In the mist

Cloudy again today with fine misty rain driven by a warming wind from early on until late afternoon when the sun peeped through now and then. Good for growing plants. Our beanstalk pyramid plants are now covered with red and white flowers, promising a healthy crop. When I got up I felt stiff and heavy all over, for no reason I could think of, apart from the damp air.

Clare cooked buckwheat pancakes for breakfast, then I worked on tomorrow's sermon. It's taken me longer than usual this week, but it's a while since I preached on a Sunday, so maybe I'm out of practice. I delayed eating a pasta lunch for a couple of hours and went for a walk in Llandaff Fields instead as I still felt full of pancakes. There were very few people out playing games or walking their dogs. Rachel called while I was walking. We talked for an hour including when I was eating a late lunch on return.

Then Clare and I both went out shopping, me for household supplies, and a new dish washing brush and Clare for dishwasher tablets and other stuff from Beanfreaks. I needed to get cash out of an ATM. Tesco's machine was faulty, so I had to use the one outside the Principality Building Society across the other side of the road. Since the local bank branches closed there are none to host ATMs. The fine drizzle turned into a shower for a while, enough to soak my rain jacket on the walk home. If it had been a few degrees colder it would have been miserable indeed.

At the end of the afternoon the wind drove away the misty drizzle and lifted the cloud cover but without dispersing it. I went to Thompson's Park to finish my daily distance and spotted four parakeets flying over the grass to roost in the tall trees on the western edge of the park. I wonder how many more of them there are in the city's parkland now?

After supper I didn't do much apart from read a long interesting article about an huge science laboratory experiment started in the 1990s called Biosphere 2 which created climate controlled models replicating different kinds of ecosystem, rainforest, desert, ocean, wetland etc in a huge sealed environment, to study changes in a controlled way. For two years it was occupied by researchers, sealed off and self sustaining to see if it would be possible to recreate earth living conditions on the moon or mars. It wasn't perfectly successful, but a lot was learned from it about how much more complex and subtle the world's biosphere #1 than is understood. Humans and Earth are co-dependent. n

No other place natural or artificially constructed would be a substitute to sustain life. Don't expect space travel romantics to believe that. Remind them there's only one earth.

Then I watched an old episode of 'The Repair Shop'. It featured a Kodak camera made in 1940 belonging to a British prisoner of war. Its mechanism although jammed, wasn't broken, it just had a screw loose and needed a good clean. The shutter worked and it still took good black and white photos. Just the case and camera body were scruffy needing cosmetic attention. The owner's son and grand daughter followed in his footsteps as keen photographers. An interesting story. Finally,  after further tweaks to the ending of the sermon, I printed it, and went to bed early. I don't know why but I didn't stop feelings tired all day, despite sleeping well last night.