Twenty years

We are rich in people impressively committed to the well being of our area.

This includes well paid businessmen. At a recent College Governors’ event, two of them mentioned to me independently their determination to improve North East Lincolnshire. One has taken a £10,000s cut in pay to work in education. The other said he only saw the point of being a Governor if his expertise contributed to making a difference to the local community.

It also includes those who are less well off members of the community, of which I was reminded yesterday. The picture is of the resident of the Willows estate who chairs the Freshney Forward group. She is in front of the bouncy castle which it provided free (as the result of a grant) at the well attended mini-Carnival there yesterday. The server at the morning service at St Michael’s yesterday was completing seventy years at the one church (he told me he began Sunday School on the second week of July 1939 when all the news was about the threat of war); he has spent half his life running Scout groups and is planning yet another of his a fund raising events for the church in the autumn.

This all pleases me no end as I’m beginning to think I belong here myself. I can’t manage seventy years in one place, but yesterday I completed twenty years in the diocese of Lincoln (having been licensed to a parish in Scunthorpe on 12th July 1989). Such stability is quite a surprise for me as I lived in seven different English counties and two other countries in the thirty years before that.