Around the Parishes Awliscombe - Buckerell - Combe Raleigh Cotleigh - Gittisham and Honiton September 2021 In this issue … Honiton Show in all its muddy glory Cotleigh’s scary scarecrows Zoom services - what next? Harvest, harvest everywhere! Cotleigh Scarecrow Competition 2021 The Cotleigh Scarecrow village competition was judged by Mrs Ann Coombe and wonderful entries they were too! The first prize goes to The Templar Knight - well done The Doble Family. th Buckerell Festival Week Continues until Sunday 5 September Saturday 4th September Buckerell Fete - 2pm Splatthayes Come along and enjoy a wonderful variety of stalls and a cream tea. Jim Causley our Musician in Residence will be leading a singing workshop at 3pm which will include rehearsing a folk song for the service on Sunday. Sunday 5th September Community Church Service – 11am Church We will be hearing from some residents of our community about these past months and reflect together, give thanks and look forward. The singers from the workshop will sing and Jim will play. We will be joined by Jackie Searle the Bishop of Crediton . For more details on events, please contact Ian Tucker at [email protected] As you read this, all being well, Buckerell Festival Week is in full swing, and preparations for the Fete on Sep- tember 4 will be busy too. After a rather poor summer we are hoping that the sun will shine for it all and that the community spirit which came to the fore in 2020 will be part of all the events and fun in the village. It will seem strange to have the Fete in September but how lovely to have one this year at all. The church will feature strongly in these celebrations. We have already had a service on 1 September for our Patronal Festival, the Feast of St Giles, and we look forward to the Community Thanksgiving Service with Bishop Jackie of Crediton. As a symbol of the history of the village over many centuries, the church has wit- nessed a year of another sort of plague since March 2020. So we will pause to reflect on everything that the past eighteen months has meant to us all, both negative and positive. At long last the inhabitants of Buckerell have had their first issues of The Buckerell Bugle for well over a year. This is the quarterly newsletter full of reports, articles and information for the village. Plans are in hand for future events into 2022, for from wine tasting to a vintage tea. The BCA ( Buckerell Community Association ) will be having the twentieth anniversary of its foundation in 2000, after an initial fun day for the millennium – it is still a thriving social force ! Watch out for details of our Harvest Festival on October 3, as plans are not yet finalised. As a rural and farm- ing community, we look forward to enjoying Harvest time again. And would you believe it - ideas for Christ- mas are in the air …. Penny Mear St Michael’s, Awliscombe I am writing this as the fete team pull out all the stops to create a wonderful day on Saturday. Duck Race tickets have been selling fast, cakes are being baked and plants are being potted up for the produce stall. If you’re wondering whether to attend the Buckerell or the Awliscombe event - come to both! Subject to a final PCC decision we’re also hoping to hold a slimmed-down Harvest Supper & Auction in the village hall on Friday 24 September. To enhance the safety of the event we are looking at reducing numbers, simplifying the menu and asking people to self-administer a lateral flow test before coming. A final decision will be taken soon, but if you’d like to attend please put the date in your diary and get your name in to Sharon Thwaites ([email protected]/548467). September also marks a further small step in the direction of services as we once knew them: we will have Ken Wood playing for our Eucharist on the first Sunday and, we hope, at most subsequent services. You should have received a letter from Revd Sue relaying the difficult decision to retain, for the time being, masks for services across the Mission Community. So we will be singing our hymns through masks - but at least we’ll be singing! I am conscious that, following a one month period earlier in the Summer when the churchyard grass was de- liberately left to grow, to encourage pollinators and a greater diversity of wildlife, there have been times since then when the grass has not been kept to its usual civilised length and visiting graves has been difficult for some. That issue should now have been sorted out, and those areas where the more recent graves are situated should be much more accessible. Janet Caudwell has been doing great work on grant applications to help fund the repair and rebuilding of the leaning churchyard wall. We’ll need to wait a couple of months to hear the outcome, but are very much hop- ing that we’ll raise enough to set the builders to work in Spring 2022. Nick Thwaites St Nicholas’ Combe Raleigh One thing’s certain. With August being the recognised holiday month in this country, the weather will do its best to keep us guessing. At the beginning of the month the Honiton Show could certainly have been blessed with more sunshine and less precipitation! Even so, Revd Sue’s activity bags for children went like hot cakes, whilst their parents sipped coffee with rain dripping off their hats and umbrellas. Now, at the tail end of the month we have a forecast of sunnier days to lead us into Autumn, or is that just wishful thinking? In common with, I suspect, many villages, life has been quiet in Combe Raleigh. We’re entering the last phase of summer blooms, a glut of runner beans, and are noticing the shortening of the days. The plant troughs on the church wall continue to delight but the weeds and rampant ivy that run riot in the churchyard are des- tined for a short existence on our planned ‘tidy the churchyard’ afternoon early in September. We have now begun to sing in church again, albeit quietly behind the face masks which we are still wearing, and it is wonderful to hear the organ after so many months of its enforced silence. Those of us who have logged into the Sunday morning Zoom services are incredibly grateful to Revd Sue for the time and effort she has put into making these such unifying and uplifting acts of worship over the past 18 months. Now that the time has come to close this particular chapter we will miss seeing what have, over the weeks, become familiar faces on our screens. From this part of the Mission Community thank you for our much valued times of shared worship. Rosemary Mapleston St Michael’s Cotleigh St Michael’s HARVEST FESTIVAL SERVICE Cotleigh SUNDAY 3 OCTOBER 11.15 am EVERYBODY VERY WELCOME! THE PARABLE OF THE GROWING SEED This is what the Kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain - first the stalk, then the head, then Do you the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has recognise come back. Mark 4 26-29 this one? This not so small AUGUST 200 CLUB fellow was found No 49 Emily Kitchen £15 in August in the No 87 Noel Barrington Prowse £10 buddleia bush growing in front of THE NEXT HOLY COMMUNION SERVICE WILL BE ON the Mackarness Sunday 5 September at 0930. Hall! Here’s looking at Pauline Gordon you! Oh What a Lovely Show! St Paul’s Honiton ‘Of course, August is a quiet month.’ If I’d had a pound for every time I’ve heard that said over the years, I would be pretty rich by now! However, anybody who thought that those words were true should have looked in on St Paul’s last month! We began with preparations for the Honiton Show. Thanks go to Lyn Thatcher and Judith Turner for organising stewards and refreshments, and to the team who gave up a long afternoon to put together 500 children’s activity bags. It was quite a task. The theme of the bags was ’What a Wonderful World’, focus- sing on gratitude and care for our planet. Each bag included some colour-in postcards to send, a packet of crayons (to help with the task), a quiz on being eco-friendly, stickers, and a pack- et of seeds. Despite the totally disgusting weather at the Show, we had no problems in handing out 250 bags by lunch-time each Assembling activity bags for the Show day. A week or two later, we held our first ‘Songs of Praise on the Fore- court’. It was wonderful to have Honiton Town Band to play for us, and to give an added boost to our voices. And what a treat to sing hymns together again. Thank you to the team who set everything up and handed out free cream teas and drinks - they went down so well. We were thrilled that so many passers-by stopped and joined in. At the end of the after- noon it was agreed that this has to be the beginning of a new tradition! With that in mind, we’re breaking with the past in Sep- tember and holding our Harvest Celebration on the fore- court at 1100 on Sunday 12 September (or 19th if the 12th is too wet!).