There was a headline on this column ten years ago in which I speculated 'that I was for the high jump, but not in the Olympics. (It was an Olympic year.) Happily I have avoided the high jump ever since, but it seems to be on the way at a time I can barely walk, never mind jump.
The Diocesan changes will probably be announced before those few words are published.

As I listened to reports of the Labour Party's most recent Conference in Galway, my mind wandered back to a 1970's conference of theirs in Salthill's Leisureland, outside of which I was the lone picketer.
There was a while of an evening in which Charlie Bird and myself manned the entrance, he as a journalist, me as a maverick priest.
Inside Dr. Noel Browne waxed lyrical about the evils of coalition government as far as the party was concerned.
One of his more damning phrases referred to ministers being "shoehorned into the back of ministerial mercedes cars."
Some years earlier it had been proclaimed that: "the '70s will be socialist" while cynics said it would not happen until "the socialists were 70."

I feel as if I am rounding the last bend in the race of life. There are a couple of more jumps left, but at this stage I am not worried about falling.
I am not in this to win, just to finish the course. Even if I have to be carried across the line I intend to get there, to at least get as far as I can.
I have had a good innings. Three score and four. When the Beatles first sang "When I'm sixty-four" I was only a young fellow, a couple of years younger than themselves.
Sixty-four seemed a terribly long way away, so far away it was almost unreal. John and George didn't make it, unfortunately, but for those who did it's an achievement in itself. 
Saint Paul used the example of life as a race on a number of occasions.