Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

  I wonder if you’ve ever been to Glastonbury. I’ve been to other festivals, but not Glastonbury, which must rate as the most famous pop festival, attracting big names like Stormzy, Beyonce, Radiohead, and over the years legends like Paul McCartney, Blur and David Bowie. But I’m afraid to say that I read last week that Glastonbury 2021 has now joined the list of of events [1] cancelled by Covid, and owner of Worthy Farm, Michael Eavis released this statement last Thursday…. “With great regret, we must announce that this year’s Glastonbury Festival will not take place… In spite of our efforts to move Heaven & Earth, it has become clear that we simply will not be able to make the Festival happen this year, we are so sorry to let you all down” [2] . I know not everyone will see Glastonbury as the great cultural event of the year, nor be as positive about some of the non-musical activities that go on there, but whatever your musical taste, we can all relate to the disappoint...

I don’t know about you, but it feels like in the modern world we have so many things competing for our attention. I’ve noticed it in myself recently, I find it very easy to start doing multiple things at once. But as my fiancée repeatedly reminds me, I am dreadful at multitasking. So what I’m really doing when I’m on a Zoom call and have a tab open to check the bbc news, and reading a Whatsapp at the same time, is I’m doing all of those things badly. At best I’m doing one of them, but I’m probably so distracted and all over the place that I’m not focussing on anything. The problem is, everything in our world is competing for our attention. We have that little noise that pops up on our phone to tell us that a notification has come in on some app or other. And it’s hard to ignore that little popup. And sometimes I do it to myself, I think of a question I want to know the answer to and want to look up an answer right away, even if I’m in the middle of something else. What do we give o...

I wonder if you have got to know your neighbours better over the last year. We certainly have. It’s partly through clapping for the NHS (though it was a bit cold last week) and local VE day celebrations, and of course being at home a little more. You see when you first move to an area, you don’t necessarily know the people in your block or street, and you don’t necessarily want to know them all, partly out of privacy and the British thing of “my home is my castle”!  But when you are thrown together in a global pandemic, and are all going through the same thing, it kind of brings you together. We’ve noticed that we chat longer to our neighbours now, and when they drop round an Amazon delivery that we missed, we find ourselves glad to be chatting to a real human being who is not on a screen or on a phone, and they linger a little longer than before. In our neighbourhood, we started a Whatsapp group for our street just before the last lockdown, just to put people in touch in case anyo...