I posted the link to this week's Morning Prayer and Reflection on the Parish WhatsApp group as soon as I woke up, then after breakfast, Clare headed off to school, and I went down to St John's to celebrate the Eucharist with half a dozen others. On the sacristy take I found a Byzantine icon of St John the Evangelist standing with the blessed Virgin Mary, capturing that moment when Jesus dying on the cross asks John to look after his mother. An label on the back said it was a thank you gift from the Russian Orthodox Exarchate Parish which has been using the church on Sunday afternoons since lock-down denied them the use of the chapel in Cathays which is part of the Nazareth House convent/nursing home.
Interestingly enough Conway Road Methodist Church offers hospitality to another Russian Orthodox congregation on Sunday afternoons, one that is under the Patriarchate of Moscow. The Russian Exarchate federation of churches began in the 1920s after the revolution, when many exiles felt that the Patriarchate of Moscow had compromised itself in order to survive under Soviet domination. It retains its identity and independence throughout Europe and owes allegiance to the Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
A new influx of Russian ex-pats arrived in the wake of glasnost who retained loyalty to Moscow and set up their own churches, once they realised the Exarchate congregations didn't want to return to the fold. It's a bit like the co-existence of indigenous Anglican Communion dioceses in Spain and Portugal, which are at least as old as many of the diocese in Europe ex-pat chaplaincies. Different pastoral needs call for different responses.
I returned from church to find a note from the postman about the failed parcel delivery - Clare's specs, which she left in Kenilworth a couple of weeks ago, sent on by Kath, which means another visit to the main depot to retrieve them. In theory you can ring up and book a re-delivery, but in practice the line is always busy or not answering. Then, I had a text message from OpenReach about Friday's Future Fibre broadband upgrade presuming we'd already received the new router and digi-box "A few days" ago.
Yodel, the parcel delivery company emailed yesterday to say the packages had been dispatched, but there was no delivery this morning, so I was forced to postpone the installation for a fortnight, which was done efficiently by text message within an hour. TalkTalk, Open Reach and Yodel all seem to be working on different time scales at the moment. It's impossible to know when, and wastes a lot of time just waiting to get things done. I was told by someone at St John's that a member of the congregation had signed up to change from BT to Sky broadband, and has been waiting a fortnight without the service switch-over being completed.
I cooked lunch, then went for a walk through the Bute Park woods - much of the park is still open by day, it's the arboretum area that's closed off for the light show. Then I wrote next week's biblical reflection and started drafting this year's Christmas newsletter. It made me realise when I'd finished how much we'd been able to get away this year in spite of covid restrictions. I have missed going abroad, but am grateful nevertheless for what we have been able to do.
In an effort to spend less time working on the computer or the phone, I stopped after supper and watched another episode of 'Crossing Lines on My5, in the absence of anything interesting on live telly.
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