Balmoral, Aviemore, then West Lothian

A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days away at Balmoral in Royal Deeside with twenty ministers, readers, and trainees, who live and work in rural settings. It was a very interesting and useful insight into working in rural churches. As I continue to search for a congregation, those in the countryside seem to be calling me the hardest. The Red Squirrel above was one of the pictorial highlights of the week!

This week I have been in Aviemore for a church conference on conflict resolution and reconciliation. This was a much bigger event with around 250 delegates. There were a range of speakers and workshop leaders from Scotland, England, and the USA. This conference also was interesting and useful and I look forward to seeing how these issues will be taken forward in the coming months and years.


As I waited for my train home I was surprised to see such a snowy scene at the top of the Cairngorms. After all it is only the middle of November!

As for the future, I finish my final training placement, at Abercorn linked with Pardovan, Kingscavil and Winchburgh churches, on Monday next week. After that I expect to be starting work in January as a temporary minister in one of the congregations in West Lothian. During that period I hope to apply to, and be selected by, a congregation with a view to becoming their minister for the next few years, or longer! I'll let you know when things become settled, but at present I can't say any more on air!

Books Galore

After our bathroom leak, these are all the books from the room below that got wet in the 'flood'! Fortunately the water missed the large majority of our books and we got those dry ones off the shelves in time.

It is now over two weeks since the episode of the escaping water and only a few of the wettest, most sodden books are still a little damp in the middle. The rest of them have dried. Mind you, some of them have gone so crinkly and expanded I'm not sure whether they are still usable.

Fortunately the dehumidifier works away by itself, blowing dry air across the wall. The books, wall, and ceiling, dry by themselves, without anyone needing to attend to them.

Round about our regular week-day work, we've been busy trying to figure out where we're going to go next. My training placement finishes at the end of November and we still have no clear idea about where God is calling us to go.

Certainly we will be going, at some point, for I'll have to live in the manse of whichever parish I end up in. Liz is determined she's not going to be left behind, and I'm glad about that!

Last weekend we went to visit some possible places. In those four days we travelled 800 miles and saw round 18 different church buildings and manses. Although seeing all these places in one trip was an efficient use of time and diesel, it has left our heads rather overwhelmed with images and impressions.

By Friday, only yesterday!, we had made some progress in sorting our the jumble of pictures and places, and were ready to go to Anstruther to spend some time with a minister friend, talking over where we had got to. He was very helpful and together we identified some of the underlying issues that have been making it difficult to find the way forward.

However, we still have a lot of work to do, looking at other places and comparing them with the ones we have already looked at. Sometimes it seems like we are making progress. At other times we seem to be sliding backwards faster than we are stepping forwards!

Last weekend we travelled almost as far as you can and still be on the mainland of Scotland. Below is one of my photos at that famous spot on the North coast, looking North to the Orkney islands. It is rather grey because the sun was setting and it had been raining recently. But you can't take that photo anywhere else!

Holy Bathroom

John's Gospel tells us that there are many rooms in the Father's house, but he doesn't say anything about bathrooms.

We had our bathroom completely renovated a few years after we came here, away back in the early 90s. In recent years, the chipboard units surrounding the sink, and containing the toilet cistern, had succumbed to the condensation and splashes. It was time for a refurb.

We got in touch with a bathroom company, picked some new units, and agreed the job.

I got a surprise on Tuesday morning this week, when two workmen arrived saying, "We're here to replace the three units in the bathroom." Although I had received a phone call the previous week to say that they might come on Tuesday, I had not received confirmation, and hence had assumed they weren't coming. Not so!

They got on well with the job, finishing it in one day, instead of the two days they had thought it might take. As you can see above, the refurbished unit looks very spic and span.

On Thursday morning, when I opened the curtains in the room below the bathroom, I got another surprise. The carpet was wet, the sofa was wet, stains were trickling down the wall behind the seven bookshelves, and the ceiling-paper was bulging and dripping. It was clear that a disaster had occurred in the bathroom up above.

What a commotion ensued. All hands on deck, but there were no pumps to be manned!

We woke up the son who was still sleeping, got the water all turned off, got the other son off to school, cleared out the furniture, TV and other electronics, and emptied the bookshelves. Fortunately only 10% of the 600 books had come into contact with the water trickling down the wall, and only a dozen or so of those were sodden. Hopefully the rest of the wet books will dry out and remain usable.



Later on that morning, the plumbers returned. They took apart the new units and checked out all their piping. No sign of water anywhere. It must be under the floor. But the only screws they had put into the floor were the two screws for the toilet bowl, and they had gone back into the same holes as before. Could it have been one of those screws?

The only way to find up was to lever up the previous floor cutting. Sure enough there was a pipe immediately under the floor boards, in line with the toilet screws, and the ash-fill between the floor and the ceiling below was soaking wet.

Well at least now we knew where the water was coming from. The plumbers disconnected the toilet and cut open the floor underneath. And there was the hole in the pipe.



It's all fixed now, and everything in the bathroom put back the way it was before. Now I can confess that the top photo above was taken after the leak had been fixed, and not beforehand! It still looks spic and span, but underneath the floor, not everything is as it should be. It's still soaking wet, and probably will be for some time yet.

It all looks wonderful on the outside, but inside it's another story. In fact, that's what the problem was on Tuesday afternoon. It all looked great, but under the floor the water was squirting out of the hole.

When the toilet had first been screwed in over 15 years ago, it had penetrated the pipe, and made a water-tight seal. But once the screw was taken out, and put back in again, the seal had been lost, and the water started squirting out.

