I’m trying to be a bit more thoughtful about Lent this year.
One of the things that I recognised last year was that I’ve been neglecting my practice of my faith and that I miss it. So Lent seemed like a good place to be more intentional about it.
I’m not giving anything up. I did consider all the usual things, chocolate, wine, gin but ultimately decided that this year I want to add to my life not subtract. So I’m participating in the Grace WhatsApp group this year, I didn’t get to Grace in February and I won’t get there in March (I’ve got the boys that weekend!), so this is a good way to stay connected, I’ll also try to get to the Lent meals but I’ve already got things I’m doing on a couple of them, so we’ll see how that goes.
Until they changed the words (I’m still not over that!), Mass, boring, plain Mass was important to me, Grace is fantastic but I love the repetition of Mass and communion, it’s probably a hangover from all those years of altar serving, when I went to Mass two to three times a week for four or so years. The problem has been that there isn’t a church locally, that I feel comfortable with, I won’t go to an RC church and the CoE churches are either too evangelical or too Anglo Catholic for me, I won’t go to a church that won’t except women can be priests or that pretends to be Catholic, be one and deal with having to obey or don’t.
So as a consequence I hadn’t been to communion for an age. I did think about St Mary’s but it’s not happened yet, but I’m working five minutes away from St Pancras Church and they have lunchtime communion on Wednesdays (which is where I got ashed this week). So I’m going to go to communion every Wednesday because I think I need that in my life and my week.
That and a bit more time for reflection are my personal goals for Lent.
Lent shouldn’t be spent all inside my head, so I also need to do more. So every week in Lent, I’m going to donate to the foodbank. It’s easy enough to do, I donate sanitary towels every time I buy some for me. But this will be more intentional, £5 worth of goods every week. I’ll check the list in the supermarket and buy that, no clearing my cupboards (you’d be surprised how many people do), no thinking about what I would buy, but what the foodbank says it needs using my money because it’s less than a bottle of wine, for goodness sake.
Then in the rain, we put the raised beds together, which was just as much fun as you’d imagine. When somebody tells you about the joy of growing your own food, remember that 95% of the work you’ll do will be digging or building. I’m getting to the time when I’ll be properly no dig but in the meantime a lot of of what I do on the plot seems to involve a hammer!
However, they are done and covered and awaiting compost. That done we sorted out the shed and I picked up pots and seed trays for the seed sowing that’s coming soon! We didn’t get to the other bed, or the raspberries because we were wet and cold and muddy.
Next week we have hired a car, so a trip to the dump and buying all the compost are on the agenda. I also really want to get the sides of the kale bed sorted and make my little round flower sections on the top. Also on the list, the raspberries and clearing that space out. This is the time of year before it gets really busy, March, April and May are going to be about sowing and planting out and trying to keep up, so it’ll be good to have more of this list crossed off before then…
Before I get to why I was there, I should explain, back when Ma was working, we used to go to the OXO Tower fairly often and became friendly with the bar manager, Ian even gave Ma a jar of brandied cherries to celebrate her retirement.
I really liked the restaurant, the manhattan was great. We ordered a couple of the small plates. Grilled lamb with Merguez, farro & treviso salad, padron peppers, bread, it was good and I was so busy eating that I didn’t take a photo of it!
I decided to have pudding and I’m still thinking about the lime posset!
I’m glad it’s doing well, it’s nice when people you like take a risk that works, my only problem with it is that it’s in East London!
Other than that and the usual Piccadilly Line failure issues, last week was fine. I bought raised beds (and blueberry plants) but I’ll tell you all about that on Wednesday. I did culture on Wednesday and went all the way to East London on Friday night (which I’ll tell you about tomorrow!). The weekend was full until Sunday, when I did very little because honestly, I needed the rest.
I don’t have major plans for this week it should be easier to get to work because it’s half term and Lent starts this week so there will be pancakes on Tuesday and ashes on Wednesday followed by cinema on Thursday and compost buying on Friday. Really living life on the edge.
This week the usual 
I am worried that there is too much to do and not much time to do it, but I’m panicking about nothing, we have a plan and we know what we want to do and we have time to get it done. It’ll all come together in the next couple of months and then I’ll be worrying about blight and watering.
This is a picture of my grandad (in the middle), my great aunts and my great grandfather.
