Along with our annual trip to see the Tappers, this weekend was also pretty busy as it was our patronal festival weekend at St James. As part of this on Saturday we had an evening from The Madding Crowd, a group of performers from Winchester, and then today we had the annual opening of the Church Tower, and a mini fete up at the Church.
The Madding Crowd primarily perform a selection of music originally written for the parish bands who in days gone by would have provided the musical accompaniment for church services in the days before the pipe organ. They augment the performance with readings and dances from the same period, drawing heavily on the work of Thomas Hardy, indeed drawing their name from his fourth novel. It was a great evening, and showed up some music that perhaps we could use in the Church choir – and some of the dramatic interludes showed up that very little has changed in the Church over the past hundred years – people still moan about the Rector, and choir practice hasn’t changed much at all, even if the instruments and the clothes have!
The main village fete alternates between being hosted by the Church and the school, so in years like this when it is the turn of the school, the Tower Opening and Mini-Fete are one of our major fund raising efforts for the year, especially important in a year like this when we have a big campaign in progress. Thanks to the vagaries of the British weather, even in July it can involve a lot of prayer for a nice day – and since all the way through this week there has been rain forecast for this afternoon, it was great to have such fantastic weather. As a result we got a lot of people through the doors and climbing the tower, and fingers crossed a goodly amount of money for the conservation appeal.
Needless to say I was around with my camera, so I’ve included a set of pictures below. As you might have noticed if you follow my Flickr stream, I’ve started to take a picture or two with the much maligned camera on the iPhone. Although some aren’t going to win any awards, especially in poor light, I have to say that some, in particular this one and this one are a lot better than I perhaps would expect based purely on the specs for the camera on paper.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
