Land of song

We arrived slightly late for church this morning. As we entered, the choir was singing an English version of a Taize chant which I've known and sung in French for over thirty years, without knowing the English. We're not back to congregational singing yet, but under the cover of my face mask I sang along quietly anyway, a reminder of those family stop-overs in Taize on summer holidays, and the one glorious year when I worked for USPG and stayed a week in Eastertide.

For the benefit of the congregation, Emma announced Fr Benedict's departure for Whitchurch, and her own temporary secondment to Fairwater, although it had been announced to the PCC on Thursday, so most people present already know, and I suspect are still stunned by the suddenness of the change while Francis is off sick. What impact all this has on church attendance and support is yet to unfold. Already the organisational changes demanded of parishes constituting the new Ministry Area are disconcerting for some who don't see good reason for the changes. 

It's all being driven from the top down and it seems to me that diocesan leadership is acting in crisis mode when it would benefit from more widespread consultation with grass roots members, It's difficult admittedly, when proper conferencing has been impossible for over a year, but top down managerial style leadership has been in the ascendancy for the past decade in the Church in Wales. Reducing its body of supporters to passivity isn't a recipe for rescue or growth, but rather resentment. That's not good for a community whose vitality comes from its interactive participatory worship and fellowship. How vital it is then for us clergy volunteers to sustain a healthy dialogue with God, when the hierarchy seems to be unaware of how its actions are being received at the grass roots level.

After lunch I walked along the Taff, still swollen from recent heavy rain, though the water level is lower than it was a few days ago. There was no sight of the Mallard ducklings, just a few pairs paddling hard to stay in the same spot, heaven knows why. Only one small outcrop of river bed rock was visible above the water, and on it was perched a Merganser female. There were no fewer than three male suitors in a line downstream of the rock, paddling furiously to stay in positon. Quite comic really.

Over the past few days, Clare's left eyelid has been worryingly swollen with a condition called Blepharitis, due to blocked lubrication glands. It might be a peculiar pollen, or pollution or an infection that causes it, but it's worrying because of the impact it could have on the tear duct surgery she had some years ago to mitigate the impact of advancing glaucoma. She sought telephone advice from our GP on Friday, and was referred to her optician, but no appointment was possible before next week. So yesterday she obtained an emergency appointment with an optician in Llandaff who prescribed an eye ointment.But it didn't stop the condition worsening. 

This afternoon she had a telephone consultation with at doctor at Heath Hospital A&E, albeit not an eye doctor. They were very busy and it took several hours for it to happen, but the outcome was a just-in-case antibiotic prescription. This was faxed directly to the emergency weekend pharmacy down in Cardiff Bay Retail Park for collection, so we drove down there at six. We had to wait a while as the prescription hadn't yet arrived, but were back home again in just over an hour. Talking to sister in law Ann, Clare learned that her late brother Eddy was susceptible to the same eye condition, so there may be a genetic component in there somewhere, who knows?

While I was waiting in the car I listened to an interview on BBC Wales by Roy Noble with a Rhondda historian, Dean Powell, about his book 'A Royal Choir for Wales'. His book is the fruit of research into the emergence of Welsh male voice choirs during the industrial era in South and North Wales. It seems that in the 19th century there was fierce tribal rivalry between two big Rhondda Fawr choirs, when it came to choral competitions. Punch-ups at the pit-head or in the pubs, betting on Eisteddfod  results, attempts to bribe judges and so on. I can imagine a wonderful movies out of this story, full of uplifting music and surreal comedy! 

There was indeed for the span of a century a Royal Welsh Male voice choir, so called as it sang for Queen Victoria, and a line of British Monarchs and Prime Ministers since. The 400 strong choir went on several world tours by ship, lasting one or two years, depending on where the gigs were. After the closure of the pits, choir recruitment went into decline, and in many places this highly popular form of recreation died as its ageing faithful members died - a bit like the church these days. Then after a spell of twenty years male voice choirs re-emerged with a new generation of younger singers, and much more varied repertoire, as exemplified by 'Only Men Allowed'. Before the pandemic Cardiff was said to be home to twenty different  male voice and mixed voice choirs. Many of them have continued, despite the difficulties, working on-line but once restrictions of singing are lifted, I wouldn't be surprised to see a resurgence popularity in choral singing, as a celebration of regained freedom and creativity.

In St Catherine's at the moment we have a choir of four to six people singing a couple of items for us at the Sunday Eucharist. Months of Mass with no music really made me appreciate what we lacked, and it's a joy to have them back, doing what they love again. Choir member Sue, an adept seamstress has in the past made purple cassocks for choristers. Recently she turned her hand to matching face-masks. It's a stylish response to the onerous necessity of being masked in church. It made me wonder about Spanish penitentes in the Semana Santa processions. They don't all wear long pointed hoods. Many of them wear a decorative face mask and head covering, to conceal their appearance - or is there really more to this than meets the eye? Given the number of times over centuries old cities were afflicted by plague I wouldn't be surprised..

