JONAL ENTRY 1291 | May 22 2013

"I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me; and him who comes to me I will not cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me; and this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day." — from John 6, from today's Orthodox lectionary readings

Diary: This entry is a roundup of activities from the past week, as the pace here continues to make it hard to keep up with everything happening. First, a visit to Tesco, the major food outlet in this part of the world, proved an earlier assertion I made to be incorrect. Campbell's soup is not unknown in the UK after all, as the first photo proves. I took this in Tesco, leaving in the pound sign on the shelf above the soup and some of the Baxter soups (a UK brand) to show that this is not a fake photo (as if this proves anything in this day of Photoshop). Take my word for it, Campbell's is alive in Northern Ireland, if still hardly a threat to Heinz's leadership in the field.

And speaking of my earlier lies, I also said (relying on Wikipedia) that the chain store here owned by Walmart, Asda, is a grocery outlet, not a department store. A little after that blog ran, I got to go to my first Asda store, Asda Living in Belfast. It had escalators and much of what Walmarts were famous for before they became the price leader in groceries in the USA, but no groceries. So again I stand red-faced and corrected.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a book reading by a local author, Tony Macaulay, whose first book, Paperboy, was a best seller and the rights have been bought for turning it into a major movie. As a memoir by a once-poor lad from Ireland, it is sure to elicit comparisons with Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, though Macaulay's life and memoirs have considerably less pathos (despite the fact that the theme of his books is "the troubles") but it has at least as much laugh-out-loud humor as McCourt's accounts.

The first video clip is a few minutes of Tony reading a couple of pages of his second memoir, Bread Boy. I bought a copy of the first book after the readings and have been greatly enjoying it. The first is an account of Tony's short career as a paperboy delivering the Belfast Telegraph in the disco days of the 1970s, told in the voice of his guileless 12-year-old personna. The second book, which is the source of the following reading, takes up where Paperboy ends, with his career as a teenage Bread Boy. (Note: A fan in the audience presented Tony a Star Wars light saber that he wields, and the reading refers to swinging a "bap" [not a bat; a bap is a "bread roll" in Ulster-speak] . . . and the clip ends abruptly in mid-sentence.)

Click the > on the video above to play it. After the video launches, you can double-click the screen to enlarge it to full-screen. If your browser cannot open the video in Windows Media format, you can try it on YouTube, here.

The second video, below, is from a lecture given this Monday by Mercia Malcolm, a Church of Ireland rector and a C.S. Lewis expert, about the relationship between Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien when both were on the faculty at Oxford University. The friendship between Protestant Lewis and Catholic Tolkien is a model for relationships between the two communities in Belfast.

Click the > on the video above to play it. After the video launches, you can double-click the screen to enlarge it to full-screen. If your browser cannot open the video in Windows Media format, you can try it on YouTube, here.

Finally, a nature walk during a break from a class I was in on Tuesday at the Ulster Museum. This is a few minutes along the River Lagan in the region of the Queen's University, Belfast's main center of higher education.

Click the > on the video above to play it. After the video launches, you can double-click the screen to enlarge it to full-screen. If your browser cannot open the video in Windows Media format, you can try it on YouTube, here.

Scripture: Jesus is previewing or foreshadowing the eucharist, the Holy Communion mystery that He instituted as the climax of His ministry on earth.

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