Church, chocolate and battle

Here's today's meditation poem:

Meditation 218

After a too-long allocation
of city to tribe,

people to place,
meeting every Israelite need

but his own,
Joshua finally takes

a city for himself
in the Ephraim hills:

calm stones, bleak grasses,
olive trees and silence.


I do always feel quite sorry for Joshua - the poor chap seems to have to deal with rather more admin than Moses ever did. He must have been hugely glad to come to the end of the paperwork at last. Talking of which, we popped into church today and sang some jolly traditional hymns. Always a good thing. Though communion proved tricky - the girlie vicar obviously decided that we all needed additional spiritual help this week (a decision for which I for one cannot blame her) and gave us extra large portions of biscuit (um, wafer, if you want the real word). Which meant that we couldn't manage to get it down before heading towards the holy booze (um the wine ...) so I for one had to store the wafer in my cheeks like a chipmunk whilst taking the wine, all the time trying not to giggle. Or choke. Lordy, Death by Communion - now that would be embarrassing. Thankfully we all survived. And I see that the September edition of the parish magazine has a short article about Disasters and Miracles in it, hurrah, so am hoping that might encourage some sales. You never know, eh.

We were then straight out for a buffet lunch with Liz & friends at her home to celebrate her retirement, and there was an utterly pleasing amount of chocolate during this gorgeous feast. Really, she knows me too well, I suspect ... We are of course all green with envy at the concept of retirement at all: a distant vision of the pleasure of stopping that one can only faintly imagine. Coincidentally, the boy vicar is also planning to retire in a couple of years, and apparently hopes to be useful on Sundays and dig his garden. Harrumph, I say. My advice was to ditch such dull religious nonsense, take up blues guitar and travel the world whilst grape-picking. That's what I would do if I were a vicar planning for retirement anyway - surely the priesthood are more in need of a break from their previous life than any of us? I think he was surprised, and strangely pleased, at my response, so only time will tell ...

For the rest of the day, I've been tackling the final read-through of Hallsfoot's Battle before sending it off to the agent for comment. The plan is to complete it before we go off on holiday this Friday, and I'm now nearly two-thirds through, so there's hope, Carruthers, hope.

And here's this week's haiku (I worry I'm obsessing too much about work and what it does to the soul, alas):

In the review form
there's no box for my mind-state:
fragmented and sad.


Today's nice things:

1. Poetry
2. The challenges of church
3. Disasters and Miracles in the parish mag
4. Lunch - and chocolate
5. The Hallsfoot read-through
6. Haikus.

Anne Brooke - still chewing that dang wafer ...
Disasters and Miracles: the everyday life of Bible folk