Blob Thing Learns The Wisdom Of The Worms In Manchester

Blob Thing speaks:

I'm going to speak less today.  My person says so.  She says that her fingers were aching after my last two posts because I talked so much and about so many different things.  So today she's only allowing me to talk about a little bit of my adventure walking along the river Irwell.  My person wrote a blog post about the Irwell too last night, about the time she walked along a small section of it in the middle of Manchester and Salford.  Or rather, on the edges of Manchester and Salford because the river is the border between them at that point.  I didn't feature in my person's blog even though I was with her.

Yesterday I told you about a scary experience I had when I was nearly eaten by a wolf.  It was a narrow escape but I was basically unharmed.  We continued our walk along the river and I met some more creatures.

These were worms.

I didn't know what a worm was and my person has had to explain for me.  It was a little confusing for me because one evening I had been sitting with my person and she had been channel hopping on the television rather than doing something even a tiny bit useful.  She came to a programme and the people on it were talking about a wormhole.  Apparently that's like a big tunnel in the universe and they would go into the wormhole in one place and leave it in a place a very long way away.  I'm not at all sure that's possible but if it was I would quite like to have a wormhole so I could go to places a very long way away.  I would go and see my creator.  I would go to the seaside.  I would go to the top of a mountain without climbing it.  But I haven't got a wormhole.

The creatures I met were worms and they didn't have anything to do with wormholes.

The worms were very friendly and they slid along the ground into different positions and as they did so they invited me to join in with their sliding.  They talked to me too and what surprised me the most was the way worms talk.  When a worm talks to a small pink soft toy its words somehow appear on the ground.  That's handy.  My person couldn't hear the worms.  But she could see the words and they were seen too by the lens on her camera.

I don't want to say much.  These photos are the words of the worms.  I am with them because they were kind enough to invite me to join in with their games.

My person says that this post is more like she was expecting all the posts on my blog to be:

Short.

I could say a lot more.  My person thinks she should take the words of the worms literally.  That she should actually lie very straight or squirm or do wiggly tricks.  I don't think there's anything wrong with that.  It's a lot of fun to do these things.  Once I had sorted my photos for this post I tried to get Winefride to do them.  She enjoyed herself doing all that squirming and wiggling.  She wasn't so happy to just lie very straight and wanted to skip straight on to the "Do it all again!" section and start squirming and wiggling again.  She laughed lots and lots and is still bouncing around from the fun of it all.

It's not the end of it though is it?  There's a much deeper message to the words of the worms.  They weren't just teaching me a little game.  They were teaching me, in wormly mystical terms, of the spirituality and philosophical basis of their worm society.  It's just their worm society.  There are lots of different worm societies in the world, even more than there are different kinds of worms.  You couldn't expect full conformity between earthworms, tapeworms and the Lambton Worm could you?

The words spoken were a game in which was hidden the deepest of worm truths, shared with me.  It was a large privilege to have it all shared with me.  The profundity underlying advice such as "Lie very straight" is mind boggling.  It's one of the two statements of ideal behaviour and practice in their society.  The other is of course "Do it all again!"  The first things they said show the theoretical and mystical basis for the practical tenets.

I would love to be able to tell you all about this.  I think, five months later, I have managed to grasp at least some of the meaning of the words.  I'd love to explain it all to you as clearly as I can and help you understand the richness of the worms.

But I can't.

Because my person says that I have to keep my post very short.

She says I have to stop now because it's already longer than she wanted it to be and her fingers are already aching.

So you'll probably never learn worm spirituality and ethics.

You can blame my person for that.

Blob Thing Has An Ecclesiastical Adventure In St. George's, Jesmond

We've just come back from a little holiday.  We went to Manchester again to see my creator.  She was very busy because she's a very busy person with a very busy life doing lots of work to help lots of people.  When we're there she helps us too and especially helps my sister Winefride.  We spent three whole days in Manchester.  On the first day my creator was busy so we went into the city centre with my person.  She spent most of the day in a special reading room doing some writing.  It was good for me because I dictated my blog to her.  But Winefride got a bit bored.  We should have taken some toys for her to play with or some of her favourite things for lining up.  We did have paper and a pen so she did some drawing so that was okay.  On the second day my person took us to Bolton but the weather was very horrible indeed so Winefride and I chose to stay hiding in my person's bag where it was dry and at least a bit warmer.  And on the third day we went on the exciting V bus to a place called Leigh.  My person says she used to live near another place called Leigh and that the two places aren't pronounced the same way.  We had some fun adventures in Leigh with a motorbike, a bus, a horse, Peppa Pig, and even some very friendly giant soldiers.  Leigh was nice and we'll go there again and ride on the exciting bus too.

Today I want to talk about a little adventure I had a long time ago.  Winefride hadn't been born then so it was just my person and myself going out adventuring.  We were having a bit of a random walk that day.  Okay, I will admit it.  It wasn't just random.  We were lost.  We had been walking to a specific place and we hadn't arrived in it because the streets just didn't go in the right direction.  Naughty streets.  They should have gone the right way and I think they just reorganised the map in order to confuse us that day.  We've been back since though and they obviously got stuck in the reorganised map version because they never changed back.  It serves them right for tricking us so badly!

We managed not to panic though and decided to see what we could find after we had been tricked so cruelly by the streets.  I hope the people who lived on the streets weren't too confused when they got home that night.  What we found was a very big building.  We saw it again a week ago on our final day hunting Snowdogs.  We passed the building.  It was quite close to one of the dogs too and I'll be blogging about that on my special project Snowdog blog quite soon.  So far I have blogged about seven dogs and a little Snowdog pack and the dog I'm talking about was number thirteen and was in front of a big sign all about kindness.  I liked that sign a lot.

But the Snowdog can wait.  I want to talk about the building.  Here it is.

Isn't that grand?  My person saw this place - it's a church - and said that we should go and explore inside if we could.  My person likes going in churches and exploring.  This one is called St. George's Church and it's in a part of Newcastle called Jesmond.  My person says that she had wanted to visit St. George's for a while because she had heard that it was pretty.  The things that she heard weren't wrong.  I'm going to write two whole blog posts about it and she's going to write one too and either post it on her blog like this one or post it on her new little project at Niume.  Or blog.  Because we took ever such a lot of pictures.

