Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

When I’m giving a thought for the day I like to share with you some piece of news that I think you might not have heard, so I wonder if you’ve heard that Robyn Rihanna Fenty (commonly known by her stage name Rihanna) has been given the order “National hero of Barbados”. The island nation in the west indies has recently become a republic, meaning that it no longer has the queen of England as its head of state. At the ceremony where it official became a republic, Prince Charles explained how cutting ties with the UK in this way is a way for the people of Barbados to move on from the “atrocity of slavery” that colours the past of the country. And Rihanna is undoubtedly one of the most famous faces from the nation of Barbados, and through her music career, she has gradually shown Caribbean influences. In her speech proclaiming her a national hero, the Prime Minister of Barbados quoted one of Rihanna’s songs, saying “May you continue to shine bright like a diamond”. She wants R...

  “Fame, I’m gonna live for ever. I’m gonna learn how to fly, high”.   It’s the theme tune from 1980s TV series, Fame, based at the New York City High School for the performing arts. Do you want to be famous? Maybe as a teenager listening in today, you are a budding musician, you’d love to play Wembley and be surrounded by adoring crowds. Maybe you hope your youtube channel or Instagram account will go viral, or you’ll play football for Man United or at least St Ives. Others look back to a moment of fame in the past, shaking hands with the Queen, or completing a charity fundraiser and getting their photo in the Hunts Post. Well here’s what a couple of famous people have said about fame, and they might make you think twice about fame… ·        “Fame is like caviar you know- it’s good to have caviar  but not when you have it at every meal”- Marilyn Monroe. ·        “Fame itself… doesn’t real...

It’s been described as a once in a lifetime event. I’m talking about the COP26 climate conference, but not for the reasons you might think! Yes, these discussions have been dubbed by one newspaper as the “Summit to Save the World” , and Boris has said that COP26 can’t be a cop out in terms of lasting change. But it’s also attracting attention for a different reason.  Plane spotters from all over the country have been descending on Glasgow Prestwick airport to see planes coming in from all over the world. A Japanese 777, a Qatar Airbus and a Russian Falcon Jet were among others that touched down on the opening day of the conference.  I’ve never really been into plane or train spotting myself. It does sometimes have a nerdy or geeky reputation, but isn’t there are a bit of a geek in all of us somewhere?!  But what for you would be a once in a lifetime event?  It may not be seeing Airforce 1 arrive in Glasgow. Perhaps it’s holding a grandchild in your a...

  Just over two weeks ago, the social media giant Facebook suffered a connection problem and for six hours the world went without WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook [1] . It was a major problem, not least because according to some reports the software glitch also affected the security in Facebook’s head office in California, meaning that employees couldn’t get into the building to rectify the situation. I found it quite amusing to read posts on the internet saying, things like “How I can’t live without my beloved Facebook” and “This is the only way I can talk to my American Girlfriend”, with someone posting “Have you tried texting, emailing, or just (throwing it out there), a phone call?!!” A similar thing happened in June when a customer of one website company, Fastly, just did a simple change of their settings, causing 85% of the websites they host to go down [2] . Well billionaire founder, Mark Zuckerberg soon apologised, and life returned to normal. I...

Earlier this week, on Monday night, facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all suffered a 6 hour outage. If you logged on to any of these platforms, which are all run by the same company, you couldn’t load anything. The servers were down, and you couldn’t get a decent connection.  Eventually the servers did come back, and Facebook issued an official apology saying, “People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”  I personally find these public apologies really interesting, because in our culture, it looks weak to say sorry. And actually, Facebook have done it in some very flowery language, but basically what they’re saying is “We messed up, we don’t know what happened, we’re sorry”.   My favourite example of this is Nick Clegg’s apology in 2012 after promisi...

In just under a month’s time, leaders from all over the world will be gathering in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit.  It’s been described by its president the Rt Hon Alok Sharma as “our last best hope for the world to come together and tackle climate change”. He says “the eyes of the world will be on Glasgow when global leaders arrive in November”  I wonder whether you take any notice of talk of global warming, or whether you get on with life. Some say that climate change is overstated, or just that there is enough much closer to home to worry about. But many today, including plenty of young people, are so concerned about what we are doing to the planet that they are willing to disrupt everyday life by climbing on train roofs or gluing themselves to the M25 to say protest.  Christians have lots to say about climate change. In fact at our church, Christ Church Huntingdon, we have been seeing in Genesis 1 on Sundays lately that this world is creat...

