Farewell series

The temperature has hovered just above zero all day after a proper frosty night. A cold wind is blowing the cloud from east to west, opposite to the most common tendency along the Bristol Channel - the Beast from the East is arriving, and maybe there'll be snow in Cardiff this week, as there is already in mid and north Wales. After a morning of digital tidying in my office, Clare's Christmas present, a new Samsung A21e smartphone arrived just before lunch, both of us received email notifications to say where the parcel was on its way to us. The last popped up to say it had arrived just as the postie knocked the door!

Transferring the old SIM and SD card to the new phone was less fraught with difficulty than I imagine. The Smart data transfer app on the old LG phone to automatically transport it to the new one was a total failure. Fortunately our Google accounts keep a copy of most of the data, and photos live on the SD card. Samsung has its own competing cloud ecosystem which wants to back up all your data and get you to use their apps, and dealing with his is an un-necessary annoying intrusion at set up. 

The phone's instruction manual leaflet came with text exclusively in Hungarian (I think), with a slip of paper containing a QR code linking to the download of the English version. This tells a story of its own. The Curry's European distribution centre is located in a country where I guess the net cost of the imported goods is low enough to provide a margin of profit in moving them on to the UK and EU. Clare was most annoyed. She like an instruction manual to read, whereas for me that's a last resort. I like to see how easy it is to figure out the operating system, how user friendly it is in reality, as opposed to the marketing hype.

My walk after lunch and phone set up took me over the the east bank of the Taff through Bute Park for a change. This too was busy, as can be expected when pandemic restrictions discourage people from going further afield. 

British teachers' Unions are advising members not to return to work, on Health and Safety grounds, unless all necessary covid testing provisions are in place and working, as opposed to promised. The government is facing a legal challenge to produce expert evidence that schools are safe enough as a workplace, and some English local educations authorities are going ahead and delaying the re-opening of schools, as the local health situation is serious enough to justify this. The government is not backing down on its insistence that schools re-open, despite mounting criticism. Nobody wants to see kids deprived of education and the pastoral support schooling provides. Everybody wants to get back to normal as soon as possible, but this is still a worsening situation, and the best everyone can do is hunker down and take no risks of making things worse for others.

Tonight, the first episode of the eighth and final series of the Parisian flic saga. Engrenages in French or 'Spiral' in English. It's been running over the past fifteen years and offers a grimly vivid view of crime in the French capital. Most of the perpetrators of vicious and brutal crimes of every kind over the years come from foreign migrants, refugees or asylum seekers 'sans papiers'. Or so it seems. The entangled worlds of corrupt cops, politicians, lawyers, financiers and indigenous organised criminals, is exposed from every angle, and involves a core cast of about eight characters who have been with the series for most if not all of the past fifteen years. 

Unlike the various iterations of American NCIS crime dramas, and the Italian Inspector Montalbano stories which have elements of family comedy about them sometimes, this has a sober serious dramatic long narrative and offers space for reflection both social and moral, on our flawed humanity, observing that the even the most brave, compassionate people have flaws when revealed under pressure, and are tempted to cut corners to achieve what they regard as justice. It's been interesting to see key characters age and gain seniority, and relationships in the brigade criminelle team develop at work and personal life. It can be tough to watch on times, chastening perhaps, but always worthwhile. There's not many TV series you can say that about.

Universities - a looming crisis

As I was getting up this morning, I listened to the Radio 4 'Sunday Worship' service. Harvest Festival with several traditional hymns pruned down to a couple of verses each for timing. It's a time of year when I can sing all the hymns off by heart, four to six verses long! Not being able to sing along to the complete hymn evoked an unexpected child-like reaction, like the kid who knows the bed time story off by heart, and corrects the adult reader if they miss a few lines or improvise. Harvest Lite! 

After breakfast, we watched Mother Frances celebrate the Sunday Eucharist broadcast from St John's. I wish it was possible for this to be done with a small socially distanced congregation, as the sound of just a couple of voices highlights the abnormality of what's being done. It was what we had to cope with during the severe lock-down months, but the presentation hasn't changed since, apart from shifting from being shot at the Rectory to being shot in church. 

One good thing about our Parish service, is that Mother Frances sounds like she's addressing a group, although only Andrew the Camera is with her. Often officiants on Radio Four sound like they are just addressing you personally, rather than a congregation. It's a broadcasting presenter's technique which works for 'Thought for the Day' and  'All things considered' and the such like, but it's less effective in a liturgical celebration, by nature a group activity.

Talking of 'Thought for the Day', yesterday's offering from Rob Marshall was reflecting on student life, in the news because of the covid-19 campus hot-spots. He recalled how European Universities grew out of the scholarly and teaching role of monastic communities a thousand years ago. His hope was that the old monastic community virtue of people looking out for one another for the common good would come to be seen as the best resource we have in overcoming the menace of contagion. 

Well and good. But Benedictine monasticism emphasised that love of learning and desire for God are inextricably linked. You can't say this holds good in modern secularised academia, where know-how and students are now commodities of industrialised learning, equipping the masses to maintain the global economy. Sure, the traditional notions of education as personal formation, and learning for its own sake still persist, but a materialistic environment has corrupted them. The element of high stakes competition, for glittering prizes dominates. It excludes or poisons the spiritual endeavour which should be at the heart of all learning. 

