Llanishen connections

This morning I drove to Llanishen to celebrate the 10.30 Sung Eucharist at St Isan's Parish Church, now in interregnum after the recent retirement of Mike Whitcombe, Vicar for the past 25 years. It's a typical old country church, swallowed into suburban Cardiff a century ago, with a ring of six in the bell tower and surrounded by an ancient churchyard. It's a mainstream church, well organised well attended with a prosperous congregation, popular for weddings. 

The first time I visited St Isan's was for my cousin Christine's wedding 48 years ago. My Uncle Gordon and Auntie Joyce were parishioners. When he died 13 years ago, I attended his funeral there. My only other visit was to preach on behalf of USPG about 35 years ago. It's still quite well attended with a congregation of over sixty, and good small choir which sang a responsorial Gradual Psalm to Gelineau Chant unusually well. The congregation was responsive, and also sang well.

As the church chancel is narrow, and the Communion rail accommodates around eight at a time, the distribution of the Sacrament took longer than I'm used to. Interestingly, the choir quietly sang through an entire Mass setting during this part of the service, which was something of a surprise, but I felt it worked quite well.

A little later than I had expected I left the church after greeting people, and drove to neighbouring Cyncoed for a midday meeting with John and Paul, the two sons of Sheila, whose funeral I'll be taking this week. John, I met last week in UHW. Paul had since then arrived from the USA where he has lived and worked for most of his adult life, without losing his British accent. We chatted for a lot longer than I intended and it was almost two by the time I reached home again, not least because of traffic congestion along Cathedral Road, generated by an afternoon cricket match.

Later, I caught up on the final two episodes of 'Follow the Money', in which the series villain meets his end, and then the last episode of 'Line of Duty', in which I'm pleased to say, I had already spotted the main secretly corrupt cop of this series early on. Hastings the heroic chief inquisitor is revealed to be a flawed man, but not a villain. It's not all over, however, and although it has yet to be written, a sixth series is promised. It's not over until it's over, as the oxymoron goes.

Not so happy Easter

This morning, I presided and preached at the St Catherine's Easter Sunday Eucharist, with about sixty adults and a dozen children present. Despite the lovely weather, and the enthusiastic efforts of the choir, somehow I felt the general mood of worshippers was subdued. We had, after all, woken up to news of mass murder by terrorists bombing churches in Sri Lanka. I found it hard to awaken the kind of responsiveness that's often possible in celebrating Christ's resurrection, perhaps because of so much disturbing news. I was pretty tired on my way home after, and throughout the rest of the day.

Owain came for lunch and spent the afternoon with us. We exchanged greetings with Rachel out camping this weekend with Jaz near Flagstaff Arizona, and Kath, Anto and Rhiannon in wet and stormy Santa Pola. We've had far kinder weather than both, for a change. After Owain returned to Bristol, I caught up with 'Follow the Money', and then watched 'Line of Duty', which yet again was too explicitly violent and gory at the end. It's simply un-necessary, detracting from the complexity of the plot lines. 'Follow the Money' has its share of nastiness on top of its complexity, but it's handled with greater care in my opinion. Thank heavens mainstream news broadcasting is generally more circumspect in what it shows of horrifying incidents.

  

Holy Week here at home

After a slow morning start, yesterday, I drove to Penarth. It's the first we've been there since our first outing with our new VW Polo last September. We had fish and chips al fresco from a booth by the pier, then walked along the coast path, almost as far as Lavernock Head. It was another bright sunny day, even if rather cool for mid-April. How good to be out and about, walking in familiar lovely places again! I watched this week's double episode of 'Follow the Money' in bed again. It certainly holds one's interest. I think i even care about it's two main characters - the baddie and the goodie, both flawed and weak in their own ways, driven their contradicting goals in life.

This morning I presided over the St Catherine's Palm Sunday Eucharist, with two dozen children and over fifty adults. The processions was only around the interior of the church, but it gave me a small opportunity to start the service by teaching the kids to sign the 'Ho-ho-ho Hosanna' chorus to get the liturgy started. And we sang it again at the end when they returned from their Sunday Club outing. I enjoyed the playfulness of this encounter, as it contrasted with an attentive dialogue Passion reading. The adults seemed happy and at ease with this. Perhaps because they know they don't have to put up with me every Sunday!

In the afternoon, Clare went to Bristol for her study group, and I languished in bed after my clinic visit, disinclined to go walking, happy to listen to a succession of Passiontide concerts broadcasted live from Riga, Copenhagen and Prague, while looking through my Semana Santa Palm Sunday photos from Malaga one year and three weeks ago. I also found the live feed for the processions broadcast on the internet from a Malaga TV channel. I'm set up for the week now. If I can't be there to enjoy it all over again, I can peep from a distance, hear the distinctive sounds, catch memorable images, and maybe even get a better sense of the routes used with an overview.

Post op day two

Something seems to have gone wrong with the wound dressing I had on since yesterday's clinic visit as it slipped off rather too easily. When I inspected the new surgical incision using a mirror I was shocked to see that it was gaping open, not superficial as I'd thought, but quite deep. I wondered if I had done myself some damage by not lying carefully in bed, or getting in and out. The incision was not secured by staples or stitches, just like the previous one. As I'd not seen the surgeon after the op and not received a promised phone call. I had no idea of what had been done or what to expect. This I found worrying enough to phone and ask for a District Nurse home visit to ask for advice.

The nurse arrived just after lunch, inspected the wound, and changed the dressing done earlier by Clare, but was unable to pass an opinion on how it was meant to be post surgery. She'd not seen the surgeon's referral letter, though I had, so I recounted to her what it said, which wasn't much. She said that if I was worried I should go to A&E at UHW and ask to be seen, since Llandough's out-patient surgical ward closed over the weekend. 

