My Mum – a Tribute

The day after I published my previous blog post I received an early morning phone call to tell me that my Mum had died that morning in her sleep. Although she had been getting more frail over the last few years, her death was still totally unexpected. In a Covid-19 dominated time, we were able […]

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Helmets and Statues

I went to visit my Mum (at a suitable social distance) a few days ago . It was my first trip of any distance for several months. Driving back I was struck by some things which I wouldn’t have noticed in the past when such trips were everyday occurrences. One thing that stood out was […]

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Rainbow in the fountain

There’s a fountain near my work, and one day – a year or so ago – I saw this beautiful rainbow reflected in it as I walked past. I’ve never seen it since, but last week, as I was passing on a lovely sunny day, I decided to walk carefully around it and try my best […]

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Significance

 Many, if not most, people want their lives to count for something – they want to be significant. This can be in many spheres. At work we want responsibility, to have a higher profile role in whichever organisation we may work for. We want what we do in our work to last in some way […]

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Mea Culpa

There’s a lot of blame around at the moment. At the UK Labour party conference yesterday, the shadow chancellor – while admitting that their party had made mistakes – insisted that Labour wasn’t to blame for the current financial challenges, saying that it wasn’t “public spending on public services here in Britain which caused the global […]

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Changing reflections

2011 has arrived, and the start of a new year is often an appropriate time to reflect over the past one. 2010 was a year of change for us as a family. I changed job half way through the year. A few months later we moved house and have been working our way through all the tasks that this entails since then. We’ve […]

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Christ at Christmas

Well I managed the third of my three series of Christmas posts before Christmas is over – even if the last of these is on Christmas day itself! It’s an appropriate day to write it however, for my third aspect of Christmas is that as well as being a busy time, and a time of celebration, […]

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Celebration at Christmas

I went into town today to buy a few last items needed for Christmas presents. Oxford city was, as usual in December, decked out with an array of different lights hanging over the streets, a Christmas tree (which didn’t have any working light on – a bit odd!) and so forth. The streets were buzzing as it was […]

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Crazy Christmas

One of the most obvious things about Christmas is that it’s a bit of a crazy time to say the least. In particular, it’s always busy. Maybe one of the reasons that most of us (Brits at least) have a long holiday between Christmas and New Year is that we need it to recover from […]

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