SORTED magazine : Nov / Dec 2012

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RUSSELL HOWARD & GREG DAVIES ON RELIGION ®

Nov/Dec 2012

sorted-magazine.com

MARK

STEVENS SINGING A DIFFERENT

TUNE

DAVID TENNANT ACTING THE PART

LINVOY

PRIMUS HAVING A

BALL

£3.50

In partnership with

CULTURE | SPORT | CARS | SEX | FITNESS | TECH | HUMOUR | LIFESTYLE

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Vol. 6 | No. 6

Up Front with Steve Legg

www.sorted-magazine.com

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Action The Bear Facts with Bear Grylls

Contents November/December 2012

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Columnists Diamond Geezer with Ant Delaney

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Your Will, Mott Mine with Alex Willmott

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Compassion with Cesiah Magaña and Kate Sharma

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Features

Culture

The great galaxy quest by Dwight Williams

Movies with Martin Leggatt

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The story of Carol Mersch, who chronicled the generally unknown voyage of the Bible to the surface of the moon during the Apollo era.

Television with Emily Russell

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Gaming with Jim Lockey

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DVD & Blu Ray with Martin Leggatt

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Creative Arts with Matthew van Duyvenbode

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Books with Mark Anderson

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Live and let’s spy by Joy Tibbs

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A sneaky peek at Secret Me, an invitation-only programme that teaches spy-related skills that can also translate to everyday life.

Facing the music by Joy Tibbs

Lifestyle

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Mark Stevens struggled to keep his head above water when fame and its trappings took hold of his life. Drug addiction and promiscuity were only overcome after he had an encounter with God.

Cars with Sam Burnett

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Playing With Fire

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Top Gear

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Three wise men and their OCC journeys

Sixty Second Life Coach with Peter Horne

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Operation Christmas Child provides children in need with shoeboxes full of gifts at Christmas.

Three men from different walks of life describe their personal experience with the charity and the impact its work is having on the receivers and the givers of these gifts.

Business

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We’re in Business with Charles Humphreys 57 Making Your Mark with Stuart Rivers

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Wrath of Khan by Stephen Milton

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Relationology with Matt Bird

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Comedians Russell Howard and Greg Davies discuss whether it is appropriate to joke about faith, or whether the subject is off limits to the nation’s funny men.

Advice 60

Big Questions with Jonathan Sherwin

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Opinion Money with Jon Cobb

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Family with Richard Hardy

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Faith with Sam Gibb

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Politics with Lyndon Bowring

68

Cut to the Chase with Lee and Baz

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Sport In the Primus of Life

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Focusing on Football with Dan Walker

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COVER STAR

FAMOUS

Smart Talk

The future?

(Dr) Who knows…

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by Stephen Milton

David Tennant talks about life after Doctor Who including Nativity 2, The Spies of Warsaw and Broadchurch. The Scottish actor talks fame, professional folly and the delights of improvisation.

Health & Fitness Fitness with Phil Baines

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Nutrition with Caroline Gerrie

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Lifestyle Doc with Dr Chidi

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Stand Up and Deliver with Andy Kind

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The Last Word with Carl Beech

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It’s all getting a bit Messi at Icons by Joy Tibbs Messi continues to be the main man in the sporting memorabilia world, but sports expert Edward Freedman predicts that some other big names are just around the corner.

Taking it all on board by Jojo Meadows

Cover picture: Rex Features

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Jojo describes the thrills and spills of Boardmasters 2012 and the impact the organisation she was working with, Christian Surfers UK, had on participants and organisers alike.

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STEVE LEGG

Sorted.

Up Front © Edward Fielding | Dreamstime.com

Publisher & Editor Steve Legg steve@sorted-magazine.com Deputy Editor Joy Tibbs joy@sorted-magazine.com Sports Editor Stuart Weir Marketing & Advertising Rebekah Taylor rebekah@sorted-magazine.com Duncan Williams Tel: 07960 829615 Classified Advertising Simon Croucher simon@sorted-magazine.com Design Andy Ashdown Design www.andyashdowndesign.co.uk Print Halcyon www.halcyonline.co.uk Distribution COMAG

Obsessive? Moi?

L

ike most men, I love gadgets.

I’m a total sucker for things that can do a job that I already do perfectly well by myself. I subscribe to every gadget magazine – each of which is full of the latest bits and bobs to fill your drawers and satisfy your masculinity. If the gadget happens to be electrical, there is an extra thrill.

I don’t have matches to light birthday candles, I have a flame-throwing lighter that half melts the candle before actually igniting it, but boy do I feel like a real man using it.

Don’t even get me started on Sat Navs; I use mine to get to Tesco! In fact, I actually have two Sat Navs in my car: the built-in one that came with it, and a peach of a Garmin that I was sent to review for Sorted.

© Sorted Magazine 2012 Sorted is published by Son Christian Media (SCM) Ltd. The acceptance of advertising does not indicate editorial endorsement.

SCM holds names and addresses on computer for the purpose of mailing in accordance with the terms registered under the Data Protection Act 1984.

Sorted is protected by copyright and nothing may be produced wholly or in part without prior permission.

Contact Sorted Magazine PO Box 3070, Littlehampton, West Sussex, BN17 6WX, UK Tel: 01903 732190 E-mail: steve@sorted-magazine.com

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THE SATISFACTION OF LOADING BOOKS ONTO THIS ELECTRICAL MARVEL IS IMMENSE. I MAY EVEN READ SOME OF THEM. Most recently we went to dinner with some friends and I saw that they had a marine aquarium screensaver. After a lovely meal I raced home and before midnight I, too, had one. I’d even chosen my digital fish!

While generally bewildered by my excitement over such things and unimpressed when I stay up to the wee hours adjusting my virtual tank, my wife surprised me with an eReader last Christmas. I can’t tell you how much more pleasure there is in digital books than real ones. The satisfaction of loading books onto this electrical marvel is immense. I may even read some of them.

And then there’s my phone. It’s hard to explain the sheer joy it brings me with its internet and email capabilities. I have to confess that I was nearly late for my own honeymoon because the latest BlackBerry came out the day after my wedding and I scheduled in a visit to the phone shop to

collect it en route to the airport.

I then spent hours assigning ringtones to friends and family so that I know, even before I look, who is calling me. My particular favourite is the tone I downloaded for my incoming texts: a riproaring wolf whistle! It got me into trouble once, but that’s a whole different story.

But gadgets can become a bit of an obsession. Lying next to my wife by the pool on holiday with my iPhone headphones in and my eReader on hardly makes me the life and soul of the party… as I discovered when I finally looked up from my virtual book and realised Rebekah had gone in search of someone who would talk to her.

And it’s not just gadgets. We all get obsessed by things: a project at work, keeping the house clean, going to the gym, following our football club, developing the garden, knowing the latest scores in the cricket or maybe even getting involved at church.

All of these things are noble pursuits when kept in perspective, but if we let them crowd in, they can push out the things that are really important to us, the people we love.

The people around us need our time. They need us to put aside the distractions, to listen to them and give them our undivided attention. We need to prioritise building relationships, playing games with our kids, taking our mums out for coffee, our spouses out to dinner and our mates for a pint.

It’s something to remember at this time of the year, which sometimes feels like a celebration of the god of materialism rather than a celebration of the God who came down to spend time with the people that He loved.

After all, with the wonders of iPlayer you can always watch Match of the Day later in peace.

Steve Legg PUBLISHER & EDITOR steve@sorted-magazine.com SteveLeggUK

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ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

Her office has been described as a shrine to the American space programme and her caller ID a who’s who of American astronauts. Carol Mersch is a businesswoman from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is author of The Apostles of Apollo, a chronicle of the generally unknown voyage of the Bible to the surface of the moon during the Apollo era.

Main picture: Forty-four years ago this Christmas, a turbulent world looked to the heavens for a unique view of our home planet.

This iconic photo of ‘Earthrise’ over the lunar horizon was taken by the Apollo 8 crew in December 1968. The crew took turns reading the first ten verses of Genesis 1 to an audience of millions back home.

The

Great Galaxy Quest

BY DWIGHT WILLIAMS

M

ersch’s journey began years ago when she heard Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, speak at a business conference in Orlando, Florida. He stood on a podium, regaling the audience with the technical tales of his mission and the one that preceded it: the ill-fated Apollo 13.

He ended with the summation: “After all was said and done, I’m convinced it was the power of thousands of praying minds that pulled that spacecraft back into earth orbit.”

Mersch was amazed that this introspective astrophysicist with a reported IQ of 180 believed that

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something as intangible as prayer might have played a part in the safe return of the Apollo 13 crew.

The encounter with Mitchell in Orlando was never far from her mind and eventually she met him for breakfast in Palm Beach, Florida. “It was the most remarkable conversation I’d ever had with someone,” she says.

As Mersch was leaving his office to catch a flight back to Tulsa, she noticed a black-and-white photo of Mitchell handing a man something. When she asked what it was he and the man were exchanging, Mitchell said: “I had just landed the first Bible on the moon and I was giving it back.”

Mersch wanted to know the whole story and the more she learned the more she wanted to write it. She learned that the motivating force behind the lunar Bibles was John Stout, the man she had seen in the picture with Mitchell.

Above: Rev John Stout.

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ONCE IN A BLUE MOON John Stout had been a NASA scientist and retained a mythical status among those who had known him 40 years earlier. He was a veteran of the Second World War and the first person to successfully photograph the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite. He had also been a professor and missionary in the jungles of Brazil.

While working as an information scientist for NASA during the Gemini and Apollo eras, he had also served as chaplain to the astronauts. One of his closest relationships was with Ed White, America’s first astronaut to walk in space, and crewmember of the illfated Apollo 1 mission.

Shortly before his death in the Apollo 1 fire on 27 January 1967, White had told a reporter of his wish to take a Bible to the moon. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Stout resolved to see this wish realised.

The information Mersch had on Stout was incomplete and virtually all of it second hand. During her initial investigation, she was told by former Apollo Prayer League (APL) members that Stout was old and unable to communicate. One rumour had it that he had recently died.

In the autumn of 2008, she discovered that Stout was alive and living in Mont Belvieu, Texas. The story Mersch had been working on suddenly came alive in her hands.

Instead of finding an old man suffering from dementia, she found John and his wife Helen not only lucid but eager to share their vivid memories of their days at NASA. The interviews began that very afternoon and Mersch would come to know John and Helen well. Moreover, Stout had all of his old correspondence from President Johnson, Norman Vincent Peale, and the legendary Madalyn O’Hair. “He was a master collector,” Mersch says. “Walking into their apartment was like walking back in history.”

SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH IN THE APOLLO 1 FIRE ON 27 JANUARY 1967, WHITE HAD TOLD A REPORTER OF HIS WISH TO TAKE A BIBLE TO THE MOON. Stout also produced an old green 8.5 inch by 14 inch registry journal. Tucked in its pages were several of the remaining lunar Bibles. “I had my camera going like crazy,” Mersch recalled. “He had a list of those that had been given to public figures, such as Yul Brynner, President Nixon, President George Bush, Spiro Agnew, Bob Hope…”.

The story of the lunar Bibles was the centerpiece of the mosaic Mersch wanted to create. She also wanted to capture the high adventure of the space programme, especially the personal side of those who rushed headlong into the greatest endeavour of exploration ever undertaken by man.

With the first-ever loop around the moon came the transcendent broadcast beamed back to earth from the Apollo 8 spacecraft on Christmas Eve, 1968. From lunar orbit, commander Frank Borman turned the camera toward earth and gave mankind the first look at itself from deep space. The crew then took turns reading from Genesis 1 to a mesmerised audience of millions back home.

The reading from Genesis introduced another character to the story. Madalyn O’Hair was America’s most renowned atheist activist, famous for getting prayer banned in public schools. After hearing the reading, she sued NASA in 1969 for engaging in ‘religious ceremonies and in an attempt to establish the Christian religion… while on scientific-military expedition to, around, and about the moon’.

News of the suit galvanised religious communities around the world. When O’Hair claimed she had 28,000 signatures objecting to the reading of Genesis on Apollo 8, Stout and the APL responded by gathering 500,000 signatures in support of it.

O’Hair had deftly latched onto the eternal American debate over the separation of church and state, but Stout was shrewd enough to understand that it was a publicity bonanza for the APL as well. As cheques poured in to O’Hair’s organisation, the American Atheists, APL membership mushroomed.

O’Hair and Stout would play the principal roles in a drama that posed a central question to the modern American democracy: could the greatest spiritual event in centuries be carried out by a society that values a degree of separation between the church and state?

Stout’s answer to this was “yes”.

While researching the Apollo 11 mission, Mersch learned of Buzz Aldrin’s collaboration with his pastor, Dean Woodruff, to take communion on the moon. f

Above: Apollo 14 lunar module pilot Edgar Mitchell returns the microfilm Bibles to John Stout shortly after he was released from quarantine in 1971. This is the photo that first piqued Mersch’s interest in the lunar Bibles.

Above: The lunar Bibles are made of microfilm, each weighing only a fraction of a gram and measuring 1.5 x 1.5 inches. The pages are legible under a 200-power microscope.

Left: Rev John Maxwell Stout is a NASA scientist, chaplain, and the organising force behind the effort to land a Bible on the moon.

Stout worked on the Gemini programme at Cape Canaveral before transferring to the new Johnson Space Center in Houston to work on the Apollo programme.

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ONCE IN A BLUE MOON vintage response from an outraged Madalyn O’Hair: “I read with absolute disgust your plans to take your [expletive] so-called Bibles to the moon [expletive]. If you persist in contaminating the space programme with your foul, disgusting [expletive] Christianity, we must take steps.”

Nevertheless, Apollo 12 launched and arrived in lunar orbit in November of 1969 with a small cargo of religious artefacts aboard. Upon their return nine days later, however, Bean had unfortunate news for Stout. The Bibles had indeed made it to the moon, but had not actually landed on the surface due to an error in the log manifest.

The support crew had stowed the PPK on the command module (CM) rather than the lunar module (LM).

Stout immediately set his sights on the next mission, enlisting the help of a young Texas congressman named George H W Bush, who had taken an interest in the space programme and offered to approach Jim Lovell, the commander of the next crew.

THE APOLLO 13 LUNAR LANDING WAS NOT TO BE. FOUR-FIFTHS OF THE WAY TO THE MOON DISASTER STRUCK WHEN A FAULTY OXYGEN TANK EXPLODED IN THE SERVICE MODULE.

NASA administrators were careful to steer clear of any direct involvement and permission was quietly granted.

Aldrin’s plan was to place a cup, a small vial of wine and a piece of bread in his Personal Preference Kit (PPK), making a ‘communion kit’. Once safely on the surface, he would say a few words and quietly take communion. The only thing he didn’t have was a suitable cup. “Go find me a silver chalice,” he instructed his pastor, “but it can be no heavier than two ounces.”

On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface. After prepping the lunar module for an emergency takeoff, Aldrin prepared to take communion, carefully pouring the wine into the chalice. In the one-sixth gravity it poured slowly and gracefully. Then he read the verse from John 15:5 he had printed on a card: “I am the vine, you are the branches.

Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.”

A mesmerised world watched as the two men became the first to set foot on another world. O’Hair later expanded her lawsuit to include Apollo 11 when she learned that the crew had left a silicon disc on the moon with quotes from world leaders, including a passage from Psalms by Pope Paul VI. Meanwhile, Stout made plans to take a Bible on the next voyage to fulfil Ed White’s dream.

As a NASA scientist, Stout was well aware of the physical limitations of such a venture. A Bible would have to be taken aboard by one of the astronauts, and it would have to fit within one of their PPKs. A traditionally bound Bible was too heavy, but Stout learned of a photo-reduced text of the King James Bible produced by National Cash Register Company that weighed only a fraction of a gram.

Captured on a piece of microfilm the size of a large postage stamp, all 1,245 pages could be clearly read with a 200-power microscope.

Lunar module pilot Bean agreed to carry the package in his PPK, along with a small banner representing the Methodist Church and a grain of mustard seed, symbolic of Christian faith.

Stout announced the plan to the APL, which elicited a 8

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Above: Ed White, the first American to walk in space on Gemini 4. In the left leg pocket of his spacesuit he carried a Star of David, a gold crucifix and a St Christopher medal.

Below: The crew of Apollo 1 prepares to expand on the success of the Gemini missions. This is the first Apollo mission with its sights set squarely on the moon. Before his death, Ed White (centre) told a reporter of his wish to land a Bible on the Moon.

Just before launch in April 1970, the future president accompanied Stout to Lovell’s home where he presented him with the Bibles. Lovell’s wife Marilyn agreed to serve as a liaison between Stout and her husband regarding stowage and handling. The PPK would hold 512 Bibles, one of which would be left on the moon with an American emblem affixed to it. The entire packet weighed just over an ounce.

Of course, the Apollo 13 lunar landing was not to be.

Four-fifths of the way to the moon disaster struck when a faulty oxygen tank exploded in the service module. The LM was converted to a lifeboat to return the crew to earth alive, rather than as a vessel to and from the lunar surface. After an unprecedented series of feats of ingenuity, the Apollo 13 spacecraft was slung-shot around the moon and three days later tore through the earth’s atmosphere with its cargo of crew and 512 Bibles.

Some of what would become known as the ‘Apollo 13 Bibles’ would be given away. One was forwarded to George W Bush and several returned to Stout, who turned them over to the APL archives. When Stout returned to his office at the Manned Spacecraft Center,

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ONCE IN A BLUE MOON Right: The Apollo 1 crew (from front): Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.

Right: On 5 February 1971, John Stout’s dream of landing a Bible on the moon is finally realised. Onehundred microfilm Bibles, wrapped in fireproof beta cloth and stowed in Edgar Mitchell’s PPK, land safely on the surface of the Moon.

Left: Apollo 11 lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin.

he received a call from O’Hair. “You know why Apollo 13 exploded, don’t you?” she asked rhetorically. “Because it was carrying all those Bibles!”

Stout assiduously turned his attention to the next moonshot and its crew of Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stu Roosa. During the run-up to Apollo 14, Mitchell agreed to log Stout’s lunar Bibles in his PPK. In light of the near-disaster of Apollo 13, Stout decided to separate them into two bundles. A packet of 200 would fly aboard the CM, and another 100 aboard the LM. On 5 February 1971, around 2am Houston time, with less than 60 seconds of fuel remaining, the spindly legs of the Apollo 14 LM Antares sank into the lunar dust in a mountainous region known as Fra Mauro. Aboard were 100 Bibles. Orbiting overhead in the CM piloted by Stu Roosa at some 17,000 miles per hour were 200 more.

Three weeks after splashdown of Apollo 14, Mitchell handed the contents back to John Stout, the man who had made it possible. The event was captured for posterity by a news photographer and a copy of the picture still hangs on the wall of Mitchell’s office.

The story of how these Bibles made it to the moon went largely unreported at the time. And it would likely have been lost in the ether of forgotten history had it not been for that single photograph noticed by Carol Mersch some 35 years later.

The theme woven through The Apostles of Apollo is transcendent spiritual impact. Landing a man on the moon wasn’t a mere technological achievement, nor was it just a geopolitical contest between superpowers.

What history had lost sight of, and what Mersch reminds us of, is the fact that Apollo was a collective, multifaceted odyssey that altered human perspective forever.

Apostles of Apollo was first published in 2011 and is available from Amazon and other outlets. Dwight Williams is co-author of Raising Lazarus, with Robert Pensack, The Way of the Explorer, with Edgar Mitchell, and A G-Man’s Journal, with Oliver Revell. He lives in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, with his wife and two daughters. Additional article editing by Clive Simpson, photos supplied by NASA, Ed Hengeveld and Carol Mersch.

Above: Buzz Aldrin’s silver chalice was stowed onboard his Personal Preference Kit (PPK) on Apollo 11. Aldrin quietly took communion with this silver chalice shortly after landing and securing the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle on 20 July 1969.

Right: Ed Mitchell and writer Carol Mersch with one of the lunar Bible presentation cases.

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ACTION

BEAR GRYLLS

The Bear Facts Grin and Bear it Bear Grylls’ autobiography Mud, Sweat and Tears spent nine weeks at number one in the Sunday Times Bestseller List.

This is a remarkable feat, but also quite a rare one for a Christian writer whose faith influences his entire life.

The book documents his family life, schooling and outdoor adventures. And along the way it reveals how he came to accept Jesus as his Lord and Saviour, and how this decision subsequently changed his views and perspective on life.

Here’s a short extract that describes his family life growing up and how this has shaped his attitude towards food, adventure and his own young family.

G

I DO PROBABLY HAVE MY MOTHER TO THANK FOR MY CAST-IRON STOMACH THAT HAS HELPED ME SO MUCH FILMING MY SURVIVAL SHOWS OVER THE YEARS. Meals were eaten at varying times of the day and night, pork chops were pulled out of a bin with the immortal words: ‘These are absolutely fine.’ (Even if dad had thrown them out the day before, as they had turned silvery.)

It seemed that the sole aim of my mother was to fatten her family up as much as possible. This actually has pushed me the other way in later life and given me a probably ‘unhealthy’ obsession with being healthy.

(Although I do probably have my mother to thank for my cast-iron stomach that has helped me so much

© Richard Griffin | Dreamstime.com

rowing up at home was always eventful, although it was also definitely chaotic. But that was typical of my parents – especially my mother, who, even by her own wacky standards was, and remains, pretty o eat… in the best sense of the word.

In fact I tend to sum my family up with the quote: ‘Families are like fudge – mostly sweet with a few nuts!’

The good side of this meant that, as a family, we were endlessly moving around and meeting streams of interesting characters from all over the world, who gravitated to mum – this was all just part of life.

Whether we were camping in an old van, travelling to listen to some American motivational speaker, or helping mum in her new business of selling blenders and water filters.

filming my survival shows over the years. God bless those pork chops after all.)

Everyone around us tended just to be the fun side of mum’s wackiness, but the down side of it was, at times, quite draining. It meant that she was always right, despite some of her ideas or beliefs definitely bordering on the wacko.

We would often catch her wandering around the garden with a copper rod, assuring us that she needed ‘earthing’ against the excessive electricity in the house.

(Considering that we never had the heating on, and mainly burnt candles instead of switching on lights, this kind of led us to suspect something wasn’t entirely normal about our mother.)

But that was mum for you; and with only the rare exceptions, my childhood was blessed with love and fun, both of which have remained driving forces for me in my life with my own family. I

Bear Grylls is an adventurer, writer and television presenter. He is best known for his television series Born Survivor, known as Man Vs Wild in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Bear spent three years in the SAS and is one of the youngest Britons to climb Mount Everest, doing so at the age of 23. In July 2009, he was appointed the youngest ever chief scout at the age of 35.

To read more from Bear, get a copy of his bestselling autobiography, Mud Sweat and Tears.

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© Arenacreative | Dreamstime.com

BRIEF ENCOUNTER

LIVE

AND LET’S

SPY

If you can’t enter a room without checking for enemy agents or sweeping for bugs, you either need to get out more, or you need to enrol on a spy skills course. You may think you’re as suave as Mr Bond, but if the only thing you’re shaking is your head and the only thing you’re stirring is your tea, then it may be time to hone your skills.

BY JOY TIBBS

S

ecret Me is an invitation-only programme that was created by former Special Forces agents. According to the company, part of the enduring appeal of James Bond is that he is the man women want to be with and that men want to be.

CEO Sara Fazlali, comments: “This course is designed to give a unique and enjoyable insight into the world of spy craft.

“It covers a range of areas from combat shooting and threat elimination to cyber skills and seduction, all taking place in glamorous surroundings. The programme is designed to inspire self-confidence and hone toughness, agility and sophistication.”

Ms Fazlali believes that the skills taught on the course are also applicable to real-life personal and professional situations. So if you’ve always fancied yourself as a master of espionage or dreamed of infiltrating a clandestine operation, the course organisers may just be able to offer you the kind of intelligence you need.

Behind closed doors The course covers a series of hard skills, mainly run by ex-Special Forces and other specialists. You will be trained in combat pistols and live shooting so that you are safe and highly competent in using a variety of 12

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BRIEF ENCOUNTER

© Jiri Hera | Dreamstime.com

© Bowie15 | Dreamstime.com

recognise poisons and guard against spiking. Leading croupiers and world competitors will teach you card skills and how to recognise the psychology behind ‘tells’ in the poker and hustling training. Finally, a top Savile Row tailor and designers will show you how to dress for impact, to adapt to your surroundings and how to experiment with your appearance.

The company’s operations director says: “Our course combines the old-school glamour aspects of espionage, as represented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Le Carré, with a genuine, authentic and exciting insight into personal protection and what it means to be a spy.

Clients will find many of the skills learnt valuable in their everyday lives.”

For your eyes only

© Henrik Andersen | Dreamstime.com

© Ha4ipuri | Dreamstime.com

“IT COVERS A RANGE OF AREAS FROM COMBAT SHOOTING AND THREAT ELIMINATION TO CYBER SKILLS AND SEDUCTION.”