The thought of spending 4-6 hours on a Saturday afternoon waiting to be seen in A&E, was as far as I'm concerned, out of the question when I knew I wouldn't be able to sit for any length of time, and couldn't guarantee that a colorectal surgical consultant would be on call - learned from experience of waiting on previous occasions in A&E. To stressful by half, the same as phoning the on-call GP service and having to repeat one's story thrice in order to get an appointment to be seen. As it didn't hurt much, and showed no sign of infection, lie low, be extra careful and do nothing seemed to be the least worse option. I found the surgeon's work mobile number on my phone from her previous contact with me, and left a message stating my concern. If she's not on weekend duty, I don't expect to hear from her before Monday. Just a little more explanation about what to expect post-op would have spared both Clare and I a lot of worry, and not made an extra nurse call-out necessary.

Owain came over to see us, a belated Mothering Sunday visit, and he brought a nice take-away salad lunch for all of us to share. We walked around Pontcanna Fields afterwards, then he left us to go to a local friend's 20th wedding anniversary party locally before returning to Bristol. We see a little less of him now that he has a place of his own to call home and manage for himself. It's only natural.

This evening's BBC Four scandi-drama was the third in the Danish series 'Follow the Money', about the investigation of crimes which have a particular economic dimension to them'. This series has a few of the same characters as in the previous two, and focuses on the intricacies of narcotics trading international organised crime and money laundering from top to bottom. It's very educational, and does a good job of exploring through personal stories the complex reasons why different people get drawn into the web of exploitation and subterfuge. First class watching.

Saturday a workshop and a financial drama

I drove to Penarth this morning for a morning's Tai Chi workshop for regular class members in Albert Road church hall. It was a refreshing and stimulating session, and good to meet with several long standing Tai Chi players whom I've got to know over the fifteen years I've been attending Christie's classes. Clare met me afterwards and we walked up to Penarth Head, then down to the pier to have coffee and sandwiches for an al fresco lunch before walking for a while on the beach and then back to where the car was parked. The sun shone and there was cool fresh breeze, a most enjoyable couple of hours after the workshop. I picked up fourteen items of rubbish, mostly from the beach, in the course of the day.

We were surprised at how relatively few people were out walking the promenade or on the beach or the pier given the fine weather. Clare wanted to call at IKEA in Grangetown to buy some curtain material on the way home. When we arrived the IKEA car park was almost completely full, suggesting that the store would be just as full with crowds of weekend shoppers, so we drove out again without stopping and returned for tea. We were out of buns, cakes and biscuits, so I walked to the Coop and bought some hot cross buns. By the time I returned, Clare had made some spicy bun dough and was preparing hot cross buns of her own for next time. Always better than shop bought ones, if you have time to make them.

The last two episodes of 'Follow the Money' were screened on BBC Four in the evening, in which all was satisfactorily resolved and a major financial crisis involving the catastrophic devaluation of the Danish Kroner was averted by our investigative hero doing a secret deal with a powerful British financial 'robber baron'. The baddies got their come-uppance, the selfish and foolishly ambitious were chastened, and survivors returned to family life grateful for a break from all the nastiness. A happy ending, sort of, with just enough key characters making it to the end to make possible a  third series, maybe. 

In one scene, financial crisis was precipitated by speculators betting on a devaluation of the Kroner, which the very powerful had deemed to be over-valued, and used a series of corrupt and illegal initiatives to bring about their aim of profiting from this movement. I found the words "The Kroner is over-valued" chilling, as it mirrored opinions voiced in the media by leading British financiers about the pound in the wake of the brexit vote. It makes me wonder to what extend this kind of strategic financial corruption may have been a driving force in getting euro-skeptics and their media backers to mount an anti-EU campaign riddled with lies and fake news. Anyway, this was well crafted and worth watching throughout, and was good in how it conveyed the human impact of financial crisis on the micro as well as macro level.

    

Education through Drama

Overnight motorway closures let to Kath and Anto taking an extra hour to get back to Kenilworth from the Shropshire borderlands, due to diversions on to minor roads, so they slept in late. It was midday yesterday by the time I left for Cardiff again. Thankfully, my Sunday sermon was ready for printing and that left me free to relax and enjoy idleness for the rest of the day. I didn't feel like going for a walk as my knee was playing up again, so for the second day in a row, my Lenten exercise lapsed and I picked up no litter.

The evening's episode of Danish crime drama 'Follow the Money' pursued the trail of a large bank's advisers misleading customers and forcing small clients into bankruptcy and sales of assets from which the bank secretly profited. It sounded all too familiar from contemporary life, given the recent scandal surrounding the mistreatment of RBS clients in the UK.

This morning, I walked to St Catherine's to celebrate the eight o'clock Eucharist. On the way there and back, I picked up half a dozen assorted pieces of litter on my way. After breakfast I drove to St German's to celebrate Mass there. Afterwards I stayed for the Parish Lunch with thirty others in the church hall, as Clare was attending her afternoon study group in Bristol. Then, when I returned home, I cooked supper for us, and we watched the last in the ITV 'Good Karma Hospital' series together. I'm glad there will be a second series to follow. It's more than just an entertaining medical drama.

While it's located in an exotic setting, with romantic threads running through the story line, it portrays the reality of a country in which many people are still very vulnerable through poverty, coping in an environment which can be precarious and highly risky on times. It portrays dedicated people working together with great compassion and love for the people they serve, and is constantly surprising, in the challenging situations the medical team has to face. This is educational drama about third world life and concerns right now. Hopefully it will serve to encourage British people to value and care about the medical services they receive, which we're all capable of taking for granted.