*WORCESTER on the edge… more bulletins from the frontline.

This time, it’s the grossly unpleasant woman who went crazy after my wife parked outside her house.

Planks like her need to know the law. No one has the legal right to claim that part of the public highway immediately in front of their home as being ‘theirs.’ This applies even if there is a residents’ parking scheme in force.

In this case, no such restrictions applied.

There are many people in Worcester who don’t have the cranial capacity to grasp this.

Perhaps they will be able to understand my timely reminder.

*I THUMBED through a copy of Stephen Dawkins’s great hymn to the secular The God Delusion.

I must say that for a scientist, his world is an extremely cut-and-dried place. And here’s me thinking that boffins had open minds. Of course, Dawkins – like his fellow travellers, the humanists – have much more in common with religious fundamentalism than they either realise or would care to admit.

There is no place for heretics in their brave new world. No burnings to be sure, but it’s the same kind of messianic anger.

*INSCRIPTIONS on gravestones make for fascinating reading.

All human life is there, if you’ll pardon the apparent contradiction.

This summer, I went on a pilgrim’s progress with my wife, visiting a number of villages where both sets of ancestors once lived.

All manner of dramas lay concealed by lichens and the years… the parents whose children all died in infancy, the family wiped out by some awful disease that had come from nowhere.

Each stone was like the cover of a book yet to be read.

*I HAD two fathers. One was linked by blood and thought all knowledge came from books.

The other – a farm labourer over the road – believed that nothing was worth knowing unless it had practical use.

Looking back, I see merit in both philosophies. But today, a greater emphasis is placed in the corridors of academia rather than the valley of the natural world and that is why an entire body of wisdom is being lost.