Another uninviting rainy overcast day. I fell sound asleep after saying morning prayer following breakfast for nearly an hour and a half. I think I'm going into hibernation mode! As Clare said, I must need the extra time out, as the post-op bruising has been quite painful these past few days, though it is subsiding now.
Finally I got around to making a batch of annual charitable donations in-line, using a debit card which I don't often use for this purpose. The first two payments went through OK, the bank security system stalled on the third. I called their hotline and the robot asked for account details and a telephone banking security number. I'm not sure I ever set one for this account, but used one I thought might be correct if I ever did. After three tries I was locked out of the system but got through to a real human being, who was patient and friendly towards a highly irate me.
It seems that HSBC's 'Verified by Visa' security routine for card payments has changed, now texting a one time pass-code for any transaction to your mobile number, a routine I'm used to with Santander Bank. Once sorted out, the third payment went through automatically, and I was able to make a fourth using the new system immediately. I also registered for voice recognition i/d to save hassles with security PIN codes in future. It seems my account details didn't include my mobile phone number, even though I've had that number since I was given my first phone, an old Nokia, back in 2001. When I start the phone, it still displays 'Orange F' before switching to EE, as the phone was first registered to me when we were in Monaco. A curious but treasured quirk of my personal tech' history.
In the afternoon, the rain slackened to a drizzle and then stopped once we'd put on our rain trousers for a walk around the park together, but it remained dark and overcast. Two lines of autumnal poetry have been going around in my head recently, things I learned in school, but couldn't properly recall, let alone identify the authors. Clare's memory was equally deficient, although she too had studied them, either in school or University.
I yielded to the temptation to google the respective lines, and found that one was the opening line of Grey's Elegy in a Country Churchyard: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. The other line was from an autumnal Shakespeare sonnet: Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. That's a good description of most of the big trees in park now. It was lovely to re-connect with these classic poems sixty years after O Level English.
We watched a lovely nature programme on S4C in the evening shot entirely in low light conditions after sunset and before dawn around the year, showcasing in spectacular video footage the range of nocturnal creatures that inhabit the wilder parts of Wales. Hedgehogs are the exception. The rural population has decreased worryingly, whereas numbers in domestic gardens and urban parks have grown, perhaps due to the greater biodiversity they conserve, and the willingness of householders to feed them. There are foxes too, well established in urban areas, where they raid rubbish bins for food like the hordes of gulls that no longer live on our sea shores but forage and breed inland, and make a nuisance of themselves.
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