Tomorrow I achieve a major milestone, or more precisely a major kilometre-stone: it’s my 150thParkRun. Sadly I am not awarded with a special vest, like the red one for 50 and the black one for 100. Even so I am expected to bring cake so that my fellow runners may celebrate my feat, or is it feet? For the record, Victor my nemesis has clocked up 221 – which takes the shine off my achievement. But that’s life. When you manage to achieve a long-sought goal, often ther

“Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot,” claims W.H. Auden. “The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.” This evening, at Bescar Methodist church, we will be watching Mel Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ.” Not that I want to, much too gruesome for me – hence the 18 certificate. Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert even deemed it “the

As we await the third episode of Line of Duty, I regret not taking notes during the first four series. The genius of Jed Mercurio’s writing is not just the twists and turns, the occasional bombshell but the references, often nuanced, to the previous four series. For those of you who live on another planet Line of Duty follows the unrelenting investigations of AC-12, an anti-corruption squad in some regional constabulary. As the series progresses, we discover that this poli

Each Tuesday at Ormskirk's Park pool Sarah tries to drown me. I now know her technique. To begin with she aims to tire me out through making me swim four lengths front-crawl. Already I am exhausted. Then a whole series of exercises, each with my facility to swim severely curtailed. The only thing which keeps me alive is the embarrassment of drowning before the other members of my class. Then I discovered that my fellow swimmer, Martin - who, incidentally, I lap during our