Clarissa et al.

Today we were congratulated for being in church because
1) It is Low Sunday when traditionally people don't go to church because they went last week.
2) It is Fifth Sunday when traditionally people don't go to church because it doesn't really count.
3) It was the Group Service when traditionally people don't go to church because they say they can never remember what time or where the service is.
4) It's the day when the clocks go forward, we all get an hour's less sleep and traditionally people don't go to church.
We were actually quite numerous - not like last week, but not at all bad.

We were at Cabourne where they have Matins rather than Communion. Always! Usually for the Group Service we have Communion regardless, but not this time. My feeling is - and this may even be canon law - that if there is just one service in a group it should be communion, and that there should be at least one communion service in every group of parishes every Sunday. At least one other of the people who never miss a Sunday had gone to Caistor, and I was very torn. However I am somewhat critical of those who talk about sticking together as a group and never go to a group service - especially our esteemed Lay Chairman - so I went along, and it was a lovely, very traditional service followed by coffee, shortbread and Thornton's Continental chocolates. Not all our rewards are in Heaven.

A little addition to last Sunday's blog: Denis who made the daffodil cross told me that when they woke to snow and realised that their car would not cope with the hill decided to walk the mile to church so, with Denis and his daughter to the fore taking it in turns to carry the cross and followed by their repective spouses and the grandchildren, they made their own impromptu Walk of Witness on Easter Sunday morning.

We had the school from hell at the museum today. It wasn't that the children were particularaly bad, as that the teachers and other adult helpers were totally disorganised, and the children deserve better than that.

These excursions cost the school and the parents quite a lot of money: it seems to me that the very least the teachers can do is to make sure that the children get the very most out of the experience. This includes doing the necessary preparation. It means preparing the adult helpers and making sure that they are fully briefed, not letting them slope off for a quiet smoke leaving me to drag in another museum education assistant who had come in to observe an unfamiliar workshop to look after one of the groups so that the children wete not left to their own devices. It means making sure that the group is properly equipped with sufficient pencils, clip boards etc., and that borrowed ones are counted out and counted back. It means handing out the workbooks and not stuffing them in your handbag. Why? What did she think she was supposed to do with 24 workbooks? Which part of "Please give these out to the children" was too difficult to understand.

Why did they take all 49 children down to the lobby to visit the loo simultaneously to the great inconvenience of other museum users who could neither get in or get out of the museum? Why did they bring two groups on the same day if they could not be bothered to do the preparation for the group doing the self guide? - you can't have two dozen unruly 8 year olds rampaging round a museum virtually unsupervised for a whole morning or afternoon.

And some of the children had the attention span of goldfish! You expect the four and five year olds to wander off the point, but by the time they reach KS2 children should really be able to concentrate on what they are doing for five minutes together without getting up and wandering off. I don't blame the children: if they are accustomed to undirected muddle from the teachers, then what is there for them to learn to concentrate on? I don't care for excuses about them coming from a difficult area: it's only a difficult area by the standards of a small Lincolnshire town, not some terrible crime-ridden urban jungle where family life has totally broken down.

FRIDAY
Dianne and I took the Florence Nightingale workshop to the school with the neighbouring (and probably slightly poorer) catchment area. Here the teachers were completely on the ball and the slightly younger children were both excited and interested in a much looked-forward to visit.

I don't often blog about what I am reading except for the book club choices, but I have just finished reading In at the Death by David Wishart. It is a political detective story set in the closing months of Tiberius' reign as emperor, and obviously very thoroughly researched. I had picked it up in the hope of finding something like Lindsey Davis' Falco novels. It wasn't.

I'm not saying that it wasn't an entertaining read, but the way in which it was written really bothered me on two counts. Our hero, Valerius Corvinus, belongs to an aristocratic 'narrow stripe' family, yet the author sees fit to put the f word into his mouth all the time including in front of ladies. Now, I'm not particularly prudish about swearing and such words used at a moment of great stress can be a very effective tool in writing, but used constantly they lose impact and are merely offensive.

