A TALE OF TWO CITIES

My parents are just in the process of moving from Brighton (well, Southwick actually) to Bournemouth and that has got me thinking again about which is the better town – Brighton & Hove, or Poole/Bournemouth? A report in the Bournemouth Echo has also got me thinking about this, as it raised the question of whether Poole and Bournemouth councils should merge. For me, the decision to merge Brighton and Hove into one city has given it a new vitality and sense of purpose, which is lacking in the unattractively named ‘SE Dorset Conurbation’ with its three separate authorities of Poole, Bournemouth and Christchurch.

The reality is that I love both places. I have lived in Brighton, and always enjoy going back there. It is a great town. But I also love living where I now do, in Poole. The two are obvious rivals though – south coast towns, competing in many of the same spheres, and with similar sized populations (Brighton & Hove 247,817; SE Dorset Conurbation 383,713). So how do they stack up?

Education

Brighton wins this one, being home to two universities, Sussex and Brighton, whereas Bournemouth has just the one. Brighton’s also score slightly higher in the league tables.  Both are great student towns though.

Sport & Leisure

Hove is home to Sussex County Cricket, which is a big plus. Brighton and Bournemouth currently occupy first and second place in football League One, and I would be delighted if both got promoted to the Championship next season. Since selling off the Goldstone ground the Seagulls haven’t had a decent stadium to play in, whereas the Cherries have a proper ground, and so win that one.

Away from cricket and football, Brighton has a racecourse, which Bournemouth doesn’t. Brighton staged a marathon this year, which has immediately become massive, but a representative from Bournemouth Council has told me that a similar event is in the planning stages for that town. Both have greyhound stadiums. Poole has speedway and cycle speedway. And Poole/Bournemouth definitely wins in terms of water sports – with Christchurch Harbour at one end and the massive Poole Harbour at the other Brighton falls a long way short in comparison.

So, overall its probably a slight win to Bournemouth/Poole in this category.

Transport links

Bournemouth has a small airport, and it is only 40 minutes to Southampton airport. But Brighton has Gatwick airport on its doorstep and the commute time to London is half of that from Bournemouth. From Poole you can take a ferry to Cherbourg and be there in two and a quarter hours.

I like taking the ferry to France, but overall this one is a win for Brighton.

Culture & History

Brighton has a reputation as a very creative place, and has some great venues – the Dome, the Brighton Centre, the Theatre Royal, as well as many smaller gig venues. Bournemouth has the BIC, which gets pretty much the same line up of bands as the Brighton Centre, and the Pavilion, which fills the same niche in Bournemouth as the Dome and Theatre Royal do in Brighton. And then there is Poole Lighthouse, which is just a superb arts centre, and home to the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra – something with which Brighton cannot compete. But then Brighton has its annual arts festival, with which Bournemouth cannot compete.

In terms of history, Brighton has its palace, and impressive seafront crescents, and the tourist trap of the Lanes. Bournemouth (well, Christchurch actually) has the Priory, and Poole has its old town. Brighton used to have two piers, but the best one has fallen into the sea. Bournemouth still has two functioning piers. Poole and Christchurch have a much longer history than the blousy upstart Brighton.

So overall I’d put that one as a draw.

Business & Industry

Brighton tends to lay claim to cosmetics firm The Body Shop, although it is actually based further along the coast in Littlehampton. Poole is home to Body Shop competitor Lush and surfwear brand Animal. Bournemouth probably beats Brighton in terms of big, multinational companies who have their out-of-London bases in the town, although some of these are threatening to pull out or (like Barclays) have dramatically reduced their staffing levels. Poole of course has Sunseeker, the luxury yacht builders.

A point to Poole/Bournemouth then.

Quality of Life

Now don’t get me wrong, I like Brighton seafront, but it doesn’t really bear comparison with Poole/Bournemouth’s seven mile long bay of golden sand. Brighton is backed by the glorious Sussex Downs. I love the Downs – I proposed to my wife on the Downs! But, again, they don’t quite measure up to what Poole/Bournemouth has to offer with the New Forest to the East and the Purbeck hills to the West.

Brighton’s traffic is worse.

Hove has its Lagoon, but Poole has its magnificent harbour. (A very unfair comparison that!)

A clear win for Poole/Bournemouth.

And the winner is…

On the basis of my arbitrary categories and point scoring, Poole/Bournemouth just pips Brighton & Hove to the post as winner of ‘best town’. However, as noted above, a significant difference is that Brighton & Hove now has an identity as one town. (I still can’t quite bring myself to think of it as a city.) In Poole-Bournemouth-Christchurch there is a strong parochial sense of each town being distinct from its neighbour, although a visitor would drive from East to West without realizing he was crossing any boundaries.

