Communications feedback

After breakfast this morning I drove Clare to the Dunelm Mill superstore on Newport Road, to buy a special between-the-knees pillow to help avoid hip joint pain when lying in bed. As soon as we left the house there was a heavy downpour of rain. There was traffic chaos at the junction of Cathedral and Cowbridge Road East, due to a collision which slowed down traffic in all directions. 

Things got complicated when I received a call from TalkTalk's complaints department while driving. I had to ask for a call back later. This came in while I was entering the store's car park, so I had to defer the call a second time. Third time lucky, we were sitting in the store cafe having a drink. The call was a follow up on our broadband outage before Christmas. I wanted to feed back to the support team about the help desk. The line quality on a mobile phone from the help desk the other side of the world, was poor, the operative spoke too fact with an unfamiliar sounding accent. This made the diagnostic process more difficult and less efficient, as I had to repeat questions and ask for answers to be repeated when I didn't understand. 

The trouble shooting process took 45 minutes, twice as long as it needed to as a result. In fact the operative redirected me to the Direct Message channel for completion. When I had a repeat outage a day later, I just used the Direct Message channel, but this also took 45 minutes with all they typing involved and waits for a response. It must be especially difficult for a person calling on an audio landline with no access to a  smartphone or computer if the help line operative is hard to understand. Anyway, point taken, and my coffee was cool enough to drink when I rejoined Clare. We drove home by a different route to avoid city centre gridlock. The rain stopped, the clouds parted and the sun shone by the time we had lunch. 

Google keeps reminding me my free account storage is more than half full, in the hope that I'll be willing to rent more space. I have no intention of doing this. Occasionally, I check what photo albums I keep in a specific account, then download an album to keep on a spare hard drive, if I see no need to keep that set of photos ready to display. I set out to do this after we'd eaten, and found that I couldn't achieve deletion of photos in an album (and then delete the empty album) as there'd been a change of interface. It took me a couple of hours to find out that I now have to go into the timeline of photos in the cloud in order to locate and delete them and then delete them from the deleted bin. It was much easier previously. 

I can imagine users being daunted by this rigmarole and ending up paying for extra storage they don't need. A cunning way to milk users of cash. The use of info about account holders is a massive income generator already. That's what comes from offering free accounts and data storage in the first place. Microsoft does the same. Windows eagerly reminds users to synchronise all their data to One Drive, and it's not easy to prevent this happening by default, Microsoft presumes everyone must want to, but there's a vested interest embedded in this, as the company's AI bots learn everything about users and exploit this to think for you and suggest what you should do - slow steps to enslavement - in my opinion.

We went out for a walk after lunch. There was no return of the morning's rain, it was just cold and windy. Dangerously high winds are threatened for places further north. It looks as if we'll miss out down south however. As ever these days, I needed to walk further than Clare. Her arthritic hip is imposing imitations on her walking, but she doesn't give up! She went out again after supper to sing in a community choir that rehearses in Canton Uniting Church. For me it was time to give some thought about my Sunday sermon. I worked on that for an hour, and then found a new euro thriller series on ITVX in Swedish, Danish, German and English to watch for an hour before bed.

Summer proposal

A change in the weather overnight with cloud dispersing and the temperature rising to 20C mid- afternoon, and it's set to become even warmer in days to come. The moon is full tonight, spring is on the way. After breakfast I found an email waiting for me from Emma in diocesan HQ, to say that it would be possible to do seven of the nine weeks of the Lausanne locum duty July-August this year, without hindrance from Schengen rules. I wanted to talk to Clare about it, but she's been off-line since last night.

Then, I walked down the the church office to sort out bible study material ready for tomorrow, and then continued into town to buy a shirt in Dunne's Stores, a long sleeved blue cotton one, only €12. I then paid a visit to Fuengirola's Municipal Market, which has some interesting shops selling teas and health food products, but most of the meat fruit and veg stalls stalls were shuttered by mid-afternoon. Like the one in Los Boliches business starts and finishes early in the day. I caught the train back, and returned to the house for a very late lunch. 

I had a chat with Owain on WhatsApp then spent much of the evening downloading archived photo albums to add to others I'm storing on a 32GB USB stick. I've cleared more than five gigabytes of photos from one of my Google Photos accounts, but the increased spare space isn't registering. I'm still getting 'account nearly full' warnings. With millions of accounts stored on its servers, it probably takes a long time to update them all, especially as data is backed up more than once on different servers. This account I started around twenty years ago, possibly during a visit to Switzerland. It's hard to imagine where my data might actually be stored. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to ask, as it's so complex.

