Way back in the 1960’s my mum invested her hard-earned money in a Kenwood Chefette food mixer and this amazing little piece of kit revolutionised our lives. Mum insisted that the margarine and sugar were properly creamed when mixing a sponge cake and prior to the arrival of the food mixer, that required effort and…

I spotted this car parked outside our local supermarket just in time before I walked straight into the ladders which extended across one of the main walkways into the entrance. I’m not particularly tall but could have sustained a nasty injury had I walked into them, fortunately the greatest inconvenience was having to duck to…

There are many great joys in working as a Minister and whilst there are times when I feel tired and maybe on occasions fed up, on the whole, I am thankful that God called me into this work.  One of the big negatives is that as ministers we move on from time to time to…

All I seem to hear at the moment is how the entire nation is delighted to see Strictly back on our screens, personally, I have never been a dancer and never enjoyed events like the Chapel watchnight socials, particularly when one of the older ladies from the Church would drag me up and force me…

Way back in the early nineties, we had a holiday in the village of Morwenstow slightly north of Bude in North Cornwall. We stayed on a farm and were fed sumptuous meals by the farmers wife and the children were encouraged to go and pick eggs from the hen hut for breakfast and could watch…

I recently pulled into a pay and display car park, it was a busy day, the car park was fairly full and there was a long queue for the pay and display machine.  My daughter rang me while I was standing in the queue and I started the process of obtaining my ticket, conscious of…

While on holiday, we drove through the Dales town of Hawes, the home of the Wensleydale cheese factory, a favourite of the Aardman animation characters Wallace and Gromit. Hawes was packed with people as we drove through the marketplace and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I spotted these life-sized knitted characters, I had to…

On the first day of our summer holiday, we called at Morrisons supermarket at Enterprise Five in Bradford, Karen, my wife fell and consequently we spent the first evening of our holiday at A&E at the Bradford Royal Infirmary where we discovered that not only had she broken her elbow, but she also had arthritis…

We Brits can be a bit obsessed with the weather, it is a great opener when we meet people “lovely day today!” or “nice weather for ducks” or “there’s a chill in the air today” we love it! The weather governs the choices we make, where we go and what we do, how good, or…

The MSC Loretto, one of the world’s largest container vessels docked at Felixstowe in June this year, the ship is a massive 400 metres long and 61 metres wide and can carry a staggering 24,346 standard containers.  I am sad enough to have calculated that if the entire contents of the ship were loaded onto…