Monday night we had our annual House Blessing. Fr. Policarpo is a man who doesn't hold with diaries so the only way to do this is ask him the day before. Then you discover that most of your friends will be out of town. Because of this, last year we managed to talk ourselves into such a negative frame of mind we were convinced no-one would come. Howard and Laurie No Friends. The arrival of three priests and a hungry multitude of biblical proportions really put my kitchen store cupboard to the test.
'An English speciality?' they asked, snarfing down a lightly-curried pasta and artichoke salad.
Erm... yes... a desperate English speciality.

This year I was prepared. This year we had a 2-priester plus deacon, so our house was truly and comprehensively blessed, and my own catering was supplemented by an emetically sweet cake that had been courier'd in from Thessalonika that morning. Tsoureki with extra thick white chocolate frosting. How those Greeks fell upon it. I managed only a thin slice and believe me, when it comes to cake I am no sissy.

There's something about house blessings that seems to attract the comical. It must be the intersecting of the mundane with the transcendant that the Orthodox handle so well. The last year we lived in England our house was blessed by a visiting Russian bishop. He was a very wide bishop and ours was a very narrow house, one of those early Victorian mid-terraces in which two rooms are piled on two rooms are piled on two more rooms.
He surged up the first staircase like a vodka-fuelled Zeppelin, sloshing holy water left and right, and we and our friends followed him in procession, as is the custom. The problem was, what to do when he reached the top.
This was not a man built for tight turns. The only solution was for us all to come down backwards. The last shall be first, just like our Lord said.
I could very easily have given way to hysterical laughter. I felt it rising in my throat. Fortunately there's nothing quite like the sight of 200 lbs of prime kasha-fed bishop hovering above you, groping for his next reverse foothold, to restore sobriety. It could have been a front-page disaster. FALLING BISHOP SQUASHES SIX

On a completely different note, my genealogy find of the week has been to learn that I have an ancestor named Morgan Morgans. This has given me more pleasure than I can explain.