Ten Songs That Are Brilliantly Honest About Sin

“If you really want to know something about me, you should know this: I like my music loud. I mean loud. I’m not talking about the kind of loud where your parents knock on your bedroom door and ask you to turn it down. Please. That’s amateur hour. When I say loud, I mean you-can’t-hear-your-parents-knocking-and-the-neighbours-are-putting-a-FOR-SALE-sign-on-their-house-and-moving-to-another-block-because-they-can’t-handle-the-constant-noise-any-more-loud … If you are not this kind of person, then I don’t think we’ll be great friends.”

Robin Benway, Audrey, Wait! (2008)

 

Thanks to Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net for this rather pretty assortment of vaguely musicky-type things.

According to Spotify’s Year in Music tool, I listened to thirty-five thousand minutes’, or five hundred and eighty-nine hours’, or twenty-five days’ worth of music over the past year.¹ My housemates know from trying to communicate with me while I have my headphones on² just how frequently I do have them on. And I tend to feel that if I spend that much time pumping content into my ears, it really should matter to me what that content consists of, and that it’s consistent with the kinds of things I want to be occupying my thoughts. So it’s probably no surprise that I’m quite a fan of the ‘Christian music’ scene.

However, it seems to me that quite a lot of Christian music frequently tends to preoccupy itself with reassuring us about how special and loved and important we are, and largely skip over the whole sin thing.³ This I find problematic; first, it’s spiritually dangerous, since acknowledging our own wrongdoing is entirely key to accepting salvation from it;⁴ second, I’d actually find it more reassuring for Christian artists to tell me that they also sin and struggle with sin and get incredibly upset over sin, than for them to constantly thrust overzealous self-esteem boosts in my direction. In case you were to by any chance feel the same way, I have compiled a (by no means even slightly exhaustive) list of some songs that I appreciate for their head-on confrontation of sin.

1)      House of Heroes, ‘Choose Your Blade’, The Knock-Down Drag-Outs (2013)

“It was a coward’s decision when I offered you sanctuary.

I knew it right then and there that our cartel would be my undoing,

But I rationalised and believed every mangled half-truth.

Choose your blade; we shall dance in the blood and the rain.

I grow sick of your whispered betrayals.

Go where the dead go; tu estas muerto.

Choose your blade; I won’t be held as a prisoner of shame.

I grow sick of your lies and your games.

Get thee behind me; you shall not bind me.”

I recall reading somewhere that the brief use of Spanish in this song’s chorus is incorrectly conjugated, but, not knowing Spanish myself, I really can’t comment.

2)      Remedy Drive, ‘The Cool of the Day’, Commodity (2014)

“What was it like before the war?

What was it like before the use of force, before the great divorce?

What was it like before the curse began to take its course?

In the cool of the day, in the cool of the day, we walked together in the cool of the day.”

First Remedy Drive made a few albums of pretty decent but hardly revolutionary Christian music. Then lead singer David Zach spent some time working against human trafficking in Southeast Asia, and suddenly the masterpiece that is the album Commodity happened.

3)      Jonathan Thulin, ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, Science Fiction (2015)

“All I ever wanted to be was me, now I know not who I am.

One day I’m Lex Luthor, the next I think I’m Superman.

I was walking on the water, now I’m sinking in the sand.

Dang, I thought was innocent, but there is blood all on my hands.

This we needs to become a me,

Because I’m a fraud, I’m an impostor,

I’m a fraud, ’cause, you see, there’s two of me.

Jekyll and Hyde, that’s what my name is.”

One of my favourite things about Jonathan Thulin is the way he still really showcases his rather excellent voice despite the heavily electronic nature of his music; many artists, by contrast, seem to autotune and edit their vocals into total obscurity.

4)      Icon for Hire, ‘Off With Her Head’, Scripted (2011)

“I know they’ll come with what I’m owed: guilty as charged.

My enemies belittle me, reminding me the penalty of all my deeds, despite my pleas, is death.

Don’t let go, ’cause I don’t want to be this.

Death is mine, I know.

Don’t let go; save your own.”

Icon for Hire have said that their goal as a band is to make honest music and play that music for anyone who wants to hear it. I really think they do extraordinarily well on the honesty front.

5)      KB, ‘Open Letter (Battlefield)’, Weight & Glory (2012)

“I tried talking to the people at church,

But they just look at me funny, only adding to the hurt.

