Sunday in the Marina

We have found on previous visits that the service at St Matthew's rarely starts on time - sometimes even ten or more minutes after the scheduled start. As a result we did not set off to walk down quite as early as we have before but did this time cut it too fine. Although we arrived only a couple of minutes after 10:30 (later than we had really planned) on this occasion they had managed a prompt start and notices were under way in the traditional church fashion. Hopefully we did not miss anything crucial.

At St Matthew's they are following a series for Lent about Giving and it was very pleasing to hear someone who is prepared to talk about money in a direct, realistic but not offensive way. Afterwards we learnt that they, and other churches in London, are this year using material from Liverpool Diocese.

Back to the boat - Mike spent most of the walk on the phone as he received a call just after we left church and it finished as we passed through the gate into the marina! Christine did her best to ensure that he managed to cope with traffic and mobile phone without the two colliding.

After lunch we stopped at Tesco for some milk and, we hoped, some rolls for the return trip tomorrow, Alas, we had forgotten that they have some strange franchise bread operation in store here and it did not have the desired range of rolls, Only some miserable plastic packs were available which we declined to buy. As a result, Mike will have to make a trip out in the morning.

We arrived in Windsor at the appointed time and found them all in very good spirits after their holiday - plenty of pictures to tell the stories, including the day spent on a Pirate Ship that involved walking the plank and a real use for Adrian's cheap waterproof camera!

Ellie also arrived back from a shopping trip in town along with her new boyfriend from Belfast who was shortly to go off to Heathrow to catch  plane back home. However, we did hear plenty of detail about Ellie's school trip to Washington and New York which happened the week earlier.

Back then to the boat and time for our roast - fortunately, having taking longer to hear about the trips, we had done most of the preparation at lunch time so it was just a matter of putting it all on to cook.