Before going into the church we walked in the grounds and it was there that we met Jesus for the first time.  At least, for the first time when visiting St. George's.  This was a very special Jesus.  With a very special talent:

He was levitating!

Now I know that Jesus could walk on water, which is a very clever trick.  But I didn't know he could levitate.  I thought that was just something magicians did in shows when creating pretty illusions.  My person is telling me that in the stories Jesus could do it for real, without the use of wires or stagecraft or props or whatever else the magicians on television and the stage use.  My person says that Jesus didn't levitate very often but did rise up all the way to heaven once in what people call The Ascension.  She says it's the final mystery of a prayer she used to pray a lot called the Rosary and that it's written in the Bible.  I don't think anyone on television has done a trick like that.  Jesus is impressive.  I think that's just a story though and I don't think Jesus ever did such a thing.  I don't think that heaven is up there anyway.  If it is then it's a very long way away.  And I don't think that, if there is such a thing as heaven, travelling through space would be the most efficient way to get there.

If heaven is the ultimate reality I think that no part of space is closer to heaven or further away from heaven than any other part so crossing the universe wouldn't help in journeying to heaven.  If there is heaven, you are just as close to it where you are sitting or standing now than you would be in any other place.  It doesn't matter whether that place is the top of a mountain, the bottom of the sea, a church, a shrine, a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas or in some distant galaxy.  You are as close to heaven now as you ever were or ever will be.  And in terms of physical distance that's zero metres and zero centimetres and zero millimetres and zero tiny little subatomic specks.  Physically you share space, or non-space, with that which is heaven.  Physically you are there now and so am I.  It doesn't matter whether you call it heaven, or nirvana, or ultimate reality, or realisation, or the ground of being, or anything else.  You and I are there now.  Because it is here now.

Oops.  Sorry.  I got sidetracked there.  Where was I?  Oh yes.  Jesmond.  I'd like to thank my person for typing all that for me even though her finger is hurting quite a bit from when it got broken years ago.  She should be registered disabled for that.  A writer with a finger that makes typing hard.  My person says she used to know a person like that.  A person who was a writer with a thumb that made writing hard.  Not too hard though obviously because that person was able to write eighteen pages of writing in a three hour exam which is far more than my person could ever do even at full writing speed.  That person was registered disabled because of her thumb even though it obviously wasn't a very disabling thumb.  Nowadays things are much harder.  Today is the one year anniversary of my person applying for a disability benefit because of all the difficulties that come through her autism and all the other things her head does.  One year.  And the process still isn't over.  After a year.  I think that's pretty horrendous and it's just lucky that she's got someone to look after her otherwise she would have ended up in big trouble.

We went inside St. George's Church and discovered that it's an amazing building inside.  If you ever get a chance to walk round it then do.  Here I am on a pew at the back of the church.  The altar is in the far distance.

We took loads of pictures.  I said that.  Lots of them don't have me in them but they're not quite so exciting so I'm not going to share them.  My person can share them herself and you will see for yourself that photos are made much better when one of three things happen.  These three:

1. I am in the photo.
2. My sister Winefride is in the photo.
3. Both me and my sister are in the photo.

All of those things make a photo better.  Of course Winefride hadn't been born when I went to St. George's Church so only the first of those things could happen that day.  When my person writes her blog about the church you can judge for yourself and find out that I am right.

Here I am at the back of the church by a big candle that's been partly burned.  My person says this is called a Paschal candle and the church gets a brand new one at Easter.  In the Catholic Church it gets introduced at a very special mass on Easter Saturday night and has pins squished into it to represent the wounds of Jesus and then it's burned through the whole of the year.  My person could talk more about this candle but I am not going to let her.  I just like the picture.  I think my person misses all the church things in some ways.  They provided some form of central cohesion in her head.

We walked to the front of the church and I decided that I would like to try my hand at being a preacher.  I'm not sure how well my sermons and homilies would be appreciated in the church.  The services there are of the Catholic Anglican tradition - very traditional and possibly with lots of smells and bells as they say.  I like bells.  My person has got to write a story about a bell soon.  It's in her head.  But she also wants to publish at least one blog post a day for the rest of the year.  Either one I dictate to her or one of her own.  That's quite a challenge.

Here I am on another pew, with the camera pointing towards the back of the church.  I nearly said "looking towards the back" but of course I was looking towards the front.

One last picture for today.  Here I am again.  Near some prayer things.  It might look like you have to light candles and then throw them in a bowl of water in case you burn the church down but that's not the idea.  To be honest I can't remember the idea.  I think you were meant to leave the candles burning which is a nice tradition but not one that could affect the efficacy of prayer in any way whatsoever unless a flame and a tiny bit of heat in some way travel up into heaven and then God sees them and then waves their magic finger and changes the world.  But that can't happen because heaven isn't up there and no God really works like that.  I think the flame just affects the people who light and see the candles.  They don't affect a God.  Nope.  Nope.  Nope.  That doesn't mean lighting them is a bad thing though.  It doesn't mean that the signs we create aren't significant.

I think the bowl of water was another sign.  Not for washing your hands.  Not for washing in any way.  There's another bowl of water in lots of churches for that.  And that's not even for washing with soap and water like after you go to the toilet.  My person still uses that bowl in churches sometimes.  I'm not quite sure why she does it.  You would have to ask her.

I think there were some pebbles nearby and you could choose a pebble and drop it into the water.  I can't remember why.  I think it was something to do with prayer again.  There are lots of things to do with prayer in churches.  Another sign.  People like signs.  I like them too sometimes.  I like signposts too.  And my person likes number plates.  We saw some good number plates on the third day away that I was talking about.  Winefride and I had our photo taken with one of them too.  We sat ourselves on the front windscreen wipers of a bus to have our photo taken.  The number plate of the bus was BUS 1S.  My person got quite excited by that.  She's a bit weird!

I'll tell you more about my visit to St. George's, Jesmond next time.  I met a couple of new friends there who live in the church and help to entertain little children who don't want to listen to the sermons.  A worthy job.  That's next time.  I'm looking forward to talking about it.  Probably more than my person is looking forward to typing it all.

[2173 words. That's rather a lot. I hope Blob talks a bit less or a lot less next time.]

Blob Thing Goes Hospital Visiting In A Week That Was Not As Planned

Blob Thing says:

This is my one hundredth blog post.  Isn't that amazing?  My one hundredth blog post was meant to be a big celebration.  A massive party in honour of me!  And of Winefride too.  It's important to honour her because my sister is amazing.

