Waste Land centenary

I woke early this morning, posted the Morning Prayee link to WhatsApp and then dozed on and off for nearly an hour before getting up. I went to the King's Road pharmacy at ten for my 'flu jab, and then to St John's for the Eucharist. There were nine of us present. Over coffee one of those present told us how the previous week he'd been in hospital on a drip for eighteen hours, a consequence of a serious imbalance in his blood electrolytes pushing his kidneys towards failure. This had affected his walking and his speech until the problem was diagnosed. It was due to the cocktail of medications he was taking for a heart condition not working together properly. 

It seems that medics treating him for ailments in different hospital departments don't feel the need to communicate with each other, or check side effects thorougly. His system needed flushing out of the toxic mess to restore him to normal functioning. Thankfully it worked. It makes me wonder about the modern world's dependency on so many kinds of medication when their combined effects on each individual can be haphazard and dangerous for some.

I returned home, cooked lunch, slept some more afterwards and then went for a walk around Pontcanna Fields. Below the weir there were three cormorants, one on top of the bridge pillar, two perched on rocks by the pool below the weir, and the young heron on another rock in between them. I got some good photos including a couple of the heron in the air, flying and just about to land. Sheer luck.

While I was taking photos on the far side of the river, I met a man called Paddy who told me that during the covid lockdowns he's patrolled this stretch of river with a video camera, observing the wildlife and changes of season. He's now in the late stages of editing his takes into a documentary. I told him about the thousands of still photos I'd taken in the same period, and still take on my daily walks. I hope to be able to find him on Facebook and see what he's made in due course.

In the evening, my laptop announced that it was ready to install Windows 11, so now that I've experienced this on my sister's laptop, I decided to let this happen. It didn't take as long as I thought it would, less than an hour, but then my laptop is much more powerful that June's, and cost about the same, second hand. While this took place, I watched the rest of the final episode of 'Inspector Borowski' on my Chromebook, sitting alongside the updating machine. A little tidying up was necessary, including shifting the Start menu back from the middle to the left side, and switching off a couple of redundant features. It looks the way it did before upgrade, except that the appearance of the icons has had a decent makeover.

Just as everything was finishing, a must-watch documentary started on BBC Two about T.S. Eliot and his innovative masterpiece of a poem 'The Waste Land' which was published for the first time a century ago this month. It drew on letters sent to Eliot by a woman he loved but never married, and the formative influence of his wife, and the poet Ezra Pound during the writing process. It was a fascinating hour and a half programme with various literary scholars commenting, and recorded sections of the poem spoken by Eliot himself, and Simon Russell Beale.

When we were undergraduates, Clare studied Eliot's poetry and occasionally, I went to her lectures to sit at the feet of Professor L.C. Knights and learn about 'The Waste Land', which I had also come across, though I can't remember who introduced me to it. It was all part of the opening up to the wider world which being at university made possible for a fairly focussed Chemistry student, part of my love affair with beautiful poetic words which has been part of my life for the past sixty years. And that inits turn has much to do with how I came to accept the call to ordained ministry, when it came to me out of the blue from a fellow Chemistry student in my second year. I might of got wealthier with a Chemistry career, but in many ways my life has been far richer than I could ever have imagined.

Autumnal words recalled

Another uninviting rainy overcast day. I fell sound asleep after saying morning prayer following breakfast for nearly an hour and a half. I think I'm going into hibernation mode! As Clare said, I must need the extra time out, as the post-op bruising has been quite painful these past few days, though it is subsiding now.

Finally I got around to making a batch of annual charitable donations in-line, using a debit card which I don't often use for this purpose. The first two payments went through OK, the bank security system stalled on the third. I called their hotline and the robot asked for account details and a telephone banking security number. I'm not sure I ever set one for this account, but used one I thought might be correct if I ever did. After three tries I was locked out of the system but got through to a real human being, who was patient and friendly towards a highly irate me. 

It seems that HSBC's 'Verified by Visa' security routine for card payments has changed, now texting a one time pass-code for any transaction to your mobile number, a routine I'm used to with Santander Bank. Once sorted out, the third payment went through automatically, and I was able to make a fourth using the new system immediately. I also registered for voice recognition i/d to save hassles with security PIN codes in future. It seems my account details didn't include my mobile phone number, even though I've had that number since I was given my first phone, an old Nokia, back in 2001. When I start the phone, it still displays 'Orange F' before switching to EE, as the phone was first registered to me when we were in Monaco. A curious but treasured quirk of my personal tech' history.

In the afternoon, the rain slackened to a drizzle and then stopped once we'd put on our rain trousers for a walk around the park together, but it remained dark and overcast. Two lines of autumnal poetry have been going around in my head recently, things I learned in school, but couldn't properly recall, let alone identify the authors. Clare's memory was equally deficient, although she too had studied them, either in school or University. 

I yielded to the temptation to google the respective lines, and found that one was the opening line of Grey's Elegy in a Country Churchyard: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. The other line was from an autumnal Shakespeare sonnet: Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. That's a good description of most of the big trees in park now. It was lovely to re-connect with these classic poems sixty years after O Level English.

We watched a lovely nature programme on S4C in the evening shot entirely in low light conditions after sunset and before dawn around the year, showcasing in spectacular video footage the range of nocturnal creatures that inhabit the wilder parts of Wales. Hedgehogs are the exception. The rural population has decreased worryingly, whereas numbers in domestic gardens and urban parks have grown, perhaps due to the greater biodiversity they conserve, and the willingness of householders to feed them. There are foxes too, well established in urban areas, where they raid rubbish bins for food like the hordes of gulls that no longer live on our sea shores but forage and breed inland, and make a nuisance of themselves.

Christmass planned and an archive revisited

This morning, I attended the Eucharist at St Catherine's, and talked about Sunday's Eucharist, when I am standing in for Mthr Frances while she spends time with the Sunday School, and then comes in with them for a blessing at the Communion. I suggested that we bless them together.

The Parish doesn't need me to cover any services at Christmas, so I offered the Area Dean to cover services in Grangetown. He needs someone for the Christmas Vigil Mass at St Dyfrig and St Samson at 7.00pm, and that's the only service they are offering. This suits me fine, as it means we can leave after Mass immediately for Kenilworth, and have the day itself free for feasting with the family. Clare has booked us in for three nights at the Holiday Inn hotel, five minutes walk from the house. We did this two years ago, and it worked well for us.

In the evening I arranged to make a bereavement visit at the far end of the parish. It rained heavily throughout the twenty minute walk, soaking my rain clothes almost to the limit. Fortunately they dried out while I was there and the rain stopped for the walk home.

Before going to bed early, I looked through my file of poetry dating back to student days for some pieces of writing I vaguely recall doing thirty years ago following the St Paul's riots. I was looking for material to stimulate thoughts for another short story to go with the other two already written about the night of the riots. I found an untitled piece of two foolscap sheets containing a few thin recollections of observations and encounters on that night, and transcribed it into a digital file. 

The flawed and fading typescript would probably have digitised fine and then need time correcting it. I entered the text manually instead, making corrections as I went along, as there were mistakes and half formed phrases which didn't read well. I've become more critical of what I write nowadays. I was quite surprised it was more poetic and impressionistic than narrative in style. Did I improve it? I also found a scrappy handwritten version in an exercise book, so I guess the typescript was an unfinished work in progress, like so many of my earlier literary efforts.