North Bohemia – Page 2

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 of this hymn book by the late Rev’d Dr Irene Ahrens when the monthly Sunday evening service began in June 2006. I presume that this was the hymn book used by St George’s, Berlin where she was the Assistant Priest.

For the German-language services held on the other three or four Thursdays each month, only a simple four-page folded A4 sheet with limited text, is produced, with hymns being sung from the Evangelisches Gesangbuch, copies of which are kept on a mobile bookcase in the Unterkirche. I was asked whether I could obtain some English-language hymn books so the same procedure could be adopted for my services.

The Church of England’s Diocese in Europe, has a Dresden Fund, which I can tap into for anything that is ‘ministry in Dresden’. So the cost of purchasing hymn books could be covered. But I had two decisions to make. Which hymn book to choose and how to get copies from the UK to Dresden without incurring huge costs.

Two revised and updated editions of Hymns Ancient & Modern (A&M) have been published since ‘New Standard’ was produced forty-one years ago. ‘Common Praise’ was published in 2000 to coincide with adoption by the Church of England of Common Worship, the liturgy in contemporary English. Then in 2013, reverting to the original title, ‘Ancient & Modern – Hymns & Songs for Refreshing Worship’, was published.

I have a music edition of ‘Common Praise’ but have only once briefly seen the A&M 2013 edition when attending a service at Wimborne Minster in April last year where it was in use. So I sent an email to Norwich Books & Music, the umbrella organisation for A&M, asking if they could send me a complete list of all the hymns contained in the 2013 edition. A prompt reply promised to send me a free sampler booklet, produced back in 2013, which included an alphabetical list of all the hymns.

Before Brexit, that sampler booklet would have dropped into my mail box, five to seven days later. But instead, what did drop into my mail box was a registered letter saying that my free booklet was held by Czech Customs in Prague. If I wanted to have it delivered, I needed to pay CZK 334/GBP 11.25/EUR 13.30 in customs duty and to gain customs clearance. Yet another example of the wonderful benefits of Brexit!

Having reluctantly paid up and then studied the sampler booklet, I decided this was the hymn book I wanted to purchase. But my mind boggled as to what customs duties might be levied on twenty-five copies of the melody edition and three full music editions. And of course, there would be legitimate carriage costs too. Therefore I decided that I would become a hymn book smuggler into the EU 😉

I have to say that Norwich Books & Music were extremely helpful and cooperative. They agreed to treat my services at the Frauenkirche as though they were a congregation in the UK, providing five of the melody editions free – I only had to pay for twenty copies. They also happily agreed to deliver them to my son’s home address in Nottingham. And because of the value of the order, delivery within the UK was carriage free.

In July this year, I drove to the UK to visit my children and grandchildren and to spend a most enjoyable week, exploring sites of religious and historic interest in the Northeast of England with a small group, led by my good friend Ken Dimmick. Whilst staying with my son Phillip, I loaded the two boxes of hymn books into the boot of my car.

I returned to continental Europe by overnight ferry from North Shields to IJmuiden in the Netherlands. At Dutch customs, all the officer wanted to know was whether I was importing large quantities of alcohol. I assured him I wasn’t and, after that, I was free to travel onwards with my hymn book booty 😉 It was a pleasure to sing from these hymn books for the first time at my service on Thursday 1^st August.

I’ve written this post to illustrate once again, the absurdity of Brexit and the lengths one now has to go to, in order to mitigate the innumerable problems it has created. Why is it beneficial to the UK for me to be forced to pay CZK 334/GBP 11.25/EUR 13.30 in order to receive a free booklet? Can Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, the Daily Fail, the Daily Excrement, the Daily Torygraph et al, please explain.

A Blogpost about my Blog

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 a bug in the system.

Having been alerted to the problem, I eventually contacted Namecheap to ask them to investigate it. This was how I learned about the ‘bug in the system’. To fix it, I had to go into my cPanel, a place I’d never been before, and manually insert my SSL certificate. It took at least six minutes and three clicks on the sync button, before it finally worked, having been assured it would only take one or two minutes.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the problem. Whilst now, when anyone put my URL into their browser, there was a message acknowledging the SSL certificate, my website was still being deemed insecure because of ‘mixed content’. Apparently, not all of the content on my website had been uploaded from a ‘secure location’. Don’t ask me how that happened!

