I'm famous cos God loves me

Before they were famous, many of the biggest pop stars in the world believed that God wanted them to be famous, that this was his plan for them, just as it was his plan for the rest of us not to be famous. Conversely, many equally talented but slightly less famous musicians I’ve interviewed felt their success was accidental or undeserved—and soon after fell out of the limelight.

As I compiled and analyzed these interviews for my new book, I reached a surprising conclusion: Believing that God wants you to be famous actually improves your chances of being famous. Of course, from the standpoint of traditional theology, even in the Calvinistic world of predestination, God is much more concerned with the fate of an individual’s soul than his or her secular success, and one’s destiny is unknowable. So what’s helping these stars is not so much religion as belief - specifically, the belief that God favors their own personal, temporal success over that of almost everyone else.

From “God at the Grammys: The Chosen Ones” by Neil Strauss.

Lacking Celebrities

There’s been a distinct lack of celebrities wandering around in the same places as we’ve been wandering since we came to England. In fact, the only celebrity we’ve seen is Stephen Fry, who was shooting a program called Kingdom (as far as I can make out) in Swaffham, the day we were there.
I’ve expected to see a celebrity in almost every supermarket or large store or main street or boutique shop. Nope. They’re very thin on the ground at present, or maybe in hiding during the summer. There was an older woman in the supermarket last night who seemed distinctly familiar from some tv progam, and I was tempted to check her out, but decided to let her have her privacy in the end. Plus it didn’t seem to be a very celebrity thing to do for her to be pushing her supermarket trolley from the wrong end, and then, when she kept getting her feet stuck in the back wheels, turning the thing sideways and having all four wheels going westwards.
Stephen Fry appeared on tv in a completely different program one night on tv: he was discussing the fact that he suffers from manic depression. And he interviewed several other people who had the same illness. Most of them, curiously, said they were happier in the end that they'd had it than not; only one woman said she would prefer to be dead. (One other bloke had tried to kill himself, by walking into a moving lorry. It had left him with severely damaged legs - and a will to go on living!)
Still, at least she hadn’t done what I did one day. I pulled the nearest trolley from the pile outside, thought it was a little large, found it quite difficult to handle, and only later discovered it was for the disabled shoppers.

Hotels in London

Once our time of baby-sitting homes in the UK finishes at the end of August we’ll need to start looking at actually paying for accommodation! Scary.

I’ve just been informed of a site on the Net that advertises hotels in London (a place we’ll be going back to at some point, since we’ve only spent three rather hectic days there so far). The focus of the site is the offer of last minute bookings (last minute in this case being within 21 days) at places that are cheaper than hotels. A slightly odd concept, since most of the places listed on the site are actually hotels, but that’s by the by!

The prices vary from the extremely economic to the top level – no guesses as to which end of the spectrum we’ll be aiming at. You have this idea in mind that hotels in London must be impossibly expensive, and that they’re booked out all year round. They’re neither. Of course you can pay the earth for a hotel – if you’re a Sheikh or a celebrity – but being neither we don’t feel inclined to pay more than a reasonable price.

Nor are we people who attend conferences regularly, but obviously plenty of other people do. In fact, my English nephew speaks at them all the year around. I don’t know if he’s spoken at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, but it’s regarded as London’s premier conference centre, so it’s likely he has. And if you get bored listening to people like my nephew (an unlikely possibility) you can stare out the window at the Houses of Parliament, because the Centre is right in the heart of London, or you can sit and consider how lucky you were that you came across your very economic hotel on the cheaper than hotels site!