I wonder if you know who the following are:              Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, Ross. The answer is “Friends”. For those who remember it, it was an American sitcom based on 6 friends living in New York. And it was first launched on this day 17 years ago, September 22 nd 2004! When its producers first pitched the concept to network NBC, they said “It's about … a time in your life when everything's possible. And it's about friendship because when you're single and in the city, your friends are your family” [1] “Your friends are your family”. Perhaps that’s why the series was so popular. In a lonely world, we all long to belong. And in a superficial world where we have hundreds of facebook friends, but sometimes very few real close friends, we crave lasting unconditional friendship from someone who says “I’ll be there for you”. But I guess that as well as being popular, with its beautiful and funny ...

“Ch-ch-ch-changes, turn and face the strange, changes, look out you rock and rollers”. I wonder if you can name the singer!? Stay tuned to hear the song in a minute! Well we’ve certainly all faced our share of changes over the last 18 months. We’ve changed our working practices , with many people working from home. We’ve changed our schooling , with many kids being taught at home, now returning to new teachers, new friendship groups, new subjects. We’ve changed our understanding of what we are and aren’t allowed to do again and again as rules on bubbles, masks and social distancing have changed so many times. At Christ Church Huntingdon, we’ve had to change how we do church . First onto youtube, then onto zoom, then to Inflatabounce and now to Stukeley Meadows Primary School with a youtube livestream. Well in the Bible there’s a verse (Heb 13:8) that says that “Jesus Christ is the same , yesterday, today and forever”. It’s very reassuring that in a wo...

When was the last time you sang? Maybe you have young children and you take them to a music group each week? Maybe like me you’re a renowned shower singer – maybe you don’t realise you are, but ask the people you live with, they’ll notice even if you do it subconsciously! Lots of people sung for the only time in a long time during the European football championships last month, whether it was the people in the stadium, or just sitting on the sofa at home, joining in with a rendition of the national anthem, or “Football’s coming home”.  I’ve heard people say that singing is what you do when speaking doesn’t convey the emotion effectively enough. Words carry a thought, music carries an emotion, a song makes you feel a thought. And maybe when you feel something so strongly yourself, it’s not enough to just say something, you’ve got to sing it! I think that might be why football matches feature the most unlikely singers of all time bursting into song, all together. And singin...

The other day I was on a bike ride with my kids. We crossed a busy Huntingdon road at a pedestrian crossing, with the older two going ahead, but my youngest hesitated staying on the pavement with me in the middle of the road waiting while the lights went back to green. She’s only little and got a bit flustered. I tried to hold the traffic for a moment for her, but I ended up going back to her side to wait for the next chance. No one was in danger.  But on my side of the road a boy racer revved his engine and raced past me, obviously not pleased with how my 5 year old’s hesitation had eaten up a few extra seconds of his very important day. On the other side, a driver was still waiting for us well into the green light, holding up the traffic patiently to let me and my daughter cross the road.  One patient driver and one impatient driver. The impatient driver nearly ruined my day, and the kind driver nearly made my day!  It’s not easy being patient in this busy wo...

According to latest data on the BBC website , more than a million people in the UK have been asked to isolate in recent days.  It’s not surprising. We are in a strange and unnerving time where the restrictions have rapidly decreased and the Covid cases have rapidly increased. So while we give thanks for the rollout of the vaccines which has cut down the number of hospitalisations, so much of the virus is going around that many people have either got it without knowing it, or come in contact with someone who has.  Some have called it a “pingdemic”, as the track and trace app has pinged thousands of people telling them to stay at home away from work and friends due to their contact with others. Indeed it’s got so bad that some supermarkets and pubs have had to close again because so many of their staff have had to isolate. Speaking of isolation, my brother in law’s sister is due to go back to Australia in August, and on arrival she and other travellers from the UK wi...

Back in the early months of the pandemic, we were all really looking forward to freedom from restrictions, weren’t we? I remember longing for the day when I heard the announcement from the government that everything was now fine, and we could go and hug our friends again. But, although we have had restrictions lifted in such a way that there is no longer any restriction on hugging our friends and family, it’s never felt like the great cry of freedom has properly arrived. This is the way the pandemic ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.  And 21 June came and gone without anything really changing, and now, the long-awaited freedom day, is coming on Monday. But I’m personally not feeling too great about it. Yes we’ll no longer have any limits on who we can see inside, and we’ll be allowed to all sing together in Church, but I feel like the spectre of the pandemic is going to be looming over us for a while longer. We’ll still have the laws on self-isolation if you ge...

