The Long Good Friday Workshop

Dannii is really a very diligent trainee druid. Which is to say, under Charlii's guidance, that she is getting a bit obsessive about knowing where the children are. After all, as St Paul said in 1 Corinthians, to each is given gifts as the spirit determines. And unto trainee ministers, it's children's work.

And so the Good Friday Workshop came along, as it did everywhere. And I advised Dannii that what we really wanted was some beautifully decorated crosses. Nice to have on the window sills of the Moot House come Easter Sunday.

But little Griswold Grommet wandered over, halfway through putting the battery-powered LED into the greaseproof paper, silver-glitter-glued cross. And said,

"Aren't we just making very pretty representations of an instrument of torture and death?"

Which of course is right. We make the symbol of Jesus's death very pretty. Even in most representations of the crucifixion, he's looking pretty stoic, and shiny, and Saxon about the whole thing. And when we abstract the Cross to a mantelpiece decoration, we lose a lot of the horror. Which may or not be a bad thing.

But what made it worse for Dannii was not the sudden grounding of the reality of crucifixion. Having caught Dannii off-balance with that, Griswold followed up with the words "By the way, are all the children still here?"

Nightmare. Utter nightmare.

Sure, Dannii had the register. And all she had to do was match it up against 27 children, each of whom had stickers on them. With their names on. But do you know how fast children move? And then Dannii had the problem that some parents had babies with them - who didn't count. And Jazmyn took little Boromir off for a Good Friday treat to Gullivers' Kingdom, halfway through. Though this was balanced by Chelski turning up late with her son, Roublze. And some kids had two stickers. Or none. And of course it's a law of Physics that at least four kids are always in the loo whenever you need to count them.

Anyway, it's all over now. All the kids have gone off happily, stuffed with industrial quantities of sugar and chocolate. There's a vague hope around the Community that some of them may even fall asleep sometime round about Ascension.

But poor Dannii is slumped into a corner of the dining room. She appears to be in a trance. But, if you sneak up close to her, you can hear what she's muttering. It consists of "23-24-25.... anyone seen Chardonnay?" over and over again. It could take weeks to get her back to normality.