Monday Sept 25th 2006
In blissful gentle rain I cycled across to Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, to hand in some vital work from Jamie at St Mary's College. As our Internet access is still down, he couldn't email it, and as he was working in court all day, all we could do was print it off on paper and deliver it by hand. Thank the Lord for cooler weather - still not proper Autumn breezes, but something less than the oppressive sticky heat of recent days. Some of the trees along the river at Kingston are just starting to turn golden-brown. There were notices at the park gates about the deer-cull. The magnificent Victorian High Anglican church at Teddington - where my mother remembers being taken as a child, before her father finally became a Catholic - is now an arts centre.

Back at home, it was just eleven o'clock and as I turned on the radio for the news, I thought I would say a prayer for the Holy Father, meeting Muslim leaders this morning at Castel Gandolfo. As I prayed the Hail Mary, the radio prattled on in the background about Gordon Brown and Tony Blair and the Labour Party conference, and then moved on to "The Pope is meeting Moslem leaders today at....." I do hope lots of others were praying, too.

On to the local library, where I raced through a feature about St Edward the Confessor (please read my weekly feature in the Catholic Times, which tackles the various feast-days as they come along!) and just managed to click "send" before my time ran out and the computer automatically switched off and the library closed for lunch. This really is a slightly nerve-wracking way to work! I went to an Internet cafe and ordered a sandwich. They are beginning to know me rather well in here.