Wyred apple juice – from tree to bottle

… well, from picked to bottle.

Wyred, the Church youth group are generating donations for their trip to Africa next summer. They've been offered apples to make apple juice to sell. The apples are on trees so they have to pick them. They're then transported to Chiltern Ridge where they are pressed and bottled. Chiltern Ridge have a wonderful service: they press, pasteurise and bottle apple juice from apples delivered to the farm.

The Wyred apple juice is selling like hot cakes - £3 a bottle or 4 for £2.50. It's available after services, at cream teas or from the Church office. 

Wyred's planned trip is described in more detail on the Church web site missendenchurch.org.uk

The apples

The press at Chiltern Ridge

Bottling the juice

Bat watch

Great fun tonight: a bat watch up at Church. After hearing a fascinating talk about bats and seeing some specimens, we were given detectors and waited for the bats to appear. Eventually we heard some pipistrelles and then saw them flying round the outside of the Church. In spite of evidence in the Church – bat droppings – we failed to detect any inside. 

Pipistrelle bat

The IBM PC is 30 years old today

and is still with us – just about! It's demise has been forecast for some time, particularly with the advent of smart phones and tablets however, I think the PC in some form will be round for some time. To misquote Mark Twain “the report of its death was an  exaggeration.” There's an interesting article quoting one of the original design engineers Mark Dean here. Mark's point is that the interest is moving from the technology itself to what is behind it. We've seen that in the recent riots where communications through social media enabled the mobs to gather rapidly.

My view about the 'improved' communications that the new technology enables is that it often inhibits good communication between people: because they can be in touch all the time, they don't communicate. A case of less is more (or the reverse.) I'm not arguing for going back, rather for learning to live better in this new joined-up world.

Speaking of Mark Twain, one quote of his I like is “I don't understand all this fuss about giving up smoking: I've done it dozens of times”

It's a bit calmer in Little Hampden...

no riots here – yet. Don started the harvest this afternoon. I hope the weather lasts but the forecast isn't too good.