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Eric in Horkstow gazing at nativity scene.

A better day today than yesterday. No encircling dogs. (I didn't mention that here, did I? A woman and her little spaniel were attacked by escaped bull mastiffs yesterday outside my house, and I had to go out and jab my brolly at them and bring her in, badly shaken. A local man acted quite heroically in trying to grab all three of them). A lift home in a car from a local very small trader along with the sack of potatoes I'd bought from him. Found a new Betty Jackson jacket for £15 (mmm - we have some great shops in Barton, at the end of the line).  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Jackson . Carol singing in Horkstow churchyard. The first 'mince pies by the fire'. But there was going to be a pic of Child Gazing at a nativity scene, though this might have seemed a bit of a hackneyed subject, and so it would have needed some original angle on it to give it some extra bite. But then the child just did something himself that I could never have planned in any way, and which in retrospect a couple of hours later blew me away.

There we were, singing Christmas carols to the sound and smell of sausages cooking in the churchyard, amid the gravestones, and me with many of my descendants there, and them being charming...  and I worried because I know how some people can be 'funny' about children clambering onto gravestones, but my little grandson Eric aged 5 just stood on the steps of a stone cross gravestone - he got there somehow but did not 'clamber' -  and stretched out his arms wide against the cross, for some long moments. I smiled at him and nodded, whispering 'Yes, just like Jesus', and wondered quite what the right thing to do was, as it was always possible that others might think him somehow disrespectful, but this grave little chap was not in any way being that. Mainly I didn't want to offend him. So after a moment or two we started to notice that there were big crowds of ladybirds on the stone, and we went off with a torch to look for more. (But we found only very few; curiously, they seemed to have congregated on that stone cross in greater numbers than anywhere else on this strangely warm midwinter night. What an image for mediaeval painters of the crucifixion that would have been! Blood-red black-spotted ladybirds!)

But I knew that Eric had been very visible, as we were on a bit of an isolated but central mound in relation to the group, and with a lamp shining down on us. There were around 120 people in a country churchyard, all singing carols, and then Jingle Bells etc, with sausages sizzling for us nearby. A very jolly do. But a little boy did a one-man passion play in the middle of it. [And later that same night, his great-grandad died peacefully just after I started to write this.]