I woke up to news this morning of a thousand deaths from an earthquake in Afghanistan,, and there are thousands more left not only bereaved but homeless. Humanitarian aid is already on the way, and efforts are being made to find a way to release the country's assets held by international banks, frozen since the elected government was ousted by the Taliban. An agreement may be possible to transfer government funds in frozen accounts directly to humanitarian agencies. Let's hope so. There have been more calls for Boris Johnson to resign following the loss of two seats in by-elections this week. He's in Rwanda for a Commonwealth heads of state conference with Prince Charles, flatly refusing to yield. Shameless as ever.
I walked to St Luke's for this morning's funeral. About a hundred people attended, and the coffin of the deceased arrived in style in a an old fashioned hearse drawn by two jet black horses with pink plumes on their heads. As the coffin was processed in, a harpist played welcoming music, a church co-worker led the congregational singing of two hymns, both friends of the lady acting as next of kin. She read a lesson, as did her son. She delivered a superb eulogy friend witnessing to the faith they shared.
The music played for the departure procession was Abba's 'Dancing Queen'. As soon as it started there were smiles, and many of the congregation began to move with the music, including me. I think that's the first time I've moved to the music in a funeral procession. At one moment I thought the bearers were going to catch up on me, and I had to had to do a double step to keep my distance. I was given a lift to Western Cemetery in a car. The return ride was in the back of the extra hearse that accompanied the horse drawn one to carry flowers rather than cram them all in the smaller horse drawn one. One of the drivers told me that the empty hearse travelling ahead of the horse drawn one also drew attention of other motorists to the coming cortege, a prudent message to avoid careless motorists spooking the horses.
I got home just in time for lunch. There was a call while I was out with an urgent request to celebrate the Eucharist at St Michael's Whitchurch Road on Sunday, as both Caroline and Meg, the priests there have gone down with covid. I won't have to prepare a sermon as one of the Parish readers is preaching. It will be the first time I've been there since I retired n 2010. St Michael's was one of the churches under my care in the Central Cardiff Team Ministry, though it normally had a priest of its own, and I'd go there on rotation a few times each quarter. Caroline's husband Glyn briefed me and wondered if covid had reached them through the church congregation. So much for returning to sharing the chalice.
Sarah, a neighbour living across the street asked for help to wipe an old computer so it could go to a specialised charity for re-homing old devices. It was Dell desktop machine, ten years old, running Windows 7, quite sprightly for its age, but then it wasn't connected to the internet, which in my experience tends to slow things down a bit, as the device is always checking, calling servers linked to programs in use,
Sarah's MS Office 365 sub had run out, and she wanted to know if she could get by without it. I pointed her to the OneDrive web app version, which seems to be useable without payment. I suspect some of its more sophisticated features are missing, but it's OK to use for basic tasks. She has a new laptop that she's getting used to, and hadn't yet logged into her existing OneDrive account, so that it would sync with her laptop. I was able to help her with this. She was still a little puzzled by the device which had updated to Windows 11 and changed the look of the user interface. It seemed to be running a bit slow for a two year old machine with a solid state hard drive and eight gigs or RAM, and Ryzen chipset, just like mine. I learned that the house internet connection wasn't all that fast. It really shows, and affects the performance of an otherwise spritely device.
I was left tired by the morning's ministrations, and found I needed a sleep again after lunch to freshen me up before a walk in the park. After supper I watched the first episode in a second series of 'Coroner', a Canadian production. Then the first in a new series called 'Rig 45 - Murder at Sea' a whodunnit on a North Sea oil rig, and Anglo-Norwegian production. In both cases, dialogue was mumbled and hard to follow, even with the sound turned up extra loud. It's a recipe for boredom if the storyline isn't that easy to follow.
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