23rd April 2010

A Chaplain’s Diary

 

Hair today, gone tomorrow

 

Never satisfied

What is it about parents that we’re never satisfied?  Kids just can’t get it right.  If their hair is too long we want it short.  If they ask for a shaved “number one” look we try to persuade them not to have it too short because “it looks so nice a little bit longer”. Given the length of my son’s hair at the moment I’m thinking of renting him out to the advertising company who make the adverts for Dulux paint – you know the Dulux dog advert – the old English sheepdog with its hair all over its eyes and face. It sits with its tongue lolling out of the side of its mouth next to a tin of magnolia coloured emulsion.  Well, if you’ve seen that dog, then you’ve also seen my son who does a very good imitation of it at the moment with his hairstyle. To eat, clean his teeth, or do anything that involves the front of his face involves parting a very long floppy fringe.  But will he have it cut?  Will he heck as like!

 

Yet if you get the old family photo albums out it has always been the same.  The longer the hair, the wider the trouser bottoms.  It’s almost as if it is to balance them.  The shorter the hair, the wider the lapels.  The photos of my ordination look ridiculous.  I have long collar length hair with long sideboards, which reach down either side of my face and almost touch at the chin.  Nowadays it all looks fairly ridiculous.  People point at the photo and say “That’s not you is it?” and then laugh wildly.  Perhaps I should have used some of my homemade hair cream that I made when I was younger.  It was my father’s recipe and involved adding boiling water to something which I think was called tragacanth.   It turned into a jelly-like mix and had to be kept in an airtight jar otherwise it dried out.  A good dollop of that each morning, well rubbed in, would certainly have kept the Icelandic volcano under control.  It dried not just hard but “concretised” (if there is such a verb) on the top of your head.  It could hold for days on end and the only problem was breaking it up or getting a comb through it.  Those were the days!  The hair gel and mousse of today cannot hold a candle to it.  Tragacanth – that’s the stuff!

 

Now I have got to come clean on why I am so anxious about haircuts. My son is President of his college at York University where they have just built a new students residential block which is due to be opened next week by HRH Prince Andrew. My son, as President, has to show him around….so it’s the photos I am worried about and its why I am going on and on about getting his hair cut. Aren’t parents a bore!

 

Postal votes

I will not be here for election night and usually I love watching the coverage on television. It is one of the few nights in the year that I am prepared to stay up into the early hours. We did not know the date when we booked the annual choir trip otherwise we would have avoided May 6^th. No doubt my thumb would once again be aching because I had switched between the channels so much to compare coverage. So on the Friday morning, if I can find a television, I shall either be elated or in a foul mood because of the results, and if so the choir members will need to keep well out of my way.  For the last two weeks the first thing I have done every morning was log on to the computer to see what the polls were saying. But all will soon be clear and we shall know how right or wrong they were.  At the last election I was a little bit confused when our postal vote arrived because the name of our usual MP was not listed so I presumed she was not standing.  However, the following morning another postal vote arrived – so this is what all the trouble is about I thought – multiple voting!  I wondered if it was going to be a bit like the Irish elections where people were encouraged to “vote early, vote often!”  But on further investigation, I discovered that there were local elections as well as the national elections so that was why I had two voting slips. 

 

On the big day I shall phone and pester the children to make sure they have all voted…..and that they have voted correctly….which is not always easy when you have a son studying Politics full time….well between pints of Yorkshire Best Bitter anyway. I shall no doubt get on my high-horse telling them how women were only given the vote in the lifetime of their grandmother, and how people are dying in the cause of democracy, or queuing for hours in the sun in other parts of the world – and we can’t even be bothered to walk down to the polling booth to put a cross on a piece of paper!  In 1997 the national turnout figure to vote was 71% and that slumped to 59% in 2001 – the lowest level since World War One – and its feared it may be even lower this time. My boss says “it is a Christian duty to vote” but that is the sort of thing that Archbishops of Canterbury say….but on this occasion I think he is dead right.

 

Here today and here tomorrow

It was a strange atmosphere on the beach at Camp de Mar at the weekend. There was a feeling that no one wanted to be there, everybody seemed to be there under sufferance. Parents were looking stressed, and if they were not lugging suitcases behind them they were on their mobiles presumable trying to look for a way to get home. The kids meanwhile seemed more than happy to be missing school. My brother in law was stuck in the Gambia having to sit on the beach drinking cold beers, whilst another friend who is a head teacher in London, was stuck in South Africa when term started. Today, all my appointments for this morning have been cancelled due to the lack of flights over to the island. At church on Sunday morning I asked how many people didn’t really want to be there and about 10 people put their hands up and said that they should have been back home by then…..but there are worse places to be stranded…..as they were the first to admit!

 

Bouquets of the week

My scribblings in this august organ were never meant to be a consumer column but I do believe in giving credit where credit is due. This week I want to give out two bouquets both of which I feel are well deserved.  On Easter Sunday our congregation at Cala d’Or had their annual Easter meal at Vincentes in Cala d’Or. We have been going there for a number of years and every year we come away very satisfied. There is one problem….people always over indulge in the first course and then never have enough room to tuck into the roast legs of lamb which are usually paraded around the restaurant before they are carved….and hardly anyone has room for seconds…….apart from….yes you have guessed who!

 

The second bouquet has to go to Sean of Ocean in Son Rapinya. Like many people on the island who are dining out free of charge on the BBC with the aid of a Sky dish I started to lose Channel 3 recently. In desperation I phoned Ocean. Over a period of an hour and a half, between customers, Sean patiently talked me through what to do to get up and running again. Now I am a total technophobe and kept pressing the wrong buttons and had to go back to the beginning, so the whole thing took an age. Sean was as patient as it was possible to be with someone as stupid as me……and the charge? Well he did not make one! They are worth patronising. You read it here.

 

Now the “Squashed Tomato of the Week Award” goes to the small grocery shop on the port front at Puerto Andratx. I think they must have seen us coming! Two tomatoes and a white onion. Price: 1 euro 80 cents and we were silly enough to pay it. Who said the English don’t like complaining! But that sort of rip off is the sort of problem that the island faces and which is being regularly portrayed in the Letters to the Editor column of this paper. The secret of course is to say “No thank you” but we Brits are not very good at that and we certainly don’t wish to make a scene. So we take it on the chin, say nothing but just write about it in the local newspaper. What a wimp!

 

Fr Robert Ellis

St Philip and St James Church

Nunez de Balboa 6

Son Armadans

Palma 07014

Tel: 971 737279

E mail: anglicanpalma@gmail.com

www.anglican-mallorca.org