First of the year

Thankfully, a day without rain, a little colder due to a wind from the west, but not as cold. From Poland to Spain average temperatures are being recorded ten degrees higher than we'd expect for early January. Very much a symptom of global warming. After breakfast I walked to St Catherine's to celebrate the Eucharist with five others, and then chat over a cuppa in the church hall afterwards. No veg bag to collect this week, so I went straight home and shared cooking lunch with Clare, as she'd bought me some pork loin steaks to prepare in whatever way I fancied. I stewed them slowly with tomatoes and onions and was pleased with the result.

She returned home with the first three kilos of organic bitter oranges from Seville for this year's first batch of marmalade. Later in the day she cooked and de-pipped them and cooked them until they were jam consistency, eight bitter-sweet jars worth! It'll be my turn next to make the second batch.

John at Pidgeons called about a funeral for the 27th of this month, which I won't be able to do as by then I will be in Fuengirola re-orienting myself for the weeks to come

I went out for a walk afterwards, retracting my steps from two days ago to check if any of the new growth of winter flowers had emerged any further. I found a few scattered snowdrops with buds on slender stems just about to open, also one narcissus in bud but not about to flower. 

Not quite as early as last year judging by a photo I took on the second of January last year, but still a couple of weeks earlier than expected. Lots of fresh grass growth is visible in places, pushing up through the brown layer of dead leaves, and there were a few hazel branches with tiny catkins on them as well.

On the way out of Llandaff Fields at the end of my walk, a man was standing outside Cafe Castan in its sheltered space juggling with coloured plastic balls which lit up - a striking sight. He said that he'd worked as a juggler over the years and now taught juggling and circus skills to children. I tried taking photos of him juggling but wasn't pleased with the result with my Sony Alpha DSLR on auto-setting in poor light, I didn't know how to adjust the shutter and ISO speed manually on the spot, and in the end attempted to take some video clips instead. With these I got this result after editing two clips together with MS Clipchamp. It's the first time I've used this camera's video capability since I bought it six years ago next week.

After supper and the Archers, I couldn't find anything of interest to watch on telly, and spent the rest of the evening just sitting quietly and pondering.

Truth suppression

I got to bed very late last night and rose just after nine having switched on the radio at half past seven and then fallen asleep again. The battle for control of one of Ukraine's nuclear power stations led to an office building being set alight. but none of the nuclear reactors were damaged thankfully. This has sent a frisson of anxiety around the world, given the likelihood of the conflict escalating even more dangerously. 

Putin's government has imposed a complete ban on all independent news gathering organisations in Russia in the hope of suppressing all news except that from officially sanctioned government sources. Officially, all news not propagated by the Russian government is deemed fake news and communicating it is an offence punishable by years in prison. Mobile phones can still be used to relay news across borders on a one to one basis. Russians are used to keeping up to date by word of mouth, however, and foreign websites can still be accessed by tech savvy VPN users which hide the true location and identity of users. One hopes that this kind of news leakage will alert people at grass roots level to what is being done in their name and lead them to act eventually, hopefully not too late for the world..

Clare had her piano lesson after breakfast, and I had to wait for the house to fall silent again before I could start making recordings, both video and audio. I cooked a veggie pasta sauce for lunch while she was having her lesson, then recorded a short video introduction for next Tuesday's extra prayer video assignment. I wanted to incorporate a video clip introduction with the slides and audio, but the software I used didn't do what I assumed it would, but once the slide show video was complete it was easy to join it with the other clip, and all turned out well. There must be other ways of doing this. I'm amazed some folk manage to record and edit video on their phones with ease. I don't like viewing myself talking to camera, let alone editing the result. I find it embarrassing to look at myself while I talk.

It was four o'clock by the time I went out for a long walk at a brisk pace, much needed after all that digital wrestling. Clare went off to the Royal Welsh College for this week's Amser Jazz. Highlight of the evening was another two hour episode of Rocco Schiavone on More Four. I moves slowly and stories are complex, but full of marvellous character portrayals. Each week's story stands on its own, but there are linked threads running through the series, the characters and relationships it explores.

Autumn Fayre at St Catherine's

A Saturday lie-in and pancake breakfast, final editing and printout of tomorrow's sermon, then cooking the lunch, and then it was time to take some jars of home made jam to the Parish Fayre in the grounds of St Catherine's. There was a super turn out of stalls and we came away with jars of chutney, a marrow and half a dozen big green apples which may or many not be cookers. I also found a new looking case for a DSLR camera on the bric a brac stall and bought it, just what I need for my Olympus which has been in a cramped case in which the HX300 usually lives since purchase.

