Lonely lives

Another dull cold day and another drive across town to celebrate Mass at St German's with thirty others. I won't be here quite so often now that the Ministry Area team is establishing itself. Two Sundays a month until after Easter. There are no indications yet of when a new priest will be recruited to fill the vacancy at St German's, and the same is also true for Fairwater in West Cardiff Ministry Area. Nobody understands the reason for this. No answers are being given by the hierarchy when questions are asked. St German's Churchwarden Peter has been elected as the People's Warden for Roath Ministry Area. Someone still has to be appointed as clergy team Warden. It seems nobody wants a job that may make unknown, maybe heavy demands on a volunteer's time. What is going on?

Travelling home in the car afterwards, listening to Radio 3, I some Georgian polyphonic choral music was played. I was struck by the similarity between this and Corsican choral music which we came across when we visited there, and from a concert by a Corsican choir in Cardiff several years ago. The language was obviously different, but ornamentation and use of harmonic singing over a group singing a drone sounded much the same. Fascinating.

After lunch, I completed this week's Morning Prayer video and uploaded it to YouTube, then we walked around the park while it was light. The sun is now setting at a quarter to five. A few minutes more each day makes a difference. After supper, I prepared tomorrow morning's funeral service, for which there'll be few mourners if any, as it's been organised by a solicitor in the absence of next of kin. It reminded me of my ministry in Bristol when I had several funerals of single men with nobody to mourn them. I remembered writing the story of a one called Sidney Cummings with no known family and few friends who'd lived in our neighbourhood. 

A quick search of my digital archive produced an ancient file written a few years after we left the Parish, which thankfully opened in a simple text editor. It needed tidying up and re-formatting to read easily but it was worth the effort, four pages long. While out walking Clare and I talked about old Sid, but after forty years my memory was sketchy, so reading this brought it all back to life. That was possibly one of the first stories I wrote about living and working in the St Paul's Area, that, and one about the aftermath of the riot. Last year a wrote a few more. Slowly, I'm building a modest collection about an influential time in our family life.

The only thing I was interested enough to watch on telly this evening was 'Trigger Point' on ITV, about a bomb disposal unit faced with a sophisticated terrorist adversary. Very tense and dramatic.