Quarantine Cymru - day Thirteen

More rain, cloud and cold wind again today, and for the rest of this week it seems. At least it will keep some people from going to the beach or having outdoor parties, littering the environment and crowding in on each other in a risky way.

Nephew Jules emailed me a big zip file of photos of his mother to select from in composing a life story slide show for the end of my sister's funeral service. The Windows 10 app which edits videos can also be used to make MP4 video slideshows with photographs. It took me a while to work out how to use this in the absence of proper instructions, but I got there in the end.

It was interesting to discover that there are no photographs of Pauline as a baby. The first photo in which she appears, she is aged five, and seen in picture with her baby sister June. There's not even a formal posed studio photograph. I believe the reason for this is that Dad and Mum were too poor to afford photography of any kind during the period of the general strike and the great depression.

It's also interesting to see across two generations of holiday snaps how many were taken at Weston super Mare. For South Wales miners it was the nearest and most popular holiday resort away from Wales. Geoff and Pauline's family home for forty years was in Bleadon Hill, a few miles away from Weston. They may have gone elsewhere on holiday by the time the children arrived and they could afford to, but Weston was the nearest shopping town and having a beach was forever an attraction. 

I realised this afternoon that day one of my quarantine was actually the day I arrived home. Despite the title of today's posting this is the last day of my fortnight in isolation. I had to count several times on my fingers to take it in! Clare and I had a big hug, then I went out and did a small practice shopping run to the shops, dutifully wearing my Virustatic mask and noticing how few others were wearing masks anywhere.

As I returned home walking up Severn Road, I saw the caretaker of the Bilal Mosque, dutifully wearing a mask, unlocking the building for another man, without a mask, who wanted to enter and pray on his own I guess. He turned and looked in my direction, I smiled and said 'Salaam', and was delighted to receive a Salaam and a wave in return.

Then I went out to the park for a walk down to Blackweir Bridge by an indirect route. The bridge is still closed as it's too narrow to permit social distancing. Despite the fact that it was a chilly fifteen degrees, even lower with the wind, three boys were swimming above the weir. Hardy kids!

Crossing the fields I was surprised to find a family of swallows flying in circles where I was walking, almost under my feet, there were so low, presumably after a certain type of insect at grass level. Down at the weir a couple of dozen swifts were also feeding on the wing, but higher up, over the water. More swifts than I remember seeing in recent years. And down on the waters edge below the bridge, a solitary heron was keeping watch. What a welcome back to Taffside!

I reached my 10k walking target once more today, and cleared the attic bedroom of everything that Clare had provided for me over the past fortnight. It meant dozens of trips up and down the stairs. By the time it was done, I was exhausted, but happy to be free at last to re-insert myself into Wales' 'new normal'.

Remembering life-long commitment

After a disturbed night, I couldn't get myself into gear to go to St German's to attend Mass, as I'd intended. I have to accept there there are going to be good and bad days on the way to recovery. To me, my body reactions seem arbitrary, but in perspective the healing process still seems positive. 

The painter returned this morning to complete finishing touches on the rear of the house. There are a few tiles on the roof to be fixed, and then the scaffolding comes down. Job done..

This afternoon I extended my walk up the Taff beyond Llandaff Weir to Llandaff North road bridge and back, thanks to footpaths on both sides of the river. Thankfully, Cardiff is blessed with routes to  take you away from the incessant stream of car traffic.

Recently, after supper and listening to the nightly edition of 'The Archers' on Radio 4, with nothing better to do, I've been watching episodes of 'Law and Order' on Five USA. Initially, it was an effort to make sense of American judicial procedures, rather different from ours, yet equally dedicated to pursuit of truth and doing justice by perpetrators and victims. What's starting to impress me now is the way different episodes introduce debate on contemporary moral issues, and the challenge we all face in discerning how to do the truth in every different situation in which we find ourselves today.

I had a message from Revd, Doreen this afternoon, celebrating her fiftieth anniversary of clothing as a Novice of the Community of the Holy Name, the start of working out her call to ministry. I recall when we met several years ago while I was on locum duty in Málaga, she told me that she first sensed a calling to priesthood as a child. It finally happened for her over forty years later.

