Topple testing casualties

Apparently two people have been injured testing the stability and scurity of gravestones in a country churchyard. Previously insurance companies have issued guidelines to country churches, insisting that they "topple test" gravestones to see whether or not they might fall over and injure someone. If you can raise yourself from a kneeling to a standing position while supporting yourself on said gravestone, without it falling over, you can be said to have topple tesed it to the satisfaction of your insurers. Unfortunately, it seems that these two hapless souls misjudged the monument, and have suffered the consequences.

These are the first instances of topple testing injuries. Prior to the introduction of these new health and safety advice there were no recorded instances of injuries from falling headstones.

Lest we forget

I don't do the whole Remembrance thing these days; the flags and the bugles and stuff, I mean. I prefer an early Holy Communion and away out of it. After said early HC I drove over the hills the long, and pretty, way, avoiding town. I headed west, and as the time reached 10.50am felt compelled to pull over. I stopped in a lay-by and looked and listened; bright winter sunshine, a dog barking, birds, cars passing on the road. I set off again at 11.05am. I stopped at the big store, where a car boot sale was in full swing; lots of people, the shop full, not a poppy in sight. I didn't want the band and the wreaths, and I certainly didn't want the small children marched from their classrooms during the past week and given Union flags to wave and their pictures in the paper. But I didn't want that either.

Long withdrawing roar

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the fields of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Don Cupitt in "Sea of Faith" writes thus:

Matthew Arnold published “Dover Beach” in 1867, in his last collection of poems. It expressed the sense, common at the time, that the ancient supernatural world of gods and spirits which had surrounded mankind since the first dawn of consciousness was at last inexorably slipping away … From now on thinking Christians would either be revisionists of some kind, or else be consciously in a dissenting minority.

Arnold himself was a revisionist, for after turning away from poetry he published in the 1870s four books which would now be called radical theology. But he was primarily a thinker. In the English manner, he was a mixture of poet and shopkeeper, combining an intuitive, imaginative mind with a sharp sense of social reality.