Well, we blinked and here we are, in the 10th month. No Goose Fair this year, then? Always went with my grandad and bought back brandy snaps and one of those beautiful dolls on a string. Yep, remember them well. Actually, when I was 5 or 6 I was not bothered about the rides but, I was bothered about those beautiful dolls with all those skirts. Loved it, special times. There is one ride we have all been on and that my dear friends is the Corona Coaster. Oh yes! We have gone up, down, side to side and back again, and we haven’t stopped yet, have we? What a ride, what a journey! Do you feel like you are going round in ever-decreasing circles?

Well, you are not on your own. It’s a good job the Christian journey has a goal in sight and we know the way we are going. We may feel at times that we are going round in ever–decreasing circles, we may wander from the path and just like that Corona Coaster we may feel like we are being thrown from side to side. We hang on though, don’t we, sometimes by our fingertips, but we hang on knowing that God is holding our hand tightly through the scary bits. We can’t see what’s around the corner, we can’t see what’s up ahead but we continue our walk of faith, because that’s what faith is, isn’t it? Being confident that God holds us by his hand. We can read in Isaiah:

“For I, the Lord your God hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, Fear not, I am the one who helps you.”

(Isaiah 41 v 13)

“Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”

(Isaiah 49 v 16a.)

Engraving is permanent, engraving is etched, engraved is what we are. Engraving takes time. For those who love Jesus and do life’s journey with him, the journey is excitingly scary, but we know he is right there holding us in his everlasting arms, in his powerful hands. The Lord bless you and keep you.

Wendy

We are open again!

A warm welcome to you. From the 4th October our Sunday service is at 10 am.

Please use the West door entrance and follow the steward’s instructions. They are to help keep us all safe. Please gel your hands and wear a mask.

We will escort you to a pew. Sadly there will be no singing and no refreshments. At the end of the service, we will escort you out of church.

Deanery Synod representatives

We need two people to represent St Paul’s at Deanery Synod meetings. If you are interested in finding out what this role involves, please talk to Wendy.

Sunday - a special Sabbath day.

Picture the scene. It is a warm Saturday afternoon in early summer. Jesus and his disciples are walking past a field of corn which is waiting to be harvested. The disciples pick some of the ears of corn and rub off the chaff in their hands and chew on the hard grain. The Pharisees, sticklers for the law, have been following and wanting to find fault with Jesus. They have their chance - picking the corn is technically harvesting and is thus working on the Sabbath, and so they accuse Jesus and his followers of breaking the Sabbath rules. Jesus’ reply to this is “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” In other words, the whole point of Sabbath was for our benefit, it wasn’t about another set of rules.

So, what is Sabbath? The word Sabbath comes to us from the Hebrew word “Shabbat”. The word literally means “to stop”. So, Sabbath is simply a day to: – stop working; stop wanting things; stop worrying; just stop the hurry in your life. In our consumer-driven world, we are bombarded with the need to do more to get more stuff, to hurry from one thing to another. The world of advertising is selling us a dream to strive for more things and to work harder to get these things. The result is that it creates in us a deep sense of not being fulfilled or satisfied, and this can damage our souls. Corrie ten Boom once said, “If the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy”. Her thinking was that sin and busyness have the same effect of cutting us off from God.

The Sabbath was a day that was intended to feed our souls, a chance to stop to take stock of our lives and of course our relationships, with each other and with God. The fourth commandment says, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days shall you labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.”

Thus the Jewish people would start their Sabbath at 6pm on a Friday and it would go through until 6pm on the Saturday. Many households would start the Sabbath with a special family meal on the Friday evening. It was a time for family to gather to share food and time and news. In fact, it was a time to strengthen relationships, but it was more than this - it was a time to pray. The meal would start with prayers and the lighting of candles so that God was brought right into the centre of family life.

Why should we keep a Sabbath?

The early Christians moved their day of prayer and worship to a Sunday, the day on which Jesus arose from the dead. This custom of keeping Sunday special persisted until fairly recently in our country, but as time goes by it has been slowly downgraded as a special day in the week. Many people have to work on a Sunday and as a result there is no chance of a day of peace and quiet. Yet studies have proved that once a certain number of hours have been worked, our productivity stalls. The ideal number is 50 hours, roughly a six-day week. My point is this, there is a rhythm in creation, there is an inbuilt need for a day of rest and re-creation. It is in fact a way of governing our pace of life and ensuring we have time to recover. Just as much as sleep is necessary for you to start a new day feeling refreshed, so a Sabbath ensures you start a new week feeling renewed. So, can I encourage you even if you can’t make it a Sunday, that you find time to create a day of peace and renewal for your soul.

