Competition

When Emily's family first came to Swanvale Halt, they arrived at our Toddler Group before they'd even moved into the area. They were looking for a church, they said. Unfortunately when they came with Emily as a babe-in-arms to a Sunday service she bawled her eyes out whenever any music started (everyone's a critic) and so that was that until she was about eight and she became quite enthusiastic, especially when she could bring along her little sister and make a fuss of her. She and her dad were on the serving team for a while, him carrying the cross splendidly and Emily herself making an angelic acolyte. 

Now Emily is in Year 7 and as well as the usual lethargy which I gather creeps over tween/teenagers for physiological reasons she has taken up jiu jitsu which inevitably takes place on Sunday mornings. Her dad has had a few health challenges making carrying a heavy cross around not a good idea, while her younger sister now gets dragged to multiple toddler groups and nurseries during the week as her mum has had to work as a childminder, and going out again on a Sunday to something which doesn't feel very different is less of a draw than staying home and playing with her own toys, thank you very much. 

I mention all this not because it is anything new or results in groundbreaking reflections, but precisely because this is a really quite well-disposed young family which has been very well embedded in the church in the past, and, in an ideal world, would want to be again, but just finds it a challenge. Emily is interested in the putative youth group we want to start later in the month, which is just as well as she's our best prospect of anyone coming at all. It shows that sometimes, perhaps, in the world as we find it, the bits of church life we think of as add-on extras could well be the best way of keeping an entire group of people in contact with God. 

We Do Things Differently Now

Usually the safeguarding training I'm obliged to attend is run by the Diocese, but today I was at a school-based session. It wasn't compulsory, but as our parish school begins its adventure of being joined with a secular school locally I thought I would come along to show willing. The outlines are the same, but whereas in a church setting safeguarding focuses on the supervision of children and vulnerable adults, safer recruitment and the occasional interactions with children which characterise the life of most churches, in a school setting everything's all the more intense - you deal with children all the time. 

Topics came up that edged around the core of what I normally understand as safeguarding, and into areas to do more with wellbeing and welfare: drug use, underage vaping, online bullying, and so on. The contrast with my own schooling in the 1980s struck me. The teachers at my provincial boys' state grammar school were mainly decent sorts, but they saw their job as keeping order and delivering lessons. Quite apart from the tendency of some members of staff to involve the use of projectiles to carry out these basic tasks - I suppose the woodwork master must have worked out how to throw a chisel across a classroom so as to minimise the possibility of serious injury - there was really very little interest in what happened outside the school. That just wasn't its concern. Even on the premises, beyond the classroom we were left to our own devices, and the school was pretty much a feral environment of persecution, low-level violence and cruelty. I think any suggestion that anyone should look for signs of pupils being unhappy would have been met with incomprehension: of course they were unhappy. Misery was built into the experience. Even in the early 2000s, a friend told me when I talked about this, her own grammar school turned a deliberate blind eye to the difficulties she was having at home. Someone else's problem. 

It occurs to me that this is a colossal change that has happened over the last couple of decades: how the life-experiences of children has become the business of schools in particular is remarkable and would be worth someone studying properly.

Taking Centre Stage

'Come to the Year Two nativity' advised the head teacher at the Infants School, 'They're more likely to have got it together'. And so they had. I spotted all the attenders at our after-school club, including Billie ('girl Billie' as she points out when there might be confusion) who was the most animated star - a starring star, not just the stellar chorus - I've ever seen; and Miriam, the oldest child in the school who sometimes looks remarkably out-of-place when stood against some of her tinier classmates, and who carried off the Angel Gabriel with RADA applomb. It was, we all agreed, the best show you'll see this Christmas.

I can remember nothing of the nativity plays of my own childhood. In contrast to the situation now, when school events are virtually illuminated by the light of phones held aloft by parents recording the occasion,  in our own family archive there are just three relevant images, all from the same event in 1975. I'm invisible in every one, and in fact not much can be seen at all, the only identifiable person being the teacher whose name I forget and who looked a bit like Princess Anne. That initial failure was probably why my mum didn't bother trying to take photographs again. I rather envy Billie, Miriam and the others their apparently easy enjoyment of taking the limelight and dancing about the stage: certainly by the time my memories really begin in junior school I was so atrociously self-conscious any movement was torment. The role I was best suited for was the Magic Mirror in a production of Snow White when I could read my lines completely unseen behind a cardboard screen!

