Staycation round two, day thirteen

A damp grey start to the day, listening to the Radio 4 Sunday Worship programme, from RAF Cranwell's chaplaincy, appropriate on this Remembrance Sunday, in the eightieth anniversary year of the Battle of Britain. Later on I watched the Remembrance ceremony at the Whitehall Cenotaph on telly.The Queen watched from a balcony above, while her sister, her son and grandson took part in the ceremony below. Prince  Charles laid a wreath on behalf of his mother, and a representative number of Commonwealth diplomats attended. 

It was all beautifully arranged with the hugely reduced number of participants safely socially distanced from each other. Quiet disciplined order give an extra sense of dignity to the occasion. This kind of social demonstration in a time of grave crisis and national lock-down is what characterises the United Kingdom rather than new footage of boozed up crowds thronging the streets of Soho, on the last night before pubs closed for the duration of the latest restrictions.

Beforehand, we logged into Facebook separately to watch the Parish Eucharist being celebrated from the Rectory this morning. Both of us had connectivity problems, picture freezing, or picture running without sound. It was most frustrating and distracting from prayer at a distance. Was this our internet connection playing up or an issue at source? Clare later heard from others on the Parish social network that we were not alone in experiencing this. I wish the Benefice would invest in proper digital streaming devices and a proper dedicated streaming web platform, not just get by with fancy phones and Facebook, which not all recipients trust or like using. It's hardly friendly to new users whose internet usage is limited. 

It's time to get used to the prospect of on-line broadcast services will be with us for the future. Even if the majority are eventually able to return to regular public worship, there will still be housebound people who want to continue benefiting from a local church service in a place they love, in a way they never could before.

My personal phone was switched off for charging for much of the day, and when I turned it on I found a text message from the Covid Test and Trace centre saying that my test was returned negative. Having been symptom free throughout the year, and living in quarantine or under restrictions much of the time for safety's sake, I was pretty confident that I had remained virus free throughout. So now due diligence has been satisfied, the op can go ahead on Tuesday. The text message delivered a code to insert into the NHS app on my phone, which I did, conscientiously, only to be informed in best big government Web-2 graphics that I didn't have the virus. What Ashley would call 'belt 'n braces' info, I think!

In the evening we had a family Zoom call with Rachel and Jasmine to celebrate her 47th birthday tomorrow, and Jasmine's 14th on Thursday this week. I watched the last episode of 'Roadkill' on iPlayer afterwards. I found the ending somewhat obscure. The dodgy popular politician anti-hero makes it to be prime minister and doesn't get the comeuppance he deserves. His mistress dumps him, he owns up to a grown up love child, and his wife who has been party to his secret perversion of the course of justice, withholds the means to a cover-up to keep him on a tight leash, while both enjoy the privileges of life at Number 10 Downing Street. 

It seems each of the characters portrayed in the 'Westminster bubble' has something incriminating on someone else, but don't use it in order not risk losing their own privileges and status. Whether that is truth telling fiction, but it's impossible not to see Boris Johnston as a model for the main character. I wonder if this is a first series with another to follow? Often it seems these days a serialised story ends on a note that allows for the possibility of a sequel, even when one isn't planned.  

Staycation round two - the Lord's Day

Another grey wet day, another day indoors. All Saints day too, and no Eucharist to attend except on line.  BBC Four's All Saints day worship was from the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland, still going strong after fifty five years in its international ministry of reconciliation and renewal.

I was frustrated later by problems with finding Facebook's live stream of Mother Frances celebrating at the Rectory, and couldn't get either of the devices I tried to synchronise with Clare's iPad as we've done previously and sought to do today with social distancing. This really upset me. I listened, from hers at a distance. It was too small to read hymn texts, two metres away, but I could see that the audio lip sync was distractingly funny. Not good for prayer. It made me doubt the value of Mass facing the people in these circumstances.

After saying Morning Prater late, I visited the YouTube site of the Jerusalem Monastic community at St Gervais in Paris and watched most of last night's Solemn Vespers to cheer myself up. The audio stream is superb,  the camera work is an act of thoughtful devotion in its own right, and the music, makes use of Russian Orthodox chants for a rich vein of French monastic liturgical texts. A feast of beauty in which the mixed community of men and women plus a congregation, numbering about eighty people, all stood facing the sanctuary, with only occasional glimpses of their faces from the apse behind the altar. Only the priest reciting the collect at the conclusion was see full face on. Nothing distracting.

I wish the parish techies would use a different platform or a plain linked user interface. It would make worship more accessible to those of us who rarely use Facebook An interesting sermon however, making a point about the saints being part of a mysteriously inclusive 'cloud of witnesses' not a crowd, which can include or exclude, by friendly or hostile. I find Facebook's messiness excludes me. It may be better to use the Facebook app, but it's one of many apps I don't want on my devices.

Despite a better night's sleep I felt physically tired all day and did my pacing up and down in two halves morning and evening with a rest after each. Yesterday on less sleep I walked further. Today I paid for it. After lunch I finished editing the six reflections I'm doing for the Parish Facebook page for the week before Advent. I'll pass them over to someone else to upload this week.

