Sunday 1st March - Lent 2 - Just Showing Up

St David's Day!

We had a short break in Tewksbury back in 2012 (I think) and this dragon was siting just inside someone's garden, yearning towards Wales, across the River Severn where the curlews call to it.

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The next '52 ways to improve my spiritual life' idea is to Just Show Up. I'm so ready to pick and choose whether I go to things; 'oh I'm feeling a bit tired', 'oh I'm not in the mood', and even 'oh, I don't really like that person's style in leading church'. And so I talk myself, all to easily, into not going. Dare I even say into not bothering?

It's different if I'm taking an active part, or hosting the event, I'll surely be there then, but it's not enough. Communities, be they swimming sessions, choirs, book clubs, church services, home groups, all need people to turn up on days when they are just part of the group.

So, starting from today, this morning in fact, I'm going to push Just Showing Up higher up my list of priorities. 

Obviously if I am actually unwell, or on my knees with exhaustion, or have a really unavoidable conflict in the diary, that's a different matter.

Today I Just Showed Up to zoom church  - well, I was reading the first lesson, so I had to - and I felt all the better for joining the other two dozen regular members of our online community.

I do have a terrible tendency to doodle in the reflection though...

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I'm glad I took a picture of my witch hazel tree in the middle on the month. It has been a bright blaze of yellow to fill the gap between the snowdrops and the daffodils. Here it is on 14th February 

And here's the picture I took yesterday. You can see why I notes that the flowers were like yellow spiders earlier, and have now turned brown.  

You can see some of the daffodils, and if you 'embiggen*' the photograph, you can make out the buds on the hazel. (* embiggen is a word Granny Marigold shared on a recent blogpost - I love it!)

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Here's Benjamin Brittten's arrangement of a traditional Welsh Folk Song, The Ash Grove.

   

Sunday 1st March - Grace before meals

At very very long long last I have gathered up all the comments following my post about saying Grace before meals back on September 7th 2025. If I missed yours, or you have another addition, just let me know in the comments. 

I have put them all on a new page at the side of the blog, like this;

I wrote a blog post on Sunday September 7th^th 2025 about saying ‘Grace’ before meals, and included these;

All good gifts around us are sent from heav’n above;

Then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord for all His love.

We often sing this together before a shared Harvest Supper, or any other shared meal at my home church. (We joke that our church does love a shared meal)

Also, in a novel I was reading, someone said a grace before a meal, remembered from their days as an undergraduate at Oxford;

Benedictus benedicat, which means 'may the Blessed One give a blessing'

 

And a little sung grace I learned from the children at a Church of England primary school;

Thank you for the world so sweet, ho hum.

Thank you for the food we eat, yum, yum.

Thank you for the birds that sing-a-ling-a-ling.

Thank you God for everything,

Ho hum, yum yum, sing-a-ling,

Amen!

 

Then the comments started rolling in! So here are all the ‘Graces’ from that post…

 

From Granny Marigold;

 'For what we are about to receive, may we be truly thankful'.

My reply; I have a feeling that we used to say 'For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful' which always sounded slightly threatening to me.

From Martha;

'Rub-a-dub, thanks for the grub', from a trainee youth pastor, much to the surprise of the senior pastor.

My reply; I have just remembered 'ta, Pa'; which I think one of our vicar’s children replied when asked to say grace at a Sunday lunch we had been invited to. (It was a very very long time ago so it might have been a different child, and a different occasion!)

 

Three contributions from Skye;

1.      Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
Whoever eats the fastest, gets the most

When asked to say grace, the speedy reply is, 'Grace'.

 

2.      Not a grace, but a little something from Jonathan Swift:

On the table spread the cloth,
Let the knives be sharp and clean:
Pickles get and salad both,
Let them each be fresh and green:
With small beer, good ale, and wine,
O ye gods! how I shall dine.

Frugally Challenged wrote one for wedding receptions

St (John's) Church with the sun above
Thank you, God, for the gift of love.
(The Berkeley Hotel) and a great hub-bub
Thank you God for the gift of grub.

