Wednesday, September 05, 2018

An icon evolves

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A couple of weeks ago, I went on an icon workshop. I spent four nights in one of my most familiar places, the Cathedral of The Isles on Cumb...
Wednesday, February 07, 2018

Springing thoughts

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Two days after the last snow left I saw the tiny hint of life in colour, purple, on the mud which rain had flooded winter-long, a...
Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Another Advent

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Another Advent For Andy, who suggested the possibility. From the darkness that returns each year we sing our plaintive song and ask t...
Wednesday, December 06, 2017

Dreich weather and a sonnet: Argyll Weather

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I haven't written a sonnet for 37 years. At that time, I thought I might be halfway through my allotted life span and wrote my first att...
Monday, October 16, 2017

The way we were

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I've held off from saying much online about the latest celebrity-outing as a sexual predator, but the Harvey Weinstein furore has got me...
1 comment:
Saturday, July 29, 2017

Defective articles and the Love of God

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I've been catching up on an unread bit of a Sunday paper, and found an interview with actor James McCardle. In the light of what I'v...
2 comments:
Tuesday, July 04, 2017

Memories of a Hillhead infant

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It was this picture that started it. I've been rummaging among my old teaching materials and came upon a small buff book, with cartr...
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: