St Mary the Virgin Church

The steaming Christmas pudding is placed ceremoniously on your dinner table. The brandy is sloshed over it (an extra one for luck). The lights are flicked off. A match is struck – and in the darkness the pudding flames dance with beautiful blue light. The last day of last December, and I’m on Hembury Fort to bid farewell in the closing daylight to an extraordinary year. A surprise snow-shower sweeps in. The light turns momentarily magical and mysterious, vivid brightness battling the dark clouds. December is a battleground. Light and dark – which will win? The Christmas lights go up […]

Climate change challenges my faith. It would perhaps be surprising if it didn’t – our Planet’s problems seem overwhelming. As Government leaders gather in Glasgow for the pivotal COP26 climate conference, I find I have to go back to basics. Sometimes that’s the best way. The reality of global warming has long been evident. Working in climate research 30 years ago made that clear – the basic physics is not ‘rocket science’. The global graphs of temperature would go up. A lot. How far and how fast, that was the question. Covid-19 brought graphs into our living-rooms. Graphs went up […]

There is quiet celebration in the Carrington household this summer. Our house-moves over recent years fell strangely into a 3-year rhythm. This month we mark our 3rd anniversary of moving here – and we’ve no intention of going anywhere else. We are delighted at this more settled prospect. For you this may be for-better-or-for-worse! In some walks of life, regular moves are of course the norm. In my former training life at the Met Office, we liaised with the Navy’s meteorological training centre in Plymouth; a strong relationship with my opposite number would be building, only for them to be […]

Summer – what a wonderful word! The days stretch and relax. The sun shines (or not!). Warmth fills our bodies – winter’s cold becomes hard to imagine. Memories of childhood summers, lying back on the grass with gloriously nothing to do but gaze up at the deep blue sky and pick out animal shapes in the drifting clouds. A pint in a pub garden. The smell of suncream. Of bar-b-ques. What are you doing this summer? Less traveling than in others, perhaps. In whatever way Covid chooses to cramp our summer style, the season will still sing for us its […]

Images of Service It’s less than 24 hours since the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh as I write this. The images are raw. The military precision of the procession in the bright sunshine. The Royal family, grieving but together. Most of all, the Queen in the double pain of her husband’s funeral with Covid restrictions. The first glimpse of her seated in the limousine, face-masked. Then most poignantly of all, sat in the Chapel isolated from her family members. Vulnerable and frail, she walked the painful path so many others have done in these past months, her mourning cramped […]

Does life win? It’s Saturday of Easter weekend last year, on the hill above Feniton. It’s dawn. We can’t hold our usual Sunrise Service there the following day due to this new national ‘lockdown’. I am making a fumbling attempt at filming an introduction for an Easter video service. And the sunrise is perfect. The huge orange ball emerges inch-by-inch above the hills over Honiton. At the end of the year I will compile an album of 2020 lockdown photos – that sunrise is now its front cover. Resurrection comes. Often slowly, but it comes. Those compact three days from […]

Once upon a time… there was a beautiful forest. Everyone called it the Christmas Forest. Each winter all would come to it for a merry and festive time. Every patch of woodland was named after the particular delights it brought: Shopping Wood, Parties Wood, Carols Wood, and more. But one winter a Man with a Mask brandishing a chainsaw arrived at the forest. Brutally he began to raze all the lovely trees to the ground. Parties Wood was first – the majestic timbers of fun and jollity crashed to the earth, the buzz of conversation and fuzz of drinks extinguished. […]