OK, here's another update for any of you that may be vaguely interested in me.

I'm setting myself up as a freelance consultant. I've had some cool business cards printed up and have bought a website name for myself - the not-at-all self-indulgent www.stevenallenconsultancy.com. I'm working on the content as we speak, at the moment its forwarding to a website I made about 3 years ago on children's rights. Whaddya think (apart from that the colours are shit - this I know...) I'll be offering all sorts of services and will have a cool little price-list - different rates for speaking at conferences, delivering training, providing consultancy etc. How posh am I? :D

My mum is coming home tomorrow and I can honestly say that I haven't seen her as well as she is for many years. It may not sound like much but she is now much more pro-active in creating conversation and has acquired a get-up-and-go that I don't think I've ever seen from her before. It's almost as if she's fed up of being passive in her own life and is wanting to use it. Thank God. I think the next few months are going to be a really interesting time.

On the work side of things, I'm in the middle of a massive amount of travelling for my job. Yesterday I was in Gloucester, tomorrow I am in Stroud, Thursday sees me arriving in Liverpool while on Friday I've got two nights over in Derby on a residential for some of the young people I work with.

Of course there's good and bad elements to all this travelling. Good is that I get to see new places, and I am (slowly but surely) loosing my London-centricness, which is quite cool. On the bad side, its making me absolutely knackered. I can't imagine how tired I'm going to feel next Monday :s. I'm really starting to value home.

But Gloucester was quite cool yesterday. I did some worky meeting stuff but then I had some spare time so went to the cathedral there. I was caught by the canon (I'm told you don't have vicars in cathedrals :s) who showed me to The Cloisters, where Filch's cat was petrified in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets film. That was quite cool.

But here's when the weirdness kicks in. The canon asked what I did and when I told him I worked for a children's charity, he said "When I worked in other parishes, particularly in The North, I sometimes felt that it would be better for us to take children away from their families to make them into better people". Now, forgive me for being a bit indignant, but I thought the family and support for it was enshrined as a basic ethos in the Christian religion. There was something slightly unnerving about a man of the cloth advocating the break-up of families. Not to mention the almost discriminatory way he was talking about people from 'The North'. Not that I think much of the Church anyway - I'm non-religious.

Anyway, the cathedral experience did get even stranger. I walked around the rest of the cathedral on my own. There was a massive organ being played (I couldn't see who was playing it tho coz the chair back was so high and it was raised off the ground). The music was extremely oppressive and dim - I felt like it was being played in a way so as to put the fear of God into you, if you'll pardon then pun. The music was almost frightening, and made me shudder. I noticed a few sarcophagi (not sure if thats the correct plural form of sarcophagus...) with statues of the people in them on top.

Now, forgive the blatant idiocy, but I wasn't sure whether those things really were sarcophagi, or if they were just monuments to people who were buried somewhere else. At one point I found myself surrounded by about 4 of them and I was hoping that the latter was true. It totally spooked me out that I could be surrounded on all sides by dead people with deep organ music playing that was shaking my bones. When I got home my dad confirmed there would have been dead people in them. Which slightly freaked me out. I did get to see the sarcophagus for King Henry III though, which sparked the nerdy interest in history in me that I rarely tell people about.

Anyway, this whole experience got me thinking about this religion thing. The cathedral was an amazing piece of architecture, massive in size, style and indeed personality. But the personality aspect of it particularly troubled me. It was almost as if the whole building was made massive in order to force you to bow down and accept its holiness and grandeur. Inside, all of the stained windows had pictures of (all white!) people, but not one of them were smiling - all were extremely serious. The sarcophagi were all grand in shape and size and seemed to be made so in order for you to get a sense of importance of the people inside. Everything seemed to be about how big and grand the church was, and how little and insignificant you were made to feel in consequence. I think this says something about the religion, something I'm not totally comfortable with - that Christianity believes dogma is more important than a person. I can never believe this, and so would never be able to accept religion. Amen.

OK, enough of the degradation of the Church. I'll be back soon to chat a bit more about my life (and I'm sure you'll also be back soon to read all about it too :D). See ya soon!

steven

"Love is something that cannot be forced upon you - it must come from deep inside." Me, today.