Fruits of the Spirit

It was the morning of the Village Show and, despite the extraordinarily unfavourable growing conditions in recent months, some dogged local allotment holders and gardeners were turning up to drop off their entries. Ella the former Rainbows group leader was guarding the car park beside the church (which we use on sufferance of our neighbours) and was accosted by Lara who'd been for a run. Lara is still just about a parent-governor at the Infants School and Ella was a parent more years ago than she might prefer to recall. It was a lovely community occasion, they agreed, and from that moved on to a discussion about how communities like Swanvale Halt function. There are economic elements - the few remaining businesses, especially the café and the small supermarket - and social ones, including the Infants School itself. There's a secular primary school further away from the village centre, but from our point of view, and that of people with at least some faith such as Ella and Lara, the Infants School links into the church, bringing one into the other. The children may not grow up with any particular degree of faith, but they will have had some exposure to the deposit of stories and images that make Christianity up. It, and the building constructed to express them, will be something they have in common even if the theology that makes it more than that isn't something they buy into very much. 

That doesn't sound a lot. In fact it is very nebulous and unmeasurable and impossible to capture in Church of England mission statistics. But I would argue (as I think I mightn't have done once upon a time) that it is not nothing, especially in an age when there is little else that brings communities together. Remove it, and you would miss it. You can attempt to construct ways of communities expressing their solidarity and identity and they always seem hollow. I'm reminded of the various well-meaning efforts of humanist groups to come up with some sort of alternative to 'church' that functions in the same way as 'church': they eventually seem to devolve down to stand-up comedy and singing 'Sweet Caroline', and fizzle out. It is as if, to express our common humanity, we need to be committed, however fuzzily, to something more than our common humanity. Funny that.

The Two Cultures?

In the parish there are three secular, non-Church schools in addition to our Church infants school. On Monday the all-through primary school sent a class to the church to look at art, which inevitably involved some discussion of the purpose of that art (because it's a church); on Thursday I was in the other primary school doing an assembly on their value of the term, 'Forgiveness', which was of course Christian in content; and this Wednesday I'll be in the secondary school delivering a seasonal assembly on Christmas. I know that secular-minded people would prefer there was no contact between State schools and religion at all, but what I can say is that, certainly in sunny Surrey, there is no marginalisation of Christian thinking or institutions in the way the new Christian Nationalist right would have you believe. Oh, and last week I did a reflection at the turning-on of the Swanvale Halt Christmas lights. All of these are secular settings and occasions and to be asked to participate in them is nothing other than a privilege. 

School Day

The local secondary school, Widelake, isn't completely foreign territory to me, but I don't go there very often. I paid a visit back in 2013, and then again the year before last, when I spoke to an RE class about communion and then answered questions at a philosophy group. 'When you talk about the way prayer affects you', asked one girl, 'How can you be sure it's actually due to contact with something beyond you or is just the effect of long-term self-examination and reflection?' I felt like bringing in the politician's answer along the lines of 'That's a very good question and I'm very glad you asked me' before moving swiftly on. But now I seem to have an arrangement to offer seasonal assemblies before the main festivals. Before Christmas I spoke about the sense of history embodied in the Christmas Proclamation: 'today, the 25th day of December, untold ages after God created the heavens and the earth ...' And yesterday I delivered one of my strange discursions about Lent and Easter, fasting customs and evidence for the Christian story. We met in the sports hall, which has no heating apart from the presence of hundreds of teenagers, and a tiny projector screen at one end. Can they see it at the back? And can they hear me at the back, even if I'm quite used to projecting, myself?

In the afternoon I was in the very different surroundings of the Infants School, doing another assembly and then Church Club. The children are off on a sports day on Friday and so I decided to talk about rules and how Jesus didn't always follow them but remembered what they were there for. My illustrative material included a croquet mallet and ball from my battered old Jacques set at home. 'Oh I never come into school without a croquet mallet', I said in answer to Sandra's incredulity when she turned up for Church Club. 

