Spoiler Alert

You may or may not receive a Christmas card from me, with this image on it. (I took the photograph in the austere 12th Century nave of Lescar Cathedral just before setting out on my Voie du Puy walk in April. Whether the carving itself is 12th Century, I rather doubt, but I find it quite a charming depiction of Matthew 2,14 even though none of the Holy Family is apparently riding on the donkey.)

The point is, I didn't have enough printed in order for all those on our rambling Christmas card list to receive one. Which brings me to the question, yet again, of whether we need to send so many people cards. Somehow, we're beset by a conspiracy to keep it going: every year, the additions to the list seem to exceed the (usually sad) deletions. Occasionally, you meet up with someone you haven't seen for decades, but have exchanged cards with: when you realise how little you now have in common, each reaches for the red pen.

What's to stop a greater ruthlessness? Well, I suppose it's something to do with the Christmas spirit. And we enjoy receiving cards ourselves, even from those who live next door. Possibly we all wish to avoid the King John outcome, the cards upon his shelf... were... only from himself.

Crazy isn't it! Especially in the days of instant messaging - and blogging. Particularly as I somehow feel it's not the same if I haven't written the addresses out by hand. I used not to, so this is a further indication that I am moving backwards into the Dark Ages. Seems too to give a lie to what I mentioned Ben Brangwyn said the other day, "Complex systems never return to a prior state."

Having written this, I see it's all really said much more amusingly by Jon Canter in today's Guardian. (And "Martin" is the hero of the story.)

Talking the talk

Over the past 48 hours, I've attended three meetings where sustainability or resiliance have been the watchwords. On Tuesday afternoon, there was quite a heated discussion in the RCE Severn Steering Committee about the extent to which we needed to sock it to our stakeholders. Should our working groups challenge businesses' CSR policies, and challenge too the whole notion of the sustainability of continuing economic growth, given Peak Oil and that we are already in ecological debt? Are children being equipped by our schools for a society based on the realities of resource depletion and global warming? What is our positive vision of a low-carbon, steady state economy or our plan for energy descent?

Some of these questions were addressed by Ben Brangwyn of the Transition Network at the University of Gloucestershire's IRIS Seminar that evening. Ben's "excited by local currencies," he tells us - not as a replacement for the pound sterling, but as a complementary process. And he's big on visioning: "Where will we need to be in 20 years' time? How do we get from here to there - year by year?" "We don't know," he stressed, "if this Transition thing is going to work: it's an experiment; but we cannot sit around and wait for someone to do a pilot." And he cautions, "complex systems can never return to a prior state." Sustainable Bungay was an example of what could be achieved with faith-based communities heavily involved. Or, talking of adaptation, what about Cheltenham becoming a City of Sanctuary? (There's a challenge!)

My photograph was taken at the well-attended meeting of the Gloucestershire Churches Environmental Justice Network yesterday, where Professor Daniella Tilbury spoke of the UoG's work in the sustainability field. What is it about our lives that has got us to where we are, was the question she posed. Not, "Who dropped that plastic wrapper?" but, "What sort of society makes it necessary to have such wrappers?" Strategies to change behaviours don't work: the consumer culture is here to stay. How do we influence without preaching? "The biggest problem we have in this institution [the UoG] is students."