This month we have the phenomenally successful Garden Trail in the village. I’m happy to share my garden but always anxious too. The changes made somehow never look enough for the hours you know you’ve put in, but hopefully people will be generous in their views of this ‘work in progress’.

One of our Sunday services in May is basically just going for a walk and then eating cake in the beautiful gardens of Clinton Lodge,. I don’t suppose there will be any complaints about this but, just so that you know, there is a serious and historic purpose lying behind what looks like skiving.

Easter has been celebrated continuously on this island since Christianity first arrived. Continuously celebrated for nearly two millennia.

On March 30th we will be marking one of the best observed festival days in the UK, Mother’s Day. Every year, many people will insist that it should be called Mothering Sunday really. What’s in the name? What’s in the name is a bit of history and this is the story as I know it …

One of the people I am most grateful to have known is a gentleman called Dick Scott. Dick was a retired engineer living in my first parish (St George Salford) and an absolute stalwart of the church.

Everyone has had the experience of making a judgement about a person and then realizing we have got them wrong.

The poppy is the enduring symbol of remembrance of World War One.

Poppies were a common sight, especially on the Western Front. They grew well in the soil churned up by the fighting and shelling. The flower provided Canadian doctor, Major John McCrae, with inspiration for his poem 'In Flanders Fields', which he wrote while seated on the back of a field ambulance during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.