We are also told that David Wishart is a classical scholar, and we must therefore assume an educated man. However at three points in this book he uses a double negative. These double negatives were not put into the mouths of slaves or low-lifes but were a part of the narrative of Valerius Corvinus who is, as I said, a member of the upper classes and would not make such a mistake. This means that the error must be the author's and has passed unnoticed through all the proof reading. Now I seem to recall - and my recollection could easily be wrong as Latin was never exactly my strongest suit - that in Latin there is a use of a double negative to emphasise the negativeness rather than, as in English, the one negative cancelling out the other. Could it possibly be that Mr. Wishart was using it in this way? I don't really think so, do you?

Well, I got to church safely, and so had lots of other people with getting on for 50 of us there.

Above are the daffodils at the church, and below are the ones at home.

I went to church on my own because Joe had got up at 5.30 to go to the dawn service at Walesby Old Church (the "Ramblers' Church" which is now isolated from the village at the top of a hill in the middle of fields, the village having eased itself down into the valley over the centuries) where he was pumping the organ, there being no electricity in the church.

This rather dramatic painting of Walesby Old Church by Tom Robinson was bought by my mother with money given to her by her brother on her fiftieth birthday in 1978.

From there he and Colin (the organist) went back to the Reverend John Carr's for breakfast, thence to Caistor for 10 o'clock communion, and finally to Nettleton for the latter part of the service there and a change of car into mine for Joe. After a substantial lunch, Joe is now sleeping peacefully in the library. His grandfather, who did not go to church, but did clear the snow from the drive so I could get out, is also peacefully asleep in front of the television in the drawing room. I cooked the lunch, I laid the table, I dished up, Pa carved the chicken, I cleared the table, I stacked the dishwasher, I organised the Easter Egg Hunt (indoors this year). I am hoping that I won't sleep peacefully through Time Team, Antiques Roadshow, Larkrise to Candleford and No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Monday
Last night I fell asleep ten minutes before the end of No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency. I decided to find out about this watching TV on line that they keep advertising, and discovered that it is really easy so I have now caught up. Like Larkrise to Candleford, though to a lesser extent, it struck me as more of an essay into the themes of the book than an accurate chapter by chapter dramatisation, but nonetheless enjoyable. I like all this series of books though I am by no means a fan of some of Alexander McCall Smith's other novels, and I was very surprised by the number of people in the Swallow Bookworms who did not enjoy No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency when we read it a year or so back.

I loved the music, but my father, who a couple of years ago started to use a hearing aid, found that it made the programme unwatchable as it drowned out dialogue which was already difficult for him as he has never been good at understanding non-standard English accents. Wouldn't it be good if programmes were transmitted with two soundtracks so that those who wish could turn down/off the music track, and turn up the dialogue. The music of its nature must be added post sync. so it shouldn't be too difficult, and it would certainly be a blessing to many people.

The light in the room woke me as early as the alarm clock normally would on a working day so I took photographs of our most un-Easterlike snow from the bedroom and bathroom windows. The first shows something I never recall seeing before - the washing line thickly coated in snow - you can also see that the trees across the field behind us are almost invisible as the snow continues to fall almost imperceptibly as its flakes are very fine, but persistently.

I am now wondering whether I will be able to get to chuch this morning. Fortunately the service is at Nettleton which is on the A46 rather than one of the other villages down tiny winding lanes, and is at 11 o'clock; so, as long as I can get the half mile to the main road, I ought to be able to get there.

Yesterday Evening I attended the Maundy Thursday Eucharist at Caistor - this is the second year running I have been there as there was no service in the Swallow group of parishes. Like Ascension Day and Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday seems to be rather neglected by most church-goers, but that isn't what I am really writing about today. I read on other blogs about exciting and innovative services and wonder whether our local clergy are right in their assumption that innovation is not what Lincolnshire country folk want. Certainly at any hint of 'happy-clappy' the loudest chorus tends to be that of disapproval.

