The Reader – the brilliant charity that organises reading aloud with thousands of adults and children in places like cafès, libraries, hospitals and prisons – is running an appeal this Christmas for donations for Reading Heroes. Donations will: Recruit, train and support volunteers…
Good Things
DAISY REFLECTIONS
Sometimes all I want to do is stand and stare …
Hamlet on the Titanic
This 15th April is the 113th anniversary of the night RMS Titanic sank. My great-grandmother, Noël Rothes, was, ‘One of the lucky ones’, as she wrote three days later. Lucky not only because she survived, but because none of her beloved menfolk had sailed from Southampton with her. If they had, they would have died in … Read More
A Blessing for our times
Jan Richardson wrote this Blessing for her blog The Advent Door in 2014. It’s included in her book Circle of Grace published in 2015. Elsewhere Richardson talks about wild and stubborn hope. I love that phrase. A friend of mine sent Blessing when the World is Ending to me a few days ago. It feels … Read More
A Caribbean Rum Christmas Cake
In all my 72 years I’ve never made a Christmas cake. When I was a child I was lucky enough to have them made for me but also, often, we bought them. And I’ve bought them ever since. But this year I made my friend Helen Hermanstein Smith’s Caribbean Rum Fruit Cake from her glorious … Read More
Kindness
In Matt Haig’s The Comfort Book – reflections on hope, survival and the messy business of being alive – he writes: Life is short. Be kind. A beautiful thing to be. (The Comfort Book is also beautiful, full of ‘consolatons and suggestions for making bad days better’. I was given mine for Chrstimas … why … Read More
Feeling Low? Try karunavirus. Seriously.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling pretty low about the state of our corona-contaminated world (not to mention other depressing events) so I went looking for something uplifting. And I found karunavirus. Seriously. Nothing to do with that virus; all to do with kindness, compassion, good news, good things and full of … Read More
When This Is Over … and some Christmas Lights for the dark Winter Nights
When this is over, may we never again take for granted a handshake with a stranger, full shelves at the store, conversations with neighbours, a crowded theatre, Friday nights out, the taste of communion, a routine check-up, the school rush each morning, coffee with a friend, the stadium roaring, each deep breath, a boring Tuesday, … Read More
Bookshop.org: an online bookshop that supports indie bookshops. And, ‘It’s easier to be a Dad, this morning … .’
Bookshop.org, as the Guardian articles below suggest, is exactly what the publishing world has been waiting for. Bookshop.org supports independent bookshops (it doesn’t undercut them, as the unmentionable does) and it makes it possible for independent bookshops to benefit from online sales wider than they, on their own websites, could reach. From this article: Bookshop.org is being … Read More
Shonaleigh Cumbers: Grief is Love with Nowhere to Go; and One Green Thing: clean aviation fuel
Shonaleigh Cumbers is a Drut’syla. To quote from here: She’s a living tradition holder. It’s a tradition you probably won’t have heard of. It’s a tradition that flourished in Jewish families, but that was wiped out during the holocaust. Almost wiped out. As far as we know, Shonaleigh is the last Drut’syla. Drut’syla is the Yiddish … Read More
A Warming Valentine to the World (and vegan vogue)
A friend of mine told me about the speech Prince Charles made at this year’s Davos World Economic Forum who say, in their Mission Statement: We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change. The theme for January 2020 was … Read More