If anyone has seen Mr Reynolds can they please let me know?
To mark the death of Edgar Allan Poe we will be releasing 166 ravens. In accordance with the Streeb-Greebling liturgy, we are supposed to get them to fly underwater. But after last year's disaster, we decided "never more." We'll let them out in the open air this year.
"It’s ridiculous,” says one FTSE-100 chief executive who used to take that road to commute into the City. “I live in Chelsea but Embankment is just a disaster. My driver these days goes south of the river, drops me off in Southwark and I walk across the Wobbly Bridge to our office in the City."Is your heart bleeding yet?
"It’s ridiculous,”No - it's roadworks. They happen all the time in London, but when it's hundreds of tipper lorries on the latest redevelopment in Town to strip out its character and replace it with over-priced empty boxes for foreign speculators, the captains of industry are quiet.
"says one FTSE-100 chief executive who used to take that road to commute into the City."Well, don't. It's a stupid thing to do. There's not much space in London and the Embankment should be an attractive place to wander, not somewhere for your bourgemobile to clog up the path. Get the Tube. Or ride a bike. They're building a bike lane, apparently. That'll be handy. Or earn your money and get in early. You'll miss the traffic. Although, ironically, you'll still be traffic.
“I live in Chelsea but Embankment is just a disaster."No, it's roadworks. London has them all the time. Often to benefit motorists or property speculators, sometimes for water and gas pipes and electricity and stuff, so this is a bit of variety for you.
"My driver these days goes south of the river, drops me off in Southwark and I walk across the Wobbly Bridge to our office in the City."It's nice to hear you're getting some exercise these days. You'd pay a fortune for that at a City gym. Appreciate that lovely view up the River. Doesn't that take away the executive stress? And just think - if you're fit enough to walk across the Bouncy Bridge and up the hill into the City, you're probably fit enough to cycle from Chelsea. It'll be great once the bikes don't have to tangle with the coaches and City executives, won't it?
Archdruid: For those who are now 5p poorerCombining the Pet Service with our Celebration of Psalm 8 turned out a bit fraught.
Can I remind Beaker Folk that triffids are not pets? Once again, they're a valuable oil source. But we can't have them receiving blessings in the Moot House. It made the alpacas uneasy. And now we know what alpacas do when they're uneasy. And it's not fun to clean up, Burton tells me.
But Young Keith's creative liturgy for Psalm 8 was impressive. Who would have thought of building a scale of the Moon and putting it into low orbit like that? And although the RAF did shoot it down, what a fantastic display of shooting stars we got! Or so I'm told. With the triffids feasting on alpaca droppings, last night was definitely not the time for watching meteors.
So everyone woke up this morning screaming that they couldn't see anything. I had to explain to them that there's no cause for alarm. It's autumn. The sun just hadn't risen yet. Same talk I have to give them every year.
I'm expecting them to be out round the ornamental maple later, wondering what illness has made its leaves go red. Every year the same.
I was confused. Why have Liverpool sacked Brendan Rodgers, after a perfectly respectable result? A draw away at Everton - nothing wrong with that.Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them. (Mark 10:2-16)Whenever someone tells us that Jesus took the weight of the Old Testament Law from our shoulders, in my experience at least, it is unusual for them to mention at the same time his teaching on divorce.
As a humanitarian agency involved in search and rescue, MSF does not have a mandate or means to assess the immigration status of the people we assist. We provide medical care without judgment and strongly believe that no human being should drown when the means exist to prevent it.
Sometimes the world is so frenetic. In this whirlwind, active England of ours - even out in the sticks, where you'd think we were more civilised - people are constantly shouting - through action, through clothing, through sheer noise - "look at me!" And you get the suspicion that the increasingly Big-Brother-ish (in the Bazalgette sense), X-factored drawing of attention to oneself is a desperate attempt to attract to the shell of people - for fear that there may - in these days when response times are measured in nanoseconds, and you are the sum of your instant reactions - be just emptiness within.
Social media has plummeted - If it ever climbed in the first place - to similar attractions. People over-sharing for attention - for are page impressions not a form of love? An outbreak of virtue-signalling on Twitter that dwarfs everything since the gentry started putting their names on their almshouses.
I figured that, since value-signalling is a form of structured information, I could use it as a source of energy. So I got Young Keith to build me a Twitter-powered model aircraft. Had to ground it with technical problems, unfortunately. This terrible whining kept coming from its left wing.
And I am grateful to Ian Paul for his article on why pushy men get the top jobs - because they're pushy, it turns out. Though his article is so thorough that I got lost trying to work out his view on how humble men lose out to pushy women. For what it's worth, any of my sympathy for humble men will be put on hold while I await the findings on why there are so few "showy" females. Probably because if you get to be called "gobby" or accused of using sex as a career progression technique or have to be twice as pushy to get as far as less-talented men, you're at risk of deciding that being "humble" is a better career option. Still, pushy wins every time.
So in the midst of a value-signalling, attention-seeking, image-projecting world I made my little oasis of fuzzy thinking here. A place of quiet and reflection, where we could let silence drive out the murmurs of self-will. And what do I find?
An average of twenty meetings a week. Sixteen separate rotas. Acts of worship that become about the planners, the leaders, the person whose folksy ten-minute links between songs just became fifteen minutes. The people who tell you that if you behave like them, smile like them, tilt your head to a 27° angle when you hear any kind of sad news like them - then you can know a true form of self-realisation, and not worry about the emptiness and the fear that, one of these days, the whirlwind outside will break your shell.
Down by the side of the main road, an old bloke sits looking on a pile of newspapers and watches the traffic go past - all day. And someone sits alongside him. In the Med, a boat is hunting for sinking dinghies and struggling to save the people on them. And someone is walking alongside them. In a bombed out street, a girl struggles to cook a meal for her younger brothers. And though they don't know it, someone is at the meal with them. Not in the whirlwind? Maybe.
