Wansteadium

Christmas Eve

4pm Crib Service for younger children at Christ Church

4pm Nativity Service at Wanstead United Reformed Church, Nightingale Lane

4.30pm Children’s Carol Service at Grace Church, Wanstead House

5pm First Mass of Christmas at Our Lady of Lourdes

6pm Family communion for all the family at Christ Church

7pm Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes

9.30pm Carols followed by Midnight Mass at  10.00 p.m at Our Lady of Lourdes

11.30pm Midnight mass at Christ Church

Christmas Day

9.30am Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes

10am Christmas Day service at St Mary’s, Overton Drive

10am Christmas Day service at Wanstead Baptist Church, Wellington Rd

11.15am Christmas Day Service at Wanstead Grace Church, Wanstead House

11.30am Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes

(Please report any more to info@wansteadium.com or add in comments below.)

Wanstead is going to miss Sumo Fresh when it closes on Saturday. The restaurant is closing after ten years serving noodles, sushi and other favourites, and is apparently to be replaced by a curry house in the New Year, though its sign leaves open the possibility of continued takeaway service..

Here is how we reported its opening in 2013, with a long list of favourable reports from customers.

Reviews for Sumo Fresh welcome

Thank you to all at Sumo Fresh for your service over the years.

Wansteadium reader Tom D writes:

On 4th December the residents of Woodlands Avenue received the sad news that one of their most unusual residents – a White-Cheeked Turaco known to everyone as ‘Bob’ – had passed away.

Nobody knows quite when Bob appeared in our area, but he’s been stealing blueberries and unsuccessfully trying to charm local chickens for well over a decade. His ‘whoop whoop’ call was a regular sound of summer evenings.

Bob must have escaped from captivity, but successfully survived many winters in the local area. 

He’d been taken ill a few months ago, with problems breathing, and was staying at the South Essex Wildlife Hospital in the hope he’d recover – and he’d started to make good progress.

As he’s non-native and shouldn’t have been in the wild in the first place, it wasn’t clear whether he’d ever be able to return to the area he’d have known as ‘home’, but sadly that’s no longer a question. The vet performed a post-mortem and he had a hard/diseased liver and gall bladder, which looks like the result of a condition he’d had for some time.

Bob gets mentioned in Wikipedia – but clearly many people think he’s theirs.

A GoFundMe raised over £1500 to cover the costs of his treatment at South Essex Wildlife Hospital – donations in his memory would, I’m sure, continue to be welcome.

You may have heard of Aaron Robinson’s marathon running around Wanstead Flats – the Guardian now has a write-up of how he has completed a marathon every day for the past year, and the details are pretty jaw-dropping. For example:

I get up at 3am to start running at 4am. It takes around five hours. Then I start work, finish work at 6.30pm, go to bed at 7pm, get up at 3am and do the whole thing again.

There was also the time he had food poisoning and was sick six times during his run, which took him longer than usual. And there was also the time he ran into a cow. It’s worth a read.

Aaron runs to raise money for anti-slavery & human trafficking organisation Hope for Justice.

Records of Wanstead marriages, burials and baptisms were among the items stolen by thieves from the office at Christ Church early on Sunday morning.

Money collected at the church’s Christingle service, which had been intended for the Children’s Society, was also stolen, though a JustGiving appeal set up after the thefts has, at the time of writing, raised more than £2,300 for the charity.

The documents however cannot be replaced and the information was not held elsewhere.

Wanstead rector Father James Gilder said: “In the safe were all of our records – who was baptised, who was confirmed, who got married, and also more sadly the records from our garden of remembrance, where people’s ashes are buried.”

The documents were in a safe which the burglars could not break into – so they removed it from the wall and took it away, escaping bizarrely, on an electric scooter. The church is now appealing for anyone who might see a grey box safe dumped nearby to get in touch, as it may contain the documents.

“Please keep a lookout for papers and folders that may get dumped in skips, waste ground, in the parks or forest land in the area,” the parish said on Facebook. “If you do spot anything, please let us know using the contact numbers on our website.”