The help desk at Namecheap suggested that the issue could be fixed by ‘adding a special line to my .htaccess file which locates in the root folder of my domain name at my cPanel’. I wasn’t at all keen to go there again 🙁

But fortunately, they also noted that my blog used WordPress and they suggested two possible WordPress plugins that might also fix the problem. An /ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ . I chose the second suggestion which had many positive reviews, and set about installing it, something I also had never previously done. And I’m very pleased to report that it worked!

My grateful thanks to my good friend & former colleague, Kathy Ferguson, who first alerted me to the problem and has regularly re-tried to go to my website whilst I was working on resolving it and fed back to me the messages she was getting. Therefore a big shout-out for her new blog https://staying-put.blogspot.com/ 🙂

Please let me know, if in future, anyone has an access problem Use email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or even snail mail to contact me. And I do have a couple of future posts planned. One about how I became a hymn book smuggler into the EU and another about my recent trip to SW France.

Comments are most welcome & I will always try to respond to them. At the moment, there isn’t a captcha as it was previously causing difficulties to genuine commenters. But if I get inundated with offers of free Viagra or money making scams, I may have to reintroduce it. Here’s hoping I don’t.

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, there are no stairs, only a drop down loft ladder that you can see in the last photo of my previous post. If those two rooms are to be used as guest bedrooms, then there has to be an internal staircase which would allow any guests to have access to a toilet, shower and washbasin, without having to descend a ladder into my study-bedroom.

What I envisage and hope might be possible, is to install a staircase, starting in the little un-renovated room, and going up and round to the right, through the ceiling. It would then require some alteration and extension to the roof at the rear of the house.

One of the two rooms in the roof space © Ricky Yates

As you can see, before anything can happen, I first will have to sort out the contents of the boxes in the photo above. Most of them are books which will hopefully all fit on my newly installed book shelves. So far, four boxes have come down the ladder and been unpacked. However, there are at least ten more to go. At the bottom of the photo, you can just see down into my study-bedroom. I was standing part way up the loft ladder in order to take the photo.

The other room in the roof space © Ricky Yates

The photo above shows the other ‘upladder room’, with the double bed waiting for visiting guests to sleep in it 🙂 My suggested staircase would enter this room at the far left corner.

When I retired from Prague and moved to live in Stará Oleška 44, I thought it would take me about two years to get the ground floor how I wanted it to be. Instead, it has taken nearly seven years 🙁 My offer to buy the house was accepted on 14^th March 2017 and I moved in some two months later.

It is my sincere hope that it doesn’t take me another seven years to complete what I’ve outlined in this post. But first I need to find an architect or structural engineer to discover whether what I want to do is actually feasible.

The renovation of the ground floor of my house is just about complete

Stará Oleška 44 with the first snowfall of the 2023/24 winter, 24th November 2023 © Ricky Yates

Once again, I have to start a blog post with a sincere apology for the absence of any posts for a whole six months – the longest hiatus in the fourteen-year history of this blog. In recent months I have said to myself several times that I must start writing again. But then, there are always other things to do. But enough of my excuses, here is the latest instalment of the renovation of Stará Oleška 44.

Before the extension on the west side of my house was built, (on the left in the photograph), with a new front door into an entrance lobby and what is now my sitting-dining room, the way into the house was up a set of steps onto a open verandah and then through a door into what is now my study-bedroom.

One of the last things the previous owners did was to have two pairs of high-quality double-glazed uPVC windows fitted across the front of the verandah to enclose it, as you can see in the photograph. However, they left the existing single-glazed windows on each side of the verandah, unchanged. In November 2017, I had these replaced to match those across the front.

Interior of the enclosed verandah, 9th March 2017 © Ricky Yates

This photograph shows how one end of the interior of the enclosed verandah looked when I first visited the house on 9^th March 2017. The photo was taken from the doorway of what is now my study-bedroom.

After K & K renovace nemovitostí Decín had renovated my study-bedroom in April 2023, Karel junior said that it would be perfectly possible to lay a matching wood laminate floor in the enclosed verandah, to replace the piece of old carpet and flattened cardboard boxes which were the current floor covering. The main problem with that being done was that the room had become the perfect place for things to be dumped that hadn’t been properly sorted 😉

View from my study- bedroom, through the old front doorway into the enclosed verandah © Ricky Yates

You can see some of them through the old front doorway in this photo of my renovated study-bedroom which appeared in the earlier blog post.

Over the Summer of 2023, I finally sorted and found new homes for most of the things and got rid of the rest that I no longer wanted or needed. And so in December 2023, K & K returned to recommence work.

