Dear Parishioner,

There are no prizes for guessing what I shall be saying in this Newsletter!  Thank You.

It has been a truly wonderful week for me.  To be honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to it.  To be really honest, I think I was dreading it a bit.  While I like making a fuss of others, I get rather embarrassed when I am on the receiving end.  But all my anxiety were swept away.

It first dawned on me that something big was in the offing when I came back from Pwllheli on the Friday evening and saw the altar.  The flower arrangements were simply breathtaking.  At first I thought I had forgotten a wedding, then I realised why they were there. So, first of all let me say Thank You to Des and her faithful colleagues for decorating the church so magnificently; and in the same breath, I thank the ladies who came in to clean the brasses and get everything ship shape.

I was really touched by the numbers of people who came to share the celebration with me.  The church was really full – I couldn’t believe my eyes.  And thanks to the Bishop for being there and my fellow priests; thanks, too, to Mgr John Allen for preaching, a sermon that has been talked about and praised ever since.

But it was not only the sermon that impressed people, but the thirty-one altar servers who so crowded the sanctuary that they were almost sitting on one another.  What a great example that was, and what an impression it made on the visitors.  I am grateful to each and every one of them for giving up their evening to come and share the celebrations.  And we all know who was responsible for their superb serving and equally superb reading.  I am particularly grateful to Sr Jennifer.

Also extremely impressive were the leaflets and prayer cards.  We thank Stephen Watson for the photograph, but it is Mandy who must take all the credit.  It is great to have such a wiz-kid as my secretary!

It was Mandy who joined forces with Father Andrew, Sister Jennifer and Mrs Elaine Dingsdale to form the committee which organised everything so efficiently behind my back.  I am so grateful to them for the huge amount of work they put in, ensuring that everything went as well as it did. And central to all those goings on, kept so successfully from my notice, was the organisation of the collection.

I am so grateful to you for your outstanding generosity.  The collection has enabled me to do something I desperately needed to do – change my car.  My aptly coloured red Corolla had a fault in its heating system.  Toyota said it didn’t, but it most certainly did.  It was like a mobile sauna.  OK in the winter, but from Spring to Autumn it was almost unbearably hot.  My new model has air conditioning.  It is a cool silver, and I hope that it will be cool in both the original and the contemporary meaning of that word – though Fr Andrew tells me that Toyota Corrollas are old geizers’ cars, lacking all street cred.

And not only the collection, but all the Masses and cards you sent me.  You are welcome to come into the house and see the vast number of them.  They are everywhere.  They speak to me of the love you so manifestly showed me.

After the Mass, so brilliantly marshalled by Fr Andrew, came the buffet.  And what a buffet!  To think that Mandy and her husband John did it all by themselves!  It was Mandy’s birthday the following day and I forgot to send her a card – can you believe it?  Just as I failed to send her a card, so also words fail to express the gratitude in my heart to herself and John.

I am really grateful also to Mrs Dingsdale for letting us use the school – these occasions always cause a lot of extra work for the staff.  And when I thought it was all over, I got a wonderful surprise on Wednesday.  I said a Mass of thanksgiving in the school and at the end of it was presented with a most magnificent pair of binoculars.  I was, and am, utterly delighted with them.  Apparently they did think of a trip in a hot air balloon as a special treat for me.  Thank God they didn’t.  I have no head for heights and, anyway, there is enough hot air rising from the pulpit and wafting you to dizzy heights!