But there is at least one thing I can say without fear of contradiction – both Brighton/Hove and Poole/Bournemouth are infinitely superior to Portsmouth!

SEX TALKS

Well, its nearly two weeks since I posted on this blog - a sure sign that I have been busy with other things and my creative energies are somewhat spent. But I'll stick something up today just so you don't all think I've died or something!

One of my current side projects is writing a book on sex for those in their late teens & early twenties. This has developed from a series of seminars on the subject that Grace & I did at Newday this year. My plan is that the first half of the book will be a write up the five sessions we took, giving a biblical background to how we should approach sex. The second half of the book will be made up of answers to about fifty questions that we got asked over the week. I hope to have this finished by Christmas, but at my current writing rate might not achieve that. But as a taster, here is an example of one of the questions and my response (this is one of least X-rated ones):

Q. So do people not have sex in heaven? And if not, why not?

Jesus was once asked a question about marriage in the resurrection – the world as it will be once God has renewed the heavens and the earth. (It is more helpful to think about life in the new heavens and earth than to talk about ‘heaven’ as it is the new heavens and earth which we are ultimately going to live in.) Jesus’ response was, ‘in the resurrection they neither marry not are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.’[1]

The biblical expectation of sex is that it is something that should only take place within the covenant relationship of marriage. So if there is no marriage in the resurrection it seems there will be no sex either.

This might sound like very bad news! It is the kind of news that means many young people hope that Jesus doesn’t return until they’ve had the opportunity to lose their virginity!

And why would there be no sex in the resurrection? If sex is so good, why won’t it continue forever?

I think the answer is found in the things that sex is meant to achieve. One of those things is the creation of new life – sex is meant to result in babies! But in the resurrection there will be no need for further reproduction. The new heavens and earth will be filled with God’s people and the creation command to Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply will no longer apply.

Also, think about what sex is meant to achieve in terms of it being the most intimate experience of being joined with someone else that we can know – what the Bible describes as becoming ‘one flesh’. This becoming one in some way reflects the union we have with God – that we are joined into him, and become part of his body. In the resurrection this union will be final and complete. We will look on Jesus face to face and become like him[2]. There will not be any division between us and Jesus, but we will live in the constant experience of his light and love.

In this joining with Jesus we will also be united perfectly with all his people. The Bible tells us that in some way this is already the case[3], but in the resurrection it will be made perfect – you’re actually going to like everyone else there for starters! And the good news is that this perfect relationship with Jesus and his people will be even better than sex! What sex achieves at its best – at its most beautiful and most powerful – is but a shadow of the joy we will experience in our relationship with Jesus forever.

So don’t worry about the return of Jesus and the resurrection – look forward to it!

---

[1] Matthew 22:30

[2] 1 John 3:2

[3] 1 Corinthians 12:12-26

OVER THE RAINBOW

Having last Sunday preached about Noah and how the church of Jesus Christ are to be the real rainbow warriors, it was a nice touch to see a photo of a rainbow at the Ryder Cup (we beat the Americans by the way) in so many of the papers on Monday. Rainbows only appear when there is both sunshine and rain and as such speak of the way in which often the most beautiful things are born out of times that are not all clear blue sky. At the end of what has been something of a sunshine and showers week, I am glad to be an inheritor of the rainbow promises of God.

Grace and the daughters are away this weekend, up north for Grace’s mothers 70^th birthday. I should be there too of course, and feel bad that I am not, but arrangements were set in hand rather late for me to be able to cancel a working weekend here in Poole. So this evening it has been lambs neck stew (at 25p from the butcher a lambs neck is a veritable flavor packed bargain), a glass of shiraz and Wagner on the radio – none of this may be to your taste, but it works for me.

Tomorrow the preaching moves on from Noah to Abraham, leaving Ur of the Chaldees, “going not knowing” what the outcome would be. What a journey that must have been – to be a nomad on a road out east, without maps or guidebooks, but merely an instruction from God. Many of us find our security in a sense of place, somewhere that is familiar and known. To uproot and travel to who knows where with no hope of return to the familiar would be the very definition of psychological torture for most people – it is what defines being a refugee.

But for Abraham leaving Ur was not so much the path of the refugee as following the rainbow. At the end of the rainbow was a promise – maybe not a crock of gold, but of a place that would be home, and a blessing that would extend to all peoples. And the promise of that was better than winning a golf tournament, or even Wagner and sheep off-cuts - Abraham's was the promise of the multi-colored rainbow-hued destiny of God.

"By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God." (Hebrews 11:8-10)

Amen and amen. May we also be people who follow the rainbow into the promises of God, even when going means not knowing.

