Ash Wednesday

The beginning of Lent, and wondering what I should do lately, has led me to the idea of working on a daily reflection/meditation in a separate blog, drawing upon images or pictures which catch attention and make me think. Yesterday's outing to Patricio brought me face to face with a work of sculptor Frank Roper which I hadn't seen before. Roper did some marvelous works for churches, including a lovely crucifix in the Herbert Chapel at St John's. His style of working in cast metal is distinctive. I sensed it was one of his works before I could find the attribution on the back of a church postcard.

Anyway, I set up the blog, and then spent a great deal of time wondering what image might strike me as worth reflecting upon to get started. After a quiet morning at home working, I went to the monthly Ignatian meditation session at Diana's house. There were seven of us, the best attendance for ages, in spite of this being a busy day for the three clergy in the group. During the silence, one image kept on presenting itself for attention. You can find the result on the blog posting here.

I went into the CBS office for a couple of hours in the afternoon, though there wasn't much to do except look up information and pass it on by phone, so I wrote a sermon before going home to get the car to drive out to Tongwynlais and celebrate the Ashing Eucharist of the day with ten others. I'm wondering what I'm going to learn in the weeks ahead, and whether it will help me sense the direction in which my ministry is meant to be moving now.

 

Faith in such a beautiful place

Yesterday afternoon I took a camera out with me, and on my way into the office I took some photos on the Hayes to provide me with some decent quality material to edit for use on the new website I'm building at the moment. It wasn't quite as easy to get what I wanted as I thought it would be, knowing that I'd be changing the proportions of the picture, and needing to get people and iconic buildings into it as well. Nothing like a challenge, and the nice thing about digital photograph, is that I can return and try again if I'm not satisfied with the finished product.

Today was somewhat different. A visit to Chris, one of my former St Mike's students, now working as a country parish priest with a group of three mediaeval churches to look after on the edge of Gwent's Black Mountain border country. He lives in the hamlet of Llangenny, population 100 with church and working pub, and a stream running through it that has trout and where salmon return to breed. A delightful place, and lively for such a small place.

He drove me up the Grwyney valley to show me the ancient church at Patricio, on a high hillside overlooking the upper reaches of the valley, and mountains beyond. The ruins of Llantony Abbey are eight miles away, but Patricio is special in its own right. There's been a place of worship here for a thousand years, to judge by the age of the font, and the present building originates in the 12th century but was elaborated subsequently, down to Elizabethan times. It has 15th century chancel screen and rood loft intact, and three ancient stone altars still in place, having survived reformation iconoclasm in this remote place, five miles away in the mountains above Llangenny.

It's dedicated to Merthyr Issui, the celtic Saint Issui hermit and martyr whose dates are unknown. Only fragments of his story survive. There's a holy well in the hillside below the church, and a hermit would have lived close by and ministered to passing travellers. One murdered him. The well still flows with spring water. Its little walled enclosure and surrounding trees are littered with an odd collection of votive offerings - ribbons, money, drinking vessels, new-age trinkets. Local Boy Scouts visit annually for a tidy up session and to clear the spring of silt. 

Attached to the church west wall is a separate chapel with a mediaeval stone altar, a squint window looking into the church and a modern statue of St Issui by Llandaff sculptor Frank Roper in an ancient niche. This may have been built as a shrine chapel to house his bones after the church itself was built.

This has been a place of popular pilgrimage for centuries, and attracts many hill walkers who take their leisure in this part of the world. All the surrounding land is still being worked by sheep farmers and breathes an air of being lovingly cared for. The views of this place and the views from this place make it one of Wales' hidden treasures. Chris is very happy to have this as one of his churches, not least because it has a lively congregation and many visitors, people who evidently feel the effort of getting there, either by foot or by care is well worthwhile.

Chris' wife Wendy joined us for lunch at home. It was great to see how happy they both are with their new life and all the opportunities it presents them for sharing faith in such a beautiful place. 

More photos you can find here.

Transfiguration Sunday and opera matinee

I arrived at Llantriddyd church before any of the congregation this morning. Amazingly the church is still left open for people to visit, so I had a little time to take photos of the sixteenth century chest tomb of Sir Anthony Mansell and his wife Elizabeth, with the wall monument behind it in memory of her mother and father, John and Elizabeth Basset. It dominates the north chancel wall, eliminating the possibility of ever having choir stalls on that side. Although the reformation banished chantry priests and chapels, it couldn't eradicate the custom of burying people in church and erecting monuments that advertised their status as prominent people, so that they were difficult to forget.

The monuments of the walls are interesting, not least because of the length of the inscriptions they contain, reading fulsomely, like newspaper obituaries. Public prayer for the dead may have been suppressed, but there were always other strategies for remembering loved ones.

It's a jewel of a building, with a transfiguration scene in the East Window, a happy coincidence as this Sunday before Lent is now known as Transfiguration Sunday.

The church is still off-grid, and has but two calor gas heaters to stand close to for respite. It was cold, very cold indeed, and it took me an hour to warm up again after the service. It was nevertheless a lovely place to lead worship. The chalice I used was Elizabethan, dating back to 1876, and still in regular use. It's very similar to the one I used on a single occasion ten years ago at St John's City Parish church, when it was brought out chiefly for an exhibition of church silverware during the centenary celebrations of the city. Standing at the altar, back to the congregation in that small space, lit only by candles and weak winter sun, I felt as if time was standing still, which century was I in?

After the service I drove to St Catherines to collect Clare to go to the Riverside Market, sharing the last ten minutes of the service with her, and chatting with Fr Mark, whom I haven't seen since Christmas. He's very busy these days.

In the afternoon we met with Martin and Chris at the Millennium Centre to watch the WNO perform Mozart's 'Magic Flute'. The singing was delightful, and a good English version of the libretto made it doubly enjoyable. We know the music very well, as we have CD of the highlights, which has been played many times over, although that's in German. It was a nice change not to have to look up at the surtitles to keep up with the nuances of the tale and the music. And everybody laughs in the right place without delay. We were in the front row, as usual, and I couldn't help notice that Lothar Koenig conducted from memory with just a couple of pages of typewritten notes for reference. He really seemed to be enjoying himself, and as ever the orchestra, like the singers was on top form.

We've seen this production before, so say, inspired by Magritte's artwork. It's an amusing idea, but for me it doesn't quite work. Many of the supporting cast wear bright orange coloured overcoats, with matching umbrellas and bowler hats. The dominance of the colour orange reminds me of a certain mobile phone's branding colour, distracting me with the thought that this might be some clever form of sponsorship. In that respect, the colour distracts from the rest of the performance.

Martin and Chris came home with us for supper afterwards. It was lovely to have uninterrupted time together, just to relax, eat and chat. When we visit them at home, their place is always lively and busy with people coming and going, making demands of them both, so we treasure moments like this.

  

Vale vineyard hunt

Another afternoon spent on building the new website in the office on Friday, with the sound of rain hammering on the roof while we worked. No question of going out and taking photographs. That will have to wait a while longer

This afternoon we went out to Dyffryn Gardens for a walk in the last hour before it closed. Skinny looking crocuses and snowdrops are out, and the first daffodil shoots are just breaking ground. Most of the flower beds look bare, clean and tidy, ready for the first planting of the season. 

We went on from there along the A48 to find out how to get to Llantriddyd, where I'm engaged to celebrate the Eucharist and preach tomorrow. We took a wrong turning, which led us down a narrow lane to Llancarfan, then back to our destination by a round about route. Llantriddyd church is 12th century, restored in the 19th, set in a churchyard bedecked with snowdrops. My friend Derek Belcher is to become priest in charge of this grouping of parishes when he retires from Cowbridge benefice next month.

Next to the churchyard is the ruin of a mediaeval mansion, one of the Aubrey family's historic possessions, abandoned since the early nineteenth century.

