Centenary Armistice Sunday

I celebrated and preached at St Luke's this morning. Getting the eleventh hour timing right on any Remembrance Sunday is a matter of choosing lengthy hymns and if available longer readings. Today's lectionary set were all short, as were the hymns. Even at a leisurely pace we reached the end of the Gospel at ten to the hour. So, I started to preach, knowing it would take me longer than ten to reach my conclusion, hoping to find a right place to pause. Thankfully, but more by luck than design, I'd reached a place in my sermon text where a pause would work, so we went into the Act of Remembrance bang on time. Honour was satisfied, and that matters to me. 

We've been treated to several excellent documentaries featuring interviews with World War One veterans on TV lately. It's so good to hear their personal stories of first hand loss, plus those of people on the home front, not just the tales of top generals, politicians and industrialists, whose collective decisions inflicted such tragic scars on people in Britain, Europe and across the world. When will we ever learn?

After a post lunch siesta, a walk around the park again as the sun was setting. The third part of Le Carre's 'Little Drummer Girl' novel dramatized was on in the Sunday evening prime time slot on BBC 1. The plot is rather convoluted and not presented in a way that's easy to follow. Even so, it captures the seventies ethos very nicely - a trip down memory lane for europhiles at least.

 

News at the surgery

I was pleased to stand in for Fr Mark and celebrate the Eucharist at St Catherine's yesterday and then  this morning, I stood in for Emma at St John's. She had a meeting elsewhere this morning with a small group of Saint Padarn ordinands she's been invited to work with, in the same way I worked with a small group at St Mike's five years ago. She said how delightful and inspiring she found their enthusiasm for ministry. It's great to have an arrangement where priests active in early ministry can help nurture vocations, and share their own fresh exploration and discovery of parish life. 

The new training placement arrangements are an improvement. While I enjoyed my time working with such a group, I found the academic hothouse ethos, similar to the one I endured fifty years ago, no longer as necessary for sound formation. Today many people come later to ministry, and are more mature with a lot more experience of life. It can mean some are set in their ways, and a few less open to a range of different ways of expressing faith, as it's commonly found throughout the church these days. Both the exchanges in College and in the parishes help broaden understanding and perspective, helping students to learn to live together with differences, and focus on serving others.

I went into town in the afternoon and visited the Castle to take photos. Sister June said she'd not seen any pictures I've taken before. When I checked my archive, I discovered it was ten years since I last did so, and that was before I started to use Picasa Web (of blessed memory) and then Google Photos. I was delighted to discover how my Sony Alpha 68 with its new wide angle lens worked, as its broad field of view invites a photographer to step forward toward the subject to fill the frame, rather than step back. New things to learn.

The Castle's annual Garden of Remembrance with its field of crosses had been dedicated in the morning, as befits the ceremonial home of the Royal Welch Regiment. At the opposite end of the grounds a special Armistice centenary art installation has been created which resembles the layout of a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Flanders. A superb idea to touch the imagination of Cardiff visitors who have never see such a cemetery in real life. I was there just before four, and witnessed the evening flag lowering ceremony, carried out, I believe by a senior and two junior members of the Regimental museum staff. I felt privileged to be there and my photos are here

This afternoon I had a GP appointment, ostensibly to review my blood pressure medication, but it was an opportunity to review what's been happening with my various recent medical appointments and tests. To her surprise as well as mine, the ultrasound scan report had arrived. It seems I have one 4cm stone in my gall bladder, meriting an operation to remove it later on. Thankfully, adoption of a dairy free low fat diet is keeping pain and discomfort at bay, so it's a matter of 'watch and wait', and get through the MRI scan and fistula removal operation to follow. I'm managing that problem fairly well at the moment, limiting pain and discomfort to several hours in the middle of the day. I can work around this, and keep making an effort to stay active. Exercise does me good.

I'm still watching 'Berlin Station' on More Four, but find it somewhat difficult to work out who's who among the spooks, much of the dialect seems to be delivered sotto voce through gritted teeth, quite undistinctly. I fiddled with the TV sound settings to see if I could improve things, but it didn't. Also, considering the American CIA dramatis personae are all supposed to well trained and educated, the office dialogue is littered with the F-word. 

It's not that it's so offensive these day. You expect it in violent movies maybe, but in a 'corridors of power' mise-en-scene, it feels out of place and smacks of poor dramatisation. Nor am I entirely clear I can follow the various plot lines, as there are so many mysterious hunky 'men in black' fornicating their way in each episode, it's hard to work out their roles. It's not that it's a spy mystery, but rather that its obscurity fails to retain interest.