So what I am about to write is best written when I am angry. Which I am not at the moment. But when I’m angry I don’t write things down. I have had quite a long association with academia and received funding myself to pursue research. Now I am no longer so closely associated with …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
“you know they are Catholics not even real Christians”
Well I just had a properly depressing conversation. I went outside the building where I have an office and entered into conversation with two young men of Pakistani origin. The elder of them, 32 years old, had spent seven years in prison and was bitter and frustrated at not being able to find work. His …
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on not being stuck
I took my youngest child to school this morning and as I turned the car around in a small side street I saw a woman whose children attend the same school. This is somebody I have spoken to on and off for probably six or seven years now. She is a very nice person as …
St Antimo 1999
1. The tomb is always empty It cannot be otherwise I am here Such lamentation there will be when I rise. 2. Always we approach the White Hart And always he retreats So with stealth we approach And still he flees. To touch him He must die 3. Great silence …
clergy and heritage
Today I walked in to Sheffield Cathedral where extensive work has been done to remodel the entry and the interior of the nave. I was walking around and I could hear somebody reading from the Bible and was surprised to see that although there was no visible congregation other than one two people sitting reflectively …
volunteer missionaries
I have noticed over the last 10 years when I have been involved in increasing amounts of voluntary work that I encountered a number of people who have been brought up in families where parents or grandparents were missionary workers. Statistically such people do not account for the large numbers but nevertheless it is quite …
for Coco
So I will try and gather my thoughts from what I was speaking about the other day. It won’t be easy because it is rare that I can see this particular concept as clearly as I did on that day. In death we stop existing. Our bodies fail then stop functioning and everything that we …
Capsules and Violence
Wandering through Birmingham I’m struck, as I was last time I was here I think, by Birmingham feeling edgier, more violence around. I walked past an entrance to Debenhams and there were store security guards, dressed exactly as bouncers do, protecting the doors and looking as if they were waiting for some trouble or had …
Tea
It is almost as if I always have to have something to do which has absolutely no value other than my own pleasure and of course some form of associated commercial transaction. In other words as my parents always said to me and I’ve not heard said since: money burns a hole in your pocket. …
Circuses and Sochi
The idea of bread and circuses. What does that mean always works in my mind. There is the idea that it was wrong to offer bread and circuses, to dupe a population by letting blood. Somehow also we just don’t really understood the blood lust and sit with the notion that it was also something …