Friday, December 04, 2015

To Richmond...

...and Mass at St Elizabeth's Church,  where Fr Stephen Langidge has recently been appointed Parish Priest.  This is a church  with a fascinating history, on which I will be doing some research. As is customary in most parishes, the Mass-intention was announced, and today it happened to be a foundation Mass for the soul of Louis-Phillippe d'Orleans  whose family has a long link with this area, living for some while at Twickenham...just one bit of the rich history of this loop of the Thames...

One perk of getting older is that life begins to have agreeable links. As a teenage school-leaver in the 1970s, I began work as a journalist on the Richmond Herald newspaper, then based in George Street. Years before, my mother and her brothers were growing up in Richmond, and she still speaks with happy memories of childhood days in Richmond Park and along by the river. Somewhere in the parish archives will be the record of the reception of her father and all the family into the Catholic Church...

2 comments:

Di said...

I don't understand what a teenage "school leaver" is. Please enlighten! Does it mean you didn't graduate from what we in the US would call High School? Love your blog! It sound like you're always "on the go"......

Joanna Bogle said...

In my case, "teenage school leaver" translates as "High School graduate". We don't use "graduate" in Britain until university level - Bachelor of Arts or whatever. I became a reporter on the Richmond Herald newspaper immediately after taking my "A" levels exams and finishing my final year at school: VI form as we say in Britain. I have since, as a mature student, taken a degree in Divinity and am now doing some post-graduate study in Theology.