What on earth are you wearing - Guest post by Abigail

 Abby did a project on Clothing through the Ages recently. She made paper dolls and created clothing for them for all the stages of fashion. They were amazing. She also wrote this poem, which I asked her if I could post here.

Clothes Through History

I'll start with the cavemen, a wonderful crew,
They'd wear a bear for a dress and a mole for a shoe!
The skin of a lion, a leopard, a sheep,
compared to our blazers they were really quite cheap.

Now the Vikings used wool to weave their own clothes.
They used natural dye to put colour to those.
They used animal leather to make themselves shoes,
and their jewellery was wood, or metal, - you choose!

Roman men wore armour of silver and red,
but when not in battle wore togas instead.
Women wore tunics which swept to the floor,
and sandals of leather which they bought at a store.

Medieval men wore tunics down to their knees,
with trousers like leggings and leather boot-ies.
The ladies wore veils and a dark under-gown,
with slippers on feet and flared sleeves hanging down.

Tudor men wore short coats which were heavy with jewels.
Big puffy sleeves and plumed hats were the rules.

Women wore hoods with short pleated veils,
also a tight bodice with a skirt which trails.

King Charles was a Stuart who dressed with panache
with his gauntlets, his boots and his curly moustache.
Women, like men, wore collars of lace,
their skirts were floor length and their hair done with grace.

Georgian women had wigs which curled to a height.
Their faces were pale and their corsets were tight.
Men wore breeches and a simple waist coat,
their silk shirts were frilly - oh didn't they gloat!

Victorian men liked their top hats and smart walking sticks,

Bow ties and their morning coats were really classics.
Ladies wore bustles to give shape to their skirts,
They chose to wear black for the death of Albert.


Girls from the 70s wore platform shoes,
big hair and bright tights were both in the news,
The guys wore white suits and put make-up on too.
Why their clothes were so shiny I haven't a clue!

Nowadays girls all wear leggings and shorts.
Their converse trainers aren't really for sports.
The guys all wear hoodies and jeans with ripped knees.
What'll happen in the future? Read the next poem please...

by Abigail Button.

Jesus' face

It was not an accident that Jesus' incarnation happened at a time and in a culture where there were no portrait artists, and no cameras. Jesus came for all people - so the fact that we can give him a Middle Eastern or British or African or American or Ethiopian or Russian or Japanese appearance is good and important - he is incarnated into all our cultures. But sometimes I really do wonder what Jesus actually looked like - the historical Jesus. The face above was an attempt to reconstruct the face of a 30 year old Palestinian man from the first century AD, by building up layers on a skull. It doesn't quite work though - because he looks vacant maybe? And I am pretty sure the hair is wrong.

Below is a painting based on the image of the face on the Turin Shroud - for a very long time this was thought to be the real shroud Jesus was buried in, and so the marks on it formed a picture for us, if we believed it,  of the real Jesus. But the Turin Shroud was proved by carbon-dating to be a fake.

















So we are left guessing. I began to think about this again when reading Silence, by Shusaku Endo. The priest in the book spends days and even weeks on his own, in hiding, secretly meeting Christians, then being arrested and paraded through a town in chains, then imprisoned in solitude, hearing others being tortured - and what gives him the courage to keep going is an image of Jesus he had in his mind, from a portrait of him he had back at home. The memory of the face stayed constantly with him, and through it, Jesus helped him endure.

I realised that when I think of Jesus, I am left without a face - or it is kind of vague. I do think of him as he is portrayed in famous pictures, or as the shepherd with lambs in his arms as in a childhood painting we had, or sometimes as one of the movie Jesus-es. But none of them are quite right. One friend not long ago said when she sees Jesus, he is in jeans. Hmm. That made me think of the very American bro Jesus with the tool belt and jeans of William Young's The Shack. But that isn't quite my Jesus.

Maybe I should settle for the image that was on my laptop long ago when I was first in Uganda... I was in the old tiny computer-room at UCU (which is now the Archives), where we all went to send emails back then. I had a picture of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings as my screen saver. Emmanuel Gatera came in and glanced at my screen over my shoulder - "Ahhh, Jesus!" he said. I didn't feel like putting him right!

I think this could work don't you?

As always, open to any other ideas or suggestions...

Rats!

You know I have always been a fan of pets. We have had a respectable list since Abby and Alex arrived - multiple cats and kittens, pint-sized tortoises, a chameleon, fish, more fish, beautiful hamsters, A Dog, three mice... and most recently, two gerbils and two rats.

Pets are the best. They are lovable, dependable, grateful, cuddly, friendly, funny, shaggy, and beautiful, in varying measures.

Pets teach children to look after another being. They teach children the values of loyalty and friendship, and tolerance (by modeling them). Children learn to take responsibility, to remember to feed the creature that depends on them, and to persevere in keeping their territory clean. Many times children don't remember and don't persevere, of course, but eventually they get the hang of it.

But still, rats... I was a bit reluctant, to put it mildly, when we embarked on the rats. Especially when we discovered they would need an enormous cage for them. EBay came up with the goods though, so, we moved on in the ratward direction. When Dan and Alex came home with two male Dumbo rats, they were shy to tell me why the males were available while all the females were gone... male dumbo rats carry the most enormous testes under their tail! Oh well, we politely ignore them.

Otherwise, the rats are cuter than I had anticipated. These rats have white bodies and black head and shoulders - so they look like they are wearing medieval hoods. They are quite handsome really. They are called Sneaky, and Spotsy. They will play and sit on people's shoulders, but at the moment they are still scared and scurry for their little log house when we come close to the cage.

Meanwhile Abby has two gorgeous gerbils, Peanut and Conker. They are far prettier, with furry tails and bright semispherical eyes. I love the gerbils! They spend all day springing in their wheel until they tire and fall out, and pawing through their food bowl; they burrow into the sawdust to rest and crawl out all sleepy-eyed and adorable.

I doubt the rats will win me over as the gerbils have, but, you never know.

Enough is Enough

I have just received in the post a book by John V Taylor  (ordered on Amazon for 1 p plus postage!) called Enough is Enough - a book on Christians and the environment, written in 1975.

His words written so long ago now, ring frighteningly more true today:

"Excess is the subject of this book and the enemy which I shall try to invite you to fight year in and year out. It confronts us in our rich countries whichever aspect of our situation we look at - our consumption of food and our accumulation of goods, our wage claims and price rises, our waste and pollution, the concentration and congestion of our cities, our destruction of living creatures and our plunder of fuels and minerals, our expenditure on armaments and the wanton disproportion of the way we use them - excess is the word that comes continually to mind; ruthless, unbridled, unthinking excess. We are being made to expect too much. We are taking too much. We are scrapping too much. We are paying, and compelling others to pay, far too high a price."

Image from greenplanetethics.com 

He wrote that forty years ago. Was anybody listening? Is anybody listening now?