SADLY, the ministry of a visiting cleric, the Revd "Mr Snow",
proved all too brief, although he did his bit with the children of
Market Rasen, and also helped with flood defences. He first
appeared, some seven feet tall and fully robed, on 19 January, at
the monthly Saturday Club run by Linda Patrick, the wife of the
Revd Charles Patrick.
He caused quite a stir as a new recruit to the Market Rasen
Ministry Team; for Mr Patrick, who has ten churches in his care in
Lincoln diocese, had recently lost his curate,
although he does have a strong contingent of Readers and lay
leaders.
On that same morning of deep snow, when the Saturday Club
children were happily building the walls of Jericho around Mr Snow,
just so that they could knock them down again, one of the local
farmers was doing valuable work. Having learned lessons from a deep
snowfall three years ago, when the village was cut off, he used his
tractor and snow plough to throw gravel on all the roads around the
village so that they remained passable. It was typical, Mrs Patrick
says, of the community spirit in the village.
Mr Snow was robed again for the Sunday-morning service, and many
families brought their children along to be photographed with him.
And Mr Snow himself contributed to mitigating the floods that came
to the village ten days later, after heavy rain also brought a
thaw. The Environment Agency had suggested that snowmen could help
to delay floods by compacting snow and slowing the thaw; but the
trouble was that several million were needed. But by the time the
floods took hold (fortunately, no houses in the village were
actually flooded), Mr Snow was no longer available for comment.