But life doesn't always work out as planned.  My person was going to help me with this post at the weekend and now it's the end of the week.  So this is my post and it's not a joyful celebration of me.  Because things happened and my person didn't manage to find the time or the energy for my blog.

On Saturday my life was being very good.  I went out with Winefride and my person to meet up with a friend we all knew from Autscape.  We went to the Literary and Philosophical Library and I tried not to have flashbacks of my last visit there - the one in which a dragon dressed up as a giraffe stole my Autistic badge when I fell asleep.  My person helped me write a blog post about that.  We went to a very good photographic gallery.  And we sat in Super Natural cafe for ages.  During the day this photograph was taken.  It was an accidental screenshot.  Sometimes very exciting photos happen when accidental screenshots happen on the phone.  Sometimes very boring ones happen too.  This is one of the best.  Don't worry.  The vampire bunny didn't manage to bite me.  I have not become a blood sucking small pink soft toy.

Everything was very happy.  But that changed.

On our way home we learned that my person's wife had suffered an accident.  She was at the hospital being checked out.  That was on Saturday.  It's now Friday and she is still there.  She fractured her spine.  So my life this week hasn't included writing happy blog posts.  My person might have been able to find the time for them but she didn't have the mental energy to help me.

Today she's agreed to help me and I'm going to share some photos from my week.  It hasn't all been bad.  I've had some fun too.  And my person's wife is going to be okay which is a big relief to everyone.  Winefride and I have been hospital visiting every day too.  Here we are in one of the wards of the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle - a place where the staff are all doing a wonderful job looking after my person's wife.

My person has taken quite a few photos of the prettier part of the hospital.  On one day we had some food in the cafe.  We might have some more later today.  The cafe is in the prettier part, which also houses the Great Northern Children's Hospital.

Here I am sitting on a ledge by our table.

And here's a view from a walkway we use on our way to the ward.

It's a very nice place even though it's a hospital.  But from there we have to walk through a very long corridor to get to the ward.  Maybe this afternoon, if the weather is fine, my person can go to the hospital a different way and avoid the corridor.  Maybe we can also go and see some ducks in a nearby park too.  I'd like that.  I like ducks.  I had an adventure with some geese once and I'll tell you about that one day.  They didn't think our pea snacks were tasty but we didn't have any proper goose food and they were all very insistent about being fed.  There were dozens of them gathered around us.  I have to admit that I didn't like the pea snacks either.  I don't think my person was that keen either because she didn't eat all of them.

It's not all been hospitals this week.  Not for me.  It's all been hospitals for my person's wife though.  She hasn't left the hospital yet.  She hasn't even been able to visit the pretty part of the hospital.  And she has had a lot of pain.  It's all been very worrying.

My person has also been able to give me a few adventures.  Little ones, but for me a little adventure is better than no adventure.  Here I am with Winefride.  This amazing creature is on a wall in central Newcastle.  It was very friendly and told us a very interesting story about its place in the history of the city and about how it came to have such a fabulous tale.  Gosh, it was a brilliant story teller.

Here we are again.  We're back at Super Natural cafe.  I thought the books were quite interesting.  Mr. Hitchens made some very good points in his book but sometimes spoiled them by using some very mean insults that I don't think were called for.  We've only just started Mr. Holloway's book.  He seems a lot more calm about the whole thing than Mr. Hitchens.  We've been enjoying Mr. Hitchens though.  Well I have.  Winefride hasn't.  She doesn't want to sit there and have our person read big books to her.  Why would she?  Sometimes I think that she's far more sensible than both of us and that her priorities are far more what life should be about.  She's amazing and so full of joy and love and excitement.  I love my sister.  But my person is still a little obsessive in her thinking about God things and I've picked up some of that too.  I spend quite a bit of time in rooms that contain a lot of God books and I read some of them.  But Winefride can't read.  She can't talk either.  Or she doesn't talk.  It's hard to know which.  But she can laugh and smile and let out big whoops when she's excited.  She's amazing.

Here I am a few days ago.  We went to Whitley Bay.  My person knew that the Amazon delivery person was somewhere in the street just now and she was right.  She couldn't see him but could hear the bass of the music coming from his car.  That Amazon delivery person has a particular tone of bass noise coming from his car.  Sorry for that sidetrack.  The Amazon person has gone now.  Yes, we went to Whitley Bay.  Just a quick visit to help my person stay calm by doing something other than being at home or at hospital.  We visited the charity shops.  All we bought was that book by Mr. Holloway and a book containing the Dhammapada with a commentary on all the words and their meanings and how they all fit in with Buddhist philosophy and practice.  I did say my person was still a bit obsessed with God type things.  She probably always will be, no matter what she decides to believe in ten years time.  I am going to enjoy watching her continuing to grow in the ability to be lost in wonder at the things around her.

So that's my one hundredth blog post.  It's not what I wanted it to be.  But that's okay.  I can have a big celebration of the wonders of my life at another time.  When my person started this blog she was just going to share a photo of me and say where I was when it was taken.  She didn't expect that I would find my own voice.  I am very happy with the way it turned out.




[1246 words]

Blob Thing Visits The John Rylands Library In Manchester

My person doesn't want me to just dictate my blog today.  She says that she wants to be in control and edit everything I say.  She wants to have the control.  She says that I've been very mean to her in my last two posts.  She says that I shouldn't have forced her to help me talk about the Blue Peter garden last night when she was so tired.  And she says that I shouldn't have called her a meany bum so many times in the previous post.  Especially not when showing just how many adventures she takes me on and how I get to take Winefride too.  So she wants to be able to stop me today if I start calling her names again.  But this is my blog.  MY blog.  It's not hers.  So I should be able to say whatever I want.  That's free speech.  She doesn't have to read it if she doesn't like it does she?  It's not as if my words about her ever descend to the level of a hate crime.  I'm not into hate crimes.  And she was a bit of a meany bum to not help with my blog much.  After she promised to write nearly every day.

I have promised to behave very well though.  No calling her names today.  Apart from that meany bum name I just used.  So she has agreed that I can talk and she will type and it will all be okay.  It feels like I'm on some kind of probation though and that she might change her mind and wrest control from me again.  If only I could type my own blog but even with a pointer tool it would take me a very long time.  I'd use a speech to text tool but for some reason they don't seem to understand my voice.  It's lucky that my person understands me so well.

