After the Wednesday morning Eucharist and coffee morning, I was sitting in the church office, and a man came in to see me, enquiring about marriage services in Spanish chaplaincies. He spoke good English and was well versed in understanding the history and origins of Christian marriage liturgy. It was a subject he had researched, and it turned out that he'd done a ministerial training course at a reformed seminary in Spain. Now he was enquiring about how he could legally and legitimately marry his fiancee, a non-EU citizen, and bring her into the country - a difficult undertaking for an honest man.
He was on leave from his work as an educational outreach worker in the Granada gitano community, persuading kids to turn up regularly for school and complete their basic education. Illiteracy and innumeracy are high among gypsies due to their fundamental distrust of state efforts to integrate them into society through the educational system. As an evangelical Christian missionary he was involved in gitano church planting, a social and spiritual enterprise which has met with considerable success in Southern Europe over several decades. When we'd finished an interesting conversation lasting more than an hour, I wished that I had more time in Andalusia to go and visit him in Granada and discover more about his work. I just had to let the opportunity go, aware of the need to concentrate on handing over to Hywel, my successor as locum chaplain.
Today I needed to get my broken Blackberry into a postal package for sending back to Ashley in Cardiff. I bought a jiffy bag and acquired the necessary form for a registered letter, only to be told at half past one that registered post is accepted only between nine and midday on working days. Ah well you live and learn.
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