June 2012 – For the fainthearted . . .

Missing Auntie Beeb

The BBC had always been there. In Northern Ireland, it was part of the landscape, but even when moving to Dublin in 1999, the AM channels were easily accessible – BBC Radio 4 on Long Wave and BBC Radio Five on Medium Wave continued to feature in at least some part of the week, as they had before. Radio 4 was especially important, Irish broadcasting simply has not the resources to sustain such a station.

Moving from the east coast of Ireland in 2010 brought immediately noticeable changes. The digital …

Not being a Herbert

Ordained priest on Sunday, 28th June 1987, Saint Peter’s Day twenty-five years ago was my first celebration of Holy Communion. Standing in church this evening for the handful of souls gathered to remember Peter, there was a few moments to reflect on the changes in a quarter of a century, the biggest of which seemed to be that there was far more preaching than in times past.

George Herbert’s A Priest to the Temple or The Country Parson has remained the ideal through the years. Herbert died in 1633, from …

The end of an icon

The BBC reports that French Minitel system will be switched off on Saturday. Revolutionary in the 1980s, visitors to France probably only encountered France’s forerunner of the Internet at hotel receptions, or in the pictures of busty women pasted on roadside hoardings inviting interested persons to encounter them via a 3615 Minitel number.

Another episode of communications history comes to an end. An icon of technology will be no more. The speed of change seems to increase.

A friend who died in 2004 would have talked of the century of …

Sermon for Sunday, 1st July 2012 (Trinity 4/Pentecost 5/Proper 8/Ordinary 13)

“Do not fear, only believe “. Mark 5:36

I always loved action films. In my childhood years there were the cowboy films: the hero and his trusty lieutenant would be trapped in a ring of waggons or in a log cabin, defending a group of women and children against the attackers. There would usually be some feisty woman who would ignore his instructions to stay hidden and would prove to be a shot as good as Annie Oakley as she picked off the surrounding villains with her late father’s rifle. …

Being unfashionable

“Maxi-Dress €20” declares the advertising billboard for Boohoo on the Limerick road from Mountrath. An alluring, dark haired woman reclines in a multicoloured dress that is presumably a piece of retro fashion.

Didn’t maxi dresses appear in the late 1960s? Certainly, the bright print colours of the featured garment might not have looked out of place at Woodstock or the Isle of Wight. They were the preferred attire of those who would have painted CND logos on their faces, who would have worn flat soled leather thong sandals, and who …

In the corners of the mind

Names surface, uninvited. Reading a Marilynne Robinson interview in this week’s Church Times, there is a memory of recalling a name from the past: Barry Davie.

Sitting in a psychology lecture once, the lecturer was talking about memory. He suggested that it might be possible that the brain retained everything we ever heard. (This seemed doubtful, I couldn’t recall what the lecturer had said in his previous point). The problem, he said, was in recalling the information from the depths of the memory

Wanting clarification, I asked him a silly …