Christmas peace

In this darkest part of the winter, at the end of what has been an extraordinarily turbulent and threatening year, I can’t think of anything we and our world need more than peace this Christmas. So this is what I wish you all, with gratitude for your friendship and the deep pleasure your blogs give me.

Here in our corner of Mid-Wales the baking is finished, the presents are wrapped, and the suitcase is packed, ready for an early start tomorrow, as we head off to spend Christmas with DS and his family. Wherever you may be spending your Christmas, may it be full of joy and peace.

Image:   Nativity by Duccio di Buoninsegna (c1255/60–c1318/19 Siena, Italy)

               National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA

Carol:    Stille Nacht

               Words by Josef Mohr (1792-1848)

               Music by Francis Xaver Gruber (1787-1863)

Advent pause for thought

On this calm, chilly November afternoon I’m sitting at my desk in my warm, somewhat untidy study. Outside DH has been taking advantage of the dry weather to do some jobs before the sun, which has been peeping out intermittently from behind the clouds all day, finally sets. The house is quiet and still, as befits the beginning of what is for me one of the most reflective seasons of the church’s year.

The peace and quiet are very welcome after what has been a very busy and often turbulent year. At home it has been an unusual year, with none of our habitual peregrinations to Scotland and France, but with substantial changes, necessitating a lot of hard work, taking place here in Wales. In the wider world it has been a year of often shocking political upset, with both the EU referendum in Britain and the presidential election in the USA plumbing new depths of misleading and vitriolic campaigning, and their results plunging our two countries into deep and prolonged economic and political uncertainty.

Into this turbulence and uncertainty comes Advent, with its message of hope and expectation, reminding us that however dark things seem there is always the promise of light and new beginnings. For me, as for most of us, it will inevitably be a busy time, with cards to write, presents to buy and lots of baking to be done. Yet I will try to hold onto this still centre of quiet and hope amid the busyness and the darkness, in anticipation of the joy of Christmas itself.

One of the pleasures of writing my annual Advent Sunday post is deciding what music to include. This year I have chosen a poem written by my friend Christine McIntosh, set to music by her musician husband John, and sung by their church choir at Holy Trinity, Dunoon, Argyll. The exquisite combination of words and music captures perfectly the expectant, trustful hope of Advent. I hope you love it as much as I do.

A flurry of endings

2016 is turning out to be a very different kind of year from its immediate predecessors. Apart from a last-minute dash to Scotland in January to make sure the house was protected from frost damage, we have remained resolutely in one place until my trip to Prague last month.

Instead of our normal travelling we have been involved in two very different journeys. By far the most significant has been the decision to sell the old house on the hill which was our home for almost forty years. It finally went on the market on the day before the EU referendum and three days later, to our complete amazement, we received an asking price offer from the very first people to view. We were very grateful for this gleam of light amid the profound gloom of the referendum result.

Given the state of the market, and knowing how long some local houses have been for sale, we had been mentally preparing ourselves for a prolonged and frustrating wait. Instead we have spent the summer dealing with all the myriad questions and details which accompany a property sale, which culminated this week with both us and the buyers signing our respective copies of the contracts. Completion will take some time, but the selling  journey has definitely reached its goal. 

The old house as we first saw it in 1973

The old house over 40 years later

Another journey which reached its goal in the last couple of weeks was the seemingly interminable saga of the conservatory. We started sending for brochures this time last year and the building work was finally completed in August. DH then worked like a trooper during my time in Prague, painting walls and laying flooring, ready for the specialist removers to dismantle his beloved snooker table, transport it down the hill and reassemble it in its new home. Since then I can usually rely on finding him in there whenever he isn’t in his usual haunts.

It’s too late now for us to fit in a short trip to France and we have too much to do to head north in November as we usually do. But we are determined that next year, come what may, we will once again be perpetually in transit.

Foundation trench heading for Australia

The walls rise...

And the roof takes shape...

He plays by day...

He plays by night...

Despatch at the start of a journey

I’m sitting at my desk on a warm and humid day, the sky heavily overcast and thunder rumbling in the distance. Upstairs DH is snatching a nap after a very disturbed night. In the hall is a stack of luggage, waiting to be transferred to the car in a couple of hours, when hopefully the rain will have stopped. We will then head across to stay overnight with my mother-in-law, before DH drives me into Oxford to catch the coach for Heathrow.

