a sense of belonging

The Bowls Club meet on Friday for a celebratory lunch in our newly refurbished Church Hall. Over fifty members attend.

There are many things to celebrate - birthdays, special wedding anniversaries and fifty years service in ministry.  Advancing years are no barrier to fun and their laughter soon fills the room. I go round taking photographs and hear story after story. It is such a privilege to help document this lunch in pictures.

I meet the most senior member of the club, the two friends whose paths first crossed as four year olds in primary school, a couple at the back still obviously deeply in love after fifty years of marriage.  The one thing everyone has in common is the desire to create and be part of a community.

Don't we all feel that need just to belong ...

aston villa 2 - 0 rotherham

Tonight finds us back at Bostin' Fish and Chips for a pre-game ingestion of cholesterol busting sustenance. Mighty good food it is too!

We've listened to Radio WM on the way in and it seems nothing less than a sound  thrashing of the newly promoted Rotherham will suffice. This seems strange given they are but one point behind us in the Championship table and in their last game they saw off Derby, an early season trail-blazer.

Steve Bruce faces the sack in the morning, Brexit is on the cusp of reducing us to wode and potato scrapings and POTUS, Donald Trump has just been handed another baby-rattle.  We could be in for a good night!

 

departed - no. 6

 did they make it safe to the other side?

hic!!

Every so often I travel into town for lunch with my old friend, Terry. I say 'lunch' advisedly as inevitably we see out the afternoon in one of Birmingham's choicest watering holes.

Our favourites are the inestimable Wellington, the doyen of fine real ales, closely followed by the Post Office Vaults. As its name suggests, the Vaults were owned formerly by the Royal Mail. It's now home to one of the biggest selections of foreign bottled beers in the Midlands.

And so it is to the Vaults we go, in search of good beer and fine fellowship.  Hic!!

juxtaposition

Juxtaposion: variable noun 

The juxtaposition of two contrasting objects, images, or ideas is the fact that they are placed together or described together, so that the differences between them are emphasised.

Collins English Dictionary