Boxes Everywhere.

I have been a little quiet on the blog recently, for which you may be thankful. This picture above explains why to an extent. I took it five minutes ago, having just returned from Church to my house where my belongings are being packed up. I have moved some things already, pictures in particular, so that I can clean the walls behind them ready for my first tenant. Pray that things go well with that, for I am not starting a business, just letting my house for just enough, happily, to cover the mortgage. Anyway, boxes are everywhere, tomorrow they come and take almost everything away and then they return on Monday to get the last few bits and pieces and follow me to Preston, where boxes will once again be the theme until they are all unpacked. You will see more as I can show it to you, but forgive any gaps in communication, my mind will be elsewhere and even though BT managed to come and reconnect the telephone and deliver a wireless router for the internet, none of these things are yet connected, so blood pressure is sure to rise above the usual chilly calm.

Anyhow, things are exciting and I look forward to the move greatly. The only imminent cloud on the horizon is a great worry about money - I seem to be waiting for cheques continually, that they have not yet come is a real concern and as I type another bill arrives which I have absolutely no way of paying. Never mind. Something was bound to go wrong.

So this morning I went to Saint Hilda's and filled up the oil stocks, changed the candles and prepared the altar for Corpus Christi which is either today or Sunday. For us it is Sunday and Saturday is the Summer Fair, hopefully making use of the new facilities in Church, the kitchenette et al. I was very aware as I toddled around the Church that it was the last time I will have to enjoy the peace and calm of Saint Hilda's on my own and just as I was about to say my prayers at the altar rail a procession of different people began traipsing in, each one wanting something else. Then it was time to go, both in the immediate and wider sense, which is a happy thing really.

This banner is on temporary loan from Nazareth House, a Roman Catholic nursing home up the road. We are having another one made in a while showing the Annunciation, for carrying in processions and decorating the Church, by one of the members of the choir who specialises in these things. I look forward very much to seeing the pictures!

News From the Provinces.

These pictures are taken from the website of Saint Silas, Kentish town and show Father Graeme Rowlands, their parish priest, celebrating twenty years of his being installed there with a High Mass. Congratulations Father!

The Deacon introduces the peace. Saint Silas' must be the only Anglican Church I have ever been to where members of the congregation have said 'pax tecum' to me during the peace. Saint Silas' is a witness to the faith in North London, happily near to Marine Ices, the finest ice cream parlour in London with, incidentally, a very reasonable old school Italian restaurant attached. I look forward to my occasional visits both to the Church and the gelateria all the more because I would not want either every day. Good religion and good ice cream, take away the London stock brick Georgian buildings and you could almost be in Tuscany. Now that I would like every day!

Craig Aburn, MC at Saint Silas and friend of AW, is acting as Subdeacon. His son is the small child to the left. You can see more pictures of this event and of the church on their website here.

This picture of Saint Therese, taken at Saint Hilda's last week, marks the next step on my journey this year with her, which will be to Preston. The year of Saint Therese which I have kept will culminate in visiting her relics later this summer at the Cathedral in Lancaster when I will give thanks for the many blessings and encouragements received from her this past nine months, proving that roses from heaven do not have to come immediately, but can be sent over time, to many unexpected places. St Therese, Ora pro nobis.

Unlike some other blogs which have their links listed under 'Anglican' and 'Roman Catholic', I have not had to do any tinkering today with our sidebar. Fr Jeffrey Steel of De Cura Animarum will shortly resign his orders and live in London as a Roman Catholic layman, thus taking him to the next stage of his long journey from American Protestantism. We have enjoyed reading his blog and hope to do so still, the URL is the same and the link still takes you to the same page. A different Anglican wandering, but one which I am sure will make interesting reading. Pray for him, that all may be well.

Trinity Sunday.

The High Altar was bedecked with relics for the last time in a while today, as next Sunday is Corpus Christi when Mass will be followed directly with a procession of the Blessed Sacrament and Benediction and neither possessing nor being inclined to possess the little curtains for the glass part of the reliquaries we will have a relicless gradine. The next Sunday is the first 'green' Sunday for some time and then, with the brief blip for the solemnity of Peter and Paul, we enter the long stretch of Ordinary Time.