© Patrck Lau | Dreamstime.com

weapons and facing different combat situations. You will learn on-foot and mobile surveillance, disguises and gadgetry and become an expert in kidnap and escapology, which will help to familiarise you with the physical and psychological states of kidnap.

You will learn a range of cyber skills to help you protect yourself and the things that are important to you online.

This includes data mining and profiling, and information on how to hide and find information on the internet. Other skills include threat recognition and elimination, during which you will learn basic selfdefence and situational awareness strategies. Seduction and persuasion training will help you to understand your own strengths and weaknesses, learn new ways to win people over, discuss body language and be proficient in recognising ‘the honey trap’.

The programme has three phases and participants will need to complete each one successfully before being offered the chance to progress to the next phase.

For the first phase, known as The Camp, clients are flown by private jet or helicopter to a private stately home somewhere in the UK. Over the following three days, elite instructors will help you gain the skills needed to progress to phase two: Mission Training.

Mission Training transports clients to an exotic overseas location where, over a five-day period, the skills you have learnt are developed to a higher level and tested in various scenarios.

A few months later, clients are invited to take part in The Mission, the details of which are top secret. But what we can tell you is that you are likely to be whisked away to a secret location, board a luxury vessel and during a week-long ‘spy scenario’, you will be forced to put your newfound skills to work.

When your assignment is completed, you’ll have time to rest and recuperate in your luxury location before returning to base camp (otherwise known as home).

It’s worth noting that this course is not for the faint of heart or for the light of pocket. But if you fancy yourself as a licensed trouble shooter or just want to find out more, visit http://s.ecret.me or email Sara Fazlali (sara@s.ecret.me).

The drinks and poisons part of the course will show you the art of making the perfect cocktail, help you understand what to drink and where, and how to

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COLUMNISTS

ANT DELANEY

Diamond Geezer

© Pavel Reband | Dreamstime.com

A marriage made in heaven?

A PROMISE MADE, WITNESSED, HEARD, REMEMBERED AND TRUSTED IS THE FOUNDATION OF MARRIAGE.

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started my article in the last issue by pulling out a few excerpts from my new book, The B.E.S.T. Marriage. I’ll be starting a series on it at my church soon, and I had a conversation with a single person the other day who had been thinking, ‘well I’ll skip that then’.

There are three reasons why I encouraged this person not to.

1 They know married people and could help them 2 They might get married someday

It’s a short, funny book with pictures – so blokes will actually read it. And it outlines four easy-to-recall practices that help build the B.E.S.T. marriage!

B is for BLESSING There’s a trend these days for having ‘a marriage blessing’, maybe because the couple didn’t get married in church and now feel they want to acknowledge that they need God’s help to build the strong home we’ve been talking about in some way. Perhaps it’s a celebration of a number of years together. For whatever reason, I think marriage blessings are fantastic and can really do a lot to enhance a relationship. There’s something very Sorted. Nov/Dec 2012

strengthening about making a public commitment.

So when exactly does marriage begin? Not with falling in love, because too often falling in love is just about a feeling. It’s not when people first “make love”; sex is a gift from God, which blesses a marriage, but it doesn’t make it. Not when people first move in together and set up house, because there are no real commitments there. Nor does marriage really begin when a piece of paper is signed. It begins when two people make a promise to be faithful until the end of their days. Marriage begins with a vow.

When the vow is spoken, something very powerful happens. Everything changes. A promise made, witnessed, heard, remembered and trusted is the foundation of marriage. Not emotions, not physical desires, personal needs or the practical fact of living together. No, not even love. It starts with a promise, a covenant, a vow. That’s the spiritual heart of marriage; of two becoming one.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a great German Christian leader who opposed Hitler, wrote a sermon from a Nazi prison cell to be read at his sister’s wedding that contrasted the uncertainties of love and life with the strength of marriage and the vows that cement it: As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of marriage above the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage

It’s important that you recognise that the other person is God’s provision to bless you.

He or she is a blessing from God. When did you last thank God for that blessing?

You don’t have to book a church to have a wedding that is blessed. You simply have to receive the other person, with all their differences, with all the challenges of those differences, as being God’s blessing to you.

Then you have to decide to be a blessing in return. How? You can be a blessing when you put the other person first. You are a blessing to your wife when you discover what her needs are and do something to meet them.

Are you a married man? That’s your assignment right now. Before you read another Sorted article, Think of something you can do to bless your wife. Be a blessing!

The B.E.S.T. Marriage is available now on Amazon Kindle, or direct from www.ivymanchester.org.

Former plain-clothes policeman Anthony Delaney is a broadcaster, writer and speaker who leads Ivy Manchester Church. Regularly appearing on BBC Radio 4 and 5 Live, his book, Diamond Geezers, is available now and is published by Integrity Publishers. Follow him on Twitter @anthonydelaney or read his blog www.anthonydelaney.com.

© Erin Cadigan | Dreamstime.com

3 Even if they don’t, they still need to learn the relational skills that are applied to every relationship. That applies not just to marriage but to every single relationship in your life.

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that sustains your love… Free from all the anxiety that is characteristic of love, you can now say to each other with complete and confident assurance: we can never lose each other now; by the will of God we belong to each other till death.

Marriage is a blessing from God. I don’t know where you are right now in thinking about God on a personal level, but I’ve seen time and again how it acts as a strong glue in pulling a couple together when they see the hand of God in their circumstances and become aware that they didn’t meet ‘by chance’. I listen to people’s stories of how they met and I think, ‘it’s no accident that you met; a divinely appointed destiny was happening!’

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RUNNING HEAD COLUMNISTS

ALEX WILLMOTT

© Matthew Gough | Dreamstime.com

Your Will, Mott Mine

Lost and found

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irmingham New Street Station has the unique ability to depress me instantaneously. I can think of only two things that would make the station any worse: 1 Being delayed by three hours 2 Being delayed by three hours while suffering with a stomach infection Welcome to my life last Thursday. I stood among the panicked passengers, each one becoming more like the Hulk every second, and I knew I had to block out the unrelenting sound of trains before my eardrums shattered. I put my headphones in and played The Best of James and took the band’s advice to sit down.

As I looked for a patch of floor without a stain, I was tapped on the shoulder. I always get nervous when I’m tapped on the shoulder; I fear it’s either a psycho with a hammer or the Predator.

My fears were allayed pretty quickly. A young woman in her twenties stood in front of me with tears building up. She had hearing aids in both ears. I immediately considered how awful this situation must have been for her. Like all of us, she had no idea which new train she would have to get amid the cancellations and delays, but she also had another battle to face.

She had to desperately pick out the broken

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words from the mumbling station announcer while attempting to lip read the anxious New Street staff.

I placed my hand on her shoulder and asked if she was OK. She whispered: “I’m so sorry, I’m hard of hearing and this is very scary for me.” I wanted to magically silence the engines and screeching brakes engulfing the West Midland airspace. But I have about as much superpower as I do tact: zero.

I asked her where she was heading, and she replied “York”. Ironically, though that’s exactly where I live, I was actually heading to Chesterfield that afternoon.

I’M NOT SURE WHY, BUT EVERYTHING WITHIN ME WANTS TO FIND AND HELP ANYONE WHO IS LOST. There was very little I could do to help, but there was no way I was leaving this lady on her own. She tagged herself onto my jacket like a lion cub in a stampede. And as I looked around the sprawling mess, another lady walked towards me. (I prayed that she wouldn’t need help as well; after all, my

stomach bug was impersonating nuclear fallout at this point.)

This lady smiled and said: “Hello, I’m going to York. Do you know which train I need?” To which I replied: “Nope, but you’re going to do me a favour and make sure this young lady gets on the same train as you.” Her cheeriness amazed me. She took my new friend gently by the arm and hopped away like Mary Poppins.

I knew she’d get home.

Maybe it was the exhaustion from the 20 toilet dashes that morning, or just the stress of the moment, but I found myself wiping tears away. I was reminded that many people are currently stranded in the horrendous noise that life often regurgitates. And many are waiting for someone to tell them what to do next. I’m not sure why, but everything within me wants to find and help anyone who is lost. And I am certain with every fibre of my being that this is the best help for anyone who is stranded: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep” (John 10:11-13).

Alex Willmott penned the epic Selah trilogy. Former newspaper journalist, sports fanatic and local football manager, Alex took a vow to live life to the full after reading the book of John in the Bible aged 16. Visit www.alexwillmott.com for more information.

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COLUMNISTS

CESIAH MAGAÑA AND KATE SHARMA

Compassion

Where do you belong? before long he joined one of the local gangs.

The knife-toting youths who roam the streets may look like a nasty bunch of good-fornothing reprobates, but behind the bravado are children whose deepest desire is to belong and be loved. Within the fraternity of the gang they seek to fulfil those very basic human needs that family, community and life have failed to provide.

It’s a sad tale that is repeated across the world. According to UNICEF, the Latin America and Caribbean region is considered to be one of the most violent in the world. Six million children and adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean experience severe abuse, including abandonment, each year. It’s relatively easy to point out the failings in society that breed gang culture; it’s much harder to put them right.

BY CESIAH MAGAÑA (COMPASSION MEXICO) AND KATE SHARMA (COMPASSION UK)

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t’s probably not something you actively think about, but ‘belonging’ is part of human nature. We’re built to live in community with one another and help each other through life. But when communities and families fail to provide the support children need, they may go in search of it elsewhere; often with tragic consequences.

To say life has dealt 12-year-old Carlos Reyes a rough hand is perhaps an understatement.

Born in the poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Coyulta near Vera Cruz in Mexico, where makeshift houses are crammed together on rubbish-filled roads, this young lad has experienced more pain and hardship than most of us could imagine.

BREAKING THE STRONG HOLD OF GANG CULTURE IN LATIN AMERICA IS NO EASY TASK. When he was barely a few years old, Carlos’s father was stabbed to death in a street fight.

His mother soon remarried but her new husband had a vicious temper and Carlos was regularly beaten. Eventually the small boy was abandoned to the care of his elderly grandparents. Filled with resentment, bitterness and hatred, he felt worthless and forgotten, as if he were a nobody.

The streets of Coyulta, like those of many rough communities across the world, were waiting to swallow up kids like Carlos, and

A safe place For a few years before he joined the gang, Carlos had been enrolled as a Compassionsponsored child at the Los Seguidores de Cristo Student Centre. The project, run in partnership with the local church, offers kids an alternative lifestyle and provides them with the practical skills and support they need to fulfil their potential. As the gang took over his life, Carlos stopped attending the project, but they never forgot him. While he was searching for a place to belong in the gang, loving staff were watching out for him, visiting him at home and praying for him.

Eventually, Carlos was persuaded to attend a session at the church where older kids shared their testimonies with younger kids. It was here that Carlos saw an alternative future. He realised that he didn’t have to end up like his parents, and for the first time he felt safe enough to let his guard down and share his pain and hurt. He made a decision that day to leave the gang family and join a church family.

Unravelling Carlos from his gang lifestyle hasn’t been an easy task, but with guidance from the project, Carlos stands firm in his decision. The project has helped him catch up on school work, involved him in the project football team and provided him with a mentor.

In Brother Habacuc, Carlos finally has someone to look up to. “He held out his hand to me, even when I was a mean boy,” says Carlos, “and now I think he cares for me as if he was my own dad.”

Breaking the strong hold of gang culture in Latin America is no easy task, but in partnership with churches across the region, Compassion is slowly rescuing kids from this destructive lifestyle, one by one. More than 26,000 children from desperately poor backgrounds across Mexico are currently

attending Compassion projects. Many of these young people are, for the first time in their lives, discovering a sense of self-worth and realising their true identities. At last, they are finding a place where they belong.

To sponsor a child with Compassion, visit www.compassionuk.org or call 01932 836490. Compassion is an international Christian child development and child advocacy ministry. Partnering with local churches, we are committed to the spiritual, economic, social and physical development of children living in extreme poverty in 26 countries, enabling them to become responsible, fulfilled Christian adults.

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MOVIES

With Martin Leggatt

Excuse the pun, but this is a real Christmas Cracker.

Nativity 2

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his surprise sequel to Debbie Isitt’s surprise Christmas hit of 2009 sees the children of St Bernadette’s with a new, downtrodden and disillusioned supply teacher, Mr Peterson (David Tennant). Peterson Time to be great again, my Lord.

Lawrence of Arabia (50th Anniversary)

Rex Features

A dark speck on the horizon, getting gradually closer and closer towards the fixed camera that acts as the audience’s eye with no backing soundtrack for the duration of some five minutes… It seems an eternity, but you are held breathlessly spellbound until the black-clad figure of Omar Sharif astride his camel trots sharply into focus.

It’s the subtle moments of greatness in direction like this that make David Lean’s masterpiece (which has been lovingly restored complete with the rousing Maurice

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enters the school for a national singing competition, going up against his more successful and obnoxious twin brother Roderick Peterson (Tennant again) and his terribly precocious pupils from terribly posh St Cuthbert’s College.

The worry-prone Mr Peterson is a glutton for punishment, battling against lifelong sibling rivalry, the return of super irritating Mr Shakespeare (Jason Watkins) and

his Oakmore pupils as well as experiencing the added pressure of a pregnant wife (Joanna Page). Pam Ferris reprises her role as head teacher Mrs Bevans and there is also a return for the dreaded Mr Poppy (Marc Wooton), the super enthusiastic man-child.

This film is a hard one for me to review. I really was divided by the original, identifying more with the grumpy character played by Martin Freeman and feeling totally annoyed and embarrassed by the Mr Poppy character. For me it rekindled the childhood embarrassment and cringe factor of Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do Have ’Em and the Jerry Lewis performances that marred and scarred my Dean Martin viewing pleasure.

This sequel pretty much cements those views for me. However, that is definitely a very good thing for all connected with the film, as it looks set to emulate its predecessor in being loved by everyone else that I know. My wife and children love the first film and I am confident that the sequel will also enjoy phenomenal success. It’ll probably leave you laughing, crying and smiling, while I finally come to terms with the fact that I am becoming a grumpy old man!

Jarre score) an eternal classic and ever-present in many cinema toptens. The awesome scope of the original Super Panavision 70 works well in this anniversary 4K digital restoration, which is set for a nationwide release in its original roadshow format of Part I and Part II divided by an intermission and overture this November.

Just in case you haven’t seen the film, it recounts the story of Thomas Edward ‘TE’ Lawrence who, as a junior officer in the British army during World War I, accomplishes the near-impossible feat of uniting the bickering and feudal Arab tribes and the hostile Turkish occupiers. In an epic tale of infighting, uneasy alliances and heartbreaking betrayal, Lawrence leads the Arab forces to their target and ultimately a bittersweet victory.

It netted a massive 10 Oscars in 1963, including Best Director (Lean), Best Music (Jarre) and Best Picture (Sam Spiegel) and nominations for Best Actor for Peter O’Toole and Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Omar Sharif.

In a film with a cast of other famous faces: Jack Hawkins, Jose Ferrer, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle and Claude Rains, it is renowned more for the big stars who turned down a part in the film. David Niven and Laurence Olivier both turned down the role of General Allenby (eventually played

by Jack Hawkins) because they weren’t willing to gamble on a film with a relatively unknown actor in the lead role.

This is quite ironic considering O’Toole was far down the preferred list behind Albert Finney, Anthony Perkins, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Watching the film now it is impossible to imagine anyone but O’Toole as Lawrence, particularly with his uncanny resemblance to Lawrence at the same age.

Many of us have probably seen this film on one of its many seasonal outings on the goggle box; a few may, like me, even have it nestling in their DVD collection. But I would urge everyone to go and see this restored version on the big screen.

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Jack Reacher This eagerly-awaited big screen appearance for Lee Childs’ eponymous action hero is something of a bittersweet pill for his many fans. My good friend Chris is a perfect example – he loves the character of Jack Reacher, but is far from enamoured with the casting of the diminutive Tom Cruise in the role of a man who in a literary sense stands head and shoulders above our leading man.

In my review of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol I observed that Cruise has become an excellent action movie star and he continues to bolster that reputation with this film.

For the uninformed, Jack Reacher

is a highly decorated former Major in the US army’s military police, with a background in working with Special Forces units. In the film, his military career behind him, he has become a drifting vigilante who moves across America meting out justice: “He doesn’t care about proof, he doesn’t care about the law; he just cares about what’s right.”

The script, written by Christopher McQuarrie, delivers some very terse, gritty one-liners and dialogue for Cruise and impressive action sequences; particularly the fighting scenes, which make Jason Bourne seem less formidable than your Aunt Agatha.

There is a surprising film appearance from director extraordinaire (and all-round crazy

man) Werner Herzog, together with the ever-excellent Rosamund Pike and Robert Duvall, who co-star in this surprisingly decent adaptation, which should even satisfy my mate Chris.

A gamble

Gambit My DVD review in the last edition couldn’t have been timed better with the Coen brothers’ latest comedy offering directed by Michael Hoffman and starring Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz set for release in late November.

For those of you with a good memory, you will remember the 1966 film of the same name starring Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine. This remake is a tale of payback with Firth playing Harry Deane, a downtrodden art curator who tricks his nasty boss (Alan Rickman at his very nasty best once again) into buying a fake Monet.

However, things go awry when he fails in love with his wayward and

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey To say this is a long-awaited film is something of a severe understatement. The last of The Lord of the Rings trilogy The Return of the King was released almost ten years ago and fans of Tolkien’s Middle Earth have been crying out for a cinematic outing; for the prequel story of Bilbo Baggins’ adventures.

Tom Cruise at the top of his game.

that doesn’t quite pay off.

unpredictable accomplice (Cameron Diaz). The film also features Stanley Tucci and Tom Courtney as well as many recognisable parts of London.

Although I know my wife will like

Once again directed by Peter Jackson, Martin Freeman has eventually become the incarnation of the adventurous Hobbit with Ian Mckellen reprising his fine role as Gandalf the mysterious wizard. The pair embark on an adventure with a band of dwarves intent on burgling the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent.

Leading the dwarves is Thorin Oakenshield, played by Richard

this just because Colin Firth is in it, I have to say I think this could be making its way onto my Coen brothers’ turkey list.

Armitage, as they encounter familiar faces from the LOTR trilogy: Elijah Woods as Frodo, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Hugo Weaving as Elrond and Orlando Bloom as Legolas.

Unfortunately for Bilbo and company, Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) is a dragon and, as if that were not bad enough, a dragon of superior intellect, who is willing to protect his hoard with deadly force. Quite why there is a need for a Hobbit trilogy from a book that was half the length of one of the instalments of The Lord of the Rings is beyond me, but I’m sure there must be more than a mere financial reason… or am I being naïve?

A long overdue film from the master of Middle Earth himself.

Martin Leggatt is married to Sue and father to Aaron, Sam, Hope and Paige. He’s a selfconfessed movie geek, although his tastes run to an eclectic assortment of action, thriller, black and white, war and pretentious (as Sue would say) art house films. Martin’s favourite film is Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death.

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TELEVISION With Emily Russell

The spies who dumped me “What’s it like being a spy? Like sitting in your dentist’s reception area 24 hours a day. You read magazines, sip coffee and, every so often, someone tries to kill you.”

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ichael Weston (Jeffrey Donovan) is a spy who is good at his unconventional job. But one day he’s ‘burned’, all ties to his employer are cut and all his accounts are frozen. He’s dumped in Miami and told to stay there, or he’ll be hunted down. Determined to find out who burned him and why, Michael works freelance by using his unique skillset to help people. He’s aided by his trigger-happy ex-girlfriend Fiona Glenanne (Gabrielle Anwar) and an old friend, seedy ex-spy Sam Axe (the legend that is Bruce Campbell).

THE LEAD CHARACTERS ARE SHARP, DAMAGED, FUNNY, AND FLAWED.

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forever trying to control Michael.

It’s a funny, sharp-edged blast to watch.

The fifth series of Burn Notice is currently airing on Mondays at 9pm on FX, and the first four series are available on DVD. I Emily Russell has a degree in Media and Film Studies and works part-time for the University of Southampton. She has been writing Culturewatch articles for the Damaris Trust website (www.damaris.org) since 2005 and watches far too much science-fiction and fantasy, crime shows and wrestling. She is married to Anthony.

Joe Pugliese

There are two types of families in Burn Notice. First, there are blood relations. One of the banes of Michael’s life is his chain-smoking mother Madeline (Sharon Gless), who constantly calls on him for help. She drives him crazy, as does his gambling brother Nate (Seth Peterson), and Michael clearly has no love for his dead father. But he’s stuck with them, no matter what lengths he’s gone to before to avoid them.

And Michael finds that once he’s forced to spend time with them, they’ll do a surprising amount to keep him safe and help him out, bravely putting themselves out there for him despite the disdain with which he treats them. He also finds that spending time together can even be tolerable on the odd occasion. Nobody said family life was easy, a fact that Michael is teeth-grittingly aware of every day.

Then there’s the family formed from friends. Fiona and Sam become as important to Michael as his blood relatives and vice versa. They’re a team and while they may frequently fight and get on each other’s nerves, they stick by one another no matter how crazy things get. He realises that these kinds of relationship are special and need to be treasured.

After all, not every friend would stick with a person who is wanted by every major law enforcement agency and the target of several murder attempts.

The show demonstrates how far people will go for revenge, money or to follow orders. It shows the frustration of continually unravelling layers of deception, spy politics and greed and never quite getting to the answers at the centre.

It’s saturated with wit, tension, and gorgeous scenery.

Burn Notice never fails to show the painful consequences of gunplay and fist fights. The lead characters are sharp, damaged, funny, and flawed, and you want to see them succeed and get one up on the shadowy sadistic types who are

Glenn Watson/USA Network/NBCUPB

Burn Notice

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CULTURE

GAMING With Jim Lockey

Bad times for the console, good times for the game

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his year, gaming news has been peppered with reports and leaks from Sony and Microsoft regarding their next generation of consoles.

Meanwhile, Nintendo’s next offering (Wii U) is no such secret. We are officially in the twilight of the PS3 and 360, and it’s a nervous time.

Console manufacturers will be trying to balance getting the most out of the old hardware while simultaneously trying not to fall behind the competition. Games developers will already be getting their heads around building for the new technology, and consumers will hesitate a little more before handing over their cash now that they know the next generation is around the corner.

The consoles currently on offer should be looking tired by now as they are packing technology from six years ago or more. But the reality of life at the end of a cycle isn’t really so bad, and while many industry savvy gamers are looking forward to what is yet to arrive they’ll be missing out on the games that will come to be recognised later as the pinnacle of the current generation.

To illustrate what I’m saying, let’s

take a look back at the days of PlayStation 2. Many of the games now remembered as the best and most memorable experiences on that console were released so late in its cycle that they were somewhat overlooked at the time of their release.

For example, there was Shadow of the Colossus, released the year prior to the launch of PS3. This game caused me to miss much vital study at university. Today it’ll top the list of most PS2 game rankings you’d care to look for online, but when I was locking myself away with it for hours at a time in 2005, I knew only one other person who had played it.

Nobody was talking about it, because no one had heard of it. Why wasn’t the game better promoted? It must have been down to the imminent advent of the PlayStation 3; I mean who’d spend money advertising a new IP on a soon-tobe-obsolete console?

Even more poorly treated was Okami, which was actually released after the PS3 launched. It had a beautiful cell-shaded style and drew from Japan’s rich folklore to create a really special experience, but though highly acclaimed its late release led to poor sales. Luckily, the game

found a second life with a port to Wii in 2008.

So, why is it that some of a console’s greatest games appear so close to the end of its life? It’s not just about developers becoming more experienced with the equipment. This period is so rich because the limits of the console’s capabilities are already shown. The first few years of releases on a console put a lot of emphasis on a smooth experience and graphical fidelity, but when they reach the limits of their platform things tend to plateau.

DEVELOPERS WILL ALREADY BE GETTING THEIR HEADS AROUND BUILDING FOR THE NEW TECHNOLOGY. As a result, developers have to innovate. We saw this with Okami’s bold visual design and the way that Shadow of the Colossus used tricks to defy the PS2’s processing power and build a vast open world in a manner that wasn’t previously thought possible.

For this generation, the light of new innovation will come in the form of those games that get over the hang-up of trying to look like movies and start treating games as their own form once more. There are always games that buck the trend; take the recent PSN title Rock of Ages (which ditches realism for a Monty-Pythonesque, cutout theatre aesthetic), but at the end of a cycle we can expect to see more of that kind of flair. When loosed from the chains of having to imitate reality the possibilities are endless, so dust off your consoles people, the best is yet to come.

Jim is a lifelong gamer and lives in Kent with his wife and children. He is also an artist and curator. His website is www.jimlockey.co.uk and his PSN name is tearfulminotaur.

