Viber calling and more funicular finding

This morning, just after breakfast I had a surprise video call on Viber from Rachel in Arizona, just returned from a gig up-country and winding down before bed. It was good to catch up with her and talk dad to daughter for a good long while. By sheer co-incidence, at the end of the afternoon I had another Video video call, this time from my sister June and daughter Kath, who was visiting her auntie during a London trip. She helped her out by adjusting her Galaxy Tab display setting to big font size, and completed the registration of Viber, which I'd installed for her on my visit last month, but failed to complete at the time. Hopefully this'll pave the way for video calls to my sister as well as the children, if she can remember how it works and use the app as intended.

Cousin Dianne sent me an email to confirm that she and husband Ian are going to be in Champex Lac, up above the Val de Bagnes for the annual local desalpage on my last weekend here. I'm going to make my third trip up there to join them for this ancient rural custom, only this time changing trains at Sembrancher to reach Orsieres, where they'll pick me up. Great to have an opportunity to see and photograph another part of the trois vallées, plus the bonus of this special mountain fête. In spring, animals are taken to higher pastures to graze, and in autumn when they are returned to the shelter of lower lying fields and barns. 

These events are celebrated in a traditional way. Beasts are decked with ribbons, flowers and bells, walked from farms through the village and then taken uphill on the most convenient track, a journey which may take all day, and provide an excuse to picnic en route. In the autumn, festivities take place back in the village. Nowadays, with larger herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, the majority of animals may be transported by vehicle, with a select number decorated and walked up or down by road. I remember seeing flocks of sheep and goats herded down country roads from higher pastures inland on the Côte d'Azur one autumn fifteen years ago. I remember seeing a farmer in the Pays de Gex returning to his farm from high pastures with just a few cows, festively dressed. No audience, no welcoming party, not for the tourists, just something he and his forebears had always done.

I also had a phone call from a notary in Aigle, managing the affairs of an elderly Brit living in Bex, but now in hospital and close to the end of his life. He wanted to know if, when the time came, it would be possible for him to arrange the man's funeral in St John's, as his few closest relatives lived in Britain, and may not be so easy to contact to arrange things anyway. I reassured him that it would be possible, and we then exchanged contact details by email. It's not unusual for elderly single expats or those married but childless to end their lives alone in old age, known maybe to just a few neighbours, having outlived colleagues, friends and siblings. It's very sad, and one can only hope that living one's final years in a place of great beauty offers them the consolations of nature, when family friendships have already run their course.

After finding the old funicular railway yesterday afternoon, my mind was exercised by not having identified its point of departure, so I retraced yesterday's route until I found the first place where I'd seen the railway line, near the escalier de Collonges. Here, the line ran into a cutting, then went into what looked like a tunnel, except there was no sign of the line emerging lower down the hill. On closer inspection I concluded this dark space, enclosed by a security gate, was all that remained of the funicular line terminus. It was next to and beneath a large imposing old house in classic Vaudois style, which had been renovated with its lower boundary and approach road remodelled by generous application of concrete. It was impossible to tell if the house had been part of Collonge funicular station. To the left of the steps, I found a blocked of passageway shrouded with bushes, perhaps leading down the where the departure platform once would have been. If my surmise is correct, it wouldn't be impossible to restore this line for services, but it would, doubtless, be expensive.

And to finish the day, a Viber call with my best beloved Clare in Cardiff.

Art to make you think

My fourth weekend here, a new month, and today is Owain's 39th birthday. It's hard to believe that my youngest child was born that long ago, at home in St Agnes Vicarage, Badminton Road in those days, just a bit to the east of the St Paul's Area 'front line' in Bristol. A little over half a lifetime ago. I was fortunate to have him here with me last weekend. Tonight he'll be in Cardiff with Clare, Kath, Anto and Rhiannon for his birthday celebration, and then we'll talk as best we can for a while over any VOIP connection we can establish.

