Abbey United Reformed Church, Romsey

The church has had visitors again. Would you believe this – not mice but a badger this time?! (And not to mention the buffaloes in our garden at home a little while ago!).

On 2nd March, Alan, who lives next door to our church, rang me to say “you have a badger trying to get in the back door of the church! Does he belong to you?”

Well, I made a quick phone call to Mike at the Hampshire Wildlife Rescue, who sent David, a badger expert from Fordingbridge, to view the situation.  When David arrived, he shone his torch in “Brock’s” direction and the badger made a very quick getaway through the shrubs. David then went to a few houses to alert people in case the badger ended up in their gardens, as David thought the animal may have been hit by a car.

This all happened in about 1½ hours. It was wonderful work from the Hampshire Wildlife Rescue team and we are grateful to them.

Our Fabric group met at the church recently and decided the outside of our church could do with being redecorated. Also, it was decided to have the vestry and toilet facilities redecorated too. The inside walls of the church are quite good, so aside from a bit of DIY painting of a patch on one wall, it was decided to redecorate the rest of the inside of the church sometime in the future.

Although Romsey URC still hope to re-open on 23rd May for Sunday Worship, as we at Braishfield were hoping to as well, but having talked to our minister, the Revd Mike Perrott and Maggie B, our pulpit secretary, we at Braishfield URC think it would be wise for us to wait until after 21st June, when hopefully all restrictions will be lifted.   So, we hope to re-open for Sunday Worship on 27th June, for our 203rd Church Anniversary Service at 10am.

We trust that most of redecoration work will be done before the church re-opens.

Of course, there will undoubtedly still be some restrictions in place for a while but hopefully not for too long. When all the restrictions are lifted, we will have a Songs of Praise service to celebrate and who knows what else we will do! We will keep in touch, with more details later.

With best wishes to all of our readers and we hope to be able to see you soon!

                                                                                    Shirley Smith