Quarantine Cymru - day Four

Clouds and sunshine today, but no rain, and warmer again. I wish I could go out for an early morning walk. Clare returned from her walk and cooked delicious vegan pancakes for breakfast. Our Saturday treat. I have now worked out how to capture audio from YouTube with a Chromebook web app called 'Twisted Wave'. It's one which I must have used ages ago, as it recognised we when I logged in with my Google i/d. I can't have used it much at the time. After a lot of messing about, I found a way to channel YouTube sound from my Linux laptop to my little Sony hi-fi system, and then return it to the laptop's microphone input using a pair of stereo cables. This allows Audacity on Linux to capture the audio in an editable digital file. I could have done with knowing this yesterday.

I had a good chat with Hywel about our contrasting Balearic locum experiences. He was in Mallorca in February, leaving just before I arrived there. He too wonders how chaplaincies are going to cope as they derive a key proportion of income from visitors. 

The Costa Azahar Chaplaincy closes this month as it is no longer able to raise enough founds to keep going. Fr Louis, their priest already accepted a part time stipend, and had a part time job. I understand he's keen to stay in Spain and continue ministry like this. He's been appointed to St George's Malaga and starts next month. That chaplaincy is equally susceptible to fluctuations in tourist income, but has its own building and grounds, an enormous asset, unlike Costa Azahar, where church buildings and shop-cum-social centre were rented.

It's a welcome move for Malaga, with good potential for redevelopment long term, and a young priest willing to earn his living in return for a house for duty plus expenses arrangement. The shape of things to come in many chaplaincies and parishes I suspect. No more locums there for me, but when it's safe to do so, we will visit a city that I love and miss. Rosella has kindly offered us the use of her apartment in Rincon de la Victoria.

Public health restrictions are to relax slightly, and will allow churches to re-open for private prayer. it sounds good, and is seen as an acknowledgement of the importance of public sacred spaces for the good of the people. The guidelines of managing the re-opening are strict in nature, and will take a good deal of planning and organising, regardless of how many people take advantage of it as intended. Many people, particularly older people who might value their church being open again, are still nervous about going out, and may be reluctant to make a visit.

Not that many Anglican churches have been opened regularly for personal prayer over the past 30-40 years for security reasons. Once they could no longer afford a virger or caretaker churches saw a rise in numbers of thefts and vandalism. I wonder if the PCC of Canton Benefice will be able to reach a conclusion about the practicalities of church opening like this? Is there a need? How can one know?

Back at the time of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, I was Chaplain in Monaco. The next morning, I kept St Paul's church open for prayer during daylight hours, until the following Sunday, and spent time there in case anyone came to pray who needed a priest to talk to. Just a small handful of people came, few of them church members. The doors of the church had been kept closed outside of service times for years. I was told that Casino gamblers used to drop by and make a note of the numbers displayed on the hymn board if they'd been left up, as this was considered lucky. Whether it was a joke or not, I don't know, but it said something significant about irreverence and sacred spaces. 

I heard from my niece Nicky that my sister Pauline's funeral is to be on the afternoon of 3rd July. It'll be good for her son Jules, stuck in Dubai, after work on Friday, the Muslim day for weekly common prayer at the mosque. The service, at Worle crematorium in Weston will be relayed to those of us who cannot attend, like Jules, via a custom video link. Hopefully, Owain can attend and represent us. I've been asked to read on video the eulogy which she and Jules will write between them.

Laguna Fuente de PIedra revisited

Two older married couples came to St George's this morning for the midweek Eucharist. The wives were sisters, descendants of William Mark the British Consul whose patient efforts over decades led to the establishment of Malaga's English cemetery. Although a layman, he can also be thought of as the founding father of St George's Chaplaincy, given that his duties as H.M. Consul in this region included reading Morning and Evening Prayer with a sermon from the Book of Homilies on Sunday at the Consular residence, for anyone who cared to attend. It was decades before occasional visits from a priest to celebrate Holy Communion were possible, let alone the appointment of a regular Chaplain. I was delighted to be in a position to tell the couples about Chaplaincy life today, with a new Chaplain's appointment about to be announced, and the Confirmation service last week.

