Carbon Fast during Lent?

One resource I didn't include in the initial round-up of Lent resources is from Tearfund, who have produced a Carbon Fast to be done over the period of Lent - 40 days to examine our carbon footprint and take some steps to reduce it. It is firmly based in prayer and action. You can sign up for Carbon Fast emails and get the daily actions, facts and prayers emailed to you, and Tearfund will also add you to the carbon map. You can also download resources for personal or church use.

Leicester's Lent Pilgrimage

During Lent 2008, Bishop Tim will be Crossing the Diocese - he will be a pilgrim walking 215 miles and visiting 114 churches in the Leicester Diocese (download the walking plan). The pilgrimage takes place between Thursday morning and Sunday evening on each of the six weeks of Lent. Along the way others will join Bishop Tim as part of their Lent observance, and he will also meet and talk with the people of the diocese at a variety of events. There will be stories to be told, heard and shared. The pilgrimage begins and end in the Cathedral with an Ash Wednesday service and the Palm Sunday service. Although there will be opportunities to meet the bishop on his pilgrimage he also hopes for times of prayer and silence as part of his personal discipline during Lent.

Bishop Tim asks for prayer for all that is planned and encourages us to share in the pilgrimage prayer during the coming days:
O Lord God, on today’s journey you walk beside us,
on our journey through Lent you walk ahead of us,
on our journey through life you are the end of all our longing.
On all our journeys may you be the way, the truth and the life
which sustains, guides and fulfils us. Amen.

Pancake recipes

No sooner do I mention the Infusion Pancake Party on the blog, but I receive an email from Lakeland Limited with two pancake recipes: pancakes with orange sauce and potato and feta pancakes. (There are more Lakeland recipes here). Lakeland also explain to visitors to their website that:

Pancake Day or Shrove Tuesday is the traditional feast day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Lent marks the 40 days leading up to Easter and was traditionally a period of fasting. The name Shrove comes from the word ‘shrive’ which means to confess.

Lent resources

Lent begins next week. Infusion is celebrating Shrove Tuesday early with a Pancake Party on Saturday, but if you wish to feed your spirit (as well as your body), here are some resources:

• Easter Reflections from rejesus.com
• SGM Lifewords is hosting an online reflective journey through Holy Week
• Count your blessings is Christian Aid’s latest resource, with ideas about how you can do this by offering something to reflect on or do every day during Lent. There is an accompanying Bible study for small groups (PDF)
• The Methodist Church offer Buy Less Live More, a resource (and Facebook group) to encourage people to change their patterns of behaviour by becoming less 'consumerist' and more generous and fulfilled
• The Hope08 website suggests some books
• An article on Lent for the Non-Liturgical from Christianity Today
  

How green is your holiday?

Thinking about your summer holiday is a good antidote to the grey days of January. The Telegraph reports on which tour operators, airlines and cruise lines are doing the most for the environment in How green is your travel company? The report focuses on five factors that signal whether these companies are really committed to creating positive change: carbon reduction, carbon offsetting, conservation schemes, responsible tourism (RT) policy, and sourcing of local produce, services and employment. The article also suggests some eco-friendly travel ideas.

Of course, the Youth Hostel Association ("travel company" of choice for a number of Infusion folk) has a strong commitment to going green, and is increasing the number of environmentally sustainable flagship sites (known as eco-hostels or Green Beacons) it provides. However it is the Scottish Youth Hostels Association that claims to have the most eco-friendly accommodation in the UK at Loch Ossian Youth Hostel.

Not-so-virtuous foods

In a week that may see many of us reaching for extra calories - whether to cheer us up on Blue Monday or simply to enjoy Farmhouse Breakfast Week or a Burns Supper - the Guardian reports on the foods that pack a surprisingly high calorific punch, including the coffee with 628 calories. Perhaps we need The Dieter's Prayer Book after all!

Burns Night and the Scots language

Last year we held an Infusion Burns Night, albeit on the 27th January. Some of Rabbie Burns' poetry was read and we enjoyed our haggis, neeps and tatties - though sadly only as a starter.

I was pleased to read a recent Guardian piece on In praise of ... Scottish words but I recognise that not everyone has the privilege of growing up in Scotland. I'm therefore pleased to say that the The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) is freely available on the Internet. It comprises electronic editions of the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language: the 12-volume Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) and the 10-volume Scottish National Dictionary (SND). These 22 volumes provide a comprehensive history of Scots, and are essential research tools for anyone interested in the history of either Scots or English language, and for historical or literary scholars whose sources are written in Scots.

