Easter crisps

Bryan bought these for us to snack on while we were playing Blood Bowl this month. (Read my match report)

Easter is the really big chocolate holiday and, it turns out, crisps can be chocolatey too. The cocoa flavouring on these made them look like the much-missed Bovril flavour crisps of yore, but they tasted like chocolate before a mild spicy tang kicked in. There is a potato aftertaste as well. 

Although we both liked them, Bryan and I agreed that we didn't want to eat too many of them in one go. But these would be an ideal snack for chocoholic friends.

Holy cards and Easter hoods

I like trading cards. When I saw "Holy Cards" on sale in Malaga, I had to buy a pack out of sheer curiosity. I felt the frisson of excitement opening them, same as I do with football stickers.

You get 7 cards in a pack for a Euro. I got some big names.

I got Jesus

Jesus

Jesus on a donkey

Mary

These two things (your guess is as good as mine)

And the equivalent of a team badge

There are also binders for sale to keep all your cards in. I didn't buy one. 

I also bought a packet of La Liga trading cards. It also only cost €1 but there was one less card and zero Jesuses in it. 

Malaga had several shops selling Catholic religious merch. 

They all had little figures of people in the traditional garb worn during the big Easter Parades every year. The robes and pointy hoods are, well, let's be honest, creepy-looking and makes it look like the Ku Klux Klan are coming to town. 

They do their best to make the hooded guys look cute. It doesn't really work. 

There were also some life-size effigies around. It wouldn't persuade me to go into a shop if I saw one of these. But it takes all sorts!

One day I'd like to go back to Malaga. But maybe not at Easter.

Seasonal marketing never sleeps

Popped in quickly to B&M stores on the Friday before Christmas and saw this rollover holiday marketing.

I've got to admit I'm a bit tempted by a Biscoff version of a creme egg. It will be disgustingly sweet, I'm sure. But I'm still tempted...

Miles and memories - happenings in March

A dragon for St David's Day! 

Cathy and I covered lots of miles in March. I had a couple of days off work because we had an appointment at the specialist clinic in Cambridge (we have been heading over there annually for about six years now, pandemics notwithstanding). This year we decided to go via Shrewsbury and see Mum on Mother's Day weekend. I went to church with her (and most of the rest of the family) on Mother's Day and got to say hello to lots of old friends. 

Our Mother's Day dinner plans were thrown awry by the restaurant phoning up to tell us they were having a software problem so they couldn't process any food orders or payments. So we ended up with a stack of takeaway pizzas instead. In a weird way, it was a nice reflection of how resilient we are as a family that we can adapt to a situation and still have fun.

Mentioning resilience makes me think of how we have adjusted as a family following the loss of my dad. This March marked the fifth anniversary of his sudden death. I found myself thinking of him quite a bit. I went to a Wales 'C' International football match on the day itself - I think he would have liked that. 

On the Monday after Mother's Day we set out to Cambridge. We had a trouble-free journey and after checking in at our hotel we went for a little trip to Newmarket. It's a horsey place with lots of horsey businesses and also a cracking toy shop!

After our hospital appointment on the Tuesday we headed home to Cardiff. We stopped in Oxford and saw our friend Ella on the way. 

We got home about midnight. The next morning I was on the 7.23am train to London for an all day meeting. I was also incubating a cold. Gotta admit, I wasn't at my best in that meeting. 

Before I came home I met up with my baseball buddy Gawain in an American sports-themed restaurant under Waterloo Station, in a warren of railway arches covered in graffiti. 

Selfie on the way to Waterloo

Meeting up had seemed like a great idea when we made the plan. By the time I got there though I was beyond exhausted. However, Gawain is very good company and we had a great two hours chatting before I had to get the train home.

All that excitement was just in five days. The rest of the month has been a bit of a blur. I made it to my first Keep Grangetown Tidy litter-pick of the year. Fiona who organises it took a picture as proof.

I also made my first foray to the cinema in 2024, watching Dune Part 2 (which I blogged about here). And we went to our first gig of the year - to see Tony Wright at the Metropole Theatre in Abertillery. It was on Easter Sunday, so we took him some Easter eggs, which Cathy presented to him afterwards.

We even had time this month for some ice creams in Victoria Park with the Wootten family. Spring is here. Summer is coming!

December 2021 - End of month review

This is my final monthly round up for 2021 and my final blog post for the year, taking me up to an annual total of 92 posts.

