Zooming with the team

The sound of drilling came in from the street when I was getting up late this morning. A road repair team had arrived to work on the sink-hole in the middle, six inches deep and two feet across, above the line of the 125 year old sewer running down the street. Once every two years over the past decade the sink hole has appeared and been repaired, either patched with tarmac or dug out then filled in and tarmacked over again. The sewer doesn't appear to have collapsed, but changes in the water table have had an impact on the surface layer, causing it to sink. I chatted with the guys doing the job, and was told that the sinking subsoil problem was likely to be due to the wrong qualities of material, gravels of different sizes and sub soil being used in appropriate thicknesses to ensure it doesn't compress in places and produce sink-holes. We'll see if this is correct in year or so from now.

After breakfast, Clare's study group arrived for their two hour session at ten while I continued working on the Lent course until lunch. I did the week's shopping at the Co-op, after lunch, and then at three joined the St Andrew's ministry team meeting on Zoom. It was good to see Caroline and Peter on screen, two team members I worked with on my first visit to the Costa del Sol West Chaplaincy nine years ago. There's also John a retired cleric and his churchwarden wife Jen and William, a curate in training, being supervised by Fr Louis in Malaga but living and officially attached to St Andrew's Los Boliches. It's great that a monthly ministry rota is still organised, and good to see my name on it, so that I can plan well ahead.

I went out for a walk after the forty minute meeting, and hadn't gone a mile before started drizzling and then raining lightly, enough to soak my shoes and trousers by the time I got home again. Clare went out to her meditation group at six and I had supper on my own. Afterwards, I watched one of Michael Portillo's Great Railway Journeys series on Indian railways - fascinating. Then an ancient episode of Dalziel and Pascoe I'd not seen before. Well, it makes a change.