A place to call home

Before being collected to go to St John's Canton to officiate at a funeral, I spent the morning house sitting, as the last of the contractor's teams set about replacing the original cast iron gutters and down pipes with modern plastic ones. Our house is old, heavy gutters, however well fixed originally, can suffer from ageing. There is a risk of them detaching in bad weather and causing damage in a fall. The light plastic ones can also fall in a storm, but the impact would be much less. Thankfully these houses are not yet the subject of a conservation listing order. Whenever home improvements are made, extensions built, loft conversions installed, there's no uniform pattern imposed. Slowly the appearance of the street changes, and becomes much more varied than the measured uniformity of the original build, whose chief decorative feature is colourful brickwork patterns contrasting with grey Pennant sandstone.

Unfortunately for the workers, there was drizzling rain from lunchtime onwards, but they carried on anyway. The job couldn't be completed totally however, as scaffolding obstructed installation of the of the lowest gutter, though not its removal. It won't take long once the scaffolding is dismantled however. At five, I went into the office and spent the evening catching up on necessary company business which is needed before we can present BCRP finances to our accountant for vetting. Getting it all right is vital for the success of what we do, and there can be no cutting corners. I'm fairly confident that we paid sufficient attention to the detail, and that our financial planning is proving as good as it should be. Just as well, since this is the first year in which we have a full time employee to look after.

News of the latest Italian earthquake set me thinking. For millennia, the Italian peninsula has been geologically unstable. Yet, people have made their homes, built villages and towns in hill country and been afflicted by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions with terrible loss of life over millennia. It seems that the benefits of living in the place far outweigh the risks. Some may move to live in safer areas, but most don't, despite the struggle to rebuild homes and re-establish a devastated economy. Perhaps this can only happen because the sense of community with a sense of place is the greatest of human assets. 

This contrasts in many ways with the contemporary culture of mobility embracing millions of people, either out of necessity or from opportunity to live differently. The internet, so say, abolishes distance, and people build on-line communities of interest that embrace the world. Yet every website still has its Home Page. Everyone starts somewhere which can later be referred to. The trouble with excessive mobility is that many feel they don't really belong anywhere. They may think of themselves as digital nomads, but fail to understand that ancient nomadism revolved around a succession of special places to which a clan would resort with the passage of the seasons. A sense of belonging to the land is far more important than any sense we may have contrived of land as property someone can own. In the end, as the Psalmist says "The earth is the Lord's", and our place in is His gift.

A sense of belonging is essential to our sense of identity. Having moved around a great deal over my lifetime, my sense of being a Welsh Valleys boy, European, and a priest ordained for Llandaff diocese are important to who I think I am. Where I think I belong, where I come to rest, alive and dead, are however, issues yet to be resolved. "Here we have no abiding city.", as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews states. We've made a home and been at home in dozens of places over the years. Cardiff is the place in which we've been settled for longest, and we both love it, but I still can't help wondering where I truly belong and will finally settle and not want to go anywhere else. Not at a result of infirmity and need, but from fulfilment and content. Will I ever really setle down? It's all part of the great mystery of our existence, I guess.

     

Health check

This morning I visited my GP surgery for the periodic hypertension medication review which they do to keep an eye on my general health. The nurse weighs me takes a blood sample (usually with difficulty) and my blood pressure, which is always higher than when I take it at home. It may be my home machine is not as sensitive as the surgery's state of the art kit. The blood tests monitors for sugar, cholesterol and liver function. I learned recently that the latter is checked to see if prescribed medication is having side effects from long term use, over eight years in my case. So far so good.

Sugar is usually low as I consume little sweet stuff by choice of habit. This, plus changes in diet have led to weight loss, although exactly how much is hard to say, as I'm weighed with variable amounts of clothes on at each visit, and if I didn't insist on taking them off, shoes also. I check without clothes at home, to satisfy myself of progress. Now it seems I'm only 'slightly overweight'. I've noticed recently my blood pressure has been higher than usual, so this showed up as worryingly high in the surgery and that means a visit to the doctor before I go away. It's become an annual ritual, and has resulted in no change of medication so far. By the time I see him, it is unlikely to be quite as high. In fact, it dropped during the day, almost back to normal. 

Recently I've had a little 'grumbling' from small kidney stones, detected several years ago. They move a little, and for a while I am left feeling thick headed, as toxins don't filter out of the blood quite as efficiently, and my blood pressure goes up. Once the 'grumbling' stops, the blood pressure returns to normal and thick headedness goes away.  I've had no kidney discomfort all day, and my blood pressure is nearly what it should be, according to UK medical opinon. Not quite so bad if you're under a GP on the Continent, where slightly higher seems to be the accepted norm. Anyway, the more water I drink and regular exercise I get, things return to normal fairly quickly. I'm fitter now than for a long time, due to the amount of walking I do in Spain. I walk somewhat less here than I do there. A bad habit I need to break, a bad habit dependent on the weather, sad to say. I am most fortunate to be as fit and well as I mostly am, and as well as being grateful, I need to be sure to make the effort, at all times and seasons.

End of the afternoon, I went over to the University Optometry school and collected my first pair of prescription reading glasses for use with a computer. While I was n Spain I began to notice that in high contrast light situations my eyes were reacting unusually. I was seeing everything in what I can only describe as dappled light, as one ordinarily might experience looking at a river in sunlight. It was quite disconcerting at first, but I found that wearing my driving glasses helped. I discussed this with one of the team who said that it might be a consequence of too much computer screen time. They emit an extra amount of light at the blue end of the spectrum which strains they eyes. But, why recently and not years ago when I spent much more time working on computers? Then it occurred to me that in the past year, the three devices I most use all have brighter high resolution screens. Just working with the new specs for this evening had shown the difference they make.  

Work on the chimney stack removal slowed down during the second week, as only a few small jobs remained, like repairing the rendering immediately below the end ridge tile, where the stack had protruded, and sealing places where redundant flue outlets had been removed. The end ridge tile is a different colour and slightly smaller. It's made to metric rather than imperial measure standards, and the older matching ones are getting harder to find. It makes little difference, but it's part of the nearly 120 year old story of the house now.

Vibration from demolition work has opened new cracks in the rendering on our side, and caused some parting of rendered surface from brickwork. The wall surfaces are old,cracks may have been patched in its lifetime, perhaps as long as our lifetimes. The grey cement surface has never been painted. We've decided to see how well it withstands damp ingress over the winter, and then consider full repair and painting in white next spring. That'll help reflect more light into Clare's lovely green space.

This week the original cast iron guttering on our side will be replaced, depending on weather and workers. We've been told the end of August is a high demand time for days off in the building trade.