Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

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 ...