On track again

I woke up late in sunshine after going to bed early, and reading for an hour, then losing sleep due to coughing when eventually I lay down. The sore throat has gone, replaced by disgusting heavy catarrh which will probably last for days, I was slow getting started for church and arrived a couple of minutes late for the St Catherine's Eucharist. There were eleven of us. I stayed for coffee and chatted with Clive and David until it was time to return for lunch. Fortunately, Clare was in the last stage of cooking lunch, happy not to rely on me, now her back is improving except for when heavy shopping bags from the Coop were delivered and needed bringing in. Sensible precaution.

After eating I started work on next week's Thursday prayer video upload with the texts Ruth provided for the purpose. It's Corpus Christin next week, sparking an idea about a reflection, which I wrote, recorded and edited in an hour. Then I went looking for a replacement fit-bit in shops I didn't visit yesterday. Sadly, no luck, but I did find a Huawei Band 4 activity tracker which does all the same things in W H Smith's of all places. It costs half the amount of a replacement fit-bit and as I had £1.50 left on a gift card to make use of, I got it for even less.

It's slightly larger with a different user interface, and more flexible in that it can be worn on the writ band provided, or in a clamp which can be attached to a laced up shoe, or an ankle strap. A useful addition. Setting it up wasn't  straightforward. A user guide which needed a powerful magnifying glass to read, was equipped with a set of QR codes sending you to app installations on Huawei's own cloud service. 

The Blackberry wasn't happy about the security of this and refused to install anything with dire 'be it on your own head' threats. Fortunately Google Play Store provides the necessary apps for phone and tracker cleared by its own Play Protect software, so after much trial and error I got the thing running with one minor annoyance. App update notifications, directing me to the Huawei cloud service which the Blackberry doesn't like, with no updates available on Play Store. As the device user interface is different, it will take some getting used to. It remains to be seen whether or not its strap is as durable as the Samsung one I had to replace.

After supper, another edition of 'Springwatch', all about nesting birds and badgers under surveillance by webcam, This was followed by a nature documentary on More Four about the river Clyde. Another tale of a river which for more than a century couldn't sustain a fish population returning to life with the demise of polluting industries, just like the Taff. There were some remarkable pictures of a century old hydro-electric power station under a sixty metre waterfall, still going strong, house in a white painted industrial building with huge windows letting in natural light, and a big panel of dials monitoring the generator output, a classic design. All for show nowadays, as the plant is now watched over by digital devices from a laptop. Worthwhile watching.

Business phone no more

Cold and cloudy today, so different from yesterday. For me, a duty free Sunday. We went to the Eucharist at St Catherine's, and while we were singing the first hymn, Fr Rhys came up to the back of the nave to where were standing and asked if I'd assist him with the chalice, as the regular assistant minister of the Eucharist wasn't there. 

Later during the offertory hymn, I went to the sacristy and borrowed a stole to wear over my shirt and trousers to identify myself to anyone who might wonder who I was popping up out of nowhere, although most people in church probably have some idea who I am. I think we were about thirty adults and half a dozen children. Interestingly only about half the communicants received the chalice, an indication of persistent nervousness about contagion. Very few are wearing masks in church now, but it's good that nobody feels the need to conform one way or another, such is the respect people have for each other. 

St Catherine's is hosting a Parish Platinum Jubilee garden party next Saturday, then a Summer Fayre two weeks later. That's an immense amount of work for a relatively small number of people, but to judge by previous post-lockdown open air events, it will draw in people from the neighbourhood and further afield.

After lunch, I spent another hour reading 'Invierno en Madrid' before we went for a walk in the park together. Clare's back pain has diminished significantly in the past few days, and she's just left with a dull ache when she rests. It's really cheering news. While we were out, I noticed that my Blackberry was no longer able to send or receive calls and messages. Finally, a month after Ashley requested termination of service, BT acted. Last month Cardiff Business Safe was finally wound up and struck off the Companies' House register. I let Ashley know and we discussed whether or not I could just exchange SIM cards with my PAYG phone. Before supper, I made the swap and found that the Blackberry worked perfectly with the PAYG SIM. 

I have a dim recollection of being told that BT didn't lock its phones to a specific SIM any more. I think this would be necessary for someone who might travel abroad and want to use a native SIM instead of a UK SIM, as is the case for people owning a dual SIM phone. All I needed to do was install WhatsApp on the Blackberry. Most of the archived messages appeared to have transferred, but on close examination a couple of weeks worth were missing, perhaps because they hadn't yet been back up. Not that it matters, there's little of importance that hasn't already been copied elsewhere. 

Then it was a case of decommissioning my six year old Samsung, ready to donate to a recycling charity, when I can find one that will accept it. Fortunately there was nothing on telly that I felt was worth watching, so I finished and uploaded next Thursday's Morning Prayer video, which took me a little longer than I expected. Time to go to bed earlier than usual. Tomorrow, after a visit to our National Museum's collection of motor vehicles not on public display, we go to Kenilworth to stay overnight in order to attend the last performance of 'Squidge' on Tuesday, right at the end of their country-wide tour of a show that's gone down very well indeed with children and parents who have seen it..