We Do Things Differently Now

Usually the safeguarding training I'm obliged to attend is run by the Diocese, but today I was at a school-based session. It wasn't compulsory, but as our parish school begins its adventure of being joined with a secular school locally I thought I would come along to show willing. The outlines are the same, but whereas in a church setting safeguarding focuses on the supervision of children and vulnerable adults, safer recruitment and the occasional interactions with children which characterise the life of most churches, in a school setting everything's all the more intense - you deal with children all the time. 

Topics came up that edged around the core of what I normally understand as safeguarding, and into areas to do more with wellbeing and welfare: drug use, underage vaping, online bullying, and so on. The contrast with my own schooling in the 1980s struck me. The teachers at my provincial boys' state grammar school were mainly decent sorts, but they saw their job as keeping order and delivering lessons. Quite apart from the tendency of some members of staff to involve the use of projectiles to carry out these basic tasks - I suppose the woodwork master must have worked out how to throw a chisel across a classroom so as to minimise the possibility of serious injury - there was really very little interest in what happened outside the school. That just wasn't its concern. Even on the premises, beyond the classroom we were left to our own devices, and the school was pretty much a feral environment of persecution, low-level violence and cruelty. I think any suggestion that anyone should look for signs of pupils being unhappy would have been met with incomprehension: of course they were unhappy. Misery was built into the experience. Even in the early 2000s, a friend told me when I talked about this, her own grammar school turned a deliberate blind eye to the difficulties she was having at home. Someone else's problem. 

It occurs to me that this is a colossal change that has happened over the last couple of decades: how the life-experiences of children has become the business of schools in particular is remarkable and would be worth someone studying properly.

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!

An Important Visitation

The children from Swanvale Halt Infants School regularly come to the church to look round as part of their RE syllabus. Yesterday was the turn of one of the Year 2 classes. They moved around in three small groups, asked all the usual questions they usually do and some new ones, and struggled to remember what I had told them at Assembly earlier in the day when the topic came up. 

They are often fascinated by the font, which we keep open with some water in it. During the visit we discovered that the water wasn't in a very good state - it had got dusty and when you dragged a finger through it a nasty buckle of scum built up behind. I thought it would be fun to empty and refill the font and bless the new water. 

The children gathered round as I sprinkled some salt in the font (I'm still working through the pot of Dorset Sea Salt I bought several years ago), said the prayer of blessing ('Lord, we thank you for the gift of water to sustain, refresh, and cleanse all life ...') and made the sign of the cross three times in the water. Even if they've been at baptism services themselves, they won't remember these words and won't even have understood a lot of them but that doesn't matter: instinctively they all came in with 'Amen' at the end in exactly the right place. They know that something holy happened. Probably.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

The Infants School children came to church this morning to deposit their Harvest gifts, sing some songs, and listen to me reflect on the season for a minute or two. I decided to think about work: the fact that at Harvest we focus on farmers (and the children often sing about them), and a younger cousin of mine decided she wanted to be one, but hardly any of us will have much contact with that kind of life. 'I wonder what you will be when you grow up?' I asked Years 1 & 2, and got a variety of answers. The traditional train driver was the first, followed by scientist, vet, police officer ('so I can stop bad guys being bad' the little girl in question claimed) - and fairy. I didn't ask the Reception class what they thought.

As they left, I remembered that although fairy may seem an unlikely career trajectory, there is a professional mermaid operating in St Ives in Cornwall. She was the one who posted the video of her priest uncle accidentally setting himself alight during an online service early in the first lockdown (the Revd Beach, to add to the sense that the whole thing was scripted by a higher power). In fact, trying to recover the facts today, I find there are quite a lot of professional mermaids about. Perhaps it's not inherently less likely than anything I do.

Performance

A little while ago S.D. told me of the traumatic experience a group of friends had suffered when attempting to go to church the Christmas-before-last. Today we have an uncannily similar occurrence which makes me wonder how common they are. My brother-in-law works at a church school: there is a new incumbent at the parish church. The term starts with a service for the staff, something I'd been thinking of offering. In came the new vicar whose words of welcome were 'This is going to be an informal communion service. I've brought my guitar and I'm going to sing you a song'. 'It would have been rude if we'd all put our heads in our hands', my brother-in-law said.

This is an artist's impression of what it would be like if I was to try doing it. Ha-ruuuuu!

