Sunday night at the movies

For this morning's locum assignment I drove to St Isan's in Llanishen again to celebrate the Parish Eucharist with just over sixty people. After the service, preparations for a baptism service were being made, and I wondered if it was for the afternoon, and who was coming in to take the service. On my way out I went to say goodbye to the wardens, who looked puzzled and wondered why I was going. 

It seems that the christening request arrived and had been booked in since I agreed to come and take the main service some two months ago. Whoever was responsible for the arrangement hadn't thought to contact me! It's just as well I wasn't in a hurry to move on to a next engagement, as I was last time I was at St Isan's. I didn't mind at all. I was delighted to perform another baptism this Sunday, as I did last week. For so many years in my last job, and on foreign locum duty in retirement,  baptisms were a rarity. And, I wasn't at all late home for lunch!

It rained in the afternoon. A street party had been planned from lunchtime onward, but ended up as an outdoor tea-time social get-together. Clare went along, but I had a little work to do for tomorrow's funeral service. This proved to be frustrating when it came to printing material to use. The network connection wasn't functioning properly and defied re-setting. I had to switch off the router and every attached device for half an hour and then reboot. Then it started to behave again. Later I learned that there was a massive Gmail outage in the USA, and patches of slow connectivity here also in the UK. Instead of downloading a file to print from Google Drive, I had to connect a phone to the computer and extract the file attachment I received, and knew was stored there. 

Computer systems utterly dependent for error free functioning on having an internet connection are a liability. There's no guarantee this will always work as intended, no matter how many internet service providing satellites Elon Musk insists on contaminating near earth orbit with. I nearly got caught out today because the file I wanted hadn't been saved to proper computer storage belonging to me, from where it could be printed. But it was on my phone. I did print it out having transferred it from there. It may be possible to do it directly from the phone. If so it's something I have to learn how to do.

Clare dashed in from the tea party, alarmed to realise we were about to be late for the evening movie she booked us in for at Chapter Arts Centre - the Elton John bio-pic 'Rocketman'. We walked there very rapidly, and arrived after the batch of ads we've already seen on telly had finished, just as the title screen appeared.

It was superbly entertaining, in the format of a rather quirky screen musical. It was also thoughtful and sad, showing us his early life and taking us up to his mid-life addiction crisis, through some of his difficult relationships, and his glorious performance successes. The film was shown with subtitles for the hard of hearing, which included the lyrics of songs essential to telling the story. Never having been an Elton fan, I'm only slightly familiar with the music and not the words, so subtitles which could have been an annoyance made it unusually accessible to me. A great treat, coming in the same year as the Freddy Mercury biopic.

Llanishen connections

This morning I drove to Llanishen to celebrate the 10.30 Sung Eucharist at St Isan's Parish Church, now in interregnum after the recent retirement of Mike Whitcombe, Vicar for the past 25 years. It's a typical old country church, swallowed into suburban Cardiff a century ago, with a ring of six in the bell tower and surrounded by an ancient churchyard. It's a mainstream church, well organised well attended with a prosperous congregation, popular for weddings. 

The first time I visited St Isan's was for my cousin Christine's wedding 48 years ago. My Uncle Gordon and Auntie Joyce were parishioners. When he died 13 years ago, I attended his funeral there. My only other visit was to preach on behalf of USPG about 35 years ago. It's still quite well attended with a congregation of over sixty, and good small choir which sang a responsorial Gradual Psalm to Gelineau Chant unusually well. The congregation was responsive, and also sang well.

As the church chancel is narrow, and the Communion rail accommodates around eight at a time, the distribution of the Sacrament took longer than I'm used to. Interestingly, the choir quietly sang through an entire Mass setting during this part of the service, which was something of a surprise, but I felt it worked quite well.

A little later than I had expected I left the church after greeting people, and drove to neighbouring Cyncoed for a midday meeting with John and Paul, the two sons of Sheila, whose funeral I'll be taking this week. John, I met last week in UHW. Paul had since then arrived from the USA where he has lived and worked for most of his adult life, without losing his British accent. We chatted for a lot longer than I intended and it was almost two by the time I reached home again, not least because of traffic congestion along Cathedral Road, generated by an afternoon cricket match.

Later, I caught up on the final two episodes of 'Follow the Money', in which the series villain meets his end, and then the last episode of 'Line of Duty', in which I'm pleased to say, I had already spotted the main secretly corrupt cop of this series early on. Hastings the heroic chief inquisitor is revealed to be a flawed man, but not a villain. It's not all over, however, and although it has yet to be written, a sixth series is promised. It's not over until it's over, as the oxymoron goes.