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notes from a small vicar from a parish in Liverpool, UK Home Blog About me My talks My writing My wish list Email me: john[at]johndavies.org Subscribe to Join me on my PARISH WALKS 1 - On rogation beside the River Alt 2 - Bounded by green avenues 3 - Following mislaid tracks 4 - Bringing in the Bacon 5 - Tropical storms over Scarisbrick 6 - Leisure pursuits 7 - The shopping trolley trail 8 - Everyday English 9 - Dog & Gun rogation 10 - Boundary slippage Related Talks and articles: Iain Sinclair in Conversation with John Davies (at Greenbelt 09: cd/mp3) Walking with the Psychogeographers (Greenbelt 2008 talk) Walking with the Psychogeographers (Greenbelt 08 talk: cd/mp3) Heaven in Ordinary (Greenbelt 2007 talk) Heaven in Ordinary (Greenbelt 07 talk: cd/mp3) Heart of Cheltenham pilgrimage: notes Heaven in Ordinary (Greenbelt Leeds event talk) Reading the Everyday (Greenbelt 06 talk: cd/mp3) Reading the Everyday (Third Way article: pdf) Reading the Everyday (Greenbelt on Iona 2006) Stars of Norris Green (radio talks) Making of the Croxteth Landscape Healing Places retreat programme Towards an Urban Theology of Land Mapping an Urban Parish Donations towards the cost of my MPhil/PhD theology/psychogeography research project gratefully received via THE FIRE THIS TIME: Deconstructing the Gulf War A permanent record of the fate of Iraq ![]() Co-travellers: Pip Wilson Jonny Baker Joe Moran's Blog The Reluctant Ordained ASBO Jesus Dave Walker's Cartoon Blog Paul Cookson Maggi Dawn Dot Gosling: Wildgoose Ellen Loudon Rachel Andrew Walking Home to 50 The Manchester Zedders A Mis-Guided Blog Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives Islingtongue / Leytonstongue Remapping High Wycombe National Psychogeographic Diamond Geezer Danger: Void Behind Door Common Ground Strange Attractor: Further Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary Kristin Hersh Unofficial Fall website Bill Drummond: Penkiln Burn Iain Sinclair Julian Cope: Head Heritage Billy Bragg Rough Trade Second Layer Records Freak Emporium Probe Records Piccadilly News From Nowhere Abebooks The Wire Smoke: A London Peculiar London Review of Books Demos Greenhouse Archives July 2002 August 2002 September 2002 October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009 December 2009 January 2010 March 2010 April 2010 | Keep following my blog on Typepad This is now an archive site. My live blog is one click away on my Typepad pages. I hope you'll go there now and bookmark it. This site remains open as I shall continue archiving texts of my talks etc here, and I will no doubt put it to various other uses as time goes on, so I hope you keep checking in here. I'll be upgrading the blog archive links pages soon, to make them more user-friendly. Meanwhile the best way to find what you think may be here is by using the search box on the left. Thanks for visiting! Friday, April 30, 2010 The good man Morton and the scoundrel Cole For technical reasons to do with Blogger not supporting my kind of website any more, my blog is migrating to my Typepad pages. Read the first one here: The good man Morton and the scoundrel Cole, a review of two very good books indeed. Tuesday, March 23, 2010 John Davies Talking Walking My conversation with Andrew Stuck on his excellent Talking Walking website. Saturday, January 16, 2010 On throwing up in the gutter and other great moments with Jim The text of my tribute to Jim Hart, which I improvised around during my contribution to today's event at St Michael in the City, where around thirty or forty assorted folks from different parts of Jim's rich life gathered to remember him in word, image, prayer (including a Mourners' Kaddish) and song. The final act of a lovely short service arranged and led so sensitively by Mike Williams - The Dream of Glyndwr - moved me deeply, applying the words of the Welsh ur-hero to Jim's life and destiny, the whole thing was excellent.....My friendship with Jim has developed over the past 15 years - since Jesus in the city (expand)... more recently taken the form of visits to his house and day trips out, usually in my car, to exotic locations within a day’s drive of here: Lancaster, Wakefield, Shrewsbury, Carlisle and Shap, the canals of Wigan and the cemeteries of North Manchester. Others who contributed on the day - please feel free to add in your writing in the comments box or email me (see sidebar for email address) Sunday, January 10, 2010 On running away from God My latest offering, a spin on the Jonah and so-called 'prodigal son' stories (the first part of their journeys not the conclusions: On running away from God. Thursday, December 17, 2009 'Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways' by Phil Smith Good to know that Phil Smith's Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways is just emerging from the printers:My name is not on the