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin'-race!

Impact of An Inconvenient Truth

"Heating Up for Global Warming Research and Policy" is an article (from a library magazine) which looks at how effective the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth has been in spreading the word about global warming. The article looks at newspaper coverage of the topics related to global warming and climate change and notes that the film received its theatrical release in June 2006, and media promotions began 1 to 2 months before that. Newspapers have shown a marked increase in the coverage of global warming news in the past 15 to 18 months, the film won an Oscar, and Al Gore was named as co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for these efforts. The article concludes by saying that:

"..it takes more than winning Oscars and Nobel Prizes to combat global warming..... Everyone, from large multinational corporations to individuals, is joining the debate on the important issue of global warming and climate change. More important, people are looking for much more than just words to solve the problems. The resources in this article should give you a starting point and should help you stay informed, become educated, and begin communicating about global warming."

What is YOUR favourite book?

People across Leicester will be thinking about their favourite books as part of the city’s celebrations for the National Year of Reading 2008. This month, Leicester Libraries launches its search for Leicester’s favourite book. It doesn’t matter whether you are an avid reader or just flick through the occasional paperback, the survey offers you the opportunity to to suggest your favourite book.

Any work of fiction, including novels, short stories and poems are eligible for nominations. Every member of library staff will also be suggesting their own top reads and these will be combined together with ideas from the public and decades of library lending records to produce a shortlist of Leicester’s favourite books. People will be able to vote on the shortlist from April, and the winning book will be announced in July.

Farmhouse Breakfast Week

Farmhouse Breakfast Week is an annual campaign that emphasises the importance of eating a healthy breakfast every day. Running from 20th - 26th January, A Great Start is the theme of the 2008 campaign to encourage everyone to wake up to a balanced breakfast as part of a healthy and active lifestyle. Check out the website which includes recipes and facts and figures.

Smells like..Infusion

Pottering through M&S today I spotted Infusion - the fragrance! I know we don't have a monopoly on the name, but I was still surprised to find the name on a bottle of women's perfume. The website just says it is "an exotic floral fragrance" but in the store it merited a whole descriptive paragraph.

Big Garden Birdwatch

The 2008 Big Garden Birdwatch takes place next weekend. All you need to do is watch your garden or local park on either Saturday 26 or Sunday 27 January, and spend an hour counting the birds, recording the highest number of each species seen in your garden (not flying over) at any one time. You can download a counting sheet to help you keep track of how many birds you've seen; the sheet has pictures of the commonest birds seen in gardens and space to cross off how many of each species you have seen in total.

The Big Garden Birdwatch is the world's biggest bird survey. Thanks to its simplicity and the small time it takes to do, the Big Garden Birdwatch has always had great support, providing the RSPB with a vital snapshot of the UK's birds each winter.In 2007, over 400,000 people took part by counting the birds in their garden for an hour. Together they spotted 6 million birds across 236,000 gardens, helping reveal the winners and losers in the garden bird world.

If you need an additional reason to take part, a report commissioned by the RSPB reveals that nature improves your fitness and reduces stress.

National Year of Reading

Given my profession, its hardly surprising that I blog about books and reading fairly often. However, I may do so even more frequently this year as 2008 is the National Year of Reading. Here are some recent links on the topic:

• Do you need to read books to be clever? - BBC website

• The reading cure (Bibliotherapy) - The Guardian

• How book groups got child- friendly - The Guardian

• Make 2008 your National Year of Reading - DCSF Press release

2008's most wanted culinary gizmos

You probably resisted the most-wanted gadgets this Christmas, but if you enjoy food as much as most Infusion folk do, you possibly own a few kitchen gadgets. There's an article in today's Guardian which reveals that last year UK consumers spent £625m on kitchen gadgets, up 240% on the previous two years. This included more than £8m on chocolate fountains alone! According to the article, the must-have kitchen accoutrements of 2008 are: Raclette, St Lucia Coalpot, Sous-vide digital bath, Home smoker, and Pressure cooker (read the article for explanations).

