The lyrics of Paul Simon’s America filled the car at 6.25 am. It was a mellow start to a grey and damp November day.
The ballad tells the tale of a young couple journeying through a mythical land, an America that had to be sought, that needed to be searched out
Counting the cars
On the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all come
To look for America
It is sixty years this month since the election of John F. Kennedy as president. The Kennedys were part of that mythical land, that …
It is the centenary of the interment of the remains of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey, a hundred years since the human shreds that were once a person were buried beneath mud that had been brought from the battlefields of Flanders and France.
It was not before I had visited the Western Front at least half a dozen times that I came to realize that a soldier could be unknown to varying degrees. There were unknown soldiers about whom something was know, and unknown soldiers who were entirely unknown.…
There being an English teacher absent, I was called upon to cover a Year 11 English lesson.
English is not my subject and Year 11 students have their GCSE examinations next summer, so it was a relief to discover that the lesson was about discussing the topic of graffiti as art and then writing a letter to an imaginary council to support or condemn the appearance of graffiti in the town.
An eight minute video introduced the subject, explaining that graffiti had been around since classical times. It might be …
On 29th October each year the Anglican Church remembers James Hannington, a bishop who was killed for his faith on 29th October 1885.
The bishop’s name has been much used in East Africa since then, he has been remembered as a saint. At least one of those who used his name was less than saintly.
Visiting Burundi in 2009, one of the list of projects I had been detailed to visit was one which had received £60,000 in funding from Ireland, paid through an evangelical Christian agency. £30,000 had come …
There is no better remedy for the annoyance caused by the current range of politicians than to think of the pale blue dot
The Pale Blue Dot, Is a photograph taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on 14th February 1990 when it was six billion kilometres from the Earth. The photograph is taken looking toward the Earth, which covers an area of less than one pixel in the picture.
The astronomer Carl Sagan reflected on that pale blue dot, he sought to place our human existence and endeavours in …
It was Sibelius who raised the idea. Thinking about the Intermezzo from his Karelia Suite, I switched on Classic FM on Sunday morning to hear that very piece of music being played.
“If I can pick a piece of music at such long odds, “ I thought, “then perhaps I could pick lottery numbers.”
It was a thought that prompted a web search. Perhaps there were websites that suggested on how being able to pick a random piece of music might be translated into predicting combinations of numbers that …
