Winter, and youth

The winter evening settles down
with smell of steaks in passage ways
six o'clock

Well, it's half past five actually, but almost dark, and three days before the winter solstice we've had only one real winter morning. I'm wandering around the house in shorts and T-shirt, the doors and windows are all open.

Of course come 5 am I'll be wearing a track suit top and turning on the heater, but there does seem to be local warming, if not global warming.

David Beckham has finallly left Manchester United, and their shares immediately went up -- that must have been a confidence booster for him! Five years ago my daughter had posters of him all over her room, and was drawing him and his team mates, and hoping to sell the pictures at the MU supporters club, but now she has substituted spiritual athletes for physical ones and her walls are all over ikons of ascetics and podvizhniks, and she has just finished painting an ikon of St Seraphim.

And while five years ago she would have been listening to Blur and Oasis and Manic street preachers, now she listens to Byantine and Valaam chant. As Bob Dylan used to say, "The times they are a'changin."

Monday was youth day, and we went to Dennilton out in the boondocks for a youth rally. But the youth of today are different. Youth day commemorates the youth of 1976 who marched and toyi-toyied wearing T-shirts with political slogans, and were gunned down by police in Soweto. Politics was everywhere. But that was then and this is now.

Now it's designer jeans and cell phones and hair extensions, and the newspapers are full of the sex lives of celebs. At least that's what they tell me. But really, when you actually come right down to it, the youth of today are not the airheads that conventional wisdom seems to portray them as. At least not the ones in our congregation. Our singing is led by a bunch of fairly serious and committed teenagers, who work hard at their studies. Yes, they have cell phones and hair extensions, but they don't seem to take much interest in the sex lives of celebs, at least not so's I'd notice.

The times they are a -changin' -- but which way?