Surprise! October 27, 2008

One of the things we do well at the Boiler Room in Wandsworth is party. We don’t need much of an excuse, and everyone will happily bring along some breadsticks or some flapjack and join in the celebrations.

One of the things that marks our community is that, for a lot of people, it exists as their family. I think that makes the celebrations we do have, more special in a way. There is always a real sense of love and a subconscious knowledge that when we gather to mark a wedding, or a birthday, it is really important.

This weekend we held a surprise party for the lovely Dee. Here is a photo, just after she arrived:

She had a small inkling that we were plotting something. (Another thing it is hard to do when you’re in close community with people is to keep secrets!), and she had been expecting something similar since organising a surprise party for our ministers a couple of years ago, but the evening went well.

I love a good party. We played pass the parcel, pictionary, and we ate party food and macaroni cheese. Plus there was the awesome scrabble cake… how cool is this:

(ps… we know surprise is spelt wrong… we had some space issues!)

Everyone milled around, enjoying each others’ company and making sure Dee knew how fab we think she is. We all wrote birthday messages in a book for her, so that was doing the rounds too.

After days laminating scrabble letters, making banners and trying to make Dee think she was going out for a meal without lying too heinously, I was thrilled with the final result. One of my favourite things to do is to think up imaginative ways to do presents or parties, and executing surprises is the most fun in the world… After all of this though, I was pleased to be able to sit down and enjoy the celebrations with a good strong cuppa!

CSI Wandsworth October 18, 2008

Today I had an unusual but very exciting privilege. It was one of those occasions when I wondered how I got into the situation I found myself in. But (unless I decide to pursue a pretty drastic career change) I’m thinking it’s something I won’t have the chance to do again in a hurry!

For the last few months we have been setting up and launching a street pastors scheme in Wandsworth borough. My role in this has been to head up the team of keen ‘prayer pastors’, the cheery intercessors who stay at home and pray while the street pastors are treading the pavements.

Anyway, so today we had a street & prayer pastors get together, and tagged on to the front of this, the lovely people at the police decided they wanted to give the street pastors some training on forensics! I always think its good to get a full a picture as possible if you want to pray accurately about something, and I was intrigued about the training, so I tagged along.

Walking up the marble steps into our austere art-deco police station this morning I wondered what I had let myself in for, but it was great. We learned about the history of forensic research, how they assess and treat a crime scene, and best of all how that spray that finds where blood has been splattered works. We also heard about some real life cases, and we learnt what to do if people handed over guns, knives or drugs to us! After a tea break, we got to try some of this out first hand (not using them, I must clarify, but how to safely bag them up for evidence).

We donned pretty purple gloves, rifled (ha!) through a box of weapons, put our chosen one in a weapons tube or a box, signiture sealed them in, filled in information about their origin and nature, and then handed them over. How cool!

Then we went back and heard about a real life crime scene, how they found and processed the evidence and found the perpetrator. I hid behind my hands a bit for some of the pictures, but it was amazing to hear about it all.

Spending a day in a training session is not an unusual thing for me, but being trained about this sort of stuff was definitely a first! I left having been reminded about quite how random my life is, but how exciting all these different things I end up doing are.