Matt Baker and The 5 Star Biz Quiz

From Dave Tomlinson, writer and vicar at large:
Something that often shocks visitors to London is the amount of green space in the capital. One of our favourite green haunts is Queens Wood in Highgate – 52 acres of ancient woodland wonderfully allowed to grow wild – where we’ve spent many pleasurable hours walking our beloved lurcher Woody…. where we finally scattered his ashes. On burning city summer days we’ve relished the cool shelter of the old oaks and the hornbeams. In winter we’ve delighted in the woods’ transformation into a magical snowy fairyland. We’ve watched sparrow hawks stalking prey, found a heron fishing in a quiet stream, spotted all three species of woodpecker – while, planes soared overhead, police sirens sounded in the distance. 
The ancient Celts thought of heaven, not as a place far away in the sky, rather, as a form of parallel existence. Heaven and earth are but three feet apart, they’d say, and there are “thin” places where the distance is even less. Queens Wood is one of our thin places: a coppiced cathedral of birdsong, lofty boughs and wild flowers. Being there, we feel we glimpse something beyond the sights and sounds – a different ‘existence’, God, however defined. We breathe again…feel beguiled and inspired by the wonder of life…find new and better perspectives on daily stuff that weighs us down. I suspect most of us have such places, though perhaps thinness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder – one person’s thin place is another person’s thick one. 
But actually, I reckon a thin place is really any place where we allow ourselves to be fully present – a coffee shop, the kitchen, a seat in the park, even a car stuck in traffic. It’s when we stop hankering to be somewhere else, open ourselves to where we are, start living instead of anxiously spectating. For me, everywhere is a potential thin place. It’s just that sometimes I’m too thick to recognise it – as my wife pointed out recently when I was chuntering irritably in a long line of traffic. ‘You’ll make yourself ill’, she said. ‘Why not relax and enjoy this undisturbed time with me!’ Difficult to argue with that! Heaven was indeed there all along. I just needed to see it. My missus told me so.