Wrexham County Borough 130 - An eye for an eye /Tacky Church decorations / 1165 and 6296 what happened to everyone ?

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Being on your own when walking gives you chance to remember things or ponder on them.The thought for the day was one from I think the Dalai Lama who suggested perhaps wisely that an eye for eye ended up with blindness . That was going round and round my head as it was counter intuitive from the Biblical idea of an eye for an eye. It was not revenge but something that was in the end a useless idea at times. My friend had popped something in the window for me to see and ponder upon . She knew I would be passing by . Todays message read Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Set out like an opticians reading chart. My walk feels all the better for seeing messages left for me .

1165 blogs. That is how many I have written since my first blog in 2012. 6296 photographs. I could hardly believe just how many I had written and just how many photographs I had taken in the space of 13 years. The 1165 blogs did not start with holidays in 2012. Instead I found myself remembering trips where we stayed in the local hotels in France or in a gite for a fortnight . I found myself in the first blogs trying to recount those trips as best I could . I never remembered the tat just the interesting bits or the parts that were dreadful . The thought of blogging starting earlier than 2012 when we first mooted buying a motorhome . We devoured every blog on line we could find . Putting in a search we came across elderly couples who purchased a van in the east of the USA, travelled across the states and sold it before they returned home . We read blogs on European destinations and those further afield . Oddly many of those who wrote now have sold their vans or found other ways of travelling . Sometimes bloggers just disappeared . We wondered what had happened to them . The blogs though do trigger happy memories . Memories of places I would have long forgotten without the trigger of the photographs or the words. The 6296 photographs bring back a memory so in the end the van travels may have ended but they are not forgotten . The blogging continues but perhaps since Covid in a different way.

My plan was to go to the church to see what the parishioners had done in the way of decorating for the services on Armistice Day. I remembered last year where I travelled to a neighbouring village to see their church before it closed its doors for the last time . Our own church was decorated tastefully . I wondered what this year would bring . The lyche gate cried out for some form of decoration . I could in my minds eye see a cascade of poppies inside the wooden structure . Even one inside the stone porch would have been a nice feature . But somehow these were deemed to be tacky . Or at least that is what one parishioner told me . I wondered what they did to decorated the church and the village in 2018 where everyone knitted red poppies and displayed them in shop windows, on war memorials and hanging from balconies . Did they consider them tacky then ? Sad if they did .

The interior of the church was dark . Last year it appeared one person presumably the same person who decorated for Harvest was in charge of putting up the poppy displays . They had purchased a large number of clear glass vases, filled them with silk red poppies and placed them in the window bottoms , around the font and on the altar . I somehow expected the same this year . And that was what I got . But more of the same . No sign of any tacky decorations this year . The decorator had been out and purchased what looked like more clear glass vases and even more of the same poppies . More window bottoms were filled . More corners full of vases of the flowers . My thoughts were flying between the thought that yes they were thoughtful, they were pretty but they were the same everywhere . I would have loved to have seen a red altar frontal rather than the pale one being used . I found a red one at Hanmer church and thought how lovely it looked . A splash of red providing some much needed colour . Perhaps knitted poppies could have been hung from the tower or around the church . But then would have been too tacky.

As I walked I liked what I saw but hoped for something more , something different . Perhaps next year ?

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