'Church Preparation'

When I did my time-recording exercise last year there was a category of activity, at least in my detailed listing, I called 'church preparation'. As far as Saturday morning was concerned, it was this kind of thing.

- Said Morning Prayer. So far, so spiritual.

- Set out to clean cycle tyre marks left by teenagers from the floor, and discovered the floor polish I put in the vestry had gone. Over to the Co-Op to buy more.

- Cleaned cycle tyre marks from the floor.

- Hoovered children's corner of detritus left by teenagers.

- Put hoover back together as it'd been wrongly assembled.

- Reorganised the chairs as people seem incapable of leaving them where they are supposed to be. (They were all put out again in the evening by a concert using the church, so I put them back again before the 8am mass on Sunday).

- Took down old notices in the entrance. People are very keen to put them up, less so to take them down.

- Looked for bookmarks made for use during Morning and Evening Prayer and missing for some months. Found them in the office.

- Wrote up banns book.

- Wrote up service register.

- Tidied up vestry, although to be fair it's mainly my fault if it gets untidy in the first place.

- Changed dirty altar cloths.

It strikes me that other people could very easily and profitably be doing most of these things, and also that I am very, very bad at asking them to. Mind you, Il Rettore spent an entire winter mainly dealing with the boiler, and one of our churchwardens is a whiz at heating equipment, or I have told her she is.