Back from Oxford

Hi! Everyone - I'm back home, for a little while at least, and have missed you all.

I want to say just how thankful and grateful I am to you all for your heartfelt comments and concern over my garden after the recent bad storm. It's nice to know that people care. The only permanent damage will be on the evergreen shrubs as all the deciduous ones will grow again next Spring.

I continue to be aware of the folk who had their homes flooded so am not over concerned about my garden.

Our trip to Oxford was wonderful. Our accommodation was superb. Oxford is only 1 hour and 45 minutes from home so we have visited before but this is the first time we have actually stayed there and really spent time taking in the beauty and history. I have 116 photographs so as you can imagine they will be distributed over quite a number of posts once I can get them all filed and organised. I plan to give you some history and interesting facts also.

I will do it all as soon as possible but it won't be as quick as I would like as life is quite busy at present.

We arrived home late Saturday afternoon and after unloading went straight out to do a weekly shop before going to a do a study of Paul's letters to the Phillipians in the form of a book club group. This worked very well and proved very interesting with everyone's contribution. Then today was our church picnic.

Tomorrow I have a family from Alberta, Canada coming to stay, along with 2 dinner parties this week.

The following week brings "Soul in the City" an outreach initiative where young people from churches across our Borough get together to work in the community. I have the job of supervising and helping a group that will be cleaning up around our local library, weeding and tidying up the surrounding garden. There will be activities for families in the park in the evenings. The young people sleep and eat at the school belonging to our church and spend their mornings in Bible study and worship and prayer before going out to serve afternoons and evenings.

Also during that week we are hoping to join our friends on their long boat on one of the canals if we can fit it all in .

So I will be posting and visiting you but maybe not as frequently as normal in these next couple of weeks. Hope you are all having a good Summer so far.