There are a few houses in the vicinity, but these are mostly hidden by trees, so the church presents a solitary demeanour. Before the construction of the A48 the road past the church would have linked Beaupre Castle near Cowbridge and St Hilary with Bonvilston - all place names connected with Norman settlements in the Vale.

From there, we headed north in search of Llanerch Vineyard, near Hensol Castle and the village of Pendoylan, on a mission to see if we could make an advance booking for a family meal to celebrate jointly our 70th birthdays at a time when all the children can make it. It's much nearer the M4 than the A48. Although well signposted across country between the two, it seemed to take us ages to get there in the fading afternoon light. We were delighted with what we found there, and that booking a table for the last week in July presented no problems either.

Mission accomplished, we returned home to complete the day with a paella, and the last couple of gut wrenching episodes of 'Engrenages', aka 'Spiral', past paced, full of twists and turns, maintaining the tension right to the last frame. I like the fact that I can understand much of it, even though it's mostly Parisian French you hear. I follow the subtitles to make sure I don't miss anything, but as with 'Inspector Montalbano' episodes, hearing the original dialogue is a great bonus to entering into the emotions of the drama.

Picture hunting

We had a visit from our trusty gas fitter this morning, to perform the annual service and safety check on our water and central heating boiler. God to know that it's safe to have around, especially as it sits in the corner of the room which I use for a study. 

I've rearranged the study furniture yet again this week and feel even more pleased with the result, as I can now open the window fully, and have enough space to sit on a chair that's not at my desk and survey the garden. Great for bird-watching, if ever any of the small garden birds return. There's been a real dearth of them since several trees in neighbouring gardens got taken down or pruned last year. Theses days, what we see mostly are crows, pigeons and gulls. Robins and sparrows visit more rarely than they used to.

I spent a productive afternoon in the CBS office, working on a new website for the Business Crime Reduction Partnership. It must be nearly five years since I last built a website using the Google Sites facility, and it took me a little while to refresh my memory and find my way around the web app.

In the process of getting started I took a photo from the office window with my phone of the Central Market and St John's. The quality wasn't good enough for permanent use, and there weren't many people out shopping to make it fit for purpose, but playing around with size and shape was a useful exercise to get me started. Then I hunted in my vast archive of city centre photos, and found one that was suitable, taken on a busy day on the Hayes.

When I looked closer, I realised there was a line of security fences in the background on the right hand side, some of which, though not all of which could be cropped out of the picture. It was over five years old. If I'd looked closer I might also have noticed that some of the shop fronts have changed since then. It was a simple reminder of how even a modern city centre with 'iconic' buildings doesn't stay looking the same for long, and that's entirely discounting the ephemeral events that can temporarily change the look and feel of the place from week to week. Catching views of the place in a period of limited but normal activity is what's needed for a web page, unless it's one to be updated week on week, and that's high maintenance for a modest set of information providing static pages.

I shall simply have to take a camera in with my and shoot some new ones, the next time there's a decent sunny day.

Winter wait

Monday and Tuesday, I didn't leave the house once, it was just too cold, overcast and grey even to venture out with a camera to find new subjects to explore. I just pottered around doing nothing important, scanning old photo negatives, re-installing an ancient edition of Photoshop on the big laptop which now serves as my office work station - still getting used to it. I had to rediscover how to increase virtual memory in Windows. It's so long since I last had to do this. I even sat and read a proper book for the first time in ages. Nothing to go out for really. I feel that I'm lack a sense of purpose, some creative project to give me focus at the moment. It's back to the same question - what should I be doing next?

Today was better. We had a visit from a green energy consultant in the morning, to survey the house with a view to installing renewable energy sources, either solar panels or heat pump. He was a very honest straightforward and capable engineer, and confirmed after spending a short time in the garden looking up at the roof, what I had expected. Even with the most efficient of technologies the roof and upper walls of the house spend too much time of any day in the shade, winter or summer, to make an investment cost effective even in the very long term. The orientation of the terrace, and the fact that we are right in the middle of the terrace, leaves us short of light levels worth exploiting. How sad!

Then an afternoon spent in the CBS office with several tasks to complete, and getting them all done. That felt much more satisfactory. Clare told me she'd heard back reassuringly from the surgeon about post op recovery time, freeing me to book a flight for my next assignment of locum duty in Nerja, Costa del Sol, in the third week of April. Thankfully, Vueling flights from Cardiff are operational again this year, and I was able to book seats at a good price, leaving and returning at civilized times of day, all of which makes coming and going that much easier. It's nice to have some prolonged blue sky and decent light to look forward to. 

I enjoyed Winter when we lived in Geneva. Even when it Lac Leman was under low cloud at near freezing temperatures for weeks on end, blue skies were but half an hour's drive away on the ridges of the Jura behind where we lived, and that drive was worth making several times a week. British winter darkness and weather makes me turn in on myself to no constructive purpose. I find  myself looking at sunrise and sunset times almost every day at the moment.

   

No subtitles on radio

Saturday morning, I drove to Kenilworth to look after Rhiannon, while Kath and Anto went to do a gig with their band 'Sonrisa' down in Hampshire, driving home in the early hours of the morning. Rhiannon received Monopoly among her Christmas gifts and is now a keen player, so we spent the afternoon playing the game. After supper of fish and chips we watched a TV game show and several episodes of 'Last of the Summer Wine', contentedly snuggled up on the sofa together, while she constructed virtual houses on her iPad. Clare emailed to say she's been given a date for her shoulder operation at last, the 26th February. Now we can start planning ahead once more.

Today, on a cold and frosty morning, I walked to the eight o'clock Communion service at St Nicholas' Parish Church. Since I was last here a fortnight ago, snowdrops have come out fully in the churchyard, pristine white in early light.

It's not a good photo, as it's taken with my phone which only performs decently in good lighting conditions, but it gives an impression.

After breakfast, Rhiannon and I played Monopoly again for a couple of hours, then I drove home with the sun in my face, listening to Choral Evensong from St Paul's Cathedral on Radio Three, with an amazing, hard to sing contemporary setting of the Latin Magnificat text by Giles Swayne. All well and good, but the complexity of the music made the words hard to hear and understand.

I rejoice in the creative adventure that is a feature of 20th and 21st century church music. I love the fact that we can use Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French and various kinds of English in our acts of worship, but there's still a streak of reformation soul in me that wants things to be understood in our mother tongue as well. Not least for the sake of those hearing these texts being sung for the first time.  A broadcast on TV or the web could stream a readable text easily enough. With Radio music there are no subtitles. Now there's a challenge!

We watched an interesting late evening programme called 'Finding Shakespeare' in which Lenny Henry spoke about discovering Shakespeare in adult life, acting on stage for the first time in 'Othello' and recently in  'Comedy of Errors'. Schooling had left him with the idea that Shakespeare belonged to elitist high-brow culture, not relevant to a working class black kid. As an adult he worked his way over six years through an O.U. degree in English literature, which gave him a different appreciation of texts that were aimed at all levels of people in a mixed society, from this he made his first venture into the world of straight theatre, after the best part of thirty years on the comedy stage. A fascinating insight into the way education has contributed to the stratification of society and culture.
   

Laptop giveaway

Wednesday we drove to Bishopston in Bristol to visit Marion, an old family friend from our St Paul's days, whom Clare has renewed contact with in recent years. The purpose of our visit was to give her a much loved old laptop, still working well, for sending emails and surfing the web. As she's still very much a beginner in computer use,  so there was no point in making a big dent in her savings when her needs are limited, and she's not yet certain how well she'll get on with the technology as a late starter.

I configured for a seven year old HP Pavilion 15" laptop running Linux Mint KDE sweetly and made it as simple as possible to work with. There was just one problem, establishing a wi-fi connection from her apartment. Although close to the communal area of her housing complex where the router serving residents and their guests is based, the signal wouldn't reach. It was always a bit slow establishing a connection at home, but in this environment it seemed impossible to attach to the network. 

