A special day today…

It’s hard to imagine two more different days. Yesterday I plucked up the courage to visit the dentist while today I have officially become a member of the Church of England.
Beginning with the dentist… they are like Marmite; people are either indifferent to them or hate/fear them with a vengeance. I am in the fear them category though in recent years I’ve no complaints at all about the gentleness of their treatment. This stems from an alcoholic school dentist who was never sober on duty!
So why the visit? A couple of weeks ago I felt a twinge in one of my teeth and knew that it could progress to raging toothache so I popped in and asked for an urgent appointment. The man scheduled for right now was a no-show so they said go straight in for an assessment. Gulp! I had hoped for a bit of warning; but it was fine; in and out within minutes and an appointment for the extraction on 3 January. But what I also learned was that the RA drugs over the years absorbed into my bones meant I was likely to bleed more than normal and not heal as quickly. How to make a nervous person worse!

But today is much more enjoyable because I will officially become a member of the Church of England after losing faith in some of the beliefs of the Vatican and actually lapsing as a Catholic for ten years.
It isn’t necessary to do this because the CofE are happy to accept Catholics without ceremony but the option is there and I wanted to mark the transition. I wasn’t exactly nervous; certainly nothing like my reaction to the dentist but there was a certain amount of anticipation.
I am a noisy flamboyant pest most of the time but in some ways I’m very shy so Penny, the vicar suggested I might be best to take the option to do this privately rather than at a Sunday service. So today it was just the vicar and my sponsor. It was lovely with all the Christmas trees on display for charities and there were people milling around choosing their favourite tree.
So I’m delighted that I now belong to the Town Church where my association goes right back to 1996 when I learned to ring on their new bells.
Oh and no this wasn’t handbells but the big boys up in the belfry. An amazing hobby which has allowed me to do exciting things like ring at cathedrals in England including Liverpool, Canterbury, Winchester and the anti-clockwise Bath and also to ring at various towers in Australia. I retired after I rang in a method called Seventieth Birthday Doubles to celebrate my 70th birthday. And so ended my bellringing career…