Wulf's Webden

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6 April 2026
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Shifted Butt

After lots of iterations, we still haven’t got supplying water to the butt at the far end of the garden working well. The pipe overflow that ensures any excess rainwater gets to the canal without slowly draining all the way through the garden and my diverter can reduce the rate at which the first water butts get fed but I think the run is too long for a regular hosepipe and the far one wasn’t getting filled even in the wet months earlier this year.

Today we implemented a more radical solution and shifted that large butt up next to the polytunnel near the other ones. We’ve still got figure out how we are going to link the two together but the job should be a lot easier now that there is about a 50cm gap rather than a 15m one between them.

5 April 2026
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Sonrise 2026

Each Easter many groups of churches organise early morning services, frequently making use of the son-rise / sunrise pun. The Soar valley area in which Loughborough sits is one of them with a gathering on top of Beacon Hill which Jane and I try to attend. It always starts at 6:30am which was pretty much perfect timing for the official sunrise time (6:32am when I looked it up last night) and, with clear skies, we got a wonderful view of the burning ball of the sun rising up and giving an increasingly clear light.

The only downside is that, with an Easter morning service in the regular slot at church, hosting a friend for dinner and other things, the early morning definitely starts to weigh in on wakefulness later in the day. However, while we can manage to get there, we’ll help keep up the tradition, even when the timing of Easter means it starts in darkness or the weather means that the view is just a sea of fog!

4 April 2026
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Sing Around Songs – 4 April 2026

It was another well-attended session today so just two songs from me, both on ukulele. Firstly, I did a version of the piece I duetted on with my friend, Katie, at last week’s concert: Dance Me to the End of Love. I pushed this one from F minor to G minor both for chords which were more resonant on the ukulele and to get the vocal range where I could project better.

I was in pole position so started both halves of the gathering but, just before the break, Carolyn had read a poem inspired by the space mission Artemis that is currently underway so I decided to go with Rocket Man as my second piece. I’m currently reading Bernie Taupin’s autobiography (he wrote the words and Elton John wrote the music) and it is one of those tomes that makes me glad I never became a rock star… but this is another fantastic song.

3 April 2026
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Hot. Cross. Buns.

Until I got to dinner this evening, the only thing I’d eaten all day was hot cross buns. A bun (rather too hot, straight out of the oven) for breakfast, another for elevenses, a couple for lunch and about a quarter of a commercial bun after this afternoon’s reflective service at church. That isn’t a recommended diet and I did have a proper dinner later but it is the day for hot cross buns.

It did get me musing on those words. I realised that I tend to think of them as “hotcrossbuns”, as if it were a single word. However, the truth is that they are buns, with a cross on them (traditionally only the Good Friday batch) that are often served hot (and ideally slathered with salty butter). The one I had for supper tonight wasn’t hot so I probably should have just called that a “cross bun”. Each of the words should be bringing something to the table, otherwise it just becomes a portmanteaux, empty of meaning.

2 April 2026
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Bun Dough

We’ve had a couple of unadorned practise batches recently but it is time to go and put the dough on. Tomorrow is Good Friday, which means all sorts of things but one of our traditions is that it is the day of the year for baking buns and putting the crosses on them. All those new-fangled flavour combinations need not apply!

1 April 2026
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Good Wednesday?

Most churches follow a liturgical calendar around Easter that has the Last Supper on “Maundy Thursday” (where we get our mandatum to love and serve each other), Jesus being arrested and tried overnight, crucified on “Good Friday”, put in a borrowed grave before the Sabbath and resurrected before dawn on “Easter Sunday”. It is a well worn route but some wonder how the time from before sundown on Friday to before sunrise on Sunday can qualify as three days and three nights in “the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). Unsurprisingly, these questions rise to the fore online at this time of year – this morning, I’ve read a blog post on the chronology of Holy Week and watched a video arguing for supper on Tuesday, death on Wednesday and a three day gap incorporating both a regular Saturday Sabbath but also a special annual Sabbath on the Thursday:

Note that the video is provided by an organisation linked with a church group somewhat on the fringe of traditional Christianity and it doesn’t reference some of key assertions, such as the existence of a “high day” sabbath as well as a regular one. That makes me a little cautious about accepting it as “gospel”.

Speaking of which, I’ve taken time to re-read the relevant passages from all four canonical gospels: Matthew 27:51-28:8; Mark 15:42-16:8; Luke 23:50-24:12; John 19:38-20:10. That doesn’t magically make things clearer. For example, it is clear that Jesus was laid in a tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea on the evening of the day he was crucified and that the Pharisees go to see Pilate on the next day, “the one after the preparation”. Wouldn’t those both be Sabbath activities under either the traditional or the “two Sabbath” chronology?

