For many years Karen and I went to St Andrews Methodist Church in Undercliffe Bradford and one of the features of life in that Church was Scarborough Weekend. Every year during November a large group of us would take over Green Gables hotel (pictured above) and in its heyday we would number a hundred plus…

We have just spent a wonderful week in the North East on holiday with our eldest daughter and our grandson. I had two main objectives for the holiday: the first was putting the new mobility scooter through its paces and secondly, as my daughter puts it perfectly, making memories for our grandson. During the course…

There are times in my work when I meet some amazing and wonderful people. I recently had the privilege of meeting the daughter of some church members who is working in Gaza, this was not some formal meeting, it was simply a chat over a cuppa after a service. All we seem to hear about…

I maybe ought to have written this thought last Sunday, but to be honest, I wasn’t even aware that last Sunday was the London Marathon until after I had written last Sunday’s thought.  I’m glad that I didn’t write something, because it would have been very different to how I feel today.  No doubt some…

This thought was first published on 24th December 2023 One of my favourite Christmas songs is “O holy night” I remember a few years ago hearing a teenage girl singing the song and she was pitch perfect, (as far as I could tell) it was a thing of beauty, and I can still remember feeling…

On Monday 23rd March 2020, as the nation fast approached lockdown due to the Covid 19 Coronavirus pandemic, I remember sitting at my desk and thinking “what do I do with myself now?” I had a load of meetings in my diary and services to conduct, and at a stroke of a pen, everything was…

I have decided that our family is weird, there are four of us living in the house, each with different sleeping arrangements, I am one of those people that is a morning person and am often at my desk working around 4am, which means that I am not very late turning in on a night.…

My daughter told me that I ought to watch the Coldplay concert at Glastonbury.  This is not the kind of thing I would watch as a matter of course, I know very little about the band and their music, so it was with a sense of duty, and my best attempt at being a good…

One of the projects at several of the churches in the Ipswich Circuit have embraced over the last couple of years has been the introduction of free little pantries and at the time of writing six of our churches are successfully running pantries. There is a notice inside which invites people to take what they…

Having got the Election, the Euro’s and Wimbledon out of the way, we now have the Olympics and for the next fortnight the news, the papers, and the television schedules will be dominated by the games and whether this is just the sort of news we have been looking forward to, or we are irritated…