Capitulating to the inevitable

Good grief! Not another blog?!

Not another computer screen full of half-baked ideas, maudlin sentiment and introspective drivel? Lashings of well-worn metaphors, multi-clausal sentences? Argh. Run away, run away now! (Also, I must to say, as self-proclaimed Luddite, who advocates the return of fountain pens and parchment, this feels the oddest thing!)

The world doesn't need another blog, so why am I doing this?

The blog is called "Addison's Walk" for a number of reasons, and maybe an explanation of some of the thoughts that went into the name might help.

Firstly, it's homage to CS Lewis. If ever I had a spiritual father in the Christian faith, it would be CSL. On warm summer nights, CSL and his friends would stroll along Addison's Walk, a side path on the grounds of Magdalen College, that runs past the river Cherwell, in Oxford. CSL was converted, in part, due these long walks with his friends. CSL, Tolkien and Dyson got into some heated arguments - hammer and tongs - long into the night; lasting till early hours of morning. (Then, being the freakazoids that they were, instead of going to bed, they wrote poems, summing up their arguments in verse. Tolkien's "Mythopoeia" was the result of one of the most significant of those summer walks.)

And so, in a cheesy turn of metaphor, this blog will like an Addison's walk, in tracing the passage of a life after conversion. I hope, if this blog continues, that it'll help me see God at work in me, and encourage me to take captive every thought, decision and act for Christ.

Another thing about Addison's Walk: I've always enjoyed talking the best, when it's coupled with walking. And I love the image of friends walking and talking together. I think this is largely the reason I've chosen this public platform, for what otherwise would be private musings. By nature unhealthily private and introspective, my thinking needs to be aired - taken into the sunlight, as it were - and then (trans)formed by being challenged by others wiser and clearer-thinking.

I have a memory like a sieve, and am incredibly scatter-brained. So I also write so as not to forget - a rather desperate grabbing before the waters of Lethe drown out all. Perhaps it's my training as a historian, but I find time and memory incredibly sad concepts. The reality is that all things shall pass and be forgotten, and their value lost along with the ones who found them precious. So this blog will try to capture transitory moments in reality, and, to borrow a phrase from Updike, "to give the mundane it's beautiful due." (The assumptions/world view underpinning that phrase are profound - but perhaps more on that in another post!) Of course, it's only God who Remembers, and all this is but my playing 'grown ups' in the dress-up box.

So! Adding to your plethora of on-line reading material, email updates and general grey cell exertion, here is my humble little patch of cyberspace. I pray that sometimes it might be useful for you, and enjoyable, as you stroll along Addison's Walk with me. It's mostly harmless. We'll see how it goes, anyway.

WHAT THE BIRD SAID EARLY IN THE YEAR

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.

- CS Lewis.