...and so...

...on to a busy Sunday. After Mass, I hurried to the college where I am doing some post-graduate work, intending to send in my latest essay. One has to do this electronically, so I had arranged to do it on a Sunday afternoon when the Library is open and with few people there, so I could get the Help Needed for a Useless Woman Who Worries About Computer Things.  And the kind young librarians couldn't have been more helpful, but it turned out that for various reasons I couldn't deposit my essay yet. Gulp. Panic. A sudden overwhelming longing for the days when one could write - or type - something out and hand it in. Just like that. No computer, no magic electronic thingummy, no hassle. Just me writing and some one reading...

Anyway, we sorted something out and I browsed to find something stimulating to read on the bus. A book by an ex-Jesuit, writing in the early 1970s, assured me that "long before the year 2000 there will be no recognisable Catholic Church in the world..." which was amusing to read having spent the weekend at a big Blessed Sacrament Procession through London, followed by a busy Sunday parish Mass teeming with noisy children, while meanwhile in Rome crowds attended a beatification...oh, and I was en route to visit an elderly relative at a beautiful Catholic nursing home: when I arrived she was enjoying supper under the benevolent smile of a framed pic of the Pope.

Oddly enough, the Catholic Church is one of the things that hasn't disappeared, when so much else has: big red-brick Post Offices, public libraries, the Iron Curtain (Deo Gratias!), half-crowns (and florins, and sixpences..), people saying "wireless" and "greengrocers", telephones with dials, brown paper bags, and those old cash tills that opened with a pleasing TING.

I chose a book about Dr Michael Ramsey, an insight into the old CofE of the early and mid-20th century, got a cup of coffee from the student canteen, and settled at the bus-stop.