Ash Wednesday

After an unusually good night's sleep, only having to get up twice in the night instead of four tines I had breakfast, then read Morning Prayer, Litany and Eucharist. Clare met Emma returning from her walk and was given a special Ash Wednesday prayer card with cross drawn in ashes on it. A nice gesture on the part of the clergy team. 

I received a delivery of fish for freezing from Ashtons while Clare was out. The bones filleted out of the salmon get turned into a fabulous soup. The house smells of fish soup during into the evening. And there's a treat of laver bread with bacon for supper. Not exactly abstinence, but certainly something to give extra thanks for. The must be extra room for praise and gratitude in a season of penitence.

Clare asked me to pay for the order using our secure on-line banking set up. It's not something I do often and in between times forget exactly how it works. The action buttons menu is clear enough when you know where it is and what you're looking for. I didn't, and tapped something that ende up in an endless maze of information pages with no route back. I had to log out and start again, which rather uoset me. My suspicion that inconsistent web behaviour, is a result of accidentally running into a malicious intervention runs very high, even on a site with high security entrance protocols. A glitch in data flow is usually the cause of anomalies, or else poorly designed pages using esoteric terms, but these also happen with malicious sites. It all feels to me like hostile territory nowadays. Perhaps I know too much about web security issues to trust and rely on cyber things.

I spent the morning trying to get Linux to work on an old Netbook having reinstalled it and then found the hard drive wasn't recognised. A hardware fault? Or an Installation error due to the hateful early UEFI firmware being improperly configured? I had to physically remove the drive and check it on another device using a hard drive caddy. No hardware errors, found. I downloaded the latest version of Linux Mint and used it mounted on a USB card to do a fresh netbook install. This time it was bootable despite throwing a system boot error first. Something to do with UEFI.

The system functioned but couldn't be updated. It wouldn't accept root password I'd assigned to it. It's so frustrating, I'll have to reinstall and reset, if I can figure out where I've gone wrong. Something to do when I'm not busy.

Light rain came at the end of the morning and persisted non-stop into the evening. It was quite mild and there was no wind, but walking over to and then around Victoria Park, then crossing over to Llandaff Fields was a miserable wearing experience, as if I was carrying a heavy load. I was tired when I got back, and hadn't walked as far as I thought, but my rainwear was sodden. I went out again after supper when the rain had reduced to a drizzle, to complete my daily distance in the dark.

Later, we watched another interesting archaeological programme on More Four. In suburban Newcastle upon Tyne there once stood a Roman fort. The sight was partly excavated before the houses were built, and the site of its gatehouse was left exposed. An investigative team came to the area with a theoretical maps of the fort and the civilian settlement adjacent to it, with a view to digging exploratory trenches in people's back gardens to search for evidence to confirm the mapping. Local residents were happy to give permission and took a great interest in the findings. 

It brought to light the history of how in the couple of centuries after it was built and established as a garrison gateway in Hadrian's wall, the civilian settlement grew up and over time grew closer to the fort itself. The findings suggested a prosperous cosmopolitan community had flourished there until the Romans retreated from Britain in the third century. I wonder what will be left to show of our settlements in two thousand years from now, given the threats to existence from pandemics and global warming we now face?