Harvest Festival
 An event that children and adults of all ages and nationalities seem to enjoy is our World Harvest Supper and Barn Dance. It clearly had caught Natasha’s imagination as she spent all week cutting out and decorating a barn, creating a display which included a hay bale, a scarecrow, a wheelbarrow and lots of foodstuffs as well as labeling all the world flags on display. Big thanks to her. As usual there was a great variety and pride in the national dishes that were provided for the meal. The Barn dance part of the evening takes me back to The Barn, the International Coffee Bar, which I set up with a team in the hall of St Barnabas’ Church Cambridge in 1978 and ran for four years and where I met Tricia. Thirty-five years later it is still going. Back then, Barn dancing was part of the staple entertainment and the cassette tapes I had then are the basis for the music that we use at the Harvest Supper.
As well as our own Harvest services, Stephen and I visited St Christopher’s School for their junior Harvest assembly and it was good to be able to interview Stephen and to highlight some of the very practical ways the harvest gifts brought by the children met the needs of families and individuals through both the work of the ECC and the Mission to Seafarers. After the assembly we filled our cars with the gifts and brought them back to the Cathedral for onward distribution. |