As I left Mass this morning with the Parish Priest to have lunch in Clitheroe (very nice, thank you, particularly the pate and the pint of bitter in the New Inn afterwards) the end of Whittaker Lane, just after the shops, was being prepared for the last day of the Oasis concerts. This is what the whole road looks like in both directions, but particularly so here next to the Tram station. Still, most people made the journey to get to Church, although a few who travel from farther afield did not, not knowing what to expect. In the end, what we found was a spectacularly well organised event, with all the (piles and piles) of litter cleared from the last night and traffic calming in place. A few kebab wrappers and beer cans greeted me in the Church path, but that was all - and most Sundays start with that anyway.

We had a High Mass for Trinity Sunday, as you might expect. I am not going to dwell on the corporate nonsense currently doing the rounds in the CofE which replaces this day with a secular commemoration, other than to say that our ranks were swollen with a few people from other local Parishes whom we have not seen before.

The renovation work is progressing, here you see the back corridor leading from the Community room to the new toilet, which is tiled and half grouted, the sink and other accoutrements will go in soon. Hopefully I will get to see it all finished before I leave next Sunday. Whether I do or not is irrelevant really, but it is nice to see development work going on.

The community room has its kitchen units almost finished and the painting work has begun, with the Parish Summer fair next Saturday and for future events, both envisaged and not, this will be a very useful resource.

Atonement: common ground

If I were an Episcopalian, I would be a member of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio, and H.E. Thomas Breidenthal would be my bishop. So it goes I am not and he is not, but I admire Bishop Breidenthal very much. I thought that I would share with you his explanation for his choice to deny consent to the election of Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester to the epicopacy for the Diocese of Northern Michigan.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

I am writing to inform you of
my decision not to consent to the consecration of Kevin Thew Forrester as Bishop
of Northern Michigan. I did not want to make a public statement before I shared
my concerns with the Standing Committee. I was able to do this at their meeting
last Friday, March 27.

Two subjects have arisen as matters of concern in
the wider discussion of consent for this Bishop-elect. I want to be clear that
these matters have not contributed to my refusal of consent.

First, the internal process which led to Bishop-elect Thew Forrester's
election. In my view, it violated no canons, and, although I have questions
about it, these have not entered into my decision to withhold consent. Second,
some have voiced concern that Bishop-elect Thew Forrester has been recognized by
the Zen Buddhist community as one who practices Zen Buddhist meditation in an
exemplary fashion and accepts the basic ethical principles of Buddhism. I have
no problem with this. Many Christians have deepened their own faith through
Buddhist prayer practices, and in my view the moral framework of Buddhism is
largely consonant with that of Judaism and Christianity.

But obviously I
do have concerns. These concerns lie closer to home. My own reading of
Bishop-elect Thew Forrester's sermons over the last year (these sermons were
available on the website of his parish church, St. Paul's, Marquette, Michigan,
as of March 16, but are no longer posted) reveals an understanding of the
Christian narrative that is troubling to me. I have spoken about this with the
Bishop-elect on the phone, and he has followed up with e-mails, but I remain
troubled.

According to Thew Forrester, Jesus revealed in his own person
the way that any of us can be at one with God, if only we can overcome the
blindness that prevents us from recognizing our essential unity with God. The
problem here is that the death of Jesus as an atonement for our sins is
completely absent, and purposely so. As I read Thew Forrester, nothing stands
between us and God but our own ignorance of our closeness to God. When our eyes
are opened, atonement (not for our sins, but understood as a realization of our
essential unity with God) is achieved. Thew Forrester's rejection of salvation
understood as an atonement for sins we cannot procure for ourselves is not an
idea he is merely exploring. In a very consistent manner, he is developing this
idea. In materials he submitted to the House of Bishops earlier this month, he
has shared with us his own revision of the Prayer Book rite for Holy Baptism, in
which references to salvation are replaced with references to union with God.

I would not worry about this so much if Thew Forrester were merely
speculating about alternative ways of understanding the Christian faith. I would
not even worry so much if it were simply a matter of the content of a number of
sermons (although I think we should expect to be accountable for what we
preach). But, as his revision of the Baptismal rite makes clear, he appears to
be settled in his conviction that our relation to Christ is not about salvation
from a condition of objective alienation from God, but about a more realized
union with God.

