SIR Ken Dodd OBE, British comedy legend, died this year, at the age of ninety. He had lived in the surreal world of Knotty Ash with the Diddy people, their jam butty mines and black pudding plantation. He was still touring in his ninth decade and his shows sometimes lasted into the early hours of the morning. "Some of you are optimists," he'd tell his audience at the start of a show, "you've booked your taxis for half-past twelve, but they say the breakfast here is good."

"Laughter is the greatest music in the world," he once told a reporter, "and audiences come to my shows to escape the cares of life. They want to laugh and so do I. My job isn’t to educate people or even do politics - I've got to make people feel good. I want to make them happy."

If you translate 'I want to make them happy' into the language of the Bible it would become 'I want to bless them.' Blessing is a great theme of the Bible: the poem at the beginning of Genesis describes God creating a land with the capacity to produce plants and trees which bear fruit, blessing animals to be fruitful and multiply, and creating human beings in his image, who will reflect that creative hand and who will themselves be a source of blessing to others.

We are grateful for all those who bless us by their intellect and insights, and their capacity to make us laugh.

The Rev Richard Snow, Team Rector for Kirkby Lonsdale and the eight churches of the Rainbow Parish