What a baffling settling: a person pays the equivalent of 160000 average annual uk salaries to avoid prcecution of brexit manipulation… imagine what the damage is to uk and its partners…

🕯️We are living through a silent time of inhumanity: As Europe celebrated the season of charity, our crew was forbidden from helping people in distress at sea. The Italian authorities unlawfully detained our fully operational vessel, Humanity 1, for the past 20 days. 1/2

The beauty and simplicity of God’s love shown through Christ, creation and community - Iona, the place my soul and spirit finds peace. youtube.com/shorts/ospdn...

Happy Christmas! May God bless you & all who you love & care for, love, joy & peace today and throughout the year ahead - a special place in my prayers for those who find this time of the year difficult, may you have hope & light to carry you to what you need, whether you know what that is or not.

MONO (Japan) will be releasing their fourth in their Christmas EP series tomorrow - Taka (the composer and guitarist in the band) confirmed to me in October that it would be available on Bandcamp on Christmas Day! monoofjapan.bandcamp.com

“We have noticed increasing numbers of pilgrims from all over the world returning to Jerusalem.” The best way to help Christians in the Holy Land is to visit, writes Richard Sewell ✍️ @sgcjerusalem.bsky.social #Jerusalem #Palestinians #churchtimes

So Tommy Robinson converted to Christianity whilst in prison… I look forward to him welcoming refugees fleeing persecution & seeking safety in a foreign land like Jesus did with His parents shortly after His birth that we’ll be celebrating soon. Or was the conversion another lie of his?

Tonight’s listening pleasure: MONO’s live performance of their Oath album with an orchestra in Japan. It’s an exquisite recording, well mixed too. Listening to it takes me to a place of joy, and thankfulness too for seeing the London-leg of the same tour and meeting the band in Bristol recently.

No I did not write a shorter sermon so I could get home to watch the Formula 1 highlights, but I do thank God that He suggested the length that He did!

I went to (probably) my last concert of 2025 to see one of my favourite bands (Dirty Three) and the bearded proportion of the audience was well above average, quite possibly partly in solidarity with and partly influenced by Warren Ellis’ beard. I aspire for such a beard. Amazing band and gig.

RFK Jr: "Two weeks ago we ended, under your leadership, a twenty year war on women". Three out of five men in this shot have been accused of sexual misconduct, harassment or abusive behaviour towards women. A fourth signed into law a near-total abortion ban in his state as governor.

A lot of links and information in this piece helping debunk some of the more common myths about migrants. Please support @migrantvoice.bsky.social, and donate to their campaign if you can, to help combat misinformation about immigration.

Advent/Christmas season as a self-supporting Priest* is more of a challenge this year - I do less than paid priests but managing teams, preparing services and writing multiple sermons alongside a job to pay the bills, being a roadie for gig playing son and other family stuff makes for a busy life!

Being a roadie tonight: whisked my son straight from a performance for a college exam and off to Thunderbolt in Bristol where his band Getaway are playing. Tomorrow it’s Dirty Three at Electric in Bristol, a band I’ve followed since I came across their album Ocean Songs in France back in the 90’s

This seems like a good time to mention that this Labour, you know "protect vulnerable people" government has pretty much closed the last remaining "safe routes" for people to seek asylum in the UK, along with preventing refugees already here being reunited with their spouses or children.

This by Mahmood is frankly not only disgusting, but also massively disingenuous. It equates seeking asylum with illegality, there's nothing illegal about seeking asylum no matter the route. It ignores that Labour's policies penalise those in need of protection, and plays to hard right rhetoric.

Someone should ask Starmer and Mahmood whether they think the Kindertransport, for example, should have been a return ticket. Whether Alf Dubs, rather than becoming a Labour MP and now Lord, ought to have been sent back with his family to Czechoslovakia once it was liberated from German rule.

Current favourite thing on the internet.

Good morning. I don't know who did this, but I love you.

Last night I got to see one of my favourite bands, MONO, open their European Tour in Bristol, UK with one of best concerts I’ve been to which closed with my favourite piece of theirs “Com(?)” & the band signed an Ep for me Do check if they are coming to a place near you www.monoofjapan.com/tour.php

I could wait to watch the Bruce Springsteen film Deliver Me From Nowhere at home or I could go to Everyman Cinema in Bath and sit on a sofa there to watch it sooner on a screen that fills my field of vision and with a sound system better than I could afford at home… I chose the latter.

Well that was a revelation! Gregory Alan Isakov and his band at The Beacon in Bristol were amazing, as was the sound - judging by concerts I’ve been to there before and since its refurbishment and renaming, the venue has certainly improved but it’s still dependent on a good band & sound engineer.

It’s relaxing to be at a concert when you don’t know the artist or their music, yet also disconcerting when the numbers attending suggest the artist is very well known… clearly I’m not as in touch with ‘the music scene’ as I used to be.

