On the train yesterday I sat next to a family with some very excited children who were off on holiday. You couldn't help being caught up in their sense of excitement and anticipation. I know just how they feel. I keep wanting to say: Are we there yet...
You can become more fearful and protective of your lifestyle and your loved ones or you come to terms with the fact that open and tolerant societies will always come with their own risks. These societies flourish because we put our trust in people, i...
Over the last few days we have seen and been reminded of two massacres. Last weekend Norway remembered the first anniversary of the 77 victims of a bomb and gun shooting. During a brief television clip a young Norwegian man said that this tragedy had...
The British propensity for non-deference militates against special treatment to anyone, unless of course you're the official underdog. The last shall be first is a biblical theme which could just as easily have been written by a British attitudes and...
The London Olympics has given us new vocabulary: ORNs and PRNs. Or as we've been hearing, Olympic Road Network and Paralympic Road Network. And as from today London commuters travelling along the Olympic network will have to beware of the 30 miles of...
I was attending a workshop on women and violence. One told her story. She was 18 and visiting a farm with her boyfriend. Alone together, they had sex even though she didn't want to. Guilt-ridden, humiliated and demeaned, why didn't she report it? Bec...
It was Bob Diamond, recently of Barclays, who defined business culture as how people behave when no one is watching. Speaking in a lecture sponsored by the Today programme last year, he declared that business corporations like Barclays had to learn h...
One of the features in common between the phone hacking scandal, the various banking scams and the latest row, over the failure of G4S, is that the men at the top claim not to have known what was going on. OK, you can't expect the top person to know...
It is said that faith is both a gift and a task. By Saturday this week most Muslims around the world will have begun observing the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim lunar calendar known as the month of fasting. Between sunrise and sunse...
As a boy I'd have been in dead trouble if I'd ever used the name of Jesus as a swear word at home. Blasphemy just wasn't tolerated, even though my parents were non-believers. The boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable language are shifting al...
