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'What you should do', said Don, the American former member of the congregation who I sometimes talk to via the wonder of Zoom, 'is get a six-foot stick and cut a cross into the end and then stamp people with it!' He was very pleased at that, an idea for facilitating the traditional ashing to begin Lent in a socially-distanced age. I was less sure.

Then a colleague mentioned entirely in passing at a Deanery Chapter meeting that she'd spent hours laminating cards including an ash cross to send out to members of the church and I had my solution. There was a way of actually bringing the chief physical expression of penitence and forgiveness that inaugurates the Lenten season in front of people who wouldn't be able to come to church to do it. I could include not just regular congregation members but also Messy Churchers and a few others we know well but don't often see in church.

The task has dominated everything since Friday: constructing a distribution list and route, designing the prayer card, copying them (this time it took an hour on freezing Saturday morning for the photocopier in the church office to decide it was sufficiently warm for it to get on and do its work); addressing the envelopes, and making the cards. I eventually worked out the best way of doing it was to mark each card with a cross in glue, then press it onto a pile of ash. It was messy but that didn't matter. But the laminating took ages: the cards had to go through at least three times and occasionally four. 

Should the cards be posted, or delivered? Some had to go out by post, but the rest amounted to just over 120. That would have cost about £80. It was just about cost-effective for me to deliver them myself, following a wildly circuitous route which took me up hill and down dale and incorporated almost every street in the parish. I estimated it would take a couple of hours: it was, in the event, four and a half before I propelled my bicycle unsteadily back into the drive. I suppose I'd had some useful conversations on the way.

And I realised that there was one person on the list I hadn't delivered to. Even though, if asked, I would have sworn that I remembered writing his name on an envelope, I had, inadvertently and inexplicably, missed out the sole and only black member of the congregation. Instantly that episode of Father Ted flashed into my mind: 'I hear you're a racist now, Father'. Don't worry, I returned to pop one through his door separately.