Rochester

Another fully committed day today.  I spent the morning on Complex work and phoned Mum for our weekly chat.  She is still suffering from aches and pains but the better weather is making it a bit more bearable.  We talked about my late friend and Mayor of Louth, David Kaye, whose funeral is tomorrow.  Unfortunately my commitments down here make it impossible for me to attend.  I am just so pleased that I was able to see him and spend some time with him whilst he was alive and enjoyed working with him to put together his last book.  I very kindly gave me a model of a Wolverhampton trolleybus as a keepsake which I have here in the study and which I shall treasure.  At lunchtime today we met up with the children's godparents and our bridesmaid who is over from Canada with her new boyfriends.  We spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Pizza Hut in Amesbury before Richard arrived to take me off to where he and I were to meet with the Rev. Rob Ryan who runs a Pub Theology Group in a Wetherspoon's pub in the High Street there.  We found that our hotel was on the west side of the River Medway and about a 2-mile walk into the city centre (actually after some seven hundred and fifty years or so of being a city, Rochester lost its status as a result of a failure by the local council to secure it during the last local government re-organisation when Rochester-on-Medway merged with Gillingham).  Richard and I decided that as we had plenty of time, we would walk into Rochester town centre over the Medway Bridge.  Stopping at Morrisons for some contact lens solution, we took about an hour to get to the High Street where we had a cup of tea al fesco.  We entered the Golden Lion pub at 6.45 p.m. and were delightfully surprised to find that a pint of Adnam's beer (brewed in Bury St. Edmunds) was only £2.30 (a £1 cheaper than back home in the village).  We met Rob and three of his regular pub theologians as well as a lady who, like us, was researching the idea of pub theology for a dissertation for a degree in theology from the University of Kent. We spent about two and a half hours chatting about many subjects and getting a good feel for how and why pub theology is working in Rochester.  We will need to make quite a few adaptions for it to work in Winterslow.  We visited an excellent Indian restaurant in the High Street which Sara and I had sampled before and whose reputation was confirmed by our theologians - "Two Cities" - where we had a balti each.  After the beer and the Indian food we decided that instead of getting a taxi we would walk back the 2 miles to the hotel arriving at around 12.30 a.m.  A good night's sleep too!