As we walked home laden with stuff, crowds of people, mainly young families it seemed, were heading down King's Road to the church. It's the first outdoor church event of its kind since before lock-down and the attraction of something different yet familiar wasn't being taken for granted. I suspect we'll do well.

I went for an hour's walk in the park, and tried editing a video I'd made with no success, perhaps because I had disposed of some temporary files during a system clean up without realising. Backup of video editing files to One Drive stopped working officially last year. It's now necessary to make a backup on the device, or you won't be able to return to a recent video composition and change it. To effect the change I needed to make, I had to load the already rendered MP4 video into an old version of Movie Maker on my desktop workstation, and then remember how to make a one second cut in the audio and video stream to remove a tiny but noticeable error. It was tricky, but it worked eventually. I started the job before supper and went on with it for an hour afterwards. Then I checked out the substitute laptop I'm taking to my sister when I go to see her tomorrow, and watched another old episode of 'The Repair Shop' with Clare before heading for bed.

Unusually busy

More bright cold sunny weather today. At last some free time to spend on preparing for the rest of the week's services on WhatsApp, and making contact with chief mourners arranging funerals at which I'll be officiating this week and next. I uploaded this morning's as soon as I woke up, and got tomorrow's ready during the day.

For this week's assignment, Clare recorded all six resurrection Gospel readings. I think it's good to have the change of voices. Doing this for a continuous live recording is too complex and stressful given the resources available, and the recording time it requires. Inserting an audio file against a photo into the video stream was easy to do. I recorded Morning Prayer, and my reflection of the Gospel of the day separately, and this allowed me to edit them together using Windows Movie Maker. The program is perhaps long in the tooth, but I've used it enough times now not to find it hard to recall how to, and that's what counts, when you're under time constraints, and want to do this as well as possible.

I took a break for a walk in the afternoon, and worked again in the evening. One thing I had forgotten but which was nagging me in the back of my mind was the preparation for the on-line Safeguarding training I have committed to do in order to renew my Diocese in Europe PTO. Maybe I'll never get another locum duty assignment abroad, but I'd prefer to be ready if asked and am free to travel safely etc.. What matters is keeping up to date on an important dimension of pastoral care and awareness applicable to any parish or chaplaincy. The ways in which people can abuse and harm each other seems to keep growing. We have to 'expect the unexpected', as Ashley would say.

The on-line training seminar is a week today, and before that I have to answer, and submit to the training team a series of questions in a digital work book about the nature of safeguarding and the church. There is a deadline for this on Wednesday this week, so that nagging feeling was that I'd better got on and do it pronto. I sat up when I'd finished my other tasks for the day and looked at the questionnaire, thinking I'd do it in the morning, but thoughts occurred to me rapidly, so I wrote to completion, emailed it and went to bed later than I should have done. This training promises to be very interesting, despite being on-line and not in the flesh.

My, that was a busy day!

Video hassles

Sunday worship on Radio Four first thing was from Brecon Cathedral, in honour of tomorrow's St David's Day. Archbishop John Davies preached, referring to his own call to ministry and reflecting his impending retirement. I remember meeting him first when he arrived as curate of Bulwark in Chepstow Parish, in the late 1980s where we lived during my time working for USPG as Area Secretary for Wales. I wonder what he plans to do in retirement? It seems strange to have been around long enough in ministry to see eight Archbishops of Wales come and go - Glyn, Gwilym, Derek, George, Alwyn, Rowan, Barry and now John.

What a delightful blessing to walk to church in sunlight under a clear bright blue sky in crisp morning air! There were thirty of us celebrating the Eucharist together again in St Catherine's. We're still hemmed in by 'no socialising' policy, even if we're careful to maintain social distance. No hanging around in the church grounds, go to the supermarket instead, or talk in the street with two metres (?) between you, if you want brief interaction or company of sorts. As if we weren't going to be careful, having survived this far!

It was warm enough to have lunch in the garden again today. I edited and wrote some of this week's parish WhatsApp Reflections before going out for a walk up to the Cathedral, and then to Llandaff Weir. It's the first time in many weeks that the footpath up to the weir has dried out enough not to feel treacherous underfoot.