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DVD & BLU RAY With Martin Leggatt

Everett Collection/Rex Features

Sellers’ movies will never Peter out

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he other day I was watching television with my youngest daughter Paige in a bid to continue her indoctrination into great cinema. The film in question was Stanley Kubrick’s excellent Dr Strangelove. Certainly, I had to explain many of the nuances of the film and the meanings of much of the humour and plot, including a mini history of the Cold War, but by the time the end credits ran she was hooked.

Thankfully, and rather gratifyingly, the thing that hooked her was the same thing that had hooked me many years ago – the funny man in the wheelchair. That man, for the uninformed, is Peter Sellers and it rekindled so many happy memories of his films that I have scrapped my intended listing of the best-ever Western films to present my best of Sellers selection.

In Dr Strangelove, Sellers gives not one but three brilliant performances: as the titular former Nazi scientist; the stoic Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, who is the unlikely hero of the film; and as President Merkin Muffley, an egoridden and indecisive leader.

This hilarious, satirical film is layered with an embarrassment of riches, with exceptional performances from some fantastically named characters: the commie-hating Gen Turgidson (George C Scott); the utterly paranoid Brig Gen Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and the incredibly gung-ho Major ‘King’ Kong (Slim Pickens).

That Sellers could outshine these performances with all three of his

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incarnations is amazing. The script helps with many a barbed lampoon of McCarthy-era paranoia, with winning lines such as “Gentleman, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!” and “Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.”

HIS BEST PERFORMANCE WAS HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN BLAKE EDWARDS’ THE PINK PANTHER. However, for many of us, Sellers’ name is synonymous with perhaps the most famously incompetent French detective to grace the big screen: Inspector Jacques Clouseau.

Clousseau had five outings with Sellers in the role (the Alan Arkin, Steve Martin and Roger Moore incarnations are just too abominable to consider), but by far and away his best performance was his first appearance in Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther.

In this original, Sellers delivers an understated yet hilarious performance of the most intellectually challenged, deluded, incompetent and accident-prone detective the Sureté has ever seen.

This slightly restrained performance is the perfect foil for the suave Sir Charles Lytton, played by a typically superb David Niven.

The subsequent films descended into pure farce with cruder fart joke

humour and Clouseau becoming a caricature of the original. The addition of Burt Kwouk’s Cato character adds little to the films, which can’t even be saved by the appearance of the great Herbert Lom as his long-suffering boss Dreyfus.

Speaking of Herbert Lom, they had collaborated on the fantastic The Ladykillers some eight years before.

This Ealing comedy features a great cast with Sellers playing one of five off-the-wall criminals masquerading as musicians living in the house of dotty old lady Mrs Wilerforce (Katie Johnson). Led by Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness), they pull off their nefarious robbery, but are hilariously killed off one by one as they each in turn conspire to kill the old lady.

Forget the Coen bothers’ turkey of a remake, this is the real deal.

“Birdie numnums!” is a famous catchphrase from The Party, another Blake Edwards movie, in which Sellers plays Hrundi V Bakshi, an Indian actor prone to gaffs on a grandiose scale. Bakshi’s name is added to a list of actors set to be fired from a producer’s movie, only to be confused with an invitation list to a high-powered Hollywood party with side-splitting consequences.

Bakshi innocently runs amok, causing all kinds of mayhem from the moment he arrives with his mudspattered shoes, which he cleans and then loses in the decorative water feature during his hilarious fiddling with hi-tech gadgets, which causes a Manneken Pis to spray fellow guests and, of course, where he feeds the ‘birdie num nums’.

From the visual gags, we move on to I’m Alright Jack, where he plays bolshie union shop steward Fred Kite, who uses his boss’s naïve nephew Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael) as a pawn in his eternal power struggle against the ruling aristocratic owners.

To finish with I’d also highly recommend The Wrong Arm of the Law, Heavens Above!, Two-Way Stretch and The Mouse That Roared as some of his greater films, all from his earlier career when, in my opinion, he was at the height of his profession. Sadly, by the end of his career many of his performances had lost their edge and the great man seemed to be going through the motions in some dreadful roles. I

PETER SELLERS MOVIES

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CULTURE

CREATIVE ARTS With Matthew van Duyvenbode

All sewn up

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he built guy with the shaved head and white Classics had a tattoo incorporating the allseeing eye on his left calf. His daughter, long-since bored of tugging on his arm and asking to leave was swinging her legs from a nearby chair, playing on her dad’s iPhone.

This was the first time the man had been inside a church since his mum died, and he was staring intently at a set of 42 panels of tapestry work.

Yes, that’s right, tapestry work.

Tapestries, somehow, don’t seem either hugely compelling or manly.

With its intricately embroidered butterflies and deft calligraphy, Creation: A Celebration seems to follow the expected trajectory. But with more than 250 square-feet of artwork undertaken to an exacting standard over 18 months, the task of developing the piece was certainly Herculean.

Creation: A Celebration was being displayed at a town centre church in Gloucestershire that wanted to exhibit the tapestries as a way of engaging with its local community.

And the exhibition certainly didn’t

theme of the panels (which aren’t exactly tapestries – it’s more accurate to say mixed media) derives from the Bible account of creation found in the book of Genesis. Panel by panel, some of the most famous verses of scriptures are illustrated in sometimes intriguing and often thought-provoking ways. Much is a literal translation into art, but there are frequent and tantalising rereadings of the Bible text, with language, music, exotic creatures and scientific discovery embroidered into the panels.

Perhaps it’s this playful and credible re-interpretation of the story mixed with the technical finesse of the artwork that helps to provoke the deep engagement that kept this chap viewing for such a long time. The detail invested by the artist mirrors the detailed care of the creator in the creation story. The ingenuity of the artist is in patterning the divine creativity.

After all, it’s not often you see a perfectly embroidered view of the earth from a spacecraft.

Creation: A Celebration challenges preconceptions on lots of levels: the role of art in interpreting sacred texts; the contemporary re-reading of an ancient narrative; and the unlikely combination of tapestry work that feels compellingly contemporary.

disappoint. For around a month, more than 1,000 visitors and passers-by visited the church to see the tapestries, many of whom – like this unlikely lad who stayed for over an hour – were pleasantly surprised to find a welcoming environment where beauty could be appreciated.

AFTER ALL, IT’S NOT OFTEN YOU SEE A PERFECTLY EMBROIDERED VIEW OF THE EARTH FROM A SPACECRAFT. The artist, Sue Symons, completed the work in 2009. Since autumn 2011, it’s been on tour around the country, where similar stories abound. One group of churches in Buckinghamshire created a pop-up exhibition in a vacant high street shop as a gesture of goodwill to the town, receiving nearly 2,000 visitors in six weeks!

But what is it about the work that attracts so many people?

As the name might suggest, the

Matthew van Duyvenbode’s background is in engaging young people and those on the fringes through creativity. He works in the Arts for Bible Society’s culture programme team (www.biblesociety.org.uk/arts).

When he’s not working on music, visual arts and theatre projects, @duyvenbode is usually at a pub quiz or playing Civilization V.

DATES Creation: A Celebration opens in Blackburn Cathedral on the 7th January and is on tour throughout 2013. For an up-to-date listing of venues, visit biblesociety.org.uk/creation.

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CULTURE

BOOKS

With Mark Anderson

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The Hard Corps The Face-to-Face Book

Dai Hankley

Ed Keller and Brad Fay

The 300 Spartans, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Ireland’s front row…

When these names are read out you think real men! Hard Corps tells men that they can be blokes and have a personal relationship with Jesus. Hankey says: “Contrary to popular belief there is not a single verse in the Bible to suggest that when a man starts to follow Christ he has to hand in his testicles at the door. Far from it.“ Hankley tells it straight: apathy, anger, jobs, jealousy and porn are gripping men and turning them into slaves of sin, which causes pain, destruction of homes, division in families and selfloathing. Alice Cooper is quoted in Hard Corps as saying “Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your room is easy, but being a Christian is a tough call. That’s real rebellion.”

Hankey recites the exploits of King David’s mighty generals. This is not bedtime reading for your kids, but it offers powerful examples of how real men of God should act. Hankley’s rhetoric is preach, reach and teach. If you don’t feel ten-foot tall after picking up this book, then I suggest a reread.

Hard Corps is humbling, scolding, caring and powerinducing from the off. It comes highly recommended. I

Fed up of being constantly told we are moving into a faceless world of communication? Here is a fascinating look into that preconception.

Keller and Fay reveal that less than 5% of all communication takes place through online social networks and that they have far less influence on day-to-day living than people think. Are we being sold another gold rush? The Face-to-Face Book helps reader rethink the rhetoric of social media evangelists.

20th Century Richard Overy Packed full of the most important events of the 20th century, Overy goes to great lengths to portray the moments that have shaped our world: from the incredible feats of engineering to countless conflicts and much more. I have never been so engrossed in a book that arguably depicts man’s most incredible century. The photographs are beautifully captivating and give a sense of awe, wonder and pride as well as a certain level of shame. It’s a great gift for dads.

The Killing House Chris Mooney Imagine your son was kidnapped, you couldn’t tell anyone and the only way for him to survive was to kill your partner. Protagonist Malcolm Fletcher is a former FBI profiler, drafted in to investigate missing child cases with daunting 26

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circumstances. It is thrilling from the word go. Mooney creates suspense in droves, and the twists and turns are truly breathtaking. It’s quite chilling and may not be for the squeamish, but prospective readers can probably guess that from the title.

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda Ali Soufan There are many books about September 11th; however this reallife story is fascinating. Soufan is an agent for the FBI who takes it upon himself to walk us through the motives of the most ruthless of terrorist organisations, Al Qaeda, and exposes how the US could have prevented the attack. This is a gripping encounter of one man’s tribulations, coming face to face with men who are willing to destroy human life while sacrificing their own.

Mark was born in Belfast, and developed a book and football obsession at a young age.

He and wife Lisa belong to Fishgate, a church plant in Newtownabbey. Read Mark’s musings at overtakenheart.blogspot.co.uk.

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LIFESTYLE

SAM BURNETT

Cars

CARS ELECTRIC CARS

Do androids dream of electric cars?

Electric cars up to now have been a bit boring; they’ve lacked a certain spark…

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ased on my recent experience of driving an electric vehicle (EV) for a week, I would definitely describe myself as a fair-weather EV driver. Not because I would only drive in the sunshine, far from it,

but because I can only charge one in warm and dry conditions. I’ve no outside socket on the driveway, you see, so I had to run the charging cable through the living room window.

Around a third of households in London, where I live, have off-street

parking. Running a cable out of the house and across the pavement would be terribly odd, and quite possibly dangerous, so the potential market for electric vehicle owners has already been slashed.

I’ve always scoffed at people who talk about the so-called ‘range f

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LIFESTYLE anxiety’ that’s associated with driving electric vehicles, but it wasn’t until I started driving one that I began to appreciate the neurotic anguish associated with depleting batteries. I used up eight precious miles one afternoon trying to find a free charging point in Croydon, but gave up and made a frantic 20mph dash home in search of the umbilical safety of my 13amp socket.

As soon as the indicated range on the dashboard began to sink below 50 miles I would develop this nervous tic and start to sweat. It makes you think about every single journey! The Mia Electric I was driving only has a range of about 80 miles anyway, which means you can’t go more than 40 miles away from the house. You start jotting down rough calculations factoring in the weight of your potential shopping from Bluewater and the ambient temperature, as if you’re a World War Two bomber pilot or something.

Listen to most car manufacturers and they’ll tell you some sort of made-up-sounding statistic like 99.4% of journeys people complete are less than 30 miles, and that people really only need their cars to go to the shops and they should get the train more. But the funny thing about people is that we really don’t want to be told what to do and how we should do it.

Most folks buy cars for the one time in six years they’re going to drive to France or for that long journey when you drive to visit family at Christmas. Sure, we don’t drive more than 500 metres down the road for weeks at a time, but we’d always like to imagine that we could if we wanted to.

There’s a part of EV ownership that feels like you’ve been constrained, that part of your freedom has been taken away. It’s largely nonsense, of course, a selfcreated range prison, but it exists nonetheless. It’s a terrible shame, especially when electric vehicles are so much fun. I’ve driven three recently: wildly different cars that really shouldn’t be on the same pages or involved in any sort of comparison save for their common propulsion. But I’ve been determined to try and prove to myself that electric cars can be whimsical and fun.

Perhaps the greatest driver of his generation, Sam Burnett is a London-based motoring writer, wit and conversationalist. He has previously worked in politics and the third sector, but definitely prefers flying around the world and testing cars. In his spare time he blogs, tweets and does other faddish things before losing interest.

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MIA ELECTRIC would describe it as a sort of micro-MPV-meetsmilk-float chic.

The Mia can be driven in normal mode, albeit with a subsequently reduced range of around 60 miles.

That may bring a perky performance boost, but it ends up being so stressful that it’s just not worth the hassle. It’s far better to press the Eco button on the odd dashboard and hold people up as you pull away from the lights. Two arms extend from either side of the instrument cluster, holding the various buttons and incomprehensible ventilation controls.

There is so much room inside – a chasm of elbow room for the driver sat up front all alone, and limitless legroom for the two passengers who sit behind on either side – that you forget you’re in something the size of a biscuit tin. There’s some ergonomic trompe l’oeil at work here, all the more remarkable when you consider that the Mia is barely inches longer than a Smart Fortwo.

The suspension is unsophisticated, and you bounce along rutted British roads with abandon. Once you get past the psychological barrier of believing that the Mia will tip over as it leans into a corner, it actually becomes quite entertaining. There is a certain amount of wobble, but thank those low-slung heavy batteries for keeping everything on the ground.

The Mia works a spell on you while you’re inside it.

You develop a totally irrational love for it, broken only by distance and prolonged mockery from friends and indeed total strangers. Never before have I been heckled by a four-year-old pedestrian at traffic lights.

The Mia Electric has rarely been seen outside its usual motor show setting – indeed, the example I drove was a very early one on French plates, shipped over for tests before UK-spec cars go on sale later this year.

The car is the first model from the company of the same name, a French outfit staffed with several exVolkswagen designers who clearly fancied a challenge. The whole thing feels a bit like a practice run, but you can’t help crossing your fingers and hoping they make it to a second car, because it’s an extraordinary experience.

The EV running gear is fairly conventional as far as these things go. It’s the packaging that intrigues; I

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LIFESTYLE

TESLA ROADSTER Tesla’s Roadster is being phased out with production ending shortly, despite the fact that the car remains massively ahead of its time. Tesla remains at the forefront of EV technology and has been busy in the last few months signing deals with major car manufacturers to let them have a sneak peek at its little treasure in return for piles of cash.

The Roadster chassis is borrowed from the Lotus Elise, which means it is a magnificent sports car, with peerless (apart from the Elise) handling and sublimely controlled ride, which communicates every ripple of the road surface without becoming obnoxious and uncomfortable.

The instant surge of torque from the electric

motor suits the car exceptionally well and the 060mph time of 3.9 seconds is frankly ridiculous.

That it is electronically limited to 125mph is absolutely no problem, but what does cause problems – for rival electric vehicles – is the range. At around 230 miles, it blows pretty much every other EV out of the water; but the £100,000 asking price does put it in the more expensive cost bracket. But just think – when it’s tax exempt and a full charge costs only a couple of quid, you’ll make the £80,000 extra over a diesel Ford Mondeo back in no time. Bargain.

You can’t really look at the Roadster as an electric vehicle, however. Its talents drag it far and

away above the competition, making it an extremely desirable proposition as a sports car in its own right. It’s like the Margaret Thatcher of EVs, or something.

NISSAN LEAF The Leaf is perhaps the car that brought the idea of the electric car to the mainstream, even if actual sales remain miserably low. It was quite a daring move by Nissan to bring such a car to market, even if it seems like a sensible move now.

The company has never really been well known as an innovative outfit, but it happened to be in the right place at the right time with the Leaf.

The interior is surprisingly plush when you get inside, in fact the creamy upholstery and plastics almost put you in mind of James Bond’s escape pad at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me. Buy a Leaf and you really would be keeping the British end up as the cars are built in Nissan’s Sunderland factory.

It’s utterly conventional to drive, with light steering and well-damped suspension making it a useful city companion. It’s good if you were a bit worried and hoped that an electric vehicle would turn out to be normal, but slightly disappointing if you were hoping that such futuristic cars would hover, or that the driver could steer from the boot or something.

There are many magnificent engineering and design touches around the car: the windscreen wipers, for instance, have been specially designed to create less wind noise than in normal internal-combustion-engined cars because the din is apparently intolerable when you don’t have hundreds of controlled petrol explosions every second to drown it out.

The Leaf is as much an expensive, cultural toedipping exercise as anything else, getting us all used to the slew of EVs that will be slung our way

by Renault-Nissan over the coming years. The company is really putting its weight behind an extensive electric strategy, but in many ways it will be business as usual, just much quieter.

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LIFESTYLE

PLAYING WITH FIRE

BY JOY TIBBS. PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEVEN CASE

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here’s something about men and fire. While I was still playing with Barbie, my brother was finding out what happened when he and his friend tried to set magnesium ribbon on fire in his bedroom (answer = lots of smoke and a very angry mother).

On another occasion he and the same friend (under the careful tutelage of said friend’s dad) formulated a petrol bomb powerful enough to blow the garage door off.

So as Bonfire Night approaches, I have three pieces of advice to offer.

1 Check out our top-ten, awe-inspiring pyrotechnic devices so your display has your family

1 Thunderous Finale

2 Screaming Spiders

This is the one to save for last: a display that would make even Gandalf’s eyes water. It lasts around 60 seconds and launches 80 shots – four at a time – into the air. These shots break into huge coloured palms like exploding shells to a background symphony of electrifying crackles.

Spiders aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but you will have everyone ‘oooing’ and ‘ahhing’ at this two-stage spectacular. First an explosion of golden tails accompanied by jet screams, glittering confetti and crackling comet tails, and then blue peonies, dragon’s eggs and strobes spring forth. Any eight-legged beasts will surely flee in its wake!

RRP £129.99 (Epic price £64.95)

RRP £89.99 (Epic price £44.95)

3 Earthshaker Lasting two full minutes and delivering high-decibel action from start to finish, you’d do well to ‘borrow’ your daughter’s earmuffs if you’re planning on setting this little beauty free. Its 72 massive shots, bangs, whistles, hummers, crackling comets, silver strobing stars and a cloud of crackling stars will keep your macho image intact.

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(and neighbours) in suitable raptures and 2 Avoid blowing any garage doors off – your wife won’t be impressed and your mother may still give you a clip round the ear for your troubles!

3 Don’t make the same mistake as the San Diego display organisers who set off 15 minutes worth of fireworks in 15 seconds (check it out on YouTube!).

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4 Angels vs Demons You may not have read the book, but this little gem is a work of art in its own right. If spinning golden dragon tails and large brocades with slowfalling golden glitter appeal, you’re in for a treat here. Everyone will get right in the spirit of things if you book this funky firework as part of your display.

RRP £159.99 (Epic price £79.95)

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LIFESTYLE

5

6

Gold Willow

The Brick

This little gem has nothing whatsoever to do with the reluctant dwarf that appears in the eighties classic of that name. In fact, it’s a firework of truly epic proportions, releasing nine blocks of five high-powered shots at a time, littering the sky with a cascade of slow-falling golden stars. Just make sure there are no evil, baby-stealing queens present.

The Brick is a lot less dull than it sounds. Starting with red peonies, blue stars and silver glitter, it bursts into red and green comets with silver tiger tails, fired six at a time. This rapidly proceeds to whistling, spinning silver stars followed by red and green peonies and silver chrysanthemums. Another fanned section of green and silver leads onto a rapid-fire finale of crackling stars, silver spinners and loud pink and blue peonies. The dog will definitely be bricking it.

RRP £129.99 (Epic price £64.95) RRP £129.99 (Epic price £64.95)

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Momentum

Predator 500

This amazingly timed piece of sky art offers golden red palms that explode with blue stars and falling strands of red and white glitter, five shots at a time. It’s sure to get things moving along nicely.

The Predator isn’t likely to start feeding on you, but it will certainly hold your attention.

With a fast-firing array of effects including peonies, bangs, crackles, whistles and an intense finale of large glitter storms, this little beast is a real family favourite.

RRP £99.99 (Epic price £49.95) RRP £79.99 (Epic price £39.95)

9 Smiley Face Rocket

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Your adoring crowd will mirror this extraordinary firework when it hits the sky. The purple ring of twin stars surrounding two large green eyes and a red starred smile will prompt happy faces all round. Emoticons will never hold the same charm again, and costing less than £15 it offers a pretty cheap laugh.

There’s nothing more manly than planting a rocket in the ground, lighting it, and stepping back to admire your handiwork. This one won’t disappoint. And with its single burst of giant glittering golden willow and a seemingly unending descent of twinkling stars, you’re all in for a thrilling ride.

RRP £29.99 (Epic price £14.95)

Sky Thriller Rocket

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LIFESTYLE

TOP GEAR

The greatest gear, gadgets and gizmos we could find Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver Electric Toothbrush

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Even Time Lords develop tartar, and Gallifreyan gingivitis can be nasty, which is why the good Doctor developed this handy toothbrush attachment for the Sonic Screwdriver. Ok, so it’s not the actual sonic screwdriver, but this electric toothbrush is officially licensed and approved by dentists in multiple dimensions.

TOP BUY

www.firebox.com RRP: £11.99

Napster Napster offers its subscribers a huge range of music genres and subgenres as well as unrivalled editorial content and exclusive artist tracks. The Mix features up to 10 new music articles each week written by a selection of leading music journalists. In addition, subscribers have access to exclusive video content, including On the Record, in which artists have 45 seconds to discuss their favourite album. It’s very cool.

www.napster.co.uk RRP Napster Unlimited: £5-£10 per month

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TOP BUY

SureFlap

Be king of the hills with this ultra-rugged, motorised 4x4 Crawler. Operate the four-wheel steering and four-wheel drive using the Power Functions infrared remote control. Then ride the roughest rocks, taking advantage of the high-performance, extreme suspension.

This heavy-duty model also features opening doors and top section. Rebuild it into a tough 4x4 off-road truck and create a stir with all the other big kids out there.

Do you experience strange cats coming into your house? Well, worry no longer. This super high-tech cat flap actually recognises the ID chip implanted in your cat, allowing access to your moggie and making unwanted visitors a thing of the past. It’s battery powered, a doddle to install and there’s no need to worry about collars or tags getting lost. It even looks stylish. Tiddles will love it.

www.technic.lego.co.uk RRP: £139.99

www.sureflap.co.uk RRP: £79.99

Lego 4x4 Crawler

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LIFESTYLE

Air Table Tennis This classic game has been completely reinvented. For a start, you don’t need a ball, a net, a table, a musty youth club basement, or even an opponent.

Simply sweep the battery-powered paddle through the air as if serving a ball and your virtual rally will begin. You can play anywhere; from your living room to the office lift! With your virtual opponent varying the speed of their returns, it’s like playing table tennis with a figment of your imagination, or an invisible Forrest Gump.

www.firebox.com RRP: £24.99

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TOP BUY

Ultralite Shirt Folder This is the perfect stocking filler for travel enthusiasts. If you know someone who is a frequent business flyer or global explorer, it promises quick and easy packing and is made from a strong yet light fabric that won’t weigh a case down. Simple to use and big enough for five shirts, the handy Shirt Folder will keep clothing looking pristine throughout their travels, ensuring that he (or she) looks sharp on arrival.

www.lifeventure.co.uk RRP: £14.99

Spy Net The ultimate in cool spy technology, Spy Net offers a range of fully functional gadgets that James Bond would be proud of. Spy Net takes high-end electronics and interactive gadgets and puts them in the hands and imaginations of burgeoning young secret agents. Its amazing range of equipment provides everything a budding spy needs to protect his base and secret codes, but on a budget.

© Valerii Zan | Dreamstime.com

www.SpyNetHQ.com RRP: From £19.99-£49.99

Black Socks Blokes are mostly reliant on a loved one buying them new socks on birthdays or at Christmas as they are useless at buying them for themselves. This leads to the wearing of odd and tatty old socks and it’s even been known for some lesser men to wear horrible Christmas socks in the middle of summer. But suffer no longer with a new sock subscription service where your new socks can be delivered once a month, every three months or twice a year. You can even choose any colour you want – as long as the colour you choose is black.

www.socked.co.uk RRP: From £1.97

Star Trek Door Chime If you’re a sci-fi fan, there’s never been much to get excited about when it comes to doorbells… until now. This officially licensed, motion-sensitive door chime is modelled on the original ‘oldschool’ Star Trek communicator panels and is easily mounted. It also features three distinctive sound effects: a pushbutton communicator whistle, a door opening sound and a red alert alarm in case of interplanetary intruders.

www.firebox. Com RRP: £24.99

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LIFESTYLE

PETER HORNE

60 Second Life Coach

Make your own sunshine

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© Tarragona | Dreamstime.com

y the time you read this, Team GB’s Olympic success will have almost become mythology: a truly memorable event in every way. Less memorable was our not-so-glorious summer, with extremes of sunshine and rain resulting in what was apparently the second wettest summer on record, with flash floods sweeping in as a finale!

As I reflect on these meteorological extremes, it reminds me that life can be a bit like this: seemingly calm and pleasant one minute, only to become torrid and stormy the next.

Although often we can’t control the adverse events that take place in our lives, we can choose how we respond to them. Some people are naturally skilled at this. Most of us, however, become preoccupied with what’s going wrong. We fall into the trap of focusing on the thing that we don’t want – how miserable we feel – instead of how to get where we’d rather be.

ALTHOUGH OFTEN WE CAN’T CONTROL THE ADVERSE EVENTS THAT TAKE PLACE IN OUR LIVES, WE CAN CHOOSE HOW WE RESPOND TO THEM.

© Warrengoldswain | Dreamstime.com

In extreme cases, these adverse events can totally immobilise us for huge chunks of time.

A friend of mine uses the phrase “timeburgled”. Wouldn’t it be great to put a stop to such blatant robbery of our inner peace and the time it takes to recover?

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One approach is to learn how to reframe an event or experience so that it takes on a different meaning; hopefully a less painful one. When the meaning of an event changes, our responses and behaviour will also change. Using the weather analogy, the arrival of rain can be a grey and depressing event to one person. To another it can be life-giving and refreshing.

Here are some simple practical strategies that may help…

1. Notice when your initial response is an unhelpful one. This first step can pay great dividends. You can master this skill by asking yourself questions like “is my response to this situation useful?” or “how can I respond differently”? To make this questioning technique as effective as possible, learn to detach yourself from the experience and imagine that you are looking on as an independent observer. It may even help to get a trusted friend to ask you the questions. This process can also help to reduce the level of discomfort we might otherwise feel.

2. Inquire about the positive intention.

Someone else’s seemingly unpleasant action can often be understood, if not condoned, when we try to understand the positive intention behind how they’ve behaved. This change of perspective helps to take the sting out of their unhelpful action towards you.

3. Change the timeframe. Evaluate an event from a different timescale; either one that is much longer or one that is much shorter. A single unpleasant event can have much less significance when viewed as ancient history or as an isolated occurrence that is out of the norm.

Although none of this stuff is rocket science, it pays to practice your emotional intelligence skills until they become everyday habits that will set you apart from the crowd.

Peter Horne is a qualified life coach with a passion for helping people change stuff in their lives when they feel stuck. He works with individuals and organisations, and can be contacted at enquiries@therealyou.eu. Peter is married with four children and is a member of Arun Community Church in West Sussex.

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MARK STEVENS

FACINGTHEMUSIC You may remember Mark Stevens as Nick Page in Neighbours… if you’re old enough to have been watching the show during the late ’80s, that is. These days, Mark is a worship leader at Abundant Life Church in Bradford and has just released his own album.

I met up with him to find out about his journey to fame and, more importantly, his journey to faith.

BY JOY TIBBS

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ark was born in Tasmania and developed a love for music at a very young age. When he turned 13 he applied to appear on Young Talent Time (YTT), an Australian variety show similar to America’s Mickey Mouse Club. It involved ten kinds singing the hits of the day and generally having a laugh with host Johnny Young.

In order to take the job, Mark’s whole family had to move to Melbourne for six or seven years. Other Neighbours cast members including Dannii Minogue also appeared on the show in their early days. These kids took part in major tours that played in massive, packedout stadia; an experience Mark would never forget.

“I didn’t really get to grips with the fame, and for the first year I lived in a bit of a bubble,” he says. “It’s hard to process all that as a young guy. I was at school like any normal kid, but I also had a full-time job and I was getting paid more than my father.

“It was quite an experience and it exposed me to the entertainment business. It was a great place to be, but it was dark as well. It offered opportunities and benefits that a lot of kids don’t experience, but it propelled me into the adult world and introduced me to a different lifestyle.”

Searching for new highs By the age of 14, Mark had started dabbling in drugs and alcohol, and getting into the party scene. By the time he turned 16, he was starting to experience the ill-effects of this lifestyle. He was getting restless and wanted a new challenge. Fortunately, his agent pulled some strings and he was offered the role of Nick Page on iconic show Neighbours.

“The success of Kylie and Jason attracted the spotlight of a lot of the world,” Mark says. When he joined the show, around 40 million viewers were regularly tuning in. For those who watched Neighbours at this time, Nick’s on-screen family included Helen (Anne Haddy) and Jim (Alan Dale).

And although Nick was involved in an onscreen love triangle with Sharon Davies (Jessica Muschamp) and Lucy Robinson (Melissa Bell), he actually had a real-life crush on Bronwyn (played by Rachel Friend), to whom he wrote a number of love letters. Unfortunately for Mark, it was a case of unrequited love; a fact he blames entirely on the mullet he was sporting at the time!

His success on Neighbours opened doors for Mark in the UK and he came to England aged 19 to appear on the stage. Meanwhile, his life outside the show was starting to get a little wilder. He got heavily involved in the club f

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scene and started taking recreational drugs. He was earning a lot of money and was spending it in ways that weren’t good for him. “It was party, party, party,” he recalls.

Shirking work He also got a record deal with BMG and found himself touring the UK with big names such as (the one and only) Chesney Hawkes, Sonia and Take That. “I thought that life was amazing,” says Mark. “We were earning tens of thousands of pounds but the lifestyle that went with it was killing me.”

By this point, Mark was heavily involved in the drug scene and several dealers were ‘looking after him’; plying him with coke, LSD and other narcotics. He was missing work appointments because he was living in a constant, drug-induced hangover, and his PA was constantly having to cover for him. “Things were going horribly wrong career wise,” adds Mark.

He was also estranged from his family, who had sacrificed a great deal to help him get his career off the ground in his teens. And although his mother was on the other side of the world, she knew things weren’t right.

The young actor and musician decided to head back to Australia to promote the single he had just released and ended up with a warrant out for his arrest for an incident involving a policeman he nearly ran over at a crossing. It was at this point that Mark’s record company “kind of dropped” him, but he neither realised or cared; he wasn’t happy with the way his career was going anyway. He ended up back in Tasmania, living with his family and spending most of his time drunk, stoned and sleeping around.

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Mark’s brother suggested they return to the UK, so Mark’s brother sold his car to pay for the flights. They lived with his ex-PA for around a year, during which time Mark’s brother returned to Australia. Mark had sunk to new lows, taking heroine and even drinking cough medicine in a desperate bid to get high. “In my head I felt like Jim Morrison reincarnated,” says Mark. “I couldn’t work because I kept blowing it by not turning up to recording sessions, so doors just closed. It was like I wasn’t aware of any emotion.”

Turning it around Around this time, he bumped into a girl he had previously dated. She was a Christian but had been backsliding when he had first met her. After they broke up, she went back to church and got her life right with God. She started praying for Mark and things started to change in his life. It was at this time that his mum rang and pleaded with him to go to church, so he told her he would go to appease her and get her off his back.

“I DON’T THINK I STOPPED CRYING FOR ABOUT THREE DAYS.” And he was as good as his word. He went to church and experienced a real peace that he hadn’t felt before. When he left the service he went right back to his normal

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lifestyle, but he started to see things in a different way. In fact, God started to reveal a number of complex spiritual things to him, giving him powerful dreams and visions that convinced him God was real.

Mark’s ex-girlfriend had come back into his life and she invited him to a party. But true to form he turned up four hours late (and “fried”), with his drug dealer in tow. He was stumbling into sober people and causing quite a commotion, which culminated in Mark’s drug dealer being kicked out for shooting up heroine in the bathroom.

His ex then confronted him, asking him what he thought he was doing, and he remembers sliding down the wall with his head in his hands. He suddenly became aware that he needed God in his life. “It was like an awakening,” he says.

He stayed the night and the next morning he remembers the presence of God filling the room. He broke down into tears and started crying out to God. He found himself sitting wrapped in a sheet that he had vomited all over; a complete mess.

“I don’t think I stopped crying for about three days,” Mark says. I had no money, no friends, nothing.”

One of the pastors at Hillsong London prayed for him and He was completely bowled over by the presence of God. He started going to the church regularly and got a job as a waiter in Covent Garden. He moved in with a group of Christian guys and enjoyed just doing normal things with them, hanging out. He also joined the worship team at church and loved being able to play the piano and sing again without all the negative stuff that had previously gone with it.

A brand new life Then ten months later he moved to Sydney to make a new start. He could only afford a one-way ticket, so it was a real step of faith. For the next four years he attended Hillsong Sydney, and as he was back on home soil, he decided to get the outstanding police warrant sorted. He went to jail for a day and had a huge fine slapped on him, but he was finally able to settle his debts and start afresh.

Before long Mark fell in love with a beautiful woman named Bethan Scanlon and they decided to get married.

Since moving to the UK, the couple have really got stuck into church life and the music scene at Abundant Life. He relishes the new season he has found himself in, and the way God has turned his life around so drastically. Mark and Beth have since been blessed with a gorgeous son and daughter, and fatherhood suits Mark down to the ground.

Having previously recorded music with the likes of Nik Kershaw, Nikki Graham and John Farnham, Mark has finally achieved his dreaming of releasing his own album.

Describing the sound, he says: “It’s a collection of testimonial-based, gritty songs. It’s my testimony; dealing with my journey, struggles and relationship with God. It’s about leaving one world and entering another, and taking hold of what God has for me.”

The album is called To Be With You and features ten fantastic tracks. Out in October, it will make a great Christmas present for family and friends, or even a prefestive-season gift to yourself! It’s also worth following Mark’s inspirational tweets (@marklstevens on Twitter).

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OPERATION CHRISTMAS CHILD

Three wise men and their OCC journeys Samaritan’s Purse is calling on UK churches, schools, workplaces, families and individuals to help achieve a remarkable milestone, that of delivering its 100 millionth gift-filled shoebox during this year’s Operation Christmas Child (OCC) campaign. Sorted discovered how three men from very different backgrounds got involved with OCC and the impact it has had on their lives.

OCC FACTS We are hoping to reach the 100 million mark with this year’s campaign. If 100 million shoeboxes were stacked one on top of the other, they would stand 1,722 times higher than Mount Everest!

If all the children who received an Operation Christmas Child shoebox stood hand in hand, they would circle the globe twice.

Broadcast journalist Peter Wooding As news editor for Christian radio station UCB UK for many years, I’d been reporting on the remarkable work of Operation Christmas Child, but in 2000 I had the privilege of joining an OCC distribution team in Vukovar in Croatia.

My first impression of this city was complete shock at the devastation of the buildings that had either been completely demolished or covered in bullet holes. Most shocking was a hospital that had come under intense attack. But as we helped distribute the shoeboxes in the children’s wards, their smiles were a comforting break from the scars that remained following the violence that had occurred there.

Almost as shocking was visiting a school that was completely covered in bullet holes. However, as we gathered the whole school to explain why we were there, there was such joy as we sang along with all the children.

Towards the end we had completely run out of boys’ shoeboxes so I had to give one boy a girl’s shoebox. I was expecting disappointment, especially when he opened his box and saw the first gift: a make-up set. But instead, his face lit up because he knew he had a gift to give his mother.

The most moving experience, though, was delivering shoeboxes to an orphanage. There was such excitement as the children anxiously waited to open their gifts, but beforehand they sang together: “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so…”

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Samaritan’s Purse works in around 100 countries, providing aid to victims of war, natural disaster, famine, disease and poverty.

In the UK, more than 5,500 churches, 7,000 schools and 3,000 workplaces take part in Operation Christmas Child every year.

Between 300,000 and 400,000 people wrap and pack at least one shoebox for Operation Christmas Child each year.

In 2011, more than 1.1 million gift-filled shoeboxes were wrapped and packed by people from all walks of life across the UK; 8.6 million globally.

In the UK, more than 6,000 volunteers help collect and process the shoeboxes through 140 processing centres and warehouses in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Children in 105 countries received shoeboxes last year.

At this moment I was doing a live broadcast and as the presenter heard the children singing he also got very choked up. After my broadcast, the children were given a countdown and then they excitedly ripped off the wrapping paper.

I had the privilege of going on a second distribution team to Belgrade in 2008. This was a very different experience as we helped distribute shoeboxes to the many Roma gypsy camps.

Again, my first impressions were of complete shock witnessing the terrible living conditions these marginalised people were surviving in, especially when we visited one camp on a rubbish dump underneath a motorway. But each time we arrived and sang some songs with fun actions, and told some stories from the Bible about Christmas, the atmosphere quickly changed into joy and excitement.

Both trips had a major impact on me and I feel very privileged to have seen the difference these shoeboxes make.

Pastor Tony Cole In 1999, Tony Cole had just retired from running his car and van hire business when his brother, with whom he ran a church, asked him if he’d be willing to take over as a volunteer lorry driver for Operation Christmas Child.

Ever since then Tony, now approaching 70, and his friend Ted, who is nearly 80, have spent many hours on the road, driving thousands of miles around the South London area picking up the shoeboxes from local schools and churches and then delivering them to the OCC depots ready for distribution.

Tony explains: “The first time I did this it was very moving seeing the enthusiasm, especially from the schools. We would pull up at the schools and they would make a chain of all the children to the van and they would pass along the shoeboxes as we were loading them into the back of the van.

“It was very moving to see the response of the children, especially as they didn’t realise a lot of the children hadn’t got parents and that this would be the only Christmas present they would receive.”

Over the past 13 years there have been many challenges; especially in pre-Sat Nav days. “Somehow though we would muddle through and get all the boxes there,” says Tony. “The van can hold up to 1,300 boxes at one time; our record was 1,411 boxes. It’s quite strenuous loading that much in the course of a day and, when we

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get to the depot, they’ve got to be unloaded as well.”

Each year, Tony and Ted have given their time, working up to three days a week from 8am to 7pm for eight to ten weeks in the lead up to Christmas.

“It’s fantastic when you think that 99% of the people who do it don’t get paid,” Tony says. “Most of the volunteers, including myself, don’t get a penny. Not that we want to; it’s just for the love of the Lord and for the children and I think it’s a fantastic milestone. I’d recommend anyone to take up Samaritan’s Purse as their charity.”

Firefighter turned pastor, Simon Corlett When retained firefighter Simon Corlett took over as pastor of Harvest Church in Alton in Hampshire, he didn’t quite grasp the impact of the church’s involvement with Operation Christmas Child.

Simon was invited to be part of the latest Samaritan’s Purse DVD to be filmed on a distribution trip. “Having never been to Africa before, or on any kind of overseas charity trip, it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss; to see this happening for real and hopefully get a better insight of how it all works,” he says.

“You could really see how the shoeboxes were a way of empowering the local church and the local people, who were distributing them,” he comments. “There was a real buzz. You’d turn up at a school and within minutes all round the school all the local community had gathered to see what was happening. You could see it had a real effect on the local community.”

Simon claims seeing the looks on the children’s faces as they opened their shoeboxes was like Christmas at home with his wife and four daughters, but on a much larger scale.

He says: “It was incredible the joy on their faces, the excitement, the noise, the buzz in the classrooms. It was an almost like being at home at Christmas when our children are opening their presents. I’ve got four daughters and there was that buzz about it and excitement as they opened their presents. It was just like seeing that on a mass scale and seeing these children with their woolly hats and scarves and gloves, or even great big diving goggles! It was just fantastic.”

However, some of these vulnerable children’s stories came as quite a shock for him. “The thing that struck me was seeing the children running home,” he says. “My eldest daughter is 12 and they’ve got some children younger than that who are vulnerable to all sorts of dangers and the poverty that they were living in.

“It was really heartbreaking and I was thinking about my own girls and how they would cope. That was upsetting.

The other upsetting thing was seeing the hospital and seeing some of the little children with AIDS.” But out of this despair Simon experienced one story of hope: “There was a school where this little child and his mum turned up. The boy couldn’t afford to attend the school because his mum had no work. But the child did manage to leave with a shoebox and, when they realised his mum had a degree, the school looked at how she could do some work there. So that was some really good news for one family! There were many moments like that, and to see the impact that these boxes had was just fantastic.”

Now Simon fully understands the wider impact of the work of Operation Christmas Child: “The great thing about these shoeboxes is that they help establish relationship between families and their community through the local church. And it’s through these relationships that needy families get the support they need.

“To see that in action was fantastic! For the first time I could really see how a church in the UK could enable another church across the sea to do what they’re trying to do here; utilising this amazing shoebox programme to reach their community. I get it now. I didn’t get it before and it’s something we’ll be promoting a lot more!”

HOW CAN YOU GET INVOLVED? If you are part of a church, school, workplace or community group and would like to get others in your group involved, simply follow these three steps:

1 Order or download your free Operation Christmas Child resources (http://www.samaritanspurse.org.uk/operation-christmaschild-resources) including leaflets explaining how to pack your shoebox and including boy/girl stickers for your shoebox.

2 Encourage everyone in your group to get hold of an empty shoebox, fill it with gifts and gather them together before November 18.

If you make your £2.50 donation online, you will be told where your shoebox(es) went!

3 Samaritan’s Purse will then give you a call to arrange to collect your shoeboxes sometime after November 18. Your shoeboxes will then be processed by our volunteers before being distributed to children in need.

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GREG DAVIES & RUSSELL HOWARD

WRATH OF KHAN After the BBC’s new sitcom Citizen Khan caused consternation among the Muslim community, the touchy subject of religion in comedy has hit the headlines once again. So just what is the right way to go? Sorted asked Greg Davies and Russell Howard whether religion remains a taboo subject in comedy, or whether humour might actually be the ultimate bridge for faith.

BY STEPHEN MILTON

B

ack in September, the BBC and Ofcom found themselves inundated with complaints – reportedly more than 200 of them – from irate viewers venting their anger at the stereotypical depiction of Muslims in new sitcom Citizen Khan. Created by Adil Ray, himself a British Muslim, the six-part series starring former My Family star Kris Marshall and Eastenders actress Shobu Kapoor, follows a Muslim community worker and his family living in Birmingham.

Of course, close cultural stereotypes are nothing new in comedy. Runaway hit Goodness Gracious Me, for instance, leant on these while subverting our own ideas, but following comedic references to the Quran and hijab, some labelled the new series a stereotyped and glaring misrepresentation of Muslims.

One viewer who complained to the BBC said the show “insulted” and “ridiculed” Islam. “We feel as though this show has crossed the line. We expected a comedy but now we have witnessed a mocking show,” said one angry viewer, while another called the content “bigoted” and “offensive”.

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And comedian Humza Arshad, star of hit internet comedy Diary of a Badman, was quoted by BBC’s Asian Network as saying that some of the jokes went “a bit too far”.

“I wasn’t offended, but I think some other people might be. Scenes with the Quran, for instance, should be played safe. Some people will rightly complain about it.

After all, the Muslim community is one of the most sensitive out there.”

It’s not just in Islam, though, where humour and faith come to a crossroads. Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan inadvertently made a household name for himself at the beginning of his career when he lampooned the crucifixion on live TV, while American talk show host Jon Stewart rather deftly offended millions recently when he jokingly claimed Christianity was created by a pregnant teenage girl who told her parents an angel had come down from heaven and impregnated her.

So when it comes to religion, be it the Quran, the Bible or the Book of Mormon, where should the line be drawn? In 2012, is all spiritual belief fair game for a ribbing roast, or should the funny men and women maintain a healthy distance?

Two of Britain’s most prolific comedians, Greg Davies and Russell Howard, generally pursue the route that ‘all

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GREG DAVIES & RUSSELL HOWARD is game for laugh’ when it comes to subject matter on the stage, but does this really stretch as far as religion?

“I am not a religious person, but there are plenty of things in life I do believe in, have passions for, and [that] I use to shape who I am and the way I live,” begins Greg.

“Will I reference those subjects in humour? Of course, because in my opinion humour is the best thing to link people, no matter what method of life they subscribe to.

“But I think it’s important to be genuine in what comes through in comedy. I don’t subscribe to a strong faith so I won’t reference large parts of religion in my act. That’s a bit like me making gags about windsurfing yet having a phobia of water. Ultimately, you have to be true to your subject matter, true to your audience and true to those whose passion it is you talk about.

“I think for me to start referencing religion in my act – which I may well do one day – I’ll need to be a bit better informed on the subject. Comedy is such a fantastic bridge for powerful messages. Everyone likes to laugh, it’s the ultimate feel-good feeling, so conveying powerful messages through comedy must be the answer. It’s almost like laughter loosens up our natural resistance to a subject.

It allows a message to permeate between the chuckles.”

Greg Davies on the troubles of being tall (as shown on Mock the Week) “There was a little old lady in front of me at the cashpoint and when she’d finished she turned round and she hadn’t seen me and she went ‘OH!’ And then with no hint of irony at all, she asked me this question: ‘Would you like a job at my house changing light bulbs?’ ‘No! No old woman.

I have plans of my own. Now get out of the way of the cashpoint. Twenty minutes is long enough to have worked out that that’s a Tesco clubcard!’”

“IF I’M GOING TO GO DOWN THE RELIGIOUS ROUTE, I’LL MAKE SURE I THINK CAREFULLY ABOUT EVERYTHING I SAY AND WILL MAKE SURE I CAN JUSTIFY IT. I TEND TO GO BY THE MOTTO ON GOOD NEWS: ‘SAY THE JOKE ONLY IF YOU COULD SAY IT TO THEIR FACES’.

IF NOT,YOU KIND OF KNOW, DEEP DOWN, THAT IT’S NOT REALLY FAIR” RUSSELL HOWARD Irreverent comic Russell Howard appears to echo this sentiment. “I wouldn’t say I ever drew the line; I think everything is fair game as long as it’s funny, simple as that,” he says. “With a series like Good News I tend to go after what’s topical, what’s newsworthy, and if religion is the current affair of the week, I’ll certainly reference it. I think it would be unnatural if I didn’t. People want honesty and transparency.

“I think when I was starting out as a comedian I’d go into the subject of religion a little less than I do now. I think you have to be brave to tackle it because you know it’s a fine line. I know a number of comedians who adlib tend to steer well clear. Religion is probably the one subject that can ruin a reputation or get you into some very hot water.

“If I’m going to go down the religious route, I’ll make sure I think carefully about everything I say and will make sure I can justify it. I tend to go by the motto on Good News: ‘Say the joke only if you could say it to their faces’. If not, you kind of know, deep down, that it’s not really fair.

“Some comedians can lose sight of what they’re there to do – entertain people, not offend them.”

As two of the funniest men in the country, it’s interesting to learn each comedian’s own belief system.

Does faith play a part in their lives?

“I think there’s a large amount of whatever it is you find comfort in,” says Greg, soon to tour the UK with new stand-up show The Back of My Mum’s Head. “For me, that’s humour. I wouldn’t ever say that’s a replacement for faith, but it does give me comfort and warmth. f

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Our favourite Russell Howard gags “I lived with a guy who had OCD and I used to put Rice Krispies in his slippers before I went out. He went mental… but not before he counted them all.”

“Kids did really well in their A levels, how do we respond? ‘A Levels are getting easier. In my day you had to do 50 questions in a minute and if you got one wrong, they killed your dad!’”

“Anyone else wonder if the Queen ever props her quilt cover up to her neck while in bed and says ‘Look Philip, I’m a stamp!’?”

“Some people in England only have their wheelie bins collected once a fortnight.

Their suffering is unimaginable.”

“So, it was my grans birthday. I asked her ‘What would you like for your birthday, nan?’

‘A shredder!’ ‘What do you want a shredder for?!’ Identity theft!’ ‘Who’s gonna steal your identity?!’ ‘Osama Bin Laden! He feeds Satan!’ ‘Gran, you have got to stop reading the Daily Mail, it feeds you lies.”

“I guess the being I believe in is a pretty awesome stunning thing with an amazing sense of humour. I mean he or she would have to be wouldn’t they?”

Howard, again, seems to run with similar ideals. “I’m not religious, I don’t think too many comedians out there are, but I think heaven is a lovely idea,” he says. “It must be awesome hanging out on clouds with angels strumming harps and Jimi Hendrix floating by. I don’t know if the reality is as lovely; I certainly hope so.”

“I GUESS THE BEING I BELIEVE IN IS A PRETTY AWESOME STUNNING THING WITH AN AMAZING SENSE OF HUMOUR.” GREG DAVIES Howard, who’s still officially the youngest comedian to sell out London’s O2 Arena, and recently returned with a brand new series of his self-titled show, holds some strong views of his own on faith, but equally maintains that everyone should be free to believe in what they want.

“I find certain things unsettle me in religion, just as they do in most other subjects. I’m not sure about the whole speaking to spirits thing. It all feels a little false to me.

“But, I suppose, on the flipside, if you’ve lost someone and you need to take comfort, and that helps you get through your day, then that’s your business – who am I to say anything to the contrary?”

But where comedy is concerned, religion clearly has a part to play. Christian comedians Tim Vine and Milton Jones have seen a rise in the popularity of their stand-up shows over the last few years, with Jones recently claiming it’s down to his lack of swearing and suitability for family.

