This page is not about writing (or at least, not my own writing). It is a rather off-beat collection, in no particular order, of my favourites of many kinds, by no means all literary... I offer it merely in the hope that it might cheer up any readers by reminding them of old favourites of their own. It includes both secular and faith, because I try not to live my life in isolated compartments. It will not impress: being non-literary in background, I am a very common man.

Favourite current English words: Local and Hinterland - What lies around us? Just as importantly, what lies behind us, even if it is now hidden to us? How fine are the memories that we have created in those we have met? What richness might spring from that hidden past?

Favourite Bible verse: 'For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.' [2 Tim 1:7 (KJV)]

Favourite quotation about writing: 'A man may always write when he will set himself doggedly to it.' [Dr Samuel Johnson, during his Hebridean travels in 1773; the italics are his (or maybe Boswell's)]

Favourite quotation about dealing with modern life: 'If I attempted to answer the mass of futile correspondence that surrounds me, I should be debarred from all serious business of campaigning.' [The Duke of Wellington, quoted by Fuchs and Hillary]

Favourite Bible books currently: John and Job

Favourite modern classics: Lord of the Rings and Watership Down

Favourite political novels: Animal Farm (but not 1984); Uncle Tom's Cabin

Favourite Christian book of all time: Pilgrim's Progress (both parts)

Favourite classical music: 1. Brahms, Violin Concerto, third movement; 2. Chopin, Nocturne in F (although I struggle to play it now!); 3. The Karelia Suite; 4. Beethoven, 5th Symphony, end of 3rd and beginning of 4th movement (played loud!)

Favourite Bible character: Jacob - the man who was broken

Favourite Russian novels: Denisovich and Karamazov (but not War and Peace)

Favourite natural history books: The Peregrine by JA Baker (which I discovered long before it became iconic); Where the Bright Waters Meet by Harry Plunket-Greene; Over the Hills by Keble Martin and Meadowland by John Lewis-Stempel

Favourite nature fiction: Tarka the Otter

Favourite colour: Red (we have always had a bright red front door! Why be colourless?)

Favourite opera: Tosca (what else?)

Favourite humour: The indispensable Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel; Whisky Galore

Favourite Psalm: Psalm 1

Favourite past English monarchs: Alfred the Great; George VI

Favourite chemical reaction: Vicarious nuclear aromatic substitution (!)

Favourite classic film: Harvey (James Stewart, with his invisible six foot high white rabbit)

Favourite nature reserve: RSPB Balranald with its shell sands and machair

Favourite chemical reagent: Tetrabutylammonium hydrogen sulfate (indispensable for phase transfer reactions)

Favourite speeches: I have a dream and St Crispin's Day

Favourite Christian book by a scientist: The Language of God (Francis Collins of the Human Genome project)

Favourite ancient classics: The Odyssey (but not the Iliad or the Aeneid); and Beowulf.

Favourite thriller & sci-fi writers: Hammond Innes, John Buchan [especially John MacNab and Prester John] & Isaac Asimov

Favourite travel book: Johnson and Boswell's double act in the Hebrides

Favourite parable: The Two Sons (Matt 21:28-32)

Favourite character in literature: The Elephant's Child - who was like Socrates but even more persistent!

Favourite painting: The Fighting Temeraire

Favourite birds: Manx Shearwater, Little Tern and Swallow

Favourite islands: Canna, Barra, Alderney and Handa

Favourite islands for beaches: Vatersay, Benbecula and North Uist (no trend there, then?)

Favourite British mountain: Stack Polly (Stac Pollaidh) - small but oh! what a view

Books and authors I have least enjoyed : The Communist Manifesto (wearying); the Qur'an (repetitive); Thomas Hardy (depressing); Catch-22 (gave up!)

Favourite wild flowers: Corn Sowthistle (a weed to some, but the sunniest of faces to me). Followed by the little but lovely (and more genteel) Autumn Squill and, in the mountains, Starry Saxifrage

Favourite fern: Lemon-scented (Mountain) Fern

My wife Christine's favourite wild flower: Eyebright

Favourite rock: Gneiss (especially the Highland sort when cut by dykes full of little garnets and tourmalines)

Favourite Christian nature books: The Birds our Teachers by John Stott; Under the Bright Wings by Peter Harris; Planetwise by Dave Bookless

Favourite dragonfly: Banded Demoiselle

Favourite explorers and tales: Livingstone; Shackleton; Nansen; Brendan the Navigator; Apollo 13; Xenophon; the Grain Race

Favourite hymn: Guide me, O Thou Great Redeemer

Favourite hymn writer: Phillip P Bliss (1. Brightly Beams Our Father's Mercy; and 2. Dare to Be a Daniel, a favourite of my mother's mother)

Favourite political quote: 'The majority is usually wrong' - by several great thinkers

Favourite play: A Man for all Seasons

Favourite Christian worship song: From the squalor of a borrowed stable

Favourite secular poem: If

Favourite striking words: How about serendipity and inspissated (the latter I discovered in a literary review by Enoch Powell of the autobiography of Screaming Lord Sutch, where Powell was lamenting the author's painfully clotted weight of slang!)

