Tag Archives: paston

Hard work and good meals

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A glimpse of the new floor in the study

A kind of order has been restored to 22 Aspland Road. The new floor is all down, and only one thing remains to be done – get  a carpenter (Gary) to reduce the oak post under my desk sufficiently to get it in the space now available. Not quite sure why Mark couldn’t do this. Apparently he didn’t have the right saw.

The filing cabinets presented the most difficulty, because they had to me emptied and filled again each time they were moved. The problem was exacerbated because I took the opportunity to do some resorting of files – mainly grouping them more rationally but in some cases doing some thinning out. Very tiring work, but I’m pleased with the result. Moving the actual cabinets wasn’t the problem we thought it might be, and we’ve also got the hall (Gemmell) bookcase back inside and full of books. Dot thinned out the dresser. Of course we now have stuff in the garage that needs to be disposed of – particularly our futon, for which there will not be room when our study has been converted into a two-person room. (Next stage. Gary again. Hopefully we will also get him to fix the catch on the attic trapdoor.)

At present my car is in the garage to be serviced and MOT tested at huge cost (“It’s the big one”). I’m hoping to get it back before I need to be at the surgery to discuss my blood pressure. but I also want them to do a proper job on the lights, which haven’t been working properly for some months. Pressure? No pressure. None at all. No, really.

Had a very pleasant few days to offset the hard work in the house. On Saturday went to the Greens with Judy for a lovely evening. The Veseys had also been invited, but someone had got the dates wrong. So it was just the five of us plus Anandi and her fiancé David, who are lovely. Saw some photos from Howard and Anna’s recent Ethiopian holiday, made fascinating by their comments and enthusiasm. Lovely meal too. Teetotal Judy gave us a lift, so were able to enjoy Howard’s excellent wine.

Last night’s Valentine Day meal at the Eagle on Newmarket Road was also superb. I had a smoked salmon terrine, followed by the best ribeye steak I’ve had for a long time, and we shared a meringue and fruit sweet. Setting very pleasant, a rose for Dot and service first-class. Could hardly have been better. We didn’t drink there because I was driving, but we came home and finished the evening with a couple of glasses of Prosecco.

Earlier in the day Vicky came round with Amy and George. Jared was away in Kent because his mother had died suddenly (though she had been unwell). Amy and George were pretty lively (respectively), and of course George had to climb the stairs. Lot of illness around: my aunt Josephine’s friend Joyce has recently died, and Josephine has moved (at least temporarily) into a home on Cecil Road. My nephew Joe is very concerned about numbness in different parts of his body (CT scan clear), and his brother Sam has dislocated his shoulder again. Saw Joe outside the Cathedral in the remaining snow on Saturday: he had just given a 2½-hour lecture. Had a chat with him and Birgit, who was waiting for him.

Last Friday I took the afternoon off to go to North Walsham while Mark finished the floor. We had a meeting of the group which will probably be known as Chronicle (Caroline, Rob and me) to discuss putting a Paston show together suitable for presenting at the Coast festival late this year, as well as at Dragon Hall next year or St Peter Hungate (some time). This last followed a meeting with a Hungate trustee on Friday which established that they would be keen for us to do stuff at the church, which is a prime Paston site as well as being significant in its own right. He bought tea and cake at the Briton Arms for Rob and myself – has to be a good sign. The three of us are now going to do some writing centring on Margaret Paston from Mautby.

I led the service on Sunday, and we followed that (after coffee) with a rehearsal of four songs aimed at the Seagull on the 26th. Went surprisingly well considering I was working on the tune of one of them till the last minute. They are Bernadette, Living on a Fault Line, I didn’t think it would come to this and Where you go I will follow (which is not a stalking song). The cold weather has been abating since then – probably not causal – and for the last couple of days it’s been damp , windy and a few degrees above freezing.

After our North Walsham meeting last Monday I called in to see Jessie and her new bathroom. Roger was there too. The bathroom looked really good, though disturbingly there were two metal tubes left over. She seemed in good form. Elsewhere in the county someone has been found to be stealing money rather systematically from another of Dot’s relatives. Who? Sub judice, I’m afraid.

Eating out with Jessie

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Only the year is different: Jessie celebrates last year at the Banningham Crown. This year same Jessie, same place, same pavlova.

