AUTUMNAL TREES

We had a great service at Church this morning with some wonderful songs.  Although we have no Minister at the present time, we are blessed to have heard some amazing sermons from many different people.  The man who was due to preach today, Reverend Professor Philip McCormack , MBE, the Vice Chancellor and Principal of Spurgeon’s College in London, couldn’t come because of a family bereavement, so Colin, one of our members, and himself a retired Minister, preached instead and it was a “cracking” sermon.    

As we are going to be “Twicers” today - i.e. we were at Church this morning and we are there again this evening, when I am singing, we decided to come straight home after the service.  I decided that I would take some photographs of the autumnal trees at the back of our house, and the left hand shot in my collage is the sycamore tree, with thousands of leaves on the ground.  They may look beautiful and indeed they are, but we have as many again actually IN our garden, which causes Mr. HCB a bit of a nightmare, trying to keep up with sweeping and collecting them, although he did say that the besom brush, which we inherited from the previous owners in 1982, does a wonderful job.  He also pulls up about 200 saplings in the Spring, so if anyone is in need of a sycamore tree, just let us know and we can send you one!  You can see the struts holding up our fence, which came down in the high winds last year and so far seems fine, for which we are very grateful.

The other shot is looking over towards Snodshill Roundabout, where there are lots of horse chestnut trees, which look much better since the Council trimmed the excess branches off the trunks a couple of years ago.  I have put in an extra to show how small the trees were in 1982 when we moved in.  Fortunately, these don’t seem to be as affected by the disease that has ravaged many of this type of tree in other places, for which we are grateful, as the roundabout would look very bare if they had to be felled.

It’s a cold and dreary day today, but we have a chicken casserole bubbling away in the slow cooker, so we will warm up before we go back out this evening.  Our heating hasn’t cut in today, which means I am feeling the cold, so while Mr. HCB is watching football, I will be under my electric throw keeping warm and catching up with the newspapers online.  Since I have stopped reading “actual” newspapers, my eyes haven’t been so sore, so it was obviously the ink used in the printing process that was causing the issue.  In any event, it saves having to put lots of newspaper in our recycling bin each week and the other bonus is that it is free to read them online, using my library ticket!

Hope you all have a great week - Mr. HCB says we could have some misty days this coming week - but it is November, the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” so I guess we should expect that.    M xx