Year's End

By mid-day on Christmas Eve, the church and the outbuildings were starting to get chilly. Still warmer than my house, but not very warm. This was because there was no heating, and that in turn was because the gas had been turned off on Saturday evening. The carbon-monoxide alarm in the kitchen had sounded. It had sounded on the Thursday evening (the 18th), but I didn’t learn about this until the hirers told me they’d taken the alarm off the wall, wrapped it in a towel and put it in a drawer so it didn’t disturb the concert taking place in the church. By that stage nobody needed actually to go in the kitchen so I decided to leave it until Friday morning. I wasn’t even sure what to do; I hadn’t realised there is a company that maintains the gas network and it’s them you call when this kind of thing happens. Our boiler engineers told me on Friday to run the heating system and see if it happened again; it didn’t, so I left it. Until Saturday, when it happened again, and this time there was no avoiding action. I thought it might be due to one of the stove’s gas rings that seemed to be misbehaving. 

So on Christmas Eve, about noon, the engineers arrived, spent quite a while investigating, and concluded – wonder of wonders – that the original alarm was faulty. They put up a new one, turned the gas back on, and left with the plea that we not use the hob anyway as the ventilation was insufficient and it should never have been fitted. But at least we had heat. 

At least we had heat – especially welcome when ten or so souls turned up half an hour early for the Crib Service because the wrong time had been on the church website and they hadn’t checked (why would they?) since it was put right. This year the Cribbage was so full that I, the server, and the children bringing up the crib figures could barely move around: I think somewhat over 300 people were present. Attendance at the other Christmas services was similar to last year, but that was remarkable, easily the highest we have had since we last had donkeys attending many years ago. My final seasonal duty, as usual, was at Smallham Chapel where the carol service went beautifully smoothly including our customary visit to the barn to sing a carol to the nonplussed sheep. 

And this week I am off. Yesterday I was in Salisbury having not looked properly round the cathedral for many years. There are two relatively modern images of St Catherine, one on the reredos in the chapel of St Martin, and one on an altar frontal. I also add one from the Ashwellthorpe Triptych, seen by friends at Norwich Castle Museum. Happy New Year all!

Christmas 2024 ...

... it would be easier to say, was the same as nearly every year, except there are always variations on a theme. Every event was better attended than in 2023, in fact better than for several years. The Crib Service has never been quite the same since the tragic loss of our friendly donkeys (don't worry - it was only tragic for us, nothing malign befell them), but this time we were standing-room only which was very gratifying. The slightly quieter and more intimate model of Midnight Mass suited the fifty-plus attenders, and on Christmas Day itself - which I had been concerned was dying off - we numbered 14 at the Missa Ad Gallicantu and over 80 later on. This would have been fairly unremarkable about twenty years ago, but it's quite pleasing to experience now in these dark days. 

This is especially so because I'd been feeling a little ground down earlier on. Not for the first time, the usefulness of the Office struck me: its quiet concentration on texts contrasts with all the whizz and bang around it, and allows clergy especially, I think, to focus on what the season means. There is a deep wisdom in arranging that the transition from Advent to Christmas should happen with this undemonstrative liturgy - undemonstrative even if you belong to a religious community such as a cathedral celebrating it as Evensong, and all the more so a parish priest on their own like me. You're not really going to be nourished anywhere else.

Outside the church after the Crib Service I noticed Robert and a group of other fellows whose children have passed through the church (and I fear out of it, but such is life) together. The grown-ups still come to this service even if the children are elsewhere. And the chaps, at least, have for years marked the occasion by downing a shot of Croft Original supplied by a hip flask Robert is charged with carrying. I've never noticed this quaint custom before. Then at the midnight I greeted one young man on his way out - it was Iain, who ten years or so ago belonged to one iteration of the fluctuating group of youngsters who used to cause havoc in and around the church. I think he may have had a young woman with him. But I don't mind what brings them in!

Picture from Smallham Chapel as we sing to the sheep. 