Fortunately, just in case of problems, I packed the much travelled HP Pavilion 11.3" Windows 7 netbook, bought when I retired. It's crossed the Atlantic twice, once to Canada and once with Rachel to Arizona. It's been to Sicily, Spain and Switzerland with me. Rachel returned it at Christmas once she'd acquired a replacement Mac. It runs on mains as the battery is dead, but it too runs sweetly. It wouldn't connect in Marion's place either, but when we went to the communal area, it did. Being so much smaller, it occupied less space on Marion's small desk. I created a User area for her and deleted old data, packed the big laptop to take home, leaving Marion with a big grin and a learning curve ahead of her. There are other Windows users among her neighbours who can help if she has problems, so I don't expect too many tech support phone calls.

We then drove to Southmead to see Amanda and James. When he and I were chatting he told me that his five year old Sony laptop, whose broken screen I'd replaced two years ago, had a broken screen once more. He also told me that he was getting curious about learning Linux, which is what I'd expect eventually from a lad doing computer studies in HE College. The big 15" HP laptop was just perfect and at the right moment. His main use of his Sony laptop was skyping friends while gaming on-line. I showed him how to access the package manager, download and install Skype for Linux, and set him off on a new learning curve, which will fit in well with what he's presently engaged with.

I returned home, feeling that that I'd made progress in returning working old machines to useful service. I have one more to off-load, another HP laptop, nine years old, slow but still running Linux a lot faster than it ever ran Windows XP. I should find a home for this one too.

Thursday was less eventful. A visit to the office to prepare and upload material to the DISC database, then a conversation with Ashley, continued later in a phone call, all about the next stage in planning CBS finances. The outcome of this was several hours spent drafting a new policy document, and bed after midnight, though not before I'd taken a picture of the waning moon with my recently acquired second hand Minolta 'beer can' lens, leaning out of the spare bedroom window in the freezing cold. I couldn't think of a better antidote to the effect of spending hours staring at a small screen.

Oh dear, I'm becoming a moon bore.

  

Capital Outing

Yesterday was unremarkable, just the usual routines of food shopping, a trip to the office to work on some outstanding documents, plus the acquisition of a Tesco Mobile PAYG SIM card for my sister's new phone. It was another cold clear night, with a bright almost full moon that tempted me outdoors trying to get pictures of the almost full moon with a halo and Venus nearby.

When I checked EarthSky, one of the astronomy websites I googled to fnd out about what planets are visible tonight, I discovered no fewer than five planets are visible at the same time this month.

This morning I caught the nine fifteen coach to London, for the preview of old friend Greg Tricker's new exhibition of paintings meditating on Cetic stories, partly myth and legend, partly hagiography, about St Bride, possibly aka St Brigid at the Piano Nobile gallery in Holland Park. As this wasn't to open until the evening, I had plenty of time to visit my sister and deliver her new phone. It turned out that she had an unmissable hospital appointment, so all I could do was use the front door key she gave me ages ago to let myself into the house lobby, and leave the package in her mailbox.

I returned to Victoria, and walked from there down to Westminster bridge, calling in briefly at the diocesan office in Tufton Street to pick up a copy of the current prayer calendar. I took pictures of the statuary in Parliament Square and Whitehall, including the new memorial honouring the women who served in the world wars. A nice piece of work, even if it did require a change of culture and ethos to shape the consensus behind its commissioning.

I had a cup of coffee in Methodist Central Hall, and also visited Westminster Cathedral, to enjoy this great sacred space. After spending time in Spain visiting wonderful church buildings I feel as if I have an extra layer of familiarity with Catholic churches are those who frequent them. Westminster Cathedral is quite an unique building, a Victorian edifice in the Byzantine rather than Gothic manner. It's quite reserved in decoration, yet gives you the same sense as being in an ancient Italian or Sicilan basilica. A wonderful place for liturgy too, but the lunchtime mass was over long before I got there.

An a whim, instead of taking the bus or the Tube to Holland Park, I walked to Pall Mall, then across  Hyde Park towards Notting Hill as the sun was setting. There seemed to be more wild geese foraging than people, and the people were mostly cycling or running, at the end of their working days I guess. It started to rain as I neared my destination so I took refuge in a book shop until it was time for the opening of the exhibition. Greg was there, looking stylish and delighted to greet friends and clientele turning up as invited guests. Bishop Richard Harries was one of them and he gave a brief introductory speech before Greg spoke. Last year Richard Harries produced a book called 'Images of Christ in Modern Art' and Greg is one of the artists whose work he writes about.

I love Greg's work. It embraces a richness of colour and simplicity of form. His human figures are sparsely drawn, though never abstract or fragmented. The eyes are like those in a Byzantine icon which look at you, yet gaze beyond you at the same time in way that is most moving.

You could imagine yourself standing there within the picture, in them or with the subject portrayed, You too could look upon the infinite and live. In this sense, his works are aids to contemplation rooted in classic incarnational spirituality.

The subject of his paintings is often set alone in a minimal landscape or else in a domestic scene like a hearth, a cowshed or a village street among companions. His use of colours, one moment bright and intense the next ethereal and subtle, is what gives each work its uniqueness, conveying a mood or feeling of awe and wonder. 

I've seen hundreds of his works of art over the years, and there's a similarity, in the imagery and symbols he makes use of. It seems to me a self imposed limitation of form, in the same way that the Byzantine iconogaphist constrains subject matter and content. But rather than producing icons that all have a similar appearance and hue, if not content, Greg's exploration of his chosen range of materials takes place primarily through his varied use of colour, texture and surfaces painted upon. This very vibrancy of expression fuels meditation on the image and its meaning.

This is his seventh exhibition at Piano-Nobile. I think I've seen four of his, three here and one in Gloucester Cathedral. He's also exhibited in Peterborough, Salisbury, Westminster and Rheims Cathedrals. The coach back home left a nine, and the M4 was bathed in the light of the full moon as we headed for the Severn Bridge and returned to Wales. It was quarter to one by the time I'd walked the last mile through empty streets and reached the house, sore footed, having walked seven more or more earlier in the day. But, it was well worth a wintry outing to London to see the continued flourishing of an old friend's mystical creativity.

Candlemass weekend

We went to St Catherine's for the Family Eucharist and Christingle service to celebrate Candlemass. Children made and distributed the Christingle oranges, lit during the talk after the Gospel but they  seemed detached in the 'childrens area' of the north aisle, on the edge of the usual choral service. Much work goes into preparing events like this, but to my mind they don't quite succeed in achieving their objective. Revision of liturgical texts and music is not enough. The shape of the environment where the 'family' of the church assembles for worship also matters. Holding the liturgy of the Word in a social space more amenable to informality, then moving to the sanctuary to pray around the Lord's table might work, but can be hard to manage with a large congregation. What can be easy to achieve in a modern multi-purpose church centre or a huge minster, can be hard to do satisfactorily in a Victorian legacy building.

We walked to the Riverside market after the service, enjoying the sunshine, though it was chilly, and I only really warmed up by the end of the return trip. We went out again for another walk after lunch, across Llandaff Fields to the Cathedral for Evensong, attracted by the prospect of Candlemass Eve music. We were not disappointed. Straight after the service, a baptism party arrived, the seventh liturgical engagement of the day for the clergy and staff. 

It's much harder to make baptism a regular part of a Cathedral service as happens in many parishes. There's such a tight Sunday schedule and big congregations. Occasional offices are attended by many people who would never normally attend a church service. This carries particular challenges for the conduct of a relevant, dignified ritual that parents and other family members will find meaningful. 

As we climbed the hill from the Cathedral to Llandaff village to have tea at Jaspers, a car pulled up and a young man man got out, looked around and asked "Where's the Cathedral?" It would be unfair to allege this is symptomatic of a poor church public profile when we've raised several generations of people biblically illiterate and ignorant about the church and its historic relationship to culture and community. 