After tea I set about recording tomorrow's St David's Day reflection, with a brief video introduction, a photo of Fran's icon and an audio commentary. I hadn't forgotten what I learned from recording my sister's eulogy last summer, and soon found out how to produce a viable video, which ran correctly on a PC, but not on a smartphone, producing only a perfect miniscule version. I tried every trick I could think of to get the video to display properly full screen without success. 

Fortunately a conversation with Kath proved to be helpful. I re-recorded the little video introduction in landscape mode, and replaced it in the file editor, then rendered it as a 720p video. The whole thing only looked best on a phone in landscape mode. There's a problem I cannot resolve with mixed portrait and landscape display. If I could have done the whole thing on my phone without resort to an internal video editor, maybe this problem would not exist, but my phone doesn't have a video editor I know of. Kath has developed expertise at video editing on her Mac, and on a smartphone in the course of work this past few years. Rhiannon, doing video projects at home for drama college uses only a smartphone, and produces some impressive sophisticated results. Ah! These digital natives!

A remarkable twenty million vaccinations have done in Britain in the first three months of deployment. It's a logistic triumph for thousands of people working together. All deserve a medal of honour. Six new cases of the Brazilian covid variant have been detected among passengers travelling from there on a flight via Zurich, thanks to rapid genome sequencing of test samples. Five of the six people infected have been tracked and traced, A sixth didn't give sufficient detail on their form to make tracing possible, potentially sowing infection chaos, so a high speed hunt is on to detect the potential super spreader. 

If only people weren't so careless about giving their details or neurotic enough to want to obscure them in the interests of personal privacy. In a village, it's not unusual for everyone to know each others' business. Now we're in a global village. While there are many good reasons for safeguarding personal privacy on a host of different issues, matters of who we are, where we've come from and going need to be known for the sake of the common good, and such doesn't have to be broadcasted or exploited to this end. Nobody is exempt from the risk of being a carrier or a victim of this plague.

Time wasted

After breakfast I knuckled down and made a couple of efforts at a first video service recording. The first was too long and that meant pruning texts I'd prepared yet again to get them the right length. I second try was OK, but with a second or so of irrelevant footage at the end I wanted to trim away. No a problem in a video editing suite on my Windows 10 PC, except that the rendered edited file wouldn't play full screen on a phone and was a tenth of the size it needed to be. It tried every rendering option I could think of, to no avail, and wasted hours trying. 

Just as annoying was the fact the the PC wouldn't recognise my phone. I had to save the edited video file to a SD card, to transfer it to my Linux laptop, which has no trouble at all recognising my phone and its supplementary storage. As a result of losing so much time, my daily walk started mid afternoon and finished in darkness, and it was even colder still today, so tomorrow I'll go out in my ageing ski jacket and wear gloves. Time to give up wearing sandals for the winter too.

I tried every method I could think of to trim the end of that video without success. I have wasted so much time on this today, without success. That imposes even more pressure to record each service in one straight take. I'm dreading it. Only late this evening did the PC finally decide that it could and would recognise my phone, long after I found a workaround and gave up hope. I wonder if it will remember again tomorrow,

Usefully occupied

I ended up going to bed late last night and sleeping late this morning, but I was out and about in time to go to the Eucharist at St John's. There were nine of us. I cooked lunch when I got home, and later went for a good long walk. Each day it seems to be just a little colder in the afternoon. There's sunshine but it's really humid, so it's hard t dry washing and the cold clings to you., something I remember well in my first month in Ibiza, as I hadn't packed enough warm clothes to take with me, expecting it to be milder.

The rest of the day was given over to working out where how to shoot videos of Morning Prayer using my phone, and trying out the texts for length. Five or six minutes are recommended. It was much harder than I imagined, and I had to set about pruning one text and then experiment with a video. It's less than straightforward. The pressure is on to get all six done in advance and post them on WhatsApp one a day, as I'm doing for the Daily Reflection I'm posting to WhatsApp this week.

The thought of recording live video on the day without making errors, and the uploading the finished product by eight in the morning is far too much pressure. As my phone with WhatsApp on is four years old, it's not got a video editing app, and not enough memory to make a video editing app work properly. Better to get them all done  in advance and avoid the stress. But learning how to achieve the desired result is taking up a lot of time.

I've had a request to take a funeral at St John's in two weeks time on a Friday, Mother Frances' day off. It'll be the first funeral in church I've done since restrictions were lifted. How this is going to work with restricted numbers and social distancing, I have yet to learn. Interesting times! 