Drop Down O Heavens

According to my entries - which are the only entries - in the service register at Smallham Chapel, numbers at the annual Christmas service were about 30 for the last couple of post-pandemic years, but I thought there were about 50 people this time, including a variety of children. I recognised some faces, including that of Clarice who used to organise the event and who moved to a care home last year, brought along in her wheelchair, but as always there are new souls. For the first time ever, there was a deluge just as we left the church to head down to sing to the sheep, and so we were allowed into the barn to shelter (very Biblical). In this photo it looks as though we are advancing menacingly on the unfortunate beasts, but that's just the distorted perspective of the camera. Honest. The pompom on my biretta will never be quite the same.

Christmas 2023

It was pretty similar to last year in terms of numbers, the Cribbage and Midnight very much the same, 8am a bit down, and 10am a bit up. The fact that it was one of those years when the Fourth Sunday of Advent magically transforms into Christmas Eve at mid-day didn't seem to make that much of a difference to anyone except me and the team of souls who staff the services, who were spread a bit thin between six services, not to mention Carols by Candlelight last Friday night. 

After last year's experiences, I rethought the Midnight: rather than attempt a grandeur we can't manage, we went for intimacy instead, abandoning the old high altar, not having anyone in the choir (two choristers were present but sat in the congregation), and having subdued lighting and lots of candles. I was just thinking that for the first time I could remember the service had gone without any mishap at all when Margaret who was one of the eucharistic ministers knocked one of my huge pillar candles over and sent wax spinning over the dais the altar sits on. At least it hadn't been Tim the crucifer as, in his polyester robe (we still use the ones a churchwarden made in 1975), he would have gone up like a candle himself. 

On Christmas Day I attended the Churches Together Christmas Lunch, ending up giving three of the guests a lift after various people went down with a norovirus. I ended up sitting with a Nigerian gentleman, a woman from Sierra Leone and her small daughter, and a Sri Lankan nurse working in one of the local care homes. Somehow we began talking about Reformation history, and it was quite agreeable to explain about Lady Jane Grey and Henry VIII's wives to people who wouldn't have been able to pick me up on the bits I'd forgotten about. They still knew more about the history of the British monarchy than I do about those of West Africa or Ceylon, though. They had no idea about the UK Christmas tradition of the monarch's speech. The Lunch organisers had some trouble with the audiovisuals and so we ended up watching Chucky Boy on the TV while his words were played through a mic off someone's phone, with a delay of about 3 seconds which was most disconcerting.

Down in Dorset for Boxing Day, I, my sister and elder niece went for a little walk over Turbary Common, that charismatic landscape of my childhood. As I and Lady Arlen discovered last year, there are cows there now, and they were there today. I can't tell you how odd it is to see these bovine presences so close to a very suburban environment I am very familiar with.

Real Presence

The approach of Christmas is about concerts and nativities, but it's also about taking communion to members of the Church who won't be able to make it any time over the season itself. It's strange that this is more a Thing in some parishes than others; I once spoke to a priest who looked after two rural Oxfordshire parishes with completely different traditions, the one where there were lots of home communicants, and the other where they assumed that being brought the Sacrament in their own surroundings was a certain prelude to death. At his training parish in the mid-1980s, Il Rettore was once charged with taking communion to 14 people in one day, and surviving that without derangement was quite an achievement. Here in Swanvale Halt, my illustrious 1970s predecessor Fr Edward introduced the Roman Catholic practice of communion being taken to home communicants by lay ministers directly after the Sunday mass, an ideal long since gone by the wayside, and now it's almost invariably me visiting a fluctuating group of souls. 

So yesterday found me visiting two homes with two people in each, and today I've seen five more in four visits. Tomorrow I'll call on Sarah who has just been discharged from hospital. It's helped me feel that I've been doing something worthwhile on a day which began with looking for my keys and grappling with an unco-operative photocopier. I suppose delivering Lemsip tablets to Mad Trevor also counts as 'worthwhile', though his insistence that he has flu is undermined by the fact that he insists it every other week. 

Seven home communions over three days isn't twice that in one, and I don't know how I'd react to that: I probably wouldn't want to do it every week, either. But curiously it doesn't seem wearying (any more than I already was weary) or tedious. Each encounter, which has exactly the same shape, feels different. It involves a different person or persons in specific surroundings, each with a special history of their own that they bring to that moment. Tomorrow we begin the great celebration of the Incarnation, so the presence of the Christ in each unique individual is part of the point. The Sacrament brings him together with them. This is the best way I can imagine of making it real.

