June 2013 – For the fainthearted . . .

Looking for a golden age

Glastonbury filled the evening viewing, a venue very changed from the one I attended for the 1979 festival. ‘Glastonbury Fayre’ the promoters called it that year; Pilton Pop Festival, we called it. But even attending Glastonbury could not dispel the feeling of having missed the real music. The Beatles had broken up in 1970; Jimi Hendrix, Joplin and Jim Morrison were dead before we became aware of their existence. There was a feeling that history had ended.

By the late 70s, the tenth anniversary of the important events were occurring …

Branch line Ireland

Irish railways never had a Betjeman, or perhaps Irish people had not a sentimental attachment to trains. Writers did not extol the virtues of branch lines that carried handfuls of people to sleepy destinations. No-one became famous writing lines about steam locomotives and stone stations and characters in carriages.

Perhaps it is a residual Englishness that prompts a diversion from the main road to seek the course of the Kilkenny Junction Railway, closed fifty years ago and erased from much of the landscape. There had been a station on the …

All a scandal does is annoy you

Do scandals really just ensure nothing changes? Does the anger aroused by the Anglo Irish Bank tapes simply assist those intent on keeping things as they are?

Was Dario Fo right in 1970 when he wrote of scandals as no more than a ‘liberating burp’, a political antacid that rids the body politic of troubling indigestion? Think of the political scandals that spring immediately to mind and ask which of them brought any fundamental change.

Growing up on stories of the Profumo affair in Britain of the 1960s, scandal seemed …

Sermon for Sunday, 30th June 2013 (5th Sunday after Trinity/Proper 8/Pentecost 6/Ordinary 13)

‘Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?’ 2 Kings 2:14

The story of Elijah and Elisha is a story always appropriate at the end of a school year, it is about a teacher-pupil relationship drawing to a close, about the pupil facing the reality that he must face the world without the one who had been his guide and mentor, about the pupil being forced to go out and take the initiative himself. Elijah has been teaching Elisha and the time has come for Elisha to start out on …

The politics of indignation

‘Torpor’ is defined as ‘a state of mental and motor inactivity with partial or total insensibility’.

‘Torpor’ was painted in large black letters in the stairwell of the flats on the edge of Manchester’s Moss Side. The area had exploded into rioting in the spring of 1981, but by the winter, with its cold Lancashire drizzle, there was an air of resignation and hopelessness.

The stairwell stank constantly of urine; the lifts did not work for much of the time, and, when they did, smelt even worse. The occupied flats …

Growing older than the flowers

His whereabouts were uncertain, it seemed important to call at the house. The lane had fresh stones, or at least it seemed so, perhaps it was just the summer dryness that had created an under wheel firmness. The long six bar galvanised gate was padlocked, very firmly. Near his front door, a line of clothes blew in the June breeze. If there was washing on the line, he must be well and he could not be far away. His car was not to be seen, but that was not conclusive …