Quarantine Cymru - day Eleven

More rain in the night and early this morning. It's cooler now. By breakfast time cloud dispersed enough to let the sun in for a while. For most of the day it remained overcast and cool, with more rain in the evening. 

Clare cooked us perfect veegan breakfast pancakes again, our Saturday treat, whatever the weather. She also went out early to collect the antibiotics I was prescribed yesterday. She's going to need a holiday after making so much effort to look after a quarantined me since I returned.

Today I worked on recording the eulogy for my sister Pauline's funeral next Friday. The script that Nicky sent me only needed minor modifications to make the text flow nicely. I know how I'd like to record it, but can I set up my HX90 camera somewhere in the house where it's quiet and suitably lit for static head and shoulders footage? I settled for the front room eventually, where it was possible to sit on a low arm chair with a blank wall behind me. In Ibiza this was so tricky to do without a camera tripod but now back home, it was easier than I anticipated once I found the right place. 

The text took nine minutes to record, and I managed to do it without fluffs in one take. Reading for the most part from a script out of camera sight wasn't easy. On reviewing the footage I was perhaps more conscious of eye and head movement than a one off viewer might be. TV news readers have a auto-cue reader to enable them to look straight into the camera most of the time. No such luck for me, and learning the script off by heart wasn't an option, as I'd ad lib too much, and then it would need more editing. I hope it will be good enough. Let's see what Nicky and Jules think.

I had another go at using the Windows 10 video app, which I learned to use in Ibiza on quite a powerful machine. It's very user unfriendly with no help files to show you how. It fails to tell you that you must put all the photos and video clips you intend to use into the same sub-folder of the Photos folder or the app cannot use them. It does tell you that you must make a sub-folder without explaining its purpose. Plain daft. Once I'd figured this out, I was able to make the app work as intended. It allows you to make a slide show, or to incorporate video and slides into a sequence that will be rendered into a MP4 video file a third the size of the raw material. I've found out this much by time wasting trial and error.

I started wondering a plan had been made to include a slide show of pertinent photos covering my sister's life span, and mentioned in my covering email to Nicky when I sent her the YouTube link to the uploaded video. She likes the idea and I have landed the job of making one. I just hope they can come up with a few more photos than one which I already have in my digital archive.

We've been assailed by recorded messages once or twice a day this week tells us that a sum of sixty pounds has been taken from the Amazon Prime account neither of us have. You press button one for a help line, where either someone will attempt to con personal details from you, or the response you made will register the line as active so you can receive other scam calls at your number. As scam call systems use a random number dialling routine, this may act as a basic filtration routine to make the dialler focus on live numbers. So important not to respond.

How annoying that the UK government is abandoning its two week quarantine requirement for inbound visitors from select lower risk European countries including Spain from next weekend. Too late to benefit me with only three days to go now. Ironically there are localised infection spikes in several countries, Spain among them. Thermal sensing of passengers is being introduced at airport terminals and nobody with a temperature will be allowed to board so they say. Is the desperate wish to resume some degree of normality undermining the need for prudence and caution?
  

   

State of Alarm - day Sixty Three

I woke up to a lovely warm day and got up slowly, thinking of the Ascensiontide prayer video that I started preparing late last night. Things can be better to return to after sleep, and fortunately this was so when it came to completing the text. As there was a slight breeze, catching the trailing vine and the lemon tree at the front of the house, I positioned my HX90 where it could see both, and set about recording. 

After half a minute a car and some cyclists passed. Stopped and re-started. Then another half a minute into recording another car in the opposite direction. This time I paused to let it go past, then repeated the section which was being drowned out. It's what I have to do when I make a mistake with audio, and edit the errors out later, so why not with video? It was easier said than done. 

The Windows 10 video editing app is simply laid out, but far less easy to use than the old Windows Movie Maker which I have at home. There's simply not enough on screen help to use its editing tools, or it presumes you know exactly how it works. Well, you learn by trial and error hands on. Who wants to spend ages on YouTube bombarded by irrelevant ads and suggested videos, just to access a simple 'how to' guide? 

In my vocabulary the word 'trim' refers to removal of some kind of excess - hair, overgrown hedge -

using the 'trim' tool left me with only the bit of video I didn't want. How perverse is that! After several attempts, I worked out how to remove the redundant section of video, and then it was ready for uploading. Will I retain this information the next time I come to use it?

