Mad Dogs and Englishmen

After the midweek mass on Tuesday I went to the café opposite the church and sat in their 'garden room' to contemplate what I might say in the sermon for the recorded service this week. The cane chairs, basket in the centre, the bamboo growing up the wall and the rattan sunscreen all gave the space a vaguely colonial air, and I wondered whether I ought to have been wearing a sola topi rather than a panama. In the past I've been tempted to buy a sola topi but wasn't sure the number of occasions I might wear it would justify it. Strangely one of the congregation told me this week that he'd been at school with the explorer John Blashford-Snell who always wears a sola topi when he goes on expedition, which he still does in his eighties. I met him when I worked for the Royal Engineers which regiment he belonged to and where he was universally referred to as Blashers. 'That wasn't what we called him at school,' Francois told me, 'but I'd better not share that'.

As an elderly couple were leaving the café they came to speak to me, spotting my collar. They used to live in Swanvale Halt many years ago and were complimentary about the improvements since that time of which the café was one. Then the woman let on that she had predicted the arrival of the pandemic long before it happened. 'It's one of the Seven Plagues, you see'. Covid, unlike the first of the seven plagues of Revelation, isn't accompanied by sores and boils, but I thought it would be fruitless to get into that. Thankfully I had some coffee left.