Traffic and Traffik

I awoke this morning on the lounge sofa at 7 a.m. feeling rather uncomfortable. Having watched Auf Wiedersehen Pet I stayed downstairs wrapped up in a sleeping blanket as I didn't want to disturb Sara and felt too tired to move anyway. I realised that I was due in Dorking again today so got up promptly, made tea and mustered the troops. Tom was up but both Mary and Sara were sound asleep. I showered and set off for Dorking, giving Tom a left to the bus stop for his school bus. I arrive in Dorking at around 9.30 a.m. and bought a coffee for each of me and my team and a toasted bacon sandwich additionally for me. I had no appointments in my diary so spent the day at my desk dealing with paperwork and assisting Belinda on a couple of problems. I broke with my normal routine today and had lunch with the managers. During the course of the day I educated Ann on the "evils" of the Mars bar and she is now considering only eating fair trade chocolate. Hopefully another convert to the Stop the Traffik campaign. I returned home by way of the A31. The traffic around Farnham was absolutely dreadful and I got home at around 7.30 p.m. with just half an hour to spare before the House Group started. Tonight we had Max, Ivan, Duncan, Sylvia and Klynn. We might have had more but there was a Team Council Meeting tonight too. We started off on our journey with The Apprentice and we all agreed that the camera work on the DVD was appalling and detracted from the messages being spoken. Although it was meant to be an artistic way of portraying the subject matter, the stop/start, focus/out of focus, zoom in/zoom out techniques used were irritating and most of us viewing it had to close our eyes - disappointing when you think the DVD is an integral part of the study material. We had some lively debate and listened to two songs too - one a praise song and the other a contemplative prayer type piece. I hope it was a success although the subject is quite heavy when done in an analytical way. Klynn stayed behind for a couple of glasses of Jameson Whiskey and we chatted about Stop the Traffik. I felt extremely tired when he left and Sara went to bed at 11.30 p.m. I am now feeling incredibly tired and will close. At least I am only in Salisbury tomorrow.

Mission Giving

Back to Dorking today for the first time in a week. The traffic seemed relatively light for a Wednesday morning and I was in the office just after 9.00 a.m. There was a pile of paperwork for me to attend to including finalising the monthly report. I carried on working through my lunch hour on some International matters as I wanted to leave quite promptly this evening to get back for a meeting of our Mission Giving Group at our house. On the way home I phoned Mum to see how she was as I have been so busy over these last few days that I hadn't phoned her as usual on Sunday night. She said she was fine although some of the pain she had been experiencing with her polymyalgia rheumatica had returned. She has had all the garden fencing replaced. Rosemary, Max, Gillian, and Cynthia attended the meeting and after much debate we decided to give larger sums to fewer charities this year - the principal ones being the Deanery Mission Project (Ethiopian children), Winterslow School, Medical Aid to the Sudan and, I am pleased to say, Stop the Traffik. This will all have to be ratified by the full PCC in due course on the 19th May. As a result of the meeting I missed watching Auf Wiedersehen Pet so stayed up late to complete this blog and watch Love Actually so that I could see the repeat of Auf Wiedersehen in the early hours of the morning. Back to Dorking again tomorrow.

Unexpected trip to London

As I recorded yesterday, instead of journeying to Dorking to work in my office there today, I drove to our Salisbury office this morning to leave my car there and take the train up to London to appear on my Company's behalf in the Royal Courts of Justice on a Directions Hearing before the Master in respect of a disputed health claim case. My assistant Belinda was due to attend but as the other side were using a barrister it was felt prudent to ask me to attend. I met up with Hilary, from our Claims Dept. in the office and we walked up to the station to catch the 9.20 a.m. train. I would have caught it at Grateley except that I discovered yesterday evening that if I had gone to Grateley to join it as originally intended, I would simply have watched it flash through that station at 70 mph! It was the fast express! The weather was fine when we arrived in London and we walked over Waterloo Bridge to the Courts. Having divested ourselves of metal and other objects and gone through the high security screening, we consulted the Daily Cause List to discover that our case wasn't actually listed. We made our way to the East Block and found that the Master to whom the case had been allocated was simply the Practice Master (PM) for the Day i.e. available for emergency and ad hoc applications only. I found the barrister on the other side in the Bear Garden (yes it is spelt as the animal not the drink!) on the phone trying to reach my assistant. Apparently the court was supposed to have written to the parties to tell us that the hearing had been postponed until Friday! However, as Master Foster was available as the PM he would hear our case (he didn't seem to have anything else to do at that moment). Thankfully, the barrister on the other side was most reasonable and we came away with a consensual order we could both live with. Having dealt with the matter so quickly I had a little time to spare in London, so used my otherwise lunch hour to visit Stop the Traffik near Waterloo Station and met with two of their staff over a mug of tea in one of their meeting rooms. Ruth would have joined us too but was still away in New York. It proved to be a most fruitful meeting. Back on the train to Salisbury and back to the office where I dealt with a number of emails which had piled up during the day as well as some emergency work from the Isle of Man. I managed to get to the gym this evening, with a full kit, for an hour before getting back home and being plunged into trying to help Sara help Tom with some linear equations - me who had to resit maths GCE!!? I have never found the need, personally, to know in my daily life what the value of x is in an equation such as 6(2x-2) = 5(1-x). Please don't even try to work it out unless you are sad! I had a bath to sooth my aching limbs (and brain?) - all that walking in London and on the gym treadmill - and then spent the evening doing my preparation for the House Group on Thursday. Tomorrow it is Dorking!

