Ian Poulton – For the fainthearted . . .

Mornington religion

Driving through Trim in Co Meath each morning, I pass a sign pointing to Mornington View. A search of a streetmap of the town show that there are also Mornington Heights, Green, Drive, Avenue and Way. While there is no Mornington Crescent, the signpost always prompts thoughts of the the BBC Radio 4 panel show I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue.

There was a game on the programme called ‘Mornington Crescent.’ The game seemed a random naming of stations on the London Underground network until someone said ‘Mornington Crescent’ and …

Silly rituals make a difference

Flicking through a friend’s copy of a Church of Ireland directory, I remembered a story told by another friend who belongs to the Masonic Order. He had complained that attendance at his Lodge meeting had been so thin that he had played a number of roles to allow the evening’s proceedings to take place, at one point this meant answering his own question.

I laughed at the thought of it. He is someone who is always on the edge of a joke or a story and a sense of the …

A new sermon for Sunday, 22nd January 2023

A sermon on the Gospel reading for Sunday, 22nd January 2023, Saint Matthew Chapter 4 Verses 12-23.

How many times have the verses of today’s Gospel reading been read in church? Anyone who is a regular attender at Sunday worship has probably heard them hundreds of times, yet how often has anyone ever stopped to look at the places mentioned?

In more than thirty years of parish ministry, I do not recall that I ever preached on the places named by Saint Matthew. Why not? I’m not sure.

Sitting at …

And what are you thinking?

‘What’s on your mind, Ian?’ asks the ‘status’ box on Facebook. It is a question they have asked for the past decade or so.

It seems an odd question, even a silly one, how many people are going to sit and type into a public web page the stuff that is going through their mind? It’s not that thoughts are unrepeatable in polite company, it’s that they are just boring. Does anyone really want to know about the stuff that fills the waking hours of most people’s lives? Wouldn’t a …

Recoiling from voicemail

The parent-teacher meetings were conducted on Teams, a platform I hate. Calls were placed by clicking on a telephone receiver icon and the recipient would appear, sometimes just as a voice, sometimes as also an image on screen.

Thankfully, all but one of the calls was answered. The one that wasn’t went to voicemail. I hate voicemail more than I hate Teams. I am always lost for words.

I remember my first encounter with answering machines.

I was a twenty-eight year old rector of a traditional, rural Ulster parish and …

The power of steam

I had never heard his name before, but among the enthusiasts who post on the Facebook group ‘Disused Railways’, the name of Dai Woodham is held in the sort of regard in which a religious person might hold a saint. Dai Woodham, it seems, was responsible for the survival of hundreds of steam locomotives.

Britain had continued to build steam locomotives after the Second World War when electrification would have been a better long-term investment. In post-war Britain, a thousand pits employing a million miners, and traditional steel works producing …