On the mend at last

I was in bed after ten last night, asleep by eleven and awakened by a bout of violent coughing just after twelve. Half awake, I went to the bathroom to find an ibuprofen to take. On returning to bed, I stepped on an odd shaped paper clip. It threw me off balance, knocking a photo of the wall and I started a nose bleed bending down to retrieve the broken frame. Thankfully Clare heard my wails of woe and came to my aid. This cost me an hour and a half of sleep I needed, but strangely after this my general condition seemed to improve. My head stopped screaming pain every time I coughed and coughing became less frequent. That was a vicious parting gift from the virus. I think I'm now in recovery mode at last. 

Resting in the armchair all morning, getting around to downloading updates to the Llandaff and European Diocese intercession lists, and preparing a sermon for next Sunday at St Paul's Grangetown are things that I couldn't think of doing yesterday. Clare cooked salmon for lunch then I went for a walk. The temperature was around zero all night but with the frost, comes drier air and cold doesn't cling in the same miserable way, but I needed to wrap as warm as possible. Thankfully walking briskly to get warm wasn't a problem after several days of inaction, but I only stayed out for an hour and a quarter, to reserve some energy for the rest of the day. 

Clear blue sky and cold fresh air was a tonic for head and lungs. I realised that when I coughed, my rib cage was painful but my lungs were not sore at all. And I cough far less often in fresh air. At home I think my sensitivity to house dust has risen. Will it stay like that? I hope not. After a lifetime in which 'flu or cold usually led to bronchitis, it's good to find a silver lining in this dark infectious winter. Maybe that RSV vaccination last autumn did make a difference, evening if the new strain of 'flu slipped under infection monitoring radar and threw a curve ball at vaccination research too late for this year's crisis.

Hospitals are overwhelmed at the moment, with ambulances unable to respond to emergencies as they are stuck waiting to deliver patients, with beds full, well patients in heed of home care unable to be discharged as social care people and resources are stretched beyond their limit. A nightmare for medics and those who manage NHS and local government social services.

Sunset ten minutes later than at the solstice now, and the temperature dropped to minus two after dark. I climbed up to the loft, camera in hand hoping to glimpse the promised aurora borealis in the clear night sky, but there's too much light pollution overwhelming natural light in the heavens. I've never seen it in real life, with or without a camera in hand. A night journey out of Cardiff to Gelligaer Common might be revelatory, but it's too far to venture nowadays, especially when I'm not yet fully recovered.

The Archers Christmas podcast I listened to tonight is all about the story behind its theme tune 'Barwick Green' by Arthur Wood. It's been there from the beginning, starting and finishing each episode It highlighted significant moments in its 74 year run when it wasn't played for dramatic reasons. It's the most played piece of theme tune ever, and heard throughout the world. A British cultural landmark, not a fossil, as it's well researched and keeps up to date with current events. I've been a fan since I was a kid and may have heard some of the earliest episodes on the family wireless, listening to the BBC Long Wave Home Service.

Once the heating goes off for the day, It's going to get really chilly indoors as well as outside. so it's time get moving in the general direction of bed.  I understand that battery powered vehicles drain more power, used at low temperatures. I noticed today my TZ95 runs sluggishly at 4C, so I'm not surprised. 

Deep in the dark vale

The temperature dipped down below freezing again overnight then went up to 6-7 degrees, under cloud with rain showers for much of the day. The cold clammy atmosphere left me feeling colder than when it was minus one. After breakfast, a walk over to Lidl's in Leckwith to get supplies of several kinds of nuts, as we'd run out. I walked again after lunch and for a change, trod unfamiliar streets in the housing area of Llandaff Parish adjacent to Canton Benefice. 

The oldest houses are fine original late Victorian mansions spread over a wide area of land. Each probably had extensive grounds originally, but between and after the wars in the twentieth century, detached and semi-detached houses in laid out in streets took up what once would have been rolling south facing slopes. Some roads seem to follow the line of older tracks, while others are part of the layout of a small housing estate with similar houses. Some of these have acquired extensions in this century, garages, attic rooms and so on. It's interesting to see the variety of domestic architectural styles, reflecting the period of their construction. 

The older the houses, the more use is made of coloured brick and Pennant sandstone, then plain red-brick is used, and then white painted concrete rendered exteriors, as the decades pass. There is just one house, entirely built of Pennant sandstone, enclosed by a carefully planned garden which looks as if it may be from earlier in the nineteenth century, maybe a farmhouse, with a terrace of half a dozen small labourers' cottages next to it. Some of the street names suggest this was once orchard terrain, and domestic gardens in the area still have surviving fruit trees.

