… and Two Others

‘I’m not sure how many readers know the name of Anthony Smith’, asks Douglas Murray of the former President of Magdalen College, Oxford, in today’s edition of The Spectator. ‘But while not every reader will know him, you are lucky if you know the type: that rare person whose passion is helping other people —…

Read More

On Wisdom

The Oxford Oratory has reprinted one of Jerome Bertram’s sermons to mark both his anniversary and St. Frideswide. It recalls the man rather well. Our Father Jerome died on 19 October, two years ago. Many of you found his sermons and talks both interesting and entertaining. His was indeed an inimitable style. Although our Weekly…

Read More

Two Oxford Men…

Today for St. Frideswide, who is best marked, perhaps, with a Respite in memory of two Oxford men, neither of whom I knew well, but whose presence I observed around the city, and whose further acquaintance I will now no longer have.   Jerome Bertram was a father of the Oxford Oratory. I noted him…

Read More

Our Lady’s Birthday

Today, in honour of Our Lady, a tree currently in flower at the Four Seasons Nursery in Lilongwe: Tabebuia aurea, aka. Yellow Tabebuia vel Caribbean Trumpet Tree. It is, in fact, S. American, like J. mimosifolia, aka. the Jacaranda, whose dusky purple, for this brief season, transfigures Capital City. T. aurea J. mimosifolia

Read More

Greek in the Tropics

We have just awarded the Kamuzu Academy Lower School Certificate in Greek for the second time.   The survival of the Classics in the Malawi bush is due perhaps more to the life support of presidential mandate and institutional inertia than to any respect or understanding that they command among either colleagues or pupils. There…

Read More

At Dedza Pottery

It seems appropriate to write the first of these Respites at the conclusion of an Ulendo on which I have sought recreation amidst what is done well in Malawi. I would not be the first to comment that it is a particular quality of the country, different from others in this part of Africa, that…

Read More