jelly babies

Over the past couple of weeks I think I have bought five boxes of jelly babies, which I've taken to various social events and meetings. They've been half price in Sainsbury's. I haven't eaten them all by myself, honest.

To quote the blurb on the side of the box:
"Originally launched in 1919 as Bassett's Peace Babies to celebrate the end of the First World War, everyone will enjoy eating these delicious treats. You can have fun choosing from the different fruity flavoured soft jelly sweets ... and then enjoy eating the baby shapes - will it be head first?"

At a dinner party at the house of some friends of mine, we ended up discussing how eating babies was supposed to celebrate the end of the First World War. We decided that they probably didn't think of it in those terms - perhaps the babies were a sign of innocence or of new life and new hopes for the future after the end of the war. Perhaps they were intended to encourage the replenishment of the population.

Apparently you can't get them in the US.

parables

"For most folks, it's a parable if it's a story with a message. Once upon a time there was a vineyard owner with three sons who cast out their nets and caught wheat as well as tares. And the landlord returned in the middle of the night and said to the Samaritan who had sold everything he had in order to buy the pearl, 'You have forgiven much so much will be forgiven you,' but to the one who buried his talents and had no oil in his lamp he said, 'Depart from me, I never knew you, and kill the fatted calf on your way out.' Or something like that. Now that's a parable!"

(Conrad Gempf, Jesus Asked (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), pp. 23-24)

being on Japanese TV

I spent last Monday as an extra for a Japanese TV drama, filming at St John's College. I was one of a group of 1920s Cambridge students and wore a stripy tie, a stripy shirt, a V-necked jumper (which I put on the wrong way round until this was pointed out to me by the chief haridresser), cords with braces and a tweed jacket. I got a free hair cut too. It wasn't as scarily short as I feared and was more or less as I have it cut anyway. I felt the look quite suited me, and we didn't look hugely out of place in the surroundings. More info on the filming is available from the university website.

The drama is about the life of Jiro Shirasu, who studied in Cambridge and went on to be a key player in mediating between the Allied occupiers of Japan after World War II and Japanese politicians, playing an important part in the drafting of the new Japanese constitution. In the national archives is a letter by Jiro Shirasu to an American official contrasting, with the aid of diagrams, the American "airway" route of reaching an objective directly with the Japanese "Jeep way over bumpy roads" of reaching the same destination indirectly - an insightful analogy which resonates with my own experience of Western and East Asian modes of thought. Among other accomplishments he was apparently the first Japanese person to wear jeans.

The day mostly involved walking round the same courtyard for hours on end in the background of the action, but I also got a scene in the library talking to the lead actor. You may see me on Japanese TV next year if you look out.

In other news, I've moved house and my brother and family have moved to Texas.