I started running this year. Like every bloke of a certain age I have been, to put it in polite terms, ‘thickening’ around the middle and I wanted to arrest the spread, so I began pounding the streets of South London every other day or so. It hasn’t been a dramatic or life-transforming epiphany. I …
I was going to talk about holidays today: about the excellent John Lubbock, who, in 1871, introduced the Bank Holidays Act to fix national holidays in the working calendar and about how the Sabbath, one day’s rest in seven, shows that even God recognizes we all need a break sometimes. Instead, my producer wrote to …
‘A good and virtuous nature may recoil in an imperial charge’ Macbeth IV.iii, 18-19. It’s easy to be critical of people in leadership. We’ve all had a boss we can’t stand, an insufferable manager or a selfish captain. We are endlessly confronted in the news by politicians who have been caught fiddling their expenses or …
My Father was a good cricketer in his day. Every weekend, I’d go and watch him play for our local club, hoping I’d be good enough to join him one day. Sadly, my brother got the sports genes. The very first time my Mother saw him in action, before they were married, Dad took a …
My job is a long way from my home. I consequently spend far too much of my time on public transport. More to the point, I spend far too much of my time on public transport in the dark. Two and a half hours travel at either end of the working day means that for …
As you’ve probably heard, over Easter they switched on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland again, hoping to find out something more about the ‘dark matter’ that seems to make up 96% of the mass of the universe. Like most people, I can’t begin to contemplate the complexity of the questions that are …
I used to be in a band. It was the greatest fun it is possible to have and the friends I played with are still among my closest, 30 years later. There’s nothing quite like live music, making it or hearing it. Recently, I saw Wara - a London based band whose members are all …
About four hundred years ago, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei was starting to understand, along with others throughout Europe, something of the way the universe works. The earth, it seemed, was not at its centre, but travelled around the sun, along with the other planets. These new discoveries didn't sit well with the church, which …
This summer I didn't have a 'summer holiday'. I camped for a couple of days each in Wales and Dorset. I visited friends for a couple more, and I volunteered at a festival. In every case, someone shared. Some friends shared their garden for camping and others their house for more refined sleeping. To prove …
Like me, you may have grown up with harvest festival services. We sang ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ and brought gifts of fruit, vegetables, tins of soup and packets of biscuits and tea, to place either in front of the communion table or on the stage in the school hall, often arranged around a …