Paid in full

Another good night's sleep, another cold cloudy day. One of the roofing team arrived as we were having breakfast to remove the last traces of the work done and tidy up the front garden. Clare went off to her study group in Penarth, and I took the bus into town to pay the roofing bill at Santander Bank. I was rather annoyed to discover that the bank's computer system was out of order. I was expecting the last person to arrive at the house to collect a back alley gate key at twelve thirty so I caught a bus straight away rather than hang around in hope. When I got back, I made the slide show to go with next week's Morning Prayer video and then cooked lunch. Clare was back just after midday and was able to hand over the last key herself.

After lunch I took a bus into town and re-visited Santander Bank. This time everything was working as intended. Give the size of the invoice I was paying, I was impressed at how thorough the bank clerk was in questioning me about the payment I wanted to make; about the job done, how we chose the contractor and whether any advance payment had been made. She explained that it's part of their anti-scam protocol when dealing with large amounts. Given the rising prevalence of banking fraud I must applaud this, even if it does add a few minutes of Q&A to a visit to the bank. 

On-line banking with Santander is also thorough with its own in-built protocols to ensure you know what you're doing and haven't been pushed into making a transaction by a third party you don't know. I could have made the payment on-line, but as it was such a big sum, I wanted an official receipt containing all the necessary details, for the record. While I was there I was able to leave a notification on our account of my next stay in Spain. I was also told of a new current account set up called 'Edge' which promises favourable interest rates and no fee withdrawals and payment when in Spain. I must investigate this, as it could be beneficial.

While in town I visited John Lewis' but couldn't see any bargains worth contemplating, the popped into Wally's deli and bought a chorizo and some Greek Black olives before taking a bus to Canton and walking the rest of the way home. Before supper I watched the remaining one and a half episodes of 'The Drought', which was, I thought, an impressive piece of movie making, portraying a good relationship between two investigators and the teams backing them up, with some lovely townscapes of Caceres in Extremadura and Lisbon in Portugal. Both places worth visiting. 

Then after supper, with no urgent jobs to do, settled down and watched a couple of episodes of 'Vigil' about a murder on a British nuclear submarine. An interesting way to showcase the role the Navy plays in deterring global superpowers from wiping out life on earth by accident or design. Interesting detective work with limited resources in an unnervingly claustrophobic environment.

More musical refreshment

Needless to say, I got up late, enjoyed our usual Sabbath pancake breakfast, and then went back to bed. There was nothing inviting about the weather, on a day which started with sun and then low drizzly cloud enveloped the city. I cooked a pasta lunch with His and Her sauces, then walked to the surgery to deliver my prescription renewal request. 

Clare joined me for a circuit of Llandaff Fields, then I did a circuit of streets on my way to Tescos for a few items of shopping. When I came to pay contactlessly the shop card reader asked for my PIN number. The same had happened to the lady in front of me in the queue, and she was having trouble remember her new PIN and needed several tries at it. The checkout guy said this was not an anomaly, but that banking systems run an occasional security check on contactless card use to be sure the card hadn't parted company with its owner. A coincidence that it should happen to the customer in ahead of me?

After supper, I watched last night's Jazz 625 programme again together with Clare, as I so enjoyed the music last night. Then a came across a half hour music documentary programme about a Puerto Rican virtuoso musician called Edwin Colon Zayas, player of the cuatro a traditional stringed folk instrument of the island. It's based on the mandolin, but has five pairs of strings. It got its name from the fact that the instrument was named when it only had four pairs of strings. 

Cuba has a similar instrument called the tres cuatro, with three pairs of strings, although the Cuban version now has four pairs like the early Puerto Rican instrument. It was a delightful programme in which Zayas was interviewed and performed half a dozen songs he'd composed, some of them with his brother and sister in deeply rural settings. To finish the day, I watched the first double episode of a new Icelandic crimmie on BBC Four.

Autumnal words recalled

Another uninviting rainy overcast day. I fell sound asleep after saying morning prayer following breakfast for nearly an hour and a half. I think I'm going into hibernation mode! As Clare said, I must need the extra time out, as the post-op bruising has been quite painful these past few days, though it is subsiding now.

Finally I got around to making a batch of annual charitable donations in-line, using a debit card which I don't often use for this purpose. The first two payments went through OK, the bank security system stalled on the third. I called their hotline and the robot asked for account details and a telephone banking security number. I'm not sure I ever set one for this account, but used one I thought might be correct if I ever did. After three tries I was locked out of the system but got through to a real human being, who was patient and friendly towards a highly irate me. 

It seems that HSBC's 'Verified by Visa' security routine for card payments has changed, now texting a one time pass-code for any transaction to your mobile number, a routine I'm used to with Santander Bank. Once sorted out, the third payment went through automatically, and I was able to make a fourth using the new system immediately. I also registered for voice recognition i/d to save hassles with security PIN codes in future. It seems my account details didn't include my mobile phone number, even though I've had that number since I was given my first phone, an old Nokia, back in 2001. When I start the phone, it still displays 'Orange F' before switching to EE, as the phone was first registered to me when we were in Monaco. A curious but treasured quirk of my personal tech' history.

