Last night a fragile agreement was signed by the President and Opposition leaders in Ukraine. It followed three month-long street protests that had started out as peaceful demonstrations but had escalated to violence over time, leading to the bloodshed of recent days. The outcome of the negotiations was threatened, as neither side trusted their opponents and neither side was ready…

Our country has been battered in recent weeks by an unusual string of powerful winter storms. Swathes of the country flooded, fallen trees all over the place, houses destroyed, blackouts… Scientists were giving explanations for that unusual weather. Some blamed humankind for global warming and changes in the climate caused by it; others saw a rather natural cycle similar to…

In a book published two years ago Alain de Botton, an atheist philosopher, suggested a secular, irreligious equivalent of Christian worship, mainly based on the Catholic ritual of the Mass but deprived of any religious meaning. He constructed this idea on the assumption that non-believers can have a similar communal experience to that of believers. Similar ideas have been put…

Shortly after I’d come to Elgin as a parish assistant, I realised that many of my compatriots living in that area were struggling because they didn’t speak English. Dealing with simple, everyday hurdles caused problems, as their inability to speak the language required massive hand signals or finding an interpreter. The solution seemed obvious: help them to learn English. So…

A week ago I replaced my tyres with winter ones. It cost me a small fortune, but I did it being certain that was cheaper to do that than replace a car after a possible crash. Since then the temperature has hardly dropped below 10 degrees Celsius. Well, actually it has, but in Elgin and Inverness, not here. It seems…