Colin Brazier, Author at Catholic Herald

Colin Brazier

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August 11, 2020

The UK may have left the EU, but next month a little slice of England may edge that bit closer to Catholic Europe. Councillors from Hampshire, where I live, will deliberate on whether to ban lorries from driving in the county on a Sunday. If they do so, this part of southern England will join

On our loss of humility

August 03, 2020

Before her cancer really took hold, my late wife and I were planning to move our family to Scotland. It was a serious idea. We even got as far as making an offer on a house in the Scottish Borders. I looked to an old friend from Glasgow, as my role model. Aged 45, he

Moving the Lords to Yorkshire

July 27, 2020

My 17-year-old daughter, Agnes, had a question. “Where do you end up, if you keep going straight from here?” We were standing on a cliff overlooking the North Sea. “The Netherlands.” I said with conviction. And a certain middle-aged prejudice. Teenagers are cartographically challenged, aren’t they? Products of geography lessons denuded of the study of

Widowhood and the question of remarriage

July 20, 2020

After the death of my wife two years ago, I made no bones about how I felt. Including in print. There were things I felt needed to be said. In particular, I wanted to write about the eternal nature of Last Things and the changing nature of ceremonies and conventions which govern how we face

A sneak peak inside Gaddafi’s library

July 15, 2020

One of my colleagues at Sky News made the papers earlier this month. Deborah Haynes was talking to a presenter in the studio via Skype or Zoom when the “fourth wall” came crashing down. She was half way through an interview about Hong Kong, when her toddler came into view with a question of his

Cricket is a school for life

July 06, 2020

Test Match cricket returns to our screens this week. Colin Brazier considers faith in relation to the sport. There’s a theory in cricket that all wicket-keepers are slightly mad. It’s certainly true that batsmen are often more than a little bit superstitious: it’s the precarious nature of batting. With bowling, you get umpteen chances to

Horses for courses

July 02, 2020

Two years after his wife’s death, Colin Brazier has decided to fill the horse-shaped hole in his life. I made a decision this week which may cost me my life. A melodramatic observation if ever there was one. But not without a smudge of truth. My decision? To fill the horse-shaped hole that has been

A Father’s Guide to Widowhood

June 25, 2020

When your wife dies, leaving your children without a mother, there’s no rulebook. Occasionally TV makes me catch my breath. At the news channel where I work, I introduced a report this week about a Briton unfairly imprisoned in America and whose release has been delayed by coronavirus. The inmate was a devout Christian. A

Football: A fleeting love affair

June 19, 2020

Too often, football clubs seek to invest themselves with a spiritual significance they don’t warrant. I am a snob about football. One of those people who, like a reformed smoker, pretends it was never much fun and the cause of much harm. But the truth is that it was a massive part of my early

A nation of ‘onlies’?

June 04, 2020

“….Every only child is a monster, albeit an articulate and well-socialised monster, hypervigilant when it comes to parental moods, driven to excel in order to reap praise and rewards, but ever standing in unhappy, unstable relation to authority and to peers with siblings. What is the mass psychology of a generation, or a nation, of

Coronavirus and the case for siblings

May 31, 2020

The question of “if kids” and “how many” is often airbrushed from an increasingly polarised debate. Has living through lockdown been easier for children with a brother or sister? This isn’t the methodology of advanced social science, but I’ve just walked through the house and put that question to the first child I came across.

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