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'Yes, he may be a liar but he’s my liar!’ These extraordinary words were spoken by a supporter of Donald Trump as he prepares to take another run for the White House. As we have seen this week, at the same time he faces spiralling charges of criminal activity on a number of counts in several different states. Most of us will have asked ourselves the question ‘what makes people vote for a man so entirely without scruples?’ But we have learned not to see that the latest revelations of immoral or criminal behaviour seem not to wound him fatally. If people regard him as ‘my liar’ then no amount of evidence of bad character is going to change their minds. This sentence may help us to understand the Trump phenomenon though of course it in no way excuses it. All of us need someone who is unconditionally on our side, someone who will fight our corner. Many Americans see Trump as that person. These will often – not always - be people who are towards the bottom of the economic pile. They will often live in those unfashionable parts of the USA well away from the prosperous East and West coasts. Alabama maybe or Montana. They will feel that they do not fit somehow. They will feel that in their case the great American Dream has turned into a nightmare. The corridors of bureaucratic power are an impenetrable labyrinth to them. Wall Street is on another planet. And Trump is the man who will give them voice and hope again. And if he breaks the rules in doing this, so be it. We all need someone to be our advocate sometimes. BUT…we also need that someone to be a person who will tell us the truth. Someone who will not avoid the moment when some difficult words have to be said. This can be very tricky in families. You have to live with these people long term, and evasion can sometimes seem an inviting option. We have a commitment to care for them and we have a commitment to tell the truth. In the end someone who tells a lie for you will tell a lie to you. And that is the moment when the first crack in the relationship appears. A hairline fracture perhaps, but a line of weakness which may give way under greater pressure. There are ways of telling the truth of course, and times to do so. But we have seen with Donald Trump that if you trade in lies you unleash a power which has destructive effects far and wide. And we see that power in our own UK society from top to bottom, from government ministers to Joe Bloggs. We are about to see our own government held to account on just such grounds. Lies of convenience. Comfortable evasions. As we write, these lies have dealt a deadly blow to the Westminster career of former prime minister Boris Johnson. We must do better than our leaders.

A friend of mine who’s a couple of decades younger than I am, has, as the saying goes, ‘done her back in’! She was lifting some tables at her church when it happened. She told me, ‘I was the youngest one there and thought I should move the tables!’ Bad plan! Visits to A&E and osteopaths have followed but she’s still in a lot of pain. Through a blur of painkillers she muttered to me this week, ‘I don’t want to be human, I want to be superwoman!’ She’s not the only one seeking heroism! You don’t need to read the Guinness Book of Records to absorb the myths of super personhood. Media of all kinds feature stories of people doing amazing things. Just watch the Olympics or any other sports programme of your choice! Social media suggest to us that within or just outside our own circles, people are: breeding families of happy and adorable children, following exciting careers, eating and drinking whatever they fancy, travelling to the most exotic places, seeing the most impressive sights, meeting friends, fashioning beautiful gardens, writing and reading books and running marathons into their dotage. The temptation to be superwomen and supermen doesn’t go away as we age. I’ve had enough honest conversations with contemporaries to know that, although we may not trumpet it on social media, the ability first to recognise and then to admit that we ‘can’t do what we used to do’ and need to stay within tighter boundaries than we used to is a regular challenge for all sorts of people. ‘Know your limits’ is easy to say! The knack is, first of all to know what those limits are and then to decide how to handle that knowledge – or to put it another way – to push or not to push boundaries. Around us are all sorts of people who either push their boundaries themselves or find that others persuade them to do so. Don’t just sit there, do something! Sometimes, unlike my friend with the bad back, people make the boundaries rather than the pushers, into the casualties. People are surprised at what they can do when they give it a try! In an article in the Observer last Sunday, Saskia Sarginson recounted a surprising conversation in her 60s in which she made what turned out to be an inaccurate judgement about her own limits. Walking in the park and minding her own business, she was approached by a stranger who asked Saskia to join her modelling agency. ‘Who? Me? Saskia responded. ‘I don’t think so! I’m a granny!’. The stranger persisted and eventually Saskia agreed. Eventually she was glad she’d been persuaded. Saskia, it turned out, was too cautious. My friend was probably too ambitious. It’s all about the challenge and the paradox of limitations and about knowing what you can do and what you can’t. Meeting the challenge is a very individual matter. The trick, as my bed-ridden, back-hurting friend says, is admitting in which areas you are most certainly not super! The wisdom of knowing who we are and what our limits are takes some personal and individual honesty and humility, whatever our age. If our instincts have been telling us for years, ‘I can do this’, we may need to recognise and retrain. Others who have been instinctive ‘safeplayers’ may need to find the imagination or courage – or whatever it takes – to risk! And all of us, alongside recognising our own limitations, need to contend with other people’s perceptions of who we are and what we can or cannot do. Developing wisdom about our limits may take trial and error. It is the work of a lifetime – and it takes supermen and superwomen to do it well!

