Thursday 25 April 2019

HE IS RISEN INDEED!

A Happy Easter

Importantly, we have now celebrated our first Holy Week and Easter in the newly-refurbished church. We still had to clean and polish everything, as the amount of dust in the atmosphere is still tremendous, but everything is looking much better, and I was not ashamed to welcome the Archdeacon of London, Fr Luke Miller, who spent Holy Week with us. Having someone else to share the preaching (and reading the Passion on Good Friday) makes a surprising physical difference.

With some repaired and refurbished candlesticks we were able to create a much better altar of repose on Maundy Thursday, and then to make a bigger, better splash on Easter Day, and frankly St Mary Mags looked splendid. We also used the old marble paschal candlestick for the first time since I've been here (as we had builders' labourers to move it) which looks impressive in the sanctuary. That still needs repair, but it's quite safe, so it's good to use it. 

We also used our new Stations of the Cross, which I am very pleased with. I bought them in Palermo, and had them shipped over, which was fine, except that the package was just left on my doorstep. The old plaster-of-Paris ones were past repair, and looked very tatty. They would inevitably have got even more damaged, and if we had tried to put them up and take them down it would have been a terrible chore, resulting in more damage. They also take up a lot of space in storage. The new ones, on the other hand, are in silvered bronze (and so pretty resilient) and are virtually flat (and so store easily). They are also silver, which looks very striking on the dark walls of the church. Their design is contemporary, but not aggressively so, and they are framed by a stylized thorns pattern, which works very well in a gothic setting.


Deliverymen

The person delivering the Stations left them on my doorstep, but at least he delivered them in a timely fashion, unlike a Hermes deliveryman, who took a fortnight to find my house, despite having "The Vicarage" in six-inch-high letters outside. I discovered through this that Hermes is not really a delivery company at all, but essentially an internet device, matching up deliveries with self-employed deliverymen. This would be fine if they were all competent, but mine wasn't. I actually saw him on one of his failed visits, trying to get into the school one evening, little imagining that this was for me. His vehicle was distinctive, and it is even more ironic that I have since seen it overnight a few hundred yards away in St Peter's parish. He claimed to have tried to deliver, but never left a card, and simply failed to identify the house on repeated alleged attempts. Since there are only 3 buildings with my postcode, and the others are the church and the school, I was not impressed. Hermes of course takes no responsibility for failed deliveries and directs you back to the supplier you purchased from, so I had long email exchanges with Rapha (classy cycle clothing, ironically based about 4 miles away). The particularly annoying thing was that I have had numerous successful deliveries from Rapha before (via Royal Mail, I think) and so let them know that I didn't think much of their new contractor.


Nearly There

Of course the new building wasn't finished for Easter. Silly of me to have thought it would be. But we are genuinely close now. The scaffolding is coming down, and it looks terrific. New turf is going down where the compound has been. People are frantically fixing things. The lift car appears to have been manufactured the wrong size, which is more than a little vexing, but we trust that something can be done.There were a whole string of things that were meant to be done over the school holiday, to avoid annoyance, but which seem not to have happened then, which is a shame. I compared notes with my neighbour Jem, the Baptist minister, who has totally rebuilt his church (and has flats on top); his is even further behind than ours, and we should just about finish together!

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