December for us is dominated by Christmas. We wrote about 120 Christmas cards. Cathy took a picture of me posting a load of them outside our local post office, where the postbox has been decorated by someone with excellent crocheting skills!

There will be a series of posts in January about the 2021 Annual Christmas Card Audit. As cards have arrived, it's been fun seeing who has been trying to get a mention in the ACCA this year!

On the first weekend in December we put up the Christmas tree and decorations. (You can see some of them here.) We also had five advent calendars this year. Last year we didn't bother with the Lego Star Wars one, but this year we did, mainly to get the Christmassy version of the Child star of The Mandalorian, Grogu.

Life has gone on inbetween all the Christmassy stuff. I had an appointment to go and get my booster jab. This time it was in Splott instead of the big centre in the old Toys R Us building. 

There were signs up when I went in saying they were offering the Moderna vaccination, but the leaflet used the brand name, Spikevax. I asked the lady doing the jabs why they weren't using the brand name and was told "because it sounds like something you'd make up!" Technically, all brand names are 'made up', I suppose, but I know what she meant. It's a really silly sounding brand name.

Being boosterised means I should be protected against the omicron variant of the Sar-Cov2 coronavirus. However, as we have been seeing people, we have been doing lateral flow tests to make sure we haven't picked it up anywhere. It occurred to me as I binned yet another baggie of used tests and swabs that there is going to be a 'covid layer' in the landfill sites excavated by future archeologists that will help them accurately date the rubbish they are sifting through.

I had an early surprise present off Cathy when she bought me a box of Captain Crunch cereal. It's the proper American stuff complete with neon bits and that wonderful artificial "fruit" scent that comes with it.

At the start of Christmas week, the Welsh Government announced a ban on spectators at sporting events. The FAW responded by putting football on hiatus until January. At that point, I had only been to one game in December, because of other commitments and Barry Town having to postpone a game. However, that one game, which was between Caerau Ely and Cardiff Draconians, was a landmark game on my Futbology App. 

I was in work right up to Christmas Eve, then Cathy and I had a quiet Christmas Day. Two days later we went up to Shrewsbury and had some days with family before heading home to ring in the New Year. While in Shrewsbury I went to a football match at the Meadow for the first time since March 2020. It was an evening game that ended in a 0-0 draw, but it was so good to be back there! Here is a photo of the team warming up.

I haven't been to many evening games at the Meadow. It always feels a bit special. That was my final game of the year, giving me the following totals on Futbology.

This also doubles as a summary of my season so far as I didn't see any games before July. I'm quite pleased that I've been to a dozen new grounds. 

On the way home from Shrewsbury we stopped and called in at the Hereford Model Centre. I bought myself a present with some Christmas money. This will be the subject of at least one future blog post!

And if the thought of reading about Dungeon Bowl in the New Year doesn't fill you with excitement, then how about this reminder of the next holy holiday that I spotted in a Co-op in Shrewsbury?

That's right! Easter is on its way....

When religion and politics intersect

Political discourse took an interesting swerve over Easter. The Conservatives put out a meme poster on Good Friday that caught my attention.

From a theological point of view, the use of an empty cross to mark the day the gospels report Jesus was crucified, is slightly ironic. From a political point of view, the symbolism is equally as empty. I was left feeling this was posturing along similar lines to the insistence on Union flags being flown from government buildings and being in the background of Zoom interviews. It's a nationalist tangent trying to link in to a cultural heritage of being a 'Christian country'. The Tories were trying this ten years ago (I blogged about it angrily then), and it's making a reappearance.

The linking of politics with religion is often included in lists of 'signs of fascism'. So it wasn't a surprise to see comparisons on Twitter of the Conservative meme with Nazi propaganda.

Previously, there have been British political parties that have tried to co-opt Christianity for their cause. This is one such example:

This poster campaign was some time ago now. The BNP has disappeared, outflanked by UKIP, the Brexit Party and the Conservative Party, which seems to have moved to the right with each passing election.

If overtly aligning with religion is a known tactic of the far right, then what does it say about a government when it starts aligning with religion?

In a way, this intersection of politics and religion feels almost inevitable after the power demonstrated in harnessing the white evangelical vote by the Republican Party in America. (75% of white evangelicals voted for Trump last year; the theological label is practically synonomous with Republicanism now.) The recent Conservative electoral success has been driven by following the right wing American playbook and the government are doubling down on it. So it's only natural that they would eventually come and try to claim religion.

But not to be outdone, Labour leader Keir Starmer decided to do a publicity piece for Easter by visiting a church.

