Saturday Outings

A trip with the new camera to Dyffryn House and Gardens this morning. It's as much a pleasure to hold as the Alpha 55, quicker to focus, and offers photos to play with which are 50% larger. I used my 18-55 kit lens around the house and gardens, and switched to the 18-280mm telephoto lens at the end of lunch in the cafe, to snap birds feeling at the table outside the window. This was where I was most hoping the upgrade would be worth it. I wasn't disappointed. An excellent longish lens and high-res photo size will produce better results than the HX300 with three times the magnification and 20% smaller file size, as it can focus and shoot faster. Learning how to get the best of this combination is going to be a photographic adventure for me.

The Gardens are mostly tidied up for winter, and bulb planting has been done With such a variety of trees, even without leaves they add colour to the landscape. Some are budding earlier than usual and winter flowering specials are already about their business. The vegetable garden is an array of vivid rows of green and purple Brassica varieties, with a dash of orange. An amusing sculpture trail with pieces themed on the song 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' is laid out, for children of all ages to discover with the map provided. Such a delightful way to sustain visitor interest in a quieter part of the year.

In the evening, we went to a concert performance of Fauré's Requiem, which was meant to be at Eglwys Dewi Sant, but had to be switched to nearby City URC due to a church heating breakdown. The choir had evidently rehearsed hard, but the last minute switch of venue can't have helped. It was accompanied by piano and organ. For acoustic balance, the organ could have done with being more in the background, not so much loudness but choice of stops used. The choir lacked the emotional energy to make the performance sparkle. I couldn't help wondering how many choristers, mostly of a certain age, were familiar with the meaning of the text, and where it fits in Christian devotion, and in Fauré's case, theological discussion, as he had a slightly unorthodox take on its finer meaning. 

Ours was the liberalising post war generation when the influence of established Christianity and religion in general on society became noticeable, and this affected education and religious literacy. Controversy over the critical interpretation of scripture simply led to more ordinary people being deterred from taking seriously or receiving its inheritance of biblical and liturgical information. Ignorance, like a disease has spread down the generations since, and affects attitudes to many things including classical music. People of any kind of informed committed religious faith are perhaps no more than ten percent of the UK population these days. There's an awful lot of muddled religious belief out there, as well as agnosticism and ideological atheism. The muddled that worry me most.

When we returned from the concert, I watched the French crimmie 'Witnesses - Frozen' on BBC Four, have seen last weeks episode on iPlayer, earlier in the week. I had a most annoying time trying and failing to convince the telly that I was an already registered iPlayer user. Perhaps it would  have helped to get the password right, still on a piece pf paper on my desk, and not in my password book. But, it still let me watch, so really what's the point?

The French spoken is mostly with a Pas-de-Calais, if not Wallonian accent, nice and clear to follow, not quite making the subtitles redundant, but rather making them less than vital to keep up with the dialogue. I'm not convinced about the practical plausibility of the plot, about a serial killer with ritual magic and child sacrifice overtones. Too many lingering shots of women staring aimlessly. I've not returned to watch the second series of the previous Spanish crimmie, as it had become so implausible as to be annoying. So much for entertaining Spanish conversation listening practice.