book, though I wrote it. It takes the form of a documentary-fictional collection of the internal documents, diary fragments, letters, emails, narratives, notebooks and handbooks of a loose coalition of artists, performers, 'alternative' walkers and pedestrian geographers. All illustrated in full colour by Tony Weaver, who designed the Wrights & Sites' Mis-Guide books.And there's a website too, 'which pushes it all a little bit further', Phil says. I'd say quite a lot further. It's packed with goodies, provocations and resources: check out the booklist for a lifetime's worth of ambulatory elucidation. I feature in the site as a contributor of photographs (on the page devoted to Manchester, Mythogeography and Mobile Machinoeki) and in a list of Mythogeographic Characters ('Concepts not costumes, these ‘characters’ are dissolute identities': Pilgrim, Crab, the Nomad, the Doctor, “Guy Debord”, Toby the Marxist Tramp, the Small Vicar, Comus, Pontiflunk, Cecile Oak). Phil is a performer who spends some of his time carrying out ‘subversions’ of the ‘standard’ guided tour. ‘Deploy[ing] the ideas of mythogeography, placing the fictional, mistaken and personal on equal terms with factual, heritage and municipal histories’, he takes his walking companions on alternative journeys in tourist sites in South West England. So National Trust houses and Exeter's tourist hives become 'place[s] of performance, space[s] of multiple layers, including ambience and psychogeographical effects, geological, archaeological and historiographical data, myths, rumours and lies, unrealised architectures and collectively expressed desires, autobiographical associations, incongruities and accidental hybrids.' Finding the 'hidden Real' in places is one of Phil's intentions. The Mythogeographer suggests that having fun - walking sideways - is one of the best ways of achieving this. Friday, November 20, 2009 Jim Hart - Rest in Passion ![]() I've spent most of today drafting a Research Essay in which I reflect back on forty years of urban walking, realising that since childhood I have enjoyed walking in the city, whether exploring the streets with others whilst at play, or in 1971 taking a memorable quarter-mile walk in the company of teachers and classmates, which symbolised our move out from our ‘old’ school building into our ‘new’ one. This walk has stayed in my mind as at the age of nine it awoke in me an awareness of how a simple journey on foot can reveal the power and complexity of people’s relationships with particular places, a phenomenon which I have continued to explore ever since. I was thinking of Jim as I wrote, wondering how he was, thinking I must get to see him soon to record a conversation about his approach to urban exploration. Jim hosted a walk during the 1995 Jesus in the City conference - a guided walk of Toxteth, taking us through the faded Georgian terraces and back alleyways and shoddy social housing of L8, talking about their social and economic history in terms which made connections which fizzed with insight and provocation. It was an afternoon which matured me theologically, awoke me to ways of viewing the city which I'd never thought of before, strengthened my resolve to engage with this particular city and its people. After that walk I kept in touch with Jim, grew a friendship with a man who was often difficult to deal with, out of order on many things, but ultimately a man whose passions for God and justice I shared. Always energising, a visit to Jim's. Always challenging: coming away laden with papers which he'd written on all manner of subjects which he demanded be immediately read and responded to thoroughly. Always exhausing, a walk with Jim - he would soak up a place at speed and spin out endless insights while I (and often his good friend Dave), many years his younger, would struggle to keep physical and mental pace. In a pub near a cemetery in North Manchester on our visit to Irish Republican graves last year the woman serving us lunch asked me, 'What would your dad like to eat?' Now my actual dad is alive and we get on well, but it was nice to be associated with Jim in this way, albeit mistakenly. Jim mentored me, tormented me. And his example - a working class lad with a desire to know more, fully explore and write about life as he saw it - was a direct influence on me and my own ongoing mental fight. Suffolk-born Jim was soon out exploring the whole of Britain, as his unpublished gem Boy on Bicycle describes. Liverpool has been his home for much of his adult life, where he has been variously a self-elected youth worker (operating from his flat on an outer housing estate, taking groups of youngsters on long bicycle journeys in conditions which would seem nightmarish to today's risk assessment addicts), a researcher and advisor to churches on the social settings in which they served, an educator among the poor, an agitator of bishops and diocesan