Midsummer sadness

The longest day of the year, warm, bright and sunny despite clouds decorating the sky interestingly. Clare had to go and help at the Steiner School summer fair. I went for a walk and later joined her to have lunch at school and chat with various people. Then we drove out to the St Fagan's National Museum of Welsh life for a walk around the delightful and beautifully maintained italianate gardens of St Fagan's Castle, busy as ever with people enjoying one of Cardiff's best free visitor venues.
 

On the way out, through the gift shop I found and bought a newly published Gomer Press book of photographs, with text in English by Damien Walford Davies and in Welsh by key bi-lingual Carmarthen writer Meredydd Hopwood. It's called 'Poet's Graves', a black and white photo expedition to the last resting places of seventy one Welsh poets from antiquity to yesterday. Each picture is accompanied by vivid poetic prose in both tongues, It may sound like a morbid theme, but it's a beautiful statement about people whose seminal words have best defined landscape over centuries. Many of the places portrayed I have visited at one time or another, being a cleric and having spent seven years in ministry visiting parishes in the length and breadth of our 'Gwlad beirdd a chantorion'. This book gives me both pride and pleasure in being a native of Wales.

After supper, we settled down to watch the final episode of the last series of Wallander recounting the detective's last case before he has to retire, victim of early onset Alzheimer's disease. Throughout this series the portrayal of his decline has been a tribute not only to the acting of Krister Hendrickson but also to the sensitivity of the production team in airing one of the crucial issues of our time.
 

The series ending was sad, but nonetheless impressive - not in a pool of blood in a final shoot-out - that would have been a cinematic way of stating that violence has the last word. Wallander retains his dignity, and is seen at peace surrounded by family, yet he has freedom and independence, until presumably he can no longer look after himself. In the parting shots he is not not yet ravaged to helplessness by the disease, but left in the winter of life on the cold ocean shore. His eventual dying and death lie outside the story of his achievements as a champion of truth and justice. In dramatic terms, this fictional character, so real in many ways, is allowed to defy the maxim: 'If it can be seen, it must be seen'.  We're none the worse for that.

It's so good to have a dramatic production that speaks about the blighting effect of Alzheimer's on a gifted individual in an age when more people are getting older and living with sickness and weakness for longer. The prospects for old age are nothing but scary when you start losing your powers, and society is a better place when this is universally recognised, understood and provided for. I wonder if any of the perpetrators of violence both great and small ever consider what may happen to them before making victims of others?