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Showing posts from 2016

The Island of Painted Tin

This is a story that my great-grandfather told me when I was a child. I've told it to you before, but were you listening? So I am writing it down, and when I leave on my travels your mother, my daughter will be able to read it to you. My great-grandfather told me this story when I was being disingenuous or insincere, a fault I was prone to when I was young. You might think because of this that he made the story up to teach me, but that is not so. It is a true story from his own life, and when he returns from his travels he will tell it to you much better than I can.  On a very clear day go and stand at the top of the hill and look out to sea. On the far horizon, if the air is clear enough, you will see a thin grey line. This is the cloud that covers the old land, the land that my great-grandparents left to come here. In that land the sun almost never breaks through the cloud to shine on the land. The cloud moves slowly, always east to west, and when it drops rain it is hard and hea...

Three and a half years

Well after my recent attempt to make a biblically informed prediction I'm a little trepidatious to embark on more. BJ is not the new PM of Brittain so that part of my analysis was clearly wrong, however Brexit happened and the feeling of flux in the waters of our little universe still seems eschatologically strong, so I may just indulge in a bit more of the same. Interpretation belongs to God of course, but I don't have a problem with making informed speculations as long as everyone knows that they are speculations and feel free to draw their own conclusions.  Passages of Daniel and of Revelation are still vividly resonating in my mind with world events so I am jotting down a few thoughts here to get them out, as it were.. In the past I found the description of the final incarnation of the King of the North at the end of Daniel chapter 11 strangely similar to the two Small horns of chapters 7 and 8, to the point of wondering whether we (that is, Jehovah's witnesses) had got...

The Prisoners' Wall (the entire novel 2006)

The Prisoners’ Wall -  b y Sam Hollands       Introduction There had been war for nearly two thousand years. As well as three major continental wars there had been countless civil wars, land wars, sea wars, the war of vanity,  and  the prolonged and terrifying war of technology. The psychological dissonance of conflict had crept with varying degrees of subtlety into every home. War constituted the strongest thread of meaning for two thousand years. One of the poets of this world had described these two millennia as a “love affair with mortality” and the people loved him for pulling off that age-old trick of supplying a glib phrase to allow everyone to be wry and wise about something truly and incomprehensibly terrible.   Then mankind achieved peace. Worldwide unity of purpose, an end to the unsightly carnage that had been their heritage for so many jarring years. It had begun with a piece of legislation called “The Universal Bill of Conservation” which...