Acts of the Apostles, chapter 20, verse 35?

The Church of England is sometimes remarkably inept.

A good example of entirely failing to get it is Exeter Cathedral’s Christmas lunch for its Volunteer Stewards and Guides. These are the people who, for most of us, are the face of the Cathedral. As the Cathedral website says,

Exeter Cathedral, like all cathedrals, relies on its team of Volunteers Stewards and Guides to welcome visitors and provide guided tours throughout the year. Their role is one of public relations and as such they are ambassadors on the Cathedral’s behalf. The time and dedication of them all cannot be praised highly enough.

And there are a fair number of them – some 90 or so.

But far fewer will have gone to the Christmas lunch today, as the Cathedral asked each of them who wanted to go for £12.50 for a buffet lunch and one glass of wine. And for a number of them this was simply too much.

What a way to thank people for a year of service.

Tugging one’s forelock

Telegraph sub-editors sometimes slip one past. In the paper today (though interestingly no trace on-line, so no link) a small piece on the Prince’s Teaching Institute’s schools programme mark. This recognises inspirational ideas to enhance the teaching of English, history, geography etc. And the title of the piece? Prince promotes ‘traditional’ subjects. Well he would, wouldn’t he.

Even turkeys know Christmas is coming

In The end of inevitability Jordan Furlong challenges the legal profession to think about its future. In a few short paragraphs he identifies the key issues that will shape how law is practised in the future. And it is not just that there are profound changes happening in the relationship between lawyers and their clients, but that it seems most lawyers are simply not aware of them.

It is a sobering post. For Furlong, it is that almost complete lack of awareness of the legal profession that is the real issue,

The one thing that concerns me most, as an observer of the extraordinary change in this marketplace, is that the majority of the profession has no idea what’s coming. Most of the lawyers with whom I’ve dealt over the past several years simply can’t envision a world where lawyers aren’t considered essential to the social and economic fabric. They might recognize that times are tougher and costs are rising and prices have topped out and clients are more demanding. They might be resentfully aware that providers outside the profession are entering the market with lower-price offerings, and they might grudgingly accept that technology allows things to be done faster and cheaper than they used to be. But they’re not putting it all together. They’re not following this road to its conclusion, because they can’t really see how the world could get along without us. The inevitably of lawyers is our fundamental precept, and it has become a mental block.

This is as true in the United Kingdom as it is in North America.

It is certainly difficult in the hurly-burly of practice to take time out to think about what we need to change to stay in the market; and the very fact that we are busy is itself a problem, because it allows us to think that things are, after all, OK: change is not something any of us are that eager to rush into. But choosing to ignore the problem won’t make it go away, and the clock is ticking. And just as Furlong ends his post, ” Lawyers should know better than anyone else what a ticking clock sounds like.”

Cultural differences always make it a “little bit sticky”

An article by Ed Crooks and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in today’s FT points up the difficulty that BP has had in finding “the right tone to fit America’s emotional register”,

That climate of opinion [ where even Barack Obama has been attacked for failing to show enough emotion, and pushed by the US media to show how angry he is] makes it particularly damaging for BP to appear to be making light of the disaster.

Mr Hayward has been the target of many of the attacks on BP, becoming the “most hated and clueless man in America” according to the New York Daily News, after a string of inflammatory remarks.

Some of the comments for which he has been criticised have been entirely defensible, such as his admission to the Financial Times that BP lacked the engineering capability to tackle a blown-out well in deep water. Others have been crass and insensitive, such as his observation that “I’d like my life back,” for which he was forced to apologise on Facebook.

He has a British tendency to make a joke or smile to try to defuse tension, which has made it look as though he does not understand the gravity of the situation.

It was that last paragraph that really caught my eye.

Being a Brit I understand only too well that approach; after all, it is a stock-in-trade for most of us this side of the Atlantic.

But cultural differences have been a perennial source of misunderstanding for Britons when dealing with Americans. A telling example was at the height of the Korean War, in April 1951, when men from 1st Battalion, the Gloucestershire Regiment were holding a key ford over the Imjin River. They found themselves heavily outnumbered by the Chinese, who had sent an entire division of 10,000 men against their 650.

A day and a half into the action, surrounded and with ammunition and supplies running low, they were in imminent danger of being overrun. An American, Maj-Gen Robert H Soule, asked the British brigadier, Thomas Brodie: “How are the Glosters doing?”

As reported in an article in the Daily Telegraph on the 50th anniversary of the battle,

the brigadier, schooled in British understatement, replied: “A bit sticky, things are pretty sticky down there.” To American ears, this did not sound too desperate.

The Glosters lost 622 men and officers to death, injury or captivity.

Two very different days

Saturday afternoon and Celia (daughter #4) and I were on the 6th level of the Millenium Stadium, watching Wales lose a game to South Africa that they should have won, and which at half-time they were leading.

The noise from the 60,000 of us watching the game was such that at times it was difficult to think, with what was happening on the pitch mirrored seconds later by the response of the crowd. Warmed up by all that now accompanies a major rugby game in Cardiff, we had seen male voice choirs, the Lostprophets, three base jumpers off the roof, choreographed pulses of fire, before the gladiatorial entry of the teams, and the anthems: Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika, then Land of my Fathers. The final chorus, “Gwlad, gwlad, pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad” filled the stadium. Expectation rippling around the crowd, a sudden still, the referee’s whistle, and then game on.

Television delivers an experience stripped of passion, where the commentary and the camera angles shape how you see the game, and just in case you missed it, the replays. Very little is left to you. There is no sense of involvement, and your role is no more than a passive observer. Up close and personal, or as up close and personal as you can get on the 6th level, it is all very different. You see the whole pitch, and even if the the players are difficult to distinguish, there is movement: it is much easier to feel what is happening and to make sense of it. You can hear the stands opposite and at each end; and the bank of spectators behind you: to your front it seems little more than a wall of noise, with the occasional words of Cwm Rhondda suddenly heard; and yet behind and around there are the snatches of conversation overheard, laughter and groans, and “Wales, Wales”, taken up and echoed back.

And afterwards there are the crowds.

Arriving at the ground is easy: we were through the turnstiles at 1.00 and had an hour and a half, watching the stadium slowly fill. At the end of the game it is as if a plug has been pulled, and thousands are funnelled down the stairways, and out through the Gates. It has been a very long time since I found myself in quite such a crowd and making our way to the railway station, sometimes with and sometimes against the flow was not pleasant, even though he crowds were quiet: as if all excitement had been drained away.

This afternoon was a different world.

Caroline and I were on Mardon Down, bright sunshine and wind making ripples through the grass. The bluebells may be past their best but they still tint the shallow slopes where the bracken is uncurling, pale green- still only a hint of what will be a dense covering in little more than a month. In the air Skylarks, floating in the wind, with Swifts hawking insects and a lone Buzzard playing at being a Kestrel, holding position with hunched wings.

Just the two of us, accompanied by birdsong and with views south to the Moor, caught in shadowed sunlight. And a slow drive home. Hawthorn in bridal white and campion splashing the green walls with colour.