In front of our house there is a small patch of grass and a couple of trees. It is beyond our property and the local council maintains it...usually! But the last few weeks it has looked more like a meadow with long grasses and several species of wildflowers. On local FaceBook(FB) pages we discovered that this seems to be a borough wide policy! Some people are suggesting that No Mow April and May will become Jungle June! But we quite like the ‘meadow look’. It makes good ecological sense and we will happily live without a more manicured look as long as we can see the neighbours opposite! In one of the FB comments, someone was recalling how cleaning the car in the summer used to mean wiping a lot of dead insects off the windscreen. Not any more! Insects are on the decline and a recent TV programme highlighted their vital importance for pollinating our flowers, fruit and vegetables. Without insects we would be in serious trouble. In fact, no insects eventually will mean not only no humans but also fewer birds, fish, frogs and many other creatures which depend on insects for their nourishment. It’s time to stop noticing them only when they buzz irritatingly around our homes. We need these tiny creatures to maintain our very way of being. We need them more than ever as we see so many fields and hedgerows falling to the building contractors’ heavy diggers. Vital to maintaining a different way of being are what Mark Oakley, Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge, calls Kinship Carers - adults who look after children whose parents are absent or incapacitated in some way. A couple of weeks ago, the Church Times carried a picture of Oakley of with his 101-year-old grandmother who stepped in to look after him when his parents divorced when he was just two. He said he never felt abandoned because she was always there to love him. Now he’s returning the compliment. Kinship Carers are currently looking after 162,000 children in England and Wales. Add to that the larger numbers of people looking after their elderly relatives rather than see them go into some sort of unsuitable residential care, and you have a veritable army of different kinds of kinship carers. Our social welfare system, already in a parlous state, would simply collapse without them. Such caring is not without cost. It can be very isolating. It may mean that other relatives may keep their distance for fear of feeling any weight of the undoubted responsibility of being a carer. It will probably carry a financial obligation. And there may well be an emotional and mental health cost, especially for where carers are themselves lonely or unsupported. Since people often assume that it’s a ‘family obligation’, they may receive very little recognition or acknowledgement. Compassion of all kinds, carers of all kinds are basic to the ecology, the thriving of most human communities. They provide a kind of human pollination. Others flourish because they care. In such people lies our hope. Hope against the seemingly unstoppable waves of aggression, self-interest, greed, depredations, and misunderstanding which fill our daily diet of news. Where to find such hope? This week we saw a quotation from the American poet Mary Karr, a recovering alcoholic, whom we’d never heard of! In her book Lit: A Memoir, she describes a moment of lucidity: ‘An idea, the thread of a different perspective to any I’ve ever had…it feels as if it originates from outside me…comes in solid quiet in the midst of psychic chaos’. Hope for the environment and for human society lies in grasping a different perspective – on insects and on people! Photo: Mark Oakley

This week marked the end of our care for Helen’s aunt. We did the final inspection of the memorial stone in the graveyard where she is buried alongside Helen’s grandmother. A quick wander among the nearby graves where many family friends are buried revealed another new headstone inscribed with the words, ‘The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it’. This week we have been inspired by various people spending their life on ideals bigger and more enduring than themselves. On Monday, we watched the British Book Awards in which we have a special interest because our daughter is a leading organiser! The evening was full of authors and illustrators, publishers and booksellers expressing their sense of privilege and delight in the business of making and sharing ideas. Maybe the most enduring idea was acknowledged in the presentation of the second-ever Book Award for Freedom to publish. The ongoing determination of ‘authors, publishers and booksellers to take a stand against intolerance, despite the ongoing threats they face’ is a quiet but often forgotten reality in our world. In his videoed acceptance speech, award recipient Salman Rushdie underlined the need for continuing vigilance to the ideal of free speech. ‘We live in a moment, he said, ‘at which freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West....We need to be very aware of it and to fight against it very hard.’ Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, said, ‘More than most, Rushdie has lived his defiance and continues to pay a huge price for it.’ Another man living his defiance of social injustice is the British film-maker Ken Loach, two-time winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. At 86, Loach has long been a passionate campaigner for social justice, and many of his films focus on the lives of people at the bottom of the social pyramid especially in the north-east of England. Set for UK release in September and previewed in the press this week, his latest and last film, The Old Oak, is a farewell work set in a former mining town decaying after the pit closures of the 1980s. In the film, the struggle between the established community and a group of Syrian refugees which the authorities have chosen to resettle there is fought out in the Old Oak, the local pub. It is a battle for the heart and soul of the community, a battle for enduring values which is fought out in so many places in our world – a battle on which so many ordinary people spend their lives. Many people closer to home commit themselves to enduring values and causes bigger than themselves. Some work for environmental causes in the hope that this will keep the planet from fatal depredation. Others do a stint with a food bank or a charity shop. Others have provided support for refugees as they try to navigate the social welfare system. The church offers a warm space and a cup of tea in the winter months. Spending time with children and grandchildren, sharing their lives and trying quietly to share with them any wisdom that we may have accumulated, surrounding them with as much love as possible – all these are ways to give our lives to something bigger than ourselves. There are so many other ways. The screenwriter of The Old Oak, Paul Laverty, says that the vital question for our country posed by the film is: ‘Can we come together to build the impossible?’ And can it be done without resort to violence? Building the impossible sounds like a grand undertaking. Really it is not. Loach makes it clear: there’s a choice to be made. The cathedral – also, we understand, at the heart of The Old Oak story - was built a stone at a time over decades, even centuries. The invitation to all of us is: come and lay a brick. Photo: The Bookseller

This week, we have had a biographer in the house. As we write this blog, he is buried in the archives of his subject’s home city trying to piece together the details of a life from newspaper articles, archival resources, and conversations with curators of collections who may provide a vital clue. It is slow, painstaking work. Almost archaeological in nature. Hours spent following leads which may yield very little. And then, he hopes, that fragment of evidence, that document, that moment when suddenly the colour of this life sharpens. Another shake of the kaleidoscope and a clear pattern emerges, the essence of a life shows itself…he hopes! Our two eldest grandchildren are involved in a similar process from the inside! Our grandson’s current obsession with football is not that unusual for a ten-year-old boy but he too, is assembling a life, trying it on for size maybe. He can supply you with all details about the current state of the Premiership. He can offer a profile of Messi, Ronaldo, Rashford and others you might name. He’s a pretty slick footballer himself (but that is not his picture above!) He watches videos on footballing trickery online and tries to copy his heroes. Even at this age, he is slowly defining the essence of who he is. It’s an important part of human development. As is discussing his thoughts with his mum and dad – and, if we’re lucky, with us. Would he like to become a professional footballer? He’s considering that as a possibility. But he has values! He already understands that being paid exorbitant sums of money is not what it’s sometimes cracked up to be. He is not sure what he would do with ten high performance cars in his garage! And, after a while he might just tire of ‘putting the ball in the back of the net’. We enjoy watching him working it all out. His elder sister, now a teenager, is working through her own process of self-definition. A few years back, she loved nothing better than ‘making a video’ in which she starred as an announcer and continuity person while her younger brother contributed cameo performances. She was very good at improvisation, never short of a smart comment. When we found some of those videos recently, we asked her, ‘Do you think you would like to read the news?’ She had reasons for her answer: ‘Nah! It’s boring and you have to get up too early! She’d obviously considered the possibility! The process of self-definition does not stop. Even into old age we must figure out, not only what our life has been about, but what it is about now. This also involves hard graft, perhaps of the sort imposed by aches and pains, decreasing agility of body and mind. It may involve facing some unpalatable realities. The ’work’ of our grandchildren and our biographer friend and all of us require the slow distillation of the essence of a person amidst all the detail. It is difficult to do. It requires careful reflection alone and with others. It demands the making of judgements. And it also requires of us a level of self-knowledge and honesty which makes both the living and the writing more arduous but eventually more worthwhile. One thing is certain: we cannot let other people ‘write’ our biography, we cannot allow other people to define who we are. Unless we want to be stereotypes or carbon copies, each of us needs to do the kind of inner archaeological work that brushes away the layers of culture and other people’s expectations and seeks our own wisdom, our own values. As our biographer friend would say, it’s a lot of work but it can be fun! (Library Picture....not ours!)

The coronation of King Charles III tomorrow in Westminster Abbey is the only show in town this weekend. It is supposed to be a scaled down affair this time but there will still be plenty of pageantry: soldiers in splendid uniforms, various dignitaries in their fine regalia, golden carriages from a different age, very serious ceremony in the Abbey, the balcony appearance. The grand spectacle that Brits like to stage. But who cares? An entirely unscientific poll of the shops around the corner from us shows that only 3 out of 8 are bothered enough to display flags or bunting. Someone who was doing some work in our house yesterday said that they would record the event, and fast forward the boring bits. It’s all very different from the last coronation in 1953 which we both remember. The grey images flickered on the small screens as we crowded into the houses of television owners. We were rapt in our attention to this new wonder called television as much as to the coronation itself. Actually, there was another smaller show in town yesterday. Today is sandwiched between the local elections yesterday and the coronation tomorrow. These represent twin pillars of our nation. These elections offer the opportunity to register an opinion on who will best serve the area in which we live. We voted at 1 p.m. yesterday and one of the officials told us that 130 people had voted that morning out of a ward electorate of nearly 6000. Later in the day there must have more activity at the polling station but the total electoral turnout in our ward was under 40%. When offered the privilege of exercising our vote so many of us neglect it. Many will shrug it off with a lazy ‘They are all as bad as each other’. Privilege comes in different shapes and sizes. It doesn't hurt any of us to consider what privileges we enjoy and whether we employ them for the common good. King Charles III stands atop a system of privilege and power based on heredity. Below that apex, all kinds of people who have some sense of entitlement based on their family line hold on to their positions. The entertainment value of this social hierarchy is evident in the widespread popularity of shows like Downton Abbey and films like The Queen and The King’s Speech. The UK has a love-hate relationship with the class system. We believe we would be a better and more equal nation if that system was pruned. At the same time, we recognise that deep in not only the British psyche but also in the human psyche is a hunger for hierarchy, for someone to ‘look up to’. Other countries have sated that hunger by abolishing monarchies and creating elected leaders – with varying levels of success. Elected representatives of the people seem to abuse their privileges as much as do hereditary