The Storm Past

The parish, and indeed the whole area, awoke on Christmas Day to another power cut, apparently due to a tree falling onto power cables about ten miles away. This wasn't as serious, as far as the church services were concerned, as it would have been on the evening of Christmas Eve; we lit the Lady Chapel with candles for the handful of souls who attended the 8am service, and gave people hand-held candles for the 10am (not that there was a huge number of them), and enjoyed the playing of the piano rather than the organ. It was fine.

Of more interest was whether the traditional Christmas Day lunch for those who would otherwise be on their own at the Baptist Church in Hornington would go ahead. It did, so imagine access to gas ovens must have been possible. The lunch usually concludes with the Queen's Speech, for which the electricity came back on again at 2.20pm, thus demonstrating once again the hidden power of the Monarchy even in our democratic age.

Thankfully I was able to scoot out before that. However by then I had a headache so penetrating I was wincing and biting my lip on my way back to the car. I put it down to tension, but several cups of coffee at a friend's house back in Lamford demonstrated it was mainly down to lack of caffeine ingested over the last couple of days. On Boxing Day, therefore, I did what I'd been threatening to do for ages, and bought a little camping stove so that, in the event of future power cuts and for the preservation of my health and temper and the spiritual wellbeing of others too, I can still have tea.