Ambivalence, reluctance and the Jesus scale
About eight months or so ago, I started talking about the concept of a scale of faith in Christ. I christened it the Jesus scale. Here is a diagram: On the far left, you have antitheism, hard...
View ArticleIn which I make the best of things
Greetings from the tail end of a typical British bank holiday, where the big highlight was gardening in the rain. In all seriousness, it was rather lovely to be out tidying up the flower beds in the...
View ArticleWe need medicine
I caught up with Wanda on Friday. She’d managed to inspect the captured swarm the day before, and all seemed hunky-dory. No eggs yet, but you can expect to wait a couple of weeks before a newly mated...
View ArticleNot Knowing Where You Are Going
One of the initiatives I started when I became Master of Churchill College was a series of public conversations with eminent women, many – but by no means all – academics. To start with I was quite...
View ArticleBuild It And They Will Come
I love ponds. I love digging ponds. I love furnishing ponds with plants. I love watching as the wildlife spontaneously arrives. I have had a number of ponds in various places in my garden — and...
View ArticlePaperback Writer
I made a list. I’m doing quite well with it—ticked off more than half, and others are ‘in progress’. I’m not going to finish it before I start work again, but I’ve given myself permission not to get...
View ArticleThree Little Birds
I’ve said elsewhere that our garden is a wildlife paradise. Turns out that the house is, too. I often see our family of robins just outside the kitchen door, by the hen house. I’ve taken to shaking the...
View ArticleWhat I Read In May
Ken Liu (ed.) Invisible Planets Hungry as I am for more SF from China, and with birthday requests on the table, Mrs Gee ordered me this collection of contemporary Chinese SF, edited and translated by...
View ArticleCroeso i Gymru
Earlier this week several Gees drove 300+ miles across Britain to spend a few days in an entirely different country. Specifically, Carmarthenshire, where Mrs Gee has relations. We rented a cottage on...
View ArticleIt Has Not Escaped Our Notice
Thanks to our correspondent Mr K. Z. of High Barnet for this one seen in a shop window in Abergavenny. Continue reading →
View ArticleRole Models for Girls?
Recently I received an email from a young girl (aged 8 and a half, as she signed herself off, with overtones of Adrian Mole) complaining about the lack of representation of women in STEM. As she says...
View ArticleOur House
It’s not just the wrens. This is Shorty. Shorty is a year-old robin, one of the expanding family that lives in the shaggy old laurel tree out the front, and together with his (or her—difficult to tell...
View ArticleSunny Afternoon
What do you do with 6 lbs cherries? Actually, that’s quite an easy problem, compared with the years we’ve had nearly 30 lbs from the tree at the back of the garden. It’s an old tree, and I’ve put the …...
View ArticleWhat I Read In June
Baoshu The Redemption of Time I generally don’t have time for fan fiction, but there’s fan fiction and fan fiction, and this one is of a superior sort. Baoshu (a pen name) is a fan, specifically of the...
View ArticleIn which I dream of escape
Sometimes everything just seems too much. As the non-existent summer rolls on – 14C mornings of rain or overcast, wool sweaters taken back out from storage – I find my stress level to be the only thing...
View ArticleThis song has no title
Jenny has mentioned the non-existent summer. It’s certainly been ‘variable’, with autumnal mornings and more than an inch of rain in 12 hours one day last week. I haven’t quite kept to my commitment to...
View ArticleIt Has Not Escaped Our Notice
I’ve long wanted to patronise this shop, but I’d have to disguise myself as a helpful Labrador. Continue reading →
View ArticleWhat I Read In July
Richard Fortey: Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind Richard Fortey is best known as an author (Life: An Unauthorised Biography) and palaeontologist (Trilobite!) but as his sparkling memoir A Curious...
View ArticleIn Transition
Readers may think I’ve given up on my blog, but the reality is more prosaic: as my ten-year stint as Master of Churchill College comes to an end (at the end of September), I have been moving out of the...
View ArticleMore Than A-Levels
Last week saw the annual media interest in A-Level results (at least in England). Commentators noticed, for instance, the substantial increase in STEM subjects, with over 100,000 students taking Maths....
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