The wonder of email brought a photograph of my primary school teachers this afternoon.  It is hard to imagine the two ladies of advancing years had been the commanding figures of memory. It will be forty years in July since I left High Ham Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School where Miss Rabbage and Miss Everitt comprised the entirety of the full time staff.

Miss Everitt, I discovered for the first time today, had been there since 1947 and taught for thirty years until her retirement in 1977. Miss Rabbage …

Philip King’s ‘The South Wind Blows’ plays softly on the radio; his voice as gentle as the unnatural mildness of the January night; the RTE programme conjuring an Ireland that might have seemed dead to one living in Dublin during the Tiger years.

There was an attractiveness in soft accents and soft landscapes  during years in the North. The strident denunciation of all things ‘Irish’ by voices certain of their righteousness was something that pained. An unhappy man would write angry letters to the ‘Belfast Telegraph’ signing himself as ‘Non-Celt’ …

Beauty is a strange thing, it can allow a moment of escape from horror and ugliness. In one of the most profound books I ever read, the space of a single page in five hundred put the other four hundred and ninety-nine into a different context:

The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley.  The air had a feeling of purity as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of the evening. 

…

Buying Matthew Hollis’ book Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas because of a single poem, ‘Adlestrop,’ there is a pondering of what it is in the poem that prompts the purchase.

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
the name, because one afternoon
of heat the express-train drew up there
unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
no one left and no one came
on the bare platform. What I saw
was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and

…

Journeying through Somerset last Thursday, we travelled the road the road between Shepton Mallet and Glastonbury. In the last light of a January afternoon, mist lay in the valley below Pilton; Glastonbury Tor was silhouetted against the western sky; a view that would have inspired mystic thoughts and legends in centuries past.

Glastonbury was the centre of the world when I was a child; the stories with which we grew up made it the most important place in Britain. It was the place where in ancient times those feet had …

Sitting in a Rathmines pub, we discuss last night’s BBC dramatisation of Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong. Favourable newspaper reviews are cited; two of us express doubt about the opinions of the television critics.

‘Faulks is a good writer’, a friend interjects, ‘but he is not a great writer’.

Having all of the work published under his own name, confessing a liking for his writing was the honest reaction. Reviewing texts from his novels prompts a pondering.

Faulks’ describes the moral reality of of our economic situation in A Week In December. …

Three years ago the Church of Ireland embarked upon discussion of a ‘code of conduct’ for its clergy.  It was a bad idea then, and, as questions arise over those discussions, it is a bad idea now.

‘Codes of conduct’ and their ilk are a case of hard cases making bad law.  Where all is well, then no code of conduct is necessary and where there are problems, the rights introduced by a code would stymie whatever progress might have been made under the plain, traditional guidance of the bishop.…

Twenty monologues on the life of Jesus.

The Shepherds        The Magi      Mary      Herod       Simeon

Anna      John the Baptist       Andrew       The Woman at the Well       Matthew

Martha       Lazarus        Judas        Pilate        Peter

Claudia Procula       The Centurion       Joseph of Arimathea…

Christmas Services

Christmas services begin at 7pm on Saturday, 24th December with Holy Communion at Seir Kieran.  This is followed by Borris-in-Ossory at 8.15 pm and Lacca at 9.30 pm.  On Christmas morning, we begin with Roskelton at 9.30 am and then have services at Annatrim at 10.30 am and Mountrath at 11.30 am.

Vintage Tractor and Car Run

Come along for fresh air and a great spectacle at the Vintage Tractor and Car Run assembling at Mountrath Mart at 11.30 am on Wednesday 28th December and departing at 12.30 …

John Creedon played two tracks from the golden era of Fleetwood Mac, ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Little Lies’.  He recalled that ‘Gypsy’ had come from the ‘Rumours’ album and that he had been at a birthday party in 1979 where the person celebrating their twenty-first birthday had been given no less than four copies of ‘Rumours’ by various of those invited to the celebration.

The story sounded odd. By 1979 in Somerset, I can remember no-one celebrating their 21st birthday. Maybe they did, by the time my class was 21, we were …