Dear friends, The Rev Timothy Dudley-Smith is one of our most prolific twentieth century hymn writers with around four hundred hymns to his name. I was looking at one of his hymns, number 684 in Singing the Faith which begins “Here on the threshold of a new beginning” and in it he reawakens the Spirit…
Firstly, I apologize for the grainy nature of the picture, it comes from the 1917 edition of Highways and Hedges, the book of the National Children’s Home in its day. The governess in the picture is my granny, my maternal grandmother, who was the granddaughter of a Methodist Local Preacher, and her great grandfather was…
We got married in September 1985 and moved into our first home together, we bought our first ever three-piece suite from a famous northern upholstery company, in their sale with the one and only opportunity to have the thing for one year and not pay a penny and then pay the balance off, interest free!…
It is twenty-two years ago this Autumn that I first started on the journey that would lead me into working as a minister of Religion. The process began with me attending an interview at a Church in Huddersfield, one of the tasks that I had been given to undertake, was to read a book and…
Dear Friends, I am wading my way through the four and a half hours of the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Pageant first shown live on Sunday 5th June, marking the final of four days of national and commonwealth celebration with an audience of over a billion people worldwide. Days like this make…
Devastating news for some, the final episode of the Australian Soap Opera Neighbours was completed on Friday 10th June 2022 and will be aired in the UK on channel 5 on Monday 1st August 2022, not that I will be watching, but like it or loathe it, the programme has enjoyed a tea time slot…
Amidst all the pomp and ceremony of the Jubilee weekend celebrations, the BBC managed to hit us with two and half minutes of pure genius and we saw maybe the best bit of television our nation saw in a long time, as the queen invited Paddington Bear to Buckingham Palace for high tea and in…
Weather permitting, the people of Great Britain and around the British Commonwealth will be spilling out into the streets this weekend to celebrate seventy years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. You don’t have to be a staunch royalist to appreciate all that she has done over the last seventy years and still continues…
Dear friends, This time of the year is always special for me, I always look forward to Lent, Holy Week, and Easter. In my past life the biggest incentive was that it was the first Bank Holiday of the year, which I used to look forward to as I set out to work on dark…
My first proper bike, a two wheeler had a bright blue frame and splendid white mudguards. My dad had got it from a bloke at work because his son had grown out of it, I remember pushing it home, on that journey it was a tatty navy blue with no mudguards and I guess looking…