2014 Christmas card (embroidered by Mary Addison)
This photograph was the vicarage’s 2014 Christmas card. As many of you may know – and may remember seeing here previously – the flower is a Hellebore/Christmas Rose, one of the flowers embroidered for the patchwork altar frontal (as yet unfinished) for Ipsden Church.
Over Christmas, 5 services in as many days can take a heavy toll on a country vicar, so we had a quiet start to the festivities which meant the vicar could pace himself and wind down before the house became full of visitors (and the sitting room transformed to a girls’ dormitory at night). Oh, yes and there was the important matter of celebrating a small person’s first birthday.
Hellebore/Christmas rose: detail of handembroidery
As well as the 2 churches in the vicar’s care there is also the semi ruined church at Mongewell, a little community with a big heart tucked away in between the A 4074 and the Thames. It is a mystery to me that a photograph of 1947 shows this church with a roof and yet now only the apse remains intact while the walls of the nave and aisle and the little early C19th octagonal tower stand broken down, crumbling and ivy clad in a manner that suggests the work of centuries, not decades.
Now under the care of The Churches Conservation Trust, the church is licensed for several services a year, one of which is almost always an informal carol service (weather permitting – snow and ice made it inaccessible two years ago) during which people do all manner of creative things ranging from short comedy routines, original poetry recitations, ad hoc male voice choirs and communal singing of Christmas favourites, like the 12 Days of Christmas (complete with actions – some of which are difficult when you have 70 or so people crammed in somewhere the size of a family kitchen on the cosy side of deceptively spacious). Impressively the organisers of this Christmas celebration always manage to find a resident new to the area to take on the compering of the event, an experience that has bound at least one of them to the church so firmly that last year, in difficult circumstances she resolutely stuck to her desire to get married there. An Archbishop’s certificate granted to the chancel ensured the legality of the wedding, but as the groom’s wheelchair was too big for the small door into chancel, the ceremony was performed with my husband contorting himself so that while seeming to stand on the step outside the consecrated bit of the building, one hidden foot was firmly placed inside – yet another of the many reasons why clerics wear dresses – sorry, cassocks.
I hope to be back up to speed next week, having passed my tenacious winter cough and cold on to the vicar who has gallantly taken it off my hands and sensibly retired to bed.