Yesterday [when keeping me up late, thank you Blob.]  Sarcasm?  [Oh well done Blob you spotted it.]  More sarcasm?  [Oh, noooooo, not that time Blob.]  Well thank yooooou!  [We had better stop this.  We're both being sarcastic now.]

Yesterday I told you about my visit to the Blue Peter garden.  Today I want to tell you about the start of that day's adventures.  I confess I've already told you about one adventure I had that day - the time when I met Ted's sheep in the middle of Manchester.  If uncle Adrian's emergency Welsh sheepdogs had been there then they could perhaps have herded all the sheep into a beautiful sensory room.  It's possible.  Stranger things have happened.  You don't know about uncle Adrian do you?  Or his emergency Welsh sheepdogs.  I feel sorry for you for not knowing such things.  But I don't feel sorry enough to explain everything to you.  You might want to know.  But you don't need to know.

I'd gone into the centre of Manchester that morning with my person.  We were going to go walking later in the day but first she wanted to find bookshops and look for some good books filled with walks in the local area.  First we went to the tourist information centre.  They would know about walking in Greater Manchester wouldn't they?  No.  They wouldn't.  Information centres only seem to be able to tell you about expensive things to do, not free things like walking for miles.  They couldn't help us at all and didn't even have a map of the area except for a not very good city centre map.  So we went to seek out bookshops, the start of our pre-walking delays that turned out very useful because when it rained very heavily later we were still close to somewhere we could shelter.  I'll tell you about that in a couple of days.

After that we wandered some more.  My person suddenly shouted out, "Look!"  Everyone stopped and stared at her.  Then they turned and stared at the thing she was pointing at.  And then they stared at my person again wondering why she was pointing at this thing and telling everyone to look at it.

It's just a building.  And they, mostly being residents of the area, had seen it before lots of times.  My person had seen it before too but she's not perfect at knowing where everything is in Manchester so she was happy to see it again.  She began happy flapping in the street and got ever so excited.  Some people continued to stare because she was putting on such a display.  And then she said to me, "Let's go in."  Now, I know some things about buildings.  And one thing I know is that you're not allowed to just enter them uninvited.  And this was a big and imposing building.  Surely we wouldn't be allowed into this one.  There were probably security guards and perhaps it would have it's own police force too and big dungeons and they would throw trespassers into a big pit filled with slime and if we entered the building we would be thrown into the slime too and meet the man called Albert who got thrown there three years earlier and he would sing us long songs about his three years of misery.  And that would be made much worse because Albert can't sing in tune and his songwriting skills are dreadful.  Seven hundred verses of misery.  Out of tune.  And all of them almost exactly the same because there's not a lot of variety when you're alone in a slime filled pit dungeon.  So I told my person that we shouldn't attempt to enter this building because I didn't want to get covered in slime.  I got quite worried about it.  What a sight we must have been.  There was my person happy flapping and almost jumping up and down in excitement.  And there was me fretting and panicking and being quite close to a full scale meltdown and the prospect of the slime and the difficulties of getting clean even if the queen of the matriarchal society inside the building ever let me out of the pit which I didn't think was very likely.

My person eventually saw my difficulties and she calmed down and held me tight.  She told me not to worry because we were allowed to go into this building.  It was a library.  We wouldn't be breaking any rules by going in and having a look round.  We wouldn't break any rules.  She promised.  She promised.  I calmed down too and was able to smile at her.  A library.  That sounded good.  I like books.  My person said that this was the John Rylands library.  It wasn't just any library.  It had lots of old books and it had some rooms which were also museum displays.  We would be able to see the oldest surviving fragment of the New Testament in the world.  And we would be able to look at lots of old books about demons and witchcraft.  Or at least see them.  We wouldn't be allowed to handle them or read them because they were far too precious.  That all sounded good.

So we went into the library.  And my person broke her promise.  Straight away.  It was okay though.  It was quite funny.  I'm making her show the next picture and I hope she doesn't get into trouble or have to go to prison or be thrown into the stocks that are actually a pillory at Hexagon.

It's a toilet.  It was down a staircase at the back and it's a very old loo.  There was a sign outside saying that you weren't allowed to take pictures inside.  My person ignored the sign.  She says that she wouldn't have taken that picture at all if the sign hadn't been there.  That's my person.  She's a rebel.  She takes illegal photos of toilets.  A rebel and a meany bum all wrapped up in one woman.  [Don't call me a meany bum again in this post Blob.]

My person used the toilet [People don't need to know that Blob.] and we walked back up the stairs.  First we looked at that piece of Bible which was very old indeed.  I couldn't read it because it was in Greek and lots of the words and characters were missing.  If I was God and I was personally inspiring every single word people wrote down to form a Bible, if I was breathing them out, then I would have been a lot more careful about it and made sure that people would know what the right words were even two-thousand years later.  I wouldn't have done such a shabby job in preserving my words.  I'd have spoken clearly too and not put anything in that people could easily use in order to own slaves or persecute people of colour, women or gay people.  Or trans people like my person.  If I was God I'd have done a much better job at dictating my book and I'd have planned it a  lot more carefully.  But maybe God didn't breathe the Bible at all.  Maybe people wrote it based on their own ideas and cultures and beliefs and their own seeking after the divine and mystical experience.  And maybe what they wrote contains errors and biases and all kinds of things among the human words.  I don't want to be definite about that here in case someone gets very grumpy at me.

Then we looked at the books about demons and witches in Medieval Europe.  They were quite interesting.  And then we walked into a gigantic hall full of books.  There was stained glass and a very high ceiling and a statue of this man.  This is John Rylands.  John.  An ordinary name.  There's also a statue somewhere of his wife, who started the library in his memory.  Her name was Enriqueta Augustina.  A less ordinary name.  It's lucky that my sister wasn't created the day I went to the library or she might have been called Enriqueta instead of Winefride.  

We walked behind Mr. Rylands and I had my picture taken showing the length of the hall.  It was massive.  I found it quite hard to balance on this post.  I'd have held on with my teeth but it's uncertain whether I have any behind my beautiful smile.

