It was the late 70s and we thought him almost a god, my school friends Helen and Anne and I. An actor-director undergraduate, impossibly tall, dark and drop dead gorgeous, he co-hosted a party every summer for which all the guests had to dress in whi...
The Bible's boring, everyone knows that. Phares begat Esrom and Esrom begat Aram and Aram begat Aminadab. When I was teaching public bible reading in our church, I made the lesson readers practice with a telephone directory, to learn how to make it i...
A photo of the Rolling Stones was prominent in the papers yesterday, as they came together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their first live performance in 1962. Their faces revealed that they had, to put it politely, aged somewhat. You are old F...
Yesterday the Health Secretary announced his social care reform plan. The reforms have been adopted from an earlier commission which grappled with the soaring cost of residential care. While the State is considering the cost of care for a growing ove...
Each year the serious depression affects 6% of UK adults and 121 million people worldwide. At some time in our lives, one in six of us will experience an episode and the World Health Organisation predicts by 2020 depression will be the largest single...
My younger son said something to me the other day that took me completely by surprise and haunts me still. We were sitting in a caf at St Pancras Station, where we occasionally meet when I'm in London, talking about the financial crisis and the unres...
Risk is endemic in human affairs. To say to someone I love you or to say in church I believe can never be risk-free undertakings. They are to make investments in things that are not fully under one's control. The other person may not love you back. T...
In a more agnostic culture than the one I grew up with it's a challenge to know how to talk meaningfully about something so enormous when we don't really understand it. There is scepticism about the afterlife these days. But however sceptical people...
A burglary is often described as being a violation. And it's a good word for it because it's not just about what is physically taken, it's about what is emotionally done to the person being robbed. I had suffered no physical assault, but when I sat d...
These well-informed young people had a very modest interest in the print media. Unlike me, they didn't feel their day was incomplete without reading a newspaper.Total newspaper circulation has been declining by roughly a million copies each year. And...
