September 2013 – For the fainthearted . . .

Handling grief

Bible stories are read so often in church that people stop listening. It is assumed that nothing more is to be heard, that nothing more can be learned. Maybe the problem arises from discontinuity, breaking the material up into chapters and verses, reading so much and then stopping until next Sunday, instead of reading it as you would any other story.

John the Baptist is killed by henchmen of the vicious thug Herod, the consequence of a drunken whim. Many people without the slightest church connection will know the story; …

Lamenting the loss of a station

Released on 12th March 1929, “From Galway to Dublin” by Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band is probably a record to which one might listen once, but be tempted to change channels if it were to be played a second time. The early recording features the naming of each of the stations through which the train will pass on its excursion, along with a brief comment on the town, with someone laughing and providing their own comments at each announcement, against a background of traditional music. Were it to be …

Solo

Of course, he hasn’t changed in five years, at the age of 22, he is the person he was at 17. Maybe people don’t ever really change. He is still solitary, still leading an individual existence, but is that such a bad thing? History is full of people who were outgoing and sociable and who did great evil, and quiet, reserved people who didn’t do much harm.

Turning back the pages, five years ago, the conversations were not much different.

“He’s been there nearly a week now and he hasn’t …

Forgetting the best bit

A photograph posted on Facebook from August 1973 recalls memories of a holiday forty summers past. Moments from such times remain fresh long after recent times are forgotten.

The holiday had been long anticipated. Friday evening was spent in anxious waiting for my uncle, aunt and their family with whom we would holiday. Leaving Gloucestershire on a summer weekend evening in those pre-motorway days; darkness had long fallen before they arrived. No matter that the hour was late, we would travel to Cornwall through the night hours to avoid the …

You can’t not be on a boat

As someone who could become sick in a rowing boat on the Serpentine, anything involving vessels crossing water has been nothing more than a necessary evil. Boats, of whatever size they may be, are for the purpose of moving one from Point A to Point B in the minimum possible time; the idea that one would pay to spend day upon day on a boat seems absurd.

Finding myself on a nineteen hour crossing from Cherbourg in northern France to Rosslare in south-east Ireland would be a prospect that would …

I’ll be here in fifteen years

A schoolmaster would probably have dismissed such a hope as evidence of “a lack of ambition”. In my late-twenties, an aspiration developed to become a writer of bad novels, making just enough to get by. The meagre living would enable the purchase of a small stone cottage deep in southern France, a place within walking distance of a village which had a bread shop and a cafe. The sea would not be too distant, though the area would not be so popular that the roads became congested in the summer …