A flurry of activity - Day 2

Day 2 in the residential course house.

X Piry is not feeling so good............

By the afternoon I was feeling a bit hyper, and found it difficult to concentrate.

To use a term common in theatrical parlance, but not necessarily appropriate in funerals; I corpsed.

Our ceremony was for a young woman with small children. One of my colleagues was role playing as a small child. Now, I genuinely believe that a small child saying "I want to go to the toilet" would not throw me. However, to have a mature and elegant woman say it was just too much, and I got the giggles.

However, this was only part one of my inadequacies.

I'd been in charge of the script that four of us were working on, and I'd put some of the pages into the folder in the wrong order. That was a classic schoolboy error, and I felt genuinely ashamed about it. My colleague coped with it brilliantly, and the congregation would never have known, but I still felt absolutely awful.

Add fatigue to this and I was a very grumpy bunny by the time I was coming home.

In conclusion, however, I shouldn't dwell on the negative; we got some very good feedback, and are all moving forward to the next stage. My overall feeling is that it went well, so that's what I should carry with me.

(Famous last words).

A flurry of activity - Day 1

Day One in the Residential Training House................

X. Piry is in the diary room................


Day 1

I'm a bit knackered, and we've only done 6 hours training!

Started at noon, and it's gone pretty well. I haven't done much since the last session, especially in comparison with a number of my colleagues, who've been attending ceremonies left right and centre.

We covered a lot of practical stuff today; record-keeping, music selection, a walk through of the ceremony, that sort of stuff. I am much more at home with practical than theory, and as soon as they mentioned the magic word "spreadsheet" I knew I'd be okay.

Then we worked out who was doing what in the presentation tomorrow, and decided what to do with our script. I think it's one of those "oh, that'll do" things, when we worry more about delivery and volume (I know I speak too quickly, and must learn to slow it down). However, you can bet your life that tomorrow we'll get feedback and say "oh, we wish we'd spent more time on the script", but that's the way it goes.

Let's just hope for a dry half hour when we come to do our outdoor burial bit.

The hotel is quite nice, although the rooms are across the road from the main bit of the hotel, so we got a bit wet when we booked in earlier. So much for my lovely blow-dried bob this morning!

But enough of this nonsense. I need a shower and to iron my clothes for tomorrow.