Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

  Good morning My thought for the day today is entitled, “Have a break”.  According to a recent Harvard Business Review, when one business woman recently did a survey with the question “how are you?” 8 out of 10 people replied “busy” [1] . Now I don’t know what sort of circles you move in, but a lot of people today are busy, busy, busy. It’s kind of ironic, because compared to our forebears, we have more labour-saving devices that can do our chores for us, we have AI that can do some of our thinking for us and we have overall better healthcare that should mean we are living longer and are more productive. But everyone is busy. Perhaps even now you are dashing from one thing to the next. Well can I suggest one practical step. “Have a break”. No this is not an advert for a kitkat! It’s a return the the wisdom of what the Bible calls the Sabbath. In the Bible, when God created the world he had a break! After 6 days of creating, he rested. Now since He is all powerful and di...

Click here for audio .    Don’t believe all you read on the internet. That’s the title of today’s “Thought for the Day”.   Sometimes when I’m cycling and listening to a talk on YouTube, it goes straight to an advert, and since I don’t want to stop my bike and skip it, I’m forced to listen to several minutes about some product, apparently proved by scientists that is going to change my life, or make me millions, or save me from oral hygiene disaster. I’m sorry I don’t believe it. I’ve got all I need thank you very much, I don’t need your gadget. As we turn more and more to Chat GPT and Google AI to do our thinking and possibly our homework for us, we need to be a little careful. Here are a few examples of things that you will find on the internet that aren’t true. 1.      The word “strawberry” has 2 ‘R’s in it 2.      You should add glue to pizza to stop the cheese sliding off . 3.      Cats can breathe ...

Click here for audio  Lynn Crawford, 71, Susie Matthews, 73, Rose Sulley, 74, and Christine Goodwin, 80 are all grandmas from Wales who have been friends for more than 40 years. They had an interesting plane journey recently when they went to take Rose’s late husband’s ashes to be scattered in Las Vegas. Due to a confusion about seating, they found a very well built young man called DeReiss Gordon sitting in one of their seats on the plane. They kindly asked him to move but he was convinced he was in the right seat. Well things got a bit heated, but eventually all was sorted out and one of the nans asked the young man why he was going to Las Vegas. It turned out that he’s a professional wrestler known as “ Man like DeReiss ”, and he got chatting to the women and invited them along to see him wrestle a couple of days later. Well they kept their promise and went along to their first wrestling match. They got a message through to DeReiss and he later said “I was at the merch ta...

 Click here for Audio .  I don’t know if you watch breakfast TV, but one of the BBC’s most appreciated weather forecasters, Carol Kirkwood, retired from the BBC after 28 years last week. Now if you are not familiar with Carol, she has a warm lilting Scottish accent and for nearly 3 decades has not only provided the weather but also reported from events like Wimbledon, Chelsea Flower show and has even featured on Strictly. Click on the BBC weather or the Christ Church Huntingdon Blog for a link ( here ) to some of her funniest moments. Well it must have been quite emotional for her as she did her last forecast, and glowing reports from various journalists flooded in from people she had worked with. I wonder if you’ve done something lately that could have been for the last time. Perhaps it’s chatting to an old friend who is no longer with us. Perhaps it’s being able to open a jam jar. Perhaps it’s more light hearted like running   the 100m in well, under 1 minute. N...

 Click here for audio.  Good morning and welcome to Thought for the Day. They say that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me”, but I don’t think any of us think that’s quite right. You can still be struggling from the pain of words many years later long after any physical hurts have healed. Why do I raise this this morning? Well the Bible has a huge amount to say about our words. The book of James – most likely written by Jesus’ half brother, James, talks about our words by focusing in on the part of the body primarily responsible for generating words, the tongue. And it says, you know how a bit is a small piece of metal put into the mouth of a horse, and yet with it, a rider can control the whole direction of travel. Or think of a rudder on a big ship. Relatively a small piece of wood or metal in comparison with the whole ship, and yet it has huge effects. In the same way the tongue is one of the smallest parts of our body, but it can...

Audio here .  Good morning and welcome to Thought for the Day. Beachcomber Ryan Stalker from Weymouth , (click for pictures) had a bit of a surprise the other day when walking along the seafront at Osmington Mills on the Dorset Coast. He saw some rubbish washed up on the beach. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But on further inspection the big plastic item turned out to be an intact wheelie bin. Yes like our beloved HDC wheelie bins that line our street on a Monday and Tuesday (depending on where you live), a whole wheelie bin had washed up on the Dorset shore. But this particular wheelie bin turned out to have come all the way across the Atlantic from Alabama in the United States. Once this hit social media, Americans went wild, and managed to track the item by its bar code to one of three particular missing wheelie bins. And this one went missing in Hurricane Sally in September 2020. So the barnacle encrusted wheelie bin had travelled over 4000 miles in nearly 6 years. Talk abo...

Recording here .   Good morning and welcome to my Thought for the Day entitled what an "oppor-tuna-ty". Well I’ve been doing a bit of research and a tin of tuna will set you back about £1.50 in the Huntingdon supermarkets these days, though you might be able to get a budget tin for more like 80p if you hunt around. So guess how much Kiyoshi Kimura paid for his bluefin tuna in Tokyo last month? Answer, a staggering half a billion yen. That’s £2.4million for a fish! Well that must be the most expensive fish ever sold [1] . Apparently big blue fin tuna (and this one weighs in at 243kilos) sell for big money. But the first tuna of the year at the opening fish market in Tokyo in January are particularly sought after. They are believed to bring good luck. Mr Kimura who is known as the “Tuna King” bought the fish for the record breaking amount (yes £2.4M) for his restaurant chain Sushi Zanmai, and one customer said after eating some of the Sushi containing this fish “I feel ...