Author: MarkSanderson

Tomorrow (Saturday 5th July) at St Mary’s there’s Coffee and homemade cakes from 10.30 am – this time organised by St Mary’s Choir and Youth Choir.

Out in the churchyard the Churchyard Angels will be strimming and raking from 9.30 (and supplied with coffee and homemade cakes). Please come along and help if you have the time. Bring tools with you if at all possible. You’ll be most welcome in either place.

This month’s FREE lunchtime concert at St Mary’s (Wednesday 2nd July @ 1pm) will be given by music students from John Kyrle High School. We are greatly looking forward to welcoming them.

As always, feel free to bring your lunch, your laptop … Food outlets in High Street will be happy to provide you with food.

Why not bring along a friend, to support the students of Ross.

If you’re free at 5pm today (Saturday 7th June), drop into St Mary’s for 45 minutes of sumptuous Tudor music by Orlando Gibbons, who died 400 years ago this week. It’s all wrapped up in a service of Choral Evensong and sung by St Mary’s occasional choir, Round Byrd, that specialises in music of this period.

If you can’t manage that, how about Sunday 8th at 6pm when the regular church choir will be singing our usual service of Choral Evensong (2nd and 4th Sundays of the month) with more modern music for Pentecost. More on all this at https://rossparishes.uk/evensong

We look forward to seeing you!

We are greatly looking forward to seeing Northwick Baroque, once more, at St Mary’s. They will be performing on Wednesday 4th June at 1pm for the next in our series of FREE lunchtime concerts.

As always, please feel free to bring your lunch – the many wonderful food outlets on High Street will be happy to provide you with something delightful.

Tomorrow (Thursday 29th May) is Ascension Day. Join us for a service at St Mary’s.

At 1.00pm on Wednesday 21st May we have the second of St Mary’s FREE Conversations Over Lunch. This month we welcome Ralph Barber, Chair of the Herefordshire & Gloucestershire Canal Trust. His subject will be the fascinating past, present and future of the canal that used to run between Gloucester and Hereford, many stretches of which still exist and are being restored.

Then at 7.30pm, you are invited to Gardeners’ Question Time, the first big event in our Open Gardens season. Bring your gardening questions to put to our local panel of experts, chaired by Tim Shelley.

Did you know that there used to be a canal linking Hereford and Gloucester. Many stretches of it still exist, if you know where to look, and even where no canal is to be found there are many fetures (buildings, locks, bridges) that make it possible to see that it existed. All of this is looked after by the Herefordshire and Gloucestershire Canal Trust who are enthusiastically restoring many sections on the route and have exciting plans.

Come and find out about the past, present and future of the canal in a FREE talk by Ralph Barber (Chairman of the Trust) on Wednesday 21st May, in St Mary’s Church. This is the second of our FREE summer series of talks – “Conversations over Lunch”. Feel free to bring your lunch, perhaps grab it from one of the many High Street outlets closeby. These events are generously supported by The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics and Art – More at https://rossparishes.uk/conversations

It’s the first Saturday of the month so if you fancy a bit of a workout you could do worse than join the merry band of churchyard mowers, strimmers, tidiers … that will be in St Mary’s Churchyard from 9.30am. There’s coffee and delicious homemade cakes for grabs in the church too.

Come and meet TV antiques celebrity, Kate Bliss, on Wednesday 18th June in St Mary’s Church, 7.00pm. She will be talking about her experiences in the antiques and TV world and then giving some valuations of the things brought along by members of the audience – choose carefully!.

Tickets are available online (there is no booking fee) for £16 (to include a glass of wine or soft drink) – £20 if you buy them on the day.

Join us in St Mary’s on Wednesday 30th April as we begin a new chapter in the life of The Ross Parishes with the installation service for our new Rector, The Revd. Prebendary Kelvin Price.

The service begins at 7pm. We’re expecting a full church, so come early. Please stay for refreshments after the service.

Join us at 7pm in St Mary’s for Thursday’s (24th April) Book Talk – Nunc! by Quentin Letts.

