Despite a good eight and a half hour's sleep, I woke up feeling tired and felt tired for much of the day. I've no idea why. With more work to do on Carole's funeral and people to contact, it was hard going. I went to the Eucharist at St John's, which Emma celebrated. She brought her two infants with her. One slept and the other played with his toy car around the altar, not too noisily. I don't think anyone minded, but it was a challenge for Emma. She didn't think to ask me to cover, as she thought I was still away. The congregation was pleased to see her again and catch up with her, now she's seconded to Fairwater until an appointment is made. This may be further delayed now that Francis is on bereavement leave. As Ministry Area Leader Frances needs to be involved in the new appointment.
This is an unexpected testing time for the resilience of the Ministry Area set-up before it comes into force legally next January. I think there is a significant measure of resilience in the seven constituent congregations due to their long histories at the heart of their local communities. Will this cope with identity loss, grouping together in a larger entity without precedent or preexisting social cohesion? I'm unconvinced it will do anything to forestall further decline.
Our neighbour Liz moves house tomorrow after living forty years in the house next door, ten years before we arrived. She's moving to a retirement apartment to be closer to family in the Cotswolds, so she came for a farewell lunch today. I wonder who'll be the next occupants, and how much makeover work will be undertaken before they move in, and how long we'll have builders' noise and skips taking up parking space in the street. Houses change hands at the rate of around three a year nowadays in a street of twenty eight houses. House prices have soared and the interest in our area by first and second time buyers has increased so the rate of 'churn' in home ownership is likely to increase further.
I went into town after lunch and bought the pocket digital dictating device I ordered last week, and picked up the pair of shoe insoles ordered from the Ecco shoe shop. I hope they work better than all the other kinds I have tried. They're certainly better quality and much more expensive.
My sister June has had several days of connectivity grief with her landline and broadband playing up leaving her frustratingly isolated. Engineers from BT and Open Reach have been two days running. I hope the problem is sorted now. There's been such a lot of rain in the area where she lives it has led to a flood of line fault reports, whether due to infrastructure inundation or connections into properties compromised by the weather. It's very distressing for her as she doesn't understand the error messages which her computer and phone throw up, and doesn't know what she can do about it when things that are fairly reliable cease to be reliable.
It just doesn't feel right that so many people are now heavily dependent on technologies the hardly understand or adequately control, because government and business presume a level of technical literacy many older people will never acquire. I have thirty five years of experience behind me, and have got to the stage where I am less than interested in the learning detail of how new tech works. I just want things that just work in delivering what they promise to provide in the simplest and easiest way they can be designed to function. Is that asking too much? The new digital voice recorder I bought today took me half an hour to figure out how to work. The instructions were printed so small they were difficult to read and make sense of, and working things out by trial and error, just by handing the device, was impossible without the near illegible instructions - well, near illegible for anyone with poor close vision eyesight.
T.here was a huge head of celery in this week's veggy bag, and Clare used much of it to make celery soup for supper. Just celery in the pressure cooker with a little veggy stock powder, no need for thickener when it surrendered to the blender. It's quite a strong flavour, but with a small amount of Miso added, it's quite an interesting flavour. We slumped in front of the telly and watched a slow moving episode of 'Vera' which I hadn't seen before.
No comments:
Post a Comment