Anyway, what I am really writing about is what happens at the end of the Maundy Thursday Eucharist when the altar is stripped in preparation for Good Friday. For several years the Swallow Group gathered in Nettleton for Maundy Thursday where the altar was stripped with great ceremony. They are very fortunate in their churchwardens in that one attended the same Church of England primary school I went to (albeit he was there a good few years earlier) where ceremony seems to have been instilled along with the multiplication tables, and where many of the boys were recruited for the church choir and taught yet more ceremony. The other churchwarden is the son of a Methodist minister, is himself a lay preacher and has a naturally dignified presence in addition to any learned ceremony. Stripping the altar they always worked in perfect harmony of action, making even the folding of the cloth a precise and dignified action, while the crucifix was always handled with respect. At Caistor the man and three women who strip the altar and sanctury take far longer and have all the dignity of furniture removers.

Admittedly they have a bigger job to do - Nettleton has no side chapels, no banners, no miscellaneous saints in niches - but is it actually necessary to remove all these 'nick-nacks' (even the microphones from the pulpit and the lectern) when symbolically stripping the Lord's table?

OK, I admit that I seem to be making a fuss over nothing much, but I felt that the way it was done somehow lacked proper respect.

The Good Friday service was a meditation about choices made by Judas, Peter, Pilate, the crowd and the women, and by ourselves. I'm not generally a particularly meditative person, but it was good.

Yesterday the Museum Education staff went on a visit to Hull Museums (Anyone who believes Hull to be a cultural wasteland and hasn't visited their museums is missing a treat - outside London I would guess what they have to offer is second only to Liverpool, and all of it free. www.hullcc.gov.uk/museumcollections ) Anyway, we weren't there to have a general look round, but to observe a schools workshop at the Streetlife Museum. This we duly did. It started with the Enabler (their version of our Museum Education Assistant) taking on the character of Theo Sparkes, a man selling electric cars in 1901, who extolled the virtues of the electric car over those of petrol and steam, but revealed how in a race from Hull to Scarborough the petrol one beat him because he ran out of juice after 40 of the 42 miles and there was nowhere along the way to recharge, but that the steam car fared worse by blowing up. Thus the botton of the electric car market fell out and he had to take a job on the trams. (Everyone moves from historic car display and takes a seat on a tram.)

So far, so good - a well thought out talk given as a lively character.

He then took the children to the Education Room where he reverted to Bill in 2008.

What happened next was disappointing not because Bill wasn't good, but because it could have taken place in any classroom in Britain, and ended up with year 4 children building circuits just like those they had already done in years 2 and 3. Worse than that, as Theo Sparkes he had told them to look into the future to decide which sort of car would ultimately win after a century of petrol, but as Bill he never returned to the subject but just did a very standard workshop on electric circuits and supply. Not having seen this sort of thing since first year physics when I was a grammar school pupil I was slightly more impressed than Margaret, Sharon and Linda who have all taught primary science and Rachel who did this sort of talk when she worked for Yorkshire Electricity.

However by the end of lunch we were sufficiently inspired by what we had seen to draw up an outline year 4 to 6 workshop based on the new technology used at Normanby Hall when Sir Berkeley Sheffield had it remodelled and extended in the reign of Edward VII.

In the afternoon we visited Hands On History, which I had not been to before. It wasn't perhaps quite as hands on as all that, but we noted that the pre-schooler out with his grandparents was having a great time while we more mature visitors found plenty to talk about. Finally we went to the little cafe opposite which serves proper leaf tea and really home-made cakes, which didn't quite fit with the plastic cloths and counter service.

I was back at Bursar school today - this time with Hilary to do the Egyptian outreach with Year 3. The children were as well behaved and well prepared as the younger ones last week.

