Sunday, 18th January, 2026
It’s slow Sunday again. You know the hoardes are walking smartly down the street to church …. err, No. A handful of lonely, old ladies in thick coats sniffle in a cold and echoing church inhaling the acrid smoke of a few candles which flicker in the darkness and hardly raise the temperature to bearable. Church is definitely going.
Church Going (1954) – Philip Larkin
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?………
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
In these sorts of days I centre my time on Sunday Newspaper reading, Blog writing, Gym workout and afternoon football which I share with friends in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Great match yesterday as Man.Utd. played like Man.Utd. for the first time in years. On a high, how did I celebrate?
I helped my Housekeeper work out how to clean the ovens. They are new in the last few months and have catalytic, self-clean linings. The AEG handbook describes how to set the cleaning programme off but it was clearly written by Swedish German who has used Google Translate to turn it into English.
I must admit the sort of technical challenge I welcome. It’s a great way to spend Saturday evening. Eventually, I got there and the oven spent an hour burning off all the grime from Roast Chicken. No chemicals are needed and it was left gleaming and brand new. Modern technological advances make life more complicated but so much better.
In 1949, my Mother refused to move in to my Dad’s house before he ripped out the black lead cooking range from the 1890s and replaced it with a ‘modern’ gas cooker and grill. How the hell she cooked for a family of 9 on even that ‘incredibly modern’ gas cooker goodness knows. She produced cakes and pastries virtually every day in that oven. Bacon and egg with toast every morning to send us off to school and work with energy. In retrospect, it was heroic.