Covid sabotages reunion

We had a message from John, Jasmine's dad last night, to say they'd all got covid after a family wedding last week. When I saw photos of the wedding party my first thought was of a potential disaster waiting to happen. If Jasmine doesn't test negative midweek, she may not visit us as planned. If she did come anyway. I'd need to avoid seeing her, as I can't risk covid stopping me from travelling. It's going to be risky enough getting on a 'plane knowing that on average half a dozen people flying will have covid whether they know it or not. I'll need to be very careful en route to be fit for work when I arrive. If I do arrive that is, given current flight cancellations and delays. Had I seen this coming before booking, I would have preferred to pay extra to travel all the way by train, even if it does take twenty hours, and cost double the price of a flight.

Yesterday, I bought a new clock radio and CD player for Clare. It was proving frustratingly difficult for her to follow the setup instructions and get the thing to work properly. After breakfast I had a go at the job, and fiddled about with the controls to try and figure out what each did. A bit hit and miss, but I managed to get a few key DAB stations to work, but it's doing to be an uphill struggle to get the FM stations tuned in as well. The system has twenty pre-set buttons but with no clear indication of how to add or delete pre-set stations. How ridiculous to make quite an expensive domestic item so user unfriendly.

It was raining when we both set out for church, so I gave Clare a life to St Catherine's and then went on to St German's. There were only two dozen of us this morning. The holiday season is upon us. We kept the feast of St Thomas the Apostle, and as the readings with quite short and my sermon wasn't too long, I was back home for lunch by one.

After Clare's siesta we went for a walk through Llandaff Fields and along the Taff, where I saw an egret fishing again in much the same spot as I spotted one a fortnight ago. Later I caught a glimpse of a heron flying down river, a magnificent overview too brief to photograph. If you see them flying over you with  neck folded in and legs protruding beyond the tail, they look a bit odd, ungainly, but from above their four foot wingspan is a wonder of elegance to behold.

This evening I watched the Vienna Philharmonic's outdoor summer concert from Vienna's Schoenbrunn Palace. A magnificent affair, bringing to mind their 2020 summer concert, as European concert venues  just started to resume public performances. That was postponed until the end of September, and was a huge organisational challenge to arrange after months of rehearsals punctuated by covid testing. I found that event most moving, as a symbol of resilience in the world wide artistic community. And here we are nearly two years on, better protected after a succession of four vaccinations, but still capable of getting infected by one or other of the contagious omicron variants doing the rounds. Will it ever end?

I woke up this morning still thinking about last night's episode of Inspector Montalbano. I believe it was the one that started filming around the time that the pandemic broke out, and completion was subject to long delay. I thought this might account for the deserted outdoor scenes, but as I pondered upon it further it struck me that in many previous episodes few street scenes were populated with anyone other than the actors involved. I thought there may be different reasons for this. 

From a film producer's viewpoint, filming a populated street scene is expensive on crowd extras, road closures and security personnel. Scenes are often shot in daytime when it can be hot, and people stay indoors out of the sun, so an empty daytime street would be normal. Then there's the possibility that the producer choses to do this, because many ancient small towns and hill villages in Italy are depopulated by emigration, or contain holiday homes only periodically used. Empty properties have cropped up in story lines from time to time as well, so it's possible streets are empty most of the time, and the film portrays this. One way to inform the speculation would be to read all the novels, as they describe the setting of the fictional Vigata. I've only read one of the three dozen so far.

Enter omicron

It was minus one when I wok up this morning, but by the afternoon the temperature rose to six degrees. It was cloudy but we were spared rain. There were the usual domestic chores after breakfast to mark the start of the week then writing before cooking lunch. I walked to Aldi's after we'd eaten, for some bananas and peanut butter, not to mention wine. A new checkout clergy accidentally double scanned a couple of bottles, so it was just as well I checked the amount owing before tapping my card on the cash terminal, as I'd been overcharged by ten pounds. I had to wait several minutes for the error to be reversed and checked by the duty manager. The checkout guy was a newbie and rather embarrassed. He'd teased me about an age check for alcohol purchases earlier, but age was no hindrance to being sharp witted, and I laughed it all off.

