We had a message from John, Jasmine's dad last night, to say they'd all got covid after a family wedding last week. When I saw photos of the wedding party my first thought was of a potential disaster waiting to happen. If Jasmine doesn't test negative midweek, she may not visit us as planned. If she did come anyway. I'd need to avoid seeing her, as I can't risk covid stopping me from travelling. It's going to be risky enough getting on a 'plane knowing that on average half a dozen people flying will have covid whether they know it or not. I'll need to be very careful en route to be fit for work when I arrive. If I do arrive that is, given current flight cancellations and delays. Had I seen this coming before booking, I would have preferred to pay extra to travel all the way by train, even if it does take twenty hours, and cost double the price of a flight.
Yesterday, I bought a new clock radio and CD player for Clare. It was proving frustratingly difficult for her to follow the setup instructions and get the thing to work properly. After breakfast I had a go at the job, and fiddled about with the controls to try and figure out what each did. A bit hit and miss, but I managed to get a few key DAB stations to work, but it's doing to be an uphill struggle to get the FM stations tuned in as well. The system has twenty pre-set buttons but with no clear indication of how to add or delete pre-set stations. How ridiculous to make quite an expensive domestic item so user unfriendly.
It was raining when we both set out for church, so I gave Clare a life to St Catherine's and then went on to St German's. There were only two dozen of us this morning. The holiday season is upon us. We kept the feast of St Thomas the Apostle, and as the readings with quite short and my sermon wasn't too long, I was back home for lunch by one.
After Clare's siesta we went for a walk through Llandaff Fields and along the Taff, where I saw an egret fishing again in much the same spot as I spotted one a fortnight ago. Later I caught a glimpse of a heron flying down river, a magnificent overview too brief to photograph. If you see them flying over you with neck folded in and legs protruding beyond the tail, they look a bit odd, ungainly, but from above their four foot wingspan is a wonder of elegance to behold.
This evening I watched the Vienna Philharmonic's outdoor summer concert from Vienna's Schoenbrunn Palace. A magnificent affair, bringing to mind their 2020 summer concert, as European concert venues just started to resume public performances. That was postponed until the end of September, and was a huge organisational challenge to arrange after months of rehearsals punctuated by covid testing. I found that event most moving, as a symbol of resilience in the world wide artistic community. And here we are nearly two years on, better protected after a succession of four vaccinations, but still capable of getting infected by one or other of the contagious omicron variants doing the rounds. Will it ever end?
I woke up this morning still thinking about last night's episode of Inspector Montalbano. I believe it was the one that started filming around the time that the pandemic broke out, and completion was subject to long delay. I thought this might account for the deserted outdoor scenes, but as I pondered upon it further it struck me that in many previous episodes few street scenes were populated with anyone other than the actors involved. I thought there may be different reasons for this.
From a film producer's viewpoint, filming a populated street scene is expensive on crowd extras, road closures and security personnel. Scenes are often shot in daytime when it can be hot, and people stay indoors out of the sun, so an empty daytime street would be normal. Then there's the possibility that the producer choses to do this, because many ancient small towns and hill villages in Italy are depopulated by emigration, or contain holiday homes only periodically used. Empty properties have cropped up in story lines from time to time as well, so it's possible streets are empty most of the time, and the film portrays this. One way to inform the speculation would be to read all the novels, as they describe the setting of the fictional Vigata. I've only read one of the three dozen so far.
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