“Will you still need me, will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four?” A song for its time, written by the 14-year-old Paul McCartney in 1956. In those now distant days, 64 seemed positively old. Just twelve years later I was doing Health Economics under the redoubtable Dorothy Hahn. Our working assumption then was that on average men in the UK died at 68 and women two years later. And I recall, as a young curate in the late 1970s, when taking the funeral of someone who had di

Greetings from the city of the one-armed lady! This blog comes from one of the oldest cities in the world, founded by the Phoenicians around 770 BC. We’re in Málaga, in Andalusia, at the bottom right of Spain. Just down the road, Calle Alcazabilla stands the Cathedral, built on the site of a former mosque after the Reconquista, the period in which Christian kingdoms gradually took back control of Spain and Portugal from Muslim rule. Locals call it La Manquita , the one

Fifty years ago, practically to this very minute, I was reading Psalm 66 as my daily discipline. It’s what I still do – working through all 150 psalms, and then starting all over again. But this Saturday morning, it was different. It was 1976: I was a final year theological student at Durham with Jacqui pregnant with our second child. It had been a difficult few months. She had had blood pressure problems in having Deborah two years earlier but this time it was worse, requiri

“It was so casual for them—just a joke, just a post—but for me it stayed, long after they’d moved on.” Bullying through social media can be both casual and cruel, especially for young people. What feels like a fleeting moment for one can linger painfully for another. It is no surprise, then, that governments around the world—Australia being the first—are beginning to explore ways of offering greater protection to this vulnerable age group. And yet, this is not a new phenomeno