Visit to Bienne long overdue

I walked into Montreux gare to get the 10.45 train prescribed by my discount ticket. At Lausanne I changed for another inter-city express to take me in an easterly direction to Bienne, also known as Biel, as the roeschtigraben seems to run through this town, so French and German conversations can be overheard on the streets. You're never sure whether neighbourhood passers by are going to greet you with bonjour or groetzi as polite social custom requires. It keeps you on your toes. Laura met me in the station car park. We were both incredulous that our last meeting was in 2010, the summer I retired.

First stop was a big Migros supermarket to buy fish, fruit and veg to cook with, then to Laura's amazing modern wooden house whose exterior is entirely glazed in armoured dark glass. It has a modern kitchen too, with powerful induction hobs to cook with - a good as gas. She invested in photo voltaic solar panels early this year, a wise long term economy in a place which gets more than average sunshine.

Despite the unfamiliarity of the kitchen, cooking the paella went well. I felt especially blessed to be able to cook with olive oil, which Laura was recently given by a Florentine cousin - pressed from his own Umbrian olive trees. I was pleased with the end result, and thankfully, so was Laura. She'd bought a Catalan Tierra Alta Garnacha red wine, which we drank with the meal, and afterward some ice cream with figs her cousin had also preserved. Memorable flavours all round.

After lunch and washing up, we went for an hour's walk in the communal forest to the east of her housing estate. It's mostly deciduous woodland flanked by cornfields currently being harvested. At the turning point of our walk, the snow capped peaks of the Berner Oberland were visible across the fields, some seventy kilometres to the south.

There was much to catch up on. News of our children, and the story of how Laura has come through the nightmare experience of losing her husband Daniel when he was away walking high mountain paths in Corsica. His body still hasn't been found. He was an experienced mountain man, careful and fully aware of the risks.The only other person I ever met who shared this experience was Peggy in my last Parish, whose fiancé, a naval captain, disappeared in Cairo towards the end of the war, and was never found. It's hard to imagine what it means to live with a person's unfinished life story.  Laura never ceases to be a positive person, and says that having many friends, and an active, varied musical life have sustained her this past three years. "Despite what happens, you just have to get on with life in the end" she said. Or go under, I thought to myself. Such admirable courage.

I left on the 16.45 train to Lausanne. It was very crowded, but I found a seat, and dozed off half way along Lake Neuchatel, waking up only when arrival at Lausanne was announced. The connecting train once more was conveniently just a 30m walk from one platform to another, and I was back in Montreux, walking home by 18.15 after a very easy discount journey. 

The rest of the evening I spent helping Ashley with crisis management resulting from a breakdown of relationships over strategic policy in the BCRP Board of Management. It's what happens when busy people don't take sufficient time to develop a full understanding of what 'partnership' requires of them, or try to lead on the assumption that everyone must agree with them. Everybody does it. Brexit negotiations show this happening day by day.

  

A place to call home

Before being collected to go to St John's Canton to officiate at a funeral, I spent the morning house sitting, as the last of the contractor's teams set about replacing the original cast iron gutters and down pipes with modern plastic ones. Our house is old, heavy gutters, however well fixed originally, can suffer from ageing. There is a risk of them detaching in bad weather and causing damage in a fall. The light plastic ones can also fall in a storm, but the impact would be much less. Thankfully these houses are not yet the subject of a conservation listing order. Whenever home improvements are made, extensions built, loft conversions installed, there's no uniform pattern imposed. Slowly the appearance of the street changes, and becomes much more varied than the measured uniformity of the original build, whose chief decorative feature is colourful brickwork patterns contrasting with grey Pennant sandstone.

Unfortunately for the workers, there was drizzling rain from lunchtime onwards, but they carried on anyway. The job couldn't be completed totally however, as scaffolding obstructed installation of the of the lowest gutter, though not its removal. It won't take long once the scaffolding is dismantled however. At five, I went into the office and spent the evening catching up on necessary company business which is needed before we can present BCRP finances to our accountant for vetting. Getting it all right is vital for the success of what we do, and there can be no cutting corners. I'm fairly confident that we paid sufficient attention to the detail, and that our financial planning is proving as good as it should be. Just as well, since this is the first year in which we have a full time employee to look after.

News of the latest Italian earthquake set me thinking. For millennia, the Italian peninsula has been geologically unstable. Yet, people have made their homes, built villages and towns in hill country and been afflicted by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions with terrible loss of life over millennia. It seems that the benefits of living in the place far outweigh the risks. Some may move to live in safer areas, but most don't, despite the struggle to rebuild homes and re-establish a devastated economy. Perhaps this can only happen because the sense of community with a sense of place is the greatest of human assets. 

This contrasts in many ways with the contemporary culture of mobility embracing millions of people, either out of necessity or from opportunity to live differently. The internet, so say, abolishes distance, and people build on-line communities of interest that embrace the world. Yet every website still has its Home Page. Everyone starts somewhere which can later be referred to. The trouble with excessive mobility is that many feel they don't really belong anywhere. They may think of themselves as digital nomads, but fail to understand that ancient nomadism revolved around a succession of special places to which a clan would resort with the passage of the seasons. A sense of belonging to the land is far more important than any sense we may have contrived of land as property someone can own. In the end, as the Psalmist says "The earth is the Lord's", and our place in is His gift.

A sense of belonging is essential to our sense of identity. Having moved around a great deal over my lifetime, my sense of being a Welsh Valleys boy, European, and a priest ordained for Llandaff diocese are important to who I think I am. Where I think I belong, where I come to rest, alive and dead, are however, issues yet to be resolved. "Here we have no abiding city.", as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews states. We've made a home and been at home in dozens of places over the years. Cardiff is the place in which we've been settled for longest, and we both love it, but I still can't help wondering where I truly belong and will finally settle and not want to go anywhere else. Not at a result of infirmity and need, but from fulfilment and content. Will I ever really setle down? It's all part of the great mystery of our existence, I guess.