An Important Visitation

The children from Swanvale Halt Infants School regularly come to the church to look round as part of their RE syllabus. Yesterday was the turn of one of the Year 2 classes. They moved around in three small groups, asked all the usual questions they usually do and some new ones, and struggled to remember what I had told them at Assembly earlier in the day when the topic came up. 

They are often fascinated by the font, which we keep open with some water in it. During the visit we discovered that the water wasn't in a very good state - it had got dusty and when you dragged a finger through it a nasty buckle of scum built up behind. I thought it would be fun to empty and refill the font and bless the new water. 

The children gathered round as I sprinkled some salt in the font (I'm still working through the pot of Dorset Sea Salt I bought several years ago), said the prayer of blessing ('Lord, we thank you for the gift of water to sustain, refresh, and cleanse all life ...') and made the sign of the cross three times in the water. Even if they've been at baptism services themselves, they won't remember these words and won't even have understood a lot of them but that doesn't matter: instinctively they all came in with 'Amen' at the end in exactly the right place. They know that something holy happened. Probably.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

The Infants School children came to church this morning to deposit their Harvest gifts, sing some songs, and listen to me reflect on the season for a minute or two. I decided to think about work: the fact that at Harvest we focus on farmers (and the children often sing about them), and a younger cousin of mine decided she wanted to be one, but hardly any of us will have much contact with that kind of life. 'I wonder what you will be when you grow up?' I asked Years 1 & 2, and got a variety of answers. The traditional train driver was the first, followed by scientist, vet, police officer ('so I can stop bad guys being bad' the little girl in question claimed) - and fairy. I didn't ask the Reception class what they thought.

As they left, I remembered that although fairy may seem an unlikely career trajectory, there is a professional mermaid operating in St Ives in Cornwall. She was the one who posted the video of her priest uncle accidentally setting himself alight during an online service early in the first lockdown (the Revd Beach, to add to the sense that the whole thing was scripted by a higher power). In fact, trying to recover the facts today, I find there are quite a lot of professional mermaids about. Perhaps it's not inherently less likely than anything I do.

Moving Along Again

It's the end of another term, and another year, school-wise. Church Club came to an end, as did the Toddler Group, and on Wednesday the children of the infants school were in the church to celebrate their Leavers' Service. The event culminates, as ever, in handing over the Lions Picture Bibles which the church funds, each of which contains the relevant child's name. They've been redesigned a bit over the years, but not basically changed - not that they will probably date all that quickly. The school brings over its own sound equipment these days, but I must admit I heard barely a word the children said. That didn't matter: the event made its point. And so off the Year 2s go, scattering far and wide (well, mostly to Hornington Juniors), and I will have far less to do with them than I have done up till now. For most, that Lions Picture Bible has to do an awful lot of work! 

Well It Was Your Loss

Is there any end to the Coronation? Our Messy Church concentrated on that theme yesterday, and all the children's crafts focused on making bits and pieces of the regalia (including cloaks made out of patches of red velvet which we happened to have been given some time ago), culminating in them having their photographs taken sitting in the Bishop's Chair. This is an impressive 18th-century bit of furniture which we have acquired somehow, and as it is viciously uncomfortable it's highly suitable to support the bottoms of bishops. For one granddaughter of the manse, it was clear, being photographed in a crown with royal regalia in either hand just confirmed the view of the world she has had all along, and I suspect she wasn't the only child for whom this was the case.

Hardly anyone came. We eventually worked out that this was almost certainly because of the rival attraction of a major village fair not far away, especially as the weather had been grim in the morning and lovely after lunch. Providentially this turned out not to be a bad thing as making the kit was so complicated any more children than we had would have been still constructing crowns as darkness fell. 'This is the best Messy Church I've ever been to', said Lottie. So there. 

Tears Before Bedtime

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. 