Now I’m torn, ’cause, the other day, I stumbled over porn.

I’m supposed to be a leader, man – how can I move on?

I know this is a lie, that’s why I’m coming to you praying.

I’m praying that you can pray for your sister to make it through.

I’m crying as I write, ’cause I want to be right.

Many girls have fallen and I don’t want to fall too.

There’s a war inside my heart and mind; every day, I fight it.

So make me align to the truth and rely on your Spirit inside me.

It’s time to make war, ’cause life is a battlefield.”

This song essentially takes the format of two versified (rap-ified?) versions of letters written to KB, interspersed with the chorus and a prayer for the authors of said letters.

6)      Andy Mineo, ‘Tug of War’, Heroes for Sale (2013)

“I wear a cross and give you thanks for my blessings – ain’t that enough?

Why do you want everything? Can’t you leave this part of my life untouched?

I thought following you meant I only had to say yes once.

Now every day I wake up, you give me some cross to take up.

You really want me to break up with my girl? Now that’s too much.

I know what’s best for me. You don’t understand my complexities.

See, I’ve got to make a living, so don’t ask where my cheques come from.

Now I hear you talking, I ain’t gone numb.

I know I’m in the dark and I’ve got to find my way to the Son,

’Cause he’s calling on my name and I know I can’t run.

I’m so back and forth like a tug of war.”

You can blame Andy Mineo for sparking off my now ever-growing fondness for Christian rap. I used to completely discount rap as a genre, but thinking about it, it’s basically just poetry (which I love) set to a backing of electronic music (which I also love). Winning combination.

7)      Switchfoot, ‘Mess of Me’, Hello Hurricane (2009)

“I am my own affliction. I am my own disease.

There ain’t no drug that they could sell.

There ain’t no drug to make me well.

There ain’t no drug. It’s not enough. The sickness is myself.”

There’s also an acoustic version of this song, with a gorgeous bridge-into-final-chorus section, that’s worth checking out if you can find it; it does appear on an album called Acoustic Live & Rare 2010, if that helps.

8)      Relient K, ‘Maybe it’s Maybelline’, The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek (2001)

“We point the finger even though it’s not polite.

We condemn the Son of God; we’re hoping two wrongs make a right.

Maybe it is them, or maybe it is me, or maybe it’s Maybelline.

The truth is excuses are lame.

Accept consequence; accept the blame.

We’re all sinners; we’re all unclean.

Well, maybe we’re born with it, or maybe it’s Maybelline.”

There are any number of Relient K songs I could have employed here, but the comedy value in this one’s title just about gave it the edge.

9)      Pas Neos, ‘The Accuser Comes to Judas’, Who Do You Say I Am? (2012)

“I’ve been working you for ages.

Every workman’s worth his wages.

Pushing buttons, vetting vices –

Subtle nudges, compromises.

Only a little leaven, and you kept letting me in.

It became less about the price when you let the enemy in on the inside.”

I’m not aware of any other band that does what Pas Neos does; every song is sort of a meditation on a particular Biblical event.

10)   Tim Be Told, ‘Not Gods’, Mighty Sound (2015)

“Atlas tried to carry all the weight of the world and it broke him like he knew it would.

Ares started wars with every rumour he heard and he did it ’cause he knew he could.

We’re not gods of the universe, we are only human.

So let’s stop trying to be superheroes now.

Freedom will come when you lay it down.”

I discovered Tim Be Told over Christmas and have since then been listening to Mighty Sound with quite ludicrous frequency. The references to Greek mythology in ‘Not Gods’ are, of course, an added bonus as far as I’m concerned.

So there you have it. Hopefully you might have found some value in at least one of the above suggestions, even if you vetoed some of them on grounds of generic taste. If you happen to have any further recommendations, there is of course a comments box hanging about at the bottom of this page.

Footnotes

¹ If you’d like to know your own statistics, the tool is available here, https://yearinmusic.spotify.com/en-GB, although it takes an absolute age to load.

² I am extremely fond of my headphones on two counts: first, they are ecologically sound (no pun intended), having been made by the House of Marley, https://www.thehouseofmarley.co.uk/; and second, they have the best noise-cancelling in the world.

³ Even some Christian bands I really like seem determined to persistently cast their listeners as admirable victims in perpetual need of being told how special and loved and important they are; try ‘Made’ by Hawk Nelson, ‘Rock What You Got’ by Superchick, and ‘Lightning’ by Fireflight, for instance. All good songs, but that sentiment by itself simply doesn’t do.

