Monday 6th September 2010

A very warm welcome to my site and I hope you will enjoy finding your way around. There are serious bits and not-so-serious; and I hope that you will have a giggle over part of the Gallery section which includes photographs and features! Please also do have a look at the Radio 2 Good Morning Sunday link, also within the Gallery section.

Isn't time flying by? Now into September... Over this last weekend I was up at the Live Crafts craft show at Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. It was a lovely show and we had 'perfect' show weather on Friday and Saturday. Thank you to all those who came along to my stall to say hello and to those who sat and listened and/or who bought a recording.

Last month it was a real joy and delight to have completed the 'Cathedral tour' - to have had the opportunity of playing in some magnificent places of worship and history. It was wonderful just gently playing in the beautiful surroundings of Peterborough, Ely, Norwich, Wells, Rochester, Truro and Exeter - and, of course, Gloucester back in April. Thank you to all those of you who came along to support me at these informal recitals.

The new album, A Time for all Things, is being much enjoyed and touching many hearts. I have been enormously excited about this album - it had been almost two years in the making, from conception. For the first time John and I have recorded some well-known popular ballads - including The Rose, Always On My Mind and The Power of Love - as well as some worship songs, old-fashioned hymns and our own material. So there is something for everyone! We hope that it will appeal to those of all faiths and none, and that in these troubled times, where many are experiencing hardship, it may provide an encouragement for the listener to reflect and for some to deepen their relationship with God. Please visit our Online Shop for a full track listing and to listen to snippets of all seventeen tracks.

It was a real real pleasure to have been invited back on Good Morning Sunday for a chat with Aled Jones on 18th April. It was such fun - my dear mother had been invited along - a lifelong fan of Aled, and she was SO excited at coming to London with me, sitting in the production studio and enjoying all that was going on, and then meeting Aled after the programme finished at 9 o'clock. They share the same surname (my mother's maiden name was Jones) and chatted away in Welsh!! Below are a couple of shots taken on the morning, and you can listen to the interview on the Good Morning Sunday page of the Gallery section.

My words, and the music from A Time for all Things that he played, seemed to have struck a chord with listeners. We were inundated with orders and enquiries - and thank you so much to all of you who wrote or rung in saying how much you appreciated my words and music.

And for other Radio 2 fans Sarah Kennedy played a track from A Time for all Things each morning for a week in June after Pause for Thought. She is continuing to play tracks from time to time.

Cross Rhythms has been hugely supportive of my music for the past seventeen years or so, and I was delighted to have been invited for a live interview with Mike Rimmer on his evening programme on Wednesday 18th May. It was really exciting as he linked up with John Daniels in the States via the telephone (and the line was brilliant, too!)

I am increasingly being asked where our music is available. Apart from our own Online Shop, and a number of internet sites, our CDs are on sale in a number of individual shops around the country, mainly Christian bookshops. They are also on sale in the Wesley Owen stores in the following eight cities: Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Bromley, Coleraine, Derby, Glasgow and York.

It was lovely to have performed at the Christian Resources Exhibition at Sandown Park in May. A huge exhibition with just about everything under the sun to do with Christianity, I had lunchtime slots in the Unistage Arts Theatre. Thank you to all those who came along to sit and listen, and it was really good to meet so many of you afterwards. I am sorry for the slight technical hitches, but all was well in the end I think and I hope it still not spoil the experience.

Below are some shots of Gloucester Cathedral, where I played back in April -including the beautiful stonework of the main door to the Cathedral and the Tailor of Gloucester's House!

With best wishes

Charles