This time I met the school secretary, and guess what? I was at school with her - Julie Favell - in the same year but a different class until the sixth form. We shared a room on a school expedition to Rome in 1969 or thereabouts and were in the Guides together. And her grandma was our cleaning lady for a while. We haven't seen each other for 35 years.

An even briefer encounter also 35 years ago was when I went for an interview for the drama course at Hull University. I got into conversation with a first year student called Tony (I remember the name because it is also my father's, but I have no recollection of what he looked like). I wonder how many Tonys were studying drama at Hull then, and whether the lad I talked to was Anthony Minghella. Whether it was or not, I am sorry to see that this gifted film director has died when he should still have had so much more time to do all he wanted to do.

In another blog I have just read the words "You British are so good at desserts".

On the whole I am not a pudding eater, and weekday dinners tend to be a single course followed by fruit, a biscuit or cheese. But on Sunday I nearly always cook a pudding - a proper traditional English pudding. Today's was ground rice. Now I have heard this excellent pud compared in both taste and texture to wallpaper paste, but I love milk puddings and so does the rest of the family. Even Jacob, the milk hater, likes milk puddings. Our top favourite is rice pudding (which would have taken too long today), but almost anything where a grain or pasta is cooked slowly in sweetened milk and flavoured with nutmeg will do - tapioca, semolina, barley, macaroni . . . or come to that baked egg custard, Birds custard, blancmange: you name it, we'll eat it.

My other favourites include bread and butter pudding, Queen of Puddings, African Queen (Queen of Puddings without the lemon and jam, but with a good flavouring of cocoa powder), treacle sponge, ginger sponge, treacle tart and Christmas Pudding. Some of the boys have a great liking for jam or marmalade roly-poly, but with all that suet there have to be limits on sin.

Yesterday I was making the Simnel Cake when Jess turned up. Jess doesn't care for marzipan (strange child) and insisted on her right to make a chocolate sponge to take home with her (using up the last of my butter and all of the cream). After recent school cookery - chilli con carne which nobody except Joe likes and apple crumble which is hardly a challenge and not particularly popular - she was very pleased to have made something everyone was queuing up to sample. She took it home uncut, and father and I have given up hope of a piece or two making their way back here.

I went to Bursar School in Cleethorpes today to talk to Year 1 about toys from the past. While I was there I also told them about my family's long and extensive connection with the school. My grandad's big brothers Clemment and Charles were among the first pupils there. (Here they are with baby brother Stanley who, along with sisters Eveline and Mabel, joined them there in turn)

Between the wars my father, his older brother Frans, and cousins Peter, John, Don, Robin, Wilfred and Walter were all pupils there. One of their teachers was my grandad's cousin, Bessie Rose, (at a guess herself a former pupil of the school) still alive and still a mine of information about Cleethorpes and Cleethorpes folk throughout the twentieth century. (Here are father and Frans and John and Don)

These are my parents' school photographs from 1935, the one year that they overlapped at the school after my mother's family arrived in Cleethorpes and before my father aged 9 joined the junior form at the boys' grammar school.

After the war my father's little brother and sister, Stephen and Clare were also pupils there.

I didn't go there. By the early 1960s there were four forms to every year at Bursar - between 160 and 200 children - or a total of well over 1,000 children in the school. St. Peter's, on the other hand, had between 50 and 60 children in each year - fewer than 400 children in the whole school spread over three buildings, three playgrounds, a small playing field and an orchard.

Now both schools are reduced to single form entry, and those classes of 25 to 30 children rather than the 40 to 50 of my childhood. Admittedly there are two more modern schools to the south of the town, but there are also two vast new estates full of families. (When I say new I mean less than 40 years old - most of the building took place in my teens.) So, I ask "Where have all the children gone?"

Committees are bodies which take hours to make minutes, and our parish Council is no exception.