⁴ In fact, the way Jesus chose to announce the coming of his kingdom was with a call to repent, as reported in Matthew 3 and Mark 1; here’s the Mark chapter for your perusal: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+1&version=ESVUK.

Cinema’s Suicide

“The idea behind each one was, we took a film that we liked and made the title stupider. And then made a new film to reflect the new stupid title. It’s a formula that only produces horrible films, but for some reason we keep using it.”

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

 

My, that’s some funny-looking popcorn. Still, thanks to renjith krishnan on freedigitalphotos.net, it is at least clear enough, with the barest of glances, that this is a post about cinema.

My theory goes thus: cinemas, plural, are killing cinema, singular. Allow me to elaborate.

In my home city of Peterborough (which has, incidentally, a population of nearly two hundred thousand), there is only one cinema (as in, a building specifically intended to fulfil the chief purpose of screening films, not counting theatres, churches,¹ and other venues that may occasionally do so). It’s on the edge of town in an industrial park, so the only transport options are to drive there – and then work one’s way across the vast concrete prairie of the cark park in order to reach the entrance – to brave the perils of the surrounding roads on foot, or to track down the lengthy alternative route that leads through a gap in a hedge into another stretch of (apparently disused and completely pointless) car park peripheral to the cinema’s own. Having finally arrived, one is then confronted with the extortionate (and complicated) array of ticket prices, with general admission at peak times costing £9.90, and the various discounts available for off-peak, children, students, seniors and so on never reducing the price past £7 – unless one signs up for a special discount card, which pushes it down to £6.25 on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Sunday evenings. To view a film in 3D costs £2 more, with a further £1.50 required for 3D glasses, and the option of upgrading to a fancier seat for £1.80. One is then presented with a selection of similarly ludicrously overpriced snacks and drinks, so that it’s really very easy to end up spending some twenty pounds a head in one trip.²

Now, so that this doesn’t turn into some kind of personal pity party, I shall now allow you, O Similarly Extorted Reader, a moment to recount your own grudges against the cinemas you have experienced yourself. (It seems to me that most people who enjoy going to the cinema do hold some such grudges, many of them concerning pricing; the cinema I described above isn’t necessarily the most expensive chain around,³ though the monopoly it holds in the city does allow it to inflate prices beyond what they are elsewhere.⁴) Ready? Go.

…

Finished? Good. It’s a pain, isn’t it? But I think this conversation represents more than us engaging in a spot of British grumbling about personal inconvenience; it highlights a genuine problem in the cinema industry, namely a restriction of access to cinema-going.

Because going to see a film is so expensive, only those with significant disposable income are able to do so with any kind of frequency. (Similarly, on the transport front – which I appreciate is not as ubiquitous an issue as the overpricing, but, equally, I feel can’t be singularly peculiar to Peterborough – it becomes difficult and possibly even dangerous for those without easy access to a vehicle, perhaps due to income or to age, to go to the cinema, again ruling it out as a possibility for regular trips.) Everybody else is forced to be highly selective about which films he or she is prepared to hand over the cash to see. As a result, there is a gravitation towards films that might be called ‘reliable’: the big-budget summer blockbuster that will at least have plenty of explosions in it, even if the plot is somewhat lacking; the latest sequel, prequel, spin-off, or side-project of a well-known franchise; the multi-part adaptation of a bestselling book or series of books. An unorthodox premise will only suffice if supported by a stellar cast, or perhaps the previous huge success of the director or studio involved. Since cinemas are where films are released first, they are where one goes to see a film one hasn’t seen yet; therefore, to purchase a cinema ticket is to take a risk. Raised prices demand the placing of a larger bet; in compensation, our preference for short odds increases.

And so the blockbusters and the franchises and the celebrated stars rake in the millions, and that which is more obscure, or unusual, or low-budget, is pushed to the sidelines: if it is shown in a mainstream cinema at all, few of us are likely to go and see it, because it represents too risky a bet for our hard-earned cash. I’m not directing my criticism at us the customers though, but at the cinema owners who set the prices.

 

I mean, think of all the other things you could buy with nine quid odd. That’s nine loaves of good bread. Or three bottles of Barry M nail varnish. Or one-thirtieth of an Xbox One. Endless possibilities.

