Just in time - with Cardiff bus

Up and breakfasted in time to drive to St Peter's Fairwater to celebrate the Eucharist at ten fifteen with twenty two others. During the coffee morning after the service, Fr Colin the former Vicar came around to get some plants from the community garden, looking well and relaxed, enjoying his retirement. He'd come over from celebrating Mass at St Augustine's in Llanrumney. It's what we do, use retired clergy, fill in the gaps, when incumbent clerics are overloaded with demands.

I drove home again, to collect the empty veggie bag and then went to exchange it for a full one at the new veggie bag depot in the courtyard of Chapter Arts, as it used to be before covid. For the past three years the pickup place was in the front garden of a house in Eton Place, but the woman who hosted it there is now moving elsewhere, and Chapter has agreed to host the depot once more. Clare was already in the throes of cooking prawns with veggies and rice for lunch when I returned, nice and early, as I needed to go to 'The Res' in Ely to celebrate their midweek Mass at two fifteen.

I decided not to go by car, for fear of losing our street parking place. This often happens when there's a big event in town, as people driving in from elsewhere for major sporting events, tend to park away from the immediate city centre and hi-jack neighbourhood parking spaces and walk into town. Beyonce was starting her latest world concert tour in Cardiff this evening at the stadium. Clare feared our parking space might be nabbed, so I resolved to take to 18 bus up to Grand Avenue where the church is instead.

I walked to the nearest Cowbridge Road East bus stop for an eighteen bus and was there by just after one thirty. A succession of four westbound buses passed me, none of which was an eighteen, the only one to go the length of Grand Avenue, past the church. In town, because of the concert, there was traffic chaos, with people from all over Europe, let alone Britain arriving for the concert, and the buses having to make their ways through heavier than usual traffic.

Last in the procession of westbound buses, nearly twenty minutes after I reached to bus stop, came two number 18s, nose to tail! I had no clear idea of how long the journey would take so I found the email address of Carol, one of the steadfast long standing members of the congregation, and sent a message to warn her I might be delayed. We had an eccentric bus driver who sang silly songs and made lame jokes all the way there. It certainly cheered up an otherwise tense journey! Carol was looking out for me at the gate when I arrived. I actually ran a hundred yards from the bus stop down to the church, the first time I have been able to do that since I sprained my ankle last December, with no ill effect. By leg behaved itself surprisingly well today, and I arrived with couple of minutes to spare.

I joined the congregation of nine for coffee and a chat afterwards, and we had a great laugh together recalling the days of our young. Almost all were in their late seventies or eighties, and talked about the places they frequented in their youth in Cardiff. We talked about first experiences of foreign imported food, and a man and his wife told the story of how he turned up the collect his wife for their first date in a red London bus whose brakes he'd just serviced. He'd gone to collect her from home driving the bus to pick her up and take her to town. Unfortunately her parents weren't impressed, but there they were some sixty years later, anyway.

Back home on the 18 bus to Canton once more, realising on the way that I'd taken off my specs in the sacristy and left them there. Carol will bring them to the Ascension Day Mass at St Luke's which I will be celebrating tomorrow night. Our Basque neighbour Miriam was on the bus. We walked home talking in a mixture of Spanish and English. She works in a special needs school with severely disable kids the other side of Ely Vale from 'The Res'. That was a nice surprise.

After arriving home, I did some shopping, then went for a walk around the park, getting back just in time for the Archers. Afterwards, I spent the evening writing a sermon for tomorrow evening. All in all, a busy but enjoyable day.

Summer tastes

Another journey across to Adamsdown after breakfast this morning to celebrate Mass with four others at St German's. We celebrated St Bartholomew a day late. I called into the the Aldi store on Western Avenue to buy some cooking apples and wine. While I cooked a paella with prawns in it for lunch, Clare chopped up the apples and cooked them with the blackberries - half to freeze and half for the foundations of a super crumble tomorrow.

I intended to collect this week's veggy bag immediately after eating, but slept soundly for an hour before doing so. Then a walk in the park, passing the two crab apple trees we've foraged from this past couple of years. They are crammed with very pale green unripened fruit, save for the odd one that has started to turn red. It'll be interesting to how long they take to go pink and then finally a rich cherry red, when we can to  start pick them. I noticed one unripe fruit on the path nearby, bitten off I suspect by a passing bird, then discarded when found to be unpalatable.

For the last couple of weeks we've been receiving in our veggy bag several large Roma plum tomatoes, a favourite of mine for cooking. These are very tasty and as succulent as a peach to eat, so none have ended up in a sugo so far. The vegetables grown at Coed Organics are superb, unless there's a weather disaster. The produce generally has been excellent this summer.

I spent a couple of hours tidying and backing up photo albums this evening. Although I make much use of Google Photos, backups on hard drive and workstation are essential to my mind. Almost everything we do relies on The Cloud these days. On the whole it works well enough and is convenient if moving from one device to another, but I wouldn't trust my entire digital life to it. We've no idea what unforeseen disaster is just around the corner that could afflict the internet in the era of climate change and unstable weather. 

The world has been shocked by the speedy collapse of the status quo in Afghanistan, followed by mass panic by tens of thousands trying to flee the country and escape the Taliban. Even with all the planning and information available, the powers that be failed to anticipate what's happening now. The randomness of people's reactions to radical change are by nature unpredictable. To their credit, the armed forces and airlines have done an amazing job evacuating many tens of  thousands to places of safety in the past fortnight, though tens of thousands more will be left behind after the withdrawal deadline, and subjected to even more agonising delay if they still want to leave and have sufficient reason to do so. And this is only stage one. The re-settlement of maybe a hundred thousand refugees in different countries is likely to take a long time. The suffering of powerless people drags on and on.