I caught up with Clare late evening, having spoken only briefly at lunchtime. After thinking about it she okayed the prospect of a summer holiday in Lausanne, and catching up again with old friends, so I informed Emma, and look forward to making contact for a briefing in the coming days.

Family reunion begins

House cleaning after breakfast to prepare for the arrival of Rachel and Kath. Rachel's flight arrived half an hour ahead of time at Heathrow, and she was able to take a coach earlier than the one she booked, arrived a couple of hours earlier than planned, which is great.

My sister June called about a minor annoying problem on her computer, which I could fix in seconds hands on, but would find impossible to explain to her on the phone. It'll have to wait until my next visit. Maybe next week? Google photos has been giving her grief as well. Her account display was congested with shared albums so she couldn't find her own pictures. Fortunately this was something I could fix, as I'm able to log into her account for trouble shooting purposes. It took me an hour to remove dozens of shared album links, plus even more blank shared albums, a product of accidentally pressing on the wrong button, over the last decade. It'll be a lot easier to find her own photos now, though these too need pruning as there are lots of accidental duplicates. 

A walk around the park for both of us separately before lunch. We almost missed the grocery delivery as it turned up ahead of the scheduled time. The deliveryman spoke poor English and didn't seem to understand that the scheduled time frame written on the bag needed to be adhered to. He rang to ask where we were, as Clare was still outdoors. She was able to redirect him to Mary across the street, but arrived before he'd left, and  made him carry the bags back across the street to our house. She the rang the Coop to complain and train their deliverers to read the label on the bag. Fat chance of anyone doing that nowadays as people are so focussed on their phones.

I took Clare to the hospital for a back injury x-ray before meeting Rachel's coach. I walked to Sophia Gardens coach station to meet her and walk back home with her. Clare's appointment didn't take long so she walked to meet us in Pontcanna Fields. 

Kath drove down from Kenilworth, arriving an hour and a half later. Supper, cooked by Clare feeling better today, was on the table as she came through the door. Afterwards Clare went to bed early, needing to recover from her day's exertions, and I sat at the kitchen table, chatting with my lovely grown up daughters and listening to Latin Jazz they found and wanted to share until it was time for bed. My girls are amazing gifted women, doing marvellous things with their lives, and happy about their lot. I'm so proud of them, as I am of Owain.

Meanwhile, Putin reviews the troops on Red Square on the anniversary of the Russian victory over the Nazis in Germany, and speaks falsehoods about Ukraine being a breakaway derivative of Russia  denying the historical fact that Kyiv was founded before Moscow as the centre of mission to the Rus tribes, and has had its own life and culture for centuries before Russian empire building ambitions evolved. His aim, to judge from the way his army has acted in the weeks since its botched invasion of Ukraine, is to subjugate the country forcibly, as it did before, ninety years ago, after the revolution. It's no wonder that Ukrainians are fighting so hard against neighbours with whom they have so much in common.

Summer tastes

Another journey across to Adamsdown after breakfast this morning to celebrate Mass with four others at St German's. We celebrated St Bartholomew a day late. I called into the the Aldi store on Western Avenue to buy some cooking apples and wine. While I cooked a paella with prawns in it for lunch, Clare chopped up the apples and cooked them with the blackberries - half to freeze and half for the foundations of a super crumble tomorrow.

I intended to collect this week's veggy bag immediately after eating, but slept soundly for an hour before doing so. Then a walk in the park, passing the two crab apple trees we've foraged from this past couple of years. They are crammed with very pale green unripened fruit, save for the odd one that has started to turn red. It'll be interesting to how long they take to go pink and then finally a rich cherry red, when we can to  start pick them. I noticed one unripe fruit on the path nearby, bitten off I suspect by a passing bird, then discarded when found to be unpalatable.

For the last couple of weeks we've been receiving in our veggy bag several large Roma plum tomatoes, a favourite of mine for cooking. These are very tasty and as succulent as a peach to eat, so none have ended up in a sugo so far. The vegetables grown at Coed Organics are superb, unless there's a weather disaster. The produce generally has been excellent this summer.

I spent a couple of hours tidying and backing up photo albums this evening. Although I make much use of Google Photos, backups on hard drive and workstation are essential to my mind. Almost everything we do relies on The Cloud these days. On the whole it works well enough and is convenient if moving from one device to another, but I wouldn't trust my entire digital life to it. We've no idea what unforeseen disaster is just around the corner that could afflict the internet in the era of climate change and unstable weather. 

