In London today...

...the mood was normal, cheerful, and rain-washed.Yesterday I phoned friends in Battersea to ask how things were going. It had been frightening, C. admitted, but now people were gathering with brooms and brushes to clean things up.

Pics in the Evening Standard of clean-up operations, and of people donating food, clothing, and cash for those who have lost their homes and livelihoods.

To St Mary Moorfields for a committee meeting of the Catholic Writers' Guild. We had a great number of entries for our 2011 Catholic Young Writer Award (run jointly w. the Catholic Union): all have now been read and some preliminary selections made ...discussions with the Master of the Guild, Mary Kenny, re this. It's the biggest number of entries ever, and the overall standard is high. (Theme was love, marriage, Cana, Christian teaching on love and family - ref. Papal encyclicals of JPII and BXVI.We chose this becuse of the Royal Wedding, and it seems to have struck a chord.)

Phone interview w. Relevant Radio Catholic TV station in the USA, talking about the riots...

Stayed on at St MM's for Adoration, the Rosary - it was Thursday, so the Luminous Mysteries, which I love - Evening Prayer, and Benediction. Home, walking through the City, past the Bank of England and then St Paul's churchyard, which is a feast of roses at the moment.

London cool and rainy and pleasant. Madrid next week will be boiling hot, but I am looking forward to being part of World Youth Day. C's daughter is among the big team of young people attending led by a South London priest - teens and 20s, a mix of races, some seminarians, school pupils, college and university students, nuns...

I was gloomy the other day, felt that the Britain I knew was just going to be a distant memory, that things felt alien. "Do you think" said the priest to whom I was chatting "that when St Augustine wrote the City of God in the collapsing Roman empire, he felt that he was at the end of something, or the beginning of something new?"