To all this blog’s friends and supporters: thank you; and very best wishes for Christmas and the coming year

Phil Groom writes:

THIS BLOG would be nothing without you, its friends and supporters: thank you for all your encouragement over this past year.

In recognition of your support (and rather than add to humanity’s carbon footprint by sending out dozens of cards that will mostly end up in recycling bins anyway) I’ve done my usual and bought a goat from Farm Africa, and the good folk there have kindly attached a label to it for you:

Farm Africa Presents: A Goat

Click on through to farmafricapresents.org.uk and you’ll be able to watch a video that tells you all about Farm Africa’s work — and, I hope, you’ll be inspired, to buy a goat for someone else. Don’t worry if a goat’s not your thing: you can always send a beehive, a camel, a chicken or something more quirky such as a bottle of fermented cow’s urine.

• Find FARM Africa on facebook
• Follow @FARMAfrica on twitter

Cross posted with UKCBD Blog

To all this blog’s friends and supporters, with best wishes for Christmas and the coming year (cross posted)

Phil Groom writes:

THANK YOU to everyone who has taken the time during this past year to visit, comment, or otherwise contribute to either this or the UKCBD blog: it’s been an honour and a privilege working with you.

My gift to you all, a small token of my appreciation, is a goat, courtesy of Farm Africa. Rather than link to the video and risk overloading Farm Africa’s servers (a very real risk given the level of traffic the UKCBD blog has seen recently, especially over over the last month or so), I offer you a few screenshots:

Farm Africa Presents...

Farm Africa Presents... a goat!

... and a goat provides milk.

To all this blog's friends and supporters...

To find out more or to give your own goat, visit Farm Africa for yourself.

Christmas: to us, a child is born: to them, a goat is given. The child is born for them too, of course, for each and every one of us: born into poverty, forced to flee as a refugee, eventually returning to be rejected by his own. But somehow, in that process, setting us free.

There’s no magic, no fairy lights or tinsel on the Cross at the end of the story; but a glimmer of hope in an impossible-to-believe resurrection. I urge you: hold on to that hope. Many here feel broken, betrayed, bereft by what has taken place within our trade over the past year or so … the future remains uncertain, especially for those 26 (0r 27?) shops and their staff for whom there was no room at the Biblica inn and now unceremoniously wiped off the Wesley Owen map; and for those in the Durham Cathedral shop, left out in the cold by the Charity Commission.

And yet … and yet we see signs of hope, most recently in Chichester, where churches came together to save their local Christian bookshop. It can be done; and I hope and pray with you all that we will see more initiatives like this emerging over the coming year.

Grace and peace to you all,

Phil

Er … woof

Matt Wardman