The evening before yesterday, I attended my local church and I had a particular reason for doing so. It was the first service conducted by our new, and very young, parish priest who had previously served as an assistant priest in Coventry and before that in Leamington Spa. By way of introduction, he gave us a few words about his own biography and as he indicated, he is well acquainted with this wider region even if not Bromsgrove itself. I am sure that he will be a tremendous asset to the parish and he certainly made all of the right noises, as it were. It must be quite a daunting prospect to introduce oneself to a well-established, even if ageing, congregation such as ours and I thought that the sermon that he gave hit just the right note. There is going to be a special inauguration in about seven weeks time in the pub with a large meeting room across the road for which one needs to sign up. I must admit that I forgot on my way out of church but as I suspect that the list will soon fill up, I am going to make a special journey to the church this morning for the sole purpose of adding my name to the list. In the congregation last night was an elderly Irish parishioner who is very committed to the church and has often delivered some of the readings in a delightfully soft Irish brogue. But over a year ago, he was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer and his doctors had given him three months to live. But he still with us after a whole year, but I must say only just and is now painfully thin and receiving morphine injections and had made the most tremendous effort to attend the church and to greet the new priest. We used to see him on a Tuesday morning when we were having coffee in Waitrose and I even have a photograph of him and I with Meg and our University of Birmingham friend that was taken last Christmas. I find this man a completely inspirational figure and was delighted to see him for what could be the last time and I will certainly mourn his passing and attend his funeral which cannot be too far off now. To a man of such deep faith, then perhaps death holds no fears but how remarkable it is that he still making a positive impact upon the world when he is absolutely defying all of the medical odds. When I returned home, I managed to watch almost the whole of the England vs Australia women’s rugby match which, in the end, England won quite convincingly. But the English team did not start well whereas the Australians did so it looked as though it was going to be a much tighter match than it turned out to be. Apart from handling errors, what often sets teams apart is the level of fitness of the individual players where the teams who have players who have had superior training regimes have the strength and endurance to enter and to succeed in the scrums, mauls and rucks which is at the heart of the game. There are going to be some tremendous matches this afternoon and if I have no social calls upon my time, then at least I can enjoy the rugby. Sundays are often quite unpredictable days because it all depends upon the social commitments of my friends and acquaintances and, of course, I am acutely aware that Sunday is very much a ‘family’ day for most of the population.
Early in the morning, after I had undertaken my Pilates exercises, I decided to go and visit my local church not for the purpose of attending a service but in order to ensure that my name was added to the list for the inauguration of our new parish priest in late October. When I attended the church for the service the previous evening, we were encouraged to add our names to the list but chatting with others I forgot and only remembered later and as this inauguration event was bound to be popular and numbers might be limited, I was anxious to be included in the list. I bumped into several fellow parishioners that I already knew and was glad that I had made the effort and then I returned home to have a delayed breakfast and a viewing of the Trevor Phillips Politics program on the Sky News channel. Quite nearby there is a sort of water sports centre – actually an area used for the extraction of salt and gravel up until the 1950’s and into which local streams and water courses have now drained0 which is now used for canoing, swimming, sailing and similar water sports. It has a simple cafe so I decided to go there, along, if only to have a coffee and look out over the water. But my University of Birmingham friend phoned after I had texted him earlier in the day and I was more than happy to accept his offer of a lift to the centre. It was raining cats and dogs so we sat indoors and drank our coffees whilst catching up on the various things happening to us over the last fortnight. But as he is on holiday in Majorca next weekend, I shall not see him for another fortnight.
I knew that women’s rugby would dominate this afternoon’s TV viewing, so I settled down to watch the New Zealand team (the ‘Black Ferns’) take on the Irish team. But the Irish team were completely outplayed and won the match by 40:0. The nearest that the Irish came was a long punt up the field onto which the Irish player just had to drop to score a try but, given the shape of a rugby ball, there was a cruel bounce and the ball bounced out of play. Given the speed, precision and strength of the Black Ferns, I cannot see how they can be beaten in this competition, even by England playing at their best. This might be the eventual final, of course but we shall have to see once the quarter finals and semi-finals have been played. As I write this, France is playing South Africa but at half time, France have established a dominant lead by having scored four tries and will probably go ahead and complete their victory in the second half.