 

 And added this (‘Not one of mine but lovely’)

 For food in a world where many walk in hunger.
For faith in a world where many walk in fear.
For friends in a world where many walk alone,
We give you humble thanks, O Lord.

From Ang;

A Breakfast Prayer from my youth "Lord make me not like porridge, slow and hard to stir, but make me like cornflakes, quick and ready to serve"

 

From Sue in Suffolk;

We always said grace when we ate anywhere where Father in Law was present, - Methodist Lay Preacher - and I've just remembered the grace he said - been trying to think of it since your post the other day,
"For this and all thy gifts we thank you Lord".
There was a short children’s one too - I wonder if any of my children can remember it

 

From Chris;

We always say a Grace and hold hands in cafes.. at home I always add a thanks to the cook!

From Beth;

In my former small congregation we often gathered for meals and used the following sung grace, which we knew from More Voices, one of our United Church of Canada hymnaries. It's translated from Spanish and is apparently set to a traditional Argentinian melody.

 See here on YouTube for the Spanish and then the English: https://youtu.be/PiFG07FZ3zI

God bless to us our bread.
Give bread to all those who are hungry,
and hunger for justice to those who are fed.
God bless to us our bread.

Friday 27th February - progress on several fronts...

Cake; I've started a Nigella Bara Brith. Her recipe takes a few days from making the tea to soak the fruit, to making a pot of tea to accompany a slice. Today the fruit, sugar, mixed spice and tea is all soaking. Tomorrow I add the SR flour and egg and cook it, and glaze it with a little runny honey. Then, says Nigella, you should wait two days before you eat it! So that can be a Sunday afternoon treat. 

I think I'll have to make another cake to have a in the meantime. I'm debating between my yoghurt cake recipe, perhaps flavoured with ginger and marmalade.... or a lemon drizzle version.... decisions, decisions...

I've been working on the first patch for my QAYG quilt. Or I could call it a LAIG quilt... for Learn As I Go...

Finished?

Hmm... perhaps a little more...

Finished! This one is almost all running stitch. I don't love it... but it will be one of many so that's fine.

Lunch was another 'Nigella',  a version of her sardine and spaghetti recipe. I added extra veg; chopped red pepper, celery,  sundried tomatoes, and broccoli. With pasta wriggles instead of spaghetti. Pasta wriggles are easier to eat! But spaghetti actually works better.

The afternoon was admin, the sort I detest; s anning in stuff, copying stuff, filing stuff, emailing stuff. Huh. Grump. Whinge. Whine.

BB walked round to the corner shop for something and came back with a little tube of smarties for me!

So I was in a positive and cheerful mood to start teaching an arrangement of Danny Boy to a piano student- it was a good lesson!

Tuesday 24th February - three events today - that's enough!

 So far today I've managed to keep to the 8dea of just three 'events' in one day...

First; meeting the estate agent at my father’s flat.

Second; joy oh joy oh joy - my first real walk of the tear! After the meeting we drove to Nymans Gardens. The weather is properly spring-like today at long last.

We braved the queues in the café and emerged with drinks and pasties, and sat outside in the sunshine in a sheltered corner. The café was sufficiently busy that we both wore masks - it must be obvious to any passers-by why we consider it necessary if they saw the oxygen cylinders we wore like backpacks! (One for now, one for later).

There was an unruly gaggle of rooks keeping an eye out for opportunistic snackery... they sort of crash about from one tree to the next in the heedless way groups of young people do when they are out for a 'jolly'.

I walked a small loop around the gardens. There were quite a few couples around, mostly, it seemed to me, out for their first dodder along the paths 8n the sunshine. None of us (apart from our minders!) looked altogether steady on our feet and a fair number were propped up with sticks and rollators. 

Still, we staggered along; I felt as though I ought to be handing out rosettes for effort!