This afternoon, I went into the Old Town to hunt for a shop selling herbs, to find some nettle and mistletoe leaves, as requested by Clare. Quite close to the Cathedral I found a herbolaria called 'Escencias de Sevilla' selling a wide variety of herbal medicines, including the ortiga verde which I was after. No luck obtaining the muérdago, I also needed, although I was pleased to have conversed in Spanish and made myself understood without recourse to English - except for the one word that wouldn't stick in my memory - muérdago. Altogether I had to look it up using Google Translate no less than three times in a couple of hours. Annoyance was compounded by the fact that the phone I was carrying was down to its last 5% of battery, so I had to keep it switched off, just in case I really needed to call in an emergency. Vocabulary retention deficit is a rather humiliating crisis to keep on repeating.

I tracked down a Bio shop in the Old Town, but it was closed for siesta. Rather than return to the apartment, I used the hour and a half wait to revisit Lagunillas barrio up behind behind La Merced. Conservation measures have retained many features of the main Old Town area, with its rich architectural diversity of 17th to early 20th century dwellings. Further out, older humbler domestic and artisan dwellings have been obliterated to make way for modern apartment blocks of 5-6 stories. The ancient street plan, squares and churches are retained, but the rest has a uniformity of character, despite efforts at design variety. These dwellings haven't evolved, but were 'organised' for the good of the artisanal classes by urban planners and developers. Disappointingly.

Some older streets of Lagunillas barrio have so far survived in a state of delapidation and awaiting demolition, no doubt. Remarkable high quality artistic graffiti cover walls here and there, and there are signs of a grassroots resistance campaign to stop demolition and regenerate the older housing stock rather than destroy it. This makes a lot more sense to me now than during my visit last year, maybe because my Spanish is improving.

I also spent time in the Plaza de la Constitucion, with an open air photo exhibition entitled 'Genesis' by Sebastião Salgado, portraying some of earth's great and awesome wilderness spaces in 38 huge black and white photos, mounted in double sided iron frames. The aim is to raise environmental awareness, and to get the public to think about natural treasures we're in danger of losing for good. Quite apart from the excellent high quality photographic work and its production, the subject matter is indeed chosen to stimulate thought and reflection. For me it was an experience of the sacred right in the heart of a key public place in the city.

When the Bio shop I'd located finally opened, I had no success in obtaining muérdago. As a last resort I'll visit the Mercado de Atarazanas on Monday morning and see what hidden treasures there are among the stalls - another proper herbolaria, hopefully.

After supper I had a Viber conversation with the family, all in Meadow Street after a visit to The Conway pub for supper. I managed to give them a visual tour of the nearer reaches of the apartment using the front camera on the tablet, but it kept dropping out as the signal is poor beyond 10 metres. It's so annoying and frustrating. I thin I must splash out €30 on a wifi range extender for the place fairly soon.

  

Solidarity revealed

It's getting noticeably hotter by day this week, not only here, but in Britain. Clare has been making the most of her time with Ann in Pembrokeshire, and fine weather, to visit a different beach every day and post photos of them, on Instagram and Viber. She's in her element. I'm not that comfortable sunning myself on sand, though I love to walk along the promenade and sea shore, day or night. 

Monday was a day with no appointment, just clothes to wash and a visit to local food shops, notably an eco-tienda, the other side of the Bull Ring plaza, to purchase a jar of Tahini using my best Spanish with complete success. But, most of the day I lay low in the apartment avoiding the intense heat, venturing out to the Old Town in the late afternoon as it was cooling down, to get some exercise. Having done a lot of walking over the weekend, my legs were quite tired. I'm walking at least 3-5km a day, but I'd like to build up to 5-7km a day every day, to get back to the fitness level I had last autumn in Mojácar.

Tuesday was also a day with no appointments, but a day of preparation for Owain's visit, and a day to draft a sermon for next Sunday's first visit to the Salinas congregation to celebrate the Eucharist. I found myself drawn to the Genesis lesson about Abraham and Ishmael and its relation to Islam.

More information is emerging today about the attack on worshippers at a Finsbury Park Mosque in London, by an assailant from Pentwyn, Cardiff, who seems to be a loner filled with hatred for Muslims. The impact of this act of terrorism, like the London Bridge incident last month, has been a defiant expression of solidarity by people of all faiths and none at every level, both the leaders and the led. 

