On my way to Swanwick to speak to the Southwark Diocesan Clergy Conference on the wonders and delights of blogging for fun and profit (actually, the use of blogging for pastoral care and education). Shall I tell them that London Diocese has positioned tanks on Tower Bridge?

In what way is Greenbelt like heaven?

You end up meeting all kinds of friends in unexpected circumstances.

To that end I have shared a Cumberland Sausage (cheap and good), a pint of beer (good and expensive), and a beer-garden hymn sing (bizarre and… bizarre) with Sam Norton.

Good beer, good food and good friends. The only difference between Greenbelt and heaven is the nearer presence of the Lord.

“Anything that is worth believing in goes beyond the available evidence.”

Alister McGrath

An email received today from Church House Bookshop:

Exclusive Special Offer – Today Only!

Today only, until midnight (BST) on Thursday 9 July, Church House Bookshop are offering the following recently published titles at specially reduced prices:

If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him
- was ?14.99, now only ?13.50 (www.chbookshop.co.uk/2411995)

I love the question marks!

Ronald Reagan said that “A recession is when your neighbour loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.” The reasons why you are losing your job, or your neighbour is losing his, are never as easy to understand as Reagan’s knockabout political abuse seems to pretend.

Why are we mired in such financial and economic turmoil?

In the UK we are fortunate to have Evan Davis and Robert Peston to explain the ins and outs of the credit crunch to us. In the Church of England we have been fortunate to have Andreas Whittam Smith, First Church Estates Commissioner, explain the ins and outs of the credit crunch to the General Synod. Exemplary as all these explanations are and have been, I have yet to come across anything so elegant, so simple and so terrifying as Jonathan Jarvis’s The Crisis of Credit Visualized:

From The Guardian this morning:

If you meet a shark …

• Keep your eye on the shark at all times. Sharks may retreat temporarily and then try to sneak up on you

I can’t tell you how much I needed to be told that. It would be so very easy to be distracted by something else in the event of being attacked by a 16 foot Great White shark.

I am distressed to learn of Richard Wright’s death today. One problem with listening to Pink Floyd’s music, and the massive contribution made to it by Wright’s fine keyboard playing, is that it is so familiar (at least to people of a certain age); we just don’t hear it any more— we only recall hearing it, remembering where we were and who we were with the first time someone played, for example, The Great Gig in the Sky.

Wright was central to the genius of Floyd. It was his fluid, lyrical and melodic keyboard parts that added the wistfulness to the hard-edged anomie of Roger Waters’s music and lyrics.

Richard Wright, the poet of alienation and wonder, requiescat in pace.

From the BBC’s website

Princess Anne’s son, Peter Phillips, is to marry Canadian management consultant Autumn Kelly at Windsor Castle later.

The couple, both 30, who met while working at the 2003 Canadian Grand Prix, will exchange vows at the Berkshire castle’s St George’s Chapel.

Miss Kelly has given up her Catholic faith to allow her fiance to retain his place as 11th in line to the throne.

Well, I suppose if Paris was worth a mass then Windsor is worth a matins.