Bill shock

More rain overnight but it had stopped by daybreak. I awoke at seven fifteen and posted today's Morning Prayer YouTube link to WhatsApp, then fell asleep again with the radio on after 'Thought for the Day' for another three quarters of an hour. I certainly needed the sleep. The after effects of the vaccine seem to have worn off now thankfully. Unusually, Clare woke up after me. I had breakfast on the table by the time she appeared. It's usually the other way round.

I walked to Tesco's for the weekly food-bank donation and then St John's for the Eucharist along with five others and Fr Colin. With Puddled roads and pavements, with drains blocked by uncleared leaves making it so much longer for the rain to empty away, it's hard to avoid getting wet feet from pavement puddles and wet trouser legs from cars passing faster than they should. Keeping the streets clean and safe seems to be no longer a concern for Cardiff Council.

A bank statement arrived just before I returned from church with a TalkTalk debit double the usual size, just a month after I reduced the bill by dispensing with unused paid extras, no longer strictly necessary with wi-fi calling and WhatsApp to reduce the monthly outlay of over fifty quid for phone and broadband. We now have to pay for outgoing landline calls, and whatever the tariff, it ends up expensive, as we've become so used to talking for up to an hour without thinking about what it cost since a fixed subscription covers all calls. A couple of years hence, our copper landline will be phased out anyway, so might as well get used to using the wi-fi calling set up now. I admit I forgot a few times initially, but most of the landline calls Clare made, as she'd not properly understood that she could use this with her mobile at home, instead of using the 4G network. My fault, I should have explained more clearly.

Clare cooked lunch, and while I reviewed yesterday's performance of 'Branwen:Dadeni' on my blog after identifying the cause for the phone bill price hike. After lunch an email arrived from Fr Colin with info about an Advent quiet day in Llangasty Retreat House to publicise. I converted the text into jpeg format in Open Office to include in Sway. After lunch, I finished my twelfth Mailchimp Sway link distribution and got it right first time. Pleased that I'd got the job done hassle free for a change.

It was pouring down by the time I was ready to go out for a walk. I had to put on my heavy rain gear to go out, and by the time I opened the door about four thirty, the rain had stopped, and didn't return until I was near home, an hour and a half later. The cloud was so low, it was semi-dark an hour before sunset. I went to Aldi's, and bought Clare a bottle of brandy, and a couple of bargain bottles of wine for myself to last me a week. The water level in the Taff is still up to the top of the fish ladder, but no higher, about meter below the top of the river bank each time I've passed by this week. We've not yet seen the volume of rainfall that caused the river to overflow on to the footpath, in January this year, back on 16th February 2020, when Pontcanna fields were flooded and much worse things happened higher upriver in Ponty and Taffs Well. 

Remedial river bank clearance work followed later in the spring. I wonder if additional work has been done on clearing riverbed stones this year, as water flowing over the weir doesn't shoot up into a foamy wave now impeding downriver flow as it used to. I spend the equivalent of half a day each week out in the park, and take an interest in any environmental changes that might overwhelm flood defences in times of a catastrophic weather event, even though we live nearly a mile away from the river. One thing I have noticed this year is that the pool just below the weir is frequented more often by Cormorants fishing for the elvers that hatch there. Some as yet unobserved change has improved breeding conditions. 

I wrote for an hour before supper after my shopping trip in the dark, and wrote more in the evening as well. Before turning in for the night, I watched the sixth and final episode of 'Payback' on ITVX catch-up in which the evil perpetrators got their comeuppance, and the surviving victim and her kids got to start a new life in a new place where they couldn't be found. A complex tale of crime and money laundering and the extraordinary lengths to which criminal financial experts will go to hide conversion of ill-gotten gains and invest in legitimate businesses and property, somewhat hard to follow on times, but worth watching.