Lion Cubs Den

Widelake Secondary School has been almost uncharted territory for me in all the time I've been in Swanvale Halt. There is a Christian ecumenical youth work charity in the area that goes in to run a Christian Union and do seasonal assemblies, but paradoxically I suspect that means I have less contact with the school than I would have if they didn't exist at all. So I was delighted to be asked to visit by the RE coordinator to speak to two classes, bring some kit, and answer questions, last Friday. The younger group were studying Christianity as part of their general RE course, while the older ones were at a more philosophical level, and so it proved. I really enjoyed the experience. They were (mainly) interested and engaged and the second group provided some genuine intellectual stimulation. The very first question I was offered by them came from a girl whose opening gambit was 'I don't mean this with any kind of disrespect ...', which made everyone laugh, and who went on not to tackle the Church's attitude to same-sex relationships or child abuse but to ask, 'You spoke about prayer and how it works. How can you tell that what you experience isn't just the effect of long-term self-analysis and examination?' I thought that was rather brilliant, because of course it could be and (as I said) there's no way of proving it isn't. I feel hugely encouraged to think there are such thoughtful young people in our community (even if they don't come anywhere near the church).

Two Little Girls

The fact that it was Ash Wednesday hadn't been mentioned at Church Club, but Etta spontaneously raised the subject. 'You didn't come to do the crosses this morning', she upbraided me, and it was true, I hadn't, because I ran out of time to arrange it with the school. Etta also reminded me of a story involving my elder niece which I had no idea I'd told the children. 'Yes, she has a photographic memory', her mum told me when the parents came to collect them, 'It can be quite disconcerting'.

At the evening mass the Swallow family came, mum, dad, baby daughter, and Edie, who is eight. When the Swallows first arrived in Swanvale Halt, Edie too was a babe-in-arms. They came to the main Sunday service and as soon as the singing started she bawled the place down, and did it again on every occasion they turned up. Discerning child, you might think, but it meant that they beat a retreat and didn't come back until Edie was old enough to see things differently. Now she seems to be growing very religious. 'I'm not saying we didn't want to come', said her dad, 'But it was Edie who insisted that we did'. I have seldom seen a more solemn recipient of an ash cross, and when the family knelt at the rail for communion and I blessed her sister, Edie reached along to touch the baby's hand with hers. Just as well I am a hard-hearted soul impervious to such sentiment or it might have been embarassing. 

No Use Crying

Never was anything so rightly characterised as a mixture of triumph and disaster as Christmas 2022 at Swanvale Halt. The chief instance of the first was the Crib Service, the first time we have followed the old pattern since 2019. I say 'the old pattern', but in fact this was the pattern devised by former curate Marion which we'd only actually done once anyway, and which I cobbled together from her notes. The keynote is the children bringing up the crib figures - nice, robust wooden ones - to form the crib scene. The children were led by Poppy with robe and candle, and that all went pretty swimmingly with a couple of hundred souls in church. But the Midnight - the Midnight was another matter. Now I have always regarded the Midnight Mass as one of the high points of the liturgical year and have worked to set it as a marker of proper Catholic practice, so I already feel a bit pressurised to get it right, not least because there are always going to be people there making an occasional, or even once-a-year visit to church. It's important. This year the choir could muster only two voices, thanks to illness and absences, and we had as organist Corinne who has only just begun playing again after a long gap. She wasn't the most confident of presences and the music was hesitant and a bit inconsistent. There were very few people there anyway - no more than 40 - and I was on edge enough by the time we got to the high altar for communion. Then I noticed Gordon the head server had managed to lose the new charcoal from the thurible, and it lay smoking on the Victorian tiles. The thing now only contained a charcoal that had long gone out, and so though I went through the motions of putting incense in it I knew it wouldn't burn. The altar itself was an inch or two too far towards the wall meaning it was awkward to lean over. And then, somehow, unaccountably, I managed to spill the wine - a big, significant spillage of already-consecrated fluid. I hadn't knocked anything, or caught my sleeve or anything like that: instead it felt as though something unseen had knocked my arm (demons, presumably). It took some time to recover. The tiny miracle was that, although I'd registered to my horror that there was no plastic sheet under the altarcloth and on top of the superfrontal, and although the cloth was soaked in wine, we discovered at the end of the service that none had gone through to the superfrontal. Washing winey linens is one thing; getting consecrated wine out of a piece of kit you can't wash is another. So I went home a little less horrorstruck and shakey, and clutching an armful of linens. 

It all makes me reflect that I may have to retreat from my ideal of how the Midnight works. We seem not to have the resources to run an event on the Lamford pattern, or even how we did it at Goremead that one year I was there. It needs a confident musical lead and if we can't find that, and have to scrape around to find servers and singers, we need to rethink.

The Christmas Day services were fine, thankfully!

