Evening Taffside walk home

I walked to St Luke's to celebrate Mass with four people this morning. Fr Jesse Smith attended, on his way to meet the Archdeacon. It's ages since we last met. It's great to see him looking fit and well after a challenging bout of serious illness several years ago. At that time I did some locum duties in his Parish, though we got to know each other when he was Team Vicar in Central Cardiff Parish 16 years ago. He left us for a Tyneside parish. I remember going up there for his induction, a six hour journey. I was delighted that after a spell over the border he returned to the Parish where he's been incumbent now for ten years.

I had an email request to take a funeral a week Thursday. I won't be able to meet with the family members until next Monday to discuss the service, but that gives me plenty of time to prepare. 

This evening we went to choir practice, and numbers attending were thin enough to conclude that it's now time to stop rehearsals for the summer. Instead of learning new pieces we did some voice exercise work, which to my mind is a good thing. Mine gets well worked in the course of leading services but doesn't really get stretched by new demands. I have a little idea now of what I need to be doing to remedy this. I've lost a few bottom notes, but it seems that it's never too late to recover them, if I make the effort.

We went to choir by bus, but there were no buses timetabled for eight thirty when we were ready to set off for home, and nobody going in our direction to give us a lift, so we walked back 5.3km along the Taff trail, after buying a picnic supper in the swish new Llandaff North Lidl store. It was a very pleasant summer evening walk, marred only by discarded cans and bottles. I couple of items I could not pass by, I carried 400m to the nearest bin. Sometimes the distance between bins is greater. More are needed to cope with the problem caused by the couldn't care less members of our throwaway society. More bins require more maintenance staff, and city budgets have experienced terrible cut backs. 

Last week I completed a local council on-line survey to give feedback on its public cleansing services, as I expressed an interest in the issue many moons ago. In this era of enforced austerity in public spending, I believe it's necessary to make it easier for volunteers to work on keeping litter under control, by making collection resources available to them - temporary bins, bags, gloves, tongs etc. Is this too hard to consider, I wonder?