Friends reunited and The Archers

Today for a change we went to the eleven o'clock Sung Eucharist for the Feast of St Paul's Conversion at the Cathedral, and enjoyed the choir singing Mozart's 'Sparrow' Mass. Graham Francis was preaching for the last time as Canon in Residence before his retirement as Vicar of St Mary's Cardiff Bay. We were in St Michael's as students together in the revolutionary year of '68, when reform of theological education and training for the ministry managed to make it briefly to the student agenda for the first time in modern times. Throughout his ministry he has taken an interest in the development and adaptation of Christian liturgy in the service of mission and evangelisation, and over the years has acquired an extraordinary library of liturgical resource texts, and the expertise to make use of it on all kinds of occasion. He can best be described as a liturgical entrepreneur, and is an excellent preacher. 

It was good to hear him preach again, and good to catch up with him and Eleri after the service. He was lamenting the prospect of down-sizing that goes with retirement, wondering what to do with his unique extraordinary resource collection. I hope he doesn't need to dispose of it, but can instead find a way to keep it intact as a library of material for use by seminarians and researchers of liturgy, maybe at St Michael's?

We then made our weekly visit to the Riverside Market to get our organic veg supply, before setting out for Newport, and lunch with Martin and Chris and their family. It was a long and leisurely affair with lots of delicious food and good conversation. It must be last summer since we got together with them, so there was plenty to talk about. We got home just in time for the week's first episode of The Archers. These days, there's nothing routine about the varied and complex story lines criss-crossing the imaginary Borsetshire landscape. Sometimes it seems a bit over the top to cram quite so many up to date socially relevant issues into the life of this particular fictional backwater, but it does make for good discussion about what's going to happen next. It's fascinating that the innovative approach to script themes has of late become an issue for debate and even protest in the public realm of media observers and Archers afficionados.