Spring celebrations

Cloudy for much of the day and as cold as it was a month ago. We went to the Eucharist at St Catherine's. The Palm Sunday procession took place in church rather than outdoors, which was just as well given the temperature. There were just over forty adults and half a dozen children present.

After lunch, I slept in the chair for an hour. This seems to be the case if I don't get to bed before eleven but I'm not very disciplined about making the effort. Then a walk in Llandaff Fields before going down the woodland path alongside the river Taff and Pontcanna Fields as far as the cricket stadium. It's sad to see so many trees and bushes along the riverside still festooned with pieces of plastic bags and sheets, deposited either by high wind or by flood water. There is one consolation however. 

In a gale last November a large canvas awning from heaven knows where was carried by the wind and dropped on a river back tree riven asunder by the wind. It's been caught in the broken branches at the edge of the water ever since, until last week when it was removed at last. Disentagling the canvas from the branches must have been a risky business, given the position of the tree and its uncertain stability. It's a relief to the eye.

At the  stadium end of the field a huge fiesta was happening, with loud Asian music, food stalls and others promoting Sri Lankan enterprises. There must have been about a hundred cars parked along the edge of the field and a crowd of three to four hundred, playing outdoor party games, animated by a compere. What sort of fiesta was impossible to tell as the banners on the stage were written in Sinhala and/or Tamil script. At home I found out when I googled that in mid April, Sri Lanka celebrates the start of the solar new year. It turns out tomorrow is Vaisakhi, a Punjabi Sikh spring harvest festival, and this weekend is Passover, and it's Holy Week too.

After supper Clare decided to watch an episode of Dr Who on telly. It didn't appeal to me but I watched out of curiosity. It was a waste of time really, all that gobbledegook sci-fi language, endless sequences of noisy fight and flight. I shouldn't have bothered. Once the telly was switched off, I watched the live stream of Semana Santa processions in Malaga with great pleasure, glimpsing familiar streets through which they passed.