I watched the third episode of UK political drama 'Roadkill' this evening. All four episodes are already there on-line. Everyday life is overladen with tales about the 'Westminster bubble' and dodgy wheeler dealing, I'll wait to watch the last.

Staycation round two, day two

I woke up earlier than usual this morning and needed a shower. Clare was already up and listening to Classic FM. I immediately recognised the opening bars of a string quarter being played as a work by Haydn. It was a masterpiece I's been introduced to aged seventeen during a weekly 'Music Appreciation' class at Lewis Boys Grammar School, Pengam. Sixth form wannabe scientists like me had this plus a 'Use of English' session involving poetry and novels imposed on us, whether we'd passed English 'O' level or not, as I recall. We got acquainted with the work of William Golding and Dylan Thomas before they became mainstream on the curriculum.

Before multi-disciplinary studies were accepted as normal, this was an attempt to broaden our minds, to make us sound a bit more cultured than we really were if we went up for Oxbridge interviews. It was forty years before the internet was born, making culture browsing possible everyday for the curious of all ages remember! I was blessed to be brought up in a musical family. Many aspects of popular classical music I simply grew up with,  played live at home, with a mother who was a piano teacher and a father who was a 'cellist, and two sisters who sang beautifully. Jazz and pop music weren't excluded either, as long as they weren't too discordant, but full of melody.

I couldn't recall the name of the work I was hearing, only that it was in D Major, so I googled 'Haydn string quartets', and came up with a Wikipedia site which listed them all, movement by movement, and gave access to sound recordings, to check for the one searched for. It was 'The Lark', I discovered. Then it came back to me, sitting in a temporary corrugated iron classroom, over-hot in summer term, cold in winter, where the school's second piano and instrument stock were kept, commonly known as 'The Music Shant', its resemblance to a third world shanty town dwelling having been noted by boys and staff alike. 

It was a school with posh ambitions for not so posh boys. Great for turning working class lads into lawyers, doctors, educators, even politicians, and of course international capped rugby players. I endured rather than enjoyed my time there. There was a harshness, even a cruelty about the way we were treated. Bullying was not uncommon, but the school did the job of getting me to University where my liberal arts enculturation progressed and opened me to the world as I studied within the confines of un-applied science, as it was in those days.

Talk about having time on your hands! This morning I took each of my cameras, and reset them to GMT and corrected clock inaccuracies. This normally happens piecemeal and haphazardly when in use. Good for getting photos from different devices into an accurate display sequence. Strange to say it can make a difference when trying to recall a succession of events photographed. 

I'm not sure how I succeeded in doing next what I didn't set out to do. I'm preparing six reflections for the daily Eucharist Gospel readings for the last week of the Christian year, a pretty glum lot altogether. I completed one four days ago, and started on the next. It came together easier than I thought, then another and another until I had completed and initially edited for length the five remaining drafts. About two and a half thousand words altogether. I don't know what came over me. No work done on the novel today, and that has come quite easily this past few days. My energy for writing seems to have returned, and I found time to walk over ten thousand paces indoors. I shall sleep well tonight hopefully.

Blogger improvement improved

Nothing much to say about yesterday. It was uneventful except for walking into town to get a few things for Clare from Lakeland and finished editing the completed texts of the six reflections on priesthood for the Benefice Facebook page. All that remained was to find images to match the theme of each, to draw attention to the posting of the day. 

I got around to it this morning, settling for Byzantine icons, then had to figure out how to send docx files to Emma for uploading via WhtasApp. I'd created the files in Google docs, and didn't want the fiddle of sending a link to the page, but rather a proper copy of the file in question. I could only download a pdf to attach however. Normally this is all I need, but couldn't risk sending these for upload to Facebook in case it didn't work. Eventually I found a way to download the docx files from Google Drive, and attach them, one at a time to WhatsApp messages for sending. Hopefully these won't break.

Since the weekend, there have been several welcome changes in the Blogger user interface. Once again  what you type in the 'Labels' subject search box is immediately visible and it offers suggestions quickly. Instead of burying the 'page justification' icon in a slow drop-down menu, it's back on top in its old position. A welcome improvement. There's still a drop-down menu, but it contains less used format items now. The new interface became the default last month, but features I moaned about at the time have only been changed now, three weeks later. What took them so long? I wonder how many other users complained?

Video labours

Slowly but steadily over the past few days, I've edited the footage from Rachel's gig last Friday into separate videos of all sixteen of the songs she performed. Technically speaking they're not perfect, but, the sound quality is excellent and the performances are remarkably good, well worth uploading to her YouTube site for a wider audience of fans family and friends. The first one to be published 'Bubble Trouble' is here. It's a song from ten years ago, and there an audio recording of it on her site, but the live video is value added in my opinion even if it's not as polished as a studio recording. She will release one song video a week on YouTube and publicise the series on her Facebook page. Good for getting her work a wider audience.

