Partly sunny and pleasantly warm today at 24C, with a few hotter days to come. It'll be just as hot if not more when we arrive in Portugal next Thursday for our cruise. We went to St Catherine's for the Eucharist at the same time as a mother of two who's regularly in church with her husband, together with her third baby, born at home three days ago. The service started with a round of applause to welcome baby Carys into the congregation. A shared moment of great joy and delight. Hilary announced to the congregation at the end of Mass that the sale of church garden produce has resulted in a donation of £150 to church funds. Donations of surplus garden produce has also made it possible to pass on some veg to the Oasis refugee project which hosts a weekly communal meal for asylum seekers. An expanding virtuous circle!
After coffee and a chat we returned for lunch. After we'd eaten, I started preparing the texts for Morning Prayer on the last Wednesday of the lunch and wrote a reflection to go with it. Then a walk in Llandaff Fields and down to the river. As ever there were a couple of cricket matches going on. I was astonished to see the number of empty water bottles littering the grass in the out field of both games. I'd like to think that someone is assigned to collect them and take them to the nearest bin when they finish, but when there are scores of them scattered about, there are always strays which get missed. If only the rules for hiring a pitch made the provision of special recycling bins in a prominent place and obliged team managers to train players to use them.
Heaven knows what passers by think when they see the mess. It troubles me that so many athletes are so focussed on their game that they lose awareness of the environment and discard drinks containers wherever they are with no thought for the consequences. It's an echo of global competition for power and wealth, focused on achievement with little regard for consequences, leading to oceans over heating and plastics poisoning ecosystems, including our own bodies at the microscopic level. As a species we are in danger of poisoning ourselves to extinction, one way or another.
After supper, I joined Clare watching an interesting BBC Four documentary about master pianist Alfred Brendel, made twenty five years ago when he was seventy. He died two months ago aged 95. Back in the 80's I was given cassette recordings of all his Mozart piano concertos. They were the sound track of my journeys when I was travelling the length and breadth of Wales representing USPG. I digitized them in the '90s and still have them on my mobile phone amongst other places, a musical treasure.
I then set up my sixteen year old Windows Vista PC and scanner to digitize one of the remaining packs of film negatives from before digital camera days. The film scanner won't work with more modern operating systems, without paying for a driver update. Finding a driver is one thing, finding one that's malware free is another. Either way it's not worth the expense when the original kit still works, albeit slowly. Once I run out of negatives to scan, I can get rid of both computer and film scanner and clear space in my study for the next phase of sorting through stuff to keep and stuff to get rid of. Tonight's digital harvest dates back 29 years. Photos of James' christening plus Amanda and James' Geneva visit in 2000. Thirty frames scanned in an hour, then bed.
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