Packing error

Another cold day with the return of overcast skies and light rain until mid-afternoon, deterring me from going out altogether in the morning. June rang me in distress as she'd lost control of her email window on her computer and couldn't see any complete messages. Emailing her back was no good, nor was  calling her to explain. It has to be show and tell, and at the moment there's nobody available in the Opus Dei centre across the road to help her. I need to set up a remote access link to her computer from mine so I can trouble shoot and explain as I go along on the phone.

My old friend and colleague Tom Arthur emailed me out of the blue with questions about St Luke's and someone I didn't know whom he'd met the day before in the park. Despite problems due to osteoporosis which took a long time to obtain a correct diagnosis for he's still active taking services. He's a year older than me and has to cope with much pain when standing which is exhausting. 

The United Reformed Church, of which he is a retired Minister is like the Church in Wales, very short of clergy, so like me, he just keeps doing locum preachments. I was delighted that he emailed me a set of his three recent sermons. He's always been engaging, scholarly and a poetic story teller in the great Protestant pastoral tradition. Would that we had more of it these days. 

I fear that preaching in the age of digital communication has become rather lightweight and not long enough to really explore issues deeply. Although I work hard on mine, to condense what I have to say into no more than a thousand words, ten to twelve minutes, I accuse myself of this fault too.

I steamed coley and veg for lunch, then wrote and printed off my Sunday sermon for St German's. Then we drove to Curry's superstore on Newport Road to buy a food mixer Clare had spotted on line.. We were served by a Mexican guy called Miguel, and Clare egged me on to talk with him in Spanish which I did after we'd paid. His accent was distinctive but his command of English excellent, so he understood my Spanish but replied in English on auto-pilot, as he was in role doing his job.

When we got home and unpacked the Kenwood Chef we'd bought, it turned out its food mixer device was different from the one designed to fit on the machine, somewhere along the line there had been a packing error. For this reason, we'll have to pack it up and exchange it. A lot more hassle than we had imagined.

After supper I watched the latest episode of 'Astrid - Murders in Paris', all about suspicious deaths in a music conservatoire. Rachel rang towards the end to enthuse about her new 'cello, which has arrived recently. I'll have to listen again to the last ten minutes on catch-up. Time for bed now.