Rain, Heat, Boxes and Buffets.

Gosh. Another busy week. No surprise anymore but there you are, worth remarking on anyway. This week I have been beavering away at work, as well as churning out essays at a great rate of knots, wondering where I might do my curacy and looking at wooden boxes in a meaningful way as well as trying to write this Sunday's sermon and planning my garden party for this Sunday. I only hope the sun comes out or the sixty odd parishoners will be playing a very tight game of sardines. The money raised by this jamboree will provide a new green High Mass set and cope for the Church and the remainder will go towards the disabled toilet fund, work for which is now about to commence.

So what are the wooden boxes about and why is there a picture of the (rather forlorn) Holy Souls Altar above? I have meant for some time to build a dais for the altar, to raise it up and make it more of a Chapel and finally found what I was looking for to start the ball rolling on eBay the other day, namely six one metre square pallets with almost solid tops. Four will be trimmed and nailed together, then timber screwed in around the edges, then topped with plywood and the sides painted in purple and the top carpeted. Onto this will go the other two, treated in the same way, at the back. So the Altar will stand on the top step, giving an altar step and the rail will stand on the bottom one giving a communion rail. The book of remembrance can be given a new home there and then we can use the Chapel for daily Mass in the month of the Holy Souls. I will start this a couple of weeks after I get back from Walsingham and am quite looking forward to it. The six pallets cost twenty four pounds, our local friendly Policeman Neil drove to Hyde to get them for us and is now hopefully happily drinking his wine, the paint and timber, carpet tiles and plywood will probably cost about another hundred pounds and then we have a very good usable chapel, quite the place to put the altar which came from Our Lady and St Thomas Gorton and the altar cross from St Benedict's Ardwick. I may even exert my charm muscles to convince a lady or two that what would really finish it off would be a purple altar curtain behind. Any more suggestions?