Taff Vale childhood

Last night's Tai Chi session was good and challenging as we played the full short form through twice. There are still gaps in what I remember properly, two thirds of the way through, but it's nice to think that joining up the parts is once more within sight.

I was glad of a quiet morning to prepare a sermon for Sunday, and prayers for the afternoon's funeral. The driver from Pidgeon's who collected me for the trip to the Wenvoe crematorium was someone I hadn't met before. He turned out to be an EasyJet pilot made redundant in a recessional-cost cutting exercise. He'd flown aircraft into Geneva many times but never gone beyond the airport terminal. A strange change, from driving an Airbus all over Europe to a Jaguar around Cardiff and the Vale.

The crematorium chapel was full, as the deceased was well known as a golf club member and a freemason. A childhood friend now in his mid seventies, close to tears, reminisced about growing up in Morganstown when it was still very rural before and during the war, before it became a Cardiff suburb. His simple eloquence brought to life that era in which my sisters grew up a generation before me. Thirty years before them, my father had passed his school years the opposite side of the valley, in Taff's Well.

When I got home, after the funeral, I was sent out on an errand to B&Q to get a big bag of potting compost, a hanging basket and a rotary clothes-line socket for the garden, now that Spring is here. I also bought some seed, and filled the bird feeder for the first time since we moved here. It'll be interesting to see what birds come and use it.