Humpty Dumpty

There’s kiss and cuddle, kiss and tell and kiss and part. Finding a partner is not a straightforward matter. Ecstasy and humiliation may...

It’s odd. We’ve never had a King Basil in England. We’ve had Harolds, Henrys, Edwards and Georges in abundance but never a Basil. What...

The will to win is highly esteemed in our society. We like winners. So it is that we tolerate a vast and widening gap between the wealthy...

David Livingstone is not the only one to have his heart buried in one place and his body in another. The same happened to Queen Eleanor,...

Uprooted, all at sea, isolated on streets where the traffic is all on the wrong side of the road. This is how an Englishman (not to...

Let’s start by saying that some things are incredible (like believing that the sun goes round the earth). Some are inedible. (I shudder...

I remember an occasion when I was on my way to church when I realised I had left a simmering saucepan on the hob. The person who was...

Happy-go-lucky people make good company. They see a laugh in everything and make the best of everything, including traffic jams and...

The next best thing to looking down from the Rialto is to see Venice through the eyes of someone who lives there. And if, like Donna...

There used to be something called frugality. In deference to it, householders saved brown paper and string from parcels that arrived by...

‘He needed not the spectacles of books to read nature,’ commented Dryden. He was referring to Shakespeare. Shakespeare, of course, was no...

After decades of fumbling we find ourselves with Common Worship. Well, that is not quite the whole story. The way we worship has been...

‘Sweet are the uses of diversity’, as Shakespeare might have said. Jaques, the speaker in ‘As you like it’, found, in the life he was...

I have few claims to fame but one of them is that I belong to that select band of people who have never been to Lichfield. I know of it...

Now, about those magical words ‘as originally given’. I revert to them because they crop up on the websites of flourishing churches and...

When we think of fashion, we think of Beau Brummell. Born on 7 June 1778, he was the archetypal dandy. In our day when men’s fashion has...

'Cross my palm with silver,' the doorstep Gypsy used to say. 'Let me look into my crystal ball and I will see your future,' was a similar...

‘All is for the best in the best of possible worlds,’ said Voltaire, tongue firmly in cheek. But he was more or less paraphrasing what...