Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

  On this day in history 173 years ago a French man by the name of Jolly-Bellin spilt something all over his wife’s table cloth while she was out shopping. The substance was a turpentine-oil mix from an oil burner. Oh no, disaster. Well as he started to try and clean up the mess before his wife came home, he discovered something rather fascinating. The parts of the table cloth that had been spattered with this mixture had become cleaner than the rest. So he started to experiment and he started to discover the process that we now call “ dry cleaning ”. It became hugely useful for the clothes cleaning business and within a few years had spread all over the world. All from that little accident with the turpentine lamp. Well after a little internet search, I found that many great inventions have been discovered by accident. Matches, Coca Cola, X-Rays, Shatterproof glass, microwave ovens and superglue were all discovered by accident. Maybe we have the makings of a ser...

Mark it’s great to be here live to share my first Thought for the Day in person since before Covid , and actually my 100 th ever Thought for the Day on HCR! And the title ? “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas”. You probably know, Mark, that “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas” (written by Irving Berlin and sung by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the film Happy Holidays) is the best-selling song ever . I wonder what it is about it that makes it such a popular classic? I think in part it’s the crooning voices, but also it’s because a white Christmas is so rare (like England winning a major football tournament!!) that it kind of taps into childhood memories and fairy tales. Proper snow on the ground has only happened 4 times in 51 years apparently. Apparently it’s Charles Dickens who is to blame who wrote a lot about snowy Christmases, probably inspired by his childhood, growing up in the coldest decade in England for more than a decade- a time when the Thames froze over. (s...

Well MP Matt Hancock’s appearance on “I’m a celebrity get me out of here” has been very controversial. Some from his Haverhill constituency (not far from here) have called it a disgrace that he’s gone on the programme, and others have said he should resign. Even a mild-mannered relative of mine wrote “stupid man” over his photo on a newspaper cutting that she sent to me! A few on the other hand, have valued his time in the Jungle said that it’s been important to see that he’s only human like everyone else. But fellow contestant, and TV presenter Charlene White tackled him directly on how he had flaunted the very lockdown guidance he had asked others to follow: "My aunt died from Covid in the first wave. So, we couldn't go to the hospital to go and visit her. I had to sit by myself in the church at her funeral. We couldn't hug each other because we were following guidance. And I get that you fell in love, I understand all of those things, but sorry for a lot of...

Did you know that in vaults of the Bank of England there are around 400,000 bars of gold worth over £200billion! Only the Federal Reserve in New York has more gold than that! It’s so heavy that there are special purpose-built shelves to hold it all up, and of course lots of security, and as a result no gold has ever been stolen from the Bank of England. Italian Job, Oceans Eleven, sorry! However, in Victorian times there was a close miss! You can read about it on the Bank of England’s website . In 1836 the Bank of England’s Directors received anonymous letters from someone claiming to have access to their gold. In fact they offered to meet those directors inside the vault whenever they chose. Sure enough at the appointed time there was a noise heard from beneath the floor, and a man popped up through the floorboards. He had been doing repair work and had discovered an old drain that ran underneath the gold. Billions of pounds worth of gold was at his disposal, but he cho...

  Around 10 years ago my wife and I met a man called Stephen Lungu. He came to preach at our church in Brussels. Stephen Lungu had an amazing story. Tragically beaten by his father and then abandoned by his mother aged 7, he grew up on the streets of Zimbabwe where he was involved in drugs, gangs and crime. He had two knives and he used to mark a notch on his knife for each person he had stabbed. He was an angry young man. One day he and his gang, known as the “Black Shadows” decided to throw petrol bombs into a Christian meeting that had set up a tent in his town. They came into the tent and sat at the back. Just ready to give the signal to cause mayhem, Stephen was held back, first by the sound of a beautiful girl’s voice who was singing a Christian song, and then from a preacher who spoke of how we have all done wrong, but how we can be forgiven by Jesus Christ and his death on the cross. There and then he called out to Jesus Christ for help, becoming a Christia...

