And everyone 'neath their vine and fig tree...

Well we have arrived in Toulouse - getting up this morning was not the most pleasant awakening to catch the early train from Geneva to Lyon; and getting stuck for an hour in field just 10 minutes from our destination because of signallying problems was a little frustrating.
Anyway the great thing about train journeys is reading - papers for the meeting of course (please note my boss is reading this so it must sound as if I'm working a bit!) and the new Elizaabeth George.

The Institute which is housing the meeting is right in the heart of the city and I have a lovely room with an interesting view which inspired me to use the biblical quote in the title - on the right a view onto a glorious fig tree and on the left a typical southern European city skyline. The biblical image - from Micah I think (ok I admit I forgot to pack my Bible but they'll have lots downstairs) - depicts a kind of fruitful and fecund rural idyl after speaking about all nations beating their swords into pruning hooks. I wonder about how much such rural biblical imagery can speak to us now - so much of the world's population today lives in cities and towns. So as our meeting thinks and discusses the challenges surrounding ethics and conversion it's interesting to think about the fig tree in the heart of the teeming, diverse city within which all can dwell and work and walk in peace and faith and be unafraid... Oh dear sounds like a sermon folks I better stop!

And so to my next blogging challenge which is to see whether I can actually post the photos I've just taken
... if you see any it may mean I've managed it.

Later challenges will I suppose include having to put url links etc into all of this I suppose if you don't try sometime you never will and I dare say we could call it capacity building or something afterwards - training of the not-so-very-technically-interested.
Which reminds me that se (re)convertir in French can also means to retrain, to change career or direction. Quite fun that I am trying to retrain as a marginally web-able person during a meeting on conversion.

Okay I'll see if I can manage the photos now.