Visit St Aldhelm's as part of the Open House Festival on Saturday 19 September, 10am-5pm Mother Anna writes: What if you were a visitor, coming to St Aldhelm’s for the first time? What would you notice? Would it be the outside of the building? The warm red bricks, maybe the detailing over the windows that always looks like eyelashes to me. Or perhaps the doors and their ironwork – they are old and tired but that doesn’t diminish the delicacy and surprising prettiness of the b

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash One last week of August ahead of us. The weather is changing, the leaves on the trees, starved of water all Summer, are starting to fall, the mornings are cooler, evening darkness comes sooner. Is anyone else quite excited about this? I love the change from Summer to Autumn. September always seems like a new beginning, a time for new shoes and empty notebooks and exciting possibilities ahead. It’s a time for packing away the short sleeves and

Mother Anna writes: In a world in which so many of us rely on the internet, what happens when the internet goes away? Well I can tell you what happened in our house - frustration, stress and a whole lot of scurrying around trying to get things fixed. Because without the internet, how could we work? How could we do our online weekly shop? With no streaming services to watch TV and no data to doomscroll on our phones, how would we even survive? I'm not going to lie - it really