Moving Along Again

It's the end of another term, and another year, school-wise. Church Club came to an end, as did the Toddler Group, and on Wednesday the children of the infants school were in the church to celebrate their Leavers' Service. The event culminates, as ever, in handing over the Lions Picture Bibles which the church funds, each of which contains the relevant child's name. They've been redesigned a bit over the years, but not basically changed - not that they will probably date all that quickly. The school brings over its own sound equipment these days, but I must admit I heard barely a word the children said. That didn't matter: the event made its point. And so off the Year 2s go, scattering far and wide (well, mostly to Hornington Juniors), and I will have far less to do with them than I have done up till now. For most, that Lions Picture Bible has to do an awful lot of work! 

Tears Before Bedtime

We all remember the occasion at Church Club when, as their craft, all the children were making paper chains which would be gathered together as part of a great national paper chain being organised by the charity Christian Aid, I forget exactly what for. Maddy was deeply reluctant to give up her chain and in fact on being told that was the idea began to cry and for some reason couldn't stop. Even after we conceded the point and let her take her bit of paper chain home, she was sort of stuck in one emotional gear and carried on weeping unconsolably even as her mother collected her and ushered her away.

Yesterday we were apparently in a somewhat fraught mood. There are very often some tears at Church Club as one child or another gets accidentally (or not so accidentally) slapped by one of their companions, or hit by an ill-aimed ball. But on this occasion the children who didn't find some reason for crying were in the minority, whether it was a barely-perceptible injury or a passing inability to make a bit of cardboard stick on a sheet of paper. Perhaps it was to do with the phases of the Moon.

We finished as always by shooing the little darlings out of the hall and into the arms of their waiting parents and guardians. And disaster struck one more time as Edie couldn't find her cardigan. Someone else had taken it and the one she was left holding wasn't hers: this was a catastrophe of such proportions it clearly demanded more desperate tears. 'It's fine', Edie's mother insisted, 'it'll turn up', as Grace's father standing nearby commented that earlier in the year his daughter had lost all six of her cardigans in a week. 

Lion Cubs Den

Widelake Secondary School has been almost uncharted territory for me in all the time I've been in Swanvale Halt. There is a Christian ecumenical youth work charity in the area that goes in to run a Christian Union and do seasonal assemblies, but paradoxically I suspect that means I have less contact with the school than I would have if they didn't exist at all. So I was delighted to be asked to visit by the RE coordinator to speak to two classes, bring some kit, and answer questions, last Friday. The younger group were studying Christianity as part of their general RE course, while the older ones were at a more philosophical level, and so it proved. I really enjoyed the experience. They were (mainly) interested and engaged and the second group provided some genuine intellectual stimulation. The very first question I was offered by them came from a girl whose opening gambit was 'I don't mean this with any kind of disrespect ...', which made everyone laugh, and who went on not to tackle the Church's attitude to same-sex relationships or child abuse but to ask, 'You spoke about prayer and how it works. How can you tell that what you experience isn't just the effect of long-term self-analysis and examination?' I thought that was rather brilliant, because of course it could be and (as I said) there's no way of proving it isn't. I feel hugely encouraged to think there are such thoughtful young people in our community (even if they don't come anywhere near the church).

That Doesn't Make Any Sense

Trevor has been quiet for quite some time: his delusions haven't been of the kind I can do anything about, and I have stopped arguing with him as there is no point. They are so deep-rooted and such a part of him that there is no dislodging them even as they upset him. But just over the last couple of weeks he has been complaining about the Adversary's activities again.

Trevor: I'm experiencing supernatural events. I keep levitating.

Me: When does this happen? Are you sitting watching the TV and then lift up out of your seat?

Trevor: It's when I'm lying on my bed. [clue: this means he's asleep].

Me: Has anyone ever seen this happen to you?

Trevor: Leeeet meee thiiiiink ....

Me: I think you'd probably remember if anyone else had been there.

- As indeed any potential observer would have done. Trevor wants to be exorcised, but I reminded him that I can't do that without referring to the Diocesan Advisor on Deliverance, and I have taken him to three of those over the years and none of them have deemed exorcism a necessary step to take. He accepted that without complaining, for now.