TANTRIC TANTRUMS

Following on from my review of Eat, Pray, Love this article on Yoga by Albert Mohler may be of interest. It certainly seems to have got the internet hornets nest stirred up...

BOOK REVIEW: EAT, PRAY, LOVE

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

You’re right – this isn’t my normal kind of reading.

However, as with the self-imposed torture of reading The Shack I thought I should read this one in order to know what it says. It has sold in multiples of millions, and is now a movie. It is popular. So I thought I should read it. (And I’m still summoning up the courage to start reading Twilight at some point, which I really must do.)

In her defence, Gilbert does write very well, so in that sense this is not such a noxious experience as reading, say, The Shack. But it is written in that chatty-girly style which many women love, but can be quite irritating for a man. It is this chatty-girliness that seems to account for much of the books popularity though. Gilbert claims a gift for being able to make friends with anyone, and millions of women are reading E,P,L and then passing it on to their girlfriends while wishing they could be friends with the author.

But anyhow, I may as well cut to it – you know its coming – and set out the reasons why I do not like E,P,L. Or perhaps, rather than simple dislike it is more a case of what E,P,L reveals about the soul of my generation, and the fault lines that run there that I dislike. (For a parody of E,P,L which reveals some of these things more clearly than any review could check this out.)

Basically, the woman is completely self-obsessed. Now, I appreciate that as this is a memoir it is meant to largely feature the thoughts and feelings of the author, but really… Gilbert comes to the end of one self-absorbed way of living – material success and prosperity – and is propelled by a messy divorce into another – spending four months each in Italy, India and Indonesia, seeking to find ‘pleasure and balance’.

In Italy she learns Italian and eats lots of ice-cream. In India she spends hours meditating in the Ashram of Swami Muktananda (whose identity she says she does not wish to expose, but then gives enough clues for a quick google to reveal) having transcendental experiences. In Indonesia she hangs out with a medicine man and hooks up with a Brazilian lover.

And it is this that seems to have struck a chord with millions of women who wish that they could go and do something similar.

The problems with the Indian leg of this journey are obvious, as I would not see Gilbert’s spiritual experiences as benign, and far less as positive. Believing as I do in a sovereign God, and a real devil, rather than simply a loving universal force, the spiritual exercises of Yoga look extremely dangerous. Muktananda taught that his disciples should, “Honor your Self, Worship your Self, Meditate on your Self, God dwells within you as you” which pretty much sums it up – this is definitely a road not to be travelled.

So Gilbert’s spiritual philosophy of life is essentially selfish, which reflects my generations general approach. My generation is also broken and in pain – which Gilbert articulates without embarrassment. She is clearly drawn to father figures who give her the emotional connection lacking with her own father. In the Ashram ‘Richard from Texas’ functions in this way, offering fortune cookie nuggets of mystical wisdom. In Bali she falls in love with Felipe, 17 years her senior and able to give her the emotional support she craves, as well as sexual satisfaction. Gilbert’s life has been one of throwing herself into the arms of various men, seeking physical and emotional connection, only to be damaged repeatedly by the experience.

In one telling section of the book Gilbert relates how in a previous generation, “if a man had been my suitor, my father might have sat that man down with a long list of questions to establish whether this would be an appropriate match… when I made the decision to marry, my modern father didn’t become involved at all. He would have no more interfered with that decision than he would have told me how to style my hair.” How tragic.

So I can understand why this book connects with a generation that has experienced broken hearts and spiritual dislocation. That has been told it can have it all – and is worth it all – yet finds that trying to achieve it all leads to divorce and emotional bankruptcy. The irony of course is that Gilbert still seeks to find it all, as the subtitle of the book expresses it, One Woman’s Search for Everything. The book ends on a high note as she does seem to find much of what she wants – getting over her divorce and finding new love, but the underlying motives and premises are still all wrong.

Last weeks survey revealing that it is my age-group who are the most unhappy in life also helps explain the appeal of E,P,L. Gilbert has touched a nerve. But we are not going to find our redemption in mystical backpacking adventures. As another member of my generation expressed it recently about his own backpacking trip, “The amazing thing was that, at the end of the trip, I had indeed ‘found myself,' and, surprise, surprise, it turned out that I had never really been lost but had been here all the time! Surprising as it may seem, I was located in the space between the soles of my feet and the top of my head. Amazing.”

Rather, the hope for us must lie in the church, and the gospel, and building communities where there is real commitment, and trust, and love, and in which fathers check out their daughters prospective marriage partners. Eating, praying and loving are all fantastic things to do, but Gilbert doesn’t give us a good model for how to do them.