5 July 2009 (Sunday) - To Church

You might have noticed that at the bottom of this page there is a hit counter. If you click on “View Site Stats” it brings up a separate window showing all sots of nonsense about my loyal readership – how many people read it each day, how many people are first-time visitors and how many are returning. On the left hand side there is an option “Recent Visitors Map”. Yesterday as well as my loyal readers from the UK, USA and Canada I had hits from the Republic of Ireland, the Canary Islands and from Italy. I can’t help but wonder who they were.

A restless night – by the time I’d done the ironing and composed a crossword & letter to the chokey it was gone midnight. I couldn’t get to sleep, and lay restless for an hour. Once I eventually nodded off, ‘er indoors ^TM came home. It is from her that “My Boy ^TM ” inherits his ninja-like stealth. Not content with making enough racket to wake the dead, she then decided to attack and fight me for my blanket, claiming it was hers. It might have been once. It isn’t any more – I’ve stolen it. I got maybe an hour’s sleep before waking again. It was too hot. At 5am I was doing washing up and having a shave. I eventually wandered back to bed, and nodded off around 6am. At 6.30 the phone went. Work had a problem. So I was off to the hospital for an hour, before once more trying to get some kip. The phone rang just before 9am – a voice message asking if I had a contact number for Sophie. I had no idea who the message was from, or who Sophie is (or was), so at that point I gave up and went for brekkie.

It’s Sunday – to church. Together with a dozen or so mates, Enrique had his first Holy Communion. The church was packed to heaving – with at least five people to a pew, and fifty pews, to say nothing of people standing all along the sides of the church. I was in with the crowd standing at the back and there were loads of congregants (!) in the balcony. There must have been about five hundred people there. The left footers would seem to be doing a roaring trade – the boss vicar (they had three vicars!) said that they’d done thirty nine baptisms this year. And they were organised – I remember Holy Communion from my days in Methodism. It would take twenty minutes to do twenty people. The left footers shifted several hundred in ten minutes. The service was a bit…. Well, I suppose like most church services, you need to know what’s going on. Standing up, kneeling down, up and down. But having said that, this is my third time in church this year, and I think that if I have to go to church, I’d rather go R.C. There’s a sense of ceremony with the left footers that the C of E and the Baptists seem to be missing.

And then to the post church bunfight. Despite the close proximity of fit cousins, I spent most of the afternoon sniffing round Enrique’s fit teacher (who’d come along) Things have perked up since I was in school…