  Last night Emma and I watched a really moving film, “Military Wives” [ 1] , starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan. You may be familiar with it, or may have seen the Gareth Malone TV series “The Choir” first aired in 2006 which inspired it. It’s a story about the spouses of military personnel while their loved ones are deployed on duty in Afghanistan, and how they find support, and even an outlet for their emotion by joining an unlikely choir, of varying musical ability, who eventually get to perform their own song in the Royal Albert Hall. Well as you can imagine, it’s very emotional viewing. There’s the young bride, who gets that devastating visit that no military service family wants to get, there’s the Colonel’s wife who has already lost her soldier son and whose husband is caught up in an explosion. And yet it’s as funny as it is moving, thanks in part to the brilliant dialogues between chalk and cheese choir mistresses Kate and Lisa. Well in a ...

Believe it or not we have now passed the longest day. On Monday morning the sun rose at 4:38am but from here on in, the days are getting a tiny bit shorter and the nights a tiny bit longer. Don’t let that depress you because, we still have the summer ahead of us, and by all accounts the next couple of weeks will be quite hot. The summer solstice is made famous by the Druids, many of whom meet at Stonehenge on 21st June each year to worship the sun. This year numbers were lower due to Covid, and actually people gathered there against government advice, but it all seems to have passed off safely and peacefully [1] . I didn’t know much about Druidry, so looked online to discover a bit about their beliefs. It’s quite interesting. The British Druidry Order has its own website [2] and Druidry was officially recognised as a religion under charity law in 2010, allowing them to receive tax free donations like the Church of England [3] . Writer Emma Restall-Orr explains in “Wh...

Last week I went to visit my cousins, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time. And my eldest cousin has got two children, the youngest of whom was only born a few months ago, so I got to meet her for the first time, and have some cuddles with my newborn cousin, which was just so lovely.  And it was great to see her older brother too – he’s now three, but because of the pandemic, I hadn’t actually seen him, since he was one! When I saw him last, he only really communicated through noises, but now he can not only hold a conversation, but can pick up one of his toy dinosaurs and say “That’s an ankylosaurus!” But something struck me about how my cousin and her husband related to their son. There were a couple of times that he did something naughty, like throw a tantrum and kick a chair when he wasn’t allowed more ice cream, and his parents got very firm with him and said “No, we don’t do that. That’s not ok!” It can’t have been pleasant hearing his Mum, who loves him so m...

I guess it’s happened to us all many times over the last year. Those plans for seeing your family at Christmas, that holiday that you were going to go on, your long awaited family birthday party, all cancelled or delayed. You expected life to go one way….. and it went another. Time and time again Covid has scuppered our plans. Let me give you a personal example. Last October, Emma and I reached our 10 th wedding anniversary. Well, all through our 10 years of marriage we had been saving up some pennies and looking ahead to what we were going to do for our 10 th anniversary. In 2018, 2019, we were saying, “what shall we do in October 2020, a romantic getaway to Europe? A special holiday in the sun for a few days?” Well in October last year, we weren’t going anywhere, except Huntingdon! Plans put on hold. But with everything in life, there’s 2 sides to every story. When something goes wrong like that, do you look at the down side, or the bright side? Yes, over the last y...

I saw a newspaper cutting recently. It was taken from the Tacoma News Tribune, a local Seattle based newspaper way back in 1953. The article asks about the telephone of the future. Let me quote from this 1953 article, it’s not too long (remember that it’s nearly 70 years old)…   “Mark R Sullivan, San Francisco, president and director of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph company, said in an address on Thursday night (1953), “Just what form the future telephone will take, is of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: ‘In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want as they talk. Who knows but what it may actually translate from one language to another?’” Well I think that 70 year old guess about the future of the phone is pretty spot on. My mobile phone can be carried around, allo...

