After Avington’s opening event last week, we are now entering our Harvest Festival Season in earnest!

This coming Sunday, Harvest comes to Easton: please join us in St Mary’s at 10.00am for a traditional-styled family service—to sing some of your favourite harvest hymns and to hear the voices of the choir from Prince’s Mead (as well as that of a younger Chris Ellis!).

We would be very grateful to accept donated produce which will be passed on to the Winchester Basics Bank. They are in need of most grocery items, in particular the following:Tinned vegetables or fruit, squash and fruit juice, jam, marmalade, tinned puddings, UHT milk (dairy and non-dairy), noodles, coffee, dog food.

All financial donations at our Harvest services will be divided between these charities: Trinity Winchester, Winchester Beacon and Winchester Basics Bank.

Our other happenings this Sunday will be in Itchen Abbas—with our 08.30am Holy Communion (1662) in St John’s church and with Café Church in the Village Hall at 4.00pm.

I look forward to seeing you at some point during the day. I always enjoy it when the first of October falls on a Sunday: I was born on Sunday 1 October 1961 (just after 6.00pm during the first broadcast of ‘Songs of Praise’!)  and was ordained deacon in Rochester Cathedral on Sunday 1 October 1989.

Finally, a BIG THANK YOU to all those who will have been offering harvest-hospitality of different kinds in our villages during these few weeks of the Harvest Season: it’s a beautiful time of year to ‘open wide our doors’ and, as a rural community set in this lovely Itchen Valley, to express our gratitude to God (as it says in the Prayer Book’s wonderful ‘Prayer of General Thanksgiving’) for ‘all the blessings of this life’!

With love and prayers

Revd Peter