I own two of these - the pressure cooker (since the 1980s) and a raclette (for nine years - it was a gift) and I'm pleased to be so on-trend for once as we used our raclette when family visited on New Year's Day! The article notes that although pressure cookers may not be cutting edge (dating back to 1939) they excel at making the most of cheaper cuts of meat, which would normally take several hours to render edible. The article concludes: "as longer working hours reduce the time we have to prepare food, a pressure cooker can almost make you believe that you're the sort of person organised enough to have marinated your food in advance". It's made me want to dig out my pressure cooker and use it again.

What unused gadgets do you have lurking in your kitchen cupboards?

Health news

The good news is.....this winter's norovirus outbreak may not be as bad as the media have made it out to be (which friend who is a doctor told me two weeks ago). The bad news is....your computer keyboard is a breeding ground for bacteria and almost certainly a health hazard! We can't all afford to use the ultrasonic cleaning discussed, but there are a number of websites that advise on How To Clean Your Keyboard, including this Step By Step Guide.

Cross shaped MP3 player

A blog post, Awful Object of the Week, alerted me to the cross shaped MP3 player! Its from the Ship of Fools website which also features many more Gadgets for God (aka tacky religious artefacts).

Slim for Him - religious dieting

After the superb food at the New Year's Eve Party, did you resolve to start eating smaller portions (and less junk) in 2008? And are you sticking to it - or still eating up the Christmas cake and chcolates? If its the latter, then have a read of Slim for Him - religious dieting post over on FaithCentral. Links include prayers from The Dieter's Prayer Book!

In praise of ... the Covenant Service

Good to see The Guardian with an editorial piece on In praise of ... the covenant service. This refers to the Methodist Church's Covenant Service, celebrated in January each year. The Methodist Church website says that the service is for members to "celebrate all that God has done for us, and affirm that we give our lives and choices to God". The traditional Covenant prayer makes it very clear that this affirmation is a serious one that embraces the whole of life. As the website says:

"Most people find it quite tough to say, and really mean it. But the prayer is so central to the Christian life that other Churches have also adopted it. In our culture we tend to prize our ability to make decisions and choose our own path in life. It can feel very hard to give that up. But this prayer is like a love poem. It is about surrendering to God in love and joy."

Coffee made with UK-grown beans

Coffee beans grown at the UK's Eden Project have been turned into enough coffee for just 20 cups! This week Eden Coffee, carefully nurtured in the giant greenhouse biomes at the Eden Project in Cornwall, was revealed to the world at Fifteen Cornwall, part of the chain of restaurants launched by Jamie Oliver to help disadvantaged youngsters. While Fifteen tries to source as much of its menu locally as possible, locally grown coffee is certainly going a step further, and this was probably the first cup professionally made out of beans produced in the UK. However, the Eden coffee crop only produced a handful of Arabica cherries - 200g (7oz) worth, which turned into only about 150g of beans - enough for about 20 cups.

It is perhaps not surprising that coffee has been produced in this part of the world. An increasing number of products normally associated with warmer climates are already being grown in the south-west, and tea has been grown at Tregothnan, an estate near Truro, for some time. Tregothnan Tea is stocked at some of London's most prestigious food halls.

Anglican Bloggers: new Facebook Group

Just discovered that a new Facebook Group for Anglican Bloggers has been created. You can join here.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Giving to religious causes on the increase

Noted in the latest Christian Research Newsletter that giving to religious causes has risen despite charity giving going down. In the report UK Giving 2007, the latest figures released by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) and the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) show that the proportion of the UK population that gave to charity in 2006/7 dropped to 54% (from the 57% in 2005/6). This decrease was also reflected in the total amount given - £9.5 billion, which showed a 3% drop from the previous year.

Religious causes were the only causes to see a rise, accounting for 16% of money given, second only to medical research which received 17%. Religious causes were also the recipients of the most high level (over £100) donations. The research also revealed that married women were more likely to give than married men (62% and 52%). Generally, there has been a significant decrease in giving among men, with single men being the least likely to give, and the least generous.

2008 trends (1)

After reading about the anticipated trends for 2008, I thought it might be interesting to see how relevant these are to life in Leicestershire. So here goes with a look at the first two trends:

• Make it yourself: while creating your own music, video and multimedia productions and posting them online has become commonplace (see this post about Loughborough musicians, for example), it is predicted that it will soon be just as easy to create physical goods - designing them online and having them professionally manufactured, and then joining online communities to share tips, market and sell their goods. For the past two Christmases I've used online sites to create photo calendars as gifts, although the trend takes this much further .
  

