Overcast, but no wind or rain today. I attended the Eucharist at St Catherine's this morning. There were ten of us celebrating Saint Andrew's Day. After coffee and a chat with the others in the hall, I went and collected the week's veggie bag, and headed home for lunch.
This week's prayer texts arrived from Ruth, and after eating, I set to and prepared my Thursday script and wrote a reflection to accompany it. The, I went into town afterwards to bank a cheque. It's bad news that HSBC is to close another hundred branches next year, having already whittled Cardiff down to two. The high street banks have enthused the majority of clients into banking on-line, and the use of cash has greatly declined since covid against the rise of tap and pay bank card.
This has happen with the growth of digital demand pushed by government and business alike, without adequate thought for those who can't or won't use on-line resources, and no apparent concern for the potential for the entire global banking system fall apart due to catastrophic failure of the internet. The tech geniuses think they have robust resilience built into all their systems, but there are still unknown unknowns, like the impact of colossal solar flares internet if not nuclear wars. The worst thing is that banking becomes more and more impersonal and remote, and individuals continue to be vulnerable to internet fraud.
Having said that, I was using my HSBC account this afternoon to make a donation to Andrews eye hospital work at Mulanje Mission Hospital in Malawi, (it has an interesting website) and found the HSBC transaction verification procedure has added another security layer. In addition to the now commonplace One Time Passcode one now has to repeat the email address used for the transaction, which the bank holds on record, just in case your card or/or mobile has been stolen. The thief is unlikely to have the appropriate email address. That's as good as it can be for now, I guess.
With the weather now decidedly colder I started to think about buying a new padded winter coat on my way back from the bank. On impulse, as I was passing the Mountain Warehouse shop in Castle Street, I went in to see what I could find on the Black Friday bargain rail. To my surprise I found the Nordic style calf length coat I'd despaired of ever finding, with a faux-wool lining and hood. Just the job for really cold wet weather. At last! And a third of its original price.
Nothing of interest again on live telly tonight so I watched a couple of episodes of a series I've not heard of before called 'London Kills' a police procedural series of 20 episodes dating from 2019 about a Met murder squad. Forty-five minute episodes, to a upbeat sound track, with the usual sort of plot, and formulaic introductory scenes of a corpse discovered, and yet another side story about a senior detective whose wife has gone missing. Oh yeah, really?
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