My Experience At Being Self-Employed

In the past, when I thought of being self-employed as a career, I had something different in my head to the reality. Not for the purpose of naivety. I just didn't have an idea, just like every child has a different idea. But it wasn't something tangible – I didn't have a set idea of …

A Case Of Mutual Resignation

It's Boxing Day 2018 and I have just come home from my third interview of the week. As I wrap up warm on the sofa, my phone rings. It's the internal hiring manager from the third of the interviews. "It's good news," she says, "they want to give you the job." Relief surges through me; …

Made it Through the Dark

To think that it was only a couple of weeks ago that I posted another photo from this same location on Acomb's Hobmoor in near-darkness. I've been walking this same route once a week for the past seven months and it hit me this week: I remember when I walked this in the heat of …

The Hotel Experience

It’s been a fabulous eight months and I do mean that in the most flamboyant of senses. In retrospect – 20/20 of course – it would have been interesting to have blogged about it, but when one works on shifts, on one’s feet all the time, and getting home when one’s time is late and …

10 Days and Counting…

10 days to go. I repeat, 10 days to go. This is not a drill!   What I have enjoyed the most about wedding planning: - Organising everything from scratch. I got so much praise from my arguably-disorganised venue coordinator when I sent over my tables of menu choices, and it had been something that …

What would you regret…?

I just wanted to share this video by YouTuber 'LindyBeige', a man whose intelligence and witticisms I much admire. Perhaps, I feel like we should take more stock of what questions are actually saying, rather than what they purport to ask. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohg2ZQcZ_h8&t=0s And what would you regret not having told someone?

A Wishlist for the Disappointment of Christmas

Ah, now that Christmas is but crumbs and recycled paper, we stare at what counts as presents and ponder – did it really have to be this way? It occurred to me that I probably don't voice my opinions on gifts that much, but Christmas is difficult to manoeuvre. People disrupt my brain! After all, if …

What Advent means to me

CAFOD blog

CAFOD volunteer Trevor Stockton, from St Anthony of Padua parish in Wolverhampton, reflects on the significance of Advent in his life, past and present.

Trevor Stockton speaking at a Romero Mass in St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham

Advent was a word I didn’t know about until I started going to church in my teens. The period before Christmas and Christmas itself really took on a new meaning for me thereafter.

Before then, as a child in a working class family in the 1940s, Christmas was simply all about having a few treats that we didn’t get all year round. Having an ordinary stocking filled with nuts, dates, a tangerine and other similar luxuries was amazing.  A few, and I mean a few, simple presents followed by a family Christmas meal made the day. There was no television and the day continued with playing games. So, the weeks before Christmas were spent…

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Pray First, Worry Later

In an offhand comment made about the ecumenical community in which I live, my conversation partner and I discussed how to find God in the silence. By Grace, this coincided with the homily/sermon given by the pastor this Sunday morning, focusing on today’s passage of 2 Corinthians 12: 7 Therefore, in order to keep me …

One More Step Towards Recovery

When I was fifteen, I wrote this song. It wasn't the best I'd written, but it was far from the worst, both in lyrics, melody and accompaniment. It was meant to be about a relationship falling apart; but listening to it now, I could say that its lyrics mimic the recovery one takes from mental …