Gales, bells and smells

It's not often that I can say a gale has actually kept me awake in the night. I kept thinking someone was knocking on my bedroom door and at one point actually shouted, "come in," thinking it might be a frightened Julie!

There was an odd sort of flashing in the Eastern sky, which could have been lightning, that or some kind of broken lamp behind the houses opposite.

I spent a good twenty minutes trying to record the gale on my little device, but first the battery was dead (thank God my Mum is deeply organised when it comes to where replacements for these sorts of things are kept), but then I couldn't open my bedroom window, so was creeping around at the front door and then the bathroom window trying to record sounds, until I realised my headphones were not working, and then I kept running out of space on the sound card... I'm not sure it was entirely meant to be. Still, there might be something worth using at some point in my life...

I finally fell asleep, and woke up to the sounds of my parents laughing at me describing myself as a Sioux chef in yesterday's blog (now corrected to sous chef!) My computer auto-corrected the word, and I've always been comically rubbish at homophones!

I don't think I slept quite enough, however, as I've felt rubbish all day. I shouldn't complain. I've not had to do more than sit on a sofa and eat copious numbers of mince pies all day.

Brother Edward and Sacha arrived in the afternoon and we ate a lovely evening meal, cooked by Julie, which paved the way for a series of games involving pens and paper. One of them, which required us to draw book titles, was particularly amusing. Try drawing "Emma!"

Julie and I went to the first part of Midnight Mass. We processed around the church holding candles whilst singing Once in Royal, which was just lovely, but when the religious content got confusing, intense and curiously quiet, we made a run for it! We left with the sound of ringing bells in our ears, almost choking on frankincense fumes.

It strikes me that church services will only become relevant when people learn to use those beautiful spaces in a classy and theatrical manner. There's so much inherent scope for moving and engaging people which it seems is rather arrogantly ignored by church people.