Mainly for the collective sense of humour of its inhabitants. In days of yore, sure, you might go down the pub and trade insensitive jokes with your friends. You’d share that kind of humour in the privacy of your own lives where no-one who might get offended might hear. And the vast majority of people would candidly admit that they didn’t think that kind of humour was right or respectable even while they would quite happily join in with it with their mates. I am quite comfortable with that as a concept.

But ‘it’s not rape if…’ and Dead Baby jokes and racist humour and so on are utterly rife and exploding on the internet. And again I suppose in theory I don’t mind that so long as I’m not likely to come across it. By and large you just accept that there are some websites you’re just not going to find amusing. That’s fair enough. I’m not some kind of internet vigilante and I don’t want to be.

I don’t think photo groups on facebook are the place for that kind of thing, firstly. But again, accepted, not everything everyone says is ever going to be to my taste. But commenting after something that isn’t in any way witty or clever, but is just grim, and which has been followed by ‘I hope that doesn’t make anyone throw up’, by egging the commenter on and saying something like  ‘Are you new here ? I don’t think that’s going to make anyone throw up’ – this attitude that just being insensitive, gruesome and entirely intolerant without also being in the least bit witty is something to be defended and actually encouraged… I think that’s new. And I don’t think it’s healthy.

I don’t like that I now feel the need to point out that I’m not a total prude and it’s not like my sense of humour isn’t sometimes a bit rough and ready and that this isn’t just good-little-Christian-choirgirl-me having a bit of a rant. This is me a decent, mature human being who has been quite honestly appalled by what is deemed acceptable.

I guess it’s just that this kind of thing didn’t used to get written down, it wouldn’t reach such a wide audience, and to an extent I suppose that also means perhaps the jokes wouldn’t snowball to this level of hate-filled witless idiocy.

We did the usual – carol-singing, last-minute shopping, late-night decorating, surreally-early drinking, etc. My sister and I continued two rather more individual traditions of ours – silly knickers in lieu of stocking presents (we’re technically too old for stockings now, so instead we give each other the silliest, frilliest knickers we can find, and mum still gives us an orange, some chocolate and a book and things – thank you Mum ), and that I would forget to buy at least something – in this case, the knickers – and have to write her a grovelling IOU instead.

I found this year’s My Favourite Christmas Advert (a post I know you’ve all been waiting for on tenterhooks). Can’t seem to find it on Image Search but it’s a photo of Hugh Laurie looking edible, next to a large image of a men’s moisturiser, with the tagline, ‘Get yourself a new man this Christmas with new Vita Lift 5 from L’Oreal’ (or something). The bit I particularly like is the small print at the bottom: ‘Hugh Laurie is not a free gift with this purchase’. It made me laugh.

Weepie moment of the year (since normally my Christmas ad is a surefire winner for this slot too), thanks to L at Patchwork Dreams, is the Military Wives’ single. I can’t help it.

This year, resolutions. I don’t know what I normally write here. Presumably the usual earnest intentions about being happier and more organised and nicer and all the rest of it.

Bother all that. This year all I want is to get to the end of the year and know how to put together a whole roast dinner. I know it’s technically simple, but the act of timing everything right so you get a perfectly cooked joint, lovely roast potatoes, vegetables, gravy and all the other trimmings, all beautifully cooked and hot at roughly the same time – it’s basically pretty daunting, especially for someone who isn’t sure she can cook.

This is because I think making New Year’s resolutions is a bit artificial. Who, really, hasn’t? We would all love to get to the 31st of December 2012 and consider that we’ve grown as people and lost that half stone we wanted to shift that the start of the year and given 15% of our earnings to charity and actually kept up that gym membership, but life doesn’t happen that way and you know it. You make massive life changes when they become necessary and not because it’s a new year; and so if I’ve made resolutions at New Year’s at all these past few years, it’s essentially been a bit half-arsed. So I thought to myself, why not resolve to do something that doesn’t make me a better, thinner, healthier person? Why not simply resolve to do something I haven’t done before, just because I can? Far more exciting than not resolving to do anything, or rather, resolving to do nothing. Resolve to do something constructively fun.

Though I suggest you avoid any invitations I might make to dinner any time soon…

Christians on the internet. That’s what makes me sad. I shouldn’t read comment threads especially on things like, for example, this video, which is of a young man making a passionate defence of his loving and supportive upbringing in Iowa by his two mothers, simply making the point that the gender of your parents is not what matters. Very well done him, but it’s a shame that in the 21st century this is something that still needs saying.