The world has been shocked by the speedy collapse of the status quo in Afghanistan, followed by mass panic by tens of thousands trying to flee the country and escape the Taliban. Even with all the planning and information available, the powers that be failed to anticipate what's happening now. The randomness of people's reactions to radical change are by nature unpredictable. To their credit, the armed forces and airlines have done an amazing job evacuating many tens of  thousands to places of safety in the past fortnight, though tens of thousands more will be left behind after the withdrawal deadline, and subjected to even more agonising delay if they still want to leave and have sufficient reason to do so. And this is only stage one. The re-settlement of maybe a hundred thousand refugees in different countries is likely to take a long time. The suffering of powerless people drags on and on.

Pandemic origins according to WHO

The government has announced its plan for organised quarantine hotels for travellers returning to the UK from overseas, at a cost of £1,700 for an obligatory ten day stay for entrants from high risk countries. This includes two covid tests while confined in personal isolation. Only rich people and executive business travellers will be able to afford this. At the moment foreign holiday travel is considered illegal. A surreal notion. The hopes of an air travel industry revival any time soon are being dashed, as infection rates are still high, even if declining slowly. Any easing of restrictions and return to some kind of normality could take longer to arrive than we expect or wish for.

The WHO investigative committee has reported on its visit to Wuhan. Their findings rule out an accidental release of a virus from a research lab there. The market at the centre of the initial outbreak is thought to be the place where the virus, occurring in bats, may have crossed the species barrier, perhaps to other animals before crossing the barrier to humans. Something similar I guess may have happened in other parts of the world spontaneously, given there are reports of covid traces being found in waste water in other countries at or before the first reported outbreak. 

We're already learning from recent experience that very similar if not identical new mutations in covid19 are emerging in this way, so why not. Right at the start of the crisis environmental health experts said this kind of thing was inevitable because of the breakdown of natural ecosystem complexity which normally would check the spread of new viral mutations and the crossing of species barriers to humans. Biodiversity loss all over the planet, no matter what complex mix of species a region may contain, has a similar outcome. Humans are now reaping a disaster they have sown.

It's been another bitterly freezing cold day with strong wind. Again it was a challenge to walk in the park in the afternoon and stay warm. Yesterday afternoon I took a photo of a Tesco trolley parked on a hillock by the north west entrance of Llandaff Fields, noticed over the weekend. I posted the picture on Instagram tagging Tesco Metro's community service team. By this afternoon it wasn't there, hopefully retrieved and returned to service. I was leased about that.

I spent rather a lot of time later in the day shifting my collection of Ibiza photos from one Google Photos account to another, having discovered I uploaded them to my Google Blogger account without realising, many months ago. I need all the free space of that account for texts posted over the past fourteen years - yes, that's how long it is since I started with my first 'Edge of the Centre' blog.

It was good to hear this evening that the American Senate has voted to proceed with impeaching Donald Trump. It may not lead to a two thirds majority decision to convict him, but at least the full story will be told and stay on the record. It will be there to be quoted against Trump if he decides to run for a second term as President in four years time. And then the voters can made another hopefully informed decision on the basis of what they know then. 

Tech' sweatshop day

 Another Saturday lie-in and pancake breakfast to start the Sabbath! But not much of a day of rest for me. I was determined to prerecord all six services of Morning Prayer for the coming week to upload daily, rather than take the risk of doing it live each morning and having unforeseen technical failure or me failing to get myself properly organised to broadcast the live feed on WhatsApp. 

I've had an unprecedented run of good days since the operation, and it's been a joyful relief to get through each day with minimal discomfort or pain, and plenty of energy to enjoy everything I do. Unconsciously however, I remain on the alert against a reversal of fortunes, just when I least expect it. 'So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall!', as St Paul reminds us. It's happened before and it was upsetting and demoralising. I expect this mindset will change eventually, if the final op is the success hoped and prayed for, but making fairly fail-safe plans is what I need to do for now, and I'm not ashamed of that.

Having already prepared the texts for each day, producing around thirty five minutes worth of recordings took me the two and a half hours that remained of the morning before lunch. The sky was overcast and I had to juggle with lights pointing at the ceiling to give the illusion of being in the full daylight. As editing footage wasn't possible due to the video rendering problem I failed to resolve yesterday, each day's video had to be done in one take. It wasn't as easy I as thought. 

My eyesight is deteriorating due to the cataract in my camera viewfinder eye. I need a very strong light to read fluently these days, and technically it wasn't possible to put a light source close enough to me and not affect the video recording. If it had been bright and sunny outdoors, I could have got away with it. I noticed in the playbacks that I fluffed some of my words and didn't quite get the sentence flow right, normally not a problem. But it was a good idea record them in advance. Doing it live in the early morning, when my eyesight is often at its worst, would not be such a good idea!