But can a Christian comic ever rise to the highest echelons of British comedy or will that glass ceiling always remain?

“I would just say whatever kind of comedian you are, good luck to you because it’s not easy,” Howard sums up. “It isn’t easy for anyone. And it’s something that you have to be very brave to attempt, in whatever capacity. Starting comedy is no mean feat and any comedian I doff my cap to.”

“I’ve seen Tim Vine and I wouldn’t know the difference to be honest,” Greg adds. “I imagine being a so-called Christian comedian would be somewhat limiting, but he is on-point hilarious; his gags are spot on.

“Again, I feel faith is not really the issue, it’s whether you reference religion or you don’t. Just be funny, that’s the simple rule to follow.”

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DAVID TENNANT

The future?

(Dr) Who knows…

Life has been a time warp for the former Dr Who and it seems he wouldn’t have it any other way. David Tennant talks fame, professional folly and the delights of improvisation.

BY STEPHEN MILTON

D

avid Tennant certainly feeds off variety. Most actors strive for diversification in their careers, citing it as the lifeblood of their craft; the reason they got into the game in the first place.

Ultimately, they find themselves resolutely pigeonholed despite their best efforts to shake it up with a controversial move from centre left: a display of nudity on the West End, for example, or a switch from gangster grit to period pomp.

The former Dr Who star is one of the rare few; a onetime instant hit who doesn’t seem to have collided with such a wall. Since his breakthrough with the Tardis, Tennant has explored a plethora of genres and characters, from Potter and Hamlet to vampire slayer and fire breather. The 41-year-old has even taken a swing at the American comedy circuit with failed sitcom Rex is Not Your Lawyer.

He takes success and failure in his stride and explains to Sorted that his career is a battle for challenges. Right now, he has just finished filming the lead in The Spies of Warsaw for BBC4 and is due to start filming for a new ITV1 drama series, Broadchurch.

“I’ll perpetually be looking for a new gig,” says Tennant.

“There’s a kind of thorough adrenaline push, which is alarming and overpowering, but very encouraging. It’s fear of failure. Is this the one where they discover I don’t deserve to be at the party? I wait for someone to say: ‘You’ve had a good go, now it’s time to go.’

“I admire other actors’ work and then see mine and it seems false and crass. As an actor you put yourself up for appraisal on a regular basis and ask for your insecurities to be tweaked. It’s a terrifying business sometimes.”

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Tennant’s forthcoming work will hardly ease those anxieties as the West Lothian Scot takes on the dual roles of warring twin brothers in festive creation Nativity 2. After the success of its predecessor, which saw The Hobbit star Martin Freeman play a teacher at an underachieving primary school that is competing against a local private school to produce the best nativity play, Tennant was delighted to take over the reins.

“I loved the original movie, the chaos and mayhem of bringing together a nativity play; the spine, the backbone of a child’s educatory life story. Martin Freeman did such a fantastic job that when they came to me for the sequel, I jumped at the chance.

“What I loved about the movie as well is everyone has a memory of playing one of the wise men, or one of the baying sheep. For me, it was Joseph, one my first tastes of the stage. I guess the nativity is where I got started.”

“AS AN ACTOR YOU PUT YOURSELF UP FOR APPRAISAL ON A REGULAR BASIS AND ASK FOR YOUR INSECURITIES TO BE TWEAKED. IT’S A TERRIFYING BUSINESS SOMETIMES.” Playing competitive school teachers at opposing ends of the financial bracket – one at a posh private institution, the other an underachieving comprehensive – Tennant will take the opportunity to exercise an emotional comedic range.

“You think playing twins would be a nightmare, but f

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FAMOUS

DAVID TENNANT it ended up being one of the richest experiences of my career. I mean, all the attention was on me, who cares about the rest of the cast?” he jokes. “It was a challenge for sure. But it’s not like it was a serious, intense drama series.

“It’s a fun, family comedy written by the wonderful Debbie Isitt, who crafted a story that really appeals to anyone who’s ever experienced the lunacy of a school festive period. Of course, a lot of it is about religion and the real message of Christmas, but outside of that there’s so much to do with teachers and parents rushing about frantically and kids with pre-performance nerves. It’s an exhilarating time, though.”

In Nativity 2, after each school enters the national ‘Sing a Song for Christmas’ competition, the brothers’ rivalry intensifies and sees both embark on a wild, crosscountry race to make it to the fabled ‘Christmas Castle’ in time for the contest.

Boasting the likes of Gavin & Stacey star Joanna Page, Shirley Ghostman creator Marc Wootton and the excellent Pam Ferris, the cast had the unique opportunity to completely improvise the script; yet another lofty but inspiring challenge for Tennant.

“It actually wasn’t as bad as you’d think,” he says. “Most performers have done some improvisation in some shape or form, so it’s not completely out of your comfort zone.

“We’d be given a scenario and told to just go with it and when you’re working with Joanna Page or Pam Ferris, it comes fairly naturally. At least it should. We had many a scene fall to pieces over and over.”

Born David McDonald, Tennant was brought up with his brother and sister near Paisley, where his father was a minister and at one point Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Faith has always been an integral part of his life and now, as a father of one, he finds his background has stayed with him and shaped his character today.

“It’s the old Presbyterian thing,” he says, “just like the work ethic. It’s all connected, isn’t it – that sense that you’re not worthy and therefore you have to prove your worth, and you don’t get above your station.

“Religion has definitely shaped my character, when there’s been such a heavy influence all my life, I’m sure it must have. I mean, I still go to church occasionally although it’s not every week, and not necessarily something I want to impart on my own family.

“The way I see it, there’s a morality… I think there’s a moral compass, but whether that comes from religion or just from being a good person, and where one starts and the other begins….”

So what is he: religious or a good person? “I’m a good person, I hope. But I’m never as good as I want to be, never as nice as I want to be, never as generous as I want to be.”

Young David always knew his goal in life: to be an actor and, one day, to play Dr Who. “I was lucky because I knew what I wanted to do from the age of three, although that seems unlikely and when I look at three-year-olds now it boggles the mind,” he says. “I find it remarkable that nothing happened to steer me into a more explicable career. It must be luck as much as circumstance.

“I was obsessed with Dr Who, Tom Baker was my idol among others, and I must have watched every single episode a hundred times over when I was a lad. I guess, for me, it wasn’t the acting vocation that appealed, it was being Dr Who. Only later on did I discover there were other characters to play.”

At Paisley Grammar School he honed his passion, taking the lead roles in amateur productions, while attending classes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. At 16 he passed an audition for the academy’s full-time acting course and became one of its youngest pupils, studying there between the ages of 17 and 20.

Early stage work saw him acting opposite future Scottish starlet Ashley Jensen in The Resistible Rise of

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DAVID TENNANT Arturo Ui, one of a few plays he performed in as part of the 7:84 Theatre Company, and portraying a transsexual barmaid in an episode of Rab C. Nesbitt.

Obscurity continued for many years, broken by supporting roles in Jude, with Kate Winslet and Who predecessor Christopher Eccleston, and Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things.

It all changed for the actor when BBC producers signed him up for the second series of the revamped Dr Who and Tennant became the scourge of the Daleks for five phenomenally successful seasons.

Anonymity quickly became a thing of the past. “Of course, I lost a certain amount of right to privacy, which is not what I’d choose, but I accept,” he explains. “Noone can teach you what it’s like to be observed in public.

“I remember before I was that person, watching wellknown people walk into a room. You instil them with inner confidence and a slightly royal presence.

Passing the torch to Matt Smith in 2010, David felt the time was right to change it up. “I’m very glad it happened,” says Tennant. “Mercifully, I haven’t been typecast and it opened more doors than it closed. I was never bored but I wanted to make sure I left before it became a job. It’s still thriving and Matt Smith is brilliant in the part.”

almost universal scorn, even though he seemed the ideal choice for such a romcom, in which a famous American actress tries to prevent unscrupulous media attention ruining her wedding to an author (Tennant) by holding it on a remote Hebridean island.

“It’s disappointing when something in which you’ve invested time and love isn’t well received. But there’s little you can do,” the star muses. “As the years trundle on you become objective. I thought it was a lovely film but critics probably aren’t writing for its intended audience.

“Doing something new is the point, every fresh project is a gamble. You draw a deep breath and ask yourself, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’. And the answer is that it’s not very good… You can’t worry. You do your best and think, ‘This works for me, at this moment, for whatever reason. I just hope I get another job at the end of it’.”

And there’s no danger of that not happening.

At present, there’s talk that Tennant may reprise the role that made him a household name for the milestone 50th anniversary episode of Dr Who. The actor is remaining tight-lipped but hints at the plausibility of such a return alongside Smith.

“I’ll always be able to come back in the alternate world because the ‘Doctor’ will age like a normal human,” he says. “It’s always possible.”

“DOING SOMETHING NEW IS THE POINT. EVERY FRESH PROJECT IS A GAMBLE. YOU DRAW A DEEP BREATH AND ASK YOURSELF, ‘WHAT’S THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN?’”

FAMOUS

Married on New Year’s Eve to 27-year-old Georgia Moffett, an actress he met on the set of Doctor Who in 2008, the couple have a daughter, Olive, born in March last year, and Tennant has also adopted his wife’s tenyear-old son, Tyson.

And while famously discreet, the flourishing family man holds his hands up to one or two skirmishes with the press.

“I’ve had a pop at them,” Tennant says, frankly. ”I’m not saying my phone was hacked, although it would make sense of certain moments in my life when I was surprised at how some personal info became public.

“It’s hard to do anything about imprecision or invasion, even if you think you have a good case. It becomes very expensive very quickly. Grapple with the Daily Mail and you’re up against some serious lawyers. They have a weird power.

Since Dr Who, Tennant has kept it interesting. BBC series Single Father saw him take on the intricacies of modern parenthood, while there have been endless guest spots on institutions such as This is Jinsy and The Catherine Tate Show.

Hollywood was beckoning, however, and David went to Los Angeles in 2009 after signing up to make a pilot for Rex Is Not Your Lawyer, a legal drama series in which he played a brilliant litigator who suffers panic attacks.

“I thought, ‘Why not?’,” he reasons, despite the show’s subsequent failure to get off the ground. “It was a wonderful experience. I’d feel better equipped if I tried again.”

Two films also brought limited success. In Fright Night, a remake of a 1985 vampire thriller, Tennant played a leather-trousered Las Vegas showman and vampire hunter opposite Colin Farrell.

“It was well received critically,” he recalls, “but no-one went to see it, which tends to be a problem for a movie in this industry. It’s rather important.”

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DAVID TENNANT

Fathers at Christmas

BY SOPHIE LISTER

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ever work with children or animals, the saying goes, but this is advice that film director Debbie Isitt doesn’t seem to have heeded. Her film Nativity! (2009) charted the misadventures of a primary school class, their long-suffering teacher (Martin Freeman), and their overenthusiastic classroom assistant Mr Poppy (Marc Wootton). Now the gang are back for more Christmas-themed chaos with Freeman replaced by fan favourite David Tennant.

Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger! finds Mr Peterson (Tennant) starting a new job at St Bernadette’s school. He’s just trying to make it through the term, caring for his pregnant wife (Joanna Page) while avoiding the interference of his father (Ian McNeice) and thoughts of estranged twin brother Roderick (also Tennant). But Mr Poppy has other ideas. The children have their hearts set on entering the national ‘Song for Christmas’ competition, and Mr Poppy will move heaven and earth to make sure they get there.

‘FATHER FIGURES PERVADE THE STORY: INADEQUATE FATHERS, ABSENT FATHERS AND DISAPPOINTED FATHERS.’ A madcap journey ensues, and Mr Peterson finds himself quite literally dragged along for the ride. Mr Poppy smuggles the class out of the school and into Wales, where a crosscountry trek is the only way to reach the competition venue. Before the end, there will be laughter, music, white-water rafting, and an abseiling donkey. But amid all the fun, a more serious message is allowed to unfold.

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fathers, absent fathers and disappointed fathers. One of the boys in Mr Peterson’s class was so devastated when his dad left that he hasn’t said a word since. Mr Poppy, beneath his exuberance, is still hurting from his fatherless childhood. And as he prepares for the birth of

his child, Mr Peterson must confront his difficult relationship with his own father. The older Peterson won’t stop comparing him with his more successful brother and refuses to accept him for who he is.

Sadly, the difficult situations these characters face reflect what is often a reality. Despite its light tone, the film doesn’t hide from the anger and pain that many people carry because of their own fathers. But thankfully the message doesn’t end there. Mr Poppy and Mr Peterson learn to act as surrogate parents to the children in their class, demonstrating that anyone can become a good role model. Their humour, kindness, and willingness to empathise with the children make up for their inadequacies, and for their own bad experiences.

So will Mr Peterson come to terms with the huge responsibility he’s taking on in becoming a parent? We see him fight to start this journey in a spirit of forgiveness for his own father’s failings rather than passing on the hurt he’s received.

And of course, this being a seasonal story, there’s another father waiting in the wings.

As we’re reminded of ‘the baby who was born in the hay’, we also think of the one who sent him: the Father who doesn’t fail, or bail out.

The Father who gave everything for the sake of his children.

Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger! will be released on November 23. Sophie Lister is a researcher and writer for The Damaris Trust. For free resources on Nativity 2 see www.damaris.org/nativity2 and for more articles and study guides see culturewatch.org and toolsfortalks.com.

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TEARFUND

Church in the Wild This year, British charity worker Steve Collins, his wife and his two young children will spend their first Christmas in their new home in Nepal; one of the poorest countries in the world and one in which the Christian faith is very much a minority.

BY STEVE COLLINS

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long time ago my wife Jude and I sat our children down and explained to them that one day, when they were older, we would go to live in Nepal. It’s not often in life that you get four years’ notice to up sticks and move your family out to one of the poorest countries in the world, but for my role at Tearfund, it was in the job description.

In my job as country representative for Nepal I’ve been visiting the country three or four times a year. But living right in the heart of the action I can connect more easily with the people that need our help, and listen and understand exactly what the issues are that are keeping so many millions of people in poverty. I can also work alongside our partner organisations and local churches to make long-term differences in people’s lives.

For our children, that’s sometimes harder to understand. We strive every day to teach them why we do what we do, and why we feel God has called us to be where we are. But understandably they sometimes want to be back home, and that is becoming more apparent as we get closer to Christmas. No snowball fights, no nativity play, no roast potatoes.

This isn’t the first time Jude and I have left our home to live in another country. We’d always had the wanderlust, the desire to work overseas.

After meeting at Aberdeen University, we married and settled in Scotland for a few years. When we got the chance to move to Honduras for Tearfund, we couldn’t pack our bags fast enough. Of course, it was difficult to leave our family and friends behind, but we felt God’s call to be with people who were living in poverty. There wasn’t a flashing light or a blinding vision, as you might expect when God calls you to leave your life and your country for another, it was just an incredibly peaceful feeling that everything was happening as it was meant to. So we went.

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And there we were, a young couple, living in one of the most remote villages in Latin America. Untouched by ‘the West’, it was heaven on earth; although maybe not everyone’s idea of it.

There were no roads, no electricity, no piped water, no phone and no internet. We lived in a wooden house on stilts that had solar panels for lights, a long-drop toilet in the garden and rainwater collected from the roof. Travel took place by dugout canoe, mule or by light aircraft when we travelled to the city once every two months to collect supplies and to send emails.

After a few years of being in Honduras, we were thrilled to discover that Jude was pregnant. Village life had been relatively easy with just the two of us, but raising a child? Absolutely! We may have had to take a canoe and a light aircraft to the clinic for our check-ups but, hey, we liked the challenge.

Jude and I made the decision to stay put and to fly home for the final trimester to get ready to welcome our child in the UK with our family and friends. A few months later, Amy-Ruth Lilia was born. In the local language of the village back in Honduras, ‘Lilia’ means ‘joy’. And that’s exactly what she was.

When Amy-Ruth was just eight weeks, we moved ‘home’, back to the rainforest to raise our beautiful daughter. We were never short of babysitters. It was exactly as they say, it takes a village to raise a child. AmyRuth flourished in her Honduran home. When she was a toddler, she’d call the chickens in and feed them rice.

Once, she even shared a 15-seat plane with 1,000 chickens. She could not have been a happier child. Amy learned to speak Spanish before English and her first word was “apia”, which (of course) means “no” in the local Miskito language. But while our experiences in Honduras shaped her character today, sadly she can’t remember anything about our time there now.

We moved back to the UK when Amy-Ruth was still a toddler. I started my new role as country representative for Nepal, and we soon celebrated the birth of our wonderful son, Paul. We settled into a good life as a family of four in Farnham, leaving the beauty and simplicity of the rainforest for the high-speed internet and flushable toilets of rural Surrey.

Life in Surrey was great, but we always knew that one day we would be moving to a different corner of the world; a hotter, busier, smellier corner than the one Amy-Ruth grew up in. It was important to us to keep communicating with our children about Nepal as when we first told them they were too young to fully understand.

We have helped them understand that new and challenging experiences help us to grow. A few months before we left, I remember asking Paul how he was feeling about the move. He grinned, came and gave me a big hug and said: “Daddy, I’m scared”. I said: “I’m a bit scared too. It’s not going to be easy all the time, but we are going to have some amazing experiences together

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TEARFUND and we will talk about this for the rest of our lives.”

The big issue for Amy (9) and Paul (6) was always going to be saying goodbye to their friends and extended family in the UK and making new friends in Nepal.

Paul’s been pretty easygoing about the whole thing, but being older, Amy analyses things more deeply and there have been tears at times.

Here in Kathmandu, we live in a concrete and brick house in a residential area. It’s bustling, noisy, dusty and smelly; a typical capital city in a developing country.

There is a much lower sense of community compared with a rural village. We have all the basic services but there are long power cuts, currently lasting 16 hours a day and predicted to rise to up to 20 hours when the glaciers start melting before spring. Water is in very short supply and we have to save water from washing to flush the loo.

The most exhilarating thing about living here is feeling so stretched in almost every area – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually – because the context in which we are living and working is so different from what we are accustomed to. I have to rely on the Lord and when I am close to him, it’s a great feeling knowing that while I am out of my own depth, I’m still in the palm of his hand and that he is using my gifts within this situation. But if I drift away from the Lord, it’s terrifying and I find myself thinking, ‘What on earth have I done to my family, bringing them out here?!’

The mutual support Jude and I are able to give each other is invaluable. When one of us is experiencing culture shock or having our patience tested, the other is able to provide encouragement and support.

The children have been attending an international school for the past four months, and have made new friends very quickly. Amy-Ruth is one of only two Brits in her class and her new best friends are Nepali and Indian.

The school is quite small, with only 200 students from around 30 countries, so it has a strong multicultural community feel. Teaching is in English and the school runs from kindergarten right up to A-level. The fact that Amy and Paul are settled and happy makes things a great deal easier for me and Jude.

a gift of healing from God, so she rushed outside and pleaded with them to come in and heal her mother.

They came in, and they prayed. Puspa looked on in amazement as her mother leapt from the bed, throwing off her blankets and declaring that she was healed.

The growing local church and Tearfund’s local partner organisation are helping people like Uma to get back on their feet; helping them to get an education and find their own sustainable sources of income so they can lift themselves out of the cycle of poverty. It’s all about offering a hand up rather than a hand out.

Even though Christmas was given national holiday status just a few years ago, the vast majority of Nepalis don’t celebrate it, so Christians here use Christmas Day as a huge outreach event. Churches are two or three times fuller than normal (and for most growing Nepali churches that means they are often bursting). Family, friends and neighbours are all invited to the Christmas service and a free meal of traditional dhal bhat (rice and lentils) with curried vegetables afterwards, and perhaps even chicken for those churches that can afford to offer meat.

Nepali Christians have adopted many Western Christmas traditions and, in the run up to December 25, groups of young Christian often take to the streets singing carols, just as they did a few years back when Uma was healed.

For us, Christmas will definitely be a time of missing things, especially for the children. We’ll miss spending time with our extended families in Shropshire and Yorkshire; good old British Christmas grub; walking in the country in crisp frosty weather; and returning home to a log fire (although we definitely won’t miss the traffic jams on the M1 and M6!).

But we wouldn’t change our situation, and we understand God’s calling for us to be here for this moment in time. God is clearly at work in Nepal and He will continue to work here with or without me and Tearfund.

But He has already demonstrated that He has a distinct role for Tearfund to play in His plan for Nepal.

So my prayer is that in all my work and relationships I will continue to understand, fulfil and expand this role as it evolves so that as a result of Tearfund’s work His Kingdom will come in an increased way, both here in Nepal and in the lives of me and my family (Matt 6:10).

And that all this will be for his glory.

WHEN ONE OF US IS EXPERIENCING CULTURE SHOCK OR HAVING OUR PATIENCE TESTED, THE OTHER IS ABLE TO PROVIDE ENCOURAGEMENT AND SUPPORT. We have started going to a Nepali church, which is a great way for us to make friends, and it’s fantastic to be able to meet other Christians who practice their faith in a mostly Hindu country.

Christianity is still generally considered a ‘foreigner’s religion’ and Nepali Christians are seen to have rejected their country and traditions. However, as church leaders grow in their understanding of the gospel, Nepali Christians are beginning to demonstrate that they really do care deeply about the day-to-day issues faced by their countrymen and women in many practical ways.

Tearfund’s work over the years has had a big part to play in this change within the Church.

For one woman, Uma, who lives in a village far outside the city, Christmas is a time of transformation and hope.

A few years ago, the former slave lay in bed unable to move, seriously ill. With only her 13-year-old daughter Puspa to take care of her, the future looked bleak.

Puspa heard carol singers from the nearby church singing outside. She had heard that some Christians had

To find out more about the communities Steve will be working in, visit http://www.tearfund.org/ nepal-christmas.

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BUSINESS

CHARLES HUMPHREYS

We’re in Business

Discover your inner entrepreneur Peter apart was that he placed his faith in Jesus and allowed Him to speak directly into his life’s calling: transforming his business from a fisher of fish to a fisher of men.

God has a plan for every part of your life, and it does not include your staying unemployed so that you cannot pay your way. If you ask Him in prayer, then He will speak to you about your next move; either through the people you speak to, the articles you read or through that quiet inner voice.

Some of your steps to self-employment may well feel like you need God’s help to walk on water, but His guidance can also be found in more mundane advice.

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FIVE STEPS to get you started…

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n the same way that most of us have a book inside us just waiting to be written, if we dare to glance at our inner risk-taking side, we may well find a successful entrepreneur waiting to take centre stage in our lives.

The day after I was made redundant, I reluctantly stepped into my local JobcentrePlus and, as I waited to see my adviser, I considered any alternatives to signing on every fortnight: even self-employment.

PETER RAN HIS OWN SMALL-SCALE FISHING BUSINESS AND WOULD HAVE BEEN FAMILIAR WITH RISK-TAKING AND BASIC ECONOMICS. At that moment I wish I could say that my mind was filled with inspirational quotes from famous self-starters such as Anita Roddick or Peter Jones. Instead, I felt a degree of fear at the thought of being self-employed, which could neatly be captured by Les Dawson: “I used to sell furniture for a living. The trouble

was, it was my own!”

The Apostle Peter is the character to whom many of us can relate most. He was sometimes a bit thoughtless in his speech and too quick to make promises, but he was also a person who displayed huge courage. If you have ever considered starting up your own business, then you will be able to connect with Peter’s experience of being called by Jesus to step out of the boat (his comfort zone) to do the impossible: walk on water (Matthew 14: 28-29).

Today in the UK, more than four million people are self-employed, including an increasing number who feel pressurised into it following unemployment. Economists generally agree that entrepreneurship is the way out of recession, and it is people – possibly you – who, with brilliant ideas, big dreams and well-crafted plans, can lift communities and nations out of the grip of recession.

Peter ran his own small-scale fishing business and would have been familiar with risk-taking and basic economics. If he had sought only human wisdom such as: “Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity” (Groucho Marx), he would have remained a normal and unremarkable fisherman. However, what set

1

Do something you are passionate about. What are you good at?

What problem have you seen that needs solving?

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Research the market. You may love your idea, but does anyone want to buy it?

3

Write a business plan. A business plan helps you to focus your idea, foresee any pitfalls and will be essential if you want to seek funding. For essential business advice visit www.businesslink.gov.uk; www.fsb.org.uk; www.start.biz/home.htm.

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Sort out your finances. Many businesses can be started on a small budget using savings or loans from friends or family.

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Build a support system. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs credit their mentors for getting them there.

Join a local business network or visit www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk to meet other business start-ups online.

Charles is an experienced careers coach and founder of Christian-based careers coaching service: Want2 get on? (www.want2geton.co.uk), which offers 1:1 careers counselling, workshops and seminars. He wrote The Christian Guide to Jobs and Careers (www.hope4acareer.com), is a busy dad of three young boys and husband to an overworked doctor.

