Summer has already come, and with that a polite question to me: ‘Father, are you going home for your holiday?’ My answer is invariably the same: ‘No, I’m not, because I am at home here.’ It isn’t a courteous phrase or a sort of PR stunt. In my six years long stay here in Scotland I’ve always felt that, and never been homesick. For…
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This Munro was the one I had previously left unclimbed; partially because it requires quite a long walk to the foot of the hill. Yesterday mixed weather forecast for Scotland somehow pushed me there, as other regions were expecting rain. The long walk turned out to be pretty pleasant, though still long. The entire route was rather straightforward, running along…
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Recently I’ve had a very pleasant chat with some extremely nice people; among several topics there were memories from the distant past. A person recalled that Catholics had been perceived as people preoccupied with sin, whereas other denominations apparently were passing on a much happier message about God’s love. And now a few decades later nobody seems to talk about…
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One week of good weather in Scotland is something really unusual. It allowed me to climb week by week in the same area; this time one of the tops had been controversially stripped of its Munro status just to get that back some time later; anyway it just two feet over 3000. As I’ve mentioned the weather was good, but…
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Elijah the Prophet was definitely not a man of the cultural mainstream of his time. His fierce stand against an immoral and corrupt king and his court made him particularly unpopular among the powerful. His denouncement of the king’s ‘yes-men’ – false prophets – was provoking fiery criticism. When he managed to crush them in a spectacular way, the queen…