'St Clements Provides Plenty Of Christmas Cheer!'

St Clements Church

I had a lovely time today at my favourite Christmas Fair of the whole year!  The St Clements Church congregation always make a great effort to present something that is full of fun, colour and atmosphere and my Christmas pretty much starts with their Christmas Fair!

This year was no exception and I bumped into Amber Rudd while examining the home made Christmas decorations, cards and gifts stall. She said hello to me (we have met before) so I’m not sure if she recognised me (my Cowboy hat is memorable even if I’m not!) or was just being polite. Now, I know The Conservative Party are not perfect and I can’t say that I am happy with all of their policies either but I do feel very sorry for Amber as she has been the subject of a lot of very personal attacks of late and I don’t think that shows a good side to politics. Because of that I did my best to make her feel welcome, smiled and told her that it was “lovely to see her here”. I wanted to ask for a photo for this blog but decided to let the poor girl have some 'quality time away from the cameras’ in the end…

Anyway, I spent the best part of two hours browsing the stalls and FARMING the £1 a go - win every time stall, as ever! The people on that stall all know me and welcome me each year and so I always do my best to help them sell out! 

The one thing I did find troubling this year though was the fact that most of the people running the event and manning the stalls this year were elderly. Its a worrying trait that these kind of community events, fates, fairs and indeed Christmas itself all seem to be kept alive more than ever these days by the older generations. Even the people I chatted to over a cup of tea and mince pie were a fair bit older than me. Now you know why I try to do all I can each year to spread Christmas spirit and thus ( hopefully) continue to re-inforce it and the wonderful traditions that go with it. Not being a religious person myself there’s a certain irony in me ‘leading the charge’ on that front I suppose but no-one can say a bad word about any of the volunteers at St Clements - that’s for sure!

Oh, and I even won a 'star prize’ on the bottle stall! After telling the lady running the stall that I was going to ‘invoke the spirit of Tommy Cooper’ in order to try and win something this year and that knowing Tommy if I managed it I'd probably pull out a ticket that said ‘Drinking is bad for you’, I went and won a star prize with the first ticket I chose! Good on you Tommy! I suppose you could say that it all fell into place ‘just like that!'

Well, I don’t know what the rest of the festive season will hold for me this year but at least I can now say that I LOVED one part of it!