Every time I visit St Petersburg the engineering feat that is the 8 mile road across the ocean never ceases to amaze me. Today for the first time I would be visiting the cathedral to join fellow music directors in the diocesan choir for the Chrism Mass. I got there early enough to have a look around the cathedral. It only re-opened last year after a major re-ordering. Unfortunately although the sound system is now great for the spoken word the same cannot be said for music. The choir, organ and other instruments operate from the rear of the nave in a purpose built space which is slightly elevated above ground. The people are gathered in four quadrants around the altar.

There was a brief rehearsal/warm-up led by other music directors and then Chris Berk, the Cathedral MD appeared and took over. He informed us that some of the brass were caught in traffic as the skyline bridge had been close due to a ‘jumper’. I later asked him if he knew for sure that it was not the bishop! The music was largely choral but there was enough for the assembly also. The bishop was on good form and gave a wonderful talk about the characteristics of oil.

After the Mass which lasted 2 hours we were invited to lunch and the opportunity to chat with colleagues.

A few days ago my washing machine had sprung a leak. I had bought a drain pipe but it was not the right size so I returned it and did a bit more food shopping at Aldi. I will be getting up early tomorrow in order to prepare the end of term school Mass. Then I shall be free until the evening when we have the last full choir rehearsal before the major events of Holy Week.

I’ve just watched another of those ghastly Schwarzeneger films and am not fit for bed!

On Friday I managed to get the worship aids printed for Holy Thursday and Good Friday before the machine finally died. The engineer would not appear until Monday so there was little point fussing over it.

On Saturday I did the usual routine of Vigil Masses. It was Palm Sunday and immediately noticeable was the reluctance of folk to start the celebration outside in the piazza.  So we went through the motions of gathering outside but most remained in the church as they could hear what was going on anyway.

In the evening I joined colleagues at Danah’s house for dinner. The centrepiece was a 5kg Red Snapper. It was wonderfully cooked and the company was perfect. Unfortunately my early rise for Sunday meant I could not stay long.

Sunday went smoothly. “The best Palm Sunday music I can remember” was one supportive comment. The Parish Council also approached me to speak to them after Easter. They have woken up to the fact that there was no formal welcome for me and are looking to rectify this.

I spent yesterday Monday preparing for my first experience on my kayak. This meant getting the kayak down three flights of stairs, onto ‘water noodles’ on the car roof and managing the ratchet straps which secured it. The first time is always the most uphill experience and it was awkward but I managed to get the thing to the launch site and although there was no bottle of champagne (Lent! there was great relief. It floated even with me in it and I soon got the hang of things. On my return I almost dented a Mercedes as the kayak once unstrapped slid from the roof!

In the evening I joined the Elect and candidates for confirmation who were doing a run through for Easter Vigil. This was a 2-hour affair and I managed to nip out periodically to reset the photocopier with Easter Vigil booklets.

Today it’s Tuesday and I drive soon to St Petersburg for the Chrism Mass at which I will be singing. I was not able to be at the rehearsal last night because of the rehearsal at St Lawrence but they have let me in. It will be a good opportunity to meet up with colleagues.

What a week it has been. I haven’t had a day off since last Friday and I won’t get a break till Monday. It’s the lead up to Holy Week and that always means extra work but what I had not accounted for was a temperamental photocopier. I don’t know why I overlooked this … they always are. I arrived to start printing off the Orders of service yesterday and the machine would not work. The technician was called and arrived today at 2pm so I was not able to get underway until he had gone. Of course he hadn’t fixed it properly and after sporadic fits of performance it gave up the ghost at 6.30pm. I managed to get all of Holy Thursday and Good Friday completed but the greatest task, Easter Vigil, remains.

I’d have to admit that there is no shortage of things to do while one waits for the machine to function. This last week we have been urged to tidy our office areas in preparation for the arrival of a new Pastor (in July). Through this ‘tidy-up’ I have gained an in-tray, an attitude-adjuster and a filing cabinet. Next week I’m holding out for a Cadillac and a water bed.

At Tuesday’s rehearsal with the school I taught them Nzamuranza. I can recall hearing it first in Iona Abbey and have loved it ever since. The language presents something of a workout for the jaws but it is great fun and by request of the kids it featured in Wednesday’s School Mass.

This week also contained 2 evening rehearsals with the choir who are working really hard for me. Tonight I attended Live Stations of the Cross which featured many of our young folk. There were some great voices to be heard.

The weather this week has been changeable. On Wednesday it may have been in the 80s but tomorrow it will be sunny but only in the 60s. Next week the temps rise to 90F.

