"Thou Mine Inheritance, Now and Always..."

Yesterday a dear friend of mine had her confirmation. The service was at our college chapel, which is an absolutely beautiful building where I attended a memorable Christmas service last year. This was, obviously, a private service so everyone there was her family or friends. While this is the first time I've been to a confirmation, I can say I found the service lovely; my friend gave a testimony about her journey, which was both interesting and a nice way to personalise the service, and the college choir sang. I love our college choir - they're a definite asset to the place! Afterwards we had dinner in hall, at which I found out that one of the other attendees was from the same part of Devon as me, was actually neighbours with a family I'm friends with, and we have at least fifteen mutual friends & acquaintances! Devon is such a big county that I never expect to meet people from my part of it, much less people who know the same people I do. We worked out that we had, if not actually talked to each other before meeting at Oxford, at least been in the same room a couple of times. Funny how that goes.

Unlike my friend, I am not religious. I was raised in an irreligious family, and you'd have to go back to my great-grandparents' generation to find genuine religious feeling on either side of the family (my mother's parents were raised Catholic, but have been lapsed for a very long time) and barring various superstitions regarding the saints - my mum always told us to pray to Saint Anthony whenever we lost something - religion has never been a part of my life, really. I went to a CofE school for a couple of years as a child, but all I took away from that was a deep resentment at being forced to pray before lunch. I was hungry! I didn't want to thank God for what he had given me, I wanted to eat!

Sometimes, I do think it would be nice to have a faith, but I think I was raised secular enough that belief in God... I'm not wired that way. I appreciate a lot of things about religion - I love visiting churches and cathedrals (and other religious buildings, but since I'm European and mostly travel in Europe, churches are overwhelmingly what I find) and I'm awestruck by the fierce love and dedication that went into constructing such amazing buildings. I also love a lot of religious music - hymns, psalms, carols, you name it. The few times I've attended a church service, I never fail to get a rush of overwhelming emotion when the singing starts. In that way, while I appreciate the ideas and sentiment behind sects like the Quakers, the closest thing I get to religious awe and passion has only ever been at very "high-church" services. Actually, I remember visiting a Serbian Orthodox cathedral (Saborna Crkva Rođenja Presvete Bogorodice in Sarajevo) and being so overwhelmed by it all that I left reeling, head spinning, almost unsure where my body was. I was visiting with a friend who said the feeling, leaving that cathedral, was like we had been "crushed by God", and we had to go for a strong cup of Bosnian coffee to get over the experience. So yes, religious grandeur definitely does it for me.

And because I might as well, here's the hymn I quoted from in the title. It's my friend's favourite hymn, and we sung it in her confirmation. I hadn't heard it before but I think it's beautiful.

This is a Post Title

My feelings on the election can be mostly summed up as "doom, death, desolation". I didn't in my wildest dreams think the Tories would get a majority. I suppose worst-case scenario, I get a TEFL certificate and fuck off for a few years until there's a government change, although with the gains the SNP made I might not have the same country to come back to. It's a mess.

So instead I will offload the links I've had open in my browser tabs for a while, both so I can have a record of them and so you can maybe enjoy them.

• Travels in Siberia - one of my friends linked this on Facebook. It's the account of one American man's trip across Siberia, and although I haven't yet read it she said it was an excellent piece of travel writing.
• The Next Christianity - informative and terrifying, on the growing divide between Christian belief in the West and in the global South.
• Footnotes in History: Being Anglo-Indian - this article makes me so, so sad. My mother's family is Anglo-Indian and although as a British woman with a father from Yorkshire I can't, in good faith, call myself a true Anglo-Indian, that culture and history has been part of my life since I was very young. And it makes me sad, and somewhat guilty, to be part of the reason why this group barely exists any more.
• The Ancient Ghost City of Ani - gorgeous photos of churches from the city of Ani on the Turkish-Armenian border.
• In Pictures: Yugo-Nostalgists Mark Tito Anniversary - I've been to Tito's grave! And now you too can be there in spirit, and see the mostly old people who remember fondly the days of bratstvo i jedinstvo.
• Я паркуюсь как сел - Kazakh website documenting the shitty parking skills of the good people of Kazakhstan. I hope you appreciate the effort I went through to type this text in Cyrillic.
• Swedish policeman dancing - I am so confused yet charmed.

And Life Goes On...

Since I last posted, I've come back to university, and promptly not done most of my work for the past week and a half. I didn't have to hand in any essays until comparatively late, and without that initial jolt when you sit down to write your first essay of the term it's hard to get back into the swing of things. But next week I might actually go to my lectures (ha... ha...).

I voted! And want to curl up in despair. It's inevitably going to be another hung parliament, and the results are even more uncertain than last time, so who knows how long it'll take to get a parliament together. The act of voting was, as with most "adult" things, suitably anticlimatic. It was identical procedure to when I voted in the European elections, so. Soon the tortuous waiting starts, and I pray for five years of Milliband, because fuck Cameron.

After the gale-force wind of the last three days, in which I greatly suffered riding my bike directly into the wind, it was rather sunny today, and typically I didn't have enough time to wander around Oxford in the sun, although it did remind me of how much I love my city. However! There was a Jewish fair in Broad Street for Lag B'Omer, and at one of the stalls you could make challah for 50p. When I was young my parents sometimes bought challah from the bakery for a special treat (I might as well mention now that I'm not Jewish in any way, I just really love challah), but I haven't eaten it for years. So I made some there - and got praised on my plaiting skills! It didn't survive the cycle home too well...

...Yeah. But I managed to sort-of straighten it out on the baking tray, and it came out looking all right! The plaits got lost as it rose, which is a shame, but while it's not the best bread in the world, it's recognisably challah. I was given a recipe, so maybe I'll try again once I'm back in Devon (no point baking here; I have none of the implements or ingredients). Hooray for challah!

I'm now off to the pub to meet up with the fellow Oxford interns for my summer internship in the US (!!!). Hopefully I will recognise them from their Facebook profiles, because I've never actually met any of them before.