Yes, after a static but very busy  summer, full of building works and house sale and interrupted by another debilitating virus, I’m finally on the move again. This time it’s not to France or Scotland, but to Prague, for a much anticipated and very welcome return visit to my friend Ricky Yates, the Anglican chaplain there, before he retires next year. I’m looking forward enormously to exploring Prague again and catching up with the friends I made on my previous two visits.

During my visit I will be taking a Sunday service in Ricky’s absence and on the other Sunday I will go with him to Dresden, where he leads a monthly service of Evening Prayer in English at the Frauenkirche, the world-famous symbol of Dresden reborn.  This time he has invited me to be the guest preacher, a hugely exciting, if rather daunting, prospect. Wish me luck.

I’ve spent a rather large number of hours in the past few weeks working on the sermons I will preach and now they are nestling in my new super-light suitcase, along with two complete sets of clerical robes, as well as an ample stock of more usual holiday wear. The freezer is full, so DH won’t starve in my absence, the hairdresser has again successfully tamed my unruly mop and I’m ready for one more adventure. 

Staying put

I truly cannot believe that almost two months have gone by since I last posted, but the calendar doesn’t lie, so two months it must be. And what has she been doing with herself during those two months, I can hear you all thinking. She certainly hasn’t been reading and commenting on our blogs with any regularity, if at all. The answer is very simple. I have been busy, very busy, but with the kind of activity that doesn’t really make for rivetting (or even mildly interesting) blog posts. 

One of these was the recent move from Windows LiveMail to Outlook for dealing with my email, since Microsoft, in its wisdom, has decided to stop supporting LiveMail soon. It’s been a tedious and longwinded process, as somehow the vast majority of my very large number of stored emails were inadvertently duplicated in the process of moving across and the duplicates had to be laboriously deleted by yours truly. Sigh…  

On the positive side, it proved to be unexpectedly fascinating to go back over long-ago events, as I dealt with the emails concerning them. I’d never before thought of email as a memory store, but for me it turns out to be exactly that. I have never managed to keep a diary or a journal for longer than a few weeks, but this has proved to be almost better than a journal in many ways, because the sequence of messages captured not only my thoughts, but those of others involved. As you can guess, the deletion process took considerably longer than it need have done…

Then, of course, there are the preparations for the conservatory. The long-awaited ground-works are scheduled to start on June 2nd, and the construction of the conservatory itself will, all being well, take place in the last full week of June. As I type I can hear DH busily lifting and storing the last of the patio slabs (which were very solidly bedded in!) so that they can be reused eventually to create a small patio at the far end of the conservatory, overlooking the river. Thankfully the weather is being kind here in Mid-Wales, and we seem to be escaping the rain which is currently drenching much of Western Europe.

However,  overshadowing everything else is the major topic which has been consuming most of our time and energy since I last posted - the firm decision to put the old house up the hill on the market at last. What with getting estimates from estate agents, continuing to work on sorting and clearing the house and outbuildings, and trying to bring order to the riot of greenery which has been making a takeover bid, there hasn’t been much time or energy left for anything else.

The house will go onto the market officially as soon as the details of the sale particulars have been finalised by the agent, but, being us, we haven’t been leaving it all to the agent. Using material drafted by DH, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort in the last couple of weeks creating a website (using Blogger) to hold more information and images than any estate agent can include in normal sale particulars. It was a fiddly and sometimes frustrating process, but it finally went live yesterday, and we’re hoping it will help in the process of finding a buyer who will love the place as much as we do and be as happy there as we were for so many years.  

Beyond our own small concerns there is, of course, the looming referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, about which, you’ll be glad to note, I don’t plan to say more than this. It is a huge decision, with very long-lasting consequences, and you will probably not be surprised to hear that as convinced internationalists, DH and I are profoundly hoping Britain will vote to remain a member.

Finally, because so much is happening at the moment, we have been forced to accept that we simply cannot go to Normandy as usual this year. What with the possibility of house viewings and the need to keep the undergrowth around the old house in check, we absolutely must stay here all summer – hence the title of this post. If all goes well we hope to get across to France for a short visit in the autumn, but for this year there will be no cherries, no kittens and no year’s supply of apricot jam to make and bring home. I’d better make the one remaining jar in the cupboard last as long as possible. Even the travelling pelargoniums are staying put this year.

The big bonus of being here is watching our still newish garden blooming through the spring and summer and having the time to carry on developing it. I wonder what new treasures will show themselves over the coming weeks…?