This year was the first white christmas I have ever experienced. Looking around the area things all looked pretty much like your average greetings card picture (or the atypical English winter depicted in The Holiday), so we got some nice pictures of the church thanks to Richard Owen who brought his camera along with his [...]

After tweeting that I was going to hear Baby 2.0, thanks to the sheet ice on the road, Beth went on her own to the surgery, and I only got to hear the recording.
However they do say that live is always better than recorded, and that was what we got today, with the first specialist [...]

The collective principle asserts that… no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.
You cannot failed to have noticed that there is a bit of a debate about healthcare going on in the US at the moment. One of the key Obama election promises [...]

Hat tip to the Flickr Blog for highlighting the White House Photostream, which does seem to show a pretty candid behind the scenes view of the Obama White House.
I’m quite sure all the pictures have been suitably cleared, but it does seem that the photostream gives you a lot of behind the scenes views, so [...]

Check out this page of pictures from this years Earth Hour, where households and businesses are encouraged to turn off non-essential lights and electrical appliances. Of course as in previous years, my biggest issue with the whole thing is it gets turned into one giant publicity stunt by numerous cities and businesses around the world, [...]

Seems I’m not alone in being disturbed by the palling around with terrorists/Muslim associations.
This is the full video of General Colin Powell, member of the Republican party, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State in the first George W Bush administration, endorsing Barack Obama for the next President.
Powell is [...]

I had to share this video that is doing the rounds which is from a report on the English language version of Al Jazeera who went out to a Sarah Palin campaign rally in the conservative heartland of the mid-West.
There has been quite a bit of discussion over the fact that McCain seems unwilling to [...]

In amongst the news items over the past week, you cannot have failed to notice news of the spectacular collapse of the banking system in Iceland, with all three major Icelandic banks being put into recievership. The problem impacts people in the UK because two out of the three having popular British operations who thanks [...]

Last night was the first of the US Presidential debates, which after initial suggestions by John McCain that it should be postponed, went ahead with the participation of both major candidates.
Since of course it took place in the middle of the night UK time, various of the UK channels have been rerunning either the whole [...]

Now I’m certainly not the kind of Christian who believes that God is some kind of cosmic puppeteer, and that he will manipulate the rules of the world at the request of his followers. There are however some who do, check out this video from Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family, the conservative evangelical [...]

So a few weeks after coming into office, midnight saw the high profile enactment of one of Boris Johnson’s election pledges, the banning of alcohol from all London public transport, the logic being that if you curb low level disorder it will help make steps towards curbing the bigger problem. There are needless to say [...]

Tonight was another one of Channel 4’s periodic crazy Christian nights, this time a documentary in the Dispatches thread related to the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Bill that is currently working it’s way through parliament. Although at it’s heart the documentary was trying to make an important point about the growing influence of fundamentalist Christian [...]

Sometimes I despair of how clueless politicians can be when it comes to technology. This morning we had a great pronouncement that the government will protect children by requiring sex offenders to give them their e-mail address. Quite apart from the fact that many of the companies are based outside UK jurisdiction, how difficult [...]

With my Churchwarden hat on there was a good little bit of news from the Budget today – the news that although the basic rate of income tax will be cut from 22% to 20% on April 6th (which was announced last year), they are now not going to cut the rate at which Gift [...]

In all the discussion about Britishness that Lord Goldsmith’s proposal for an allegiance oath yesterday have kicked off, the most interesting thing is that what appears to unite everybody is the thought that it is a totally stupid idea. Looking through the comment pieces in the papers we have “Labour’s oaths and flags do not [...]

In a meeting on Monday, I used the term ‘Church Politics’ which was greeted with some surprise by one member of the committee who said that there wasn’t any politics in our Church… Didn’t take him long to concede that there was though…
The problem we have at the moment is what should have been purely [...]

So there you are as a government, taking a significant amount of heat for wasting a large amount of money on something before following the advice other parties were giving in the first place, what do you do? Why not distract the general populace by re-launching a debate on immigration!
The hot new idea this time [...]

So are you left scratching your head as to what the ‘Sub-Prime Market’ is, and what the ‘credit crunch’ is all about? Here Bird and Fortune explain it all…

The top story on the news this morning is still the story about the Archbishop of Canterbury saying that Sharia law in the UK is ‘unavoidable’. Needless to say you actually need read beyond the hysterical headlines as what Rowan Williams is saying is a lot more complicated, and a lot less cut and dry [...]

One of Mum’s many ‘hats’ is being chair of the governing body of the primary school near where they live, Arnett Hills incidentally the same school that myself and my brother attended many years ago.
One of the issues that has been occupying the governors recently has nothing at all to do with education, but is [...]