Congestion miscalculation

I went to bed far too late last night and woke up having lost at least an hour's sleep. These days I find that I don;t get along so well on less than eight hours a night.

The bright sunny blue sky weather continues, but it's deceptive. I went out without a top coat and hat to walk down to St John and celebrate the Eucharist this morning, and felt the impact of a chilling breeze. The loss of sleep affected me as well. At the beginning of the service I twice reverted to the modern language rite instead of the traditional one mid-sentence! I had to re-start the Gloria, as people were rather confused, but thereafter I was OK. The funny experience gave me a pretext to talk about how the Word is communicated despite language confusion and even through faltering broken speech, thanks to the Spirit speaking heart to heart, whatever else is going on.  

Again we were thirteen people. We would have been fourteen, but one lady came, and as she was getting water to freshen up the flowers, she dropped her hearing aid into the sink, and was compelled to return home and dry it out immediately, hoping that it wasn't by damaged by the inundation. She has difficulty hearing, even with a hearing aid. It's one of the trials of old age which so far I have been spared, except for the occasional miserable wax blockage. 

With Clare in school this morning, I cooked lunch on returning home, and then had an hour and a half of a siesta which perked me up, ready for my walk in the park. Opposite the riding centre stables is a very rich area of well cared for mature allotments. It hosts many different garden bird species, more than any other part of the green zone at the heart of the city. It's a real treat to stand under the trees by the hedgerow and listen to chaffinches, wrens, robins, blackbirds, thrushes, starlings plus other birds singing I still cannot identify. I made me appreciate just how fortunate I am still to enjoy good hearing. I had a few good lucky bird photos too. This one was the best: a missel thrush, I think.

Having had a moan about traffic congestion caused by Castle Street restrictions yesterday, I was pleased to see an article on just this subject posted on this morning's Wales Online website. I must get busy and write to Caro Wild our local ward councillor who has been involved in road management changes this past year. While the objective is to reduce pollution in city centre hot-spots the solutions tried so far simply lead to the distribution of congestion and queues to other inner city zones, with longer journeys and delays leading to more pollution distributed more widely but a general increase in the carbon foot of city traffic associated with slow moving traffic.

With preparations for tomorrow's funeral complete after supper, I decided to go to bed really early, relax and watch a couple of episodes of 'Non Uccidere', in an effort to catch up of missed sleep. Hopefully I'll be on better form tomorrow, when we're having our second covid jabs just after ten. It's terrible to see the rate of virus spread in India at the moment a third of a million a day in the absence of universal lock-down (maybe impossible to enforce anyway) plus the continuation of mass gatherings for pilgrimage rituals and political rallies. Inadequate reporting of fatalities in some impoverished regions may mean that the true scale of covid deaths may never be known. 

Mass religious gatherings would be hard to stop anyway, as pious people are often stubborn with it, but political rallies could simply be cancelled by the prime minister. It's hard to fathom such foolishness, and we've seen so much of this in the past year. So many avoidable deaths ultimately due to egotistical populist leadership.