More torrential rain and flood warnings greeting us when we woke up this morning. After breakfast Kath Anto and Rhiannon got ready to drive to Kenilworth in horrible condition. I took my leave for them and headed for St Catherine's during a pause in the rain, pick up my prescription from the surgery and take it to the pharmacy across the road, before opening up the church to celebrate the St John's Day Mass with five others.
Owain stayed on to have lunch before returning to Bristol. I drove him to the station to save him getting soaked, and fortunately it stopped raining just as we arrived at the Wood Street back entrance. He was even luckier to walk straight on to a train for Bristol, with his rucksack and two bags-for-life full of pressies and a share of leftover feast food. By half past three the travellers were home safe. For Rhiannon, there's work this evening as an ice rink steward in Coventry. In Kath and Anto's case, preparation for their departure to Melbourne tomorrow. Owain has to arrange transport for a take-away fifty quid sofa in the next few days before he has to start work again. It was a lovely few days together, involving much effort on all sides, we're all rather tired, but it was worth the effort.
I waited for a pause in the rain, then walked to Blackweir as the sun was going down to find out what impact the last few days of rain had made on the Taff. For the first time since last January. For the first time the river was just overflowing on to the footpath. The weir outflow spewed three metres into the air, a good half metre more than I've seen it all year. Those severe weather flood warning weren't exaggerating.
While we ate turkey soup for supper when I returned, we listened to four episodes of 'The Archers', as we have missed them during our family festivities. Then I spent an hour or so tidying up my phone file system, and archiving albums to a hard drive from by Google Photos accounts, to clear on-line space for whatever new pictures I may take next year and store on my free Google account space. I'd rather not pay for extra storage when I can find a safe haven for years worth of pictures on my own devices.
Clare gave me a two terabyte hard drive for Christmas. I could probably get all the photos I've ever taken on to this, but I already have several other storage devices, not yet full, containing in a random fashion the twenty two years worth of digital photos I've taken, plus another thirty years worth of digitised photos scanned from film negatives. That's a job not yet finished. I have acquired from Anto an old Windows 7 laptop which should work with my film scanner. It will take up less space than what I use at the moment, a fourteen years of Windows Vista PC to drive my equally ancient film scanner. Here's hoping anyway.
When I'd finished my digital tidy-up, I joined Clare watching a fascinating nature documentary about the remarkable properties of mosses, which are able to grow and adapt to existing in all kinds of hostile environments. They're amazingly resilient and may have been among the first kinds of living organism along with plankton, to colonise new environments and help lay the foundation for the rest of life on earth. Then I watched a re-run of an episode of nineties comedy show satirising the Asian expat way of life in the UK, 'Goodness Gracious Me'. I don't really recall watching this when it was on originally. It had some funny moments, but on the whole I found it crude, lacking subtlety, over-reliant on stereotypes portraying Asian culture. Mind you, this seems to characterise a great deal of what passes for comedy broadcasts today.
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