Palm Sunday Scenes

On a gorgeous Palm Sunday morning we gathered at the Recreation Ground to process along the main street to church. The sky was a perfect, undifferentiated blue, so that the café opposite the church was busy with breakfasting customers who gawped rather satisfyingly as the Swanvale Halt parishioners made their way past singing ‘All glory, laud and honour’.

At Mass I was about to begin the prayer of consecration when a wasp plopped onto the altar in front of me. That could be distracting, I thought, I’ll be constantly looking at it to see what it’s doing. So I popped a ciborium lid on it until I could dispose of it, which I did as soon as communion was over, slipping a bit of paper under it and taking it out of the church. Apparently some people assumed it was an obscure liturgical action specific to the day.

At noon a baptism, with three little girls handing me the necessary kit from the table – shell, towel, oil, candles. Amazingly once they’d told me their names I managed to remember.

In the evening I took a member of the congregation being confirmed to a service at a modern church building in Woking. The font amazed: a wee glass bowl supported by three pillars (one steel, two wood, for some unknown reason) set into concrete feet below a strange boxy structure. The whole thing reminded me subliminally of Robbie the Robot. The communion bread came in the form of rolls which resulted in bits spraying everywhere: the vicar of a neighbouring church to Swanvale Halt hissed to me ‘Our Lord is all over the carpet’. I waited until the throng left for cake and coffee, borrowed a dustpan and brush, and swept Him up. There wasn’t as much left as there should have been, trodden, I assume, and taken elsewhere on people’s shoes. I took the remnants home and buried them in the garden.

And a post-Palm Sunday scene: I went to the Cathedral to make my confession, and found the duty canon, the vergers and volunteers all sat on the grass outside because the refurbishment works had closed the building due to ‘unacceptably low air quality’. And that was before I’d even started.