• Local networking: although Facebook will still continue to grow, trend watchers expect the social networking phenomenon to diversify next year, with the rise of smaller, "local" sites for a single neighbourhood, street or building. The BBC report suggests that local networking sites could be "very useful, enabling people to post advertisements and helping with anything from lost cats to trader recommendations. They also have the potential to recreate the kind of community spirit we like to imagine existed in the days before we spent our lives glued to computer screens". You could argue that postcards in the windows of corner shops have done sort of networking this for years! However, this isn't ground-breaking stuff as many university (and some hospital) communities have offered this sort of interaction electronically for some years (through bulletin boards, portals and Virtual Learning Environments). However this trend again raises the issue of the digital divide and disenfranchises those without access to speedy online connections.

New Year Party 2008

Online, in touch, up to speed

The Infusion Group on Facebook is still small in numbers - but those who are shunning Facebook are bucking the trend in the UK, as the UK's social network obsessives are the most connected in Europe! A study from the regulator Ofcom notes that social networking is categorically "no longer the preserve of teenagers and students" and has been adopted by a growing army of older surfers determined to link up with old acquaintances.

Thanks to their growing obsession and the widespread availability of broadband, the UK leads Europe in using social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. UK adults spend more time on social networking sites than any other country in Europe, with 4 in 10 UK adults saying that they regularly visit the sites. The UK adults who visit the sites spend an average of 5.3 hours each month on them and return to them an average 23 times in the month.

WordLive

Scripture Union have just launched WordLive – a website which allows you to step into a multi-media Bible reading experience and deepen your relationship with God.

WordLive offers a range of creative approaches you can follow to engage with God’s Word. Each day when you log on you will be prompted to pray and then read the Bible, the next step is up to you. Using the revolving carousel that sits underneath each day’s Bible passage, you can watch a video, listen to the Bible passage (or download it to your mp3 player), dig deeper into further Bible study, dip into creative prayer suggestions and explore other activities. You can sign up to receive a daily WordLive email, or you may prefer to access WordLive through your mobile or PDA.

WordLive is updated and growing each day with new notes, images, videos and audio. It also has an extensive archive of material. WordLive is free to access and is funded by donations.

Hope for Planet Earth Tour

Hope for Planet Earth is a national tour running between 18 Feb and 14 March 2008 exploring the science behind climate change from a Christian perspective and its impact on people and the planet. Leading experts from Tearfund, A Rocha, John Ray Initiative, The Faraday Institute and Share Jesus International are working together to create stimulating, educational, interactive and challenging presentations for students and adults.

During the day the team will be working with students in schools around the country. The evening presentations provide the opportunity for parents and the general public to meet the experts, explore the relationship between science and faith and challenge the myths surrounding climate change.

Local(ish) meetings are Rugby (Tuesday 19 February) and Nottingham (Thursday 21 February), and Derby (Friday 29^th February). Full details here.

Bible put on a pinhead-size chip

The BBC reports that scientists in Israel have succeeded in putting a version of the Bible on a chip smaller than a pinhead. The 300,000 words in Hebrew were inscribed on a silicon surface at the Haifa Institute of Technology, and the researchers involved stated that the project aimed to increase young people's interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

Fair trade 'more effective than giving to charity'

A recent ICM poll, conducted on behalf of the Department for International Development, has revealed that British consumers believe shopping ethically is a more effective way to relieve global poverty than donating to charity.

The poll found that 61 per cent of people felt they had a personal responsibility to help relieve poverty; most said that charities were the biggest influence on their decision to take action. 74 per cent of respondents in the poll thought buying fair trade goods was an effective way to benefit those in the developing world.

Electric eel used to power Christmas lights

While we're still in the twelve days of Christmas, here's one last Christmas post (or perhaps it is simply the first of 2008), a story with admirable green credentials: from Japan comes details of an electric eel being used to power lights on a Christmas tree.

Trends in 2008

After considering 100 things we didn't know last year, the BBC consulted trend-prediction experts to discuss what will be the hottest trends of 2008. The list they produced identifies these:

• Make it yourself
• Local networking
• See-hear-buy
• Think blue
• Secret bling
• Radical transparency
• Body language

100 things we didn't know last year

Happy New Year! If you have time to surf the Internet today, here's a round-up of interesting and unexpected facts that the BBC website has covered in the past year, entitled 100 things we didn't know last year.