In a world daily bombarded with all that's new, it's not hard to overlook what's always been there. I recall from my time at St John's occasions when elderly Cardiffians came in, declaring that they'd shopped in the market opposite all their lives and never set foot in the church before. It points out the importance of the ministry of welcome, and being open to every opportunity to make places of worship friendly and accessible in communicating their purpose and meaning to the world. I still wonder what I could have done better.

  

   

Libre Office landmark and new lenses day

This morning I noticed a tweet announcing the release of Libre Office 4.4, so I downloaded a copy to install as soon as I could and installed it to try out on one of my home laptops. I was most impressed by this upgrade and processed to install it on four more Windows 7 & 8 machines in the house. It's worth the effort. A few days after the release, whatever device you run Libre Office on, notifies you of the upgrade and nags you until you install it. If you're busy, that's a time wasting distraction, so it's better to waste a block of free time and get the job done early, if you can.

It's been one of those weeks when business work has been done mostly from home. The afternoon I went into the office to touch base with Ashley and work on a few things together. I got around to upgrading two of the four machines with Libre Office installed, although I'm the only regular user, as the machines are set up for MS Office default use. Changing that would most likely sow too much confusion for comfort and efficiency. I'm glad to have been an early adopter of Open Office, and then Libre Office, not least for their versatility in dealing with different file-types, and ,pdf generation. It's great to think that so many people world-wide contribute their expertise to make a product which continues to adapt and develop in  changing times.

On my way to the office I resolved after much agonising to buy a new telephoto lens for my Sony Alpha 55, something more capable than the kit lens which came with the camera originally. I visited Cardiff Camera Centre, where I've purchased all my Sony camera equipment over the past decade, and walked out, not only with the 18-270mm 'all in one' general purpose travel lens I had my eye on, but also a second hand bargain, an old and heavy 75-300mm Minolta lens with Sony Alpha mount compatibility. It's known as the 'beer can' lens because of its length and shape, and needs mounting on a tripod, but even with the few trial hand-held shots I took outside the shop, I was impressed. Very quickly I got the feeling this would be fun to experiment with. 

Later, back at home, out in the back garden, I got a hand-held shot of the half-moon with better detail than most attempts I've made in recent years with other cameras. I'm confident the new lens will do everything I need it to. There's extra pleasure in having a classic old lens to play with as well, at little extra cost. Moreover, the purchase has prompted me to retrieve the camera handbook from my digital archive to investigate the ins and outs of using the camera's 'manual' settings. Normally, I am so lazy that I rely totally on Auto settings, and spend ages afterwards fiddling about with a digital photo edit program to get the result I could have got in the first place with a bit more forethought. What you think you see isn't always what you get in the world of photography, digital or otherwise.

       

Rendezvous in Ross on Wye

A chilly wet day today, nevertheless, we drove to Ross on Wye to meet with our old friends Mike and Gail. I've known Mike a couple of weeks longer than I've known Clare, as he introduced us at Bristol University a long time ago. We met outside the mediaeval market hall. It was pleasing to see clothes traders about their business in the street below, and under the ancient shelter the market hall offers. 

We made straight away for the Royal Hotel, perched on a promontory overlooking meadows flanking an elegant bend in the river Wye, framed by the A40 bypass road, busy in the background. The main bar with terrace offers a view that in better weather would rate as delightful. Today was too cold and wet to stroll the streets, let alone venture into the meadows below, so we stayed indoors for elevenses and lunch. 

The rain turned into sparse snow while we were eating, but then it cleared for long enough to allow us to walk up to the Parish Church, to take in the equally delightful view of the river plain from an unusual churchyard terrace. Then, after a warm drink and more conversation in one of the town's coffee shops, we parted company and headed for home through countryside lightly tinged with white.

I doubt if we'll see much more snow than this in the months to come, despite severe weather warnings for other regions of the U.K. Fifteen years on, I still miss real alpine snow.

     

Old tech, new tech

Finally on Monday morning, the phone I ordered for my sister from the Easy Life Group website arrived with the postman after a two week wait rather than the two days promised. What a relief. It's about the size of a smartphone with big keys, but its operating system is of the previous era of mobile telephony, so navigating menus and keying in the phone book data provided by June, with a plea to do it for her, was a very fiddly job. Three dozen names and numbers took me more than an hour to enter. I hope that none of them are wrong, as that will cause endless frustration.

The phone has a USB linked charger, and immediately presented some of its file system areas for examination by a PC. But there was no indication that there might be software for uploading a digital address book file from an external source, and no internet capacity, only free memory for music and pictures to display on its small coloured screen. It has other facilities that make it an attractive prospect for older people, like an alarm button and hands-free cradle. I hope June will have the patience both to maintain it and use it, after I've handed it over to her. She doesn't have that much patience with more technological innovation than she's already struggled to adjust to.

Tuesday morning Clare went off to her regular study group in Dinas Powis. I drove out to pick her up afterwards, and we went to the Fig Tree restaurant on Penarth sea front for lunch before taking a walk to Lavernock Point along the coast path. On the return leg of the walk we bumped into Sue, walking with one of her grandchildren. It's the first time we've met since my retirement dinner nearly five years ago. How time flies! We stopped at the Leckwith retail park for some shopping and had tea in M&S on the way. A pleasant change in our workaday weekly routine.

Today I had lunch with my old friend and partner in publishing the Spiritual Capital report over seven years ago, Roy Thomas. He now runs his own public relations company Redefinepr, and is about to become a domain name  registrar for recently approved .wales and .cymru URL handles. I wish him every success in putting the Principality on the global internet map in this way. When I went to the office later on, Ashley and I agreed that we must act to register our enterprise immediately, as a matter of pride. Besides, British Telecom has let us down very badly. 

Having registered our web domain with a .co.uk label, BT insisted on controlling the linkage of the domain name with our web-site which is not hosted in webspace hired from BT. It worked for two and a half years and then was unaccountably disconnected. So far BT has failed to reinstate the link or give a reason for not doing so. BT is so big, so complex an operation, it often seems that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.  

    

Friends reunited and The Archers

Today for a change we went to the eleven o'clock Sung Eucharist for the Feast of St Paul's Conversion at the Cathedral, and enjoyed the choir singing Mozart's 'Sparrow' Mass. Graham Francis was preaching for the last time as Canon in Residence before his retirement as Vicar of St Mary's Cardiff Bay. We were in St Michael's as students together in the revolutionary year of '68, when reform of theological education and training for the ministry managed to make it briefly to the student agenda for the first time in modern times. Throughout his ministry he has taken an interest in the development and adaptation of Christian liturgy in the service of mission and evangelisation, and over the years has acquired an extraordinary library of liturgical resource texts, and the expertise to make use of it on all kinds of occasion. He can best be described as a liturgical entrepreneur, and is an excellent preacher. 

It was good to hear him preach again, and good to catch up with him and Eleri after the service. He was lamenting the prospect of down-sizing that goes with retirement, wondering what to do with his unique extraordinary resource collection. I hope he doesn't need to dispose of it, but can instead find a way to keep it intact as a library of material for use by seminarians and researchers of liturgy, maybe at St Michael's?

We then made our weekly visit to the Riverside Market to get our organic veg supply, before setting out for Newport, and lunch with Martin and Chris and their family. It was a long and leisurely affair with lots of delicious food and good conversation. It must be last summer since we got together with them, so there was plenty to talk about. We got home just in time for the week's first episode of The Archers. These days, there's nothing routine about the varied and complex story lines criss-crossing the imaginary Borsetshire landscape. Sometimes it seems a bit over the top to cram quite so many up to date socially relevant issues into the life of this particular fictional backwater, but it does make for good discussion about what's going to happen next. It's fascinating that the innovative approach to script themes has of late become an issue for debate and even protest in the public realm of media observers and Archers afficionados.