Co-incidentally, I made a personal retreat before my diaconal ordination at the Convent of the Holy Name in Malvern Link around the time of her clothing. A CHN sister made my first traditional style alb for me and I wore it for both ordinations, and at services for the next twenty years until I was given my first all-in-one cassock-alb as a parting gift by Halesowen parishioners in 1992. 

Fifty years later and we're both still active in the adventure of voluntary ministry, still energised by that vision and sense of mission that inspired us half a century ago. Thank God, that's all I can say.

    

Cosmopolitan footpaths

As the new cement rendering on the rear of the house is stable and dry, the surface was painted a pale magnolia colour yesterday, the first coating. There are also a few finishing touches to fit in, relating to rain proofing the window double glazing mounts, important details. 

It rained in the night, but by the time the painters began the sun was shining and surfaces were drying off, and in four hours it was done. I stayed in while the workers were present. Clare went out and did some food shopping, then went to the gym. Later in the afternoon, after the workers had left for the day, I took my daily walk. As it had been sunny I went out again with no top coat, and was rained upon, not much, just enough to make me feel annoyed and resentful. 

In the evening I read some more of Poveda's 'El Maestro'. Kath has been reading the first of his trilogy 'El Profesor' during siesta hours on holiday in Crete. She's been posting lovely sunny holiday photos on WhatsApp. A few days ago the three of them did the six hour Samaria Gorge walk, we did that in the early nineties. I wonder if we'll get around to doing it again one day?

No painter today, just the builder's man, completing work on the windows. I walked into town for a change and returned through Bute Park. It's lovely, no matter which route you take, and so well used by holidaymakers, students and other city residents. Walking the footpaths of our city open spaces so much, I'm struck by the relative infrequency of hearing people conversing in English. You'll hear Welsh, Spanish, French, German, Italian, but also Polish, Chinese, Arabic, Malaysian, Urdu, and Hindi spoken. It's a measure of how international Cardiff has become in recent years.

   

Advent time out

Thursday slipped by with nothing remarkable happening. Perhaps this is what happens when you don't have a project or a work plan, and at the moment, I have neither. I'm not resting, or putting my life on hold, but waiting to recognise and respond to whatever comes towards me next in life. I refuse to think that all I can do, having reached three score years and ten, is to wait for rigor mortis. 

Retirement from regular employment with a modest pension for security simply set me free to work in new ways, as I have come to appreciate over the past six and a half years. Finding priestly things to do is never a problem, but this doesn't occupy the whole of my life. It's time now for me to move on and do something different. What this is, I don't yet know. It's strange territory to inhabit, and in a way this is just right for the season of Advent, a time of waiting that offers us an opportunity to see everything in our lives in a different light.

Today, having finalised my Sunday sermon, and done some digital tidying - the best way I can describe making my archived stuff intelligible and accessible - I walked the longer route through Bute Park and back, and saw a dozen Magpies gathered in the same area of grass. I believe the collective noun is 'charm of magpies'. Can't  think why, but am pleased to see so many in our City Centre parkland. The same is true for Crows, Gulls, Pigeons, but also, surprisingly enough, Tits. Walking down the tree lined path to Blackweir bridge, I saw a family of a dozen long tailed tits, plus a few others, working their way quickly through each tree in turn, searching for insects, so quickly that I couldn't get photos of them despite bare branches stripped of leaves. I also saw two pairs of Jays, also too quick for me. Even so, it's a delight to know that there are still so many birds in our wintry parkland.

Owain came over from Bristol to have supper and spend the night. We drank good wine and talked until late on politics and culture and social vision, as well as career matters. I feel very blessed that we still have so much to talk about. I have so much to learn from him.

    

Travel marvels

Kath, Anto and Rhiannon drove Rachel and Jasmine to Birmingham International Airport for the first leg of her home run to Phoenix at five this morning. Their car journey continued south to Portsmouth for a ferry to Bilbao. From there they'll drive to Toledo on their way to Sta Pola for a well deserved three weeks holiday. The cost of the trip for the three of them is roughly equivalent to three peak time airfares plus holiday car hire, and gives them the advantage of enjoying stopovers in new Spanish cities each trip. We benefit from their photographs and visitor reports. Owain is off to Berlin to catch up with friends and colleagues there this coming weekend. No doubt we catch him up on Instagram.

