It's not that often that the start of Advent in church coincides with the commercial Advent on 1st December, but this year it does.

The Advent wreath at church is very beautiful, and has nice chunky candles that will last all through the four weeks, even with some midweek lighting along the way.

Advent and Christmas always get so hopelessly mixed up together, and this year is no exception with the start of the 'Angel Voices' reflections tomorrow - preceded by an angel craft session with the Rainbows and brownies - a Vicar School Carol Service and Christmas Dinner on Tuesday, and then a crazy run through with two or three things almost every single day until Christmas.

At the moment there is nothing scheduled for 14th December, a Saturday... I am planning to keep it that way if I possibly can.

I do love Advent-Christmas with all its crazy, heretical, frenetic, celebratory, stressy, delightful activity... so here we go again! (And at least it is only 24/25 days this year!)

I usually take off the last weekend before Advent begins, and I suspect by the time Boxing Day arrives this year, I will be wishing I had done because I will be so very, very tired.  For all that, yesterday was a good day, a very good day, with a toy service, which saw lots of new toys gathered for the Salvation Army to distribute, a big gathering of folk sharing a soup lunch, and many of us learning how to make wreaths - mine in the photo above.

Having been at church at 8 a.m. to start off the slow cooker and not leaving until nearly 3 p.m. after we had cleared up, it was a long day.  The days ahead are filling up rapidly, with all sorts of good things and, weather/trains permitting, a few work-related trips. 

Although I have to constantly remind myself I am now rapidly approaching 62 not 22, I do enjoy all the craziness of this time of year.

I was late to social media - I liked blogging, liked not knowing who was reading this stuff, unless they commented or made contact in other ways.  Eventually I gave in and joined Facebook and later Twitter.  Yesterday I was one of the millions joining Bluesky.

I have mostly enjoyed, and still enjoy, social media, but over time parts of it have changed dramatically and often not for the better.

I remain on the platform formerly known as Twitter, at least for now, since there are many good people and fun accounts still be found there.  But for how much longer if rumours about sales and control and other unpleasant changes prove to be true?  I ponder the tension between the truth that you can't change something from outside of it, and the truth that participation can become collusion.  Tricky.

And of course now there are so many other platforms that there just is not the time or space to be there.  My decision to join BlueSky (as myself and as my cats) with the same 'handles' as  on the other place seems to echo that of millions of others - so much so that some glitches have arisen in the new place.

For now, what's enjoyable is that the connections I/we have are few, and trusted, and it it take seconds to scroll through the posts.

Scarily, it's now nineteen years since I began blogging, and this once busy French provider is now a lot quieter than it used to be.  I get a lot, and I mean a lot, of BOT messages, whch I systematically delete, but otherwise the sky here is actually pretty nice too!

Lots of churches - and other buildings - have Rolls of Honour to record the names of the men who died in military service during the two so-called World Wars.  A few even have names from later conflicts.  The one here in Railway Town is different in at least two ways...

Firstly, it is a list of those who were on active service, and was, so I am told, read out weekly at a prayer meeting.  The two names edged in black are, we believe, those who died.

Secondly, and so far as I am aware this is unique, it includes the names of six women who also served, at least one as a nurse and possibly others on the land. 

Yesterday at the Remembrance service, despite my careful planning, I needed a fill of about five minutes if I was to hit the 11a.m. silence correctly, so I read aloud these names... which was quite a moving thing to do, not least as there were more on the roll than present in the service.

Today I recall with gratitude Irene, who spent long hours on the Yorkshire moors listening for morse code being transmitted behind music on the radio... I recall Lilias who was a captain and lorry driver... I recall Jean, in a reserved occupation,  whose twin sister Betty was a private who served under Lilias...

And I recall with a measure of sadness Jane and Flora who pastored Baptist churches in Scotland during wartime only to be squeezed out when the men returned:

‘the pastorates of Jane Henderson and Mary Flora MacArthur [which] were shortlived in the extraordinary circumstance of war. Thereafter Scottish Baptist women faced a long struggle to achieve equality with men in the pastoral office and some doubt whether true equality has been reached’ Talbot, B (ed) A Distinctive People, Milton Keynes, Paternoster, 2014 page 74

So many names never appear on official rolls of honour, so many names written on people's hearts. We will remember them.