Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 62

Diagram prize shortlist points the way to this year’s oddest book titles

Here’s the shortlist of entries for the Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year:

Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop by Reginald Bakeley (Conari, £9.99)

God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis by Tom Hickman (Square Peg, £12.99)

How Tea Cosies Changed the World by Loani Prior (Murdoch, £12.99)

How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees (Melville House, £12.99)

Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts by Jerry Gagne (Foy’s Pet Supplies, £51.50)

Was Hitler Ill? by Hans-Joachim Neumann and Henrik Eberle (Polity Press, £20)

via Diagram prize shortlist points the way to this year’s oddest book titles | Books | guardian.co.uk.

Hat-tip to The Poor Mouth.

Facilitating conflict

A few years ago, when I was working in the Editorial Department at the University of South Africa, the university administration arranged for all the staff in the department to attend a workshop on “facilitating conflict”. The workshop was run by a “task group” whose task was to “facilitate conflict”. They wondered why we kept giggling.

This kind of misuse of “facilitate” came up for discussion in an English usage forum, where someone said.

There’s a notice up in a cafeteria regarding a change in hours, which the management says it’s required to make “to facilitate staff shortages”.

I mentioned this misuse of “facilitate” in an earlier blog post on Zemblanity and education, but it now seems to be spreading. Another poster in the English usage forum said

My eldest son was waffling about ‘conflict facilitation’ once and I asked if that was what a boxing promoter did.

Someone else mentioned that he was in a similar position. His job title was “Disaster Coordinator”, and he wondered if he might be promoted to “Disaster Facilitator”.

Of course it is quite important to coordinate disasters. It is really bad disaster management if you have a tornado, a flood and a fire at the same time. They should be so coordinated that they follow one another at decent intervals.

It got me wondering about the cause of this diseased language, and I suppose the root cause is that very Zemblanity and education, but it nose seems to be spreading. Another poster in the English usage forum said

My eldest son was waffling about 'conflict facilitation' once and I asked if that was what a boxing promoter did.

It got me wondering about the cause of this diseased language, and I suppose the root cause is that very zemblanity in education I wrote about before. Zemblanity is the opposite of serendipity. Serendipity is discoverering something happy or good or useful when one is not looking for it -- by accident, in other words. Zemblanity is therefore the knack of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design, which seems to characterise much formal education." target="_blank">zemblanity in education I wrote about before. Zemblanity is the opposite of serendipity. Serendipity is the faculty of discovering something happy or good or useful when one is not looking for it — by accident, in other words. Zemblanity is therefore the knack of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design, which seems to characterise much formal education nowadays.

How did “facilitate” come to be so misunderstood as to mean its opposite?

To facilitate conflict means to promote conflict. To facilitate staff shortages means to promote staff shortages.

I think what the university really wanted its task group to do was to facilitate reconcilation and conflict resolution, and not to promote conflict, as the title of the task group proclaimed. A boxing promoter is indeed a conflict facilitator.

So where did it all start?

In South Africa I trace it back to the early 1960s, when the Anglican Diocese of Zululand brought in an American priest, Don Griswold, to run courses in “group dynamics”, also called “sensitivity training” or “T-Groups”. In these courses a group of people of different backgrounds got together for a week and interacted with each other and were asked to observe their interactions, to give them some insight into the way groups function, and how human beings established and maintained relationships with each other.

These courses had a profound effect on the Anglican Diocese of Zululand. The groups were composed, as far as possible, of people who did not know each other, or did not know each other well. They came from different parishes, at opposite ends of the diocese. They were black and white, English-speaking and Zulu-speaking, rich and poor, lay and ordained, charismatic and non-charismatic.

And these T-groups indeed facilitated reconciliation between people of different backgrounds. The participants came away with a better insight into what made other people tick. They helped to deepen the Christian fellowship of the Anglican Diocese of Zululand. Soon people from other Anglican dioceses began attending, and then people of other denominations. Similar courses began to be held in other places, in some places with a loose organisation to coordinate the training and maintain standards. Such regional groups often went by the acronym CELT (Christian Education and Leadership Training).

In the training courses there were small groups of 8-10 people, and each group had a “facilitator” to help the group. The word “facilitator” was chosen carefully, with the meaning of “facilitate” in mind. The facilitator was not a teacher, a trainer, or a leader. A teacher or trainer or leader takes the initiative, sets the agenda, teaches the lesson. The task of the facilitator was to do none of these things, but simply to observe, and if the group really seemed to be getting stuck, bogged down, to help it through the difficult patch, and then withdraw again. The facilitator was to help to make things easier when they got difficult, and that is the essential meaning of “facilitate” — it is to make something easier.