In the afternoon it was Church Club. The story was Gideon, and taking a cue from the episode of the fleece my theme was experiments. For some years when I've told this story I've taken a pair of tarnished copper coins into school and, during storytime, put one in a jar of vinegar until the end of the session to show how the vinegar cleans it. I sat down to do this yesterday and Disaster! found no bottle of vinegar in my bag|: I was convinced I'd brought it. I apologised to the children. 'There's some vinegar at the bottom of the toy box!' cried Bryony brightly. The toy box sits at the side of the hall, full of foam rubber balls and the like and the children had all been playing with them while we got ready for storytime; it seemed prima facie most unlikely that the school would be storing vinegar in it. I went to investigate, surrounded by a crowd of excited children, and, sure enough, right at the bottom, was a bottle of vinegar.

For a moment, I admit, I was bewildered. All my expectations, which seemed so reasonable, were confounded and I could not work out any reason why the school would want to have vinegar around other than in the canteen, let alone hide it in the hall under a mountain of foam rubber balls and rings. But this was only a moment: I realised it was my bottle of vinegar, which must have fallen out of my bag thanks to the children rummaging around, and found its way to the bottom. This was a relief, or I might have had to concede that perhaps Trevor had been levitating after all.

Normal Service

 

You don't often see pirates watching country dancers, let alone see them in your parish church, but this was the scene at the Infants School leavers' service on Tuesday, to which I have already alluded in connection to the temperatures that day. It was the first time since 2019 that we were able to gather in our accustomed manner to celebrate the Year 2s passing out and onwards to their junior schools, with all the excitement and emotion that usually entails. The altar was piled with named picture bibles to be given out to the children. In previous years I and the head teacher have done this, but for the sake of speed we had two teachers helping us this time, which did cut proceedings down a bit though we all had to pirouette around one another as we negotiated our way around the children crowded on the stage. The farther candle you can see in the photo has been broken and reset, hence its wonky appearance. It looks straight from the front!

The Church amid the Heat

At the very moment at tea-time on Tuesday that I was listening to a BBC reporter talking about the fire at Wennington in Essex, and mentioning the parish church there, I was watching this aerial footage on Sky, showing that very building. The church was safe in the end, though as you can see the flames came very close, the scorched grassland just a yard or two from the foot of the tower. The image reminded me of the famous photo of St Paul's Cathedral emerging from the smoke of the Blitz, although SS Peter & Paul's, Wennington, is not the grand cathedral of the diocese of London: this doesn't look like an image of defiance, but of vulnerability. The photos of burning houses from Wennington that appeared in the newspapers were more terrible and violent than this, and people live in houses and not in churches, but for me this picture is about the fragility, not merely of the Church, but of the whole of human society in the face of the chaos our hydrocarbon-based economies are unleashing. Of course there are always wildfires in heatwaves. Accounts of holy wells and other folkloric springs often refer to water-sources which 'kept running even in 1921', a once-proverbial time of drought when, again, crops spontaneously caught light in the fields; but as we know the temperatures are significantly higher now.

Here in Swanvale Halt I had a number of tasks on Tuesday which took me out into the heat. There was a mass in the morning (attendance: 4), and then, just after lunch, the Infants School Leavers' Service. The church felt relatively cool when we started and less so after 150 people had been in it for an hour. I stood outside to say goodbye to everyone as they left; there was quite a breeze, but it just felt like being in a fan oven rather than a conventional one. Finally I was at the Air Cadets in the evening. Turnout was unsurprisingly low but the remaining youngsters sat dutiful and even engaged through my presentation on Change. They had the option of leaving the hut if it became unbearable but none of them did. I did cut it a bit out of compassion, though. I'm coming up to a week's leave which means I am psychologically winding down somewhat, but even putting that to one side the heat hardly encouraged me to do anything more than I absolutely had to!

The Smoking Ruins

Last week Church Club was a surprise; this week, it was a disaster. I offer you an account only because it shows that I can be doing something for twelve years, and the church for about sixteen, and it can all still go haywire out of the blue. 

