A lot of stuff happening in the next little while which will necessitate a fair amount of time 'on the road' and a fair amount of that ministerial art of 'mood switching.'  When they teach you pastoral care skills they talk a lot about 'immediacy' and 'congruence' but far less about the need to adapt to the context  'chameleonism.'

This week is relentless meetings of one sort or another - a couple of local ones, a couple of Association ones and a national one, each very different and with equally diverse expectations; it promises to be a fun and busy week.  Next week is a first - I will conducting the funeral for one of my cousins who was younger than me.  I have always been a bit wary of 'intra-familial' undertaking, not least after attending the funeral of an atheist uncle around 25 years ago (which was just embarrassing, it was so bad; I was left feeling very sad for my dad whose brother it was) and when my sister took my grandmother's funeral a decade or so back and was left really drained with nowhere to grieve.  But this feels right somehow - I don't want to entrust my cousin, even though not someone I'd met very often, to a 'duty vicar' who will know nothing about the life they led or the dreams that are now forever lost.  It's not an objection to other ministers - goodness knows I do enough 'duty vicaring' myself - it's just a concern that it be done well, and in a way that the surviving siblings (along with my aunt & uncle) can own.  I realise that the stakes are so much higher for me than a 'duty vicar' who can simply walk away and be grumbled about ever after, and maybe there is a sense of this being the only thing I can do for someone who 'there but for the grace of God' go any of us.  It will be a little odd to swoop in to another county, picking up my mother en route, to an unfamiliar crematorium to conduct a funeral, not least as I can name a good four or five local minsters (Baptist and otherwise) who I know would do a fantastic job, but it feels right on this occasion that it be so.  SBJ 1967-2009 RIP.

This morning it was my turn to host our monthly prayer breakfast.  About half a dozen of us are committed to this event, with typcially four or five coming along.  It is always a good morning - never runs to "time" because often we don't start formally praying until an hour after we begin, instead we enjoy each other's company and share news and views over a leisurely breakfast.  Usually we have croissants, bagels or brioches with assorted conserves.  Given the weather and the likelihood that some folk would opt out, I offered bacon butties as a bribe!  It seemed to work as we had a full house.

Today, for a change we used the Celtic Daily Prayer morning prayer as the framework for our prayer time.  It seemed to work quite well, creating a still atmosphere for our intercessions.  We prayed over some massive decisions we need to make this week and a couple of big issues impacting our mission, for our own folk and more widely for nation and world.  It was good.

Amazingly, we managed to get the dates fixed for the next three months - by which time we should have got past the need to lure people out with promises of bacon.

So, last night five of us put on our hiking boots or wellies and trogged off to 'Thing in a Pub.'  As we munched our butties and supped our coke/wine/guiness/lager we talked over various pastoral things, the fact that the bat-inspector has been unable to come put because of snow (holy cow, Robin, it's the wrong kind of snow - the bat mobile is stranded...(or words to that effect anyway)) and then moved on the the nonsensical legend of how Dibley got its name.  This last one was interesting as someone then asked how we could be confident of Biblical reliability - they said OT but I added NT - the transition from oral tradition to written record, the challenges of translation and so on.  I couldn't say it was a deep discussion but it was a start.  So, we noted the Elhoist and Yahwist strands in the early part of Genesis (which creation story is "right"?!  Look at Genesis 1 and 2 for anyone who's never compared), the parenthesis at the start of John 8 (woman caught in adultery) the various endings of Mark and so on.  One person seemed mildly perturbed that I have a book of gnostic scriptures on my shelf, others were fascinated by the idea of (essentially) redaction.  Good fun!

It is intriguing to see how we have moved and changed as a group of people, and how these sitting around food/drink initiatives somehow free us to talk more openly and honestly about faith issues as compared with the twee right-answers of a house group of Bible study.  I think we must have made an odd sight sitting there in our boots and discussing elementary biblical studies, but it was well worth it.

... do my forty- and fifty-somethings see a few flakes of snow and start cancelling everything days ahead when my sixty-, seventy-, eighty-, ninety- and even hundred-and-somethings wrap up, put on their boots and get on with it? When did we get so nesh?

More snow this morning - hurray!  I blame it on being born in the 1962/63 winter - the first five months of my life snow was normality.  There's a wonderful post here which expresses delight in the snow and raises sensible questions about cost/benefit of changing our infrastructure to cope with 5E-2 return frequency extreme events.  It doesn't use that language, Maggi is a musician not a risk assessor, but she's right I suspect - the sums probably don't stack up.

In the days when I did risk assessment sums for a living we used the Health & Safety Executive guidelines for 'cost-benefit analysis' on potential risk reduction measures.  The basic rule of thumb is obviously that the financial equivalent of the benefit needs to exceed the cost of the change.  As I recall it (and it's now ten years since I last did such an exercise) a risk reduction modification would only be required by the statutary bodies if the benefit was ten times the cost.  If the cost exceeded the benefit, and if the risk was already ALARP or broadly accpetable (both jargon for degrees of liveable with) then the modification would not be made, even though it would reduce risk.

I have no idea what the cost of snow ploughs, gritters and grit would be, I have no idea what the financial-equivalent of lost working days, road accidents, falls and fractures might be.  But maybe it is our attitude not our infra-structure we need to be changing?

As for me, I may venture out to see one or two house-bound folk, admire the lovely views across my garden, sup hot chocolate, possibly create some snow-folk (how PC is that!) and enjoy the relative quiet of an enforced slow week.