Organs, Ancient Beams, Architects and worms

Another exciting morning talking to an architect; this time for our £300,000 church regeneration project in Cragg. It’s been a hard journey for them with difficult turns in the road including trying for a lottery bid, which failed, the decision to sell the existing hall, heroically encouraged by one of our older members; Doris, and finally planning permission for change of use which was a victory but felt like a failure.
This morning it was the exciting business of dreaming dreams and what dreams we had, more of that another day but two things stood out in the process. The first is how hard it is to make decisions about old artefacts. We have a lovely old organ, it’s apparently significant and worth saving but if we are brutally honest it doesn’t fit into our church. In our discussions this morning it was literally “The Elephant in the room,” so much so we could almost hear it breathing heavily in the corner. To be honest my head says get rid of it, but my heart doesn’t want to let go. I don’t know what we’ll do. The other exciting thing was going above the ceiling to inspect the roof space, a place in my own church I had never visited before. It was dusty but the beauty of the structure, it’s simplicity and openness was almost moving. As our architect said it was “honest,” you could see how it worked, built in the same simple effective way that many of the mills of the area had been built. I caught our architect caressing a beam making a connection with his forbears which we hope he makes in the plans he has for our church. It was good to see and makes me feel quite hopeful for the future of our church and through it our village.
Today is my brother’s 50th birthday and so I have brought him after much searching something for the garden as requested. I have bought him a wormery... I’ll know later if it is well received.