As part of my role within the URC Youth, I am the nominated “Green Apostle” for the young people. Among other things, I sit on a national committee of “Green Apostles” who meet twice a year to discuss different actions that can be taken on smaller and larger scales to reduce our impact, both as…

Greta Thunberg certainly caught the world’s attention with that one word! She was attending the Pre-COP 26 meeting in Milan, where various world leaders were meeting to try and agree on actions before the main COP-26 meeting in Glasgow which starts this week, and accused the world’s politicians of “30 years of blah! blah! blah!”…

When I was a lad, shopping looked very different to how it does today, we travelled by bus into town and visited a range of different shops to buy different products, each shop with shop assistants behind counters and tills to store the cash that you’d just paid with.  I remember going as a family…

I am now the proud owner of three different coloured passports, OK two of them have expired. Thank goodness my last one expired, my photo makes me look like a corpse! When you cannot wear glasses and you are staring straight ahead terrified you might blink as the camera flashes. There was a great deal…

When our girls were growing up, we bought a season ticket each year for Eureka! The children’s museum in Halifax.  It is a museum designed to capture the imagination of children from birth to eleven and grown-ups are only permitted if accompanying children.  Our season ticket was money well spent as our girls walked through…

If you get your milk delivered by the milkman you may have seen this image of the 5 Rs. REFUSE to buy unnecessary items. We are a society of consumers. Even in lockdown we were still shopping, with delivery drivers on the roads for long hours at a time, and not always essentials and grocery…

In the good old days, when I was living at home with my parents, we would have a clear out every so often and fill the back of the car with a load of our junk and drive down to the tip at Rodley and lob it all in a skip. The most stressful part…

As part of my retirement gift from my colleagues at the Surgery I was given a voucher for a tour of the vineyard at Chilford Hall in Cambridgeshire. It was really interesting to hear how the grapes are cultivated on the vines, harvested and then turned into various wines – white, rose, red and sparkling,…

I remember visiting western Scotland for the first time, many years ago. We were camping in Dumfries and Galloway, a beautiful part of the country and my eyes nearly popped out of my head as I saw palm trees growing along the coastline. I thought that this was to be expected in some of our…

Those of us of a certain age may remember a song by Carol King on her Tapestry album entitled “I feel the earth move.” The chorus has the following lines: I feel the earth move under my feetI feel the sky come a tumbling downI feel my heart start tremblingwhenever you’re around. This song is…