Ash Wednesday

I went to the Eucharist of the day at St Catherine's this morning. There were nineteen of us and most stayed for coffee and a chat afterwards. Mother Francis preached well using the text of the hymn 'O Love that will not let me go', and telling the story of its author, the blind preacher George Matheson. It was a cheery gathering, and perhaps because I was in a quiet observant mood, I kept noticing how kind and attentive people were towards each other. As we parted company I had to wish them Happy Easter, as this was the last time I'd see them until my return in two months time. That felt strange.

After lunch, I phoned up and booked a room in Bristol Airport Holiday Inn for Monday night, so I can get some sleep before rising early for my flight to Mallorca at 07.05 on Tuesday. Then I walked over to the Sophia Gardens coach station and booked a ticket for the 17.40 coach to the airport. In the evening, I activated my new travel money card and registered an online account that will enable me to keep and eye on my euro spending. 

A job that's been in my pending tray for over a week, checking out whether or not my DBS update service registration now works. I had occasion to call the gov.uk troubleshooting hotline over error messages which seemed to be caused by me having two separate CRB checks running at the same time. I was able to access my account with the reference number given by the troubleshooter and this gave me confirmation of the Church in Wales certificate. I then added the Diocese in Europe certificate to the same account as I'd been instructed. As suspected before it was clarified by the call, I have and need only one access path to both applications on the DBS update portal. 

I find all this digital detail hard going these days, too much time spent typing in numbers and re-checking them, no matter how good the cause or convenient the purpose. Reducing human beings to a collection of numbers and use statistics is not my idea of being made in the image of God. Giving up surfing or reading newsfeeds and tweets for Lent in favour of a good book might be worth doing, but it's impossible to give up all things digital as almost everything we do relies on it, one way or another. What are we doing to ourselves? Where will it end?

This last few days army and police helicopters have been evident in the city skies by day and even by night, on a joint training exercise relating to major incident preparedness, according to the news media. As I was walking through Bute Park, two RAF Lynx helicopters circulated overhead and landed in the field by the Ambulance station. One was clearly a rescue craft, the other was armed, to provide protective cover. Services designed to protect citizens have to be ready for anything I guess.
I got some good photos to prove the co-incidence of my being there during the ten minutes they were on the ground. You'll find them here