To Coventry...

...to meet the Coventry Ordinariate Group and discuss a schools project with them. Young Father Paul met me at Coventry station, and the meeting was in his house, with his young family evidently happy and familiar with parish events, tucking in with us to the bring-and-share supper...( quantities of the most delicious food, including two different sorts of  lasagne, and a most great array of puddings). Everyone had made enough for twelve...

A most useful meeting, talkative and friendly, and the schools project looks set to be under way shortly...all rather exciting (details to follow in due course).

I'd spent much of the earlier part of the day au Euston station, as I was worried that with the Tube strike I might not get there on time...in the end I arrived by bus with two hours to spare, so got out my laptop and finished doing the footnotes etc for the new Prayer Book to be published by the CTS, to mark the canonisation of Pope John XXIII and John Paul II.  Working on this book has brought me into greater contact with John XXIII.  I'd read his Journal of a Soul, of course, and studied his other writings and encyclicals, but there is more.  An impressive and extraordinary life: Bulgaria and Turkey in wartime,  with so many conflicting groups and tensions,Nuncio to Paris in the days immediately following WWII...and then, as Pope, a joyful and humble certainty that the Church can face the future with confidence and hope. I've become a fan...

After the meeting in Coventry I stayed the night at the home of Ronald and Jenny Crane, and we talked Ordinariate news and The Portal, and so on. I do wish the Archbishop of Birmingham - who is an old friend whom I have known since his seminary days - would show more strong and positive support and encouragement for the Ordinariate: it's going to be a big part of the Church of the future in this country, and it could bring him and the diocese a much-needed boost...

Travel is going to be restricted over the next weeks because of the rain and floods...I was due to go to Cornwall, but the railway line linking it to the rest of the country has been swept away, and it is just a mangled mess of metal and shingles along by the beach at Dawlish...