secretaries, a thinker, a depressive, an inadvisedly heavy drinker, a tireless reader, writer and sharer of knowledge. A frustration. A disciple of Christ. A friend to many, some who have fallen out with him and fallen away but retain a fondness for the man. I have blogged about Jim and his influence on me many times. It's a modest body of words and a small contribution to a legacy which I hope will grow as others too go to print with their reflections on the hard but faithful man's good influence. Pic: from my blog of June 24, 2006, the day he took me on his 'Alternative M6' journey, Jim picnicing on the farm road which runs between carriageways above Shap Monday, November 09, 2009 Remembrance: Coming Home As a rookie curate I preached some rather mealy-mouthed pacifistic sermons on Remembrance Sunday. Since then I've been learning to live with complexity and to listen harder to the stories of people's lives. Hence my first blog offering for a while (moving house etc has kept me away from the keyboard), Remembrance: Coming Home Thursday, October 15, 2009 On the Tapscott trail with Iain Sinclair ![]() The crocodile, says Iain Sinclair, seems to be a ubiquitous presence in grafitti protesting against the devouring of communities by sharp-tooted predatory redevelopers. He has seen it often painted on the blue-panelled wooden walls encircling the Olympic site in Hackney. Yesterday I walked him around Liverpool 8's Welsh Streets, a vast area of working-class terraces reduced from a living, active community to a tinned-up wilderness by one signature sweep of John Prescott's hand. The rock-faced stone steeple of the Welsh Presbyterian Church still shines in the Princes Road afternoon sun but its roof is down, its stained glass windows out. We two Welshmen-of-sorts (Sinclair Cardiff-born, me Cardiff-educated) noted that the place still carries its voice: its security fences are a billboard for nonconformist opinion, dissidents of temperance objecting to the developers' voracity, dissenters with a hold on local truths protesting the developers' deceptions: NO MORE DEMOLITION - NO MORE BULL. Our walk was informed by Bill Griffiths' epic Liverpool poem Mr Tapscott (see previous blogs here) which weaves the story of the city together with a case of murder and false imprisonment which contributed to the general atmosphere of distrust between police and people in L8, pre-riots 1981. So we took in riot hot-spots (including the Rialto corner, now site of a city council-sponsored pavement etching quoting Psalm 133: 'Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!'); we marvelled at the glory of Princes Park and its surrounding roads with their grand Victorian / Georgian designs; and we enjoyed our walk up Lodge Lane where one person noting our stopping, pointing, asked us if we needed help, and another group seeing us photographing the facade of the Middle Eastern Restaurant, said: 'Take our picture if you like, we're from Lodgy you know'. ![]() The brooding unrest of the neighbourhood's downtrodden people bred riots in 1981 and emerges in dissident graffiti and anti-Pathfinder Programme protests in 2009. The regeneration which matters here bears no relation to the glistening empty apartments rising above the swank streets of Liverpool One, but is seen in men making a tenuous start in business (MT BELLY'S host was generous in his helpings of dripping sandwiches and free mugs of tea) and by the recent emergence of groups of people like The Friends of Princes Park, reclaiming territory previously lost to (unfounded) fears of crime in public places. Pics from my On the Tapscott trail with Iain Sinclair Flickr photoset Tuesday, October 13, 2009 Save Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield This just in. The vice-chancellor needs to know what you think...Many students, academics and others associated with the discipline of Biblical Studies around the world have been shocked to hear of the news that the University of Sheffield is considering closing down the undergraduate program in the Biblical Studies Department.UPDATE 27 October 2009: The welcome news that due to the strong response to the university's proposal, the department has been saved: see here. Monday, October 12, 2009 First steps with the new family ![]() Leaving church on the wedding day. Thanks Linda for sharing this and others from the Facebook album. There should be more to follow from us. If you have any to share, do email them to john[at]johndavies.org. Friday, September 25, 2009 Should a man blog on his wedding day? ![]() Better men than I have done it and escaped opprobrium as geeks or a-romantics. But I might not. If a man blogs on his wedding day it must mean that: - he's so relaxed about the forthcoming nuptials that he can switch into reflexive mode for half an hour; - he's so full of the occasion that he needs the world - or at least his 150 online readers - to know; - he's