Église St. Pierre, Avon

Sunday
Another cold, but beautifully sunny day. We had a new locum chaplain at church this morning, who has joined us from Austria, and will be with us through Christmas. After the service, we had another practice for music for the carol service which will be next Sunday evening. Then it was home for a quick bit of lunch, so that we could get out for some exercise before going to an Advent concert at the church shown in my blip, featuring Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, a wonderful piece of music, written for treble choir, soloists and harp. As we were listening to it, my mind took me back to the last time we heard a live performance of it, which was Laura's college choir performance at Miami University, Oxford Ohio - quite a few years ago now! It was a very different performance today, as the choir was relatively small, but very talented. The only thing was, these old churches are not well heated. There were a couple of heaters mounted high on the pillars, but the weren't terribly effective, and as the outside temperature was not much above freezing, we got pretty cold after we had been sitting for a while!
For our afternoon exercise, we had gone walking in the grounds of the chateau, which extends out very close to the church in Avon, and where there were quite a number of people out enjoying the sunshine. We watched for a while quite a feeding frenzy on the Étang des carpes, where several people were feeding a hungry crowd of gulls, coots, mallards and swans!

One year ago: Chateau de Fontainebleau by night