Muxworthy's Musings

Earlier this year my Dad passed away and as I get older I realise how the seemingly insignificant things can evoke a memory and make me smile. One such occasion was the other day when I was at work, and walked past the toolbox of a workman who was doing some maintenance. There, amongst all the tools was a battered Golden Virginia tobacco tin – Dad used to keep various drill-bits in the same sort of tin and all marked up for the type of drill that it contained. It made me smile and for a moment I remembered all those times when I had to help him and be sent to get some tool or other. Usually, I had no idea of what he was talking about or where it was apart from ‘On the left of the vice in the shed!’ This narrowed it down to several square feet and if I hadn’t found it within three minutes he’d come tell me off, pick it up and walk out, with me grudgingly trailing behind him. The thing is that never once did he sit down and explain what exactly all these tools etc did. I was expected t...

On the day the Queen passed away my wife made a very pointed observation that evening when we were sitting watching events unfold in front the TV. It was by now late evening and getting dark and we saw the crowds milling around outside Buckingham Palace and Penny turned to me and said, ‘They are wandering around seemingly lost and hopeless like that verse in the Bible.’ It was in verse thirty-six of Matthew chapter nine where it says: When he (Jesus) saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. I imagine a lot of us have seen or even been in that state where we have experienced a loss or ending of something in our lives, and we are left wandering about asking ‘What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now?’ For most of us reading this we have known no other monarch other than Elizabeth II and we have now seen that she like the rest of us was mortal after all. The work...

  In the world outside the church of Christ the following verse is possibly the most often misquoted verse of scripture and that is where Paul writes in chapter six of his first letter to Timothy the following words: ‘For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.’ What we usually hear quoted is that ‘money is the root of all evil.’ This has really been something I have been reminded of the past few weeks and what really moved me to write this was something I saw in a shop the other day. As I write this we are coming to the end of the August of 2022 and what I saw was a display for Halloween related gifts with the words ‘Happy Halloween.’ Not only is it well over two months away, but also how on earth can you use the word ‘Happy’ in conjunction with what is a satanic festival. If you are one of those people who are going to say that it is a harmless bit of fun fo...

Hiraeth (Here-eyeth) is one of those words in Welsh that doesn’t have a specific equivalent translation into English. The nearest you can get is ‘Longing for ones home’ and frankly ‘Home-sickness’ really doesn’t come up to scratch. An example I remember being told of was an aunty of mine who had married and moved to the outskirts of London in the 1930’s and remained there for the rest of her life. When she was feeling particularly down and missing Wales she used to sit and watch the coaches going between London and Swansea on the off chance of seeing somebody she knew. Funnily enough this was something that I thought I was now immune from having now passed the point in time where I have lived in England longer than I ever lived in Wales. That was however until we went on holiday to South Wales this summer. We stayed on the edge of the Black Mountains and over the space of one week took in some of the most beautiful scenery the UK has to offer. To think this is the same scenery I gr...

There is some truth in the saying ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.’  When I first met my wife Penny she was working as the events coordinator at St Pauls Cathedral in London (you might have heard of it – big Wren building with a dome!). This in turn allowed me the privilege of going to some of the events she had organised as well as attending other functions. I will not bore you with a list, but more than a few of them involved royalty and the great and good of this land. I’ll be honest with you here and tell you that my upbringing was ordinary, the comprehensive school I attended supplied more people to be tried in the justice system than it ever did Oxbridge graduates. Consequently, I grew up with a that mindset people from Wales are sometimes accused of and that I was not good enough. Despite this, up to this moment in time I have to say the good has outweighed the bad, despite it not feeling like that from time to time. It was this skewed mindset that dogged me whe...

We seem to now live in a world where everyone is distracted in some way shape or form. How many of us have laughed at seeing a person walk into something whilst absorbed by their phone screen – the irony being that we have more than likely viewed it on our phone screen! There is also a dark side to this when we hear of ‘Distraction Crimes’ where a smooth-talking con-artist keeps somebody at the front door whilst their associate gets into the house and helps themselves. When I began my training as a train driver one of the first things we were warned about was the danger of distractions. The importance of this was brought home to me in the summer of 2017 when there was a derailment at Waterloo. I was bringing a train into Waterloo, and we had been delayed and only had a vague idea of what might have happened. You can imagine my surprise when the sight of a train leaning to one side loomed into view on the line immediately to my right and milling around it were a small army of orange c...

My Dad used to be a pipe smoker and gave it up after having a bad chest cold. The one thing that I recall quite clearly was the tobacco he used, and I recall the three varieties he favoured, there was Condor Long Cut, Condor Ready Rubbed and Clan – mainly because he sent me to the shop to get them (despite me being well underage). He always kept it in a leather pouch that was down the side of his seat in the front room. For some bizarre reason I occasionally took to opening the pouch up and smelling the contents inside and I must admit the aroma was something I found quite nice. Then one day I must have taken leave of my senses, probably after hearing that people chewed tobacco. I reasoned that if people chewed it and it smelt nice then it would probably taste nice too. For once the fact that we have a sense of smell to tell us whether something is fit to put in your mouth proved wrong! I picked out some of the tobacco and placed it in my mouth and began to chew! Well, the chewing didn...

2 Corinthians 1 v3-11: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might...

I'll be honest I am not the biggest fan of Christmas for me as somebody who is Neuro-Distinct it is just complete sensory overload and it leaves me feeling drained. That's one of the reasons I always insisted on a book as a present so I could escape the whole thing once I'd unwrapped it. Working as I do in a retail environment ( also see the word 'Torment') has made me realise more and more how the reason for the season - the incarnation of Jesus, has been well and truly lost in the western world. Where else you can find people celebrating the season of goodwill by getting so drunk they can't recall a single thing or taking part in the pre-holiday war-game that is shopping. There are moments when I honestly wonder if when presented the truth of Christ's coming most people would turn their noses up at it as if it were an over-boiled sprout. For some perhaps the Saviour gets a dusting down once a year like the artificial tree in the form of the annual visit to...

