Good Friday '24

I think I've probably said this before on Blipfoto on Good Friday, when I end up probably posting variations on the same photo, that the oddness of the day is compounded by realising that for the vast majority of people it's merely the prelude to a Bank Holiday weekend, the start of the school Spring break, the day they take to a crowded motorway despite the warnings of closures and traffic. For us nowadays, not merely as church people but also as church musicians, the hour we actually spend at a church service dominates the entire day, so that the morning seems squashed in before we have to leave the house at 1.30pm to be ready for the start of it in the silence at 2 o'clock. Today, because it was actually  dry and sunny, I did a couple of washings and hung them out, but the main thing I did was finish off a poem that had its genesis in the experience of yesterday - that watch in the garden, that staring in the dark into the candle flames,  often produces a poem.

The service at 2pm was filled with intense silences and powerful words and drama - that big cross in the photo was carried in from the back of the church by our rector, with the heavy thump as it was as it were driven into the floor at three points on the way. Three of us sang the setting of the Reproaches by Victoria - Himself had to rewrite it to make up for the loss of our fourth singer, the one who's gone off to the outer isles. There were three hymns. There were impenetrable silences - a silence notwithstanding the presence in the congregation of two visiting dogs who seemed silenced themselves. There was symbolism and powerful words, and the reading of the Passion.

And then we drifted out into the sunshine (extra photo), and I talked to friends among the daffodil-strewn graves, and a visitor told Himself it had been well worth her journey to come, and we went home and ate hot cross buns because we'd not had any lunch. And then we went out again, walking this time, back up to the church for me to run through what I have to sing tomorrow, to see if at my age I still have the voice to sustain the Exultet. It seemed fine, and we walked home in the now chilly last sunlight and Himself cooked curry and I fought to stay awake.

Now, yet again, it's past midnight. In the world outside our bubble our family are travelling with football teams, buying their first actual new car, and all I can think is that I need sleep. 

Does one get too old even for this?