When all this was new and fresh, it worked pretty well. The groups made discoveries about human relationships, often serendipitous ones, and unpredictable ones, because every group was different.

CELT was also careful about other aspects of language they used. They did not speak of “running courses”, but rather of “designing educational events” — in other words, not force-feeding teaching against peoples will, but providing a setting in which people could learn. But ineitably, zemblanity crept in. “Designing educational events” eventually became viturually synonymous with “running a course”, and just became a politically correct way of speaking about the same thing.

It spread beyond the church. Some people who had been facilitators at CELT events set themselves up as consultants to business management, and began to make a good living out of it. The methods and procedures were adapted to the business environment, but some of the terminology stuck, including the word “facilitator”.

But the term “facilitator” got detached from its original meaning, and became a politically-correct term. Just as teachers in schools have latched on to terms like “learners”, and, regarding them as politically correct, use them in circumstances where people are not learning (“Three learners on their way home from school were run over by a speeding car”), so people began to use the term “facilitator” in the same way — a facilitator was a person who runs courses, and if the course is on conflict, then the person must be a “conflict facilitator”, and their task must be to “facilitate conflict”.

That is my theory of how the term got distorted into meaning something like its opposite.

But those who invent or propagate such terms should try to think about what nonsense they are speaking.

There is a difference between a promoter and a facilitator.

The difference is that that a promoter is more proactive than a facilitator.

A conflict promoter incites conflict, and tries to start conflicts where there are none.

A conflict facilitator merely makes it easier for existing conflicts to grow, and tries to exacerbate them.

So a term like “facilitate conflict” demonstrates two kinds of ignorance:

Ignorance of the English language, and the meaning of the word “facilitate”
Ignorance of the educational principles that led to the introduction of the term “facilitator”

A conflict facilitator is a warmonger, that’s all.

 

 

 

Blogiversary

Got this from WordPress, reminding me that this blog is 6 years old today.
 
Happy Anniversary!

You registered on WordPress.com 6 years ago!

Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging!

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It seems a bit silly to try to write a review of a book that was published more than 150 years ago, and is so well known, but here are a few thoughts prompted by reading it.

Dickens is generally regarded as a Good Author who wrote Good Books, and so reading them must be Good For You. Even F.R. Leavis allowed Dickens into his canon.

As a result, Dickens’s books are often prescribed reading for schoolkids, to do them good. But the only book by Dickens that I liked when I was at school was A tale of two cities. It seemed to fit in with The scarlet pimpernel and others of the same genre.

Another one we had at school was Great Expectations. It was a matric set book, and our English teacher, a guy called Derrick Hudson-Reed, told us that in 20 years time we would come back to visit the school and confess to him that we had never read Great Expectations. Quite a number of us told him that right after the exam. We’d read an executive summary to get the main points of the plot. Perhaps if I’d read it I’d have got an A instead of a BB in the exam, but I rather doubt it. I rather suspect that Charles Dickens is wasted on the young.

About every four or five years I pick up a book by Dickens and read it. I’ve enjoyed them, but as I’ve read them I’ve been glad that I hadn’t read them when I was younger. There was so much that I just would not have appreciated.

Oliver Twist begins with scenes in a 19th-century workhouse in England. When you are at school, they explain such things in a brief footnote, or maybe the teacher would say something about it.

But reading it now, at my age, I’ve read quite a bit about workhouses because of my interest in family history. I know that my great great grandfather (well, one of them) died in Bodmin Union Workhouse at the age of 83. It was what passed for an old age home in those days, and if you’d spent your life as a woodman, scrounging wood from the woods, you didn’t end up with much in the way of a pension. Oliver Twist not only describes life in a workhouse; it has graphic descriptions of death in a workhouse.

And reading the descriptions of death in a workhouse put me in mind of the saying, “you can’t make this stuff up”.

Dickens was writing fiction, so obviously he did make this stuff up, exceopt that things like that really did happen. Read the case of Absalom Henry Beaglehole, here, and see for yourself. Even his name is the kind of thing Dickens might have made up.

So I’m glad that I read it at the age of 71, rather than at the age of 11 or even 21. If I’d read it then, I’d have missed too much.

Having said that, I might not have noticed the plot holes if I’d read it earlier. There are just too many improbable coincidences, too many people fortuitously meeting too many other people who turn out to have been related, or friends of relations, or enemies of relations. I suppose that that is in part the result of its having originally been written as a serial, and having so many plot threads that Dickens had to find ways of tying together in the end.