Jessie is having her bathroom noisily rebuilt – to a plan by Roger – and so we took her out yesterday to lunch at the Gunton Arms (Elderton Grange reincarnated in more pubby but still upmarket mode). More accurately, as it turned out, she took us out for lunch, but as it was a snack and a drink, I decided to allow it. My smoked salmon pate and toast was delicious; Jessie had a venison sausage roll and Dot a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel. All very good, with deer in the background and a touch of sun – which was a change from yesterday, when it hardly got light at all.

This was the second meal out with Jessie in less than week. As I mentioned last time, we went for an evening meal to the Banningham Crown last Saturday with Jessie, Roger and Liz, and that was excellent too. I had a game pie, followed by an impressive pavlova. If you had a league table of service standards, the Crown would be at the top: welcoming, efficient and very friendly throughout. Food is good too. Not entirely convinced that the garage has fixed my lights – in fact pretty sure it hasn’t, but I really can’t be bothered to go back. They will have to sort them out when they do the service in the middle of February.

After preaching on the wedding at Cana on Sunday I watched Senna, a film that David had got me for Apple TV. It was excellent: Senna himself came over very well, and the ending was particularly poignant, with an inevitability about it. Funny how all this background story totally passes you by at the time.

On Monday evening we went to a planning meeting at the vicarage. Nicholas has an idea about introducing a monthly Sunday evening service aimed at people who are turned off by “church”. It’s a communion service, but much simpler and with no hymns. Obviously. I managed to avoid getting too involved, although I’m in favour of it. I have enough to do at St Augustine’s at the moment – as well as organising the services, I’ve been dealing with the accounts this week, trying to get the to balance as near as I can. Hard to do it when the start point is so obscure.

Before seeing Jessie yesterday I had a visit from Rob: we had a discussion about various Paston futures. Lucy is in Papworth again with a worsening prognosis, and I’m not sure when she’ll emerge. I’ve spoken to her on the phone a couple of times, and she seems remarkably cheerful.

Local history difficult to pitch

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Dot by the Tower of London as daylight fails

At the end of a damp and gloomy week, there is a touch of sun in the sky. And there is some sense of achievement too, as I’ve finished and sent off the five poems to Ian Fosten. All I have to do now is turn up on Friday and say something about why I wrote them. “Because you asked me to” will not be an adequate answer. Dot has decided to come too, so I will have moral support. From there we will head north and stay the night at Toton by invitation, going on to Buxton the following day. I have also finished a sermon for Sunday, based fairly tightly on one I wrote exactly ten years ago.

On the subject of poems, Oliver sent me a brilliant one that he wrote at school. It’s about the moon, and called God’s eye, and has rhymes and similes and everything. Exceptionally good, IMHO, and he was sent to show it to the headmaster. Spoke to him and to Amy last night on the phone: Amy seemed to like the story I wrote for her and found it “very funny”. She thinks it’s my function to be funny, and she’s probably right. I must write her a really funny story.

Speaking of funny stories, I have just finished the current Booker prize winner, The Sense of an Ending, and it’s not funny at all. In fact it was rather disappointing, the plot depending on one character not revealing something that they had no real reason not to reveal and that was not too hard to guess anyway. I suppose it had some interest philosophically, but it belongs to a category that I find increasingly frustrating: well written but basically pessimistic and lacking in any trace of redemption. On a brighter note, I’ve now finished two of Kate Atkinson’s Brodie novels, which were unusual in combining good writing, murder and humour.

Going back in time – while Dot had a long lie-in, not knowing I’d left the house, I spent all of a chilly Tuesday morning in the garage showroom at Wrights, while a man did his best to disguise some scratches on the car caused by a vandal a few weeks ago, and another man tried to correct a problem with the direction of the lights. I think the latter was successful, but I haven’t really been able to try it out yet. Should find out this evening, when we eat at the Banningham Crown with Jessie and Roger.

I did go out to Mundesley library on Wednesday for a Paston-related Reading the Landscape session, during which Dr Richard Hoggett gave half a dozen of us some pointers on how to use computers to research local history. Difficult to pitch, you might think – and indeed one lady (out of an initial company of eight) left almost immediately after discovering it involved computers at a level beyond her expertise. Not sure what her expertise was. Rob had always intended to leave early, but another two also fell by the wayside after getting the direction they required. I could have left then too, but felt I should stay on as the only PHS representative, so I lingered. However, after 90 minutes I departed as well.

