Filofax 1997
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09.11.97 / 01 / first labyrinth at grace
This was the first labyrinth at Grace, run by members of Live On Planet Earth. They had developed it for their worship at a church in Kent, but had been closed down and ejected by the church leaders. Now several of them were living in northwest London and wanted to get involved with Grace. It was the start of a fruitful collaboration, and we still do regular labyrinth services.
29.10.97 / 01 / delirious? in grimsby
I went to Grimsby 28th October - 1st November ostensibly to visit relatives, but also to see Delirious? again. The audience was only a quarter of the venue capacity, so Martin Smith invited us all down to the front seats. He sat on the edge of the stage and talked to us between numbers. A nice intimate gig. Being an ex-worship band they didn't feel a need to put distance between themselves and an audience.
19.10.97 / 01 / labyrinth people
Diary note: 5pm St James the Less, then Grace at the New Inn to ‘talk to labyrinth people’ - the start of a significant collaboration...
12.10.97 / 01 / pretending to be a machine
My first task as a member of the Grace team - hiding behind muslin screens in the dark, operating the slide projector whenever anyone came in the room to make it appear automatic. I missed the actual service.
When it was over and I could emerge, we looked at the dinner place settings on the altar created by the congregation. It was so beautiful that we were reluctant to remove it. None of us had a camera. As a result of this, I bought a camera after Christmas and started to photograph Grace and other alt worship services.
06.10.97 / 01 / epicentre discussion group
On this day I was inducted into Epicentre's private internet discussion forum, which had around 40 people, mostly Epicentre members with a few others. People usually accessed it by threaded emails rather than via a web browser - in the days of intermittent dial-up (charged as a phone call) you could download all the emails and go offline to read them and prepare replies. Consequently I still have several threads and various loose emails. We spent our evenings in theological and sociological debate which could be fairly vivid. All forums have in-community trolls, I had a 'favourite enemy' who I was always crossing swords with. The facilitator once said to me, we're all spending four hours every night trying to craft the perfect reply.
The forum closed with Epicentre in 2002. Half of Epicentre continued in another place as Moot, with their own forum, but I wasn't part of the community by then, and had various other forums to attend to!
28.09.97 / 01 / decks and samplers
Diary note: St J’s - will Steve B and Jason [the Abundant DJs] use decks and samplers?
They were trying to introduce a different music into the service, but it didn't work. The flow of a DJ set couldn't be achieved without reinventing the form of the liturgy, which was not allowed. So it was not tried again, but this set the Abundant team thinking about doing something elsewhere - which resulted in Vaux a year later.
27.08.97 / 01 / redundant
Made redundant, but secretly delighted. I had wanted to leave for a while, but this way I got redundancy pay as well.
22.08.97 / 01 / greenbelt
This year at Greenbelt I knew a lot of people and could wander round just bumping into friends. Grace had rashly undertaken to do five services, one every night Thursday to Monday. It was an arduous task, the equipment had to be set up in a marquee and taken down every time. Fortunately I wasn't yet officially part of the team.
Delirious? played a memorable set. Their single was in the charts and there was an electrifying love between the band and the audience. They were deeply moved by the reception and the audience were moved that they were moved. Afterwards I wandered the outfield stunned. Iona were the headliners but they couldn't follow Delirious?
This year Greenbelt treated the Monday as a festival within the festival, with big-name secular acts and separate ticketing, hoping to get a different audience in for the one day. Unfortunately the weather this year was atrocious and the site turned to mud. It was bad enough to make the front pages of the national papers. By Sunday evening the regular festivalgoers were packing their tents and leaving in droves. The hoped for influx of visitors on Monday did not happen but the headline acts still had to be paid. This almost bankrupted the festival, it took years to pay the debts.
At this time the entire site was under canvas, so it was hard to escape from the quagmire. I was in a swampy marquee waiting for Graceland to start, but the marshal told us we had to leave because the electricity cables were in the watery mud and we could be electrocuted. I braved the torrential downpour to watch Lamb on mainstage for a while - they were under shelter - but it was took much to take. I fled to a fairly dry service by Holy Joes. It looped the instrumental introduction of 'The Drugs Don't Work' as background, shifting to the words as we began to take communion - a counterintuitive and very moving effect. Goldie played the dance tent, I was dancing in waterproof trousers which were as wet inside as outside.