'Live and let live' has been a default expression of tolerance in British urban society for generations, despite politics, despite local difficulties and compatibility tensions between communities with different lifestyles. It's not always comfortable, but people get used to it, make it work, as much by passive acceptance as through active community relations. There are more ways for people from different backgrounds to get used to each other than we realise. But, when there's an external threat to the natural balancing act going on in every kind of living community, there's a most remarkable reaction from within. 

People who've been muddling along start taking notice, and stop taking peace and stability for granted. Crisis pushes them out of passive acceptance of each other into a defensive affirmation of a diverse common life together. A sense of human solidarity becomes more conscious. It breaks down barriers of race, language and culture in public. What may have occurred when near neighbours had something to celebrate or grieve about, is revealed by harsh circumstances to be an experience shared by the larger community, which just wants freedom to continue muddling along, putting up with each other and living with differences.

Memories are awakened of my time as Team Rector of St Paul's Area Parish, Bristol at the time of the 1980 riots. That was a place where many poor people of different races and cultures muddled along together. Rioting broke out as a result of a bungled operation by poorly briefed police officers unaquainted with the area, without consulting police working there day by day. It was an expression of utter frustration by local young black people with far reaching consequences, and it attracted global attention for a while. 

There were unaddressed social problems as well, that's for sure, and a great need for British public bodies to re-examine their attitudes toward those who were of a non-British culture, in order to find out what all had in common, and what differences there were which called for respect. There were many top level enquiries, and a few changes, though never enough to make a major difference. Even then, as the crisis passed, all who lived in an area subject to intense scrutiny soon wanted just to be left alone to get on with a struggle to survive which no media or political intrusion could ever make a real difference to. 

Young rioters effectively said: 'Stop messing with us' to police with no idea how to administer law and order worthy of respect, as local Bobbies could. Hit a community with an islamophobic attack, or an islamist attack and we can label them politically any way we desire, but when the people of a place bond together in mutual respect to support each other, they may simply be saying: 'Let us be. Let us deal with this as best we can.' Whoever suffers, whoever is the victim, the community feels it's an assault on them and their effort to live together. It's almost like a revelation, this discovery that, as St Paul tells us "We are members of one another."

   

Surprise supper

A quiet morning spent reading responses to the news about the Law Lords' conclusion that Parliament has to be consulted, not informed about Brexit proposals. The more the decision to leave the EU and its ensuing consequences come under scrutiny, the more likely it is that those who voted in favour of it may realise they were duped by lies and un-deliverable promises, and start demanding a way out. Already, before any strategic plan for withdrawal negotiations has been formulated, let alone debated or agreed upon, discussion on limiting the impact damage from Brexit is being aired. You could say that an early attitude of bullishness among our leaders is turning into sheepishness.

I walked to the Mercadona to buy some chicken to cook for lunch, for a change. Afterwards I chatted with Rachel and Jasmine over in Phoenix using Viber, and then with Clare in Cardiff. I was glad to learn that she's now been given a firm January date for the operation on her other eye. It's good to have something to plan everything else around. She's expecting a weekend visit from Ann tomorrow, when it will be a year to the day since Eddie was laid to rest. How quickly that year has sped by. Living at opposite ends of the country, we didn't see a great deal of each other except for family gatherings and holiday visits, but an abiding sense of his quiet, untroubled, thoughtful, assuring presence makes it hard to absorb the fact that he's no longer with us.

Just as I was thinking about having supper I had a phone call from Pam and Alwyn inviting me to join them for supper in a restaurant with Archdeacon Geoff and his wife Carol, who'd spent the afternoon with them on their week long whistle stop pastoral tour of Costa Chaplaincy visits. Such a welcome surprise! It's a couple of years since I last saw Geoff of Carol in the course of looking after Nerja on locum duty. Though Geoff and I skype each other and exchange emails from time to time, there's nothing as good as catching up face to face. And great to see them both looking so well. The Derbyshire country air is doing them good.

We went to the Bella Vista restaurant, one of Mojácar's most recommended eateries. The food was very good and the price for a very varied set menu most reasonable. I had sopa de mariscos and sardinas. The waitress laughed as she corrected me saying sopa de marineros - literally - seaman soup, instead of fish soup, but nevertheless expressed appreciation for my effort at ordering in Spanish. How kind! It was a lovely convivial evening, with friends old and new.