leaders. And, to be fair, to do about the same amount of good...and bad! So how much do we care about this coronation? We are not yet republicans. We both come from royalist families and these days retain some sort of respect for the monarchy. But only in the absence of a better model and a better way to create one than divisive revolution. A shift towards republicanism would need to be gentle and linked with a continuing and widespread loss of interest in the monarchy. There are sinister populist and nationalist forces at work which would put democratic stability at risk – even here in the UK. Our coronation street party tomorrow will be a very soggy affair if the forecast is at all accurate. Maybe the weather is a symbol of a continuing but rather limp support for the monarchy. Our big, old Union flag – now red, grey and blue – will probably remain in the garage throughout! See that as a metaphor if you will. But we can still say with some conviction ‘God save the King!’ Photo: Telegraph

In London last Sunday I watched two races where both runners and spectators were doing their best to improve the future of human life. First, we spent an hour or so waiting for our friend Rafa to come along the Embankment just prior to finishing the London Marathon with a PB of 3 hours 4 minutes. Congratulations, Rafa! The wide variety of runners was absolutely amazing: – ages, genders, nationalities, heights, lifestyles (lots of vegan runners!), levels of fitness, energy, seriousness and cheerfulness, courage, determination and discouragement. Great spectator sport! The crowd-runner interactions are equally fascinating – some runners seem entirely unaware of the crowd clapping and shouting encouragement, others absolutely lapping it up and raising their hands to encourage more cheers – and the fun runners playing it for laughs all the way! But there’s a much more serious side to the marathon and I was more aware of it than ever this year. Our experience with our grandson’s various health challenges in the last year has made us newly knowledgeable about the extraordinary efforts – both medical and voluntary - to support people with a wide spectrum of health problems. Marathon charity runners are some of them. They represent hundreds of organisations who work with sufferers while researching and fighting against every disease and disability imaginable. Family and friends who run marathons have made us more familiar with the huge amount of personal training and regular discipline plus final organisation required to get one person to the start line. It is impressive. Spectators like me get only a tiny insight into the breadth and depth of human determination to fight disease and other situations that blight the lives of women and men and children we love, and others whom we know little about. The stories of runners on the TV coverage demonstrate how personally affected and passionate many of them are about the causes they run for. Mingling among the crowds of marathon spectators were placards from the other serious cause I had come to support. Last weekend saw participants in a different race occupying parts of Westminster right next to where the marathon runners loped or limped or straggled by. The Big One - a four day gathering organised by Extinction Rebellion(XR) and other supporters of two hundred other environmental causes - gathered in Parliament Square and along the railings of the Houses of Parliament. As I moved among the various groups, I talked with serious campaigners who have stepped back from their civil disobedience tactics and are concentrating on partnership with other environmental organisations in a new campaign. The targets of their campaign now are what they call ‘The Pillars of Power’: the justice system, the finance system, the fossil fuel industry and the media. Their goal is to persuade these groups to change those aspects of their behaviour which ignore the need for serious changes in the race against the extinction of the human race. One report said that over 60,000 people participated in ‘The Big One’ over four days. It is clear that, just like the participants in the marathon, they represent hundreds of thousands of other people who are contributing their best efforts to win the race against human extinction. Their failure would be all our failures. But I do wonder...what will happen first? - a cure for cancer or a national government elected by a majority of voters committed to taking climate change seriously? Few of us can contribute to the first race, all of us can contribute to the second.