Why is Thew Forrester's teaching troubling to me?
Because it flies in the face of what I take to be the conviction at the heart of
our faith tradition, namely, that we are in bondage to sin and cannot get free
without the rescue God has offered us in Jesus, who shouldered our sins on the
cross. Our tradition certainly declares God's closeness to us and God's love for
us, but insists that this is solely due to God's gracious initiative, made known
to us in Jesus. In other words, Jesus in his singular closeness to God is as
much a reminder of our alienation from God and from God's ways as he is God's
word to us that we are loved despite our collective wrongdoings.

Some may say, "So what?" Should the Episcopal Church not allow as much
latitude as possible when it comes to theological reflection on the meaning of
Jesus in our lives? Yes, of course. We are a church that values a broad range of
opinion on practically every subject. Yet our (unrevised) Baptismal liturgy
(Book of Common Prayer, beginning at p. 299) is extremely clear about what it
means to be a follower of Jesus: we are to turn to him - the same Jesus of
Nazareth who was crucified and rose again and continues to invite us into a
personal relationship with him - and accept him as Savior. Whatever else we have
to say about Jesus follows from that (even though different people may end up
saying quite different things).

I cannot emphasize enough that clarity
about our relationship to Jesus through our baptism is especially important as
we move on from the Lambeth Conference, where the bishops of the Episcopal
Church pointed repeatedly to our Baptismal rite as evidence of our commitment to
Jesus as Lord.

I write this with a heavy heart. Kevin Thew Forrester
served as an assistant in the parish where some years earlier I was ordained a
priest and served as an assistant. He has been raised up by a sister diocese in
our own Province V, and I know how highly he is regarded there and what a blow
it would be to the people of Northern Michigan if he were not to receive the
requisite consents to be consecrated. But I also know that the Episcopal Church
needs at this crucial juncture in the life of the Anglican Communion to be clear
that all our hope is founded in the cross.

Faithfully,
+Tom Breidenthal

Bishop Thomas E. Breidenthal
Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio

Source

I appreciate Bishop Breidenthal's candor. I also appreciate his ability to disagree, even strongly, with another cleric and theologian without resorting to polemics, namecalling, and rabble-rousing. (See, American RC Bishops? It can be done!)

In a communion fraught with so much discord, it is good to see some common ground being established. And what better common ground can there be than a shared faith in the atoning death and resurrection of our Lord?

Pax et bonum.

Is Wine Essential to Salvation?

The Church Times this morning has, as always, a 'hundred years ago' extract from its archives, telling of the triumph of the dedication festival at All Saints, Margaret Street, with the Bishop of London remarking on his support for praying for the dead and belief in the Real Presence. He goes on to remark that old hostilities and mistrust between catholics and evangelicals in his Diocese have stopped and all may dwell in peace. All very Jeeves and Wooster and good, but that happy time in English history was soon to be shaken by the First World War and a global depression as Elysian fields were torn open by the tracks of tanks and young men marched out of their schools to death on the front lines. Today being D Day, I should like to offer a pause for thought for the fallen of the two World Wars and a moment of reflection on the rise of fascism in Europe once again, witnessed by the large proportion of the vote given to Geert Wilders' party in Holland yesterday in the European elections. This is the man who called Islam 'the ideology of a retarded culture' and who would see the Koran banned in Holland, because it is a 'fascist' book.

Now, I have no bones about the Kingship of Christ and I am convinced of the claim of Christ that He is the way to the Father, who is the one God, I should not like to live in a country which banned the Bible because it was predominantly an Islamic nation which saw Christians as a threat to their way of life. I should be even more concerned if that county were Holland, more famous for Edam than terrorism. Maybe this is the natural outcome of wearing wooden shoes and living in tulip strewn windmills, but I feel it may be more to do with the Northern European history of great trading ports and the dominance of commerce in the cold harbours which has slowly opened our part of the globe up to trade, resettlement and immigration, three things which I am happy to be a part of. Our putting money first and foremost in the busy shipping lanes of North Europe has landed up in a situation of being he most multicultural part of the globe and it is now, when the economy downturns and the shipping ports and docks are mothballed that multiculturalism is found to be at fault for this situation. We cannot have it both ways, the money which built Rotterdam, Liverpool and Marseilles came from international trade and has become multicultural reality. Just as it has since the Vikings, the Romans and oh, all the other groups who have come to Britain and been gently assimilated. And don't give me any baloney about Saint George, we all know where he came from and for that is a perfect symbol of England now. This is something to be proud of, I think, not a source of unrest.

