Fr Phelim asked me to celebrate the St German's 'class Mass' this morning, and I was delighted to be free to stand in for him. Apart from doing a funeral there in July, it's a year since I was last here for this service, and sat in the congregation. Storytelling with a class of kids in church and singing with them was always a favourite with me when I was working and on retirement locum duties. I was so warmly welcomed back by the regulars in church and the day centre. The highlight of the service was a child losing one of her milk teeth during my address. Everything stopped for the first aid kit to come out and a spare plaster wrapping found to slip the tooth into for safe keeping. Delightful!
As this is St Dyfrig's feast day, I looked at Wikipedia in advance to fill in my knowledge gaps in his story. It seems he was born in a village near Hereford, and was a enthusiastic young theologian of the fifth century, who taught Illtud and Samson, and founded monastic places of learning, including one at Llandaff where his bones lie, since the building of the Cathedral in the 12th century. He was named Archbishop of Llandaff by St German of Auxerre during his visit to Wales to teach against the Pelagian heresy popular it seems among Celts at that time. If I knew that before, I never properly took it in. It was one small curious semi-historical fact to share with the children.
Fr Mark has asked me to take on another funeral for him, a week tomorrow, and tomorrow's Mass at St John's. I'm glad to be active. I find coping with my condition much harder if there's nothing to distract me. Telly is not nearly as good as activity, social or physical.
Again this afternoon, I was feeling pretty tired, so I had a siesta and then sat in bed catching up on blog writing, with a HP laptop which runs Linux on a solid state drive I bought and installed a couple of weeks ago and forgot to mention at the time, as I haven't got around to using it until now. It's amazing quick, booting and opening Open Office ready for work in 30 seconds, on a seven year old device, which takes about three minutes to do the same under Windows 10. I have another laptop to convert, but being newer, it's trickier to open up and swap out the hard drive, plus it's a damned UEFI motherboard, which also make sit fiddlier to do.
At four twenty-five the house was plunged into darkness by a power outage which lasted until five to five. I posted a query about the extent of the outage on the local social media 'Next Door' website, as I still had an indoor phone signal at the back of the house on my Blackberry. Quickly half a dozen reports arrived stating that the area surrounding Cathedral Road, up Penhill, and East Canton had been hit. I don't remember when this last happened, perhaps once, since we've been living here.
There was only the burglar alarm to stop screaming and the cooker clock to reset. The router came on automatically, but internet connection and our internal mobile phone signal booster which relies on internet connectivity were both flaky for several hours afterwards, and strange to say they only settled down once we switched on the telly, which also relies on the broadband signal. Not that there was anything on worth watching tonight. Talking of which, our Talktalk broadband has been pitifully slow of late. Speed checks revealed that it's now a quarter of the up and down speeds we're paying for. Must chase this up, as it slows photo uploads to a very annoying extent.
Again this afternoon, I was feeling pretty tired, so I had a siesta and then sat in bed catching up on blog writing, with a HP laptop which runs Linux on a solid state drive I bought and installed a couple of weeks ago and forgot to mention at the time, as I haven't got around to using it until now. It's amazing quick, booting and opening Open Office ready for work in 30 seconds, on a seven year old device, which takes about three minutes to do the same under Windows 10. I have another laptop to convert, but being newer, it's trickier to open up and swap out the hard drive, plus it's a damned UEFI motherboard, which also make sit fiddlier to do.
At four twenty-five the house was plunged into darkness by a power outage which lasted until five to five. I posted a query about the extent of the outage on the local social media 'Next Door' website, as I still had an indoor phone signal at the back of the house on my Blackberry. Quickly half a dozen reports arrived stating that the area surrounding Cathedral Road, up Penhill, and East Canton had been hit. I don't remember when this last happened, perhaps once, since we've been living here.
There was only the burglar alarm to stop screaming and the cooker clock to reset. The router came on automatically, but internet connection and our internal mobile phone signal booster which relies on internet connectivity were both flaky for several hours afterwards, and strange to say they only settled down once we switched on the telly, which also relies on the broadband signal. Not that there was anything on worth watching tonight. Talking of which, our Talktalk broadband has been pitifully slow of late. Speed checks revealed that it's now a quarter of the up and down speeds we're paying for. Must chase this up, as it slows photo uploads to a very annoying extent.
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