August 2015 – For the fainthearted . . .

August Bank Holiday Monday

It was August Bank Holiday Monday in England. It was on one such day in the early-1970s that my father took me on a fishing expedition from Lyme Regis; perhaps fixing in my head the idea that Lyme Regis was the sort of place one should go on an August Bank Holiday.

Unfortunately, August Bank Holiday Monday is a Mrs Warboys day. On Mrs Warboys days, the entire populations of large cities decide it is the very moment for the whole family to jump in the motor car and to …

Timetabled contentment

Standing on the platform at Betws y Coed station on a Thursday afternoon in April five years ago, railway timetables became a matter for discussion. There was a train that departed from Betws y Coed to make the 27 minute journey to Blaenau Ffestiniog at 0559 every morning from Monday to Saturday. Who travelled the line in that beautiful but remote corner of Wales at such a time of the morning? In an age of rationalisation and market economics, to what workplace were people travelling through the darkness of winter …

Different spaces

A telephone call yesterday confirmed that a lay reader from the neighbouring county could take a service usually taken by one from our own parish. “We are going out to Alberta.” she had said.

“The weather is good there in the fall,” I smiled.

“Indeed.” she has laughed, catching the allusion to Neil Young.

Is there a correlation between space and contentment? Do wide open rural acres lend themselves to a more mellow view of life? Or, if not mellowness, an inclination to let things be, to turn away from …

Sermon for Sunday, 30th August 2015

“You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” Mark 7:8

Have you ever been sat in a church service and wondered that you might be out doing something more useful instead? It’s not that you don’t believe, not that you don’t feel that God is present in your life, but that you wonder if the church has anything to do with your faith. There are occasions when such thoughts have crossed my mind, perhaps it was a failing on my …

Pictured detail

A friend from the ’80s was a good amateur photographer (good to the point where he had exhibitions); he took photographs of unlikely things, interesting things. Driving along the Bangor to Belfast dual carriageway one morning, he stopped to photograph the side of a barn, upon which was painted Bible verse. The prophecy of the forthcoming judgment was juxtaposed with dark thunder clouds in the Ulster sky to the west.

A couple of dozen photographs in our albums are in the friend’s style – though without his technical ability. Pictures …

New conversations

Standing on a garage forecourt filling my ageing Peugeot with diesel and contemplating nothing in particular, a voice broke into the moment of reverie. “Do you not have a sign for that?”

I turned to see a middle aged, well dressed man carrying a pile of books stepping into the passenger door of a car stopped at a nearby pump. I was baffled by the question, “Sorry?”

“Do you not have a sign you can make, like the sign of the cross or something, so that the car fills itself …