Category Archives: Personal Columns

News is how you interpret it

For the fainthearted . . .

There was a colleague who used to tell a Chinese legend counselling caution about drawing conclusions.

There was a farmer who had only one horse, and one day the horse ran away. The farmer’s friends sympathised with him over his bad news. ‘It could be bad news, it could be good news, who knows?’ responded the farmer.

Sometime later, the horse came home – time bringing with it a group of beautiful wild horses.

The friends were delighted at the farmer’s good fortune and said to him how pleased they …

Lines on ugliness

For the fainthearted . . .

Poems from Philip Larkin are among those for the Third Year English course. Larkin seems appropriate for young people daily confronted by uncompromising realities. There is a realism in Larkin’s work, an unflinching willingness to take on life as it is, whether it be beautiful or ugly.

One of the complaints against Siegfried Sassoon from his contemporaries was that he wrote of ugliness and violence and not of things that might lift the heart. His lines were often filled with hideous images, they troubled, they disturbed. It was not what …

Routines

For the fainthearted . . .

Viewers of the television detective series Endeavour will know about Inspector Thursday’s sandwiches. Sitting in a pub at lunchtime each day, Morse quickly works out the sequence of the fillings and each day can tell his superior what Mrs Thursday has put in her husband’s sandwiches for that day.

A colleague in Cheltenham used to similarly tell me what was in my sandwiches. ‘Cheese and pickle, Ian.’

Of course, he was right. The sandwiches were always cheese and pickle.

‘Ian, why do you always have cheese and pickle sandwiches?’

‘I …

A Sermon for Sunday, 11th September 2022

For the fainthearted . . .

“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” Luke 15:4

How do you imagine this shepherd?

Perhaps our picture of the shepherd depends on our own experience.

Growing up in the pasturelands of the English West Country, a shepherd was a farmer who kept sheep. They grazed in fields, lambed in springtime, and were shorn each year.  The propensity of sheep to escape made them …

Lost in time

For the fainthearted . . .

The No 7 bus this evening – Monkstown to Pearse Street and then walk to College Green for the No 40 to Ballyfermot. Straightforward.

The bus was very quiet and we were rattling and there was a sudden feeling of not knowing where I was or why I was there.

Maybe everyone has such moments, a sudden sense of dislocation, of wondering what set of circumstances conspired to leave one in some unexpected place.

Usually the thoughts come far from home. There is a sudden angst at being in a …

Slipping away, piece by piece

For the fainthearted . . .

Once, he spoke at a church service in my parish. A brilliant exploration of the interaction of religion and science. Long after his retirement, he was still in demand as an authority in his field.

Then piece by piece, his memory started to crumble. The conversations he once would have enjoyed became too difficult.

One cannot imagine his experience, it is a place from which no-one has returned. The nearest analogy I could imagine was prompted by a picture a friend once posted online.

Daphne's mugSeeing the picture gave me, perhaps, …