Celebrating yesteryear

Watching Angela's funeral on-line yesterday meant missing the first Eucharist at St Catherine since the restrictions were lifted, so I went to St John's this morning and joined a dozen others for the service. It's over a month since I was able to go there and so lovely to be welcomed back by the regulars. 

Afterwards, I bought some flowers for Clare before going home to cook lunch. She's still busy recording videos of her self for the Carnival Band community choir contribution to their virtual concert. When I copied the trial files from her phone on to her laptop, the sound quality of some of the videos was poor as if a fault is developing. It may mean she needs a new phone, but in the meanwhile, mine can be put to use, when she makes another attempt tomorrow.

She drove to Llanrumney for a hairdo appointment with Chris after an early lunch. I intended to go out early for a walk, but fell asleep and lost an hour. At four we were due to watch another on-line interview arranged by the WNO Partners programme, so I only had three quarters of an hour to walk to Blackweir Bridge and back, but that was enough to meet my current exercise target of the day. The conversation was about theatrical staging in the different genres, theatre, musical theatre and opera. Quite fascinating to hear what creative interpreters of text and libertto have to take into account with different performers and productions.

I see from the news feeds that Trump's lawyers are encountering strong criticism as well as dismissal of of his claims of electoral fraud, as there is no supporting evidence beyond hearsay. One postal worker who did claim to be witness to a fraud has since recanted, saying his story was false. Trump's inner circle are said to be trying to persuade him to admit defeat but so far he hasn't conceded victory. He is however talking about a possible future in broadcasting aiming at destroying Fox news, once his number one fan base, and now among his critics. His immediate future occupation is most likely to be determined by the criminal lawsuits which will be brought against him when he steps down. His billion dollar empire may well come crashing down around him as a result. A guy who has always been a winner and never a loser in the end will pay for the mistakes he refused to admit or learn from.

After supper BBC Four showed the 1949 musical 'On the Town' with a very young looking Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, with some superb set piece song and dance routines, shot in glorious 'technicolor' and a few location shots of New York. The music is by Leonard Bernstein, and you can hear melodic traces and harmonic suggestions of his later masterpiece 'West Side Story' in the score. Like old colour photographs colour movies of this era have a natural quality about them. They are gentler on the eye than modern digital colour rendering. I can understand why there's a resurgence interest in using colour film for photography and then digitizing the result, and why more sophisticated digital cameras have settings which emulate the look of images taken yesteryear. 

The movie was followed by a historical documentary on the Queen Mary liner, now residing in Long Beach California and used as a hotel and museum, a major tourist attraction. Its classic twentieth century high quality interior design evokes the era of leisurely travel in days before high speed air travel for the masses became routine. The pandemic has decimated the new holiday for the masses cruise industry and many ships have been retired early and sent for scrapping, while scores of others wait at anchor offshore until their future can be determined. But it's not only the pandemic that casts a cloud over their future. It is now being noticed what huge carbon footprint cruise lines with several thousand passengers generates. Is a sustainable future possible without returning to the drawing board? Time will tell.