Categories: uncategorized
Date: 07 May 2005 22:37:23
Phew! Week began with alarm going off at 3.40am on Saturday. There has to be a reason for such an unnatural state of affairs, and there was - we were off to Bruges (Belgium) for the day. We arrived at church at 4.45 as requested, and the coach arrived at 5.15, bearing folk from our on-the-way-to-being sister church, the organisers of the trip. Once underway, the drivers offered us cheery banter which was really not appreciated at that hour of the morning, and waiter-service cups of coffee, which definitely were. The coffee was accompanied by cake and flapjacks which some wonderful persons had made.
After arriving at Folkestone in very good time, we produced our passports. Both ours have pictures which look like they came from the Police Gazette - mine as an unidentified corpse pulled from the Thames, and Spike's as an Al-Qaeda suspect. We were all let through, however, and the coach drove on to the shuttle train. Being on board this was like spending 45 minutes at a standstill in an artificially-lit box. I much prefer the ferry, even though it takes longer and the last two times I have travelled by ferry I went decidedly green about the gills. After an hour and a half's drive through the flat lands of northern France and southern Belgium, we arrived at Bruges, which was as I remembered it from previous visits - fascinating medieval architecture, canals, tempting chocolate shops, packs of tourists of various nationalities, and occasional whiffs of dubious-smelling drains.
After four hours in Bruges, we headed back towards Calais. As we pulled out of the car park the coach went over a bump, and the remains of the cake came to a literally sticky end as the box fell upside down on the floor, and bounced down the emergency exit steps. At Calais we visited the Cite Europe shopping centre, but were too knackered to do anything except grab a couple of crates of bargain-priced beer, a bottle of gin and some yummy baguettes for tea. The drivers then had the exciting task of loading everyone's purchases into the hold of the coach, in the correct order for unloading when we got home. Our priest had a very large laundry-type holdall labelled 'Father's Bag' - I don't know what he'd been buying, but it took two people to lift it onto the coach. And so we arrived safely home at the very reasonable hour of 9.45pm, and a plethora of husbands and grown-up children arrived with cars to take their wives/parents and all their purchases home.
Tuesday was our second wedding anniversary, so Spike cooked a yummy three-course meal and we drank the last of the numerous bottles of bubbly he was given for his 40th birthday back in September. I remember thinking as I got up that two years ago today my mum had just come to my room with a cup of tea, and around 11am that I was just getting back from the hairdressers. However, I had a horribly busy day at work, so didn't really think at 1.15pm 'two years ago we were standing up at the front of the church', or indeed at 12.20pm, 'two years ago I'd just thought, well, whatever isn't organised now will just have to not be organised, I'm going to get in that taxi and go and get married'.
And so of course we come to Thursday May 5th, when as we now know, Labour won a historic third consecutive term in office. It was also Ascension Day and my turn to do the intercessions. It would be unthinkable to me not to mention the election, so I struggled to write a prayer for justice and good government, without nailing my political colours to the mast. I was mindful of a service Spike described to me a few months ago, where the intercessions had a distinct 'hang 'em and flog 'em' flavour, and he and Father subsequently teased each other with 'I didn't hear you responding "hear our prayer"', 'no, nor you either'.
In previous years, Spike has always been at parties on election night, staggering home as it gets light, and I had looked forward to being a part of this. Unfortunately, last November we moved from a constituency with a very active Labour Party, to one which seems to consist of two blokes (now that Spike's moved in) delivering a few leaflets. So after church we took home a take-away curry, and this along with a few bottles of Bruges-trip beer (Spike) and a couple of cups of strong tea (me) took us to 2.30am in front of Peter Snow and his Swingometer, and then I gave up and went to bed, giving in to that 'I've got to work in the morning' feeling which is so unimaginable when you're 18. Impressively, I managed to be at work at 8.10, which meant I could be out that door on the stroke of 4pm. The weekend starts here!