Losing a grip on contagion

This morning I worked on the second of the four offices of Morning Prayer that I have to prepare for the week before Christmas. I'd just completed it at half past eleven when my Chromebook froze on me. Both Google Docs and Drive were inaccessible. I had no idea whether it was a fault in the device or on-line, but soon enough my newsfeed was reporting a global Google services outage, which made the afternoon news broadcasts, but by that time it had been fixed and I was able to access the document in question and it was undamaged, just as it had been when I finished it.

On reflection I thought how foolish it was to rely so heavily on Cloud storage. No matter how good and generally glitch free it can be, the bottom line is that I'm not in full control of my own work. All that's needed is to start a document and save it to the memory of the device itself or better still to its SD card extension, as the card can be removed and used on another device instead. I must change working habits to this effect, as it would be possible to work on a document stored on the device, even when off-line, even given the high web dependency of a Chromebook.

Yesterday evening before settling down to watch telly, I finally got around to putting cards and letters in the envelopes labelled last week to finish the job. After lunch I took them to Canton Post Office. Outside eight people were queuing. The prospect of a long wait to be served pushed me to walk half a mile up the road to Victoria Park Post Office, where only four people were queuing. I bought stamps for the fifty odd cards I had to send, five to Switzerland and forty five to UK addresses, but had to put the stamps on the envelopes outside as there was no room to do this inside. 

I used the top of a telephone relay cabinet next to the building as a work surface, and popped them in the posting box in batches as I proceeded, grateful that it was dry and not windy. By the time I'd finished, the queue outside had eight people waiting, and when I walked back past Canton Post Office fifteen people were waiting. I was lucky to have gone out before most people had finished their lunch.

Now there's the digital greetings to do, and a cross-checking interrogation from Clare to ensure that I have registered this year's changes of address. There are always a few.

Then, a quick visit to Tesco's for some wine, and after taking it home, as circuit of the park past the crab apple trees, as Clare reported that apples were beginning to fall from the tree which hadn't been stripped bare. I took my Reacher device along to help me grab hold of branches and pull them down to get at high level fruit. It wasn't that good, but I did gather about 250 grams worth, so now we have 400 grams to  turn into jelly and puree. And now I feel stiff all over from all the athletic effort of stretching up to grab branches. I hate being old.

More surges in infection rates locally and particularly in the South East of England, and probably easing of restrictions over Christmas may get cut back nationally as the heath services are already getting over-stretched in a worrying way. Early closure of schools and reverting to on-line learning is being ordered in England, and was already put in place in Wales last week. Would that schooling was better geared up to this change, and that everyone had equal access to digital equipment and service provision, but they don't. 

The country is not being well served by reactive policies. Our leaders are quite nervous about imposing proactive stricter measures for fear of push-back from the public. No measures are really adequate to address the complexity of the problems we're facing right now. This is a long a steep learning curve for people at every level of society, leaders and the led.

 

A fruitful day in several ways

Clare went off to the gym before I got up. My first task after breakfast this morning was to process and edit yesterday's videos, upload them to my Google Drive and send a link to Anna. Then, I found a link to my Sarajevo photos and sent it to Daniel when I arranged to meet him, Thursday this week. I started cooking lunch early and it was nearly ready by the time Clare returned. Afterwards I did the week's main grocery shopping, then we went out for a walk together.

Taking my usual route, I showed Clare where I'd collected the crab apples for making two lots of jelly. The higher fruit on the two trees still hasn't fallen. I found a long stick and with it we were able to hook and bring down some higher branches heavily laden and pick their fruit. We returned home with another load of nearly three pounds weight to clean and cook. We hadn't intended do this when we went out. Somehow we just spurred each other into action. The cooked fruit mash is hung in a straining bag overnight. I think the crab apples picked have produced about a litre of juice. Jelly making tomorrow.

An interesting new detective series started on BBC Two this evening, called 'Vienna Blood'. It's set in 1906, the era when Sigmund Freud was teaching in Vienna and publishing his work. A young medical student does a placement with a detective working on a murder case, and using what he has learned from Dr Freud's lectures starts to develop profiles on both the victim and the murderer. This is the birth of forensic psychiatry. Is this really how it happened, I wonder? It well portrays the open anti-semitism of the city in that era, and the frightful way in which mentally sick people were dealt with, including  ECT therapy trending in those days. A three parter, based on novel I understand.

Crab apple harvesting

I celebrated and preached at St Catherine's this morning, and we had a christening during the service as well. As I approached the church porch, members of the baptismal party were assembling outside and greeting each other. I could hear Italian being spoken, and realised that Nonno and Nonna were here to welcome the latest addition to their family. They'd come from Sardinia to be with their son and daughter-in-law. A good night's sleep meant that I was fully alert and was able to greet them in Italian, without lapsing into Spanish, which is my default second language these days, after five years of daily learning. The ten month old infant was well behaved, and only just started to grumble when we reached the font. Mum held her as I poured water over her head. She went quiet and looked surprised when I did this, and it caused everyone to laugh with delight.

Kath arrived in time for a late lunch. She has an evening's work tomorrow as a 'Dr Who' film extra up in Ystrad Mynach, my home town. The filming takes place in Tredomen, where Caerphilly Council's new offices are located, or the site of a former engineering works. The engineer's office and laboratory, dating the early 20th century was where my mother's father was based when he was an installation engineer at the works. The laboratory was where I had my first summer job as an assistant in a Coal Board pollution monitoring station in 1964 nearly forty years later. That old building still survives, but is dwarfed by the imposing new glass and concrete municipal headquarters.

Clare left early for her monthly study group, so I cooked for us, and then we went for a circuit of the Taff and Bute Park. Near the tennis courts and bowling green on Llandaff Fields are two crab apple trees crammed with brightly coloured cherry sized fruits, which add a splash of vivid colour to trees whose greenery is fading. A lovely sight.

On my walk Thursday afternoon, I gleaned a raincoat pocketful of them within reach on lower branches of the smaller tree. This yielded over half a pound of fruit. Clare found a recipe, then I prepared and stewed them to pulp in a pressure cooker, and strained off the liquid through a mesh bag overnight. With sugar added and further cooking, we ended up with two jars of a delicious spicy jelly.

Kath and I tackled all the branches we could reach on the larger of the two trees, even more densely packed with fruit, and came home with four pounds of fruit. It took ages to prepare them for cooking, and the mass of pulp left straining overnight was the size of a melon.

I went to be early after supper, as I needed peace and quiet to write a special letter of greeting to an old friend from Geneva days, Philippe Chambeyron, who turns seventy at the end of this week. He and his wife Julia, were part of the small group who worked to build the mission congregation at Gingins, and develop the now thriving La Côte Anglican chaplaincy between Lausanne and Geneva.

We've stayed in touch since, but haven't visited them for seven years. Lack of a car when we were in Montreux in summer 2018 prevented us from visiting them at home, due to the difficulty of getting from the train at Nyon to the village of Vésenex outside Divonne les Bains where they live. It was the end of 2000 when we left Geneva. We continued to visit most years even after I retired, but then I started locum duties in Spain and the years simply seem to have sped by since then.