January 2011
8 posts
A Dickens of a half
Our business meeting ended. I was a hungry journalist, wondering what to do. Only one thing for it. I drove to the Charles Dickens, on Worthing seafront.
I’m much happier with my own company these days. I have plenty of memories of absent friends and family to keep me occupied. I ordered the perfect gentleman’s light lunch - Guinness and chips. That’s all I wanted. The chips...
“It is such a secret place, the land of tears.”
– From The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Overwhelming
Without warning,
The past poured out
Like a mountain stream.
Pictures of you
Pictures of us
Forced out the woe.
A pressure pushing the pain
I could not keep within;
The growing absence of you
Like the presence of you -
So overwhelming
So uncontaining.
This is my reality now,
The cold, cruel breeze
Blowing through the deep, dark valley.
By Clive Price
“God regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is...”
– Brother Lawrence, author of The Practice Of The Presence Of God
Food of wisdom
It’s the food of wisdom from Irish mythology. Bradán feasa is the ‘salmon of knowledge’. Those who eat it shall know the wisdom of the world.
I don’t feel much wiser. But it was certainly salmon, and I ate it while on the Irish Sea. It was reclining on a slice of soda bread, and it tasted great. I washed it down with a gentle tide of red wine.
When the ship docked at...
Mono playback
I can’t resist it. I just have to make a new commitment for a new year. Alright, it’s not so much one of those fancy resolutions - more a kind of personal wish. I want to become monastic.
Straightaway some of you will think, ‘Ha! What an eejit’. Others will think, ‘He’s playing with ideas - he hasn’t a clue about being monastic’. You might all be...
A very small sign
It was ‘satisfactory’. That’s how the wise men describe the sight that greeted them when they found the holy family’s home – according to T S Eliot in his wonderful poem The Journey Of The Magi.
I love Eliot’s interpretation of this monumental event in history. Imagine the scene. These magic men – one meaning given to the word magi is ‘sorcerer’ – came...
“A minute of life at 74, just before you die, is just as valuable as a minute of...”
– Liam Clancy, from influential Irish band The Clancy Brothers (interviewed by Moya Brennan on the American TV programme Music Of Ireland)