Helps Celtic Mission

We are thoroughly/mostly enjoying our mission and things are getting better all the time. By “things” understand the following. Here are the top ten. 1. The days are lengthening and it is light when we drive to the office and drive home. This makes an enormous difference to our mood and the beauty of the drive. Yesterday we went out exploring Craigmillar Castle. Here's the view from the battlements. Craigmillar Castle is a ruin, built in the fifteenth century, and remodeled and extended in the sixteenth, seventeenth and later centuries. Currently all the stone walls, stairs, parapets and battlements are still standing, but there are no roofs or wooden floors. On our way home happened to merge with the route of our normal drive home from the office, but we weren’t sure for a few minutes that we were on the right road, as we could see the buildings and the surroundings, so everything looked unfamiliar. We enjoy walking in the park when we can, and with increasing day...

We have been in Scotland for a month and ten days now, and are therefore as expert as we are ever likely to be on the subject of this fair land and the great city of Edinburgh. I suspect that as we stay longer, our black and white opinions are likely to soften into shades of grey, so let's get them down while we can still be opinionated about everything. We love the sense of history and caring for history that pervades almost everything. So many of the buildings are old, and have been adapted for various uses through the centuries. In the land of the brave and the home of the free they would have been torn down and something new built in their place, probably several times over the past few centuries. This may well be a more economical approach, but there is a love of the past here - so many of the elderly buildings have cleanish stone walls and at least semi-translucent windows; keeping them clean is, we suspect neither easy nor cheap, but may well be a labour of love.. The st...

When we first arrived in Provo many years ago, I heard about climbing the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to the 'Y' on the slopes hundreds of feet above the valley floor. I had been told that many people climb up to it, even small children. I decided that I should do that. Being an engineer and thinking in straight lines I drove directly from our apartment on Seventh North, Provo toward the Y, parking when I reached the foot of the mountain and started climbing straight up. I was surprised after some climbing to realise that there was a bench higher up which I could easily have driven up to and where I could have parked, saving myself the first third of the climb. Nevertheless I climbed on, going straight up the spur of the mountain toward the Y. I arrived at the foot of the Y exhausted and panting, and totally unwilling to believe that many adults could make that climb, let alone small children, but there they were, mothers and children both, playing on the rocks of the ...

Saturday (P-day): A rare beautiful day. The weather predicted rain and snow, and these happened, but only while we were indoors and focused on other things. While we were outside it gave us mostly sunshine with fluffy clouds. The wind blew, but we were prepared with woolly hats, scarves, gloves, and several layers with long sleeves, as well as zipped up coats. As we said, a rare, beautiful day. We did the ultimate touristy thing, hopping onto a tour bus, (one of the hop on and off whenever you feel like it sort) and cruising around the city with an audio guide explaining stuff. This is a great way to get to know the general layout of downtown, and to make a list of places we want to go back and visit. The audio tour was available in several languages—we selected British English which came with a nice Scottish accent. After awhile we found an alternate soundtrack, “Horrible History” aimed at kids. Lots of fun and G-rated ghoulishness, including some real history. All very interesti...

The final stages of our move between flats have been 'interesting', in the spirit of the curse, "May you live in interesting times".  Stretching out the move over several days has advantages and disadvantages, but listing them in the sense of making a choice between them is meaningless, because we effectively had no choice.  So while we enjoyed our comfortable bed and available WiFi at the "old" flat, we also put up with the fact that whatever we wanted was already at the other flat, or worse—as happened one night—the tape needed to seal a box was inside the box that was being sealed, and as soon as it was sealed we needed the scissors to do another job, said scissors being inside the just-sealed box.  Now we consider ourselves reasonably smart people and try to plan ahead. So the clothes we needed for our last couple of days were carefully not packed away, nor were the cleaning materials needed to clean the flat when we finally departed. On t...