A Funeral

Last week I returned to Nottingham for the first time since I left over a year ago. I struggle to articulate the feeling of going back to a place which one knows so well and where, really, quite a lot took place. For me, the birth of two of my children and the early years of two others, the period of lockdown with the heightened emotions of anxiety, stress, and strangeness that accompanied it all, the first four years of my ordained ministry and the church with the people, the worship, and the work, and our life together in all of it. There are the contours of the cityscape, the roads and natural features. Some are the same and some are different, such as the coal-fired power station that we used to approach on our way home which bellowed out great streams of dark smoke into the sky from its numerous massive chimneys, with enormous piles of coal outside being gathered by diggers and other machines, now strangely empty and lifeless, the factory and its employees murdered by the joyless technocracy of Ed Miliband and the militant cult fanaticism of “Net Zero”.