After a late lunch, I walked to the village nearest to the house, 3.5km away, St Agosti des Vedrà. It's perched on a ridge above the main road, with the 19th century Parish Church in a prominent position with a large patio just up from the village store. The whole area is being re-paved at the moment, in a way that complements the essential simplicity of the building. Its architecture is in the traditional Ibiceno style, thick fortress like walls with tiny square windows, like the older houses. In fact, I could only find one window in the north wall and none at all in the south. I'd love to have seen the interior, but it was locked. There was a notice stating that a capilla could be found at the east end of the building for personal prayer.

As with other churches I've seen here, the priest's house is behind the sanctuary, with its front door opening on to a patio with a tree shaded garden area beyond that. The door was open, and the lobby inside had been turned into a prayer room. I'm not sure how that would work in terms of social distancing, but in a country village few people would visit at the same time anyway. I wondered if a priest lived in the house or perhaps a caretaker, and if it was possible for people to arrange to consult with him. My photos are here.

State of Alarm - day Thirty Nine

At last, a return to a sunny blue sky day with a temperature of twenty degrees from mid morning to early evening. I had Sunday's ministry of the Word to complete with files of recorded readings to add to the assortment of variables that string together to give an audio version of the liturgical text. What is so easy and natural to do standing in front of a congregation requires attention to detail to produce an acceptable final version.

Late yesterday my idea of making another short video of reflective discursive praying - example not instruction - bore fruit in a text I felt able to record. Last time I used the improvised altar set up in the dining room. This time I wanted to use the Taize Icon of Friendship, a Coptic rendering of the icon of Christ with St Menas, one of the Desert Fathers. I found a photo image on the internet that I could display on my Chromebook with the sides curtained off and a cloth over the keyboard. Then it was possible to position my Sony HX90 to focus on the image and fill most of the screen. 

With this arrangement it was a matter of pressing the camera video button and praying from behind it. This worked quite well until it came to turn off the camera. I couldn't see it clearly enough in the semi darkness to turn off without shaking the camera. This left me with a video needing the shaky silent bits trimmed off. I uploaded it to YouTube in the mistaken hope that there would be a simple video edit facility on the site. If there was, I couldn't find it. All you could edit was the information aka metadata. So I had to give up, as it was almost midnight. 

I noticed an email had just come in from sister June. Earlier she'd written to tell me that her Tesco on-line shopping order would not now be delayed several weeks as there were late night delivery slots available and she'd secured one for tonight. She wrote to let me know all was well and that friendly neighbours had helped her to take the groceries into her flat and dispose of the delivery crates. That was a nice note to go to bed on.

This morning I installed PiTiV video editor on the Linux laptop. It worked just about worked, being far too under powered for heavy duty processing. That's always the problem with video. Anyway on the powerful office PC I found a simple video editing app to use, so simple that it took me a while to figure out how to operate it and do the simple thing I wanted, which was to trim the shaky bits of the video I'd made. Eventually it gave me what I wanted, and I ended up with a three minute video clip which was half the size of the original MP4 from the camera, so it took half the time to upload. After this, I had a link to email to Dave for posting on the church website. Pleased that I was able to get this done before completing the assembly of Sunday's Ministry of the Word.

I had long WhatsApp chats with Clare, with sister in law Ann and with Mother Frances, who called to check me out. It was lovely to talk 'shop' with her and hear about the Parish. I'm also lucky that I hear from several congregation members as well, all coping with social isolation in different ways and places, and interested to know how each other is getting on. Nobody is taking community for granted. This immense threat which we're now living with is teaching us to appreciate better people around us day by day, and that is doing wonders for social health. We've all be so preoccupied and driven by pressures of work and keeping up with entertainment and social demands in recent years that a period of time out makes us realise how superficial life has become under meaningless kinds of pressure.

Maaret came by mid afternoon, as I'd asked her to fill my empty containers of filtered drinking water at the filling station she goes to in San Josep. Why don't we go together, but in two cars, she suggested brilliantly. It was just what I needed, to drive out on a familiar road on a bright sunny day, to be shown how to find and use the municipal filtered water supply filling station on the outskirts of the pueblo. 

The water station used by many people from further east on the island is on the outskirts of San Rafael, three times the distance away and tucked behind a gas station. The payment system is the same in both places, but the water supply in San Rafael is uncontrollable as water pipes have no tap attached, so juggling with water containers has to be practiced. I wasn't looking forward to doing that on my own. The San Josep pipes do have taps so filling is orderly and controllable. 

