Such a pleasure to wake up to a blue sky rainless sunny day. By the time I surfaced, Clare had prepared our Saturday pancake breakfast, and started cooking the second batch of marmalade. It was midday by the time another eight jars were filled and cooling ready for storage. We drove out to Dyffryn Gardens for our first visit since last April. We used to go three or four times a year, and last year downgraded our family membership, as the grandchildren are no longer young enough to enjoy it as an adventure playground and not yet old enough to enjoy a historic building and landscape.
Only recently we decided to cancel our annual subscription, now over a hundred pounds, and not without justification, given that one visit a year for the two of us costs only twenty five pounds. Well, the National Trust benefited from our subscription for the last fourteen years anyway, but we've not used it by visiting any other property in the last five years. We don't do that kind of leisure travel often nowadays. Clare finds long car journeys more and endurance than an enjoyment. Our horizons are shrinking with age. It saddens me. I don't mind travelling on my own if I have work to do, but leisure travel is for enjoyment shared.
Both the regular and overflow car parks were full of cars. There are a few charging points for electric cars near the garden entrance, and the place was busy with families, as well as old folk like us. Scaffolding has been taken down from the building, now that weatherproofing has been completed, but the main rooms of the house have yet to re-open. Only a day room looking on to the garden is open at the moment and used to showcase latest restoration works. Snowdrops are already in full bloom, and early daffodil shoots above ground. Some, though not all of the flower beds have been tidied and made ready for planting. On such a bright day, the leafless trees look striking against the green of the lawns. Leaf buds are appearing earlier than usual, the trees are ready in their own way for the surge of new life to come.
Clare had a drink and a sandwich, but I didn't feel like eating, absorbed with taking pictures with my Sony Alpha 68. I wanted to take my Olympus and/or my new Panasonic TZ95 with me, but found the batteries in both needed charging. I've used them very little in the past three months, a reflection of how little there is that's new and catching my attention in my unchanging daily routine. I'm not bored with photography as much as bored with the sameness of it all, but not yet restless enough to do anything about it.
We were home again before sunset, so I went out and walked again for an hour, to complete my daily round. Clare thawed out and heated what was left of the chestnuts in red wine casserole from Christmas dinner for supper, enough for the two of us with brown rice and brussels sprouts. Still tasting good! Our dear friend Gill called us from Geneva, and we enjoyed a half hour chat with her. She told us about the costly building development project being undertaken at Holy Trinity Church. Phase one was an interior refurbishment of the worship space, phase two is the excavation of another suite of rooms beneath the present basement level church hall. This is apparently justified by the recent expansion in youth ministry.
It was good to hear that the Chaplaincy now has a half time curate, who is also a half time representative of the Anglican Communion with UN agencies in the city. He served his title at St Andrew's Moscow, but had to leave when Putin declared war on Ukraine. Having a young married priest is apparently going down well. HTC like most other chaplaincies tends to have an experienced cleric in mid-life ministry. HTC will benefit from having the best of both worlds.
On BBC Four this evening the 2021 move 'Parallel Mothers' from Pedro Almodóvar. An great unmissable story beautifully told by one of the greatest film makers of our age. It combines the story of two mothers which give birth on the same day, whose babies are swapped while undergoing post natal observation. It's something which has been known to happen. The one mother is young enough to be the daughter of the other, and they become friends.
One child suffers cot death, and it's many months before the truth comes out. But that's only half the story. The other is about a village which has ten of its men murdered in the first weeks of the Spanish civil war, and how an investigation relying on the detailed memories of village elders enables their mass grave to be uncovered. The stories are linked by a fleeting encounter by the older mother with a forensic archaeologist who fathers her child. Both narrative threads are emotionally powerful. It's about identity, memory and the way truth comes out eventually, no matter how much it's resisted.
Best of all, once I'd tuned in to the way the Spanish was spoken, I found that the vocabulary and language used was more accessible than I expected. Subtitles confirmed what I heard and understood, rather than substituting for my lack of comprehension. That gave me as much pleasure as the stories told.
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