This is another picture of the hall.  I'm glad there wasn't anyone here to steal my "Autistic" badge like there was in the Literary and Philosophical library.  I think I would have got very out of breath if I had to chase a disguised dragon round a hall this big.  I'm still not clear as to why the dragon had disguised itself as a giraffe or why it tried to steal my badge.  Some things perhaps are better left as mysteries.

And another picture of the hall.  My person took lots of pictures of the library.  She wants to use them for a blog post of her own if she every manages to get round to writing lots of blog posts for herself.  She says that sometimes she's too busy helping me with my blog to be able to write her own.  I think she's just making excuses and could write far more than she does.  Especially if she just got on with things.  She could write in the morning.  And the evening.  And the afternoon.  It's not as if she has to work in an office or a shop for sixteen hours a day.  I keep telling her to write more and she keeps promising she will.  But sometimes it seems to me like her promise is like the one she made about rule breaking in the library.  I need to bully her more and get her writing.  Her blog.  Lots of stories.  Poems.  And I know she wants to start writing the story of her life.  I think it was remembering the time a man called Iorwerth confiscated a small packet of non-toxic crayons so she couldn't kill herself that finalised her decision that she will write her story just like everyone keeps saying she should.  She is still not sure how she would have managed suicide with a small packet of non-toxic crayons and she has had maybe twenty-four years to think about it.

We left the hall and walked around the rest of the library.  Apart from the bits we couldn't go in.  There were some "No Entry" signs in places and there was a special section of the library just for members.  We didn't go that way because I still didn't want to get thrown into the slime pit.  My person tried to tell me that there wasn't a slime pit and I wondered for a moment why we weren't going into the forbidden places if there was no slime to be thrown into by the queen's police.

I asked for a picture to be taken on these stairs.  I was quite safe but it doesn't look that way.

I thought that this corridor looked like the cloisters of Durham cathedral.  It was very pretty and there was no giraffe in sight.  I wonder if I could have had a chase game with the dragon giraffe up and down this corridor.  Or we could have played a ball game.  Or maybe, and this would have been brilliant, we could have used the corridor for a game of ten pin bowling.  My person could have been the person standing up all the pins and bringing our balls back to us.  I'm sure she wouldn't have minded.

It had been an amazing visit to the library and we left the building happy.  I wasn't covered with any slime at all and hopefully there won't be any slime as a consequence of sharing that toilet photo.  I was glad that we had visited John Rylands in his library.  I might go back one day but there are so many other things I want to do in Manchester first.  I haven't even been to the Hidden Gem yet.  Or to the Working Class Library in Salford.  The John Rylands library doesn't seem working class even though working class people are allowed in.  I want to go to see the Working Class Library.  I think that would be just as much fun as the John Rylands Library even though the buildings and contents are so different.  And maybe a working class giraffe dragon would be more friendly than the one that stole my badge.



[2417 words]

Blob Thing Meets Giant Refugees And Enjoys Art And Free Tea At Greenbelt

Blob isn't going to write much today.  He's finding it hard to focus being down in Sussex and at this point would much rather be with his friends.  Winefride is finding it hard too.  She's getting quite bored and it's left to Blob to do the looking after.  Blob hopes that she can come out on an adventure soon but his person keeps being busy and doesn't know if any of the busy people would want to go out on adventures with soft toys.  Blob also hopes that they can all escape soon and go out and see the animals.  Maybe today after all the other silly human jobs are done.  Blob says that humans spend a lot of time worrying about meaningless things and collecting meaningless things.  He doesn't understand humans sometimes.  Then again, his person doesn't understand them either and she is a human.  Blob and Winefride are very glad that Portal is here too because Portal brings a little bit of soft toy sanity in the place.  Even Portal is looking forward to being somewhere else.

Greenbelt was going very well but it was Sunday morning.  Everyone knew that would be a harder time due to the lack of things going on.  Grief.  Blob is finding it very hard to write while here.  It's not a comfy writing place for him.  Not comfy at all.  He's not going to go into the reasons why but you can probably guess some of them.

Blob said in his last post that he didn't want to go to the big communion service at Greenbelt.  Lots of people did go and they seemed to enjoy it.  But Blob didn't want to go.  However, on his way to breakfast that morning he and his companions met some very friendly people who were on their way to the service.  They were incredibly tall for humans and were from another country.  Blob and Winefride didn't quite take in what country they were from but they had their pictures taken anyway.

He thinks that the two people were refugees who had come to the United Kingdom not so much to find a better life but to escape a terrible one.  He knows that refugees have often escaped from horrendous situations.  None of them wanted to leave their countries.  They just felt they had to because their lives were so bad.  Not just through poverty.  Oh no.  If they were just poor people coming to Britain to get richer then that would be an entirely different situation and Blob would have preferred them to stay in their countries and some help given to build better financial and economic lives there.  That seems sensible.  It's not that simple though.  Refugees aren't refugees from poverty even though many of them were very poor indeed.  They are refugees from war, hatred, oppression, injustice and a whole range of awful things.  They had to leave their homes, their lives, and head off on a long and difficult journey.  Blob Thing is very glad that he has never had to be a refugee.  He might moan about how hard it is to write a blog post today but that's nothing compared to the lives these people have lived and the lives many still live due to not having been granted refugee status.

Blob had met refugees before and he was very glad to meet some more at Greenbelt.  They were ever so friendly and smiled almost as much as he and Winefride does.  Blob doesn't know how much Winefride understands the refugee situation.  She was pleased to meet the people and swung wildly on her reins as she was held and she giggled so much it's a wonder that the entire Greenbelt festival site didn't hear her.

After breakfast, Blob, Winefride, Blob's person, and his creator had a plan.  It wasn't mentioned in the main programme but Blob's person had seen that one of the tents would still be open and that they would be able to sit there and do some art things.  It was ever so good.  The people in the tent gave them all free cups of tea.  And then someone from another tent passed by and gave them all more free cups of tea.  Out of fairness to those people Blob has decided not to say which were the better cups of tea.  He was pleased to have received both drinks.

