Newsprint, newspring, Newcastle, new Geordie .......

Snowdrops and Winter Aconites are spreading rumours of spring furiously around the faerie dells in the Vicarage Wood.

In the dusk, if you listen carefully, it is possible to hear the faerie choir singing the coming spring.

Of course last year the same thing happened hints of spring swept away by the 'Beast from the East'.

Who knows what might occur in 2019?

Donald Trump?

Possibly, because he knows everything and what he doesn't know he is happy to make up.

In the middle of last weeks storm with hundred mile an hour winds sweeping everything before them I stopped for fuel at a Tesco Extra store in Consett.

As I got out of the car to unlock the fuel cap I was practically blown of my feet.

Quite a feat!

Whilst I am no longer sixteen and a half stone in weight I am still six feet tall and well constructed, definitely Yeoman stock!

Nevertheless the wind almost swept me off my feet.

Climate change the scoffers scoff. Global warming? The sceptics query.

The answer, counter intuitively, is a definite Yes.

As the world warms and the ice caps melt so the weather responds and the world will become a warmer, wetter, windier place, at least the winters will.

The summers will just become hotter.

So we look forward to Summer in Shotley Fields.

It has already been possible to sit outside in January with a book, a beer and a sandwich and enjoy a leisurely view across the fields.

The Chickens when they are not being blown sideways past the window are able to enjoy a breeze ruffling their feathers almost as much as they appear to enjoy the Cockerel ruffling them.

Yesterday we planted the hollyhocks, transposed from Cumbria, as they have started to sprout in the plastic bag where they have been hiding since before Christmas, I am sure that their new, freshly dug, south facing bed will provide the perfect location for a splendid show of Hollyhocks in 2019.

Representing as they do fruitfulness, fertility and ambition one can only hope that our show of Hollyhocks will reflect and characterise a fruitful ministry where our ambition for the Gospel will prove to be planted in fertile ground.

Parish life is much the same in my reincarnated existence as it was in previous incarnations, the major difference appears to be that this new sphere of ministry is much more of a shared ministry than I recall.

Confessions at the Bar have it seems characterised my ministry.

I have written about Dances in Little Hulton where I heard more confessions, more regularly than my predecessor who held confessions on a Saturday night rather than Dances.

Today my conversation at the Bar after a Funeral proved instructive not the least because my interlocutor had been an engineer in the Merchant Navy.

His last two jobs were instructive at a number of levels but his stories about Newsprint from Vancouver Island to San Diego illustrated the complexity of supply chains in a complex and modern world and his story about carrying cargos of salt from Mexico to the US for the purpose of maintaining swimming pools and ensuring that they were clean and healthy for their users, said much about the proximate relationship of first and third worlds.

Politicians can deny Climate change.

Kings can order the Seas back.

Politicians can promote the benefits of Brexit.

But the faeries in my Garden, whilst they are not yet warning of disasters ahead, are certainly asking us to welcome spring whilst advising that winter might yet have a sting in its tail.






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