The font is filled from a jug for a baptism and emptied and dried after, and the stone bowl holds nothing between services. Most weeks, on a morning with no baptism booked, it holds about two litres of clean water, which is what the jug holds, and the jug is in the vestry, dry.
I am the verger, and the font is in my care, which mostly means keeping it dry and the lid on.
How it is used.
For a baptism I warm two litres of water in the vestry and carry it to the font in the brass jug, and the priest pours it in. After the service I bail it out, dry the bowl, and put the cover on, and the font is dry until the next family.
Between baptisms the cover is on and the bowl is dry. I check it because damp in stone is bad for stone.
Most weeks, on a morning with no baptism, I lift the cover and there is water in the bowl.
Clean water. About two litres. Cool, the way water goes overnight in a stone bowl, and with the surface still, and the cover was on.
The jug is in the vestry, on its shelf, dry, with the tea towel over it, where I left it.
What has been checked.
The cover. It is oak, heavy, and it sits on the rim. I have marked its position on the rim with a pencil, and in the morning the mark is where it was.
The roof. A leak over the font would fill it, and would fill it with dirty water and stain the bowl, and I have had the architect look, and the roof over the font is sound, and the water is clean.
The stone. A font is porous and can sweat, and the diocese has had fonts do this, and I put a hygrometer in the bowl for a month with the cover on. Dry stone, dry air, and two litres of water on eleven mornings.
The water. I have had it tested by the water company, who were kind about it. Mains water, they said, from our own supply, chlorinated as ours is, and the church's supply is turned off at the stopcock in the vestry every night, by me, because of the frost.
The amount.
It is always about the jug. I have measured it back into the jug on twenty mornings and it fills the jug to the mark I fill to, near enough that the difference is what clings to the stone.
Two litres, warmed in the vestry, carried in the jug, poured in. That is what a baptism is, and the font has had one, in the night, with the jug on its shelf and the water turned off and the door locked.
What is done about it.
I bail it and dry it and put the cover back, and I have told the priest, who said the font has been baptising people for six hundred years and might be forgiven for not stopping, and who has not, I think, thought about it since.
I have looked at the registers. Baptisms are recorded, and I have gone through the book for the weeks it happens, and there is nothing, of course, because nobody was brought.
What I do.
I keep the font.
The one thing I have changed is that I do not dry it with the vestry towel.
The towel is a linen one that lives on the jug, and for years I dried the bowl with it after a baptism and hung it back on the jug.
On a morning in the spring, with two litres in the bowl and nobody booked, I went for the towel and it was wet. Not damp: wet through, wrung and folded the way I fold it after I have dried the bowl, and hung on the jug, which was on its shelf, and which, when I picked it up, was warm.