We all remember the occasion at Church Club when, as their craft, all the children were making paper chains which would be gathered together as part of a great national paper chain being organised by the charity Christian Aid, I forget exactly what for. Maddy was deeply reluctant to give up her chain and in fact on being told that was the idea began to cry and for some reason couldn't stop. Even after we conceded the point and let her take her bit of paper chain home, she was sort of stuck in one emotional gear and carried on weeping unconsolably even as her mother collected her and ushered her away.
Yesterday we were apparently in a somewhat fraught mood. There are very often some tears at Church Club as one child or another gets accidentally (or not so accidentally) slapped by one of their companions, or hit by an ill-aimed ball. But on this occasion the children who didn't find some reason for crying were in the minority, whether it was a barely-perceptible injury or a passing inability to make a bit of cardboard stick on a sheet of paper. Perhaps it was to do with the phases of the Moon.
We finished as always by shooing the little darlings out of the hall and into the arms of their waiting parents and guardians. And disaster struck one more time as Edie couldn't find her cardigan. Someone else had taken it and the one she was left holding wasn't hers: this was a catastrophe of such proportions it clearly demanded more desperate tears. 'It's fine', Edie's mother insisted, 'it'll turn up', as Grace's father standing nearby commented that earlier in the year his daughter had lost all six of her cardigans in a week.
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