Our house is full of arguments. In this, I’m pretty sure we are no different from most families. We argue over who sits where in the car. We argue over who has the most roast potatoes. We argue over football, homework, housework, and scrabble. We argue mostly at table, when we eat, where the conversation …
When I was younger, I wanted to be something. I don’t mean that I wanted to be famous, or important. I didn’t want to be the boss of something or to accrue titanic wealth (though I sometimes wonder whether I underestimated the appeal of titanic wealth…). What I mean is that I wanted to belong …
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 …
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 …
I was climbing with my son Silas yesterday. We’ll be doing that a lot this holiday. It’s brilliant fun – but it makes me anxious. Although the wall is only around four metres high, there are no ropes or harnesses, so if you fall, you hit the ground. I’m not brave and some moves make …
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 …
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 …