...helped at a very large funeral in the village church - I had never met the chap, but he had had a major influence in the village and the care home he moved to before we came here - he died of MS (I think) at 51 - young, teenage, family left behind.

The family were all devastated, as you would expect, but had asked that the church be decorated for Christmas and had a tree etc. - it was a bizarre mix - tragedy of a young, sporting, intelligent person, with the church packed out with black jacketed mourners (I was a black cassocked mourner...), but tinsel, fairy lights and lots of candles. It is a time of mourning, advent (well, penitential, I suppose), but the celebrations keep breaking in.

Unusual committal, from my experiences - the churchyard is open, so we all walked a few yards outside the church and saw him buried right there, outside the south door.

The only other personal shock - I was ringing a bell in the tower a few minutes before the service started - the bells have a reputation for being slightly structurally unsound, but I was getting on OK. Suddenly other bells started to ring and things were creaking and crunching all over the place - I thought the lot was about to come crashing down into the nave crossing below! But ... it was only the clock chiming the bells for quarter to the hour! I should have spotted it and waited, but no major harm was done, and I just started ringing (well, chiming) again!

News that we will have a house when we leave here later this year! yay! Gloucester Diocese have bought a house at the other end of the parish from the church - completed yesterday!

It's on a new estate where no-one belongs to the church - it may not be church planting, but it will be curate planting!

Very exciting!

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Classic line in Bob Dylan, Rollin' and Tumblin' (on Modern Times - you must get it - I don't like Bob Dylan much but this is fantastic - a must-download)

I'm flat out spent,
This woman being driving me to tears.
This woman's so crazy,
I swear I ain't goin' to touch another one for years...

My back is very sore - it's the middle of the night and I can't sleep - until the painkillers kick in, I hope.

I have always had a bit of an iffy back, but just in the past few days it has got very, very twitchy and tending to freeze up.

Now, there is a nice woman who sorts this sort of thing, but she's based in Bristol, near where we used to live, rather than Oxford, where we live now. The drive could just about be getting worth it...

Ouch!!!

Nurse giving me a hep B injection this morning - suddenly, out the blue, annouces she is spending Christmas is a local nunnery, working with her husband, the caterer. Turned into a fascinating talk about the arrival of a new black mother superior and the existing acting head who is white South African!

Later, a van was parked up outside our house with two young chaps in it. I went up to see if i could help them (aka what they were up to) and they were busy rolling joints. All very polite, but got bizarrely lippy, claiming to be Richard Branson and the owner of the college (I didn't think Virgin had gone in for theological education yet). They were doing no overt harm, and left a little later.

Final one ...

The weather and the end of term.

People seem to be 'being themselves' more in this final year than before, and there are some rough edges appearing, as groups cease to care so much about how they relate.

Very interesting to look at one's own reactions - why do i feel very hostile towards some of the goings-on, but am quite relaxed about other ones? Normally because the winding-up ones are closer to where I could be if i went down a self-indulgent route about feeding myself and being selfish over worship styles and attitudes.

But it is very interesting - I need a chat to my spiritual director about all this - should be interesting as he comes from the same spirituality as some of the antics that I am struggling to see the humility, service and outward focus in. I haven't actually broken and told anyone other than my wife what I REALLY think about it all.

...things just too manic at the end of term.