When we packed up and left, the first task was to head somewhere to get rid of some of the mud and put on dry clothes. The people in the service station knew where we had been.
27.07.97 / 01 / last service
The minister at my old church in Surrey was moving on. We had been good friends, but my church life was now at St James the Less and Grace. It was time for me to go as well.
17.07.97 / 01 / brighton
And the next day I went to Brighton for a few days, for skateboarding practice and a couple of ear piercings. The piercings hurt less than my bruised and swollen knee from the slams. They were done by a very sweet BDSM guy. He said that people in that scene are very gentle in everyday life, because their violent urges are channelled into their subcultural activities.
16.07.97 / 01 / online at home
I went online at home! Had to negotiate use of the one phone socket - reached by a long extension cable down the hallway from my modem. I could only use it late at night when no phone calls were expected.
Jonny had said, do you have an email address? The Grace team communicate by email. So I had to do it.
05.07.97 / 01 / a pivotal weekend
Filofax entry for 5th July: Abundant 3rd birthday night, Grace sunrise service, go to St James and drink with Heather.
From an email years later:
The 3rd birthday party night was perhaps the best night they ever did, and was an essential part of a pivotal weekend in my life. Sat night Abundant, wild wild night, I had been going a year but this was the night I suddenly made friends with all the central people - and Grace the following night - after which I got invited onto the Grace team. Funny thing was, it was my church homegroup's weekend away, a big long-awaited bonding thing, and I'd made my excuses and not gone because I just knew from God I had to be at Abundant and Grace. And that was when the doors opened.
Funny memory of Abundant 3rd bday - two blokes are crawling around half-naked on the floor in front of the decks while another half-naked bloke whips them with a rolled-up t-shirt in time to the music.
Me, Jonny and Mike Rose look on wondering if it's worship... sadly I didn't go everywhere with a camera back then.
In the next room the new thing - a Playstation hooked into a video projector with a snowboarding game - big excitement - this is 1997 remember!
I'm not sure that this account is quite right. I think I dipped out of the sunrise service. However, I was definitely invited onto the Grace team the following week at the Earth service after I made a good clay pot!
02.07.97 / 01 / anachronism
Diary note: ‘discuss Beckham issue with AI’. It can’t have meant what it would now seem to mean. AI probably meant Approved Inspector, who was a Building Regulations consultant. And Beckham was a place or a thing, not David.
xx.xx.97 / 01 / swim
Recurring note ‘swim’ on Sundays. Also in 1998.
I was never a good swimmer. When I was a child there was only one pool in the area for all the schools, so we had lessons until we could swim a length of the pool, and that was it. Now I was trying to improve my swimming, and also do exercise that might be better for my hip injuries. Trouble was, the local pool was mostly block-booked for clubs and special age or ability groups. The limited general access times were packed with children and teenagers messing about. It wasn't conducive to systematic practice.
13.04.97 / 01 / first visit to grace
I made it to the last date on that term's flyer. I blogged it here on the 25th anniversary.
I wrote about Grace in the church newsletter. There had been much discussion about exploring new things to rejuvenate the worship, so I invited people to Grace and St James the Less. But nobody seemed particularly keen, and I realised that my time there was up.
21.02.97 / 01 / constantine bay
15th-21st February some of the Dorking homegroup stayed in a cottage at Constantine Bay in Cornwall. On the first day the sea in the bay was disconcertingly covered in foam like a dirty bubble bath.
One evening we went over to Padstow for a meal. Rick Stein's famous fish restaurant was fully booked, so we ended up in a small bistro. By the time we received our main courses it was clear that the food was remarkable. We deliberately ordered all the desserts to see what happened. It was stunning. We asked questions. It turned out that the chef had left a top London restaurant to run his own place in Padstow.
The next evening we ate at a pub in Padstow. The standard of food was much higher than we expected from a pub. It seemed that the presence of Stein had pulled the general standard up in competition. It was a sign of the growing foodie revolution in Britain.
28.01.97 / 01 / discussion
I saw the minister at my church in Surrey to discuss St James the Less and my involvement in it. I had been part of the church machinery for over a decade - church council, property steward, newsletter editor, head communion steward and other things - so it mattered that I was now wondering about moving on.
07.01.97 / 01 / work email setup
2 hours email setup in the office - seems we didn’t have it until then.
