Find Chapel, Apply Crowbar, Remove Digger

Really.

My church is inconveniently situated on the wrong end of a dirt track running through common land, and the track is constantly getting potholed.  So we've had some contractors in to rearrange the surface of our 'car park', to try and make it less lumpy.  We're not allowed to use concrete or anything, but we can at least level out the unintentional scale replicas of the Alps which keep growing outside our front door.

Unless someone steals the digger, that is.

The contractors parked their mini-digger inside the church's front porch overnight, and sometime on Wednesday night, someone smashed the doors in and nicked it.  As you do - y'know, stealing large machinery from chapels.  Apparently it turned up again somewhere else on the common, probably having run out of diesel, but that doesn't change the fact that our doors are bashed in.

I didn't see the damage until yesterday, and it didn't look as dramatic as I'd expected... until we unscrewed the doors from the emergency framework which is holding them in place.  Then one of them fell right off its hinges.  So until we can get new doors made and fitted, we're going to have to come in a few minutes early for each service, get in by the back door, and take the front doors down so we've got an emergency escape route at the front of the building.

It's all covered by insurance (I'm told), but it's still going to be a lot of hassle.  We'd all love to express a <sarcasm>huge debt of thanks</sarcasm> to whoever decided that it would be a nice idea to pinch some heavy plant from inside a place of worship and take it for a joyride.  Clever you.

Well, it's all going to make for a very interesting interpretation of that line about forgiving your enemies, and all that...

But the good news is that the car park is a lot flatter than it used to be, so at least we won't have to traverse so many mini-Himalayas every Sunday.

Okay, rant over.


- The Colclough


PS. totally unrelated paragraph: I've just made the new (widescreen!) 2010 version of the Root Hill Films logo, which will go on the front of the video.  One more thing off the checklist 8]