Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

  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...