Filofax 1999
<< Filofax 1998 / Filofax 2000 >>
01.12.99 / 01 / last audiology appointment
This seems to have been my last audiology appointment checking my hearing damage from eight years earlier.
20.11.99 / 01 / collect bus
Driving home on the A3 with my new purchase I had an alarming experience on a bend that tightened as it continued. I entered it too fast and the bus leaned over scarily, fortunately it didn't roll but it was clear that I would have to drive this vehicle more carefully.
12.11.99 / 01 / coldcut at shepherds bush empire
Coldcut at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, with a stunning (for the time) video setup of five screens suspended in a cross formation. It was mind-blowing, they were the cutting edge of DJ/VJ events at the time. Of course we saw these things and wondered how we could do it in church.
07.11.99 / 01 / grace at brainstormers eastbourne
At this time Jonny Baker was working for Youth for Christ, so Grace did alt worship sessions at youthwork conferences and events. We were trying to bring some new ideas into the field, especially the idea of small-group creativity. Many of the youthworkers would be leaders of churches later, so we hoped that they would be more creative and open after exposure to our work, and to some extent that seemed to happen.
06.11.99 / 01 / buy vw bus
1980 aircooled T3. This was a bad idea. I had wanted one for years, indeed I still think it is the only vehicle I have ever truly wanted. I went to a supposedly reputable dealer, but the bus was not all it appeared.
16.10.99 / 01 / survey
I surveyed the south transept of St Paul's Cathedral, to work out how we could fit a labyrinth into the space. I realised immediately that the chequerboard floor pattern was a major issue. It was impossible to tape out a circular pattern on it, either we had to cover it up or make a pattern using the chequerboard itself. The design was based on the chequerboard in case we had to use the bare floor, but after a while we decided to cover it with hessian cloth. We used the design anyway, it was adapted to the shape of the space, the stations on the labyrinth and the need to have the entrance and exit in the same place. We didn't have time for second thoughts.
09.10.99 / 01 / start of the st pauls labyrinth
Meeting at St Paul's Cathedral to start work on the labyrinth. We expected to be given a part of the crypt for a few hours one evening, but they gave us the south transept for a week in March 2000. This meant there was a lot of work to do in five months, to expand our event to the scale and duration required, within the operational constraints of the cathedral.
18.09.99 / 01 / digital film
A party at a well-off friend’s house - someone filmed the party on a digital video camera, and half an hour later played it back to us in the party. This was new.
11.08.99 / 01 / total eclipse
After Greenbelt I was on leave to 15th August. I went to St Ives to see the total eclipse of the sun, but my diary makes no mention.
It was a last-minute decision. There had been a lot of publicity about Cornwall being booked out and overcrowded and please don't come at the last minute there will be gridlock - it backfired because people stayed away. I went to St Ives because it was easy to get to by train, had a lot of hotels and was on the line of maximum totality. If I couldn't find somewhere to stay I would come back. In the event there was no problem. I had one night in one B&B, then moved to another for another week. Unfortunately I got food poisoning from the first place - it was investigated by the authorities. I managed to drag myself out to the headland for the eclipse. There were huge crowds. The light dimmed slowly, and then the shadow of totality came rushing across the sea.
Unfortunately the sky was overcast, the only cloudy day in weeks of blazing sunshine. We didn't see the sun, but people let off fireworks and flashbulbs all around the bay in the dark so there was a festive atmosphere for two minutes, and then the light returned. I wondered if the cloud was an effect of the eclipse shadow, it was strange it should happen that one day.
With hindsight this seemed to be a significant event, a boundary-crossing in my life. In 2007 I had a tattoo to commemorate it, and blogged a full explanation.
From an email to my brother a week later:
St Ives was mostly hot and sunny, and was crowded with people who all seemed to be from Lancashire. It was like going to Blackpool and finding it full of Cockneys.
There is a severe shortage of cafe space in St Ives, meal times were a trial for everyone unless you had booked a table somewhere beforehand. If Conran were to open a 300-seat restaurant he would clean up, there was so much business going begging. The beaches are gorgeous, I spent a lot of time photographing [as slides] sea, sand, sky in various colour combinations as backdrops for worship settings. No surf, flat as a pancake.
Everything had gone eclipse-mad, as well as all the souvenirs the galleries were full of eclipse art, little of which had much to say.
I came down with a very nasty gastric virus on the Monday night before the eclipse which i have only just got over - I spent much of my time lying in my room [near a toilet], which fortunately had a perfect view of St Ives harbour and town centre. I was able to make it over to the headland by Porthmeor beach to watch the eclipse, of course we just had the pouring rain and the darkness. Every headland was crowded with people, the great thing was all the flashbulbs going off around the bay in the dark, a barrage of twinkling and cheering. This was apparently on TV, did you see it? The guy who did the sand sculpture on Porthmeor beach made all the papers. My eclipse glasses remain a sad unused souvenir, but I am glad to have experienced the darkness, if I hadn't gone I'd have always wondered what it was like.
29.07.99 / 01 / Greenbelt
This year Greenbelt was 29th July - 2nd August, the only time it was not on the end-of-August public holiday. This was due to complex circumstances involving a collaborative venture which collapsed, leaving Greenbelt with no venue for the public holiday. Instead they found another weekend, at Cheltenham racecourse for the first time. As it was not a public holiday numbers were severely down - 3000 rather than 20,000.
