Software annoyance

I celebrated the Eucharist at St Catherine's this morning with ten others, observing yesterday's Feast of St Peter and Paul. On the way home, I collected the week's veggy bag from the drop-off place, then cooked lunch, as Clare had a morning meeting in school. I needed a siesta afterwards, before going to Beanfreaks to collect the groceries Clare ordered, while she got on with making and bottling the strawberry jam. She said the strawberries were over-ripe, and the end product was a little more runny than she hope for, but to me it still tasted delicious.

Finally I settled down to record and edit Morning Prayer for tomorrow, but when it came to making it into a video slideshow on my new laptop, the Windows 10 Video Editor would not allow me to use the photos I had edited, and I don't know why. I had to revert to using a different video editor Movie Maker with the same photos and audio on my old slow desktop machine, and this worked as it ever did. The Video Editor app on this machine also worked using the same material when I checked later. I have a feeling that there's a slightly different version of the software, or operating system and it's behaving obstructively. Typical of Windows. If it can screw things up and annoy you to the point of despair it will. At least tomorrow's video is now safely uploaded to YouTube, ready for the morning, even if it did take far longer than I expected to finish the job.

It was nearly nine when I went out to the park to clear my head and complete my walk for the day. Clouds in the sky were beautiful shades of pink and grey. I notice two pairs of policemen walking around the edge of Llandaff Fields in opposite directions - looking for miscreants or homeless people camping I wonder?

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!

Parish Music Milestone

After another good night's sleep, I woke up just after the Sunday Worship programme started on Radio Four, reflecting on the past year of life suffering and death in lock-down. We had a reflection on a Gospel story from the Archbishop of York, plus a sermon from the Dean of Winchester, using a different biblical text. Both were insightful, thankfully. A lovely English choral version of the Lord's Prayer was used, disconnected from the prayers of intercession, as if it was just a nice piece of music, and I'm not sure that we didn't have two versions of the same modern hymn, or at least two modern hymns that were rather too similar to each other. It felt like a cobbled together Ministry of the Word whose structure was something of a mystery to me. 

In contrast following this, we were treated to a ten minute 'Point of View' by poet Michael Morpurgo, the story of whose suffering and recovery from coronavirus has been widely reported, and he himself has written about the experience. This morning it wasn't what he was reflecting on. He spoke of how much he misses personal contact with his audience as a writer, through book signings, Q&A interviews at book festivals, reading his stories in classes of school children. All the things which make his life as a writer meaningful, in other words. 

Then he went on to speak about what he'd gained, learning to do the same things using Zoom and how, much to his surprise and delight, he found he was reading on-line not to audiences of ninety but ninety thousand all around the world. It's not about fame or recognition, but his joy, sharing something valued he has made. Something similar has been observed by churches offering on-line services over the past year, finding that audiences extend well beyond the usual circle of parishioner. And not only for worship, but also for on-line discussion groups as well. Will this last as part of the new normal, I wonder? 

Another sunny morning to walk to St Catherine's for the Parish Eucharist. There were about thirty of us. Next Sunday, St Luke's will reopen for worship. Few people from there have joined us in St Catherine's that I'm aware of. Did they go to other churches that were open or watch on-line? No everybody's needs are the same.  

After lunch I walked up to the Cathedral. The ranks of chairs in the nave had all been pushed back to clear a space in the front where half a dozen chairs were placed in a big socially distanced semi-circle, as if for a performance of some kind. I was surprised to see the high altar stripped bare, and a plain wooden cross placed on a pedestal in the choir. The place looked as you might expect it to look of Good Friday. I wondered if this was an innovative modification to the Passiontide liturgical environment in the light of the pandemic or the first anniversary of UK lock-down and asked one of the duty stewards. It was indeed in anticipation of Good Friday, as the Passion Liturgy of the day is going to be prerecorded later in the afternoon for streaming on the day itself. All will revert to normal tomorrow. 

I rather like the stripped down vista of choir and sanctuary. The blend of shapes and forms due to different architectural styles has a special quality unadorned. Monastic churches nowadays have that kind of simplicity about them, and are furnished only as necessary for acts of worship. I wish we could do the same in parish churches, but recognise this would cause a lot of extra routine work for parish sacristans. Shifting it all out of sight for the Holy Triduum and doing the annual spring-clean is enough of an exercise as it is.

