Not contagious, but not clear

In an effort to get back to normal despite the back pain, Clare rose early and cooked our usual Saturday pancake breakfast. A cold but bright sunny day, so we both spent lots of time outdoors soaking in the sun, two and a half hours walking in the park morning and afternoon.

I did a lateral flow test before lunch and it turned positive again. When I was down by Blackweir Bridge I met Fran with a couple of her friends and we talked about covid testing. One of them said he was obliged to be in a daily lateral flow testing regime at work. After he tested positive and quarantined for ten days, he returned to work and was told not to do further lateral flow tests for ninety days. 

It seems that certain people get over covid, are well and symptom free, but still test positive for a long while as a trace of infection works its way out of their system, but they are no longer contagious. That sounds like where I am at the moment. It's impossible not to feel like a pariah, but nobody has any control over how their individual immune system deals with this virus.

Thompson's Park has in the past week seen an outdoor shelter extension to the park keeper's lodge turned into a Lufkin coffee stall. It has a simple un-treated timber frame with vertical slatted screens for walls, in the spirit of an oriental tea house. There's room for a dozen or so people to sit inside and chat holding their takeaway coffee cups and cookies, and be out in the fresh air at the same time. I daresay in time a green canopy might be allowed to grow over it, but for now it has a bare modern minimalist look about it.

Nearby, another whimsical Dogs' Trust Snoopy sculpture has appeared. This one is in heavenly hues, decorated with comets planets and stars, and entitled 'Bark Night'. 

I wonder how long these sculptures will survive both weather and curious clambering children? Especially in Thompson's Park where all the yummy mummies hang out with their bairns after nursery and infants' schools finish. 

This evening I worked for a couple of hours on the visuals for the Good Friday service. It's the longest audio-visual presentation I've ever done, and it's going to take a fair amount of time this coming week/ It's just as well I don't have much else booked. When I'd completed the first phase containing twenty seven slides, I felt that was enough to be going on with, so I watched a vintage episode of the Scottish crimmie 'Rebus'. It's not a series I've often seen before so it made a change. Back to St German's tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it.

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.