Advent 4

A St Joseph from Bangladesh!
To work on Saturday and a quiet day doing housekeeping things like deleting lots of items not found in the stocktake - dull! At Vespers we sang the O antiphon in Latin - what a thrill to sing that! I put our more leaflets for "Understanding Islam" - the poster is still up! To Mass and Philip and I were the servers for Fr Dwayne. Deacon Ed gave an excellent homily about Joseph - not heard him preach before. On the radio we had Prokofiev's "War and Peace" from the Met and in the opera quiz an extract from "O holy night". Liz went to take Ann Marie to the airport and borrow her car over Christmas. Watched Monarchy programmes on TV - the Queen is amazing!
Sunday to collect meat from the butcher in Addiscombe and Liz was thurifer at the solemn Mass with Bishop John Arnold. We sang "Hail blessed Virgin Mary" and "For Mary, mother of the Lord". Started with "Come thou redeemer of the earth" and "Long ago". Last chance to sing "O come, O come Emmanuel". I played Flor Peeters and Walther on "Wachet auf" - my copy of the Krebs voluntary on this tune has disappeared! Funny how some music does that - the Celtic Alleluia is another one that likes to hide!
Back at 4 to rehearse for the 9 lessons and carols at 5. Good to have extra singers and all went well. "Sing lullaby" was particularly good. And so was Darke's "In the bleak midwinter". I managed all the flats in Rutter's "What sweeter music" OK. I particularly like his Cradle song - arrangement of a Flemish carol in the blue book.
Watched Antiques roadshow and Monarchy and bits of "Vanity Fair". John Rutter was on "The choir" on radio 3.