It’s the end of the school term and I was able to get to one of the grade 6 concerts. It’s a very special feeling watching your 2 eldest grandchildren who are cousins performing on stage. Especially when you know they have been rehearsing at home for weeks, stressing out over complicated choreography, and driving…
Last Saturday I was queuing up to order a meal in a pub. It was a long queue. Christmas music was playing. Two men in front of me (about my age) were passing the time by talking about the next few weeks and all the end-of-year functions that they would be involved in. They were…
Anyone walking past 163 Chapel St will notice that scaffolding has gone up and repairs to the tower will begin shortly. I want to invite you to think about this work as a metaphor. Scaffolding doesn’t actually support the tower; the tower supports the scaffolding. It wraps around it and enables people to access difficult…
As work begins on renovating the tower at 163 Chapel St, and public safety fencing is erected, I’m very conscious of disruption. The space at the front of the church building will not be available for a few months. The bench will be temporarily inaccessible – where will people sit and watch the world go…
The Kingdom of Heaven is like…… Jesus mostly talked about the Kingdom of Heaven in the form of parables. In their uninterpreted form, they provide us with the best raw material in the bible for understanding Jesus’s ministry and agenda. But parable, as a form of communication, is not unique to Jesus. His are powerfully…
One of my favourite poets is the late Seamus Heaney, and one of my favourite poems is Digging. As poetry, it does many things: it brings to life a hint of nostalgia from childhood memories, it reminds me of the dogged graft of labourers from a previous generation, and then it reminds me to be…
Greta Thunberg So many options for this week’s article and it was a toss-up between Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN, Boris Johnson’s unlawful ‘cancelling’ of Parliament in the UK, impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, or Scott Morrison’s absence from the UN climate summit. Then I realised that all 4 are all connected – especially…
One of the big philosophical questions that physics threw up when I was about 14, is ‘what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object’? I remember the discussion, and we all concluded that perpetual stalemate was the answer. However, our rather whacky physics teacher demonstrated that this was a flawed paradox, because something…
One of the interesting things about talk-back radio shows is that you get a pretty good glimpse of the kind of community that we live in. The other morning Freedom of Speech came up and I was surprised by just how many people rang in (all male by the way) who felt it was important…
My fascination with history (especially that of the Roman Empire) began as a young child growing up in Cambridge. I was surrounded by so much history. One favourite historical ‘excursion’ was walking along one of Britain’s earliest Roman roads constructed around 200 AD. It is still known as the Old Roman Rd, and it connects…