No Use Crying

Marion the curate felt thoroughly rough on Sunday morning, having clearly caught The Cold from her son and husband. 'Could you preside?' she asked, so I did, while she croaked and sniffed through the deacon's role. It was the third of my year-long(!) series of catechetical sermons, in which I was talking about the creeds; after the service we were due to celebrate the 95th birthday of a member of the congregation, and finally I was doing a baptism at noon. 

At Communion I reached across the altar to rearrange the vessels to a more convenient configuration and managed to knock over one of the chalices: wine everywhere. I told everyone to sit down while I and the servers removed everything from the altar, fetched clean linens and then carried on (thankfully this happened before anything had been consecrated - otherwise it would all have been more complicated). During Communion Janet, who admitted to coming to church without having had breakfast (which in principle of course you should do, though I think if you are, like Janet, an elderly lady with balance problems and mental health issues, you should probably be excused fasting), dropped her Host and in trying to pick it up broke it into pieces, which I gathered up and ate once she'd finished treading on them. 'Thank you for the service,' Andrew, who works for a big national construction firm, said to me afterwards; 'it was enlightening in so many ways.'

I stumbled and tripped my way through both birthday and baptism; the latter was of an adult so I had to reorganise what I'd usually say on such occasions and with my brain only partially functioning I didn't do it very convincingly. Coming up the hill I saw an ambulance driving off, never a sight one welcomes. Going a little further a car went past me, and on finding myself hailed, I turned back to discover it stopped and Peter and Anna, two young teachers who are members of the congregation, attracting my attention. It turned out that the ambulance contained Marion, who had fallen over on the way up the hill, and her son, whisking them both off to hospital. 

Peter and Anna took me to hospital, and back home when it was clear that Marion probably had nothing more serious than a cracked rib, and an hour or so later I went back again to check the situation. Peter and Anna had gone and I took Marion and son back home when she was discharged (with nothing more radical than Ibuprofen, I was surprised to find). Marion's husband got home from a school sailing weekend he was leading in Portsmouth in time to take their son to a concert he was singing at in Guildford (what complex lives we lead, not enough redundancy in the system). 

Did you get all that? I'll be asking questions.