Better safe than sorry

I woke up just the second time last night at half past six, and couldn't get off to sleep properly again afterwards. After Thought for the Day, I uploaded today's Morning Prayer without a hitch, then got up for breakfast, conscious of not having enough sleep. Often I doze off after praying, but not today. I've had an email from Emma at Eurodiocese HQ asking me to do the on-line stage two Safeguarding course, now a requirement for clergy with PTOs. I'm happy to do this, whether or not it ever becomes possible to do another spell of locum duty abroad. 

I'm conscious there are all sorts of low level abusive habits or tolerated practices persisting in the life of the church, some of them to do with bizarre kinds of piety, but others to do with changes in governance and management styles under the guise of coping with crisis. Clergy and lay leaders can be victims as well as perpetrators. I'll be interested to see if any of this is reflected in the stage two course.

This afternoon I walked up to Llandaff Weir for the first time since 22nd November. There's been so much rain over the past couple of months that the footpath and surroundings stayed waterlogged and muddy, treacherous to walk on. A photo I took that day shows a huge tree stump, roots trunk and remains of branches, lodged at the top of weir in the same position as it had been since last February's floods. I think it must have washed out of the river bank nearby, eroded by the storm water surge. I was curious to see if it was still stuck there after the more recent spell of heavy rain, and it wasn't. 

There was no sign of it among the entangled remnants of trees and bushes trapped by island reefs of pebbles that build up in the river bed. Could something that heavy, perhaps half a ton of wet wood, have been carried further down the river out of sight? Or was it necessary for the river management team finally to remove it, as even more wood washed downstream built up and impeded the water flow? I'll never know the answer, but it's clear that work has been done along the banks of the Taff to improve the outflow of flood water.

On the walk back I was pleased to find the Cathedral open to visitors. A dozen English Cathedrals are now closed to visitors and offering only on-line services, because of soaring infection rates. In Wales the rate of increase is showing signs of slowing, but numbers of infections are still high and rising. First Minister Mark Drakeford instigated partial lock-down in Wales before England did, and the measures have been tightened since. Shopper behaviour in supermarkets is being identified as a source of contagion, as well as indoor meetings of households, are now to be restricted. Wales was first then England followed, again.

In the evening I watched the fifth episode of 'Spiral' on iPlayer, having discovered that all ten episodes of this final series are already available to watch. It means I'm not tied to watching later on Saturday evening and ending up not having an early night before church.

Clare's recently been learning to play a 1950s jazz ballad 'Cry me a river'. Julie London's recording with the legendary electric jazz guitarist Barney Kessel and bassist Ray Leatherwood made it into the hit parade after it was performed in the epic Lil' Richard rock 'n roll movie 'The Girl can't help it' in 1956, the year I started grammar school. The song was written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in a movie, but it was dropped from the story-line, and she sang it in an album of her own 1961. By that time it was a cover version of London's hit. I still remember the words off by heart. I found it on YouTube and played it to Clare this evening. She remembers them too. 

More covid worry and frustration

Waking up again to more bad news of covid infections continuing to rise out of control, and calls for a stricter lock-down. We were twenty adults and three children for the St Catherine's Eucharist, but for how much longer, amidst calls for even tighter restrictions, heaven only knows. Our church warden fell at home broke her leg and needed a few days in hospital after surgery. Then someone on her ward was tested positively for covid, so now she's stuck there in quarantine for ten days, and we're hoping and praying that the rest of the ward doesn't get infected.

When I walked in the park after lunch, I noticed that Coffee #1 and Cafe Castan were open for takeaways. Outside Cafe Castan, despite distancing measures, and a line of people queuing properly to be served, small groups of people stood un-distanced, un-masked, chatting nearby. And no sign of law enforcement. 

The BBC seems to be interviewing an 'disproportionate' number of elderly people expressing the opinion that the country should go back to a much stricter lock-down asap. Maybe they can't get anyone who doesn't care a toss about others to stand in front of a camera and be counted, unless they are in some kind of anarchic demonstration in defence of their civil liberty right to be careless and selfish. 

Calls for Trump to be removed from office before his term finishes continue to grow in the USA, as public outrage against him and congressional supporters continues to grow. He's been banned from both Twitter and Facebook, and the alternative far right free speech extremist social network is being removed from app stores and deprived of its web server space, as the big companies are recognising how damaging the persistence of their paranoid hateful messaging has turned out to be. The control of both national and international security rests ultimately with a President who increasingly behaves like a mad dictator, to the point of talking about a counter demonstration on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration.                                 

After my walk and before supper, I caught up the third and fourth episodes of 'Spiral / Engrenages', it is turning into a tragically powerful story of undocumented child migrants from North Africa in Paris, and how they subsist by mugging people and stealing phones or wallets. A phone shop dealer not only acts as a 'fence' for stolen phones, but is trusted to perform a social service for them, by electronically transferring ill-gotten euros to family accounts back home. 

One child gets murdered having stolen a batch of cocaine from a dealer who has collected it from drug 'mules' bringing it into the country in their digestive systems. It was shocking to hear an airport customs officer stating that they could only catch a fraction of travellers transporting drugs daily in the way. An dramatic exaggeration or not? Maybe recreational cocaine users will watch this series for entertainment, and realise how their demand makes them complicit in such an evil form of exploitation of poor people.

It was Anto's birthday today, and various family members Whatsapped him their greetings and talked on line. No family get-together in this year of covid for any of us.

After supper I worked on this week's batch of recordings of morning prayer, this time in the attic bedroom. At the moment the parish intercession list for the sick and departed needs regular updating. Unfortunately this can happen after I've made a recording, and then it needs doing again, since it's impossible to edit the video and get it to render correctly on Whatapp, the chosen platform for prayer group use. With a four year old phone, uploading the video file is problematic as the phone doesn't have enough memory and the process stalls. I've had to strip all but essential apps from it to free space. Recording ahead is necessary in case I hit unforeseen problems. Doing it on the day carries too much of a risk of failure. Doing it the day before risks not having an up to date intercession list. I wish there was a better way of doing this that'd justify scores of users making the change, but there isn't. It's been hard enough to develop the circle of users to may who have never used Whatsapp before. If only I could figure out what stops edited videos from rendering correctly on a smartphone ...