The Inexhaustible Brightness of Being

After this morning's Being Very Nice, this afternoon's Bright Hour got very much into its stride.

Mabel Whimsey's Crochet Corner filled the first twenty minutes. It's hard to know what to say, really. I mean, crochet is a traditional craft, and therefore a Good Thing under the meaning of the Act. But there's no getting away from it - 120 slides of old tea- and egg-cosies take some viewing. And Mabel's script could do with some tweaking. There is, after all, only so many times you can make the joke about the egg being "nice and cosy in there".

And then we moved onto Gladys's World of Crumpets. And again there were good and bad points. If she'd actually brought some in and toasted them, this could have been a great session. But no. A slide show.
Of course, in the glory days of Methodism this would have been a "Ladies' Bright Hour." But we've changed this on the grounds of inclusivity, sexist terminology, inaccurate demographics (most of the "ladies" were not members of the aristocracy at all) and - most of all - people's inability to put the apostrophe in the right place on the notice sheet.

The down side of opening the Bright Hour up is that men can now attend, and even do presentations - naturally I don't allow them to teach or preach, because of the innate disconnect between their emotional intelligence (I use the word loosely) and what they say.

And so we got Burton Dasset's Cornucopia of Railway Tickets. I'll say this for Burton, he's given us all a great grasp of the length of eternity this afternoon. But there was a lovely moment at the end when he dropped the entire box of tickets. It's gonna take him ages to get them back into alphabetical order.