Last day with Jas

Cloudy sky returned for some of the day. Jasmine cooked pancakes for breakfast with Grandma support. Then we drove to Porthkerry Country Park and the cloud cleared along the coast. We took photos on the beach, then had a drink and ice cream at Mrs Marco's Cafe. I had my first veegan choc ice of the season which was nice, but not quite chilled enough so it rapidly began to melt in the heat and needed eating fast, which detracts a little from the pleasure. 

When we returned, Jas and I went to check out the moorhens in Thompson's park. Parents with young kids in the park after school were keen to tell them about the nest, and the hope of seeing eggs hatch. Sadly it's not going to happen while Jas is here, so I've promised to send her the first photos I get when they do. 

The two of them walked over the the Royal Welsh College at tea time for the 'Amser Jazz' end of summer term session. I had messages to respond to and worked on Sunday's sermon. With three readings this week worth drawing attention to, it took time to think about what to write. Then, a walk around the Fields and back, by which time Clare and Jas were crossing the park on their way home just behind me. I got home just ahead of them, in time to start cooking pasta and veg.

Then it was time for Jas to pack her case, ready for an early departure for the London train tomorrow. It's been a lovely week we've had with her. Sharing an interest in photography with her has been a delight, as Clare has had pleasure in making music with her, and sharing culinary creations. Hopefully in a couple of years time she'll be studying over here in UK, and there's be opportunities to see her more often.

Discovering MuseScore

Another dull day, brightened by a pancake breakfast followed by a lie-in. Then a trip to Canton Cobblers to collect my repaired shoes and sandals. The shoes were finished, but my sandals had been in a queue of other sandal repairs, and hadn't been done, so I'll have to wait until next week.

Clare received an email with an unreadable zip file attachment on it from the music transcription service of the Royal National Institute for the Blind. They have a specialist volunteer team  helping those losing their sight to continue normal activity by making large print copies of music whose notes or text layout is too cramped or too small for easy reading. It's not as straightforward as enlargement, as the layout of text in relation to music contributes to legibility issues, a digital re-write is needed using a special app called MuseScore. Clare's file attachment was not only zipped but in a special .mscz MuseScore file format.

Clare's laptop runs under Linux Mint, and initially the .mscz file was unreadable. I emailed it to myself and tried without success to read it on my Chromebook, so tried again on my Windows workstation. This told me to look in the Windows App store, where I found and downloaded MuseScore3 for free. This was able to display and print the file as intended. Then Google told me there's a Linux version, so I installed it on Clare's laptop for future use. It's a nice piece of work. You can create your own music files using it as well as files others have created.

Clare cooked a delicious salmon soup for lunch. Afterwards, I finished and printed tomorrow's sermon. Then we drove to Porthkerry Country park for a walk tea and cake. The sky remained overcast threatening rain but it didn't arrive. For supper I cooked myself a pasta sauce with red pepper and tomato - things Clare's diet forbids. Then I recorded next Thursday's Morning Prayer and Reflection.

Clifftop walk

How lovely to wake up to a bright sunny day after a dull and mostly wet week. After our usual Saturday pancake breakfast, I finished off and printed my Sunday sermon, and then we drove to Cold Knap in Barry for lunch at Mister Villa's fish restaurant. It serves the most delicious fish soup, even better than the one at La Marina by Cardiff Barrage. What a treat. I also had cod and Clare had hake, perfectly cooked. 

While we were there, restaurant owner Christine arrived for lunch. Clare knows her through Steiner study groups but not seen her since before the pandemic, so after we'd eaten they had a catch-up chat before we went for our clifftop walk to Porthkerry for a cup of tea. I don't think I've ever seen the tide so far out, exposing bedrock a couple of hundred metres from the vast bank of pebbles forming the beach.

Fighting continues in Ukraine with more than a million feeling the country altogether so far. Attempts to create a humanitarian corridor to let civilians to leave Mariupol failed in the first hour of implementation due to a breakdown in trust between invaders and defenders. Russia and Belarus have been banned from the World Cup, and the Russian Formula One Grand Prix  cancelled. Paralympic athletes have been barred from the Winter games, the day before it started and more banking sanctions imposed, hitting the global economy as well as the Russian economy even harder. There's no sign of a halt in fighting though it seems Ukranian forces are still slowing down the Russian advance remarkably. What next?