   

Coed-y-Werin discovered

Blessed with a bright clear day we decided to drive out of town, to go for a walk taking a picnic lunch with us. We didn't go far, just to the top of Caerphilly mountain, and took the muddy path east  from the busy mountain top snack bar, following the ridge. On the first stretch of the path there are small oak trees, and then a line of beeches, followed by a conifer grove. We stopped by the beeches to eat our picnic in the sunshine, and listened to the call of the huntsman's horn and the hooves of horses clattering unseen in the wooded valley below. At that moment, it was if time had stood still, it felt as if we could have been there at any time in the last couple of centuries. 

We descended the ridge to the track that leads to the nearby hamlet of Wern Ddu, but went in the opposite direction, finding the entrance to the Coed y Werin nature reserve, a large hollow area in the mountain top folds occupied by clay pits and coal extraction since ancient times. It's now managed as a site of ecological interest, by Caerphilly Woodland Trust. Apart from its variety of trees, there are wetland features, and a coal seam out-cropping from old sandstone rock so typical of the South Wales Coalfield basin. A lovely discovery, which I look forward to re-visiting later in Spring when the bird population picks up again.

After our walk, we drove into Caerphilly to have tea and home baked fruit pie in the delightfully traditional Glanmor Tea Room opposite the main castle entrance. Then, home for an idle evening, in front of the telly, with no Sunday sermon to prepare. While this lack of routine task tends to leave me feeling uneasy, it is good to take a break from ministry, to step back for a while and be on the receiving end.

      

Mail order frustration

A week last Tuesday 14th January, I bought a large format mobile phone by my sister from the Easy Life Group internet store, that promised delivery in two working days. Friday l7th I received an email stating that the order had been dispatched. After a week of waiting in for the delivery, nothing has been received. The company advertises an order tracking service. It's not working. Rather than pay to make an enquiry via an 0800 number, I have emailed the company three times at two different and received no response. Clare has used this Kent based mail order company before and admitted that sometimes they were a bit slow delivering, but how slow is slow?

When I was young, mail services were consistent and reliable, and if you were out you could rely on the postman leaving it with a neighbour or calling again the following day. Now there are competing services of a very variable nature, so that waiting for a parcel to arrive no longer has any degree of consistency about it. Therefore I am reluctant to place any trust in mail order trading, and prefer to buy goods whenever possible in real shops. The exception this is travel tickets, where I have most experience of on-line purchase over 20 years.

     

St Agnes Day

I drove through slow heavy traffic to Radyr this morning to celebrate the midweek Eucharist at Christchurch. Before we started I told them something about St Agnes, whose martyrdom in Rome at the end of the third century the church celebrates this day. A young teenager, whose love for Christ and the Gospel led her to resist an arranged marriage to a pagan noble, at the cost of her life. It's 40 years since I became Vicar of St Agnes in Bristol. The story doesn't lose its relevance or interest, as it's about a girl defying the common assumptions of her age about the status and expectations of women. Several people commented about this at coffee after the service. The story of Malala Yusouf is still fresh in peoples' minds.

I arrived home, and got ready for the Ignatian meditation group, meeting chez nous today. It was my turn to lead, and I focussed on Discernment, and Russel's question last Friday: What am I meant to be doing next?  It's still the question uppermost in my mind. Apart from another spell of  locum duty in Spain after Easter I have no other plans or projects to focus upon for the time being. It leaves me feeling uncomfortable and restless. It's not that I need lots of activity, just a sense of focus to give an added structure and discipline to life.

My new 'geriatric' driving license had arrived in the mail, a quick and efficient turn around in just a week. Well done DVLA for being so efficient!
    

Winter sun, Cardiff style

Apart from a chilly walk around the park in the afternoon, and finishing off my first Sunday sermon of 2015, the only thing of note about yesterday was completing my driving license renewal application on-line, cutting up the old licenses and posting off the pieces to the DVLA. 

The license renewal website is a model of simplicity, clarity and ease of use. I was relived to find the Government gateway i/d and password I use for on-line income tax filing worked as intended, and just a little surprised to discover additional information; e.g. N.I. and passport numbers, birth place, was required to complete the process. If we ever moved towards being an i/d card holding nation, all the vital information threads are stored in the DVLA database already. Hopefully the new driving license will be with me in a week or so.

On this bright and sunny morning, I celebrated and preached at Tongwynlais and Taffs Well. St James' in Taffs Well is a simple church building with whitewashed and no stained glass, on a day like this sunlight transforms the space and really lifts the spirits, enhancing the pleasure of worship.

I drove into town at the end of the service to collect Clare from the Riverside  Farmers Market, and we ended up staying for an al fresco lunch of curry served by one stall holder, washed down with a delicious Colombian single estate coffee from another. It was too chilly to stand around for long time before taking the shopping home, but once we'd unloaded and packed it all away, the lure of the outdoors returned. So, we wrapped up again and took one bus into town then another to Penarth for a walk along the pier and the front.

Many people were out enjoying a walk in the sun and dozens were fishing off the pier end as the tide was in. The queue for refreshments in the pier pavilion cafe was too long for us, so we returned home and Clare cooked some scones for tea instead. Crisp and fresh and warm. Nothing better!

Sister June is eighty today, housebound awaiting a knee replacement operation. After months of appalling mis-managment of her case by London's St. George's hospital, compounded by a broken kneecap, thanks to jerky London Transport bus driving provoking a fall, she's finally got an operation date in March. She's keen to start travelling again once she's mobile. We're still waiting for a date for Clare's 'urgent' shoulder repair, wondering if one hospital specialist department is communicating with another. Until we know we can't make any proper plans.

  

Catch-up conversations

I drove out do Dinas Powis this morning for coffee and a chat with Russell, a friend of ours through the Steiner school network. He turned ninety while I was away, and is remarkable lively and active in his engagement with life, limitations of age notwithstanding. We talk about philosophy and theology together, wondering about the path of human progress in these troublesome times, looking for signs of hope and creativity, marvelling together at the wonders of nature. 

We laughed at the co-incidence that both of us at the same moment, pondering on the priorities of life and its limitations as we get older, asked ourselves the question: 'I wonder what I'm meant to be doing next?' The implication is that we haven't forgotten what we're doing now, but are contemplating what the future holds for us. There's no waiting for rigor mortis. Until death intervenes, there are always new ideas to consider, new projects to be undertaken. Growing limitations don't rule out embracing whatever is there for us to enjoy and learn from. I enjoy our little chats.

Shortly after I arrived home, Clare's god-daughter Caroline and her daughter Sarah arrived for lunch on their way to visit a friend in Hereford, during a circular English tour centering on a visit to Caroline's mother Daphne recently moved into a care home in Devon. Sarah has just completed her first year as a medical student in Witwatersrand University, South Africa, where they live. It was a most enjoyable re-union. Sara was a shy adolescent when last I saw her. Now she is a confidence and strikingly attractive young woman embarking upon a challenging career. Who knows where it may lead her. We shall watch with interest.

In the mail today, a letter from the DVLA inviting me to re-apply for a driving license, now that my 70th birthday is but three months away. From hereafter, re-application has to be made every three years, and is dependent upon fulfilling certain medical requirements, voluntarily declared, regarding health and eyesight. The form is long, and bi-lingual, but it can be completed on-line. Not today however. 

  

Virtuous re-cycle

I had another of my restless nights and early risings today. Tucked away on my One Drive, I found a folder entitled 'New Book' that was newer and different from another I'd found on the computer I was working on yesterday. I still haven't mastered version control or system consistency. This time I was amazed to discover half a dozen chapters dating from my first stay in Vinaros, two and a half years ago. I enjoyed re-reading them and then editing and adding to them. Apart from sermons and blog postings I've not stretched my mind with fresh efforts at creative writing since then, shame on me, though come to think of it, on returning to St Mikes in the autumn of 2012, I did re-visit my first book writing effort, and did a further revision encouraged feedback from by Peter Sedgwick who had read and commented on it. Whether either book will ever get published isn't as important as making an effort to keep thinking and reflecting creatively in as many ways as possible.

