I picked up a book given to me in 1986 as an ordination gift by a neighbour of my grandmother.
There was a momentary wince of pain recalling the last time I saw my grandmother on a winter’s evening in 1987.
The cancer about which I knew nothing was obviously very advanced at that time and she had hugged me with tears in her eyes and said how much she loved me.
We were not a family given to displays of affection and I had responded in a lukewarm way.…
I have put on a stone since last summer, I weighed twelve and a half stones this morning.
If I had to identify the cause of the weight gain, it’s probably too much bread and cheese. In the fridge there is large block of cheddar, together with Branston pickle, and jars of pickled onions and pickled beetroot.
Sometimes, picking up the plate and a mug of tea, there is a sudden moment of slipping back more than forty years.
Perhaps a teenager, perhaps only eleven or twelve, I was with …
Three weeks until Marseilles. Hours have been spent on Duolingo.
Travelling via Lyon and travelling alone, I want to get by in French.
Unpacking my boxes of books that arrived from England last Monday, I picked up Living French by T.W. Knight M.A. (Oxon). It was first published in 1952 and excellent value in 1979 at £1.25.
For thirty years when the generosity of the Church of Ireland stipend allowed long holidays In France, there was hardly a summer that passed without reciting that Mrs Dubois has a pretty hat. …
Star Wars Day (well, it is if you pronounce ‘force’ in the manner of Violet Elizabeth Bott from Richmal Crompton’s Just William)
I remember a Saturday back in May 2005 when Star Wars III was in the cinemas. I watched Arsenal in the FA Cup Final and then went with my son Michael to see Star Wars at the cinema in Bray.
I also remember a Saturday in May 1978. Arsenal played in the FA Cup Final on a Saturday afternoon and in the evening my dad took me …
“I’m nice to people and people are nice to me. And if they’re not nice to me then there are other people who are”.
The words of Neil Baldwin in the film Marvellous express an entire philosophy of life.
Neil Baldwin is a person incapable of malevolence. He is an embodiment of the Golden Rule. He seems a fufillment of the common notion of karma, that doing good brings good things to you.
Perhaps the deeper problem for those of us whose lives seem much more complicated is to discern …
‘What are you doing for Easter?’ asked a colleague.
‘Going home,’ I said.
But what does ‘going home’ mean? It seems a phrase rich with possible meanings.
From Dvorak’s Symphony Number Nine, the New World Symphony: the Largo became the base for the song Goin’ Home. Once, at a funeral I conducted, a male voice choir sang Goin’ Home. It was a transcendent moment, the sound gave the sombreness a different quality.
‘We’re going home’, was what the hero would declare at the end of films in boyhood …
