Actor Michael Simkins wrote in the Sunday Telegraph about our own peculiar preferences with iconology.  Apparently the BBC and the British Museum had assembled some 600 items covering the history of the world, and a strange range they were, from Joel Garner’s size 16 cricket boots to the mask of the god Laran. He spoke…
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Tears are the liquid product of a process of crying to clean and lubricate the eyes. Strong emotions, such as sorrow or elation, may lead to crying. Tears flow from tear glands into your eyes through tiny tear ducts. The tear glands are located under your upper lids, and when stimulated, produce tears to form…
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Monday dawned bright, clear and sun-blue; it was one of those rare early summer days in England. It was also my day off, after the blessing of Sunday. I often awake with ideas or thoughts about the previous day’s sermon, and how it could have been developed better and the PowerPoint slides made simpler. It…
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Between 1438 and 1795 travellers to the Netherlands commented on the manic Dutch cleaners.  75 out of 250 reports mentioned about the obsession they had with cleaning their houses. The women regularly cleaned windows, feverishly mopped floors and men wore slippers indoors. It was argued by Simon Schama that housewives’ fastidious cleaning reflected a moral,…
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The goal of life is not the acquisition of wealth but a life of worship. We spend more hours obtaining our income than on anything else, especially in London because of traffic and distance. It is therefore natural to be strongly affected by the procurement of money and its use. There are two things we…
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The world has high jacked both Christmas and Easter with encouragement to spend unlimited money on chocolate. It seems indicative of the way that retailers have commandeered the market on Christian festivals. The trend continues and gathers pace as the way we live reflects the philosophy of the world at large. Easter comes near the…
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In the spring of 1939, an anonymous civil servant was entrusted with finding suitable slogans for propaganda posters intended to comfort, inspire and stiffen public resolve should the massed armies of Nazi Germany ever cross the Channel. Three were designed and two were produced – they read: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring…
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Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize winner for playwright’s standards, stole a book from Bermondsey library 59 years ago. It was entitled Murphy, written by Samuel Beckett, published in 1938 after 42 rejections, and was his third novel. It contains one of the great chess scenes in which, rather than attacking one another, Murphy and a mental…
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By 1853 there were so many mines laid around Russia that the Allied Fleet supporting the troops in the Crimea was forced to anchor its medical supply ship at Balaklava where it was destroyed by a hurricane on 13 November. The 7,000-ton medical cargo went down to the bottom leaving the British troops to an…
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A mother died from breast cancer because of a single key-stroke error on a computer. Two letters informing her of hospital appointments were sent to the wrong address because the number of her home was typed as ’16,’ instead of 1b.” This meant the cancer was not diagnosed until a year later by which time…
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