Month: May 2019

Listen to me in silence (Isaiah 41.1). 8.00 am: A communion. We suffer most when unable to comprehend the purpose of either our own or other people’s distress. Apparently meaningless…

9.00 am: The weather was peculiarly apposite: sullen-grey and indifferent to suffering – like on the day after my paternal grandmother died. And life goes on in a stupid way,…

How is the gold become dim (Lamentations 4.1). 6.30 am: I awoke, showered, breakfasted, and dispatched various domestic jobs before settling to the morning’s communion. I addressed a necessary corrective.…

7.00 am: Showered. 7.45 am: Following breakfast, I pressed on (quite literally) with what remained of the ironing. (Socks and other delicates would be coupled and sorted at the close…

Yesterday afternoon was absorbed by ironing. I’ve been a believer in this purgatorial chore ever since a female college friend in the early 1980s remarked to me that I looked…

I love tomorrow (Conrad Roberts, ‘Inamorata’). 7.30 am: I’m a weak and inconstant man. But I have it; it doesn’t have me. (‘Keep telling yourself that, buddy!’, my ‘muse’ whispered.):…

8.00 am: A communion. ‘The Lord upholds all who are falling, and raises up all who are bowed down’ (Psalm 145.14–16). There’re times when either falling or bending under the weight of…

Leave me now.Leave me nowHope is gone,all my time’s run out(Moby, ‘Hope is Gone’). 5.15 am: I awoke; my mind racing. Since it was in gear, I returned to my…

6.00 am: I awoke, and failed to return to sleep: But who could’ve resisted such a lovely early-summer day. ‘Up, boy!’: 6.15 am: Showered. 7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 pm:…

Frail as summer’s flower we flourish,Blows the wind and it is gone(Henry Francis Lyte, ‘Praise, My Soul, The King of Heaven’ (1834)). Over the weekend, my mother-in-law passed away after…