Easter 2024

Holy Week at Swanvale Halt was bookended by syncope. Lillian, our former Lay Reader, keeled over during the Palm Sunday mass, and at 8am on Easter Day a pregnant young woman who I’d never seen in church before but came accompanied by two older women one of whom I recognised from the streets of the village, also found standing up and sitting down in order too much, and passed out briefly. She was ever so embarrassed.

This was how it all worked. I decided to do a healing mass on Monday evening, Compline and Benediction on Tuesday, and Tenebrae on Wednesday, as ever, low-key services which brought the expected handful of faithful souls (not quite the same handful on each evening, but nearly). The bigger Triduum observances of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday had lower gates than the unusually high numbers of last year, but it wasn’t bad to get 23 at the dawn mass on the Sunday the clocks went forward (most of the conversation in the vestry beforehand orbited around how little we’d slept and how we couldn’t remember which of our timepieces would automatically update), 18 at 8am and 100 at 10am for the first time since 2018.

For the first time in some years I remembered to order a garland for the Paschal Candle from the local florists: if only I’d also remembered that I had to carry on watering it after the great excitement was past, the daisies would have survived longer than they did.