Phone woes

Hot and sunny today 27C, after a good night's sleep. An email from Fr Jarel arrived asking if I'd stand in for him at the Parish Eucharist the Sunday after next, which I gladly accepted. I went with Clare to the Eucharist at St Catherine's. We were thirty today, just one family with children above Sunday school age. Fr Sion said he'd spotted me on the Maes at the Eisteddfod on Friday, his day off. 

A Sikh family came into church just before the service, wishing to speak to the Vicar but they had to return afterwards. I learned from one of the stewards that they were asylum seekers from Afghanistan, and I think they have moved into a house opposite the church gates. Sikhism originated in the north Indian region of Punjab, in the sixteenth century, a significant minority in neighbouring Pakistan and in the old North West Frontier region, home to Afghan tribes. It became an independent state in 1926 after two years of war with Britain's colonial forces 1919-21. 

In the 1970s there were 700,000 Sikhs in Afghanistan, but the population dwindled to 220,000 by 1992, 400 at the beginning of 2021 and 150 by the end of the year, such has been the pressure exerted by Islamist militants throughout the country. Sikhs have never had it easy in predominantly Muslim regions, not least because of their respect for the sacred teachings of other religions - Hindu, Muslim and Christian. There are more than 10,000 in the UK, and were among the first migrant communities to establish themselves in Britain in the twentieth century as so many had served in the allied forces during the war. Like the Jewish community, Sikhs value their distinct identity and education, significantly in law, finance, science and commerce. Many are farmers in the Indian sub-continent. Afghanistan is so much the worse for having driven out its Sikh population. It's the same old lesson, exclusive fanaticism impoverishes, but inclusive diversity enriches.

After lunch I slept for an hour in the chair, then walked to Thompsons Park to photograph the Moorhens. I couldn't be sure but I think there's a now a second brood of chicks there. They look smaller than those I took pictures of last week, swimming around but not venturing into the mud of the surrounding reed bed to forage. It was hotter than I anticipated when I left the house, so I returned all sweaty and changed shirt and jacket for a light tee shirt, then walked around Llandaff Fields, taking photos of a cricket practice.

When I got home, I dropped my phone. It landed flat, but instead of the impact cracking the screen, as happened when I dropped it in Fuengirola, calling for a replacement, this time the display has patterns of fine vertical stripes running through it. Text display was readable initially but photographic images were impaired, making it impossible to edit. When I took it from its case, the screen display became completely unstable and unreadable. I pressed around the edge of the screen, and to my surprise it became clear and stable again. A loose connection tightened again by chance? I put it back in its case, but then the display broke down once more, then stabilised when I applied pressure to the frame. Maybe the metal chassis of the phone is slightly distorted.

It might might be possible to fix it, so that it doesn't break the next time I drop it, but given that it would cost half the price of a new one, but would it be worthwhile. I bought it in November '22, when it had been on the market for half a year already. It's got slower since the last Android update. I'll stick with it for now while it still works, and live with it rather than make haste to replace it with one that's less vulnerable.

After supper, Clare went to Chapter Arts Centre as there's a free Jazz gig tonight. I worked my way through the corrections she made to the first 115 of 203 pages of the  printed novel. This took me the rest of the evening, right up to bed time. It's the night when the Perseid meteor shower is in full spate, with a hundred sightings an hour anticipated, but I felt too tired to stay up and watch, especially as the sky was hazy and urban light pollution reduces the chance of seeing much anyway. But I still remember sitting out under a clear sky in the darkness of rural Picardy meteor watching on a camping holiday trip south, half a century ago, still awesomely vivid in my memory. 'How many are your works O Lord: in wisdom you have made them all.'