Dungeon Lane is a dump, merely a dreary track.    I’ve passed over it many times, always at about 20 metres – it runs alongside the southern boundary fence of John Lennon airport over which planes land. It goes nowhere, except to the airport viewing area #2.  Beyond that, just some scrubland and a boggy shoreline.  That’s all.    And yet, no doubt, it will be pulling in the crowds from all over the world, just like Penny Lane.    Paul McCartney is about to release his 18th so

, It’s 1985. We’re visiting friends in central London, staying in their vicarage. Their curate is about to move—but to where? An idea is beginning to take shape, even a fresh way of doing ministry: what if he didn’t go alone? What if a whole group went with him, to breathe life into a struggling church? My response? “Great idea, Sandy!” And that, as it turns out, may be my principal contribution to the Church of England. I know this because I have just read a long article in

To believe in God inevitably raises difficulties.   “It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God,” mused the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, “and naturally hope that I’m right in that belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God. I don’t want the universe to be like that.”   Yet whatever Nagel may wish, the universe is as it is. We cannot construct our own version of reality, except in our imagination — and that doesn’t really count. The world is

You just never know. In about 45 minutes I’ll press the  SEND  button and this blog will go out into the world. Very occasionally I think I may be sending a masterpiece, but more often than not it is simply the best I can manage at the time.  No one is paying for it , I tell myself,  so they can’t complain! That was certainly the case a few weeks ago. By any reckoning it wasn’t one of my best efforts. But it was the best I could produce that morning. Amazingly, a few days lat