25th June 2010

A Chaplain’s Diary

 

A Chaplain’s Diary

 

Friday 18^th June

 

The weddings juggernaut is in top gear.  All over the island couples are flinging themselves into matrimony at a rate of knots. Usually it is for the first time but for others they are having another crack at getting it right this time around. For those for whom it’s not their first marriage, I’m far too polite to remind them that Oscar Wilde once said, “A second marriage was the triumph of hope over experience.”

People who have lived here for years are always very surprised how well I, as a relative new comer, know Majorca.  It’s all down to criss-crossing the island to perform wedding ceremonies at villas up little country lanes, restaurants with the sea lapping around the terrace, rustic fincas with the lingering smell of the old olive press, to snazzy five star hotels with crisp white linen both on the altar and at the tables.  Up on the limestone plateau between Capdella and Andraitx lies Son Bosch, one of my favourite spots for a wedding, but recently I was asked to conduct a ceremony at their next door neighbour, Santa Catarina, in their huge wine cellar surrounded outside by the maturing vines.  Apart from being cool and beautiful, we were surrounded by thousands of bottles of wine and casks waiting to be bottled.  The couple had arranged candles everywhere and it was a magical atmosphere as we sat quietly waiting for the bride to appear.  I think a church usually provides the right setting and the building stresses the tone and solemnity of the occasion, but there was something quite serious and provocative about this setting.  I could think of no better place to begin your marriage even if some of us do need a bottle or two of the stuff afterwards to survive what seemed such a good idea at the time as we sped down the aisle! 

 

Saturday 19^th June

 

Tomorrow, it’s Father’s Day.  In our house, woe betide anyone who forgets Mother’s Day, but come the third Sunday in June which is Father’s Day – well that’s just a commercialised American day!  Actually Father’s Day is a hundred years old this year because in the year 1910, for the first time ever, it was celebrated in the U.S.A.  Some countries, of course, including here in Spain and also Andorra, Belgium, Italy and Portugal, celebrate Father’s Day on St. Joseph’s Day on March 19^th.  For most other countries, including the U.S.A., the U.K., Nigeria and South Africa, it’s always the third Sunday in June.  In America on Father’s day they used to wear a red rose in their lapel if they were remembering a father who was still living, and a white rose if he was deceased.  If you are not sure what a Dad is, then let me tell you he’s someone who can change an electrical plug with a butter knife!  Or, as one child wrote, “the greatest gift I ever had, came from God and I call him ‘Dad’.”

 

Sunday 20^th June

 

To the airport yet again.  The car knows its own way there and we were to meet someone off a flight who had hired a car.  I left my wife with her in a fairly long queue at 4.20 pm exactly to drive to San Lorenc, the other side of Manacor, to conduct a wedding in a private villa.  It took me over an hour to drive there and as I was anxious not to be late I arrived quite early in time to draw breath and have a coffee.  At approximately 5.50 pm my wife phoned on the mobile to say they were still queuing to pick up the hire car.  Impatience was beginning to set in, yet little did she know that she would be there for quite a bit longer.  After conducting the wedding ceremony, at about 7 pm, I phoned to see how things were.  “We’re still in the queue”, she said, “and they are processing people at the rate of one every fifteen minutes.”  At 7.45 pm they reached the front of the queue.  There was no apology, no explanation and rather surprisingly no one had lost their temper or got annoyed.  I suppose when you’ve paid car hire up front, there’s very little you can do apart from stamp your foot and raise your own blood pressure.  They had stood queuing to pick up the hire car for 3 hours 25 minutes at the Record Car Hire Desk at Palma Airport. Those times are not an exaggeration; they are factually accurate and please note the name of the company. Imagine what that would have felt like if you had small children or had been up at the crack of dawn for an early morning flight.  It’s not good enough, and it’s the sort of thing that the Editorial Column of this newspaper is constantly going on about.

A tourist is a friend…don’t make me laugh! 

 

Monday 21st June

 

The Georgie Insull Singers were moaning again tonight.  They practise in our church every Monday and Wednesday evening and invariably they complain that it’s either too cold or too hot.  I guard the central heating control and the air-conditioning zapper with my life because to use either costs money – and I am a Yorkshire man after all!  Tonight they were complaining they were too hot, so with a fixed grin on my face and an air of reluctance, I switched on the air conditioning for them.  Twenty minutes later they’re moaning yet again because they reckon the air-conditioning is drying the air and it’s affecting their throats.  Will they never stop whingeing … and so the air-conditioning was turned off….well at least I was saving money.  Stress is in the air because it’s their concert on Friday evening.  Chairs have to be dragged up from the hall, the conductor’s box has to be dusted down, bottles of wine have to be stacked in the fridge, tables have to be put up and everyone is cooking like mad for the refreshments afterwards.  Tickets are at a premium, which when you consider they are only €10 for a first class concert, with drinks and eats afterwards, it has to be a good deal, and all the proceeds are going to the local Palma charity, Amiticia, which does sterling work with disadvantaged children.  Once Friday night is over, I can then stop hiding the two zappers and hopefully I shall be able to return once again to quiet Monday and Wednesday evenings, though I rather fear it will only be a matter of time before I’m being serenaded with Christmas carols in the middle of August.

I’m not surprised I’m so confused.

 

Tuesday 22^nd June.

 

We have a cousin staying and “the photos came out.”  If there is one thing my wife is good at, it’s keeping up to date with our family photographs. We have albums of them going back years, all labelled and in chronological order. In fact if we were ever to get divorced I think we would fight over the family photo albums and the loser would get the children!

The one thing we do both agree on is that if there was a fire they are the first things we would want to salvage. They’re our history and where we have come from. There are photos of my father, who we thought was quite old when we took them, but when I look at them again he looks younger than I do now. Age is such a funny thing.

As you flip through the years, the weight goes on, the hair comes off and the children change from nervously splashing around in water-wings to dunking “Dad”. So there they all sit, rows and rows of photo albums, which no doubt when our time comes, the children will laugh at and throw out because their wives will not want them taking up house space. 

Yet up in our loft are the two card board boxes of my parents’ family photos. Unlike my wife my mother never got round to putting them in albums, and now its too late. They never will be sorted and we shall never know who the strangers in old fashioned clothes at family occasions were. Time and tide has swept them into oblivion.

There are the tiny old photos barely 2 inches square, a scientific marvel in          their time, and there are the transparencies which were the “in thing” in the 60’s when you either closed the curtains and got the slide projector out or passed around the hand-held viewer as everyone got impatient at the slowness of it all. “Come on hurry up, we haven’t got all day. No! I’ve seen that one.” Happy days. Though on reflection my mother used to hate “getting the photos out” because she claimed it made her maudlin, seeing how many people were now dead or had moved out of her life, and unspoken but equally true the fact that she, like all of us, was moving inexorably towards the final page of the album.

 

Fr Robert Ellis is the Anglican Chaplain of Mallorca

St Philip and St James Church

Calle Nunez de Balboa 6,

Son Armadans, Palma 07014

Tel: 971 737279

e-mail:anglicanpalma@gmail.com

www.anglican-mallorca.org