I certainly needed a siesta after lunch today, so it was starting to get dark by the time I got home have my afternoon circuit of the Parish streets, occasioned by a trip to the chemists to get some Tea Tree cream. On my way around I had a conversation with Mother Frances, about including the Church in Wales special prayer for Advent in the daily office. I explained that I'd recorded them which surprised her I think, but she understood why once I explained myself. I promised that I'd make a supplementary audio recording of the prayer, with accompanying slides of the texts, which I though I could do easily enough. Famous last words however.

The slides were easy enough to create, and I used a couple of photos taken of the NHS prayer station outside St Luke's which has stood in the locked porch of the church since early in the pandemic. I thought I might be able to use Google's old Picasa app to make the audio and slides into a video. I did the job fine until it got to the rendering stage, working as intended, but consistently failing to complete the job, getting stuck at 98.9% and not saving. Bizarre. 

Then I tried using the online Google Photos, having succeeded with stringing together some stills of Kath and Owain leaping into the air on Oxwich beach into a crude stop motion video. Another fail here however, as this app offers lots of themed templates of photos from your collection trawled together by their fancy image recognition AI Cloud software. As for letting the user decide what photos they wish to make into a slide video, forget it. There's no custom option, or at least none that is plainly visible on the otherwise user friendly interface.

I stopped to watch this week's double episode of 'The Valhalla Murders' on BBC Four and eventually, settled for using Windows Movie maker, going strong since Windows 7, and installed on my Windows 10 machine alongside a newer app that does the same thing but has a mystifying user interface. This did the job nicely. It didn't take long, and ran as expected in WhatApp. Altogether, it was an annoying frustrating evening, but I was relieved to have everything resolved by my my usual midnight bedtime.

Home and dry, nevertheless

After the torrential rain and flooded roads a few days ago, and prospect of more rain to come, we were left feeling uncertain about travelling home on Tuesday morning. As there were no extreme weather warnings for today, we decided to leave today instead, and packed after breakfast. Then the sun came out, so we walked on the beach and through the dunes for a couple of hours before lunch and then headed for home. There were only a few light showers all day! 

Clare was happy to return early as she has extra preparations to make for school this week. I did the shopping, then uploaded to Google Photos 290-odd pictures from our Oxwich stay, and edited them on-line. In the absence of a wi-fi connection, there was no point squandering mobile phone data allowance, especially given the flaky signal we had there. I tried old-school editing on the Linux laptop I took with me, but although the software is good, the poor resolution display on a machine nearly ten years old delivered misleading colour rendering, especially with large high quality photos.

I indulged myself by taking four cameras with me and using them in different situations, just for interest, as taking them by car wasn't a burden. With a poor display screen, comparing them was unsatisfactory, so I transferred the entire folder of these photos to the SD card on my Blackberry, for viewing purposes. As this is a modern sharp high resolution screen on a powerful device, the viewing experience was impressive, despite being small. It revealed mistakes I had made in trying to adjust photos using a screen not really fit for purpose, and that convinced me to leave editing until I could do so at home using a better screen. 

The laptop is OK for writing but not for editing photos. I still regret losing to a beer spillage while working a similarly aged Dell XPS a few years ago, which had a high res screen and ran Windows and Linux well. In most ways a Chromebook fits the bill. It's designed for 'always online' use, and can be used off-line, although differences between modes of use are a limitation, especially when it comes to saving a copy of work on a USB device for transfer. It's do-able, but calls for vigilance. 

Although 'always online' is the new normal with Windows, files created by use of the device's own apps are saved first to the device, easy to copy for transfer, and then  sync'd if/when it's on-line. For Chromebooks, it's the opposite way around. Normally this does not matter, but this difference becomes a noticeable irritant if working offline is inevitable.

Still, it's back to digital normal again now. It was noticeable that after powering up the router and signal booster on arriving home, that we were attached to the internet again within minutes, while the EE signal booster, which runs via the router, and normally runs very well, took several hours to settle down and deliver the usual service. Again, it's one of these things you don't notice, if you neither send nor receive mobile phone calls or texts in the house while the network sorts itself out and re-attaches the device. 

It's confusing if you find you cannot make a mobile call, and confusion is compounded nowadays as we can make WhatsApp or Skype calls via wi-fi as well as direct mobile phone calls. It's easy enough to forget or confuse what medium you're using, when not looking at the phone. That's if you've bothered to register the difference between the two services anyway.

I managed to get another couple of hours writing my latest story, which continues to grow in a way which keeps me interested and motivated. I had no idea when I started where this would take me. It's a story about a traveller, and while I have ideas about how it will end, I'm still not sure how long it will take or how to close the circle. What an adventure!