  Well I’m sorry to say folks, that we are due some thundery showers as the week goes on. Some proper rain. Maybe that’s appropriate for the time of mourning that our nation has been through over the last three weeks. But do you remember how dry it was over the summer with all that heat; and how our grass became like “shredded wheat” (as one person I talked to called it)? Apart from a few short showers here and there it wasn’t really until the end of August that we got “proper rain”.  On Thurs 25th August I went for a bike ride to Houghton Mill and the heavens opened and the rain came down. It was wonderful seeing the big plops of rain landing in the River Ouse and thinking how much good it was doing to our crops and to all our gardens. Proper Rain.  In the Bible rain is a sign of blessing. You can understand why: in the dry and dusty middle east, rain can be a lot harder to come by and drought can be a reality as we faced this summer.  In fact there were ...

  The Queen was a remarkable figure who for over seventy years served our nation tirelessly. She met with every Prime Minister from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss just days before she died, she hobnobbed with everyone from heads of state to filmstars, opened parliaments, and had her image on every stamp or banknote in this country. There are 25 awards, 56 places, 85 buildings, 28 hospitals let alone the bridges, roads, Schools and trains that are named after her. Many things have been and will continue to be spoken by great politicians and journalists as her story goes down in the history books. But it’s actually the testimony of the everyday people that I find most moving. A BBC reporter was out on the streets of Hull and here are some of the comments that everyday people made. ·         "England won't be the same country without her," ·         "She's always been there. She's been positive, sh...

I wonder if you’ve seen the TV programme, “Escape to the Country”. It’s a reality TV programme that features a prospective buyer, normally from the city, looking at 3 or 4 houses in the countryside.  So you get John and Patty from London, who have always loved the Lake District. They’ve lived in the big smoke all their life, and now having just retired, they want buy a tumble-down cottage out in Cumbria.  With the help of the presenter, they visit 3 properties that match their wish list- remote, enough space for the dogs, and ideally with Lakeside views. They are shown some delightful picture postcard cottages, including one “mystery property” and then they get to decide whether they will buy one. Well it’s great TV, even if sadly, many of the buyers never actually buy any of the properties. I think we’d all like to “escape to the country”.  First, you can feel closer to nature in the countryside, (perhaps one reason why people live near Huntingdon with its bir...

For the Thought for the Day today, I’d like to tell you a rather funny story from this time of year a couple of years back. It was quite late on a summer’s evening, and my wife and I were about to head to bed when we heard a strange high pitched bleeping noise from outside. It sounded like this, I’ve got a recording…. Well I didn’t know what it was. It was rather annoying and I didn’t sleep that well that night. The next night it happened again. So I went outside to our bins and I thought, aha, I know what the bleeping is. I had thrown out an old smoke alarm, and when they run down on batteries they give out an intermittent beep. But the bin men had already been a couple of days earlier to take the rubbish, and the bins were empty, so it couldn’t have that. I tried to investigate. The strange thing was that when I went outside and the motion sensor light by the side of our house came on, the bleeping stopped. Now that was really annoying, because now I couldn’t figure...

The UK is now facing a heat wave and Monday is forecast to have the hottest temperatures ever recorded in the UK! I’m recording this on Tuesday, and part of me wonders whether it’s actually going to be pouring with rain when it goes out on Thursday!  It’s quite funny, looking at how brits respond to the heat – I expect to see many people with sunburn in the coming weeks, and freezer compartments in supermarkets may well face an ice lolly shortage. They say only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, so I can imagine we’re not about to start having siestas any time soon!  And we also love a good complain don’t we, we brits! It’s too cold, it’s too wet, it’s too hot! Never happy really are we? But it’s strange I think, how the sun is always in the sky, always burning, but the temperature that we experience here on earth differs so massively depending on how close or far away we are from it. It’s not as if the sun is changing, it’s that our planet is ...