We arrived at school to be told that all the Year 1s were out at Sports Day at the local secondary school. We looked at the rain, the first significant precipitation hereabouts for weeks, and thought of the bedraggled six-year-olds making their way back like half-drowned rats. The school has only just re-started mixing year groups in its activities after the pandemic, so this term we only have two Year 2s in Church Club, meaning we started very quietly indeed with two unprecedentedly sensible little girls. 

Sure enough, about twenty minutes into the session the Year 1s began to return, damp and tired - but small children don't express their tiredness as you or I might, by having a nice lie-down for ten minutes, but in activity which is even more frantic and less focused than usual. Despite Sandra's scepticism I thought we would still be able to get through a truncated version of the story (the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders) and the craft (making a little card house), because we always have in the past. The children's inability to listen to anything was marked, as was, once we began the craft, their tendency to do anything but apply themselves to the task in hand. The limited time seemed magically to melt away and we were nearly at home time with me, Sandra and Jill desperately trying to help the children complete something to take home, while a couple of the girls made unfeasibly-elaborately decorated houses and the less-careful Year 1s, more satisfied with their efforts, wrested toys from the trays on the far side of the hall and tore around with them. It was bedlam. I rounded up such children as I could for a final prayer, not without, I fear, some ill-temper on my part as Aaron responded to my demand that the toys be replaced in their trays by getting more out. 

We returned the children to their parents, a few minutes late, and not without trauma. Bobby was in tears as it became horribly clear that he wouldn't complete his house to his satisfaction; Evie was inconsolable as her roof kept coming off. I was mentally composing an email of apology and not far off weeping myself. We looked at the wreckage, and got a broom to sweep up the bits.

Fair Enough

The infants school have removed the last of their pandemic measures and that means they’ve returned to activities that mix year groups. Yesterday I did my first whole-school assembly since March 2020, though the school have been having them for a while. The new time, ten past nine, is a bit of a challenge as for me it means either saying Morning Prayer earlier than its customary start time of 9am or later (earlier makes more sense). Was that set in stone? I asked the head teacher. ‘Not in granite, but I’d say in sandstone’, she replied.

Neither the Church calendar nor school life lent me a clear topic to talk about. Some of the children were at the Spring Fair on Saturday to do country dancing, but, as I told them, there are no stories about fairs in the Bible, and while some people do dance you can’t describe those incidents as stories (actually you could make a story out of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant and being despised by Michal his wife, or indeed of Salome doing her turn, but neither would make for a very edifying narrative). Instead I thought of Woodbury Hill in Dorset where the great Fair – one of the biggest in southern England, in its day – probably began after a hermit came to live in the old hillfort in the 12th century, and an annual gathering was set up by the landowner, Tarrant Abbey, to support them, whoever they were. There was even a holy well there whose waters were drunk by visitors to the Fair. So I made up a bit of a story about a holy man (‘We don’t know his name, let’s call him John’) and how the Fair might have started. I even had a couple of photos to show, one of the Fair in full swing in about 1910, and one I took of the hilltop in 2017, now bare apart from a farmhouse and cows, as you can see here.

It struck me that this is a bit like the stories in saints’ lives, woven out of a few things people did know and a lot of supposition about what must have happened. Possibly some of what is in the Bible isn’t too far from that either. Talking of things half-remembered and half made-up, I’d thought my grandparents had met at Woodbury Hill Fair, but checking back I discovered it was the Ilchester Flower Fair at the Lamb & Lark in Limington, which must have been a much humbler occasion. Nan remembered that Grandad and his brother Alec were there, Alec with his arm in plaster having broken it in the gate-jumping contest. Grandad asked Nan to stay to the dance and so she did. I don’t think we’ll have a gate-jumping contest at the Spring Fair next year.

Seeds of Doom

The story at Church Club on wednesday was the Parable of the Sower. For the last few years we’ve played a very satisfying game as part of this session. The floor of the school hall is scattered with seeds and the children are set the task of gathering as many as they can into a plastic beaker each. The beakers are then weighed to determine the winner of the game. Not that they actually win anything other than, as I am fond of warning them to general bemusement ‘a warm glow of self-satisfaction’ but that’s usually enough for six-year-olds. It is a very good game, in that it provides the maximum amount of child activity and occupation with the minimum amount of adult involvement. This week we even got to tidy up while the children were busy. Everyone gets what they want!

