December 2016 We are pleased to send you greetings again this Christmas time, hoping you are well. 
Most members of our families have continued much as before, so we will just mention the most significant changes. John’s daughter Helen has moved from working for Cambridge City Council to helping a local Anglican church with its social outreach. Helen and Colin’s eldest daughter Rachel and husband Chris have moved back to the Chichester area. We particularly miss Chris’s practical skills and technical expertise.  Daniel, the middle son of John’s son Richard and Rachel, was married in June to Louisa Heron (R & R on left of photo). They have since gone to work for six months at a centre in southern Brazil similar to the one in Scotland where they met and worked together. David, eldest son of Richard and Rachel, is now teaching history in Reading.
Another addition to the family is John’s first great-grandchild, Harvey Cuthbert, grandson of David and Margie and son of Ruth and Mark. Harvey was born in October and we are looking forward to meeting him soon after Christmas. Elizabeth’s sister Margaret and Davie have both celebrated significant birthdays this year, which they marked by a trip to Antarctica. Her sister Helen and Tim’s elder daughter, Ailsa, has enjoyed her first term at Oriel College, Oxford, studying biochemistry. As well as a week’s holiday in Eskdale with various family members, we were able to fit in visits to Elizabeth’s three siblings who still live in Scotland (top photo) around Daniel and Louisa’s wedding. At the end of September we joined a coach-load of people connected with our church to visit the Oban area of Scotland, including a trip to Iona. Our church is named after St Columba (who founded a monastery on Iona) and the coach trip was one of a series of special events celebrating the 125th anniversary of our church building. Health-wise this has been a mixed year for us. In July John fell in our local park; mercifully he did not break anything but his mobility has reduced since then. While on the church trip he had a mild stroke which affected his left hand for some weeks but it is now nearly back to normal. Sadly we had to miss the day trip to Iona. On a more positive note, John has rejoined the U3A painting class which he used to attend and has continued to attend a class on Polar Studies. Elizabeth continues to teach a weekly French class for the U3A (University of the Third Age). We dropped out of the community choir early on in this last term but hope to return to it in the new year. We have enjoyed various plays, films and lunch-time concerts and, of course, we are still very much involved in our church. Currently our congregation is wrestling with two major questions: ‘What does it mean to be church in the centre of Cambridge?’ and ‘How can we work more closely with another United Reformed Church which is nearby?’  In the early part of the year we had regular visits from a young Taiwanese lady who had been commissioned to write John’s biography (in Chinese) for the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. A copy was duly presented to John by the head of the Taiwanese Church Press in October. The title ‘ti vuvu katua vatu katua ngiaw’ means ‘The grandfather, the dog and the cat’. This was the title of a little booklet which John wrote to help the Paiwan people learn to read their own language. The Paiwan are an indigenous group whose traditional home is in the mountains of south-eastern Taiwan and one of John’s tasks in the early 1950s was to work out a way of writing their language so that translations of the Bible could be printed.
Also in the autumn, the 60th anniversary of John’s ordination as a minister was marked by both our church and the area synod of the United Reformed Church. As 2016 draws to a close we are grateful for so many good happenings while also wondering what the future holds on all levels, from the personal to the global. With our best wishes this Christmas and for 2017 John & Elizabeth Whitehorn |