Falling With Style

Warm beer, cricket, stoolball, morris dancing, conkers, maypoles, poll tax, queueing, Brighton rock, Stonehenge, stoney beaches,the Rolling Stones, the rolling south downs, Ugborough Beacon, Hadrians Wall, northern bluntness, Cheddar Cheese, Kendal Mint cake, Eccles Cake, Victoria Sponge, Queen Victoria . Tea with the Vicar, Harrods, the corner shop, red telephone boxes, 007, Harry Potter, Del Boy Trotter, Whit Friday bands, the Beatles, Benny Hill, the Old Bill, the Robin Reliant, the Mini, the mini skirt, Notting Hill, Robin Hood, Yorkshire Dales, the Daily Mail, Diana Queen of our hearts. Sunday roast, marmite on toast, open fires, Spitfires, 1066, 1415, 1966, 'We'll fight them on the beaches', annus horibilis, & did those feet in ancient times walk upon Englands green & pleasant land......? Happy St Georges Day!

Try as I might, I couldn't remember when I last entered a proper record shop. Amazon now owns me & my entire music collection. I have surrendered to the instant charm of immediacy, the siren voice of the cheap download. Last weekend I snuck away from the keyboard & wandered into an independent record store in Covent Garden. It was a meandering kind of morning; Lazy, hazy sunshine for slow saturday starters, a long breakfast watching the world wake up around us. Where people used to wash down a full English with a mug of tea & the daily papers in a rush, they now saunter through sun dappled squares, taking out a skinny latte & muffin, surfing on their iphones. And so to the record store - We can't even call them records anymore. My kids think a record is something you get from the Police & my explanation that the Police did indeed make some great records only adds to the air of generational confusion. It's a clash of cultures, a flashback to a simpler, sh...

I was almost prevented from getting to Torino in January because of unprecedented snowfall, now our trip to Roma looks to have been scuppered by everyones favourite Icelandic volcano. I'm already beginning to wonder what we'll have to fight through to get to Calabria in the summer - maybe fire & floods? Last time we were in Calabria we faced a wild fire, spitting & leaping across tinder dry land & fuelled by an angry wind up the valley from the sea for 24 hours. We fled the house, grabbing what we could & watched as the wall of flames moved to within 20 feet away, consuming everything before it. Then,as we prayed, the wind changed direction & blew itself out up the mountain away from the buildings. Talk about Acts of God! So to this weekend, & our TV screens are filled with incredible images of huge pillars of cloud. Volcanologists (not to be confused with pointy eared Star Trek fans) are brought out from under rocks to offer pasty faced expert opinion. ...

Never mind six degrees, today I sat one degree, five feet to be precise, away from the greatest Englishman in modern history! Just another Friday afternoon, & I sat in Caffe Nero reading John Crowder & sorting out my diary, when in walks the Rt Hon Nicholas Soames MP, grandson of Sir Winston Churchill. Here is a man who immediately draws attention to himself, not in an ego-centric way, he just has presence, & plenty of it. Taking a seat at the ajoining table, I watched him lower his considerable frame into a chair which was never designed to have such greatness descend upon it. It was like trying to balance a grand piano on the quivering head of a matchstick. I attempted to mind my own business & get into my book, but every so often I was picked up & dropped into the pages of history. His voice, which travelled rather well across the tables, carries echoes of all those speeches that were first heard across crackling wireless sets. So caught up was I in the moment th...

It happens every year around the time the clocks go forward. As the daffodils lift their heads, up step the fantasy forecasters & we desperately want to believe them. Here we go again, this morning I read the first headline of the spring to herald a long hot summer in 2010 . The experts who were so narrowly wrong last summer (oh did you miss it?), the same experts who told us we would save on the heating bills through this mild, warm winter - they have dared to come out to play again! I quote, 'a summer of unbroken sunshine & record breaking temperatures, perfect BBQ weather, the best since 1976....' I know their predictions are about as reliable as the human rights entry on Google China - But I can't help myself, I already feel hope of a suntan stirring in spite of a Met Office reputation for missing the target that rivals the unused directors cut footage from the new Robin Hood movie. Our problem is that we are just too cynical. We congratulate ourselves over this...

We're learning a lot about healing. In the nitty gritty of ordinary life we are never short of opportunities if we are prepared to step out of our comfort zone & have a go. Tonight we have a Healing Meeting. The specific naming of this gathering indicates what we hope the fruit will be - yet we remain locked in our experience (or lack of experience) when it comes to seeing the sick healed. I've seen some incredible breakthroughs over the years, a terminal brain tumour disappearing, a 9lb growth in the womb shrinking to nothing in a week, a deaf ear opening to name a few. However, these high water mark moments of power breakthrough have been punctuated by far longer periods of powerlessness. Much more frequent have been the times where I've prayed & nothing has happened. Or, if I'm being honest, I've even avoided praying at all. I really have been one of those wavering disciples of whom Jesus despaired, 'You have so little faith, how much longer must I be...

There has been a lot of exciting stuff coming out of Canada over the last week with the Winter Olympics getting underway. However, you'll be hard pressed to find something more stirring than these paragraphs from A W Tozer, surely Canada's finest writer of the last generation. Tozer was churning out gold medal books when John Arnott & the Toronto Airport Vineyard church were still in short trousers! This week I picked up Tozer's classic 'Whatever Happened to Worship?' to supplement our own 21st Century Worshippers series. He still sounds such a fresh note in our generation & saves us from the self obsessesd deceit that we were the first to discover these timeless truths. 'It is true that a great number of us think that worship is something that we do when we go to church. We call it God's house. We have dedicated it to Him, so we continue with the confused idea that it must be the only place where we can worship Him. We come to the Lord's house m...