Last meeting we all looked at plans to turn a grotty little cottage into a comfortable four bedroomed house, which the plans succeeded in doing without damaging the general appearance of the cottage (one of a pair) from the front so we gave our whole hearted approval. The neighbours were also happy - the other half of the pair is itself still undergoing considerable alterations to make it better suited to the needs of the couple and their four boys, the neighbour on the other side is the architect for the extended house, and the neighbour behind is on land so elevated above the pair of cottages that only their cellar (if they had one) would be affected. In short the village was perfectly happy that extending the cottage in this way would be an improvement welcomed by all.

The District Council thinks otherwise, and has insisted on reducing the house from four to three bedrooms and from two to one bathroom. The study and the porch have also had to go, to the detriment of the whole design.

Why?

Just across the road they allowed seven four and five bedroom, three bathroom houses to be built in opposition to the wishes of the village, the next two houses in the road next to the cottage are equally large and the next cottage beyond the two new ones has been similarly extended, so they can't say that the alterations are out of keeping with the village. Nor can the changes to the plan bring it down into the affordable housing bracket - it will just be a less desirable expensive house when it is finished. The village could probably do with some more social housing or a couple of pairs of cheap semis which local youngsters can afford to buy, but that is a different issue which has nothing to do with alterations to this particular cottage.

It is said that you can tell a great deal about someone by the contents of their fridge:

I had a look in mine . . .
2 x 6pts milk
2 x 1 litre squeezed Florida orange with juicy bits
3 x 1 litre squeezed Florida pink grapefruit with juicy bits
1 x 1 litre squeezed Spanish orange with juicy bits (nearly empty)
2 x 1.5 litres apple juice
1 x 1 litre white grape juice
1 x 1 litre cranberry and raspberry juice drink
1 bottle New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc

1 celeriac
3 peppers (assorted colours)
1 green cabbage
1 swede
No carrots or sprouts - this is unusual. Onions and spuds not kept in fridge.
1 bag satsumas
1 lettuce
2 lemons
1 bowl of lychees
Some cherry tomatoes
Some grapes
1 bowl cold cooked green beans
(To throw away - one manky grapefruit and one quarter very manky cucumber)

1 Tyrolean smoked sausage
1 half leg of roast lamb
1 pack Black Forest ham
2 jars black and 1 jar red caviar (the cheap stuff)
1 jar shrimps in brine
1 bowl of boiled cod roe in vinegar
1 pack smoked salmon
1 jar soused herrings
1 box containing both plain and smoked streaky bacon
1 gammon joint to boil

5 packs German butter
2 packs Stork margarine
1 large packet of strong cheddar cheese intended for grating.
1 round of Camenbert cheese
Covered cheese board with assorted ends of cheese
1 pot (nearly empty) of home-made duck dripping
(Eggs also not kept in fridge)
1 pack full fat cream cheese
1 small plain yoghurt
1 jar of rather runny home-made blackcurrant jam
1 jar (nearly empty) mayonnaise
1 jar tartar sauce

Is this good or bad?

Two conclusions: I'm not Jewish and I am German - one right and one wrong.

The boys have just been - no longer any prawns, or grape juice, and the lamb, milk and smoked sausage severely depleted.

Joe has been giving me a blow by blow account of today's wedding.

The bride was half-an-hour late.

There were no flowers in the church.

The photographer took flash photographs during the ceremony.

The congregation chattered throughout the ceremony.

People kept wandering out for a smoke, and there are cigarette butts all around the church porch. There is a dustbin 'hidden' behind a table tomb next to the porch which they could have used.

They left screwed up service sheets, tissues and sweet papers in nearly every pew.

The two horse carriage was lovely, but the driver was seriously fed up with the bride.

While I was at work Joe spent the day really earning his verger's fee cleaning the church. He was somewhat concerned that, in all the time he was there, nobody came to arrange flowers.

This evening I fielded two phonecalls - the first from Emma at the pub saying that the bride was there asking how she could get into the church to arrange her flowers. Christine and I are both on the websites - both church and village - and there is a very clear key notice in the church porch with names, addresses, phone numbers and a map showing how to find all four keyholders. (Emma, as Neighbourhood Watch Co-ordinator, probably ought also make a note of these details, but that is a separate issue.)

