Summer tastes

Another journey across to Adamsdown after breakfast this morning to celebrate Mass with four others at St German's. We celebrated St Bartholomew a day late. I called into the the Aldi store on Western Avenue to buy some cooking apples and wine. While I cooked a paella with prawns in it for lunch, Clare chopped up the apples and cooked them with the blackberries - half to freeze and half for the foundations of a super crumble tomorrow.

I intended to collect this week's veggy bag immediately after eating, but slept soundly for an hour before doing so. Then a walk in the park, passing the two crab apple trees we've foraged from this past couple of years. They are crammed with very pale green unripened fruit, save for the odd one that has started to turn red. It'll be interesting to how long they take to go pink and then finally a rich cherry red, when we can to  start pick them. I noticed one unripe fruit on the path nearby, bitten off I suspect by a passing bird, then discarded when found to be unpalatable.

For the last couple of weeks we've been receiving in our veggy bag several large Roma plum tomatoes, a favourite of mine for cooking. These are very tasty and as succulent as a peach to eat, so none have ended up in a sugo so far. The vegetables grown at Coed Organics are superb, unless there's a weather disaster. The produce generally has been excellent this summer.

I spent a couple of hours tidying and backing up photo albums this evening. Although I make much use of Google Photos, backups on hard drive and workstation are essential to my mind. Almost everything we do relies on The Cloud these days. On the whole it works well enough and is convenient if moving from one device to another, but I wouldn't trust my entire digital life to it. We've no idea what unforeseen disaster is just around the corner that could afflict the internet in the era of climate change and unstable weather. 

The world has been shocked by the speedy collapse of the status quo in Afghanistan, followed by mass panic by tens of thousands trying to flee the country and escape the Taliban. Even with all the planning and information available, the powers that be failed to anticipate what's happening now. The randomness of people's reactions to radical change are by nature unpredictable. To their credit, the armed forces and airlines have done an amazing job evacuating many tens of  thousands to places of safety in the past fortnight, though tens of thousands more will be left behind after the withdrawal deadline, and subjected to even more agonising delay if they still want to leave and have sufficient reason to do so. And this is only stage one. The re-settlement of maybe a hundred thousand refugees in different countries is likely to take a long time. The suffering of powerless people drags on and on.