Christmas Revival

As Christmas approaches there is often a spate of journalistic comment about religion that doesn’t necessarily bear on the season, but on the state of Christianity as a whole. Dr Abacus recently called the attention of myself and other clergy he knows to a piece for the FT by Camilla Cavendish, about the benefits of religious observance, while in The Scotsman Tory leader in Scotland Murdo Fraser tilts at the long-toppled windmill of Dr Richard Dawkins to allege ‘early signs of a Christian revival’ in the UK. I thought both were a bit questionable. Baroness Cavendish describes herself as an unbeliever but prescribes religion for personal wellbeing, while Mr Fraser, while also declaring Christianity’s utility in answering what he reports as Nicky Gumbel’s summary of human needs – ‘to be loved, to have a purpose, to belong’ – adds to them its role in underpinning 'Western values', basically roping God into culture-war discourse. His description of Christianity’s ‘inspiring message of hope and light’ rings every bit as hollow and unconvincing as you might predict. I’d never dream of using arguments like this. The first amounts to ‘come to church and you might feel a bit better’, while the second translates as ‘come to church and together we can stop the Muslims’. Never satisfied, me.

Meanwhile over on Radio 4 we have a somewhat more rewarding and intellectually hard-edged diatribe from Will Self:

It’s precisely in order to hear [these ultimate questions] posed that I attend church services of all denominations, and ones in mosques, ashrams, gudwaras, and synagogues as well. Other non-believers may go for aesthetic reasons, and especially at this time of year, for a live enactment of some Christmassy reverie; I go, as I say, to test the mettle of my own understanding of my self, and its relation to others and the world, and for this to work for me, I require a sermon! Often, I’ll find the sermon in the established churches so woefully bad I have to restrain myself from heckling. It’s not just a matter of banal popular cultural references, it’s the reduction of the majesty and awe that should be associated with this extraordinary belief system to a kind of weak humanist jus.

… which all acts as some sort of cautionary warning as I compose the five sermons I will preach across Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, just in case someone like Will Self is there, ‘believing that any sermon I hear could be the one that triggers some profound conversion experience’. At least he was mildly approving, despite one throwaway reference to Nigel Farage, of what he heard ‘on Advent Sunday as I sat with about forty others in the exquisitely beautiful St Jude’s-on-the-Hill’, preached by, as it turns out, Revd Emily Kolltveit, former Mediaeval Baebe and leader of symphonic-metal band Pythia before she caught religion. I wonder what sermon got to her.

Taking Centre Stage

'Come to the Year Two nativity' advised the head teacher at the Infants School, 'They're more likely to have got it together'. And so they had. I spotted all the attenders at our after-school club, including Billie ('girl Billie' as she points out when there might be confusion) who was the most animated star - a starring star, not just the stellar chorus - I've ever seen; and Miriam, the oldest child in the school who sometimes looks remarkably out-of-place when stood against some of her tinier classmates, and who carried off the Angel Gabriel with RADA applomb. It was, we all agreed, the best show you'll see this Christmas.

I can remember nothing of the nativity plays of my own childhood. In contrast to the situation now, when school events are virtually illuminated by the light of phones held aloft by parents recording the occasion,  in our own family archive there are just three relevant images, all from the same event in 1975. I'm invisible in every one, and in fact not much can be seen at all, the only identifiable person being the teacher whose name I forget and who looked a bit like Princess Anne. That initial failure was probably why my mum didn't bother trying to take photographs again. I rather envy Billie, Miriam and the others their apparently easy enjoyment of taking the limelight and dancing about the stage: certainly by the time my memories really begin in junior school I was so atrociously self-conscious any movement was torment. The role I was best suited for was the Magic Mirror in a production of Snow White when I could read my lines completely unseen behind a cardboard screen!

