The weeks immediately after 21st December are notable for dark mornings. Even as the evenings grow slightly lighter it takes longer for the mornings to brighten. I am not making that up, it is a fact. I like to get out for a walk after breakfast and before I go back up to my study,…

Today is a terrible day in the liturgical calendar. This is when we remember the other side of the story; after the adoration of the Christ child comes King Herod’s instruction to slaughter innocent baby boys in an irrational attempt to take out his opposition by firing grapeshot. This was the first time Jesus got…

The latter part of the prophesy of Isaiah is directed to a nation returned from exile to their own country but still sometimes inclined to indifference. Indifference is fuelled by boredom and over familiarity amongst other things. Today’s passage from Chapter sixty-two (Isaiah 62:1-12) starts, ‘I will not keep silent’. I have attended many concerts…

The rogues gallery on our landing shows five generations of the family on one side or the other. A dive into a cupboard could get me back a little further and a what a range of achievements and views, long and short lives, successes and failures, there are. All people who were and are loved…

Earlier in the year the famous sycamore tree beside Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland was deliberately and illegally felled. It was a sad act of vandalism but there is the chance that the stump may sprout again, and all may not be lost, even if it is completely different. I first wrote one of these thoughts…

How many times, I wonder, when on our holidays or out for walks in the country, do we stop and look at the alluring site of the babbling brook. Running water, stones, riverbank plants and trees and the buzzing of insects. Tranquil and lovely. Many years ago, a little willow sapling began its journey to…

One of my grandmothers had a particularly robust view of God’s will. I struggled with its idiosyncrasies from an early age. It went along the lines that bad things are God’s will so it cannot be changed, and as good things are bound to fail soon it never pays to be optimistic. Generally, I have…

Just after the recent flooding in Framlingham, as householders we received a standard e-mail from the company responsible for our drains. One provider sells us water while another company charges us to take it away again, (after we have washed in it or processed it through our systems.) Run off water from our properties goes…

I have had water on the brain recently, and not just because of the recent flooding in Suffolk, about which more next week. Before the inundation of Framlingham by a couple of days, I had made myself quite ill, temporarily, by sheer stupidity. To cut a long story short, I had a metal water bottle…

There is an important place for those who can think and behave in unorthodox ways; without them we would not develop exciting new technologies, exceed old limits, or crack long standing problems. Free Spirits can also be disruptive in a destructive way and do harm, they may exploit vulnerabilities and they sometimes unknowingly bring anxiety…