Thanks for visiting anvilding, the website devoted to the speaking, writing and broadcasting ministry of Chick Yuill.

Before we go any further, and since people always ask, let’s explain the collection of unusual  - you might even think unlikely!  -  names…

The name on Chick’s birth certificate is Charles, but where he was born and grew up near Glasgow, they almost always shorten that to Chick.  Don’t ask why.  Nobody knows, they just do!  And Yuill is simply a very common Scottish surname. 

And anvilding?  Well, that’s a different story.  Chick has a weakness for poetry in general and a passion for the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins in particular.  In one of his poems, Hopkins offers a prayer that God will either work in our lives like the gentleness of spring, or that he will forge his will ‘with an anvil-ding and with fire’.  Since Chick’s experience of God’s dealings has been much closer to the ding of the hammer on the anvil than the balmy breezes of Spring, he thought that was the ideal description for his life and ministry and an apt name for his web-site.

 

To find out more about Chick, click on the menu items on the left.