The tent contained lots of information about something called Iona.  Iona is an island off the west coast of Scotland.  Blob is now asking when he and Winefride can be taken to Scotland because it looks really close on the map from Newcastle and they have never been.  Blob's person says that it's quite expensive by train and takes a long time to get to on the bus but one day they will get up early at the weekend and go all the way.  Blob's person says it's more than a hundred miles to Edinburgh and even going by train would take quite a long time.  She hopes that one day early next year they can all go there on the train for free because she hopes to have a medical appointment there.  She has been hoping to have that appointment for a very long time but the powers that be keep not allowing her to have it even though she has been legally entitled to it for well over two years.  Blob's person has to be very patient.  Sometimes she doesn't care about it all.  Sometimes she's pretty unhappy about the whole thing.  Sometimes she doesn't even want the treatment that the appointment would eventually lead to and wonders what the point of it is.  Blob wants her to stop talking about it now.

Iona contains a Christian community.  They always seem to be quite nice people and they sing lots of nice songs.  Blob wouldn't want to be part of the community though.  They all have to read the Bible a lot and they have to keep praying and praying and praying and using liturgy addressed to the sky God he doesn't believe in.  Maybe some of the community members don't believe either.  They just use the liturgy.  Blob keeps reading about such people and he met some more at Greenbelt.  People who don't believe in a sky God but use long prayers addressed to the sky God.  Blob doesn't quite understand how people can do that.  He knows that there are ministers who don't believe in the sky God and lead prayers in every service addressed to the sky God.  Blob doesn't think he would be able to cope with doing that if he was a minister.  He would have to use prayer forms that removed the language of such forms of theism.

Iona people are nice though and later in the weekend Blob and his person would attend two Iona services.  Blob's sister and his creator would be at the second one too.  There was ever such a lot of singing in that and it was enjoyable.  Blob's person likes singing and it makes Blob happy to watch her enjoying herself.

The piece of paper Blob's person had read was true.  There was art to be done in the tent.  It was called the Northern Lights tent.  Iona is a long way north.  It was a bit confusing for Blob though because he got taken a couple of times to a church in Newcastle called Northern Lights and the tent didn't have anything to do with that church.  Blob's person had to explain that more than one thing can have that name.  Blob met a few people from that church at Greenbelt.  There are people from that church there every single year and they're all pretty nice too and some of them don't really believe in a very orthodox Christian God.  One woman in the congregation does believe in a sky God but not in the normal Christian story and she rewrites all the prayers and liturgy as she goes along and says different words to everyone else.  Blob's person has been known to do that too.  Not that she goes to church much now.  She attended more church things at Greenbelt than she had in the previous six months and she didn't join in with a single spoken prayer in a service.  It's lucky there isn't a sky God who created an eternal hell or she would be doomed and Blob would be doomed too and his fur would keep getting singed for eternity.

The Iona people had a plan.  They had a lot of spare boxes.  And a lot of pens.  The boxes and pens would be combined.  People could decorate the boxes with things to do with justice and inclusion.  That sounded like fun.  More fun than listening to sermons and sitting around while a thousand people shared bread and wine (or blackcurrant).

Blob's person and his creator got to work and they managed to create some nice things.  Blob's creator managed to decorate an entire box which she left behind for the display in the tent.  Blob's person only managed to decorate half a box and she took it away to complete at home.  She hasn't completed it yet.  But in part that's because she isn't at home.  Blob hopes that she will finish her box when she gets back there.

 After their time in the tent the four companions moved on.  Blob's creator and Winefride went off to do some things and Blob and his person went off to do other things.  Blob's person still needed to change into clean clothes and that seemed the most urgent thing to do.  As they passed the Big Top and the communion service, which still hadn't finished, Blob heard Justin Portal Welby talking.  He must have said something very funny because everyone laughed.

So that was the start of Sunday.  It was going to prove to be a difficult day.  Blob's person wasn't coping well for quite a lot of it and he had to look after her a lot.  By the end of the day things were wonderful again and that was a big surprise.  Blob's person would be totally surprised by her own actions and by how things turned out.  But that's a tale for another blog post.

 

 

[1720 words]

Blob Thing Gets Up At Greenbelt And Goes To The Airport

Note:  All the photos are random ones taken on the Saturday of Greenbelt.  They aren't connected with the events told in this post.  There's a reason for that which Blob Thing will explain at the end.


Everyone is feeling very tired this morning.  Nobody slept that well.  It turns out that Blob's person has developed some kind of allergy to Crawley, the town their staying in.  Yesterday her eyes kept stinging and her nose kept running.  Maybe it's not Crawley to blame.  But it feels as though it is.  It was a problem last night though because every time Blob Thing or Winefride was falling asleep, Blob's person would blow her nose loudly and they would be wide awake again.   Blob wishes that his person's nose was designed in such a way that it could be blown silently.  If he was an intelligent designer we would have built the human body very differently.  Forget all that argument about the design or evolution of eyes.  He would have sorted out human spines.  He would have made everyone immune from the common cold.  He would have made noses silent.  And then, just to please everyone, he wouldn't have designed a creature at the top of the pile and given them hiccups.

For Blob Thing, hiccups is a good argument against intelligent design.  Stupid design maybe.  He's happy to agree that the hiccups argument doesn't remove God or a super intelligent alien race as designer.  But he does think that it's an argument against God being a good designer.  One classic argument from design spoke of a watch and how you knew it could only be there because it had been designed and made by a clever person who had studied watch making.  Blob asks whether anyone would be all-knowing and all-powerful and still design a watch that got hiccups?  You can tell that Blob is tired.  He wouldn't come out with his hiccup argument if he was full of energy.

Back to Greenbelt.  He's not going to write much because he's coming to talk about Sunday and that was a more difficult day.  Blob says:

Yes.  It was hard.  Yesterday was hard too.  Maybe in a week we won't be here.  Yesterday also had some good bits.  Winefride and I got taken to look round an airport.  My person has been promising that she will take us to see Newcastle Airport sometime.  We could go there almost whenever we wanted.  It's not hard.  Just stay on the Metro until the end.  But she hasn't taken us there yet and we haven't even been on any really long walks in a while and I would want to.  Yesterday was different.  We went to an airport and it wasn't Newcastle.  I think she only took us because she had to go there anyway.  She wasn't taking us as a treat or anything like that.  I don't suppose we'll get many nice treats while we're in Sussex.  She won't even take us to the Brighton Pavillion and that always looks so pretty in photos.  [Now, now Blob.  I haven't even taken me there.  Ever.  And this trip isn't for you two to be tourists.  It's for practical purposes.]  Today she might not take us anywhere at all she says.  Meanie person.  I'm only joking.  She's not mean to us at all and we have excellent lives for little soft toys.  And we got to go to Gatwick Airport yesterday.  We got there later than planned because we had to put up with her photographing a cemetery first.  She likes doing that.  I like it too when I get to pose on all the gravestones but that didn't happen yesterday.

