Lent is forty days long...

...(if you don't count the Sundays).

Numbers are v. important in Scripture, and the number 40 especially so (Moses leading the Chosen People 40 years in the desert, Christ in prayer in the desert for 40 days...). And in God's arrangements for human beings too. A child lives for 40 weeks in his mother's womb, waiting to be born.

A new book on the "40 Days for Life" campaign was launched in London the other day at Holy Apostles Church, Pimlico, and I went along...some  rather tender stories emerged of how women had been helped, and children born safely, through the help and support given by the "40 days" team. They are currently praying outside various abortion centres in London, including one in Ealing. Auntie will be joining them there at some point, because I have a friend lying ill at St David's Nursing Home, and I can join the "40 Days" team for a while en route to one of my regular visits there...after the book launch there was a lively talkative meal and then I walked to the station with the young organiser of the Alliance of Pro-Life Students, who  as we hurried through PImlico heard good news on her mobile 'phone of a student group which had succeded in defeating a pro-abortion resolution put forward at a leading university...

Attitude of these young campaigners towards Auntie is rather sweet: they see in me a  slightly dotty old thing with a jolly-hockey-sticks voice who does her bit by providing useful contacts and helping to get things done. Which is roughly how I saw older people of my type when I was their age.

Pimlico is still a bit of real London: I mean, it has some real pubs and real messy bits and real shops and people who really live there. It's not the same as when that splendid film was made...but there's still a sense of place about it.The pleasing symmetrical look of  tall fine London houses - now all divided up into flats of course - gives way to odd corners, and pubs where people help if you stop to ask the way, and there are a couple of good Victorian churches and so on. Holy Apostles isn't one of the latter. It was bombed in WWII and the present building was put up in the '50s. It's a busy parish  and has its own life independent of  the world-famous bits of Westminster nearby , but the parish priest also  has pastoral care of  Parliament and   regularly celebrates  Masses there for MPs and Parliamentary staff.  I took a History Walk around Pimlico a few weeks back and we enjoyed putting together the layers of  the years. There is a big comfortable parish hall and the whole makes a break in the line of houses. Then as you get nearer to Victoria Station there is Ecclestone Square and suddenly the railway and the crowds hurrying...