• Review of Predictions for 2018

    On 1 January I made predictions for the coming year. Time to see how I got on.

    1 – General Election in the second half of the year.

    Well, no we didn’t and the government linger on. Not right

    2 – “…and as the polls close, our exit poll predicts that the Conservative Party is unlikely to be able to form a new government…”

    Well, the government did linger on of a fashion.  N/A

    3 – The next but one leader of the Conservative Party becomes Ruth Davidson MP.

    Too soon to tell. Not right yet.

    4 – The hipsters get bored of vinyl and discover cameras with actual, you know, film.

    In September, I happened upon three or four hipster types from Denmark in the cathedral grounds taking photographs for a fashion shoot in Belgium. They had stopped shooting for a moment…. to reload film canasters.  Right – but likely to become more common yet.

    5 – No date for a new referendum on Scottish Independence.

    No date for a new referendum and no great call for one either. Right.

    6 – No progress for LGBT affirming Anglicans in England.

    Sadly correct. Right

    7 – Progress for LGBT affirming Anglicans elsewhere, particularly Brazil.

    Stunning progress in Brazil – marriage agreed by huge majority on synod floor. (And who else saw that coming!) Right.

    8 – Increasing realisation that sexual abuse is part of church culture. #churchtoo #metoo.

    Yes – meetings happening all over the place trying to work out how to respond. Few coherent policies yet. Right.

    9 – FTSE lower at the end of 2018 than it is at the beginning. (7687)

    As I write this the FTSE is at 6728 – worst year in a decade. Right

    10 – The end of the beard.

    Those with style, manners and culture have seen the error of their ways and shaved. A few young and misguided types cling on. Completely and utterly right.

     

    Not a bad year, I think.

18 responses to “General Assembly on sex and singleness”

  1. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    DCampbell writes:
    Wow, Kennedy – I hadn’t realised there was so much or so many people to it, but surely it is not beyond us to have some kind of webcast of the more important sections of the proceedings

    Webcasting from Palmerston Place presents a number of challenges:

    resourcing the camera crew, vision mixer and director (kit and people) and integration with the projection system to carry any slides and visuals
    looking at the lighting to allow good pictures but without interfering with the projection system (which suffers from light spill from the windows already)
    Network and machine infrastructure in the building to capture and code the video.
    Dedicated bandwidth (with Quality of Service) to transfer the video and audio stream out to a distribution server. (We currently piggyback on Palmerston Place’s own internet connection).

    An alternative would be an audio stream with a general shot webcam updating every 30 – 60 secs but again would probably need a dedicated connection to the net to ensure that there was no breakup.

    This is not a litany of reasons for not doing things – it’s just a realistic assessment of the resource requirements.

    Kennedy

  2. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    Or another thought-

    We start having Synod on the Th/Fr/Sa after the Assembly on the Mound and share the costs of the setup.

  3. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    No, I suppose a general ‘piskie tag would work just as well, but I’m with Kimberly and would prefer #piskie

  4. kelvin Avatar

    My only problem with piskie is that in some parts of the UK a “piskie” is one of the little people, and not necessarily a nice one.

    See for example:
    http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/cornwall/folklore/the-piskies-of-cornwall.html

    “Some people saw them as the souls of pagans who could not transcend to heaven, and they were also seen as the remnants of pagan gods, banished with the coming of Christianity. In tradition they are doomed to shrink in size until they disappear. “

  5. Elizabeth Avatar
    Elizabeth

    Maybe it’s just me, but I have always found the potential confusion between pisky and piskie immensely pleasing (by ‘always’ I mean, since I discovered the term – not too many years ago!). It’s one of the (many) reasons I’m pleased to be on the pisky/ie side of the pond.

  6. David Campbell Avatar

    Thanks Kelvin – all this stuff is quite amazing really – especially Kennedy’s informative and knowledgeable material about what is actually needed. I agree about the Primus’s charge being essential, but if live streaming (if that is what it is called) is too intensive an operation in all kinds of ways for an admittedly small audience, why not do a twice daily edited digest of each day’s business like the one the Revd Dougkas Aitken does for the CofS?

  7. Kelvin Avatar
    Kelvin

    Rob Warren already does do digests in audio format – video may well be the next step, though it is quite a big step to take.

  8. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    The video update that Douglas Aitken does is a copy of his audio update with appropriate video material behind it ie you don’t get any actuality from the chamber.

    We would still need editing and coding time before the video could be uploaded to an external server.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Previous Posts

  • Christmas Message from Bishop Gregor

    It is quite likely that people reading this blog won’t be aware of Bishop Gregor’s Christmas Message – I don’t think it was sent to clergy or congregations and it doesn’t appear on the diocesan website. However, it is quite a good one and so I’m putting it on here. I heard a carol new…

  • Christmas Sermon 2013

    [UPDATE: The Herald newspaper covered this sermon as a front page story here: http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/clergyman-calls-for-human-rights-focus-at-2014-games.23039023] Here’s what I said in my Christmas Sermon this year. It has become something of a commonplace that Christmas, at least in the life of the shops and the media starts all too early. Even at the end of September, the…

  • We’re going on a journey

    A couple of years ago, there was a new initiative in St Mary’s – someone suggested that we should have a crib service for children at 4 pm on Christmas Eve. We kind of expected a few children from the young church to show up. In the event there were about 50 people in the…