This was the first Sunday morning in recent times when it rained hard when we were setting out for the Parish Eucharist. Even so there were as many people in church this week as last, undeterred by weather. Mother Frances preached about the impossibility of organising a perfect Christmas dinner, despite one's plans and best efforts, because, she reminded us, we're not perfect. Then she turned to the John's Gospel passage for the day about the testimony of John the Baptist to the Messiah, and how when questioned as to whether he was the One to come insisted "I am not.". No matter how gifted and competent we each may be, we are not perfect, not God. A good point worth making in a world which entertains the idea of superheroes not only in comic book mythology but in everyday life where popular stars are idolised.
At home afterwards, I received an email from Sara in Gothenburg with a web-link to the Swedish telly annual broadcast on the morning of Sta Lucia. It's an hour of Advent and Christmas Anthems and Carols sung by an excellent youth choir and by a group of primary school kids. The teens, in white ceremonial dresses sang to camera, socially distanced as one might expect. I seem to recall this was what happened in previous Sta Lucia day concerts, as all the girl choristers are carrying candles! It's set in the hour around dawn, whether live or not I don't know, but it's enchantingly beautiful.
It makes me realise just how close we are musically across the North Sea. Not least because so many Scandi composers have studied and worked in Britain I suppose. Melodies, influences, composers, the style, the energy in singing - I love the warm soft edged tone to the voices, clear yet tonally precise, distinctive, different from the UK young choral sound. A pre-luncheon Gaudete Sunday treat, and great tonic for the week leading up to winter solstice.
I didn't realise until later in the day when I heard on a radio programme that 13th December in the Julian Calendar was Winter Solstice. This explains something of the significance of the candlelight ceremony that is a popular feature of Scandinavian culture.
I went out for my afternoon walk in the rain. It then stopped for an hour, and started again as I headed home, but at least it wasn't cold, and the wind wasn't strong. The Taff was swollen and the fish ladder by Blackweir bridge almost inundated. The field of football pitches to the north west side of the bridge was filled with an unusually large number of white gulls with grey wings, a couple of thousand of them, all feeding in large groups and moving around the field. Our usual urban gulls are bigger and to see them in such very large numbers in one place ground feeding would be that typical, except at a rubbish dump. So I concluded after seeing photos on-line that they were herring gulls on the move between fishing spots, maybe thrown off course by the weather.
The bare trees in the avenue alongside Pontcanna Fields was thronged with several hundred birds, not so unusual just before sunset, although normally large numbers got to roost in woodland the other side of the Taff, and can be seen there in large numbers visible from afar. But not many starlings around at the moment. I wonder where they are? Walking past the two crab apple trees I noticed one tree had been stripped bare, and the other still had a lot of berries, higher than we could reach when we harvested fruit from the lower branches back in October. There were a dozen or so in the grass, unspoiled, so I picked them up and brought them home. It's a puzzle, that one tree should be stripped presumably by birds, and the other only raided by humans. The stripped one is closer to other trees, so the leaf cover would shield birds from predators while picking, whereas the other was more exposed, only worth the risk when food becomes really scarce later on.
In the evening I watched a police procedural drama on ITV based on a real life murder called 'Honour' and the difficulties of investigating the honour killing of a twenty year old woman by members of her family, including her father and an uncle of Iraqi Kurdish origin. Painful to watch, and to think that it's not uncommon for long standing residents of Britain could harbour such violent and vengeful impulses towards family members, immune to the influence of a host community which offered them security freedom and self respect. Not that the UK is a stranger to its own variations on gender based violence, of course. How do we rid our world of every kind of interpersonal violence when it's so persistent. and the subject of so many games and movies that entertain us?
No comments:
Post a Comment