I once heard a joke about a rather disreputable individual who died (certainly not the person in the picture above) The person who was asked to give the eulogy knew full well the character of the man and was suitably wracked with dread as culture dictated that he not only tell the truth about the deceased but also say something positive. Telling the truth was not going to be a problem but saying something positive was going to be a big ask. So come the funeral this is what he said: ‘As many of you know Mr Robbins could not be described as a man of a clean character. He treated his family terribly, on reaching eighteen he threw each of his children out onto the street to earn their living with only the clothes on their back. In his business dealings he had no care for those he ripped off. In addition to this he had numerous affairs and even more children as a result, he treated his wife so abysmally it shortened her life, and he didn’t even bother to attend her funeral.’ He then paused ...

As you might know I hold a train driving licence. It was a very long hard slog to learn all the rules and regulations and ultimately pass my test to be allowed out on my own to drive passenger trains. During the practical side of this training, I was trained to drive during the dreaded leaf fall season. Yes, there have been many derisory comments made about the fact that a mere lot of leaves can wreak havoc with trains. Well, it’s nothing new, even the Rev Awdry wrote a story about it in his Thomas the Tank Engine series called ‘James and the leaves.’ The thing is that you have the two surfaces of polished metal in the wheel and the rail and then you add to that a collection of wet leaves. As the train runs over them it naturally squashes them and leaves behind an invisible residue which caused the wheels to lose traction. Trains have safety systems (one akin to ABS on a car) to mitigate against this as well as sending out specialist trains being sent out to clean the rails. So, how...

  Introduction. Before I go any further let us first look at some of the names that we find in this passage:   First of all we have the Canaanite city of Ai (pronounced Ay-eye) the probable meaning of this is  ‘The Ruin’ which it later became. Secondly, we have Beth-Aven meaning house of idols/nothingness/iniquity/trouble. Now we come to Achan which again probably meant trouble, which is also the probable meaning of the Valley of Achor. So, as you can see there is an awful lot of trouble in this passage, and this was to be the case for the children of Israel and ultimately Achan. Following the destruction of Jericho, God forbade Israel to take anything whatsoever from that city for themselves. However, Achan thinks that this either doesn’t apply to him or he thinks that with all this loot lying around it won’t be missed. It’s funny how human nature never changes as we often reflect in the UK of the great community spirit that existed during the Blitz of 1940/41, wha...

Have you ever looked through a keyhole to see what is on the other side of a locked door? Some years ago, I was with a friend going around what is left of Swindon railway works. As some of you might know it was closed in 1986 with part of it being converted into a shopping outlet whilst another part now houses the Steam Museum. We came to one of the buildings that was separate from both the shops and the museum, but it had at some time been part of the old works as there were still rails going up to a big door. Naturally we were interested in what the building had been and more importantly what it was now being used for. It wasn’t long until we spied a keyhole to look through. The sight that met us was quite unexpected, it was filled with all sorts of old railway vans and wagons and other bit of old railway equipment that in some cases dated back to before World War Two. To this day I have no idea who it belonged to, but one thing was for sure we would have both dearly loved to have ...

The conversation went like this:  Customer:  ‘Can you help me; do you have any cantaloupe melons?’ Assistant:  ‘I’ll just check our stock to see if we have any.’ The assistant checked their electronic handset. ‘I’m sorry but we won’t have any until tomorrow morning.’  The reaction from the customer was not what the assistant expected. In fact the reaction was on a par with receiving news that a loved one had died. It wasn’t as though there weren’t any other varieties of melon available (there were several to say the least). No, it had to be cantaloupe and it had to be available now!  Yes, I was that assistant and other than the usual customer service bit; there was little else I could do. This left my mind to wander (not a good thing at the best of times). Were their family being held at gunpoint with the kidnappers demanding provision of a myriad of exotic fruit of which this melon was just one, in exchange for their liberty? Were they going to suffer unspeakab...

  One of the many words of wisdom my Dad has passed onto me was this: ‘Just remember son, civilisation is only skin deep.’ So, what did he mean by that? Basically, because of his study of various wars throughout the centuries what he meant was that the ugly side of human nature isn’t very far beneath the surface of each one of us. The book The Lord of the Flies by William Golding graphically illustrates this, and we don’t have to watch much reality TV these days to see those sorts of attitudes in the raw. For me, I have seen this manifest itself in so many ways, both in me personally and in the world we all inhabit. I was told of something that happened the other day at a petrol station during the latest panic for petrol which brought this home to me. There were a load of vehicles queued outside this petrol station, the drivers were getting angry and stressed with everyone and everything. However, the most insane part of this was that a petrol tanker arrived to make a deliver...

Proverbs 13 v12:  Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. I have just finished reading a book entitled The History of the Jews, it’s quite big book as it spans from Abram to the establishment of the state of Israel in the late 1940’s. One of the points the author makes early on is that outside of the Old Testament, Apocrypha and certain Jewish historians there is very little written history when compared with what we have for other civilisations of antiquity. The reason for this being the fact that because of the stateless nature of the Jews up until the 1940’s, added to the fact that because of persecution and being driven from various countries most history was learned orally with only the scriptures being written down. For me though the thing that comes through in this book is the fact that there have been many false messiahs in Jewish history, both before and after Jesus. This led me to consider the fact that when we look at the trial ...