Life is very hectic at the moment as the round trip to visit D. Teresa takes three hours, so no time for Chapter talks or podcasts, alas. If there were, I'd like to say something about St Swithun. Instead I'll have to point people in the direction of Michael Lapidge's excellent "The Cult of St Swithun". I daresay all the local children will be reciting the old rhyme about rain on St Swithun's day and looking anxiously at the skies, but I wonder how many, confronted by the image of a bishop holding a bridge and with broken eggs at his feet, will realise that it is a representation of St Swithun or recall the miracle it purports to recall? Odd that in an age when the visual is so important, Catholicism has lost much of its ability to read the language of symbols. Perhaps that is why the monastic life we share with St Swithun is incomprehensible to so many. It is, in the fullest possible sense, "symbolic".