At Gatwick we did a particularly exciting thing.  We got to ride at the front of a train that didn't have a driver.  I want to blog about that when I get home.  It was amazing.  A bit like riding at the front of the Tyne and Wear Metro trains but even better.  The whole of the front of the train was a window and we could see everything.  We could even see all the aeroplanes on the ground.  There was a man who talked about it and called it a flight.   Silly man.  It wasn't a flight at all.  We were riding on a train on a rail and the train wheels ran by the rail not on the rail so it was a crazy kind of train.  He told us that we were flying at a height of thirty-five feet and we weren't.  We weren't flying.  What kind of fool does he take me for that he thinks I might believe him?  Or maybe he truly believes it because he said all the same things on the way back too.  That would be sad if he is that deluded.  He's not harming anyone unless they believe him about a flying train.  But he could get some help to not be deluded anymore.  There are more dangerous delusions.  My person isn't allowing me to talk about them right now.  I am tired and I want to talk and talk and talk but she knows that if I am allowed to let my words fly this morning then I might say things that people don't like even more than they might not like some of the things both I and my person have said in the past.

My person says I should talk about Greenbelt.  Because that's what this post is about.  On Sunday morning my person got up before my creator.  She got herself dressed.  That didn't take long because she had slept in her clothes and didn't bother changing into new ones until later in the day.  She then went back to the all night cafe.  Winefride and I were able to stay in the tent so we got more sleep.  She got practically none.  At the cafe she bought tea.  Two teas.  The cafe was very useful for tea drinking.  They sold a spicy chai tea.  My person and creator appreciated being able to drink lots of it.  By the time Sunday evening came the people in the cafe knew my person's regular order.  Maybe not many people ordered the spicy chai.

Sunday morning was going to be a challenge.  Most things at Greenbelt stop on Sunday morning for a communion service.  It's hard to find things to do because the festival people think that you'll probably be at the service.  But my person and creator didn't particularly want to go even though an important man would be speaking.  At least, he's an important man in terms of church hierarchy.  Whether he's more important than anyone else is another matter.  He's just got a posh job.  The man was the Archbishop of Canterbury.  He seems nice enough but we didn't go and hear him.  My person didn't want to sit (or stand) through two communion services in twelve hours.  She doesn't go to church normally and is very glad to not go.

She used to go all the time.  For a while she went nearly every day and would very often arrive before the church was even unlocked because she was so eager to pray to her God.  What does she feel about that now?  I know that all the order and the rules and the certainty helped her cope with her brain and gave her some stability.  But does she regret quite a lot of it?  That's for her to talk about.  It's not a thing for a post about Greenbelt when it's my post.  The most exciting thing about the Archbishop of Canterbury for me is that one of my very good friends got named after him.   Portal's name is Portal.  Named after the archbishop.  His name is Justin Portal Welby.  I love Portal and we're all very glad that he came to Crawley with us.

So we were at Greenbelt and the programme didn't list that many events for Sunday morning except for that giant communion.  My person and creator didn't know quite how they would fill the morning.  They had a few plans but didn't quite know what to do.

Plan one was breakfast.  The Christian Aid tent had advertised a big fry up and while none of us wanted a big fry up we did fancy some toast and so we went to that.  It wasn't a very exciting thing and the programme had got the time wrong so they hadn't get cooked the frying food anyway.  We all really enjoyed the toast though and were pleased to have successfully eaten some food.

I'm going to stop now.  My person has just received some bad news.  Right at this moment.  All of a sudden she isn't up to helping me write my blog.  That's okay.  We can write it together tomorrow.  It's going to be a strange thing while we're away.  I don't know how much time I'll have for blog writing.  Well, I'll have lots of time but I need my person's help otherwise typing would be very slow indeed.

We'll just add a Greenbelt photo somewhere above to give you all something to look at and my person can then get on with the day.  Sorry that we didn't talk much about Greenbelt.  I promise that we did all find something nice to do.  Don't worry.  But the news is sad and my person might be a bit sad about it too.


[1576 words]

Blob Thing Meets Rumi And Fails To See The Stars At Greenbelt

Blob Thing didn't manage to post anything yesterday.  He and Winefride had a very long day which got longer than they had hoped.  They had to accompany Blob's person to Sussex.  She is visiting her parents' house which needs to be cleared and sold and she is very anxious and stressed about the whole thing.  She was much too tired to help Blob with anything last night so he couldn't write his blog.  So he missed a day.  Blob wants to apologise but he stresses that it was entirely a circumstance not of his creating or his control.  He hopes that he will be able to blog every day while he is away from home but he doesn't make a promise.

Blob's first day at Greenbelt had been very exciting.  He had done lots of fun things and met lots of people who he would probably never see again.  And he had survived a storm.  Now it was time for Blob and his person to be reunited with his sister and his creator.  They had half planned some more activities to do once they had eaten food.

Before food Blob's person and creator met up in the Playhouse.  His creator had been watching a performance called Smash It Up.  Blob's person might have seen it all had she not been sheltering from the storm at the other end of the festival site.  As it was she only saw the end of it which wasn't enough to understand it.  But that was okay.  She was glad to have been able to find Blob's creator again in time for dinner and the planned evening events.

The first of these was in a place called Canvas, an open air area with a canvas roof.  They were going to a Sufi / Rumi session.  Someone was very kind and gave Blob's person and creator seats to sit on.  Both of them like Rumi and Blob's person has quite a few books of Rumi's poetry.  Blob wants to point out at this point that his person hasn't actually read the books yet, just browsed some of them and that she should stop buying books and read what she has.  Blob knows that the chances of that happening are nearly zero but he feels it would be a good idea.  Blob's person wishes that he would stop pointing out the silly things she does.  But she knows that the chances of that happening are also nearly zero.