In the afternoon, the rain slackened to a drizzle and then stopped once we'd put on our rain trousers for a walk around the park together, but it remained dark and overcast. Two lines of autumnal poetry have been going around in my head recently, things I learned in school, but couldn't properly recall, let alone identify the authors. Clare's memory was equally deficient, although she too had studied them, either in school or University. 

I yielded to the temptation to google the respective lines, and found that one was the opening line of Grey's Elegy in a Country Churchyard: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. The other line was from an autumnal Shakespeare sonnet: Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. That's a good description of most of the big trees in park now. It was lovely to re-connect with these classic poems sixty years after O Level English.

We watched a lovely nature programme on S4C in the evening shot entirely in low light conditions after sunset and before dawn around the year, showcasing in spectacular video footage the range of nocturnal creatures that inhabit the wilder parts of Wales. Hedgehogs are the exception. The rural population has decreased worryingly, whereas numbers in domestic gardens and urban parks have grown, perhaps due to the greater biodiversity they conserve, and the willingness of householders to feed them. There are foxes too, well established in urban areas, where they raid rubbish bins for food like the hordes of gulls that no longer live on our sea shores but forage and breed inland, and make a nuisance of themselves.

Picking up the pieces

Since we've returned home, we are both still waking up before dawn, much earlier than usual. At first light the streaks of cloud across the sky are all red, and it doesn't take long for the the cloud cover to grow dense and grey, obscuring the remains of the early blue and it stays dull and grey all day, and sooner or later rain comes and goes. It's typical of mid winter along the lowlands of the Severn Estuary. There's no point in hiding, so eventually we get up, eat breakfast, say prayers and get on with the day, trying not to get lost thinking too much of open skies, sun and mountains.

First, a trip to the GP surgery to pick up a prescription in response to yesterday's letter. It isn't ready, I can't hand around to find out why, as there's a tutor team meeting in College to get to on time. It's the day when activities resume, and there's a Masters' degree course running. Our students will arrive in fits and starts over the coming days, as there are two weeks worth of an exam schedule before the normal routine of College life resumes.

After the meeting, I popped across the road from College to say hello to Pauline, and learn that two St John's people have now died recently over the holiday. Nancy, in her mid nineties and Sam in his late eighties, details of funeral arrangements are awaited, but it's likely neither will be in a place where they were well known and loved. After coffee I inspected Pauline's increasingly slow running computer. Its browser was congested with tool bars and add-ons that sap performance on a seven year old machine, and goodness knows how long it is since the hard drive was last de-fragmented.

We left it running as we parted company, to get on with our respective afternoons. I think a new machine will soon be necessary, even though this one hasn't died. It can't keep up with the demands made on it. Sad to say, it would run quite decently for regular tasks using Linux, but the problem is the learning curve for someone busy. And having made the switch, the machine might still expire, and another new operating system would then have to be learned, and that's no fun when you're busy and organising your life depends upon not having to think about what you're using.

I returned to the GP surgery and was successful in obtaining a prescription second time around. I collected the medicines, returned home to change wet shoes, and then headed into town to see if I could buy a replacement kitchen florescent tube, but no luck again, the sizes don't match, and we'll have to order one via the internet. Our not very efficient kitchen suppliers use non standard components - vendor lock-in. Things you don't tend to think about when you're spending lots of money fitting replacement units. 

By the time I got home it has already been dark for two hours. Clare was working out how to assemble and use the Nokia phone she bought today to replace the stolen one. The operating system, though basically the same had a different user interface, and this took an age for her and I to figure out. We're just not used to swapping phones. Why should we unless lost or broken? Clare's now taken out a monthly contract. This was less easy than anticipated, because she had to prove who she was. The reported theft of phone meant that the PAYG credit was rescued and credited to her, but it also meant that a strict credit rating identity check had to be run as protection against identity theft. Pleasing if inconvenient thoroughness.

She also enquire of her banks when she could expect replacements for the other two cards reported missing and presumed blocked nine days ago. Neither branch had any record of notification. The cards didn't seem to be blocked at all. Clare called the card protection agency who confirmed from their records that notification of all three cards lost had been sent, but not acted upon over new year. This is certainly to the discredit of the banking system. Come to think of it, the very notion of 'bank holiday' is not at all comforting in a 24/7/365 world.

It was disturbing news, but thankfully bank statements showed no unauthorised card activity on either account since theft. It's possible that after money and phone were extracted by the thief, the bag ended up in the sea, or tossed into waste land, where it may one day be discovered. It was what the investigating officer said happened typically in these cases. Local thieves weren't that sophisticated.

I whiled away the evening reading one of my Christmas presents: my first Inspector Montalbano novel by Antonio Camillieri - the Voice of the Violin. I remembered the TV movie well, so there were no surprises, but the humour and lean descriptions played well with memory and imagination, and I read it in an evening. A sliver of wintry comfort.