Pancakes again for breakfast today, plus a couple of rashers of bacon from a packet opened a few days ago, an extra treat! There were more outbreaks of heavy rain, plus enough respite time to have a good walk in the park. I've been trying to figure out a setting in which to video the next batch of Morning Prayer videos. It's rather tricky to set anything up that looks good in the favoured portrait display mode, due to the phone camera's field of view at close range. I've cleared Clare's desk to make space for an icon, a big candle in a red vessel and an open bible. but positioning the phone to block avoid home office-like surroundings and having room to show my face as well is really frustrating. I have to record on the phone in one take so distribute via What'sApp. Anything edited on another device or taken with a proper camera doesn't render correctly when transferred back to the phone and I can't figure out why. You have to work with what you've got, however. And I can, with a bit more patience.
At tea time I had my appointment at the Heath Hospital, driving over there in the dark, and parking at the house of Vanessa and Keith, friends from St John's City Parish, to walk into the campus rather than risk not being able to park. I could have chanced it as the hospital turned out to be pretty quiet at that time of day, and during a pandemic. I was twenty minutes early and ushered in straight away. I had to change into a clinical theater gown, before going into the scan room for a briefing, and kitted out with ear defenders, as the equipment is very noisy. The twenty nine minute sequence of scans, pairs of three, then four five and six minutes at different frequencies is a strange sci-fi like experience. Amazing imaging technology, invented and developed to a high degree of sophistication from scratch over the past sixty years. What a time to be alive.
When I returned to get my my car, I chatted with Vanessa and Keith on the doorstep for five minutes. It had just been announced on the phone that the lifting of meeting and travel restrictions for the Christmas feast has been cancelled nationally, because of the rapid surge of infections caused by the new contagious variant of covid-19. The changes come into effect at midnight tonight. I'm not surprised. Fortunately, church services haven't been cancelled, yet. This could have been foreseen a few days earlier. Such short notice will be create havoc, not just for families planning Christmas gatherings, but also for businesses which are already in an advanced stage of preparation and delivery of Christmas dinners.
Not much of interest to watch on telly this evening, so I worked on my New Year's Eve reflection and Morning Prayer combined video script. Very hard to keep within the optimum eight minutes. I tried a few experimental recordings, but wasn't satisfied with the result, and went to bed, not quite as late as usual.
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