"Kitless"

It was absolutely pouring with rain when I got up this morning. We had both slept quite soundly as the fur cover on our bed was unruffled - quite unusual. I made tea and showered and threw my gym kit in the car as I intended to go down to the gym after work today. I had a short commute again to our Salisbury office and set to work on the preparation for a telephone tribunal hearing in the Exeter Employment Tribunals. I bought coffee and a sausage muffin for breakfast as I had left the house without anything to eat this morning. The hearing went very well indeed with the employment judge giving an indication to the other side that their case was going to take some convincing. This set me up in a good frame of mind for the rest of the day although all the uncertainties at work still remain in my mind. I lunched in the office restaurant with Sara - a reasonable Thai green curry and rice - thinking that this is something we will not be able to do together much longer. During the course of the afternoon I learned that a court hearing in London tomorrow was not going to be as straight forward as we had thought. My original intention had been for Belinda to appear on the Company's behalf as it seemed that the Court Order would be agreed by the other side. This was not to be the case and so it was agreed that I should represent the Company in court. I needed to get some documents emailed to me immediately and left the office at 5.30 p.m. to go to the station and get a ticket for the 9.20 a.m. train to London from Salisbury tomorrow. After stopping to get some money from the ATM at Waitrose I arrived at the gym to discover that in my haste this morning, I had failed to notice that my kit bag contained neither shirt nor shorts - only a towel and my shoes. I had to abandon the idea of gym exercise and carried on home where Sara had cooked a lovely cottage pie. Sara intended to go to the gym herself but couldn't find her gym shoes. I offered her mine (at least I knew where mine were) but she didn't feel comfortable in them - so no gym for any of us tonight! I will have to go tomorrow on my return from London. I had a lovely long chat on the telephone tonight with Mike Billington from Manchester who was telling me all about a court case he had been conducting against his son's landlord. We made a point of promising to meet up during the next convenient trip I have up to Liverpool/Manchester. It will be so good to see him again. Mike would also like to visit Salisbury to see Stonehenge and the Cathedral. He was telling me that although he had been a devout Roman Catholic and at one point had been considering a career in the church, he was now a non-believer. Sara and I watched a programme on Henry VIII presented by David Starkey and I was amazed to find out that the sarcophagus intended for King Henry VIII (originally designed for Cardinal Wolsey actually) was finally used to house the coffin of Viscount Lord Horatio Nelson in St. Paul's Cathedral (see picture).