We returned to St Catherine's this evening for a special Passiontide service with five scripture readings and choral items from the choir, singing socially distanced from the choir stalls for the first time in a year since lockdown UK began. I took a camera with me and video'd the service, handheld, which means it's a bit shaky in parts. The audio could be better, but I wasn't in the most effective position for this, but it does record a small but significant moment in the history of the pandemic and the Parish. I was able to edit the two video files taken that cover the service using the old Windows Movie Maker, which I prefer to the Windows 10 video editing app, perhaps because I can more readily remember how to. It uploaded to YouTube while I watched the first episode of 'Line of Duty' series six, so I could send a link to Fr Benedict and to Choirmaster Colin for them to circulate. Good to get the job out of the way quickly. On Tuesday I'll be making a video at St John's with Mark and Fran about her icon of the resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene. It'll certainly be easier there to get the sound right! 

Royal Berkshire nuptials

Last night, Rachel played a gig at St Canna's Ale House on Llandaff Road, co-incidentally a hundred yards away from the Apothecary Tea Room where she did a gig in July last year. Clare did all the organising and emailed friends and associates to let them know. Rachel borrowed the three guitars she needed (each with a different tuning) from friends, and installed herself in a corner of the bar room to play. It wasn't the best location, as it was adjacent to the way out to the toilets, but she's so used to working in awkward environments that it didn't seem to bother her. 

There were around twenty people there, including people from church, friends and colleagues of Clare. It wasn't one of my better days, so my only contribution was to video the first hour of the gig on my Sony HX300, from nine until ten. I didn't have the energy to stay for the second half, and went home early. St Canna's Ale House is a warm friendly place, dedicated to good beer and conversation, so not surprisingly there was too high a level of audience chatter in the background for the recording to be of much use for distribution, but I figured it would give Rachel an opportunity to monitor her performance critically.

I rose early to work on the videos, to be able to upload them to YouTube before we left for my cousin's Lindsay's wedding in Ascot. The job took just a couple of hours, as I didn't bother editing the raw footage, since it wasn't for public consumption. Since I edited footage of her last Cardiff gig, I've done videos of two choir and one eurythmy performance, so I've not forgotten how to use Windows Movie Maker. It's a slow business with an average speed internet connection and a not particularly powerful computer, but I've trained myself to start processes and then get on with other tasks in the meanwhile, like making and eating breakfast and packing bags. 

We succeeded in leaving at our planned departure time. The trip up the M4 as far as Reading was plagued by wind and rain, but we drove into better weather. It was a race day at Ascot and Google's itinerary re-routed us on a circular route through leafy suburbia along roads line with exclusive and very expensive houses. Our destination was the Royal Berkshire Hotel, once a huge Churchill family mansion, now an even bigger country hotel with golf course and tennis courts. The wedding reception was going to be held there so Clare thought it would be a good idea to stop there overnight. It was an expensive B&B for the night, but an enjoyable experience, well worth the indulgence, as several of my cousins and members of the bride's family also stopped overnight, and a special breakfast room was reserved for wedding guests.

We had an hour and a half in our room to rest and dress up before taking a taxi to the Parish Church of All Saints Ascot Heath, just past the racecourse, in the London Road. It's a beautiful ornate gothic revival building dating from 1864, with frescos and mosaics, where Lindsay attends church. His bride Lynne lived in Bromley, but she was happy for the service to take place in the area to which she'd be making a new life. Her parish priest gave the homily, while his performed the ceremony. There was a small robed choir leading the singing, and a soloist sang Mozart's 'Panis Angelicus'. It was moving to hear then plighting their troth for the first time, he 70 and she 65 and recently retired from teaching. Lynne was born and raised in Natal, South Africa, and is one of triplets, a brother and a sister who is an Anglican priest, living and working here for over 25 years.. What a lovely occasion it was!

We set off for the reception after the post-wedding photographs, just as racegoers were leaving at the end of their day. It was slightly surreal at tea-time to see women in party clothes staggering in high heels down the London Road while others were staggering drunk with excess of Pimms or Champers. It's a strange foreign world to me. The Royal Berkshire hotel, in contrast, was sedate and quiet. The reception and banquet were delightful, accompanied by a life string quarter, who played for the best part of the four hours it all lasted. So many interesting conversations with family members and guests with whom we shared a table. A day to remember with much pleasure, and a capacious comfortable bed in which to bring it to a close.

