On this Holy Night (I’m writing this on Christmas Eve) lights are going on all over Europe as legislators and bureaucrats work their way through the 2000 pages of dense text which represents the hard-fought UK-EU Brexit agreement. Not the best way to spend Christmas, I would have thought. Certainly this agreement represents a major achievement for these pizza-fuelled negotiators over just 11 months and during this paralysing pandemic. But as ever, in any agreement, detai

“If in doubt, burst into tears!” Of course, not for all situations, especially if you are being goaded – but often it takes tears to show how much we are hurting. And often people need to know. It was vicar-evangelist David Watson who taught me this some 40 years ago. His church in York was leading the way in charismatic renewal as well as large-scale evangelism. He was a key player for the Kingdom until cancer took him in 1984, as it happens my first Sunday as a vicar

We are now entering ‘last minute’ territory, at least judging by the headlines in this morning’s papers. The Times speaks for them all: Prepare for no deal, PM tells Britain. When you read this blog you may well know the outcome but here and now, on a dark, dismal Friday morning, it seems that the Brexit negotiations will finally hit the buffer on Sunday without any agreement. But you never know – is this a negotiating tactic as each party waits for the other to blink

Over the months I have become a master practitioner in assembling the little cardboard box, the container chosen to safely convey my swab sample by Royal Mail each Wednesday. This is one of the skills I have developed as a result of being one of the 24,000 volunteers from the UK, Brazil and South Africa involved in the phase 3 trial of the Oxford/Astra Zeneca covid-19 vaccine. We all feel very proud of the achievement of this dedicated team. Certainly I was impressed by