Remembering times past

Another damp dark drizzly day, making my long for sunnier climes. This prompted me to walk down the 'The Salad Bowl' greengrocer's shop to find out if this season's Organic bitter Seville oranges consignment had arrived. I was delighted to find out that they'd come in after Christmas and were now on display in the store. I bought two kilos worth, and later in the day Clare bought three kilos of Demerara sugar for making our delicious dark marmalade. There's just one jar left of last January's batch, to move from my stash of extra jars that tide us through the lean season of autumn.

Then I drove across town to St Margaret's Roath for Allan Frampton's funeral. For a church with socially distanced seating and masks still in force, it was quite full. Along with his family, there was a cross section of his mainly elderly friends, colleagues from the building trade and St John's City Parish of which he was a member for sixty years, many of them as churchwarden, and Roath Parish which he became part of in the last decade of his life. It was a touching occasion, and it was good to sit near Alwena and Richard, St John's members of my generation among the few still around and active eleven years after my retirement.

After lunch I made a couple of bereavement calls and arranged a couple of local visits, one this afternoon. The daughter of the deceased told me that she chairs the Rotheram Minister PCC a notable 13th century church building, with a rare Snetzler organ of 1777, built by a migrant craftsman from Passau, south east Germany. The Minster has a fine mediaeval west window containing ancient glass currently being restored at a cost of 4.5 million pounds. So there's quite a lot for the church council to think about.

This evening, a couple of episodes of NCIS series 18, neither of which I've seen before, then a hunt for photos of Clare and I in the 1990's when we were in Geneva, to add to the brief biography I wrote and sent to Manel yesterday. I have hundreds of negatives from that period which I never got around to scanning. At some stage the photo prints were ditched because they took up too much space, so now maybe its time to get out the scanner and work my way through them all, and retried detailed memories of an amazing time in our lives. But not tonight, for sure. And I have to get the ancient negative scanner to work as well.