Magnifying glass from a Christmas Cracker proves useful as a spoon

Christmas for our Guinea Pig

 

mmmm, Brussel Sprouts!

St Philip's Place is open again!

Salford Choral Society Christmas Concert

Some of the prayers offered at our Carol Services

 

We had a large present at the front of church and people placed a gift tag on the present with prayers written inside. Some of the prayers are really beautiful and moving. Some of the little ones simply put there name or left it blank but it was lovely to see people really joining in and now we have a reminder of all our prayers.

Salford Uni Big Band

One of our kittens has decided to lie on my keyboard!

They are very cute but not very helpful when they want to be around me all the time and lie on e everything on my desk!

Salford City College Performing Arts Concert

It's Advent!

Lisa Hannigan at St Phil's

A truly marvelous gig last Friday. Lisa has a tremendous voice, good songs and some wonderful musicians with her. Some songs were beautifully moving others were amusing (such as safe travels). The audience were extremely attentive and very appreciative. Fionn Regan this week (Thursday) will have to be really special to top that.
some photos of mine on Picasa at https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Y93xxzuUkJU8iMxEuuDaCtMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink

Salford University Big Band at St Phil's

At Tate Liverpool

My fairly useless right arm

 

So it's clearly my own stupid fault. But I am really starting to get a bit fed up with it now. I suppose I am learning some things like how much we take for granted and how many things are difficult to do with just one hand. My right hand does actually work but anything I do makes it ache and I have to work around this constricting lump of concrete on it. So ... my writing with my left hand is improving but still looks like that of a 3 year old, my left handed typing is getting faster than it was but is soooo much slower than using both hands, and I have lot more sympathy with people with disabilities.

Autumn Photos of St Philip's

DSCN4476, a photo by St Philip's Church, Salford on Flickr.

The Photography group who meet on a Wednesday afternoon have taken photos in and around St Philip's. There are some quite nice ones here, so have a look!

It's not the right shape!

 

I don't know how obvious it is from this photo but this is my badly broken wrist. Climbing in and out of wheelie bins is not a good idea. This is what happened to me when I was squashing down the leaves and the bin tipped backwards and I broke my fall with my right arm. tomorrow I'm getting a metal plate put into it to hold the bits of bone into the right places. Typing one handed is very slow especially when it's the weak hand, maybe it'll be good for me!

Very strangely addressed photo

Once there were two types of bird...

This book dates from 1965 when there were two types of bird: British birds and Foriegn Birds!

Salford Symphony Orchestra

James Vincent McMorrow at St Philip's

 Really good gig at St Phil's last night. The music was beautiful, all of the band were really nice people and the crowd were good too. I've posted some photos on Picasa here

Time in hand

 

Mark from The Cumbria Clock Company has arrived today to put the hands back on one of our clocks at St Philip's.  It'll be nice to have all four clock faces working again. We snapped this photo as Mark was just passing through the church on his way up the tower. We happened to be around for our photography session.

Caelidh/hoedown/barn dance

Whatever you like to call it, we had a great time at our Silver Wedding Celebration at Salford Lads Club. It's great fun dancing and good exercise too. The nice thing about this sort of dancing is that there isn't anyone who looks really good at it so anyone can join in. It doesn't really matter if you make mistakes because lots of people are doing it worse than you! We had a great live band for ours, featuring our friend Stephen McCusker. We've got another one this Friday at St Philip's, in the church. No live band this time but Fred who is an excellent caller. Should be a lot of fun.

Manchester School of Samba at St Philip's School

Tony from MSS recently took some drums into St Philip's School and did a Samba session. The kids really enjoyed it and got a lot out of it. Tony does Samba drumming and dancing (well actually Danny does the dancing) every Wednesday at Sacred Trinity Church, Chapel St, Salford. Session runs from 7 pm until 9.30 pm. There is something quite special about a group of people getting into rhythm together and naking a great sound.
MSS website is at http://www.sambaman.org.uk/

Bishop Mark visits St Philip's School

Bishop Mark is chair of the Diocesan Board of Education and visited St Philip's CE Primary School on Friday. He went down well with the kids and the the staff and parents.

The Travelling Band at Ramsbottom Festival

Pretty good line up here. It's just a shame about the weather! So far I've enjoyed Kid British, Denis Jones, Cherry Ghost and this lot. Looking forward to Badly Drawn Boy.

Joan As Police Woman

A rather wonderful concert at St Phil's last night.

We scrub up well!

 

This is St Philip's ready for a wedding this afternoon. The church looked beautiful and you'd never guess there'd been a noisy rock gig in there last night! Congrats to Holly & Sheldon on their wedding.

Our Zoe is very proud of the banana bread she's made

 

It's still the holidays for the kids even though us grown ups have to work for a living. We've been trying to make suggestions of exciting things to do and today Zoe made a banana loaf with her sisters. She's very proud of it and here she is showing it off. We'll get to taste it in a bit!

