The futility of playing Hearts

Here's a confession: sometimes, when I have a very long To Do List, instead of tackling it I find myself playing Hearts on the computer. It's a game for four people, but the computer generously provides you with three virtual opponents, whom you are free to name. I called mine Ernest, George and Leonard, after the characters in my favourite A A Milne poem. (Ernest, in case you don't know, was an elephant; Leonard was a lion; George was a goat; and James - with whom I strongly identify - was "a very small snail".)

But I digress. (Though isn't digressing fun?) Sometimes when I play Hearts I get despondent. Because the way this game works is that you play one round after another (I think the official term is "trick", like in Bridge) and your points accumulate, and go on accumulating until someone reaches at least 100 and then the game ends (with the lowest score being the winning score). So if you have a few awful rounds, you get to the point when you start to feel that this is a pointless exercise (if pointless is the right word to use here in this context...) as you have no chance of winning the game when you're carrying all these awful points from previous rounds - even if you do really well in the next round, you don't feel like you stand a chance.

And I find myself thinking: this is a bit like life without Jesus. You make some mistakes, you do some stupid things, and you go around carrying the guilt from the past and you feel: well, there's no point being good, no matter how good I'll be in the next round, I'm carrying so much guilt from the previous rounds... I was thinking about this recently when reading the book Brick Lane by Monica Ali (an excellent book, by the way) - the main character is a Moslem woman who ends up having an adulterous affair. It doesn't stop her devout praying etc, but she very clearly feels that after what she has done she is heading for hell and that's it, there's no chance of a pardon.

When I finish a game of Hearts and start a new game, I get to start with a clean slate - no previous points. So I start out feeling hopeful: this time I'll do better. Of course I don't always do better, but every time I start a new game I get this new hope. Thank you Jesus that through you I have this hope in real life!

The Scatty Moments Competition

Been meaning to write about this for a while but I keep forgetting... but seriously, I have just had the internet equivalent of those moments when you walk into a room and think, now what did I come in here for - I opened a new tab in my browser and for the life of me I can't remember what I was going to look for.

I started calling these moments "scatty moments" after an occasion when I referred to one of these as a "senior moment" and somebody who happened to know that we're the same age made a comment which indicated he wasn't quite ready to accept the suggestion that at our age we're entitled to "senior moments". (For those who are not familiar with this term - it is a euphemism which I believe was developed in order to avoid saying the word "senile".)

So, I'm hereby announcing the official opening of the Scatty Moments Competition, non-exclusively open to anyone who reads this stuff and thinks they can outdo me. Here are some of my best:

• Far too long ago to blame age I remember making a coffee, putting the milk on the stove and going to put the kettle in the fridge.


• In my days of working in an office, I had a pile of papers which needed to be faxed; I got up from my desk, picked up those papers and walked down the corridor. But instead of turning right towards the fax machine I went straight on to the photocopier and copied the whole lot.


• Recently I took the vegetable peels out to the back garden and opened the rubbish bin, nearly tipped the peels in before realising this was not the compost bin.


• Years ago, when I didn't have a computer at home and I used to go to an internet cafe once in a while, I typed up a couple of poems which I wanted to email to a whole load of friends. Typed up the poems, sent the email, deleted the poems from the computer because I didn't want to leave them lying around on a public computer, then walked home from the internet cafe, and... yes, you guessed it: I had forgotten to click Attach.

Now, what was I doing? Ah, yes, save and publish, that's it...

Creative use of place names

Read the second half of this article for some interesting new meanings for English place names. I particularly like her Rotherhithe suggestion - there really ought to be a word for this.

And Perrivaling is something I'm sure any blogger will have done.

Intolerance in the name of tolerance

According to a brief item in the Faith News section of the Times last Saturday, the general secretary of the Hindu Council UK is calling for attempts to convert members of one faith to another belief to be made "a crime under international law".

So he wants it to be against the law for me to tell someone that I believe worshipping a cow is wrong and that they should worship God, who created this world including the cows?

The amazing thing is that this kind of talk comes in the name of tolerance. It's not just the Hindus. You get this kind of comment from all directions in this pluralistic society we live in here in England - we should all respect each other's point of view, we shouldn't be trying to persuade anyone else that our way is better. Which means tolerance of everyone's point of view as long as that point of view does not include a belief that their way is the right way. Which is not tolerance at all!

If I didn't believe that Jesus is the best way and indeed the only way to God, why would I bother with him? I could have kept things much simpler, stuck to the normal Jewish ways and not risked alienating my family.