Unlucky for the many in my opinion

I prayed that the election wouldn't turn out as bad as I had feared, but it was so much worse than I had imagined. Britain has, like America elected a liar and an author of lies, hell bent on pursuing a British separatist policy which could cause untold damage and suffering to poor people.

In trying to be 'pastoral' to both sides of the brexit debate, the church has ended up being pastoral to nobody in particular, but preserved its place on the irrelevant periphery of society. It's a bitter pill to swallow, the fact that core moral values and judgements have been so eroded and weakened.

With such a large majority, the government will feel emboldened to resist Scottish calls for another independence referendum after the SNP won 80% of the Scottish seats. There will be trouble! This is a painful day. The only consolation is that the urban South of Wales, from Newport to Gower has stayed a Labour stronghold apart from losing Bridgend, with Monmouth and the Vale of Glamorgan staying as Tory as ever.

Is it the 'flu that's making me ache and feel drained today? Or is it a reaction to the prospect of a UK future in which my kind of view on living with justice, partnership, consultation and thoughtfulness will supplanted by sales-talk and disinformation without substance, over which I have no control?

Co-incidentally, the full moon reached its peak at 00.12, two hours after polls closed. And, it would be Friday the thirteenth today wouldn't it?
 

Day of election surprises, obsequies and city culture

This morning I woke up to discover Britain has a hung parliament. Although the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn didn't overwhelm the Tories, neither was it routed by a landslide as predicted by many wishful thinking pollsters, pundits and disgracefully biassed BBC reporters, and panel game comedians. Serves them right. They all humiliated themselves by showing how much they haven't listened properly to what was happening at the grass roots, especially among young voters. Despite his double rejection by the Parlimentary Labour Party, his patient listening and dialoguing with potential voters has regained support for a economical credible set of policies, which are more representative of pre-Blairite British socialism. Shame on all of them too. Labour has a modest man with moral integrity in charge, who has ignored every attempt at character assassination and isn't a self promoting egomaniac. Such a pity he's not at the helm right now, but he has re-introduced hope into political discourse when it was most needed.

It's not enough however to be nearly, but the challenge of building majority support, despite the lies of the right wing British press, can continue until the next electoral opportunity arrives. The Tories can cling to a slender majority with the support of the even more right wing Democratic Unionist Party, founded by Ian Paisley. It still espouses policies worthy of American fundamentalists. Whether this marriage of convenience is viable or sustainable remains to be seen. It casts another shadow of uncertainty over forthcoming brexit negotiations. How long before we wake up from this bizarre nightmare?

I spent most of the morning preparing a Sunday sermon, editing and uploading photos, finalising the liturgy for this afternoon's funeral. For some reason I can't fathom, I felt apprehensive about doing this. There's nothing new I haven't done before. I know and have driven the route to Velez-Malaga's  'La Esperanza crematorium before. I've prepared and taken services there before. I kept checking things before leaving, and came to the conclusion that I was nervous about omitting something or getting it wrong. Perhaps it's down to the experience of my first contact with the funeral director. 

I explained in my best Spanish that I had been asked to take this funeral by my colleague Doreen. It wasn't that he didn't understand my language, but rather didn't understand who I was and why I was contacting him about this funeral which as far as he was concerned was taken care of. It turned out that he spoke enough English for us to untangle things, but I still didn't understand why he referred to Doreen as 'Roy'. Moreover, neither did she when I asked her. My best guess if that he has 'Roy' as the reference name attached to that particular contact number on his phone. I'm used to muddling through in all sorts of odd situations, but 'unknown unknowns' can rattle the cage of my confidence.

I arrived at 'La Esperanza', short for Nuestra Senora de la Esperanza, with a good half hour to spare, checked in with the staff, and was shown the chapel. It was the one I used before, big enough for a congregation of a hundred, and all the wherewithall to celebrate a Requiem Mass, ready prepared in the sacristy. I wonder how many funerals here are in the setting of a Mass nowadays, compared to the turn of the century? The attendant who looked after me said that only four people had come for a viewing of the body earlier in the day, and wondered if that was the expected number, I explained that people were arriving from UK flights earlier in the day.

There were thirteen mourners for the service, just family and close friends, so they packed into the row of three pews nearest the coffin. The attendant looked after the recorded music, which meant he spent the service at a low cupboard door behind the altar, to control the CD player. Could he not find the remote control device? I wondered. Normally, I guess the officiating priest would stand up there and deejay for himself. The service proceeded as simply and quietly as intended with no surprises, thankfully. The family was appreciative, but with a lot of catching up to do with those who'd just arrived, there was nothing more to ask of me, so I took my leave of them, and returned to Malaga, feeling pleased that I'd spoken only Spanish with the crematorium staff throughout, and had been understood.

