Every now and again I de-clutter my house. One of the ways I do this is by listing things on an auction service on the Internet, where potential buyers place their bids and the highest one obviously wins. Online bidders cannot have a close look at the listed items, as they would have the opportunity to do at local auctions.…

A car with the red letter ‘L’ attached to its boot stopped in an awkward position, wedged between a parked car, a narrow drive and another parked car. Clearly the driver had not honed his or her driving skills – and that’s something you can expect. However, the driver couldn’t reverse – the only way to rectify the situation –…

In the light of Jesus’ demand in today’s gospel, I cannot be His disciple because I love my mum; you know, she’s the only mum I have! On the other hand, I could have qualified for that sort of discipleship when I was an angry teenager; I hated my father, and I believed I had good reasons for that. But…

‘Do you know who I am?’ asked a man angrily at an airport check-in desk. A resolute attendant manning the desk grabbed the microphone and asked over the PA system: ‘Can anyone help? This man doesn’t know who he is.’ This is an old joke, but I couldn’t find one any better than this; and it pops into my mind…

A couple of weeks ago at the High Court in Glasgow a man received a life sentence and was jailed for a minimum of 27 years. The convicted man was a taxi-driver who’d travelled 200 miles from Bradford to kill a shopkeeper he had known only from seeing videos on the Internet. The murdered man’s ‘crime’? His interpretation of Islam…