August 2011 – For the fainthearted . . .

Firmly drawn lines

Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Highway Patrolman’ was played on the radio as the last light of the evening slowly faded. It seemed fitting music for driving Midland roads on the last night of summer; a sense of something having been lost, of something gone beyond recovery, in the song’s case the end of a friendship, in the calendar’s case, another season forever gone beyond recall.

The end in the ‘Highway Patrolman’ is more than an emotional separation, it is a physical parting, made possible through the line on a map, the border …

Turned to gold

An African friend used to joke that his country had solved the alchemist’s quest, that they had found a way of making gold. (The truth he disclosed was less pleasant, that the gold exported was plundered from a neighbouring country). The search for the Philosopher’s Stone, the thing that would turn common metal to gold or silver, preoccupied researchers for centuries.

The Philosopher’s Stone appears in the writing of the 17th Century English priest George Herbert. In his ‘Teach me my God and King’, what makes everything special is not …

Not a Mrs Warboys day

It was the English August Bank Holiday today. Walking through Dublin at 8.30 this morning on the way to a meeting, the thought occurred that it would have been nice to have one of those old fashioned Bank Holiday weekends, a weekend that started on Friday evening and finished on a Tuesday morning, with no work on the Saturday or the Sunday. Then a second thought occurred, the August Bank Holiday is a Mrs Warboys day.

On Mrs Warboys days, the entire populations of large cities decide it is the …

The world is getting smaller (or High Ham is very big)

Preaching in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin this morning, a clerical collar near the front row of the congregation was easy to spot; its wearer did not look familiar. When he came to the communion rail, he was definitely someone I had not seen before.

Going to the south door to greet worshippers as they left at the end of the service, the man in the clerical shirt and his companion approached with warm smiles. ‘Good morning’, he said,’ we are pleased to be with you. I’m a Roman Catholic …

A Dublin saint

The two roomed flat is the ground floor of a nineteenth century house in Dublin’s Kevin Street. The building would once have stood as part of a row, but its companions on either side have long since disappeared. Driving down Kevin Street with its constant flow of traffic, it would be easy to fail to notice the front door.

In the hallway, beside the intruder alarm control panel and above the fire extinguisher, a wooden plaque is affixed to the wall:

THIS DISPENSARY
WAS ERECTED
IN MEMORY OF
THE THIRTY …

Lyme revived

Standing in the hallway of a parishioner’s house Tuesday evening, a watercolour scene hung in the wall. ‘Lyme Regis’, I smiled.

The man looked astonished. ‘Did my wife tell you where it was?’

‘No. It’s unmistakeable. We used to go there when I was a kid. You know the actress Meryl Streep? She stood at the end of the harbour wall there in a scene from ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’. He looked bemused. ‘It was a film based on a novel by John Fowles; it was quite famous when it …