Sunday, April 19, 2009

The English countryside...

...enchants in April...and Easter was full of good things...a glorious Easter vigil with fire and candles and heavenly music, a family enjoying a delicious lunch with talk and fun, an Easter table groaning with simnel cake and chocolate cake, and scones-with-jam-and-cream, an Easter branch decorated with home-made Easter biscuits tied with ribbons, lambs gambolling in fields, very small children hunting for Easter eggs hidden in a garden...primroses along all the banks and lanes, and even the sides of motorways, a small great-nephew playing with his train-set, and being taken to see his first Real steam-engine...

On Easter Monday we took an Australian friend to see Dorchester - where St Birinus baptised the king of the West Saxons in the Thames more than a thousand years ago. We wanted to show him the beautiful little Catholic church there, and ended up being welcomed with magnificent hospitality...standing in the mellow late-afternoon sunshine of an April day in this most lovely of villages, as a happy day drew to a glowing close, it was difficult to believe that Heaven will not be a little bit like this.

2 comments:

sydneysider said...

Hmmm...Time for another long overdue visit to England.... This sort of prose gets me every time..

Sharon said...

I'm with sydneysider even if I come from Melbourne! lol I grew up on Miss Read, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and fell in love with the English countryside and the kind of England you speak about - decency and uprightness, all that sort of thing. I just love your country posts.