Special Soup Weekend

Back in March I spent a weekend helping out at the Diocese of Sourozh with their Easter shenanigans (so disrespectful and inappropriate to refer to it as shenanigans, but go with me here). I'm not particularly religious, but when we were younger my brother and I were summarily dispatched to the summer camp run by the Orthodox Church in London to meet up with other Russian kids and get out of our parents' hair, so yeah, it's all connected.
So back in March I was invited to return in July to help out with their celebrations of the Divine Liturgy, I totally said yes, came home and immediately forgot about it. Imagine my puzzlement when contrary to all the social norms I live by they decided to remember my promise and hold me to to it! And on the weekend that I've been invited to a really cool fancy dress party too! (no, that's not an oxymoron, shut up, you guys)
Bof, who cares. Needs must, and to Hastings I must go. I picked up this little number a couple of days ago, and since one of the things I'll be doing on Saturday is making soup for 80 people, I thought I might as well leaf through it to clue up on cooking, spirituality, and an old man's take on modern life.
Bad! Wrong decision!
There isn't really anything wrong with the book, but going through it I got the same feeling I had when I read Diana Athill's 'Somewhere Towards The End' which was that I'm intruding on somebody's stream of consciousness. Maybe as a twenty year old I just can't grasp an 80 year old's frame of reference. Or maybe when you go off on a tangent in the middle of a narrative it's just jarring.
Here's a couple of other gems:
On women doing the cooking - The emancipation of women is a thing of great good, as long as it does not divorce the priestess from her altar. That is the way divorces start.
Odd mash-up of Eastern and Western religious ideologies - The penitent thief was promised Nirvana because he recognised the Buddha nature in Jesus.

I'm going to stop bitching, there's nothing wrong with the book it just isn't my style, but there are a few recipes in here for seafood, soups and curries. Just make sure you're not a vegetarian because every recipe has pork or mutton in it. And try if you possibly can to live in the countryside instead of being 'imprisoned' in an apartment, that way you'll be able to cook over a wood fire and forage for herbs in the surrounding woods. Just like you're supposed to.
Helpful to me in no way.