Safeguarding and Ascension ...

It could be an annoying quiz question: what is the link between safeguarding and Ascension...? but today the answer was Holy Trinity Church Dunoon. The pair of us spent the day - well, from 10.30am till 3pm - in the RC church hall (we're always borrowing it!) for a training day for Vestry members and others who do stuff in the church, updating our perceptions and knowledge on the matters of safeguarding and appropriate action in the kind of circumstances that can suddenly arise in a church community - indeed in any community, but our focus was obvious. We were joined for this by some people who'd travelled from other diocesan congregations, as well as a sizeable group from our linked charge on Bute. 

The work was intriguing, challenging and thought-provoking; the speaker, the Provincial Officer for Safeguarding as crisp, as human and as informative as I'd hope for, with some interesting analogies gained from his past life in bomb disposal ... The Bishop and our Rector (David I and David II) were both there; I caught up with my old school/university/orchestra/singing friend from Bute (we find it incredible that the pair of us, brought up in Glasgow as Presbyterians, should end up working in the same linked charge in Argyll); I was strangely exhausted by 3 o'clock.

However, I'd realised last night that the Easter Garden was a tad inappropriate for Ascension Day, and there was a service at 5.30pm, so after a quick cuppa we were off to church - me to grovel under the altar fishing out plaster angels (their wings were damp), the empty tomb (empty or no, a very heavy plaster object - originally, I was told, a mould from Dunoon Ceramics when there was actually a factory here) studded with pebbles, a whole sackful of bone dry sphagnum moss and the morning sky backdrop, which had a very large spider on it ... The moss went down the side of the hill below the church, the dust into the dustpan, the spider ... Who knows?

We went home again for just long enough or me to put a loaf on in the machine (we'd have had no bread for breakfast otherwise) and then we were out again, back to church for the Ascension Day Eucharist. Big hymns, small congregation = big sing! And home again, to salmon topped with oatmeal accompanied by samphire and a few English asparagus stems, followed by strawberries and total collapse.

And that is almost but not quite an example of ...zeugma?