Mourning ritual

Another day of clouds, sunshine and showers. After breakfast I went to St John's to share in the Requiem Mass for the Queen. There were nineteen of us present, and the service was streamed on Facebook as well. Then I went to town, hoping to hear the great tenor bell of St John's City Parish Church, tolling ninety-six times to mark the Queen's passing. I wasn't disappointed. I met Ruth in the porch, welcoming visitors and alerting them to the fact that the  usual midday Mass was going on. She told me Evan Chapman the verger was doing the honours up in the tower's ringing chamber. Good to hear he's still there, over twenty years in quiet service of the church's solemn ritual if not longer to my knowledge.

I recorded some of the tolling, and then went to the Castle for the Royal Welsh Regiment's ceremonial honouring of the departed monarch with a ninety six gun salute. People were queuing along Castle Street in the drizzle to be security checked into the grounds. I joined a crowd of about a thousand others waiting for the salute, scheduled at one o'clock. By the time the ceremony started, the number had doubled. I took nearly sixty photographs and a short video of four out of the ninety six rounds. 

The ceremonial field guns were positioned with their armourers standing watch over them, and then at ten to one the teams responsible for each one in full dress uniform marched to their assigned positions, behind each gun. With meticulous punctuality, they fired a round every ten seconds, beginning as the City Hall clock struck one and ending at one sixteen. Each team then left the field in their personnel vehicle, towing their gun. The crowd was too dense to see all that was going on. For security reasons no vantage points from above were accessible. Press cameras were on a grassy bank about a metre about the field itself.

In the course of taking photos beforehand and trying to keep my camera from getting wet while it was still drizzling, I lost my camera lens cap. When I realised, I retrace my steps, and fortunately a couple and a young girl had spotted it on the ground, and left it there in case I returned. I was lucky! It seemed like everyone in the crowd was taking photos on their phones - hundreds of people with both hands held high in the air to position themselves for their best shots. I wasn't able to get near the crush barrier so my photos weren't as good as I hoped for. Nevertheless, when I reached home, late for lunch I spent the afternoon editing the sound files I'd made and incorporating them into a video slide show, which I thought my sister June would appreciate, and maybe a few others as well.

At six o'clock, before the national thanksgiving service at St Paul's Cathedral, we watched King Charles' first speech as our new sovereign. It was a warm tribute to his mother's vocation and life's work and he included twice his solemn pledge to continue to minister to the nation in the same way as his mother. He acknowledged that his life would change in the light of his new role, but expressed confidence that the things he was passionate about over the past fifty years now had momentum of their own in the hands of many others. 

The service following was good, uplifting music, carefully chosen readings and some new prayers for the departed I wasn't familiar with, but which spoke poetically about the mystery of eternity and resurrection. Such public prayers for the dead in a CofE service back at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign would have led to hard-line Protestants causing uproar, alleging papist inflitration. Not only the world, but the church is a different place from how it was when I was a kid.