“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” – William Morris When I grow up I’d like to be a polymath. I rediscovered this word at the William Morris Anarchy and Beauty exhibition because Morris, apparently, was one. Apparently he was also an “artist-craftsman, designer,…
I hadn’t expected Auschwitz to be such a tourist destination. It was a grey and sombre Friday in November yet, apart from the absence of those ubiquitous key ring vendors, it felt as touristy as the Eiffel Tower. Groups of teenagers on school trips flirted loudly with each other and dropped litter. Coach loads of…
(originally published here on Breathe) When I ‘lived below the line’ last week, I was really only poor in the same way that someone who posted a make-up-free selfie on Facebook was brave. Nevertheless, taking part in a week-long challenge of living on £1 a day to raise awareness and funds in the fight against…
Last week I joined thousands of others around the world to ‘live below the line’ (£1 a day for food and drink) to raise awareness and funds for the fight against extreme poverty. Here’s how it went! Pre-challenge prep Tried really hard to rustle up a team of people to do this together. Epic fail. Even my housemate…
“As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.” Matthew 4:18 He greeted me with a grin and said that he was glad I was ok. It had been a while. When…
“It could be worse,” said the nurse as she shoved the needle in my arm. “Think of all those poor people in Kabul and Somerset.” I’d just confessed that I was more nervous about my jabs for Afghanistan than I was about the trip itself. But yes, it could be worse. I could be in…
Still lacking time to write new stuff for my blog, so here’s something I wrote a few months ago… I’ve always been slightly bothered by the fact that an English flag flies so prominently over my church’s building. Time to get it out of my system and work out why. One issue, I…
‘His life was trees’ was one of our favourite bench inscriptions back in those park-roaming university days. How would we choose to be remembered, we wondered, if the totality of our lives had to be whittled down to a one-liner (which, depending on the park’s location, stood a high likelihood of being defaced anyway)? On…
emilyintheworld 