From the Registers

all quiet!

January 2004 - Calendars, Dates and Plans …….. 

I often feel the New Year is wrongly dated and should coincide with Spring and fresh growth, with Easter close at hand. This would leave winter to work its course at the end of the year. Instead, we start the year in the middle of winter, with the likelihood of the worst of the weather to come. Hardly a fresh start as it is! Perhaps we should inaugurate a New Calendar Society and root for keeping strictly to Greenwich Mean Time - this would mean also that we and time are governed by the sun and so we do not need to fiddle about with clocks at different seasons of the year.

Thumbing through the stack of calendars is an insight into the marketing wiles of local traders, regular suppliers, charities, galleries, travel agencies etc - not forgetting the W.I. who will never be touched by the Young Farmers. (One hunt supporters group comes a hasty second!) Some of those, like the old Pirelli calendars, become collectors items; others remain a useful reference point like receipts, Dales travel notes and places to walk, galleries or artists collections etc. Charities often provide useful, but not notable or keepable, calendars - the W.I excepted.

Am I therefore wiser from this glut of dates through the letter box? Not really. I still have to sift the info, which can often be as one-sided as various media items. Take the female curate who took the police to court over not prosecuting over an abortion. Thunderer in The Times gave her a not unreasonable pasting but omitted the key flaw. Surgery had left her very good looking and a triumph of her own cause, but the whole process was very subjective. The objective consideration is that many parents know that under such similar circumstances they could not cope. Their faith and their hopes are there not to dig a pit but to give them strength to make their own decisions accordingly. We talk about faith as freedom, not restriction - but every newborn child brings its own demands, and in the aftermath of the Christ Child we have to work out our own responses in his light. "I am the way the truth and the light." All sorts and conditions have to work out how the light best endorses the truth along the way they follow. My decision is not your decision. Your solution is not necessarily my solution. We have to live it through, like Christ, and be the beacon we are called to be.

Another calendar scheme is to turn to your computer, beam up the dates and insert your own pictures: grandchildren for the grand-parents: trains and cars for the enthusiast: places to fish for the fisherman: churches to visit for the M.U. etc. The permutations and the lists are too numerous to cite. However, a few red-letter days in the coming year (2004) might start a few chases for an illustration for your own calendar over and above the date to highlight. These are opportunities for all the parishes to get together and extend our fellowship and appreciation of each other:

14th January Parish Lunch

5th February Joint open P.C.C./Hillside Parish Meeting

3rd, 17th, 31st March Food for Thought

8th, 9th, 11th April Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter activities

20th May Ascension Day 12th June M.U. Pilgrimage around Hillside Churches

13th - 15th July Great Yorkshire Show

29th August Motorists Service, Leake

September Video and other parish activities centred on "At Your Service" should take better shape.

October Harvest Festivals (incl., on 31st, Archbishop of York at Boltby).

22nd November My Birthday - and four other people in the parish!

December Christingle and Christmas activities.

All too soon we start all over again! To avoid disappointment, book now! Best Wishes, and Happy New Year!

STOP PRESS - IRAQ. It is to be hoped that our troops will be welcomed home with the same kind of jubilation - if not more! - that was accorded to our World Cup Rugby heroes!

P.C.C. Notes

Leake. Fabric. Faculty is in hand for work to tower and churchyard wall. Faculty in hand for floodlighting in memory of Terry Coverdale.

Over Silton. Fabric. Volunteers needed to repair churchyard wall.

Felixkirk. Arrangements in hand to sort out sound amplification, loop system.

Kirby Knowle. Funds needed to set up sound amplification, loop system.

Nether Silton. Repairs/replacement organ necessary.

Cowesby. Volunteers needed to finish churchyard wall, as the scheme that used probationers has fallen through. Once finances are on an even keel, we need to launch a "spire appeal" to reclad the spire.

What support is there for loos and for which churches?

The peace of the running water to you,
The peace of the flowing air to you,
The peace of the quiet earth to you,
The peace of the shining stars to you
And the love and care of all of us to you.

Celtic traditional prayer.

CHILDHOOD - now who is Ella?

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 50s, 60s 70s and 80s probably shouldn't have survived.

Our baby cots were covered with brightly-coloured lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors etc., and it was fine to play with pans.

When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip flops and fluorescent "clackers" on our wheels

As children, we would ride in cars with no seatbelts or air bags. Riding in the passenger seat was a treat.

We drank water from the garden hose, and not from a bottle - it tasted the same.

We ate dripping sandwiches, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.

We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can - and no one actually died from this.

We would spend hours building go-carts out of scrap, and then went top speed down the hill - only to find we had forgotten the brakes.

After running into stinging nettles a few times, we solved the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark.

No one was able to reach us all day, and no one minded.

We did not have Playstations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound (what's that?), no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet chat rooms. We had FRIENDS - we went outside and found them.

We played elastics and street rounders - sometimes that ball really hurt!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits.

They were accidents. We learnt not to do the same thing again. We had fights, punched each other hard and got black and blue - we learned to get over it.

We walked to friend's homes.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate live stuff, and although we were told it would happen, we did not have many eyes out, nor did the live stuff inside us live forever.

We rode our bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats only by the hood. Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. The idea of a parent baling us out, if we broke a law, was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!

 

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem-solvers, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned to deal with it all.

And you're one of them - Congratulations! Please pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as real kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives for our own good.

(But I think one of the saddest things that ever happened, were computer-controlled OO trains, c.1980 - what happened to the O-gauge clockwork?! Ed.)

ELLA is a little girl - she is the daughter of a friend. She has Cystic Fibrosis. I only learnt what this means recently, since the Great North Run in fact! If you want to know more, beam up your computer and look at the website: www.runningforella.info ! If you would like a brief resume, please let me know and I'll put something in the February HPM. Ed.