Me: in brief.
After years of study, formal and informal, and years of labour in fields unrelated to my studies, I now work as a writer and editor. Playing with language and getting paid for it: O frabjous day; calloo callay!
I’ve also lived with depression (more precisely, chronic dysthymia) since 1993. But I’ve been chugging happy pills and controlling my mind, and now life is brighter. My cat also helps to keep me sane.
I am addicted to air, usually having to breathe, on average, 16 times a minute. I am allergic to the combination of gravity, acceleration and falling from any height over 30 metres. I will eat any food that won`t eat me first. However, if it has more legs than a standard cow and an exoskeleton then I probably won’t eat it at all. Nor will I ingest anything that is white, bland and gelatinous - these are the warning signs of tofu.
I go dancing when my knees can afford it - particularly swing dances like Lindy Hop and Balboa. Oh the style and nuances and variations!
These are a few of my favourite things.
• My cat, Lacey Bray.
Some friends of mine from Trinity Theological College gave her to me as a 30th birthday present. She is a domestic shorthair tortoiseshell, and is of superior fluffiness. Many times she has kept me from despair and being swallowed in an emotional abyss simply by being around. She is an unconscious subject of various nonsensical rhymes of my devising that mainly centre on her penchant for kangaroo meat.
• Swiss army knife
The genuine article, I bought it in Munich in 1988. It has been invaluable on many occasions: fixing wiring problems in my (now) 20 year old car, cutting sundry materials for creative purposes.
Denver and the Mile-High Orchestra CD Stand
While I was writing my first book on epistemology, I had this on continually. A big band who are all Christians, they play great swing (and other types of) music: mostly their own compositions but occasionally they jazz up a classic standard or hymn.
• Hebrew and Greek copies of the Old and New Testaments, respectively.
Don’t get me started on the super-surfeit of English translations. Most people I know use the NIV and that’s fine; that’s my usual translation. But you can’t always translate word-for-word without the result sounding nonsensical, so the idea is to translate the concept, while retaining as much of the original wording as possible. Even then, when we try to “style” it for native English speakers, you can lose even more information, while in the original languages you can find nuances and connections that aren’t translated to English.
For example, in chapter one of Hosea, God tells Hosea what to name his children. Usually, when God commands something, the text runs something like: “he-said God call his-name X” But in Hosea, “God” or “Yahweh” isn’t mentioned. It’s just “he-said call his/her-name X.” This lack indicates God’s separating Himself from the idolatrous nation. And in the same chapter, when God says to name Hosea’s third child (second son) Lo-Ammi “Not my people”, He says it is because “you are not my people, and I am not (will not be) to you”. This is the same root word (hayah) that He tells Moses His name is.
The significance of this is that God, as Yahweh, or (”he is” or “he will be”) is saying that Israel has broken their covenant with him. It’s the opposite to what He has said earlier (in the Pentateuch) that they will be His people and He will be their God. Sure you can get in the English, but there’s just that touch more impact in the original.
This is the reason why I prefer the original languages. And it leads to my next favourite thing …
• My Greek and Hebrew analytical dictionaries.
Without these - especially my Hebrew - I’d be sunk. My Greek is better than my Hebrew, which isn’t saying much really, but Hebrew, although it’s a very ordered and regulated language, has so many minutiae that a single dot can literally make a difference; usually in working out who is telling whom to do what.
