A strange thing happened last week: we missed Mass on Sunday morning and suddenly the whole day just completely fell apart. Lunch time came around and I hadn’t prepared anything – no chicken, no roast potatoes, no nothing – and we ended up having a pizza out of the freezer. Then after lunch, when we would usually sit down to read our newspapers, there were none because I would normally buy them on my way home from Mass. The rest of the day passed in an unstructured blur, as the children squabbled and every fibre of my being went into not completely losing it with them.