Parish Jottings

Fibre optic parish

Throughout our parish and other parts of Henley, hundreds of pink barriers have been appearing and disappearing, along the footways and in the roads. Men have been digging trenches; machines have been whizzing up and down the roads; the sounds of disc cutters and pneumatic drills have become familiar. What has been going on? The ‘Zzoomm’ men have been laying fibre-optic cables to connect up every home to a new broadband network, which gives high internet download speeds for computers and other devices. Previously in this area, broadband was only available via a telephone line. The new service is already up and running in some roads, and by the end of the year, the service will be available for most of the 7,000 homes in Henley.

Church magazine technology

Technology continues to assist the production of our church magazine. The latest printing machine, used by Sam Brewster, who prints our church magazines, not only automatically prints the magazines in colour, but in addition, it collates, folds, and staples them together. Previously all this work has been done in stages by hand, involving several people; how times have changed.

However, please remember that the main requirements for our church magazine production, are the submissions made by church members for the magazine. Without your input, there would be much less content in the magazine. Therefore, please continue to send in your articles to the editor for inclusion in our forthcoming magazines.

Vision for the future

The church tries to stay out of politics, but none the less has to exist in the secular world. January 31^st marked an historic threshold in our nation’s history when we officially ceased our half-hearted membership of the European Union (E.U.), to which just over half the European countries belong. In 1973, the government signed us up as a member of the Common Market, a European trading community. Many people had been sceptical about the government doing this ever since. No one voted to join the E.U. as it exists today; it just evolved to become its present autocratic governing authority. In the referendum of 2016, the U.K. voted to leave this legislating organisation to which our country was subordinate and had to conform. Now that we are an independent nation once again, the country must unite and benefit from the exciting opportunities available in the wider world.

Churchwarden George Hill and the Reverend John Clarke with the Holy Trinity church choir (1970s’)