Lost and Found

I have to admit that an eleven o'clock service start at St German's compensates for the twenty minute drive to get there. There's not the same pressure to get started, even if I am still leaving the house by ten fifteen. I have the quiet relaxed time in the car, listening to Radio 3, and this morning Mozart's Mass in C Minor was just ending with the Sanctus as I arrived at church. There were twenty eight of us for Mass, with Ross the ordinand arriving just in time, after running late at St Saviour's - Father Chris telling too many stories, he said. I was glad to have a chat with him about the books on Orthodoxy I'm bequeathing him from my library of (almost ancient) texts. Unfortuantely I too got into story telling with him after coffee and it was twenty to two instead of one o'clock by the time I reached home.

There was another reason for being late home however. There had been a call to the church warden about a wedding in October, rather short notice, so the couple were told to come at the end of Mass to talk to me as priest of the day, to get them started. All I could do was refer them to the Area Dean Fr Dyfrig who has to deal with these matters in the absence of a priest in charge but it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed. 

The couple were middle aged and from the Czech Republic, accompanied by a woman who said she was their daughter, although there was no obvious family resemblance. She acted as interpreter for them. The need for haste seemed to have something to do with them leaving the country. Perhaps going home for good? Who knows. The last time I had pastoral dealings with a Czech family was over the christening of a child at Christmas 2005, the penultimate Christmas in St James' church before it closed. They were Roma, who'd come here to work in menial jobs to improve their life prospects. Czech society treated them with hostility and suspicion. The short Christmas break was the only time they had for family rites of passage. Perhaps the family today was also Roma. Fr Dyfrig is celebrating Mass at St German's tomorrow night and they will meet him and get a proper briefing. No doubt I will hear more in due course.

After a late lunch, I listened to Choral Evensong on Radio 3, then went for a walk around Llandaff Fields, and down to the river, then returned after an hour and a half to change my shoes as my feet were giving me trouble. Then I went out again went out again, down to St John's, to see if I'd left my reading glasses there. I've been hunting for them high and low since Thursday. They weren't in St Germans, nor St John's. It's a complete mystery. Maybe I dropped them. I have lots of pairs of cheap reading glasses, including a most powerful pair sent to me by my sister June, but the problem is that my prescription pair are designed to let me read at arm's length, from altar and Gospel books during the Liturgy. I had to use my computer glasses at St German's this morning, which was just about OK, but not quite right. Heaven knows how much I will have to pay for a new pair.

This evening I had to revisit and correct for a second time the video slideshow I made of Kath's birthday weekend. Ninety nine percent OK, then one laughable mistake, the wrong month in the birthday date. Silly stuff, so annoying. Thankfully it wasn't hard to do as the component files were still in place on my workstation, but it still took me more than an hour. I finished by nine, in time to watch a superb music documentary on BBC Four about the life of Antonio Vivaldi, centred on the interpretation of his Four Seasons Concerto Grosso.

When it was over, on impulse I got down on the floor of the lounge to hunt again for my missing spec's, and spotted them right at the back beneath one of the new armchairs, the one I don't tend to sit on. What a relief after two days of worry and hunting!