Visitor

J has been a friend of J’s for fifty years, and midday he visited us in between “gigs”. Too cold for the garden, so we used our conservatory with doors and windows open.

Decades ago he had a radical change of career, and became a priest, spending over twenty five years in Peru and Chile. He’s now back in the UK, based at HQ in the midlands and currently travelling up to the north-west at weekends.

He relies on sat nav to find the churches where he’s “gigging”. The blip is a fascinating article he has written for a magazine, which he was telling us about (he’s a bit of a columnist, he left us a few articles he’s written). He was following his sat nav, which announced that he had arrived at his destination in West Lancashire. He was perplexed, as all he could see was farms and barns, no village. But it turned out that the church was one of the barns. It had been built in the period just before catholic emancipation in 1829 when Catholic worship had ceased to be actively persecuted but was just barely tolerated. So the new church was camouflaged to look like a barn (no windows) and away from settlements.