We returned from 12 days in the US this morning. The weather was perfect: sunny and cool. No rain. Vermont was lovely in late autumn, enough red left on the maples. Manhattan was Manhattan.

Everything there is about present and future. We come back to this island off an island off the edge of a continent that doesn’t matter any more, to be confronted in national and church press by same old, same old squabbles. It’s all about the past here. People are still perseverating about what Christians should and shouldn’t do with their genitals, and primates are pontificating about perceptions of parochial attitudes. It seems that ‘sex and sectarianism’ is now the strapline for the Irish church.

It’s good to see that it’s got its priorities right.