Here's what we might have seen as we ambled round;

I was glad to get back to the car; yes, I was breathless, but it was my knees and hips and legs that were protesting at all this new activity after months of staying mostly indoors.  I'll have to make a point of going out when the weather is good.

Later today it will be time for the third event; a preliminary site visit by the company I hope will do the groundworks for the extension at the back of our house. Early stages, early stages...

I was searching youtube for something Spring-like' but found this instead. Fair dos, a good many bloggers that I follow are still living in the depths of winter with spring weather some way off.

John Field, Nocturne in E minor played by Alice Sarah Ott.

Monday 23rd February - this and that

 52 ways to calm your mind; this week it is 'prepare ahead' - specifically 

lay out your clothes the night before - that's easy, it's pretty much the same as yesterday but clean vest and underwear, and clean top and trousers if that seems good. I chuck dirty clothes into the laundry basket at night, and drape the rest of the clothes over the bedpost - an improvement from dropping on the floor!

prep your lunch the night before - that's more for the packed lunch brigade than me, although it's helpful if I've got something out of the freezer the night before. Talking of which.... excuse me for a moment... I'll just get out the pork mince for meatballs tomorrow

Well do I remember those school/work packed lunch days of yore... four lunch boxes, each with ham or cheese salad sandwiches, carrot sticks, frozen frube (do they still make them?), piece of fruit, small piece of frozen cake wrapped in greaseproof paper, packet of crisps, water bottle and mini chocolate treat. That did for break time, lunch, coming home on the bus... plus, when BB was doing really heavy work in the warehouse between jobs, he needed several slabs of bread pudding to get the calories in. He lost so much weight in the first couple of weeks it was alarming! We were all out for quite a time, with travelling, after school clubs, commuting, overtime and so on.

I went back through my photo file to find a spring picture for the blog header; the autumn leaves have been up for far too long! Our local National Trust garden usually has a display of which flowers are out in the gardens. This is what was around in the middle of March 2020, days before the official lockdown for Covid;

    

 

I selected part of the picture with the pink camellia. Spring. Must be coming closer, surely?

The stitchbook saga continues; I had a reply offering me £4 and saying I could keep the book. I've sent a polite but robust response insisting they sent me the full cost, and if they want the book, the return postage as well. So far, silence. so here's another extract to delight you;

Here's my mock up of what a 5 inch QAYG square might look like;

I haven't done any sample stitching in the centre... yet. Five inch square are definitely a better size. I haven't dared work out how many I will need! The real stitch sample squares (that's a mouthful) will have grey and white centres. If I stick with the original plan. Slippery things, plans.

    

Sunday 22nd February - 1st Sunday in Lent

Wikipedia, creative commons

 In some Christian traditions the Sundays in Lent are seen as 'Little Easters' and therefore a break from fasting.  So although the elapsed time in Lent is 47 days, there are only 40 fasting days, reflecting Christ's 40 days in the wilderness after his Baptism. 

The Lent course I read every day written by Andrew Dotchin always takes a break on Sundays. I don't know if he takes a break too!

I'm on the fence here. I haven't given up chocolate or biscuits; but I guess I shouldn't take a break from being kind, thoughtful, considerate, prayerful! So I'll stick with keeping my Lent resolutions on Sundays.

I'm pondering the sort of things that would make a '52 tiny changes to improve your Christian life', rather in the line of the '52 tiny changes to quiet your mind' book by Kelly Dugger. They would really have to be tiny... nothing too strenuous like 'get up at 5am so you can read and study and prayer for 2 hours every morning', for example! That's SO not never ever going to happen in my life.

Let's try anyway, maybe just one tiny change for each Sunday in Lent.

Change no 1

Sometimes I say a prayer before meals, sometimes I don't.

I've got a huge collection of graces from the comments to a blogpost last year. Now I'll try and say grace more consistently. Sometime soon I'll track back through the comments and gather them together. 

 (I forgot today before getting stuck into my porridge. Never mind, lunch and supper will give me two more chances to remember).