Buckfast

We visited the Abbey today, mainly to see an old friend, an ex-RAF RC chaplain who was in the area, but also for Mass.  The choir was fantastic, the sermon (meeting Jesus on the way to Emmaus) very appropriate, and the carvery in the restaurant on the site very good indeed.

There's an odd sense of scale when you enter this Abbey: it looks large on the outside, but feels curiously compact once you're inside.  Admittedly the choir stalls and the altar area take up a fair amount of space compared with the area set aside for the congregation, but it's an odd feeling.

And one of the co-celebrants was a Benedictine monk who was at school with me.  He took holy orders after school with the Benedictines who ran the school but that community moved down to Buckfast when it grew too small to keep going at Downside Abbey.  Small world . . .