Philip Thomas

Carlton Memories

Apart from some shocking moments, like the aeroplane wing that crashed through the roof of the Co-op on Oakdale Road, and the petrol tank that exploded at Avondale Garage, I have very happy memories of my childhood in Carlton.

Parkdale Primary School was a wonderful place to grow up. I don't remember any of my lessons except the Art ones, although they must have worked because I ended up being able to read, write and do sums. But it was the 'playing' that was so good - toy racing cars across the playground, whips and tops, hoops, Cowboys and Indians, Robin Hood, fantastic school sports days on the vast playing field - the same playing field that, when covered with snow, led to the most memorable snow-ball fights that seemed to involve hundreds of people.

However, there was a down side - the Headmaster's slipper for short sharp punishments, writing out "I must not do (whatever it was you'd done wrong)" 300 times for more protracted disciplining, and the Dinner Ladies' Revenge.

We all loved chips. Whenever chips were on offer we'd make sure we got a good portion. Then, just occasionally, we'd bite into our chips and realise they weren't chips at all but cunningly-shaped parsnips. I don't know what the dinner ladies did to the parsnips to make them taste so foul, but we were told that we would NOT go out to play until we had eaten every last one of them. The children moaned and groaned to no avail and so resorted to smuggling the parsnips off the plate and into pockets, inside shirts and even into underpants to escape the dinner hall.

I've heard it suggested that in Heaven you are given back your childhood innocence and that would be great, but I do hope the parsnips taste better than they did then!

Pete Nightingale

Leaves of Southwell Project

If you’re interested in crafts, you might like to visit this Exhibition at Southwell Minster.

It is hoped that many of the entries will be donated for use in educational visits.

We've had some superb entries into our Green Man competition inspired by the C13th carvings in the Chapter House. All pieces are now installed & form a stunning exhibition. The quality was out of this world - come & see for yourself! The Minster is open every day between 11am-3pm pic.twitter.com/XkByyio3Ff
— Southwell Minster (@SouthwMinster) September 30, 2020

The Minster is open every day between 11am - 3pm

The answers to the Missing Link quiz from September edition All the words could be made up from letters in the word HARVEST answers:

Earth
Vest
Harvest
Heart
Tear
Star
Sea
Hat
Tea
Heat
Ear
Seat
Art
Set
East
Save
Rate
Shave
Vast
Share

Cheesy bonfire bread

Based on a BBC Good Food recipe,

Ingredients

200g wholemeal flour

200g Plain flour

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp salt

1 tsp caster sugar

25g butter – melted

300ml milk, at room temperature

175g Cheddar cheese – coarsely grated

85g roasted peppers from a jar, drained and chopped

Optional – some pumpkin or sunflower seeds

Method

Step 1 Heat oven to 190C/170C fan/Gas 5. Sift the dry ingredients into a large bowl and make a large well in the middle. Combine the melted butter and milk, then pour into the well. Mix to a soft dough.

Step 2 Dust the work surface with flour. Add most of the cheese, and the chopped peppers to the dough. Gentle knead on the floured surface to combine. Divide into 8 lumps and shape into rough rounds, 2 finger widths deep.

Step 3 Put the pieces side by side on a floured baking sheet, then scatter the remaining cheese - and the seeds if using – on top. Bake for 30 minutes until golden brown and the cheese is bubbling. Cool on a wire rack for a few minutes but eat the bread while it is still warm. It can be frozen and then reheated by wrapping the bread in foil and baking it at 200C/180C Fan/Gas 6 for about 30 minutes.

TIP Vary the flavour by substituting Red Leicester cheese for some or all of the Cheddar; add some finely-chopped red or white onion instead of some of the peppers; a pinch of dried herbs or finely-chopped fresh rosemary added to the basic dough will give the bread extra flavour.

Ministry

October has for many years been the time when Readers in this Diocese have been licensed. Clergy have traditionally been ordained, and made Deacons or Priests during the first weekend in July. This year it was delayed until the end of September.

I thought it might be interesting to work out how many years the current ministry team at St Paul’s have collectively served – both in this church and previous ones - since they were licensed or ordained. The total may surprise you.