I looked at these things keenly as the streets were new to me. They held my attention and made me think about local history with fresh eyes. Not a bad thing on such a dull cold day. 

The grim threshold of a hundred thousand people dying from covid has been formally noted in today's news, one of the world's worst infected populations. The true number of excess deaths to date  may be even higher. Epidemiologists reflecting on the past year admit responses to the pandemic Europe wide, not just in the UK, was too slow at the outset in imposing restrictions to curb virus spread. 

Llandough and Heath hospitals have experienced sharp spikes in hospital generated contagion. It's said that people who don't know they are infected are coming to hospital seeking treatment for other ailments or accidents, not being diagnosed in advance to prevent them from infecting others. We're still not making a priority of universal regular testing for covid infection. Expensive to achieve maybe, logistically complex, but much needed. Hope are pinned on vaccinating as many people as possible as quickly as possible, but that won't stop the lethal spread among the un-vaccinated. It doesn't make sense.

I've been asked to do a funeral in two weeks time at the graveside, not in church or chapel of rest. Back in my first curacy days, it wasn't uncommon to have prayers in home of the deceased and then go straight to the grave or the crem. I struggle to recall if I've ever done a funeral which is simply in the open air, and will need to give it some thought. Given the restrictions on using places of worship let alone homes for a service it's not surprising that a common sense decision has been made. Graveside only services have been around since time immemorial, but not in my ministerial experience. Being outdoors in a natural setting is possibly consoling to a group of mourners, although bad weather could have the opposite effect. I just hope there's no strong wind or heavy rain. 

It was consoling this evening to watch the nightly nature programme 'Winterwatch' on BBC 2, with some lovely landscapes and closeup shots of birds, voles, beavers and otters. The enthusiasm of the presenters is delightful. Likewise the enthusiasm of Professor Jim Al-khalili on the BBC Radio Four 'Life Scientific' programme. Each week he talks with a leading scientist from a wide range of disciplines. It's a half hour of intelligible conversation about scientific discovery and the careers of the discoverers themselves. He's by far the best interviewer the BBC has. I wish he was used on news programmes. In my opinion, few of the present generation of news presenters and interlocutors are really good enough for the job.

Rush to judgement

How annoying! When I got up this morning, I didn't switch my phone on until after breakfast, and so  missed the calendar alert to take the car over to N G Motors in Splott early for today's MOT text. This left me with not quite enough turn-around time to go to St Catherine's to celebrate the Eucharist. Fortunately, Clare was free and able to do this instead of me. I could just as easily have forgotten to look at a paper diary and have found Google's Calendar app an invaluable replacement in retirement now I'm no longer steered through the working week and year mostly by a set pattern of events. There's a fair amount of routine in my life even so, due to interregnum duties. Just enough to balance the freedom I also value.

Eighteen years today since the destruction of the New York Word Trade Centre towers, an event that changed the modern world irreversibly, and not for the better. It was a violent revelation of the failure of dialogue between modernity and traditional culture, festering wherever people felt marginalised and powerless, and emerging in pathological form in islamist extremism. The Gospel at the Eucharist was that of Jesus a the deaf mute man, a story which for me is chiefly about a miracle of communication which is revealed by his extraordinary ability to look at people and understand what's needed to get through to them, reaching into their isolation and setting them free. He looks, listens, then acts and speaks. He looks without prejudice, without stereotyping the other person, and this is what transforms the man's life.

I arrived at church from listening to a Radio 4 feature about Amanda Knox, accused of the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia twelve years ago. It took eight years for Knox to be acquitted of a crime there was no forensic evidence she had a part in, and for which she was initially tried and imprisoned. Her involvement as an accomplice in the crime was attributed to her attitude when confronted by interrogators. She was out of her depth as a 20 year old, and didn't know how to react it seems. 

A psychology research project demonstrated how it's possible in a high proportion of cases to identify a guilty party under interrogation from their body language, whereas this is not so with an innocent party, whose reactions are naturally more ambiguous and influenced by confused feelings about being under examination. An interrogator may read this confusion as evidence of guilt or complicity, but it's a presumption which may not survive scrutiny. It's all down to how we look at and listen to someone, and whether we think we already know about who they are and what they think.

