Gobbledegook alarm

Another cloudy start to a cold morning, but when I arrived at St German's to celebrate the Eucharist the sun shone for a while and illuminated the church with shafts of light for much of the service, and then the sky clouded over again. There were thirty three of us for the service. Angela gave me a belated birthday bottle of Cote du Rhone Villages wine from the vineyards of a Carthusian terroir in Provence.

After the service I was chatting with Terry and he was telling me about his involvement with a group which organises a yearly outing to Lundy Island on the MV Balmoral, of which he is a trustee. He organises a choral BCP Evensong in the island's church of St Helena, built in 1896, though there's been a Christian foundation on Lundy since the sixth century. The island has a population of 28 humans and multitudes of birds including a puffin colony. Services in the church are rare events, and the island is twelve miles off the North Devon coast, part of Hartland Coast Parish near Bideford.

It was one fifteen when I got back home for lunch. Afterwards, I fell asleep in the chair for more than an hour, and was waking up when the national emergency alarm test broadcast was made. My phone buzzed and shrieked at me, and a full screen message appeared saying what was happening in Welsh and English. A bizarre audio version of the message was delivered. The first half of the message sounded like a set of unintelligible words in a foreign language, sheer gobbledegook, and the second half was in plain speech delivered by a synthesised voice. 

This seems to have been the product of a text-to-speech applet at work, incapable of rendering Welsh words properly. It was puzzling most confusing. I look forward to an explosion of outrage from Welsh politicians about this in the next few days. On the parish WhatsApp some people reported not receiving the message, others said the alarm was very quiet. Maybe that was because their phone's speaker volume was auto-reduced while using headphone and not reset afterwards.

As I had fallen asleep listening to music on Radio Three and the alarm went off at three, it was followed by Choral Evensong, which I sat and listened to. It came from Cirencester's Parish Church beautifully sung by the choir of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, including several Psalm chants which were new to me, full of unusual dissonant harmonies and cadences which fitted well with the emotion of the words being sung. It's inspiring, the way old Prayer Book texts are still able to inspire musical creativity in contemporary composers, just as ancient Latin texts do.

Then, after a cup of tea, walking in cold wind around the park for an hour and a half, followed by supper and another episode of Inspector Ricciardi, touching again on the terrible poverty of Southern Italy in the years between the wars