Dear Friends,

And so, we come to the end. My final ‘Wednesday’ letter. What began as a means of keeping in touch with everyone during the 1st Covid lockdown in Spring of 2020. All of a sudden with found ourselves confined to home with no real sense of if or when it would come to an end. There was an urgent need to find a way of saying the same thing to everyone. And so, the ‘weekly letter’ which has carried on every week until now. An eccentric mix of politics, religion, popular culture, sport, and anything else that happened to be in the headlines (or the small print) that particular week. Almost invariably cobbled together late on a Tuesday evening, its 11.46pm right now, and often bearing the hallmarks of a ‘last minute effort’ – grammar, syntax, spelling, sentence construction all too often ruthlessly exposed by WORD’s inability to correct mistakes. Sometimes you just couldn’t make it up. Take tonight for instance. Heading back to London after a day away from the Suburb, leaving enough time to return to the Manse, to watch some TV before applying myself to this my latest (and last) Epistle. All of a sudden, bang, front tyre, driver’s side, hits an object in the road. Instant deflation to zero. Limp into a layby. Wake up a Polish lorry driver (an angel in disguise) hitherto asleep in his cab. Borrow his ‘phone – I don’t have one – contact the AA who to their credit arrive within 20 minutes who then tow me to a late-night tyre shop where a replacement is duly fitted. Big shout out to Dom James of the AA who provided 5* service, and all with a smile on his face, especially when he discovered I was a vicar. Continue journey home, with football commentary on the radio, so beginning to recover my senses only to discover but a few miles out that the North Circular was closed and traffic diverted goodness knows where. Eventually I’m home and now have to begin to think what to write about. Well, what I was going to write was this…

…THANK YOU, ALL OF YOU…

You have all been so kind, so generous, so patient, so encouraging, so supportive, so engaging, so much fun! I hope you have got as much out of reading these letters as I have got in writing them. I produce a sermon each week, as many of you know. And there is something to be said for the art of sermon craft. A sermon deserves all the attention that is paid to it, because it is all too easy for hearers to realise that a particular sermon had not been ‘crafted ‘as well as it might have been. Writing a sermon is a ‘walk in the park’ compared with having to come up with something new every Tuesday evening. But I have enjoyed the challenge, and appreciated the feedback. I have often been surprised, in a nice way, by comments I have received. Even the occasional criticism was tempered by kindness and prefaced with an apology for being ‘critical’. And so, with that, I sign off for good. As I have always sought to be…Yours faithfully…

The final ‘Wednesday’ letter