Today we sang carols in a palliative care home.

Well I say 'sang', but I'm not so sure the sounds our unrehearsed
motley crew produced could have been judged pleasurable by any stretch of the acoustic imagination... people were very nice to us, anyway; that was nice of them.

I feel very small now.

Not just in height (so I'll steal the wind from your sails before you
leap to make a mightily witty comment - oh yes, I saw that glint in
your eye); more just young, again, and so naive. And quite helpless in
front of the bigness of words I can't even make sense of, like suffering, pain, death.

That someone can be cheerful and bright from a institutionally clean
hospital bed strewn with drip tubes makes my life a laughing stock.
Doesn't it? It makes the dramas of my days so tame and self-absorbed.
That our poor effort at singing and a few mince pies can make someone's week seems incredible. Incredible in the sense that it can't be right, it can't be possible, - I feel ashamed by it.

Some of us were talking the other night of how inside you can feel so
much younger than your chronological age; how sometimes it feels like
you've accidentally got stuck at a certain age while everyone else is
getting older normally. Apparently even older people feel the same -
imagine that, feeling the same way as now, with the same intensity of
desires and excitements and fears in a body that is changing and slowly deteriorating in so many dramatic and unpredictable ways. Like a
science fiction film.

I feel about five a lot at the moment. A lot happened then... other
times about eleven, or even eighteen. Twenty-two? That sounds grown up.

Here's a secret though: I'm not a grown up. I know the disguise wasn't very convincing anyway but now you know the truth.

Someone said the other day that somebody is old when they stop living forwards and start living in reverse.

How do you not do that??

God's Grandeur,
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.