One of the most often cited reasons for people handing in their resignation to Boris Johnson last week was integrity. People didn’t feel that he could be trusted anymore. And as you’ll know he’s now stepping down as leader of the Conservatives. One person who resigned last week was Sajid Javid, outgoing Health Secretary and I quote… “I am instinctively a team player but the British people also rightly expect integrity from their Government”. But just in case any of you were worrying, this thought for the day is not about politics, its about integrity. Integrity is about when something is whole and not undivided. If you say one thing and do another, you are divided. If your loyalties are split so that you seek to serve people, but you are also seeking to serve yourself and your own agenda, you lack integrity. There is a verse in the Old Testament that is so important to me that my wife did some embroidery to write it indelibly in needlework on a piece of fabric that is...

I recently saw a wonderful interview with a man called Richard Griffin on a clip from Sky News . It was around the time of the Jubilee. Dick Griffin is now retired but used to be one of the Queen’s royal protection officers (ie bodyguards). One time he was up with her near the Balmoral Estate. There were a couple of American hikers who got into conversation with the Queen and her bodyguard at a picnic spot, but who didn’t realise who they were talking to. After a bit of a conversation, they asked the Queen (just thinking she was a member of the public) “So where do you live?” She replied, “I live in London but I have a holiday home just the other side of the hills”. The tourist without realising who he was talking to asked whether she’d ever met the Queen! As quick as a flash the Queen replied “I’ve never met her, but Dick here meets her regularly”. The tourist then asked the bodyguard “What’s she like?” Pulling the queen’s leg, he replied “Oh she can be very cantankerou...

Happy Jubilee to everyone. I wonder what your favourite moment of the weekend was?  • Paddington Bear having tea with the Queen? • The service in the Cathedral?  • Little Prince Louis stealing the show by pulling funny faces during the rock concert or covering his ears as the Red Arrows flew over. • The pageant on Sunday, was described by one BBC correspondent as “baffling, brilliant and bonkers”. • Or perhaps for you the greatest moment was Brian May emerging under Queen Victoria’s nose playing “We will Rock you” on his electric guitar?  Well we as a family had the privilege on Thursday to go up to Westminster to watch the planes flying over. We didn’t quite make it to the Mall, but where we were near Big Ben we could see each of the 70 planes flying over, with a massive roar of the crowd each time. And to top it off, our neighbourhood here in Huntingdon had a street party complete with Union Jack cake and Good old British weather. It was a histori...

Good morning everyone, and happy platinum jubilee day!  My neighbours have got bunting out all over the front of their house, there are events going on where I live in Godmanchester for people to go along to – but, for some of us, we’re not that invested in the Royal family or the Queen. That’s certainly true for me.  What’s this weekend for you? Is it a chance to celebrate 70 years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, or is it just a couple of extra days off? Because, even if you don’t care much about the queen, in fact, even if you’re strongly against the monarchy – you still get a bank holiday! The Queen has granted good things even to those who don’t care about her, or those who hate her!  And the same is true of God! Think about this, God is the creator who sustains our world, but he does that for those who believe in him, and those who go around trying to convince everyone he doesn’t even exist. Jesus says “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the goo...

“Send her victorious, happy and glorious, Long to reign over us, God save the Queen”.  Despite calls for it to be updated or replaced in recent years, the National Anthem has been sung countless times over the decades at everything from sporting events to national ceremonies. If like me you watch the Queen’s speech at Christmas, you’ll be familiar with hearing it each year, and you may even have had older members of your family who would stand when the music starts up.  According to Wikipedia, no-one is absolutely sure when and where it originated though the first published version of the tune came in 1744, though the melody may go back far earlier to a combination of an early plainsong melody with an early dance rhythm.  In 2002 Brian May played it on the roof of Buckingham Palace at high volume from his red special electric guitar for the Golden Jubilee, which was an idea he had which he called the most “incredible energizing moment, but terrify...