While we were having breakfast, a team of scaffolders arrived to erect a structure in our and next door's garden to make access possible for work on the shared chimney stack at the end of the rear extension to adjoining houses. A few months ago we agreed with Sarah next door that it was time to demolish the chimney stack and re-make the roof gable end, as neither house has used the fireplaces since central heating was introduced, probably in the sixties. In addition, the stack is badly in need of pointing and may indeed be structurally unsafe, since it's letting the damp into both houses. It took the team just an hour and a half to complete the job. Demolition starts tomorrow.

In the afternoon I took Clare to the Heath Hospital to visit her opthalmology consultant. We were there a good two hours, with various tests, and discussions. Mr Rajkumar gave us lots of time for discussion of the findings. He's booked Clare in for two more surgical procedures to mitigate the impact of her glaucoma condition this autumn, unfortunately, I am booked to be away in Spain on duty at this time, but we don't yet know the dates. Once we do there are some plans to be made.

Around six we had a message from Rachel to say that she'd landed at Newark New Jersey, and was waiting for her connecting flight to Phoenix, expected to be an hour late. Just before bed, another message to say she was home, altogether about eighteen hours of travel, and she has to work tomorrow. Kath, Anto and Rhiannon land in Bilbao at breakfast time tomorrow after a good meal and a night's sleep on board. Their sea journey is less than a sixth of Rachel and Jasmine's. Amazing to consider how many weeks an ocean voyage and a rail journey across America would have taken a century ago. How quickly the human race has adapted socially, economically and politically to such mobility, and what extraordinary changes for better and for worse have come about as a result.

There are ten thousand Olympic athletes in Rio to compete at the moment. What an amazing feat of international logistics and co-operation to get them all there. The news is dominated by Olympic events right now. I am trying not to get sucked into spectatorship as the commentariat excels in endless trivia, sound bytes and snippets of heroic stories, not to mention statistics of every kind. This drains sport of any sustainable interest as far as I'm concerned. There's nothing much else worth watching on telly. It's a matter of hanging on until broadcast schedules normalise again.

I spent a couple of hours this evening digitising some of Clare's collection of old Colvill family photos. Her brother Eddie inherited them, but had not completed the job of digitising them before he died. Many are in quite good condition, dating back to the 1890s. Some are of Clare's father Francis, when he was a young marine engineer, working in the North East of England. He was nearly sixty when she was born. As a young merchant sailor he spent time ashore in Cardiff, and attended the farewell dinner given for Scott of the Antarctic at the Great Western Hotel, St Mary Street in Cardiff in June 1910 before he set sail on his ill-fated expedition in the Terra Nova. A couple of the photos show him in his dress uniform. This collection offers a tantalising window into the past, worth further research.
    

       

The illusion that speed means progress

Easter Monday we all rose late. It's quite a while since I last slept ten hours. We didn't do much or go far, as it was still cold and dull. Irritatingly, the internet was intermittently on and off all day, and for the most part slower than usual. Not that unusual with TalkTalk Broadband however. Most nights we're without a reliable connection from nine thirty for two hours.

Easter Tuesday, rising late again. Mary from across the road came over to ask for help with her computer, as she was getting error messages she didn't recognise. It turned out that her internet connection was also very slow and intermittent, making the job of updating an old XP driven computer into a series of long freezes. Now Mary is a BT customer. I've checked all my equipment, connected to TalkTalk broadband, and the problem's the same. This suggests there's an infrastructure problem somewhere not too far away and it's affecting service providors who buy their slice of the information highway from BT Openreach.

My router shows I am connected, the operating systems on various computers in the house show that my  data is being sent out but only a tiny fragment of data is returning, not enough to display a website, only enough to make the browser hang. Then after a while the router displays 'unable to connect to internet' and drops out for several minutes before resuming at a speed too slow to be functional.

Nothing about local outages on the news. Nothing about it on the TalkTalk website - no point in phoning them as their customer service is rarely of any use at the time you need it. Oh yes, the way I know this is because my BT 3G wireless internet dongle still works, enabling me to visit websites and post this. It's lucky I have no urgent need to spend lots of time on-line at the moment. 

