Christmas in Zermatt

St Peter’s Church, Zermatt © Ricky Yates

After conducting a wonderful service of Nine Lesson & Carols in the Frauenkirche, Dresden on the evening of Sunday 8th December, I was planning on spending a quiet Christmas at home in Stará Oleška. My Christmas worship was going to be attending a service on Christmas Eve, in German, at the Lutheran Church in Obercunnersdorf, led by my good friend and colleague, Andrew Allen. I’m not due to officiate again at the Frauenkirche, until Thursday 2nd January 2025.

Then, early in the afternoon of Thursday 19th December, an email dropped into my Inbox. It came from Jim Perryman, who oversees what is known as ‘Seasonal Mission’ for the Intercontinental Church Society (ICS). ICS are the C of E mission society who supported me when in . . . → Read More: Christmas in Zermatt

Exploring the River Adour in South-west France

Les Gaves Réunis, a tributary of the River Adour, at Hastingues © Ricky Yates

Two & a half months ago at the end of my post entitled ‘A Blogpost about my Blog‘, I declared that I had a couple of future posts that I intended to write. The first, about how I became a hymn book smuggler into the EU, I published a month later. However, I am unsure whether anyone has ever read it as it has attracted zero comments 🙁 Despite that, here finally, is the second promised post.

In late August/early September this year, I travelled from my home in the Czech Republic, to South-west France, for a ten-day holiday. As part of that trip, I explored the course of a river I had first . . . → Read More: Exploring the River Adour in South-west France

How I became a hymn book smuggler into the EU

Smuggled hymn books in the boot of my car © Ricky Yates

As I posted here a year ago, since May 2023, I have been officiating at a monthly English-language Anglican service of Evening Prayer held on a Thursday evening in the Unterkirche of the Dresden Frauenkirche. This is in addition to the monthly Sunday evening service in the Hauptraum for which I’ve had responsibility since January 2015.

For my monthly Sunday evening service, the Pfarrbüro produce a twelve-page complete Order of Service based on the text I send them at least a week earlier. Hymns are taken from ‘Hymns Ancient & Modern New Standard’, published in 1983, with the melody line of the tune, as well as all the words, reproduced. As I understand it, the Pfarrbüro was given a copy . . . → Read More: How I became a hymn book smuggler into the EU

A Blogpost about my Blog

Sunflower & a bee © Ricky Yates

Despite promising to be more regular in writing and posting here on my blog, I must yet again apologise that over four and a half months have past since my last post. However, in the last couple of days, I have discovered that, even if I had written and posted a blog post, almost nobody would have read it. Because if you had put my URL into your browser, you would have received a message saying that it was unsafe to proceed because my website had security issues.

Back in February 2024, I renewed the hosting of rickyyates.com with Namecheap.com. Part of that deal was the provision of an SSL certificate showing that my website was secure. This should have downloaded automatically, but it didn’t 🙁 There was . . . → Read More: A Blogpost about my Blog

House renovation – the next stage

The little un-renovated ground floor room © Ricky Yates

As I entitled my previous post, ‘The renovation of the ground floor of my house is just about complete‘. But there are two important little phrases in that title – ‘just about’ and ‘ground floor’. And those two phrases are connected.

The photograph on the left shows the one little ground floor room to which nothing has been done, (other than me vacuuming up all the cobwebs before taking the photo 😉 ), hence ‘just about’. And there remain two rooms in the roof space to which also nothing has been done, hence I wrote ‘ground floor’.

Please note, I didn’t say ‘upstairs’, in describing the two rooms in the roof space. Because that is the problem, . . . → Read More: House renovation – the next stage