Christmas 2018

Greetings from St Margaret's Bay!
"Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat …" or rather - hopefully the prepared turkey + trimmings etc that cookfood.net will deliver to me on the 21st!
We hosted Christmas in Dover in about 1988, but this is the first time since then!
Emily and Alex will arrive with me on the 22nd and stay for a week. They have moved back to the family house in Wimbledon (where their wedding reception was 5 years ago). They are coping with the double trouble of Martha and Phoebe as two-year olds!  

In my flat, on the elephant which belonged to Jane's father!

 

off to Nursery!

 

in Kew Gardens

Edward, Nicci, Daniel and Oliver (+ new addition Bonnie the dog!) have moved to a village near Canterbury! I am their first call for baby-sitting! They will join us for the day on the 25th.

proudly in their Kent College Junior School uniforms!

One of the highlights of 2018 for me was my pilgrimage to Russia (with 6 friends) to take part in the 'Tsar’s Days' in Ekaterinburg in the Urals, where the Royal family were murdered 100 years ago.

The Church has recognised the family as saints and martyrs.  

Some months before their deaths, Olga, the Tsar’s eldest daughter, who was 22, wrote these words in a letter to a friend:

"Father asks the following message to be given to all those who have remained faithful to him, that they should not attempt to take revenge for him, since he has forgiven everyone and prays for everyone. He wants them to remember that the evil which is now in the world will become still stronger, but that evil will never conquer evil, but only Love..."

It was an amazing and very moving experience to be part of a congregation of 100,000 for an open-air midnight service presided over by the Patriarch of Moscow, followed by a 14 mile Cross Procession to Ganina Yama where the bodies were taken to be disposed of.   

Such a contrast from my experiences in the 1980s when Christians were persecuted and imprisoned. 

It was wonderful to see something of the resurrection of Holy Russia!

 

I was also able to spend 4 days in Moscow, and I hired a car for 5 days and visited the Golden Ring of medieval cities to the north east of Moscow. It was a wonderful feast of churches, museums and great sights. My previous visits to Russia had been to the two capital cities, so it was great to see something of the real Russia of birch forests and old ladies selling berries at the side of the road!