The time slot for the delivery was 8.00am to 6.00pm and when I telephoned the delivery company for more information I was told it was 9.00am to 5.00pm. I could have had an extra hour in bed.

I hung a notice on the door knocker that read, ‘Delivery. Please press the bell long and hard.’ I wanted to be any to do some gardening and not miss the delivery. I need not have bothered as at about 11.30 I had a phone call from the delivery driver telling me she was parked around the corner. I explained where I lived and she said it would not be a problem to bring the delivery, a new garden bench, to my garage.

We met at the garage and straight away she asked, with a friendly smile, “Where are you from?” I said, “Guess!” She answered, without hesitation, “New Zealand.” I then asked where she was from and she told me – the Bay of Plenty.

We had a very pleasant time comparing experiences and what we felt about London. A passer by helped us get the bulky bench into the garage and my fellow country woman graciously declined a tip for her trouble.

That was a sign of the New Zealand I remember as well as the friendliness. The new garden bench looks very fine.

I realised how like my father and my eldest brother I am becoming when, having received help from a young attendant at Kennington Station topping up a travel card, I went on to ask about her life and to tell her what I was doing and where I was going – to the Oval Farmers’ Market.

She listened politely, feigned interest in my narrative and answered my questions patiently. It was only when I noticed her glance towards another customer who needed attention that I realised that I was ‘going on’ a bit.

My father used to do it all the time wherever he was in the world – talk and listen to complete strangers – and I am told that my brother does it as he walks each morning to his local café in Geraldine New Zealand for his morning coffee .

What strikes me, on reflection, is how understanding, patient and kind most people, especially the young, are to those of us who are old.

I will try and curtail the habit but it may be a ‘condition’ from which I cannot escape.

Incidentally. A travel card in London is called an ‘Oyster’ card; for the sky train in Bangkok it’s a ‘Rabbit’; in Hong Kong its an Octopus; in Beijing it’s a Yikatong and I have no idea what that means.

A nephew, his wife and some of their family came to dinner on Tuesday. They live in New Zealand at Mount Peel in the house where I grew up. It was such a good evening and we were able to be in the garden for the whole evening. The two of them are off walking in the Dolomites this week. Last year they climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

As a child I skated on the rink at Mount Harper in the winter and in the summer we picnicked at the Willows surrounded by the peaks of the Southern Alps, the Two Thumbs Range and the Butler Range, the same mountains that were filmed for Lord of he Rings.

Recently I went back to St Mary Abbots, where I had served as curate, for the funeral of a good friend. One of the readings was from a letter by Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, 30th January 1801.

‘I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into Cumberland… but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey… I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.’

In my love of London it seems I am not alone.

While sorting through papers and note books to put them into some sort of order I have found some long forgotten bits.

Sometime in the 1970s I helped organise an annual festival – chiefly of music and theatre – in Peel Forest. I have found the whole programme for one of the evening entertainments in the Peel Forest Hall. Each item, with notes, is in a school exercise book.

As well as an excerpt from Daisy Ashford’s ‘The Young Visiters’, Ngaio Marsh reading from Dickens, a limerick which begins ‘There was a young maiden from Joppa’ and finishes, ‘And the rest of the story’s improper,’ the programme included this poem ‘By the Time’ read by the actress Judie Douglass.

By the time you say you’re his,    Shivering and sighing,

And he vows his passion is,          Infinite, undying –

Lady, make a note of this,              One of you is lying.   

And, on a piece of writing paper from an earlier address something which I think is from a letter to me from Bishop Godfrey Wilson one time Bishop of Auckland a good friend and guide, this:

‘To one who knows how to wait all things are sooner or later revealed, on the condition that he has the courage never to deny in times of darkness the things which he himself witnessed a in times of light.’

And on the same piece of paper but not, I think, from the same source:

‘Only embraced endings permit new beginnings. Those who do not face the endings will not receive the beginnings.’

I understand fractionally more about Artificial Intelligence than I did before thanks to an interview on BBC’s Radio 4 with Sir Tony Blair. In the interview Blair likened what is happening to our world with the discovery and development of A.I. to the Industrial Revolution.

This new revolution, I now understand, is happening and will happen. There will be positive results because of it and negative as well. It is not going to go away, it is affecting my life now and will continue to do so. It is not something I can ignore on the grounds that it will only matter to my children and grandchildren.

Last Sunday, Trinity Sunday, I preached a very short sermon at St Agnes. I needed to keep it short because the annual general meeting followed after the service. My theme was that we are made in the image of the One God who is a relationship of love – a Community of love in Unity.

I said, and believe, that it is in relationship that we find joy and fulfillment. True relationship is about reality not artifice of artificiality. In the midst of my short sermon I heard myself saying, ‘If losing your phone becomes more important than losing a friend then you’ve  lost your way.’

We will survive and benefit from A.I., I believe, as long as we differentiate between what is real and what is artificial and choose to live in the reality.

P.S. An apology. High Society is, of course, Cole Porter not Irving Berlin. I don’t know how Berlin’s ‘Having a Heatwave’ made its way in. The heatwave is over in London. It’s been cold and wet.