Author Archives: europhilevicar

Life in lock-down We are back from Normandy. Except that we didn’t go there. This is the twelfth week of lock-down for us here in Edinburgh. It is the longest that I have been in the same city for as long as I can remember. Perhaps for ever. Since March 15th I haven’t been anywhereContinue reading “Though a glass darkly – 10”

Postcards from Normandy We are in Normandy. Except that we’re not. We had rented a house at St Floxel, a small village in the Manche. It would have been half term week, and we were to have been sharing it with the children and grand-children. Getting there from Edinburgh was an interesting challenge. We hadContinue reading “Through a glass darkly – 8”

The missing centuries I only have two recurrent nightmares. One is about revisiting History Finals at Oxford. [I might share the other another time.] I am sitting in  a cafe or a pub with growing awareness that final exams are only a week or two away. And to my mounting horror, and initial disbelief, itContinue reading “Through a glass darkly – 8”

Spotlight on dark happenings I fear that I have something of a blindspot as regards child abuse. So anyone reading this who was abused as a child has all my sympathies, but may want to stop reading now. I spent nearly seven years at an English single-sex, boarding school in the 1950s and the 1960s,Continue reading “Through a glass darkly – 7”

The problem of suffering and evil Exposure to too much COVID-19 stuff can induce compassion fatigue. Too many people dying, unevenly distributed here in the UK in terms of class and ethnicity. And too many deaths among people working in the NHS. The stories raise once again the age-long question of how we square ourContinue reading “Through a glass darkly”

Bouquets and Brickbats A friend wrote to Susie to say that she heard I was blogging ‘to make sense of this COVID pandemic’. That’s not true. I am not able to offer a synoptic view. But, as we move into Week Five of the great lock-down, inspired by Piers Moron of the Daily Mail {probablyContinue reading “Through a glass darkly”

Dem bones, dem bones: the Easter message My first ‘grown up’ Easter was in Paris in the mid-1970s. We went to church on Easter Day in the Eglise Réformée in the rue de l’Ouest in the 14th arrondissement and heard a visiting African choir sing A Toi la gloire, words by Edmond de Budry, musicContinue reading “Though a glass darkly”

Cold Turkey Turkey doesn’t mean much in our life other than Christmas lunch. So Susie and I were pleasantly surprised to spend six wintery weeks in Turkey at the end of last year. I was locum chaplain at St Nicholas of Myra, the Anglican congregation in Ankara. But I soon learnt not to introduce myselfContinue reading “Through a glass darkly”

The daily round Arthur’s Seat is the volcanic plug which we can see from our house on the south side of Edinburgh. I walk round it most days during this time of COVID-19 lock-down. These photos were taken on Saturday, March 28th  Arthur’s Seat from our garden 2.  Dalkeith Road – no traffic on SaturdayContinue reading “Through a glass darkly”

Have we been here before ? Susie gave me Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: a new history of the world for my birthday. It’s a dense book of 600+ pages, so I’m reading it one chapter at a time. I’ve just reached the mid-14th century. As Frankopan tells the story, the Mongols had rapidly overrunContinue reading “Through a glass darkly”