Dear Diary...

...no busy priest can afford to be without his diary - or should the stipend stretch that far his diary secretary. H would of course, if asked, perform that latter function without demur or complaint, but the fear of creating another angle for rank wifely nagging has always deterred me from hinting let alone asking.

"You know you should be setting off for N now. You can't keep +Tom waiting and you never have change for the car park. So drop the homily notes. That can wait for this evening. Honestly!"

You can imagine the scenes as they unfold, neither to my delight nor to my peace of soul.

Mind you being at the right place at the right time for the right hatch, match or dispatch is no light matter. Well being there is, it is the not that isn't.

Just the once, relying on but memory unaided, have I pitched up at an assembly of godly folk expecting to promote to glory one gone shortly before, only to find I was actually being expected to bind a Betty to her Dave.

Entirely the wrong vestments on board of course - not that they would have noticed, possibly even remarking how 'cool' I looked and that black was quite the colour perfectly to offset the bride's somewhat disingenuous virginal white.

Mercifully, all necessary textual matter was to hand in the vestry and if the intended homily on the beauty of aged wisdom - interspersed with fond remembrances of dear Gladys in India before the War - had to be dropped in favour of an extempore rant on the wonder of fecund creation in a sometimes spiritually sterile world, then it did them no harm to hear it.

Too close a call for comfort mind you that. From that time to this there has been a self-imposed strict inscribing of each minute detail of who goes where, when and why.

That said, that has tended to be the limit of my diary keeping and with the diary itself kept firmly on the desk where it belongs. Can't be doing with these clerics who carry round their leather-bound Filofax numbers under their arms as if it were - though most certainly it were not - Holy Scripture.

This 'blog' - still dread word - then must serve as necessary and sufficient recall of events through the ages. Not by any means a full record but, shall we say, serving as handy marker buoys on the sea of personal amnesia.

And thus one does occasionally turn back the pages for recall and review. The time of year being now to be doing that for the year gone by. And thus, as I read past posts, I come across my first thoughts of 2008 on the whole utter ghastliness of New Year's Eve and the sheer sinking dread it brings.

By golly though, if I thought that then shan't we all be thinking it next week? Can we stand the expectation and anticipation of just how wretched 2009 is likely to be?

I doubt we can any of us. You should see my wine cellar overflowing with intemperate volumes of fine wines and spirits to deaden the impending pain. I won't be alone in this, of that I am certain.

"Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow........."? Will I be here to write it as well as survive it? Watch this space if you care or dare.