Illuminations

I am late posting about the turning-on of the Swanvale Halt Christmas Lights last Friday - considerably and satisfying into December, unlike most places! - for which I was drafted in to say a few words. In fact it was all on the brink of disaster when Santa Claus drew into view about ten minutes early and all the children bundled in his direction. The Mayor and the Town Council Community Services Officer wondered how they would ever get their attention back, but in the end I even had time to fit in a three-minute homily (which, for reasons best left obscure, majored on Kate Bush) before the lights were switched on. Actually, as the Town Clerk admitted to me, it's only the lights on the Day Centre and adjoining tree that are switched on, while most of them are on timers. Meanwhile, in the church, we were hosting music exams for the Royal School of Music. One parent came out of the building with her child examinee only to find that, since she'd left her car (against all advice) in the Day Centre car park, it was now boxed in by a couple of hundred children and Father Christmas on an illuminated sleigh. 

That Doesn't Make Any Sense

Trevor has been quiet for quite some time: his delusions haven't been of the kind I can do anything about, and I have stopped arguing with him as there is no point. They are so deep-rooted and such a part of him that there is no dislodging them even as they upset him. But just over the last couple of weeks he has been complaining about the Adversary's activities again.

Trevor: I'm experiencing supernatural events. I keep levitating.

Me: When does this happen? Are you sitting watching the TV and then lift up out of your seat?

Trevor: It's when I'm lying on my bed. [clue: this means he's asleep].

Me: Has anyone ever seen this happen to you?

Trevor: Leeeet meee thiiiiink ....

Me: I think you'd probably remember if anyone else had been there.

- As indeed any potential observer would have done. Trevor wants to be exorcised, but I reminded him that I can't do that without referring to the Diocesan Advisor on Deliverance, and I have taken him to three of those over the years and none of them have deemed exorcism a necessary step to take. He accepted that without complaining, for now.

In the afternoon it was Church Club. The story was Gideon, and taking a cue from the episode of the fleece my theme was experiments. For some years when I've told this story I've taken a pair of tarnished copper coins into school and, during storytime, put one in a jar of vinegar until the end of the session to show how the vinegar cleans it. I sat down to do this yesterday and Disaster! found no bottle of vinegar in my bag|: I was convinced I'd brought it. I apologised to the children. 'There's some vinegar at the bottom of the toy box!' cried Bryony brightly. The toy box sits at the side of the hall, full of foam rubber balls and the like and the children had all been playing with them while we got ready for storytime; it seemed prima facie most unlikely that the school would be storing vinegar in it. I went to investigate, surrounded by a crowd of excited children, and, sure enough, right at the bottom, was a bottle of vinegar.

For a moment, I admit, I was bewildered. All my expectations, which seemed so reasonable, were confounded and I could not work out any reason why the school would want to have vinegar around other than in the canteen, let alone hide it in the hall under a mountain of foam rubber balls and rings. But this was only a moment: I realised it was my bottle of vinegar, which must have fallen out of my bag thanks to the children rummaging around, and found its way to the bottom. This was a relief, or I might have had to concede that perhaps Trevor had been levitating after all.

Children Present and Absent

Messy Church at Swanvale Halt has been severely impacted by the pandemic, though we aren't entirely sure why this should be. Our numbers were steady right up to the very last gathering in March 2020, and now we are getting roughly half what we could expect before the Great Disruption. Some attending now are new, some are the families who were coming before, but there are just fewer of them. Saturday's theme of 'Holy Fire' chosen by the team was a bit of a challenge to try and illustrate in my worship time, but I gave it a go and I think everyone was happy even if I didn't end up actually lighting a fire. Today Poppy (rather appropriately) joined the serving team for Remembrance Sunday and her plus two children present with another family meant we had more minors present at an ordinary Sunday mass than for a long time.

We've long since given up trying to do any traditional Sunday-School-type children's work, having tried so many configurations over the years. On Wednesday my colleagues in the Deanery Chapter shared their woes in the same area. Even the big, well-organised evangelical Tophill finds that its numbers of children have halved since the pandemic, and its vacant children's and families worker position is one of thirty-seven across the diocese. At Caringfield Rector Rebecca can't find anyone to fill her similar job, despite offering to juggle it to fit applicants who won't work with primary school children, or secondary, or work this or that time. She's propping up all her groups herself by doing all the preparation and organisation: 'I have just enough to make these groups viable in the hope that eventually someone will take them on before I go under'. At Wormton they had a very flourishing Sunday School but now can't tell whether they will get a dozen children or two, and I didn't feel like warning them that's exactly what happened to us: after few weeks where the children themselves can't be sure any more than a couple will be there, they will stop wanting to come at all. It's no fun with just the two of you, or even three. Meanwhile what parents expect, my colleagues think, is the level of children's work they are used to from schools, and there are very, very few churches who can provide that. 'Our outreach has gone back by ten years', said the vicar of Wormton. I think we are moving into a new and very different world, and there will be no going back to the old one at all - but that nobody really knows what the new will be like.

