Who I Am

I am a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, a wife to Hubby Paul and mother see below.

I have two friends whom I once gave birth to and of whom I am immensely proud of.  When son left home, for what I am declaring as the last time, his room has been converted into a theological reading room so he can’t come back unless he wants to follow in my footsteps and read some theology.  He along with my daughter he lives and works in Glasgow.

I love to drive my ‘Baby’ (a Mazda MX5) searching out castles (ruined ones are usually the best), ecclesiastical buildings, quiet coastal spots and just for the fun of it.  I am also rather keen on F1, and if a pile of money was to inexplicably fall into my lap that I had to spend on something totally outrageous then I would follow the F1 trail round the world for a season.

I am constantly seeing things make me wish I could paint or draw but I can’t, that is my excuse for usually having a camera somewhere close by.  With it I try to capture those images which make me smile, laugh, sigh or feel elated, happy or wistful.  I am not however a photographer, while on holiday in Wester Ross I saw this slogan and wholeheartedly agree with it - just because you own a camera, doesn’t make you a photographer – my photographs are memory records rather than works of art, although there a couple of lucky shots that I have printed up and are displayed in the Rectory.

I love – angels, cooking, champagne, footwear and handbags (well I am female) and listening to music just about any kind, I am passionate about good design and would love to have a home full of delightful arts and crafts pieces, hence my love of trolling through antique shops and browsing on e-bay.  I am also a big fan of old films, Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart being my firm favorites, a cold winters afternoon with a glass of wine a bar of chocolate and Some Like it Hot, followed by Calamity Jane, followed by Breakfast at Tiffany’s and rounded off with It’s a Wonderful Life sounds pretty good to me.  Reading, oh how I love to read but rarely seem to have the time but am a recent convert to talking books.  Which while brought on by a necessity which has now passed, will probably always be with me.  Give me a good historical biography or novel and I will be quite content but I also enjoy the classics and more modern stuff – the books I would never part with (steering clear of theology for that would make the list too big) are What a Carve Up by Jonathon Coe; The Count of Monte Cristo by Alandera Dumas; Northhanger Abbey by Jane Austen; The Tortilla Curtain by T C Boyle; Great Expectations by Charles Dickens; A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes; Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple; The Geographer’s Library by Jon Fasman; Miss Garnet’s Angel by Sally Vickers; The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson; His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman; Magic Woodland Series by Beverly Nichols; the Time Quintet by Madeleine L’Engle; Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carol.  Of course there are lots of others that I love, you would have to tear away from me the historic biographies and novels and I would bemoan the loss of many others simply because they were no longer there to maybe pick up once again.  Those listed above are the novels that I have been read and enjoyed on multiple occasions and there may be some missing that for the moment have escaped by dubious memory.

I don’t like spiders (unless they are the four-wheeled variety); offal (although I will cook it for others); 4×4′s unless you live on a farm, up a mountain, or somewhere that has constant lying snow for at least two months of the year you don’t need one – those American half truck/half 4×4 things are worse (people you are not a cowboy and don’t live in the Wild West); excess packaging (why should I have to pay for that and pretty soon have to pay to get it taken away when I never wanted it in the first place!)

You will find a whole hotchpotch of things on my blog.  Some people keep their blogs for certain corners of their lives only, I …, well the journey I have made to get where I now am means I am less bothered about people not liking me, or a particular aspect of me, so you get the lots warts and all.  That also means that you will get things that are still being mulled over and thought through – this isn’t a paper for a degree or research project, it is a personal blog, some of it is religious, a lot of it isn’t, some you wont like, I hope you find something you do.

Currently I am Rector of All Saints, Bearsden and St Andrew’s Milngavie on the north side of Glasgow.