On a day of steady rain...

...at Maryvale  in Birmingham,  I am working on Apologetics, and ouside the window, under the shelter of the wide pillared veranda,  a  couple of cheery Brigettine Sisters kneel with with evergreens and bright Autumn chrysanthemums  to make a great garland around the chapel door.  Tomorrow this will be blessed and opened as the Holy Door for the Year of Mercy for the diocese of Birmingham.

The house is bright and warm, lectures are taking place in the main rooms and there's a promising smell of cooking wafting from the kitchens...It is good to be here,sitting amid books and papers under the kindly gaze of Bl John Henry Newman, who lived and worked here over 150 years ago, and with  thoughts of all who came here in the years before, when this was a recusant Mass-house, approached across the lanes and fields where all is now roads and houses and shops and curling motorways...

Birmingham is, truly, a dreadfully ugly city now - there are some gems in the city (St Chad's Cathedral is one), but the place is dominated by vast slabs of concrete and steel and  a simply horrible massive lump all covered with enormous blisters, alongside New Street Station. On summer nights, there is a lot of shrieking and drunken lurching about and fighting in the shopping centres as crowds of the young entertain themselves, but last night in December rain the city centre was just traffic and Islamic families shopping. Arriving at Maryvale brings a sense of welcome - I spent happy years here working for my BA...I used to walk around the grounds, and put my hopes and worries about my exams before the white statue of  Mary near the chapel door where, just now, a Brigettine sister stands, hands on hips, surveying the garland work while another tweaks a leaf here, a branch there, to make all complete...