I wonder what would be the reaction if this 'a hundred years ago' thing could be done in reverse? What would our forebears have made of the headline on page 8, 'New Bishop is a Lesbian'? Was she covered in chocolate for the ceremony? Swedish Luterans, you are making history, just not very well.

As my birthday is Saint George's Day and I am going to serve in a Parish which includes a Church dedicated to Saint George, I felt that Saint Hilda's, that Victorian Church, could do with a Georgian reminder, a nod to a past of invasion, Bede, the Abbey at Whitby and Beowulf, all things which I cherish and have devoted a good part of my life to reading about. I hope to get my English literary retreats off the ground next Summer, looking at ancient sites and tracing the history of the Faith in England through architecture, music and literature. Much work is still needed on this though.

And for the moment I am taking pictures off the walls and cleaning behind them, scraping wax off the floor, throwing great boxes of stuff away and sorting through a thousand papers, weeding out what I do not need. Which is quite a lot! A monastic friend suggested, after I sighed at how difficult it is to decide what may go, that I throw away all that is not necessary for salvation. I wondered, to an encouraging smile and nod, what to do with all the wine.

The Gardener.

I think we may safely leave fascism aside for another day and I will take advice from one of our commentators and leave football alone as well. The fact that I have no interest in football helps of course and it is hard to write about Bar Billiards any more than to say 'I like playing Bar Billiards'. Let us instead turn to the issue of women's ordination and continuing churches and I shall prepare myself for a barrage of emails and Karen's comments, but as she is jet lagged maybe she will be moderately sedated. Have another tablet dear and keep reading.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no fan of the continuing Churches, although I realise and accept that the situation may be different in the USA, although the reasoning remains the same. This is not an attack on the Anglican Catholic Church in the UK as their presiding Bishop will be glad to read, nor is it intended to slight the same institution in the USA. I understand their stance although I disagree with it. However, you may remember a few months ago when GAFCON first reared its head and the idea of off shore morality havens first appeared, that they were in communication with a number of continuing Churches - some of which are of very dubious practice. This was about the time that Damian Thompson seemingly made up the entire story about the TAC putting a catechism of the Roman Catholic Church on the altar or the RC Church in Walsingham. Nothing of the sort happened.

We remarked at the time and have remarked incessantly since that FiF and GAFCON would be incompatible, a view shared by everyone I know who has expressed an opinion either way. A new group is forming though in the US, ACNA, which seems to be ECUSA without Schori and Gene Robinson. It is a mainly evangelical group which, like GAFCON, is courting Anglo Catholic suitors. Why I cannot imagine, we share no doctrine of the Eucharist or orders and if we were to put the catechism on their altar I think they may recoil in horror at what is contained therein. This particular group contains evangelicals who are in agreement with the ordination of women as Priests but not Bishops. This new group may seem attractive to many in ECUSA who are sick of overly liberal, pluralist leadership which does not have reference to the teaching of the Church over two thousand years but seeks to change fundamentals of faith (and I sympathise with them on that count) but a group such as ours which stands with the vast majority of Christians throughout the world and with two thousand years of informed teaching and doctine in recognising the equality but difference of men and women in relation to Church order would be very unwise to leave one broken communion for another.

Archbishop Haverland of the Anglican Catholic Church, was asked to attend the inaugural meeting of the ACNA, but refused with a beautifully written letter which explains just what I am trying to say here; that in ACNA and indeed in GAFCON we see the fundamental alterations in the faith which has produced groups like the ACC and FiF opposed to changing the tenets of the faith delivered to the saints and taught by Christ.

St Therese of Lisieux comforts us when she said 'The guest of our soul knows our misery, He comes to find an empty tent within us, that is all He asks', that is, He comes to us and will make His home in us, the me in Thee and the Thee in me, if only we keep His commands and strive to maintain and grow the faith He taught by His unending love and mercy. I find this hard and I think probably you do as well, with so many attacks on the faith from without and within, sometimes for being Christian sometimes for keeping certain viewpoints. It is difficult not to shout back sometimes, to turn the other cheek and to speak humbly and live justly, according to the example of Christ. Conflict within the Church at the scale facing us is, ultimately, diabolical. I take as my example the imaginary figure of the gardener whom Mary Magdalen did not see when she saw Christ, I like to imagine him enjoying a moment of mistaken identity while looking at this wonderful scene of friends equally at home in the presence of Angels and thorny weeds. I would do well to strive to continue being at home in the presence of Angels and thorny weeds, reminding me that the Church commissioned by Christ has a duty to be in all places at all times, we are just lucky to live in such interesting times, when we have the chance to live the faith against a backdrop of secularism and fighting. The darkness makes the light shine brighter, no?

Local and European Elections.

Tomorrow is local election and European Elections day in the UK and a worse time could not be imagined. Many MP's have been caught with their noses in the trough and the home counties gravy train has been spilling the jus of finest Dexter beef at every bend. Enough of the food analogies. There is a great amount of national and local resentment to the mainstream parties, particularly Labour and to a slightly lesser extent the Tories. The Conservative party has been playing to the prejudices of the gallery by claiming money from the public purse to clean their moats and furnish ducks with 20K floating houses but it is Labour who have been claiming by wholesale, rather than the more rarefied claims of the Tory grandees, many of whom I am willing to gloss over because I care for our heritage and would see our ancient buildings kept in good condition and lived in rather than becoming the ubiquitous storage depot for older people. The Liberal Democrats seem to have less of these traits, but then there are less of them.

What happens when the public are feeling angry and disenfranchised and an election comes up? We are not at Wiemar Germany yet, but it is very likely that people will register a 'protest' vote against the main parties and elect fringe parties to local seats in the council. This election will not decide who governs the nation - although surely that is not far off - and with our rejection of proportional representation we need not fear for the economy if fringe parties are elected to local council seats, but it decides the moral timbre of the nation. It matters if fringe parties hold local seats - sure, a Lord Sutch or a Monkey Mayor here and there adds grist to the wheel of democracy, but how would you feel if they were YOUR mayor, YOUR councillor? How well represented would you feel and how able would you feel to approach them in real time of need? How would you feel if a significant number of people in your small local area voted for a candidate from a nationalist party? The fact that this is mainly the European elections is not to denigrate the process, who we say we are to the wider community is vital. Are we a nation of bigots or a nation of tolerant, fair minded people - the definition of Britishness for hundreds of years.

The British National Party, for some years a disorganised rabble with political hobbyists, is fielding candidates in many wards tomorrow and it is likely that they will win quite a few seats. They have been campaigning strongly in Churches - and getting much coverage by their being stopped doing this - their website has comments about the CofE stopping 'God's holy will' being done by the BNP. They have been writing to every pub landlord in the country pledging that they will stop the decline in pubs and these landlords who are scared for their livelihoods will respond to this, they have been underlining their support for capital and corporal sentences in court, a return to 'traditional' education, including training children for industry, rather than being sentient beings. They also want 'immigrants' sent home, of course, as do UKIP, who will stop any further immigration to this country which is made up genetically of immigrants going back thousands of years.

We accept that the vast majority of the policies of the BNP are not enforceable if they ever rose to power and we also accept that their economic policies seem to be lifted out of the pages of Jeeves and Wooster, if you recall the character 'Spode' who would turn over the whole of East Anglia to the production of potatos and the North East to bicycles. They would destroy this nation by setting people against each other and by forcing our economy into the situation of Zimbabwe's, the President of which they resemble in all but skin colour. There are, also, a close network of Continental Nationalists (if you will forgive the comical, impossible, collection of words therein) with whom they have seemingly close ties who. like the BNP, are exploiting opposition to the EU with promises of jobs tomorrow. This worries us as it worries all sentient British people, for it is easy for these groups to grow across national boundaries through the internet, without which they would find it very hard to exist in more than a local fanzine-extremist network.

