Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

Believe it or not we have now passed the longest day. On Monday morning the sun rose at 4:38am but from here on in, the days are getting a tiny bit shorter and the nights a tiny bit longer. Don’t let that depress you because, we still have the summer ahead of us, and by all accounts the next couple of weeks will be quite hot. The summer solstice is made famous by the Druids, many of whom meet at Stonehenge on 21st June each year to worship the sun. This year numbers were lower due to Covid, and actually people gathered there against government advice, but it all seems to have passed off safely and peacefully [1] . I didn’t know much about Druidry, so looked online to discover a bit about their beliefs. It’s quite interesting. The British Druidry Order has its own website [2] and Druidry was officially recognised as a religion under charity law in 2010, allowing them to receive tax free donations like the Church of England [3] . Writer Emma Restall-Orr explains in “Wh...

Last week I went to visit my cousins, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time. And my eldest cousin has got two children, the youngest of whom was only born a few months ago, so I got to meet her for the first time, and have some cuddles with my newborn cousin, which was just so lovely.  And it was great to see her older brother too – he’s now three, but because of the pandemic, I hadn’t actually seen him, since he was one! When I saw him last, he only really communicated through noises, but now he can not only hold a conversation, but can pick up one of his toy dinosaurs and say “That’s an ankylosaurus!” But something struck me about how my cousin and her husband related to their son. There were a couple of times that he did something naughty, like throw a tantrum and kick a chair when he wasn’t allowed more ice cream, and his parents got very firm with him and said “No, we don’t do that. That’s not ok!” It can’t have been pleasant hearing his Mum, who loves him so m...

I guess it’s happened to us all many times over the last year. Those plans for seeing your family at Christmas, that holiday that you were going to go on, your long awaited family birthday party, all cancelled or delayed. You expected life to go one way….. and it went another. Time and time again Covid has scuppered our plans. Let me give you a personal example. Last October, Emma and I reached our 10 th wedding anniversary. Well, all through our 10 years of marriage we had been saving up some pennies and looking ahead to what we were going to do for our 10 th anniversary. In 2018, 2019, we were saying, “what shall we do in October 2020, a romantic getaway to Europe? A special holiday in the sun for a few days?” Well in October last year, we weren’t going anywhere, except Huntingdon! Plans put on hold. But with everything in life, there’s 2 sides to every story. When something goes wrong like that, do you look at the down side, or the bright side? Yes, over the last y...