Ian Poulton – For the fainthearted . . .

A statuesque lady

The unveiling of her statue in Grantham at the weekend has shown that even in death, Margaret Thatcher retains her capacity to polarise opinion. Never someone to whom people could be indifferent, Britain’s first female premier was either loved or hated.

Margaret Thatcher was a revolutionary. Her revolution was not amongst the middle classes; any Tory leader might have commanded those votes. Margaret Thatcher’s success was to garner the votes of millions of working-class people, particularly around London and the south-east. ‘Essex man’, the brash, Sun-reading, proletarian, was at …

Familiar ballads

When did popular music become popular?

There were folk songs that people knew that were passed down from generation to generation, and there were the music hall songs from the Nineteenth Century known and sung in urban and industrial communities up and down the country. But popular music, that which cuts across geography and class and even age, seems to have come with the advent of the radio and the record player.

Donovan was played on the radio. I have never bought a Donovan record, never been at a Donovan …

Yes, I do like to see people suffer!

Arranging the CDs in the rack, I picked up an Adele’s 21.

In the the final track on the album, Someone Like You, her soulful voice expresses the angst of the jumbled emotions of the lyrics.

Never mind, I’ll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you.

‘Hmmm, Adele’, I thought, ‘you’re a better person than I am.’

I’m more into a bit of schadenfreude. I am afraid I take a certain delight in the misfortune of those who have caused me hurt.

There is …

A Sermon for Sunday, 22nd May 2022

‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you.’ John 14:25

Professor Sean Freyne, the New Testament lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin used to divide the Gospel of John into two books: the book of Works (Chapters 1-11) and the book of Words (Chapter 12-21).

The miracles that John recounts in Chapter 1-11, are seen from John’s perspective not just as incidents in a story, but as deliberate signs pointing to the glory of Jesus. After the turning of the water into wine in John Chapter …

We have wintered it out

After his poetry collection Wintering Out was published in 1972, a comment from Seamus Heaney on that violent and turbulent year was reported in the Cork Examiner, “If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.”

Some forty-eight years later, as Covid-19 closed down society, Heaney’s words became the most popular meme in Ireland.

The words have expressed the mood of the present times. The first stanza of Heaney’s poem Servant Boy tells of a man who has spent his years working wherever he may earn a wage:…

The cycling nights have arrived

It was not so much a bicycle, more an amalgam of bicycles, a frame from one, wheels from another, parts gathered from various places. Its improvised nature meant it was not as valued as much one that had arrived shiny and new. Once it was stolen, its absence prompting a telephone call to a local police station, where a pleasant officer asked for its description and then revealed that it has been handed in to them a week before; the thief had thrown it over a hedge between High Ham …