…and success failure. On Thursday Elon Musk’s hugely expensive ‘Starship’, the most powerful space rocket ever launched, climbed over 20 miles into the sky in about four minutes. And then it exploded. A spokesman for SpaceX described the launch as a success. It had greatly accelerated the development of what will eventually be a reusable space vehicle, he said. Ruth Perry, head teacher of Caversham Primary School in Reading took her own life while waiting for the publication of a report which would label her school and her leadership ‘inadequate’. The anxiety and stress she experienced following the inspection by OFTSTED (the government’s office for standards in education) became too much to bear, it seems. Meanwhile amid the clamour following this tragic death, the government pronounced itself basically satisfied that its inspections were fit for purpose. Further, a single overall grade would continue to define schools’ performances. Many teaching professionals would vehemently disagree. Dr Joasia Zakrzewski accepted a medal for third place in the GB Ultra marathon, a 50-mile race from Manchester to Liverpool. It became clear this week that she had accepted a lift in a car for 2 miles or more because of great pain in her legs but she did not withdraw from the race. The medal has become a badge of shame and badly damaged her high reputation in the field. This morning comes news that Dominic Raab has resigned his position as deputy prime minister in the Conservative government because a high-level report has found him guilty of bullying civil servants in the Foreign and Justice ministries. He maintains that his high-octane approach produced exactly the kinds of results which the public demands in their public servants. And so it goes on. Putin and his cronies regard the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine as a successful step on the road to his vision of Greater Russia. Most people outside Russia would disagree. It all depends on how you measure success and failure, and how you brand it. There are significant judgements about performance to be made. It is very easy to buy into the images and estimates of success which confront us in the media. But the feature articles which appear in weekend newspapers about the lives of people in the public eye, make it abundantly clear that ‘all that glistens is not gold’. There’s a lot more to a good primary school than OFSTED reports. There is more to competitive running than getting medals or even achieving personal bests. The successes in our own lives are not typically measured by objective standards even if they are often the easiest measures to use. At the end of another week, it’s useful to ask, What do I see as successes and failures in my life in the last seven days? ‘Who sets the bar for success and failure in my life?’ Where do my standards of success and failure come from? Are they fit for purpose? But then again...some successes and failures are only obvious to the next generation! Maybe we’re not our own best critics...someone who loves us well might be the best judge!

I have spent some of this week drafting a chapter for a book on bisexuality. The invitation to write came from a friend of ours tasked with producing a thoughtful and speedy response to a specific and volatile situation emerging in the church in another European country. Simply stated, a pastor acknowledged during his sermon on honesty that he is bi. By all accounts it was just a brief reference, in no way polemical, but it was enough to set the hares running. This declaration is a kind of ‘Marmite’ event in a relatively conservative Christian community. Similarities with Brexit in the UK. I don’t know the local church community in question but it is not difficult to anticipate the likely reactions. There will be those who see a pastor saying something like this as yet another erosion of Christian values. They will argue that it needs to be confronted directly. That ‘the’ Christian view needs to be clearly stated. Then there will be many others who regard this primarily as a matter of pastoral care. They will know that the pastor is human, and that he and the pastoral family will need support in the face of the many-pronged hostility which is bound to come their way. In spite of the fact that the pastor neither chose to have these feelings nor acted upon them. I am no expert on bi-sexuality and only agreed to write if I could produce a sort of stream of consciousness. Having secured the editor’s agreement, I simply sat and wrote whatever came. And it came! Mostly in the form of questions. Was it wise for the pastor to go public even if only briefly? Could he not just continue to fly below the radar? Did he not realise that this would have a divisive effect on his church, his circles of friends and the larger community? Will there be any effects on the children of the community? Does the individual matter more than the community? We can show ourselves sympathetic but is this not a slippery slope? And then the stream flowing in the opposite direction. As a Christian can I ever require another human being not to tell the truth about who they are and to behave on the outside differently from what they believe themselves to be on the inside? Should the church not be above all, an honest and welcoming community? Is this whole sexuality issue not largely a tangled matter of genetics, hormones, environment? Is it not that body chemistry is a bit of a lottery and, as a straight man, I ‘got lucky’ and was spared this inner turmoil? I haven't had to carry the opprobrium that this person carries - will he not need help carrying the burden now thrust upon him? And the questions kept coming and coming. Rather uncomfortably I began to find that it was I who was being interrogated. Do I really understand the plights of people on the margins like this? Where is my gut instinct on this when all the nuances have been removed? As a scholar in this area, would I be willing to go public in defence of this man and those like him if that was my conviction? These questions were accompanied by a parade of emotions. Confusion, sympathy, fear, pity, anger, admiration. I like to think of myself as open. Not judgemental. But I did find myself rushing to some judgements. And I did not know where these judgements would finally settle. I was not quite sure where I stood. I have done a lot of work on the ethics of sexuality and thought at my age I had developed a fairly stable set of convictions but.... in this particular case, they were being challenged again. I was struggling. I believe that Christianity calls for unconditional loving compassion towards our fellow human beings. I also know that radical Christianity has always swum against the cultural stream. So my stream of consciousness chapter is very much a work in progress. I must think and listen. If any of our readers has something that they think I should listen to, I am ready to hear. I am struggling with this…more than I expected. The last line of the draft I have written is a prayer for me and for all Christians involved in this debate: ‘Lord, have mercy on me, on us, as we sing our ‘broken hallelujahs’.

