Livre d'Or

Not being in church for Holy Week and Easter, or Pentecost for that matter, was hard; especially as our vicar decided to focus her energy on the (important!) work of keeping the soup kitchen and food bank going in the face of sudden drastic increased need.

Going to church without music is...strange, but not as bad as I expected. I'm involved in discussion of how to sing safely when we decide to do that (and my bottom line is at least as many precautions as for speaking or they can do it without me).

I'm not entirely sure what we'll do for Christmas. I did run several online carol services a few years ago, and could do that again. If it's still allowed to go to Mass I will be going... again only if the doors are open (and various other precautions), and really if we don't have some kind of harder lockdown imposed again soon it's time to have a conversation with my household/bubble about whether it's safe to go at all, and my own actions will be subject to that of course, the "if it's allowed" includrs if my household decides it's allowed. The lack of available testing makes it difficult to evaluate risk and this frustrates me.

Christmas at home with hairyears and without seeing other family on the day is pretty normal for me by now, because none of my family live near enough for them to see me and for me to also be at church, and when I was working as an organist I couldn't just take off to Canada (or even just go to a church in a different part of the UK if I wanted that) for those services. What will be weird will be not being exhausted by then. Even when not officially working as an organist I usually end up with a few carol services and so on to do during December, and even if I'm only singing the extra travel and rehearsal comes at a time of year when I need more sleep and quiet time, so I usually get to Christmas Day and go splat.