St Oswald's cross and body

 

Preaching on St Aidan's Day at the end of last month, I drew attention to the picture of St Oswald in one of Grimsby Minster's stained glass windows.  He is standing with the cross he raised on the Heavenfield battle field.  A week or so later, staying with friends in Northumberland, they took me to revisit the battlefield site, where this cross now stands.  I was struck by seeing it twice.  

We also stopped at the shrine of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral where St Oswald's head is likely to be the one buried in the same grave.  

A few weeks earlier a different friend had helped me renotice that a small cluster of churches at the northern end of Lincolnshire's Isle of Axholme are dedicated in St Oswald's name.  We wondered whether perhaps his body (which was taken to Bardney Abbey in central Lincolnshire) might have rested there on the way, or perhaps, in the grisly story of his body parts, some now unrecorded relic belonged there for a time.

Uphill Lincoln today

 

The replica tank parked by the Cathedral, encountered when going uphill, was more explicable when the new sign had been unveiled by the time I went back downhill, although the information on the pair of signs (one old and one new) is pretty similar, so almost appear to be be there to promote their promoters.  Lincoln’s early twentieth century agricultural machinery industry had pioneered caterpillar tracks, which is what opened the way for the development of what secrecy initially labelled water tanks, a name which stuck.

And walking a little further, I found the rebranding of Bishop Gosseteste College / University finally visible at the beginning of a new academic year.  Sad as I am to lose the place of Grossteste in our landscape, I do realise that people not knowing how to spell and/or pronounce Grosseteste can't have been a good marketing feature, and the 'Nottingham Trent' or 'Leeds Beckett' model of name alreday existed (even though the latter has already taken the 'LBU' brand).

Campaign choices

 

The Daily Telegraph has discovered that if someone places a house in the name of a disabled child (so that the child can have a secure home for life) it nevertheless counts as still being the parents property for some tax purposes.  They even discovered an example of a parent who didn’t realise this and had paid less tax than they should, although that person promised to pay the extra tax as soon as being made aware of this.  What would that campaigning newspaper do next?  Presumably it would put a lot of effort into a campaign to have this law changed?