Summer Holidays - Part One

So I had a week or so away.

Event number one was a super wedding - Simon and Cathryn Armer, at Bowness on Windermere. The photo here is of Simon and Cathryn, with Cathryn's family all around. Cathryn's dad, Kevin, is also a vicar - indeed, the vicar of the first Anglican church I ever attended! I was organist and choir master of St John's Great Harwood before I knew how to play the organ or conduct the choir. Cathryn's mother, Linda, died a couple of years ago, and she ran a choir which sang my first musical...

It was a fun wedding. I did the actual ceremony - thanks to James, the local vicar for letting me do so. Though he did interrupt and almost stopped me from saying "You may now kiss the bride". I guess the line really isn't in the service book, but who misses out that line? Not me!

The next photo is of Karen, Siobhan, Warren and I on the morning after, down by the lakeside. The wedding started at 4pm on Friday and was still going when I drove off at 2pm on Sunday! K&S are work friends of Cathryn's, W used to be in the youth group at Great Harwood. We all had a splendid time - including some rather non-vicarly dancing from yours truly. Cathryn dances like her mother - very dramatic, and rather splendidly.


Then I had a lazy few days based at Mum's, but travelling around to see some friends. This photo is of Philip and Cynthia Johnston - Philip was formerly headmaster at my old grammar school, and Cynthia taught me maths in my first year there. They live in Long Preston in North Yorks now, in a splendid seventeenth century house, and we had a delightful lunch together. Cynthia took me for a walk around the village and showed me the church where she is Warden and Philip Reader, and Philip was on good story telling form. He went into Christies in Manchester the following day for a cancer op - though you would not have known there was anything wrong with him.

He was a controversial figure at school; but I thought a good headmaster: a school like ours needed someone to put it on the map, to get in sponsors and funds, to achieve charity work alongside academic excellence. (From memory, twenty-one of us went to Oxford or Cambridge in my year - there were only forty-nine in this year's upper sixth form all told.) If he had his blind spots, as some are quick to say - which of us do not? I personally look back to one of his assemblies (and to one given by the school chaplain) as a turning point in my coming to faith, so I have much to thank Philip for.

This is me visiting Robin Taylor, ex-English teacher, and inspirer of my love of literature, writing and many things dramatic. He was the director of my one Shakesperean stage role - Brutus, in a 1984 school production of Julius Caesar. I'll share the photos another time. Robin is always good company, as is his wife, Ann, my first form French teacher. And my current reading (Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree) is rather shamed by his Complete Letters of AE Housman. Still, I enjoyed regaling them both with an encounter I had with an ex-East businessman-cum-musician who used the phrase "I had to teach him a lesson" in a way that was more akin to Reggie Kray than my old grammar school...

And that more or less covers my little holiday trip. Apart from a strange experience of healing prayer and the dog - but perhaps I'll write about that another time.