More than Writers

As I've watched some of the coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's passing and listened to people talk about her through the last few days, I've been particularly struck by the way people have found in her a great stability and constancy. She has been there for all of my life, and all of most of our lives. My mum remembers the excitement of gathering around a neighbour's tiny television screen to watch the coronation in 1953 and I remember the joy of street parties celebrating her silver Jubilee when I was small. She's always been there, like a strong mountain in the backdrop of our lives, and it's difficult to think that she is not there any more. It seems to me that there is a collective feeling of sadness not only in her passing but in the shutting down of something that made us feel safe, something that we could always rely on, this remarkable woman who served God and her nation all her life. It got me thinking about constancy, and what that means. There's som...

Fed up with Covid as it tips us further into isolation once more?  We should have been sitting in a remote Northumbrian cottage today (with sea at the bottom of the garden) instead of looking out on lockdown Leeds. Terry Waite has suggested via social media that we stop moaning – it could be worse. He should know! And there's other negative comfort around, like the facebook post with tips for survival: 1) Don't watch the news. 2) Don't get on the bathroom scales. But in spite of how it might feel, God is still around and there is one piece of news that offers a clue. Have you heard of the Eternal Wall of answered prayer; the national monument twice as big as the Angel of the North coming to Coleshill next year here ? It's not only that North Warwickshire planning council gave unanimous consent to this 'in your face' Christian monument, expected to be seen by half a million journeys each week. The story behind the vision inspires me beyond words. God delights in ...

    'Jesus wept' is the shortest sentence in the Bible, and a very powerful sentence it is too, for so many reasons. Yet the sentence I want to talk about involves not the son of God but a dog, well to be more specific - a man and his dog - and their travels across America.   I'd heard about John Steinbeck when I was at school but I'd never read any of his books. I guess his subject matter didn't appeal to a teenage boy. It was a dog walk that finally led me to this great man's work. A fellow dog walker who I know from our local library, knowing my dog is called Charlie, recommended Steinbeck's book to me and I'm very glad he did. It took me a little while to get into it but it wasn't long till I was regularly reading extracts out to my wife, most often when Steinbeck mentions his dog. A French poodle who he calls Charley. The following piece is one of my favourites. That night was so cold that I put on my insulated underwear for pyjamas, and when Ch...

December this year marks my younger son’s 21 st birthday. Born in the days leading up to Christmas, there was something magical about his arrival. I remember that year, 1996, holding him in my arms in church, the words of the carols washing over me and making me feel like Mary herself. “To us a son is born.” How perfect .   Yet the lead-up to his birth was anything but. According to my midwife, my first son had been born in an apparent text-book pregnancy, birth and recovery. A couple of years later, when we looked to increase our family, we had no other expectation than a repeat performance. How wrong we were. Little did I know what heartbreak lay ahead as each pregnancy resulted in a loss. Four officially. I privately acknowledge two more. There’s much I could tell you about hope and the lack of it; disappointment; despair. Some of you know from your own sad experiences just what those feel like: unwelcome companions on a journey you didn’t intend making. Ea...

Image copyright of HarperCollins Ltd I wrote a dystopic fantasy for this blog, but then I decided it was too dark. So I’m starting again. We have just begun on our annual reading of The Lord of the Rings . We always start again around the time of Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, 22nd September. Actually we were reading something else—John Garth’s wonderful book Tolkien and the Great War , the best biography of Tolkien there is—but our daughter and our new grandson came to stay and she said ‘are you reading The Lord of the Rings yet?’ and we said ‘No, but we can start.’ So we did. This evening we were reading the last part of the chapter called ‘The Shadow of the Past’. In it Gandalf tells Frodo the full and very bad news about the Ring; and very humanly (of course he is a hobbit, but he stands for the ordinary person) Frodo bemoans the situation: ‘why do we have to live in times such as these?’, and later on, ‘why did the Ring have to come to me?’ We can just imagine the deep ...