St Agnes postponed

I went to St John's Canton this morning to offer a 10.30 Eucharist, relocated from its usual venue at St Luke's as the heating there is broken. There was a coffee morning going on at the other end of the church and nobody turned up to worship, so I prayed and read the Liturgy of the Word on my own, which I was quite happy to do. It's St Agnes Day today, but I'll be celebrating it tomorrow in any case.

Afterwards, Clare and I took advantage of another day of sunshine and went for a long walk around the park. I half recognised up to a dozen different kinds of birdsong, which was encouraging. I spotted a wren and a robin, and photographed a heron on the Bute Park river bank, and two large cormorants perched on different stones in the river, eyes fixed, like the heron on the water beneath them, hunting for fish, possibly salmon on the move to their spawning ground up-river. Strangely, yesterday, I heard and saw few birds apart from the ubiquitous crows, magpies and pigeons. Yet, the weather was the same as today. Getting to know the riverside parkland as wildlife habitat requires lots of walks and observation in the same locations time and time again, to build up a proper picture and understand it. It's nice to have much more time to look these days.

The rest of the day was uneventful and the evening spent watching the rubbish TV. The only thing of interest I found to read was an article about how groups of academics and computer geeks in the USA have been working around to clock to download and archive the content of American government Environmental protection agency data, before the new President takes office, suspecting that he will act to suppress volumes of published scientific data which confirms climate change. Trump is a declared denier and skeptic, who looks set to relegate climate change action to the bottom of his priority list. In other tech news, on his first day in office with executive power, the tech media are already reporting that US government web information on environmental and climate issues is no longer accessible. This is a worrying sign of dangerous times to come. If the truth is meant to set us free, suppressing the truth is surely meant to enslave us. But, as Trump sows, so will he reap. Suppress the facts and they could well return and cause your fall eventually.