But, also this week, an unparalleled event took place: someone cheated at the game. When we came to the weighing-in at the end, John’s plastic cup was unfeasibly full, while a couple of his friends had nothing at all in theirs. ‘John said we should give him our seeds so that he would have more’, they complained. John’s denial of this seemed unconvincing given the unanimous testimony of the others and their completely empty cups, unfeasibly little to show for several minutes of fevered scrabbling on the floor. First place accordingly went to someone else, I’m afraid. Quite apart from John’s cheating it struck me as remarkable that the others went along with it as a perfectly reasonable proposal until after the fact when it struck them that giving him their seeds meant they didn’t have any. ‘we’ve all learned a lesson,’ said Anita who was helping. Yes, I thought, as well as an insight into child development, we now have to build anti-cheating measures into the games.

A Sensible Approach

Remembrancetide - as witnessed by this display in the window of the village florist - is way in the past now, but I hadn't wanted the reaction of the children at Church Club when we discussed it to go unrecorded. Having talked about it in assembly in the morning, they were as clued-up as 6-year-olds are likely to be about the history. Genevieve stuck up her hand. 'My great-grandad was in that war,' she informed us; I think there might have been a generation missing there, or she got the wrong war. 'But he wasn't killed,' she went on brightly, 'he was all right, because he ran away.'

Harvest 2021

I am still on leave but I don't mind breaking into the succession of holiday snaps to report briefly on what we did for Harvest this year. In fact it was all very modest. The Infants School came to the church on Wednesday at the end of September for two short services, one for Reception and one for the older children, with no parents present, as they did last year, so it was very low-key. They sang, brought their gifts, listened to me talk in very short order, said a couple of prayers, and went away taking their gifts with them to be taken up to the Food Bank. No other organisation made its presence felt at all.

For the Sunday we kept our Harvest Festival, as such, at the first resumed Sunday Space service. Before the first lockdown last year we'd already decided to experiment with a non-eucharistic service once a month which wasn't consciously directed at children, and thus wasn't a 'Family Service', because no families had been there for quite a long time; but we'd only managed to do one when everything was shut up, and that was really the old Family Service pattern. For the resumed and renewed version, I shrunk the liturgy down to the very bare minimum which required the congregation to do nothing more than respond to the Kyrie, say 'Amen', 'thanks be to God' and 'hear our prayer' at appropriate points. We had one reading, and I talked about it. The much-reduced music group accompanied five hymns, and, for the prayers, aside from blessing the Harvest gifts, I brought the Blessed Sacrament from the aumbry in a monstrance, and placed it on the altar on the simple Step-Pyramid-like stand helpfully made from a nice bit of oak by Jack ('Just don't drop it on your foot'). Prayers done, we sand 'God be in my head' a couple of times, and back the Sacrament went. That is what will happen in the future. 

It was short, simple, and focused on Scripture and prayer, but the addition of low-key sacramental adoration adds the Catholic element I am anxious to preserve. There are two main problems: first, it's a bit heavy on contributions from me, the only other voice being a reader's: I want that to change. Secondly, we don't have anyone to serve refreshments afterwards, which I think is quite vital. That's got to be a priority!

Church Clubbing

Another small milestone today as we resumed Church Club at the Infants School. Sandra, Hilda and I struggled to remember how to set things up after 18 months, even though the school had made it simple enough for us by restricting membership to Year 1 children which resulted only in 6 attenders, half what we would usually expect (and will all of those stick, we wonder?). Over the course of the pandemic all the stuff we store in the room off the hall at school has disappeared, so I'm glad I found a secret hoard of hole-punchers, staplers and sticky tape while clearing out the church hall loft - of which, rivetingly, more later.

The Year 1s, only just out of Reception, are very, very tiny. Normally a leaven of Year 2s would lead the way, boldly tackling the puzzles and crafts, and sometimes take the younger children under their wing. At least the girls might. It would be an exaggeration to say that this group don't know which way up they are, because achieving that is a key goal in Reception year, but they haven't got much farther than that.