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Showing posts from September, 2018

Playing our Part for the Sake of Peace

Here, as promised, is my "Thought for Yesterday". If you prefer to hear it, here it is ... they even went to the trouble of producing it as a stand-alone clip this week... That's my last TFTD for a while, and given my frequency of blogging recently it might be my last blog for a similar period...   My role as a Methodist minister means that I often end up moving from one event to another, hastily changing the hat that I am wearing, and sometimes other items of attire… The juxtaposition is sometimes stark. Moving from celebration to consolation to confrontation, from business meetings to baptisms to hospital bedside, from infrequent weddings to sadly more frequent funerals, from BBC studio to board table to the occasional windswept building site. Yesterday evening put two very different events side by side in my diary… First, I was “networking” with business and other civic leaders on the observation deck of the new Belfast Grand Central Hotel in Bedford street… Then

Time to Stop Dreaming?

Ooops... This is actually last week's Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster. I only discovered that I hadn't pressed the "Publish" button when I went in to upload this week's offering... I suspect that the few readers that this blog has will not have been waiting with bated breath for it, but I thought I would still publish it for the sake of completeness... If you are interested in hearing my dulcet tones, the broadcast versions are still available at the time of publication  here at 25 and 86 minutes in. The news cycle has moved on, but the issues I touch on are sadly timeless...  I will publish today's "thought" tomorrow... If I remember... I don’t often pay much attention to speeches at Annual political and union conferences… They are usually, to use an ecclesiastical metaphor, an exercise in preaching to the choir… nor, if truth be told do I often pay much attention to the public pronouncements of Bishops or Archbishops, with the possible exc

Exclusion Zones

Here is my Thought for the Day for last Friday morning, which you can hear in it's live form, trimmed of the bits in italics in order to fit the 2 1/2 minutes, here , at both 26 and 86 minutes (in between thoughts about the late, great Burt Reynolds). Ten days ago fire devastated the old Bank Buildings in Belfast. Thankfully no-one was killed but it caused millions of pounds of damage and put Primark employees’ jobs at stake… It quickly became clear that it would also have a massive impact on the businesses around it, but most people were astonished that the pedestrian exclusion zone around the unstable shell of the building will probably be in place for around 4 months, causing disruption to traffic and commerce… leading to understandable demands from surrounding business owners for the empty shell to simply be demolished, despite the outpouring of affection for the grand old building in the wake of the fire… Difficult decisions need to be taken in the near future, and there wi