October is never an easy month in the monastery. The last few weeks have seen some round-the-clock work on proofs for the Catholic Directory of England and Wales, a race to prepare our accounts for audit, a succession of visitors and one or two domestic hiccups, such as losing electrical power for a few hours when most needed. Despite having checked our Talkshoe set-up just before going live, Thursday's web conference had to be abandoned because the system broke down. We had already decided it would be our last using Talkshoe but we are sorry that those who joined in, and those who intended to join in, should have cleared their diaries for nothing. We shall resume once we are confident that the new system works better than the old.

So, gloom and doom all round, right? Wrong. It has actually been a blessed time. Our accountant lives in the New Forest area, so taking our records down to him is never without interest. While giving Duncan a forest walk, we saw a roe deer stag and some hinds close up (happily the wind was to us) and cattle heavy with their winter coats and murderous-looking horns. A little later and we were looking out over the Solent to the Isle of Wight, where the sea was a shimmer of silver and the sky a brilliant blue. Our visitors have all been delightful; we managed to fix the electricity problem ourselves, using our trusty DIY manual; we have been harvesting tomatoes, courgettes, butternut squash and runner beans in abundance; and we managed to dispose of some of our superfluities at the local dump (always satisfying, that).

We are currently feeling tired, there is still much to do, but we have been reminded, yet again, that it is not what we do but how we do it that counts. We can rail against fortune, groan about the burden of busyness placed on our shoulders, or simply get on with things, trusting that the Lord's purposes are wiser than our own. For myself, those few hours in the New Forest more than compensated for all the stress and strain of previous weeks. They were a little bit of heaven here and now.