1986 Wendy Murphy (Ordained in 2013)

1991 Christine Shaw, Geoff Crawford

1995 Mike and Di Skidmore (Mike was then ordained 3 years later)

1996 Philip Thomas (Ordained in York Minster)

2000 Kathy Crawford

2005 Pauline Thomas

2008 Rod Kight

Maths is not my strongest subject, but I think that adds up to a grand total of 213 years!

Book Review

Faith, Hope and Mischief by Andrew Graystone is published by Canterbury Press. It is also available as an e-book.

With his flat cap and simple homemade sign which said “You are my friends. I will keep watch while you pray”, Andrew became an unlikely global hero as he stood outside his local mosque in Manchester after the mass shooting at the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand. He wanted to demonstrate to the local Muslim community that others cared about their pain so he stood there for 90 minutes while they were attending Friday prayers. It was a supportive gesture of what Andrew calls Everyday Activism – small acts of kindness, resistance or rebellion – that say ‘no’ to the way the world so often is, and ‘yes’ to what it can be. In this warm, heartfelt, moving and funny book Andrew tells his stories of being a suburban subversive and of the difference that even the tiniest kindnesses can make in the face of injustice and problems – whether those are global issues, national situations or personal ones.

Andrew Graystone is a writer, journalist, teacher, broadcaster and provocateur – or as his mother puts it, he can’t hold down a proper job.

Special Sundays

Well, I was asked a while back if in these Covid-19 times I still keep Sunday special. Personally, I do. I miss going to Church on a Sunday, but I know that on that day I can catch up on the Wednesday or Sunday website services on my computer.

It got me thinking that, going right back to my childhood, Sundays were always special. I wasn’t brought up in the Christian faith. I didn’t become a Christian until well into my adulthood. When Sunday came round in our childhood home, we wasn’t allowed to go and play in the street. If friends came to call, they wasn’t allowed in the house. All the family stayed in and we would have a special treat in the afternoon. Perhaps a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, shared between Mum, Dad and my sisters, because it cost 6d and we came from a not-too-well-off family.

Sometimes we would share a Mars bar, which had to be put in the fridge to get cold enough to cut into slices to share. Also, there would be a bottle of Ice cream soda if Dad had been paid that week. What I am trying to say is that you don’t need lots of money or personal possessions. You just need lots of love and someone to tell you to keep Sundays special. Even if you aren’t a Christian and don’t think of our Lord on that day, you’ll always look back on all those special Sundays and hopefully have great memories.

Dorothy Hyson

‘For the Fallen’
by Laurence Binyon

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Just for Fun Quiz

A general knowledge with multiple choice answers

Who was Henry VIII's last wife?
Catherine Middleton
Catherine Parr
Catherine Aragon
What main character in a Disney film never speaks?
Dumbo
Mickey Mouse
Dopey (Seven dwarfs)
What was the first national park to be created in the UK?
New Forest
Peak District
Lake District
Which famous long-distance train had its first run in October 1883?
Flying Scotsman
Orient Express
Kanyakumari Vivek Express
What is the largest planet?
Sun
Jupiter
Neptune
What is a baby crocodile called
Calf
Hatchling
Pup
In Bingo, if a caller says Knock at the door, what does he mean?
4
64
84
Which parts of the human body have half of the bones?
Hands and Feet
Knees and elbows
Spine
What is the largest city in the world by population?
Delhi
Shanghai
Tokyo
What is the official language in Brazil?
Spanish
Portuguese
French
What colours are the five Olympic rings?
Blue, orange, green, red, purple
Orange, green, red, yellow, black
Blue, yellow, black, green, red
Which bird can fly backwards?
Kingfisher
Hummingbird
Kestrel
What is the capital city of Switzerland?
Zurich
Bern
Geneva
What is the key alcoholic ingredient of any daiquiri cocktail?
Brandy
Vodka
Rum
What is astraphobia a fear of?
Planets
Being alone
Thunder and lightning
When did the Vietnam War end?
1969
1972
1975
What is the name of Wendy’s dog in Peter Pan?
Spot
Nana
Hannah
Which Ocean is the deepest?
Atlantic
Indian
Pacific
How many planets in the solar system have rings?
4 Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune
5 Venus, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter
6 Venus, Saturn, Moon, Neptune, Jupiter, Uranus
Where in the human body would you find the hammer, anvil and stirrup?
Hand
Foot
Ear

Answers in next months newsletter