A photo journey rediscovered

I had a dental checkup at nine forty this morning, and decided to go by car. As it was Clare's day in school, I was able to give her a lift to Llandaff North. Despite my apprehensions, the outgoing traffic was light and I was there by nine thirty, and had been seen by my appointment time. This gave me time to shop at the big new Lidl store, then drive home, and walk to St John's in time for the Mass at ten thirty. That's what I call a good start to the day.

In the afternoon, I hunted through several hard drives on which I store old data and photos, looking for the pictures I took on my study trip to Jamaica early in 1982, I digitised in 2009, not long after buying the slide scanner I still use from time to time. Once retrieved, I uploaded all 313 of them to Google Photos, and went through them, realising that contemporary web photo editing tools are a lot more capable and user friendly than the original Picasa desktop tools I used after scanning photos to my computer.

All the Ektachrome film scans I made looked too dark and over saturated. How to modify them at the time was rather hit or miss, not merely due to limitations of the tools and my experience of using them, but because now I see and remember from a different perspective, having spent so much time in Andalusia, where high contrast, rich saturated colors make the place so attractive, (not to mention the music). It was good to be able to render the photos a little closer to the way they looked in reality. They weren't scanned in the order they were taken, so now I have the task of reconstructing from memory date, time and location, titling and filing them by category, so they are not randomly presented for viewing - very much a labour of love and remembrance.

The quality of these old images is by no means as excellent as stuff I can take with any of my regular cameras bought over the past five years. You'd have to be a real craftsman with an old school film SLR to get results that good. Such intense light, high contrast photos are hard to take, for an amateur, even with a UV lens filter, which mine had then, as nowadays on my digital SLR equivalent. Cameras with Digital auto-settings have taken much of the burden from a mostly point and shoot camera user.On the Jamaica trip I used an excellent East German Praktica SLR camera, but it packed in half way through. Humidity caused the shutter to stick. Fortunately, I had a second camera - a mini Ricoh pocket camera, which shot half frame images on 35mm standard film.

Part of my Jamaica mission was to photograph the island and its schools. I decided to have all my films developed out there, to put money into the local economy, and discovered the Praktica was letting me down. Nightmare! It meant I had to retrace some of my trips and shoot some places again. It was fine, as I had a hire car, which I could afford, as I wasn't spending money on hotels, due to hospitality offered by families with parish links back in Bristol, and I found out in good time to make good the losses I identified.The little Ricoh camera delivered surprisingly good results, but sad to say, I undervalued it and can't even remember how I parted company with it. It was as simple in design as the Olympus Trip I took with me to Mongolia in 1999, but even smaller. If I'd kept it, I might still be using it occasionally with film for its remarkable results.

Now the photos are uploaded, they can be seen, albeit in fairly random order right here. Looking at them with different eyes nine years after digitizing them was quite revelatory. They awaken place memories and forgotten insights, as well as reminding me how I made use of them as an adult educational tool, after returning home.

Next, I must find and transcribe my handwritten accounts of that unique, life changing journey, made half a lifetime ago. It's time to let that see the light of day, and reflect on the differences between then and now.

Camera talk with Amanda

There were nine of us at St Catherine's this morning, when I celebrated the eight o'clock Eucharist. Clare went to the ten thirty service, so I had a quiet morning to myself at home. In the afternoon we drove to Bristol. It was Clare's anthroposophical study session, and after I dropped her off in Stoke Bishop I went to see Amanda. Clare got a lift and came and joined us an hours and a half later. In the meanwhile, Amanda and I talked photography. 

A couple of months ago she bought the same Sony H400 as Rhiannon got for her birthday, and since then, she's been out in her wheelchair with her carer, taking photos in the city museum, on College Green, around the Harbour and St Mary Redcliffe Church, and she's taken it to church with her. What a difference it's make to her, now that she was a care package geared around taking her out thrice weekly, for shopping, or just to visit places that take her fancy.

Handling the camera is quite a challenge given her physical limitations, but thankfully her working muscles are strong enough to hold a camera without shaking. I was able to show her how many of camera features work, that she hasn't yet got to grips with, and how to upload pictures, set up web albums using Google Photos, and make a start on learning to use web editing tools. She's got a good eye, and is quick to pick up things. This, I believe, will bring her much reward for the effort she makes in taking on this new challenge.

Over the weekend I've started working my way through a Belgian crimmie box set on the 'Walter Presents' channel called 'Rough Justice', focussing on the cases handled by a female commissario de police in Antwerp, so it's in Flemish for a change. Interesting due to her effective but questionable methods of bringing suspected perpetrators to account, and the whiff of corruption and blackmail that seems likely that its may all end in tears. Sure, it's all be done before, but we'll see if it all pans out any differently by the end of a thirteen part series.

