Stuff without Story

Lots of things have been going on but I'm not sure how interesting any of them are. I remember two things last week. On Thursday evening I lost my temper with Mad Trevor who called me in the evening after having spoken to me twice during the day (one occasion a half-hour consultation in which I refused to hear his confession after I decided I wouldn't talk to him about religious things any more). He was in an awful state having seen 'a spirit' in the form of a colour 'moving into him' earlier in the day and was now convinced he was 'falling into darkness' and being possessed by Satan. In the day he'd told me God was angry with me for not being friends with him, and that he would 'despise me in heaven'. I snapped, and found myself shouting at Satan to get out. 'It's gone, it's gone' he said. Of course I'd shocked him and given him something else to think about. At least it seems very clear his manifestations are to do with guilt about a particular issue - he's had a long while doing a lot better, and suddenly the delusions surged up again because I wouldn't hear his confession earlier in the day. The whole thing has been absolutely hateful. I feel very much ashamed for losing my temper, but as Dr Bones assured me Trevor is so mad probably nothing I say can do that much harm. I wonder how much he takes in.

A couple of days before I was about to take the weekday service and discovered my clean whites (alb, amice and girdle) were at home, so I had to borrow one of the cassock-albs from the corner of the vestry used by the Roman Catholic congregation who borrow Swanvale Halt church for their Mass on a Sunday morning. They were filthy. All the adult servers' albs had great black and brown splotches of God-knows-what down the side. The only one that was acceptable was the priest's, and that was grubby to say the least. The RCs get significantly more people than we do on a Sunday and I often wonder what it is that keeps them going. Father Brendan is delightful, but he should have retired ten years ago and I wonder he doesn't fall over half the time. The general sloppiness is atrocious. What's the secret? They're not all Irish.