Will Dig Life

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

When we became Catholic a few years ago (blog post here ) we knew that we were leaving a loving, deeply connected community of friends. We were willing to do that to follow Christ; but there’s no sugarcoating the fact that the type of churches we came out of has a much stronger fellowship, and of course we have missed that. Doing life together - families whose kids grow up together, meeting up regularly and being each other’s social circle, practical and emotional support, deep friendship. This is life in the type of church we were part of.  D’s First Holy Communion - in our old parish The Catholic Church is pretty much as expected; while we have certainly met lovely people, there is no understanding of fellowship the way we mean it. On Sunday, after church there will be coffee and friendly conversation - and then everyone goes home. There’s midweek Masses of course, but those are about meeting with Jesus and not with each other. Fellowship meetings, small home groups, are unheard ...

It's been a busy autumn, and it's nearly over - to me, Advent marks the new season (as it also begins a new Church year!) - so here's a photo dump of things we've done. The big highlight of autumn is of course N's birthday, which I've covered in another post . Not long after that comes Halloween though, which we enter into sparingly: I'm not on board with a lot of the commercial excesses of it, nor the gory expressions of death and torture which have become so popular. But, we pick what we like and leave the rest; and one thing we liked a lot was the offering of a welding workshop (yes, for kids!) where they got to make their own spiders... Keeping their distance from the sparks! D with his finished product! We also visited the Wetlands Birds Centre at Slimbridge, which is always a great day out and was gloriously sunny... Another great day out at half term was the SS Great Britain - we'll certainly be back for the Christmas festivities there later this ...