It's all going terribly well

Here at the House of Stories we are lurching from one exciting episode to the next. Various relations are crocked. We had actors from the wonderful Riding Lights Theatre Company to stay last week - if you're in the UK and get a chance to see Simeon's Watch, do go. A thoughtful, wise, moving and funny play about dementia, with faith themes woven in and out of it and a nod towards Christmas. They were lovely house guests, too.

There was just time to change the beds before The Golden Child and her family came to stay. I think the highlight of the visit was a bit of exploited child labour when we let them climb The Tree and it took them about twenty minutes to harvest their body weight in apples. All this with late autumn sunshine, and I'm sure our little garden was full of angels.

On Saturday we had Hexham Abbey full of children. The extraordinary people who organise these things felt that instead of being disapproving and 'the church doesn't do Halloween', we'd offer something that took Halloween back to its Christian roots and made it possible to talk honestly about death and sadness. We did skeleton building and made candle boats, and talked about remembering the people we love. In the first hour we had about twenty children through. Nice steady pace. And then they flooded in, queuing up in their costumes, all the little Draculas and witches holding their mummies hands, and we were raiding cupboards so we didn't run out of stuff. And they LOVED it. Result.

A beautiful Sunday autumn afternoon in the garden, gentle weather for putting the garden to bed, and I burned garden rubbish in the little outdoor stove that Tony gave me a few years ago. The smell of woodsmoke hung around me and came into the house, and was perfect.

On Tuesday, a very beautiful service of remembrance, with people who've been bereaved in the last year gathering in the Abbey. My friend Wendy and I were on duty doing tea and coffee afterwards, and were surprised at how many people stayed for a cup of tea (not coffee). As my mother once said to me, never turn your nose up at people who make a pot of tea in a crisis. Sometimes it's exactly what's needed.

And at last, yesterday I was at the bank sorting out a new account which I would have done weeks ago if not for family upheavals. Very nice young woman with a computer got it sorted, except that every time she was about to put everything through, the computer went down. Fortunately we both laughed about it, instead of unplugging the thing and banging it against the wall even though we had more crashes than the Grand Prix. By the time I left it was raining, but never mind - I popped into a charity shop and bought a Terry Pratchett, which redeemed the day.

It's all going terribly well.