Anyway, yes, Christians on the Internet. Presumably those same Christians hold those same views away from the internet as well. I don’t like to say that they’re wrong. I believe everyone has a right to the opinions they hold, but people get so angry in these kinds of arguments and then quote bits of the Bible, e.g. Corinthians and Leviticus, where homosexuality is clearly made out to be a sin. Then other people jump back in with ‘JUDGE NOT LEST YE BE JUDGED’ and, I’m sorry, but if you feel the need to put an argument or quotation in capitals, well, you’re probably going to lose your audience. Everyone has different views on all of these things and the problem with the Bible is that you can pull out quotations from all over the place to justify more or less any opinion under the sun.

You can also pull out quotations which are either completely irrelevant in the 21st century, or have as hard and fast laws things that no decent person would do these days, like keeping slaves or exchanging wives for material goods.

Of course I think the Bible is a very valuable text. A lot of wise people contributed to it and a lot of Godly people had a hand in it and I do believe a lot of it to be divinely inspired. I’m not a biblical scholar by any means – I haven’t even read the Bible all the way through once yet, so arguably I’m completely unqualified to jump in on any debate like this. But even the youngest books in the Bible are nearly two thousand years old. The old testament is even older. It was written for a different people in a different set of cultural conditions. Parts of it were very specifically addressed to very small groups of people with very specific concerns – for example, look at most of the letters of Paul. You cannot take a literal approach to the Bible. But you cannot choose on a whim which bits you like and which bits you don’t, either because you’re a massive hippy and think Jesus would probably encourage you to get stoned and have lots of sex with lots of people because he hung out with 12 guys and a prostitute and his first miracle was turning water into wine, or because you sit on the political right, think that turning your 5 talents into 10 is the best idea ever, believe that that line about camels passing through the eyes of needles and rich men getting into heaven is probably mistranslated and means almost entirely the opposite, and meanwhile that homosexuality is a sin which will get you cast down into hell.

The Bible says a lot of things. Some of those things almost directly contradict each other (see the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible for a list). Furthermore everyone coming to the Bible has their own opinions, feelings and thoughts, biases which they apply as they begin to read. There’s a whole wealth of meanings and layers and interpretations there and though I would say the Bible hugely informs my faith, so do a lot of other things. And I would never feel qualified to get into an argument about Christian morality or philosophy without a lot more thought or unless very obviously on the understanding that I am not qualified to comment in any way. So it makes me sad when people simply use the Bible as a sort of armoury of quotes to back up their opinions so they can say ‘Jesus would definitely agree with me’. It doesn’t work like that.

Still, it’s not as if the atheists are any better. If your argument consists of ‘WELL THE BIBLE SAYS WE SHOULD STONE ALL THE HOMOSEXUALS SO YOU CHRISTIANS ARE ALL IDIOTS’, you can quite frankly get off the internet now thank you.

I suppose what I mean is, if you’re going to argue a belief in any thing, you should know yourself why you hold that belief and you should have interrogated that belief a little bit more deeply than ‘Leviticus says we should stone all the gays so let’s do that’, or ‘Mary Magdelene was a prostitute, hooray’.

Furthermore, I mean, I’m sorry that some obviously very angry and emotional people somehow manage to consistently make Christians look a bit stupid. I feel like a bad person for questioning anyone’s intellect or how much they have really interrogated their faith, but I don’t believe that mine is a religion which is homophobic by necessity or nature (or indeed anything else, I’ve simply been using homosexuality as an example), and what really makes me sad is that there are as many intelligent, responsible, thoughtful and wise Christians out there as non-Christians, and those good people are so much less likely to be listened to because so often everyone assumes that they know what’s coming, and what’s coming won’t be wise or intelligent or liberal. That’s not necessarily the case, and I really wish that the dim and intolerant voices out there didn’t somehow often seem also to be the loudest.

If not, have a gander at urlesque’s 100 Most Iconic Viral Videos..?

I am considering all this. This is not to say that I have considered this, merely to say that I see now that all these are things I need to reconsider. Can you see how carefully I am trying to express all this? Whatever you may think, I am not always good with words, and if I’m still being clumsy I apologise.

The thing about knitting I find is that I don’t like to have more than one project on the go at once. However this does then mean that I’m halfway through one project when I decide what the next one will be, and then I am impatient to finish the one and move onto the next. I shall enjoy my next project – when that goes up, with any luck, you’ll recognise it, by the way – but I’m already thinking about the two projects that will follow it.

That said those are two very different projects. One is massive and lacy, the other is massive and very, very simple. So I may have to do those both simultaneously because otherwise I will get bored of lace work, or bored of dead simple, and either way I shall go slightly mad.