There wasn't much of interest on telly after supper, apart from a French satirical comedy called 'La Belle Epoque'. It was hilarious in parts, poking fun a digital modernity but the plot was rather confusing to follow and over reliant on simulated oral sex scenes to represent boredom in jaded relationships. Totally pointless and time wasting. The movie run time could have been ten minutes short without them. I don't know why the BBC bothered with it.

Monday closures

We all got up late after the the intensity of yesterday's musical experiences. The weather promised to be a mixture of sunshine and showers. Before going for a walk and lunch in Porthkerry Country Park, I made a bereavement call about the funeral I've been asked to take a week Tuesday

We intended to eat there at Mrs Marco's café, but found it was closed on a Monday. We walked for an hour in Cwm Ciddy woods and found the remnants of the ancient grain mill on the banks of the stream that runs down the valley, then drove to Cold Knap in Barry, where the Romilly's Coffee shop was open. We had a snack there in a pleasant eaterie, next to Mr Villa's fish restaurant which we thought might be open, but wasn't. Fortunately it didn't start to rain until we started out for home. We drove to the Bay Barrage at the Cardiff Marina end, to book a table for tomorrow's birthday lunch for Clare at la Marina. The receptionist said all booking was now done on-line, but helpfully produced his laptop and made a booking in situ. 

When we got home, I slept for half an hour, then went to Tesco's for a birthday card for Clare and some ingredients needed for the paella I cooked for supper. While cooking I also worked on next Sunday's Patronal Festival sermon for St German's, before settling down for a couple of hours in front of the telly with 'Secrets of the Museum' and this week's new episode of NCIS.

Driving around today, it took me a while to realise that some of the petrol stations I noticed had their fuel price displays set to zero, a sign they had no fuel to sell, even if they were open for other reasons. Fortunately I filled up last week before the new media began to report on the occasional fuel station that had to close for lack of delivery. This reportage sparked a round of panic fuel buying. exacerbating the recent fuel delivery problem prompted by delivery driver shortages. 

This crisis, in my opinion, has been stoked up by media reports, and pushed the government into doing what it should have done several weeks ago, to recognise the urgent need for temporary visas for drivers resident in the EU to return and work here until new ones can be trained, having been de-motivated by brexit to stay here and work as they have done for decades. A populist government, driven by mostly right wing media moguls. And this is modern democracy?

Foraging in Porthkerry

We had a lie in, followed by our Saturday pancake breakfast this morning, then we drove to under a blue sky to visit Porthkerry Country Park for a walk along the coast path. We've walked there from Cold Knap in Barry several times, but I'm not sure if we've driven there before. A wooded valley with a broad grassy meadow runs down to pebbled beach through a saline marshy area, with different vegetation, albeit dried out at this time of year. A nice new boardwalk has been constructed running from the cafe to the beach, about three hundred metres, excellent for wheelchair users. I don't think it was there when we last visited three years ago. 

The entire domain is very well managed and litter free. The cafe is run Italian style with a wide range of usual snacks, but also offering a range of canoli worthy of a Montalbano story. The car park has Pay and Display machines, a pound for two hours. These incorporate contact-less pay devices linked to the mobile phone network I think. It worked fine, although the payment signal sent to the banking network took about a minute for verification to be transmitted. I stood peering at the rather dim black and white screen waiting for my ticket to be produced, and a kind lady stopped and asked if I needed help. I wondered if she'd often seen older people peering at the device trying to figure out how it works.

The coast path heads up from the beach, a stiff climb of about 70 metres. As the tide was at its lowest, we could have walked along the beach, but big pebbles make for a slow ankle twisting trudge, so the climb was the lesser of two evils. I say this as two years of park walking on the flat have reduced my climbing fitness, so my legs feel very stiff and take ages to loosen up. Clare went up faster than me, as she uses her exercise cycle several times a week. I wish we lived nearer some really steep hills for daily walking.