And then there are the other candidates, leaving aside the BNP for a while, one of who's candidates recently declared rape to be something which women probably enjoy. Candidates from the Green Party and the Respect party and all the other one horse wonders who, if in power, would, just like the BNP, be incapable of running the nation. They all know this, I am sure. A reading of the BNP website offers no clue as to how they would govern the nation or the economy other than a few populist and to some idealist statements about 'right' and 'wrong', from their own seriously misjudged angle. None of these parties will ever gain power, but that does not mean that we can dismiss them at local level. If you wish to be represented by people who understand the global need for reform in the economic sphere, by people who can represent us globally, by people who see the need to maintain and improve the environment, by people who are answerable to the nation and have been for generations, for God's sake vote tomorrow for a mainstream party. Vote Lib Dem if you like, or Conservative, or Labour or even, maybe Green Party, but a vote for the BNP or UKIP, or a decision not to vote at all, would be a sin for which we will be answerable to almighty God.

In Christ there is no black or white, no slave or free, He died that all may have life, if they so choose. To vote for a party which discriminates against His children by the colour of their skin, or who would close the boundaries of one isle against another rock of His own making, is to evade our responsibility to all His creation. When our souls are demanded of us and the Lord asks us how we furthered His Kingdom of justice and how we told of His word, we do not want to stand accused of causing division and hatred. Whatever mess our politicians have got into now, a vote for extremists is a vote for hatred and will turn us away from the Lord. A protest vote for a seemingly innocent fringe party is to vote for someone with no chance of power or governance. To not vote will leave people in certain areas with a BNP councillor to represent them, which is intolerable, to God and to man.

Wandering Around.

I was wandering up to the Post Office today so that I could have a letter weighed and measured under the new Mengele-like directives for pricing and sending post by size as well as weight. Counter staff now have to produce a plastic sheet with pretend post slots in it and smilingly push your letter through before weighing it and concocting a price. Only the smallest letters are exempt and even these I have had problems with before as a counter personage tried pushing it through the slot the wrong way round. Hundreds of years of rectangular envelope tradition counting for nothing when confronted with a pretend letterbox and a big bucket of stupidity.

Talking of buckets of stupidity, let me share with you my conversation this morning with British Telecom. I enquired as to whether the engineer will still be coming to my new house on the appointed day to install the line. One cannot be too sure. Yes, was the answer, but could I provide a contact number for the man to call when he was close by. No, said I, I have no mobile 'phone. Ah, said he, in which case he will phone you on this number, from which you are calling. But, said your brave hero, I will not be there, I will be awaiting him some many miles away. Could you, he asked, not stay there and then drive to the new address? No, said I. Then, he enquired, could I not ask a neighbour to receive the call and say that I was in. No, this would be odd. After forty five minutes - forty five minutes, Gunga Din - I was told that this was fine but only a senior manager could dispense this exemption.

It has been fruitless telling you all this, really, but I get so irritated with having to conform to the whims and directives of companies so tied up in their own red tape that they actually cease operating as public services and become too concerned with meeting targets to operate effectively. Any comparisons with the Church of England are in your imagination.

Holy Trinity Platt, in South Manchester, a community which allies itself to GAFCON, has this witness in the middle of the largest concentration of Asian businesses in Manchester, sandwiched in between a hundred halal take aways and restaurants. The sweetcorn van seems to have covered it effectively. As I will miss the little Theological College in Rusholme with its balmy courtyard and hysterically biased library I have taken to toddling around lately, much taken with the Tee Total hotel with a new neon sign saying 'non alcoholic' outside!

I was also briefly in Liverpool, a city which I always find confusing, even though I find the accent of the womenfolk pleasing. The men sound like they have a mouth full of inverted whistles, but there we are. I love the architecture surrounding the arteriel roads going to the docks in Liverpool, all puffed up yeomanry and London Georgian, slightly tatty though and sunning to seed, it reminds me of Euston fifteen years ago. Many of the pubs still seem open and not too many have for sale signs on them, clearly they do better than those in Manchester which have been devastated by the smoking ban and the sudden availability of cheap drink in the supermarkets.

