Next week I’m planning to fulfil a long-held ambition to walk a section of the pilgrimage route known as the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. In its heyday, the Camino was one of the great pilgrimage routes of the western world, with the Spanish city of Santiago joining Rome and Jerusalem as one of the […]
School’s out, and as my summer offer begins – details below – my own summer reading is well underway. So far this year, my holiday reads are not so much the result of conscious choice as chance – books that turned up serendipitously in my life, embedded in their own little stories. The first, Love […]
You’d never know. An unobtrusive Georgian townhouse on one of Bradford on Avon’s busiest roads, where the cars back up to squeeze through the town’s narrow streets, is home to a Buddhist monastery. Founded in 1986 as part of a monastic order called the Aukana Trust, the monastery is only open to the public for […]
Amid the mass of coverage spewed out by my radio the day after the election, I was struck by one voter’s reason for rejecting the incumbent Tory government. It was the Tories’ plans to repeal the hunting ban, he told the interviewer; he just couldn’t stomach them. The hunting ban, which became law under a […]
This spring, I’ve been getting closer to birds than I ever dreamt of by volunteering at the wildlife rescue centre Secret World. At this time of year, the centre is full of young birds who need help from humans to make it to adulthood. Generally orphaned and sometimes injured, they will be cared for […]
Last weekend I was fortunate enough to do something I’d been wanting to do for some time – attend a death cafe. The death cafe movement, which aims to address the western stigma against talking about death and dying, has been going from strength to strength since the first British death cafe was held in […]
Alex Wright’s short book Exploring Doubt is bang on zeitgeist. Situated firmly in the terrain between religious faith and unbelief, it turns on the thesis that ‘it is in hiddenness, not transparency, that life’s meanings may most eloquently be expressed.’ Along with a growing number of voices pointing to the limitations of a society […]
Sometimes it’s hard, to misquote Tammy Wynette, to be in publishing. There’s so much talk about the opportunities opened up by the digital revolution, but most of it is set against a background of change in which the struggle for readers and sales is greater than ever. But for me, there’s one digital-age development that […]
The first British Christmas tree was not the perfectly proportioned Scandi fir that adorns the ideal living room. It was a single yew bough, introduced to the English court by Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, decorated with ribbons and candles. She went on to display an entire yew tree and from that the Christmas […]
Not a lot of British people know this, but December 13th is the Feast of St Lucy, a young girl who died under the Roman persecution of Christians in the 4th century. Until a few centuries ago, under the Julian calendar that preceded the modern Gregorian one, St Lucy’s Day was also the shortest day, […]