In the afternoon I visited the office, where Julie, under Jane's tutelage, was getting to grips with the use of Sage accounts for invoice production. Getting the information display design right is indeed tricky. incorporating the CBS letterhead into the production template was trivial in comparison. The challenge was to find the right sized most up to date version on the office data system, one thing I was able to contribute to the process. Having Sage properly set up as well as the file of invoices that I generated last week, will make it possible for Julie to issue invoices in a rolling programme while she gets to grips with a new procedure. We need changes of this kind to be as painless as possible to ensure the workflow continues as it needs to at this time of year.

My old Dell laptop has languished under the office desk the during the year I've mostly been away, and is surplus to current needs. There's nothing that cannot be done using it that can't be also done on a newer more portable piece of kit. Given that it's six years old it's still quite quick and has a superb HD screen. It must have cost a fortune when it was new before I arrived on the scene with less costly hardware requirements to fulfil our working needs. As it's not found a use, and is superior in speed and quality to my home desktop workstation, which serves personal and work needs, I decided to take it home and re-instate it as a space saving workstation substitute. The result is satisfying. The old Acer desktop Vista PC can now deliver its file content ad lib over my home network to the laptop, thanks to the improved network efficiency of Windows 7, and my study work space looks that much freer as a result. Less clutter around the office and at home, a real win-win situation.

  

Mobile office work stations compared

When the weather is cold, grey and wet, days pass when there seems nothing much to do apart from routine domestic tasks. It's not pleasant enough to go out unless it's strictly necessary, and there's not much to do apart from read the news and feel listless. Thus passed Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday I went into the office to complete one of my outstanding tasks, and came home with a Microsoft RT Surface to investigate. It had been hanging around for ages doing nothing, as Sarah had acquired it but not found it user friendly, and had tucked away on the common workspace to be found a use or new user. I took the pass-code details, charged it and satisfied myself that it was working properly, and ending up taking it home. 

It's a neat solid device. It starts up quickly and has a decent enough touch screen. It is runs on an Nvidia Tegra chip, as does the Asus Transformer. Windows RT is a version of Windows 8 built for the hardware. It has a version of MS Office, linked to the One Drive cloud file system. This works well, and is easier to work with than the Google Chromebook equivalent. Both are intended to function primarily as mobile office devices for working on documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. Only after two years of competing production are some Chromebooks acquiring a touchscreen. The Surface is twice the price however. What you pay is what you get. 

The Surface keyboard is one deal breaker, closely followed by limitations of having a single USB port and no card reader in contrast to Chromebooks. If Microsoft had more closely followed the Chromebook hardware specifications it might not have been such a disastrous market flop. As it is, Chromebook sales are growing healthily. Newer hardware designs are of a quality approaching that of the Surface. The Google User interface works reasonably well and has lots of good features, but it's ugly compared to Windows. And in the end, aesthetics as well as functionality make a wholesome working environment, Each has assets and shortcomings. The ideal mobile computing platform would be a blend of the best of both. Good though Android is as a third alternative, it hasn't got email or browser interfaces for touch screen use to the point where you don't lose a precious text draft through an accidental finger swipe. If I use an Android tablet to browse or send emails, I do so distrustfully as a result of bad experiences. 

The Chromebook will continue to travel with me, in preference to the others, as it's so quick to start for use. It's light and has a great keyboard. The awkwardness and relative unfamiliarity of Google's filing system and off-line web apps I can put up with. They'll improve if people moan at them enough.  

Gloomy Sunday

The last time I walked to and from St Nicholas Kenilworth for the eight o'clock Communion service, two weeks ago, was in darkness. Today, all of Abbey Fields on the way to church was visible in the twilight before sunrise, which occurred as the Gospel of Christ's Baptism was being read. St Nicholas does have stained glass windows, but in the south aisle, there's more plain glass than decorative, so on a good weather day, the warmth and colour of the rising sun adds a fresh dimension of beauty to the interior of the church. About twenty of us attended, unusually more men than women, I noticed. A lady sitting in front of me greeted me after the service, remembering me from previous visits. A retired cleric celebrated, but the Vicar was at the door greeting people and handing out leaflets afterwards.

We had a long family breakfast, then I did some 'tech support' jobs on a couple of laptops, before we set off for Bristol to visit Amanda in the afternoon. It was already getting dark by the time we arrived there. After early sunshine, grey cloud descended and shrouded our journey, making the day seem even shorter. 

My resolve to get up earlier every day and enjoy all of the daylight on offer rarely holds up as my sleep pattern seems so variable these days in which life is less well structured by events. I hunger for more daylight hours at this time of year, or at least less gloom in this cloud laden land.

Contemplative play

I woke up at half past four this morning, still full of impressions from yesterday, so I got up and wrote for two hours before sinking back into deep sleep and waking up several hours later than usual.

Yesterday, after meeting with Phil and Rufus, we drove to Kenilworth to meet Rhiannon from school and take her to a dance event in a studio theatre in Coventry University's Ellen Terry building. By sheer co-incidence this was Rhiannon's second visit to the city centre of the day, as her class had been on a visit to the Cathedral and its museum, as part of their study of the Second World War. Kath and Anto had a Wriggledance gig in Oxford, but as she knew we were coming she arranged for us to go to this particular event which she was bound to miss.

One of the people making the show was Tim Rubidge, a friend of ours from nearly forty years ago, when he and three partners were forming a dance group and needing accommodation in Bristol. They were recommended to us by Jane Winearls, doyenne of the contemporary dance scene whom I met in my Birmingham days and worked with as a University chaplain. The four lived in attic servants' quarters atop our vast St Agnes Vicarage for two years. There were two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, and a living room floor large enough to double as a dance studio. We all got on well, and I guess having dancers in the house influenced Katherine, then of nursery age, as she and Tim now share the same profession. She and he met up in Hexam last autumn during the Wriggledance tour, where Tim now lives. It was wonderful to see him after a quarter of a century, now a dance guru with white hair, not quite as athletic as he was in his youth, but still moving nicely.

The show was a work in progress, born of what participants call 'The Pneuma Project'. It's an extended creative reflection on the nature of pneuma = breath/life/spirit, improvisations in music and dance, in a given setting, lightly defined by its stage props - a curtain of white muslin cotton strips blown randomly by a fan offstage, lit occasionally with projected images of random curves and lines, painting light patterns on the curtain and on performers. Apart from this, the empty space with a few lights was occupied by dancers moving in response to the sounds being created by two instrumentalists.

Two accordion players began by walking slowly around the stage drawing air into their instruments and expelling it, resembling the sound of living breath for many minutes of silence, before moving making and developing the soundscape with musical notes. Tim first appeared moving slowly, carrying over his shoulder a long bare dry branch from a tree in perfect balance, an exercise in mindfulness setting the scene for unfolding improvised dance movements against the soundscape with no overall narrative to define the evolving whole, but driven by the dancers; response to their environment and to a lesser extent, each other.

The focussed stillness of the audience of about thirty, mostly dance students, was remarkably intense for the forty-five minutes of the performance. It was an amazing rich experiment in sound and movement in which time seemed to be suspended, or determined by the rhythm of breathing alone. Very much like being inside a meditation, though without the formal structure. Not quite dream-like, though full of a sense of mystery and wonder. A spiritual experience? Yes, but without the usual defining conceptual boundaries. Simply playing with silence and breath in whatever way emerged in that space and time. An expression of pure spiritual freedom born of trust in each other and trust in the process.

It was offered as a work in progress presented to an audience for the first time, therefore a learning experience for all involved. It was very much the kind of experiment I wish Christians and other religious adventurers could get into and work on to discover new depths in the living relationship between the Word and the Spirit.

Despite late rising we got Rhiannon out and ready for her youth theatre workshop in time, and picked her up from Warwick University Arts Centre afterwards. After a lazy dozy afternoon, Kath and Anto arrived triumphant from their penultimate Wriggledance tour gig, and we went out to supper at Zizzi's to celebrate Anto's birthday.

