It’s the Feast of the Annunciation, the only feast in Lent, and thus I get to administer one of my quarterly subcutaneous injections today. Not because I’m feasting on gender chemicals, but because the four injections fall on the 25th day of four particular months, one of which is Jesus’ conception, and one of which is his birthday.

But let’s not talk about injections, which are horrid things, unless you’re taking them regularly in which case they’re basically fine and boring. Let’s talk about the other thing you stick might somewhere, but not in a Ben, in a Bible!

I have plenty of Bibles, and they’re full of bookmarks, bits of paper from various studies and Christian holidays. Very occasionally I’ll flick through and try to find out what the marked passage was. Sometimes I’m baffled, but usually I’m glad to find whatever I do find. Comfort, guidance, wisdom, warning, advice and hope.

The Bible currently at my fingertips is Tom Wright’s The Bible For Everyone, which collects the translation of each book of the new testament, which he translated for his ‘for Everyone’ commentary series, which, may I say, is an excellent set of commentaries. If you want a proper in-depth look at a gospel or epistle - and if you’re listening to this, you probably would like them - that’s where I’d start. Anyway it amuses me to call this Bible the ‘for Everyone’ omnibus.

The bookmark a scrap of planning paper, and it’s Marking Acts chapter 9, and I’m not sure why. It could be for the maps — this version contains maps in the text, so you can tell where people - especially Paul and Peter - travel in the Book of Acts, which makes a lot of sense of place-names.

The other things I might have marked it for are the healing of Aeneas because I love how Peter heals him with the words ‘Jesus the Messiah heals you! Stand up and fold up your bed! - the first half of that makes it clear who’s really doing the healing, via Peter - and the second half feels more real to me than ‘take up thy bed'.

The other thing in this double-page spread that I might have been bookmarking was the healing of Tabitha, who was also known as Dorcas, and was dead at the time. About 22 episodes ago, I mentioned Dorcas but had nothing to say about her except that her name sounds like a high-school insult. I ought to have added that she was notably excellent. She made tunics and other clothes. She was ‘full of good works and generous deeds’. When Peter turns up, before he even goes to raise Dorcas from the dead, the weeping mourners pause to show him all the clothes she’d been making. If someone died in my house and you turned up to grieve with me, and I stopped to show you what they’d be sewing, it probably means it was really good stuff, or it was astonishingly, embarrassingly terrible, and I’m pretty sure we’re meant to infer the former.

For me, the clothes-making stands out more than the resurrection, which is probably because I’m fairly used to resurrections in the Bible, since over the whole text and 4,000 years we see the Jesus, Lazarus, Eutychus, Dorcas, Jairus’s daughter, three people’s sons, and an unnamed man thrown into Elisha’s grave who is revived by touching a very holy corpse, and then in Revelation every other person in the world ever. Resurrections are so astonishing that I can scarcely think about them. But the fact that Dorcas/Tabitha made some clothes? That’s human, that’s excellent. One of my favourite things about Maria von Trapp is that she made clothes, and when there were no other resources, turned curtains into clothes. I do that, and I respect it.

If like me, you leave things in your Bibles to mark the page, go through some and work out what you were marking. There’s no point leaving a bookmark that you never return to, so let this be your reminder. And if you have some nice old curtains, my advice is to turn them into piratey coats, but it’s really up to you.