Wandering back to Wandering

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This weekend, there is an endurance ride at Wandering in Western Australia. Around 1995, my husband was bursar at a private Anglican school in Western Australia's capital, Perth. We travelled several hours regularly to visit my parents, passing through Wandering which had a nice little church on the outskirts. The church always seemed lonely and forlorn. The roof was fading and we would discuss how difficult it would be for a small parish to get the roof painted. We discovered it was an Anglican church so we contacted a local parish representative and offered to paint the roof. This was in the days before Occupational Health and Safety laws were quite so strict. A firm connected with Vince's school agreed to lend us a cherry-picker and scaffolding. A few months later we were organised. Vin drove the school utility and towed the cherry picker; I followed with four 16-year-old boys and towing a trailer with the scaffolding. The first problem was to start the cherry picker motor to operate the bucket affair. Eventually we discovered that, until the struts of the picker were fully extended, the motor wouldn't start. My husband isn't too keen on heights. We had everything ready for him to go up in the bucket to steam-clean and he said 'I'm not too sure I can do this'. I just told him he'd have to. So up he went. We'd also left behind the instructions on how to erect the scaffold but we managed that relatively easily. We steam-cleaned the roof the first day and prepared the wooden parts for painting. Wandering often has the coldest minimum in the state and next morning, it was very frosty and cold but we got the roof painted red and the woodwork white. We polished the pews while we were there too. We still pass that way occasionally and the church roof really needs doing again but I'm afraid we're past it now. Besides, we'd have to jump through too many hoops. Just another nice memory.