I wonder how many people in business, or managing emergencies are wondering what on earth is happening. It makes me realise how dangerously dependent we've become on internet connectivity over the past decade, and just how wicked it is that internet service marketing promotes an illusion of a world in which every service runs perfectly, consistently and powerfully, when in reality it's still a work in progress whose reliability falls far short of being comparable with that of the national electricity grid.

The Big Joke is all the promotional hype Cardiff is getting to do with the roll out of super-fast broadband services intended to improve economic development. What's most needed is consistency and reliability at whatever speed. Without that your plans always unravel and your emergencies are un-manageable.

What are we doing by lying to ourselves about priorities?

 

Jubilee décor

After a nice lazy Saturday breakfast we went out for coffee and croissant at a popular  recently opened place on Cathedral Road. It was warm enough for two large picture windows to be open, allowing some customers to sit on a pavement patio outside. For me, the noise was unusually intrusive as I've lost three quarters of the hearing in my right ear due to an accumulation of wax. These days so many bars and restuarants lack soft furnishings to soak up noise. It makes conversation difficult. Clients tend to shout to make themselves heard. It reminds me of spartan post-war school canteens I grew up with, except that today doesn't smell of boiled cabbage and spuds, but usually the more congenial aroma of coffee.

We went into the city centre after lunch on a brief expedition to get a print cartridge for Clare's machine. We took advantage of a quiet couple of hours while Wales played the Barbarians in a big match at the Millennium Stadium, but there were lots of people about, enjoying the warmth. 

Union Jack bunting fluttered in abundance throughout the public realm, except for the section of the Hayes in front the St David's Shopping Centre where the public realm is managed, not by the Council but by Land Securities. Mean lot. On the other hand, the Brewery Quarter managers went nicely over the top with their bunting.

This was the Morgan Arcade, taken on my way home from work yesterday evening. It's just great to see so many places pulling together.

Recession is hitting every sector of the economy. Cardiff commerce hasn't been hit as hard as many places, largely due to the attractiveness and modernity of its offering to visitors both local and international. Much hard work is being invested by people in business to maintain high standards however. They know how much their livelihoods depend on getting people come and come again.
  

11/11/11

As yesterday was Armistice Day, I went into town to the Wales National Cenotaph in Alexandra Gardens behind City Hall, to join in the two minutes Silence. I arrived in good time and was surprised to discover no formal preparations for the Remembrance ceremony. About a hundred and fifty poppy wearing people turned up, some bearing campaign medals, some wearing an armed services cap. The City Centre Police Inspector and two sergeants turned up in uniform, and at five to eleven a troop of thirty cadets in identical track suits marched in, with a couple of NCOs in uniform, followed by a group of twenty others not in uniform. Four cadets read out commemorative statements which were hardly audible to the gathering, then all fell silent until the stroke of eleven when the Silence proper began. No bugle playing, no traditional formal Act of Remembrance, no wreath laying, although there will be a ceremony this coming Sunday. At five past eleven everyone dispersed. It couldn't have been more low key.

Last night I attended my ninth annual United Services Mess dinner to act as Chaplain, say Grace and lead the gathering in its customary Act of Remembrance. In conversation beforehand with other top table guests, I discovered the official ceremony of the day took place inside the Castle walls. It seems the ceremony, and the Welsh National Garden of Remembrance moved there after last year's Armed Forces Day was held in Cardiff Castle. It has remained there since. Cadets will have their own good reasons for continuing to parade at the National Cenotaph, likewise the handful standing around the nearby Falklands War memorial.  But what of the 150 others who turned up in the wrong place like me? Did they not know about the change? Or, if they knew, was it too far for them to walk to the Castle? Or, were they quietly making their protest at the change by being at the Cenotaph instead of the new location?

I walked past the Castle to reach Alexandra Gardens. The only external publicity for current events within was for the Wales GB Rally, on this weekend. There was nothing to tell passers-by that the National Remembrance Garden was inside the Castle Grounds. Citizens with photo-card passes can get into the Castle grounds free, but visitors pay. If it was special free entrance for all for the Remembrance ceremony - was this advertised anywhere? On-line maybe? Fine for those with mobile internet access, what about others who might just want to take part in such a special moment in the heart of Wales' Capital city?

Whoever is in charge of making such information public should remember there is still a Digital Divide. Also, most of the public, who just turn up to remember without benefit of an official invite, aren't mind readers.