Overcast again today. After breakfast, when I checked messages on my phone, I learned that Lynda, one of the Canton Mothers' Union members had just died. When I was at a Lent lunch a few weeks ago she told me that her name would be appearing on the Parish prayer list, as she'd just been diagnosed with cancer. When I saw her husband David at the St John's Eucharist yesterday, he told me that cancer had been found in her lungs and liver. What sort of treatment she'd receive was yet to be decided. Normally she drove him to church, but he'd been picked up by someone else as Lynda wasn't well enough. Then, early this morning the end came quickly for her. Everyone's devastated by the news, but most of all David.
Ashley called to arrange a rendezvous, and I told him about the monthly Friday lunch arranged by the MU in St John's, which Clare and I were going to attend. He decided to come and join us, as he was going to be in Canton to collect a medication prescription before going for his Covid jab. I contacted Ruth, who had shared the sad news on the Parish WhatsApp prayer thread, and offered to say some prayers with the MU members at St John's for Lynda and her family after lunch, then set about preparing them.
When I got to church lunch was served as usual with about sixteen diners but it was clear people were still trying to take in what had happened. We were about a dozen for the prayers, in front of the Paschal Candle and the MU branch banner. Afterwards Ashley and I sat on a bench in the church garden and chatted until it was time for time to get a bus to the vaccination centre in Ely. He gave me a bottle of Bourgogne Pinot Noir for a birthday present. A nice surprise.
I returned home after we parted company, then walked in the park for an hour and a half. After supper I watched the final episode of 'You Shall Not Kill'. The story-line was complex enough to follow and made even harder due to the event timing sequence jumping back and forth several featuring different people. No sooner had it been established that a teenager was killed in a crime of passion by an ex-girlfriend who covers it up with the aid of her psychotherapist father who is controlling and abusive in relationships with young women than he is killed by one of his victims, and his murder covered up by dumping his body in a remote forest, by his wife and a female victim. They give themselves an alibi, pretending to be victims of a home invasion in which the murdered psychologist is kidnapped.
At least, I think that's right. It was so confusing I needed to write the above to see if I'd got the gist of the story, but the whole thing is about four families living ideal bourgeois lives, all of which are riddled by lies. So now you know!
Then I watched this week's final episode of the second 'Helsinki Murders', which wasn't as confusing as there was one serial perpetrator of a weird sex crime whose psychosis wasn't exposed until he was caught, after living a normal responsible adult life without causing anyone concern. It was an unusual story, in a broader portrait of a policeman living a normal kind of family life (for once) despite the bleak nature of his work as a policeman, and the dark side of life in Finland's capital city.
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