Orthodox déjà-vu

After a good night's sleep and breakfast I had spare time to do some writing before driving to St German's for the eleven o'clock Mass this morning. I had a sermon prepared but hadn't remembered that Ross, the ordinand on Parish placement was going to preach. He was late arriving because he'd been at St Saviour's preaching beforehand, so I was surprised when he appeared, but pleased that he was going to preach. After yesterday's journey, the expenditure of energy preaching and celebrating promised to be a challenge I was working myself up to. 

I enjoyed listening to Ross and chatting with him afterwards. I was delighted to learn that his inklings of a ministerial vocation had arisen from challenging conversations with atheists among fellow undergraduates as the same happened to me in my undergraduate years. I learned that his wife is Romanian. He'd visited the country recently for the first time and been impressed by experiencing Orthodoxy in situ. It's not the kind of subject that ordinands get to learn much about, but it happened to me too. I ended up offering him some of my many books on Orthodox spirituality and theology. It will be nice to think that they will go to someone who will appreciate them.

After lunch I sat on the sofa to do my Duo Lingo exercises but instead fell soundly asleep for two hours, and then went for a walk around Thompson's Park and Llandaff Fields. I called my sister June who was fed up because she'd lost the browser bookmarks toolbar on which she greatly relies to access several of the things she most relies on. Fortunately I was able to talk her through the CTRL-Shift+B toggle routine to restore it, after two days of misery. It would all be so much easier if there weren't so much distractions and confusions involved in using Windows, with all its unhelpful notifications. It'll never be as easy to use as a Chromebook. Unfortunately it can be hard to change habitual usage after fourteen years.

Later we watched the sixth episode of Professor T, which is the finale of the first series, with a vignette at the end of the cause of the Prof's mental health issues. Nothing is being said about a second series at the moment, to know whether this set of episodes is a trial for a much longer series. There's plenty of scope in terms of story lines explore in other versions which appeared in German and Flemish. It's a matter of wait and see how popular it has proved.