He also leads the men’s ministry at Oasis Church in Colliers Wood.

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BUSINESS

STUART RIVERS

Making Your Mark

Mission impossible

© Yuri Arcurs | Dreamstime.com

ACADEMICS SUGGEST THAT ONLY AROUND 10% OF LEADERS REGULARLY SPEND TIME INNOVATING. Doing nothing is not an option in today’s economy. Every week we hear of more and more businesses and charities facing closure due to falling incomes and rising costs. And recession doesn’t just threaten the small business and charity. It affects small and large organisations without prejudice. So why do some do better than others?

While some organisations have suffered significant losses or even closure in the past four years, some have survived and still others have gone from strength to strength. That’s because their response was to do something different. Doing nothing is not a valid response when the pressure is on. You need to create space for creative thinking and make it a regular activity for you and your team.

Who are the innovators?

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One in ten innovate Your context might be very different, but there is still new ground to be explored in business innovation, regardless of your context. Take any sector that faces a mission impossible situation. Look at the retail sector and you can see that many have been outwitted by new online or significantly different offline business models. Even hybrid models such as click-and-collect offer added value to the customer that enables traditional businesses to develop an edge. However, despite the success stories, academics suggest that only around 10% of leaders regularly spend time innovating.

natural behaviour for thought leaders and an obsessive habit for entrepreneurs. They are having these conversations all the time, looking for ways to innovate that deliver more value to the business and its customers.

Where do I start?

There are many approaches to business model innovation. All can be useful, but each has its shortcomings. Helpful advice can be found in books such as Gamestorming (Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo), The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When The World is Changing (Saul Kaplan) and Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur). Interestingly, many are available in print and digital, from offline and online retailers, and some also have associated apps for your smartphone or tablet, just to prove that they are innovators!

This creative discipline is becoming increasingly important, especially if you want to thrive and survive the turmoil of recession.

Make space for the creative thinking that drives constant innovation and you may well be the next case study for the Harvard academics or for Sorted magazine!

Change the game!

It is said that if you want different results, you need to do something different. For some businesses, doing something different may simply mean employing another sales person or improving conversion rates. In a charity context it might mean building a larger supporter base so that your donation income can grow, or pursuing a social enterprise strategy. Whatever ‘different’ means in your context, it can also mean completely changing your business model to meet the discreet needs of your customer or supporter. So if you currently find yourself being pushed out of the game you’re playing, perhaps now is the time to change it.

Business model conversations are happening all the time. I have been involved in many of these conversations with colleagues inside and outside of work for some time now, and it is interesting to observe how some people only start thinking about this when their backs are against the wall. When there is pressure on income, most organisations start to have innovation conversations – whether they realise it or not. On the other hand, it is a

An entrepreneur with a background in marketing and business development, Stuart was appointed executive director of Bible Society in 2009. He previously spent 15 years at Ericsson, progressing to the role of commercial director in Sweden with responsibility for business transformation and innovation globally. Stuart is a former Salvation Army officer whose parents are commissioners; his great uncle was private secretary to General William Booth. He is married to Carey and has six children and two grandchildren.

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ore than ever, people in business appear to be faced with a ‘mission impossible’ situation: global recession, unstable incomes, competitive pressures and market trends that are impossible to keep up with. And it isn’t going to get easier any time soon. So what can you learn from businesses that appear to be doing quite well, thank you very much?

Hopefully quite a lot if you are prepared to think creatively. In fact, ‘thinking’ and ‘creating’ are the operative words here.

they have challenged the way they and their competitors deliver value. In doing so, they seek to create business models that are world class. “Apple did something far smarter than take a good technology and wrap it in a snazzy design. It took a good technology and wrapped it in a great business model” (Reinventing your Business Model: Harvard Business Review, 2008).

These companies are game changers! They recognise that business models are perishable.

“Success today does not guarantee success tomorrow” (The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention: Harvard Business Review, 2011).

So innovating should be a priority if you want to avoid being a Blockbuster; one business pundit coined the phrase that ‘Blockbuster got Netflixed’!

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BUSINESS

MATT BIRD

Relationology

Three key reasons to value your relationships

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s a boy I can remember my dad getting in from work and flopping on the sofa to watch TV. I was hardly ever allowed to bring a friend home to play and my parents rarely had friends over. I can remember the doorbell ringing and then my dad putting the TV on mute and making us hide in the kitchen to pretend no one was home. Only with hindsight do I realise that this behaviour wasn’t normal!

What else would a person do that has had this kind of experience than to create a new social science called Relationology concerning the art and science of relationships and how they determine significance and success? After all, relationships make the world go round and they are life-changing in three major ways:

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Relationships determine life happiness. Relationships are the most enjoyable and enriching gift for life. All the good things that have ever happened to me have happened thanks to a friend, whether it was my first job, my first public speech, my first book, my first blue chip client, my first £1 million raised for charity or meeting my wife.

All of these happened thanks to a friend.

When relationships go wrong they make us miserable. Imagine going to work having fallen out with your partner and how it impacts your ability to function. We only become fully human and achieve our potential when we are in relationship with other people.

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Relationships drive business success.

The true currency of business is relationship, not money, because people choose to do business with people they know and trust rather than people they don’t.

WE ONLY BECOME FULLY HUMAN AND ACHIEVE OUR POTENTIAL WHEN WE ARE IN RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER PEOPLE. If you were selecting a consultant or accountant from one of the ‘big four’ professional services firms, who would you choose? From the outside they all look pretty much the same, so most likely you would select the firm at which you knew and trusted one of the partners. So relationships offer the ultimate competitive advantage and differentiation. You would even be willing to pay a price premium because knowing and trusting your provider has commercial value!

Business success is due only in a small part to your technical knowledge and in a large part due to your skill in human engineering.

You might like to write a list or draw a picture of your most valued relationships and reflect for a moment on why those people matter to you and what impact they have had on your life… so far! Then take some time out to speak to them and say thank you for the huge impact they have had on your life.

Over many years I have observed the lives of people who achieve significance and success and they share a common hallmark: they are surrounded by a network of authentic, hightrust relationships. As I have interviewed them about their relationships I have never met anyone who can explain how they do what they do in their relationships. That is why I

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Relationships build a better world. If there were more global cross-cultural relationships there would be less famine, because people who know each other share.

There would be less corruption because people who know each other would challenge one another. There would be less war because people who know each other would talk rather than taking up arms. There would be less racism because people who know each other see the heart rather than the pigment of the other person’s skin.

An environment of consistent relationship and loving discipline is the best place to bring up children. I remember attending the launch of a report at the House of Commons about early childhood development. I read the report

but the only thing I remember were the brain scans of two different children at the age of six.

One child had been nurtured in a loving family relationship and the other had been brought up in a home environment that lacked caring relationships. The size of their brains was significantly different as a result.

have created Relationology so that those of us who are not as naturally good at relationships can learn the science and master the art over a lifetime.

In the next edition I will explore a number of powerful principles to guide you in your choice of relationships.

Matt Bird has created a new social science called Relationology, which explains the art and science of relationships and how they determine significance and success. He provides niche coaching, training, facilitation, speaking and consulting services. Visit www.relationology.co.uk for more information.

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ADVICE

SMART TALK

With Ben Sinclair, Jojo Meadows and James Galloway

OUR EXPERTS

What are you getting up to online?

Ben recently became a father and works as a GP with an interest in men’s health and as an emergency doctor. He also raises awareness through the Optimise Clinic, providing a bespoke mobile medical service for busy working people. (www.optimiseclinic.co.uk/ twitter@Menshealthtips).

JJ Have you considered that she

could be comfort eating due to stress? Maybe just be open and ask about her wellbeing; this could open up a host of responses.

I hear your aesthetic concerns, whether right or wrong. How about instead of worrying, channelling your concerns into encouragement?

Suggest going for romantic walks, bike rides or going to the gym together. Or maybe cook some healthy food and entice her this way? If she doesn’t respond well you may have to be sincere and tell her in a controlled and loving way.

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I just can’t stop watching porn.

At first I was ok with that (seeing as most men do it) but it’s starting to turn into an addiction. The worst thing is that I feel like it’s starting to affect my sex life and relationship with my wife.

What can I do to stop porn destroying my marriage?

Porn, is actually one of the biggest addictions, especially for men. I believe you should seek counsel from an organised and recognised, accredited service. Relate is well known, so maybe give them a call? There are software products that can help you stop, as whatever you watch will go to an accountability partner who will challenge you and help you through this. Church leaders should be understanding of this problem, so please talk to people you can trust.

But your wife, as your best friend, really needs and deserves the truth so please talk to her too.

JJ

Pastor James Galloway and wife Becky have been lead pastors at Breathe City Church (BCC) in Stoke on Trent since September 2007. Born and bred in Stoke and a season ticketholder at Stoke City, Pastor James loves his city with an unquenchable passion and believes that the Church should be at the very centre of the community and city.

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BS Men are turned on visually, so it’s no surprise that porn is a

problem for us in a society saturated with sexual images. Porn addiction is a worship problem: it takes your eyes off what God intended for you and turns your focus and eventually your beliefs about sex and relationships into an artificial, airbrushed film. To break the hold you need to choose accountability with Christian brothers and intimate honesty with your wife over a secret world of which only you partake, knowing that it internally destroys you. XXX Church (www.xxxchurch.com) can help.

The simplest answer I can give is to make a heart and mind decision to stop looking at porn.

Any addiction is overcome by an internal decision to bring change.

You become what you look at, which is why some marriages fail when we look elsewhere. Fantasy may seem better than reality but fantasy doesn't exist! Learn to enjoy being rather than desiring. It's a journey, and not necessarily an easy one, but you can do it. Don't feel under condemnation or guilt but live in the love and grace of God.

JG

I broke up with my girlfriend four months back and even though I don’t necessarily want to get back with her I can’t seem to get her out of my head!

I keep going on her Facebook profile, looking through her photos and reading what people write on her wall, and if there are blokes involved I click through to their profile and drive myself mad wondering if there’s something going on between them! I know I sound like a nutter or stalker or something. How do I move on?

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Jojo is a director of The Light Radio, works alongside youth with Urban Creation – her own project – and is involved with the skateboarding/inlining community. Having been through many life-changing experiences, including anorexia, teenage pregnancy, violent relationships and cancer cell changes, she now wants to help others who find themselves struggling in difficult circumstances.

My girlfriend has put on a lot of weight in the past year (about a stone and a half, or more). She seems perfectly happy and is still active, but is it something I need to mention to her as it’s been slow and steady and doesn’t look like stopping? I’m worried I’ll stop finding her attractive.

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ADVICE

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Tread carefully here, especially where conversations about weight and appearance are concerned. There is usually a good reason for weight gain; either related to medical, psychological or lifestyle issues. It’s best to let her take the lead once you have used a convenient opportunity to raise your concern for her, and look for positive changes you can both make to remain healthy and happy. With your support and love, your girlfriend will feel more able to take action whether that means a trip to the doctor, or making lifestyle and diet changes.

BS

Any relationship is built on honesty and trust. If you can't talk about this you won't be available to talk about deeper, more intimate subjects.

My suggestion is that the issue here is not the weight but the perception of your girlfriend.

How about loving her for who she is and in that love speaking openly and honestly about the things that concern you? How about you both embark on a lifestyle change? You'll feel better about yourselves and each other.

JJ Facebook is detrimental in this

through her photo album. Now add all your best friends watching you into the mix… do you still want to be in the picture? You lost the right to be part of her life when you broke up with her, so confess the jealousy and move on. The grass is always greener where you water it so leave the past behind and invest in your future.

area. It’s a social system that allows everything to be aired in public, which can do more harm than good. The question is, if you don’t want to get back with her, why are you following her every move? I know it’s hard to let someone go, but actually you are not helping yourself move on. The only way forward is to ‘unfriend’ her and the next step is self-discipline; rather than concentrating on her life, live your own! Stop wasting time on what was and start living in the now.

BS You need a safety mechanism

to halt your mutation into a webstalker before you lose control. If you find yourself browsing her profile, imagine yourself in her front room reading her diary and looking

JG

It is a known fact that there's no such thing as a void. What we have here is a simple case where the only thing you can think of is the memory. The simplest answer is to fill the void with something or someone else. Love God more, get a hobby. Stop looking at her Facebook page and who she's communicating with; it's nothing to do with you anymore. Focus on you and your future.

JG

CONTACT US: Got a problem and need an answer?

Email: jo@sorted-magazine.com or write to: Smart Talk, Sorted Magazine, PO Box 3070, Littlehampton, West Sussex BN17 6WX

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ADVICE

JONATHAN SHERWIN

Big Questions

Hasn’t science disproved God?

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aeroplane technology my fascination with the complexity of aeroplanes grew and grew. I am in total awe of how advanced these modern vehicles are.

Men have sat in rooms and thought and schemed and sketched and calculated and come out with things like Concorde. It’s absolutely incredible. Aeroplane designers have my total respect. Aeroplane economysection planners on the other hand … I digress.

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As with my marvels at aeroplane technology, I am profoundly in awe and wowed by scientific discoveries. As I write, NASA’s Martian rover, aptly named ‘Curiosity’, is scrambling around the red planet at the beginning of its two-year mission to see whether conditions were ever suitable for life.

It’s utterly fascinating.

Jonathan lives in Oxford where he runs Latimers, a place for people to challenge and investigate the Christian faith. He graduated from the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and now works as an itinerant evangelist, which involves co-leading CVM’s Demolition Squad. Join the conversation online: www.jonathansherwin.net.

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adies and Gentleman, the captain has just switched on the seatbelt sign in anticipation of upcoming moderate turbulence…” This is a string of words that is never followed by a cheery, “enjoy it!”

When the bumps start I instinctively look out the window, just to make sure the wings are still there. I’m suddenly rudely aware of the extent to which I am not in control.

Additionally, the thought occurs to me that if aeroplane disasters are simply statistics then every flight is a reduction in my odds.

So just how dangerous is turbulence? To answer that question, I turned to that master of knowledge, the Discovery Channel. Three words: aeroplane disaster documentaries. I was hooked. Human error, mechanical failure, unpredictable weather – I soaked it all in.

You may think it an odd way to deal with undesirable, high-altitude stress. Maybe so.

My rationale was that the more I understood the more I would feel OK (as if my knowing that human error was the number one cause of aeroplane crashes was going to help me when I was strapped in seat 49J with as much command over the elements as an Englishman with his BBQ hoping for that “perfect summer evening”).

My obsession with these re-enacted disasters did, however, bring some consolation. Through these dramas I learnt that aeroplane crashes are taken very seriously. They are investigated at great length and the knowledge gained from the studies is used to make future flights safer.

As I learnt about the resulting developments in

SCIENCE DESCRIBES THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. IT UNRAVELS MYSTERIES THAT STUN US WITH THEIR COMPLEXITY AND BEAUTY.

Science describes the world we live in. It unravels mysteries that stun us with their complexity and beauty. Some have said that with all of our acquired collective scientific understanding there is no need today for God to explain things. We can comprehend our world now in ways we couldn’t possibly fathom a century ago and therefore science and knowledge have replaced faith and superstition.

But science is what science is: a description of the way things are. Science relates theories and laws and provides a deeper understanding of what is physically there. Science enhances my understanding of the greatness of the makeup of the world, but to conflate my knowledge of the way things work with the question of the existence of God – who explains why things exist – is to make a serious category mistake.

Being in increasing wonder at the way it all works only serves to enhance my utter awe of God. Writing in The Times, John Lennox, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, put it this way: “The more Newton understood of the mathematical structure of the universe, the more he admired the creative genius of God, not the less.”

Science is the poetry we use to articulate the genius of God expressed in the creation of the universe. It is a language to explain what exists, not an explanation of why it exists.

In the same way that understanding how a well-designed plane keeps me safe at 36,000 feet goes no way to understanding what I’m doing in the plane in the first place.

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OPINION

JON COBB

Money

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Painting by numbers

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women and children. Bankers, you have blood on your hands.

I guess I’m still smarting. My rhetoric is heartfelt but clumsy. It says in the Bible that: “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Psalm 24). I just wonder if he’s happy about the way we are stewarding it.

Jon Cobb runs financial advisory business Trinity Wealth Management and runs the men’s ministry at Stopsley Baptist Church in Luton. A keen runner, ex-white-collar boxer and passionate Portsmouth football supporter, Jon has a heart to see Christian men grow to become the men God created them to be. He is available to speak at your church and men’s group (Jon.Cobb@twm.uk.com).

PAINTINGS ARE SOLD FOR SUMS EQUAL TO THOSE FETCHED BY MEDIUM-SIZED COMPANIES! I’m involved in a charity that works in many developing countries and I was in the Dominican Republic this summer working with the poor. The state of the global economy has badly affected tourism; I’ve never seen the tourist resorts so quiet. The knock-on effect works its way all the way to the bottom of the pile. Our visit to feed those that rummage in the rubbish dumps was met with three times as many people than normal, including

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do like a bit of culture. I’ve just been to the Royal Academy to view a private collection of impressionist paintings by the likes of Renoir and Monet. I ‘get’ them: the landscape looks like a landscape, the women with their coquettish looks are recognisable as women and a still life looks like a bowl of fruit.

I don’t ‘get’ contemporary art. Damien Hurst sounds like he should be in Blur and as for Tracey Emin…! The most damning piece of evidence against modern art is a work by French artist Henri Mattisse called “The Boat”, which was hung upside down for 47 days in the New York Museum of Modern Art before anyone noticed!

But how do you value a painting? It provides no income, has zero output and its contribution to the general economy is pretty negligible. However, paintings are sold for sums equal to those fetched by medium-sized companies! The current record is £160 million for Cezanne’s “The Card Player”, and even Renoir has one in the top ten, with “Dance at the Moulin de la Galette” being sold (posthumously) for a cool £86.4 million. It is a lovely painting, I do concede, but can any painting be worth that much?

What does it say about us as a civilisation, as this high-priced phenomenon seems relatively

recent. A Renoir I looked at yesterday was purchased in 1951 for $25,000 and “Moss Roses in a Vase” by Manet was bought in 1924 for $5,000, which would have been equivalent to $63,800 in 2010. These are still pretty big numbers to the likes of you and me, but they seem far more reasonable than the excesses that have crept into the spending habits of the rich.

Of course a more common example of overinflated prices can be found closer to home in the price tags of Premiership footballers. As a Pompey fan, it still rankles with me that so much money was paid in the pursuit of success when there wasn’t the remotest chance of it being recuperated, and we are still living with those consequences; having started life in the third tier with a player still on £36,000 a week.

(He’s gone now, thankfully!)

My guess is that many of us don’t earn that in a year! I shudder to think what some of our household names are earning per week. I acknowledge that some are very generous and set up charitable causes to which they personally contribute. But it does seem a crazy old world where art, acting, pop and sport can earn you far more than medical or educational vocations.

Perhaps the ultimate value given to ‘worthlessness’ is investment banking. While the traditional role of the banks (lending money to householders and business, and thus oiling the wheels of the economy) has decreased, the prevalent betting through derivatives for short-term gain and big bonuses has made some very rich and the majority very poor. Forgive me, but something isn’t right here.

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OPINION

RICHARD HARDY

Family

When ‘your’ home is no longer ‘their’ home!

KIDS GROW UP AND THEY LEAVE HOME, AND SOONER OR LATER THEY SET UP HOME ELSEWHERE. You see the truth is that she has left home, and while she may visit, she won’t be moving back either temporarily or permanently out of choice. I realise that many do move back with their parents after university because they have to. I do wonder, however, how many actually want to!

As I listened to her talk about her house and how much she preferred where she lived to where we live it took me back. Back to when I left home and my parents said, on more than one occasion, how bereft and empty they felt.

At the time I thought they were being ridiculous. Now the shoe is on the other foot I 66

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very year I am struck by one small phrase from the Christmas story: “There was no room for them at the inn” (Luke 2:7). It always connects in my head with Jesus’ own assessment of his lifelong situation: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).

Before you start thinking that this is going to be about homelessness – it could be, but it isn’t!

As a family, we are going through the throws of what has become known as empty nesting.

Our kids are on the way out after 20 plus years.

Our home – my wife’s and mine – is becoming just that: ours.

My daughter came back from university recently. It wasn’t that she announced the fact that our home wasn’t her home anymore; nothing so crass! It was rather the way the general chatter went.

I had this growing sense that I was at the beginning of the end of another phase of my life, while she was at the end of the beginning of a new one in hers. For me it was sad, for her it was exciting. If I am honest it made me feel old and a bit abandoned!

feel foolish and a bit guilty.

Having had time to reflect I realise the reality of the situation.

First, it’s the way of things… Kids grow up and they leave home, and sooner or later they set up home elsewhere. Someone once said to me, if you want to keep them you have to let them go. You do you know.

Second, I’m getting older… There’s nothing I can do about it! No amount of Polyfilla or plastic surgery is going to hold back time.

However, just because this is a fact of chronology doesn’t mean I have to let myself go to seed.

There are always new things to learn, new places to see, new experiences to be had. I know that sounds a bit middle class, but it doesn’t have to cost much to make the most of the time between your children and grandchildren. It may be the only opportunity you do have. So I am determined that my wife and I are going to enjoy our newfound freedom. We aren’t going to wallow in self-pity or feel that life is over. We aren’t going to wait at home for their visits. In fact we aren’t going to view the situation negatively at all. We are going to get the most out of this next phase of life.

Third, it’s not all clear cut or plain sailing…

The truth is this shift is by degrees. My daughter has left home, but is not quite ready

to give up her bedroom. She has left home but she’ll be back for Christmas, expecting a stocking and looking forward to time with the wider family.

She said it herself recently: “There is a difference between moving place and leaving people. The place is not important, the people are. I have left the place but I will never leave the people; they are important to me.”

Now for me, as we walk through another Christmas, that is worth thinking about. It suggests something that for me at least lies at the heart of Christmas. Something we would do well to adopt as a principle in our lives.

Jesus left heaven and became homeless precisely because people were more important to him than place. He (and we) may move around but he (and we) carry the people we care about with us wherever we go, no matter how many miles come between us.

And of course there is always prayer, phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Skype, Four Square and so on to keep in touch!

Richard Hardy is a Baptist minister and director of the Entheos Trust, which encourages leaders and enables churches to engage with their communities. Richard has spoken on community engagement, marriage and parenting at many national conferences. He has also written extensively on community and family issues (www.theentheostrust.org).

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OPINION

SAM GIBB

Faith

The incredible sulk

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ou know the feeling only too well… your brow steadily crumples and your bottom lip starts to protrude, producing a pout that would make Mick Jagger proud. Before you know it your arms are folded and you are staring intensely at the blank wall.

Arsey Whinger (did I spell that right?) has made it an art form; he’s a master of the waving hands scene which ends with him slouched in a chair like a school boy who has been sent to the naughty step.

For most of us fellas, this has become a natural habit when things don’t go our way.

Gentlemen (and any ‘over-the-shoulderreading’ ladies), I present to you ‘the man mope’, where normally bright and eloquent husbands, brothers, boyfriends and mates decide instead to sit in silence, offering only monosyllabic grunts.

Having recently got engaged and started wedding planning, I have already been guilty of more than the occasional man mope. We haven’t even set a date and I’m already getting stroppy about wedding lists and the overabundance of bunting. And I can assure you it won’t be the last time I pull the silent but deadly.

It seems men and women just work differently. While offended women call their friends, their mothers, the milkman and old Mrs Ossett’s cat before posting it all over Facebook, we men prefer to stare at the wall. I mean, why waste time engaging in pointless arguments when we all know that the point is best made while staring into an empty mug.

As Ronan Keating tells us: “You say it best, when you say nothing at all.”

But although the man sulk may be remarkably effective with others, it doesn’t work so well with God; just ask Jonah! When we find our old friend the ‘whale rider’ in Jonah 4, he’s in Nineveh having just preached the sermon of his life, leading the whole city to repent of their sin and turn to God (think Billy Graham on speed).

So, what does he do? Throw a party? Write a worshipful poem? No, he sits under a tree and sulks. As a bloke, it seems I’m wired for selfpreservation. More often than not I look out for three people in my life: me, myself and I. You see, Jonah wasn’t bothered about the Ninevites, he just wanted God to realise how bad they

were. He believed God would be too nice. He was. Point proven… let the man mard begin.

The problem was that the God-agenda didn’t match the Jonah-agenda. And I’ll be honest, more often than not, the Sam-agenda doesn’t match the God-agenda either. When I sulk, I’m declaring that what I want is more important than what God wants; that I know better than Him; that I know this world better than its creator; that I know His people better than He does; that my blindly hatched together plan for this world is better than His before-time-even-began-master-plan. The so called ‘incredible sulk’ is beginning to look a little stupid now, isn’t it?

We don’t really know what happened to Jonah. When the book ends he is still in a strop. Yet the book of Jonah ends with a

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I HAVE ALREADY BEEN GUILTY OF MORE THAN THE OCCASIONAL MAN MOPE.

question. God asks Jonah: “Should I not be concerned about that great city?”

