Ancient Buildings

Mary stayed with her friend, Lucy, overnight in Salisbury and is going shopping in Southampton today. Thom and Sara were up early this morning to do his paper round and I got up to print off the service sheets and a copy of my sermon for this morning’s service.  Fortunately the service at West Grimstead wasn’t due to start until 11 a.m. so I had plenty of time to get things ordered and prepared.  After a series of evening out or busy I was feeling a little tired so was grateful for not too early a start.  This was Sara’s first visit to St. John’s Church at West Grimstead which dates from 1291 and is the oldest church building in our Team.  There was a congregation of 16 this morning which was a decent number for this very small parish (only 150 houses in total) and the service seemed to go well.  I preached on the Book of Philemon and I seemed to be received well.  It was a simple service and as I do more of these so my confidence grows.  Quite a number of members of the congregation were asking and assuming that I would be going on for ordination and seemed a little disappointed when both Sara and I told them that that wasn’t something envisaged – especially with young children.   This afternoon I took myself off to Motissfont Abbey to view the original Shepard drawings for A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books.  I was also fascinated to see how the Tudor manor house had been incorporated into the old dissolved abbey from where it gets its name.  I was surprised to see Nils, our Rector, and family also at the exhibition – there is just no way of getting away from the church sometimes.  Tonight, however, I joined James, David and David’s son Harry as the quiz team for the pub quiz in aid of the friends of the village school.  There were some teams of school teachers so it was going to be interesting pitting our wits against the teachers.  We also heard that as we had the reputation of always winning the questions would be difficult for us.  However, true to form, we won again (with a 13 point margin).  So, it was back home again with a bottle of wine.  The end of an extremely busy week with so many engagements.  Hopefully next week will be a little quieter but it looks like some more legal work has just come in which will require a visit to Dorchester shortly.