Over-stretched church

I drove over to Llanedeyrn this morning to meet Phil and Rufus for coffee and hear how they've both been getting on in ministry over the months since we last met. One is coping with a huge increase in his workload due to sickness among colleagues, the other is bracing himself for a future working alone in an extensive parochial area, as a result of the departure of his colleague, who will not be replaced. 

Both were experienced senior professionals before ordination and made a healthy transition into their new clerical lifestyle, but the church is far from healthy, or capable of coping with the drastic changes that have resulted from loss of members and decline in numbers of fully trained pastors to support them in the challenges of mission and ministry. I'm certain they were both honestly aware of what they have taken on in faith, but that doesn't mean to say that the different demands aren't going to have unexpected impacts on them over time. 

Each diocese of the Church in Wales is working away at re-organising and re-structuring its offer of ministry to its unique social and geographical setting, and striving to get the faithful remnant behind the effort. My concern is for frenetically busy front line clergy, who in such a period of upheaval cannot help but feel less than cared for by those above them. 

It's another variant of complaints I heard in the diocese in Europe, about poor communications and responses from the centre, inferring lack of interest, in effect too little genuine pastoral oversight and leadership. People can be very good about supporting each other locally, until there are disagreements, conflicts of interest and so on, and if the cohering vision which motivated chaplaincy development begins to fade, things can start to fall apart.

I know what it is to work hard and flat out, to get tired enough to teeter on the edge of burnout, whether from having too much to do, or from coping with the insecurity of not knowing what to do next. Each can be as enervating as the other. Without the certainty of the annual family holiday over many years, I feel sure I would have broken under the strain eventually, and often I was a totally exhausted misery on holiday, barely able to enjoy being in wonderful places together with people I love most.

Now in retirement I have freedom to continue in ministry and control demands made on me in a way I never could do when licensed and obligated to a pastorate, being able to help out in all kinds of situations is a great joy and privilege, but is there more I could do to support those on the front line of the church's present crisis, and maybe help plug the communications gap, I wonder.

Office and other achievements

I woke up early, preoccupied with thoughts of batch invoice generation for the annual round of CBS RadioNet subscription renewals, due to go out this week. With no distractions and a clear sharp mind, I tackled the much unloved job methodically and by breakfast time I had the datasets and merge templates working, ready for action, and uploaded to the CBS office OneDrive account. A cheering achievement to start the day.

Then, I took the remains of the old desk for re-cycling. It was quite a job getting all the bulky pieces in the car. The large heavy desktop will have to go on a separate journey. I returned to Staples to acquire an extra storage unit to occupy an empty space in the corner behind the new desk, and some tidy trays for desk draws in which to keep all the small fiddly things that accumulate in drawers that you can't think what to do with. 

After a couple hours, two folding crates and a large ice cream carton of little bits all from the old desk, were assigned a new home. Bookshelves were rearranged, archive material rarely if ever consulted was stored out of sight, and accessible shelf space made for all the things I regularly use. The desk surface area is now too small to be a dumping ground, and can only be used for its proper purpose, to support the use of a computer workstation.

Now there's enough real room for a second chair and my office desk chair, and hardly any clutter on the floor. Quite an achievement. I can even open the window fully for the first time. It's crazy what you put up with when you are too busy to stop and think about your working conditions. I guess that spending much of this year away in clergy houses that aren't oversized, yet have good sized well equipped office workspaces, has made me less tolerant of the cramped environment I've put up with since retirement.

With everything looking neat and tidy, it was time to re-install Linux Mint. A flawless operation in its own right, with additional software installations (Chrome and Audacity) following achieved with ease. Once more, no recourse to the Home partition back-up was necessary, though when I'd finished I realise that backing up hadn't included the newly digitized sound files of the Sinatra dream concert. Nevertheless, these played back perfectly because the upgrade had gone immaculately according to plan. Bravo Linux Mint for being so beautifully consistent.

With domestic jobs done, I was able to spend a couple of hours in the office putting finishing touches to the invoicing process with a discussion on the inevitable anomalies with Ashley and Julie. Then home in time a cook a paella for supper, and relax. Wonderful to feel good enough and have the energy to get so much done, and so satisfying.

  

Desk exchange

Today, I took Clare to the Heath hospital for an appointment, and browsed for bargains in Staples while I waited for her. My working habits have changed considerably this past few years, since I began using a smartphone and equally significant, a Chromebook. More routine tasks are achievable without needing to sit at a desk nowadays. Yet, I've been thinking of acquiring a higher resolution monitor, if not an all-in-one desktop PC to support viewing and editing photographs better. Browsing didn't get me far before I was summoned collect Clare and return for lunch, but it did get me thinking.

I still write sermons at a workstation because I need to print them, but create fewer documents that need printing, as so much more of my work is now done just on-line. I have little need of a better computer workstation when my existing one, running both Linux and Vista is adequate for my purposes. A better display is one possible improvement, and now I have to admit that faster broadband has become more desirable with so many internet connected devices in the house, as many as eight at a time calling upon the services of an existing standard set-up peaking at 100mb/sec, and these days often faltering. It's a few years since I upgraded Linux Mint, so this much I decided I should do first. This time I decided to back up my Home partititon first. It took many hours, so upgrading Mint from an installation disk which I made last week from a download has to wait.

Late afternoon a courier delivered the new office desk Clare ordered for me from Amazon. It's much smaller than the existing one, and will help give my home workplace a more spacious feel. But first, how to remove the existing desk from the study? The removal men carried it upstairs in one piece and it just squeezed into place before bookshelves were erected. Since then the shape of the landing at the top of the stairs has changed with adjustments to floor levels and a new corner linen cupboard. What went in won't come out in one piece.

I manhandled it out of the room, and was able to detach the very heavy desktop, but there wasn't enough room to manouvre the base, because of its size. So, reluctantly, sadly I had to cut it into manageably sized pieces to get it down the stairs. This desk is probably as old as I am constructed strongly enough to serve as an emergency air raid shelter, and last several lifetimes. Such a pity for it to come to such an end, but what else could I do, knowing we have no space to store it even for the few days it would take to find someone to take it away and re-use it. The remains will go to the tip tomorrow.

Then, with much loving support and organisational aid from Clare, I built the replacement desk from the flat pack kit. After four hours of physical labour altogether, I was satisfyingly tired. It is indeed tiny and flimsy in comparison to the old desk, and has half the amount of storage, so work has to be done on re-arranging office contents tomorrow.

Owain expressed shock and regret when I told him about the demise of the desk, protesting that it was a sort of family heirloom, as it had been among our domestic goods and chattels since before he was alive. For most of its time with us since it was originally bought second hand, it helped fill space in Vicarage offices with far larger rooms than any we now have. Sometimes, such desks stay where they are housed. At one time, both Clare and I had such large desks. Now both are gone. All part of the task of down-sizing as you get older. One day, I'm sure Owain will understand, and be grateful this wasn't a furniture headache he inherited.
   

Epiphany Day

Yesterday was such a grey chilly day, I missed the open sea and blue sky of the Mediterranean. I went the office for a couple of hours, then met with Clare and went shopping for a new phone for her, as the cntract, taken out for a new phone after her previous one was stolen in Taormina - two years ago already! After much agonising and a little persuasion, she settled for Samsung Galaxy Mini S III like mine only in white, as these are on offer at less than half the price I paid for mine sixteen months ago, with an EE sim-only contract.

Much of the evening was taken up with setting it up, with Clare learning as she went along, and much comforted to find that it works well indoors, since we received our EE signal booster box last Friday. There are so many configurable features on a smartphone that initial confusion is unavoidable, but by this morning, she was exploring and enjoying different features for herself, with just the occasional 'What does this mean?' about some arcane unfamiliar menu term.

