I was running late.

I'm not religious.

I am spiritual.

Spuds and mussels are involved, but only peripherally. Oh, and a trawler in a garden.

Don't let your heart sink too much - these statements are connected.

As drives to work go I am one of the lucky ones. The road that I take (written as if I had a choice!) skirts the edge of a sea lough. I go through a tiny Irish town that I will not name (Hello Maguire's Bar, Hello Brennan's bread delivery man!) and wend past mussel beds (seen at low tide only), serious fishing boats pulling at their leads and on to a dormitory town (as if such a thing were necessary) for Derry City. There's the Gaelic Football field, the man selling potatoes from a little van on bricks at the front of his house and the retired fisherman who has had a one third size model of his old trawler built and plopped right there on to his front lawn.

Tractors, those who are village hopping in questionably roadworthy Mazdas and a lugubrious school bus dictate my progress.

Eventually, inevitably, I reach the bridge "on the northern side". Built from steel plate in the same Belfast shipyard that famously forged the RMS Titanic (and many more successful ships), she is known locally as "the new bridge" despite being now more that twenty years old. She curves langorously across Lough Foyle and in that curve lies her glory, taking on the colours of the day. By turn - pinks or greys or some blues yet to show up in any Windsor & Newton tube.

So, I was driving to work and I was late. I'm sure you are familiar with the scene - everything timed to perfection, from the alarm clock sounding to the amount of time that you allocate to choosing to ignore it. On to the time that the kettle takes to boil and the shower to run hot and the thousand unthinking actions one takes before getting in to the car and embarking on an oft repeated journey undertaken in a fug of "I wish that I didn't have to work" or "I wish that my pleasure was my work" or "When I retire...".

I was running late. My routine had been upset and I felt as though I was up against the clock. Automatically BBC Radio Four sounded from the the radio once I started the car. Odd this, because months ago I stopped listening to the radio and started using CDs because the news had become so relentlessy depressing.

I drove past the spud seller, past the boats and mussel creels and saw the greenkeeper for a local golf course striding purposefully to work as he usually does. It has become my habit to pick this man up if I see him (I don't know his name nor he mine) and then drop him off at his work. It costs me nothing, it hopefully helps him out and I get a little company - albeit that conversation is limited to the weather and how it affects grass - as we make our way along the sea lapping by the lough.

After the golf course and the alighting of my temporary companion I turned to the radio once more. "Thought For The Day" was on. I'm not religious but I was struck by what the speaker (Canon Lucy Winkett of St Paul's) had to say.

I have no intention of transcribing Canon Lucy's thoughts, but would like to share with you how moved I was by what she said. I won't as a result become a Christian, but she did connect deeply with that part of me that is spiritual. As I said at the start, I am spiritual.

At a rich man's funeral, she recounted, one mourner said to another "How much do you think he left?". A fellow mourner replied significantly "Everything".

Her theme was that "worth does not equal wealth". I think it was one of the truest meditations on the human condition that I've heard. A thought not just for the day, but for much longer. Here is the whole thing (only three minutes of your life) so that you can make up your own mind: