Dear Oliver Lyne, my erstwhile and much-missed tutor, once said to me “Horace is a middle-aged pleasure.” He was younger when he said that than I am now. But he was so right. I’ve been re-reading Horace a fair bit of late. Looking just now at the Soracte ode, I recall this:

Today is the 58th anniversary of my baptism. I give thanks for it every year. Somewhere there are pictures of me all in white looking as though I wouldn’t say boo to a goose. (Which I wouldn’t. Not to a goose, anyway.) But I can’t find them so this generic one will have to do.

Haha! The -varp in Danish and Norwegian and the-vad in Swedish have different origins. 'Mullvarp' exists in Swedish too but is now an obsolete noun, although it's still used in some dialects today.

Seeing this winsome advert for a VPN company in my tube train, I have to admit my first thought was not about IT. I thought: Germ. Waulwurf, Eng. moldiwarp. As I suspected, the Danish is muldvarp. And so I started worrying at once what became of the /r/ in Swedish.

Irenaeus said “Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei” (For glory of God is a living human being, but the life of humanity is the vision of God). It seems to me that crocuses must enter into this somewhere. (Bitts Park, Carlisle)

It hadn’t occurred to me that someone might use AI to write their homily. How naive of me. Yes, one sts hears poorly digested material hastily gathered from second-rate commentaries. But mostly I am fortunate to hear preaching that sounds like the fruit of much, much prayer.

Mostly people don’t say this for fear of being thought behind the curve. Just imagine: saying that The Shiny Thing might not be as good as it looks.

Anni Latinitatis apparently means “A Year [sic] of Latin”. Who knew? 365 videos. Lovely. Plainly I am not enough of an expert in Latin to know my annus from my …

My American audiobook reader pronounces St Thérèse of Lisieux as though she came from a place called Lasso. Very Wild West. And St Francis Xavier emerges as St Francis Ek-Zaviour. This is a particular oddity that one doesn’t typically meet on this side of the Atlantic.

I sympathize.

One tires of what one perceives as a somewhat precious and churchy tendency to refer to icons as being “written”. Yes, I know that the root sense of Greek γράφω is “scratch” and that it often means “write”. But I also know it doesn’t ONLY mean that. Bailly clocked this long ago:

It’s especially fun when the collars and cuffs don’t match …

I do like glazed bricks wherever I can find them. They are especially good when combined with this stylish old writing (serifs and all). One generally has to go out of Zone 1 to find stations slightly less raked by the homogenizing claw of modernity.

I hear it’s almost time for some superb owls! Here’s one from 1508 by Albrecht Dürer.

I’ve never seen tree fungus this variegated. Glory be to God for dappled things …

One wonders if people who like to have a little natter in church in a loud stage whisper during what they seem to think of as inviting lulls or troughs in the Mass would feel the same degree of licence during a concert at, say, Wigmore Hall or the RFH.

In an otherwise typically insightful chapter on “The Body at Prayer”, +Erik Varden posits a causal relationship between sexual abuse and the ritual reforms of the 1960s. But did abuse really spike then? Or did the loss of deference allow longstanding victims finally to speak out?

I caught sight of my shadow against a door on Binney St in Mayfair this evening. And with a bit of a shudder I thought of Max von Sydow in … That Film. Me Max

Would you buy a Chinese course from people who can’t spell Chinese?

Our mountainish inhumanity … youtu.be/DceEunnTA3A?...

be it from me to carp, but isn’t “situated on” a bit overblown here? Why not “attached to”? I mean, it’s nice to have headed paper. But …

How To Get On In Society (IYKYK)

Bishop Erik Varden’s point is an excellent one but it’s hard to get the toothpaste back in the tube.

Hardly a condition to which one owns up in public, I should have thought, much less names a yard after. Maybe the legacy of an over-sharing urologist with consulting rooms nearby?

Seeing this book in the New Acquisitions section of The London Library, I thought of a conversation with Sir Walter Bullivant in 1916:

Un brin de mimosa pour ensoleiller votre dimanche

Curious paragraph by Thomas Merton that I had not come across before. In his diaries for 1967. The year before he died.

