Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Not easy on a bus

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I was reflecting the other day how much more difficult simple faith (in God, mostly, on this occasion, but not exclusively) has become in th...
Thursday, February 23, 2017

Rummaging in the cyber past

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I retired over 11 years ago. After all these years of teaching English I found I was missing the discipline of writing - for when I set ...
Monday, February 06, 2017

A Treaty with metaphor

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I've been listening quite a bit to Leonard Cohen's final album - You want it darker - and in particular to one song that many, ...
1 comment:
Friday, January 06, 2017

At the year's turning ...NHS magic

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A brief appreciation, on the Feast of the Epiphany, of an experience at the year's end. The year's end, when nothing is quite as nor...
2 comments:
Wednesday, December 14, 2016

How the NHS lost my man ...

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Here's a wee NHS story with a personal twist. I've been married to a non-person for the past 12 years - or is it 11? We did wonder, ...
Monday, November 07, 2016

Tolerant no more

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I haven't been blogging much recently - short form social media has been bad for me; it makes communication easy and brief. But I've...
5 comments:
Friday, August 12, 2016

Hoolies I have known ...

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This startling photo was taken by Karen Brodie last Saturday as the participants in the Festal Evensong that had just celebrated 140 years...
1 comment:
Thursday, July 28, 2016

Cross-Pollination

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I haven't posted for a bit. It's not that I haven't been sitting at my desktop: far from it. But from being someone who rarely u...
Friday, June 24, 2016

A song for a sad day.

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Brain keeps singing songs - even today, when the news is so bad and the country has gone crazy. Scotland votes to stay in Europe? No matter....
Monday, June 20, 2016

Song

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It's strange how one can be so influenced in one's writing by what's going in - visually, through reading the work of other writ...
Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Unpredictable - a poem revisited.

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I've finally got round to some revising - a poem I wrote in Vietnam, in the heat and humidity of our first days there, before I'd se...
2 comments:
Monday, March 14, 2016

Fair buzzing in Oban

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Victorious table at dinner I've mulled it over for the past five days, but now I realise that Synod reports are being demanded - not...
3 comments:
Monday, February 01, 2016

Of urban open spaces and a post-war childhood

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I was reading the other day about a dispute over an area of land in the West of Glasgow which is currently used as a (relatively) wild place...
2 comments:
Sunday, January 17, 2016

A cold collation ...

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The weather wasn't promising. Snow yesterday and a cold night - a typical recipe for a stressful cold coming to church in the morning, w...
1 comment:
Thursday, January 07, 2016

The meeting

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THE MEETING This the night when under the dark dome the hard stars shine and that one shines brighter than them all, the night when ...
1 comment:
Saturday, January 02, 2016

Sere or sage?

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No, it's not a typo. In fact, I'm rather pleased with the title of this post, which came to me with the delightful inconsequence t...
3 comments:
Thursday, December 24, 2015

The ghosts of Christmas Past

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It's a strange phenomenon, the power of Christmas Eve to resurrect memories so strongly and yet so randomly. As I listened to the firs...
2 comments:
Saturday, December 12, 2015

Three snacks and out

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I found myself, in a procrastinating moment, leafing through a leaflet from the Co-op, a Christmas leaflet promising all manner of festive t...
1 comment:
Friday, December 11, 2015

All we go down ...

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I was at a funeral yesterday, not as a mourner but as a provider of music, one of a quartet singing the Kontakion for the Departed at th...
Saturday, November 21, 2015

Dragons on Social Media

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Now here's a thing. I have an ambivalent attitude to Facebook. It shows in the fact that I very rarely post directly to it; I will sh...