After supper, as the sun was setting, I walked through the big noisy road tunnel under the Alcazaba Palace into the Old Town. It lands you close to the historic Plaza del la Merced, whose trees were alight with reddish pink blossom, a delight to behold. The inside edges of the square were lined with matching booths, backs to the road, populated by book sellers and publishing houses. Malaga's Feria del Libro is happening from the 2nd to the 11th of June. In the middle of the Plaza there's a pavilion hosting a children's play and reading area, such as I've seen on the beach at Vinaros. There's another pavilion equipped for literary lectures and discussion. 

In the nearby back streets beyond the Mercado de la Merced, I found a church dedicated to Sta Cruz and St Philip Nerii, founder of the 16th century religious community of the Oratorian Fathers. Also the Iglesia del dos Martires, San Ciriaco y Sta Paula, young Christian converts said to have been martyred in Malaga under the third century persecution of Diocletian. Of them, nothing is known for sure but their names. They are honoured as patron saints of the city. Returning to La Malagueta I walked towards the sea front, along Clle Marquesa de Lario, the heartland of the city's luxury retail outlets, always busy with people strolling, meeting and greeting, hustling, day and night. It's a wonderfully convivial sort of place, all year round.

Walking then along the Parque del Paseo, I heard the sound of voices emanating from loudspeakers at the open air auditorium in the middle. A couple of hundred people were seated therein, and were being addressed by an erudite young man in smart casual clothes. He was accompanied by a screen with a Powerpoint display, and although he spoke quickly, I was able to gather that he was talking about consumer branding and marketing, and how these things work to capture our attention, sell us what we didn't know we needed earning fortunes for digital marketeers. Altogether very interesting, but too near bed time for me to want to stay and learn more. I don't know what sort of enterprise put on this kind of educational event, but I do know that are number of Malaga university buildings are on the edge of the Old Town nearest to here. It's lovely to be within walking distance of a lively city centre, full of people having a good time, that's not plagued by drunken louts and uncollected litter.

  

Geeky downtime

A lie-in followed by an idle day was just what I needed. I frittered time away attempting to convert an old Memory Stick Duo into a bootable Fedora Linux live medium in a USB card reader. A couple of days ago, I downloaded the latest Fedora ISO, both 32 and 64 bit versions to start with, aiming to try out on live the five year old Acer Core i3 laptop bequeathed me by Kath, currently running Linux Mint rather sweetly. 

I reformatted the Memory Stick and used a Mint utility to install the ISO on it. Neither 32 nor 64 bit versions worked. With trial and error, I realised Fedora's ISO wasn't happy loaded on a FAT16 or FAT32 filesystem. I reformatted to EXT4 filesystem, and the 32 bit ISO proved bootable. I must have a go at the 64 bit version eventually, to see if it will work on this old Core i3 machine. Being able to run any live version this way proved satisfying. I like the way Fedora's Gnome user interface works, and its reasonable performance under the circumstances. So then, I attempted a full installation of Fedora, not on the Acer's hard drive, as I didn't want to mess up Mint, but on the spare hard drive I've had sitting in a USB dock, since I retrieved it from the deceased Dell XPS.

Everything worked fairly well eventually, although Fedora's Anaconda installer bewildered me when it came to assigning full disk space, as I didn't really understand what it was asking me to do, as the drive in question was already partitioned ready for a Linux install, though not in a way Fedora was prepared to make sense of. Deleting the drive partitions and leaving Anaconda to do the rest worked, however, and in the end I was in possession of a bootable USB hard drive. It seems a little slow running to me, but maybe if physically installed in the machine, it would perform better. On the other hand, Gnome is not a lightweight user interface, compared to Mate on Linux Mint. Well, we'll see, when I next have an opportunity to tinker.

At teatime, I went out to Chapter to return two weeks worth of canvas carry bags for our organic veggie order, due tomorrow, then walked to the NatWest ATM on Cowbridge Road, to draw some money out. Since the start of the Triduum, I've had neither time nor opportunity for litter picking. On this journey of just over a mile, I picked up forty four pieces of litter. The forecourt area in front of the bank boasts a generous wheelchair ramp. There was an amazing amount of litter, paper cups, fag packets, a few cans and bottles, paper and plastic in this area, I admit that I wondered when it was last cleaned. But, as this is private property, not public realm, I made no effort to pick anything up. I tweeted about the mess instead, in the hope someone will notice.

After supper, a telly free evening, for a change. Plenty to read and think about, with Teresa May calling a General Election in the hope of increasing support for her brexit intransigence. I keep wondering what the possibility is of the electorate expressing concern and displeasure at the entirely foreseeable consequences of the referendum, and a government unable to agree, announce and implement a coherent strategy, by voting them out of office. A rainbow coalition of opposition parties might succeed in bringing Britain back from the brink, but that would be a miracle of co-operation beyond belief as the campaigning begins. But in these days of social media, six weeks is a very long time in politics, and many things can can, both for better and for worse.