The sun shone this morning, and there weren't many clouds around, a cheerful start to Three Kings Day was most welcome. A few days ago, I heard about a BBC2 radio programme which broadcasted a two hour compilation of live recordings of Frank Sinatra in concert. I listened and enjoyed, then recorded it on my old Minidisk player, to digitise and listen again when the download expires in iPlayer. It took me a while to remember how to operate the device, as it's years since I last used it. Digitising is now turning out to be something of a challenge, as I can't configure Audacity to play back what it's working on to ensure that I get the sound levels right. It's amazing what you forget it you don't use technical resources on a regular basis.

After an early supper I walked in the dark across Llandaff Fields to the Cathedral for the Solemn Eucharist of the Epiphany sung by the choir to Schubert's Mass in G. Amazing to think that the composer who wrote the 'Winterreise' lieder could also create such exultant spiritual sounds. But this says a lot about the complexity contained within every heart and life, I guess.

There were about fifty in the congregation, with thirty choir and servers present. No sermon tonight, just a quiet thoughtfully conducted service with the Cathedral beautifully lit internally and externally to offer that sense of being an ocean of light in winter darkness. Just perfect for the occasion. I slipped in through the side door as the altar procession arrived, so was able to slip into the choir without disruption. At the end, I slipped out into the darkness without staying to speak to anyone, savouring the hour of peaceful seclusion as I strode home across the fields, rejoicing in the Light no darkness can overcome.
   

Epiphany Sunday & Sinatra live

Ah! Sunday in the pew alongside my darling wife at St Catherines for the Epiphany Sunday Eucharist. Great! To my surprise we were asked to take the bread and wine to the altar at the Offertory. Oh dear didn't get it right. The collection follows, not precedes the Holy Gifts. 

It must be the first time I've got to do something that simple as one of the laos tou theu, in decades. For one as fussy as I am about appropriate good liturgy, this was a sobering experience of being on the other side of the altar rail - a bit like a man being asked to dance the girl's part. Girls are better than blokes at doing this, it must be said.

We walked to the Riverside Market after the service for our weekly outing to shop for organic veg. It was quite chilly. I was inadequately dressed and felt the cold. We concluded our expedition with a shared bowl of lentil soup to fortify our walk home. For lunch we each ate a delicious goat cheese and squash pastie, bought on our expedition.

Before the BBC4 evening news, 'Pick of the Week' featured an extract from a BBC2 New Year's Day programme showcasing Frank Sinatra's concert performances. Tonight, I found the programme on iPlayer Radio and enjoyed two hours worth of music in the American popular song genre. It was a superbly assembled playlist of Frankie, recorded singing to live audiences over a forty year period, 'curated', if that's the right word, by Barry Manilow, colleague and fan. Astonishing excellence on the part of the BEEB.

   

Study makeover

My study is full of stuff, kinda organised but never totally tidy, a work in progress ever since I retired. There's never been enough time or energy to spare for proper review. Clare has been more conscious of its shortcomings than I have, and has diplomatically suggested improvements over the past four years, but without chagrin whenever events have diverted the course of action elsewhere. In fact, the only 'improvement' since I moved in, four and three quarter years ago, was the acquirement of a decent adjustable height office chair last year.

Maybe spending so much time away from 'mission control' over the past year, and having less to do over the holiday season led to a longer than usual conversation about 'doing something' to improve the study as a work environment. As a result, yesterday I did some tricky furniture shifting in a narrow space, to re-locate a book case into a space where it didn't fit flush to the wall, but at least the difference this made was reason to be persuaded by Clare to go the next stop.

Today, working slowly and carefully together, we tackled the challenge of reducing the height of the bookcase by 5cm. This involved removing all the books to the spare room, wielding a saw in quite a narrow space, plus some inaccurately aligned hole drilling to get the bolts to fit the structure together again. 

Getting everything back in place once this was completed resulted in a tidier and more manageable arrangement of computer workstation cables.  I've now re-arranged some of the bookshelves to allow easy access to stuff used most requently, and banished archive file, never accessed from prominence to obscurity where they properly belong, until needed if ever. I'm pleased with the result, having made the effort to consider the use I make of the room that's mine.

The advent of mobile computing has changed the way I work over the past few years living mostly in Spain. My home workstation is a great tool for doing some things I do occasionally, beyond writing documents, sending emails and surfing the web. Compared to just few years ago, I can do most of what I need from a web connected computer anywhere, though not everything. Anything involving precision scanning, managing all my files, either in the cloud or on a physical device, I prefer to do from a single place of reference. My study. 

It's no good, however clever modern auto-sync programs are, I end up with puzzling file duplications, version control nightmares and document hunts owing their existence to the fact that I'm creating documents on half a dozen different devices and not always remembering to save them to places where I can be sure they will end up being sharable in a recognisable location. The format war between Microsft and Google hardly helps. Default use of one consistent universal file format on all devices and platforms would help. In reality, moving between Google and Microsoft cloud storage systems is a fiddle (what the hell is .gdoc Google? And why do I need it?). On principle, I use both, for the same as well as different purposes. After all, why should I entrust my digital life to a single mega-corporate, when two are offering me their free services? (Forget the Apple cult).

Anyway, my study is now more habitable than it used to be. A new, smaller desk has been ordered from Amazon. Once installed, my little room will offer much more space than before, and easier access to things I need most.

All thanks to Clare's persistence in making my study fit for purpose.
     

Year's end and beginning

Two days, laid low by an unpleasant cold, not leaving the house, keeping the shivers at bay. Nothing to do except machine minding while uploading to my MS OneDrive archive account photos taken in Spain during the past year. So many difference places and experiences, thousands of photos, several gigabytes worth, on a slow sometimes flaky connection. Still, if you've nothing else to do apart from feel poorly, it gives a sliver of purpose to useless days, when even watching telly is an effort.

Clare cooked a vegetable curry for our New Year's Eve 'St Sylvester' supper, and just before we sat down to eat, to my surprise, the worst symptoms of the cold suddenly abated, making the meal extra enjoyable. I had enough energy to watch telly afterwards, but most of the evening's offerings were of little interest, although I did dip into BBC Four's back to back repeats of programmes on the Swedish pop group Abba. I know their songs more from seeing 'Mamma Mia' on stage and on film several times, and from our kids playing them when they were young, far more than I do from being a fan at the time. I seem to have grown out of pop music when I discovered World Music, and expanded the interest in classical music acquired at home as a child.

By midnight, Clare was in bed, nursing her cold. The skies were briefly lit with fireworks. I went outside, but there was nobody about on the street to greet. Just silent parked cars with their red security lights advertising their unwelcoming status. There was no sound of partying coming from anywhere nearby. Nowadays I guess, far more go out to celebrate, either to local pubs, or to the city centre for the Calennig Nos Galan fiesta, or to a night club. Not my kind of scene.

I stood there thinking of how it was in childhood in Glen View, Ystrad Mynach, when older children or perhaps even a young collier with blackened face would knock on doors to greet people and be welcomed in with a drink and maybe a coin or two, for coming to let the New Year in. Then, there'd be at least some people out on the doorstep shouting their good wishes across to each other while they smoked a last cigarette before turning in. No cigarette for me, not even a glass of wine or a tot of spirit, to celebrate, just grateful to be on the mend again so soon.

  

Happily, a Eucharist in honour of the Name of Jesus was advertised for noon at St John's, a leisurely start to a Bank Holiday with all the shops except zealous convenience stores closed for business. I strolled down in good time and joined in worship with a dozen people assembled from the benefice congregations, led by Fr Phelim. Several people recognised and welcomed me warmly. Fr Phelim asked me to assist him with giving the chalice, as the regular lay assistants were absent. It's good to be home, and this is a good parish to be able to call home.

The rest of the day was a TV catch up day, having not felt up to watching much in the past week. There were two iPlayer episodes of Wallander I hadn't seen, and needed to catch before watching the last two later on in the evening. Then there was 'Despicable Me', the original movie, just as crazy funny as 'Despicable Me II' which I watched, wedged between my lovely grand daughters on Boxing Day. That's five an a half hours worth in one day. I must be crazy.