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Showing posts from June, 2018

Nigel

I first met Nigel at a coffee morning at church, in the group playing board games.   Nigel was a big, plump, shy man in his fifties, who suffered from severe osteoarthritis and walked with a frame.   As well as Tri-ominos and Scrabble, he loved drawing, and cake. After a few weeks of board games, Nigel handed me a note.   In it, he explained that he felt sexually attracted to me, missed kissing and cuddling his girlfriend, who had died the previous year, and felt that he needed sex very badly, but he would never force himself on me, and that I was welcome to come to his flat.   He added that he suffered from schizophrenia, but took his tablets regularly. I wrote a reply, explaining as gently as I could that I didn’t feel sexually attracted to him and didn’t really want to visit his flat.   The offer seemed too reminiscent of ‘ Have Some Madeira, M’Dear ’ (although if Nigel had been the seducer, he would definitely have been offering cake rather than wine). I emphasised that I was

Spinach

Before I got married, my mother asked me, ‘Are you sure you could stand being married to someone who doesn’t like mushrooms or sweetcorn?’ The answer is emphatically yes.   Being married to someone who is intelligent, funny, caring, utterly lovable, and apparently equally delighted to be married to me, and who shares my urge to sing ‘Ill Wind ’ by Michael Flanders when a Mozart horn concerto comes on the radio, is more than I had ever hoped for.   It is a small price to pay that I share my meals with someone who is deeply reluctant to eat any of the following: ·                      Most vegetables other than potatoes, roots (such as carrots and parsnips), onions, leafy green vegetables, beans, and occasionally peas.   (Fortunately, this rule doesn’t apply in Chinese restaurants, where most things are given the benefit of the doubt, except sweetcorn and mushrooms.) ·                      Any fruits except apples, pears, bananas, and possibly strawberries when fully-ripened, loc

The Case Of The Cake

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I had assumed this story had died years ago, but apparently it’s back again. In a weekly newspaper, just above serious stories about the United Nations urging the Saudi coalition in Yemen to stop occupying ports, and about Amnesty International’s report on war crimes in Syria, was the latest instalment in a court case about a wedding cake.   As you may possibly recall, about six years ago, a couple in America who were getting married, asked a cake shop to bake a wedding cake for them.   The baker decided he didn’t want to.   The couple decided that this constituted an infringement of their civil right to have a wedding cake baked for them.   The baker decided that this constituted an infringement of his right to refuse to bake for people he disapproved of.   Six years later, the case has gone as far as the US Supreme Court, who have recently ruled in favour of the baker and against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Okay, possibly this story sounded less inflammatory becaus

Am I Evil?

I haven’t updated my blog for a while, partly because I’ve been thinking things over.   However, as a friend has left a comment on one of my previous posts , and it looks a bit long to reply to briefly, I’ll start a fresh page. David, commenting on my notes about addiction, described how he ‘ recently met with a counsellor in a church who used to offer a christianised version of the twelve-step programme, which, as I understand it, is the basis of the NA and AA approach. She said she had written a new course based more on the “Freedom in Christ” model developed by Neil Anderson. Now, I'm certainly no expert on these matters, but I think she said that foundational to the twelve-step model is the notion that “once an alcoholic always an alcoholic” and “once a heroin addict always a heroin addict”, hence the need for total abstinence. Again as I understand it, the Freedom in Christ foundational belief is that in Christ we have a new identity, no longer “an alcoholic” but a n