When I got home, I completed my Morning Prayer video and uploaded it to YouTube ready for Thursday. After supper, we watched a programme about scientific research into the authenticity of a self-portrait by Rembrandt housed in Knightshayes Court, a National Trust property in Devon. We were shown the house in the course of the programme, of interest in its own right to us, as its architect was William Burgess, who designed Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch. It looks like a place that would be worth a visit for its exotic Victorian Gothic design and the high quality craftsmanship that realised it.

It's good to hear from today's news that the government is imposing rules about face mask wearing in England, in line withe the Celtic regions, and requiring travellers returning from Southern Africa to be quarantined. The extent of the threat from the recently detected and named 'omicron' covid19 variant has yet to be determined, and fortunately widespread testing has detected a small number of cases in Europe and Britain early. This is clear evidence of the need to get all third world countries vaccinated sooner not later, to hinder the development of more threatening variants. 

A hard and fast precautionary response is what scientists advise and for once they are being listened to, even more so that on previous occasions, when restrictions came in a bit too late. It such a pity that the response on previous occasions wasn't harder and faster, as it cost many lives and situations that were hard to control, even with the high up-take of vaccination. It's just a pity there weren't more practicing scientists among our political leaders.

Video hassles

Sunday worship on Radio Four first thing was from Brecon Cathedral, in honour of tomorrow's St David's Day. Archbishop John Davies preached, referring to his own call to ministry and reflecting his impending retirement. I remember meeting him first when he arrived as curate of Bulwark in Chepstow Parish, in the late 1980s where we lived during my time working for USPG as Area Secretary for Wales. I wonder what he plans to do in retirement? It seems strange to have been around long enough in ministry to see eight Archbishops of Wales come and go - Glyn, Gwilym, Derek, George, Alwyn, Rowan, Barry and now John.

What a delightful blessing to walk to church in sunlight under a clear bright blue sky in crisp morning air! There were thirty of us celebrating the Eucharist together again in St Catherine's. We're still hemmed in by 'no socialising' policy, even if we're careful to maintain social distance. No hanging around in the church grounds, go to the supermarket instead, or talk in the street with two metres (?) between you, if you want brief interaction or company of sorts. As if we weren't going to be careful, having survived this far!

It was warm enough to have lunch in the garden again today. I edited and wrote some of this week's parish WhatsApp Reflections before going out for a walk up to the Cathedral, and then to Llandaff Weir. It's the first time in many weeks that the footpath up to the weir has dried out enough not to feel treacherous underfoot.

After tea I set about recording tomorrow's St David's Day reflection, with a brief video introduction, a photo of Fran's icon and an audio commentary. I hadn't forgotten what I learned from recording my sister's eulogy last summer, and soon found out how to produce a viable video, which ran correctly on a PC, but not on a smartphone, producing only a perfect miniscule version. I tried every trick I could think of to get the video to display properly full screen without success. 

Fortunately a conversation with Kath proved to be helpful. I re-recorded the little video introduction in landscape mode, and replaced it in the file editor, then rendered it as a 720p video. The whole thing only looked best on a phone in landscape mode. There's a problem I cannot resolve with mixed portrait and landscape display. If I could have done the whole thing on my phone without resort to an internal video editor, maybe this problem would not exist, but my phone doesn't have a video editor I know of. Kath has developed expertise at video editing on her Mac, and on a smartphone in the course of work this past few years. Rhiannon, doing video projects at home for drama college uses only a smartphone, and produces some impressive sophisticated results. Ah! These digital natives!

A remarkable twenty million vaccinations have done in Britain in the first three months of deployment. It's a logistic triumph for thousands of people working together. All deserve a medal of honour. Six new cases of the Brazilian covid variant have been detected among passengers travelling from there on a flight via Zurich, thanks to rapid genome sequencing of test samples. Five of the six people infected have been tracked and traced, A sixth didn't give sufficient detail on their form to make tracing possible, potentially sowing infection chaos, so a high speed hunt is on to detect the potential super spreader. 

If only people weren't so careless about giving their details or neurotic enough to want to obscure them in the interests of personal privacy. In a village, it's not unusual for everyone to know each others' business. Now we're in a global village. While there are many good reasons for safeguarding personal privacy on a host of different issues, matters of who we are, where we've come from and going need to be known for the sake of the common good, and such doesn't have to be broadcasted or exploited to this end. Nobody is exempt from the risk of being a carrier or a victim of this plague.