Flora Watkins, Author at Catholic Herald

Flora Watkins

Children at Mass: Why are some people so intolerant?

April 04, 2024

I have just stomped in from an otherwise lovely day celebrating our eldest child reaching double figures. Children being rather more sophisticated today than they were in the 1980s – when the local Happy Eater represented the acme of fine dining for a 10-year-old – my son had requested lunch at our provincial branch of

Everything in London has changed, except the familiar scents of the Oratory

March 23, 2024

It has taken two-and-a-half years, but I have finally crossed the Rubicon and feel a stranger in the city that was home for more than two decades. In London for a book launch last month, it became horribly apparent that things had moved on without me. Never a Pret a Manger where I left one.

Yoga: What’s the problem with a bit of Downward Dog?

February 20, 2024

During the mid-2000s, there was a brief publishing trend for feel-good novels with folksy titles: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. They’d pop up as recommendations on Richard and Judy’s Book Club and turn the authors into overnight best-sellers. I’m late to the party, but I do think

Like Waugh after the new liturgy, am I finding it hard to get through the door at Mass?

January 06, 2024

I was once told that Evelyn Waugh bought Combe Florey, his house in Somerset, because it was sufficiently far from a Catholic church for him to be excused attending the post-Vatican II Mass he so despised. Sadly, I fear this anecdote may be, as we journalists say, too good to check. Whilst the “buggering up

Home is where the hearth is

December 02, 2023

Recalibrating Christmas, one year at a time. Midnight Mass at the Brompton Oratory, 2013. As the celestial music and voices swirled to ever-loftier heights to brush the blue and gold of the dome, the baby began to move inside me. I leant against my husband, overcome with a sense of serenity and calm. Later, after

Being just normal in a world of Perfect Catholic Mothers

November 03, 2023

Of all the recent commentary on the Middle East, what has been flickering irritably in my peripheral vision are the twinkling, pastel-coloured Marian devotions on the many Instagram accounts I follow of groups set up by and for Catholic mothers. I have stumbled onto these groups in the early hours, seeking help, support and solace

Normal for Norfolk?: Churches, bike rides, Communion, and skateboards

October 02, 2023

Struggling to settle, a skateboarding sister and First Communions. Why are you here? The question I am asked so frequently is posed not with hostility but with curiosity, astonishment, even. No one but no one, I have learned, moves to Norfolk on a romantic whim about wildness and freedom, a reaction to being locked down

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