Catsfield

WI: The March meeting of the Catsfield WI will be held on Thursday 2nd March at 2pm when the speaker will be Steve Hall with a talk entitled ‘Cartooning and Animation’. Non-members and visitors are always welcome.

Village Hall AGM

The Annual General Meeting of the Village Hall Committee will be held at 7pm on Thursday 2nd March. Come along to hear what the Committee are doing to keep one of the essential hubs of this village running smoothly and making it available for hire by local community organisations and individuals, as well as others from further afield. Sarah and Jim Campbell at the Village Store take the bookings and payments for the hire of the hall and Hermon Cottage too, if you only need a smaller venue. Carol Hodgson takes the bookings for the use of the excellent snooker room above the hall. Refreshments will be served after the AGM, so do come along and show your support for the work of the committee.

Women’s World Day of Prayer: This very lovely service will be held in St Laurence’s Church on Friday 3rd March at 2.30pm. This is always a very special day which starts as the dawn breaks on the other side of the world with the sun rising over the island of Samoa. The same service is passed around the world following the daylight, until the sun sets off the coast of Eastern Samoa some thirty-five hours later. The service lasts about half an hour and refreshments will be served afterwards.

Coffee Morning: The next fundraising event for the Parish Church of St Laurence will be a Coffee morning on Saturday 4th March from 10am until 12 noon. There will be Craft and Cake Stalls and a Raffle.

The Family Service: It was lovely to see so many families with children of various ages at the Family Service in church last Sunday morning, as well as regular members of the congregation. Lucy Ashton’s Children’s Choir began the service by singing beautifully about the sower and his seed, which was the theme of the readings of the day. Father Michael had brought Harold, the church cat along with him and there was no shortage of volunteers to hold and stroke him whilst Father Michael told us of Harold’s latest escapade. He had been on holiday in Norfolk recently and had great difficulty at first with the local dialect, but he soon realised that ‘Bootiful’ meant beautiful and he quite liked the sound of that.

Harold is pretty good at nodding off without realising it and finding himself involved in a dream about people from the Bible. This time he was in a warm sunny field where he met Gideon the farmer who was sowing the seeds of his next crops. Gideon showed Harold that however carefully he cast his seeds, they didn’t all land on the best soil where they could grow to become strong, healthy plants and some fell by the wayside where, in spite of struggling to grow, they eventually withered and died. Harold and Gideon prayed together that the seeds would all do well and produce a good crop for the harvest. When Father Michael found Harold and woke him up to go home, they looked at the winter Norfolk field and imagined that one day soon the plants would be growing straight and good in the sun, just as God wants us to grow in our lives. Harold said that then the harvest would be ‘Bootiful’ and God would be very pleased.

Sport: If you visited the Playing Field during half term, you would have seen that a group of boys aged 5 to 11 were enjoying three days of coaching. These form part of Westfield boy’s teams who have been using our pitch sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday morning for their fixtures. Great fun and some healthy exercise, all good use of our sports facilities.

Our football team played their last home game on Saturday against Sedlescombe. We started poorly, but got better apparently and the game finished 2 – 2, thanks to two good goals scored by Ben Newman. Now, just when we are on a drawing streak (if there is such a thing), we have only one game left to play against Hollington away, with no date yet fixed. Readers, you will have to bate your breath for more news.

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