If you haven’t read it yet, you might enjoy it, especially if you are over 50.

But Dickens, in spite of having a chapter to tie up the loose ends, never does tell us what happened to the Artful Dodger.

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Axios! Deacon Anastasios

Yesterday we went to the ordination to the diaconate of Sean Noel-Barham by the Archbishop of Johannesburg and Pretoria. The ordination took place in the chapel of Saheti School in Senderwood, east of Johannesburg.

At the beginning of the service he was brought before the bishop by two deacons to be  ordained as a subdeacon

After being ordained as a subdeacon he stands for most of the service in front of the ikon of Christ, holding a pitcher and a basin of water, and is ordained as deacon just before communion.

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The newly-ordained deacon Anastasios is vested as a deacon while the bishop proclaims “Axios!” “He is worthy!”

It was just 21 years ago, at Easter 1992, that he was baptised at the Church of St Nicholas of Japan in Brixton, Johannesburg — pictures here. So it was perhaps appropriate that he was ordained on February 3, the feast day of St Nicholas himself.

St Xenia of St Petersburg, Fool for Christ

Today is the feast day of St Xenia (pronounced “Kseniya”) of St Petersburg in the new calendar. Most Orthodox Christians (in Russia) will commemorate her on the old calendar date, which will be 6 February in the new calendar.

Chapel in Smolensk Cemetery in St Petersburg, Russia

Someone posted this picture of a chapel in the Smolensk Cemetery in St Petersburg on Facebook. The story is told of St Xenia that when a chapel was being built there she secretly brought bricks to the site, during the night. I’m not sure whether this picture is of that chapel, or if it is one that was later built over her grave (she was buried in the same cemetery).

St Xenia of St Petersburg, Fool for Christ

She was married to an army officer, and they had not been married long before he suddenly dropped dead at a party. She then sold all their possessions, gave the money to the poor, and wandered through the St Petersburg slums, dressed in er husband’s old uniform. When it wore out she dressed in any old rags she could find. If people gave her money, she gave most of it away.

Her relatives thought she was mad, and  applied to the courts to have her declared incapable of managing her own affairs, but the court found that she was sane and free to dispose of her (and her late husband’s) property as she wished.

At first many people mocked her, and thought she was mad, but later they came to see that she did not belong to this world, but belonged to God. She became known as one of those saints known as Fools-for-Christ (see Blessed are the foolish — foolish are the blessed | Notes from underground.

There is more about St Xenia here Life Of St. Blessed Xenia of Petersburg, here Xenia of St. Petersburg – OrthodoxWiki and here MYSTAGOGY: A Miracle of Saint Xenia the Fool In France.

Troparion – Tone 5

Having lived as a stranger in the world,

you outwitted the deviser of evil

by your pretended foolishness, O Xenia.

You received the grace from God

to foresee and foretell things to come.

Now, as you have been translated from earth to heaven,

you are numbered with the choirs of the angels.

Kontakion – Tone 4

You gave your wealth to the poor, O Xenia,

and accepted poverty out of love for Christ;

having lived a life rivaling the angels, you were accounted worthy of glory on high.

Zulu rising — book review

Zulu Rising: The Epic Story of iSandlwana and Rorke’s Drift by Ian Knight

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 700-page history book that reads like, and is as gripping as a novel. It covers the first battle of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the battle of Isandlwana, when the British invaded Zululand, and retreated with a bloodied nose.

The term “history book” needs to be qualified, of course. Many historians believe that detailed descriptions of battles are not real history. For real historians, they might say, the actual battle is not important, only the causes and the results.

This book is not even about the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 as such. It is just about the opening battles, or to be strictly accurate, the opening battle, the Battle of Isandlwana. The Battle of Rorke’s Drift was a mere side-show, boosted by the British war propaganda machine to divert attention from their defeat at Isandlwana.

Having said that, however, Ian Knight describes the causes of the war at some length, and it is interesting to compare it with other books on the same topic. There was a flurry of books on the Anglo-Zulu War around the time of its centenary in 1879.

I became interested in the topic when I learned that my great grandfather had fought in the war. My grandmother had died three years before we became seriously interested in family history, but I talked to her cousin, whose mother’s birthday book had an entry for Captain Richard Wyatt Vause VC. The VC bit sounded rather unlikely to me, but I asked other members of the family, and one cousin had my great grandfather’s diary of the Anglo-Zulu War. He wasn’t a VC, and he wasn’t a captain, but he was a Lieutenant in the Natal Native Horse, and he was one of the few on the British side who escaped alive after the Battle of Isandlwana. I’m glad he did, because if he hadn’t I wouldn’t be here.