Fellas, this is the challenge for us, to live life with the ‘should I not be concerned?’ heart of God. So, my task these next two months: to get my heart more in line with His. Oh, and to stop feeding the incredible sulk. Unless he likes the taste of bunting, that is.

Sam Gibb is a twenty-something currently living in London and working at All Souls, Langham Place. His passion is to present the message and teachings of Jesus to men in a way that makes sense to them. He has written a series of Bible studies aimed at lads on topics such as comedy, war and sport. Sam’s heroes are the apostle Paul, Alan Shearer and Garfield, though not necessarily in that order. You can follow him on twitter at @samggibb.

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OPINION

LYNDON BOWRING

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Politics fastest-growing sex industry in any part of the UK and boasts a higher demand for prostitution than most other countries in Europe? This is despite the fact that, according to a 2007 Tearfund survey, Northern Ireland is the most “religious” part of the UK, with 45% regularly attending church.

Last year the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) identified 26 potential victims of human trafficking from a number of countries including Ghana, China, Slovakia and Zimbabwe. The PSNI estimates that there are around 90 brothels in operation there.

IN REALITY PROSTITUTION IS A BUSINESS THAT IS GROWING EVERYWHERE.

Northern Ireland takes the lead

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have written before in this column about the horrific nature of human trafficking, which brings women and girls from across the world into cities and towns all over Britain, mainly to work in the sex trade.

Almost all those recruited from within the UK have had a tough start: 70% spent time in ‘care’ during their growing up years and the same number were groomed into prostitution when they were still children. Around 45% experienced sexual abuse and 85% experienced physical abuse during childhood.

And an incredible 95% of women in street prostitution are addicted to Class A drugs.

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Private houses, nail bars and other premises are often used as a cover for what some describe as ‘the oldest profession in the world’.

But apart from a few individuals, prostitution is far from being a professional career choice.

Tragically, it is often abuse of the worst kind inflicted on women and children who have been deceived and coerced into a life that is marked by addiction, fear and violence.

I guess most of us are aware that this goes on in London’s Soho and the downtown areas of our other big city centres, but in reality prostitution is a business that is growing everywhere.

Did you know that Northern Ireland has the

However, the good news is that politicians, police officers and many others in the region are determined that this shameful situation should change. Over the last year or so, CARE has been working closely with Lord Morrow, who not only sits in the House of Lords but is also a Member of the Legislative Assembly in Stormont.

This has led to a bill being drafted and some serious consultations taking place. Lord Morrow’s Human Trafficking and Exploitation Bill is being supported by politicians from all parties. It would make paying for sex illegal in Northern Ireland, ensure that trafficking victims are not prosecuted unjustly and make provision for child victims to be properly supported and represented through any criminal, immigration and compensation procedures. Lord Morrow’s bill also proposes training for police and prosecutors in dealing with this issue.

Meanwhile, Lord McColl and others in Westminster, along with Rhoda Grant MSP in Edinburgh, are working to bring about similar changes across the rest of the UK. Together with Lord Morrow, they are planning strategically for the future.

So although Northern Ireland may currently have the dubious reputation of being one of the busiest pay-for-sex centres in the EU, let’s pray that this situation will be turned on its head. If successful, Lord Morrow’s bill will become an example across the UK and beyond of how a government can put its foot down and outlaw practices that bring misery and dishonour to everyone involved.

Lyndon Bowring was born in Wales and studied at the London Bible College. He is an associate minister at Kensington Temple, and has been executive chairman of CARE for over 25 years. His hobbies include watching rugby, exploring London’s restaurants and developing friendships. He lives in London with his wife Celia, and they have three children.

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OPINION

LEE AND BAZ

Cut to the Chase

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It’s Chriiiistmaaaas…

BY BAZ GASCOYNE

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o Harrods broke its own record this year, setting up its Christmas Grotto complete with Santa, elves and snow in July; opening its Christmas department a whopping 151 days before Christmas.

From this date, 8,000 square-feet on the second floor has been totally covered in trees, ribbons, baubles and gifts while Christmas music played in the background. The reason given for opening the Christmas department so early was increasing consumer demand from international tourists, and sales opportunities presented by the London Olympics.

AS SOON AS THE SHOPS STARTED PUTTING OUT THEIR CHRISTMAS STOCK AND THE TV ADVERTS BEGAN, A BLACK CLOUD WOULD DESCEND ON ME.

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For those who love Christmas I imagine you are already excited about the festive season and the various celebrations and parties you will be attending. For others, Christmas can be a time of dread because of the emotions it triggers as a result of past experiences.

I used to be in the latter category.

I used to HATE Christmas as a child, and as I entered adulthood. My childhood memories are of my mam working at the hospital, my stepdad sleeping off a hangover and me and my younger brother doing our own thing, mostly. Some years I would end up at my grandparents’ house, which still wasn’t very memorable.

The result was a lot of disappointment, insecurity and sadness; Christmas was never an enjoyable time or family occasion. I can remember as an adult spending some Christmases by myself as I found it too emotionally painful to be with people.

As soon as the shops started putting out their Christmas stock and the TV adverts began, a black cloud would descend on me and I began to dread the Christmas holidays and especially Christmas Day. This continued into my 20s and 30s. Fortunately, two close friends began inviting me to their house on

Christmas Day to celebrate with their relatives and neighbours. Even though at times I felt uncomfortable, it helped me to see what Christmas could be like.

Likewise, before and after we got married, Linda invited me to celebrate with her family. Again I struggled and at times I needed to go out for a walk as I felt claustrophobic.

I remember one Boxing Day, 16 members of the family were round. This did my head in. Not because of anything they did, but just because it highlighted what I had missed. I know it can’t have been easy for them, either, but they were very gracious and loving towards me during these times. I am really grateful.

I persevered in trying to work on how I felt and Linda has helped me immensely, to the point where I really enjoy Christmas now.

If the thought of Christmas is making you feel angry, frustrated, sad or just wanting to hide, I would like to encourage you to embrace these emotions and to make a conscious decision this year to begin to break the pattern. Please don’t isolate yourself – tell someone what this time of year does to you and why.

For those of you who are reading this article and can’t relate to it, I am glad. Please also think of some of your friends, work colleagues and neighbours who may be in the same boat as I was. Invite them for lunch this Christmas, be relaxed about what they can cope with, and be part of the healing process in their lives: just like my friends Carol and Ann and their family, and later Linda and hers.

Christmas doesn’t have to be hell for people. Christmas is about God in Heaven coming to earth wrapped up in human flesh in the person of Jesus. He did this because of his immense love. Why not bring some heaven to someone this Christmas?

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a fantastic 2013.

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SPORT

SPORT Sorted. Nov/Dec 2012

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SPORT

BY STUART WEIR

IN THE “I PRIMUS OF LIFE Some Premier League players are millionaire superstars in their teens.

Others struggle to the summit the hard way. Linvoy Primus is firmly in the second category.

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t was a long-served apprenticeship to get to the top level,” he tells Sorted. “At 27 or 28 I was not sure I would ever have the opportunity to play in the Premiership. My confidence in my own ability, seeing what it would take to be a premiership defender, wasn’t great. I did not think I had enough of those qualities.

“I reflect that back to being rejected at Charlton at 20, and other things earlier in my career limited my belief in how I could play. So to make my Premier League debut at 30 was quite a challenge. I had served a bit of an apprenticeship, but when I got there I definitely grabbed my opportunity with both hands.”

Even when Linvoy signed for Portsmouth, it was no easy ride. His time at Pompey could easily have ended before he made his mark in the Premiership. He explains: “At the start of the promotion season, I was told by manager Harry Redknapp that I would not be part of his plans and if I could find a club to go to, he would not stand in my way.

“The season hadn’t started and I was left wondering where my future was going to lie. I remember my agent calling me and saying: ‘If they can get £50,000 for you, you can go.’ I was thinking ‘£50,000? At one time I was worth £400,000!’ I felt I had been let down by Harry; not given a chance with new signings coming in left, right and centre. I was very angry.”

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SPORT Linvoy had gone to church as a kid but then football took over. He was playing every Sunday so that was the end of his church experience. But in his mid-twenties, he found himself facing questions about life.

“I had all the things the world says make you happy,” he recalls. “I was doing things I set out to do from a very young age, but I was still empty. And my wife was going through a difficult period with depression.”

To Linvoy’s surprise, his wife Tricia decided she wanted to go to church because the depression was getting too much. He remembers being invited to church by friends who were Christians and explained to him what that meant. Linvoy could see his wife’s need but equally felt that church was “not a place [he] wanted to be” because of earlier experiences. “All those negative feelings about my previous experience of church came rushing back,” he says.

But church wasn’t what Linvoy was expecting: “This church bore no resemblance to the one I had known as a child. By the end of the first service we attended I knew that it felt right, that this was the real thing, and I was so pleased when Tricia felt the same. Even during the sermon she had felt as if the minister was speaking personally to her.

“IF THEY CAN GET £50,000 FOR YOU,YOU CAN GO.’ I WAS THINKING ‘£50,000?

AT ONE TIME I WAS WORTH £400,000!”

“I told my teammate Darren Moore of our experience and he spoke to me about his personal experience of Jesus in his life for over an hour.

“When he talked about praying the prayer of salvation, I liked the sound of that. I said I would pray the prayer if my wife did, so I said: ‘Trish why don’t you pray this prayer with me?’ She said: ‘I already have.’

“I took a double look. She said she had been given the booklet Why Jesus? to read and at the back there was this prayer. I asked how she felt. She went through it and said that something had lifted off her and she felt the best she had in years. I said: ‘That is enough for me.’

“I prayed the prayer but nothing happened, and I was expecting the roof of my house to lift off; God’s hand to appear or something dramatic, but nothing did.

Nothing did. For six weeks I was still questioning whether I was a Christian or not. There was nothing I could sense, and when you are in sport you live on your emotions. I was expecting an emotional acknowledgement

of what I had done and was not getting it.

“After eight weeks something miraculous happened.

I was having a problem with my knee prayed for and nothing happened. I said to a friend: ‘If my knee gets prayed for and is healed and I get to speak in this tongue you talk about, I’ll believe I am a Christian.’ He prayed and nothing happened.

Then two weeks later – eight weeks after I had prayed the prayer of salvation – I meet up with Mick Mellows, assistant chaplain at Portsmouth, to do Bible Study with him. He prayed for my knee and I was instantly healed.

Instantly, God took me back to two weeks [before] when I said I would believe I was a Christian when my knee was healed and I spoke in tongues, and that was it.

“I just said: ‘God whatever you want me to do, I will do’, because I just knew He was there, He was real. And He showed me He was with me and would always protect me. And that is how it moved on.”

Slowly but surely, Linvoy gained Harry Redknapp’s confidence and went on to play 198 games for Portsmouth.

One of the highlights was the so-called ‘Great Escape f

Transformed

Linvoy Primus’s autobiography is entitled Transformed, a reference to how Jesus Christ transformed his life. His greatest passion now is sharing the good news of Jesus with others.

He says: “Over ten years ago, an encounter with God changed my life forever. I believe He’ll do the same for you. I consider it a privilege and a blessing to have the opportunity to share the truth of God’s life-changing power and grace with you.

“I believe the Bible is the written and inspired Word of God. My mission is to invoke change in the lives of people across the globe. My desire and vision is for all to hear the Word and gain understanding of God’s love and promises, to encourage others to enjoy a relationship with the Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Colorsport / Joepepler

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SPORT season’, when Pompey avoided relegation against all the odds, winning seven of their last ten games.

Linvoy sees God’s hand in that: “All the time my faith was growing and I refused to say that we would be relegated. The scripture I held on to was ‘Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it’ [Mark 11:24].

So much of my life had been lived in fear, but this gave me such confidence and we stayed up. It was amazing! I just saw God’s hand over me. It was a chance for me to witness and believe God was in those circumstances.”

Portsmouth won the FA Cup in 2008, but sadly it came a year too late for Linvoy. He was injured and was hoping to be back by the middle of the season, but a further operation put paid to the season. Nonetheless, he was determined to have a great day.

Kicking off the latest football collectors’ range

“I GOT TO HOLD THE CUP AND EVERYONE SAYS I GOT THE LOUDEST CHEER.” “I was able to enjoy that cup final like no other player.

I was relaxed and saw everything that was going on, took everything in. One of the highlights was seeing how many fans were coming to the game as we were on the coach travelling… a sea of blue and white. Other players were so focused on the game they were unable to take it in. After we won it I got to hold the cup and everyone says I got the loudest cheer. I was an FA Cup winner.”

In 2009, Linvoy’s career as a player came to an end, after he had played 486 games for League clubs. He continued to work for Portsmouth FC for a period, but the club’s financial crisis ended that. As well as his exploits on the field, Linvoy will be remembered at Pompey for the prayer group he ran in the laundry room on match days – the only quiet room they could find!

He is also involved with Christian charity Faith and Football, supporting local coaching and playing schemes in more deprived areas of the community. He once helped raise £100,000 for charitable causes by walking the length of the Great Wall of China. Linvoy always gave 100% on the field and now gives the same commitment to the causes he is passionate about.

Linvoy is available for bookings and can be contacted via The Lighthouse Agency. Call 01371 874544 or visit www.lighthouseagency.co.uk to find out more.

Stuart Weir is passionate about Jesus Christ and about sport, and spends his life trying to help people see the connection. He has written several books on Christianity and sport and worked as a writer at the 2008 Olympics, the 2009 World Athletics Championships and spent a month in South Africa watching and writing about the World Cup. Married to Lynne with two grown up children he is a member of Kidlington Baptist Church and Frilford Heath Golf Club.

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The Character Building Sports Stars line is perfect for kids and avid footie collectors alike. It’s a new ‘football construction’ range of toys depicting the best players in the Premier League.

There are plenty of famous faces from the biggest clubs including Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United and Chelsea. Look out for mini versions of Gerrard, Bale, Rooney, Van Persie and Torres.

Each figure’s head is 3D and digitally sculpted to ensure they match their real-life counterparts. They come in five pieces and it’s within the rules of this game to swap the best headers with the legs of the best tacklers for complete top-to-toe action!

You can replay great match moments and pretend it didn’t all go wrong; or play along with your own fantasy football team.

Fans can also get their head in the game with Sports Stars Play Sets. The Pitch and Play Set lets you pass, dribble and shoot by flicking your players across the pitch for the ultimate game of fantasy table-top football.

Alternatively, you can sharpen up your penalty skills with the Spot Kick Set, complete with outfield and goalkeeper figures. There’s even a Dug Out Set so that you can make your pitch even more authentic with advertising billboards!

This new collection is set to rival stickers as the must-have football collectable.

Create your own replays and penalty shootouts, guaranteeing that your team always comes out on top.

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Dan Rowley/Colorsport

SPORT

It’s all

getting a bit

Messi at Icons

Following such an amazing summer of sport, it’s no surprise that more Brits are looking up to sportspeople such as Mo Farah, Bradley Wiggins and Jess Ennis. But sports memorabilia specialist Icons.com claims demand for Lionel Messi goods continues to outshine all the other great names in sport.

BY JOY TIBBS

I

cons.com chairman Edward Freedman says this is because the Barcelona striker offers the full package. “It’s a combination of everything, his success, the way he plays the game and his humility. He transcends general football rivalry.

If you have a Messi signed shirt on your wall, noone is going to argue about whether he’s any good or not,” he tells Sorted.

“He outsells the rest of the field by a ratio of four-to-one; in the UK, Spain, the US, the Middle East and the Far East, and is just as popular with men and women.”

The company stocks ten Messi products, including a signed and framed Barcelona 2011-12 home shirt; a dualsigned Barcelona 2011-12 home shirt with Andrés Iniesta, a signed adidas boot and a selection of signed photographs of the great man in action.

Unsurprisingly, Maradona and Pelé are among the alltime favourites for memorabilia collectors. “Their exploits and achievements are legendary and their place in history assured,” Edward says.

But having said that, there’s always someone new waiting in the wings as the next best thing. “We did a signing with Leo Messi when he was 18 and had just broken into the Barca first team and we did a signing with Ronaldo when he had just moved to Manchester United, so we are decent talent spotters.

“We think Neymar will be the next big thing. He plays in

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a flamboyant Brazilian way, will come to Europe soon and will end up being the poster boy for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil,” the company’s chairman speculates.

And his opinion counts. In the late 1980s, Edward was managing director of Tottenham Hotspur. He then moved to Manchester United and became managing director of the club’s merchandising from 1992 onwards.

Over the next six years, he transformed the commercial side of the club’s operation and helped build Manchester United into one of the biggest brands in world football. He was also a key player in the formation of the Premier League.

“EVERYONE HAS HEROES, AND ICONS ALLOWS FANS TO GET THAT LITTLE BIT CLOSER TO THEM.” Icons.com was original conceived as a platform for football players to speak directly to their fans through their own websites. It was a supporters’ network with a shop attached. Then about six years ago the company refocused to just selling signed football memorabilia and, according to Edward, it has never looked back.

We asked him why he thinks it is so important for people to have sporting heroes, and to collect items they have signed or once owned.

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SPORT “Look at what has happened this summer in terms of sporting superstars, everyone has heroes, and Icons allows fans to get that little bit closer to them,” he replies.

“It’s been an amazing summer of sport for some of the stars we have on the site: Andres Iniesta and Andrea Pirlo in the Euros; Andy Murray at Wimbledon; Jess Ennis and Chris Hoy at the Olympics; and Bradley Wiggins in the Tour de France. Stellar names who have all written their names in history now.”

Signed, sealed and delivered But for those of us who want to buy memorabilia, couldn’t we just head to eBay or one of the many other sites that sells these goods?

Edward explains: “It’s all about trust in this field. We say we’re ‘signed by the world’s best’ for a reason; we’re trusted by the players themselves, by the world’s best brands and organisations and ultimately by our customers.

“We’re sold in Harrods, for instance, and we’ve been awarded the first ever UEFA Champions League official signed merchandise licence to go with the first ever FIFA World Cup license we were given in 2010.

“Sales have increased year on year, as have our satisfaction scores from our customer surveys. Why take the chance on eBay when there’s a store endorsed by UEFA selling 100% authentic items next door?”

At each signing event, photographs are taken to document the signature and Icons creates a Certificate of Authenticity (COA) for each piece, which includes the date and venue, a picture of the product and the signing image. Each product carries a uniquely coded hologram, with an identical version being added to the COA, which is signed by the company’s managing director.

Going forward, Icons.com hopes to capture as much attention for its other sporting memorabilia as it does for its football-related merchandise.

Lionel Messi and Edward Freedman

“We’re hoping to move from being the world’s best signed football memorabilia company to being just as good for all the other popular sports. We’re adding US sport stars and a tennis range to our website this autumn and we also have the official signed Olympic range listed now too,” Edward concludes.

We asked Edward for his top three picks for the festive season. He says: “We would have to say a Leo Messi signed Barcelona shirt is still top of most of people’s shopping lists.

“A Steven Gerrard signed, framed Liverpool Istanbul photo is a key part of our Champions League collection we’re launching this autumn and an Eric Cantona signed Manchester United shirt will always outsell any of the modern-day United players.”

And if football isn’t your thing or you know someone who is really into athletics, golf, cycling or any other sport, it’s worth checking out the latest items on the site.

Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like an exclusive piece of signed memorabilia.

Roy Beardsworth/Colorsport

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SPORT

TAKING IT ALL

Lee Martin

ON BOARD

BY JOJO MEADOWS

C.S. UK

Boardmasters 2012 is an exhilarating, extreme sports competition for surfers, skaters and BMXers. The competition, based at Fistal Beach in Newquay, is held annually and attracts thousands of avid supporters each time round.

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I

t is an extremely well organised festival, featuring many different competitions and competitors of all levels. There is an electric energy that buzzes through the event.

Competitors warm up in preparation to potentially take a new title and in the background, comperes discuss who their odds are on while staff members dutifully graft to keep this incredible event running.

Riding the waves The initial part of the week is solely devoted to the surfing competition, where 144 candidates represent their respective countries.

Adrenaline levels run high, and even the normally chilled out, laidback surfers take time to meditate or undertake a strenuous workout to ensure that the surfing title they are after is achieved.

Surfing action was tough this year for the organisers, with the competition being condensed into four days and because the swell forecast at the back end of the week was not good.

The battle for first prize (and $25,000) in the men’s event was always going to be a challenging competition and the winner, 22year-old Charles Martin (Guadeloupe), won in a dynamic way as he quietly grafted his way through the earlier rounds of the event to steamroll his way to the final. He took out hot favourite and in-form surfer Felipe Toledo (Brazil) in the semis to eventually come from behind in the final with a combination of backhand snaps to earn 8.5 out of 10 and grasp the 2012 Relentless Energy Drink Boardmasters in association with Vans title.

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6 STAR MEN’S SURFING SERIES Place Name Nationality Points 1st Charles Martin GLP 15.67 2nd Romain Cloitre FRA 12.60

Sammi Gummer

SPORT

Charles, who had travelled all the way from Guadalupe to win his first W QS surfing event, was finally crowned, and he was extremely pleased to take home the trophy and prize money.

WOMEN’S 3 STAR LONGBOARDING SERIES Place Name 1st Miku Uemura 2nd Alice Melissa Limoig 3rd Atlanta Nascimento 4th Emma Neuschwanger

Nationality Points HAW 12.57 REU 11.66 BRA

9.76

Facing the music

REU

5.70

Once the surfing competition was over, the party started. Watergate Music Festival welcomed lyrical genius Ed Sheeran, who wooed the audience with his charisma. He encouraged the audience to sing along, created tight harmonies and brought a sense of unity to the whole place.

Dizzy Rascal also made an appearance and managed to totally captivate his audience!

Dancing was an absolute must during Dizzy’s set and the urban mass seemed to move as one, with no-one standing still. There was a buzzing, energetic vibe that responded to Dizzy’s animated and vivacious performance.

Hawaii’s Miku Uemura (28) won the Davidoff Cool Water Longboard Girls Pro in stylish fashion, leading from start to finish and never looking in doubt to claim the 2012 title.

Combining nose rides, rail turns and floaters to rack up two solid scores in the six-point range, Uemura held on during the 30-minute final to the cheers of the large and appreciative crowd lining the beach.

“It has been unbelievable, I am really happy,” she said. “I had been looking at the scores from the first day and I knew that Alice [Limoigne] and Atlanta [Nacimento] were getting higher scores than I was and they were very consistent too. I had that in mind and I wanted to make sure I got a high score in the first five or ten minutes and it worked out for me.”

The longer the better

The atmosphere with the skaters was entirely different from that of the surfing. These guys are determined, feisty and on a mission!

The skate park street set is built to a high spec, with part of the ramps built in the shapes of waves; a very quirky and effective finishing touch.

The judges were on the back foot from the word go due to the immense and vast amount of talent that arrived at Boardmasters 2012.

VANS SUMMER SESSIONS MINI RAMP: SKATE Cash Purse £400 £300 £400 £600 £1000 £500 £400 £300 £600 £500

Name Dean Green Smith Frank Faria Cody Lockwood Josh 'Manhead' Young Danny Carlson Sam Pulley Greg Nowick Mason Merlino Kevin Kowalski Andy Scott

Competition Best Line/Combination Best technical rider Highest air Gnarliest trick Best Overall Most Original Best switch trick Longest Lipslide Best Style Best Attitude

Alternative name The Line Executor The Surgeon The Flying Man The Punisher The Tsunami The Air Freshener The Toes Mixer The Eazy Rider The Smooth Operator The Cruiser Gentleman C.S. UK

The final stage of the men’s longboarding (for boards of over nine foot) saw local hero Ben ‘Skindog’ Skinner pitted against French heavyweights Remi Arauzo and the brothers Delpero: Antoine and Remi. It was a hardfought heat (“heavy” according to Antoine), and the four longboard specialists were hard to pick apart. It wasn’t uncommon to see four sets of feet on boards simultaneously, much to the delight of the thousands of onlookers.

The sound level at the water’s edge piqued as fans cheered Skindog on. The sight of the classic, “stiff as a board” noseride brought the house down as a stoked Skinner toyed with his chosen waves, almost riding far enough to drive his fins into the sand.

It was the older Delpero brother, Antoine, that turned up the heat. Opening with an 8.33 to get ahead of the field, Antoine managed a sturdy 17.26 over six waves. Champagne bubbles flowing as standard, the four finalists ascended the podium to share congratulations and thanks.

Time to get our skates on

Skaters from all over the UK came to represent their town or county, with determination, skill and fierce competition burning in their bellies!

The atmosphere is always so good at the skate park. Sweat, blood and some noble tricks were presented. There is always a danger of bone breakage within this extreme sport, but these guys are focused, committed, passionate and dedicated to their sport.

