A fine morning for Sunday duties at St Marychurch and St Hilary today, and the rest of the day free with no evening service to take for the first time in many months. The weather wasn't good enough for an outing, so we stayed home and did very little, apart from chatting on Skype with Claudine and Keith in Bangkok.
A possibility has emerged for me to do a month as locum chaplain in Taormina Sicily in December this year. Whoever was booked for this has had to cancel. It's a small community maintained by visiting locum clergy, and the duties are probably slightly less than what I do here regularly. It's too small to support a full time chaplain. There's free accommodation, but we pay for our own travel. I'm happy to do that. It's so much more agreeable to go as a guest than as a standard holiday tourist. I love the opportunity it presents to meet local residents, and learn about what life is like in a more direct way.
The region is spectacularly beautiful, and the chapel in situated on land overlooking the Straits of Messina once owned by the family of Horatio, Lord Nelson. I'll have to go there on my own for a couple of weeks before Clare finishes term, and the she'll join me. It was good to have leisure time today to look at websites and maps, consult the family about what Christmas plans they might have before making up our minds about saying 'yes'- they all said "Go for it!" It's too early in the year to book winter budget flights, but we can prepare by examining the various travel options available. Kath's godmother Angela, one of our neighbours when we were in Birmingham in the 1970's, was born in nearby Catania. One of her British born sons lives there. Maybe we'll get an opportunity to visit while we're there.
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