A second reason for my interest was that I was living in Zululand at the time of the centenary of the war, and we visited the battlefield both on the centenary itself, and for the centenary celebrations four months later. On the actual centenary there were some overweight people marching up and down wearing British redcoat uniforms, no doubt left over costumes from the filming of Zulu Dawn. At the celebrations there were some descendants of members of the Zulu army running up and down, also overweight, and quite exhausted by their exertions. I suspect their great grandfathers would have been quite amused.

When I first became interested in the Anglo-Zulu War the most up-to-date account was The washing of the spears by Donald R. Morris, so I read it. Now, forty years later, Ian Knight has produced a new account, and it is quite interesting to compare them. Both are very readable accounts, and well written.

In the intervening period there has been a lot of effort to collect more primary source material and make it more accessible to researchers, so Knight had access to a lot more source material than Morris did, and he quotes from it quite extensively. So Knight’s book has some first-hand accounts from both sides (including excerpts from my great grandfather’s diary). This makes the story come alive more, so that on reading it, one almost feels that one has been there.

This also means that Knight can fill in some gaps, and answer some of the questions that could not be answered in Morris’s account. Morris, for example, mentions a 12-year-old drummer boy, who was strung up by the heels and had his throat cut. Knight mentions that there were rumours of such things in the press, and stories to that effect later told by soldiers to frighten new recruits, but there was no evidence that any such thing happened, or that there was anyone younger than 17 in the British army, and the drummers were mostly middle-aged men. There may have been a few that young on the Zulu side, but they were not actually soldiers, but rather camp followers, perhaps come to help carry equipment for an older brother, and to catch a glimpse of the excitement.

There are some curious differences in the accounts of the lead-up to the war.

Morris and Knight emphasise different points, and each includes some things that the other omits. Morris’s account, with fewer sources available, is sometimes contradictory. He appears to accept the British propaganda line that Zululand, with its large army was a threat to Natal, and that the British therefore had no choice but to invade Zululand to deal with this perceived threat, but at the same time he acknowledges that King Cetshwayo of Zululand had no hostile intentions towards Natal, and simply wanted to live in peace.

Both books deal with the confederation policy of Lord Carnarvon, the British Colonial Secretary, which was the real cause of the war. Carnarvon wanted to unite the various colonies, republics and independent kingdoms of southern Africa under British rule. Both books mention that the invasion of Zululand was preceded by the British annexation of the Transvaal by the erstwhile Natal secretary for Native Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone. Knight, however, comes up with the explanation, which was new to me (or else I simply hadn’t appreciated it before) that Shepstone introduced the whole confederation scheme in conversations with Carnarvon, and convinced him that it could work in South Africa as it had in Canada in 1867.

Knight, however, omits all mention of James Anthony Froude, Carnarvon’s spin doctor for confederation, who was sent to convince everyone of its benefits. He does mention that the Cape Colony was brought around to the idea by the simple expedient of sacking its prime minister, but omits a description of the way in which the same object was achieved in Natal, where Sir Garnet Wolseley was sent to “drown the liberties” of the colonists in sherry and champagne.

In military matters, though I am no expert in such things, I think Knight gives a more accurate picture. Morris speaks of Zululand as having a large “standing army”, which is not quite true. The Zulu military system at that time more closely resembled that of the Swiss, with all males of military age subject to call-up, and being called upon to attend the king at various times. They generally provided their own weapons (only the shields were government issue). It was the British empire that had a standing army, like the two battalions of the 24th regiment, who were full-time professional soldiers, armed, fed and paid by the government. That was why the British lost the battle of Isandlwana but won the war, because a standing army has a better chance in a drawn-out campaign.

Morris also, for some strange reason, plays down the fact that both sides used firearms. The blurb in the front of Morris’s book emphasises this even more:

In 1879, armed only with their spears, their rawhide shields, and their incredible courage, the Zulus challenged the might of Victorian England and, initially, inflicted on the British the worst defeat a modern army has ever suffered at the hands of men without guns.

