Dis-Appointment and Shopping disoerientation

The cleaners came early Monday, and Clare went off to the gym. After they departed, I went out, and did the week's grocery shopping, then cooked lunch.

A letter arrived in the post from the NHS, advising me of a pre-surgical assessment appointment on the 23rd January, two months from now. Mrs Cornish did warn me that it would be a three month wait before surgery when we last met, but I was slow to react, as it seems I inevitably am. Now facts are taking shape the sense of disappointment surfaces, couple with the worry the next three months are going to be a time of growing discomfort and pain, much as I had before op number three, due to over-granulation of the wound, during the long delay between appointments. The signs are it's going to happen again with another three month wait, with the prospect that a second Christmas is ruined for me. November-January, the same period of anxious waiting misery as last year. It's a scandal when I'm as fit and well and ready for the op right now. It I were prepared to pay, I could get it done. The family say I should. Perhaps for their sake I should.

I keep on thinking of snippets of information which didn't get recorded in my Sarajevo travel diary, so as well as writing a preface today, I had to return to the text and insert a few significant memories in the right place. Eventually, I thought it was fit enough to send off to Daniel, hoping that he finds this of use to give him an outsider's perspective on the aftermath of the Bosnian war.

Another twilight walk, then an evening in front of the telly to relax. but my attention is now veering back towards my long story, I'm trying to sketch out mentally the rest of his main character's journey before he goes home to die. I need to make some notes and check the timeline. It's a story which spans thirty years, plus or minus. That's the problem. I didn't start with any plan. It's just evolved that way, and that's been a fun surprise.

Yesterday, Clare told me she'd seen knee length rain-wear at a bargain price in Mountain Warehouse opposite the Castle. Just what I need. So I went into town to check this out. No, not really that long, but long enough to cover a longish jacket, and that's what matters. So now I have an olive green mack with a hood, just as my 20 year old 'standard' length one is getting leaky at the seams.

I also bought myself a pair of Ecco winter shoes. I had forgotten that the shop is now relocated for the third time in several years in the new St David's shopping centre, and searched for it on my phone. Google maps gave me the address but the mapped location was so vague as to be confusing and useless. The St David's centre store finding display panels were useless, having not been updated even though the store has been in its present locations for six months. One of the security staff was able to tell me easily enough, but didn't know the store finder device was unable to deliver the goods. The tech' is great, but only as good as those who keep the data up to date.

We joined the Fountain choir for supper at Calabrisella. I was very tired from walking around town and shopping, somewhat in pain, having sat for a long time writing earlier constructing time line annotations for my long story. After eating a big dish of penne amatriciana, I made an excuse and left to got to bed early. Enough is enough, and today I did did and a half miles worth of walking.

  

A free Sunday

With no liturgical duties to perform today, I walked to the Cathedral for the 11.00am Sung Eucharist, a pleasure to be on the receiving end in the congregation. It had a distinctly early 20th century appeal to it, with an organ Mass and 'Tantum Ergo' anthem by Louis Vierne, the renowned blind organist of Notre Dame de Paris from 1900-1937. Area Dean of Cardiff, Stewart Lisk was Canon in residence and he preached well on the theme of Christ the King, engagingly name dropping the fact that he'd been in college with the new Emperor of Japan into the sermon, while talking about royal vesture and role and the person inhabiting them. A sermon he alone could preach, I thought!

He greeted me outside afterwards, saying "If I'd known you were free, I could have found you work to do in my parish today!" I protested that it was one of my few free Sundays apart from holidays and that I'm starting to need them to let my soul catch up.

Apart from a good long walk as it was getting dark, I spent the day finishing transcribing my Bosnia Journal. Some of the notes I made needed unpacking for intelligibility. It's now over seven thousand words, much to my surprise, and needed quite a bit of work to make the narrative style consistent. It needs a preface to explain how it all happened, as will my other occasional travel journals when I come to transcribe them - there's Jamaica, Mongolia, Syria, Jordan and Jerusalem/Palestine to come.

I feel I want to bother, so that the photos I took can have some real context. Also as legacy documents for my offspring's children and their children, who might one day decide to see what the world was like in day. I think that's how many wartime diaries began, only to be lost for many decades in dusty attics before being rediscovered. It's a bit different nowadays.
   

Project milestone reached

Apart from taking a funeral at St Catherine's at lunchtime yesterday, I spent most of the day writing, with an afternoon break for an interrupted five mile walk, to re-charge my brain. The exercise, both of transcribing and adding in explanatory detail is quite demanding, as in places my journal is  thin on detail, as it was written at the end of each day's activity while I was in Sarajevo.

When I'd had enough, I stopped watched the previous and current episodes of 'New Amsterdam' on More Four. It continues to sustain interest with its complex medical procedures, some difficult ethical decisions, and the evolving personal relationships between dramatis personae. 

