Oops I Did It Again

... except that Mr Magoo was always oblivious to the reality of his mishaps and rescued from them by good luck. Well, I suppose the latter is usually true for me. 

Acting as one of the Bishop's Surrogates is one of the tasks I quite like as it involves dealing with nice young couples and helping them get married. But there is also nothing that seems to bring me as much stress because I keep getting things wrong. There is a lot more business for surrogates at the moment because no church marriages can happen by the usual method of banns, so in most cases couples need Common Licences, and the surrogates hear the oaths in support of those applications. Not long after the restrictions came in, I had an awful day when I thought I had mucked up the process for several couples, and though it turned out I hadn't, this wasn't before having to admit to them and various Church officials that I had, and then that I hadn't after all. Then I made a mistake on one form and ended up driving to see a couple to swear the oath over again. Now it turns out that as well as taking evidence of identity I should have been asking for proof of nationality, as detailed in a document from 2016 I can't recall ever having seen. It stretches belief that every couple I've seen until now has always given me passports to demonstrate their identity, thus proving nationality into the bargain, but the issue has certainly never actually come up before. Nobody has been illegally married - there's no doubt of anyone's nationality - but if they don't have passports proving it becomes quite problematic, involving birth certificates and passports of parents at the time the person was born, which is a lot to ask for. And I do have to ask. I was in despair for a while and am very inclined to give the job up as something else I am not very good at.

But then Ms Kittywitch posted on LiberFaciorum about her recent experiences at her local hospital with gastroenteritus, no joke in its own right but even less amusing when you are a heart-and-lung transplant survivor of thirty years standing with a compromised immune system and various other things awry. The hospital could have killed her several times over the course of a few days, culminating in an attempt to inject an anti-coagulant again two hours after having done so, which would almost definitely have carried her into the other world had she not had her wits about her. Now she is at Harefield ('the mothership'), and feels much safer. At least, as I have often comforted myself, when I make a mistake it is vanishingly unlikely that anyone will die.