Just as I was about to post this, an email came in from Rachel with the ,WAV file of her song 'Chocolate' for which I put together a promotional video slide show a few weeks ago. This is a high quality sound file, YouTube ready. All I had to do was replace the MP3 file in the saved video edit file and send to to her. Now I am pleased with the result.

Sleep change plan

I woke up at half past seven, and got up and made breakfast at eight. Recent medical research reports that seven hours regular sound sleep is enough for a healthy lifestyle in older people, and that sleeping several hours longer, as I tend to do can result in deteriorating brain function. I've been sleeping nine or ten hours a day in recent years, but my sleep pattern was persistently broken by pain and discomfort. My sleep is far less disturbed nowadays, but old habits die hard, so it's time for a shake-up. Last night seven and three quarter hours sleep, and no afternoon siesta to follow, that's the plan!

After breakfast, when Clare went out for a walk, I recorded next week's Morning Prayer audio, and edited it. By ten was outdoors walking in the park under a blue sunny sky. I went to the greengrocer's on my way back to buy some mushrooms and a soft fruit treat for Clare. Then I made lunch with the butter beans, bought yesterday and soaked overnight, and added them to a sauce with spinach, mushrooms and onions, served with spaghetti. It turned out well, and I look forward to cooking it again.

Instead of a siesta, I completed work on the Morning Prayer video and uploaded it to YouTube, then went out and walked again until tea time. I had a call from Ashley to say that my Blackberry work phone account is now closing, long after CBS ceased trading. The process of winding up the business is nearly complete at last. My EE PAYG SIM card will be transferred to the Blackberry. The six year old Samsung struggles to keep up with current demand. The four and a half year old Blackberry is still fit for purpose, but its storage capacity is half what's accepted as normal in today's new phones, largely due to a phenomenal increase in the use of photo and video messaging with 4G / 5G networks and superfast broadband. I don't think I'll miss a second phone. A simpler life is far more desirable.

After supper I spent an hour working on the third chapter of my draft novel before watching another bizarre episode of 'The Crimson Rivers'. I'm enjoying re-reading my own work, despite the fact that there are always errors to correct. It's good to see with a fresh critical eye how some sentences can be improved and clarified. Working on weekly biblical reflections over this past year has been a valuable discipline. I aim for five hundred words, no more than five minutes worth to record. It's possible to pack a lot of ideas in by reworking, simplifying and editing the draft text. This exercise applies equally to a much longer piece of writing..

News today of the death of a British volunteer soldier with the Ukrainian army, one of twenty thousand foreign volunteers. Three UK Special Forces military trainers were killed last month in a missile attack on a military installation near Lviv, but the story behind that has been slow coming out. This morning a missile attack hit an armament factory in Kyiv, while the UN Secretary General was conferring with President Zelensky nearby. The Russians are demonstrating provocatively what they can do to outrage the international community with targeting like this. Ukraine's Ombudsman for Human Rights reports that 490,000 Ukrainian civilians have been deported from war zones into Russia. How is it possible to stop this terrible evil?

Remember you are but dust

Monday morning I took the car to NG Motors in Splott, to see if anything could be done about the broken heater. The journey to and from the garage is now much more convenient, as the route of the nearest of our buses the sixty one now stretches across town, all the way to Pengam Green in the far east of the coastal plain.

We started Shrove Tuesday with pancakes for breakfast. In the afternoon I had a bereavement visit to make in North Road Cathays, and walked there across Pontcanna Fields. I received a text message from Ashley on my way there to tell me that finally a Blackberry Motion ordered for me to replace the work phone I've had for three years had arrived, so I took the bus into town after the visit and met him in the CBS Office. It took a couple of hours to charge when I returned home, but by mid evening it was fully functional with my existing BT SIM card. It's well engineered, and runs Android. During the set up routine it installed all the apps from my personal phone, and transferred the data, which includes work account related stuff. Very slick.

Wednesday morning we had a phone call at half past eight to say that our mutual friend from Bristol days, Mike Wilson, best man at our wedding, dropped dead in their local Post Office yesterday. It's so hard to take it in, such a shock, just as I was readying myself to offer the Ash Wednesday Eucharist at St Catherine's. Apparently Mike had collapsed the previous day at home, but this was attributed to a recent change in blood pressure medication, as can happen when a GP is prescribing by what for the most part seems to be a 'trial and error' basis. If there was anything leading up to this which went un-noticed by the doctor, or undisclosed by Mike.

Lent starts with a symbolic reminder of mortality in the Ashing Ceremony. It's that time of year when I expect to be officiating at funerals, indeed, I have two next week. When it's a contemporary, with whom we've shared all the passages of life over the past fifty five years, it's a body blow. I can't help thinking - me next? There's no way of knowing, really.