Our retreat ends today. Our apologies for all the unanswered letters and emails but we do try to limit ourselves to prayer requests and urgent business, otherwise we'd never get a free minute. The concert on Tuesday was excellent. I think Jubilate! sang even better than last year, and there was a very convivial atmosphere in the gardens afterwards. Thanks to some spectacularly generous sponsorship the evening raised £2614, all of which will be devoted to our work for the blind (boring but necessary items like electricity bills, telephone bills, insurance and accountancy fees in the first instance; next, replacing stocks of blank cassettes and labels + a much-needed computer for office work; then we can start thinking about planning for the future. We'll be putting up an equipment list fairly soon, so you'll see how costly many of the items we need are. This is just the start of our fund-raising for St Cecilia's). Meanwhile life in the monastery has not been dull. Wasps decided to build a nest in the library during our retreat: we spotted them on the hottest day of the year, which was fun. Handynun decided to have a mammoth bake-in on the second hottest day of the year, which was also fun, especially for anyone who dared to enter the (admittedly tiny) kitchen while work was in progress; and Digitalnun was heard printing concert programmes at half past midnight on the day of the concert itself, which was . . . fun. At least she had the decency not to sing "Sleepers, awake!" Apparently, she has done something about the blog engine and assures us that from the middle of the month onwards, you will have the opportunity of commenting. The web site will probably be offline for an hour or so while she makes the switch so there will be an announcement when the changeover is to take place. Although our retreat was not quite as leisured or quiet as we might have hoped, we were immensely impressed by the retreat-giver, Fr Jeremy Driscoll OSB, and value very much the input he gave. Probably some of it will appear in this blog over the next few days. There were other joys, too. Walking along some unfamiliar woodland one evening we heard a nightingale singing. It was a heart-stopping moment. The kind of thing that makes every sense come alive with a tremendous affirmation: yes, God, YES.