Of late I have been somewhat… sporadic in my blog reports. For reasons that have seldom been particularly clear to me, there are people who take a polite interest in my life as expressed here, and in conversations with several of them recently it has become apparent that I have left large gaps in my coverage, many of which go back years. So I thought I’d attempt a few State of the Unit addresses on different strands that make up the rich and varied tapestry that is What I Have Been Getting Up To. Today I shall take for my topic the matter of the Christchurch Inter-Faith Council.

In early 2001, the advent Al-Aqsa Intifada in Israel-Palestine sparked a minor wave of concern for relations between Jews and Muslims in Christchurch, and somebody put out a call for people from different religions to form an interfaith group. I can’t remember how I heard about it, but if it was the usual way these things work, I expect that the Bahá’í community received a bulk email, somebody from the Assembly rang around a bunch of likely volunteers, and I was the one who put my hand up… actually, I do remember now. It didn’t get as far as ringing around, because I was on the Assembly myself at the time. So I went along to some meetings in a Presbyterian Church Hall in Riccarton.

Inter-faith activities often seem to begin with the formation of a group, to be followed at some length by a determination of what the purpose of the group ought to be. On the face of it, this would not appear to be an advisable way to organise anything, but it turns out to have some wisdom. Serious discussion of the purpose of a group can’t take place until the members are convinced that a group is possible, and the best way to convince people a group is possible is to arrange for them to turn up in a room and give them cups of tea and biscuits.

Lots of people did turn up, and over the course of several months it emerged that there were two broad schools of thought on what we should do, as reflected in the ungainly title we arrived at by a process of consensus and excessive politeness: the Inter-Faith Coalition for Justice and Understanding. Don’t blame me, I suggested Inter-Faith Christchurch. Loosely speaking, the Justice people wanted to go to protest marches and have panel discussions about the situation in the Middle East, and the Understanding people wanted to have fireside chats about what different religions believe.

Then the 9-11 attacks (or the 12-9 attacks as we insist on calling them around here in my brain) happened. It seemed to me that there was unlikely to be a shortage of protest marches and panel discussions about political matters with loose religious connections, so I gravitated towards the Understanding group. Sure enough, the ICJU faded away, and a group of us carried on as the ICU. But we did end up running our own public meetings with panel discussions about various topics, which led on to smaller gatherings in which various members talked about their experiences in the various religions to which we belonged. We also ran several devotional meetings for the annual Week of Prayer for World Peace. I learnt a lot at these meetings, and made some lasting friends, but by the time I moved to Auckland things had got rather quiet.

Not long after I returned to Christchurch, the Baha’i community received another email, I got a phone call of the type I would have got before, and I volunteered to pop along to another inter-faith meeting with a couple of other Baha’is. It seemed that Rafaa Antoun, who works for the Labour Party in Tim Barnett’s electorate office, had spotted that Auckland and Wellington have both for several years had well-recognised Interfaith Councils to liase with local and national government. Christchurch didn’t have one, which seemed rather shameful, so Rafaa organised a meeting to begin one.

I hasten to add that this was Rafaa’s personal initiative, and not motivated by the Labour Party. The party has been very supportive, however, and I suspect that they wouldn’t be averse to promoting any development that might get a bunch of moderate religious people more involved in civil society to counter the popular impression that all religious people are extremely conservative and vote for National. But that’s really none of my concern.

At our first meeting we went through the usual process of deciding that there should be an Interfaith Council before we had much idea what it should do, but it was clear that this one would be rather more high-powered, and attempt to take on a role mediating between communities and liasing with governments rather than holding small public meetings. I volunteered to be on the Working Group.

This has got rather longer than I planned, so I shall leave it at this crucial cliff-hanging point for the time being. Be sure to read on for my further adventures in the exciting world of committees. No really, I am genuinely excited about where this goes next.

Amarynth raises an interesting question: why is the Virginia Tech story big news in New Zealand? It’s understandable that it’s big news in Virginia, and in our departmental morning tea room where some of the staff have worked at Virginia Tech. But for the general New Zealand public it surely shouldn’t be any more interesting than any other mass shooting in the world.

I think one reason is that it’s an event that requires no prior knowledge on the part of readers. Unlike other big news stories, you don’t have to know anything about politics, science, religion or history to understand what happened: this one person went crazy and shot a lot of other people. At the risk of seeming more than usually cynical, this seems to be pretty much the level at which TV and newspapers would prefer to report on most things.

