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Monthly Archives: December 2008

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An end to Hogmanay?

For the fainthearted . . .

New Year’s Eve brings memories of childhood: black and white television pictures of men in kilts, lumps of coal, and tenor voices declaring  the virtues of laddies and lassies.  Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it seems in the memory, perhaps there were songs other than “Loch Lomond” and “Donald, where’s your trousers?”

Whatever the reality, the abiding perception of New Year’s Eve is of fuzzy television pictures from some studio, where they all thought that turning a page of the calendar was something to be marked by the singing …

Incommunicado

For the fainthearted . . .

The BBC had one of those special moments yesterday morning, of which only the BBC is capable.  Today the flagship programme of Radio 4 had a guest editor, the novelist Zadie Smith.  As well as editing the programme, Ms Smith presented a feature piece she had made on life in Liberia.  For anyone with even the slightest sense of humanity, it made depressing listening, Liberia it concluded was “a failed state”, nothing worked, there was no safety net for people like the blind children who attended a special school, but …

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For the fainthearted . . .

The world’s end was flagged up be the departure of the dolphins in Douglas Adams’ So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. The dolphins disappear from planet, leaving no more than a note to humanity thanking it for the fish received over the years.  No-one noticed the departure, no-one saw it as an omen of trouble until it was too late.

In Doctor Who , it was not the dolphins that disappeared, but the bumble bees, foreshadowing the coming of the Darkness but not noticed until the moment when …

Making it look different

For the fainthearted . . .

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendour and joy.

Brian Friel’s character, Gar O’Donnell quotes lines from Edmund Burke’s description of Marie-Antoinette as a defence against the onslaught of negative thoughts.  …

Staring down the line

For the fainthearted . . .

Lines from Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle collection recall childhood memories.

Wooden sleepers that had once formed part of the permanent way of the railway had been taken up and lain redundant until being used for the landscaping of a garden.  The scent of creosote and blistered tar bring memories of lying in the silence of a Ulster night waiting for the rattle of a train.  The memories will remain forever in the deep past as the railway is closed and dismantled and the place where it had once been …

New Year Covenant sermon

For the fainthearted . . .

Sermon at Saint Matthias’ Church at the Covenant Service on the last Sunday of the old year, 28th December 2008

(Regular readers of this blog will recognize the thoughts as having been posted here before)

‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ Matthew 25:21

2008 has not been a good year—the credit crunch led to the collapse of our economy, already vulnerable because of the huge bubble in …

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