The Personal Website of Michael Foord

It isn't always possible to feel innocent. It's always possible to become innocent. For a couple of years I identified as a progressive Christian. Progressive Christianity is a broad church, with as many meanings as adherents, but for me the essence was the understanding of the teachings of The Christ (particularly as explained by John) that God is love. And all the rest is window dressing. The Bible is a library of books written by fallible humans over thousands of years. It is full of beauty, horror, contradictions and myths showing part of the unfolding of the relationship between humanity and the divine over the span of its authorship. Unfortunately the term Christian comes with a lot of baggage, both my own and other peoples'. To most people to tell them that you're a Christian is to tell them that you ascribe to particular patterns of behaviour and beliefs, some of them ridiculous and some of them awful. I no longer want to be associated in any way with t

Your greatest work of art, of course, will be yourself. Heroin, like most of the other strong narcotics I've tried, had no effect on me the first time I've tried it. Until my naivety was crushed along with my spirit my only association with heroin was watching the Zammo from Grange Hill (a BBC TV kids program) descend into addiction, eventually caught with smack in his calculator when he wasn't even going to a maths exam! Zammo chased the dragon and got a smack on the nose was the graffiti found in Grange Hill school the next day. Like Zammo I chased the dragon, and it did nothing the first time. Chasing the dragon is vapourising the heroin by heating it on tin foil and breathing the fumes with a funnel usually also made of foil. The first time was with the friends of a girlfriend in Cambridge. She was a lovely hippy called Sharon, and as far as I know is the only woman to ever flee a city to escape me. She ran away to Manchester. True story. This was all a long time