This year, I regarded the prospect of ‘good’ Friday with a mixture of physical fatigue and emotional exhaustion. I had a strong sense of coming empty-handed to the familiar story and having none of the energy needed to reach out a hand and grasp even the simplest of resources from a story which has been speaking to me at so many different levels for more than seven decades. Some of my fatigue is the product of twelve days spent with our Scottish family and two children under five, one of them with severe health challenges. For me, being a babysitting grandmother is a complex physical, mental and spiritual experience. It calls out in me the child who loves to play, the mother who still loves to feed and cuddle and sing nursery rhymes and lullabies – I love it! The round of nappy-changing, meal feeding, toy tidying and baths and bedtimes is physically relentless but there is something grounded about it. Somehow, life with small children makes me fully alive in a way I am not when there are just the two of us, pottering around in an existence that seems so much less significant than the presence of children makes it. Decisions in their still pliable young lives are constantly being made, imaginations being shaped, attitudes being formed, futures being made more or less likely. Life with children - one of them a highly intelligent four and a half year old is full of visceral reminders to ask oneself anew what is really important - especially in the face of the troubled world where tyrants strut and ecological deterioration and climate change threaten. In this world that will very soon belong to them, what resources can we give these precious ones for their future? It was with all these questions in my mind that I made the almost instinctive decision this morning to go, as I have for many years, to the Good Friday Solemn Liturgy in our parish church about half a mile away. The service is stark in its simplicity. Two priests dressed simply in black cassocks, an unadorned altar and a quiet congregation participating in prayers and hymns and silences and taking it in turns to hold up the rough wooden cross. The heart of the service for me comes when two chapters from the gospel of John are read aloud and the members of the congregation stand throughout. Once again, I heard the story of God’s response to evil in all its various forms – some simple, some sophisticated, some deliberate and some unknowing, as various emotional and physical cruelties take Jesus to his crucifixion in the darkness of Golgotha. It is a story full of small cameos revealing fearful, egotistical defensive human responses to goodness and generosity in someone they don't understand. And like the women, I ‘stood at a distance watching these things’ and felt myself drawn in, once again, to the recognition of and confrontation with values that have always been important in human life and will continue to be valuable for the next generation however difficult they are to develop in any generation: integrity, loyalty, honesty, confession, forgiveness, perseverance. At the heart of the Golgotha story, as the poet priest Malcolm Guite says is, ‘the tree where love and hatred meet and love stays true‘. Here we see what love can bear and be and do’. Knowing from experience ‘what love can bear and be and do’ will continue to offer different challenges to life in every generation. This Good Friday has challenged me afresh to keep seeking to know them in mine.

