I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole the other evening. This happens rather more often than I care to admit, but this particular one took me somewhere I wasn’t expecting: back more than twenty-five years, into a succession of school halls. The culprit was James B Partridge. If you haven’t encountered him, he is the…
On the final morning of this year’s Friends of Scouting in Europe Tour, Mark and I went to prison. The former Stasi prison in Andreasstraße in Erfurt, to be precise. After our visit to Buchenwald on Friday, this was another encounter with a history which is uncomfortable partly because it really isn’t very long ago….
Our second full day with the Friends of Scouting in Europe began with a tram journey across Erfurt to the Bildungshaus St. Martin, where the morning was devoted to understanding rather more about the part of Germany we are visiting. Dr Claudio Kullmann, Ordinariatsrat in the Catholic Diocese, took us through the political and sociological…
There are days when the places you visit seem to speak to one another, and today was certainly one of them. Mark and I are in Germany with Friends of Scouting in Europe, visiting projects supported by the European Scout Foundation. This morning took us to Weimar; this afternoon, just a few miles up the…
Mark and I are back on our travels, this time in Erfurt in Germany for the annual gathering of the Friends of Scouting in Europe. These visits have become a part of the year that I particularly enjoy: a chance to catch up with old friends, make new ones and, more importantly, see something of…
I was nine when my mum introduced me to a line that has stayed with me ever since: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” It comes, of course, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, although at nine I wasn’t terribly interested in who Polonius was, or whether he was necessarily the wisest source of advice….
There are some things which ought to sit above politics, and saving the life of another human being is surely one of them. That is why I have watched the growing abuse directed at the RNLI, its staff and, most disgracefully of all, its volunteer lifeboat crews with a mixture of anger and disbelief. Over…
I have a confession to make, although it is not a particularly well-kept secret. I am an Archers addict. I have been listening to the inhabitants of Ambridge for more than forty years, through births, deaths, marriages, affairs, farming crises, village fêtes, floods, fires and an impressive number of arguments about things which, to anyone…
This morning I found myself at Friends House in London at something rather grandly, and I suspect, deliberately, called Volunteering Davos. There were no mountains, no snow and rather fewer private jets, but there was a serious purpose behind the name. Convened by Shaping the Future with Volunteering, it brought together leaders from across civil…
There are some places where time behaves oddly. Gilwell Park is one of them. Today I went back for the 100th Gilwell Reunion — and realised, slightly alarmingly, that it is forty years since I attended my first one. I was 22 then. I should make clear that I haven’t been to every Reunion in…