  

View from above

Looking out from the balcony window this morning, I could see market stalls being set up on the opposite side of the road on the tree covered pavement. When I went out to do the weekend grocery shopping I discovered it's a Bio market - organic farmers selling their produce direct to the public. There were mostly fruit and vegetable stalls, with one bread and one cheese and one herb stall, almost a dozen altogether. The Asociación Guadalhorce Ecológico promotes a weekly farmers' market in a variety of locations in and around Malaga, advertising through its own Facebook page. I do hope the market returns to La Malagueta again while Clare is with me. She'll love it.

After lunch and a siesta, I walked up the steep winding well appointed footpath which mounts the hillside behind the Paseo de Reding to the summit of the Gibralfaro. The views across the city and port are glorious, and the path is constantly busy with tourists taking selfies, or athletes testing their stamina. It's a tough climb, but one which I'll be repeating when I run out of new places to satiate my curiosity and my camera.

Having taken photos from on high, I then walked down to the port to visit a large cruise ship stopping here this weekend. It's the Silver Spirit, registered in Nassau in the Bahamas, according to the Maritime Traffic website. It's docked, not out at Terminals A or B, but in the prestigious quay nearest the city, along which runs the Palmeria de Sopresas, rows of Palm trees enclosing the main cruise ship reception centre, several restaurants and gardens. The quayside is enclosed by glass walls, allowing for non cruising visitors to stand and stare safely at this giant of a seven story hotel afloat. I don't think I've been this close to such a huge ship since I was a child and visited HMS Vanguard with my father.

Then, back to the apartment for another quiet evening, writing and uploading photos. I am learning that Google Photos, though not as versatile as using desktop Picasa then uploading to the web,  now works better than Google Chromebook's basic photo editing function. This is prone to crash while editing large pictures, perhaps because it's under powered or lacking in usable spare memory. I am impressed by the upload speed for the chaplain's broadband connection, far quicker than anything I am used to in other places, or at home. It actually makes using on-line apps a congenial experience. I'd still prefer using a device that wasn't so totally dependent on internet connectivity. I fear that we may live to regret this strategic decision taken by the tech giants on our behalf.
   

Bank Holiday Weekend - again

I spent much of yesterday, as the previous day, uploading and writing some key captions for the 900+ photos taken on our Rhine cruise, I only discarded a couple of dozen bad pictures. It's a tribute to the reliability, ease of use and responsiveness of the Sony HX50 and HX300 cameras I took with me.

Many photos required no editing at all. A few were taken in situations where conditions confused the camera sensor leading to underexposure, but this could be rectified using the old desktop Picasa, still a versatile easy to use app. For the most part, however, Google Photos on-line editor provided all the tools I needed. With poor connectivity on the cruise, uploading, let alone editing was impossible, so my spare time since arriving home has been taken with making an album for each day's photos.

Encouraged by Clare, I also made a couple of web albums using just a third of the available photos covering the trip in two halves, so as not to exhaust the patience of viewers. You can find the first of these here and the second here.

Owain came over to visit in time for supper after work and stayed the night, returning to Bristol in the afternoon, as he has a gig to prepare for tomorrow.. It was good to see him, and enjoy our evening meal outdoors in the warmth of the evening sun, drinking a bottle of Alsacian Gewurztraminer for a change. Before lunch, he took us to Luffkin's Coffee Roasters a tiny cafe in a King's Road back alley next to the evangelical mission hall calling itself the 'Church of God in Cardiff'. The cafe offers a few select single estate grown filter served coffees from Africa or Latin America, and offers a breakfast featuring several different special kinds of bread. A foodie's paradise. 

Further down the alley is the popular local Pipes micro-brewery, whose beers can be found in several places across the city centre. The alley also boasts a small select farmers' market stalls on weekends - organic veg, bread, cheese and a dried meat and sausage stall. It's the first time we've had occasion to explore this alleyway properly when fully in use. I turns out to be a hidden treasure of our Parish.

In the evening after supper, I walked around Pontcanna fields. The entire north football field area is currently enclosed in Heras fencing, and half of it covered with tents - a hundred four person and a hundred two person tents, plus wigwam shaped marquees and toilets. This is the 'Tent City' which is being prepared to accommodate surplus visitors arriving for the UEFA Cup Winners' cup final in the city centre's Principality Stadium next weekend. Apparently all hotel are already booked, and a large crowd of Spanish fans are expected, as the finalists are the two top Spanish teams. There's an unprecedented high level of extra security measures being taken in town as well, planned for a long time, and not just in response to last Monday's terrorist incident in Manchester.