 As I write this Thought for the Day I'm sitting in Coneygear Park, the sun is shining, I can hear the birds, and the world feels a whole lot brighter than it did just a couple of months ago. I want to talk to you this morning about staying young. I don't know how old you think I am, judging by my voice, but I'm actually only 24. According to the woman on the checkout at Aldi who asked to see my ID, I look like I'm 16, which is just past the point of being a compliment in my opinion. But we all want to look young, to fight the effects of aging on our body. The cosmetics industry worldwide is huge, and though it used to be just celebrities who paid through the nose for, well, nose jobs or other kinds of plastic surgery, it's now something members of the general public will pay thousands for. And it's not just women as stereotypes would have us believe - it's men too! A friend at church was telling me about a guy he works with who's getting Botox...

A few music loving listeners among us today may know the name Ralph McTell, a singer songwriter who’s been performing folk songs since the 60s. Probably most of us have heard of his most famous song, the Streets of London . I’ve asked Mark to play it at the end.  “Oh, let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London. I'll show you something to make you change your mind”. It’s about a song in which Ralph lyrically leads us through the streets of London to meet a few characters that have fallen on hard times.  The old man in the closed down market kicking up the papers with his worn out shoes, the woman carrying her home in two carrier bags.  It’s a moving story which has lasted in the UK memory for now 52 years. In the song Ralph shows us these characters facing poverty and homelessness and effectively says, don’t think that everything is bad and lonely, compare yourself to these guys and you’ll see you have so much. Not a bad reminder. What...

Well I wonder if you remember Betty Boothroyd's life in politics? She was the first and only female speaker in the House of Commons. Between 1992 and 2000 she kept order in the House of Commons, and now she is keeping order in her own house.  Betty Boothroyd, or the Right Honourable Baroness Boothroyd OM as she now is, is 91 and downsizing from her London home to move to, yes, local Cambridgeshire, where she has bought a small cottage 1 which just doesn’t have the windowsills or space to display all the items from her time in public life.  So 40 items from her life (which involved mixing with Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and others) are going under the hammer in auction. There’s an ornamental box from President Yeltsin, there’s a limited-edition figure of Lawrence of Arabia that was give to her for her work as president of the All-Party defence group. There’s a decanter presented to her by the British Navy in St Petersburg, and all have to go.  “You can’t take it...

I don’t know how many of you are into football – I’m sorry if you’re not. I’m personally a Brighton and Hove albion fan, which isn’t the easiest thing to be, as they’re not the greatest team, but that’s by the by. What I want to talk to you about this morning is being a champion.  I was scrolling through sports headlines recently and saw that Manchester City Football Club have a decent chance of winning what’s called “The Quadruple” – that means winning the Premier League, the FA Cup, the League Cup (or Carabao Cup) and the Champions League all in the same season. They still have a long way to go, but it would be amazing if they managed to do it, because no other club in the history of football has ever done it!  And their rise to the top, as with any football team winning a tournament, is pretty straight forward. They win a lot of matches, they might lose a few, but it’s never in doubt that they’re going to at least get close to winning. It’s never likely that they’r...

Hasn’t it been great to have a few of the restrictions unlocking in recent days so that we can see our friends and family face to face. We still can’t go into other’s homes, and so there have been some chilly moments in gardens and parks, but it’s still wonderful to actually see people. As a family, over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been able to catch up with all the grandparents too which has been lovely. It’s been a long wait for so many. There’s nothing like seeing someone face to face. Zoom and facetime, emails and phone calls are all great, and I don’t know how we would have got through the last year without them, but there’s nothing like face to face. You avoid the painful delays, glitches, misunderstandings and miscommunications that sometimes happen with talking online. With zoom you can miss a whole sentence, because someone’s still on mute! As a church at Christ Church Huntingdon we have just enjoyed 5 services over Easter that were face to face, [or as our good fr...

As I write this, it is Tuesday 23rd March 2021. Exactly one year on since the first lockdown was announced last Spring. I don’t think I’ll ever forget those shocking words spoken to the nation by Prime Minister Boris Johnson “From this evening I must give the British people a very simple instruction - you must stay at home” 1 . It was a bewildering and scary time, and though the weather was warm for months, schools shut, markets tumbled, sickness and mortality sky rocketed and since that time around 120,000 people have died in the UK alone.  Although we give thanks for the vaccines, and the remarkable work of the NHS, we are not out of the woods yet, as neighbouring countries face a 3rd wave. Today, Tuesday, has been called a day of reflection, and by the time you hear this message on Wednesday morning you may well have taken part in a minute’s silence at midday, and you may well have stood on your doorsteps at 8pm to mark the occasion with your neighbours. Where do we turn when gr...