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Showing posts from May, 2017

Will ye go, lassie go

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"Will ye go, lassie go" is a traditional folk song. It's the first song I worked on with my singing teacher, about nine months ago now. It's a lovely song. The lyrics for this arrangement are approximately: Oh the summertime is coming And the trees are sweetly blooming And the wild mountain thyme Grows around the blooming heather Will ye go, Lassie go? And we'll all go together To pluck wild mountain thyme All around the blooming heather Will ye go, Lassie go? I will build my love a bower Near yon' pure crystal fountain And on it I will place All the flowers of the mountain Will ye go, Lassie go? And we'll all go together To pluck wild mountain thyme All around the blooming heather Will ye go, Lassie go? If my true love e’er should leave me I would surely find another Where the wild mountain thyme Grows around the blooming heather Will ye go, Lassie go? And we'll all go together To pluck wild mountain thyme All aroun

The Supreme Joy

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"What could possibly be more fun?" Victor Hugo once said: "The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves" As lovely as that sounds I think he got it perfectly, completely and exactly wrong. The supreme joy, greater even than knowing you are loved, is the capacity to love. In the end, the question of whether or not we are loved fades into irrelevance in the sheer delight of the knowledge that we can love, for as we love we manifest God who is love, and what could possibly be better than that? Similarly it has been said that the ultimate question we must all face is "did we know that we were loved?". Again, I think this is perfectly, completely and exactly wrong. In the parable of the sheep and the goats Jesus describes two groups of people who faced the ultimate (literally) question. The second group had simply got on with loving in practise. And it turned out they&#

Teaching Python

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I've been teaching Python Mastery, an advanced Python course, working on US East Coast time (teaching from 3pm to 11pm UK time) to nineteen HP engineers across three different time zones. I do so enjoy teaching advanced Python. Once I get into the swing of it, which has happened today, I actually feel like an expert. I don't say that to blow my own trumpet, everyone has topics on which they are an expert, but it is such a nice feeling. There is a Victorian saying of which I'm fond. I'm afraid it's expressed in a sexist way, because Victorians, but it's universally applicable. " A true gentleman knows something about everything and everything about something. " For me the something about which I know everything (give or take) is the Python programming language. It's fun to feel like I know what I'm talking about, to be able to handle almost any question that is likely to be asked, and to be talking about it t

Wade in the Water

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This is a song I've been working on with my music teacher. This is me coming back to it after a month's break over the Easter holiday, but as we're not likely to work on it for much longer I thought I'd record it now. "We exist in the imagination of God. "In him we live and breathe and have our being." Creative life, the outbreathing of the divine."