Sunshine to start the day and I was awake early and posting my Morning Prayer link before 'Thought for the Day' for a change. I walked to St John's to celebrate the Eucharist in honour of St Patrick along with six others. When I returned I got on with preparing next week's Morning Prayer reflection, as I had some ideas to work with. about the content of text from the end of the Joseph saga.
After lunch I recorded and edited the audio. It was an unusually long and slightly repetitive passage which needed a little redaction. It was only when I'd recorded it that I realised that I'd not picked up correctly a few crucial details from the text and this introduced errors into my commentary on it, so this needed editing and re-recording to make sense.
Funny, that's not the sort of mistake I normally make, but to be honest the last chapter of the story was dauntingly long, although it did have a couple of relevant points to make use of. I do enjoy the task of explaining a text to an audience and making it interesting and worthwhile paying attention to, even if on times it can be daunting.
It's lovely to have longer afternoons again, and not having to go out quite to early to avoid walking in the dark. Sunset is twenty past six now. I had a reminder from Frank's wife Carmen that my friend from our days in Bristol University is 79 today. They retired to live in Puerto Rico on the edge of sub tropical jungle a decade ago. They'd love to welcome us there, but we can't afford to travel so far afield any longer. So we exchange messages in Spanish instead.
With the war in Ukraine pushing up commodity prices, we'll need to be very careful with our money in the next few years, and our European travel ambitions will be very restricted, if at all. We're fortunate to live in such a beautiful country that's relatively small and diverse geographically. A lot to be thankful for.
Nothing much of interest on telly tonight, which gave me an opportunity to practice Spanish and write to Frank. The news from Ukraine after three weeks of onslaught continues to be distressing, outrageous. The Russian ground offensive has made no progress, so cities are being bombarded and destroyed by guided missiles instead, and the loss of life on both sides continues to mount.
Preliminaries for peace negotiations continue, details of the agenda for face to face talks are beginning to emerge - neutrality, no affiliation with NATO, as expected, protection for the Russian language, a crackdown on neo-nazis in the country, and inevitably, formal recognition for the breakaway republics of Donetz and Lugansk in Donbass. The destructive brutal siege of the port city of Mariupol continues to take thousands of civilian lives. It's key to the Russians driving a land corridor between the two areas to unite them. If Odessa is also captured, Ukraine will be landlocked, and that will change its economic and fortunes significantly. No wonder citizens are fighting so fiercely.
The language issue on the peace agenda is interesting. Ukrainian is an older iteration of Russian, with regional variations. Under the USSR it was suppressed in favour of modern Russian, but since Ukraine got back its independence after the break up of the USSR, a resurgence of traditional Ukrainian language has taken place, suffice it to say, many if not most Ukrainians are bi-lingual, and there's no question of Russian being suppressed. It's about what Putin thinks happened beyond his control, not the reality.
Two key actors in mediation between Russia and Ukraine at the moment are revealed to be Erduan, the Turkish President and Bennett, Prime Minister of Israel. Both countries have interesting if questionable relationships with Putin's regime, from which undoubtedly they benefit. But in the end are they no more than 'useful idiots' in Putin's cynical playbook. Putin is determined to get where he wants by force, but he didn't bargain for such resistance and near stalemate in conquering cities. He could run out of time and resources to finish what he started. If he were to be toppled, who would succeed him. There's no obvious successor, and there's no end in sight for this bloddy conflict yet.
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