February 2013 – For the fainthearted . . .

Among my souvenirs

Keeping a memory box was the subject of this morning’s school assembly; somewhere we can keep the pictures and mementoes of special moments, something we can open in the future and recall times that were important. ‘I keep lots of bits and pieces in a drawer of a wooden desk’, I said.

It didn’t seem necessary to say that the drawer includes old news cuttings, pieces cut from newspapers of the times as reminders of what things had been like. There is one cutting that never loses its power, the …

The ‘Off’ App

Do you remember the days of writing letters, counting words for telegrams, or feeding stacks of coins into a pay phone? The way some people complain, it would be easy to imagine that such modes of communication represented some idyllic golden age when being out of touch meant one could exist in perfect peace and contentment. To be incommunicado has now become a selling point; the possibility of someone establishing undesired contact seems now to have prompted people to seek destinations where they cannot be reached; the BBC reports on …

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, 3rd March 2013

Unless you repent, you too will all perish. Luke 13:5

If I go out and commit a crime, who is to blame for my actions?

In times past there would have been no doubt as to where responsibility lay, an individual would be held accountable for his or her own actions, no matter how harsh such a decision might have been. Your family might have been dying in poverty, but if you were to steal to try to feed them you would have been punished with the full force of …

In heaven

A walk by the river in the brilliant white sunlight of a February morning, signs of spring are still scarce, frost lingers in the shadows. Once the bank would have been in a place of busyness, roofless mill buildings stand either side of the river. The walk seems sufficient to merit a visit to the sweet shop. A step back to the 1960s with rows of sweet-filled jars competing for attention, the presence of Hershey bars among the chocolate in Kitty’s Cabin a reminder that the business trades in a …

Aliens remain a mystery, but ghosts can be explained

Billy Pilgrim, central character of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, recalls imagined encounters with aliens from the planet of Tralfamadore. His family are embarrassed by the tales they regard as signs of psychiatric illness:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at

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Not seeing them again

Did you ever keep count of how many times you had heard a song? Listening to BBC Radio 1 in teenage years (and what else was there to listen to if you lived in rural England?), it was possible to hear a song maybe twenty or thirty times in a week. The station seemed to have a playlist that ensured huge exposure for some records whilst other, frequently better, recordings might find airtime among the more esoteric late night offerings or in the weekend programmes where presenters seemed more at …