In this era of sound-byte news when information is over-simplified for popular consumption, it's no wonder that Britain is in such a mess of brexit. Dialogue is overwhelmed by simplistic confrontation, and extremists are pushing the country towards open conflict. Parliament is wildly condemned by some for betraying 'the people', who just want to 'get on with it', whatever that means. Parliament is struggling, despite efforts to curtail its responsibilities, to maintain dialogue in a situation of great complexity which cannot be reduced to simplicities, that take time to ensure justice for all. It's taken three years so far and may take much longer to resolve in a way that achieves true common good.

The country's most senior lawyers are considering whether Boris Johnson's proroguing of Parliament for such time is legal or not, and opinion is divided even at the highest level. What best serves the common good? is the issue behind the legal debate. How is is possible to look at this with fresh eyes, without prejudice, without vested interest, without presuming this is typical rather than unique. It's a conversation which needs to happen between people of opposing views throughout our divided land. Urgently.

Window on the world out there

With little else scheduled to do, I worked on editing and correcting the music slide shows for Anna all day Monday, and when we were both satisfied with the results, she uploaded them to You Tube for viewing. At choir practice on Tuesday evening, she made sure we took note of how to find them. It's not easy to find them at first, when there are almost no views, and before Google's bots have checked the content and flagged them for basic search. By trial and error we found that Googling 'Fountain Choir Cardiff' helped locate them reasonably quickly. I can't imagine having a business and a career that involves the constant promotion of video content in a market lace which is by nature global.

Lat week there was an interesting item on Radio 4 about a curious feature of YouTube, I hadn't heard of before. Apparently millions of videos have been uploaded of the years since digital video recording became a feature of every camera and phone, which get almost no views. Some people use it to document their lives or their creative output, with no concern to promote it to others. If they do get views it may be because there's another legion of YouTube users who want to be entertained by randomly selected videos, material curated by chance, you might say.

In addition, there's a variety of sites where interesting collections of randomly selected videos can be viewed. Featured in this programme was a website called Astronaut.io, brought to life by two San Francisco based techies. It features random clips of a few seconds length, and weaves a unique tapestry of images and sound. Here's an American feature article about it. I guess it's the equivalent of what we used to do as kids, turning the tuning dial on the Long Wave radio to catch the sounds of broadcasts from Europe and the rest of the world through the hiss and crackle.

It's said the internet abolishes distance, in the sense that you can communicate with people anywhere, and be informed or entertained by material without knowing where it's been produced. We home in on themes and places that catch our attention and interest, and in narrowing our attention may miss out on much more. Astronaut.io allows the flow can be halted on any video that captures attention, and let it play play to conclusion which invites viewers to be more than passive. There's something quite contemplative about just looking and listening openly, letting yourself be surprised by what's out there.

Ministry in the face of fear and anger

At breakfast aboard ship yesterday morning, a lady with a Mancunian accent told me about the bomb incident at Manchester Arena. It seems she'd been watching late night TV news in her cabin. We had not found a moment of idleness in which either of us wanted to watch TV  throughout the week, or listen to the radio, or scan internet news feeds, so we had no idea of what had happened. Sadly, she was quick to lay the blame at the door of 'them foreigners', and my 'what if the bomber was British?' speculation fell on deaf ears. Away from the ship, it was easier to follow the story from the phone, as signal reception in the Dreieckgebeit is strong, no matter the nationality of the service provider, which switches not infrequently as you travel around.

I woke up early this morning, aware that I'd be facing a class of children attending the midweek Mass I was due to celebrate at St Germans's. It was difficult to know how to prepare for this, especially as they could be any age group between seven and eleven, and there's no way of knowing how much the kids would have taken in at home, let alone in school. For once I wasn't looking forward to taking this service. Thankfully the morning's 'Thought for the Day' by Dr Michael Banner, offered me an insight I could work with, about kindness being essential to peacemaking. And I managed to use the story of Beauty and the Beast to illustrate how loving those we fear can change people. Well, I survived. And probably wittered on too long. As I do.

Fr Phelim arrived at the end of Mass, to meet the wardens and discuss his official arrival in the Parish as he finally has a licensing date, 14th June. It's to take place in the Cathedral, Both St German's and St Saviour's will be free to welcome him in their own way. The previous effort made by the diocese to unite these Parishes was a failure which damaged rather than develop relationships between them. There's no certainty every initiative in renewal or reform of the church for mission will succeed. But, there are unlimited possibilities to learn from failure and grow in wisdom and understanding as a result. Fr Phelim is commissioned to build bridges, re-establish trust and heal divisions, as a first step. I feel confident his background ministry experience, working in Belfast will be a blessing to all in the long run. I'll be praying for him and cheering him on from Malaga by then, thankful for the last couple of years I've be privileged to share at St German's.