Epiphany Day

A rain soaked night, but sunshine breaking through this morning and a brighter if cloudy day. Housework after breakfast, then preparation work on next Wednesday's Morning Prayer and Reflection, with another Sunday sermon to prepare as well this week. It's good to have positive things to think about in the face of dispiriting world news as well as nearer home. The only sign that the Christmas festival days are over is the occasional Christmas tree dumped in a front garden, ready for a collection that isn't going to happen this year, or so we've been told.

Clare made an early lunch and after eating was spirited away by taxi to the School of Optometry for an afternoon as a test subject for student exams. Just as she was leaving a large heavy parcel was delivered for her, which needing depositing on the kitchen table for opening later. It turned out to be a bright red Kenwood 'kMix' Food Mixer with a dough hook. It seems my hand kneading days are over. Not sure I'm happy with being replaced by a machine.    

I recorded and edited the reflection I wrote earlier and then went for a walk over to the east side of the river and walked down the Taff Trail to Blackweir Bridge to do a circuit of Pontcanna Fields. The grass was rain saturated from last night's downpour and the river was running fast, higher than normal, but less than yesterday. There seemed to be fewer people out walking than usual, and conditions too poor for sports practice. The sky was clear and a cold wind made it feel even colder.

I followed the progress of a bright blue plastic ball floating down river close enough to the bank to be brushed by low lying branches, delaying its progress enough for me to keep up with it and take a few photos for interest. Only in the last fifty metres above the weir did the ball move away from the bank, swept toward mid-stream by the current before skidding down the concrete ramp into the waves of boiling foam in the lower pool and disappearing from sight. Yesterday we saw a large black kit bag float over the weir, then surface in a fast moving current of water on its way down stream. I wondered what was in it and who might have lost it, with what consequences. Will it get snagged somewhere? Will it float, half submerged all the way down to the Bay Barrage, and end up in one of the nets fishing for rubbish, about 500 tonnes a year, most of it plastic?

Before and after supper, I watched this week's double episode of a new 'Silent Witness' series on iPlayer. This story is all about elderly people with no family, vulnerable with memory loss being preyed upon by a care home nurse, who works out a way of disposing of them and laundering their assets and properties. It's quite a scary story when you're getting to that sort of age yourself. I thought it was over melodramatic in parts. Even so, in addition to a new boss who is a very senior academic lady of a certain age there's Kit, a new research assistant, who in the tradition of this series is cast as someone of exceptional ability, but in some way different. In this case Kit is played by dwarf actor, Francesca Mills, a real live wire.