So many of us are like that. Everything looks fine on the outside, but inside things are not as they should be. Maybe we are suffering from a physical illness that doesn't show on the outside. But I think many more folk are concealing spiritual disorders that are far worse than any physical disease.

After all, a physical illness can only cause pain, disability, or even death.

But if we have a spiritual disorder then it can separate us from God.

God wants you to be with Him, to be a part of his family, to live with him, in his house, for ever.

Don't let that hidden condition keep you from your destiny. Let Jesus the healer, touch you with his healing hand, and set you to rights.

Jesus knows who you really are, the hidden you, deep inside, that no-one else knows about. Jesus is the healer, he paid the price, he has the cure. He can set you free. Just ask him now.

Then you'll have the key to your own room, in the Father's house, for ever.

Mannheim to Basel

After a couple of days with our friends in Mannheim, we trailed our cases to the nearby tramstop and headed off to the railway station in town.

Before we got on the train to Basel, we had a good look round the famous water tower in the centre of Mannheim. There are some lovely varying fountains at the foot of the tower. It was a beautiful park.

Nearby the water tower we were amused to see a sculpture on a nearby building at roof level, portraying a man walking along a spike sticking out over the roadway. It looked very realistic!


The high-speed ICE train to Basel was as quick and efficient as the others we had been on and we soon arrived with our friends in Switzerland. It was very refreshing to cross all these country borders without any of the formalities we have to endure when entering and leaving the UK.

We arrived in the late afternoon before the Swiss National Day. The celebrations would start in the evening, so once we had got settled into our friends' flat, we headed into the town to enjoy the party!


A local running club was offering food and drink under one of the main crossings of the Rhine. We enjoyed our food in the open air and watched some of the party-goers indulging in the local sport of swimming down the river under the bridge. The river flows so quickly that it would be impossible to swim upstream, and most folk didn't bother to put any effort into their swimming - just drifting along on the current.

Finally it got dark, and to giant barges moved into place between the three main bridge crossings. All three bridges were closed to the traffic so that people could stand across the whole road to watch the fireworks.

I've never seen such splendid fireworks and I managed to take many good photos, as well as many more that weren't so good! I've posted my favourite shot below, but you can see some more on my Facebook site here'

Monster Spider

One evening recently I was about to get out an envelope from the box and I monster spider was sitting there daring me to come any nearer!

It was not at all fazed by my relative enormity and sat there patiently while I got out my camera and took a couple of snaps. The one above is a bit out of focus but shows the scale. On the photo below you can even make out the hairs on its legs!

Amusingly, after I'd laid down my camera, when I returned to catch the blighter it had disappeared without trace! So it's still prowling round the house all through the night looking for its next meal!!!

Heidelberg Disputation

Nestling in the hills at the edge of the flat Rhine valley lies the town of Heidelberg. It sits on the river Neckar upstream from Mannheim. We began our visit with a ride on the funicular railway up to the mostly-ruined castle above.

The castle began life in the 13th century guarding the important river crossing in the valley below. But it was destroyed by Louis XIV at the end of the 17th century. Inbetween-times the castle watched over the meeting in 1518 between the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli and the German reformer Martin Luther.

Of the sixteen points put forward for agreement, they agreed on fifteen, and even part of the sixteenth. But that last half-point of disagreement resulted in the meeting going down in history as a Disputation instead of an Agreement. Thus the two Reformations, German and Swiss, continue separately to this day.

The castle is also famous for the largest wine barrel in the world. Built in 1750, it held 58,000 gallons of wine, which is 220,000 litres. There was even a pipe running from the barrel which allowed the wine to be pumped directly to the King's Hall.


The cathedral down in the town square had a splendid new organ which was being played for the lunchtime recital as we arrived. It was great to see the beautiful stained glass windows and hear the music reverberating around the building.


We then drove farther up the river to the village of Hirschhorn where we had coffee and cake in the castle cafe, high up and looking out over the river. At this point there is one of the dams that raises the river depth for the barges that ply up and down the Neckar's river valley. Each dam has a lock to allow the barges to pass through.


We drove back to Mannheim along the winding road through the hills down to the flat plain of the Rhine valley.

Mannheim Sights

Sorry for the delay in continuing the story of our summer holidays in Europe.

Our host took my wife and I for a gentle bike ride around their part of Mannheim. It was a very calm and peaceful evening. We watched a couple of hot air balloons gliding by in the distance and then cycled round the lake in a large park. After we got back we sat and chatted in their garden until the stars came out overhead.

The next day, our daughter went into her friend's school for their exam results ceremony. She had been there before on a school trip so it was nice to go back and see the people she knew from before. But it must have been strange to go back to school after finishing two years at university!

To celebrate their exam results we lunched outdoors at the foot of the local communications tower in the above photo. From the observation level there was a splendid 360° view, although the window reflections reduced the photo quality. The view below of an empty barge leaving the River Neckar and entering a canal shows the size of the river traffic even this far from the North Sea. The Neckar enters the Rhine only a kilometer or so North from this spot. At the lower right of the photo you can see a bunch of children out for a paddle in a large canoe.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in the local park, walking slowly in the 28° temperature. We enjoyed a gentle boat ride on the lake and were amazed at the size of the Carp in the water. Although feeding the fish was verboten, some folk in another boat were dropping food over the side. In their competition to get to the food the ducks and the fish churned the water into a maelstrom! You can get an idea of the commotion from the small version of the photo below, and will see more if you click on it for the full-size image.