I highly recommend a water slide as a major component of an academic conference. If it is New Zealand’s longest water slide, that is all for the better.

The University of Canterbury campus is sadly lacking in aquatic entertainment facilities, and I doubt our ability to construct a superior water slide before next year, when it will be our turn to run the conference. I think our best hope is some kind of giant trampoline.

I am lurking at the back of a meeting of the Waikato Linux Users’ Group, which happens to be occurring on the same marae as the conference I’m attending. If you have a mental image of a Linux Users’ Group in Hamilton it is probably fairly accurate, although if any of the people in your mental image are milking cows it is time for you to wake up to the bustling cosmopolis that is twenty-first century Hamilton. There are hardly any cows here, and none of them seem to be Linux users.

I almost didn’t make it to Hamilton. Due to the impressively lateral flight scheduling system at Christchurch Airport, Hamilton was promoted to an international destination for the purposes of the flight on which I was booked. Sadly, although I had been informed of this fact, it was not uppermost on my mind when I joined the end of the queue in the domestic terminal, and my mistake wasn’t corrected until shortly after the conclusion of the final boarding call for my intended flight. I managed to arrange an alternative expedition that took me via Wellington and Auckland, and which saw me arrive dramatically at the last minute to join the tail end of the manuhiri party as we were ushered onto the marae.

Since then I have been engaged in typical conference-related activities: attending presentations, talking about research, and eating too many things with cream in them.

In these enlightened times, we tend to take for granted the existence of a plethora of meals to suit all lifestyles and personal tastes, but only a few short centuries ago, our ancestors knew of only two: breakfast and dinner.

Over the course of the 18th century, dinner grew later and later, until it was typically served well after 8pm. The enormous gap between breakfast and dinner was only partially filled by a small and poorly-understood new meal called “luncheon” which would eventually evolve into the modern-day lunch, but was then a meagre event consisting of a small amount of bread and ale. Into this mid-afternoon vacuum, and the annals of history, stepped Anna, 7th Duchess of Bedford. She inferred, through reason alone, the existence of a fourth meal, previously unknown to humanity, which she dubbed “afternoon tea”.

Early experimental afternoon teas were conducted under great secrecy in the Blue Drawing Room at Woburn Abbey. Once a safe formula was arrived at, selected members of the gentry were invited to public demonstrations, at which they learned of small cakes, bread and butter sandwiches and “walking the fields”. Later generations took this last part rather too far, and promenaded about so enthusiastically that they had to have a second “high tea” afterwards to recover.

The modern decline in promenading as an amateur sport has led us to return to an afternoon tea closer to the original. When we take it, we all remember Anna, Duchess of Bedford, without whom afternoon tea might never have been discovered.

I find myself once again with a free room available for rent. It’s very nice, sunny, and close to the University of Canterbury. There is a wardrobe and considerable bookshelf space, and it is attached to what I consider a rather nice house with many useful appliances and cats. If you are a person without a room, or you know of somebody in such a state, we may be able to make a deal here.

I shall have another room free in about a month’s time.

For a while there, it rather looked as though April was going to involve a tour of all the cities of New Zealand for a bewildering variety of conferences and meetings. Auckland is now coming to me instead of me going to it, inasmuch as Auckland is represented by the person I would have had to meet there. But I am still scheduled to visit Hamilton and Wellington, and have recently returned from a couple of days in Dunedin, which is probably the best city in the world if you are in the market for a house with a turret on it.

I travelled down with the Museum Detective, who had her own mysterious appointments in the city, at least one of which involved a Colossal Squid. I was sadly unable to join her on this expedition, but I instead had the pleasurable experience of spending the morning chatting with Alan Musgrave about his time as a student of Karl Popper. Alan seemed generally in agreement with the versions of Karl and his wife Hennie I intend to use in my play, which was a relife. Several of his stories involved useful impromptu performances as Karl, which helped a great deal in my understanding of how the great man went about such activities as searching a bookshelf for an unflattering photograph of Heidegger, storming into a Head of Department’s office, and calling Hennie to make robins stop fighting. Although Alan didn’t meet the Poppers until some decades after the point at which I want to set the play, it was immensely valuable to talk with somebody who had actually known them personally. The play is well under way, and I have now written fully a page of it.

My other appointment, to talk about sketch recognition software at Dunedin Polytechnic, turned out to be rather shorter than expected, so I had time to wander around town visit the museum (they have Martin Phillips’ original leather jacket!) and the art gallery, and spend rather too much money on tea and tea-related utensils.