Guest blogger, The Rev’d Humphrey Blytherington is Vicar of St Hilda’s, Little Snoring with All Saints, Great Snoring. He is a graduate of Plymouth University. He completed his studies for the ministry at Latimer Hall, Durham. He is married to Daphne and enjoys home brewing, model railroading and is an avid member of the Great Snoring Morris Dancers.

What ho! Good to see you lads, good to see you! I must say I’ve missed coming down here to the Goose and Garter. She who must be obeyed and yours truly have been off on holiday. Now she’s Roman, Daphne insists on dragging me off to the continent, and off we go to some sort of shrine or another–usually some sort of Froggie monastery or some such. Reminds me of the old chestnut: Sign on the coast road in Sussex points to the Newhaven ferry and reads, “Newhaven for the Continent” and some wag scrawls up there, “and Bexhill for the incontinent.” Har har.

Well, Daphne and I actually went to Rome for a couple of weeks. Beastly hot out there in the summer. Fr. Stornaway says it’s best to go in the winter, but off we went in June and we opened our sweat pores I can tell you. Daphne’s not a lightweight by any stretch and she was huffing and puffing more than usual I can tell you. Off we go trooping to the various churches. Anyway, the old girl gets some tickets to go down into something called the Scavengers or some such. Couldn’t quite make out the foreign eye-ti lingo, but it’s this underground tour thingy where you go down some steps under St Peter’s Basilica. Fascinating. Quite fascinating.

Seems that fellow Constantine back in the three hundreds got his men to carve away part of the Vatican hill and fill in the side of the hill to make a flat surface to build a church on. Read more.