A community planting a forest

It was sunny when I woke up, but soon clouded over. 'Thought for the Day' was by my old friend Baptist Minister Roy Jenkins, insightful about the way communities of really poor people can be places full of hope persisting against the odds, challenging and inspirational. I was thinking about the desperation of the people of Gaza, 40,000 people have been killed there in the past ten months and ceasefire talks are still deadlocked. Has that hope Roy talked of been quenched there? Or will it emerge again when the fighting finally ends.

When I got up, some time later, Clare was cooking pancakes with stewed apricots as a filling. Delicious! After breakfast I read an article from 'Sur in English' about an initiative to transform a large area of 'brownfield' land which once hosted a filling station storage and tanker depot into an urban forest. Bosque Urban Malaga or BUM for short. Community volunteers are planting a variety of  native trees and regularly watering them by hand with water from an artesian well belonging to a local activist. The project, with scores of volunteers has been running for six years. When mature, the forest promises to provide a huge shady green space, cooler by 6C, for a barrio of tower blocks paved with concrete.  Until trees are big enough to send roots into the subsoil aquifer, they'll need watering, but will be self sustaining in the long run. A visit to Google Street view gives an idea of the size of the BUM, alongside the Avenida John XXII. A creative expression of hope for the city's future from its citizens.

I spent the most of the morning working on tomorrow's sermon, while Clare cooked lentils for lunch. Afterwards, I went for a long walk, first to Tesco and then in Llandaff Fields after a break for tea. In the evening I finished the final chapters of 'Marina', a mix of the melodramatic and the sad. A complex story but overall memorable, for its relationships and the dark undercurrent of a theme about a man who tries to play God a bit like Frankenstein but becomes a monster himself controlling a horde of vengeful monsters. Then I started 'El Palacio de Medianoche, another of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's early novels written for teenagers and read until it was time for bed.