To Church of St James of the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem, as is my custom, to celebrate the habits of my tribe, as they have done since 1211. In King John’s time, Walter de Turberville gave the manor to the Knights, who formed a small Commandery and with local helpers built the church. Thomas Hardy was said to have used Turberville as an inspiration for the opening pages of “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”.

It was a cold winter’s night, at a sharp freezing zero, and we came early, in the hope of getting a good pew at the front. “Sit against the heating pipe” advised the Church Warden, struggling with recalcitrant candles. The pipe is large, hot against the wall, and then returns tepid in the pipe below, like a sinner seeking salvation in the purifying heat of the boiler. All this of little avail. The very stones were frozen, and such heat as leaked from the heating pipes rose swiftly to the rafters, leaving the nave and congregation cold.

The church filled quickly, every place taken: adult villagers all, with two impeccably behaved young girls and no other children. It was not a young crowd. There was one farmer, one smallholder farmer and former agricultural advisor, no others with country occupations, and no one from the few remaining oldest established country families. One adult, an oenophile with good technical skills, was asked to assemble the camping cooker, and took his seat last. “I got the stove going” he explained later “and my punishment was to be offered mulled wine afterwards”.

Now we faced the procedural problem of combining the standard hymnal with the Christmas selection on a specially printed sheet. The verses not to be sung were indicated by number, but when singing it is not always apparent whether you have reached verse four or five, so there were some hesitant pauses. To complicate matters, our kindly priest wanted boys to be able to sing with their fathers, and girls with their mothers, so he specified that particular verses were to be sung by male voices, others by female voices. Good idea, but a further burden on memory.

The Carols themselves presented a problem. Many had verses which probably should have been dropped on the grounds of being theologically confused, while others were strained in versification, or plainly repetitious. In the older, better-known Carols these verses could be accepted like the foibles of relatives, but for the newer and less melodious ones a harsher editing seemed necessary. And here, history repeated itself. In Christmases gone by the organist has sometimes stopped short, thus editing out the last verse, denying the congregation their last proper orgasmic shout. That happened in 2015, and nobody wanted to break it to the good lady that she had denied us a treat, so we lapsed into frustrated silence. This year it happened again, and there was a pause, as angels gathered in the firmament. The organist must have noticed the congregants in the front pews looking startled, because she chirped up: “Was there another verse?” and quickly rattled into it. Order restored.

One younger man made expressive good work of his reading, the lady verger also did well, the others were fine, but none thundered. The readings presented a staccato tale, like the perpetration of a crime revealed in disconnected videos, the missing sections left to the fevered imagination. As the service went on, the cold worked into fingers and bones, and the story unfolded, as it always does, the darkness unrelieved by the good news proclaimed, the candles still flickering round this frail coincidence of Christian observation. In the end, having remembered those on a further shore, we were blessed, and released from further obligations.

Then mulled wine, mince pies, conversation. I reminded the priest of his generously inviting a parishioner in to live with him and his wife for three months while he sorted himself out from various problems, during which time he found out that the young man’s social security payments were higher than his own priestly salary. “Like having a younger brother”, he said, “sometimes irritating, but still your brother”. A new aspect, he revealed, was that his Bishop found out about his charitable act, and was negative about it, fearing it was risky. Distinctly unimpressive, we agreed.

I asked a villager friend how he was, and he replied “Alive”. Sensing that something more was required, he added “I’m 91 and a half”. We agreed that the half was a cause for optimism. Turning to village matters, the road is narrow by his house, causing rural traffic jams, and he noted that few people nowadays knew how to reverse. “They keep banging into things as they go back” he lamented, “the men also”.

Then into the cold night, past chest tombs and yew trees, past Commandery and pond, past distant long barrows and Iron age forts, past houses with lit windows and dark fields with gloomy trees, past the ghosts of villagers who worshipped here, and farmed, tilled strip lynchets and kept sheep, past the Maypole and the battened hedges, past ponds and streams, walls and gates, all these spread out beneath the silent discant of the twinkling stars.

Merry Christmas to you all.