So many things, so little time...

I still seem to be playing catch up on all the things I put off whilst I was doing my A-levels. I am now up to date on my church, business, and personal accounts, which feels like a mountain climbed. It was starting to feel as though the end is in sight, but this is my busiest time of year at work, so now everything else is getting squeezed in around the edges, and perhaps it might be further off than I'd hoped. It's not helped by the fact that there's a global shortage of ADHD meds at the moment, so I'm substituting modafinil at the weekends, and planning on gradually tapering my dose so that I can make the small stockpile I had managed to build up last as long as possible, whilst at the same time transferring my care from the NHS to a private provider who I hope will be willing to switch my prescription to one of the few available treatments which is not (currently) undergoing a shortage (but which they tend to be less keen to prescribe because unlike my current meds which are a pro-drug that gradually turns into speed in your liver, is in fact, literally speed, and therefore rather more open to abuse.)

I am still finding time to have some fun though as well as catching up on tedious admin and other responsibilities. Here are some non-accounts things that have been keeping me occupied recently or are planned for the near future...

Our next door neighbours are having a horror film festival throughout October, so I went to a couple of films there last week - The Ritual, which was good, but right on the border between interestingly and unpleasantly scary, and Poltergeist, which was firmly in the entertaining range, and just generally quite heart-warming and fun. I missed a few others that I would have like to see because of needing some quiet time by myself, but I'm hoping to get to see 'Final Destination 2' on Friday. On Saturday I'm heading up to Yorkshire for a few days, where I'll be seeing leonato in The Government Inspector, and then heading over to spend a couple of days with my parents.

The weekend before last I went to Cambridge to celebrate atreic's birthday, including by singing Evensong with Great St Mary's occasional choir. As always happens when I have the opportunity for choral singing I went through the cycle of 'I really miss singing in a choir ... maybe I should join a choir ... No, Sebastian, No! No new commitments allowed ... ' but rather than stopping there I then segued into ' ... okay, but maybe at some point in the future when I don't have quite so many responsibilities at St John's, are there any churches near me that have a choir which is amateur enough to let me join but good enough that I'd enjoy singing with them ... ooh, look, Holy Innocent's Hornsey don't have a regular choir but they do have an occasional singing group for particular services, including All Souls ... learning the notes for the Fauré Requiem in a week and a half you say? How hard can it be?' (FTAOD, yes, this is in a sense another commitment, but it's quite a short term one, and it's giving me a great deal of joy, so it was definitely the right call.)

Also last weekend I was training a couple of new servers at St John's. This is a really positive step, and will take a bit of the load off my and artsyhonker's shoulders once the new folk get a bit more confident. I think the training went pretty well, and my plan to have each of them walk through one role (thurifer/crucifer) as I explained what needed to be done, and then have them swap and see how much they could recall without me telling them what to do felt quite effective pedagogically, but I hadn't quite thought through implications of the fact that whilst they were doing that the obvious role for me was 'in persona sacerdos'... ...until I was saying the words of consecration and a little bit of my brain started a running commentary along the lines of 'well this is emotionally interesting, isn't it? Maybe you should have thought about that beforehand'. Fortunately it all stayed fairly cerebral and internally sarcastic until later when I was journalling about it, at which point the yearning hit me like a punch to the solar plexus and I burst into tears.

In other church related events I am currently doing the Alpha course with St Luke's, which is Fascinating. I am clearly not the target audience, and I'm not really learning much about Christianity per se, but I am learning quite a lot about St Luke's/Holy Trinity Brompton, as well as developing relationships with the people in the group. I've been trying to balance sharing some of what I know, both in terms of book learning and in terms of my faith journey with trying not to dominate the discussion too much. I wasn't entirely sure how well I was succeeding, but I was quite reassured tonight because the group facilitator called on me explicitly and said he wanted to hear what I thought because it was clear I had a lot of knowledge that he thought it would be helpful to share with the group. (The question was about what we found convincing in the historical evidence for the truth of the claims Christianity makes, and I talked about one of the things I found most convincing was all the bits in the gospels that are awkward or embarrassing, and feel like they don't quite fit together, because if you were making it up, why would you /invent/ stories about Peter being a complete idiot, or infighting amongst the apostles and so on, and why would you draw so much attention to the utter humiliation and shame that was the crucifixion, when you could instead weave a story that felt coherent and glorious. This is obviously not an idea that's original to me, but it was new to a lot of people there, and did get quite a few appreciative responses.)

Not entirely unrelated to the aforementioned film festival and Alpha course, I've also been doing a bit of baking recently, which has all gone down pretty well. I started with a Victoria sponge with fresh raspberries (as well as jam and cream) which was good but not super exciting, followed by cupcakes with burnt butter cream which were abso-fricking-lutely amazing and I will be making again repeatedly. Today I made raspberry chocolate cake which was appreciated even more than my theological reflections :)

Last weekend I had coffee with the interim priest at St John's, as he wanted to get to know his churchwarden a bit better, and he's, oh, he's fine, and I'm very glad that we've got someone at the helm that isn't me, but he's no Mthr Alice, and I shall be very glad when she's back. Later that afternoon I spent an hour or so keeping an eye on Iona (my niece) whilst my sister had a massage that my other sister and I had bought her as a birthday present. I remain completely besotted, and also impressed and astonished by how quickly she is getting bigger and becoming more distinctly her own person. She's increasingly mobile, and of course that means able to get into much more trouble, but it's wonderful watching her explore the world around herself and figure out what everything is. (Particularly whether it's something for her to eat, to which she almost invariably thinks the answer is 'yes'.)