This will be the first magazine produced on our exciting new photocopier. The day it arrived we started running off the carol service surrounded by a mesmerized group of the junior choir. It really is an amazing machine. Of course, like any other new device, we haven’t tested it to its limit yet and I still don’t know how many sheets of paper it can cope with stapling and folding – I may find that it isn’t time to throw away the staplers just yet! But at least it produces crisp, clean copies. All being well it will have printed a coloured cover, stapled and folded each copy, and, as this isn’t too bulky an issue it should cope – but not with a coloured page for the diary in the centre – there are still some things only people can work out! (Though when you think about it, if a machine can identify and separate the first page of a document it surely ought to be able to separate the last page as well.) So – if the diary is on white paper you’ll know the machine could cope, if it’s on a colour, you’ll know it couldn’t!
This month’s sermon: it’s sometimes difficult, after a particularly focused season, to find a sermon that takes us forward rather than looking back so last year I saved Father Jeremy’s epiphany sermon and offer it here. Also the story of Arteban – what, you’ve never heard of Arteban? Well, to be honest, neither had I till last year, but it’s a good tale and because it wouldn’t have been seasonal in February I saved that for this Epiphany season too. (You can read the sermon on this website – January 2018)
New for 2019
Elizabeth Beesley is organising soup lunches once a month in the Crypt Room – see below – (may move into church after the electrical work is completed). These are going to take place on the second Wednesdays in place of Knit and Natter which I’m postponing for the moment – partly because the idea was to enliven at least one period of stewarding in church and we don’t need stewards for the next 3 months while the electrical work is being done – and partly because while I’m covering the parish office I won’t have time! But rest assured knitting will be back on the agenda later in the year and we’ll be looking for a project to take us up to the “Knitted Bible” exhibition which comes to us at the end of January 2020.
Can you help?
Two local parishioners are looking for a room to store some belongings while their flat is being refurbished, rather than putting them in storage where access would be more difficult. They will need to come in during the day sometimes and are willing to pay rent and perhaps help with shopping, etc. Please contact Jean Archer 0207 435 5490
New Year greetings
Isn’t it difficult to know whether to say “Happy New Year” or not? Even that paragraph heading may have made you cringe! As always some of us have had good years, some bad. Some of us may be looking forward hopefully, some despairingly. Some may simply hate the whole thing and long for the end of the Christmas season, the removal of the decorations, a cessation of good wishes, and a return to normality. In the days when Christmas continued till Candlemas it was considered unlucky to leave any trace of decoration after 2nd February – and no wonder, they must have been so sick of it all by then!
So if, via the pages of this magazine, I wish you a happy new year it’s with an awareness of all the baggage we carry with us, but also a real hope that 2019 might ultimately turn out to be just that – a Happy New Year.