Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
On Easter night, monk Reginald woke from a doze to find the aged hermit Godric singing lustily.
St Godric of Finchale (?1065-1170) was a bed-ridden invalid near the end of a long and eventful life when Reginald, a monk from the nearby Durham Abbey, went to see him in his hermitage in a bend of the River Wear. It was a Saturday, the night before Easter Day. Back in the Abbey church, the monks were eagerly awaiting the sunrise, but Reginald had dozed off.
The steering committee for the Great Exhibition of 1851 turned down all 245 designs submitted for the iconic venue.
Sir Joseph Paxton, a consultant to the Duke of Devonshire, was the man who designed the ‘Crystal Palace,’ the enormous cast iron and glass conservatory that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 seen by over six million people. Not only was the design groundbreaking, but the way Paxton brought it to the attention of the Building Committee was decidedly modern too.
A Wolf and a Fox go to court over a petty theft, but they have a hard time getting the Judge to believe them.
Phaedrus was a Roman fabulist, roughly a contemporary of St Paul, who turned large numbers of Aesop’s Fables into Latin verse. He admits that many of the Fables are actually his own, but says that this one, in which a Wolf and a Fox struggle to overcome their reputations for dishonesty, is an Aesop original.
St Gregory Palamas struggled all his life to stand up for the principle that the Bible means what it says.
St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), Archbishop of Thessalonica, is reckoned (alongside St Photius and St Mark of Ephesus) one of the three Pillars of Orthodoxy; the second Sunday of Lent is dedicated to him. His life was a unrelenting struggle against slander, brought about by his utter conviction that those passages in the Bible which speak of angels or heavenly lights being seen by men actually mean what they say.
The Israelites under Philistia’s rule might have blended with their heathen masters had not Samson kept stirring up trouble.
Samson was one of the Judges, charismatic rulers of Israel before the Kings. In his day, Israel had been worshipping the Philistines’ gods, and their punishment was to fall under Philistia’s government. To make sure that the Israelites were not absorbed by Philistine society, however, God prompted Samson to keep tensions high.
The Bluebell line in Sussex was the first failing British Railways line to be taken over by volunteers.
There are over a hundred and eighty ‘heritage’ railways and tramways in the United Kingdom, privately owned and run largely by volunteers. Many are routes closed by State-owned British Railways, which enthusiasts have turned into profitable companies in defiance of Authority. The first of these inspirational and quintessentially British adventures was the Bluebell Line in Sussex.