Another day with the children

Mother Frances phoned at nine to ask me to cover the Eucharist at Saint Catherine's as she'd been called upon to do some urgent trouble shooting. 

An email from Ruth arrived containing next week's texts for Morning Prayer. I was relieved to learn that after ten weeks of slogging our way through readings from the Old Testament, we're changing back to the New Testament reading of the day, currently from Luke's Gospel. It's been hard work preparing a weekly reflection on difficult to understand and sometimes complex un-redacted narrative passages, a satisfying challenge, but every time posing the question of why we're reading them now, and what relevance are they in our contemporary situation. Some of the lessons have been so long that the average time for reciting the simplified version of the Office and a 4-5 minute interpretation has crept up from ten to fourteen minutes. A challenge to the audience's attention span.

Then I had a panic email from my sister as neither her landline nor her mobile phone were working. I tried both devices and got a line engaged message on each. It suggested that there was an area wide network outage in her part of London. I explained in reply what I thought had happened and hoped that she would understand. Nothing to be done but wait until things rectified themselves in these circumstances, I said.

When I got back from church I found a text message and two emails from Google giving different codes to verifiy June's Gmail account, for which mine is the back-up address. I tried ringing her and got through straight away this time. I seems she'd started emailing Age Concern Wandsworth to find out if others were experiencing the network outage, and then had Google's two step verification login process sprung on her, and didn't know how to handle it. I was able to sort this out by logging into her account thereby avoiding further digital chaos. All in a morning's work. I wish Google's security preoccupation could be exercised without its protocols being so disruptive and annoying, if not confusing to the end user.

The four of us went for a walk around Pontcanna Fields before lunch, then afterwards while Clare was resting, Owain Rachel and I went to collect the Beanfreaks grocery order. Owain had to return to Bristol, as he must work tomorrow, so after tea, we had a photo session in the garden before driving him to the station.

It's sad that he and Rachel have only had this morning and afternoon together, and won't be able to meet again before she returns to Arizona next weekend. It's painful that Kath Rachel and Owain haven't been able to meet together on their own or with us to be fully re-united as a family, but it's what the demands of work do and have done throughout history.

Rachel cooked us a lovely lentil and veg dish for supper. Then I watched 'The Repair Shop' and the last episode of 'Life after Life'. Such a beautifully crafted period piece movie serial, but with a story line in so many fragments of alternatively imagined realities that it was hard to make sense of, or know how it really ended. Disappointing.

Today Boris Johnson has signed a mutual defence aid pact with Sweden and Finland. It's an agreement ahead of applications by both nations to join NATO, a process which could take half a year. The war in Ukraine is continues, causing so much grief and suffering to millions with little progress towards end being made by either side at the moment. Armies of the three nations already co-operate and on times train together, but this pact is a way of discouraging Putin from springing any nasty surprises upon these Baltic nations to distract attention from the Ukrainian conflict and gain an advantage. Hopefully it won't mean much in practice, though it is a publicity coup for Boris to be seen to be doing something while the political ground at home is so rocky for him.