Working this week in the Victorian School (KS2) and with Toys Outreach (KS1) - nice children, well-behaved, interested, rewarding.
Monday Evening the Swallow Bookworms met here. Joe did his usual slightly over-elaborate catering (much appreciated) and we discussed "The Mammoth Cheese" which some of us thought rather good, and others hadn't managed to finish. My own feeling was that it was a rather lumpy read as it moved from character to character, and a serious indictment of two modern behaviour patterns.
The one of very public emotions over people who are in reality strangers - in this case the pledging of support for the family of eleven babies at one birth and the very public grief when the first of them dies, but the total lack of support - even hostility - as the number of babies dwindles to eight, and the parents desperately short of money, sleep and support are in dire need of help.
The other theme was that of obsession: how a woman can become so taken up with a particular project that it blinds her to all else in her life and to the fact that what started admirably has narrowed so much that the original cause has almost vanished in pursuit of perfection of the detail.
I found the book a fascinating though not particularly enjoyable read.
Our next book is "The da Vinci Code" - we have one person who won't read it on principle, and two or three more (including myself) who are wary of its reputation for blasphemy, but wish to find out for ourselves especially after all the hoo-ha over the filming at Lincoln. So that should be another intersting discussion.
Wednesday brought a meeting of churchwardens with the Rural Dean for us to discuss how all our services and pastoral care are to be managed during the interregnum. The Rural Dean and another priest with a group of nine parishes in his care will add a further 4 and 3 respectively to their already overladen schedules. And we - some of us, at least - will do whatever we can to offer support and try to get to grips with lay led non-eucharistic worship.
lizdavies
I wondered, when you mentioned this aspect of a churchwarden's duties on my blog, whether you might be asked to lead any services. Sounds scarey to me.
You will find, of course, that the hype over the "Da Vinci Code" was mostly just hype; it's only another Holy Grail story. I thought it began really well and trailed off a bit at the end - but in a way it was bound to, given the theme!
We enrolled two new children in nursery this week. Met accompanied by their mothers, we thought they were both going to turn out to be big problems; on their own, they don't seem nearly so bad - why can't some mothers get their children to do as they're told?