Yesterday morning I celebrated the Eucharist at St John's again. There were just seven of us as some of the regulars are away, which is only to be expected at this time of year. In the afternoon, I had an GP appointment to find out the result of last Friday's blood test and ECG. I was relieved and glad to hear there are no anomalies requiring further investigation, clearing the way for my next round of duty travel to Montreux, in three weeks time. Having said that, I have an endoscopy appointment next Monday to get through first, and optimistic about the outcome of that.

I was driven over to St German's church for today's funeral, and was pleased to be able to drop in and say hello to people in the old people's day centre in the hall beforehand. As expected there was a big attendance for the service, as the deceased was a well known member of Millennium Centre staff. The organist played us out to a largo version of 'There's No Business like Show Business', but I'm not sure if any of the congregation recognised this, as people were chatting on their way out. Ah well, it was still worth the effort.

Parador pleasure and euro concern

There were seven of us for the midweek Eucharist in the church shop this morning. On the walk back, I visited the car hire office and paid the balance outstanding on the month's rental, then we went to the Parador and booked a table for this evening's last super before Clare returns to Wales.

Nerja's Parador is an interesting modern building dating from 1968, perched on the clifftop above Playa Burriana with a balcony enclosing a grassy terraced garden and swimming pool overlooking the sea, and a lift down to sea level. The building has a spacious sheltered patio for open air dining overlooking the sea. In contrast to the imaginative re-purposing of ancient castellos and palacios, this has an air of cool spacious sixties modernity - what was trendy in our youth, has by now passed the test of time. It's been renovated, no doubt, but not demolished and rebuilt. As a building, it's already a historic landmark statement about the development of the Costa del Sol as a global tourism destination.

A video slide show on display in the lobby shows photos of the hotel and of Nerja down the years. The hillsides around the hotel and Playa Burriana in the seventies were bare and empty of housing. The location was possibly chosen because it was just outside of town in a landscape that at least gave an illusion of remoteness. Now it's surrounded on all sides, apart from the sea, by the hotels and housing areas which have sprung up since those days. Holidaymakers must now go much further afield if they hunger for remoteness.

After a post-lunch siesta, I spent a fruitful hour writing a response to an enquiry about a possible RadioNet development while Clare had a swim. Then it was time to walk down to the Parador for our meal. The menu proved to be an interesting one. Clare had something called 'Butterfish' which we'd not come across before. I had stewed kid goat in a sauce of almond and saffron with sardinas for a starter, and a glass of sweet muscat instead of pudding, and just one glass of a very fragrant DOC Toro red wine with the meal. Eating while the sun was setting was pure delight, even if it did begin to get a little chilly towards the end, with the light wind off the sea. As we walked home, the residual heat from walls soon warmed us up, and the house when we arrived was that much warmer again. A lovely conclusion to Clare's sixteen days of holiday.

What's mostly on my mind tonight is tomorrow's EU referendum outcome. This last few days I've been revisiting my Facebook account, and am surprised and not a little impressed to discover that almost all those 'friended' over the years are pro-Remain. Probably the majority are Christian, and that may explain a lot. I was touched by the way public buildings in many EU major cities are being floodlit with images of the British Flag, as an act of support for the #Remain campaign. It's another expression of the sense of inter-dependence that many Brits now feel about the EU, warts and all. To want to reject the relationship built up over the past half century, just because of the difficulties it presents on all sides is an expression of contempt, not only for the colossal achievement of peace through partnership over the past seven decades, but also for those relationships we will continue to rely upon whatever the outcome of tomorrow's vote.

I will feel so ashamed to be British is the brexiters succeed, and genuinely concerned for the kind of future such a selfish vote will engender.
  

A new role for Facebook?

Another beautiful warm sunny day, and with the door into the garden open, the sound of a crowd cheering wildly somewhere in the distance. It took a while to realise that it wasn't someone's telly turned up loud in a kitchen with the patio doors open, nor the distinctive roar of a crowd over at Cardiff City Stadium in Leckwith, it was the cricket crowd at the SWALEC stadium on the Taff side of Pontcanna. The noisy excitement that accompanies the modern game isn't something I've yet got accustomed to expect on the summer air.

I went into the office for the afternoon, to meet Dave Sharpe the co-ordinator of the Barry Business Crime Reduction Partnership, and discuss with him the use of our new crime data sharing ABCP Intranet. He also related how information on suspects and their associates could be gleaned from their Facebook public profiles, thanks to the ingenuous impulse many have to self-publicise. This prompted me to open a CBS Facebook account, to give the CBS team its own access opportunity. It may also be useful for some kind of crime reduction publicity in due course, and help us to raise the profile of who we are and what we do. It's several years since I gave up using Facebook. I found it such a waste of time at a personal level. I'll be interesting to see if if any of us does research suspects in this way.

I got home in good time to cook supper before driving Clare and Gail to Dinas Powis before going to my Tai Chi class, Tonight, by special request, in the absence of our teacher, the group opted to do the entire short form three times - that's the most I've done in one session for years, and it enabled my to work at a part of the sequence where my memory is most flaky. I expect to sleep well after this workout.