I like signs. Over the last few weeks I’ve spotted a few around Huntingdon. Most of them grown out of the pandemic in some way. We still need them… ·       Opposite St Anne’s school in Godmanchester it says “Well done Kids”. ·       Near Hinchingbrooke school there’s a sign saying “NHS- National Hero Service”. ·       Again in Godmanchester a hand painted sign saying “You got this”. I wonder if you’ve ever heard anyone say “I’ll believe in God if he gives me a sign”. You see many people carry on their everyday lives wondering if God is there. Surely if God is real he would break in and show me? In the King of the Belgians pub in Hartford there’s a sign that says “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”. Well I’m not sure that’s the sign you are looking for. You see the question is, even if God did send us a sign, would we recognise it. Woody Allen, the comedian once said “I’...

I wonder if any of you saw Spiderman: No Way Home in cinemas last year? It saw three versions of Spiderman from three different universes, uniting to help save some famous villains from the people they’ve become. It was the highest-grossing film of 2021, so I’m sure you’ve heard of it. And I think the fact that it was so popular says something about our tastes in this day and age.  What won the hearts of so many fans of the film was the appearance of the previous actors to play Spiderman – Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. These references to older films fill us with a sense of nostalgia, a reminder of how things used to be. Escapism, not only into a good story on the screen, but escapism into our own past.  It's all over cinema these days – whether it’s the Jurassic world franchise bringing back Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler from the first film, or a new Downton Abbey feature, filmmakers play on our emotions by reminding of us of things we have loved in the p...

Last Friday I went to prison. Don’t worry I haven’t been getting up to some illegal activity on the side of being a vicar, but rather I had the privilege of shadowing the chaplaincy team at a prison in East Anglia. I am very grateful to the Lead Chaplain and his team for showing me around, and to the many prisoners who I spoke to, who were willing to give up time to talk, including some of those who went to the Church of England service, and others who welcomed me to the Islamic prayer service, a first for me. Now there are a lot of things you aren’t allowed to take into prison. On arrival I had to leave any mobile phone, smart watch, cigarettes or cigarette lighters in the car. That’s all very well. And of course, routinely there are searches to check that visitors to prison aren’t bringing illegal drugs. But can I tell you two things that can get into prison. The first is ducks! Yes I was quite amazed to see a family of ducks with around 8 ducklings waddling around the...

  According to a survey a couple of years ago , roughly half of the UK regularly prays. Indeed, 51% of people surveyed on behalf of agency Tearfund said that they pray. It’s less than the USA who found that 84% of their adults prayed in the last week, but nevertheless it’s a bigger number than I would have thought.   And what’s fascinating is that even among those who say that they are not religious, 20% of them still pray, either for their family or in a crisis, or even to give thanks. I wonder if you are praying person? If so, I guess the question is who do you pray to? Maybe you are from a religious background, so you pray to Allah, or Jesus or God. Maybe you are not sure. But doesn’t the fact that we are hard wired to pray tell us something? I had a neighbour when I lived overseas called Manuel. He didn’t seem a particularly religious sort of guy. He would get drunk and phone me up and say rude things in the middle of the night, and then apologise the next ...

I wonder if any of you have got into acting before? I have, I used to do quite a bit of amateur theatre at school and university, but one part I never got to play was a good old fashioned villain. I’ve often thought it would be fun to just play a character of pure evil.  Well I read recently about one man who does just that! Kevin Lee – who actually grew up in Huntingdon – is one of the most famous British actors you’ve never heard of. Because he acts in Chinese films. His job is to play the white western bad guy in patriotic Chinese blockbusters, and he’s played characters ranging from an American colonel to a hitman to a blue monster with a face scar.  In an interview with the BBC he’s said “Foreigners don’t get the chance to play the main role/ If you look at Hollywood movies, how many Chinese or Asian actors do you see play the leading man?”  All that being said, Lee in that same interview suggests that he might like to play a slightly different role...

