Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant

We had a quiet Saturday, with a brief shopping excursion together into town, ending with tea in John Lewis'. I bought a couple of re-chargeable battery chargers in Currys, for Ashley to use on the move, since he uses his phone that much when he's away from the office, a backup charging solution is needed. It will be interesting to see how useful this is in practice. The France-Wales international was on TV in many shops and in all the pubs, which were rammed. The second half had just started when we got home, so I watched, something I rarely do. Glad Wales won, with St David's Day tomorrow

Before cooking the usual weekend paella for supper, I went through the process of ordering new .cymru and .wales domain names for CBS and the Business Crime Reduction Partnership to use, linked to websites old and new that I've built. Now there's patriotic for you now ... We've had just one domain name for the original CBS website, linked to our British Telecom Account. It worked until about nine months ago, when the weblink was interrupted for no apparent reason. BT wouldn't give us access to control the .org.uk domain name which we owned, and getting it fixed by whoever is responsible in the right department is so complex and elusive we had better things to do than wait for ages on hold in phone queues to find them. Now we have a fresh start and with a new domain name providor, more control. Providing it all works as it's meant to. The new domains go live tomorrow.

This morning, I walked to Llandaff for the Cathedral Sung Eucharist at eleven, with a Schubert Mass in G and a favourite Purcell Anthem, 'Thou knowest Lord the secrets of our hearts'. I went to switch off my phones as I arrived and notice an email from our Swiss friend Claudine working in Myanmar, announcing with astonishment that she's been roped in to sing some hymns in Welsh with an expat choir in Yangon for a celebration of St David's Day. I couldn't stop smiling about this during the service, plus the fact that I was sitting at the front of a nave bathed in sunlight. There must have been a hundred and fifty in church. This congregation has doubled in the past six months. 

Good liturgy in a simple, relaxed, solemn style with decent preaching and renewed choral leadership are commending the value of a traditional worship format in modern language. Sure, the majority of the congregation are older people, but there's an increasing number of older people in society as well as among church attenders. Many are thoughtful, and too discriminating to put up with dumbed down services. It's been hard enough for most of their lives to keep the faith in wayward times. They have many strengths and gift to bring to the church's mission. They need nourishment and inspiration to make sure they don't feel like strangers in their own place.

In town there was the usual St David's day parade, and the Welsh Guards were on parade in the Millennium Plaza, looking smart and sober in their winter greatcoats and busbies, according to the news photos. But both events co-incided with worship. As far as I'm concerned, if worship doesn't get priority, the rest of the celebration is sentiment and vanity.