Busy Sunday

Sundays are always busy as I like to get up early to make the Meeting House shining and clean with a good strong smell of polish before Meeting. It has been very wild and windy so I had to tidy up the garden as well, as it was scattered with branches of trees blown down in the night. The Quaker teenager group stayed for lunch and once that was cleared away and the kitchen tidied up, and I had sorted out a couple of bed and breakfast who arrived for the night, I went to an ecumenical tea party. It is the Week of Christian Unity and I was asked as the Quaker representative. It was daunting to enter a room full of black suited dog collared clergy all talking away ten to the dozen. It was held in a sort of bar restaurant near the cathedral. On offer was: ice cream and exotic fruit salad, pate, french cheeses , wine, tea or coffee. There was not a cucumber sandwich or victoria sponge to be seen. Quite tasty though. Then we all went to the Cathedral and I was ushered with the other clergy to sit up at the front near the altar. I sang all the hymns with gusto, and a lovely Catholic priest who used to be in Winchester and is now a bishop somewhere else preached the sermon. (Another Catholic priest at the tea party told me that if he ever changed his religion he would either be a Buddhist or a Quaker) but all in all I did feel a bit of a fish out of water. Still, it was kind of them to ask me, and I had some good chats.

One of our residents teaches first aid and I have just been up to the bathroom to find several frightening dummies for practising resucitation laid out to dry after a bath. I asked her to move them as I thought they would frighten the two elderly bed and breakfasts. There is more to this job than you might think.