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Showing posts from January, 2015

I got blisters on my fingers

I had a conversation yesterday during which a friend suggested that practising the Christian life was like practising the guitar; when you first start it hurts, but as you keep practising it comes more and more easily.  This has inspired me to pick up my guitar again and pound away at those bar chords, which still sound awful.  The difficulty is keeping going through all the awfulness until something beautiful emerges.  My fingers hurt A LOT.  George Harrison taught himself to play guitar and apparently used to practice until his fingers bled. Tonight I was, somewhat ambitiously, trying to play 'Waterloo Sunset' by my second favourite band in the world, The Kinks.  (I couldn't).  It's a really, really beautiful song and to be honest they probably shouldn't print the chords in books so incompetents like me can mangle it.  But it reminded me of an interview I once saw on TV with Ray Davies, lead singer of the band, who wrote the song.  He apparently struggled with alc

Homeland, headscarves and Hebdo

An impulse Christmas present bought for my husband has resulted in the latest Nash household obsession: Homeland.  Rather than give a spoiler alert myself here, I beg you, don't tell me what happens!  I've already discovered more than I wanted to know about the seasons I haven't watched yet by googling the series to find reviews.  We didn't do much else other than watch 'Homeland' over the Christmas break. I've been planning to blog about Homeland for a week or so but, to be honest, I didn't want to take time out from watching it to write about it.  It's been favourably compared with '24' as a drama series tackling issues of terrorism but without the gung-ho attitude of Jack Bauer or constant recourse to torture in order to extract information from suspects.  Predictably it deals with the threat of Islamist terrorism but with a subtlety which was pleasing to see; amazingly for American TV, it actually helps the viewer to feel some empathy wit