Seven things to do to cheer yourself up

Years of experience has made me a wise man. If you are feeling down, and not even Baywatch seems to help

1. Put a lot of Tobasco sauce in your work colleagues tea
   
2. Flick bogies at old people
   
3. Make remarks to insecure teenagers about the spots covering their faces
   
4. Regularly throw out the metaphorical baby with the bathwater.
   
5. Visit a conservative Christian friend's flat, and swap all of their John Piper books with Funk, Ehrman and Lüdemann volumes.
   
6. Take only the King James 1611 Version to your 'emergent' bible studies, and use the word 'repenteth' a lot.
   
7. And read Douglas Campbell's brilliant, I repeat brilliant tome, The Deliverance of God. Loren Rossen has written an impressive review here, and I can only agree with his enthusiasm. I think it is the most important book to have been published since Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism. I had the pleasure of meeting Douglas last week and we had a good chat about his book and a forthcoming project which will also be a huge interest. A great guy. A worldview shaking book. Though this sort of thing is often said, I mean it most seriously: This one should become compulsory reading for any Pauline aficionados. More from me about this one anon.