Not this bloke's day

Loved the olympics. Can't wait for 2012. But here is a great clip from the modern pentathlon showjumping. One day, when dictionaries define 'not my day', they may well think of this

China and the Persecuted Church

We are really enjoying watching the Olympics and we are cheering on Team GB as much as we can. However, it would be wrong for us to let this time pass without doing a little to highlight how China's terrible human rights record affects the church.

The Christian religion is not banned in China completely. However, the only state allowed church is called the 3 self church and because the state allows it, the state controls everything about it, including what is taught in churches and who leads the church. Many Chinese christians, rightly in our opinion, refuse to be told by an atheistic communist government what to believe about God, and so they meet in people's houses and organise in house church networks. Because these networks are illegal, the government regularly cracks down on them with terrible force.

There have been many examples of pastors and church leaders in China who have been imprisoned, beaten or killed. If you would like an astonishing in-depth account of this, we would recommend you read 'The Heavenly Man' by Brother Yun. We heard Brother Yun preach in 2003 and he is the real deal.

However, one small story that affected me is the story of Mr Li Ming, Mr Jin Jirong, Mr Wang Yuan, Mr Li Mingbo. Christian Solidarity Worldwide writes about them, "These four Chinese pastors had visited their local police station to try to secure the release of 14 of their church members who had been arrested on their way home from church. They have subsequently been sentenced to two years’ “re-education through labour”."

The bravery of these men astonishes and challenges me.

I wouldn't recommend anyone to boycott the Olympics, and i couldn't do that myself, but the point of this post is to remind anyone reading that it is not just Tibet. China's government is persecuting its people and Christians are in the front line of this.

Holiday 08 - Stowting Common

We had our annual holiday last week. It was our first holiday as a family, and also special because we were celebrating our 10th anniversary together.

We thought about going back to Sheffield, but in the end settled on going back to Kent. I had never taken Alex around all the places where I grew up. So we headed on a sort of nostalgia tour.

We stayed at a self catering cottage called Shaws Farm, in Stowting Common just outside Ashford. It was lovely accomodation in a beautiful valley that we would recommend to anyone. I could go on, but i'll let the pictures do the talking.

Holiday 08 - Travelling

Travelling was one of the most challenging parts of our holiday. Partly because we did so much of it. We racked up over 1000 miles by road and rail on this holiday. We need to learn that family holidays dont necessarily happen at the breakneck pace of the city breaks we used to do. Then partly because you need to stop more because of Rocky. Also, the traffic both ways was astonishing. We've never really done holiday traffic before and it was hard work.

Partly, traffic was also challenging due to our incompetence. Take the time we went to see family in twickenham. I had a nice neat routemap printed out from the aa. But I had taken the wrong postcode and so got off the M25 a junction too early. On the plus side, we found Thorpe Park, but on the minus side, we weren't actually going there.

However, the new car held up to all these shennanigans and we got there and back safely. We tossed around the idea of going to the lake district next year, but on the form of the last week, maybe exmoor would be better.

Holiday 08 - London

On the Sunday of our holiday, we went to london to hang out with my sister, hannah and her boy, rob. We decided to go up by train, which was a bit more problematic than we thought because we forgot to bring a toy for rocky. Still, we all just about got there in one piece.

We started out hanging out on the South Bank. We saw this amazing statue guy, so still that the pigeons even sat on him.


The highlight of the day was the food. We went to a Leon's restaurant. Which is far too sophisticated for simple Plymouth people like us with their gorgeous fast food. Delicious. And then, we went to a restaurant called Le Pain Quotidian for pudding which turned into an all out chocolate melee.

We had a chance to drop in too to the tate modern, where alex took this photo of the rest of us.

Holiday 08 - Ashford

We went to see where i grew up in Ashford on Monday afternoon. Although Ashford has radically changed in lots of areas, the places I grew up were all very familiar. The only real change was how much smaller it all seemed.

The highlight of the trip was revisiting South Ashford Baptist Church, where my dad was a minister for 7 years.

Holiday 08 - Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway

Continuing with the nostalgia trip of the day in Ashford, we spent Tuesday on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway. My first ever school trip was to see the lighthouse and lifeboat at dungeness before going on this railway.

We got on at Hythe, and squeezed into the very petite carriages. Rocky enjoyed going on these trains in a way he didn't like the train to London because it was slower. He could take it all in.

Our first stop was St. Mary's Bay. I wanted to stop here because i remembered going to a pretty beach when I was young here. I have since found out that there are two st. mary's bays, and we got off at the wrong one. Amazing beach, but bleak as anything, especially in the drizzle. No wonder everyone looked at us a bit funny when we got off at this stop.



So we got back on the train pretty sharpish, once we realised that there was nothing actually at St. Mary's Bay, and in my nostalgic frame of mind, we went onto Dungeness.

Now, I clearly didn't remember the real Dungeness because if i had, we would have gone to Dymchurch or New Romney. It's hard to do justice to the astonishing sites of Dungeness. Words like 'Post-apocalyptic', 'wild-west', 'god forsaken, 'end of the world' spring to mind.




Whereas Paris has the Eiffel Tower, and Florida has Disneyworld, Dungeness has a pub, a cafe, a lighthouse, a nuclear power station, some ramshackle shacks and mile upon mile of shingle. Strange, foreign, compelling, but maybe not so much that you'd want to go there again.

Holiday 08 - Folkestone Triennial

On Wednesday and Thursday of the holiday we did some family visiting, but on Friday, we went to the Folkestone Triennial art exhibition. The idea of this is that the bloke who runs saga holidays wants to regenerate Folkestone through the medium of art. So all across the town centre, there are art installations that reflect something of the nature of Folkestone.

We first heard about the exhibition through the TV programme The Culture Show. You can watch the clip by following this link

We loved everything that we saw, although tiredness and weather meant that we didn't see everything. I was disappointed to miss the giant seagull, but we did see the folk-stones, the sunglasses mobile, the sci-fi van and the crazy golf beach huts. You can also see our inclusion in the folkstonomy exhibit here

Here are some photos that we took.





After this, we went back home to the cottage and quietly celebrated 10 happy years of marriage with a rib eye steak, a pot of ben and jerrys and Atonement, which is a very good film.