A summer concert and a couple of weighty matters

I last used Windows Movie Maker a year ago, so I had to re-acquire from the depths of my memory the ability to use it. There may be better, cleverer and more up to date programs out there. This one dates back to Windows 7, but still works and is available to download, so I have it installed on my desktop Windows 10 workstation. As my use is so occasional, it's not worth getting acquainted with anything else, given my limited needs. It's a waste of time. Once I got back into gear with it, a batch of ten short videos to process took the morning to complete and upload. Alan had asked if I could use Dropbox. I opened an account last year, but had little need to use it. Google Drive serves most of my limited needs. In fact, the free 2GB upload limit wasn't enough to complete the job, so I had to open a second account with a different email address, for the remainder. Once these have all been accessed and downloaded by Alan, I can remove the files. They'll be kept on a USB drive for future reference.

In the evening Clare had a lift to Insole Court, the performance venue to prepare the concert with the other choir members. It was a pleasant summer evening, so walked there. This time, there was room to mount the Song HX300 on a tripod, so filming was easier and better quality. I think the sound was OK, but no doubt the critical ears of choir director Anna will have something to say about that! The concert presented an international mix of little known madrigals English, Welsh, Italian, German, Macedonian and Hungarian, challenging to sing, as I well know from listening to Clare learn words and music over the past few months.

I was press-ganged into taking ticket money at the door. There was an audience of twenty in a room which held double that amount, in the beautifully restored out-buildings of the main Insole Court mansion. How the place has changed since Rachel's wedding reception was held here 13 years ago. It was quite run down in those days, but a group of local community activists campaigned to bring it back from the brink, and everybody now benefits. 

Uploading this batch of video clips to YouTube for Anna will have to wait until tomorrow. We got back after Inspector Montalbano had started, and thanks to BBC iPlayer we were able to watch it from the start. It was late when we went to bed, but it was worth staying up for. It was a complex tale with unusual twists and surprises, full of beauty and sadness - the second time I've used that phrase this week. The episode included a delightful portrayal of Vigata's Festa di San Giorgio procession through the streets with a Spanish style trona, for the saint's image, carried by a crew of white shirted guys, who bore it on high at arms length, rather than shouldering it. That's how light it was. Or else a dramatic fictional conceit. In Spain tronas are so heavy that if they are lifted up on high it's possible only for a matter of minutes.

To add insult to injury,  the episode included the funeral of Pasquano, the irascible overweight cake eating crime scene pathologist. Four bearers handled his coffin, as if it was empty. For a corpse of his size and weight six bearers are needed, and have to shoulder and carry with care, as I have often seen, to avoid a dropping disaster or injury. It was bad acting, in the absence of borrowing a few redundant cemetery kerbstones, to give weight and authenticity to the fictional proceedings. 

   

Early Music videoing

We attended the Parish Eucharist at St Catherine's this morning, and then after lunch returned to church after lunch for the Fountain Choir concert in which Clare was singing. If it hadn't been for my current condition making rehearsals problematic, I would have been singing too. I made myself useful however, by taking photos with my HX50 and videoing almost all of the performance with my HX300. 

I'd intended to set the camera on a tripod and leave it to run but there were two snags, the first being lack of a blank SD card. Fortunately the card in the HX300 had enough space, despite being half full of pictures. The spare card in my wallet was full. I had forgotten to buy a replacement. Secondly the tripod adjustable platform mounting to which the camera is attached is unstable and won't rest in a horizontal position. I can't work out what's gone wrong with it but a repair or replacement is needed, so I ended up shooting each song hand held, and moving around, which actually gives more variety.

The choir sang a variety of Early Music pieces, and was joined for several of them by the Roath Recorder Consort, a quintet featuring the full range of recorders, as befits the music. I was pleased with the result of my efforts, and delighted that the concert went as well as it did. Hopefully some of my videos will find their way on to YouTube, and be used to publicise this musical collaboration on the next occasion when a joint performance is planned. 