Portrayed

Another in the occasional series 'portraits of the Rector by church children', courtesy, this time, of Polly and Warren. My hat is not, as a rule, completely like this, nor is my bicycle, but it's the first time I've ever seen the latter portrayed at all.

Analysing Mess

Dr Abacus would, I’m sure, warn all of us that we should pay attention to facts and figures and not our own vague impressions of things. Our recent Messy Church gatherings have been very modestly attended, and my recollection had been that this was quite a long-term phenomenon. But on actually tabulating the figures ahead of a staff team meeting where I wanted to mention it, I found that this wasn’t really the case. We’ve been holding Messy Church events since just before I arrived at Swanvale Halt in 2009 and in this graph you can see how widely attendance has varied: the top line shows the highest attendance of children in each year, the bottom one the lowest, and the one in the middle the mean attendance for all the gatherings in the year concerned. In 2011, 2016 and 2018 the bottom figure is less than half the top one, and it’s very hard to discern the reason why it varies quite so much; some Messy Churches were very sparse, though I think the one in May 2016 only attracted 16 children because I’d forgotten to tell anyone it was happening, so it was a marvel that we had a soul there at all.

The graph shows that the figures for the last few years before the pandemic were not, in fact, declining at all, but experienced the same ups and downs as the earlier period. The most recent peak in the middle of 2018 of 41 children wasn’t far off the all-time maximum of 45 in 2011. Bearing in mind that, counting all the church helpers, the child attenders are typically matched by the same number of adults, 80-90 people results in bedlam, and is really too much for our space and facilities. 70ish is a more comfortable result to aim at.

The latest few years’ results are of limited value: we only had two Messy Churches in 2020 before the first lockdown; two in 2021; and only three so far this year. But our extremely low current figures do seem to be a very clear effect of the pandemic. I think my impression that the decline was more long-term is related to my memory of other aspects of worship - that we’ve been unable to sustain a Sunday School for some years, or that attendance at the Family Service, which drew about a hundred people on a couple of occasions in 2014 and 2015, with 20-25 children, suddenly virtually halved in the course of two years, losing all its children in the process. Why this happened when nothing actually changed with the worship itself remains mysterious; and, in fact, while you can see that our Messy Church’s decline is related to the pandemic, the detail of that is also foggy. Nobody can give us a clear reason.

Normal Service

 

You don't often see pirates watching country dancers, let alone see them in your parish church, but this was the scene at the Infants School leavers' service on Tuesday, to which I have already alluded in connection to the temperatures that day. It was the first time since 2019 that we were able to gather in our accustomed manner to celebrate the Year 2s passing out and onwards to their junior schools, with all the excitement and emotion that usually entails. The altar was piled with named picture bibles to be given out to the children. In previous years I and the head teacher have done this, but for the sake of speed we had two teachers helping us this time, which did cut proceedings down a bit though we all had to pirouette around one another as we negotiated our way around the children crowded on the stage. The farther candle you can see in the photo has been broken and reset, hence its wonky appearance. It looks straight from the front!

Omissions and Interpretations

'Barbara isn't here this morning', Betty told me at Tuesday's mid-morning mass, 'She had a fall and didn't feel able to come. She's staying over at the Day Centre this morning.' 'Oh goodness, once we're done here I'll pop over and see her', I said. Of course I forgot, so tried to give Barbara a call yesterday morning. I had no idea she was quite so deaf: 'I can't hear, you'll have to write a letter', she hollered, and hung up. So I called round in the afternoon. 'I haven't fallen over, how did she get that idea? I'm fine,' she insisted, and certainly didn't look like a nonagenarian who'd taken a tumble. 

