Champagne is, as everyone knows, a Benedictine invention. Each bottle contains 100 million bubbles, or as Dom Pérignon might have put it, 100 million stars. I find this useless fact quite entrancing as I sit with eyes like poached eggs, surrounded by piles of proofs (the Catholic Directory for England and Wales, if you must know, 964 close-set pages at the last count), ruler in one hand, red pen in the other, while "a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk". The digital revolution has not yet eliminated the need for old skills like proof-reading, but I have to admit that people of my generation are not nearly as speedy or accurate as those who went before. Indeed, one of the best proof-readers I ever knew, with a mastery of grammar, syntax and punctuation second to none, was a former compositor who left school at fourteen. He had a passion for books, printing, learning; and that transformed his life. Once we start talking about "transforming passions" of course, we are on common ground. Most of us have an interest of some kind that gives meaning and beauty to our lives, puts the fizz into our existence, so to say. For Benedictines, it is the search for God that, even at the worst of times, should make us sparkle. I must remember that as I sigh over my proofs.