Needless to say, I spent the evening learning yet again how to edit with Windows Movie Maker. It's July since I last needed to, making videos of Rachels' gig at the Apothecary. The laptop running it was Windows 8 and almost five years old. This program belongs to the period, and not to the era of web apps now forced upon us. As it happened, while editing there was a spell when we were without internet, but as it's a stand alone program, I could keep working, which is more than one can say about many current app offerings.

Unexpected new mini-project

I walked to St John's and celebrated the eight o'clock this morning for four people. Fr Mark arrived at the end with Rose Dymond, one of the staff of the St Padarn's Institute, to introduce her to the church set up. I was delighted to discover that she was an ordinand of the Diocese in Europe whose journey into ministry started in Leipzig, followed by Den Haag, then a spell as Rector of Bedwellty before recently joining the Institute staff. I then celebrated and preached at the St Catherine's Parish Eucharist.

Yesterday, I had a call from Andrew James the Vicar of St Andrews Major and Dinas Powys to ask if I could cover his Sunday duties next week, as he is about to start a period of sabbatic leave. As I've committed my time to help out in Canton while I'm here, I referred him to Fr Mark, who said he could manage without me next week. In all my years of ministry, I've never visited either church, although I've driven past both many times, taking a short-cut back home from Barry via Leckwith. St Andrews Major is a 12th century country church, St Peter's is in the suburban Victorian village expansion of the Parish. I must be sure to take my camera with me.

Last Tuesday at choir practice, Anna gave the gathering some musical feedback with a couple of recordings made of them at their last concert, which was, coincidentally at St Catherine's. She asked if anyone could make a YouTube video slideshow using these 'best of the bunch' tracks with some photos of the choir performing. Nobody present seemed able or willing to take this on, so I said I would give it a try.

This evening the respective image and audio files arrived. First, attempted to use the rather long in the tooth version of Picasa, still in use on my computers, but wasn't satisfied with the result. Then I hunted for Windows Movie Maker, unsure whether it had been swept aside in favour of other Apps by updating the operating system, but I found it was still there and working, so I started again. This wasn't easy, as it's several years since I last used it to edit video clips, and had forgotten how. Even so, by the end of the evening I emailed Anna with a couple of rough cuts of the tracks to see if this project was going in the right direction, pleased to have recovered a modicum of mastery over this piece of digital kit. Not something I could have anticipated doing a week ago.

Editing, uploading and seriously good cooking

By yesterday morning I'd volunteered and been accepted to take charge of Mary Lewis' funeral, spoken to the funeral directors, to Phil the church administrator, and prepared the order of service based around her wish that it should be like her late husband's. 

Following recent conversations about my unpublished book with St Mike's Principal Peter Sedgwick, I gave him a copy to read and received invaluable critical feedback. After receiving his positive comment on my re-writing of the book's preface, I now feel confident about re-writing and updating the rest. It got me out of bed early after a late night to work on revising the first chapter.

Following this, I had a frustrating afternoon in the office, trying to upload the eurythmy performance videos to You Tube using the faster connection available to us there, as I worked on other things. I found  I had to to downsize the clips, was there was no need to show them at HD resolution. It took far too long to do it conveniently. After too much messing around and not concentrating on other jobs in hand, I realised I couldn't achieve with Windows Movie Maker for Vista what I'd been able to do previously with the Windows Seven version of the program. In the end, I had to do the job on Clare's laptop when I got home, the only PC I have with the capacity to do this. I was astounded at how long it takes to down-size and upload a fifteen minute video. It seemed to slow up the entire home network and kept me up late.

This morning I finished uploading the video clips, then went out and met Rufus for coffee at Cafe Castan on Llandaff Fields. We sat enjoying the sunshine as we chatted about his first three weeks in parish ministry. Such a pleasure to share his adventure in ministry. I learned from him that 'Becca in my tutorial group for the past two years had just announced her engagement. A pleasant surprise.

After another afternoon in the office, I returned early as I'd been asked to celebrate the evening Mass at St Luke's as Fr Mark is still on leave. Clare came with me and read the lesson, which was a pleasure, as we don't often get to share worship the way we used to do, with me travelling from place to place on locum duties as often as I do. Afterwards we had supper at the Cardamom Banlgadeshi restaurant across the road from the church - an enjoyable end to the working week with seriously good cooking, and not our own for once.