Exeter stopover

Yesterday I celebrated the midweek Eucharist at St Catherine's again, and was pleased to learn that Mike, whose operation in the same week as mine was cancelled, had finally been operated upon on Monday just gone. It sounded like something pretty trick and difficult to do well. He'll be in possibly for a few weeks, but came though it as well as possible. Something extra for us to pray about.

This morning, I stood in for Emma again at St John's, as she'd been in hospital with suspicious pains in need of checking out yesterday. It sounds like a shoulder or rib-cage injury which can be quite disabling to cope with ordinary tasks. Afterwards, I returned home and packed my rucksack for our trip to Dawlish to attend Auntie Daphne's funeral, taking place in the Parish Church of St Gregory, which she used to attend, before she needed sheltered accommodation.

I went to the wound clinic on my way to the station to meet with Clare, then took a bus which got me there with ten minutes to spare. We had a half hour wait for a connecting train in Bristol Temple Meads, and then another hour's journey to Exeter St David's to stop overnight in the Great Western Hotel, conveniently located at the far end of the station car park. I think it's probably a nineteenth century hotel which consumed and converted neighbouring properties as it expanded. It's not been structurally modified and could really do with a makeover, the rooms although clean, look like they could do with renovation, but the bed was comfortable and it was quiet, and that's what matters.

I left the hotel at half past five, to take advantage of the remaining light of the day, walking up the hill to the city centre, and through to the Cathedral. Evensong was nearing its end and the caretaker had closed the visitor entrance. Nevertheless, I got some good townscape and Cathedral exterior photos. Some of the buildings, from their facades, date back to the 17-18th century. Work has begun on re-building the Georgian Royal Clarence hotel in Cathedral Yard, after the catastrophic fire which gutted its interior on October 28th 2016. The aim is to restore its facade, but I daresay that a lot of modifications to the interior layout will be required not only for fire safety but also to the kind of accommodation offered, even if all the public rooms resume their former splendour eventually. This isn't unusual where old buildings are concerned, thinking of what's happening at this moment with the Custom House building near Cardiff Central Station, of which only the 19th century facade remains.

Sister in law Ann arrived at the hotel an hour after we did, then in the evening John Muir and two of his sons Tim and Andrew came to Exeter from Dawlish, where they are staying a few days in a farmhouse AirBnb for the funeral. They joined us for supper at the magnificent Imperial Hotel, just up the hill from our hotel. This is a big building dating from 1810 with a very fine cast iron arched Orangery on a grand scale dating from 1897. The ground floor public rooms of the building are given over to dining areas, able to accommodate hundreds.

It's a Wetherspoon's institution, run with huge efficiency. All our food and drinks were ordered by Tim using the company's smartphone app, and amazingly, within fifteen minutes of finding a table for the six of us, our food hand drinks had been served, hot and freshly cooked. Very impressive, even if I won't ever agree with its pro-brexit founder Tim Martin's political stance. Sure you can run a successful business around the use of a well designed app, good logistics and staff teams with a sense of mission and shared identity as good as any small army, but this solution doesn't necessarily scale up to running an entire nation's trading interface with the rest of Europe and the world. The more variables and uncertainties there are, the more complex systems become, and less easy to manage by throwing more material or algorithmic resources at it - remember catastrophe theory? It hasn't gone away. In fact the whole brexit political and economic debacle show the danger of not taking this risk factor into account.