Happy encounters

Clare should have had her operation today, but postponement until next week means normal routine continues, and there are still office tasks to complete to ensure I can continue to do a few things from home that others won't need to pick up or worry about. On the way into the office I was greeted on St Mary Street by a Zimbabwean man who attended St John's when I was there. He was a refugee from the Mugabe regime who had a road accident and lost his memory, compounding his many problems. 

During the period when his identity and right to stay in Britain was being established, he was homeless and living on the streets, but still attended church, grateful for the fellowship and after service refreshments. Now he's settled with a room of his own in a community, possibly some kind of sheltered accommodation, although he didn't explain where. His English is limited, and I suspect he still suffers from those injuries of some seven years ago. He was cheerful, clean, well dressed, and remembered my name. Such a pleasant surprise.

On the way home, going in the reverse direction up St Mary Street, I bumped into Glenys and Bethan her grand daughter, lifelong St John's attenders, whom I haven't seen for eighteen months. Although I work next door to St John's I seldom have time or opportunity to go in there and meet people these days. I'd like to do that when I have a duty-free Sunday.

My attention was grabbed during an evening of otherwise dull and repetitive TV offerings by the BBC 2 Stargazing Live 2015 programme with Brian Cox and Dara O'Brien. It's like one of those 'Springwatch' natural history programmes that also make the most of the opportunity to open the eyes of TV watchers in a new way. It was superbly interesting and entertaining, and covered several astronomical subjects of current interest with enthusiasm and great clarity - a wonderful showcase for modern scientific adventures. It was as engaging a programme as editions of 'Tomorrow's World' were when I was a teenager.

I was taken with the appeal to viewers to send in digital photos of the constellation of Orion, which would then be processed using advanced photo stacking software into a composite hi-def image of that region of stars, to see what new information could be gleaned from the result. I remember Peter Hammond at St Andrews Fuengirola telling me about his use of photo stacking software to produce a quality image of the moon and Saturn, but crowd sourcing image data from TV viewers takes this concept to a completely different level. Must watch again tomorrow night, post eclipse.