Avian surprises

I drove to Saint German's after breakfast to celebrate the Parish Eucharist. It's the first time in eighteen months. It was wonderful to be reunited with a congregation I got to know well and love during the years I spent with them on locum duties. Fr Phelim was taking services in Grangetown, but I had the support of his two ordinands on placement, Natasha and Ross, to brief me. The sun shone and lit the interior of the church during the Mass. Ross acted as thurifer, and Natasha was sub-deacon, and deejay, controlling from her phone via bluetooth the four selected hymns of the day to be listened to rather than sung under current restrictions, with some suitable extra music to fill in when the hymns were too short to cover the action. It worked very well. The investment made by the church in a state of the art karioki device is proving worth while, though I'm glad someone else was managing this and not me! 

There were just over thirty present, all the regular congregation members outlasted the pandemic so far, and much work has been done in the time since I was last there - new church central heating, stainless steel aisle roofing replacing the lead cover which kept being stolen, new church hall heating and toilets. The old people's drop-in centre didn't survive the pandemic. Numbers dropped, not least because some of the regulars died. Transport costs rose, making the project unsustainable for the few remaining, sadly. A plan is afoot to develop a play group with mothers and babies once the covid restrictions come to an end.

Before I left, Phelim returned and we chatted briefly outside. As the new ministry area leader, he will be relinquishing charge of St German's to Roath ministry area. I'm hoping that if help is needed in future, I will get more opportunities to return and make myself useful, but that'll be next year.

We had lunch in the garden again, and after a siesta, I went out for a walk which took me down the path alongside the Taff, through the woods next to the horse paddock. There for the first time I caught sight of the resident bird of prey, perched in a tree, possibly a buzzard or a hobby, and took several photos, none were especially good, as I wasn't using one of my decent telephoto lenses, but it was the first time I had got within twenty metres of one hereabouts. 

Just below Blackweir bridge a little later, I caught sight of a flock of birds that behaved like swifts, but after a discussion with a fellow birdwatcher, conclude they may have been House Martins hunting for insects above the river, as their undersides were pale all over. Then for the second time this weekend I saw a small flock of starlings feeding on the grass. They are often to be heard in the trees around the park, or even in our local streets, but they seem to go elsewhere to feed for much of the year.

In the evening I had a call from Fr Paul Bigmore who retired from ministry in the diocese four years ago and now lives in Riverside, but is housebound following a bout of covid last year. He's a keen hymnodist, who has written texts for well over a hundred hymns, composed music for some of them and published a book of his own work. He's now working on producing another one. To have a creative project like this must be a consolation when his ministerial activity has been so severely curtailed in this way.

The penultimate episode of 'Line of Duty' tonight, another cliffhanger containing an intense long interview sequence. It's still impossible to work out how this series will end. Or will it?