We have spent the past two weeks with our family in Scotland including two children under five.* They are a delight to be with. We can say that wholeheartedly...but that is partly because we do not have to get up to comfort them in the middle of the night! When your night’s sleep is interrupted and shortened by their crying for some attention night after night, this picture of little angels becomes rather more nuanced. We’re not too old to forget the exhaustion from dealing with sleepless infants! But it is not only children that cause sleep deprivation. We have one friend who simply wakes up for a couple of hours when the new day is still some way off and just cannot get back to sleep. We have other friends who lie awake for hours worrying about a loved one who may be very sick or in some kind of trouble. Others may simply be kept awake by the pain they experience and wonder how they will get through the following day or days. Money worries, career twists and turns or responsibilities at work can all take their toll on sleep. The list of causes of insomnia is endless. There is of course that blessed minority who fall asleep when their head hits the pillow and who are barely disturbed even by a pneumatic drill outside the window. But many of us know the distortions and exaggerations of the night if not always its terrors. Some people seem to manage pretty well on maybe four or five hours sleep. Many politicians or people in senior positions of authority often have to manage on that in order to keep on top of their heavy workload. But most of us do better if we have a bit more than that. We all will have excused some irritable behaviour on our part by reference to a shortened night. Not only can tiredness literally kill in a road accident but sleeplessness can kill metaphorically too by a gradual wearing down of the spirit. We lose our capacity to be alert, to accept responsibility, to take initiatives, even to experience joy in the wonders of life. The Jewish writer, Chaim Potok, said in one of his novels: ‘Tiredness is of the Devil’. Tiredness can make us less than our best selves. When we are confronted by someone whose manner is abrupt, rude, or simply lacking in those simple graces which make the world go around, it is worth wondering if this is the best version of this person or whether perhaps they are troubled by nights (or days) which offer no respite. It is worth wondering whether we can offer a few moments of our time or even simply our attention in order to soften a little the rough edges of their day. ‘Have a good day’ is a greeting which we have picked up from our American cousins. It’s a useful addition to our vocabulary. We sometimes do well to wish each other a good night too. They are inseparably linked. So sleep tight – mind the bugs don’t bite! * Those who were following our blog a year ago may remember we wrote about the birth of our youngest grandson. Dominic has had a number of health challenges in his early weeks and months of life and continues to do so. But he is an absolute delight and last week, we celebrated his first birthday! If you're a friend of our daughter-in-law you can see him in all his glory on her FaceBook page!

I applied to renew my passport this week. I hope it comes soon because this morning I read that Passport Office workers will begin strike action on April 3. I t’s not just that a passport will give me freedom to travel abroad but from 4 May in this country we will need photo ID to vote in elections. If you don’t have a passport or driving licence, you are in danger of being disenfranchised. That could deprive many of their right to influence public life in some small but real way, especially young people - student cards are not acceptable, but bus passes are - and members of ethnic minorities who statistically are less likely to have either passports or driving licences. This move will favour the ruling political party. Nowadays you make a good living by being an ‘influencer’. It involves endorsements by celebrities and product placement in various forms of social media like Instagram. Some ‘influencers’ like Cristiano Ronaldo and Kim Kardashian have millions of followers. Many make a lucrative career of it. That may – or may not – be all well and good. But there is a still more sinister form of influencing behaviour at work than that. Nobel Peace laureate Maria Ressa has made it her life work to combat it. She is a Filipino-American and spent her early career as a probing investigative reporter. As she confronted waves of misinformation, in 2012 she founded Rappler, an online news site based in the Philippines designed to promote freedom of expression and expose fake news. This has made her a good many enemies not least the violent and ruthless Rodrigo Duterte, the president there until 2022. She was imprisoned in June 2020 for alleged ‘cyberlibel’, that is for daring to express criticism of his government. Ressa has a number of serious concerns. The first is that her beloved Philippines is a major centre of algorithm activity in the world. What happens there in large tech centres may affect what comes up on your screen when you are on a social media website. Your choices are being influenced from afar. You cannot stop such activity but you can be aware of it. The second is that freedom of expression and responsible independent journalism are the foundation of healthy democracy and a lasting peace. And there are powerful people in the world who wish to undermine both. Third, and most urgently, is that in the next 12-18 months there are very important elections due to take place in USA, UK, France, India, Brazil, South Korea and the Philippines. These countries are all powerful players in world politics for various reasons. Not only that but what happens there inevitably affects what happens here. We are not a small island anchored peacefully off the north coast of Europe. Keep an eye out for Maria Ressa – she is a remarkable woman. And keep an eye on the Rappler website if you want some balance to your usual news sources Extraordinarily enough, while I've been writing, the postman has just come with my new passport – I only submitted the application on Tuesday! I am now free not only to travel but to vote for freedoms to be protected at all costs. Listen to Maria Ressa being interviewed about her life by James O'Brien on his podcast Full Disclosure