Quentin is political sketch writer for the Daily Mail. A regular broadcaster on radio and television, he was formerly New York correspondent for The Times, gossip columnist for the Daily Telegraph, theatre critic for the Sunday Times and parliamentary sketch writer for The Times. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain. His hobbies are gossip, hymn-singing and cricket. He lives in rural Herefordshire.

Quentin will talk about his novel, Nunc! – a modern twist on one of the greatest (yet underlooked) narratives in Christianity…

The ‘Nunc Dimittis’, set to music by composers from Tallis to Rachmaninov, is one of the great canticles of Christianity and is heard daily in Britain’s cathedrals. It is based on ten verses in St Luke’s Gospel. They relate the tale of Simeon, an old man who was told he would not die before he saw the Messiah. He waited and waited at the Temple in Jerusalem. At last he saw the infant Jesus. At that moment he cried, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word for mine eyes have seen thy salvation’. Simeon was at last able to surrender his life.

Who was Simeon? Why did he wait? And how did the month-old Jesus escape King Herod’s infamous massacre of the infants? The Bible does not say.

Quentin Letts’s quirky, affectionate Nunc! tries to put that right. It takes the reader to the occupied Jerusalem of Herod the Great, the puppet ruler whose Temple was a wonder of the ancient world. The action centres on Jerusalem’s Deuteronomy Square where Simeon’s old army friend Reuben runs a tea stall selling heavenly honey cakes and fig bread. We meet Bildad the beekeeper whose hive goes missing; grocer’s boy Benjamin, owner of a mule and cart that might act as a getaway vehicle; the drawlingly subversive Zillah, whose political salon lends her influence; and Simeon’s long-suffering landlady Noor. Deuteronomy Square’s plucky regulars must endure not only the bawling of a power-mad Roman centurion, Lucilius, but also the more snivelly authoritarianism of Kedar, the city’s clerk of works.

A joint event for Rossiter Books and The Friends of St Mary’s Ross on Wye. Tickets available on the door (£8). Or in advance https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/rossiterbooks/t-rpvvypj

With Christians around the world we mourn the death of His Holiness Pope Francis. We extend our sympathies to all in the Roman Catholic Church and especially to our friends at St Frances of Rome and St Joseph’s RC Primary School, here in Ross.

Catch some great music at St Mary’s this afternoon (Saturday 12th April) at 5pm as our occasional choir, Round Byrd, sings evensong and we begin Holy Week. It will take just 45 minutes of your day and will be a perfect way to bridge your afternoon and evening.

The choir will be rehearsing from 2.15pm. If you can’t make the service you are most welcome to drop in for some of the rehearsal.

More about this and the choir at https://rossparishes.uk/round-byrd

Another great service of Choral Evensong this evening at 6pm (Sunday 6th April) at St Mary’s.

As Lent begins to reach its climax in Passiontide, on “Passion Sunday” the music become more meditative using more ancient plainsong and music by two Tudor composers, Morley and Gibbons. Possibly a bit of 21st Century, James MacMillan (especially for today) too as an added bonus.

We hope to see you there.

St Mary’s offering of FREE lunchtime concerts is back and starts tomorrow (Wednesday 2nd April) with a performance by Forest Baroque.

Join us, perhaps with your lunch, whenever you like, the concert begins at 1. For this month only homemade soup and a bread roll will be up for grabs in church from 12. It’s all very informal.

We hope to see you soon, if not this month.

You might also like to come along to our series of FREE lunchtime talks – Conversations over Lunch, on the third Wednesdays of the month.

Come and celebrate Mothering Sunday (or Mother’s Day – which do you prefer?) tomorrow at St Mary’s. Plenty on offer!

The next in our Lenten series of events focussing on our custody of the environment is a special service which will be sung by our Come & Sing choir on Sunday 16th March at 6.00pm.

Join us in St Mary’s for a special service with music by Rutter, Karl Jenkins and Haydn as we pray for peace and for our world.

There’s another splendid service of CHORAL EVENSONG at St Mary’s at 6. This time all the music is by Welsh composers and some of the service will be in Welsh too.

Join us after for a glass of sherry.

We look forward to seeing you.