vinculafido

  Anxiety.   It’s everywhere.   The invasion of Ukraine: the threat posed by China to Taiwan and the South China Seas:   the rise of new brands of nationalism: the apparently spiralling conflict in the Middle East as a result of the October 7 th atrocity: ‘where will Putin will go next?’: World War 3: ‘conscription’: the ‘Doomsday Clock’ currently set at ninety seconds to midnight. Intelligent parents and children having the sort of discussion we had with our mums and dads in 1962. Single seniors, listening to the radio, watching the telly, reading the papers.   Worry, worry, worry… and that’s before you look at your bills. My own mum, struggling with the cancer which was to kill her at a young middle-age, used to sing the old chorus: ‘ Why worry, when you can pray/Trust Jesus: he’ll find a way/Don’t be a doubting Thomas/rest surely on his promise/Why worry, worry, worry, worry, when you can pray’. Walking is good for the blood pressure.   I park up in...

  In March 1997, looking up at the necklace of lights in the hill settlements above the road from Ben Gurion airport, and then again, as our Israeli tour guide reminisced and enthused about his outstanding part in the 1967 ‘liberation’ of Jerusalem, I remember prophesying that I’d never return to the Holy Land as a pilgrim.   For once I was right.   Along with many others I’ll never again visit a country where right-wing extremist politicians, emboldened by Netanyahu, brazenly talk about replicating the slaughter of the ‘Amalekites’, and where Christians also are now sometimes harassed near the holy sites.   Israeli nationalists are making it ‘their’ place alone, and not our collective protection within a proud, sovereign nation, who own a sound moral compass where all the ‘people of the book’ are honoured and welcome. Perhaps it was never thus, but for a while we bought into the dream.   Didn’t you? The Church Times has caught onto this, and in its most rece...

  St.John the Baptist's and St. Botolph's Croxton Kerrial At the prompting of a friend, I’ve just been reading Clive Marsh and Vaughan Roberts’ 2012 book: ‘Personal Jesus: how popular music shapes our souls.’   The authors explore a mass of connections between ‘popular’ (undefined) music and our faith.   They argue successfully that Christians should pay serious attention to popular culture, and to my mind much less cogently that there’s some kind of equivalence between what people do when listening to ‘ their ’ music, and what one does in worship and attitude to God.   This isn’t the place to air my differences with them. Sufficient to say that being a music fan in 2024 costs little of necessity(!) while faith in Christ demands ‘my soul, my life, my all’ . For many of us, the blood of the martyrs sets horribly high standards. As good Christian children in unreconstructed, colonial days, many of us lived in fear that God’s will was for us to be missionaries, and thu...

  Pause for breath…and to admire the view.   Aaah… The storms have taken out the trash from the trees and hedges. In late January everything looks stripped and bare, ready for a spring and summer to come. To recap… This all began in 2016, when I began to walk to every parish in the Diocese of Peterborough. My house rules were that I’d start where we lived, in Weston Favell, Northampton, and make my way to Peterborough Cathedral by a series of circular walks, each one of which must touch another somewhere on its circumference. I went on my 2000+ km way reciting the mantra ‘Better Together’ to anyone listening. If the Church of England is to survive, it needs to pool its resources, regardless of tradition. We need to love each other more, and understand that what unites us is far greater than what separates.   To that first strapline I later added ‘Better in Colour’ , meaning that we need to be diverse and enterprising in the way we spread the Gospel. Finally, I put in a...

  They have the sheep well-trained in Leicestershire Both Sue and I had our first bout of Covid during December, (we’re ‘Novids!’) so thirty-four days from first positive test, on a dreakh, cheerless day, here I am so to speak testing the waters with a walk (never any wild swimming, or indeed any swimming at all for me)   because only on a few occasions in the last five weeks have I managed my ten thousand steps. For us the Virus passed reasonably gently, like a really bad cold, but some symptoms have hung around. Sue still has a bad cough and has lost her sense of smell, temporarily we hope. I have moments of fatigue. We’ve both experienced brain fog. The variation of Covid symptoms person to person has perhaps heightened awareness that the same is true of other coronaviruses.   One would like to think that people’s social habits have changed as a result of their experience of infection, but not so.   We probably caught it at a posh concert in Uppingham School Cha...

  My, it’s cold today.   I have to use a hairdryer to persuade the boot of the car. During my drive to Coston, the roads look suspiciously black and shiny in some places where the sun hasn’t penetrated. There’s nowhere obvious to park, so I heave the Polo up on an angled verge where it won’t bother anyone, and gingerly make first steps up the lane which runs north from the ‘B’ road. Even so I still slip and slide on the black ice. The local forecasts in Morcott won’t admit to anything lower than minus 3 last night, but it might well have been less than that in the hollows.   Cars have to ford the Eye just past the first farm out of Coston, but the prolonged rain of Monday has put the stream into spate, and the water has gathered more widely on both sides of the tarmac. I stand and look at the rapid flow.   A helpful person who’s backing her car out of the farm assumes I don’t know what to do. She gestures at the side-path over the small bridge which gives pedestria...

There’s more to Wymondham than I’d thought – it’s just that you don’t see most of it when creeping up on the church from the Oakham side.   There’s a confluence of roads from the surrounding villages, a pub (The Berkeley Arms), and above the village beyond the site of the old railway station on Butt Lane, the Windmill, with a lovely café and a few courtyard shops. I begin the day there with a restorative coffee. Thinking about it again, and today being St. Edmund’s day, perhaps the saint was the derivation of ‘Edmondthorpe’ (the station was once ‘Edmondthorpe and Wymondham’). On the other hand, since you have to climb a hill for the windmill (duh!) there’s a nice symmetry about the two place-names, if ‘Wy’ can be stretched to stand for ‘west’ and ‘Ed’ is east. Viewed from the centre of Wymondham every way is up, eventually and a little bit.   This is not mountainous country. From the junction beyond the windmill, near a trig point which has my elevation at 133 metres, I t...