Sorry about my alarming post about becoming homeless (pretty soon that would have been a month old! Shocking.) there was a massive muck up of room allocation in my college in Durham, which resulted in people like myself being thrown out of their rooms and in new students (many of whom come from thousands of miles away) arriving in a strange country and being told to go and find somewhere else to live. Not nice at all 
You’ll be pleased to hear I wasn’t homeless in the end, but I’m going to be leaving Durham forever later this month because I’m incredibly old and should really be doing something… productive? 
However, I have no internet now so for the time being updates may be scarce, but I’ll do everything I can to try and keep posting. In fact, here’s something rather interesting as a reward for still checking here after my apparent exit from society:
Do you notice anything in the rather cluttered picture to the left? Apart from the beautiful stained-glass window, of course. The little gaping hole in the wall is actually incredibly important, and something very similar to it is found in all Catholic and Anglican Church buildings.
It’s called a piscina. Its purpose is to dispose of water which has been used as part of a sacrament. The hole in the wall here drains directly into the ground, and in many Churches the piscina takes the form of a small sink. The only materials which pass down the piscina are water used for sacraments, and also the water used to wash the vessels used for the eucharist.
The idea is that it would be awful for the body and blood (bread and wine) which are used in communion to be washed down a normal sink (and presumably go through water treatment plants etc.), and that it would be far better for them to be returned to the earth they came from. In much the same way if any bread, once blessed, falls to the floor it then has to be buried in the ground; this is for exactly the same reason.
So next time you go into a Church you should try and see if there’s a little hole in the wall. It will be a very special little hole, since it’s deemed important enough to carry very sacred items back into the ground.
‘…leaving Durham forever later this month because I’m incredibly old…’
No excuse.
I hope the productive something will leave you with time free for epistolary communication again.
Interesting little fact there Maria, I never knew about that before! I’ve never seen on in an Anglican church, I always thought that any leftovers from the sacrament had to be consumed by the priest or kept for another time?
Well, the wine which is poured out is drunk before the end of the service (with the eucharistic ministers each consuming the remaining wine in the bottom of the chalice they were using). The bread which remains is also left in the tabernacle of the Church to be used later. It’s just that there will always be traces of wine which remain in the chalice, and always crumbs of the host which will be left behind – so when the vessels are washed these fragments will end up in the water used to wash them (hence the need for the water to be disposed of carefully).
In most modern Churches the piscina is normally a special sink behind the scenes, but in Churches which are either old or incredibly cool the piscina remains near the altar (where I think they’re technically meant to be).