vinculafido

  The Gorilla.  Where the Grantham canal meets its nemesis - the A1! The gradient of the lane away from the canal towards Barrowby appears slight, but is illusional. As you begin to breast the wold, what looked insignificant now makes the walker blow, or at least this walker.   To be fair the guy in singlet and shorts who was running it ahead of me seemed not to slacken his pace at all.   Inside the village limits a man is picking litter.   As I pass I say thank you, because even if Barrowby has been a three-time winner of ‘best-kept village’, it’s a horrible, unrelenting, painting-the-Forth-bridge sort of a job.   He doesn’t reply, not even a grunt. Well, he may have been deaf, or thought me sarcastic or condescending. Or I wonder, maybe he’s doing a different kind of ‘community service’, and really doesn’t want to be there at all, except it’s preferable to a few days in chokey or a large fine. All Saints’ church is locked, and as I sit on the bench to...

  On a crisp and sparkling morning, I cross the canal bridge where Woolsthorpe’s wharf would have been. As soon as I hit the towpath, there are John and Dave, both uber-cheerful and by their accents, neither of them from round here. John twits me about the compass dangling conspicuously from my neck.  ‘You won’t be needing that’, he says. ‘Well, I might, if I go ‘ off piste ’,  I counter. ‘Not much chance of snow today,’ says he.  And so on.   They’re volunteers for the Grantham canal, the restoration of which is an ongoing project. You can walk its length, pretty much, but it’s closed off at the West Bridgford (Nottingham) end, and also as it arrives near Grantham, because the big gorilla of the A1 blocks the way. Today the only barges working it are for pleasure, courtesy of the Grantham Canal Society. They provide income to support the restoration, and the 2024 season begins this Sunday at Woolsthorpe’s ‘Dirty Duck’ , so get yourselves down there, folks!...

  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...