When I weighed myself this morning I’d seem to have lost about 6lbs overnight. This might convince me to stay with the diet for the remaining week of Lent! I am hoping to get out on the kayak soon so at least I’ll be exercising! I am most grateful to one of my colleagues who insists on feeding me fish on lettuce (yesterday) and dual soup (today). What is dual soup? One half of the bowl = minestrone and the other + fish chowder.

The best news of the week is that my US tax return prompted a rebate of almost $1700 which will pay off the car insurance here which is $1300 for 6 months! When you also consider the cost of dental work here, you get to welcome any money that comes your way.

On Monday 2 March I went to Mass at the local church with my twin brother and my mum. Of course the death of Emily was on our minds. I was however mildly amused to discover that the priest has just begun the practice of saying the Prayer to St Michael at the end of Mass. This is something we are trying to stop at St Lawrence!

There was an amazing turn out for the funeral. I got there early and was able to visit the graves of my maternal grandparents, my Dad and Anne my dear sister who died from cancers at the age of 40.

There were so many people gathered that they could not fit into the small chapel. Fortunately most of the family and close friends were able to enter. The service was beautifully conceived and directed. It was of course very emotional.

After the service we gathered at the Royal Oak in New Malden. It was great to see that so many people made it there, especially the young folk who would have known Emily well. In addition to the many relatives I was also pleased to meet up with Sylvia and Mary who had sung in my very first choir at St Agatha’s when I was just a lad!

I was having trouble with my dental partial so I did not eat much … but the wine flowed!

The following day I drove to Walton-on-Thames for the funeral of Paul Reed my old music teacher at St George’s College, Weybridge. It was good to meet up with other ‘old boys’ who had been part of the College Choir and the organist Andrew Dean who was also a pupil of Stephen Hicks. I was shocked to see how changed was Bill Hayward who played the organ for the service. He has been in a medically induced coma after open heart surgery and had only recently been discharged. He was a shadow of his former self but his musicianship had remained, despite not having the physical energy to play the pedals.

On the Wednesday I went to meet up with Terri Coyle, an old friend with whom I had lost contact. Her mother had died the same day as Emily and we had so much to discuss.

I left mum’s at 9am on Thursday and got to Gatwick ahead of schedule and handed over the hire car with far more ease than I had collected it. I adjourned to the bar where I was surprised to find the same beer which had taken my fancy the previous evening (and £1 cheaper). At the Tampa end of the trip Mary Baker from the choir was there to collect me and return me to my car. I was home soon after and asleep very quickly.

I slept in on Friday and still slightly jet-lagged I pottered around the house. In the evening I went into work to set up for the Mens Conference the following day. Mass was at 8am so I was there at 7.30am. After Mass I did some admin and then a wedding followed by the usual Vigil Masses. I’d taken a pill to give me a good sleep but awoke on Sunday feeling really groggy. I made it through the first 4 Masses and after a rest was able to return refreshed for the evening Mass.

Monday was a day off and since the weather promised to be sunny I retired to the beach for the day, returning to watch a couple of films on Netflix.

During the evening I heard that an announcement would be made on Wednesday about who the new Pastor at St Lawrence would be.

I got to Gatwick at 9am on Friday to collect the hire car and got really mucked about by Avis who wanted a further £280 for insurance for the week. I kicked up of course and one hour later was driving away a brand new Citroen Cactus. I was able to spend the day with mum before meeting up with brother Chris and Sue later that evening.

On Saturday I left before 6am for Sheffield reaching it by 9.15. I dropped in on Fr Shaun Smith who had been very supportive during the cathedral fiasco and then visited the Lettings Agents to sort things and collect keys for my house.

Following that I visited the cathedral and bumped into the Walsingham folk attending their AGM. It was good also to meet Sacristan Jean who is always welcoming. I met up with Ali and Pippa at the Fairtrade coffee shop and then visited Val who passed on her sister’s contact details in Florida.

In the evening I joined a party at the house of neighbour Andrew and Ruth. Andrew was celebrating his 60th and it was a joy to meet up with so many that I knew. While I was there the dilapidated state of one of my outhouses was brought to my attention so I was able to get a builder to look at it while I was there. I will have to part with £3000 to get the work done!

On the way home on Sunday I was able to stop off at Emily’s in Leicester. She is settled into her new job and house there. I arrived at mum’s place in Kingston at the same time as my twin brother and we immediately sat down to mum’s Sunday dinner!

The school Mass yesterday went very well from the musical point of view. There was a visiting priest from the Legionaries of Christ whose homily was problematic, at one point chastising his father for being unkind and lacking the will-power to give up smoking despite cancer scares which, he determined were sent by God. What do intelligent adults, let alone 600 children, make of that?