Favourite spiritual poems: The Hound of Heaven (Francis Thompson); and God's Grandeur (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Favourite bumblebee: Large Red-tail (Bombus lapidarius)

Favourite sayings of my late father's: 1. 'When all else fails, read the maker's instructions!' 2. 'If thee dun't lahk it, thee mun do it thee'sen!'

My late mother's favourites: John chapter 14 and the quotation 'More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.' (Tennyson)

Favourite ex prisoner-of-war camp: Swanwick (where I first met my lovely wife! and started playing table tennis with her - at a Workers Christian Fellowship conference)

Favourite moment with my daughter Joanna: Racing up Ingleborough with her, trying to beat the rain (after I had carried her up many years before on my back!)

Favourite moment with my son Peter: Our small moment of celebration on the top of Elidir Fawr on the day we did the last Welsh "3000-footer"

Favourite moment with my daughter Angela: Lending her my big camera to photograph leaping bottle-nosed dolphins at Chanonry Point

Favourite moment with all three of our children: Reaching the top of Mont Pelat together (10,007 feet) in the Maritime Alps

My favourite of what the ancient Celts used to call "thin places" (I mean, of those special memorable places that one has found earth and heaven to be separated by very little): Reiff, from where Christine and I could see the far islands

AND SOME COLLECTIONS:

Favourite Christian writers and books: All of CS Lewis and Jamie Buckingham plus God's Smuggler/Brother Andrew; Run, Baby Run/Nicky Cruz; Tortured for Christ/Richard Wurmbrand; Out of the Saltshaker/Rebecca Manley Pippert; Changed into His Likeness and Song of Songs/Watchman Nee; Revolution of Love and Balance/George Verwer; Real Presence/Leanne Payne; and Who Moved the Stone?/Frank Morison

Favourite secular quotations:

'What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?' (Davies)

'The three hundred Fabiae were not defeated, they were only killed.' (Seneca)

'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' (LP Hartley, the opening words of The Go-Between)

'One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.' (Andre Gide)

'"In our world", said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."' [...] '"Even in your world, my son" said the Old Man, "that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."' (C S Lewis, in Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

'There seemed so little to show for the business. Six eggs had gone into the frying-pan, and all that came out was a teaspoonful of burnt and unappetizing-looking mess. Harris said it was the fault of the frying-pan.' (Jerome K Jerome, in Three Men in a Boat)

'It's easier to steer a car that's moving, than one that isn't.' (Anonymous)

'All you have to decide is what to do in the time that is given to you.' (Gandalf)

'. . . everyone knows if you play a game, you can’t play it without rules. You can make the rules what you like, but your whole fun and freedom comes from working within them.' (W H Auden)

'You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain.' (Josella Playton in Day of the Triffids)

And my all time favourite secular quotation:

' . . . generous deed should not be checked by cold counsel.' (Gandalf to Pippin in Gondor)

Favourite Christian quotations:

'God, who made the nightingale, also made the crow.' (John Bunyan)

'It is perfectly clear in the pages of the New Testament that no man can be saved until, at some time or other, he has felt desperate about himself.' (Martin Lloyd-Jones)

'We preach mainly the Cross, because that is what we live.' (Christian pastors in communist China)

'Lord, make me a crisis man. Let me not be a mile-post on a single road, but make me a fork, that men must turn one way or another in facing Christ in me.' (Jim Elliott)

' . . . it is a hard matter for a man to go down into the valley of Humiliation, as thou art now, and to catch no slip by the way.' (Bunyan)

'It is scarcely possible in most places to get people to attend a meeting where the only attraction is God.' (Tozer)

'That prayer, said the Interpreter, has lain by until ‘tis almost rusty. Give me not Riches, is scarcely the prayer of one of ten thousand. Straws and sticks and dust, with most, are the great things now looked after. ... With that Mercy and Christiana wept, and said, It is, alas, too true.' (Bunyan)

'God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days.' (Dr Samuel Johnson)

“If a man would live well, let him fetch his last day to him, and make it always his Company-Keeper.” (Bunyan)

Favourite theology & Bible handbooks and studies: In Understanding Be Men (T C Hammond); The Lion Book of Concise Christian Thought (Lion); Wycliffe Bible Commentary (Wycliffe); What is an Evangelical? (Lloyd-Jones); Understanding the Bible (John Stott); Angels (Billy Graham); The Books and the Parchments (F F Bruce). Wisdom from many directions!

Other favourite Bible verses of mine:

'God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.' [Rom 5:8 (NIV)]

'Wisdom is justified of (by) all her children.' [Luke 7:35 (KJV)]

'For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.' [Rom 6:6, (NIV)]

'In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.' [Isaiah 63:9 (KJV)]

'But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.' [2 Cor 4:7 (KJV)]

'Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.' [Matt 6:34 (NIV)]

'We live by faith, not by sight.' [2 Cor 5:7 (NIV)]

"Why shouldn't I . . . ?' [from Acts 8:36 (NIV) - the words of the Ethiopian eunuch. After all, why shouldn't we . . . ?]

(Jesus said) 'I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.' [John 5:24 (NIV)]

My favourite strange moment:

After a day of storm, in a small tent in North Uist, emerging into a stunning Hebridean evening with St Kilda against the light on the horizon fifty miles away; I found my watch had stopped, and asked a passing islander the time. His reply, in a soft island accent? 'Well, it might be about seffen or eight ... but what does it matter?'