About Me
Hi. My name's Tony. I'm a retired parish priest (C of E), retired in 2016, now living in a pleasant market town in Oxfordshire.
I've been blogging since the early 2000s, though I've kept journals or diaries, and thought of myself as a writer, for much longer. When I was vicar of a church in Oxford, I was keen to have a church website, but reluctant to ask anyone else to set it up. I wanted to learn how to do it myself. The resulting website was primitive, it was basic, it wasn't pretty: but it taught me how to do HTML, CSS, and even a bit of Javascript. The morning after I finally put it up on the server I had an email from a person in Australia: “I really liked the look of your lovely church. Would it be possible for me and my fiancée to be married there?” The World Wide Web was smaller in those days...
Being locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic has given me an opportunity to pursue so many of the things that I love. Basically they're all about learning life-long, and creating. So they include
- learning Welsh with Duolingo (did I mention that I love language and languages?)
- recording myself reading some of my best loved poems and posting them on YouTube
- growing a beard. I've had one on and off for over 45 years, but this is the longest I've ever grown it
- revising one of the short novels I wrote for NaNoWriMo and publishing it as a Kindle e-book. You can buy it here
- finally tackling N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God
- exploring a new blog platform — yes, this one
If you want to know more about what I love and value most, you can read it (and watch me reading it) on this post.
And you can still read my old WordPress blog — for now — Godspelled at WordPress.