Somehow I ended up co-writing the liturgy for the Sunday morning mainstage Communion service, which is the central act of worship at Greenbelt. It was very weird to sit among the congregation, listening to 3000 people speaking words I had written. It was published as the Eucharist CD.
Cheltenham racecourse would be Greenbelt's venue until 2013. It had the advantage of permanent buildings and tarmac paths in the centre of the site, so no more mudbaths. Plentiful electricity and lighting, huge numbers of real toilets! Even so it was an odd venue for a festival, its identity as a racecourse could in no way be disguised. After a few years some parts of Greenbelt moved into the centre of the racecourse among the campsite, and it felt more like a festival again.
The Cheltenham years were a significant part of my life, as a contributor, an employee for a couple of years, and a photographer of alt worship, always on my way from one end of the site to the other to record the next event or meeting friends.
13.06.99 / 01 / Vaux Jubilee 2000
Vaux Jubilee 2000 service. Grace did the suspended ice block for the first time, but I forgot to take my camera, so we had to do it again in 2001.
08.06.99 / 01 / altworship discussion group
At about this point I was invited onto an altworship internet forum. It was private and invitation-only, to protect some former members of NOS from snooping journalists, and of course to protect the discussions from external critics, fundamentalists and trolls (apart from our own!). The group included most of the significant figures in alt worship, in the UK but also in Australia and New Zealand. Not just the obvious 'leaders', but thought leaders - people with something to offer, knowledge or perspective or ideas.
This group was the core of the original alt worship movement, the reason why everybody knows everybody. When I began to write publicly about the movement I was speaking on behalf of this group, as a participant in its discussions, trying to reflect its collective understanding not just my own opinion. I did this very hesitantly at first, but didn't receive any push back but rather affirmation, or at least assent.
The forum ran in its original form until 2002. By this point a lot of the online discussion had moved into blogs. I wrote:
I think the private nature of this forum, which was once a strength, has become a liability, because new people have to join before they can see what's going on. There have been a few people in the US I've wanted to put into the conversation - but a] there has been very little conversation in that time period; b] some of them are [or were] still old-style evangelical enough to either be offended by parts of the conversations or get jumped on for their greenhorn opinions. It felt like people were going to be vetted, had to measure up to something which had reached a certain level [how prepared *are* you to go over the same old ground patiently with newcomers to alt w?]. There needed to be some way people could watch without commitment. Which is where blogs score. I guess in the 90s this kind of email forum seemed natural - was a great idea, and we all have cause to be very grateful for it. But for people/groups arriving into altw/emerging church now, blogs are the natural communicative form. And the public visibility of the call-and-response is what drives it.
After a low period the forum transitioned in 2005 into an open-access Yahoo Group, which enabled a new bunch of people to get involved, in particular Americans who as mentioned above had been difficult to introduce into the old group. The Yahoo group ran to 2017 and just stopped. By then Facebook had really taken over from this kind of forum and also blogs.
There was also a UK-only private alt worship forum 2006-2012, with many of the same people as the above forums. It enabled networking and support among the UK groups and there were several successful weekend conferences. It was initially hosted by a German alt worship friend, but moved onto Posterous in 2011 - where it died along with Posterous in 2013.
01.05.99 / 01 / time of our lives
'Time of our Lives' was the Archbishop of Canterbury's Millennium youth event, held across London 1st-2nd May. Grace took part in a small alt worship exhibition in Westminster Central Hall on the Saturday, and ran a service in Southwark Cathedral on Sunday for 500 people.
The service was odd, because we were obliged to include a sermon by someone not part of Grace, and we don't do sermons. The number of people made it hard to achieve the usual interactivity, although we tried. Before the service, as we were setting up and soundchecking, we were shouted at by tourists for 'desecrating' the cathedral with loud music. They said we should be thrown in the river!
10.04.99 / 01 / abundant at jamies
Abundant at Jamie's near the BT Tower, also 26th June and 25th September. This was my favourite venue. Three floors - Playstations with snowboarding games at the top, dancefloor on the bottom, starting at the top and working my way slowly down through all my friends.
21.03.99 / 01 / vaux
First visit to Vaux, and often from now on. Third Sunday in the month so no conflict with Grace on the second Sunday. And Epicentre was first Sunday so I could do alt worship most weeks, but I also went to St James the Less a couple of weeks a month. I was commuting in on the train from Surrey so it depended on how far I wanted to travel and who I wanted to see.
24.02.99 / 01 / rebrand
Sheppard Robson rebrand event at London Zoo, which is a short walk from their offices. It was certainly a fun place for a party. The rebrand was Y2K and angular. I have the CD-ROM from the event, but it can't be played now.
29.01.99 / 01 / ready steady worship
Ready Steady Worship was a weekend conference at an evangelical college in the north of England. Jonny and me did some Grace-style stuff which was out on a limb compared to the charismatic or conservative evangelical worship offered by other participants. It amused us that we were going to see Faithless in Cambridge on the way home.
19.01.99 / 01 / camden
Now working at Sheppard Robson's offices in Camden. This was my first time at a really big firm of architects. They had offices in several buildings in the same street. I worked in several parts of the 'campus'. There were 200 people on the internal phone list, but I only ever met about 100 of them. The people in the interior design department appeared to have all come from model agencies. I had never worked anywhere chic before.