That afternoon a warm drizzle descended as we waited to begin a funeral at the church. The deceased was only 49: a gentleman who'd had a variety of vicissitudes in life, and keeled over taking something out of the oven. 'Can we hold on for Oscar?' asked the deceased's brother as a small knot of people loitered in the Day Centre car park, 'He's doing the eulogy'. 'That's fine', I said, having made sure the undertakers didn't mind, 'we can wait a little while'. Regular updates came by phone: Oscar was only coming from about half-a-dozen miles away but making heavy going of it. Finally he arrived: our organist's fingers weren't quite rubbed raw but he'd been twiddling inconsequentially for about twenty minutes by this stage. 'Have you got your words?' I asked Oscar, and was answered with a horrified look. 'I'm not saying anything', he stammered, looking at the brother for support, 'I mean, we talked about it, but it wasn't settled'. Ah. I think the brother pressed something into service that he was going to use at the wake.

It was Church Club that put things into perspective. The story was the Parable of the Lost Coin and the initial puzzle included a picture of the lady in Our Saviour's tale searching her house for the errant currency. Arnie pointed towards the big wooden door in the picture. 'You need a door like that to keep out bad people, like Zombies', he informed me, 'If they tried to get in, they might get splinters.'

At the Hazard of Life and Limb

Now that Il Rettore and Mrs Rettore have retired and moved to Hornington to be next to their daughter and her family, Swanvale Halt has become their church of choice. Of course it has, where else is there to go? Yesterday we baptised their grandchildren. One godparent uncle stood proxy for another who is in the United States, just like the Royals. Unlike them, said absent uncle watched the proceedings via a phone.

All was well until, in fact, the service was over. Then suddenly, as I was still standing next to the font and talking to one of the party a small girl pushed the Paschal Candle stand a bit too forcefully and propelled a spurt of molten wax off the top: I caught it just before it tipped more than a few degrees off the upright. She seemed pretty unaffected, to be fair, until her parents began trying to get it out of her hair and that was the cue for some very vocal objection on her part. The parents were fine about it, possibly being more used than I am to the mishaps small children can experience, but (as we discussed a few days ago) crying infants are never a good look.

The towering Paschal Candle does have to be there, doing its job of symbolising the light of Christ within the church, and ready to light the small candles given to the newly-baptised members of the Body of Christ; a fortnight ago I was baptising four cousins at once, so you can write for yourself the joke I told about the number of candles we needed. But ours could perhaps do with a more stable stand than the one provided for it by Reg (whose traumatic death long-term readers may remember). I always try to push it right against the font making it much harder to topple but Rick the verger hadn't done that. We could put it at the back of the church, and I could make a point of warning parents about the potential hazard. None of these expedients is foolproof, though, or childproof!

The Smoking Ruins

Last week Church Club was a surprise; this week, it was a disaster. I offer you an account only because it shows that I can be doing something for twelve years, and the church for about sixteen, and it can all still go haywire out of the blue. 

We arrived at school to be told that all the Year 1s were out at Sports Day at the local secondary school. We looked at the rain, the first significant precipitation hereabouts for weeks, and thought of the bedraggled six-year-olds making their way back like half-drowned rats. The school has only just re-started mixing year groups in its activities after the pandemic, so this term we only have two Year 2s in Church Club, meaning we started very quietly indeed with two unprecedentedly sensible little girls. 

Sure enough, about twenty minutes into the session the Year 1s began to return, damp and tired - but small children don't express their tiredness as you or I might, by having a nice lie-down for ten minutes, but in activity which is even more frantic and less focused than usual. Despite Sandra's scepticism I thought we would still be able to get through a truncated version of the story (the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders) and the craft (making a little card house), because we always have in the past. The children's inability to listen to anything was marked, as was, once we began the craft, their tendency to do anything but apply themselves to the task in hand. The limited time seemed magically to melt away and we were nearly at home time with me, Sandra and Jill desperately trying to help the children complete something to take home, while a couple of the girls made unfeasibly-elaborately decorated houses and the less-careful Year 1s, more satisfied with their efforts, wrested toys from the trays on the far side of the hall and tore around with them. It was bedlam. I rounded up such children as I could for a final prayer, not without, I fear, some ill-temper on my part as Aaron responded to my demand that the toys be replaced in their trays by getting more out. 

We returned the children to their parents, a few minutes late, and not without trauma. Bobby was in tears as it became horribly clear that he wouldn't complete his house to his satisfaction; Evie was inconsolable as her roof kept coming off. I was mentally composing an email of apology and not far off weeping myself. We looked at the wreckage, and got a broom to sweep up the bits.