It’s not as if it’s unfeasible to offer tickets at cheaper prices. My university Campus Cinema Society, for instance, charges £2 for members of the society (membership costs £15 for the year), or £3.50 for members, meaning I can see four films at Campus Cinema for about as much as it would cost me to see one at the cinema in Peterborough.⁵ Admittedly, this facility fails to meet the criteria for being a ‘proper’ cinema that I outlined above, since it operates out of a Music & Drama room used for multiple purposes at various times; still, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a ‘proper’ cinema case-study to offer. When my younger sister visited me at university earlier this academic year, we took a trip to the nearby seaside town of Exmouth and, since the weather rather precluded typical beach-type activities, took a couple of hours’ refuge in the cinema (which, I would also like to mention, is sensibly placed, on the main town square).⁶ My sister, having done a little maths, subsequently lamented that the cost of the train to Exmouth, plus that of her cinema ticket, plus that of a Tango Iceblast, altogether came to less than one general-admission ticket to the cinema in Peterborough.

I have a pact with the aforementioned sister that if either of us ever, in some bizarre turn of events, stumbles into ownership of a large amount of money, we are going to buy up the inconsistently-operational theatre that used to be Peterborough’s Odeon, and reinstate it as a cinema.⁷ We will show the blockbusters and the franchises and the celebrated stars, certainly, but also odd and obscure and indie films, and also old ones, and also foreign ones, and also shorts by local directors just getting off the ground. We will have special screenings as well; event cinema, and marathons designed as preparation for new releases, and films that have particularly impressive soundtracks accompanied by live orchestra.⁸ And we’ll have a café too. And none of it will be ludicrously overpriced.

That’s the dream, anyhow – to create a cinema where it’s not a case of everything except the actual viewing process itself being a grit-your-teeth kind of chore, so that it really matters that said actual viewing process is worth the price demanded. Rather, one will be able to wander casually in wondering what might be on today, hand over a couple of quid, and see a film that, yes, may turn out to be not to one’s taste at all, but, equally, may turn out to be a new favourite that it would nevertheless never otherwise have occurred to one to go and see. I say this with reference to my experience of Campus Cinema: among the films I saw on the off-chance last term were Man Up, which I thought was excellent (and romcoms aren’t usually my favourite either), Mr. Holmes, which I thought was extremely underwhelming (so much potential for exploration of the nature of truth and memory and the relationship between the self and a portrayed character, barely exploited at all), and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, as quoted above, which I thought was emotionally traumatising, but sufficiently clever and interesting and profound that I’m still very glad I saw it. The film’s protagonist is always insisting that the films he makes with his friend Earl are terrible, but Rachel, the ‘dying girl’ of the title, really enjoys them. People enjoy different kinds of films, and cinema surely ought to reflect that breadth of interest, rather than consisting of a narrow core of ‘reliable’ films that we all like enough to consider them safe options, but that rarely capture our imaginations in especially groundbreaking ways. Still, if things continue in the direction they seem to be heading in, I feel we may watch the variety of films that are shown in cinemas be whittled down to very little more than blockbusters and franchises and celebrated stars, standing in a graveyard of creativity – and that’s something I’d really rather not have to watch if I can avoid it.

Footnotes

¹ Yep, there’s a church in my city that shows family films on a monthly basis, with free admission: http://www.orbchurch.co.uk/events/orb-cinema/. It’s pretty great. (And they offer lots of delicious and reasonably-priced snacks to munch while viewing.)

² Do feel free to check; this stuff is all on their website: http://www.showcasecinemas.co.uk/locations/peterborough. You’ll notice that the instructions for how to get there are aimed exclusively at car drivers.

³ Vue, http://www.myvue.com/ and Cineworld, http://www1.cineworld.co.uk/, both seem to me to be contenders for that title as well as Showcase, though it’s hard to tell when prices can vary quite significantly from branch to branch.

⁴ In Liverpool, for instance, general admission costs a mere £8.40: http://www.showcasecinemas.co.uk/locations/liverpool. Liverpool is, I have learned with a little Ecosia-ing, also home to numerous other cinemas, including Odeon, Cineworld, Vue, Picturehouse, Light Cinema, and Plaza Community Cinema, this last offering extremely competitive prices. Liverpool is, of course, quite a bit bigger than Peterborough, with a population of over 450,000, but even taking this into account, it has a significantly better cinema-to-population ratio.

⁵ Campus Cinema is open to everyone, not just students, and I think it’s really excellent: http://campuscinema.co.uk/index.php.

