Single Transferable Voting is fair but complicated. Then tomorrow, the feast of Christ the King, which I am making much of in church. Choir, string quartet and special…

A rather fine circle of toadstools has appeared in the front rectory garden which has given me much pleasure in the last 24 hours. I've told the cat that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, but she just yawns.

Church AGM last night went very smoothly. It is not the same without a half hour controversy over the position of the bishop's chair, but we somehow we managed to get by without this. Yesterday was spent doing the annual church statistics, something which I enjoy doing more than I would normally let o­n. I…

To my delight, I've just discovered that I cannot post certain words o­n this blog – postnuke (my blogging software) is a prude. I cannot say cock, for example, nor cock, cock or cock. The words get replaced by stars. What I have not found out yet, is where the list of words is which…