A Bosnian Welsh connection and Leonardo celebrated

Two services to take this morning St Dyfrig & St Samson's at nine and St Catherine's at ten thirty. Thankfully the journey between the two on a Sunday morning is six minutes. I'd have had longer in between them if I'd succeeded in writing a shorter sermon, and I did take a couple of hours to concentrate it by ten percent, but twenty percent would have been better. Editing for conciseness is a skill I have learned over the years, but with some subjects it's difficult, although there was another reason for not leaving St Dyfrig & St Samson's on time.

A young man called Daniel who normally serves at St Mary's comes and stands in as MC when Julian the regular MC is away on business. He was there last week as well. As we were getting ready for the service, one of the others in the sanctuary party asked Daniel when he was next due to go out to Bosnia again. Interesting, I thought, and asked what took him there. His answer was surprising. He leads a script writing team with a film making project, which is working on a story from the time of the Balkan war in the 1990s. 

The town of Gorazde was besieged by the Bosnian Serb army in 1995 after becoming a Bosnian Muslim refugee safe haven, as happened in Srebrenica. In the latter, the UN peacekeeping force surrendered the town to the Serbs and over 8,000 people were massacred. Weeks earlier the Serb forces had taken UN peacekeepers hostage in Gorazde, but couldn't take the town as a contingent of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, part of the UN force wasn't captured and fought back, saving the town from the same fate as Srebrenca. The story isn't so well known, but is certainly worth telling. After the service, I told Daniel about my visit to Sarajevo in November 1997, and expressed interest in his project, so we're going to meet for coffee and a chat later this week. And that nearly made me late.

At St Catherine's there were fifty communicants and a couple of dozen children in Sunday School to bless at Communion. Having spent time with them in the hall Mthr Frances came in with them and interviewed the children about what they'd been learning. It was such a delight to have Emma, Nick and little Ned there with newborn Eleanor, Emma's first outing apart from the doctor's, since giving birth last week. I felt truly blessed being able to bless Eleanor and say a prayer for her and Emma at the altar during Communion. There's good positive energy in the church community these days, with people responding to fresh leadership after nine month wait for a new Rector. Most cheering.

In the afternoon, Clare was singing at Insole Court with the Fountain Choir and left to rehearse right after lunch. I followed on later. It was a joint concert with the Roath Recorder Ensemble celebrating the life of Leonardo da Vinci in this 500th year anniversary of his death. It featured poetry as well as music of the period. I used my Sony HX300 to video the choir from the back of a large drawing room, filled with performers and audience. The acoustics were very good and the sound quality of the recording was far better than I expected, so it was worth doing, to provide choir director Anna with performance evaluation material.

Time for some catch-up writing after supper and then an early bed. 

A summer concert and a couple of weighty matters

I last used Windows Movie Maker a year ago, so I had to re-acquire from the depths of my memory the ability to use it. There may be better, cleverer and more up to date programs out there. This one dates back to Windows 7, but still works and is available to download, so I have it installed on my desktop Windows 10 workstation. As my use is so occasional, it's not worth getting acquainted with anything else, given my limited needs. It's a waste of time. Once I got back into gear with it, a batch of ten short videos to process took the morning to complete and upload. Alan had asked if I could use Dropbox. I opened an account last year, but had little need to use it. Google Drive serves most of my limited needs. In fact, the free 2GB upload limit wasn't enough to complete the job, so I had to open a second account with a different email address, for the remainder. Once these have all been accessed and downloaded by Alan, I can remove the files. They'll be kept on a USB drive for future reference.

In the evening Clare had a lift to Insole Court, the performance venue to prepare the concert with the other choir members. It was a pleasant summer evening, so walked there. This time, there was room to mount the Song HX300 on a tripod, so filming was easier and better quality. I think the sound was OK, but no doubt the critical ears of choir director Anna will have something to say about that! The concert presented an international mix of little known madrigals English, Welsh, Italian, German, Macedonian and Hungarian, challenging to sing, as I well know from listening to Clare learn words and music over the past few months.

I was press-ganged into taking ticket money at the door. There was an audience of twenty in a room which held double that amount, in the beautifully restored out-buildings of the main Insole Court mansion. How the place has changed since Rachel's wedding reception was held here 13 years ago. It was quite run down in those days, but a group of local community activists campaigned to bring it back from the brink, and everybody now benefits. 

Uploading this batch of video clips to YouTube for Anna will have to wait until tomorrow. We got back after Inspector Montalbano had started, and thanks to BBC iPlayer we were able to watch it from the start. It was late when we went to bed, but it was worth staying up for. It was a complex tale with unusual twists and surprises, full of beauty and sadness - the second time I've used that phrase this week. The episode included a delightful portrayal of Vigata's Festa di San Giorgio procession through the streets with a Spanish style trona, for the saint's image, carried by a crew of white shirted guys, who bore it on high at arms length, rather than shouldering it. That's how light it was. Or else a dramatic fictional conceit. In Spain tronas are so heavy that if they are lifted up on high it's possible only for a matter of minutes.

To add insult to injury,  the episode included the funeral of Pasquano, the irascible overweight cake eating crime scene pathologist. Four bearers handled his coffin, as if it was empty. For a corpse of his size and weight six bearers are needed, and have to shoulder and carry with care, as I have often seen, to avoid a dropping disaster or injury. It was bad acting, in the absence of borrowing a few redundant cemetery kerbstones, to give weight and authenticity to the fictional proceedings.