There can be no moment more melancholic than the last day of the summer holidays when you are twelve years old and must the next day begin a new year at a new secondary school.  The sick feeling at the pit of the stomach recurs like those nightmares where one is sitting in an examination hall with a paper file with questions on subjects never studied.  The prospect loomed like a dark cloud, overshadowing the whole summer.

Wandering the cemetery today, swapping memories with those whose names filled the dramatis…

Looking homewards from English shores, Ireland still seems a very different place, still outside of European liberal secularism, still not fully engaged with an Enlightenment worldview, still unprepared to contemplate a separation of church and state, still unprepared to accept a desacralisation of society.

The churches will fight tooth and nail to hold the ground they have, not because Jesus asks them to do so, but because they value their power and influence, because bishops expect to be people of standing and not merely members of a religious group.  There…

“Our sermon next Wednesday evening will be on the hymn ‘For those in peril on the sea’”.

The closing announcement at our midweek service reminded me that I missed the sea.  Driving to Graiguenamanagh last evening, walking along the banks of the Barrow, was a reminder of how far inland we now live.  The sea was part of our lives for more than twenty years, up and down the East Coat; living close to Strangford Lough, and then Dundrum Bay, the North Channel, and Killiney Bay, moving from the  coast…

A string of orange lights hovered across the night landscape, blurred by patches of mist and drizzly rain.  An odd sight, until recognition as a westbound train passing along an embankment a hundred kilometres an hour; the orange lights being the illuminated destination signs beside the doors at the end of each carriage.  Those staring out from the train would have seen nothing beyond their own reflections and the darkness that encompassed the farmland that lay all around.

Passing through an unrecognized place suggested itself as a metaphor for parochial…

Holidaying in the Channel Islands in 1997, the evening news was enlightening.  Having flown from Belfast, where the process of members of the opposing communities agreeing not to kill each other was proceeding at snail-like pace, the Channel Islands’ local news headline that someone had been threatened with a knife outside of a nightclub was strangely reassuring.  Not that someone had been killed, or injured or attacked; the fact that someone had been threatened merited inclusion at the top of a bulletin.  Imagine living in a community so safe that…

A serendipitous moment – flicking through the radio channels on the road over Salisbury Plain, an untypical voice appears on BBC Radio 3, radical singer Billy Bragg talking about Beethoven’s musical setting of Frederich Schiller’s 1785 poem ‘Ode to joy’.  The tale of the music drew upon the hopes of the French and American Revolutions, upon beliefs in human equality, upon a vision of the world very different from that which prevailed.  Beethoven, Bragg explained, wrote from a feeling of disappointment that such hopes would not be fulfilled in his…

Today’s Irish Times editorial on women bishops prompted thoughts about the absurdity of the institutional church, particularly the Church of Ireland.

A friend who belongs to the Masonic Order once complained that attendance at his Lodge meeting had been so thin that he had played a number of roles to allow the evening’s proceedings to take place, at one point this meant answering his own question. I laughed at the thought of it. He is someone who is always on the edge of a joke or a story and…

A Hyacinth Bucket character encounters a distasteful scene

Really, it wasn’t nice. It wasn’t nice at all.

I was just saying to Leonard, my husband, that it wasn’t nice. Leonard has just retired as an important civil servant and he knows about things. He agreed with me, “Not at all pleasant,” he said to me. “Not the sort of thing that decent people like ourselves should have to see”.

You’d think the Government would do something about it, wouldn’t you? I mean to say, if this sort of thing started…

From ‘Hurt for Haiti’:

Hey Folks!

On Sunday, 21st February, we are holding a massive event in aid of our brothers and sisters in Haiti who are in such despair.

We have a huge day planned with some top entertainment on hand. The venue is The Bentleys Complex- all the upstairs and downstairs rooms AND The Brazen Head next door. It’s going to be a great day out and for a great cause.

We’re gonna kick off around 3 in the courtyard with Jon Kenny and Mike Finn on hand…