What is in Kelvin's Head?

How did I do with last year’s predictions?

31/12/2025
Here’s a run down of how I did at last year’s predictions.
- Good results for Nigel Farage following the English local elections in May. Terrible results for Conservative Party.
Exactly what happened. YES
- No progress towards the marriage of same-sex couples in the Church of England
Exactly what happened. Indeed, I think things may have gone into reverse. YES
- Turbulent year for WordPress, which powers about half of the internet.
The year began with Automattic dramatically cutting its contribution to development leading to stagnation in development and much acrimony. Subsequently restored. Deep divisions remain about Gutenberg. I’m claiming this as a YES.
- 2025 will be the hottest year on record.
Final figures yet to be calibrated but all reports indicate that this, unfortunately is a YES.
- No trade deal for UK with US. Increasing talk of re-aligning economy closer to EU.
Well, there was a trade deal in May called the Economic Prosperity Deal but it doesn’t seem to much and some of the basics have already been reversed. I suppose I have to be honest and say I didn’t get this quite right so it is a NO. But…
- Ceasefire in Russia-Ukraine war but no long term solution.
Hard to assess this one. No long term solution, certainly. There have been a series of ceasefires proposed but none seems really to have been fully implemented. Partial YES.
- “Assisted Dying” aka doctor assisted suicide becomes legal in at least one of the jurisdictions of the British Isles.
I have to put this down as a NO as it completed its parliamentary journey in the Isle of Man but hasn’t received Royal Assent yet, so not technically legal.
- Turbulent year for economy but stock market higher at end of year than beginning. (FTSE currently at 8,173)
Stock market at 9,931 today and there was quite a lot of volatility in the first part of the year. So this one is a YES.
- There will be fewer Commonwealth Realms (ie countries which share the monarchy) by the end of 2025 than there are now.
This one is a NO though there has been significant progress in that direction in Jamaica and moves that way in Grenada.
- Philip Mountstephen.
Well, I was pushing Philip Mounstephen’s name as he appeared to be the only senior bishop in the C of E who actually believed the [absurd] position of the C of E bishops on same-sex relationships. But it is a NO – nothing significant to report.

So – five and a half out of ten this year. Not as good as some years. A couple of near misses.
new year, predictions. 2025

9 responses to “The Lament Question”

kimberly

12/08/2009

ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.

you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.

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kimberly

12/08/2009

the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.

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kelvin

12/08/2009

Its not just me though, and not just fours.

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Aaron Orear

12/08/2009

I think because sorrow touches the core of the human condition – we are mortal but can perceive immortality. “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11)

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Erp

12/08/2009

I understand Aristotle talks about catharsis and various philosophers have followed up on that idea.

Perhaps it arouses sadness both from the art itself but also from our own sources festering within and allows us to let go. We feel better for the letting go, the lessening of our own internal sadness, and so perceive the art as beautiful.

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RosemaryHannah

12/08/2009

Kimberly was there before me. However, even I, a nine, can sometimes see the beauty in sad things. For me they do two things (may be more but two are most obvious). The first is the catharsis thing. The second is to make me less lonely. Look, here am I weeping, but all around me people sit in the same sorrow. It is not just my sorrow – I am not alone.

I have long thought there is another answer, one I do not properly understand but I have (I think – and who am I to think it). Deep in God there is a huge well of sorrow. Unless we experience sorrow we cannot understand God. When we sorrow we tap into that well, and become closer to him.

And being a nice cheerful nine, I will now add that I live in hope that having sorrowed with him, we will share also and even more fully in the joy which swallows the sorrow. Delete this last paragraph from your mind on reading, it will only spoil the joy of the sorrow.

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Elizabeth

13/08/2009

Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?

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Ritualist Robert

14/08/2009

Surely it’s because the concept of beauty is independent from concepts such as ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ – just as a G major chord might be loud or soft, but that volume has no effect on its G major-ness.

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Steve

14/08/2009

I remember Augustine saying (don’t ask me where) that for a picture to be beautiful it requires dark colours as well as bright.

There is also a hint of an answer in this poem by Edwin Muir:

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

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