Sunday 4 February 2024

Life in a building site - the Lord's Day

Another mild, damp and cloudy day with occasional strong gusts of wind. I drove to St German's for Mass this morning, my first outing in the car since the op, being warned not to drive for two weeks. There were about twenty people there for the service, held in the hall, as the heating in church still isn't working due to a drop in water pressure from an underfloor leak. It's hoped remedial work will start tomorrow. Fr Stewart celebrated, with a full crew of servers and clouds of incense, which didn't disperse so quickly in a building with a low ceiling. I'm surprised the kitchen smoke alarm didn't go off. 

Basma came, able to walk again after a badly sprained ankle. We had a good chat after the service, during which she said she's appreciate seeing the texts of my talks for her, as this would allow her to translate them into Arabic. I had hoped that talks on their own would be useful for making sense of ambiguous words or phrases, but I was mistaken. It's easy enough to send the texts with the recording, and the first thing I did when I got home was to send the five texts already used.

St German's next priest in charge, Fr Jarel Robinson-Brown, will be licensed on Saturday 23rd March. Fr Andrew Sully will be licensed at St David's Ely on 1st March, and it's planned that Canton Churches will have a joint Eucharist on Sunday the 3rd. The appointments bring to an end my tours of locum duty in West and East Cardiff Ministry Areas. A month's respite, then two months locum duty in Nerja. What will happen after that remains to be seen. Is there anything else, anything more I can contribute in what will be my eightieth year, assuming I have the energy? Heaven only knows.

After lunch, I went straight out for a walk, though I could have done with a snooze, but I wanted to take advantage of the weather. The Fields were starting to dry out, but the latest bout of persistent light rain has revealed just how waterlogged the ground still is. Although it was 11C, it felt much colder when the wind blew. I was glad to get home before the usual ambient temperature drop at sunset.

After supper, I watched three episodes of the newly arrived second series of 'Trigger Point' streamed on ITVX. It's the same formulaic mix of fast paced dramatic action full of shocking deadly incidents starring Vicky McClure as an experienced bomb disposal officer. To my mind, there's something unreal about her being constantly at the centre of crisis action, with next to no time to react or recover before thee next one, rarely losing her cool for more than a few seconds. It makes her far too much of a super hero, head of a team whose members are less like partners and more like acolytes, despite their own experience and expertise. This doesn't quite add up.



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