There is something about trees which grips my imagination – I hope you share my enthusiasm. I think it all began for me with a programme by David Bellamy when I was a teenager. It was all about what you might call the ‘engineering’ of trees – how much pressure it takes for water to…
I was in town the other day and passed a homeless man sitting on the ground outside a shop. He wasn’t begging: he was just sitting there, in quiet destitution; a sad, pitiable sight. A woman coming towards me looked at him, then looked at me, her face signalling contempt, scorn and hatred for this…
I’ve just been away on holiday. I suppose any holiday in the English Lake District will inevitably involve encounters with sheep. I saw plenty of the beautiful Herdwick sheep which are such a feature of the Lake District fells, and there were lots of lambs. One day I stopped at a smallholding where there were…
Holy Week – Monday 11 April “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ‘Why was this perfume…
East West Street I have been re-reading East West Street by Philippe Sands: an account of the lives of two men who introduced the terms Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity into international law. Both men were Jewish, both lived in the Ukrainian town now known as Lviv in the first half of the C20th. Along…
I was talking to my mum this week about the lady who used to come and help her with the cleaning – a cheerful and kind woman who lived in terrible poverty and was married to a violent and abusive man. Their son died as a young man as an indirect result of the beatings…
Over the last month, Messy Sermons have been looking at the story of Noah’s Ark. We have learned about why God told Noah to build an ark and we have learned about Noah’s family. We found out the names of Noah’s sons but could not find the names of all the wives in the Bible…
Noise! At a hospital appointment on Monday morning I was dismayed by the noise. There was a TV on somewhere – a sitcom with canned laughter but meaningless because the screen wasn’t visible. At the other end of the ward there was a radio playing, and then some people came in with a child and…
Above the clouds, the sun always shines When I was a child we holidayed mostly in the United Kingdom, with occasional camping trips to Germany via the ferry from Harwich. There’s a layby, just west of Settle, where we once stopped to fix a puncture: my dad was a very patient man, but he really…
Hyperbole I can remember coming home from day’s out in the Lake District when I was a child, and my dad saying that he was so hungry he could eat a horse between two haystacks. One of my favourites is to say that someone has an ego the size of a small solar system. And…