I spent a bit of time to track down one further passage, John 9:1-41. In that one Jesus gives sight to man who was born blind. Unlike most of the healing miracles, we see a lot of follow up on this one, including an attempted investigation by the Pharisees. They claim they want to know how it was done but “he put mud on my eyes, I washed and now I can see” doesn’t satisfy them. It is almost comedic how they make a futile effort to discredit what has clearly happened while the healed man is resolute in his gratitude to the one who healed him. It makes me reflect that it doesn’t benefit me in the slightest if I put hours into studying the chronology of Holy Week if I’m not living in the light that Jesus has died for my sins, resurrected and now sits in heaven as King of kings, Lord and Saviour.

31 March 2026
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The Bells

One of my favourite YouTubers was a gentleman called Tom Scott. For a number of years he put out frequent, high-quality videos on all sorts of interesting things – often quite niche topics but ones that often appealed to me. Then he declared that he needed to take a break and so he did. I’ve seen him online once or twice recently as a guest on videos by various friends and collaborators of his but this afternoon was his first proper release in a new series he is embarking on where he visits each county in the UK.

You can imagine my delight when he decided to kick off not just in Leicestershire but in Loughborough. Taylors of Loughborough is the UKs only remaining bell foundry and that was where he decided to begin. Watch the video below for an informative video on the casting of bells:

30 March 2026
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Footnotes Needed?

I probably don’t need to plaster my blog with too many footnotes. It should be fairly obvious that I’m mainly offering my own opinions and you can make your own judgement on what they are worth. However, I was having a bit of a fruitless hunt for footnotes elsewhere this afternoon which brought the topic to mind.

A friend posted his Palm Sunday sermon text (see Crater Life) and I was intrigued by the idea he mentioned that, at the same time Jesus was riding in on a donkey, the Roman governor was riding in on a warhorse on the opposite side of the city. I should note that is more of an opening gambit than the thrust of Pete’s message but it is a compelling idea. However, having mentioned it to some friends this afternoon and then having felt the need to dig into it a bit more, I’m not sure it is true.

His source was a book from 20 years ago by scholars Borg and Crossan called The Last Week. I don’t know if they came up with the idea but they seem to have been influential in propagating it and AI-supported searches (for what they are worth) suggested it is now the majority view among scholars. However, I couldn’t find any proper references to historical sources backing it up. What I did find was a detailed (and footnoted) blog post from The City Gate, published in 2016. That suggests it is a key idea opening the first chapter but makes the accusation that “…Borg and Crossan provide no reference to any source concerning an imperial procession the very day that Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey.” It also notes other points which make me inclined to treat their ideas cautiously – for example, they seem to hold to the idea that even Mark’s gospel (which they put as the first to be written) wasn’t authored until about 70 idea (which, if true, would devalue them as eyewitness accounts). Another scholar, Luke Timothy Johnson is quoted as suggesting: “The important thing for Borg is that ‘scholarship’ has disqualified the image of Jesus held by traditional faith.” (The Real Jesus. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996) which would set them as teachers I would put much stock in.

I did do a bit of independent research but the nearest I could come to Imperial processions was Josephus (a 1st century Jewish-Roman historian widely regarded as a good source for the period) mentioning that Roman soldiers put on a strong display of strength around the temple area at the time of festivals (“.. they always were armed, and kept guard at the festivals, to prevent any innovation which the multitude thus gathered together might make” – Jewish Wars 2.224). Nobody was saying there wasn’t a strong Roman military presence in Jerusalem – the gospels all make this clear themselves – but this is no evidence at all for an annual parade.

The average sermon is not an academic exercise but sadly it isn’t uncommon for them to have lots of claims with little foundation, not just as attention-grabbing openers but sprinkled throughout. If nothing else, that is a message I need to keep to heart myself!

29 March 2026
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Picture Rail

I had thought I might have a fairly relaxed Sunday afternoon but I ended up spending most of it putting up a picture rail on a couple of walls in the living room. We got the wood a few weeks ago and I used my router to cut a 45° cleat at the top and a rounded profile on the bottom but today was the more challenging task of fixing the pieces to the wall. All done now and, once the filler over the screw holes has dried and been sanded down, it will just take a little bit of painting and all will be ready to start putting artwork back on the walls in a way that is more flexible than just relying on a couple of hooks that were formerly in place.

Of course, the fact that the clocks sprang forward this morning and we are now in British Summer Time means the evening is still light… but I’m going to resist the temptation to go out and potter around in the garden.

28 March 2026
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Big Instruments

The only downside of bass instruments is that they tend to be on the large size. For tonight’s Training Band gig, I had both my tuba and double bass to tote around! All went pretty well though. I managed to get a nice resonance for most of my tuba playing and although one riff didn’t quite drop from my fingers in the first duet song I did, we took off pretty well in I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.