The second was from a harpist living at Burgh-le-Marsh who was booked to play at the wedding, but had been told that the wedding plans were on hold, who wanted to know whether the wedding was in fact going ahead. I told him that it was, which actually didn't really help him as he still didn't know whether he had been cancelled, so I gave him Ian's phone number in the hope that he had a current contact number for the happy couple, and also the information that the bride might still be at the pub if he rang fast and asked for Emma.

Did I say that I was in favour of lots of couples getting married in Swallow?

There is a wedding at Swallow on Saturday. We have heard the banns being read, and on one occasion the couple was there to hear them too. Nobody knows them, although she is now on the electoral roll.

Ian borrowed the church keys and took them through a rehearsal on Monday, and through him Joe has been asked to do a verger's duties on the day including ringing our single bell, and tomorrow he is going to clean the church, replace all the half-burned candles with full length ones and replace the altar linen with fresh. (I'm at work tomorrow.)

And what about flowers? There shouldn't as a general rule be flowers in church during Lent (but then there shouldn't really be any weddings either), but nobody has got in touch to arrange a time to put them in. Are they relying on our store of artificial flowers? Or do they expect fancy arrangemets to be in place without asking? I know that when a girl or boy who has grown up in the village gets married it is not unknown for the church flowers to be done for them as a wedding present from the parish, but nobody would take it for granted and, as I said, we don't even know these people.

Last year the residence rules for Church of England weddings were relaxed, and I am all in favour of as many as possible taking place in our pretty little church, but in order to make sure that everything is ready for them we do need a bit of communication from the couple. I don't blame Ian for not passing on information because he did let drop that he is rather cross with them for their casual attitude regarding promised church attendance, so I expect they have been equally casual about informing about anything beyond that which is strictly required in law.

Anyway, end of moan. I know that they will have had a lot of things on their minds, but just a little basic courtesy would have been appreciated.

We woke to a covering of snow today, but by the time I had had my shower and got dressed it was gone and the sun was shining. By eleven I could hang out the washing, and by four it was dry enough to fold for the airing cupboard.

Last Sunday one of the hymns was "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" including the words "Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire" - we have been through two thirds of these this last week: fingers crossed against the final one! The first two between them seem to have knocked several slates off the chancel roof.

I went to church in Rothwell today, so it wasn't until I took some flowers to put on my mother's grave that I discovered someone had been digging in the north side of the churchyard, It looks as if it has something to do with electricity, but I am unaware of anyone giving them permission to dig and am waiting for the other chrchwarden, and the parish secretary and treasurer to get back to me before doing anything. Have we the authority to give that permission anyway? If we wanted to do anything inside the church we would have to get a faculty or at least a de minimus permission; does the same apply in the churchyard? And what if they have already disturbed a burial? There aren't many marked graves on the north side, but I know that is where they moved a number of ancient and fallen gravestones when they felled a dangerous tree and generally made the graveyard neater (but less interesting and beautiful) not long before I moved to Swallow twenty-two years ago. Anyway, as soon as I have heard from the others I will have to get in touch with Lincoln for advice. I've got a phone number from the barriers round the hole, although of course that may be the barrier hiring company rather than the actual diggers, so that should be a starting point. I know that when they were undergrounding the electricity cables at the end of last year, the company dug up the village hall carpark (which runs alongside the churchyard) without permission, and the VH secretary (to whom I have done a Cc on my email) had to be pretty fierce with them. At the very least their action lacks courtesy.

Tuesday

It transpires that a long time ago a group including the Clerk to the Parish Council (who, in her other hat, is Hon. Sec. to the PCC) agreed that, subject to proper checks, the wires could go along the edge of the churchyard, but nobody has bothered to get in touch to finalise this or check the graveyard plan.