On Thursday Dot discovered she had a Nafpht meeting at Thurton, which interrupted our “day off” together. However it gave me a chance to finish off my poems. By way of compensation we went for lunch to Frankie & Benny’s, which seemed to be making an attempt on the Three Horseshoes slow service record until I complained, when the main course miraculously appeared. Staff were very apologetic, and the food, to be fair, was excellent. In the evening we went to the cinema to see The Iron Lady, which featured a tremendous performance by Meryl Streep as Mrs Thatcher but in the end I think got the balance slightly wrong: too much dementia and not enough time given to her earlier life. Still compelling, though.

Sometimes the sacrifices work

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A rather bad picture of Amy having a larger-than-life experience in the Cathedral

Dot’s dizziness persists, and after trying fewer tablets with poor results, she made a late decision to go to the doctor’s this morning. By chance she got a woman doctor who was very thorough and knew exactly what was going on – apparently. Now Dot is going back on Thursday for the doctor to do a manoeuvre  with her neck which should shift some crystals that are causing the problem.

After this encouraging news we went up to the garage to get a quote on fixing some scratches on the car, apparently caused deliberately by some merry passer-by. We decided on the cheaper option, which will be accomplished next Tuesday. I’ve also booked the car in for a service, which will not be cheap.

Yesterday I met with Caroline and Rob at Fakenham to discuss forming a new PHS offshoot (us) to arrange arts-related events.  We’re concentrating on the COAST festival at the end of the year, but hope to fix up some lesser performances before that. Rob is drawing up a structure, but the performance will include readings, narrative, possibly monologues and hopefully yet-to-be-written songs. Quite exciting, and it might enable us to sell some of the recently published books.

After this I drove to Aylsham to return a book of vinyl samples, since we had decided to go with John Lewis on the grounds that it’s much more expensive. No, that can’t be right. It’s on the grounds that they’re very thorough and have a much wider range of possibilities. While I was out, a JL man came and measured the space with a tape measure. I mention this because it seems so low-tech. We had earlier (on Saturday) borrowed two vinyl samples in order to decide between them – this proved unexpectedly difficult, but we eventually made a choice. The man (another man) came to pick them up on his way home and, having seen the house, immediately plumped for the one we’d decided on. Needless to say, it was not the one that was on special offer.

My sermon on Sunday seemed to go down well, though I had a lot of trouble preparing it. Surprising how often that happens. In other news we attended the opening of Harriet’s brother’s shop last Friday, which was amazing in the sense that no effort at all had been made to make it look appealing. The shop front was just empty. One or two people were mooching around, and there was good wine and Sri Lankan food on offer (we bought some for the freezer), but although H’s brother Francis was charming, it was hard to see how it was all going to come together. Maybe it will become a cult food shop and go nationwide. And maybe not.

I’m making some progress with Amy’s story but am not entirely sure where it’s going. I have turned the last Little story into a booklet, ready to be posted to Oliver, but I’d like to finish Amy’s story first. Must try harder. Have made no progress at all on the five poems I have to write for Ian Fosten, and a couple of CDs have arrived from the King Street project that I’m supposed to listen to and be inspired by. Have read a Kate Atkinson book I was given for Christmas and started on the second. Not bad.

Last night I was called in as an emergency reserve for my chess team (I am having a chess sabbatical, but they were desperate), and while Dot was at a Norwich Youth for Christ meeting, resigning as a trustee, I managed a presentable win against Jim McAvoy featuring a rather nice sacrificial attack. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t. Here it is (for chess lovers):

1 c4 f5 2 g3 Nf6 3 Nf3 e6 4 Bg2 c6 5 0-0 d5 6 d3 Bd6 7 Nc3 0-0 8 e4 d4 9 Nxd4 Bxg3 10 hg Qxd4 11 Be3 Qd7 12 Bc5 Rd8 13 Qb3 b6 14 Be3 Ng4 15 Bg5 Re8 16 ef Qxd3 17 Be4 Qd7 18 fe Qxe6 19 Rae1 Qf7 20 Nb5!? Qh5 21 Bh4 g5 22 Nc7 gh 23 c5+ Kf8 24 Bg6(!) Qxg6 25 Rxe8+ Qxe8 26 Nxe8 Kxe8 27 Qg8+ 1-0

Walking with Australians

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Diane Jackman Lee reads her poem out at the end of the poetry-art workshop at Dragon Hall. Completed work on board.

My talk at St Luke’s on our relationship with Creation went well after a slow start: the group of 8-10 were eventually persuaded to be responsive, and actually got very enthusiastic about my paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer from the Aramaic, which made a good ending. Came away feeling quite pleased after not knowing quite what to expect.

Other things that turned out well: Roger came round to deliver a birthday present for Dot, and I had a brief chat with him about the dodgy radiators. As a result tried a couple of things that didn’t work but then had a determined go at bleeding them (I had tried before without success). After quite a bit of spillage one worked; the other didn’t. Not to be thwarted, I then had a go at removing and refixing the valve cover that adjusts the heat and managed to get it back on properly. Result: two working radiators, and I’ve now cancelled the engineer’s visit.

And I was relieved to find only two people on the Paston walk this morning – a couple of western Australians who knew nothing at all about the Pastons and not much about Norwich. So it was easy for me, and even St Peter Hungate opened for our visit as promised. Not sure about the Paston Week as a whole: attendance has been sparse and the organisation a little inaccurate at times. I expected far more to be on Rob’s walk, which started two hours after mine today, but he only had one person!

Yesterday before helping the re-enactors to set up at Dragon Hall I managed about 90 minutes in the city, paying in cheques, booking theatre tickets and dropping in a poetry book for Keiron in the hope of getting a little publicity. I also managed to buy a birthday card and something else for Dot. After the Dragon Hall set up I met Dot at the supermarket to stock up for the Evetts’ visit next week.

This afternoon I arrived home to find Phyllis Seaman visiting with a birthday card. Afterwards (and after Norwich lost 1-2 to Arsenal) Dot and I had a game of table tennis and then cleared the garage so that we could get Dot’s car in next week. So a few toys made the return journey to the loft.

Chasing the Dragon Hall

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A quiet corner at the Dragon Hall private view

A productive day today. Finished off the talk on Creation that I’m giving at St Luke’s tonight, plus an outline of the sermon I’m giving on Sunday. Also laminated the walk sheets for Saturday and completed a Gift Aid form, which I was suddenly able to access via Firefox, having failed for weeks on Safari. I’ve also suggested some hymns for Sunday, read the meter and rang British Gas to fix an appointment for them to look at our two dodgy radiators. And it’s still only 4.37pm! Of course I did have to give Lucy’s talk at Dragon Hall a miss, but I have heard it before.

Also I’ve been on Paston/Dragon Hall business for the last couple of days, running an art/poetry workshop with Annette. Most of the poetry part was on Tuesday, and we had only two people taking part – one of whom had done it before at Oxburgh (but liked it so much she wanted to do it again), and the other was on the Dragon Hall staff. I think they would have cancelled it, but because of an administrative error they had booked Diane Lee (née Jackman – hence the error) in twice. So it was pretty relaxed: I took them for a walk round Norwich, calling in at the Castle Museum, where my friend Anna gave them (and me) an amazing insight into a picture called The Paston Treasure. Oh, and they did write a couple of poems.Yesterday I was there for the start and finish, but left Annette to it for the rest of the day.

The Paston Week at Dragon Hall started on Monday evening unless you were one of the select group setting up the exhibition on Sunday afternoon. I was: Diana and I took control of the exhibition boards, and the result was, I have to say, pretty good – largely because Diana is a primary school teacher and is very good at practical stuff like setting up displays. However, I was very supportive…

The private view on Monday was a huge success: guest of honour was Sir Henry Paston-Bedingfeld from Oxburgh Hall, and I introduced the new poetry book. The five of us read a couple of poems each, and I snuck an extra small one – Magic – in at the end. The audience was very appreciative, and Sarah from Dragon Hall did a great job organising refreshments and indeed everything else. Lucy didn’t make it, unfortunately, because she was pretty tired out after “appearing” on radio with Sarah earlier in the day.

Earlier in the day too I had paid another visit to St Augustine’s Hall, this time to help Tony install a light. Pretty straightforward, this time, though I had to wait while he went and bought one. Fortunately the weather this week has been good, though cooler.

The other major event in the past few days was of course the concert by Adam Cohen at the UEA. Dot recovered enough to go (she is still not 100%), but it was annoying to have to stand in a queue for a quarter of an hour after the time the concert was supposed to have started, especially as we’d bought tickets in advance. On the plus side, Adam came out and had a brief chat while we waited.

The LCR was set out in cafe style – informal – and the whole event was quite intimate, with AC laughing so much at one point that he was unable to sing one song (Like a man). He was backed by Mai Bloomfield on guitar and cello (not both at once) and a multi-instrumental guy. The sound wasn’t brilliant, but he came over well and sang just about all the songs on his latest album as well as his father’s So Long, Marianne. Mai Bloomfield did an opening set that was sweet but not extraordinary.

I think they were both a bit bemused at the quietness of the audience. They wouldn’t have been if they were sitting where I was, with a guy behind talking incessantly all the way through. Good, though. Very glad I went: I bought the CD afterwards. Whoops. Just remembered to remove it from my wish list on Amazon.

Paston poetry book published

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Missed the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival this year, but wrote a poem over the weekend:

EXIT GRANDCHILDREN, STAGE LEFT

Empty dens in the garden,
bear on the stairs

 The speed of darkness has been exceeded
and candles lie where they have fallen
under the newly cut hedge

The cars and bricks have been returned
to the garage, and the beds
remade, redirected, resolved

The prince and princess have gone,
heading for hallowe’en
and we are in winter already

But we all remember
that trick of the city night:
lights like puppets dancing
strange circles across the sky

magic, like a roundabout,
reflecting, returning

Caught glimpses of fireworks as I drove to North Walsham on Saturday to pick up some copies of Another Country, the Paston poetry book that contains five of my poems and was designed by David. In a totally unbiased sort of way I can say that it looks very good. It will be launched next Monday at the Dragon Hall private view.

North Walsham again on Sunday to see Jessie for tea and mince pies after a quickish visit to a packed Sainsburys to buy flowers for the cemetery. Not very nice weather: intermittent drizzle. Earlier I had preached at St Augustine’s and we had a bring-and-share lunch which turned out to be better than I had anticipated at the point when I realised that about 50 per cent of it was couscous. Actually the version of couscous that included meat was quite pleasant, and there were rolls and cheese, which can never be a bad thing.

On Saturday morning I paid a brief visit to the church hall for the reinstatement of the window and discovered the Rainbows in situ, which of course meant I had tracked down Cheryl, our elusive cleaner. She has promised to send me a list of people hiring the all, but I’m not holding my breath. I also noticed that our new sign contains a mis-spelling of the word “spiritual” (sprirtual, no less), which is pretty annoying, especially considering that the person who provided the PDF for the sign people is perfectly capable of spelling “spiritual”. As he is now in Palestine, I can’t hit him. Just as well, probably.

Brown bin full of fallen leaves

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Oliver in his den in our garden

Not exactly a seamless move into autumn. We had our hair cut in preparation, and then bought a fridge, while wondering where the extra hour went. The first brown bin full of fallen leaves was left out on Monday, and now the road is covered with golden confetti. I have just taken Joy to the dentist’s – and fetched her again. Bit of an ordeal for her (the dental work, not my driving).

Dot went to London on Sunday and stayed with her colleague Barbara at David Coomes’ place in Walthamstow. Handily, this was five minutes from the school in Waltham Forest where they were doing a day’s P4C on the Monday. Kristine was absent in Kabul (some people will do anything…) but DC made them welcome. My radius has been much narrower over the past few days, the highlight being a visit to Paston to see Lucy and obtain some exhibition material that could be photographed for publicity for the Dragon Hall event. I should mention that I had to tackle a vampire on Hallowe’en, but only a small one: Phoebe, from two doors down.

Also on Monday I had to open the church hall for repairs and found myself assisting guy who was replacing a broken window, checking the starter on a light bulb and repairing some guttering. The heaters have also been serviced in my absence, and I was surprised to hear that two are broken. We knew about one of them, but the other was working very well on Sunday, so I can’t help being suspicious. Now there’s a big debate about whether we should install a better heating system.

In other news, Ian Fosten dropped in the 42 poems submitted for the Waveney and Blyth competition, from which I have to select a winner and four or five commended. Boot-on-other-foot situation. Dot has gone off for lunch in the city with Becca from NYFC, followed by a meeting with Anne, and I have a long list of things to do, largely because I’ve spent much of my time this week (a) preparing a sermon for Sunday and (b) preparing a one-day session on our relationship with Creation for a St Luke’s group. Also taking antibiotics for suspected infection in the lower abdomen area, but I think that’s on its way out. Either that or I am.

Resolving discrepancies in the Gospels

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Amy much earlier; today she is seven!

What a lovely day! A bright, crisp blue sky, it’s Amy’s seventh birthday, I’ve hung out the washing and Another Country is complete. David sent me the final PDF this morning, and I have burned it on to a CD ready for Rob to pick up tomorrow. Nice to meet a deadline – thanks to David, who has really made the book look good. We shall have to make him an honorary Paston trustee…

The temperature has certainly dropped, but when the sun it shining it’s hardly noticeable. All right, it is noticeable, but not objectionable. Quite marked in the evenings, though, and we’ve been out the last three evenings. On Monday we went to the Cathedral to hear a lecture by Cambridge Professor Colin Humphreys, who has done some in-depth research on the events of Easter week, resolving apparent discrepancies in the Gospels. Fascinating stuff: he has established that the Last Supper was on the Wednesday and the Crucifixion on the Friday, with much of the Thursday taken up with the trial. The actual date of the Crucifixion was April 3, AD 33 – at 9am. None of this may seem to matter much, but it is encouraging to see that apparent discrepancies can be resolved if you accept the rather obvious fact that people writing at the time knew more about how things worked at the time than we do. A key factor in this is that different calendars were in use, for example. Prof Humphreys is a scientist, and he was assisted in his work by an astro-physicist, among others. His book is called The Mystery of the Last Supper.

The lecture was very good, but even more entertaining were the attempts made beforehand to get the technology working. At one stage nine cathedral clergy and lay people were clustered round, trying to make a laptop communicate with a projector. It proved beyond them until a young lad in jeans came forward and solved it almost instantly. He should get a cathedral post – a canon, perhaps.

On the Tuesday our group met at the Archers’ house on the other side of the city. We gave Ian a lift, and I walked up to his house (about a mile) to give myself some exercise. Invigorating. David cooked jacket potatoes, Vick supplied sublime pears in cider, and Bridget took the evening off at the theatre with David Essex. Some people have no idea…

Last night we were at the Cathedral again – this time in the lovely Westron Room at the Hostry – to hear poet Anthony Thwaite speak about the King James version with special relevance to poetry. Some interesting stuff, much of it autobiographical, but he rather marred his argument by comparing the KJV with the New English Bible all the time and not mentioning (till questions) the NIV, which is a far better modern translation. The NEB, in fact, is pretty awful, and the Dean, who was in the audience, pointed out afterwards that it was not used in the Cathedral at all. The Dean also made some good points about the importance of using language that was familiar to the audience. I have the feeling that my mother or one of her friends knew Mr Thwaite some time in the past (he is 81), but I didn’t pursue it.

Fieldwalking: too many explanations

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The starting line, with one person hanging back...

Autumn is on its way: chillier times forecast for the rest of this week. But we’ve been fortunate over the last few days, when we’ve had a lot of sun and warmish weather. The Paston poetry book is on its way to being completed. I have got just about everything to David, and I’m pretty excited about the way it’s looking. It’s involved quite a lot of work, but it should be worth it. After delivering early versions on CD to Rob and Lucy, I took one to UEA to give to Caroline on Thursday, had a chat with her about it, and in the evening we were able to duscuss her reactions (and everyone else’s) at the Paston trustees’ meeting.

That set me up nicely for a visit to Coventry on the Friday, with Phil driving. Really easy journey over there in glorious weather, and the meeting went well, all of us agreeing on maintaining the status quo. Andrew again seemed very well; we took him to buy some jeans at Matalan afterwards, and then for a very good meal at Fridays, followed by a trip down Memory Lane – the lane in this case involving Beanfield Avenue, The Chesils and certain parts of north Coventry which I did not know before or during our visit there. Yes, we got lost – but not seriously, and Andrew was actually able to guide us back towards the end. He was in good form.

During the trip we just avoided a nasty accident when a car pulled out in front of us: Phil managed to avoid both the car and a crowd of women on the nearside pavement, which was quite an achievement. Later, as we were about to enter the M6, another car shot round from our left and in front of us. The slower the speed limits, the crazier the drivers. Happily, Joy was praying for us. The journey home was not bad, though we had to detour around Elveden as usual.

On Saturday Dot and I went fieldwalking in Paston as part of the latest project. I suspected this might not be my cup of tea, and it wasn’t – but I’m glad we gave it a go. It was another lovely day, and it would have been nice to spend longer than the ten minutes or so that we devoted to actually finding artefacts. Richard Hoggett, who was in charge, was if anything too thorough in his preparation and said the same things several times. But a lot of it was interesting. On the whole, though, I am not all that enthused by bits of things from a long time ago: there always seems to me to be too many possible explanations for things being what and where they are, and the ones settled on are too random. (Dot managed to listen to the Norwich City game while fieldwalking: we beat Swansea 3-1.)

Sunday was a quieter day after another child-friendly communion service, though we did manage to lock ourselves out of the hall after Elizabeth bolted the kitchen door and the Yale-operated main door slammed shut. Had to fetch the Yale key from the vicarage , but no real problem.