Meet Parishioner David Evans

My Portuguese partner of 26 years Jose and I found St James when we came to live in Porto three years ago.

We’d left London on the last plane out before Covid, stayed two years in Lisbon, but because the capital was so busy, eventually settled in Porto. We chose Leca da Palmeira, a quiet area with traditional two- or three-storey houses on the other side of the mobile bridge, only five minutes’ walk to the beach. We’re very happy here.

We go to St James most Sundays. Because I’m mostly retired, I volunteer two or three times a month as a guide when the church is open all day for visitors.  I say “mostly” retired, because I’m a musician and I still do the arrangements for a course in the south of France for orchestras. Jose and I previously lived in France, first in Paris, where he was working as a fashion designer, and I commuting to London where I conducted two amateur orchestras, then we moved south to Provence so I could focus on teaching the course.

I’ve lived in a few countries: Brazil, where I played in orchestras – I was a flautist before I developed an essential tremor and had to stop playing; briefly in Mexico; in England, Iceland, and Rome. I speak a few languages: Jose and I speak Portuguese at home, we still know French, and I learnt some Spanish, Italian, but sadly not the Icelandic!

I had a good basis for learning languages. I studied Classics at university – Latin, Greek, and Ancient History – before going to music college in Manchester.

But originally, I hail from Liverpool. I had an eclectic upbringing, first at a Catholic and then a Jewish school because they were nearest to my home. Then for three years at senior school, I was a classmate of Paul McCartney! We were both in the lowest set for maths, and the top set for Latin. We both stayed on through Sixth Form, though he was in a different class because he studied modern languages.

If I seem an optimistic person, I think that’s a Liverpool trait. The city produced a few famous comedians in my day, like Arthur Askey and Tommy Handley. I’ve my music, of course, classical, and pop, well, I like Elvis and Cliff Richard and anything up to the 1970s! I read a lot, autobiographies, and detective novels – Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, and MC Beaton’s humorous Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth mysteries, which were made into TV series.

I learnt ballet for many years, until I was 46. Walking is harder for me now, but when we were living in Provence Jose and I used to hike 15 kilometres each way on Sundays, to the beautiful Cistercian Abbaye Notre-Dame de Senanque.

But I like the Church of England, and the clergy and congregation at St James. In their treatment of other people they are, to find an adjective, “Christian”!