No Use Crying

Never was anything so rightly characterised as a mixture of triumph and disaster as Christmas 2022 at Swanvale Halt. The chief instance of the first was the Crib Service, the first time we have followed the old pattern since 2019. I say 'the old pattern', but in fact this was the pattern devised by former curate Marion which we'd only actually done once anyway, and which I cobbled together from her notes. The keynote is the children bringing up the crib figures - nice, robust wooden ones - to form the crib scene. The children were led by Poppy with robe and candle, and that all went pretty swimmingly with a couple of hundred souls in church. But the Midnight - the Midnight was another matter. Now I have always regarded the Midnight Mass as one of the high points of the liturgical year and have worked to set it as a marker of proper Catholic practice, so I already feel a bit pressurised to get it right, not least because there are always going to be people there making an occasional, or even once-a-year visit to church. It's important. This year the choir could muster only two voices, thanks to illness and absences, and we had as organist Corinne who has only just begun playing again after a long gap. She wasn't the most confident of presences and the music was hesitant and a bit inconsistent. There were very few people there anyway - no more than 40 - and I was on edge enough by the time we got to the high altar for communion. Then I noticed Gordon the head server had managed to lose the new charcoal from the thurible, and it lay smoking on the Victorian tiles. The thing now only contained a charcoal that had long gone out, and so though I went through the motions of putting incense in it I knew it wouldn't burn. The altar itself was an inch or two too far towards the wall meaning it was awkward to lean over. And then, somehow, unaccountably, I managed to spill the wine - a big, significant spillage of already-consecrated fluid. I hadn't knocked anything, or caught my sleeve or anything like that: instead it felt as though something unseen had knocked my arm (demons, presumably). It took some time to recover. The tiny miracle was that, although I'd registered to my horror that there was no plastic sheet under the altarcloth and on top of the superfrontal, and although the cloth was soaked in wine, we discovered at the end of the service that none had gone through to the superfrontal. Washing winey linens is one thing; getting consecrated wine out of a piece of kit you can't wash is another. So I went home a little less horrorstruck and shakey, and clutching an armful of linens. 

It all makes me reflect that I may have to retreat from my ideal of how the Midnight works. We seem not to have the resources to run an event on the Lamford pattern, or even how we did it at Goremead that one year I was there. It needs a confident musical lead and if we can't find that, and have to scrape around to find servers and singers, we need to rethink.

The Christmas Day services were fine, thankfully!

And Just the Wrong Time of Year for a Journey

Oh dear, I realise that I have ascribed the name ‘Fr Donald’ to both the vicar of Elmham who runs the local bit of the SCP and my retired hospital chaplain colleague locally. Well, there is little to be done now and I can’t think of an alternative name for the time being and so will just say it was Fr Donald of Elmham who posted on LiberFaciorum yesterday about everything that was happening in the church there this week running up to Christmas. He does it because he loves it, he says.

As you know I have never felt that in the same way! The same period here at Swanvale Halt is very similar, though we will only have the one Crib Service today because the church is quite a bit larger than Elmham’s. This first relatively normal Christmas since 2019 is, as they always tend to be, a dragged-out, draining business, essentially three weeks of the same thing over and over again. I find myself even more than usual clinging on to the recitation of the Office which has doggedly remained in apocalyptic Advent mode even while the rest of the world is singing Hark the Herald. That provides some spiritual balance, it seems, as I try to wrap my vocal chords around the Great O Antiphons. Even those seem to have begun a long time ago, when it was only last Saturday!

This morning my Bible reading was the very last bit of the Gospel of St John, and the phrase that leapt to my attention was Jesus’s instruction to Peter, ‘feed my sheep’. Regardless of what I might be experiencing, and regardless of how remote any of the Christmas activities – the concerts, the turning-on of lights, and so on – might seem to be from the kind of spiritual activity that stands a chance of changing souls, they are all, in varying degrees, food for the sheep and therefore vitally part of what I am supposed to be doing. Weak as I am, I might find a lot of what I do burdensome, even when there are moments of joy and the conviction that the work is right and what I am called to. Perhaps the Lord felt the same. If misery was all I felt, I might be compelled to consider whether I should carry on doing it; but there is still the fundamental sense of rightness, surprisingly often love pokes through the surface, and ultimately I rest on the fact that it is a command: ‘feed my sheep’.