Pentecost Sunday.

After High Mass this morning there was dinner to say goodbye to a couple of handfuls of friends who have been mainstays of my time here for the last seven years. Plenty of roast beef was consumed, copious amounts of cake and then, as the sun reached its zenith (about 3.30 in my back garden) we toddled outside for brandy, coffee and watermelon. In this civilised time (at least until the bottle of Armagnac was finished) the heat became so hot hats were called for - a decommissioned biretta and a fez were found and worn.

Before this, pudding was finished. I was of sound enough mind to clear the empties away, including a viciously sweet Pedro Ximenez, some Soave and a couple of bottles of good, peppery Cotes du Rhone before taking the picture. Peppery CdR is hard to come by now, having lost favour to the new styles, but it holds sway in Teather houses from Bere Regis to Prestwich.

A good turnout for Sunday Mass pleased us, particularly given the weather which may have called many to the seaside. I enjoyed reading and by default hearing the beautiful sequence for Pentecost as well as so many Pentecost Hymns. The twelve tall candles upon the altar brought out attention to the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the friends in the upper room, from which they went out to tell the good news. Next week is Trinity Sunday and then I will go out from Prestwich on Corpus Christi, to Preston and the next stage of my life. Do pray for me, as I shall be exhorting my new Parishioners to do as well on my first Sunday when I preach on the days readings.

Our acolytes had unfeasibly long candles because the usual stocks in them go into the tubes for candles 11 and 12 for Pentecost. Back to usual next week once I have cleaned the tubes.

The new kitchen is coming along. There will probably be a new wipeable floor in front of the units soon or the carpet will soon become smeggy. I do not know if they sell wipeable surfaces in retail outlets, but maybe Thom can have a look, as this is where he is this afternoon, shirking his responsibility to you all. Tut.

And after Mass, there was a full Church again as we had four Baptisms, thus completing our Eastertide teaching of new life and a turning away from sin. That we had running water is a boon, so that we could at least put some water in the font. Tomorrow sees a trip to Liverpool to acquire an item of which there will be more later and then North to a meeting, then far South for the afternoon. It will be a busy day, as they all are at the moment.

Wild Garlic and Sapphic T-Shirts.

No, this is not my new house, but the old Conservative Club in Preston, now 'Vintage' bar and restaurant, with a dodgy looking nightclub in the basement. I have not ever been here - it confronted me as I left the altogether less salubrious surroundings of the snack bar over the road and I thought it seemed more interesting than a picture of six IKEA Billy bookcases, which I have spent much of the day putting together, while cursing the thinness of the backing material. There has also been time to go to Clitheroe but not to join the hordes by the Ribble basking in the sun and paddling in the water, however smelling the banks of wild garlic (ramson) which grows abundantly in the valley almost made up for it, as did seeing a stout lady wearing a t-shirt bearing the slogan 'cover me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians'. There must be very wealthy lesbians in Clitheroe because it would have cost a weeks wages to purchase enough chocolate for the task.

I am going off to Church now, to lay the vestments out, prepare the altar and books for tomorrow's High Mass. Then I am going to the house of a Parishioner for a coffee evening - at least, there will be a coffee evening, I will take a bottle of Badoit water, which more suits the blazing heat for me. Pictures of the Mass tomorrow as well as photographs of the large joint of beef which I am BBQ'ing for a group of friends. It is as well to cook and shop now, for next week a siege mentality will descend upon this quiet backwater, as those of us who are blessed enough to live next to the vast Heaton Park have to contend with the arrival of rock band Oasis, who are playing on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. The local supermarket has put up a sign saying that alcohol will be limited to one bottle or can per person and special checkouts will be erected to cope with the crush - and that is a mile away! Fifty thousand people are expected to try and cram into the park each day, and many more in the streets around which will be closed. It will, of course, be hell and much busier than when the Pope came to the area, but that is life, I suppose. The series of concerts makes up part of the 'dig out your soul' tour. Sunday Mass will be almost empty, I suppose, what with the closed roads and everyone looking for their soul in the litter strewn park and the special checkouts at TESCO.