One of my favorite Christmas songs

Hark! The herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King;
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye nations rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
With th’angelic host proclaim,
“Christ is born in Bethlehem!”

Refrain

Hark! the herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King!”

Christ, by highest Heav’n adored;
Christ the everlasting Lord;
Late in time, behold Him come,
Offspring of a virgin’s womb.
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
Hail th’incarnate Deity,
Pleased with us in flesh to dwell,
Jesus our Emmanuel.

Refrain

Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings.
Mild He lays His glory by,
Born that man no more may die.
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!

St. Paul's Cathedral Choir on You Tube

Longan in syrup - a confession

Last week I needed to stow some food in a kitchen cabinet and to find a space I removed a can with fruit that had been there for ages. Then I left the can standing around for a few days and decided that it did not make for a nice kitchen adournment and had to go, but what about its contents?
The can with an Asian fruit called "longan" was a present by my best friend and his family when they took us on a rainy but very pleasurable day-trip to Amsterdam in August 2002 where we had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. They stocked up on Vietnamese food and invited us to taste this fruit. We thanked them and put away the can, first at our home in Berlin, Germany, and then here in the Catalan countryside. An inscription on the can said that its contents was "best before February 2004". Nearly six years later, I found myself with the dilemma of what to do with it now.
I opened the can, as the waste had to be separated into its metallic and organic parts. The fruit looked still fine, emitted no suspicious smells, so I tasted it. It was still fine. A taste difficult to describe, sweet. The texture is like grape.
I find it a little embarassing that it took me so long to get back to my friend's present - and I am glad that the fruit endured all that time in its can, so that I still had the chance to taste it. Better late than never.

Village life (V): Snowed in

Yesterday the weatherforecast announced snow from an altitude of 200m+ for today, and today it snowed; we are at around 230m above sea-level. Already in the morning, the village hall secretary told us via the loudspeakers for messages for the villagers that there would be no transport for the schoolkids who go to school in the county capital 7kms away. It snowed all day and the village got more or less cut off from the outside world. The trains are still running, though the first one at 7 a.m. did not come. Around midday the snowing got heavier and from late afternoon onwards there have been some short power outages; a little annoying but everyone's glad if the power comes back after a few seconds or a minute. In a winter storm on January 24, we were without electricity for 12 hours - and that was quite uncomfortable as our gas heating depends on electricity to run. Fortunately, my in-laws have an emergency generator so that we could spend some time with light and heat there.
It would be troublesome if the snow lasted for a longer time as we would run out of food soon but for a day or two it is still enjoyable for the kids.

P.S., one day later: I forgot to mention that yesterday the physician could not make his usual visit to the village, neither the grocery seller, and today there was no mail service.

Village life (IV)

Living in the countryside does not mean being eco-friendly in one's behavior. If you stroll around the fields you find a lot of places that the local wine growers use as makeshift dumps for construction waste. Some also leave empty herbicide and pesticide plastic containers there.
As there is virtually no public transport for short distances - except for the train (for middle distances)- everybody who works outside the village needs a car. That means two to three cars for a lot of families. The problem is that the village was built in pre-automotive days, the streets are narrow, and there is only limited parking space. On weekends, when most people are at home and the owners of second homes come to the village, traffic gets quite dense and parking becomes nearly impossible. Another problem is that most villagers either cannot or do not want to spend a lot of money on a car, which means that the local fleet is quite old; and there are some cars that might hail from pre-catalysator days with the resulting exhaust fumes...
There are other factors that influence negatively on air-quality. Tractors are diesel-engine powered and the engineers of Fiat Agri and the likes do not seem to pay too much attention on reducing fume and noise emissions. Another point is that a lot of houses rely on open fire places and wood-fuelled stoves for heating. The problem here is that some seem to burn whatever they find (judging from the smells) and that few houses have adequate filters for the fumes.
The good thing is that one can usually walk out into the fields and enjoy the fresh country air there - if one does not do it on a foggy day with a farmer burning his waste, as the fumes stick around underneath the fog...

Village life (III)

One aspect of life in a small village that one discovers only after a certain time is that there is a high incidence of mental illness, at least in our village. One finds a lot of "strange, rare" people. Normally, one doesn't see them very often, they don't participate in village feasts, etc. And their condition is normally of a mild to moderate kind. They are often loners. I feel uncomfortable in the presence of some of them. All have fixed habits. One woman walks a dog regularly. One middle-aged guy talks to himself and drives his car to a neighboring village every day at exactly the same time. One is a runner. One left for a convent to become a nun. Some appear to be stored in the countryside, away from their family in the city. The relatively high number of cases is probably due to a kind of "in-breeding" over the centuries. Our area has always been sparsely populated and before cars became a common good (as recently as maybe 30 years ago), communication and contact with the outside world was difficult. So the villagers married their kids to their neighbors' kids, and so on, and everybody ended up being related to most of the others - and the gene pool became relatively small. Today marriages between villagers are rare. Those unfortunate enough to be mentally ill can get treatment at a hospital around 25km away from here, i.e. if they have relatives who acknowledge their condition, support them actively and drive them there...
A pertinent entry for a grey, stormy and cold fall day.