Current Affairs

In the next week or two, The Well, the magazine that the church produces and distributes free of charge to all 5000 residents of our two parishes, will land on people's doormats.

As usual, page 4 has a letter from me:

Dear friends,

We’ve just come through the most unpredictable General Election for many years; people are talking not only of there being a new government but of a whole new way of doing politics. Time will tell what difference these changes will make, and whether they are great or small.

I know, I'm two weeks late to be commenting on this... but I've been on holiday.

The recent advertising campaign, bankrolled by the British Humanist Association, and backed by Richard Dawkins, has received a lot of publicity.

Since I posted on Henry Scott Holland's poem “Death is Nothing at all”, that blog post has overtaken my sermon on 1 Corinthians 13 as the most visited page on this site. Curiously, both the Scott Holland text and 1 Corinthians 13 are popular passages at funerals.

I've never read the whole piece before, so I was delighted to discover Dorothy L Sayers' 1947 essay The Lost Tools of Learning online. The web address for the copy I found is http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html, but I'm sure it's in lots of other places as well.

Brilliant

The BBC reported on Friday about a sign outside a supermarket in Morriston, Swansea. The English sign read "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only". They e-mailed their road sign to Swansea Council's translation department, so that they could also put up the Welsh equivalent. They received their reply, and duly put the sign up in both languages. Apparently "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith iw gyfieithu" means "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."

Those who were in my A-level maths class at school had the pleasure of being taught by a delightful teacher, who pretended not to didn't know what was on the syllabus. We were taught maths, and at some point he had a quick peak at the syllabus to check we were ready for the exams.

How heart-warming to read the BBC News headline: Too much maths 'taught to test'.

Just so we don’t miss this report, last summer’s floods were not caused by climate change.

Many will remember the furore when Prince Charles stated, many years back, that he wanted to be not “defender of the [implied, Christian] faith”, but simply “defender of faith”.

Some of the problems of that should be obvious.

Whilst doubtless local feelings are mixed (they always are), I think it’s exciting that Audley now has its own branch of Tesco. It’s not very big. But it’s there. Tesco Express Audley opened its doors at 8am this morning, and from now on will be open 7 days, 6am-11pm. Hurrah!

There are plenty of people out there who are Tesco Haters.

I always enjoy reading David Field’s posts on topics such as global warming and the environment.

The post he put up this morning, entitled A Collective Madness is particularly enjoyable. He is quoting two paragraphs from The Spectator, but I particularly enjoyed the phrase

“Environmentalism has become the new religion.”