The first part of the session was very interesting as the two people leading talked about Rumi and about Sufi beliefs and practices.  But then the session got a lot more practical.  Everyone was to chant one of the 99 Beautiful Names of God for a while.  And then another of them.  99 times.  Blob's person and creator weren't up to that.  Blob's person likes the names and Blob likes the few he has heard.  If he was using them of course he would have to change them because they are 99 names of a sky God and Blob doesn't believe in a sky God.  So where the names would say something like "God (Allah) the merciful"  Blob would have to say "God who is mercy."  That allows people to still be theists but also allows someone like Blob to move away from theism into nontheism, theopraxy, or even atheism.  Blob's person is quite into the theopraxy idea but may be stretching it even further to a statement of "whenever you are merciful you both express and create that which is God."  God thus ceases to be a being, and instead becomes Being, a way of being.

It's not a radical idea.  There would have been quite a few people at Greenbelt who said - or at least privately believed - quite similar things. Blob's person talked for a while the next day with an Anglican nun who said that she had given up believing in the sky God years ago.  Talk about radical!  The late David Jenkins said some things while he was Bishop of Durham that had conservative Christians up in metaphorical arms.  Blob's person didn't like those things at all and thought it terrible that such a man with such beliefs should be raised up to be a bishop.  Blob's person has changed a lot since then.  Blob is glad.  He would find it very difficult if she was to keep preaching to him about the need for conversion or about how Jesus died for his sins and only the blood and intercession of Jesus could ever keep him out of going to Hell.  Blob Thing may have been influenced by his person in this but he firmly believes that the whole idea of an eternal hell to punish people for real and imagined offenses and offensiveness in a single lifetime to be one of the most horrendously disgusting religious ideas ever.  Thankfully a lot of Christians don't believe in that idea any more or in the idea that every single person is inherently sinful.

Blob didn't want to sit and chant the names either.  And Winefride was obviously very impatient to leave.  So the four companions just got up and left.  No guilt.  Nobody should ever feel guilt about leaving a religious thing.  And that's another topic Blob could talk about and which his person could express from her own experiences.  Not today.  They left Canvas and didn't know what they were going to do to fill the next bit of time.

But then they passed Grove, where Blob had learned about the Jesus Fellowship earlier in the day.  A dance workshop had started and it looked.  The man who was leading it, Andy Raine, lives on Lindisfarne and helped found The Northumbria Community.  So he's connected with two of the nice bits of British Christianity.  The dances were simple and friendly and they were very fun.  This was far more Blob's kind of thing than chanting the 99 Beautiful Names.  Blob's person enjoyed it too and decided that she needed to do more dancing in Newcastle.  There's a wonderful dance event happening there in a few days but unfortunately she won't be there and will have to wait for another.  Newcastle has quite a few wonderful dance events for people who have no flexibility, no stamina and who have no clue about dancing.

Everyone enjoyed the dancing in Grove.  They didn't mind that the ground was a bit muddy from the storm.  Everyone smiled except when they were meant to be expressing pain and brokenness and dancing to one of the more depressing songs of Leonard Cohen.  That was the first time that Blob's person has ever danced to a Leonard Cohen song.  She has listened often.  She has sung often.  But never danced.

After the dancing Blob's person and creator had a definite event booked in their diary.  On the way Blob spotted a forest sculpture.  Some people make pictures and art from found materials when they're out and at Greenbelt there were some interesting pictures and patterns in some places.  Blob thinks that most of them were done by people involved in Forest Church or by people who went to workshops led by Forest Church.  He really liked the one he found and asked for his picture to be taken.

They left Grove in a hurry because they wanted to join the queue to go back to Playhouse.  There was going to be a play called Grandad and The Machine.  The was billed as a "brand new steampunk fairytale for adults."  It was very enjoyable and Britain was not destroyed.  There was music and chases and Zeppelins and all kinds of good things.  Blob and Winefride enjoyed themselves a lot.  Winefride hasn't been to proper theatres before.  Blob has been several times and likes it.  He saw The 39 Steps which was very funny and he saw The Night Watch which wasn't very funny at all.

After the play Blob's creator was tired and wanted to go and rest.  Blob's person refused to rest.  She had bought a festival ticket and was determined to use it as fully as possible.  After sharing a cup of tea, Blob's creator went off to bed and took Winefride with her.  Winefride had enjoyed the day a lot but she needed to rest too because at times it had been quite overwhelming.

Blob wandered off and took some photos, continuing to explore the site.  A brass band were playing some great music in the Big Top but Blob's person knew that she would never be able to get in there and enjoy such loud music or dance to it.  Oh no, she would never be able to do that.  Her head told her that she wouldn't.  Blob doesn't necessarily believe in believing the things people's heads tell them.  Blob is wise!

Around the site there were lots of pretty dangly things and Blob wanted to experience them all that night just in case he didn't have a chance to experience them later.

Blob's person walked back to Grove.  A man from the Forest Church movement was going to lead a session about the stars.  The description said "put on the dark and see the stars."  That sounded amazing.  But it was still completely cloudy after the storm so nobody saw a star.  Instead the man led a talk which included quite a lot of science.  Blob's person didn't stay for the whole talk even though it was quite interesting and she learned that Ursa Major is not a constellation.

So Blob and his person wandered again until they came to canopy.  They listened to the last part of a comedy night and during that time they spotted an old friend of Blob's person.  He was easy to spot because he was the only person still standing after a set of questions the first one of which was "Are you female?"  Blob's person doesn't think her old friend is female and doesn't quite know why he was still standing up.  But it made him easy to spot and it made people laugh.

Together they walked and talked and headed to a communion service.  Blob's person left the church this year and so wouldn't normally go to a communion service.  She wasn't going to participate in this one except by singing the hymns quite loudly.  She sang the last one loudly in Welsh because the service sheet said she could but didn't hear anyone else singing the original Welsh words.  It was a special communion.  The Outerspace Eucharist.  It was aimed at LGBTQ people.  Apparently they could come there with "no need to hide from God."  It's very sad that such a thing has to be said even at Greenbelt.  There is truly no need to hide from any God on the basis of sexuality or gender unless your God is a ****.  [Blob, don't swear like that!]

At the service Blob's person met some people from the church she used to attend and afterwards they went off together to the all night cafe.  Blob's person needed to eat something because she was quite hungry and she needed to sit somewhere for a while before attempting sleep.  It was then that she discovered the carrot cake in the cafe.  She would discover it again several times over the course of the weekend.

And so to bed.  Blob got an excellent night of sleep.  Blob's person did not.  Another day was coming and Blob wondered whether it could be as exciting as his Saturday had been.



[1927 words]