Sunday 15 December 2013

And the leopard shall lie down with the kid

The thundering voices of the Hebrew prophets are relevant during Advent - predictions of the changing and transformation of the world....

"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid..."

Reading a sermon from St James's Piccadilly (a new Sunday morning ritual):  Lucy Winkett suggests that we walk by faith - not by sight. That is how the unimaginable happens: the Berlin Wall falls; the British Prime Minister apologises for Bloody Sunday; apartheid ends in South Africa.

A wolf lying down next to a lamb is unthinkable.
What we need  is persistent, hopeful imagination.

Clearing out the kitchen - these corks don't look like corks at all. Collected together in a jumble they have become something else altogether.














A storm in the night and the gable end of the neighbour's barn conversion - in mid construction - falls in.
Water has crept down into the cob walls since the roof was taken off.  It's all very nervewracking, he tells me: ' We've put some fairy lights up to make things more Christmassy.'

The rain continues: a cleansing perhaps.


Reading and watching

  • Foot by Foot to Santiago de Compostela/Judy Foot
  • The Testament of Mary with Fiona Shaw at the Barbican
  • The Testament of Mary/Colm Toibin
  • Schwanengesang/Schubert - Tony Spence
  • Journals/Robert Falcon Scott
  • Fugitive Pieces/Ann Michaels
  • Unless/Carol Shields
  • Faust/Royal Opera House
  • The Art of Travel/Alain de Botton
  • Mad Men Series 6
  • A Week at The Airport/Alain de Botton
  • The Railway Man/Eric Lomax
  • Bright Lights, Big City/Jay McInerney
  • Stones of Venice/John Ruskin
  • The Sea, the Sea/Iris Murdoch
  • Childe Harold/Lord Byron
  • All The Pretty Horses/Cormac McCarthy
  • Extreme Rambling/Mark Thomas
  • Story of my Life/Jay McInerney
  • Venice Observed/Mary McCarthy