Journey to Switzerland

Yesterday morning, I celebrated the Eucharist at St John's with nine others, took my leave of them and returned home immediately to finish off packing my case and eating an early lunch. Just after one, Mary our neighbour drove us to Cardiff Central station to take the train to Bristol, with lots of time to spare, just in case there were delays in arriving at Temple Mead station. This happened to us the last time we travelled over to Bristol Airport to fly to Budapest a year ago, causing unwanted and stressful delay in arriving for our flight. This time, all was well, except that the airport shuttle bus stop has moved from one side of the station entrance to the other for the first time in all the years we have been using the service.

Bristol Airport was, as to be expected in mid-August, quite busy. People were queuing, but moving through the check-in area surprisingly quickly. Check-in desks were apparently replaced just last month by an array of automatic self-service terminals, supported by airline staff. The system is very simple. Your flight ticket QR code is scanned, your bag is weighed, and as long as it conforms to the prescribed weight limit and content declaration, the machine prints a baggage label which you apply yourself. The bag is then taken to the usual check-in desk site and placed on a conveyor, where the label is scanned to check that it's the correct one issued against the ticket. 

I think the label may have an RFID tag plus a bar code to make it recognisable to both standard systems in use at different airports. The technology now being rolled out to regional airports has been around for some years and it works impressively. Staff are available to help travellers on a friendly face to face basis, but are more efficiently used, as those used to this routine check themselves in and move on quickly.

There was a queue of several dozen moving at a steady pace through the security clearance area. This too has been remodelled in the past year. There are now six luggage and people scanning terminals, half of which were in use. This procedure only took us ten minutes surprisingly, and is a testimony to improved efficiency. People moan about long delays at larger airports. Well, Bristol's queue of maybe fifty people at a time, scaled up five or ten times at any moment in a bigger airport, even with a bigger system working at full capacity, will scale up the delay in getting through. It's still amazingly efficient at processing people unless the technology fails, or staff don't show up for work when expected. Millions of people around the world, on the move, day and night, and under such constraints. It's a remarkable everyday achievement.

As testimony to increased airline traffic, our flight was twenty minutes late taking off, and made up five minutes en route. The queue at passport control was long and slow, and although this meant we picked up our luggage as soon as we arrived to reclaim it, we missed the half part nine InterRegio train to Montreux by a few minutes, and had to wait forty minutes for the next one. Church Warden Jane met us at Montreux Gare at twenty to midnight, and drove us the last kilometre to St John's Church House.

While the church is characteristically Victorian (dating from 1875) and Anglican in appearance, the house adjoining is characteristically Swiss with shutters and dormer windows in the roof space. The upper interior is entirely clad with wooden panelling, and has four bedroom, two bathrooms, a large landing space and a small upstairs rood terrace in the space between house and church. It's a very spacious house, and the only disadvantage, like so many English churches of this period, is that it's by a busy main road and railway line. Thankfully, it's pretty quiet at night, and we slept well.

    

Evolutionary questions

Today, I was in Alcossebre for the Eucharist. My fourth Sunday already, how time flies! I drove down early, before the congregation arrived. There was a noticeable increase in cars in the free parking lot on the edge of the town centre, to be expected as Spanish and French holidaymakers flock in after the end of the school term. It seems that many Brits travelling south by car are still queuing in Dover to get out of the country.

I sat on a pleasantly cool stone bench in the shade of a tree near the church shop while I waited for others to gather. There were twenty of us for the service, and I enjoyed preaching about the Lukan version of the Lord's Prayer. Afterwards, I drove to Peñiscola behind churchwarden Ron, to take communion to his wife Jenny at home. She's still confined to the house, awaiting joint replacement surgery. It was nearly four by the time I sat down to lunch at home. Not that I minded being later than usual. I don't seem to get that hungry in the heat.

In the evening, Clare and I talked for an hour on Skype, and at her behest I resent the invitation with travel instructions to a dozen people we know will be coming to our Golden Wedding party in just under two weeks from now. Co-incidentally an email arrived today from one who'd mislaid the emailed instructions, so this was well worth doing. All I have to do is learn to be patient whenever the internet connection drops from being normally slow to very slow, as it does from time to time. 

We've come to take reliability for granted since fibre optic communications began to spread in Britain. In other places, investment priority seems to have switched to mobile internet services, but Britain has developed both, and it's just as well to have not only extra capacity, but a different kind of capacity for communications, as our world now continually shifts volumes of data that would have only been thought of in science fiction stories a few decades ago.

It's amazing to think of the different social and cultural evolutions I've experienced my lifetime, due to the technological innovations that have taken place. Will the rate of change be sustained, are there limits to the potential for growth and development? How are we going to cope with inevitable setbacks for humankind due to the impact of global warming, the gulf between haves and have-nots population growth, and the competition for finite resources? Possibly we have the equipment and even some of the ideas to address these challenges. Does humankind have the moral and spiritual substance, and sufficient collective will to accomplish the task, before problems overwhelm us?