Povey Prattle

When I was first on my own, living in Fitchburg, Chicopee and Pittsfield MA. I was fussiness incarnate around the home. Don't spread this around, but in those days I would iron my sheets and my underwear (as well as those items which needed to be ironed). On one of her visits my Mum saw me use a hand held to gather up bread crumbs from the dining room table. She said that she had never before seen a dining table being vacuum cleaned! Now in retirement (twelve years now) I have become utterly lax about cleaning, tidying etc. I place "stuff" on my hall table, on my desk, on a card table in my bedroom, and on my dining room table  -  stuff which sits and gathers dust. I look at the mess and say to  myself "I'll deal with that tomorrow". In retirement "tomorrow" is a long way off! But I attacked it with a vengeance today. Here is a  massive  bunch of paper stuff that will be recycled next Thursday. And in my utility...

Way back when (maybe 1986) I took a trip to Italy with my good Chicopee MA friend Joe R and his pal John F. Joe and John were already in London and met me at Heathrow Airport.  We set off for a fine driving holiday in France, Switzerland, Italy and Holland. Just before I left the U.S.A.  Joe's mother (the wonderful and beloved Irene R)  gave me some money with the instruction that I should use it for a fine meal some place or other. We got to Sienna and the wonderful Campo.  There I decided that "this is the place".  We went to a restaurant somewhere in the above pic. John F ordered a hamburger, much to our merriment (a hamburger in Italy?!). I forget what Joe R ordered. But I recognised the Italian word "Uovo" and assured the guys that this was most certainly a fine Italian dish. The joke was on me.  What I got was no more nor less than one egg, served in the cast iron skillet in which it had been cooked. My pretentious b...

When I moved to Fitchburg, MA in 1976 there were a few options for men's clothing. There was still a bespoke tailor business on Main St.  I think that it was called Kennedy's, (or maybe that was the last name of the super cute man who attended to me!) There was a K-Mart at what we called  (hold your breath!) the K-Mart plaza.   It was a bright, well lit store which was totally reliable for slacks, shirts, underwear, socks etc.  K-Mart was at the upper end of the discounts. Meanwhile just down the road in Leominster there was a Sears store in the imaginatively named "Searstown"! I moved to Chicopee. The "Fairfield Mall" on route 33 was a bit of a dud, but just a few miles away was the Holyoke Mall with anchor Departmental stores  such as Sears and J.C. Penney. It was 1980.  Sears and Penney's were the epitome of good service, fair prices, and a deep inventory. Off to Pittsfield in 1984  to encounter the locally owned England Bro...

I've just read and enjoyed "The Pope Who Would Be King  -  The exile of Pius IX and the emergence of Modern Europe"  David I. Kertzer, Random House, 2018). Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) was the Pontiff from 1846 until his death.  For much of his papacy he was not only the head of the Roman Catholic Church, but also the Absolute Monarch of the Papal States. Upon his election he was greeted as a political reformer and was  fêté d  in the streets of Rome.  For example he instituted  the beginning of representative City Government, and ordered the iron gates of the Jewish Ghetto to be torn down. But when his civilian Prime Minister was assassinated  and the Roman Citizenry threatened his absolute and ultimately repressive political  authority he fled in exile from Rome.   The existing powers (Spain, France, Austria) had a dog in this fight and it was through the intervention of French armed fo...

This picture, purporting to show the results of Trump/Sessions Immigration policies is not what it seems to be.  See below for details. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have only once preached the same sermon twice.  I was at St. James's,  Cambridge, MA and when l was searching for inspiration for one particular Sunday I came across (via Google)  a sermon which I had preached three years previously. I thought that it was "pretty good", so I preached it again.  I began by saying "I preached this three years ago, but I had forgotten it, and so had you!". One Sunday I re-preached a sermon which had been given by a Cambridge colleague, the Revd. J. Mary Luti.  It was splendid.  Naturally I sought her permission, and naturally I told the congregation that I was preaching one of Mary's sermons. One Sunday in a town which I will not name, and at an Episcopal parish which I will not name...

Stock photo' The old timers referred to "the shades of night", that time when light is evaporating and darkness is enveloping. Before the advent of first gas and then electric light those shades were all embracing  -   unless there was a bright moon. The Deist hymn writer Joseph Addison takes up this theme of evening shades and moon light in his hymn "The Spacious Firmament on High" :  Soon as the evening shades prevail the moon takes up the wondrous tale, and nightly to the listening earth repeats the story of her birth;  Charles Wesley in his hymn "Christ whose glory fills the skies" thinks of the shades as a kind of spiritual darkness: Christ, whose glory fills the skies, Christ, the true and only Light, Sun of righteousness, arise, triumph o'er the shades of night ; Day-spring from on high, be near; Day-star, in my heart appear. Oh those shades.    For those of us seniors wh...

Ben M, a dear friend of many of us in SRQ died in Dec 2016 at aged 92. We talk about him often, always with fondness. The gift I received the other day  reminded me that Ben also gave me a wine bottle stopper What fun! One day Ben gave me a gift in this box I knew that it could not be an engagement ring for we were not that close! I pondered  "is a a tie clip or some cuff links?" None of the above.  It was a churchkey. I keep it my junk drawer in the box.  That way I always be able to find it easily. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Church Key from Wikepedia. A churchkey initially referred to a simple hand-operated device for prying the cap (called a " crown cork ") off a glass bottle; this kind of closure was invented in 1892, although there is no evidence that the opener was called a "church key" at that time. [1]  The shape and design of some of these openers ...