Location, location ...

Thank you, SH, aye, in the Kingdom of the North, for a most charming Easter Card, via the Royal Mail Aberdeen Mail Centre! It has just arrived this morning, brilliantly on cue on a grey dismal Holy Saturday morning in the English Midlands, and cheered me up very greatly with its Paschal Candle. Two or three generations ago, we would all by now have been cheered up by the Liturgy itself at its old Saturday morning timing, with the paradoxes Evelyn Waugh observed: seeking illumination in the middle of the day by lighting a fire, and then blessing the fire by sprinkling it with water! I think our beloved Benedict XVI once wrote about those old, easily derided, Holy Week arrangements, deriving Illumination from them and, by doing so, wisely reminding us of his authoritative teaching in Summorum Pontificum, that the Church can never just abolish an orthodox Catholic rite.

Your card  had been forwarded from our former address; it occurs to me that it might be useful to give you my current address. Perhaps other readers, too, who have me in their nice old fashioned pre-email Address Books, could update me in them.

I still have such a child-like joy in being sent things!! There is only one detail that disappoints me: the old-style, round, postmarks, cancelling the stamps (and how long will they survive?) by giving place and time of franking, seem to have been Rationalised away in Britain. But lots of Commonwealth countries still preserve them. Thank God for our loyal Colonies.

26, Playfield Road,
Kennington,
OXFORD,
OX1 5RS