Like many of us, I’m back to work today, the first Monday of the new year. As soon as I leave here, I’ll be on the bus to Oxford with a long to-do-list: lessons to prepare, courses to plan, colleagues and students to see, admin to keep up with, research to start, writing to finish. …
There’s a lot of new stuff around our houses at Christmas. New clothes, new toys, new smells, new novelty foodstuffs, and yet somehow, a couple of days later the place contrives to feel weary and old and hungover. So I’ve been doing the laundry. Yesterday, I did six loads of washing, clean, dried, folded and …
I’ve been thinking about my Godchildren. Loads of us have godchildren. We get them almost by accident. We agree to be godparents because we love our friends and our families, because it makes us feel a little bit included and a little bit grown up and because we love a good christening party. I have …
One of the best things about my job is meeting experts. The Ashmolean Museum where I work is full of them, and so is the rest of Oxford. The people I teach with are specialists - in history, modern languages, theology, classics, neuroscience, geography, literature and all sorts of other things – and they seem …
As a boy, I was a member of the 2nd Headstone Scout Group. I was a cub, a scout and a Venture Scout. I made friends and I misbehaved. I learned to camp, make a fire, climb a hill, clean my shoes, paddle a canoe, chop wood, make plaster-casts of animal tracks, sharpen a knife, …
Like most of the civilised world, I watched the Rugby World Cup final on Saturday. It was brilliant; an astonishing, almost Godlike display of power and skill, control under pressure and immense strength. And like most of the civilised world, I was delighted and amazed by the footage shot after the game of the All Black …
It’s half term. We are surrounded by our children. Actually, my family are all on holiday while I’m at work and I am in no way grumpy or ungracious about that. Obviously. But it’s had me thinking rather wistfully about the summer, when we went all together to Brighton for a day of beach, fish, …
I do a lot of stupid things. Some of them are just dumb. And some of them are a bit dangerous. Last weekend I lost my glasses because I didn’t notice I wasn’t wearing them. That was just dumb. When I was thirteen, I bought a catapult, which I hid from my parents because I …
This has been the last big festival weekend of the summer, the last holiday hurrah before reverting to routine. I don’t know about you Sara, but Chris has been at Carfest South and I’ve been at the Christian arts festival, Greenbelt.Different events, same struggles; same desire for the most fun possible before heading back to …
In the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge there’s a seventeenth-century Dutch painting of some people walking on a beach. Last year, the painting went to be cleaned and, as she started to remove the old varnish, the conservator, Shan Kuang, noticed something unusual about the surface. It turned out that not only were there people on …