Survived my chamber music last night – but I need to practise my scales and exercises.  As my teacher used to say in her wonderful middle-European accent, ‘If it does not hurt, it is not doing you good.’  Which brings me painfully to my efforts to write a sermon for Passion Sunday with all its messages of life from death and suffering.  And my still-fresh memory of St John Passion at the beginning of the week.  Concert again tonight but rather less traumatic, I expect.  Black Dyke Mills Band – I always regret not having learned to play a brass instrument.  Tenor Horn, I think, if I had a choice.

So the walls of boxes are reducing steadily.  No internet connection yet so the blog is being updated by a mixture of Bluetooth on my mobile phone and sheer willpower.  Otherwise, it’s quite suddenly back to doing what I do.  Meetings in Edinburgh; meeting Vestries about appointments; exploring vocation and future possibilities with clergy; school assembly tomorrow morning; big carbon footprints all over central Scotland in the car; getting the row of coat hooks in the cloakroom straight.  Chamber music tomorrow night and I feel like a child going to my violin lesson without having practised my scales … and my hands are rough from humping furniture around.

We’re in that in-between phase.  No internet connection yet so still E Mailing by will-power, Bluetooth from the mobile and going back to the house we have left – where our network is still up and running.  Boxes reducing but not fast enough.  Nice man arrived today to set up all the TV’s that we never watch.  Poppy was confined in a room so she couldn’t get out – which is obviously why I met her coming back in through the front door about ten minutes after he arrived.  Rural Perthshire is like a safari park – eight deer in the field at the back today and buzzard intermittently overhead.  We’re obviously going to have to prepare her for release into the wild.

Just occasionally one is in the presence of something truly remarkable.  And St John Passion tonight in Perth Concert Hall was one of them.  If you ever get the chance to hear Mark Padmore singing the Evangelist, don’t miss it.  I am not easily moved to tears but this did it for me.  Peter’s denial … and the scourging …  He had the ability to put Bach somewhere in the back of his throat and create a sound which tore your heartstrings.  Where had I heard anything like it before?   I fell to thinking of traumatic funerals which I have conducted and the unrestrained outpouring of grief .. and this sound was like it but far, far more devastating because it was channelled and focused.  It opened up a window into bottomless pits of fear and anger and desolation – a glimpse of what it means to crucify the Son of God then and now.  I couldn’t cope with that every day or every week – but it reminds me of the level on which worship should engage us … just sometimes.

I’ve never quite worked out Mothering Sunday.  But that’s my problem.  Lots of people come to church … it’s obviously very important to them … there are parents and children and grandparents and flowers and the first sniff of spring.  Down in Dollar today, we had seven confirmations and there was a real sense of the importance family.  But somehow, in the middle of all that, one has to try and remember that the stable family unit of mum, dad and 2.4 children isn’t the norm it once was.  There are single people – single by choice and single not by choice.  There are people who have lost children before and after birth.   There are people struggling with childlessness and infertility.  There are people who have given children for adoption and wonder where they are.  There are parents and grandparents who do not see their children because of divorce and remarriage.  It’s impossible – but what redeems it is the remarkable ability of children just to be children and to leave the anguish and the complications to the adults.

Well, I suppose the most important thing is that Poppy is instantly and totally at ease in her new surroundings.  This is unlike our previous move where she howled without ceasing for three months and I had to keep explaining to people on the phone that we were not living in a safari park.  Otherwise our move went as smoothly as Damian and his team from Pickfords could achieve.  The exciting bit was in the need to get the conveyancing process completed before we moved into the house.   As the furniture vans set out for the new house, I was on the phone standing in the garden and we were still trying to get it sorted out.  Thank you to everyone who got the process to the finishing line just in time.  So now we just have to deal with a sort of Berlin Wall of boxes – I shall keep you posted on the reducing balance.  And the spirituality of all this?   Certainly it felt a bit like living in the ‘in between time’.  To travel lighter would have been helpful.  And a touch of Kipling’s ‘If you can keep your head …’ was around there somewhere.

This is really the moment [moving tomorrow] when one should take a blogbreak.  It’s become a bit like one of those mad committee roleplay exercises where various characters keep rushing in with ever more difficult challenges to be sorted out – now.  Or like those flat American voices doing the shuttle countdown.  As launch time draws nearer, all the warning lights flash red.  And they say, ‘Well, we’ll just let her go anyway.’  So if our supporting cast of lawyers, builders, bankers and others all say ‘Yes’ at the same time, we’ll be on our way.    By the way, Poppy has been reading the Deed of Conditions and notes that poultry, ducks, pigeons, rabbits, bees, etc.  are forbidden and that we are allowed to keep only ‘normal’ household pets.  As a Burmese aristocat, she doesn’t ‘do’ normal.  She also notes the lack of a specific clause forbidding d*gs but she will sort them out later.

These are the moments [3 days to moving] when the injunction to travel light on the Christian pilgrimage sounds a bit hollow.  So it’s flatpack furniture erected.  Curtain rails straight, level, centred ..   Why is it that, however hard you try, they are never quite right?  At least the books never got unpacked from the last move – along with many of our other bits and pieces.  So we are looking forward to meeting some old friends again.  Do I move the clutter on my desk as it is .. or shove the stuff in the drawers …   At least the weather is dry.  The place will be a sea of mud if it rains.  Travel light in wellington boots.

Moving day minus 4 and heavily into the flatpack.  I particularly relish the challenge of the Ikea stuff which comes with instructions in pictures without words but with Swedish subtitles, as it were.  It’s a sort of Porvoo-related challenge of intelligence and patience.  Meanwhile, I am working my way through the equally challenging ‘Free of Charge’ by Miroslav Volf, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book.  Not easy but good, I think.  He works out the issues of relationship with God from first base.  And he includes the killer question, ‘What do you have that you have not been given?’

I did express concern that blogging was becoming over fashionable.  I saw that the Met was attempting to curb the anonymous blogging activities of disgruntled officers – wonderful names like ‘Cough the Lot’ and ‘Bow Street Runner’  Today’s paper is full of the new genre of the ‘sexblog’ in which mainly women [I thought it was usually men who boasted about their prowess …but times change] tell all.  Still .. I’m not anonymous .. I do maintain a Bridget Jones index although my categories are slightly different from hers.   But I’m not aware of anybody else fighting for the episcopal bloggers’ niche market.  So I’ll keep going for now.