After all, this is what Jesus does, and what we are all called to take part in. I found myself thinking in my prayer time this morning that he who is the Bread of Heaven is laid where the animals feed. In 2000 years of meditation on this mystery I can’t imagine nobody has had this thought before, but I can’t remember anyone mentioning it. It was a bit thunderstriking, terrible and glorious. That's the business we are in. Happy Christmas! 

Season's Greetings

On my way back from the Air Cadets on Tuesday I saw these on a garage door. Now of course my Christmas tree is bedecked with bats and spiders, but I hadn't expected them anywhere else. I'm sure they are not left over from Halloween or I would have spotted them before. But compliments of the season to those responsible, anyway.

Renewal

'I am shocked that you have had a carol service rather than watching the football as the Church of England ordered us to,' said S.D. who I am due to see tomorrow depending on the trains. I pointed out that not only did we have a carol service at Swanvale Halt, but I'd also led the one for the local uniformed groups in the huge public school chapel nearby just as the football was due to start: 'This is obviously the way forward,' said S.D., 'order people not to come to church, and they will'.

'A friend came to visit yesterday and was describing how he and his family decided to go to church last Christmas,' he went on. 'There was a new vicar. Her first words were "We're going to start the service by singing Happy Birthday to Jesus, and I've brought my guitar". They all came out saying they were never going to that church again. So even when people do come to church, we have all these fun new ways of making sure they never, ever come back.'

Illuminations

I am late posting about the turning-on of the Swanvale Halt Christmas Lights last Friday - considerably and satisfying into December, unlike most places! - for which I was drafted in to say a few words. In fact it was all on the brink of disaster when Santa Claus drew into view about ten minutes early and all the children bundled in his direction. The Mayor and the Town Council Community Services Officer wondered how they would ever get their attention back, but in the end I even had time to fit in a three-minute homily (which, for reasons best left obscure, majored on Kate Bush) before the lights were switched on. Actually, as the Town Clerk admitted to me, it's only the lights on the Day Centre and adjoining tree that are switched on, while most of them are on timers. Meanwhile, in the church, we were hosting music exams for the Royal School of Music. One parent came out of the building with her child examinee only to find that, since she'd left her car (against all advice) in the Day Centre car park, it was now boxed in by a couple of hundred children and Father Christmas on an illuminated sleigh. 

Festive

It has been virtually a rerun of last year, almost to the worshipper - well, a different mixture of them, but amounting to the same numbers. The three mini-crib services on Christmas Eve, the curtailed midnight, 8am and 10am, took place without incident, and without a great many souls there either. But this year we have the added cruelty that Boxing Day is a Sunday. Who will turn up tomorrow to listen to my further attempts to squeeze some vaguely interesting thoughts out of the readings, I can't imagine. It has been wet and grey: I had to turn the lights on in the middle of the afternoon, and I don't mean the Christmas Tree lights. But we have survived (one more daily Lateral Flow Test to go and then I'll revert to twice-weekly again) and next year must surely be an improvement. Mustn't it?

Merry Christmas all!

A Christmas Undertaking

Sixteen years into my ministry, and eleven into my incumbency, and I have only just recognised a peculiar feature of parish life: the link between undertakers and Christmas trees. Our local undertakers are Galliards, who like many of their breed have been around for donkeys' years. I've always got on well with them: they're informative and co-operative, and don't simply arrange dates for funerals and then check whether I can do them afterwards. And they've always provided the church with a Christmas tree.

I had always thought of this as a local arrangement but suddenly became aware that it isn't. The South Yorkshire church currently served by my old vicar from High Wycombe, Fr Barkley, also has a Christmas tree provided by the undertaker's, and it isn't the only one. How has this come about? The companies don't get much publicity out of it (I decided the time had come to put a photo of our tree on Facebook, as much to promote the church as Galliards), and the connection isn't intuitive. The only thing I can think of is that undertaking often grew out of allied trades: carpenters, for instance, made coffins and branched out into arranging funerals, so there was a link with wood, trees, and Christmas decorations.

