Needle time
At Dillington House in Ilminster at 1410 yesterday, I received my Covid vaccination. The whole process took a matter of minutes and I did not feel the needle that gave me the Pfizer vaccine. A sticker was stuck to my jacket with 1410 in bold black figures. I was required to sit in a room for fifteen minutes to ensure …[continue reading …]
Ciaran uncelebrated
In normal times, this Friday would have been celebrated as Saint Ciarán’s Day. The people of the parish of Seir Kieran in Co Offaly would be holding their annual ‘pattern’, a pilgrimage walk to the holy sites in the parish – the well, the tree, and the monastic site. I remember a sense of bafflement when, on a midwinter day, …[continue reading …]
Ignore the prophets of doom, the children will be fine
A BBC Radio 4 programme, perhaps in 2001, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the London blitz, included an opportunity for people to telephone with their own memories. One man, then in his sixties, called and described how as a boy he and his mother were walking to the school he attended and that a schoolfriend was walking with them. Suddenly, …[continue reading …]
Heathercombe Brake School Photographs
There are 679 (or thereabouts) photographs here. Some of them are duplicates and some of them are in random order. Paul Pope sent me a zip file in 2014 and I have been meaning to sort and upload them ever since. To have digitized these from prints to computer files must have taken many, many hours. They are nearly all …[continue reading …]
The old scams seem to work
There can be few people with email addresses who have not received at least an occasional email that seeks details that would allow the sender to defraud them. The “Spanish Hostage” scam is the oldest approach used (thus named because when it began two centuries ago people wrote letters claiming to be held hostage in Sapin and promising abundant reward …[continue reading …]
A happy story to tell
The mood of despondency among the students continues. Locked down, isolated, without hope of seeing friends for weeks, without the chance of doing anything other than what they have done for weeks, their answer to what they did at the weekend is “nothing.” I remember a despondent ten year old on a holiday in Austria some ten years ago. Riding …[continue reading …]
A Sermon for the Second Sunday of a Lockdown Lent, 28th February 2021
“For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Mark 8:33 There is a palpable sense of injustice being felt at the Government’s enforcement of the Covid restrictions. How can people be allowed to travel through England and into Europe to play rugby and football, while an ordinary person is prohibited from travelling to see …[continue reading …]
Prairie cold
My colleague smiled at the idea that the weather of this past week was cold. Cold for her meant below -30 or even -40 The report from Scotland that the temperature had reached -23 would have gone unremarked in her Alberta Prairie home. She recalled a day when schools had to be closed because the fuel had frozen in the …[continue reading …]
New York groove?
The intro to the song found a resonance deep in the memory, a sound from the distant past, not immediately recognisable, but undeniably something that had been encountered before. Initially, it seemed similar to Hamilton Bohannon’s Disco Stomp, a cheery tune from the summer of 1975, but that did not seem a likely song for inclusion in the BBC Radio 6 playlist. …[continue reading …]
Still waiting
Sunlight shone through a gap in the curtains. The sound of a tractor passing the cottage told Maggie that it was later than she thought. Her clock had stopped at some point and she had not replaced it. Normally waking at the same time each morning, Maggie had felt that a new battery for the clock was not necessary. The …[continue reading …]