I got home from Budapest at 10 pm on Sunday night. The Easyjet flight was faultless - it left Budapest right on time and arrived at Gatwick around 20 minutes early. But then I had to contend with hot and overcrowded trains to get home. The train from Gatwick airport to London had four carriages - but the people waiting to get on would have completely filled eight or more carriages. And it was a Sunday, so engineering works meant diversions and crawling through all sorts of sharply curved railway by-ways of south London.

The European Public Information Management Seminar (EPIMS) had generally gone well. I appreciated the greater focus on practical training and felt that I had had the opportunity to learn some new stuff, especially on handling complexity and challenging questions about the Faith, and on the use of the web for Baha’i public information.

You can download notes from my EPIMS presentations on Interfaith Dialogue, Handling Challenging Questions, and on Public Speaking.

London was infernally hot yesterday (Monday). The temperature maxed at 32?C in parts of London. I had a meeting of the Westminster Agreed Syllabus Conference on the 17th floor of Westminster City Hall in the morning (deciding on the Religious Education syllabus to be adopted in the borough - the new syllabus will include a unit of work on the Baha’i Faith). The air conditioning was delicious and the 17th floor of Westminster City Hall has one of the better views over London. However, in the afternoon I chaired a meeting at the offices of the British Humanist Association in Gower Street. (This was a meeting of a working group of the Religion and Belief Consultative Group to plan an away-day meeting for the RBCG, hosted by the transition team of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights).

It was so hot at the BHA offices that it was difficult to think and we all struggled to keep going. The Underground was horrendous, hot and crowded - and parts of it shut down because of signal failures and power failures. We seem unable to keep anything going whenever we have what passes for extreme weather here.

It was slightly cooler today, but rather more humid, and there was a spectacular downpour of rain with a few cracks of thunder during the afternoon. I was chairing a meeting of the RBCG in the Church of England’s temporary offices, across the road from the Eurostar platforms at Waterloo Station. Cascades of water poured down the glass roof, overwhelming the stormwater drains.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, human rights, inter-faith, interfaith, London, public information, public speaking, religious education, summer, trains, UK