I woke early this morning, posted the Morning Prayee link to WhatsApp and then dozed on and off for nearly an hour before getting up. I went to the King's Road pharmacy at ten for my 'flu jab, and then to St John's for the Eucharist. There were nine of us present. Over coffee one of those present told us how the previous week he'd been in hospital on a drip for eighteen hours, a consequence of a serious imbalance in his blood electrolytes pushing his kidneys towards failure. This had affected his walking and his speech until the problem was diagnosed. It was due to the cocktail of medications he was taking for a heart condition not working together properly.
It seems that medics treating him for ailments in different hospital departments don't feel the need to communicate with each other, or check side effects thorougly. His system needed flushing out of the toxic mess to restore him to normal functioning. Thankfully it worked. It makes me wonder about the modern world's dependency on so many kinds of medication when their combined effects on each individual can be haphazard and dangerous for some.
I returned home, cooked lunch, slept some more afterwards and then went for a walk around Pontcanna Fields. Below the weir there were three cormorants, one on top of the bridge pillar, two perched on rocks by the pool below the weir, and the young heron on another rock in between them. I got some good photos including a couple of the heron in the air, flying and just about to land. Sheer luck.
While I was taking photos on the far side of the river, I met a man called Paddy who told me that during the covid lockdowns he's patrolled this stretch of river with a video camera, observing the wildlife and changes of season. He's now in the late stages of editing his takes into a documentary. I told him about the thousands of still photos I'd taken in the same period, and still take on my daily walks. I hope to be able to find him on Facebook and see what he's made in due course.
In the evening, my laptop announced that it was ready to install Windows 11, so now that I've experienced this on my sister's laptop, I decided to let this happen. It didn't take as long as I thought it would, less than an hour, but then my laptop is much more powerful that June's, and cost about the same, second hand. While this took place, I watched the rest of the final episode of 'Inspector Borowski' on my Chromebook, sitting alongside the updating machine. A little tidying up was necessary, including shifting the Start menu back from the middle to the left side, and switching off a couple of redundant features. It looks the way it did before upgrade, except that the appearance of the icons has had a decent makeover.
Just as everything was finishing, a must-watch documentary started on BBC Two about T.S. Eliot and his innovative masterpiece of a poem 'The Waste Land' which was published for the first time a century ago this month. It drew on letters sent to Eliot by a woman he loved but never married, and the formative influence of his wife, and the poet Ezra Pound during the writing process. It was a fascinating hour and a half programme with various literary scholars commenting, and recorded sections of the poem spoken by Eliot himself, and Simon Russell Beale.
When we were undergraduates, Clare studied Eliot's poetry and occasionally, I went to her lectures to sit at the feet of Professor L.C. Knights and learn about 'The Waste Land', which I had also come across, though I can't remember who introduced me to it. It was all part of the opening up to the wider world which being at university made possible for a fairly focussed Chemistry student, part of my love affair with beautiful poetic words which has been part of my life for the past sixty years. And that inits turn has much to do with how I came to accept the call to ordained ministry, when it came to me out of the blue from a fellow Chemistry student in my second year. I might of got wealthier with a Chemistry career, but in many ways my life has been far richer than I could ever have imagined.
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