The Coast Path route takes you through Porthkerry Leisure Park, with over a hundred chalets owned if not rented on the clifftop and in a quarry cut into the cliff facing the sea. We walked to a headland on the far side of the Park and ate out picnic lunch there. Considering how close the coast is here to the flight path from Rhoose it was fairly quiet. I noted only two planes taking off, one Vueling and one KLM. It would be much busier in a normal summer season. I saw three different butterflies,white brown and blue. There were swallows and swifts in the air. A big black furry bumble bee was browsing the undergrowth at my feet and then I watched it take off. One of several passing swifts snatched it before my eyes. Something I've never seen before.

We didn't go much further on the coast path as we'd already walked for an hour, but we stopped to pick blackberries, from the abundance of bushes along the way, a pound and a quarter. On the way back to the car we stopped for coffee and canoli. There was a ten minute queue to be served, but it was worthwhile. I had to go and sit down and leave Clare in the queue as my feet were hurting more than usual, perhaps the wrong choice of walking shoes? Anyway, it didn't stop us from calling at Lidl's for groceries and wine on the way home.

We had a wonderful salmon soup for supper, from the bones of the filleted fish which arrived yesterday. The blackberries plus some apples we bought went on to cook, and then left overnight in the filtering bag used to make fruit jelly. Wonderful seasonal stuff! Then we watched a recording of Elin Fflur on S4C performing superbly before an audience in Bangor. Her show featured Eden, a trio of clog dancers, with an original way of dialoguing with the rock band, like a second drummer. The sound is different from the Irish folk style, in which musicians are more of a backing group for the dancers, an element of Welsh pop which isn't an echo of other genres of pop music.

After a coast walk, a thoughtful movie

Clare made pancakes for breakfast again, then late morning we drove to Cold Knapp for lunch at the excellent Mr Villa's Fish and Chip Restaurant. But first after parking above the marvellous pebble beach, we walked around the headland and back. After lunch a walk along the clifftop to Porthkerry. 

The climb from the car park up to the continuation of the Coast Path is steep - 115 steps and then a further climb up to the top, as rise of about 150 feet. I was surprised at how stiff my legs became as I climbed, despite going up and down thirteen stairs at home a dozen times a day. I had to stop and rest several times, to avoid getting utterly breathless. It made me realise that the thousand odd miles of keep fit walking I've done have all been on the flat, so there are some leg muscles which have had far less exercise, and need working on. And, I need to work on exercise that will raise my heart rate too, in order to retain as the cardiovaascular condition possible. We live and learn. If we don't we die.

The weather was overcast, and a shower of light rain dampened our return journey to the car, but we covered five miles. That's the furthest Clare has walked for some time, so it did us both some good.

In the evening BBC Four treated us to a marvellous, beautifully crafted Norwegian movie called the King's Decision, all about the role of King Haakon in the run up to the Nazi occupation of Norway in April 1940, when Quisling's coup d'etat took place. 

I hadn't realised Haakon was the first Norwegian King to be elected. He saw himself as a champion of Norwegian Parliamentary democracy. Hitler wanted him to endorse the Quisling regime, but rather than do so he abdicated and went into exile in Britain, returning only when the war ended in 1945. 

Hitler rose to dictatorship by exploiting populist sentiment. The King believed firmly that only a Parliament freely and legally elected by its citizens had the right to govern his country. Showing this film when the British Parliament is under attack from populist fervour whipped up by right wing  movements and tabloid newspapers couldn't be more timely. I wouldn't be surprised if the BBC now gets castigated for its selection and scheduling of a European movie of such thoughtful quality.

Bank holiday outing

After a late breakfast, we drove to Cold Knap beach car park, west of Barry, then climbed from there up to the Coast Path and followed it to Porthkerry Country Park, about a mile along the coast. We had a coffee there, and were able to walk back along the beach, as the tide had gone out sufficiently to make it possible. By this time is was getting on for two, so we drove to a Co-op store on College Road Barry, and picnicked on sandwiches bought there before driving Owain to Cardiff Central station to catch a train back to Bristol. 

We then drove to Homebase on Newport Road, to get some plant nutrient and a new weighing scales, as ours died last week, after decades of use. We also called at Curry's digital, so that I could browse the new acquisitions and sale stock, and buy a Bluetooth mouse to use with one of my PCs with a dearth of USB ports. At ten quid it's worth the effort of finding out if using a Bluetooth  connection regularly is as good as should be.