Walsingham...

...looks beautiful even in pouring rain, and even when you are camping in a nearby meadow. The National Association of Catholic Families holds an annual Pilgrimage at the shrine each May, taking advantage of the Bank Holiday weekend. We set off very late on Friday evening, car packed with camping equipment, and arrived well past one o'clock in the morning - but there were a couple of families still up and about, on what was still a clear night, with the most glorious array of stars. They had been enjoying this magnificent display ( incidentally something very much in keeping with the whole place, because the traditional old English name for what we today call the Milky Way, was the Walsingham Way, because the myriad of stars looks liked the hordes of pilgrims that walked to Walsingham along the crowded lanes for great feast-days....)  They immediately hurried to help us, and soon they had out tent up, and we were getting everything settled and organised. It was a happy start to a happy weekend.

We were warm and snug in the tent, and the dawn began with a most beautiful rosy sky...but then, when the morning arrived in its fullness, so did the rain - torrential sheets of it, rather magnificent in its way, but rendering any attempts at cooking breakfast out of doors impossible.  It turned  the lane into a splashy series of interlocking rivers, but we whooshed down it in our car and enjoyed  a hearty breakfast in the village. The NACF campers are all much more organised, with tents that include special cooking areas, and proper stoves and all sorts of handy equipment, but...well...there are compensations to being in late-middle-age, and our breakfast in a café was one of them.

A happy weekend. All sorts of talks and activities, ranging from a film on St John Paul the Great (the weekend was dedicated to him, as "Pope of the Family"), to a briefing on the Govt's (ghastly!) Equality Act, a Mass in the shrine's big Barn Church, and pleasant times chatting to old friends... late on Saturday I had to return to London, for a week's filming with EWTN (of which more later) but Jamie stayed on, and enjoyed talks with the priests from the Community of St John, and the soon-to-be-Bishop Fr Alan Williams who has been in charge of the Shrine and is now appointed Bishop of Brentwood, and the lovely Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal...