Sunday 2 July

I was on tenterhooks all morning (tenterhooks were actually things used in the cotton industry to hold your cloth in place while you were making it, but it is nevertheless a useful Metaphor). But when Mum got back from church she didn’t mention no, I mean a, letter, so I breathed a very large sigh of relief, so large that Mum looked very concerned and asked me if I would like a Settler.

It was a very strange service, Mum said. The old choirstalls have been half demolished, so the choir had to sit in the seats reserved for Sunday School, and when Sunday School came in during Communion two children started crying because they had nowhere to sit. The choir and the organist were annoyed because the children were crying while they were trying to sing some holy Communion music, and they were still crying when Antony came to do his solo, and a lot of other children had joined in the crying by then. Mum said nobody could hear Antony because of all the weeping and wailing, and then one of the teachers muttered that the children were all right until Antony started to screech at everybody. Then after the service the relief organist had an argument in the parish hall with Miss Brandish, the Head Sunday School mistress, during which Miss Brandish’s coffee became knocked over, and the Vicar went home suddenly, saying that he had quite forgotten to write his sermon for evensong, which puzzled me, for we have not had an evensong at my Church in Living Memory.

But the best thing was that the Treasurer refused to pay Antony his fee because nobody could hear him! Mind you, I think £20 quite extortionate for two minutes of that pigeon song by Mendelssohn, so it serves him right for being greedy and shrill.

I shall remember to say Rabbits again on the 1^st of August. Though we Christians are supposed to eschew pagan superstitions, they certainly seem, in some mysterious way, to work.

Although I have done nothing further on my task, and my heart is still broken, and my breakfast egg was runny, it hasn’t been a bad day, all things considered.