Thanksgiving

Another sunny start to the day, but with a layer of high cloud coming and going throughout the morning. Clare was having trouble locating the archive of digital books on her Kindle. She failed to find the long list of books purchased and archived, only the ones downloaded into the memory of the device. The archive search option is there, but it's useless if you can't remember the name of a book or its author. She reads a great deal and has grown accustomed to recognising a book first by the visual impact of its cover. Not being able to access a display of covers in her archive, since an update a while back, is unhelpful. 

I had a look at the device and was mystified by its user interface, different from anything I'm familiar with. When plugged into her Linux laptop, the Kindle's file system was visible, but no sign of an archive list. On accessing her Amazon account in a browser, however, it was possible to see icons of all the digital book files she's purchased in the past. If she wants to search for a title in the archive at the moment, she has to check its name and author on her computer first. There must be a work-around, but where? The only useful thing I was able to do was a full update of Mint 20. It must be half a year since I last did that. Updated or not, it works perfectly, every time.

Last night, Clare baked bread and kept back enough dough for pizza making this morning. This we did while listening to the Platinum Jubilee Thanksgiving Service from St Paul's Cathedral on the radio. As ever, a majestically beautiful musical celebration, with diverse contributors doing readings, prayers and an an act of commitment to service, plus a fine Gospel sermon from Archbishop Stephen of York, standing in in for Archbishop Justin who, like Prince Andrew is self isolating with covid at the moment. 

While the country has resumed normality with vigour, almost to the point of forgetting the past two years of living with the fear of runaway contagion, the pandemic hasn't gone away. People are still getting infected with the omicron variant. Wearing masks in enclosed crowded public places is now largely ignored. While the infection rate has slowed down, infections aren't yet reduced to being a rarity. There are still people dying from covid related sickness, and the uptake of top-up vaccines has slowed down. When two known public figures are self isolating, it's a reminder the pandemic isn't over yet.

Our pizzas turned out perfectly. We ate them for lunch out in the garden with a glass of wine. It's no wonder I fell asleep in the chair for an hour afterwards. Then we walked up to Llandaff Village for tea, by the tea shop was closed, so we walked back down the Taff Trail on the East side of the river, and had a coffee from the mobile barista before heading home for supper. Another episode of 'Usedom krimi' afterwards, which was about child abduction, but also looked back to relationships made and broken at the time the DDR ended.  The island of Usedom on the Polish border was at that time in the old East Germany.

No subtitles on radio

Saturday morning, I drove to Kenilworth to look after Rhiannon, while Kath and Anto went to do a gig with their band 'Sonrisa' down in Hampshire, driving home in the early hours of the morning. Rhiannon received Monopoly among her Christmas gifts and is now a keen player, so we spent the afternoon playing the game. After supper of fish and chips we watched a TV game show and several episodes of 'Last of the Summer Wine', contentedly snuggled up on the sofa together, while she constructed virtual houses on her iPad. Clare emailed to say she's been given a date for her shoulder operation at last, the 26th February. Now we can start planning ahead once more.

Today, on a cold and frosty morning, I walked to the eight o'clock Communion service at St Nicholas' Parish Church. Since I was last here a fortnight ago, snowdrops have come out fully in the churchyard, pristine white in early light.

It's not a good photo, as it's taken with my phone which only performs decently in good lighting conditions, but it gives an impression.

After breakfast, Rhiannon and I played Monopoly again for a couple of hours, then I drove home with the sun in my face, listening to Choral Evensong from St Paul's Cathedral on Radio Three, with an amazing, hard to sing contemporary setting of the Latin Magnificat text by Giles Swayne. All well and good, but the complexity of the music made the words hard to hear and understand.

I rejoice in the creative adventure that is a feature of 20th and 21st century church music. I love the fact that we can use Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French and various kinds of English in our acts of worship, but there's still a streak of reformation soul in me that wants things to be understood in our mother tongue as well. Not least for the sake of those hearing these texts being sung for the first time.  A broadcast on TV or the web could stream a readable text easily enough. With Radio music there are no subtitles. Now there's a challenge!

We watched an interesting late evening programme called 'Finding Shakespeare' in which Lenny Henry spoke about discovering Shakespeare in adult life, acting on stage for the first time in 'Othello' and recently in  'Comedy of Errors'. Schooling had left him with the idea that Shakespeare belonged to elitist high-brow culture, not relevant to a working class black kid. As an adult he worked his way over six years through an O.U. degree in English literature, which gave him a different appreciation of texts that were aimed at all levels of people in a mixed society, from this he made his first venture into the world of straight theatre, after the best part of thirty years on the comedy stage. A fascinating insight into the way education has contributed to the stratification of society and culture.