Many students are returning to campus, disappointed and disillusioned by the poor face to face contact time they are being given, because of the pandemic. With so much being done on-line what is the point of spending so much money on a campus based education, when an Open University degree would be so much cheaper and flexible? Is the modern university value for money, if it cannot deliver a guarantee of employment afterwards? These questions were already being asked before the pandemic. They are set to become more critical as the pandemic continues.

It wasn't obviously like that when I was a student or even a student chaplain a six years later, but I've witnessed the change over my working life, and now wonder if anything can be done to save these institutions from corruption. Competition means that people can end up looking out for themselves more than others, tribally if not individually. This might well be a factor at play in the difficulties now being faced in controlling campus contagion. 

There's no lack of altruism and charity in secular society, but alongside this, egotism is celebrated and greed considered good in making economic progress. The natural human selfish impulse is a huge asset to spreading covid-19. We may all pay heavily for the culture shift which has taken place in my lifetime.

Tortosa - Festa del Renaixement

Yesterday morning, Paul came around for a couple of hours, to discuss how to approach his next study subject in Lay Reader training correspondence course, which is the Holy Spirit. When I read the list questions for assignment options , I admit that I found it challenging. It's several years since I had to look through any course material of this kind. 

The course aims remain much the same, even when the context changes. The variety of learners and their background changes too. Each generation of scholars and teachers poses questions to answer in ways that they hope will arouse interest and get learners to respond productively, but there's no guarantee any new set of questions generated will be understood by all students all of the time as the background of each person differs. It's part of the adventure of education for scholars, tutors and teachers alike. The perennial challenge is to discover the relationship between the subject matter and one's own experience.

Today, I took the train to Tortosa to meet Jenny, the Lay Reader who was licensed last month after completing her five years on the same course. It was good to have a catch-up session, but the other aim of meeting was for her to show me around large parts of Tortosa's old town that I'd not seen on my two previous visits, all set up and decorated for the city's annual 'Festa del Renaixement' - which is Catalan for Renaissance Festival.

Many if not most of the people out in the streets were dressed in sixteen century style costumes, and the narrow streets were crammed with stalls selling food, craft items, clothes, toys, jewellery. There were mediaeval games, a falconry display and rides for children and exhibitions. There were groups of school children all dressed up, accompanied by fife and drums, an amazing brass ensemble playing ancient looking instruments, as well as dressed up as entertainers. There were a few daytime concerts, but many more arranged for the evenings - outdoors and in churches. Like any old city, Tortosa has its share or redundant churches and convents, thankfully, well looked after and adapted now for other social and cultural purposes. It must be marvellous to spend the entire weekend here taking part.

Jenny and I parted company at lunchtime. I then re-visited the Cathedral before it closed for siesta.

One thing that has changed since I was last here concerns the Cathedral precinct. Its eighteenth west front is approached through a narrow street with four and five storey houses either side. Now a 50 metre rank of houses in front of the facade has been demolished, to reveal a view of the riu Ebre. I bet there was controversy about this, as the houses are side to be eight hundred years old. I can well believe there have been houses there for that long, but the ones demolished may not have been more than a few centuries old, and were pretty scruffy, as I recall. Demolition has given way to archaeological investigation of the housing site, and the findings are bound to be of interest. The plan is to create a garden in this open space created, and this will uplift the area enormously. 

After the Cathedral visit I had a lunch of Papas Pobres and cereveza at one of the many street restaurants nearby. A train still on the internet timetable at three I found wasn't running, so I had a four hour wait for the next. I walked the length of the stalls in the old town streets a second time, also the former Jewish quarter, the best part of a mile's worth of street stalls. I also explored a large park near the station with a palmeria. It contained a large old building, which may at one time have been a place of storage, but is now transformed into a showcase for a collection of large papiermache figures, gigantes, used in festive processions. 

I've seen figures of this kind in Sta Pola and Vinaros. They seem to date back to the eighteenth century, although not in this case. These figures were made in 1996, part of the cultural investment in the renaissance festival. They represent a Catalan renaissance writer Cristofor Despuig, his wife and family, plus a couple of Moors. There's even a local mythical monster the size of a small car called a Cucafera. It looks like a cross between giant beetle an armadillo and a crocodile. There were also a couple of gigantes in a fine gothic redundant convent church I visited, re-purposed as a concert venue and archive centre. I wonder how many other figures are stored elsewhere?

I got back to the station in good time. It's quite close to the centre of town. There was no display of information indicating at which of the six platforms the train was expected to arrive. None of those waiting seemed know. Two trains stood waiting at outer platforms, neither had destination boards. It was only when the train conductor and the drive arrived, just five minutes before departure, that it became evident we weren't waiting for a train from the main line to arrive and collect us (Tortosa is at the end of a branch line), but our train started right there. Generally, rail information systems in Spain work well. Was Tortosa's switched off or broken, I wonder? As this was the last train of the day to travel to Vinaros, I was relieved to find out, as I was tired after a day of walking around and trying to keep cool, taking refuge in churches when I could.

On the way back from the train station, I stopped at a supermarket to buy something for supper, and made it back just as the Archers started.