Bradford North Circuit

Whither next? I was sitting enjoying the sunshine and breeze of a summer afternoon, and the view on the edge of rolling countryside, when a couple out on a walk stopped nearby and the man stared at his mobile phone on which he apparently had a map. Eventually, they inclined hesitantly towards a choice of direction, and then they spotted me. “We’re looking for the station,” he said. I was on home ground and certainly knew the way, several, in fact, but it would have been well-nigh impossible to give clear enough directions by any of them, so, as it was on my route home anyway, I said, “I’ll show you.” And I walked with them there, taking them by interesting footpaths they would never have found on their own, leaving them gratefully on the platform studying timetables. There’s an awful lot of us staring at maps in one form or another at the moment, wondering about the way forward. This is true for all the Churches in the Circuit, pondering plans for growth or decline and how to ...