In fact our tree was a little dumpy and wonky this year: I had to put it on a little table to bring it up to most people's eye level. Rick the verger and Andy from the congregation wedged it level and draped it with gaudy tat so it looks presentable. I also made sure I photographed it from a clever angle. Not angel.

(As well as the church Christmas tree, Fr Barkley used to have a personal one delivered to the Rectory on behalf of the Lord of the Manor, along with a brace of pheasants. Sadly that custom no longer pertains. As the good Father says, "times is 'ard".

Last Hurrah

'Very bold!' cried Edward from the congregation who was sat on the station platform having coffee with Rick the verger and Rena, another regular at the church. He was referring to the fact that I was catching the train to go and see S.D. for the first time in a long time, and possibly the last for a bit, too. Earlier that morning I'd been to the Park-and-Ride near Guildford to have my booster vaccination - which probably shouldn't be called that now, but simply an additional vaccination. I'd been booked in for the third inoculation at the end of the month, but my mother wanted me to get it sooner. I'd looked for a walk-in centre, but wasn't overly bothered until Professor Abacus, who should know, emailed me to say I should get it done as soon as I possibly could. Really. I was going to go to Kingston, until Sandra and Clarice in the church office pointed me to the Park-and-Ride which isn't listed publicly as a walk-in centre, but is. I called: no bookings until after Christmas, I was told at first, but then the nice lady spotted a cancellation early the following day, so I went along and waltzed past the poor souls queuing for their walk-in jab, waiting for just a little while before I was speared and free to go.

By the New Year the whole population will have been infected, says the BBC, or various scientific sages through it. We are not shutting up shop at the church unless we are told to by the Lawful Authorities, but I am anticipating lots of people falling by the wayside and many souls deciding they will prioritise, if they must, family gatherings rather than worship. In fact some have already told me this is what they will do. My chief problem is what happens if I fall victim myself: anything else I can absorb, short of playing the organ (and I can lead carols a capella if need be). If I do, Christmas at Swanvale Halt will be reduced to one mass on Christmas Day and the funeral I am booked to do on the 30th, and I have asked for help with those. I suppose I really need a Plan C as well as B.

S.D. asked me a couple of probing questions but proffered no advice. He was most put out by attending Mass for the Immaculate Conception at St Mary's Bourne Street the other day, and finding that His Grace of Chichester, presiding, chose only to use one mitre rather than the mitra simplex and the mitra preciosa to which such an occasion entitled him. 'He now looks like Pius XII in the last stages of his life', he offered.

Illuminati

 

There were Christmas lights in Swanvale Halt last year, but no ceremonial turning-on; we did it this year! Singing, Father Christmas, the Mayor of Hornington (and a number of former Mayors) and refreshments from the Day Centre and the café over the road. In fact this photo comes from 2019, but that doesn't matter. 

The Town Council Communities Officer, Sindy, asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would be willing to be involved again and apologised for the late notice - I said that was far from late notice in my experience. So, in between the singing group and the Mayor counting down, I spoke for precisely three minutes about how end-of-year celebrations in whatever religion or culture were all about marking the fact that we'd made it and that's sometimes all we can manage, so well done all of you, said a quick prayer and blessing and then handed over to the Mayor for the great illumination. We never used to have our own lights in Swanvale Halt: they first went up as an extra community initiative seven years ago and have become quite a feature.

There's no real reason why the parish priest should be involved in the turning-on of the Christmas lights in these secular times. I suppose it represents the dim surviving sense that the continuity the church stands for is a thread that runs through the whole community. The fact that I'm asked to take part is, I think, a huge privilege and one I made a point of thanking Sindy for. 

Christmas Redux

In years to come we will recall the expedients to which we were driven in order to maintain the life of God's people and the connection with Him of the community more widely. I will certainly remember sitting at our 'Mini-Crib Services' on Christmas Eve, juggling the visual and audio input and my aging laptop and iPod providing them. I may even remember how Dennis from the congregation photographed me and managed to give me a very Bacchanalian crown of Advent greenery.

