An Elevation

Before yesterday I’d never hosted the SCP at Swanvale Halt church, and was surprisingly nervous about doing so. Part of my anxiety was over food. We have our lovely café just opposite the church, but that’s not open in the evening, and there’s nowhere else you can sit very close at hand: there’s a pizza takeway and a kebab shop in the next street, a Greek food van some distance away, and a couple of Indian restaurants of (to me) unknown quality in far-flung parts of the parish. But round the corner is a fish-and-chip emporium, so I took orders from my colleagues, let the friers know in advance, and once mass was over dashed out in the rain to collect it all. It worked out fine, even if I did confuse one attender with someone who never made it through the traffic and the deluge, and ended up with an extra bit of cod. We huddled at the back of the church to eat, hoping not too much of the aroma of grease and fish made it through to Slimming World in the church hall, and trying not to turn the discussion into a complete whingefest.

Fr Donald now has far too much to do at Lamford and so I have ascended to the rectorship of the Diocesan Chapter of SCP. My first step, apart from arranging the next gathering at the Cathedral in September, will probably be to try and learn who everyone is, and order an SCP badge which I don’t even have yet. Whether I can actually do anything practical remains to be seen.