Shiny Things!

Darn it, I was nearly caught up, and then life did its "getting too busy for me to write about it" thing, and now I'm three weeks behind again...

The Tuesday after getting back from Thronescamp I had the fourth and final session of the Mirfield Lent Course. This one was called "Making a Rule for Life", and was loosely based around the Rule of St Benedict. Of the four speakers, I thought this was the strongest, and I also found the content easiest to engage with, although I think that's partly because it was more practical than theoretical rather than because it was better per se. I was chatting to the speaker afterwards, and he became the third person at the course to ask if I was an ordinand, which, yeah, complicated feels. Once again, singing compline afterwards was a great blessing, and although the course is now over I'm going to look for other opportunities to worship there whilst I'm living nearby.

On the Thursday of that week I had been supposed to be singing with the University Choir, but slightly annoyingly I ended up having to go for a training day in Oxford. Even more annoyingly, a course that was supposed to be a full day ended up only taking the morning (it was their first time running this version, and they'd obviously not done a practice run), so I could in theory have made it back in time. Ah well. It was nice to see Oxford, and staying in a college was pleasantly nostalgic. The chapel was open in the morning, so I found a copy of the BCP and said morning prayer before breakfast.

It was good to be back in London for the weekend, after a fortnight away with rather a lot of travelling to and fro. Saturday started with parkrun, and a quick catch up with my sister afterwards, and was then a fairly quiet day spent with obandsoller.

Sunday was back to being very busy again. We had a rehearsal for St John's Singers before church, and although it was a bit quiet, with only two other people turning up, that meant that we could spend it with smhwpf & I concentrating on helping one of our least confident singers work on her part really intensively, and it was really wonderful to see how much progress she made, both in knowledge, but more importantly, in blossoming confidence, over the course of the rehearsal. After Mass we had the ACPM, which went pretty smoothly, and with a great sigh of relief I handed over the treasurer mantle to Sam.

My friend Seph (WINODW) was in London that weekend for a Games Expo, and came over for dinner that evening. It was my first time cooking for him, which actually makes me surprisingly nervous, because I talk a lot about how much I enjoy cooking, which I then sometimes worry gives people an overinflated sense of my actual skill level. Still, it went quite well in the end - I did red onion and goat's cheese crostini, followed by roast pork belly, and both the potatoes and the crackling came out pretty damn good :) We had a good catch up natter into the evening, before I turned into a pumpkin ahead of the usual horrifically early start back to Huddersfield the next day.