Sunday

Spring Forward
Fall Back

It is so easy to remember, and I got it right except that custom and my bladder got me up around 7.45 (summer time) - so quarter-to-seven.

Having fitted a lot of little jobs into my extra hour, I arrived at church at 9.20 in good time for the 9.30 service advertised, only to discover that, in order for the priest to fit in an 11 o’clock service elsewhere they had brought it forward to 9.15. Thank goodness the first hymn was a long one so they had only just reached the summary of the law when I took my place. Rightly or wrongly, if by any chance I arrive after the general confession (or even the creed) I feel I have to back-track and go through the missed parts silently in order to validate my presence at the communion table.

I have to say that something which really irritates me in our group of parishes is the way that some of the churchwardens treat the church as a private club for one village and don't make sure that the rest of the group - even if only the half-dozen or so of us who regularly visit the other churches - is kept informed. You can't cancel a parish service because the churchwarden's family will be away that weekend even if the parish is so tiny that it reduces the congregation by 70%.

Monday

Group Meeting for the Swallow Group of Parishes. Very badly attended with no reperesentatives from three of the seven parishes, and only 'the usual suspects' from the others. A lot of financial stuff, BUT I have got my pew sheet plan through by which I email a basic letter to representatives of each parish with the service times for the next two months, and that representative adds local news and contacts and prints off pew sheets for his/her own church. These service times will also now be published in the parish magazines of the two groups with which we are 'allied' during the interregnum and in the two local papers.

This meeting clashed with our Book Group meeting, which Joe attended. I picked up him and the books just as the meeting was ending, and I am now reading last month's choice 'Pompeii' by Robert Harris (which I missed through being on holiday) and this month's 'The Jane Austen Book Club' by Karen Joy Fowler. I'm only about 100 pages into the former, but the opinion that it is 'a cracking read' expressed by one of the smallish number of men in the group would seem to be a valid one.