Much of the rest of the day was spent in ensuring that the musicians who would cover me while I was in UK would have as few issues as possible. It is always easier to do the job oneself but since I have to be back in the UK there was no alternative.

I visited the church during the afternoon and discovered a woman playing the piano. She had not sought permission but that didn’t seem to bother her! She could play and sing and clearly had a history as a cover musician in many churches. She was a troubled soul and poured out much of it within minutes of meeting me!

The Lent Gathering was down in numbers apparently. I didn’t manage to attend much except the opening Lenten meal. I had to play for the closing worship, a benediction service in the church. The air around the organ reeked. Someone advised that something had probably crawled into the organ pit and died! Ugh!

Choir practice was good and I managed to get through the material for the next two Sundays as next week I would be in UK for the practice.

I awoke this morning after a good sleep eventually. In fact a mighty wind had picked up in the Bay and my bedroom was creaking. This was solved by the insertion of ear-plugs!

So far this morning I have checked in for my flights to UK later today, renewed my Norton security for the computer, ordered a new laptop battery and am slowly setting about packing. I suspect that at some stage there will be a haircut, some ironing and more packing and then a last minute panic!

At 3pm I visit the dentist for the fitting of a partial tooth replacement and a CT scan. then it’s off to a choir member’s house where I will leave my car and get a lift to the airport for the flight for niece Emily’s funeral on Monday.

Tally Ho

I began the weekend with pain in the place where a front tooth once glistened for all the world to see. I now appreciate that teeth do more than just assist eating. The absence of one tooth has caused me a dilemma in my choice of hymns. After the first hymn on the weekend I realise how unthinking I had been. the consonant ‘f’ is particularly tricky as the air just rushes through the gap and you sound a but like Jonathan Woss. The first hymn at all seven Masses was FForty days and FForty nights (he was FFasting in the wild, FForty days and FForty nights …. and undefiled) Hmmm!!!

I’d got into work early on Saturday morning partly to take my mind of the pain and also to get some preparation for my absence in UK done. Further there was a funeral to consider in Higgins Hall.

All went well on Saturday and pretty soon I was back in church for the Sunday marathon. In fact I had to leave the 4th Mass towards the end as I was passing out through pain and hunger. I dashed back for a sandwich and went to the beach for a couple of hours before returning for the last Mass of the day. Fr Rock was presiding and he had a special gift for the young violinist Elizabeth. As a Franciscan he had found a picture of the saint with two sticks imitating a violinist … apparently the origin of the phrase ‘fiddlesticks’.

Monday was a day off and I intended to take it! I had done the necessary domestic stuff by 11am and since it had turned out to be sunny I headed for the beach again. The water was so calm today and the herons put on a great display.

Today I was back in work and grateful for the fact that the work on the air-conditioning in the church had been completed and we were able to move the sound equipment back to the church in time for the afternoon’s school rehearsal for Mass tomorrow. I spent most of the day preparing materials for the substitute musicians who would cover for me over the weekend. It was great to receive a call from one of the choir offering to take me to the airport on Thursday. So very thoughtful. I also cooked Inderjit Bhogal’s recipe for daal much to the delight of a couple of colleagues!

Tomorrow will be a full on day starting with school mass and ending with a 3-hour Lenten gathering prior to choir practice.

This will sound a bit like a confession …It is 11 days since my last submission and here is my news! This time it is not all good news for me.

I awoke on Friday 13 February to receive a Skype call from my brother Pete who informed me that during the night my dear niece Emily had taken her life to the next level. Despite the fact that she had been troubled for several years the news came as a great shock to me. I can only imagine how helpless her parents must have felt through it all.

I remember visiting Emily within days of her birth, a trip the person I married forbade at the time because she didn’t want me to have contact with my family! She was the first of my nieces and we loved her to bits as we do all the subsequent children. At the age of 21 she was beautiful yet fragile in some ways. She now breathes with God and will no longer be anxious, hearing only the voice of peace.

Being thousands of miles away at times like this is not easy. You just want to hold those you love for words can often get in the way. Skype offers some substitute but it can be temperamental and it chose to be that just when I needed it most. At work less than an hour after the news I found myself playing for another funeral. The small group of mourners must have thought me unduly compassionate as I blubbed quietly through much of it! Fr Rock one of the priests here was true compassion as so many have been over here in Florida.

St Francis says something that in consoling we are consoled. So I sought to console others with my music in the hope that I would be rewarded similarly. I will travel to UK on Thursday for the funeral which is on Monday. I also hope to attend the funeral of Paul Reed, my old music teacher, the following day.

