Yesterday proved to be an interesting day. It was the retirement celebration of a well respected and loved local Methodist minister/superintendent who my American friend and I both knew. We had prearranged that we would both attend this event as my friend, together with other female members of the Methodist community, were going to bring along food for a pre-service get together. At this event, we got into conversation with a fascinating parishioner whose life had been colourful as her father was Danish but her mother a (white Kenyan) although she herself was born, by accident, in Birmingham. The tea time event lasted an hour and a half which was followed by a leaving service in which the meeting hall (serving as a church) which was packed to the rafters. This was a very Methodist affair with five hymns sung lustily but the words displayed on screens to assist the singing without hymn books. The ‘service’ consisted of some scriptural readings, many reminiscences and tributes (including one from his ancient mother) and words rom other local Methodist ministers with whom he had shared his ministry during the years. The minister himself I happened to know has a very poorly wife but he was retiring to Scarborough in North Yorkshire which is the seaside town in which I used to holiday (for one day trip in the year). When leaving, I gave him my business card and quickly outlined to him the impact on my life of ‘Uncle Jim’ who was a very well known and respected Anglican priest. Sadly, as he died in 1962/63 and the church at which he officiated was pulled down in 1975, any historical records are extraordinarily sparse but I have managed to locate on my phone a photograph of his gravestone but with no dates or other details. As my ‘Uncle Jim’ as my sister and I affectionately knew him died in about 1963 and this was over sixty years ago, then it is not surprising that the historical record is so thin. But I remember well that we could not walk for a few yards down the street without a parishioner engaging him in conversation as he was so well known and loved. Reading between the lines, I think he was the man that my mother ought to have married but did not and, if she had, I may not have even existed. However, returning to the here and now, I have the prospect of both a quiet week in front of me but also another heatwave but hopefully not as intense as in the recent past. Normal ‘social’ events are rather put on hold as we approach the breaking up of the schools and the holiday season but I have my first meeting of the U3A Philosophy group to which I am looking forward at the end of the week. The intense heat means that any grass in the area has been reduced to a straw looking, brown crisp and although it will recover in time (one hopes), in the meantime it means that the regular ritual of grass cutting is put into abeyance. When, and if, the weather cools down somewhat I hope to resume a regular walk down into town but in the intense heat I have argued that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’ and taken a journey by car rather than on foot to pick up my daily newspaper. Although I have a house stuffed full of books, I was tempted in the Methodist Centre book collection to buy an excellent hardback book on ‘Nutrition for Life’ which is copiously illustrated, very informative and had an original selling price of £18 when it was first published under the DK imprimatur some 20 years ago. My American friend are I are going to have a friendly fight over who reads which relevant sections first but at first sight, it contains a mine of well written material.
Conscious of the fact that I have not been walking down into town as I used to do every day, I resolved to make amends and made the journey down to Waitrose on foot. There I picked my newspaper and then availed myself of the ‘free’ coffee offered to cardholders and then made the journey back, pausing to have a chat with two intermediate acquaintances who I know live down the road. I cooked a meat and two veg type meal but to attempt to limit the carbohydrate load, I parboiled a few cubes of potato that had been soaking in water overnight together with a quartered onion and then finished them off with a quick toss in good olive oil and then had a meal pf this with beef slices in an onion gravy and some broccoli. After lunch, I sampled a new comedy style programme which my son and daughter-n-law had told me about called ‘Anne Android’ and is the amusing tale of the encounters between a recently widowed lady and a robot procured by her son to assist in daily activities. The humour is droll and filled with some pathos and already it has quite a following across the BBC. One viewer has offered the comment that beneath the comedy, it says a lot about the world we are heading towards with AI, ageing, loneliness, grief, older children moving on (or not!), and what technology can and cannot replace when it comes to real human connection. Having seen the first episode of the series, I shall probably stick with it for a bit so see how the remaining episodes unfold. I made use of the fine weather to peg out a whole line full of washing to dry and I know that no rainfall is expected tonight. We learn this afternoon of the intensifying fires sweeping across France and Spain and more than 250,000 people have been evacuated in France, while more than 116,000 people in Spain have had to leave their homes, the authorities have said. The flames are only seven miles from Bordeaux and fires have ravaged the Cap Ferret peninsula on France’s Atlantic coast and advanced towards the heart of the country’s winelands- it has so far burnt through 42,000 hectares of land. The French are fighting on a huge front and may be just about holding the raging fires at bay, but a giant fire thunderstorm fuelled by its own winds and lightning has formed in the Gironde region of southwest France, making a delicate situation more precarious. The seriousness of all of this is hard to over-estimate and one wonders about the damage to the French, Spanish and European economy that will result.