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…

There was no advance warning. The plane was approaching the airport in a controlled manner. Nothing looked to be out of the ordinary. But when the moment came for the plane to touch down, it made a hard landing. So hard in fact that oxygen masks descended and smoke filled the cabin. Then hell broke loose. Panicking passengers tried to…