After we parted company, I drove up the A45 autovia for a final meeting with Doreen to discuss the time we spent working together. Our rendezvous was a restaurant called Caserio San Benito, west of Antequera, in a beautiful restored eighteenth century rural manor house set among wheat fields and olive groves. This is a highly rated traditional gastronomic venue, but we only stopped there for a drink before continuing on our journey. On the land next to this is an unusual building which houses the Museo de Usos y Costumbres de San Benito.

Unusual, in that it looks, to all intents and purposes, like a renaissance style church, made redundant, adapted to serve as a museum, but it's not. It was constructed in the 1990s, using parts and materials collected from the ruins of abandoned rural 16th and 17th century manor houses in the Antequera region. It was constructed to house assorted private collections of domestic artefacts, gathered by the owner Antonio Galindo, including cameras and radios It's a pastiche of an ancient building, a folly of sorts. Collection showcases are set into niches in the walls covered by iron grilles, rather than encased in glass. It's a simple but effective design. The central 'nave area is kept free of fixtures so it can be used for events - including weddings, presumably of a civil nature, as it's not a church. It's an interesting and original idea, to say the least.

We drove on from there past fields of growing grain with huge blood red swathes of poppies and blue flowers, which I think were wild flax. It was movingly beautiful to behold. Our next brief stop was at a 17th century manor house turned into a posh restaurant and hotel further along the Roman road whose dueño was a highwayman.

Then we turned south and headed for Fuente de Piedra lake for a couple of hours of bird-watching while we talked, in one of Spain's top habitats for flamingos, with tens, if not hundreds of thousands staying there most of the time, unless rainfall shortage dries out the lake. After a wet winter and spring, there's plenty of water with guaranteed high salinity to ensure that micro-organisms on which flamingos feed flourish in abundance. The last time I was here was on by birthday three years ago, five weeks earlier, when it was much hotter. It's been quite cool for May this year.

I was very pleased with the photos produced by my Sony HX300, and even more pleased that I took my HX50 along as well, as half way through the battery of the former gave out, drained by much zooming back and forth. The latter I had recharged only yesterday, and as the batteries are identical, was able to swap them over, and have optimum benefit from the 50 times zoom of the HX300. The photos can be seen here.

It was good to have a relaxed discussion about our ministries, close to the end of my stay here as a locum pastor, and to share our common interests in ornithology and environmental issues. Doreen is a professional bird-watching tour guide, with eyes far sharper than mine, more attuned to the local landscape. She set up her telescope on a terrace overlooking the lake, while I went exploring several lagunillas at close range.

When I returned, I discovered that she'd been chatting with other visitors to the terrace, and offering them a much closer view of birds along the shore line 2-300 metres away below. She'd spotted among the crowds a pair of lesser flamingos, smaller birds, much brighter pink than the big birds. I looked and got a glimpse of them, but by the time I had my camera out and trained on the area, the flock started moving, and it's hard to tell where they are in the pictures I took.

We went hunting in the nearby village of Laguna de Piedra for a place to get a drank and some tapas but by the time we got around to thinking about food, bars and restaurants had stopped serving all but drinks, so we concluded our business and parted company, both of us with an hour's journey in different directions. It's a huge area the chaplaincy serves, and delightfully varied, with forested mountains and rolling hills patterned with olive groves and fruit orchards, coastal and high plains, given to cereal plantations, if not solar panels. As well as the ancient city of Málaga, there's equally ancient Velez Málaga and Antequera, with Granada also in range. The whole region now occupies a special place in my heart, and a host of spectacular vistas imprinted in my memory. Such a privilege to work here, even temporarily.