The next competition was down to the Vans Summer Sessions judges to select skaters who most deserved to win prize money for their style and performances. Charlie Birch, Rooney, Dennis Lynn, Harry Bray and Rob Smith all took £100 away from the event. f

MEN’S 3 STAR LONGBOARDING SERIES Place Name

Nationality

Points

1st 2nd 3rd 4th

FRA GBR FRA FRA

17.26 15.26 14.94 13.73

Antoine Delpero Ben Skinner Edouard Delpero Remi Arauzo

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SPORT

Sunday morning saw the start of the Boardmasters BMX finals. If the qualifiers were anything to go by, the onlookers were in for a real treat. Everyone was pumped up and ready to kick off by midday. Most of these competitors were ready to deliver and receive the King of the BMXers crown. Indeed, each and every one of the BMX riders rode well and put on a show that was not only crowd-worthy but entertaining too.

This year saw a mini ramp of different levels comprising an eight-foot, five-foot and fourfoot section, as well as channel gaps and other obstacles for the riders to face. This setup saw riders go big on the eight-foot and show off their technical skills on the lower ramps.

The highlights included Total BMX co-owner Mark Webb destroying the ramp and landing a 900 spin on the four-foot. Unfortunately, Mark got a puncture on a big alley-oop across the channel, but then, using a borrowed bike, he still managed to land a massive combo including a fakie front flip. The puncture clearly let Mark down on the scoreboard, but he still placed third overall.

Declan Brooks came in second and is definitely a young guy to look out for in the future. He is really good at going big and showed some big barspin moves as well as a range of consistent tricks.

EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THE BMX RIDERS RODE WELL AND PUT ON A SHOW THAT WAS NOT ONLY CROWDWORTHY BUT ENTERTAINING TOO. At the end of the day it was Monster Energy Drink’s Alex Coleborn who took the win and produced the goods. Alex did 900s, a hell of a lot of back-to-back technical tricks, and pulled a 540 barspin to foot jam from the five-foot to the eight-foot. This was a trick some of the other riders didn’t believe was possible!

C.S. UK

On yer bike

A safe haven

Reaching out The eight-strong Christian Surfers team got off to a strong start each day with morning prayer time, reflecting on the previous day’s activity and preparing for the busy breakfast station at 7am. An abundance of egg and bacon rolls was followed by copious amounts of tea and coffee for those that visited.

Once the rush of breakfast finished at 11.30am, the food station had to be washed down and ready for the lunch influx at 12pm!

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The lunch rush seemed more relaxed, as people who came along had more time in the afternoon to sit and chill as they ate.

Having a faith-based team at an extreme sports event always raises questions and creates conversations with the revellers.

This gave team members a great opportunity to share their faith in an honest and open way. Skater and surfer Bibles were offered at no cost, and copies had also been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

When Phil Williams, director of Christian Surfers UK, was asked about his time at Boardmasters 2012, he said: “One of my lasting moments of the year was coming back to the tent to see Jojo speaking to around 30 BMX riders about faith and some of the ideas that they had. It was great to see the team working well, getting to know all these people.”

For more details about Christian Surfers UK, visit www.christiansurfers.co.uk.

Lee Martin

Tucked away on a hill at the event was a safe place: a haven for athletes, workers and organisers to go. This tranquil spot was where Christian Surfers UK was based.

Christian Surfers UK has been involved with Boardmasters for more than ten years and the relationship between the two organisations has blossomed over the years. When it was first involved, Christian Surfers was on “Dawn Patrol”, a beach mission and litter-collection service. Since then, the organisation has been asked to set up its own hospitality tent to offer athletes a welcome break.

Its brightly coloured gazebo was situated on a cliff in North Fistral, and the wholesome, positive atmosphere within the base was truly enhanced and complemented by the panoramic, picturesque views. It provided a lookout point over Fistral Beach, from which point all the activity could be seen. Binoculars were on hand to watch surfers up close and personal!

The tent also catered for judges, officials and staff so that they too could escape the hustle and bustle of Boardmasters mania. As the surfing came to a close, athletes in the Christian Surfers area swapped with skateboarders and BMX in taking over the zone. It provided a fantastic opportunity for the team, including Sorted writer and Christian Skaters UK representative Jojo Meadows, to serve and share their faith.

Feedback from the organisers was very positive and there was a strong sense that God was working behind the scenes.

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SPORT

DAN WALKER

Focusing on Football A sensational summer of sport

By Joy Tibbs

A

s well as being the frontman for iconic Saturday show Football Focus, Dan Walker broadcasted from the Euros in Poland and Ukraine this summer as well as from the London Games, during which he presented fantastic daily roundup show Olympic Sportsday.

And when he wasn’t broadcasting about great sports events, he was watching them, with Wimbledon, the Paralympics and the Tour de France proving to be popular events for the young presenter. In fact, Dan believes it will be nigh on impossible to ever replicate such a fantastic summer of sport.

The BBC presenter found a few minutes to chat to Sorted on his travels and shared some of his many footballing insights.

The beautiful game

Colorsport / Andrew Cowie

whether they could do the treble and leap into the Championship at the end of the season, he simply says: “Who knows?!”

DAN ENCOURAGES FANS TO SUPPORT A HOME TEAM – EVEN IF IT IS ONLY AS A SECOND TEAM. While many opt to support the ‘big’ teams, often from afar, we discuss why it is important to follow a local football team, and local sports teams in general. Although there will always be glory hunters who like to

Colorsport / Matt Bunn

While many of the year’s sporting events are behind us, the football season is now in full swing, and Dan is glad to be back on the Football Focus sofa (as well as being able to see more of his family after eight weeks away over the summer). “I do love my football,” says Dan, “but I could have done with more than three days’ holiday!”

As usual, he is following his beloved team Crawley Town, who have enjoyed two straight promotions and, at the time of writing, are sixth in League One. They had lost to Portsmouth the evening before we spoke to Dan, but he recalls that when Portsmouth last won the FA Cup (back in 2008), Crawley were still playing in the Conference. “It’s nice to see them playing at a higher level and getting a few cheeky wins,” he says. When asked

follow the successful teams when they are at their peak and change allegiance when they drop down the ranks, Dan encourages fans to support a home team – even if it is only as a second team.

And if football’s not your thing, there are plenty of other sports you could go and see.

The more people who follow sports such as hockey and swimming for example, the more likely these sports are to attract sponsorship, which allows more people to get involved in the sport.

Extra time I’m talking to Dan as he drives to an appointment, and I feel as though we’re approaching full time. There’s just time to ask him what we can look forward to on Football Focus over the coming months. He’s keeping his cards very close to his chest (if you’ll excuse the pun) but he knows two things for sure: 1) It’ll be great and 2) It’ll be on Football Focus.

What more do you need? An expert prediction perhaps…? Well we’ve got one of those for you too. Dan claims he was the only person in the studio that predicted a Man City win last season, and seeing as it was the first prediction he’d ever got right, he’s sticking his neck out and going with the blue side of Manchester (is there any other side?) once again.

Christian presenter Dan Walker was told he would never make it in broadcasting because he won’t work Sundays. Despite that, he is now the face of iconic BBC show Football Focus.

Catch him on Football Focus every Saturday at 12.15 pm.

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HEALTH & FITNESS

FITNESS With Phil Baines

Stiff upper leg?

A

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run around, jump from great heights and do all kinds of madcap things without any thought about the impact on our joints. By the time we reach our 30s we are beginning to recognise the impact as our knees and hips begin to stiffen up. This is particularly likely if you played sport as a younger person.

MASSAGE GETS THE BLOOD FLOWING AND GETS RID OF ANY KNOTS. However, I believe there is a lot we can do to reduce the impact joint pain has on our lives.

Firstly, we can strengthen the muscles around our joints. For example, we can help our knees if we strengthen the quads (the group of muscles above the knee at the front) and the hamstrings (at the back of the leg above the knee) and even the calf muscles.

Our muscles, tendons and ligaments are all designed to work in conjunction with our joints. If we don’t keep them strong it should not come as a surprise when we experience joint problems.

Secondly, we need to be wise in the exercises we do. The problem with joint pain is that when we first start to do exercise it may be worse for a while. In fact, this is almost inevitable. The best exercises to strengthen the quads/hamstrings are squats, lunges and step-ups, but these are all likely to aggravate the joints to begin with. Therefore, it is important to be careful. If you feel severe pain or the pain doesn’t get easier, stop doing the exercise. If you feel discomfort or light pain it may be possible to push through.

Thirdly, choose exercise that does not have a great impact on the joints. Swimming or cycling, as we have said before, are very good.

If you’re like me and just love to run it will be necessary to build up the muscles alongside the running, as running is obviously high impact.

Don’t be discouraged if you feel stiffness or soreness; it will get easier.

Fourthly, stretch. I keep going on about stretching, but I just

cannot emphasise enough how important it is.

This is where the back comes in. If you have problems with your back the first port of call is the doctor.

Again, a lot of problems with the back can be alleviated by stretching carefully and doing pelvic work.

Remember, though, that this is for muscular problems. If the problem isn’t muscular, stretching could do more harm than good.

Finally, consider getting a massage, specifically a sports massage. I have found this invaluable at times. Find someone who comes recommended and book yourself in for a session. The massage gets the blood flowing and gets rid of any knots. Remember that stronger and healthier muscles mean healthier joints. So if you are suffering joint stiffness in the morning, don’t lie in bed. Get up, strengthen your muscles and feel the benefit.

Phil Baines is passionate about fitness and sport. He recently began a venture called Fit 4 The Challenge (www.f4tc.co.uk), which offers a range of physical challenges for diverse abilities. Phil organises each challenge and trains individuals and teams to complete it, either for charity or for personal achievement or both. Phil is married with two teenage sons.

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fter a good night’s sleep, do you go to get up and find your joints are stiff or even seized up? Is the same true after a long drive in the car?

As in every area of our lives, we all have strengths and we all have our weaknesses. This is obviously the same with sport and fitness.

However, there are certain areas of our bodies where we all seem to suffer to some extent; the most obvious being pain and stiffness in our joints and problems with our backs. The knees and hips are the main culprits here.

Most of these joint problems come from the wear and tear of everyday life. As children and teenagers we

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HEALTH & FITNESS

NUTRITION With Caroline Gerrie

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FOODS THAT CONTAIN THE SUPER SIX FLAVONOIDS Flavonols Onion Leeks Broccoli

Flavones Parsley Celery

Isoflavones Soya Soya milk Soya products

FLAVONOIDS HELP NEURONS TO GROW AND CONNECT AND HELP TO SUPPORT LONG-TERM MEMORY.

Flavanones Citrus fruits Tomatoes

Flavanols Green tea Red wine Chocolate

Anthocynidians

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Memory matters

W

e’ve all done it… walked into a room and forgotten what we went in there for or forgotten an important birthday.

Or maybe, like me, you’ve taken your children to the village shops, started to walk home then suddenly thought “didn’t I have a buggy with a third child in it?”, tearing back to the shop at a speed that would impress Mo Farah with two other children secured to your hands and flapping wildly like flags behind you, then finding said buggy with ‘blonde, curly-haired sticky thing’ still asleep inside the shop. Don’t gasp… it happens!

While we all have scatterbrain moments, it’s really important to ensure we look after our little grey cells and boost our memories as much as possible. Foods such as salmon and mackerel, which are rich in essential fatty acids, are a great way to feed those little grey phospholipid cells within the brain.

Dark leafy greens such as spinach and chard help to nourish our bodies with folic acid, which also

helps with memory function.

Foods containing vitamins B6, B12, vitamin C and E act together to improve synapse formation within the brain. Not only are vitamins essential in memory and brain health, but ‘flavonoids’ are also thought to help in promoting longterm memory. These compounds appear in many health-related issues and there is a lot of talk in the media and health magazines about flavonoids and antioxidants, which can be confusing. So what exactly are they?

Simply put, a flavonoid is a natural, plant-based compound that helps our bodies to fight inflammation. It can also function as an antioxidant. An antioxidant is a compound found naturally in many foods (although it can be supplemented if need be) that can protect our bodies’ cells from damage, rather like a shield.

A recent study published in Neurology looked at the functions of flavonoids, and suggested that flavonoids help neurons to grow and connect and help to support longterm memory. So to help boost our

With the Christmas season nearly upon us and in all the hurry and flurry of preparations, endless listmaking activities – not to mention the children’s activities and extra church services – eating smartly may just help us remember what Christmas is really all about. © Liv Friis-larsen | Dreamstime.com

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Red wine Berry fruits Plums

memory function, eating a flavonoid-rich diet that includes berries, green tea, turmeric and, yes, red wine may significantly cut the risk of developing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Flavanols have also been shown to reduce the build-up of a protein called amyloid-beta, which is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

Evidence for the positive effects of these simple plant chemicals has been overwhelming. Although not conclusive, research still points to the fact that consuming a plantbased diet, rich in flavonoids, can extend lifespan and certainly improve the quality of our lives by protecting the mind and body from degenerative diseases.

Caroline Gerrie is a registered nutritional therapist and runs a clinic in West Sussex. She is also a founder of Trade Aid International. In a world of pressure, both in the workplace and at home, Caroline has a passion to see people ‘fit for purpose’, not only spiritually but physically, too. Caroline is married to David and they have three children.

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HEALTH & FITNESS

LIFESTYLE DOC © Hxdbzxy | Dreamstime.com

With lifestyle expert Dr Chidi (MBBS, BSc)

Be a good sport!

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resounding YES! I believe that if we all work together it’s possible to simply make 2012 the start of something much, much bigger.

While I was trying to watch the Olympics from the US, (trying

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ow! What a wonderful year of sport Britain has had. The Olympic and Paralympic Games were a phenomenal success. Performances from David Weir, Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah and the rest of our phenomenal athletes were breathtaking.

Then there was Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour de France and Olympic gold and Andy Murray raising the roof at the Olympic final as well as winning his first Grand Slam at the US Open. There was even some positive news from British football (hard to believe I know) with Chelsea winning the Champions League final against the Germans, In Germany… ON PENALTIES! With such a positive sporting year, the question on many people’s lips is: what happens now? Is it possible to create a permanent and positive legacy after such a year of achievement?

I have to answer the latter with a

being the operative word as it was hard to find out any information about any athlete who is not from the US – God bless the BBC!), the thing that impressed me about the athletes was their different shapes and sizes. What’s impressive about that? Well it showed me that whatever shape we may be, there is a sport out there for all of us.

This means that young people, in

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HEALTH & FITNESS

Natural Hero keeps athletes in the running © Martinmark | Dreamstime.com

Natural Hero’s Hot Ginger Muscle Rub and Cool Peppermint Muscle Spritz support sports recovery without damaging the environment or overloading the skin with synthetic ingredients.

Although only launched in 2011, Natural Hero has already attracted an impressive following of high-profile sports personalities. Among the fans are Everest mountaineer Alan Hinkes and ironman triathlete David Deak.

David Deak says: “These products are simply superb! The warm buzz from the rub (or calming coolness from the spritz) goes deep into the skin and muscles. It activates beneficial circulation and recovery within the muscles.

“Among the different oils and rubs I have tried in the past, nothing compares to these; I really mean it. I truly feel that my muscles recover faster from hard training with the rub and spritz.”

Natural Hero is also a member of 1% For The Planet, a group of companies that contribute 1% of their revenue to non-profit environmental and sustainability organisations.

particular, can identify role models that look like them. This is exactly the encouragement they need to get involved with sport, and the evidence tells us that the sooner children get into sport, the more likely they are to stick with it. If they stick with sport, they’re more likely to lead healthy lives. Therefore, this can be the boost we need to prevent future generations from dying of strokes, heart attacks, cancer and many other lifestyle and obesityrelated illnesses at a young age.

GET INVOLVED IN A SPORT; ANY SPORT. And it’s not only the children who benefit. We can all take this opportunity to be inspired by what we’ve seen and to get involved in a sport; any sport. Start a 5-a-side football team, a running club, a walking club, anything!

If we do this, we know that our weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and stress levels will be reduced.

This will further reduce our risk of

getting diabetes, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s and other serious illnesses.

So if we all took a few positive steps from this great year of sport, we would not only save Britain billions of pounds in healthcare costs (which makes the £10 billion spent on the Olympics look like a good investment), but we would also save ourselves and our children a lot of future misery.

The old excuse of “I can’t find the time” is no excuse at all because when we get sick we have to make time for hospital appointments and surgery. It’s better to invest the time now and do something with friends that you can enjoy.

To turn ILLNESS into WELLNESS, replace the “I” with “WE”. Together, WE can make it happen.

Dr Chidi is president and founder of the British College of Preventative and Lifestyle Medicine, member and advisor to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, and has more than 15 years of experience as a national and international health and motivational speaker. Email him on drchidi@mac.com or follow him on Twitter (@drchidi247).

Company founder and director Louise Vincent says: “Natural Hero products offer a solution for hard-worked bodies that respect your fitness and the planet. We feel passionately that our enjoyment of sports and outdoor pursuits needn’t come with a detrimental environmental price tag, and by joining 1% For The Planet we wish to ensure we help make a dent in the damage we collectively cause on the natural world.

“Many of our customers are outdoors enthusiasts who ‘get’ the importance of respecting the very environment they enjoy.”

Hot Ginger Muscle Rub (RRP £9.99 for 100ml) helps ease fatigued muscles with its bioeffective blend of premium grade ginger root, rosemary, and sweet fennel essential oils. Cool Peppermint Muscle Spritz (RRP £11.99 for 100ml) creates an instant cooling sensation to help relieve the discomfort of stiff and aching muscles.

Both products are more than 98% natural; free from parabens, sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) and petrochemicals.

They also offer a pleasant, unisex fragrance rather than the potent, overwhelming scent caused by other, more synthetic, brands.

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ANDY KIND

Stand Up and Deliver

Not a sausage

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y wife and I had dinner in the restaurant of a popular hotel chain while on holiday last month. We’re classy like that.

The young lad who showed us to our table was new. This was obvious from the way he tried to secure a high-chair for a three-week-old baby, and also from the way he told us he was new.

“I’ll be serving you today, my name is…” at this moment he pointed to a badge on his shirt that read ‘If I don’t tell you about our breakfast, have one on us for free!’

“That’s a bit of a weird name,” I joked, like the joker that I am.

“Oh, whoops!” he chuckled, and then pointed to another badge that said ‘Richard’.

I didn’t give it much thought initially; after all, with a badge that says ‘If I don’t tell you about our breakfast, have one on us for free’ displayed on your shirt, you’re not going to forget to tell people about breakfast, are you… Richard?

And yet Richard was new. He brought our starters, and he said nothing about breakfast.

He brought our main courses, got them totally wrong, went back, dropped a plate of chicken satay skewers, came back with the right mains, and said nothing about the breakfast. He replenished our drinks, not once, not twice, but thrice, and said nothing about the breakfast.

We got to the end of dessert and asked for the bill, and still Richard had singularly failed to say anything about breakfast.

“I’m just gonna go for it,” I asserted to wifey.

“Thanks guys,” Richard said as he placed the small plate of change on our table.

“Richard?” I said, with heavy emphasis. I had meant to say his name in the way you might if you were playing hide and seek and you knew he was hiding behind the settee. Instead, I said it in the way you might if you’d just found

out he was the mastermind behind an evil scheme you’d been trying to crack for some time.

“Yes?” Richard responded. “…You failed to tell us about breakfast, and now we want a free one.”

Richard’s face dropped. We had him and he knew it.

“Right,” he gulped. “You’ll have to speak to my boss about that, then…”

“Great, I will,” I barked triumphantly, making for the bar.

“Please don’t!” Richard yelped, like a dog who had seen the interest rates on his personal ISA drop dramatically.

The colour had completely drained from Richard’s face as he continued…

“Please don’t say anything, sir. I’ve only been here a week and I’m already on a warning. This could mean the end for me.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more torn in my life. A complimentary fry-up was properly up for grabs, and yet it would mean the end of a short-lived career for the hapless Richard.

While pondering my recourse, a thought struck me: this badge he wore was totally misrepresentative of his situation.

What the badge really should have said was: ‘If I don’t tell you about our breakfast, I will be severely reprimanded and instantly fired from my job working here’. Maybe they just couldn’t find a badge big enough to fit all that on, or maybe they thought it was a little bit too thirdreichy to attract customers.

“We won’t say anything,” wifey insisted as Richard’s eyes filled with tears.

“Tell me more about this breakfast,” I demanded, like a total mard-arse.

“Well,” he spluttered, “It’s eggs – scrambled

or poached – bacon, sausages…”

“How many sausages?”

“Two sausages, tomato, mushrooms…”

At this point the bar manager strode over, alerted by Richard’s tears.

“What’s going on here?!”

Wifey and Richard both looked at me with deep, visceral pleading in their eyes.

“…YOU FAILED TO TELL US ABOUT BREAKFAST, AND NOW WE WANT A FREE ONE.” “Richard here was just telling us about your breakfast,” I said flatly.

“Well why are you crying, Richard?” asked his boss.

“Well… it’s just such a good deal. I always fill up.”

“Excellent,” erupted the bar manager, and off he went. Richard was safe.

As a treat for my honourable act, wifey treated me to the famous breakfast the following morning.

It was disgusting and a total waste of money.

They need to get some badges made up with that on.

Andy Kind has been a stand-up comedian since 2005.

Described by The Scotsman as ‘terrific’, and by The Guardian as ‘hilarious and wonderful’, Andy has featured on BBC1, ITV, Channel 4 and national radio. He lives in Manchester, and is also a published author, with his first book (Stand Up and Deliver) available from his website – andykind.co.uk.

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CARL BEECH

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The Last Word Let me explain. The car park was not only huge, it was mostly empty. In fact, there were about four spaces either side of me. That is some driving fail!

Anyway, I got out of the car to notice for the first time that the side of the car from the door to the wheel arch was all dented and scratched. The conversation went like this: Other driver: “I think it’ll polish out…”

Me: “Hmmm, I’m not so sure (face changes to a look of mild amusement and bewilderment).

It looks pretty dented, that’s going to need more than turtle wax. I’m really sorry but I think it needs to be properly repaired.”

“HERE ARE ALL MY CONTACT DETAILS. I’LL PAY UPFRONT FOR ANY REPAIR. I’M JUST SO SORRY IT’S HAPPENED.”

A crash course in honesty

O

n January 10, 1940, a German aircraft with an officer on board crash-landed in Belgium. This is nothing remarkable, really, apart from the fact that he happened to have on him the entire strategic plan for Germany’s attack on the West. In a catastrophic foul-up, he failed to burn the plans before he was captured.

Just think about it… The allies had in their possession the entire operational plan for the next phase of the war! And what did they do?

Nothing, nada, zilch, diddly squat!

Why? Because they thought that it was a bluff and a lie. Consequently, they didn’t alter their war plans at all and stuck to the original strategy of defending Belgium. Hitler, however, realising that his plans were possibly exposed, changed his ideas and attacked through France instead of Belgium as he had originally

intended. Consequently, the French became hosts to the Germans before they could say: “Mine’s a sauerkraut and chips please, Klaus”.

Now fast-forward 62 years to a car park in Chesterfield.

A few weeks ago I took one of my daughters to B&Q to pick up some stuff and to top up her collection of cacti. Spotting a cheeky Venus Flytrap we headed back to the car engrossed in conversation about how they work.

We got into the car, and in the absence of a passing blue bottle, we proceeded to try and get one of the “mouths” to close by tickling it with a piece of tissue paper. It was at that moment that someone knocked on the window of the car. I opened the window to the distressed-looking woman standing by the car and heard the words no-one wants to hear.

“I’ve just driven into the side of your car.”

My immediate reaction was to start laughing and say “How did you manage to do that?!”

Other driver: “Here are all my contact details.

I’ll pay upfront for any repair. I’m just so sorry it’s happened.”

Wow! Now that’s amazing. I’ve had my car driven into a few times over the years and that’s the first time I have EVER had someone leave me the details, let alone offer to pay immediately.

She was true to her word as well. I got a fixed quote that day and she paid it immediately. It wasn’t cheap either.

Honesty is such a powerful thing. I’ll tell you something though: right up until the point where I went to pick up my car, I still had this vague nagging doubt that maybe she hadn’t paid after all. I had to give myself a talking to for being so cynical.

Okay, so I’m not fighting a war and she wasn’t a German officer (so unlike the allies I had more reason to trust), but I do feel that there is a battle going on when it comes to our dealings with people.

Here are some questions to ponder on as you crack on with life over the next month or so: Do we believe the best?

Do we give the benefit of the doubt?

Do we take what people say at face value?

Are we prepared to keep doing that, even when we’ve been hurt or let down?

We’ll never know the answer to this, but I just wonder how much shorter the war might have been if Whitehall’s intelligence boys had taken stuff at face value back in 1940. I also wonder how much nicer the world would be if everyone was like the lady in the B&Q car park.

Carl is married with two daughters. He heads up Christian Vision for Men (CVM) and founded Codelife. You can follow him on Twitter @carl eech and Facebook.

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