The place was empty when we arrived. In fact, the town was deserted. It was at a sunny siesta time too. We stood and chatted standing by our cars at a safe social distance for ten minutes. I noticed a big sign over the water station saying it was under CCTV surveillance. That made me feel a little nervous, but I guess it was siesta time after all ... I drove home, my morale much boosted, and we had an interesting chat about the coping strategies people develop for meeting surreptitiously with friends, maintaining social distancing, chatting from inside cars in adjacent parking spaces. 

Things seem to be a bit more relaxed now, less tense. It's been days since any new cases have been reported on Ibiza nor have there been any deaths. Maybe some relaxing of restrictions for children to go outdoors will be put in place next week, and more later if that has no adverse effects. So there is mild optimism after six weeks of total lock-down. As for international travel prospects, nothing on the horizon I suspect, until June, if not longer. Life may get easier. A return to public ministry may even be possible later in May, and that would be welcome. As for home-coming, I try not to think too much about it. I'm just grateful to be alive and well. For now.

  

Follow up and check up

I spent the morning completing work on the second half gig video. This plus the audio recording is for Rachel to keep and study her own performance in detail at leisure. The next task, which I then started on is making short self contained videos for each complete song she's written. These can be uploaded more easily to You Tube in a release sequence, separately publicised via Facebook, giving optimum exposure to her full range of live performance material. Useful as a musical CV for any booking agent interested in what she can do. It's a long and fiddly job however, and will take a few days of spare time, considering the mistakes I'll make, weeding out recording glitches which evade initial attention - a product of not being able to record continuously on the same memory card. 

I've discovered today that a relatively slower card has latency glitches. When the maximum video file size is reached, a new file is started automatically but the swapover takes marginally longer and can leave a gap in the data stream which shows up in playback. That few seconds gap can be edited out easily if you've not missed it, but it's annoying to find it post production. It makes sense of needing a larger faster card, matched to the speed at which the camera's video processor works. For the first time the technical details printed on SD cards make practical sense to me.

This afternoon, I walked to UHW Heath hospital for an appointment with an ENT specialist to look into my occasional nosebleed problem. It's a matter of eliminating the possibility of anything out of the ordinary going on in my nostrils. Nosebleeds a common place enough, and I told him that understand mine are usually a result of sleeping awkwardly and constructing blood vessels in my neck. Then when I turn over, pressure buildup leads to a surge that ruptures a minor blood vessel. I've had less bleeds since I started using a shaped neck pillow. They're not so frequent or copious as in year past, but it's been a continuing problem for about fifteen years, so inevitably my GP thought it best to get it checked out. I've been on the waiting list since last December, so it's a relief to get this out of the way. I must return for another specialist check-up in October.

Next week, another appointment I've waited for since last December, this time for an endoscopy, occasioned by chronic haemorrhoid condition. I know I need this hi-tech inspection. I've coped with discomfort and occasional pain for a long time without improvement, but can't say I'm looking forward to this - no least because I dread the follow up interfering with my locum visit to Montreux next month. Well, we'll find out soon enough, I guess.

I got the bus back to Western Avenue from the hospital and walked home through the Fields, which look parched and golden at the moment after weeks of sunshine and little rain. I then had to drive out to St Mellons to meet a bereaved family to plan a funeral in St German's I'm taking this Friday. The traffic across town was very slow moving due to an M4 carriageway closure beyond the A48, and I had trouble finding my way to the street due to a wrong turning shortly after leaving the A48, which meant that I went all my way around the poorly signposted housing estate ring road, before identifying the correct turning. It's not a part of the city I'm at all familiar with.

The deceased in his last job and afterwards as a retirement volunteer had been on the staff of the Millennium Centre, and loved being involved in the hospitality side of productions. He was a fan of musical theatre, and his son showed me me the garage cum storeroom, whose walls are decorated with posters for all the shows presented there since it opened. He'd wanted the exterior of his coffin to be lined with playbills, and arranged for copies so this could be achieved. The family was none too keen about this, so the playbills will go into the coffin with him, all rolled up, as a compromise. Rod, a former member of St John's City Parish, now a St German's regular is a good friend of the family, and was there to greet me. From the way he spoke, I could tell that he'd been there for his terminally ill friend, accompanying him, ready to listen and discuss with him about the impending end of his life. Lovely to know such lay ministry goes on quietly when us clergy are so thin on the ground these days.