The Sunshine and Showers of Life

I was very tempted to re-use a title from some years ago, "A Curate's egg of a Week", but I've tried to be original.  In any case, this week has not been in two halves, nor specifically good in parts and not so good in others.  Rather the last few days have shown both sides of a number of different facets of my life.  You may have shared in the most noticeable aspect that has shown us both sides this week ... the weather.  Most mornings I was greeted by wall-to-wall sunshine - witness this beautiful tree outside my window;
sometimes this lasted until afternoon but, on other occasions, it has very quickly given way to rain.  On at least one evening, I found shine at the front of the flat, and a very threatening black cloud at the rear.  After going on my errand, just missing a heavy hailstorm and returning amazingly unscathed, I took my second picture.

Last week I was celebrating my first taste of door-knocking in the political sense; this week circumstances have made it more practical to walk around and push leaflets through letterboxes.  If the weather holds, I might revert to 'plan A' tomorrow.  The administrative procedures that lie behind the election are not seen by the average voter.  Three weeks ago I received notification that my nomination had been received and was valid; this morning I received two more letters from the Electoral Services Manager.  One told me that there would be an election (as if I hadn't realised this already) and, although it advised me where the polling station will be, it didn't say I would be welcome there!  By contrast, the other informed me of the place and time when the votes will be counted, and reminded me of my right to be present when that happens.

With the aggregated interruption in the last couple of months caused by telephone and then computer problems, it's some while since I applied myself to family history.  This, too, falls into two distinct sub-sections of life.  One is my own research where, some months ago - in fact sometime during the winter before last - I realised that there were two people who, in the early years of my research, had provided me with lots of details about distant relatives, some of which I had since found to be inaccurate.  I made a list of all the events for which the only evidence I had came from one or other of them, and I had started to research these, making use of resources now available which wouldn't have been in those distant days.  Other demands on my time have led to this pursuit being put on hold until the last couple of weeks, when time has allowed me to pick up the threads of what I was doing a year or more ago.

The other dimension to those activities is my ongoing transcriptions of the 1871 census for FreeCen.  I hadn't allowed this to be so disrupted as my own research but I went back to it this week after some weeks of not doing any, and so had to re-learn some of the routines that had been 'second nature' in the days of the previous laptop.

Readers who have loyally followed my blog for some while will recall that, some years ago our church began a routine of fasting and prayer on the last Friday of each month.  This involves three prayer sessions in church, at 7.0 morning and evening and at 1.0 as well.  Somewhat inevitably, the lunchtime gathering is the most popular because some people don't like getting up early in the morning while others prefer not to have an interrupted or delayed evening.  However, last month the last Friday was in fact Good Friday when there were other arrangements anyway, and not everyone was aware that the pattern had recommenced.  It was not a unique occurrence but today, for the first time at two out of the three meetings, attendance was confined to the curate and myself.  This didn't mean that the prayers were any less sincere, but the atmosphere was distinctly different and, in some ways, more rewarding.