St Serf's News and Events

Rector’s Letter December 2011

Dear Friends,
First of all I want to thank everyone who made it possible for me to be away for the two months that Robert and I were travelling the world. It was a wonderful experience for us and we met many interesting and helpful people along the way as well as visiting so many diverse places. Just a brief account of what we did: we had two days in Moscow, enough to visit the city centre, the Kremlin and the Tretyakov Gallery. The latter holds the Rublev icon of the Holy Trinity, amongst other wonderful pictures. Then the train journey, six days eastwards through Siberia in autumn colours, then south across Mongolia to Beijing. Not with Russians as we had thought but with travellers like ourselves, though mostly younger, from Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany; and with a train crew from China. We all got on very well, English being the common language. Then five days in Beijing staying in a friendly and comfortable backpacker hostel in the city centre, visits to the Temple of Heaven Park, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall at Mutianyu. Next stop Hong Kong where we met up with the Anglican Church in the form of our friend Bill Robertson, Chaplain at the Diocesan Boys School in Kowloon, and Katherine Graham from Broughty Ferry who is the Anglican Communion coordinator for work with refugees and migrant workers. She is on the Cathedral staff in Hong Kong and her husband Stephen is the new Mission to Seafarers Chaplain in Kowloon. We stayed in the Anne Black YWCA Hostel which also houses the local YWCA offices and training centre, so we got a flavour of the extensive work they do. In Melbourne we attended the agricultural show, which is a big event in the calendar there, and Sunday Eucharist in the Cathedral. Then on to five weeks in our main destination, New Zealand and to Rugby World Cup fever. We rented a small camper van and it seemed like almost every other vehicle on the road in those first two weeks was a camper van. We watched the Scotland/England game on television with farmers in Waipu, a Scots settlement north of Auckland and the All Blacks/France final with friends in Gore, Southland. In between we attended the Wales/Fiji match in Hamilton and discovered that the couple sitting next to us were from Carlisle and that Robert had played rugby with the husband back in the days when we lived there. On the return north we stayed in Wellington with Dorothy Macdonald’s sister Sheila Dryden, another home from home. From there we made the long flight to Los Angeles where we spent two nights and visited Venice Beach, the Farmers Market and the Los Angeles County Museum, then a wonderful day at the Getty Museum before flying home.

In LA amidst the swaying palm trees Robert couldn’t help singing a favourite from the Dunfermline Choral repertoire, ‘White Christmas’ which brings me nicely round to wishing you all a very happy Christmas and not so white as to prevent us getting to church on Christmas Day.

Yours in Christ
Val Nellist