Up and beyond the coast road

Today is actually the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster I wrote about last Sunday. The BBC Radio Four Today programme had a thoughtful report by John Humphrys, who as a young reporter had visited the village that day. Radio Cymru played part of Karl Jenkins' Aberfan memorial cantata recently premiered. BBC Radio Wales gave over the morning to playing music, and receiving phone calls from people in Wales and further afield sharing their stories from that day. At nine fifteen, the minute's silence in honour of the 144 dead was observed, but it was not 'radio silence'. I believe it was a live feed of the ambient sound being experienced at the ceremony in the village itself, as the distant roar of traffic on the A470 above, and birdsong, could be heard. 

Silence started and ended with the blowing of a whistle. I wondered if this was connected with the original rescue efforts, but I haven't found anything to confirm it. Rescuers digging for survivors commonly use a whistle to call for silence and stillness if any sound is heard from the stricken zone.

This landslide of a mining spoil heap into a school full of children, was an example of incompetent dangerous waste management on the part of the National Coal Board, many of whose practises may hardly have changed since the pits were developed by private mining companies. Eagerness to extract mineral wealth profitably from the ground and get rich as a result is often accompanied by disregard for safety of workers or the impact of the industry on the environment. It's still happening in many parts of the world, and despite modern scrutiny, it could happen again here over the introduction of fracking.

I found myself thinking not only of the teachers and children whose lives had been taken, but of the countless others working in mines, killed by industrial accidents or diseases, often receiving little or no compensation from company owners. The National Coal Board and its chairman Lord Robens were much criticised over the disaster, but nobody responsible was brought to judgement. Mother Nature's judgement on dumping large amounts of mining spoil over a watercourse was an avoidable environmental catastrophe. It wasn't bad luck but a man-made disaster. The fact that such things still happen indicates how far costs get cut, risks get taken and safety disregarded in pursuit of profitability. When will we ever learn?

After lunch, I went for a walk along the coast road. A little way beyond Mojacar's Parador hotel, I found an un-metalled road running inland alongside a piece of raised waste ground with derelict buildings on it. A gap in the more or less continuous urban development which is Mojacar Playa. The road goes alongside an arroyo flanked by more unkempt waste land, marred by rubbish. Then the road begins to rise and parts company with the arroyo. Half a kilometre from the coast road, houses with extensive gardens and terraces became visible, private villas, well separated from each other, and the road becomes metalled. After walking half an hour, I came to a luxury urbanizacion, like many others, built in Andalusian pueblo blanco style, borrowing features from Arabic buildings, arches, domes, towers suggestive of minarets but aren't. At 50 metres above the sea and an initial 10 metre rocky outcrop the road offers good coastal views.

Cloud shrouded the peaks inland, but was more broken out to sea. The mountain foothills, contain a lot more dwellings scattered on them than are visible initially from the coast road, up to a height of 200 metres. There may be a hamlet or a village up there, but then it may be a select hotel or urbanizacion, it's hard to tell, from a distance of several kilometres. Who lives there? Who goes there? Who stays there? It'd be interesting to find out, but living that far from town is must be rewarding for the views alone. 

On my way back I found I'd received an email from the Revd Roy Jenkins thanking me for my message of appreciation sent after his Sunday morning broadcast service. He said he'd worked on three different Aberfan commemorative programmes, and that preparations had been going on for over a year. When I arrived back at the apartment, I realised that I'd walked for nearly three hours, a distance of about 10 km. No wonder I'm feeling tired tonight.

       

Aberfan remembered

While eating breakfast this morning, I listened to BBC Radio 4 on the Nexus tablet, first the news and then Sunday Worship, as it was from Wales, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster. The Reverend Roy Jenkins presented it, a Baptist Minister who trained in Cardiff Baptist colleague at the same time as I was at St Mike's. We've known each other since then. He's worked for BBC Wales as their religious affairs guy for decades, and continues in retirement to present programmes. 

When I was at St John's, he involved me in a broadcast round table discussion programme, and every now and then we bump into each other at the opera, or on the street in the city centre. Coincidentally, earlier this week, I received an email from him, after a weekend visit to Malaga, where he'd gone to the Harvest Festival Eucharist at St George's. He'd seen a mention of me on their website, and was curious that someone else was there instead, so I replied, telling him that I'd been redeployed since.