Well one of the most watched videos on the internet right now is the moment when actor Will Smith, famous for his roles in the “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and “Men in Black” hit comedian Chris Rock on the face last Sunday. Yes, that’s right ladies and gentleman, an actor who shortly afterwards went on to receive an Oscar, walked onto the stage in front of an audience of over 20 million viewers and hit another guy in the face. Will Smith in a tearful speech to receive his first Oscar for the film “King Richard” apologised to the academy and then subsequently to Chris Rock himself. The reason for the action was that Chris Rock had made a passing joke about Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Chris’ joke appeared to poke fun at Jada’s shaved head. She suffers from a skin condition called alopecia and so has her head shaved, which she has spoken about publicly. Well what do you think? Was Will Smith right to stand up for his wife in that way and do what he did? I don’t ...

Imagine you are one of the thousands of refugees who has chosen to leave your home town in Ukraine fleeing for your life. Eventually you get on a train out of the country and into neighbouring Hungary. You are exhausted, you are worried, you have left loved ones behind who you don’t know if you’ll ever see again. And then you think about where you have arrived- in a different country not knowing where to turn. Well Christians amongst others in Hungary have been looking after the tidal wave of refugees streaming into the country. I received an email from a Christian pastor Adam in Hungary who writes this…  “Here is one story that just happened yesterday. The railway stations in Budapest are overloaded, they simply don't have the capacities to welcome tens of thousands of refugees arriving on train. The [portable] Toi-Toi toilets are few and dirty. The situation is chaotic. So yesterday my friend, Hamar Dani, took 25 men to one of the railways stations. They he...

We may all be thinking a lot about Ukraine at the moment, but what’s going on there is utterly horrific, and this will be remembered in history for years to come, so I think we need to try not to get fatigue from all the news we’re hearing. I’m recording this a little in advance, so I don’t know what’s happening in that country as you’re listening. Something I saw recently is the Daily Mail frontpage headline “Pray for Ukraine”. Which is an interesting comment, as the question arises – who are they suggesting you pray to? If you don’t believe in God, how can you pray? I do in fact believe in God, and believe that he hears our prayers, so I do pray for Ukraine, and I think we all should. But pray to the God of creation, the God of the Bible, not just a being thought up by human imagination.  Anyway, what I want to say this morning is about guilt. I have a Russian friend who I spoke to last week, and she was talking about how she doesn’t support the war in Ukraine, b...

    We’ve all seen horrific events on our news feeds in recent days. One day people walking free in the streets of the cities of Ukraine, and the next tanks moving in and bombs dropping. Civilians becoming soldiers, families and children sheltering underground. And as I record this, there’s talk of an increased escalation to the nuclear threat. The world has become a much scarier place than a few days ago. Today I’m not going to say very much, except to read some words from Psalm 46 in the Bible and say a short prayer. If you are a praying person I hope that you can say Amen at the end. These verses show that for God’s people there is ultimate security, and we need not fear. In the Lord Jesus Christ we can find peace and safety. Do contact one of the local churches if we can support you through this time. 1 God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. 2  Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way      and t...

    I’ve got a question for all of you – why are you up so early? Maybe you’re having your breakfast, maybe you’ve just taken the kids to school, maybe you’re on your way to work, maybe you’re already at work, like Mark hosting the show. Or maybe for some of you, you’ve just got back from a morning gym session. Ok, maybe that’s not so many of you, but I reckon a lot of us do go to the gym, or do some form of exercise at some point in our week, I personally like going running, but admittedly not really at 8am… Well whatever you do, you’ve probably got a goal of some sort. You might be trying to stay fit, to get in shape, or to build up to run a marathon, or to be able to lift heavier and heavier weights. It’s all some sort of training.  And did you know that the Bible says that’s a good thing to do? 1 Timothy 4v8 says “Physical training has some value”. The Bible, God’s word says that it’s good to do a bit of exercise! So if you enjoy a bit of exercise, t...