Funerals have featured greatly here. There have been some which were delayed by over an hour because the number of mourners wishing to pay their respects prior to Mass was so great. there are also those as I detailed above at which there were only six in attendance. Yesterday I played and sang for the ffuneral mass of one with a significant contribution to Tampa city. He had been in charge of the FBI, VP of the Yankees and many other responsibilities foremost of which was to his family. The carefully crafted eulogy from his grand-daughters will remain with me. The Bishop also popped in to be chief celebrant.

The biggest night in the parish social calendar was last Saturday as hundreds gathered in the Higgins Hall for a ‘Carnevale di Venezia’ a kind of Masked Ball. I felt quite under-dressed in a suit!. I understand that a vast amount of money was raised through it all.

This week also marked the beginning of Lent. On ash Wednesday there must have been over 1000 people at the 8.30am Mass. The other noteworthy thing was that since the air-conditioning in the church is being replaced all the liturgies are taking place in Higgins Hall! This means quite a bit of disturbance all round. We should be back in the church by Saturday 28 February.

Today I had my first tooth extraction. It is now noon and the pain has not kicked in yet. I’m starting with ibuprophen before relying on the hydro-codeine. Hours before I fly to UK they will do a CT scan and fit the partial tooth. It will be months before the bone graft will be strong enough to take the implant. It will also be months before my bank account recovers from the amount of dental work I need to be done.

This last week the weather that has been hitting the north has affected even Florida. We don’t get snow but last night the temperatures plummeted to 23F. Now it is sunny at 48F and by Sunday this will be 81F The fluctuation is amazing and we had terrible storms on Tuesday! But I’d have to admit that today it is as cold as I have experienced here.

I’m not sure how the time has flown since my last post so apologies to any readers out there.

The last week has been one involving the usual demands of the job but has also included some good social time. It was great to meet up with friends on Thursday/Friday. They had got a cheap holiday to Orlando to do the theme parks and after reaching their allotted hotel complained and upgraded to a 4-bed villa with pool. So instead of me welcoming them to my 2-bed apartment I went to them. This felt like something of a holiday. I still managed to fit in one garage sale and a trip to the local Goodwill!

After hearing last week of the death of my school music teacher Paul Reed it was a further shock to receive news that his colleague Maestro Bill Hayward, with whose choir I had served as organist on several tours, had been in hospital for 4 months after open heart surgery. I heard today that he will be recuperating with his daughter following ‘release’ on Thursday.

My dear Uncle Colin, so much a feature of my life, was buried on Friday. I always recall him laughing, red-faced and with a glass of whiskey in hand! He will be greatly missed.

It seems ironic that with all this death and serious illness for friends and family I did not in fact have any funerals at St Lawrence last week. There will be two this coming week however. I start the week with a trip out to nearby Dunedin to hear Fr Timothy Radcliffe speak. He’s a great orator and animator of the Church and one-time Master of the Dominicans. I’ll let you know how all this goes.

The weather is all over the place. Today rain is forecast and temperatures by day have been fluctuating between 57F and 75F. Although the rest of the week is set to be sunny the temperatures very considerably.

I bought 3 fishing rods from Goodwill during the week so pretty soon I might try my hand at fishing … once I’ve taken a few lessons from Google!

Tuesday continued with a fairly intense work day doing arrangements for the instrumentalists for the weekend and creating some scores for the choir. There was some relief in that the liturgical music practice was cancelled. This is the second time this has happened and on both occasions occurring when there is an additional liturgy in the week!! I was however able to attend the school choir practice which enabled preparation for the morning’s Mass.

Wednesday began before 8am with Mass with the school which went well. I am constantly amazed by how much children remember from just a few run throughs. After Mass all the sound equipment and keyboards had to be relocated to the Higgins Hall for a sound check for Friday morning’s Grandparents’ Mass. Fortunately our techie Tsai had agreed to assist with this and we were done by 11am and I was able to disappear from the office by 1215.

It was quite sunny so I went for a stroll in a local park and pottered about the apt. Choir practice was in the evening and this was great fun. I now feel supported by all the members!

On Thursday I visited another dentist for a second opinion. The visit cost me $52 which I thought was wholly reasonable … I’m hoping that treatment costs will be reduced here. It does seem that I will need significant treatment as the veneers were poorly fitted in UK and decay has crept in. It could be one implant and 5 crowns!

I visited the beach for the afternoon and watched some films at home. On Friday I was in work at 7.30am to set up for the Grandparents’ Mass. This took place in Higgins Hall because there were 1200 people looking to attend!

I was back home by 11am and looking at my phone I saw that people in UK had been trying to get in touch. This was to inform me that Paul Reed, my old music teacher at St George’s College Weybridge had died during the night. If it were not for him and the organist Stephen Hicks I might never have pursued the career path I did.

Slightly subdued I decided to take a good book down to the beach. In the evening I watched a couple of movies and went to bed … early!