St Augustine's is certainly one of the parish activities, so we were invited to participate. The invitation arrived uncomfortably close to the time of the ordination, so we had to find a symbol of St Augustine's at fairly short notice. What should we use ?
We didn't have anything. Marching in procession is not one of our regular activities, and we certainly haven't done anything like it for quite a long time. Our first idea was to find some sort of heraldic symbol which was somehow appropriate to St Augustine. Did he perhaps have a coat of arms, or some other such identifying picture ? Well, yes, he does - but by the time we'd worked that out we decided that it was too late to get all the work done before the ceremony. ( We did it later - here are the details )
After some thought, someone remembered Hermione's drawing of St Augustine; perhaps that would do if we made a bigger version and mounted on some sort of pole which could be carried easily.
So we did. We made a nice big copy ( approximately A2 ) of Hermione's picture, and mounted it on a polystyrene sheet. On another polystyrene sheet we mounted a mirror image of the picture ( so that the saint didn't appear to perform a sudden reversal as the picture went past the specatators - compare the picture below ). Then we stuck the two polystyrene sheets together, sandwiching a stout wire loop, the ends of which were turned outwards and pushed down the middle of a bamboo pole.
That gave us a very light ( though not very strong, but we didn't think that would matter ) emblem, big enough to see from afar, but easy to carry. The picture on the right shows the bearer just about to carry it in the procession.