In his (now deleted) video, Keir describes the way the church in question, Jesus House, a large, black majority Pentecostal Church in London, has supported people during the pandemic, including recently hosting a vaccination centre.

This caused a slight problem for Keir, though. Jesus House has a track record of opposing LGBT+ rights and is accused of promoting "conversion therapy" to "cure" gay people of being gay. Conversion therapy is controversial. It's often likened to torture.

As can be imagined, this visit did not play well with Keir's support base. Here's an example.

It's surprising that Keir didn't know there could be controversy attached to this visit. Both Theresa May and Boris Johnson were criticised for visiting Jesus House, for exactly the same reason.

I'd put Keir's mis-step down to religious illiteracy. I get the sense that some politicians see "religion" as some kind of old fashioned benign relict of days past, acting as a stable force for good in society. But not all religion is like that.

Keir may have thought he could go along for the photo opportunity and praise the way Jesus House is hosting a Covid vaccination centre, and that would be it. But 'pick and choose' is a difficult game to play with religion because fundamentalism is a complete package. A politician can try to separate out religiously-motivated activity they agree with and activity they don't, but an unequivocal endorsement of a church implies endorsement across the breadth of the espoused creed.

For the fundamentalist evangelical church in question, supporting people during the pandemic and their opposition to marriage equality are both motivated by their belief system. There is no way of differentiating between the two in terms of where they come from. From their perspective, the wellspring is the same - trying to 'be true to the Bible'.

In his subsequent apology, Keir says he didn't know about Jesus House's opposition to LGBT+ rights, and that it was a "mistake". He took down the video on Easter Monday.

I predict there are going to be more attempts to use Christianity as a political weapon. The Conservatives have been cynically smarter in just co-opting Christian symbolism without the burden of having to endorse any activities motivated by a belief system. It's a fundamentally empty appeal to a sense of "Christian" without having to pick their way through the specifics of a creed.

They did it again on Easter Sunday.

This will be the last fugly rabbit I post on here for a while, I promise

But as I seem to get more comments on my fugly rabbit posts than anything else, I may renege on my promise at some indeterminate point in the future.





(Pink and with a glitter-covered bottom. Oooh.)
(Spotted in a gallery in Penarth)

More ugly rabbits, now with added velour

Again, I really do not know who would buy these. Green velour bunnies. Who? Would? Buy? These?

Alternatively, if now you've seen them you want to buy them, then go to Paperchase.

If you want the absolutely definitive definition of the word "fugly"

Then check out this Easter decoration I saw last night in Home Sense in Cardiff.



Yes, that's right a three foot high metallic purple rabbit giving you the evil eyes. Eeeeeeevil!

The powerlessness of God

The Easter service today contained the following interesting observations, based on the work of a sociologist called Willard Waller and his concept of the 'least love'.

According to this, in any relationship one person will love the other more. The one who loves least therefore has more power in the relationship, because the one who loves more will forgive more often, will compromise more readily and so on. The one who loves the most will have the least power and potentially is more likely to be abused.

In the context of Easter, if the theory can be extrapolated that far, God loves most and therefore in relationship to humanity is rendered powerless. The death of Christ is not God pouring out His wrath on the Son (the evangelical demi-heresy which divides the persons of the trinity), but God extending his love to us through embracing death, even death on a cross. God is abused on the cross, and by the cross, and is broken for us, he dies and in that death is also bereaved, because of his love for us.

It's deep stuff. And it's made more deep by the passage of John's gospel which was the text for the day where Jesus invites his disciples to eat breakfast with him on the beach. This is the powerless God who invites us to breakfast, after everything we've done. Because he loves us more.

Good Friday

At the Good Friday service today, The Blessing by Gerard Kelly was read out. It resonated with me. Particularly the last verse.

May you who are restless
Find rest
And in rest, restoration
And the healing
Of your hollow soul
May peace be yours
-
May you who are frozen
Find freedom
And in freedom the faith
To face the fire
And the thawing
Of your ice-gripped heart
May peace be yours
-
May you who are conflicted
Find convergence
And in convergence
Confidence
To be the one new child
Of your old divided self
May peace be yours
-
May you who live in tension
Find tenderness
And in tenderness the tendency
To kindness
And the creativity
Of a caring character
May peace be yours
-
And you who are Godless
May you find God
And in God,
The grace and growth you need
For fruit and fullness
And the love that will last you
Through the long-haul
Of a lived-for-others life
May peace be yours