Once the old carpet and cardboard was lifted, it revealed the very poor nature of the floor beneath. There were gaps between the floorboards through which it was possible to see the earth below! The verandah is elevated because the whole house is built on a slope. Therefore, K & K laid a new floor with 10cm of hardened insulation before laying the wood laminate on top. This additionally, all but eliminated the two steps down into the verandah.

Karel junior also suggested that they could line the three outside walls and the ceiling to make the room both more attractive and improve insulation. The two following photos, both taken through the window at one end of the enclosed verandah, show the transformation K & K have made of the room. During the second half of this winter, my study-bedroom has been far warmer, retaining heat from my woodburner for many hours. The impact of the improved insulation.

The enclosed verandah before renovation commenced © Karel Konvalinka

The enclosed verandah after renovation © Ricky Yates

In January 2024, Karel senior returned and installed three shelves at either end of the renovated room.

New shelves in the enclosed verandah © Ricky Yates

With the fitting of these shelves, as with all their other work, the only problem they had was the complete absence of straight lines and right-angles. Everything had to be specially cut in order to make it fit.

And finally, at the end of January 2024, my dream of having bookshelves in my study-bedroom, came true. As I have discovered, Karel senior is a very good carpenter. He measured these two alcoves…..

Alcove in my study-bedroom © Ricky Yates

….and then constructed these bookshelves in his workshop, before bringing them to my house on a trailer, in four separate sections and then installing them.

New bookshelves installed in my study-bedroom © Ricky Yates

As with the enclosed verandah, he had to overcome the absence of straight lines and right-angles 😉 Now all I have to do is get all of my boxes of books down from one of the two rooms in the roof space, get them sorted by subject and size, and stacked on the shelves. Unfortunately, getting them down the loft ladder is no easy task.

My ongoing ministry at the Frauenkirche, Dresden

Walking towards the Frauenkirche © Ricky Yates

I’m very conscious of two things. That I haven’t posted here for two months and that most of my more recent posts have either been about my disputes with UK banks or about the renovation of my house. So here is a new post about my ongoing ministry at the Frauenkirche in Dresden, a topic I haven’t written about since February 2020, except for briefly mentioning it in my post about last winter.

The day after our December 2022 service of ‘Nine Lessons & Carols for Christmas’, my Archdeacon Leslie Nathaniel and I had a most useful meeting with the two Frauenkirche clergy – Pfarrer Markus Engelhardt and Pfarrerin Angelika Behnke. Archdeacon Leslie asked about the possibility of having a second English-language Anglican service each month, on a weekday, with it being held in the Unterkirche, beneath the main Hauptraum of the Frauenkirche. They promised to consider this idea and get back to me in due course.

There is a regular Ecumenical Evening Prayer service held at 18.00 each Thursday in the Unterkirche. Early in 2023, one of the groups who have normally led a service each month, withdrew, because of lack of personnel. Asking me to take over their timeslot both solved a problem for the Frauenkirche authorities and gave a positive answer to our request. Therefore, on Thursday 25^th May, I held my first Thursday English-language Anglican Evening Prayer service in the Unterkirche.

The Unterkirche was the first part of the Frauenkirche to be rebuilt and was completed and consecrated in 1996. It was used for regular Sunday worship whilst rebuilding continued above it. Now, when the main Hauptraum is open for visitors, the Unterkirche is kept as a place to sit quietly and/or pray. It is a wonderful venue in which to conduct worship with a relatively small congregation.

To gain access you have to walk down a flight of stone steps. Unfortunately, in advance of my first service, I managed to trip on my cassock whilst descending the last few steps and ended up in a heap on the floor. There were no broken bones but plenty of swelling and bruising. It took over two months before my right leg finally returned to its normal shape and size. I now walk down those steps very carefully, lifting my cassock as a go!

Page 22 & 23 of ‘Leben in der Frauenkirche September-December 2023

A full colour magazine entitled, ‘Leben in der Frauenkirche‘ is published three times a year. The current September-December 2023 edition features a two page bilingual article, written by me, about English-language Anglican worship at the Frauenkirche which I reproduce here. I’m hoping it will help make the new Thursday evening services more widely known as well as giving some background and history to the regular monthly Sunday evening services.

One thing this double-page spread confirms, is something I already knew from my career in publishing, before I was ordained. German needs up to 20% more space than English 🙂 On page 25, the German column starts higher up the page than the English column and my last paragraph has not been translated in full, in order to make things fit 😉