Talking of angels ...

Regular visitors here will know how the one thing that gets me out of bed and out of the house even earlier than I did when I was going to work is the thought of the emptiness of Morrison's at such an hour. I can zip round with barely a soul in my way other than the shelf-pickers making up orders. Not today. I was really brisk, out of the house earlier than I sometimes am - but my heart sank as I drove into the car park and saw so many cars (and then leapt sideways a bit as some dolt in a white car of unreasonable size began backing out of a bay just as I was passing his rear end). And right enough there were far too many people - couples, even - trailing round or purposefully ticking off things on lists. I took a deep breath and plunged in. Fortune favours the brave and all that ...

Once home, I lapsed into grumpiness because I had to carry all the bags in by myself, including the Very Heavy Bag with the orange juice and milk cartons and the big bag of porridge oats inside it. I had my breakfast and soothed the savage breast with some Italian before coffee - I don't know why people in the Diamond League are doing so many lessons this week; I keep falling into the Demotion Zone. After coffee I iced my Christmas Cake. I like to use natural icing sugar, so my icing always looked the way city streets did after snow in my childhood, when the snow turned to brown sugar between the tram rails and in the gutters. And because my recipe is old and speaks in pounds, it sits ill with my packet of icing sugar which is 500 grams and was in intractable lumps for some reason and needed crushed with the rolling pin ... sugar everywhere by the time I'd finished. I am so not a Domestic Goddess, really...

Mercifully I had an escape route in the afternoon. Di came for me and we made a visit to the church - to the tower room, to be precise - and dug out the figures for the Crèche so that we don't have to do it tomorrow. After that I had the distraction of the Advent Group, this week discussing John the Baptist and - because Advent is a week short, really, this year, the figure of Mary, the subject of the last week of Advent. Only four of us today - Christmas is clearly getting to folk - but some really interesting discussion. I mean, what did Mary, who must have been all of 14 or 15, really think when she learned she was pregnant? What did she imagine was going on? 

And then we went over to the church for the Eucharist and the moon and the Evening Star were riding high over its roof and this photo, rather than the one from a couple of weeks ago, may well find its way into a church card some time ...