Much rain overnight and showers for much of the day. I went for my 'flu jab at the King's Road Pharmacy straight after breakfast. Mother Frances messaged me just after I got back, flagging up a strange anomaly in the Mailchimp distribution, with her personalised email addressed to Jesse, not to herself. A web-server glitch? Or a catastrophic mailing list database failure? No other complaints so far, or a simple data entry typo from some time in the past? Fortunately that's what had happened, I discovered when I examined the mailing list in detail. I couldn't edit the entry however, and ended up removing it, together with two other email addresses of people who have died, one of them a couple of years ago.
Clare bought a salmon for freezing from Ashton's in the market yesterday. While I was writing a sermon for Sunday, she cooked a lovely fish soup for lunch with the head and bones left from filleting. She had a flute lesson after lunch, so I went out for a walk. It started to rain, so I took shelter outside Cafe Castan and had a cup of coffee, waiting for the rain to stop, then walked to the other end of Llandaff Fields and caught a bus into town at the stop near the junction. The bus was crowded with students returning from college so I had to stand all the way into town.
I visited John Lewis to see if there were any bargains to be had, and chatted with a young woman in the tech' section, wearing a Chromebook tee shirt and hovering around the display. She told me she'd not long returned from a year in Hungary as part of her business studies degree. Now she has the travel bug and is wondering where next to look for work. I think she was slightly surprised to learn I was an early adopter of the Chromebook over ten years ago. On balance, I use mine for everyday tasks more than I use my two Windows machines, which serve mainly for easy audio and video editing plus mailshots. I am thinking of buying a device with more RAM to use for running Linux apps, now that Chrome OS has been enhanced to make this possible, but before I do, I need to find out how feasible this would be. I'd certainly like to be able to use Linux again on a daily basis.
I caught the 25 bus to the top of Cathedral Road, then walked into the park before going home. There, I bumped into Peter and Jan walking their dogs, and we chatted for a while. Jan is a member of the Church in Wales electoral college which meets in the coming week to elect a new Bishop of St Davids. I wonder who will be elected? Jan says changes in electoral procedure are now in place that have improved the process, with preliminary briefing papers on prospective candidates available before a decision on nominating a voting short list is made. This is, I believe, intended to inform decision making and refine the selection of possible candidates with sufficient support to be electable in the ballot process. Let's hope it works as it's intended to.
Above, I mentioned Cathedral Road. Rufus told me yesterday how he learned about the origin of its name from Peter, who I met in the park this afternoon, when he was at St Mike's. Cathedral Road doesn't lead to Cathedral Road, and never did. It was named after the prestigious Victorian Welsh Presbyterian Church that still stands at the west end of the road.
In the nineteenth century Welsh Calvinistic Methodism was a major force in the social development of urban industrial Wales, said whether true or not, to have enjoyed the adherence of half the population. This building was its most prominent in the capital city, but why call it a Cathedral when its pastoral oversight is performed by a council of elders, not a Bishop?
French theologian Jean Calvin, caught up almost by chance in Geneva's independence struggles in the 1520's made a major contribution to reforming church and society in the city state, advocating a new form of governance that didn't rely on episcopal hierarchy, but a council of church elders. Two centuries later his way of thinking was influential in the Methodist revival in Britain, and especially in Wales. Geneva's St Pierre Cathedral was one of only three churches which wasn't closed for worship at the time. It's a place where his memory is still honoured, a mother church of the protestant reformation. The road was named after the church building regarded as the Welsh equivalent of 'Calvin's Cathedral'.
Sadly, in the last quarter of the twentieth century Welsh Calvinistic Methodism went into steep decline, losing almost all of its buildings. Ninety years after its opening in 1903, the congregation moved into the church hall and the main building was converted internally into three floors of offices. For fifteen years it was the headquarters of homelessness charity 'The Wallich'. It's now been acquired by Red Rose school, an independent special educational needs establishment. No longer a place of worship, but still very much in the service of vulnerable people, in the spirit of Calvinistic social thinking.
Clare was out when I got home. She'd gone to 'Amser Jazz' at the Royal Welsh College. I watched the news on telly, listened to the radio and waited for her to return so we could eat together. Then, this week's episode of Norwegian crimmie 'For Life' before turning in for the night.
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