A big football tournament is a great time for thinking deep thoughts. Who are we? What does it mean today to be English? Am I also British? European? I’m pretty sure I’m not Welsh and I’m faintly sad that Gareth Bale is. We all want to know where our identity lies and so we like …
I’ve been thinking about marathons. I watched my friend Jonny Taylor run the London Marathon some years ago and yelled encouragement on the approach to Tower Bridge before bursting through the crowd to run with him for a moment. I must have been so annoying. Now I've run half a marathon but at the end of that, …
Since I came off the bike last week, I’ve been very sore. Shaken and stirred. The timing has been bad. The Easter break is hardly finished, and let’s face it, getting injured or sick after the holidays is such a cliché; it’s like saying ‘the cheque’s in the post’. Yeah, right. And because it’s a …
I left my workbag on the bedroom floor from Friday night to Monday morning. I took out my computer to do a little work but left a bar of chocolate ready for the long bus ride home sometime this week. When I went to pack for work yesterday morning it became apparent that while I …
I was in the car yesterday when I suddenly realised it was Tuesday morning and I’d forgotten this Pause for Thought. Forgotten to write it. Forgotten to come to the studio. Forgotten the whole thing. It was a horror show. I pulled over. I started to go over the previous 24 hours to try to …
You know those terrible dreams where you’re doing something for which you are completely unprepared, amid dazzling publicity, in front of an audience full of experts, where your crippling anxiety grows more and more unbearable until, with your utter inadequacy disastrously exposed and your naked, shambling body burning with shame, fear and embarrassment you are …
This week, as we’re launching the 500 Words Competition I’ve been thinking about writing. Not just these 390 words, telling a story, trying to say something about what it means, but all stories - myths and legends, heroes, adventures, love and sadness - the stories of being human. As a child, my own stories were …
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, …