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Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

A collection of thoughts shared on Huntingdon's local radio HCR104fm by our Pastor Charlie Newcombe and other members of our church. For the full list of previous posts, scroll to the archive in the bottom left of the page.
Church website at www.christchurchhuntingdon.co.uk.

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Charlie Newcombe is the pastor of our church. He enjoys playing the guitar, gardening, and spending time with his wife Emma and their three daughters.

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Not all that glitters is Gold

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...

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A Day in Prison

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...

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Fame

“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 Town. Like the band The Script, you could be "Walking in the Hall of Fame". 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...

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Love Actually

Click here for Audio. I just called to say I love you/ Somebody to love you/ When a man loves a woman/ Can’t buy me love/ Love Shack/ Love in an elevator/ Can’t help falling in love/ Got a whole lotta love/ Sunshine of your love/ All you need is love/ It’s the theme of a thousand songs, it’s the name of 29 albums, it’s the title of 20 films, it’s the name of 12 places in the US (according to Wikipedia), it will be the subject of a thousand conversations today, there’s even a crater on the moon named after it. I’m talking about love. We talk about falling in love, staying in love, being in love, falling out of love. We love to love and long to be loved. But what is love? Do we actually know what it is? For some Love is spelled L U S T . LUST. As one song puts it “let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”. Well we won’t go into details there as this is a family show, but surely there’s more to love than lust. How many people have thought they found love, when a...

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Downsizing

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...

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The Princess

Audio recording here . Good morning and welcome to Thought for the Day. It was a big shock to learn on Friday evening that Kate, the Princess of Wales has been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy. And this only a few weeks after King Charles was having cancer treatment. It’s deeply upsetting. I guess there’s a part of us that looks at the royals and thinks that they live in a kind of fairytale story where life is always good and always has a happy ending. But it’s not. We’ve seen from the loss of the Queen and Prince Philip, difficulties between Harry and his family, and of course the tragic death of the former Princess of Wales, Diana, that no family is immune from suffering. The good news is that it seems her surgery was successful and the treatment is preventative, which sounds like there is every hope that she will make a full recovery. But Kate’s openness and honesty will have done a great deal to help others who are facing similar things. And perhaps...

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Virtual Insanity

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. It ra...

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