Andalusia in view

A splendid Saturday breakfast of waffles with marmalade, chocolate sauce, mashed bananas and sunflower seed puree this morning to cheer a damp and cloudy day, though there was the odd break when the sun broke through the gloom for a while. While Clare baked carrot cake, I got on with recording and editing this Thursday's Morning Prayer audio, remembering  Aelred of Hexham a 12th century Cistercian monk whose treatise on Friendship is regarded as a spiritual classic. 

I was interested to learn that his father had been a priest, celibacy wasn't yet obligatory in Britain it seems., but in his father's lifetime a conciliar edict banned sons of clergy from ordination disqualifying them from inheriting a living or property. The work-around solution was for a cleric to bequeath his entitlements to a nephew instead - from which we get the term 'nepotism'. Anyway, Aelred became a lay monk. His ministerial gifts were soon recognised and he rose to the office of Abbot, for which he wasn't obliged to be ordained priest. Communities were more flexible about who could occupy leadership roles back then.

After lunch, I continued recording and editing the accompanying reflection which has some relevance to the episcopal election retreat which will be taking place when the link to today's video upload to YouTube is posted on WhatsApp. With tomorrow's sermon completed and printed out. A message came into from Caroline, the Lay Reader at St Andrew's Fuengirola, inviting me to join their pastoral team meeting on Zoom this Tuesday afternoon. I'm please about this as it will give me an opportunity to meet everyone and receive a briefing from them before I arrive, which is very valuable.

About an hour before sunset we went for a walk down to the river, inspecting early snowdrops and single crocus on our way. Rain kept threatening but never really got past a slight drizzle, though the west wind felt colder than it really was, still around eight degrees, not the usual two degrees for early January. After so many days of rain level of the Taff continues to run within inches of the footpath. I'm not sure if it's still rising or receding.

After supper a lovely programme about the way Andalusia has inspired some great 20th century writers like Frederico Garcia Lorca, Earnest Hemingway, Laurie Lee, and ex pop musician Chris Stewart, whose best selling books about dropping out and living the good life in a remote farmstead in the Alpujarras led to programme presenter Richard E Grant paying him a visit for an interview, with much talk about local food and recipes thrown in. This certainly added to my excitement about this next spell of locum duty.

Then a double episode of Australian crimmie series 'Mystery Road', very slow moving and raw, with spectacular rural landscapes which seem to swallow up signs of human activity in its vastness. The dialogue is sparse, often crude, almost boring at this pace. It takes time just to get used to it, and that doesn't mean to say it's all that good a story in the end. Like other series in which the landscape seems to play as important a part as the characters.