This is an extended version of a talk I gave at Evensong in Earls Colne church on Whitsunday in lieu of a sermon. (more…)
Heather Hansen ‘How mastering the art of being alone can boost your mental health’ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134840-400-how-mastering-the-art-of-being-alone-can-boost-your-mental-health/
Ellie Hunt in New Scientist 22 May 2024 https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26234920-300-new-psychology-book-reckons-with-separating-solitude-from-loneliness/, referring to Solitude Netta Weinstein, Heather Hansen and Thuy-vy T. Nguyen (Cambridge University Press)
Onli [alone/at one] is a soule whanne it loveth Jhesu and tendeth fulli to Hym, and hath lost the savour and confort of the world; and that it myght the betere kepe this onlynesse it fleeth companye of alle men yif mit mai, and seketh oonlynesse of bodi, for oonlynesse of bodi moche helpith to onlynesse of soule [integrity of soul] and to the free wirkynge of love. pp. 236 & 239
The soul is a mirror, in which you shall see God spiritually. And therefore you should find your mirror and keep it bright and clean from bodily filth and worldly vanity, and hold it well up from the earth so that you can see it and our Lord within it. [p. 206]
Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, ed. Thomas H. Bestul, TEAMS, (Kalamazoo, 2000)
— trans. Leo Sherley-Price, The Ladder of Perfection (Penguin, 1957)
The book was launched on 18th May and is now available on-line at https://saintarnold.co.uk/shop/shop/colne-engaine-1219-book/
It is also being advertised on big bookselling sites like Waterstones – but please don’t buy it from them as we need all the profits to go to the church to keep its work going for a few more hundred years!
It is also now on sale from Red Lion Books in Colchester as well as from the village shop – so there is no excuse not to buy a copy!
I have been interviewed about the book Colne Engaine 1219 as part of a piece on Colne Engaine church to be broadcast on BBC Essex Radio which was broadcast as part of the Peter Holme programme on Sunday morning, 1st September – (almost) 800 years to the day since Peter de Feria was installed as Rector of Colne Engaine.
Colne Engaine: 1219 by Cate Gunn Book Launch
To Celebrate 800 Years of the name Colne Engaine and the first rector of St Andrews Peter de Feria
Saturday 18thMay 2019
St Andrews Church PCC cordially invite you to attend the launch of Cate Gunn’s Book Colne Engaine 1219 on Saturday 18th May 2019:
6-7pm Exhibition & Talk in St Andrews church.
7-8.30pm Complimentary Cheese & Wine with Halstead Community Choir in the village hall to celebrate the launch.
The book will be on sale in the village hall, where Cate will be available to answer questions and sign her book. There will be a raffle. Profit from the sale of the book will be donated to St Andrews Church.
For further information and to express an interest in attending please contact Rita Prior (PCC Secretary) on 01787 223867 or ritaprior31@gmail.comfor numbers for catering purposes.
We look forward to welcoming you
In June we spent five days walking in the Cantal region of the Auvergne.
A beautiful region popular for walking with the French but little known here in Britain. We met an American couple, Linda and Curt, who were walking a similar route; they come to Europe every year to enjoy a walking holiday and asked if we could recommend any good walks. I thought of the Devon coast-to-coast
which we walked last year, 2017;
and although the moors and farms of Devon are very different from the ancient volcanic landscape of the Cantal, with its steep peaks and narrow ridges, it occurred to me that the two regions have much in common. (more…)
The usual narrative for the history of the development of the parish structure in England is fairly simple, as in this account by Roy Strong in A Little History of the English Country Church (London: Vintage, 2008):
The basic structure of our present parish system developed in the tenth century. The Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical system centred on the minster, or monasterium; these were major churches with attendant buildings that housed priests servicing the outlying areas. (Strong, p. 19)
These were followed by smaller churches built by local lords during the ‘Great Rebuilding’ from 1050 to 1150: (more…)
The OS map shows the track in a straight line through through wood, heading north-north-east; it is part of a track that ran – almost straight – from Colchester to Cambridge, known as ‘Wool Street’, or maybe, by the Romans, as Via Devana, and also called ‘Worstead Street’. This sounds like a medieval name for a route through the wool producing area to ports for the continent, which was a major market for English wool in the Middle Ages. For a stretch west of Colchester, the track follows the line of the river Colne; it is still visible in Chalkney wood as a hollow way. (more…)
The walk we undertook in June – all 250 miles of it – was circular: while not describing a perfect circle, we ended up in Settle where we had started three weeks previously. In August we joined my brother and his family in Dovedale for a much shorter walk that nevertheless completed a large circle; we were bringing the remains of my mother back to the place where she had been born nearly ninety years before. (more…)
A few years ago, when we walked St Giles Way in southern France, we stayed overnight in a Chambres d’hote and the next day our host gave us a lift to the start of the day’s walk. He was keen to improve his English, so when he wished us a ‘good journey’ we tried to explain that we wouldn’t use the word ‘journey’ for a day’s walk. And yet ‘journey’ seems the obvious term for a day’s occupation coming, as it does, from the French ‘jour’ and having the same root as ‘journeyman’, which originally meant someone who was paid by the day. When walking a long distance, the day’s occupation is to walk to that night’s destination: it is a journey in a very simple sense. Yet now ‘journey’ seems to suggest a trip of some length (more…)
Now that all those who fought in the First World War have died, and those who fought in the Second are growing old, it is becoming more important to record their experiences. As we think about commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, there seems to be more interest in remembrance than when I was a child. My own father, who served with the RAF at a meteorology station near Basra in Iraq, told only the odd amusing story of his time out there, and, as far as I can recall, never talked about his older brother, Frank, who was recorded as ‘missing in action’ and never came home. (more…)