I was reading the diaries of Thomas Merton this afternoon and came across this. He wrote it in 1967. It is made all the more poignant by the fact that he died so soon after writing it, in December 1968.

I’m thrilled to be performing in Borders, which runs at the Arcola Theatre from 11-14 February. Check out our trailer (shares appreciated). Book your tickets here: www.arcolatheatre.com/event/borders/

OTD in 2017 died Prof Geoffrey Raisman FRS whom I was fortunate to know for some years from our shared membership of the same London club. He was a most remarkable and lovely man. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbm/article...

As a seeker after antecedents, I feel seen. And rebuked.

Words from +Erik Varden OCSO, Bishop of Trondheim. Anyone who has had the experience of being read by the psalms will know what he means. It happened to me the other day, like a brick through plate glass.

Someone just said to me, in Cumbria, that he’d put the latch on the snib. This means that the tongue is locked back by the little button or lever. In Yorkshire, for that, we used to say sneck or snick.(Yes, originally that was something else - see RHS picture.) What do you say?

I was chatting to someone this afternoon about David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. She remarked how beautiful Peter O’Toole was in that. I could only agree. And remind her that Noël Coward said: “If you’d been any prettier, it would have been Florence of Arabia.”

Does anyone recall The Electric Monk, an absurdist creation of Douglas Adams? It was a labour-saving device made to do people’s believing for them. A lot of enthusiasm for the imagined wonders of AI reminds me of the same thing: outsourcing what cannot be outsourced.

Here is 1 Sam 3:10, part of the OT reading at Mass today: And the LORD came and stood, calling as at other times, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ And Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant hears.’ I fear I am often prone to say something more like: “Hear, Lord, for your servant speaks.”

Put the ABLATIVE with de, Cum and coram, ab and e, Sine, tenus, pro and prae. So goes the old schoolroom mnemonic. Unfortunate to be The Latin Mass Society and get the case wrong after the preposition.

RIP Fr Hubert Bonnet-Eymard In paradisum deducant eum angeli; in eius adventu suscipiant eum martyres, et perducant eum in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus angelorum eum suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeat requiem. maristeurope.eu/father-hubert/

This from a sermon by S. Peter Chrysologus. I’ve never really understood the apparent coinherence of Epiphany, Baptism, and the beginning of miracles at Cana of Galilee. Can anyone explain?

Does anyone recall a comedy sketch where Satan offers some mortal a big slap-up meal? The bill is astronomical. Satan (with a nod to Mark Twain) only has a million-pound note, for which nobody has change. So the poor mortal has to pay after all. Seems theologically quite astute.

From today’s Gospel at Mass. It has so many layers of meaning that are beyond my power to unpack. But close to the surface is the idea of being clearly seen and thoroughly known when you didn’t realize you were. But not to worry when the one seeing and knowing is Love itself.

On this day in 2004 died Dr Gareth Jeremiah, without reaching his 30th birthday. I was fortunate to know him a bit at Balliol. He bore his chronic illness entirely without self-pity and was a kind and generous person, taken from us far too soon. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Even without the Christmas tree, Archbishop Sharp looks far too détendu. It’s the one leg over the other, I think. It reminds me of that scene in Father Ted when they phone up Rome and they are all very, er, relaxed there too …

I found myself absentmindedly whistling the tune to Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega but the words going through my head were from the #DeadRingers parody: I am sitting in a cafe At the corner of the Death Star And I need to see a doctor For my chronic emphysema …

Happy New Year. May 2026 be filled with love and blessings.

Are there any words in German of the shape CÜCC where C is any consonant and Ü is any umlauted vowel? @rbnmyr.bsky.social @olawikander.bsky.social @dannybate.bsky.social

Does this mean that I have only to scan it to get more Diet Coke? How does this work? Does it perhaps come out of my phone? One of those functions you didn’t know your iPhone had until it exhibits it.