I have been...

...in Yorkshire (of which more later) and before that in Balham, where I went to a Sunday Mass at Holy Ghost parish . Glorious music - a particularly beautiful setting of "O Sacrament most Holy...".Lots of young families - young dads holding babies, mums and/or older siblings struggling with straying toddlers.

I've also been to a committee meeting of The Keys, the Catholic Writers' Guild. If you are a teenager and want to enter for the 2010 Catholic Young Writer Award, you have exactly six days left in which to do so. This year it is jointly sponsored with the Catholic Union... which incidentally had its Summer Party the other day, at Allen Hall, a great success, good discussions, much strong feeling expressed about defending our Catholic schools and their right to teach the fullness of Catholic faith and morals. Allen Hall stands on the site of St Thomas More's garden, and the significance of his message was not lost on anyone...

From a number of different sources, I've been hearing reports of the huge success of INVOCATION, the great event for Catholic young people at Oscott. I hope the Holy Father hears about it all on his visit...there are many signs of hope in the Church in Britain. We need them, as there are going to be renewed attacks on the Church as the Papal visit draws near...

For various reasons, I left my bike at a friend's house in Balham...collected it the other evening and after a delicious and talkative supper we ended up chatting and laughing outside, with another friend, in the warm summer night, and then I cycled home through the South London streets, following the straight road that was already old when the Normans arrived, and beneath which the Northern line tube follows along the same ancient route. Late at night, when the mosques and shops, bazaars and street vendors, pubs and clubs and schools and offices are not functioning, you notice older things - the sudden appearance of the River Wandle alongside the supermarket before it goes off agreeably into a local park, the hints of ancient Merton Priory (links with St Thomas Becket, who studied there as a boy), and with Lord Nelson (who of course was given Merton after his early victories and is now honoured in local pub signs and street-names, and the old Nelson Hospital)...

Here at home, the grass is crunchy-brown on our small lawn, the apple tree grown from a tiny cutting brought from Fernyhalgh is laden with fruit, phone calls go back and forth with plans for a dear nephew's wedding later this summer, and trips to the Isle of Wight and to Somerset...and in between all this I'm reading and reading for my next set of Maryvale exams, and so the summer goes on...