It is true that the British infantry were better trained in the use of firearms, and had state-of-the-art Martini-Henry rifles, which had a longer range and were more accurate than most of the guns in the Zulu army, but until the fighting got to very close quarters, most of it was by exchanges of gunfire. In hand-to-hand fighting, the British used bayonets fixed to the end of their rifles, while the Zulus used short stabbing spears. The bayonets had a longer reach, but once someone got inside that reach, it was over. In this respect Knight gives a more accurate picture of what happend, and includes a contemporary sketch of the Zulu army deploying into battle order, armed with rifles as well as more traditional weapons.

Knight also makes it pretty clear that war was not the romantic and glorious affair that was pictured in contemporary Victorian paintings. It was brutal, vicious and messy. Both sides killed prisoners and unarmed civilians. Some, like George Hamilton-Browne, would probably today be described as war criminals. Browne and his troops seem to have behaved like Arkan’s Tigers in more recent times, though Hamilton-Brown treated his own troops pretty badly too.

Another thing that comes out in Knight’s account is the parallels between the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the Iraqi-American War of 2003. There was the same spin-doctoring in search of a casus belli, the same scare tactics and bogus threats (weapons of mass destruction/the Zulu plan to invade Natal). The main difference is that the Zulus fought better than the Iraqis in defending their country against the aggressors.

There are a few rather odd defects in the book.

In view of the subject matter the title seems rather strange. Zulu rising suggests that it is about the growth of the Zulu kingdom, but in fact the battle of Isandlwana marks the end of that growth. It is more the story of decline and fall than rising. The name of the film, Zulu Dawn, is also a misnomer. “Zulu high noon” might have been a better title. The battle began about midday.

A slightly annoying feature is the conversion of roughly estimated distances in yards into precise measurements in metres, to two decimal places.  Another slightly annoying feature is the continued reference to the Zulu language as isiZulu. He writes of a “a Zulu”, rather than “umZulu” and “Zulus” rather than “amaZulu“, so why isiZulu? If a book is written in Zulu, then I would expect it to refer to the English language as isiNgisi, and not to use “English” – so why should an English book not refer to the Zulu language as “Zulu”? When we refer to the Russian language, we write “Russian”, not Russki yezik. We write “German”, not Deutch, so why this isiZulu? These things seem self-consciously pretentious, and seem to be saying to the reader, “Look, I can calculate yards as metres to two decimal places” or “Look, I know the Zulu word for the Zulu language.”

The centenary of the war in 1979 occurred at the height of the “revisionist” movement in South African historiography, and much of the writing at that time was of the Marxist school, in which a “rigid theoretical framework” and concentration on abstract economic forces made for dull reading. Learning that unnamed people who were in a position to “extract surpluses” and actually did so in unnamed places is dead boring to read.

Knight, I am glad to say, does not follow that trend. He tells the story of people and events, and his theoretical framework, if any, is less obtrusive.

And the impression that I get from Knight is that, if he has told the story accurately, Theophilus Shepstone was the villain of the piece, aided by his family, whether they extracted surpluses or not. Shepstone it was who worked himself into a position where he controlled much of the lives of the black people of Natal. It was Shepstone who urged the confederation policy on Lord Carnarvon. It was Shepstone who recommended to Garnet Wolseley that after the war Zululand be broken up into 13 statelets whose rulers fought, as a contemporary described it, like Kilkenny cats. In other words, Shepstone embodied the principle of “divide and rule” in his own person.

And Shepstone’s brother John “continued to dominate the Natal Native Affairs department throughout the 1880s, using his considerable influence to block any attempted resurgence of the Zulu royal house. As late as 1904 he provided evidence to the South African Native Affairs Commission arguing against allowing black Africans a right to vote in colonial elections” (Knight 2011:692) — an injustice that was only rectified 90 years later, in 1994.

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First Romanian Orthodox Church in Africa

Archibhop Damaskinos of Johannesburg and Pretoria and Bishop Petronius of Zalău in the Sălaj County of Romania laid the foundation stone of St Andrew’s Romanian Orthodox Church in Midrand, Gauteng. It is the first Romanian Orthodox Church in Africa.

The foundation stone for the new church ready on a table with the Romanian flag. The daisy chains mark the outline of the new church. In the background is the Midrand Mosque, the biggest mosque in the southern hemisphere.

In 2001 Father Mihai (Mircea) Corpodean came to be a priest for the Romanian community, but since they had no church of their own, and the Churchy of St Nicholas in Brixton had just lost its priest, the bishop at that time, Metropolitan Seraphim, asked Fr Mihai to become p-0arish priest at St Nicholas. St Nicholas was started as a multiethic parish, and welcomed the Romanian community, and we still use some Romanian in services there.

