I remember drilling for oil on the moon.

It was a summer play scheme, back in the 70s sometime. It was held at Madeley Court, which was both the local sports centre and a rubbish secondary school. When the high point of a school is that they have access to a dry ski slope, you know that their standards are low. (I am aware that some of my ski-ing friends will disagree). Madeley Court was also the source of the worst bruise that I've ever received that wasn't inflicted by the NHS and related to that, a slight fear of mixed hockey. But that was a couple of years later.

There were a lot of different activities going on at the play-scheme, and I've no idea how or why I chose the one I did; the memory I have starts when I walked into a room. A large, low table was set in a clear space, and an even larger lump of clay on it. I remember that the clay was brown, and smelt very different to dirt; a cleaner, almost clinical smell. Not quite the taste of a petit madeleine, but still easy to bring to mind after all these years. I must have been 8, I think; nearly 9 as it was the summer. The lump of clay was huge; I remember it being larger than I could reach around with both arms, and we were gathered around it by one of the two adults leading this activity.

What's this? she said.

I'm certain that after the requisite delay that occurs when you pose a question to a group of kids who don't know each other and haven't worked out the pecking order yet, and aren't certain that volunteering an answer will result in a duffing up later, someone said 'Clay'.

She smiled.

No, that's what it is. What is it?

And she was laughing, but she was one of those people who knew how to laugh so that you got the joke, rather than thinking that you're being laughed at. I remember her being an adult, i.e. old, and dressed strangely; now I'm certain that she was in her late teens or early twenties, and dressed in that hippy / bohemian style that I really find quite attractive. Who needs psycho-analysis when you have LiveJournal?

But I digress. Eventually, one kid piped up;

It looks like the moon.

And she laughed out loud, and said Yes! That's it! It's the moon! What does the moon look like?

It has craters? one child suggested.

This doesn't have craters, does it? Then she pointed at three of us. Why don't you make some craters on the moon?

It really didn't take a lot more encouragement for three young children to get dirty, so they jumped forward and started digging holes in the clay with their bare hands.

What else does the moon have? she asked.

Rockets!  said one boy, with great enthusiasm, and she pointed at the spoil heaps that were appearing next to the crater-excavators. Show me, she said.

And that was the rest of the afternoon.

We took the clay and we told stories with it - bases were built and occupied by every nation we'd ever heard of, whether they had a space programme or not. Flags were raised and rockets erected. She kept asking us questions, and we answered, and everything we said, we built. I noticed that rockets needed fuel so started building oil rigs and wells and piles of oil drums, heedless of any envionmental consequences - but this was 1977 and I was eight; I'm not sure the environment had made it to Telford by then.

We ended the afternoon covered in splats of clay, with the world our storytelling had built in front of us.

My niece, who is 10, emailed me yesterday, and as part of the conversation said that she preferred English to Crafts at school. She didn't like "making things", she said, but she really liked writing. I can't blame her. In secondry school, I detested Woodwork;  I think my parents still have the fish statue that we all had to carve somewhere. My sisters (my niece's mum) is lithe and graceful - you can imagine it dropping off of its stand and into the water, darting away. Mine is ugly and solid; the sort of fish that we'll only eat when all the pretty ones have become extinct. So I do understand my niece; I hated not being able to transfer what was in my head into solid form. The things I made were never as sleek or graceful as how I could describe them. Never as alive. I never managed it.

Well, except once. The time I built oil wells on the moon.

Candles are such a transitory memorial. They're part of my family
tradition, born out of long years of Catholicism; the response to bad news
is to light a candle or two in front of an appropriate saint.

My Dad's family are Marian; most of them, male and female, took Mary as a
Confirmation name. I didn't. When you're 11 and standing in the middle
of a packed cathedral with all of your friends around, it's a difficult
thing to do - instead I chose Patrick out of a sense of connection with
the land that all my family come from. Sometimes I regret that, but in
truth, I know I didn't have the strength at 11 to put up with the jibes
that would have haunted me through my teenage years. I'm not sure I'd
have the strength now, but I would have the ferocity to fight back and to
defend my decision. Is that growth? Perhaps.

This morning, on the way to work, I stepped in to the local Catholic
church - it's about 100 feet away from my office. We're actually
bracketed by two churches - one Catholic, one CofE. Like Liverpool, the
Catholic church is a squat, 60's building, a church almost in the round.
The CofE church is of an older style, with a steeple and bells. But the
Catholic church has a peace within it, a chill that comes from the stone
and a quiet that muffles the sound of the traffic mere feet away.

Because of repeated arson and vandalism attacks, the Catholic church is
not open all hours. The front doors swing wide a half hour before each
service, and shut a half hour after each finishes. Other than that, if
you wish entrance to pray, you negotiate with the owner of a small cafe
whose premises back on to the church and if he considers your motives
pure, you are let in.

Actually, that's overstating the case - I merely asked if I could light a
candle and he showed me the door. When I returned because there were no
matches available in the church and it being early in the morning, no
other candles other than the Sanctuary light lit, he lent me his own
lighter. When I returned his lighter and left, he wished me a good day,
and God speed in an Irish accent.

I knelt, and I prayed, two decades of the rosary, and I lit two candles.
One for Uncle Jack and one for the rest of us.

Candles provide a focus. A sharp clear light in the darkness. I remember
a Roald Dahl story where a man learnt to see through playing cards by
studying intently the borders of light and darkness within the candle
flame. The light redeemed him; he started using his ability to win money
from casinos and fund orphanages.

Candles are transitory, though. No graven memorial, no stone to last the
ages, no marker that will last beyond the flickering of the flame and the
guttering of the wax. In a philosophical mood, I could wax lyrical about
the candle as a metaphor for life. But I won't.

All I will say is this - that the candle will inevitably burn out, and the
darkness will overcome it. But we can always light another candle, even
if it is only for a while.