⁶ Note also that their instructions for how to get there include numerous options in terms of means of transport: http://exmouth.scottcinemas.co.uk/yourcinema.

⁷ Now called the Broadway, it suffered a fire a few years ago and, since then, seems to have changed hands multiple times. Some kind human has collected a wealth of information about it and various other former Peterborough theatres, http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Peterborough/BroadwayTheatrePeterborough.htm. At the moment, a London theatre company are operating a run of shows there, http://thebroadwaypeterborough.co.uk/, but the last time they did so, they cleared off after a few months and left it vacant, bar the odd one-off performance, for the rest of the year. Nobody seems able to commit, you know?

⁸ My favourite orchestral scores include Pirates of the Caribbean, How To Train Your Dragon, Prince Caspian, Pacific Rim, and Pan, and I’m always pleased to receive recommendations.

That Kind of Woman

“I will be a new me – get fit, lose weight – a new me shall reigneth, like a phoenix emerging from the ashes of my old life and flapping off. Behold, I am woman and phoenix both, but not in a mutanty way, and yes, I have indeed lost my train of thought.”

Miranda S2 E1, ‘The New Me’ (2010)

What a phoenix apparently looks like according to fotographic1980 at freedigitalphotos.net. Pretty, no?

I was recently informed by a good friend of mine that her favourite holiday (defined – I did ask – as any commercialised seasonal celebration) is New Year, a statement which very much surprised me. Surely, I was thinking, all it really consists of as an occasion is counting down the last few seconds to midnight, possibly mumbling one’s uncertain way through a verse or two of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and then spending the next few weeks writing down the date incorrectly while watching fledgling resolutions inevitably crumble and fall. Not so, according to my friend: resolutions are, she told me, a key component of why she values New Year so highly; deciding the challenges upon which she wishes to embark is exciting, and likewise, recalling the resolutions of the previous January and the efforts made towards them during the year is fulfilling.

It was an outlook with which I found little common ground. As a child, I used to have some fondness for New Year’s resolutions, using coloured gel pens to detail them in the official Jacqueline Wilson diaries I received for Christmas,¹ but after a few years ticked by, they simply became synonymous in my mind with inevitable failure. I stopped making them. Why bother when I could never manage to keep them? And here we have the key difference between my friend and me; she actually keeps hers.

I’ll admit that there followed quite a twinge of jealousy on my part. How come she can manage it while I never could? It’s a question to which, having given our conversation some thought, I think I might now have something of an answer – and, conveniently, right on time for the launch of this next year as well. My problem is trying to run – or indeed, trying to be an Olympic-grade sprinter – before I can walk.

Allow me to illustrate. There’s an episode of Miranda in which the eponymous heroine decides to altogether reinvent herself. She explains the plan to her best friend Stevie thus: “I’m going to be the kind of woman who – you know, the kind of woman that just leaps out of bed and just does that –” she performs a casual head movement familiar to the viewer from numerous shampoo adverts “– and their hair looks perfect. They then grab a homemade muffin out of their Cath Kidston polka-dot biscuit tin and head to work wearing trainers at the bottom of a skirt suit, to show off they’ve power-walked in. They have pot plants that don’t die on them. Their fruit bowl isn’t full of three-week-old, rotting pears, because they actually eat the fruit. They have day bags, evening bags, and a clutch, you know? They just grab a wheatgerm smoothie in between work, because that’s enough to keep them going, even though at lunchtime they jogged, and enjoyed it – yeah, because they don’t have flesh that moves independently to their main frame. Yeah. And finally, they have easy access to pens, to finish a crossword at a bar, where the man they decided to take as a lover the night before says to them, ‘Hey, last night was great.’ You know, I’ll be that kind of woman.”

On this occasion, as on so many, I find myself relating to Miranda so neatly and absolutely that it almost aches. Even if my idea of That Kind of Woman isn’t quite the same as hers, I still have one, and, moreover, one remarkably similar in format: I’ll be the kind of woman who gets up early enough to prepare a healthy breakfast and a similarly healthy packed lunch to take onto campus, you know? They finish reading all the set text for their lectures with days to spare and also devour half the suggested secondary reading, about which they have numerous clever opinions. They sport, day to day, a varied repertoire of interesting, pretty hairstyles, are always stylishly dressed, and know how to paint their nails without smudging them. They keep themselves well-informed about current affairs. They return texts and emails promptly. They are never late for Bible studies (or, indeed, for anything else) and have always thoroughly prepared the passage in advance. Every day, they have early-morning prayer sessions, during which they do not get distracted or fall back to sleep. Their relationship with Jesus is so evident that virtually everything they look at becomes a Christian.² You know, I’ll be that kind of woman.

