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.

State of Alarm - day Forty One

Clouds and rain gave way to sunshine this morning and nice long warm day. After Morning Prayer, I listened to the Sunday programme on BBC Radio 4. This ended with a poem written by a surgeon on in a Lancashire hospital Intensive Care Unit, entitled 'I just called to say ...' It wasn't a homage to the Stevie Wonder song of the same name, but an account of his telephone pastoral ministry to the next of kin of patients under his care on ventilation. Half of his day is spent on the phone updating those who wait at home, for better or for worse. The poem spoke of what he has to tell someone at each stage, eagerly awaiting news, unprepared for how long it takes, either for recovery or to death. It was moving and powerful, and gave an insight into the anguish of the healer when all that can be done has been done, and all that's left to do is wait.

The broadcast Morning service, which I listened to over breakfast centred around the Emmaus Road story, today's Gospel. Worship was led by the chaplain and staff members of a hospice, and turned around the journeys people make at the end of their lives. In my sermon for this week, I mentioned that several places lay claim to be the original Emmaus village just outside of West Jerusalem. The preacher, principal of Mansfield College Oxford took it a step further, speaking of several possible roads to Emmaus, all of them different, one hidden, one overgrown and neglected, one dangerous, along a landmine strewn border and so on. It's an imaginative fugue on the narrative, showing how rich are the possibilities for feeding on the Word.   

I read Ante-Communion and prayed at the usual service time. Valuable and inspiring though many on-line liturgies can be, sometime I find that I just need to read the texts rather than listen to them, and then be silent, either sitting or walking. There's no substitute for fellowship, for human contact, but the empty space can be re-purposed for waiting on God. Co-incidentally, Roy over in Alicante sent me a quotation from T S Eliot's Four Quartets which speaks profoundly of the mystery of God and the humankind beholding the mystery

'I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, 

for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; 

wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; 

there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. 

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: 

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.'

Out in the garden, I caught my first daytime sight of the house gecko on a wall, and took a photo which I'm proud of. Then I saw a pair of small grew birds acting as if  they were looking for a nesting site. As one of them rested on top of the big garden cactus I took a photo which Rosi later identified as a Spotted Flycatcher. I remember Mother Doreen pointing out one in the forest near her home up on the inland border of Malaga province but that wasd fifty metres away, impossible to snap. So this was another first!

In the evening Rosi called me about booking a flight home, on the 22nd May, as a couple of direct flights to London have been advertised on the BA website., one to London City and one to Gatwick. A quick chat with Kath confirmed she'd be willing to collect me and take me home, and within an hour I had the flight confirmation document. It was booked by Rose from the UK. She was stranded there on a return trip from Ibiza where she has made her home. Decisive action was needed and taken on my behalf, for which I am very grateful. But my hopes won't really begin to rise until this flight proposal is confirmed. Any deterioration here or in UK could change the best made plans. One step at a time on this road. The old order has changed, perhaps irrevocably, who knows yet?

The inbound flight will be mostly of stranded returnees, with fewer people this soon after lock-down wanting to go to London, except for business, or people who missed out on the emergency flights in March, and didn't need to return. It will be good to go home, though there will be far less for me to do there than there has been here, except carry on waiting for that final round of surgery. Clare says that 'elective' surgery is to be re-started soon, though I suspect I'll still have another six months to wait for that.

This morning I saw a man out walking with his young teenage daughter dragging her feet behind, taking advantage of the easing of restrictions on children. I could imagine a girl of her age saying "Oh Dad, must I go out with you, you're so embarrassing."  In the afternoon I heard several children's voices out on the road, and through the trees saw three naughty youngsters out together, no parent, no dog in sight. Well, one can expect the young to push the boundaries, having been pent up at home for so long. Good for their mental health, as it's bad for the blood pressure of law enforcers.

Delta party

Yesterday was too hot to do much, apart from walking into town for exercise in the afternoon. The beaches were crowded, and I took some photos of two lads practising tightrope walking on the edge of the beach. I sat in the shade to listen outside the Vinaros Escuela de la Musica. Inside a band rehearsal was taking place, definitely a beginners band. The two young lads were learning by doing, and that captured all my attention.

This morning, another visit to L'Ampolla Pitch and Putt club house for Robert and Gerda's party, a combined celebration of 65 years of marriage and Robert's 94th birthday. About twenty people were there to congratulate them, family, neighbours, church members. A buffet lunch was provided, with a wonderful array of cakes to follow. It was such a happy occasion, with a much loved couple. I felt privileged to be there with them, and asked to pray a blessing on the gathering.

At the end of the party, I had a couple of hours free. The club house is near one of the peripheral villages of the Delta de lEbre, so it was simply a matter of heading east through rice fields to reach the north facing sea shore, opposite L'Ampolla across the bay. The geographical configuration of the Delta is a complex testimony to the interplay of river, ocean, weather and terrain over millennia, so there more to explore than is at first obvious.

I ended up at the Restaurant Vascos, which sits at the conjunction of two beaches. Here, there are miles of open sand, and right behind a thin line of dunes are vast acres of rice paddies. I took only a few photos. In the heat of the day, there weren't too many birds around, only biting insects, so I paid a price for my little expedition.

Then I drove inland to El Perello and visited John again in his residencia. We talked about T S Eliot's poetry. He's running a poetry discussion group, and was puzzling over a particular image of a white horse, and wondering if there might be a biblical cross reference. I could only think of one in the Revelation to John, and as it turned out, when I checked, there are two. Both are symbols of the conqueror's status. In Revelation 6 it refers to the Antichrist and in chapter 19 refers to the ultimate victory of Christ. If I ever knew that consciously, it's not information I've ever had to use before. That's the marvellous thing about scripture. It contains so much, but not all of it has relevance and connects with one's experience at the same time.