Open air concert season

Another lovely day of spring sunshine started with an early pancake breakfast, then a lie-in before walking to Llandaff and visiting the Cathedral for the first time in ages. All is back to normal now and there's a trickle of visitors. Gerwyn the Dean announced his resignation last week, after being on sick leave and being in dispute with the Bishop for the past two years. I wonder if he will take on a new job in ministry, or give up on the church altogether? I wonder too who will replace him? The Cathedral has been an unhappy place of late. Whoever takes his place is going to have a difficult time reconciling and rebuilding the community. 

Clare fancied a takeaway for lunch and left me to go and hunt for an Indian meal, but I couldn't find an Indian takeaway open for business in Canton. Our usual fish 'n chip shop was also closed, but eventually I found one that was open and took home freshly cooked chips and two gigantic pieces of cod. We sat out in our sun-filled garden to eat them, and drank a palatable Chilean Pinot Noir to go with the meal, just right,  not too heavy. It was so pleasantly warm that I sat outside and read for an hour while Clare had a siesta, taking advantage of the bright light to read a couple of chapters from 'Invierno en Madrid'. So much better for the eyes than artificial light.

Later, we went for another walk, around Thompson's Park this time. It was unusually quiet. I wondered if young families had gone to the beach. Then I remembered that there's a big Ed Sheeran concert on at the Principality Stadium in town. There's an American rock band playing in the SWALEC stadium too, at the same hour. I noticed that a canopied stage had been erected on the cricket pitch when I was passing by a few days ago. Well, the weather is certainly kind for hosting big open air events at the moment.

After supper I watched Rick Stein's 'Long Weekend' programme, this time set in Thessaloniki. It was a lovely reminder of the rich variety of cooking in a region influenced by centuries of Ottoman rule. We went there in the nineties, travelling by ship from Tinos, where we'd spent a few days. We only stopped a day and a couple of nights, then took the slow train journey down to Athens - a lovely experience. I'm not sure we'd have the stamina to do that kind of trip nowadays, even though the travel conditions are likely to be somewhat improved. There are high speed trains nowadays and the fastest only takes four hours for the 500km journey non stop. That's half the time it took thirty years ago. 

Then another episode of 'Beck' about a cop with extreme views of how to respond to social disorder in a changing world, and resentment towards his superiors which turns murderous. We've had corrupt cops before in this series, but this episode explored how someone with a personality disorder could somehow continue working as a policeman without this being noticed. This is a Swedish crimmie, but reflects the same concern arising in British policing in which racist and sexist behaviour persist despite efforts made to root them out.

Syncing and sandals

This morning, I took Clare to catch a train to take her to Coventry and a weekend looking after Rhiannon, while Kath and Anto travel north and east into Lincolnshire for the last of their back to back Rural Touring gigs with Sonrisa. She's now added Instagram to the band's Twitter account, and posts photos from the towns the visit, and when they're setting up. Good publicity, naturally, but also a pleasure for the family to see where they are working away. 

I stayed at home for much of the day, as there was nothing much I could contribute to the radio distribution now in full swing, until there's a pile of equipment receipts to supply more information to key into the new database. The efforts of the last few days intense concentration left me feeling quite drained and in need of respite. And there was still the OneDrive sync problem to puzzle over. It was late afternoon when the penny finally dropped, and I was running the same routine on my home computer. As ever it was was something trivial and quite misleading. The file being worked on, ostensibly within a web browser, was downloading and being opened from the hard drive and saved to 'Downloads'. Thanks to the speediness of the particular machine in use, this routine could be done without noticing where exactly the file was opening and saving from. On a slower machine this was visible.

I went down to the office and found no fewer than eight copies of the data file in 'Downloads', the result of repeated attempts by both Julie and I to ascertain how the update was not taking place as expected. Just one of them was slightly larger than the others, the first downloaded version worked on fully up to date. What a relief! Restoring this to its proper place on 'OneDrive' was trivial, as was texting Julie a brief explanation of what neither of us had noticed or understood. So we learn the hard way that while some files can easily open and close and be worked on in a browser, others cannot. The expectation isn't transferable, and the necessary cautious alertness easily forgotten if you're distracted or in a hurry.

While I was out in town, I bought a pair of Ecco sandals, having had such a comfortable experience with their walking shoes, bought a a couple of months ago. They fitted like a glove. When I went to Nerja on locum duty this time last year, I forgot to pack sandals and bought a chunky comfortable pair for a decent price in a town shoe shop. I started wearing them again a few weeks ago, once the weather warmed up enough, but discovered very soon that the hollow interior of both heels had caved in, and I was traipsing dirt in the house that had been caught in the cavities. They weren't yet uncomfortable to notice the failure for any other reason, but they had to be consigned to the bin, along with another older pair whose heel bases had collapsed rendering them unwearable, which had until now not been thrown out. A third pair also emerged that was unbroken, but they weren't comfortable enough for distance walking, only for popping down the beach. So I was pleased to be pushed into making the effort to acquire a really durable sturdy pair, which could last me several years, for a change.

In the evening, I watched with special interest the programme on Vienna in Rick Stein's 'Long Weekends' series. As a fan of Mediterranean cuisine, I find it all a bit too much 'mean & two veg' for my liking. Nor do the cake and chocolate side of things appeal that much. The white wine is much praised however, Weiner Gemischter Satz, grown on 700 hectares of land within the city's boundaries, made with several grape varieties planted and grown in a mixture in the same field rather than separately and then blended. This relies on the terroir as the French call it, the soil and the setting of vineyard, rather than the character of the grapes. No doubt centuries of experience in choosing the right varietals to take advantage of soil qualities makes for a praiseworthy product. It's something to look forward to.