麻豆约拍

From Rev鈥檇 Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

Did that woodpecker giving a weasel an airborne piggy-back appear on your timeline this week? It did on mine, about forty times, the first from a friend who can鈥檛 look at pictures of bacteria without going squee! So you imagine what he made of this heartwarming picture of two forest friends having a lovely time in the frolicsome spring.

鈥淵eah, right鈥�, was my reply: this isn鈥檛 Playschool it鈥檚 Masterchef. And indeed it transpired that the weasel was actually trying to eat the woodpecker and pounced on it as it would a rabbit or a vole and that鈥檚 how it got airborne. But lest you suffer distress, the woodpecker managed to shake off its ferocious passenger and both lived to see another day.

We do it all the time 鈥� look at nature, red in tooth and claw, and instead of seeing the impersonal forces of predation at work see 鈥楾ales from the Riverbank鈥� or 鈥楳rs Tiggywinkle鈥�.

I thought of this on Ash Wednesday, when we marked our foreheads with a smudgy cross at the beginning of Lent. We stand in the cross鈥檚 shadow until Easter, reflecting on the inhumanity we inflict, so relentlessly, on one another. The irony is that, out and about, the cross has become not a symbol of human suffering but a piece of costume jewelry, not exactly squee, but inoffensive. There are occasional surprising reminders of its real purpose 鈥� (spoiler alert) I can鈥檛 watch Ripley鈥檚 sacrificial death, falling into the fiery pit at the end of Aliens 3, her arms outstretched, without thinking of the crucifixion. 聽

But that鈥檚 an exception: normally we overlay the dark unsettling things that trouble us with something cosier and easier, because we can鈥檛 always live in harsh reality.

Lent reminds us that harsh reality can be less obliging.

But that鈥檚 a bit down, so I鈥檒l end with a joke so bad you鈥檒l probably feel worse: Chris, how can you tell a weasel from a stoat? A weasel鈥檚 weasily identified, but a stoat鈥檚 stoatally different.

I鈥檒l get my cassock.