And I think the trouble with the attitude I have traditionally had towards New Year’s resolutions is that I have seen them as vehicles for achieving this idealised model. No resolution is an end in itself; each comes with the baggage of being a component quality of That Kind of Woman, so that my failure to keep any given resolution is wholly tied up with my failure to be That Kind of Woman. If you’ve been following this blog from the start (or have been studious in your reviewing of archived posts), you’ll know I have a fear of starting things I know won’t be perfect.³ The loftier the goal, the less inclined I am to reach for it, and being That Kind of Woman is a lofty goal indeed – not simply, moreover, because it’s very difficult to be That Kind of Woman, but because That Kind of Woman does not, in fact, actually exist.

Consider Miranda. During the episode, she does actually manage to tick off all the items on her list of what That Kind of Woman is like, and turns to the camera with a triumphant, “I did it!” Nevertheless, seconds later, she falls off a stool and ends up covered in cream cake, in true ridiculous Miranda fashion. We realise she was never really That Kind of Woman at all. Moreover, this fact does not come across because Miranda actually specified that falling off stools and ending up covered in cream cake is not the kind of activity in which That Kind of Woman engages; this is, rather, simply understood from the overall picture of That Kind of Woman which Miranda presented. Being That Kind of Woman is not limited to fulfilling a list of requirements, or keeping a list of resolutions. It’s a whole idea, and exactly that – a figment of Miranda’s own imagination, and of mine.

What happens, then, if we take That Kind of Woman out of the picture when it comes to New Year’s resolutions? Well, for starters, they become far more self-contained. No longer is the failure to keep one a blow at my whole identity. Leading on from that, they become more attainable, as individual, measurable goals, rather than small corners of an impossibly large and vague one. Less, ‘a new me shall reigneth’ (which is grammatically horrible anyway – sorry, Miranda) and more, ‘here’s a specific thing that I think it would be good for me to do, and so I’m going to make a commitment to try hard to do it.’ Suddenly, I’m not nearly so scared to make them.

On which note, you may be wondering what I’m actually resolving to do this year – and, even if you aren’t, I’m afraid I’m going to tell you:

1) Become a blood donor. I am slightly scared of needles when they are left in for any substantial amount of time, but I tend to feel that other people’s lives are a tad more important than my squeamish scruples, and have made an appointment accordingly.⁴

2) Read one fifth of the Bible. I’ve read a lot of the Bible, but I’ve not yet been through it cover to cover. I tend to feel a Bible-in-a-year programme, popular as they are, would involve covering too much ground too quickly, and I wouldn’t be able to devote as much time as I’d like to each passage, so I tracked down a schedule of daily Bible studies that lasts two hundred and sixty weeks, or near enough five years.⁵ I start on Monday. It’s going to be amazing.

3) Be on time for things. I’m so bad at this, and it’s simply selfish. Any movement towards being more prompt, more reliably, has surely got to be a good thing.

So there you have it. Sincere thanks go to the friend I mentioned earlier – if you’re reading, you’ll know who you are – for encouraging me so much in this respect. Here’s to a year of leaving behind That Kind of Woman and the paralysis she causes, and instead setting my eyes and my heart on Jesus, who is not only a better model to emulate, but is actually able to bring about positive changes in who I am. I will never be like That Kind of Woman, but, by the grace of God, I will one day be like my Lord.⁶

Footnotes

¹ I had no idea you could still get them, but apparently so: http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/9780857531995.

² An expression stolen, I will freely admit, from Andy Croft.

³ See ‘Things of Which I Am Afraid’ under ‘August’ in the box on the right-hand side.

⁴ If you happen to have any inclination to do the same, you can find out more and register as a donor on the NHS Blood website: https://beta.blood.co.uk/.

⁵ I purloined the schedule I intend to use, following much online searching, from some church or other, http://southvalleychurch.com.au/5-year-bible-reading-plan/, so many thanks to the people there.

⁶ See Romans 8, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+8&version=ESVUK. I draw your attention particularly to 16-17, 23, and 29, but do read the whole chapter, because it’s wonderful.