The Bremen Bod Blog

  If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere Seamus Heaney I stumbled across an incredibly moving sight today; Ribbons tied to the railings outside Old Gourock Parish Church, some Parishioners had even left beautiful little messages of remembrance for loved ones who’ve passed on during the year. This made me think about how difficult a year it’s been for everyone and just how important these structures are to the communities to whom they belong. So much so that there’s a right good chance my head might just explode if I hear one more fellow Christian say ‘Well Ross, you know, Churches are people not buildings’, in response to the ongoing restrictions on large public gatherings.  Someone should have told our poor forefathers whose money and sweat literally built our places of worship that they needn’t have bothered because communal worship would eventually become an ‘outdated model’.   Rather, when I look at an old parish Church I reflect upon the often repeated idea of great Cat

  I belong to a lost tribe; Working class Scottish Catholic Socialists who hugely admire our Queen and don’t see much contradiction between being both monarchists and socialists for reasons too numerous to go into here. Other than to say, we’ve always known that having an un-elected family as head of state offers ordinary people protection against totalitarianism and that God Save the King was sung at Peterloo by those assembled in 1819. As such, I’ve greatly enjoyed watching the recent series ‘The Crown’ which successfully manages to intertwine the story of Britain’s social history with the tale of Queen Elizabeth’s long and glorious reign.      Despite the dramatic embellishments and liberties which have been taken with the regards to the reality of historical events, The Crown still manages to convey the essence of our relationship with the Royal Family over the last 70 years and their place in our lives. For example, the (slightly inaccurate) episode concerning Michael Fagan’s atte

"Afore grind and woe, Toiled away memory, God’s beloved was I." Haiku for Henri by Ross Ahlfeld Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to Mass on Sunday; it was my own fault since I left it far too late to book a space via Eventbrite and all the parishes nearby in my diocese were all booked out. As a result I ended up ‘attending’ a live streamed Mass online from another diocese. Out of charity I won’t name the Church  but I didn’t take too  much comfort from the homily if I’m being honest.   The basic jist of the sermon was that people who pursue a career and money are “dying alone with nobody to look after them because they’d failed to preserve and cherish relationships with family ties and friendships”. I found this to be especially harsh on the vast majority of socially isolated and lonely elderly people who die alone because of our own lack of neighbourliness and because of the loveless and individualistic society which we ourselves have created. A lonely death is our sin no

  ‘The chearfu supper done, wi serious face, They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; The sire turns o'er, wi patriarchal grace, The big ha'-Bible, ance his father's pride.’ The Cotter’s Saturday Night by Robert Burns Dear Friends, Did you know that in the 1960’s and 70’s, several of the baddies in pro-wrestling had Germanic names, wrestlers like Kurt Von Hess or Karl Steiner. Meanwhile here in the UK we had our own Teutonic villain called Hans Streiger who disappointingly, wasn’t an Anglo-German of mid-19th Century Sugar-baker stock like my lot, he was actually the less sinister Clarke Mellor from New Mills in Derbyshire. In 1973 at a wrestling match in the Hamilton Town House in South Lanarkshire, Streiger (or Mellor) was defeated by the equally exotically named ‘Billy Two Rivers’ but unlike Hans Streiger, Billy Two Rivers wasn’t playing a character. No, Billy Two Rivers was an authentic Mohawk person of First Nation heritage. Billy Two Rivers is a fascinat

  Till the little ones weary No more can be merry The sun does descend, And our sports have an end: Round the laps of their mothers, Many sisters and brothers, Like birds in their nest, Are ready for rest; And sport no more seen, On the darkening Green.   The Echoing Green by William Blake   Dear Friends, Even as a Catholic, I can honestly say I’ve never taken much spiritual growth from hardship or found any virtue in the idea of offering up our sufferings. Sure, I get that we should all carry our crosses and I understand that the meaning of our existence isn’t to be found in comfort. Yet, I often think on the words of Dorothy Day who described the goal of Catholic Worker as trying to create a society where it ‘is easier for people to be good’. Even when Dorothy embraced voluntary poverty for herself, she still understood that living was meant to be joyful. Dorothy goes onto say that ‘life wasn’t meant to be so hard, God never intended for there to be so m

  For me, the blackest mark against the current SNP administration remains the destruction of vocational education and the closure of regional Colleges and courses across Scotland, in favour of maintaining free University education. So much for devolution and subsidiarity.   This is a ‘sair yin’ for me, not just because my brother was made redundant from his job as a lecturer a few years back but also because I benefited from a ground breaking course in Graphic Art and Design at the James Watt College in Greenock back in the 1990’s. I was one of the first students in Scotland to go straight into an apprenticeship within a Glasgow Design House on completion of a four year Advanced Diploma. The quality of this course was, in no small part, down to the lecturers who taught us a wide range of theory, typography and traditional art and craft alongside modem graphic design techniques. For example, in the morning you could be making woodcut prints and in the afterno

  "To all that are faithful under His banner, Jesus wears a crown in the Kingdom of Heaven." I Bob Un Sy'n Ffyddlon by Henry Lloyd (1870 - 1946)   I don’t have any strong feelings either way about the prospect of another Indyref but I do feel that a more accurate name for ‘All Under One Banner’ would perhaps be ‘All Under Lots of Banners’. Sure, it’s not as catchy but it is factually accurate. For example, do you recall the hullabaloo over some of the banners on display at the last Independence march in Glasgow before lockdown? The demo now seems like a life time ago but you may recall that more than a few folks on social media took exception to banners displaying messages such as ‘Tories Out’ and ‘Tory Scum’ etc. Others had then gone on to argue that the entire Independence Movement was (by association) intolerant and hateful towards Tories in Scotland. This issue is of course one of the problems which comes with building a broad mass movement