Sad News

I found out when I got back to Canada that Patches has gone missing.  I had a friend who was house sitting and parish-sitting for me, and he let a group of university students from his regular parish come up and stay in the upstairs of the rectory on the weekend.  Despite his clear instructions to keep doors closed, they didn`t, and Patches managed to get out.  She`s always been obsessed with going outside.  No one has seen her since, though I`m told that the ladies from the church have been looking all over town.

Aside from that, I`m glad to be home.  I landed in Canada yesterday, to a snowstorm in Vancouver.  There were six inches on the ground, and more coming, so I was relieved that the ferry was still running.  The bus to take us there was slow in arriving, which meant that I had to stand in a line in the snow for forty five minutes, without actually knowing if the bus would turn up.

The rest of my time in Canterbury was really great.  I went to a really good town museum, a really good Roman museum (built on the site of a Roman house, with part of the original Roman basement preserved) and lots and lots of churches.  One of the churches is the oldest working church in England- dates from Roman times, they think.  You can see the distinctive Roman bricks in the walls.  I also took a tour of the town, which was neat.  One of the neatest things was the ruins of the Abbey where St. Augustine lived when he first brought formal Christianity to England (there were some Christians in England before he arrived in 597, but they weren`t very organised).  The ruins mostly date from the Norman times, because those Norman jerks were all about tearing down old churches to build new ones.  It`s just bits of wall standing here and there, and impressions in the ground.

I found, which I had forgotten since I last travelled, that there is a lot of time in the day.  I had a lot of time in Canterbury, so I would see one or two things in a day, but then filled in the rest of the time having tea, or poking through charity shops.  I was usually glad to get back to the hotel, and glad that I had my own room in a hotel, and not a hostel.  I had a bottle of Night Nurse, so the cold didn`t bother me at night!