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This post is for the benefit of Lynn "who works with children", recently decanted to Edinburgh, and who visits this blog and occasionally comments. During our visit to Cornwall Sheila and I visited Penlee House in Penzance and in the art gallery I was fascinated by this picture. It is of an early Sunday school trip, and is an important and early piece of social documentation of what became for many years a highlight of children's lives.

The painting is called "The Sunday School Treat", and the artist was W H Y Titcomb, one of the Newry school of Cornish artists who flourished in the late Victorian period. This painting shows how Sunday School treats were done on the Cornish coast and estuaries. Despite the unfashionable subject matter some of Titcomb's best paintings document religious themes such as Primtive Methodist prayer meetings, pastoral care of the dying, and the prayer and devotions of the Cornish fishermen. Incidentally Thomas Cook started his travel business by organising day trips on trains (with food included) for Sunday Schools and Temperance gatherings.

Now Lynn – with all the health and safety, risk assessment, child protection and other essential legislative safeguards, I don't suppose we're ever likely to see the likes of these outings again. Anyway – it's so idyllic I thought I'd share it to encourage you and and all those whose ministry and vocational gifts are poured into the high energy demands of working with children. I reckon Jesus probably put such ministry into the higher echelons of good long term Kingdom building.

Now I know it's possible to take things too personally. And that when we begin to do that, we are assuming that we are the centre of attention, which is a bit self-obsessed. So I'm trying not to take it personally, that when I return from a few days on the East Coast (Crail), I'm just getting out the car in Paisley when the heavens open and malteser size hailstones start bouncing off my unprotected skull. And they fell with volume and venom for several minutes. No wonder Pharaoh hated hailstones- especially if he was bald and no one was areound with a palm leaf umbrella.

Anyway, Crail was both fun and fruitful. Some anecdotal evidence:

walking up the road from the centre of Crail we met an elderly woman pulling her shopping trolley. She liked the sound its wheels made, she said. "Makes it sound like a skateboard and people move out the road."

Bought a beautiful pottery vase for our wee hoose. The colours, shape, size and the overall Scottish feel to it appealed to both of us so the decison was unanimous. I love unanimity in a marriage – balanced with an equal amount of equanimity about differences.

Read chunks of the Apostolic Fathers in the new Michael Holmes edition that has the Greek text and the English translation. Just to be clear, I read chunks of the English translation, and occasionally deciphered a Greek sentence or two. But I've liked these early Christian thinkers and writers ever since Maxwell Staniforth's translation was published by Penguin in the 1970's. My aged Penguin was brown, split into looseleaf and recently recycled – so I bought this new edition that matches the format and size of my Greek NT.

Discovered at least three good coffee shops, and one where you get home made clootie dumpling with fresh thick cream, which I haven't had with coffee before but will have again – soon! The photo is the clue – after a 7 mile round walk from St Monans, what's a dollop of cream here or there?

Rediscovered the local practice of the Wednesday half day. As a sabbaticaling visitor I readily approved of the idea that if you have to work on a Saturday (or Sunday), there is a need for compensatory time – and a need to protect it. An incoming resident complained to the butcher that he was shut when she came the day before to buy the victuals for tea. His answer was enigmatic and emphatic 'Aye, but this is Crail". Which had me inwardly seconding the motion, "Aye, so it is".

Walked several chunks of the Fife Coastal Walk, and apart from the usual ornithological suspects, saw redstarts, linnets, goldfinches, a heron standing like a grey obelisk, and close ups of hunners and hunners of geese strip-mining a recently harvested field.

Read around John Wesley's theology and especially those theological traditions which most influenced him including the Moravians, the Greek Fathers, the Puritans, and various other contributors to the eclectic mix that makes Wesleyan theology both rich in its diversity and frustratingly elusive for those who insist on theological consistency.

Spoke with the proprietor of the wee Picture Gallery in Pittenweem, whose wife is a superb painter, and whose daughter is both a primary teacher and a painter in her own right. One of her paintings was beautiful – just what I'd like to have bought and looked at endlessly – but it was too expensive, so I was left to battle with my covetousness. He told us about some of the local artists some of whom are pretty good, and some of the more pretentious ones who see themselves as 'serious' artists. Art is largely a matter of taste, but I do find myself at times baffled by some abstract work which is given a very specific name – and I can't for the life of me get the connection between the name and the picture. Perhaps a conversation of the obtuse with the obtuse. But what a nice man to talk to.

So – Crail was great, and the break a generous gift – and our thanks to the givers.