A warm but cloudy day with several cloudbursts. I did some house cleaning this morning, and cooked my recently invented pasta recipe with butterbeans, mushrooms and onions plus butternut squash, as the guest vegetable. Clare got wet going out in the morning and me likewise after lunch, when I left the house to walk to town to bank a cheque and meet with Rufus for a chat.
I ended up waiting twenty minutes for a bus which left me twenty minutes to go to the bank and back to 'Coffee Barker' in Castle Arcade, a place with lots of comfy arm chairs low light and candles, a Central European ambience. Then I bumped into Rufus with his wife Daria outside St John's, so we went straight to Barker's. Daria left us for an errand of her own, and we chatted for a couple of hours.
While we were together, I received an email from Emma at Euro-diocesan HQ confirming that the locum duty offer I made was acceptable and to expect a call from the Costa del Sol West locum organiser to sort out details. I'm delighted to have the prospect of another spell doing pastoral work in Spain. A new environment and communities to discover, old Costa friends to pick up with on days off.
It's been two years since my last Euro-locum in Ibiza, and in that time a great deal has changed in UK and Europe. This will be my first chance to learn first hand about the ramifications of brexit for British ex-pats, and its impact on church life. I am just a bit nervous about this. It'll be a test of my resilience, and whether I can pick up where I left off in terms of living and working in Spain after spending so long in the confines of Cardiff and environs, walking around Canton or Llandaff and Pontcanna Fields day after day. I'm glad that I haven't let my Spanish go, but continued to practice obsessively every day.
After parting company with Rufus and Daria, I visited the bank, just as the paying in machines were being emptied. Fortunately the clerk doing the job paused her errand to let me to make the deposit. We chatted about holidays. She's off to Seville next week and thinking of an outing to Granada. I persuaded her to consider a 45 minute trip to Cordoba on the AVE while she was there. Granada takes two and a half hours, and needs much more than a half day to savour.
On the walk back from town, I saw Mallard ducklings swimming in the Taff for the first time this year. I also caught sight of a heron, and hung around long enough to take a photo just after it had taken flight, a first for me to get one that's not badly blurred.
I pottered about until supper time sending a few files direct to Rachel. The MP4 of a LlanfairPG sign above a souvenir shop proved more fiddly to send by WhatsApp than anticipated, so I had to figure out a workaround to succeed. Trivial things don's always work out the way you expect them to.
I watched a episode of a beautiful environmental documentary called 'Earth from Space' on BBC Fourshowing how global photographic mapping reveals fascinating things about Mother Earth, and the patterns etched into the landscape by the effect of seas, rivers and weather over centuries. There was a wonderful sequence in which fishermen in the Bay of Bengal netted fish from ponds in the delta at low tide with the help of domesticated otters, and another in which an Amazonian ox-bow lake was being used as a conservation resource to house manatees, an indigenous endangered aquatic mammal.
Then another episode of 'Blacklist' on 5USA. Not only an implausible storyline, but dialogue taken too fast or two quietly. I don't think my hearing is the problem. Even with the sound turned up I find it hard to catch whole sentences thrown away by the actors. How do they get away with it?
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