Archbishop Damaskinos blesses the foundation stone of the new church

It took the Romanian community quite a long time to find a suitable piece of land, and in 2008 Fr Mihai moved to New Zealand, and Fr Razvan Tatu came to replace him, and began tolding Romanian service at St George’s Hotel near Oilfantsfontein.

Laying the foundation stone

After the foundation stone was laid at the easternmost part of the new church, everyone young and old, came to add some cement, starting with the two bishops.

Cementing the foundation stone — everyone present, young and old, took part

At the end Archbishop Damaskinos spoke on the importance of the community supporting not just the laying of the foundation stone, but all the activities of the church. The laying of the foundation stone took place with the blessing of His Beatotude Theodoros, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa, who is the spiritual leader of all Orthodox Christians in Africa.

Bishop Petronius said that he and Archbishop Damaskinos would be concelebrating the Divine Liturgy the next day in Romanian in the Archbishop’s chapel in Houghton, and invited everyone present to join in then.

Fr George Cocotos, Archbishop Damaskinos, Bishop Petronius, Fr Razvan Tatu

Bishop Petronius also said that he was born on 30th November, St Andrew’s Day, and that clearly St Andrew, the Apostle of Romania, wanted him to come to South Africa to witness the extension of his mission on this occasion.

Apostle Andrew, the Holy and All-Praised First-Called

The Holy Apostle Andrew the First-Called was the first of the Apostles to follow Christ, and he later brought his own brother, the holy Apostle Peter, to Christ.

Troparion – Tone 4

Andrew, first-called of the Apostles

and brother of the foremost disciple,

entreat the Master of all

to grant peace to the world

and to our souls great mercy.

Kontakion – Tone 2

Let us praise Andrew, the herald of God,

the namesake of courage,

the first-called of the Savior’s disciples

and the brother of Peter.

As he once called to his brother, he now cries out to us:

“Come, for we have found the One whom the world desires!”

Visitors from Romania

Yesterday there was a sudden flurry of visitors to this blog from Romania.

I don’t know what brought them here all of a sudden, but I hope they return on Sunday, when they might find something of interest.

That’s because on Saturday the foundation stone of a new Romanian Orthodox Church is being laid in Midrand, and so I hope to have some photos of the event to post on my blog.

The ceremony will take place at 48 West Road, Glen Austin, Midrand at 10:00 am on Satuday 12th January 2013, in case there is anyone in Gauteng who would like to attend.

It will be the second Orthodox Church in Midrand — the first being St Sergius Russian Orthodox Church, which opened about 10 years ago.

 

 

Theophany 2013 in Johannesburg

We had a good Theophany/Epiphany at St Nicholas in Brixton this year. Since it was on Sunday more people could be there (though many were still away on holiday) — in most years it’s a working day and we start at 5:45 am and by 7:00 people are beginning to be impatient to get away to work.

The problem is, that when it falls on a Sunday, things are different, and every liturgical text we looked at said something different too. Some said the blessing of the waters took place at Vespers, before the litanies, or after the litanies or somewhere else. In the end we decided to have it on Sunday after the Liturgy.

Vespers was very good. Fifteen Bible readings, 13 from the Old Testament, all about water.

In the morning we had Matins and the Liturgy of St Basil, and the Blessing of the Waters at the end, after the Prayer before the Ambo.

Since it was a sunny Sunday we had it outside, in the sweltering summer heat. In some places, where there is a river available, they have it there, but Johannesburg is one of the very few major cities in the world not built on a river. The watershed between the Vaal and the Limpopo runs right along Brixton ridge, very close to the church, which is about 100 metres south of the watershed. Rain that falls on one side goes to the Atlantic Ocean, and rain that falls on the other side goes to the Indian Ocean. But I digress. By the time that rain becomes a river it is far from St Nicholas, so we use the font.

Blessing of the Waters at Theophany, St Nicholas Church, Brixton, Johannesburg

It was a bit chaotic. I had one translation of the text, Fr Athanasius another, and the choir a third (downloaded from the Internet). One of the things that plagues English-speaking Orthodox Christians is that there are about 50 different English translations of liturgical texts, most of them bad.

Another problem was that about two thirds of the choir (as well as half the members of the congregation) were away on holiday still. But we had a good time, and we managed to sing our way through the service, nearly four hours of it (one of the altar servers fainted), and some even thought it was fun. At the end we had another service — prayers for school children for the new school year, as the holidays end this week.

Fr Athanasius sprinkling parishioners with the newly-blessed water