The British Airways total IT systems failure has been headline news all day, bringing to a halt all their operations at Heathrow and Gatwick. Every one of the airline's activities is so heavily dependent on use of networked computers and phones, that nobody could communicate with anyone else, and passengers were left stranded in departure lounges and on aircraft, unable to move safely without the appropriate forms of clearance. It's been attributed to power failures at the server farm level, and thankfully, not to cyber attacks. This high level of electronic dependency and reliance on the core of the system never failing is a disaster waiting to happen.

IT workers unions criticised the redundancy imposed on 1,200 BT computer system staff last year, and outsourcing of their jobs to Indian company Tata Consultancy Services. Cardiff Council made the same move several years ago, as a money saver, and on a couple of occasions I know of, the entire system went down for much of a day. The technology is new, state of the art, but this doesn't mean it's been tried and tested to the extreme limit of reliability. This couldn't have happened at a more critical time, Bank Holiday weekend. One can only hope questions are asked and lessons learned about long term sustainability from such disastrous experience.

   

Travels Ahead

A quiet Friday, not going out anywhere, with a Sunday sermon and funerals for the coming week to prepare. Just as well, as the weather was glum. Clare and I started discussing a holiday break after Easter. Although we'd mooted the prospect of spending time in Santa Pola, what both of us had been thinking about was the possibility of another cruise, this time on the Rhine. It's probably too late to get anything in May now. Last time we booked nearly a year ahead too. We can but dream ...

Well, this morning, we decided that the Koln-Basel was what we wanted to do, and sooner rather than later, so we went ahead and booked a very expensive cabin on a mid May trip, which was all they had left. Again we'll go with Riviera Travel, as last May's Danube experience was so enjoyable. Perhaps that week of total photographic indulgence made the memories extra vivid, but on dreary days, I think of many things I enjoyed and the insights gained into Eastern European history and culture, without needing to open a Google Photo album to refresh my memory.

The Rhine has a history with which I am more familiar, largely because of our past travels in Eastern France and Germany, also, having grown up after World War Two with all the stories recounted in the family, the documentaries and movies on telly. It's one period of history, perhaps too raw to have been covered in Pengam Grammar School classes at that time, which I read several thick historical books over the years. This cruise will put some of that narrative into geographical setting, but much more, because of the amazing history of Rhineland cities over the past millennium of European history.

I shall resist feeling guilty of extravagance. Working away so much over the past year, we haven't had a lot of time for holiday leisure travel, so it's a matter of quality time together rather than quantity, doing something we both delight in. I feel privileged to be act as a locum pastor abroad, to be able to live in Spain, and discover another language and culture in more depth than I could if it was holiday. Nevertheless, it is work. I'm on duty when I'm there, no matter what else I get to do when I don't have work things to do, and sometimes loneliness is the price to be paid in order to keep on working in this particular way.

Much cheered by our decision, we drove out to Dyffryn House and Gardens for lunch and a winter walk. Much work done pruning bushes and trees, and renovation work on ponds, since our last visit. With so many flower beds cleared, the seasonal contrast is vivid and helps me see things about some vegetation I wouldn't usually notice, just because there are so many flowering plants and bushes attracting the eye. I got some great photos of coal tits, blue tits and chaffinch feeding at the bird table, perfectly placed outside the restaurant. I just can't believe it's six months since we last came, judging by my photo albums, though Clare thinks we may have come for a walk one day before Christmas when I forgot to bring a camera, or brought a camera without SD card or charged batttery. I believe her, though I can't pin down when. Put it down to memory lag.

The other good thing about today is that I've received requests for locum duty in Malaga for June and July, and Mojacar over December and January. That's a lot to think about, all in one day, and a great deal more to look forward to.

   

Armistice Day on Parade, then underground

I drove to Aljambra again this morning earlier to preach at an Armistice Day service with the Royal British Legion Albox branch, one of several in the region, indicative of the strength of the population of expatriates, and Armed Service veterans among them. There were forty present, but I was told this was half the number attending just two years ago, and that was a disappointment to the church team that had turned out to welcome them. There are all sorts of possible reasons for the change. Sickness, infirmity, holiday absence, or return to the UK among them, the branch itself has been less active until recently. One thing is certain, military veterans wherever they are stay loyal to their annual remembrance-tide commitment, and that is most honourable.

After the service, I was invited to lunch at John and Ann's house, together with Duncan and Jean, the other side of the Almanzora Valley from Albox, in a hamlet not far from the village that gives its name to the river and valley. Their house has to be reached by driving on a rough track across the dry river bed where the Arroyo Albánchez joins the rio Almanzora. The house stands above the arroyo itself, which is covered with almond and citrous trees. It's a deeply rural area where shepherds still walk their flocks or sheep or goats out to pasture on the steep slopes above the valley floor. 