This morning's broadcast was a real tour de force, with hymns and readings which were important at the time of that tragedy, which occurred in a village in the neighbouring mining valley to the west of where I was born and grew up. There were also interviews with several ministers and lay people from the community, some of whom had lost children attending the school inundated by slurry from that unstable coal tip. I was especially impressed by a lay woman and a minister who spoke of how it was prayer that kept them going and enabled them to survive the aftermath of this disaster, and do more with their lives.

I left for the Mojacar Sunday Eucharist thinking about this, and resolved to introduce my sermon on the theme of persistence  to getin prayer, by speaking first about what I'd heard. It made the sermon a bit longer, but as most of  the congregation were my age, if not older, their memory of this event, and its repercussions all over Britain and the world, drew looks of recognition from many in the fifty strong congregation.

I succeeded in leaving home without any reading glasses, but was able to borrow a pair from Fr Alan to get me through, even though they were not my prescription. My driving glasses would not have been up to the task. It's a long time since I last left home without reading glasses. Perhaps I was still preoccupied with what I'd been listening to on the radio.

My personal memories of the Aberfan disaster are twofold. Firstly, in the week after, there were people out in the streets of Bristol city centre, where I was working in a Shell-BP office at the time, collecting for the Aberfan appeal, a sign of the national sympathy that emerged. Secondly, it was, I think, the first Friday of my first University half term weekend, so Clare and I, married two and a half months went over for the weekend to my parents in Ystrad Mynach, ten miles from Aberfan. Little else was on our minds apart from what had happened that morning.

Late the same evening, Archbishop Glyn Simon, who ordained me three years later, appeared on the family black and white telly to give a late night epilogue attempting to interpret the disaster, since he spoke about where God was in the midst of this unfolding tragedy. Afterwards, I remember my father, who'd worked in mining most of his life, who kept faith with reservations about the church, and was skeptical about many things, commented approvingly on what the Archbishop said. As an aspiring ordinand, this was a relief, given how skeptical Dad was at that time about me being ordained!

After the service half a dozen of us stopped at a popular Heladeria on their way home to have a drink and chat together. This is a regular occurrence here throughout the year, and the proprietor expresses his appreciation by sending us tapas - not just olives and crunchy nibbles, but also salchichon, cake and ice cream. Amazing generosity.

After a late lunch, I settled down to transferring photos of yesterday's visit to Garruch from the camera SD card to my laptop for editing and uploading. Disaster struck when I sent to delete several poor quality images, and ended up deleting fifty, because Windows Explorer, with its little tick box options for every file, doesn't behave the way I'm used to. I tells you how many you are about to delete, but in small print it's easy no to read in the middle of a routine file management operation. 

I downloaded one of the Windows recommended file u-delete program, installed and ran it. Deleted files were identified for recovery after a time consuming scan, but the program wouldn't allow me recover them without first paying for a subscription. OK, except that the download failed to mention it wasn't free. I did another search, found a free Open Source software package which downloaded and worked fine. This revealed that just four of the fifty three photos lost were recoverable, for no explicable reason, as I'd done nothing with the SD card since deleting the photos. I can only conclude the file damage was a consequence of the Windows 10 file deletion routine.

Hateful little tick boxes against every file managed by Windows Explorer by default work in such a way that you can leave boxes ticked, navigate beyond view of them in the files window, and forget that you have more ticked than you can see. Where you're copying them somewhere else or deleting, this is a recipe for havoc. It's totally untrustworthy, as a file management tool in this context. You can reconfigure to dismiss the hateful boxes, but why on earth this dangerous facility should be enabled by default is a mystery to me. One more thing which designers and programmers of user interfaces think is helpful when it isn't.

Thankfully, the batch of photos are all of Garrucha, taken yesterday. I can return, walk the same route and reproduce them, for my own interest, if nobody else's. Strange to say, but after I'd realised there was no option but to re-take the photos, I remembered another occasion when I had to do this. It was during a study visit to Jamaica in 1982, with a couple of film cameras - a Practica SLR and a Ricoh pocket half frame camera. I still have the former, but don't recall what happened to the latter. 

The high humidity level caused the SLR's shutter to malfunction. I developed  photos while I was there. When I found I'd lost a lot of valuable photos of my journey across the island, I was able to re-trace my steps and take another batch with the Ricoh. Thankfully I had time and a hire car, having saved money from my travel grant by having local contacts offering me hospitality. All those photos are digitized from the original slides and reside somewhere in my archives.

This evening I went to the beach nearby to watch the full moon rise and take photos. Unfortunately there was too much cloud and too little to capture anything of any interest. Very disappointing, but a pleasant hour on the sea shore, listening to the waves on a mild evening, waiting to see the moon, nevertheless. Maybe tomorrow.