Category Archives: Uncategorized

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”

Gratitude, and Desert Places We are living in unprecedented times, and none of us know quite how things will end. One of the unwanted side-effects of the current pandemic is that too many people are wanting to offer us their interpretation of events. The most bizarre, I suppose, is the unspeakable Trump who seems toContinue reading “Through a glass darkly”

Shock ! Horror ! Retired vicar [b]logs on As we move through the second week of the UK lock-down in response to the COVAID-19 virus, the world is moving into uncharted waters. We don’t know know what will happen next. We don’t know whether the awful scenes broadcast in recent days from Italy and SpainContinue reading “Through a glass darkly”