Dramatic fire last night

This fire on Adelphi St wasn't rioting but I think people had illegally been dumping tyres on one of the "development opportunity" sites between the road and the river. Presumably kids had started the fire. It certainly caused quite a stir with the smoke being visible for miles and I had one call from a concerned friend checking that it wasn't my house on fire!

Message from my daughter when I opened MY computer!

 

When I got in from the pub quiz I saw this message - I'm impressed by her creativity, lots of people would make do with a post-it note! She's busy uploading video. We won the pub quiz, although in the doldrums of August, there were actually only 3 teams. Steve (Landlord of the Crescent) still gave us the usual amount of beer tokens, thanks Steve!

Leavers' service at Church

 

Beautiful singing, a few tears, one or two laughs  - a lovely service as usual.

Well done Sainsbury's!

 

Sainsbury's are doing a major refit of their Salford store and for a while there have been no Cycle stands. However this morning I noticed that they've now opened the new entrance and revelealed all these new Sheffield Stands - a lot more than they had before, so well done Sainsbury's! It would be really nice if the other half of the retail park put some stands in as well.  It would also be great if it was made easier to walk around the site instead of feeling that you have to drive across the car parks because it's not safe for pedestrians... but I suppose we can't have everything...

Graduale Nobili

A wonderful, wonderful concert by this excellent Icelandic choir. There were some pieces that almost brought a tear to the eye, in fact for some people they did. It was especially moving when they stood around the church singing. A very special night!

On the tower at St Phil's

at St Philip's Church we have recieved a grant to have our masonry repaired. We're currently working on a full assesment of the needs. Today Skyline carried out a survey of the tower. It caused a bit of puzzlement whenever people looked up. Good fun though!

Church this morning

The rather pleasant setting of General Synod

A very cheeky squirrel in our window box!

 

We did have strawberries in here but probably don't now! I was a bit worried that the birds would eat them but I didn't think about the squirrels...

Eloise all dressed up

Eloise went for the 1950's retro look for her school prom and looked fantastic of course. Weird that she's now a woman of leisure with no school to go to.

Fuzzy Lights

This was a really good concert and I got some nice photos. You can see more at: https://picasaweb.google.com/the.andy.salmon/FuzzyLights?feat=directlink

Emmy the Great at Sacred Trinity

The gig was a sell-out and many more people would have liked to be there. Emmy mainly did songs from the new album that comes out on Monday but she did some of the old favourites as well. It was a really good gig; great sound, great atmosphere, wonderful band. Grace Petrie, the support act, was also very good. Solo singer songwriter with a great voice and very good songs.

Emmy was very sweet and said lots of nice things about Sacred Trinity and the team... all true of course!

St Philip's school off to Lledr Hall

 

This is the bus leaving with the rest of the school waving them off. It's year 5 & 6 who have gone and I'm sure they'll have a wonderful time. They'll come back with lots of exciting tales to tell and the teachers will come back very, very tired!

Live radio 4 service from Salford

 

It was a very early start to the day but it was lovely to be in the BBC Philharmonic's new studio for this service. Hayley, the chaplain at mediacity, did a great job and the orchestra sounded fantastic. It was nice to see lots of familiar faces and say hello to people too. You can listen to the broadcast on iplayer here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011p10r/Sunday_Worship_All_ground_is_holy_ground/

Ordsall Hall

Last Sunday we went to Ordsall hall. It only reopened a month ago and it looks stunning now. There are more rooms open, there are lots of opportunities to try on Tudor costumes and the grounds look great.

Bristol Area organists visit to St Philip's

Eloise's GCSE Art Exhibition

At Trinity High School on Friday they exhibited GCSE Art work from the students, so we went along. We'd seen most of Eloise's work already but it does look very good and we were very pleased to see it all. A lot of the work was very good. Eloise hopes to do A level Art and it'll be interesting to see how it all develops.

Threatening letter from TV licensing

 

This letter has come to "the occupier, St Philip's Church". They're investigating why we don't have a TV licence. It's come about because of our gaining of a postcode, so TV licensing now think we're a new address. You'd think though that just looking at the address would help the investigation, we're a church and we don't watch live TV.

Last Harbour at Sacred Trinity

Another fine gig from the Little Red Rabbit people. Always lovely gigs and Last Harbour were very good. The next Little Red Rabbit gig is on Monday 16th May.

Dawn from the roof of St Phil's this morning. Beautiful.

Nice day and nice view from the Edge

Moments in love exhibition launch at Trinity.

Moments in Love - Holy Week Art Exhibition

We're doing an Art Exhibition next week at Trinity. The launch is on Sunday night at 7 and it'll be open Mon - Sat, 12-4. There'll be various pieces including a few photos from me. There will also be some good stuff too!