Memorial Services: Wednesday July 8th and Saturday 11th July 2015

Having had no funeral or memorial services, since Jon was ordained, suddenly we have had three in the past month and two this week. The first was for the financial journalist, James Grant-Morris  – he was editor of The Bahrain Banker magazine and his mother and sister and her husband flew out from the UK as did three friends from his schooldays which was a testimony to his gift of friendship. He was an intrepid traveller (nearly 100 countries in his all too short lifetime), had made Bahrain his home and was clearly held in high regard all who knew him.

The second was for Norman McGuire, whose close family are all in Bahrain, very much the McGuire family home now having been brought up in the North-East of England and retaining his passion for Middlesborough Football Club. He’d met Irene his wife in Wales where he was working on a power station on Anglesey and after a brief return to the North-East, he moved to Bahrain to work first on a power station here as a mechanical engineer before moving into hotels. Shaikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa came to the Memorial service and said that he had known Norman for 40 years.

I am hugely grateful for Paul Hamilton who once again acted as a funeral director in the West dealing with many of the practical aspects of both funerals quietly and efficiently.