I’ve also taken a lot of photos recently. Some are people, so you don’t get to see those, I’m afraid, but some are plants and stuff and I’m quite pleased with those too. And I’ve discovered some things about my camera that I didn’t know before which if you ask me is quite exciting. Not that you get to see that yet because I haven’t done anything worth doing.

The main problem with this blogging lark is that I’m absolutely bloody hopeless at ever turning on my laptop at the moment. It’s all work and sleep I’m afraid…!

Although there’s a bit of me that wants to get all domestic-bliss-blogger on you and start taking photos of the things we’re making for dinner and post those every day. But I won’t because I’m 22 and that’s silly.

No, I have news. So this post is specifically for those of you who know me IRL or have read this for long enough to have built up some kind of semblance of a relationship with me. This makes me feel like a terrible blogger except, screw it, this blog is what I make of it and I choose to hardly ever post, come on here and witter frantically about someone most of you will never meet in the direction of a select few who possibly will, and then shamble away and not post until I have revision to do or a dreadful cold and still have nothing to say, then so be it.

His name, this news of mine, at least for the purposes of this blog, is S. I have just about stopped (sometimes) being surprised by how happy I am. And according to the prompting I got when I typed in my URL to get here just now on his computer, he’s already got this on his RSS feed. Hello .

I just went linkhopping, however, and found in various places some examples of really good writing – descriptive, witty, beautiful. Blogs that found the beautiful in the ordinary, the sad in the mundane, and even some that made real and enjoyable to me something that in real life I would never consider doing. I’m afraid I’m too old and tired now for all this incestuous, back-handedly self-aggrandising link-spewing, the better to get more hits. Obviously if I was going to pick up a thread or an argument from a blog, or draw heavily upon a piece of writing for inspiration, of course I’d link to it.

I remembered the pleasure of tasting words in my mouth and taking care to construct images carefully. I was going to talk about painting with words but it’s more than that. It’s more than just using words to reconstruct the world and convey it to others because there are so many dimensions to cover, all the ways in which we take information in, all the different ways we understand it – intellectually, emotionally, viscerally – and the weight we each personally put on all of those things. Writing done well is to play with perception in a way no other medium does, which is not to say that making art or music are any less multifaceted or complex, merely that these are different approaches to the same problem. And somehow, despite all the novels I read and the people I talk to, I’d forgotten that. It’s trite to say that words have power, but I will say it, because I have remembered that being allowed to play with them in a space like this is an opportunity like nothing else. It’s as if someone gave you the keys to Picasso’s studio, or whipped a Stradivarius out of their car boot. I’d forgotten, I suppose, that words are there are much to be enjoyed and crafted with as they are to record experience.

Which is as well, because if I was to simply record experiences at this point you’d get a smattering of silly drunk anecdotes, an overwhelming sense of shame with a fair helping of self-pity, some ranting about fairly common and tedious experiences, some raving about take-aways, whisky and recent television, an account of my work at the Chaplaincy and an awful lot of blather about quality control of protein formation and folding in and around the endoplasmic reticulum, which I personally am really enjoying but I can completely understand if that’s not what you come to read when you visit my blog.

This isn’t a promise that my writing will get better, or be good, or enjoyable, or any of those things. I’m not saying I’m going to write more often. This might not be much more than a place-holder. To be honest, dear reader, this post has almost nothing to do with you at all. I like writing. I now remember why. This might mean I post more often. But really I don’t suppose either of us minds particularly whether I do or not, and that’s not why I’m here.

All of which is wonderful but it does mean that I currently have very little idea what’s going on in the news, none of my clothes are ironed and fewer than I’d like are clean. My desk is stacked high with relevant and irrelevant things, knitting, and mugs. I am behind on all the telly I want to gawp at and the books I want to read. And I can’t remember the last time I had a thought worth writing about on this or any blog. Not that I have any others. Sometimes I want to write because I’m in a bad mood and I want to complain to someone far enough away that I don’t then have to get sympathy back – I just want to spill into the ether that right now I am not happy, but I won’t do that because ‘right now’ usually lasts about five minutes and then I remember something awesome that’s happening today, tomorrow or possibly in three weeks time. Do you know what I mean though – that sometimes you want to write down the way you’re feeling not because you want to communicate it to someone, anyone or everyone, but simply because you want to take it out of yourself and put it on the page as if that will somehow make it better? But as I say, these days, thank God, everything is bowling along very nicely thanks and I’m quite happy. To be honest I just like stomping around, complaining and being cross, sometimes. So you can tell me to shut up, you know.

Oh, also, if I get some time in the future, I want to get all enthusiastic about various different musical things that I have discovered (or rediscovered) recently and about whom I don’t think I’ve raved before. So…watch this space?