Washing Cars

Quite a busy day today with church in the morning at 9.30 a.m. where I read the gospel (Luke 24:36-48). It was also a very special service as Mary was formally commissioned as a member of the church choir and received her RSCM collar and medallion. It was a very proud and nostalgic moment for me as a former chorister and lovely to recite the choristers' prayer with her. Immediately after the service I drove Tom up to Barry's Fields for his Clarendon football match against Laverstock. Unfortunately they lost 2-4. I did return to church briefly for coffee and a chat about tonight's Annual Parochial Council Meeting (APCM). Back home after the match, I cut the grass on the bank and mowed the rear lawn. Both looked lovely after they had been cut. Lunch was roast pork which need a little longer in the oven than Sara thought. I tried to speed up the crisping of the cracking by placing the fat under the grill resulting in the crackling being reduced to cinders for the most part. At 3 p.m. we all went over to the Village Hall armed with buckets and sponges for the Great Car Wash for Project Uganda. As part of this month's Food for Thought, we were washing cars at £5 each with the money going to Project Uganda, a village charity, to provide mosquito nets for the people of a Ugandan village. As each mosquito net (for two people) costs £5 it meant that for every car we washed we could, effectively, save two lives. In all we washed 32 cars and raised £167.50 - a really excellent achievement. I had 50 minutes to get out of my wet clothes, have a bath and get down to St. John's for the APCM at 6 p.m. I have to confess to having dozed off in the bath but still made it down to St. John's in good time. The meeting took its usual format, reports with a lively discussion about mission giving and stewardship followed by elections. I was appointed to the Alderbury Deanery Synod and thereby relinquished my elected seat on the PCC but was immediately returned to the PCC as an ex officio member by virtue of my appointment to the Deanery Synod. This I thought meant that there would be five places for five nominees for the elected positions on the PCC and that Hamish and Stephen would be elected in addition to Klynn. However, on the night, a sixth person put their name forward and Klynn withdraw his name to avoid an election. Although it is great to see Hamish and Stephen on the PCC I was quite devastated by Klynn's withdrawal. I am absolutely certain that he would have won the election but he was concerned not to deprive the others of the opportunity. The meeting ended with an annual round up of the year in slides with a few excellent ones of Sara. I wasn't too impressed with the ones of me! Klynn, Chris and I ended the evening in the Lion's Head where we discussed the meeting and the future. I am sure that Klynn will be just as effective off the PCC as being on it. I came home to find Sara watching "Desperate Housewives".

Saints Finally Relegated; but Mariners Almost Safe

At last, the misery of this year's football season drew to a close with Saints drawing their last home game against Burnley 2-2 which was not enough to prevent them starting next season in League 1 on minus 10 points. Grimsby lost their game at Bournemouth 2-1 but with Chester only managing a 2-2 draw at Aldershot, this meant that for Chester to stay up and Grimsby to go down, Chester would need to overturn a 20 goal deficit, win their last match and hope Grimsby lost. Too tall an order for any club, especially Chester, and so for all intents and purposes Grimsby will survive league football. Today started slowly again. I didn't wake up until nearly 9.00 a.m. In a role reversal, Sara brought in tea and then she and Mary went off to ballet. I went to the shop and bought bacon and rolls for breakfast. I also took the glass bottles and jars to the recycling station in the Nelson Arms car park and bought a Daily Mail. Tom and I left for Southampton at 12.30 p.m. We couldn't get parked in our normal car park and had to park in Terminus Road by the Central Bridge instead. We lunched on chips with curry sauce from our usual fish and chip shop in St. Mary's Road. The game at St. Mary's was an exciting one and the Saints players gave a performance far better than they have done for most of the season and significantly better than last week at Hillsborough. Saints could easily have one the match if David McGoldrick hadn't missed a penalty but what will be will be. It all became academic when we learned that Barnsley had held Wolves to a 1-1 draw. After the match Tom and I went to Quito's and had a Mexican meal. We also watched three giant cruise ships Tom wanted chocolate brownies for a dessert but when I enquired as to whether the chocolate was fair trade and being told it probably wasn't we skipped the desserts course - besides, we were both stuffed by now anyway. We called in on Sara and Mary at Andrea's where Sara is babysitting tonight and Tom returned to fetch Mary at 9 p.m. I sat down and wrote this blog in draft form for publication later tonight.

Faith Supper (Cheese and Wine)

No trip to the gym or swimming pool this morning so a more leisurely start to the day as I was in the Salisbury office again. I hoisted the Saints' flag to half-mast following yesterday's announcement that Southampton Football Club was to have 10 points deducted for going into administration. This means that the club will be playing in League 1 next season. I had a meeting in the office at 9 a.m. and arrived at 8.00 a.m. where I had a latte and bacon muffin to start off the day. Following my meeting I dealt with numerous emails and phone calls. I had lunch with Sara - excellent fish and chips and mushy peas - and returned to the office for more paperwork. I left at 4.45 p.m. and went to Waitrose to get cheese, wine, butter and biscuits for our House Group's cheese and wine party tonight. I had a bath and read a bit more of Steve Chalke's "The Lost Message of Jesus" before our soiree. Max, Ivan, Dawn and Klynn came - I was disappointed that it was not more - and we had a pleasant evening discussing a wide range of Christian topics including our usual chestnut of where is the church going, what are we called to do and so on. We also discussed the topic of "The Apprentice" which we intend to follow over the next 5 weeks using material acquired from Spring Harvest. We commented upon the fantastic work that Danielle Strickland has been called upon to do and find her a great inspiration. We all agreed that the House Group was an important and integral part of our church life and growth in faith and we need Nils or Elizabeth to attend one of our meetings and endorse the work we are doing. Went to bed late after having lost the first draft of this blog and having to write it again!