There’s so much happening in the world that sucks the joy out of life that I keep trying to lift people when I preach. But my attempts to encourage through my last 2 sermons were drowned out by the challenges they contained about showing God’s care for people & planet. I long for unadulterated joy…

Greta Thunberg has arrived in Greece following her deportation from Israel, after the Gaza aid flotilla was intercepted #GlobalSumudFlotilla She said: “I could talk for a very,very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment. Trust me, but that is not the story.” #Athens airport

Free stickers suitable for flag-bearing lampposts. Send a large A4 envelope with a 1st class large stamp to me at Bragg Office, PO Box 6830 Bridport DT6 9BH and I’ll send you a sheet. #ReclaimtheFlag 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇬🇧

It breaks my mind that two British political parties have seen scenes like this and decided to try and replicate it in Britain. Thuggary, lawlessness, state brutality. Farage and Badenoch decided they liked the look of it.

"To my colleagues in mainstream media: your silence is complicity. Your 'boths-sides-ism' is complicty. Your euphemisms for genocide is complicity." From my speech accepting the 'Path of Truth' award from Palestinian diaspora group KTH. Full speech: zeteo.com/p/palestine-...

Jean-Michel Jarre’s live album from his London Docklands concert played in my music shuffle this evening bringing back memories of being there. I looked up the date, it was in 1988. I feel old…

I was listening to Michael Palin’s (1979) diaries earlier and hear him say he was picked up by a jaguar and Terry Gilliam wrote a synopsis on the toilet. My first thought was not of cars or a deposal device… cue ChatGPT’s imagination of my imagination.

Tonight’s listening pleasure: the reformed The Beta Band, live at the O2 Academy in Bristol, and a masked DJ who would I would be surprised to find out is Steve Mason or another member of The Beta Band.

Vinyl albums create a closer connection to the music than any other format, but not for their tactile nature - CD’s have a similar quality. But the very need to get up and change sides or discs means that vinyl records stop songs blurring into others and losing their individual identities.

Tonight’s album: Mogwai’s As The Love Continues - an excellent addition to their discography that includes their trademark range of sonic intensities and their finest sung song to date (Richie Sacramento).

Tonight’s bedtime listening: Underworld’s dubnobasswithmyheadman.

It’s finally out! An evening with Nine Inch Nails’ Tron Ares soundtrack has started.

Conversation today: “How did the Israelites survive for 40 years in the desert (during the Exodus)?” Me: “God sent them quails and manna to eat” “What’s that?” Me “Think of it like 40 years of KFC and bread, so no wonder they were grumpy”.

Music is my passion and fuel for life, but the sound of silence is equally powerful, the peace bringing both inner peace and energy at the same time. So with an empty house, I’m keeping the records in their sleeves and the stylus docked, and enjoying the silence whilst I can.

Funny how things coincide…read Michael Palin’a diaries covering the ex-leper scene from The Life of Brian. Few days later hear a sermon on the Grateful Leper. Then reminded of my status as a metaphorical unhealed leper best kept outside the community, avoided & forgotten Time to laugh with the film

The Pre-sale concert ticket process is way too stressful - the virtual queue and clock, the selection of seats disappearing before your eyes, the IT failures chucking you out & needing to repeat the process to get back in, seem purposely designed to panic people into paying more than they’d planned.

Angela Rayner accidentally pays less tax than she should have, resigns, and the media gives her hell. Nigel Farage deliberately pays less tax than he should have, and the media gives him a free pass. That, right there, is the problem.

The whole story in three posts.

Does anyone know of a news feed on BlueSky with a global outlook that’s not dominated by news from the USA? As much as it’s good to know about what’s happening in the US, there’s a lot of things happening elsewhere in the world that I’m not yet getting to read about.

If you’re a music fan you should check out Rick Beato’s YouTube channel - he often does long interviews with musicians, producers, etc where they discuss their playing & recording techniques - this chat with David Gilmour is full of amazing and fascinating stuff. youtu.be/OT_KFCidz_s

Yogesh Alekari travels around the world on his motorbike and it is in the UK that his bike and belongings are stolen… a shameful stain on the UK’s reputation. I hope he not only gets everything back but now receives wonderful hospitality whilst in the UK. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I’d like to go and listen to Mono’s beautiful soundtrack album “My Story, the Buraku Story, but the room my turntable is in has been commandeered for a sleep over.

I used to spend hours in record shops, browsing the shelves and looking for a surprise or a bargain or both. Nowadays that’s hard to do, and pretty much dependent on having a good independent shop nearby with a decent and diverse selection that goes beyond both the charts & the algorithm.

““Anyone who truly wants to bring the hostages home does not launch a ground invasion of Gaza,” Yotam Cohen, brother of hostage Nimrod Cohen, said ahead of a weekly rally in Tel Aviv.”

“The actor Mandy Patinkin and his wife, playwright & actor Kathryn Grody, address the policies of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu” on Gaza Not only is Netanyahu enacting a genocide, he is creating generations of people who will seek revenge in Israel & beyond youtu.be/dFjOb9DGS1w?...

Having spent 7 months in an Israeli jail last year under administrative detention, Layan Nasir is facing trial again. Her much-postponed trial will conclude on Sept 7. All pressure to avoid a custodial sentence is needed now. Letters to Israeli ambassadors and elected representatives please.