The Hearth of Mopsus

Purcell; Duruflé; Fauré; and Rutter's 'The Lord Bless You and Keep You', which I find a bit soppy but says what you want it to; ...

My journey towards thinking about animals differently didn’t start with Professor Cotillion’s cavaliers, as it really began years ago with m...

The sacristan at Goremead church, which I looked after for a few months 17 years ago now, was Agnes. In her very young days she’d been on th...

It wasn't the first time I found myself negotiating my way through another sort of spiritual space. On St George's Day this week - t...

Typical, you might well think, one of the most momentous changes, potentially, in the way the State relates to the life of the individual, a...

It's the 175th anniversary of the church this year and, for Heritage Open Weekend, I did a short tour of the church and churchyard looki...

Yesterday I went back to Holy Trinity Hawley to rifle through the vestment drawers, discovering in the process a pink fiddleback (the only ...

We prayed for Sheila - of course we did for such a loved member of the church, hoping that somehow the fast-developing cancer had been caugh...

In the far distant past now, Peter the former manager of Widelake House care home not far away used to like me (or the Roman Catholic parish...

It was a beautiful, elegaic moment as Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor regenerated yesterday evening into – well, if you don’t mind spoilers, a...

It must be well over a year since I last saw Jill. That was at her previous care home, an unsatisfactory encounter in a stuffy and hot visit...

'I don't think I've ever grieved anyone', Cylene told me. She discovered a few days ago that her friend Harry has been dead ...

Ms Kittywitch has been in hospital with what, eventually, turned out to be a perforated bowel and an infection on top of it. This is no joke...

The car park at the Pet Crematorium at Hartley Wintney contains, very very roughly, something in excess of half a million pebbles. I estimat...

Three items of pastoral news came my way yesterday. Christine, who I shorthand 'the dog lady', lost her latest and, she has always m...

Posting about COVID restrictions is thoroughly uncongenial today so here are some pictures from my alleged week off between the First and Se...

As I've recalled on another occasion , I've only ever ventured in through the doors of the UK's and arguably the world's lon...

The SCP Zoom mass yesterday was challenging in ways these things always are - sudden changes in volume between one voice and another, a ro...

The chapter of the Bible I read in the morning was Isaiah 22. As so often, I found something my eye must have skated across innumerable time...

It’s been a long while since, as happened on Friday, I took two funerals in a day. The crematorium has been working at a distinctly elevat...