Through By the Skin of Our Teeth

My first Christmas in Swanvale Halt was a maelstrom in which I felt I had no idea what was happening, when of course I did. The low point came two-thirds of the way into the Churches Together Christmas Lunch when I had to shut myself in a toilet for ten minutes to regain the composure to carry on talking to people. Over subsequent years I got control of the whole process and paced events so that if anything did go wrong there was at least the space to put it right.

The trouble with Christmas 2020 is that, in that respect if no other, it felt like lurching back to 2009. Many things are not happening, but they are largely things like concerts and carol services which I must attend but which don't actually require that much input; the things which are happening are largely down to me. I was once again surrounded by a whirlpool of events whose outcome was completely uncertain.

For instance: our biggest service of the year, the Crib Service, can't happen so I thought we would have three mini-Crib Services instead, all very low-key and quiet. Low-key they may have been but the visuals were all run off my antique laptop and through an even older projector, and the music came out of my iPod (and iPod! imagine that), wired into the sound system. Normally the Crib Service is devised by a planning group and I and Marion usually come on to lead, or preach, or both; this year it was all down to me, the tech, and a lot of candles. Meanwhile two audio services had to be put together and the paper versions delivered to those who have no internet access, and communion taken to housebound parishioners who felt confident enough to receive it. There was just enough time to get it all done, provided nothing went wrong, and nothing, praise God, did.

Another element was that everyone had to book in for the services, lists had to be compiled, and seating plans worked out. In the end I needn't have bothered, as every service apart from the 8am on Christmas Day had gaps where people had signed up but not turned up. I was a bit furious at first after putting in so much effort and anxiety assembling the services, but as well as people simply forgetting to come which applied in a couple of cases, other absences arose from positive COVID tests, tests being awaited, nerves hitting in, and virus rampant in a child's year at school. It became clear as Christmas Eve wore on how the pandemic is cutting a swathe through our outlying clientele at the moment: ironically, I think elderly people living on their own are possibly less affected than anyone else, or so it seems as any rate. 

How glorious it will be for this all to be past! The whole area is now in Tier Four so I had to zoom (but not Zoom) down to Dorset to see my family on Christmas Day afternoon, and hand over my niece's goldfish (at arm's length, obviously), which I nervously transported ninety-odd miles in a bag of water in a bucket. I photographed the sunset behind the towers of Wimborne Minster, the last view I will have of Dorset for quite some time to come.

Christmas 2019

As usual, the carol service at Smallham (altar pictured left) concludes my Christmas duties. The little chapel was packed again this year. As for Swanvale Halt church itself, the Crib Service recovered from its noticeable decline in numbers in 2018, and every seat was occupied although it was my turn to lead the children with the wooden crib figures up towards the crib, and for some reason I forgot where 'the south aisle' was. The Midnight was a bit down, as was the 8am on Christmas Day, but the 10am was up. None of this really means that much, on its own!

I am getting quite bored with doing the Christmas Day 8am according to the Prayer Book: all that business of praying repeatedly for the Queen and Humbly Beseeching Thee over and over again is starting to grate a bit. I don't think any tears would be wept if I abandoned it as it was my choice to start it. This year a young couple arrived who I instantly and accurately guessed were Roman Catholics who'd turned up early for their 8.45am mass. They didn't know what was going on.

But that's not as boring as keeping the church locked outside service times this Christmas. The troublesome youngsters have been orbiting around constantly, when they should have been tucked up in bed sucking their thumbs and wondering what Father Christmas was going to bring them, and I didn't feel as though I could risk the security of the Crib; justifiably, I think, as the ecumenical Crib which has stood unmolested in Hornington High Street for twenty years was smashed one night. I loathe locking the church against the world outside, but I hope next year we will be back to normal. 

And In Other News

As the wind and rain raged around Swanvale Halt church yesterday, the old stones rang to the songs and dances of the Infant School Christmas Production, done this year, for the second time, in two separate chunks for Reception year children and the rest. 'A logistical triumph', I described it in my introduction to the later event, and so it was. This year, the headmistress decreed that the children's costumes should not include tinsel or cotton wool, thus reducing the clearing-up quite considerably. Umbrellas were a necessary defence in the face of the inclement conditions outside (though they are not sure against everything).