(no subject)
Tuesday, December 25th, 2001 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturner"And so this is Christmas
And what have we done?"
Not a lot really. I missed two pre-Christmas bashes because I was feeling grotty (Nalan's flu trying to invade my system) and I'm actually spending Christmas day in the office. Not working, just making use of a fast, free Internet connection and avoiding reading student papers. Today is a holiday for us foreigners, who are all assumed to be Christian, though in our unit we Muslims and atheists probably outnumber Christians three to one (note deiberate syntactic ambiguity).
Nalan and I watched a bit of midnight mass on TV before she went to bed and I decided to watch The Matrix for the umpteenth time. I tried singing some Christmas carols to Nalan this morning, but kept forgetting the words, filling them in with "something something something".
Another thing is that when Nalan asked me what "Alleluia" meant, I had to confess that I didn't have a clue. Since British schools have religious services, I got to sing a lot of alleluias, but they never told us what it meant. Improvising wildly, I said it was probably something like "Bismillah".
Actually, if I could manage to believe all this trinitarian stuff, I reckon I'd make a great Anglican priest. You know, typical country vicar type: vague sermons about being nice to people, tea on the vicarage lawn, sherry with tweed-clad parishioners, special young people's services with the organist playing Deep Purple ...
And what have we done?"
Not a lot really. I missed two pre-Christmas bashes because I was feeling grotty (Nalan's flu trying to invade my system) and I'm actually spending Christmas day in the office. Not working, just making use of a fast, free Internet connection and avoiding reading student papers. Today is a holiday for us foreigners, who are all assumed to be Christian, though in our unit we Muslims and atheists probably outnumber Christians three to one (note deiberate syntactic ambiguity).
Nalan and I watched a bit of midnight mass on TV before she went to bed and I decided to watch The Matrix for the umpteenth time. I tried singing some Christmas carols to Nalan this morning, but kept forgetting the words, filling them in with "something something something".
Another thing is that when Nalan asked me what "Alleluia" meant, I had to confess that I didn't have a clue. Since British schools have religious services, I got to sing a lot of alleluias, but they never told us what it meant. Improvising wildly, I said it was probably something like "Bismillah".
Actually, if I could manage to believe all this trinitarian stuff, I reckon I'd make a great Anglican priest. You know, typical country vicar type: vague sermons about being nice to people, tea on the vicarage lawn, sherry with tweed-clad parishioners, special young people's services with the organist playing Deep Purple ...
