A Sunny Sunday Morning

The local weather forecast of gales to match the 1987 storms (when all Wimbledon  train lines were down except the deep underground tube line at South Wimbledon) so far has not been borne out by reality which is of a lovely sunny Sunday morning.

 08:15 am Mass today rather than the usual  Saturday evening Mass (doctor's orders preclude Sunday morning  jogging for another week)  was interesting not least because we had a  great sermon about human character quoting from the Daily Telegraph as well as from the biblical readings about the tax collector and pharisee.

However one of those who happened also to be present  at the Mass had been an  HCPT Group 35 helper with me some 40 years ago. He too became a lawyer but lives in Norwich Norfolk so not usually in Wimbledon for Mass. It seems however that he is visiting his  children who  have come to London to work and like many are also  having to work at the accommodation costs.

I recollected privately with some wry  amusement  how 40 years ago  the then Group leader who as a boy had been with me at Beaumont, and  the Norwich helper,  had then both been vying   for the attention of the same girl helper who was the Group 35 nurse. The BU group leader won  and the Norwich man later formed his own new HCPT Group. The BU friend later happily married the nurse though as things worked out  the Norwich man too later happily married. The former BU Group leader sadly as mentioned  some 4 or 5 years ago on this blog,  died - age only 57.

Interestingly the Norwich  helper has been travelling to Lourdes with the HCPT ever since so I asked how he took the news just out yesterday that French Railways SNCF have discontinued their great couchette trains (too old fashioned apparently)  leaving HCPT with the apparent options of paying much higher fares for German  sleeper trains or abandoning the chartered train journey to Lourdes altogether in which case the train pilgrims will  all have  to take charter flights. He said that from Norwich he had been flying to Lourdes for a few years anyway so there was no change for him.

Somehow taking a plane for a pilgrimage does not feel quite as right as taking  a long chartered train journey so I'm hoping that some alternative will be found.

 Furthermore with the increasing size of the world population and concerns about pollution should we not all be taking fewer planes and more trains anyway?

Then walking back home from Mass I chanced upon a couple of old friends. Newspapers were the main topic of conversation probably as a result of the great sermon with its quotes from The Telegraph. The husband expressing  huge negativity about the Daily Mail (read by some in  the maytrees household) and his wife saying that she would not touch the Guardian with a barge pole. He reads Times but that paper I stopped taking given the Murdoch hue and cry and read the Indy instead. Their children found the Indy too wordy hence the Times.

The conclusion I drew was similar to one about which I blog posted a week or two back, namely that we in the UK have some very good newspapers covering much of the political spectrum and long may that continue.

Meanwhile hopefully this lovely sunshine will not switch  to the threatened storm.