Another great time at the Beeb today – once again my dulcet tones will be sounding sonorously from your radio in the near future.  No crack-of-dawn start for the recording this time – all comfortably pre-recorded at a nice sensible daylight hour – but for the actual broadcast, you’ll have to be listening at 5:45am on Radio 4  (I know! – who’s going to hear that?!).  I am your one-minute-and-fifty-second Prayer For The Day this Saturday (16th) and then every day next week (18th-22nd).

Thank goodness for being able to catch up on iPlayer, eh?

For those of you for whom Radio is just a high-tech modern gadget and you can’t see what’s wrong with a good old proper book (hi Susan!), the Dock Book Group is meeting again on Saturday 30th July at 9:30am in the Premier Inn coffee lounge.

We’ve been getting our teeth into some fascinating books over the last couple of meetings – Rob Bell’s Love Wins and Tim Keller’s Reason For God both provoked passionate discussion and much debate, and both had their admirers and detractors.  Another thing both books shared in common (weirdly, since they are poles apart in so many ways) was a propensity to quote Belfast’s own C.S.Lewis at great length – especially his masterwork Mere Christianity.  So we thought it was high time that Book Group went back to the source and read this classic, which has been foundational for so many people.

Mere Christianity is nice and short (though don’t be fooled – it’s short but it’s deep!) and has been around long enough that you’re quite likely to find a second-hand copy without too much trouble.  If not, any good book shop should be able to point you in the right direction – or tread the well-worn path to Amazon, where you can get it as a book, an audiobook, a journal, a Kindle edition, or as a second-hand paperback for 1p!

And so to TV… every year we try to resist it, but is anyone else helplessly addicted to The Apprentice as the final approaches on Sunday night?  And just to add to the nail-bitingness, there’s a vague Titanic Quarter connection – Jim’s sister works in the TQ!  (Told you it was vague…)  Although I have to confess that I’m putting patriotism aside and rooting for Tom, the slightly mad inventor.  He has somehow managed the unique trick of surviving the last 11 weeks of cut-throat competition while remaining friendly, approachable, funny and decent.  I’m not sure if that counts for much in Alan Sugar’s world, but – whether he survives the final cull or not – Tom gets the Dock thumbs-up for keeping his integrity in a dog-eat-dog world.  (And for inventing the ‘Emergency Biscuit’.)

Chris