It also has history of mining, like the villages in the Sierra Bédar, though not on a huge industrial scale. The ruins of the building from which the work was managed can still be glimpsed at the base of a ravine, near the valley road, but the iron-rich hillside above present no obvious sign of industry. There are dry stone terraces, and these have supported orchards. Some may be very ancient, local hearsay reckons they go back to Roman times. Some of those terraces are where mine working entrances can be found, not they are not visible from down below. 

We had a splendid lunch, preceded by a drink on the patio in full sunshine. Too hot to eat outdoors on November 11th! This is a steep sided valley, running south to north, so the sun rises late and sets early. Temperatures change dramatically once the house goes into shade. It was a peasant farmer's house, with door arches wide enough for a pannier laden donkey to be brought indoors with produce for unloading. The outside door wasn't hung on hinges but pivoted around a pole. A narrower entrance was called for during renovation. Using the ornate wrought iron attachments from the old one, John made a substantial door to fit the new space. The quality of the ironwork which he restored has him wondering about their origin, as they seem seem rather sophisticated for such an originally humble dwelling.

After a brief post-prandial pause we drove up the mountain road to spot where it was possible to park and then scramble down the upper reaches of the ravine from where several jagged rocky apertures about a metre and a half across could be seen on the slope opposite. We reached a terrace which had an entrance tunnel to the workings, driven through the hard iron bearing rock. It was obstructed by a heap of stones a metre high, possibly from a collapsed section of terrace above. There was enough clearance for us to climb over and into the entrance tunnel without difficulty. 

After about fifteen metres, the tunnel opened out into a cavern. It wasn't dark at all, but illuminated by sunlight, pouring in from the holes in the roof above and to the side. On closer inspection these other holes glimpsed from the outside showed signs of being man made, or a widening of natural fissures. In parts of the cavern, columns of stone had been left in place as roof supports, and there were signs that other tunnels had been started, following seams of minerals wherever they went. There was a great mound of rubble below these tunnels, suggesting a work in progress had been abandoned.

We found remains of boreholes in a few rocky surfaces made by the drills of shot-firers, as the teams of explosives experts were called when I was a boy. I can remember seeing holes like this in large slabs of coal delivered to our house, and in shale rocks on the spoil heap where I used to play and hunt for carboniferous fossils. This was the only visible evidence of 19th-20th century mining as there were no remnants of equipment or fixations anchoring equipment into the rock. The cavern, like the external terrace, was so lacking in evidence of recent industry, that we could have been standing in mine workings a thousand or two thousand years ago, as basic mining technique used was the same. 

Only the ruined building at the bottom of the ravine spoke of the existence of mining in this area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, right into the civil war era. I wondered if this was a modest kind of cottage industry, using traditional techniques in an area deemed unfit or too expensive for expansion or modernisation. There's so much to learn.

Rather than go straight back to the house, we drove on over the top of the mountain and down into the next valley and paid a brief visit to the small valley town of Cantoria. The Moors had established a fortress and a hill village on a high rocky promontory to the south west of the town, and after the Moors' sixteenth century insurrection both were demolished and the sites left bare, A new town was built on the valley floor next to the rio Almanzora. It's one of a few towns of this period laid out in a classical grid pattern, such as the Romans used, and Napoleon revived later.

We re-traced our steps from here back to the house, following the rather rough track of the railway line which ran through this region to the coast, which closed in the early sixties. Quite apart from offering an interesting perspective of the valley and a few tantalising glimpses of birds I couldn't recognise, John took us back this way, to show the approximately 10km detour which must be taken from home to Albox when there's there a mighty deluge of rainwater that fills all the dry river beds to overflowing, and makes them impassible. It only happens sporadically, and who knows what will happen in future as extreme weather events get harder to predict, and likewise their impact.

I was most annoyed with myself, to have left both cameras behind, with so many sight to photograph, but Ann came to the rescue with a Sony point 'n shoot, of the same kind that I used to document the city centre redevelopment work when I was at St John's. The card slot on neither of my computers will take a Sony Memory Stick, but the connecting cables were still available. I was able to take fifty photos, transfer them to my computer, edit and upload them to the web for sharing with great ease. I was most disconcerted when I started getting notifications that people were viewing them, but I couldn't get them to display on any device. 

After a while the penny dropped. I hunted down the array of albums stored, and found them hidden at the bottom, filed in date order. The camera's operating system was still at its default date setting, 1st Jan 2008. I sorted that out, and then went through the uploaded photos altering the metadata file for each to show the proper date and time. Picasa wouldn't let me do this on originals, but Google Photos editor makes this easy and convenient. Normally I don't have a good word to say about this Picasaweb usurper, but this is one undeniable positive. All that now needs to be done is to find a simple app which will do the same on the originals on the PC. But not tonight.