so addicted to the computer that he just can't help himself. If a man blogs on his wedding day it's probably because: - he can't sleep and has to fill the long hours before the arrival of the best man and the wedding cars; - his wife-in-waiting can't sleep and she's been phoning every 20 minutes since 5.30am, so he may as well get up; - after hours and days of escorting his beloved shopping for chocolates, bedding, jewels, rings and lingerie the emotionally and financially shattered groom-to-be is asleep, and blogging is what he does in his sleep. If a man blogs on his wedding day it's likely that: - it's displacement activity for the speech he can't complete; - it takes his mind off that embarrassing 'first dance' he'll be subjected to later; - he needed to make a last-minute honeymoon booking and on the world wide web one thing leads to another. I shan't be blogging on my wedding day. But the night before: that's near enough. John and Diana Davies, as of 26 Sept 2009. A marriage made in Toxteth and to be continued in Croxteth Thanks to all who've supported and encouraged us on our way towards the 'big day' Monday, September 21, 2009 Stag Night Karting My last Saturday of singleness spent on a kart track in Aintree Industrial Estate. Filmed on his phone by Mark Coleman. From my Stag Night - Karting - September 2009 Flickr video set Tuesday, September 15, 2009 The Red Horse at Cheltenham Billy Childish may have stolen the (art) show at Greenbelt with his engaging conversation with Malcolm Doney - which began with him presenting himself as a determined religious outsider ('I never read the Old Testament ... it's all a bit bloody and ghastly, innit? No, I like the other feller, the later one, he's all friendly...') and developed into a candid and thoughtful explication of his Chatham-style, damaged goods take on spirituality. But in the venue of racing legends where around the site equine champions are celebrated in outdoor statuary, romanesque wall friezes and Hall of Fame history display panels, it was a red horse which most captivated me, and many others, the work of another artist in the very excellent Visionaries exhibition.![]() Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Green George catches the eye with its bright and unexpected colours. Green George... why? In an artists statement Hicks-Jenkins says that his work began with the horse: ‘Once I'd completed the horse, the incandescent colour of which was an early notion I'd had to make the saint's mount almost a creature of another, more heavenly realm, I knew in a moment that no conventional skin colour for Saint George could withstand close proximity to that flaming Cadmium Red. Suddenly green became my favoured option for George. And once I'd started painting with a green-laden brush, I loved the results. I loved the way red applied to George's lips and hectic cheeks transformed his appearance into a glorious and unexpected adventure. I loved the links green made to ideas of re-generation and rebirth, the allusion to a whippy sapling flooded with the promise of newness, growth and hope. Just what a warrior saint should be. And of course there was the idea of Viriditas (Green Flame), the term coined by Hildegard of Bingen to express the 'greening power of God'.All this, of course, at Greenbelt which really pulled out the stops on the visual arts front this year. Loved it. Green George from Clive Hicks-Jenkins website Monday, September 14, 2009 Luminescence at the pit head ![]() The spin on the Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa's Dream is that '...the head of a girl with eyes closed, seemingly in a dream-like state ... is the artist’s response to ... conversations with the ex-miners and members of the wider local community who wanted a piece that looked to a brighter future and created a beautiful and contemplative space for future generations, not least their own grandchildren, at the top of the former spoil heap.' On a sunny Sunday afternoon it's not contemplative, because beneath Dream children play, dogs sniff and tourists angle their lenses upwards towards the strange head. But it has a beauty - you can tell that when you're speeding along the M62 beneath it, flicking your eyes between the trees looking for a glance. Close up it becomes more apparent, the loveliness of this shining figure, luminescent in Spanish dolomite and titanium dioxide, sitting on the forty years worth of untouched coal which permeates the four miles of seams which run beneath. I don't know if Dream carries any more or less meaning as a gathering-point for the young people of St Helens than the night clubs, park gates and garage forecourts of the town which sits below this silent head, or for their hopes and aspirations. But it is a remarkable contribution to the local landscape and it does inspire interest, provoke stillness, register respect. Pic from my Dream Flickr photoset |