Much the same was true of today, with another uninterrupted five mile walk and watching a couple of episodes of Series Two of 'The Team' On More Four to punctuate the day. By late afternoon I finished the transcription job, and felt a great deal of relief. It's not finished. There are vital corrections, and probably additions as well, as I'm finding memories of the time surfacing, which didn't get noticed and noted then even though they were and still are important aspects of the story to be told.

'The Team' is most enjoyable. It's a crimmie about an international group of detectives working on the same frontier crossing case. The cast is different from Series One. Team members are from Belgium, Denmark and Germany. It's about a mass murder in Jutland with Islamist terrorism, antiquities theft and people trafficking all in the mixture. What I appreciate is the way different languages are brought in - Danish, Flemish, German, English, Arabic and French.

It's well subtitled and not confusing, but it lends a special quality to the drama. The detectives often use suitably accented English between them and sometimes with subjects being interrogated. Arabic conversations between people caught up in the crisis also occur, but the speakers use either English or French to relate to the police, since they are Syrian refugees or settlers. Both ex-colonial languages are still used in Syria. It's very well done.

Thankfully, no sermon to write this evening, as I have no assignments for tomorrow. I'm quite glad of a respite, I've done a lot of extra jobs this past year with little time off. Our Oxwich Bay holiday told me that I'm in need of refreshment. If only I could take a few quiet weeks seaside retreat in Malaga. It's impossible to plan anything until I hear about my next surgical appointment. I don't know when that will be. It could be several months before I get treated. This is really beginning to bother me. I increasingly feel like a hostage awaiting release pending negotiations out of their control.

Transcription under way at last

Several times this week I've hunted high and low for an exercise book in which I wrote a daily record of my trip to Sarajevo in 1997. Finally this morning I found it, and started to transcribe and elaborate on some of the notes I made, which presume rather a lot on any reader other than me. This is going to be quite a job, but an interesting one.

End of the morning, I walked into town to meet Daniel for coffee and lunch, at the Waterloo Gardens Tea Room cafe and restaurant in the Wyndham Arcade. It gave me an opportunity to learn more about his research work on the untold story of the Gorazde siege in 1994 during the Bosnian war. I was amazed at the extent of the research he's done, and the breadth of understanding he already has of a complex of a three sided power struggle between Serbs Croats and Bosnian Muslims with geopolitical and organised crime overtones as well. 

It was an intense and stimulating conversation which brought to mind much I had forgotten about those years of conflict, as well as things I didn't learn about at the time. Daniel is looking for financial backing to make a long movie in twenty episodes in order to tell the story fully from every angle. He certainly has the material, as the real life events are as complex if not more so than any fictional block busting saga. As Daniel himself said, worse than 'Game of Thrones'.

After we parted company, I walked around the shops for a while, then returned home and spent the rest of the day and much of the evening writing up my travel journal. It's quite hard work, as I can't always decipher quickly me own handwriting. I don't think I've looked at this since the time I wrote it back in November 1997, twenty two years ago. How time flies!

Town of three faiths

It was Owain's 37th birthday yesterday. He's taking a week's holiday in Berlin, a place he's become rather fond of in recent years. He sent us a selfie to say he's there, having a good time exploring the city by bike, as his AirBnB apartment has the bonus availability of free bike use during his stay. How splendid. It's a very bike frendly city.

I walked to the Church shop to celebrate the midweek Eucharist, and Clare joined me while I was having a coffee next door at Rosi's bar afterwards. Then we went down to nearby Playa Torrecilla so she could swim, before doing some shopping and returning for lunch.  After siesta, I took her by car to the top of San Juan Capistrano, and showed her where I'd been hunting for hoopoe photos without success so far. It was too hot for any serious walking, but at least Clare now has an idea of a place that I usually walk to when I have the time.

This morning we drove up to Frigiliana to have a look around, and ended up having lunch there in la Bodeguilla restaurant near San Antonio Parish church (where I took a wedding two weeks ago) which specialises in local food and recipes. What a treat! I think we'll be returning there to explore more of the menu before Clare returns home.

Frigiliana is a lovely hill town of Moorish origin. In the mediaeval heart of the village, history panels fashioned from glazed tiles adorn the walls with narratives about its arab history and the impact of the reconquista on a town that became a temporary refuge for those fleeing Christian armies determined to dominate a region in which Jews, Christians and Muslims had learned to live together in peace and harmony under Moorish rule, but that was destroyed thanks to the reconquista. Frigiliana today brands itself for visitors as the town of three faiths, although I can't say I noticed either a living mosque or synagogue among today's public buildings, only churches.

Pope Francis recently spoke of Sarajevo as 'the Jerusalem of the West', a city where Jews, Christians and Mulims have centuries of history living alongside each other peacefully. And yet, this visionary asset of cultural diversity and mutual regard, in so many places has become the focal point of power struggles that not even secular democratic governance can contain. Places where conciliation and compromise are an accepted way of life for the common good remain vulnerable to people reluctant to trust that anything good can happen when they are not in control. What is it that we need to learn to contain the control freaks of this world, and allow others to build trust and make a life together on their own terms?