Friday 24 March 2017

Knee news and TV crimewatching

Yesterday, as I was getting ready to go down to St John's Canton to celebrate their midweek Eucharist, Clare went off by train to spend a long weekend in Kirton with sister-in-law Ann. Walking there and back, I collected sixteen pieces of rubbish and binned them. An appointment with my GP later brought the good news that there's nothing more wrong with my dodgy knee than age related wear and tear. The doc also wants me to try out a 24 hour blood pressure monitoring device next week, to track variations over the day, as it's still higher any time it's taken in the surgery than it is at home.

With time to myself in the afternoon I sat and watched several episodes of a new euro-crime Channel 4 TV series called the 'Team'. I found it most enjoyable as uses Danish, German, Flemish, French and English, since it features the work of a multi-national investigation into corruption and people trafficking. It's not about Interpol, although the agency does occasionally feature, but rather about police forces working together. Interestingly, for group discussions English is the common language, although occasionally you also hear one person speak German and another reply in Danish or Flemish. In the evening, I went to St German's to take Stations of the Cross and Devotions.

This morning, I was back at St German's again to celebrate Mass and share in the 'hunger lunch' in the church hall. I checked the office PC's updating progress. It seemed to be stuck on 5% since Wednesday, even though the machine had not been switched off. Then I looked at the power settings and the penny dropped. Although it didn't go properly into sleep mode, the hard drive was set to stop spinning after two hours, so the update download could not be saved. So, I set the machine to stay fully alive and left it to continue, aware it could still take a long time. 

Then I Julie and Ashley in town for a cup of tea and a chat, and before taking Ashley to the RadioNet equipment supplier in Chepstow with a several radio handsets to be exchanged for re-configuration. It was a pleasant drive on a bright and sunny day, and the sun was in our faces as we returned in evening traffic as the sun was setting. Trees in blossom and daffodils in the roadside verges everywhere.

Later, I watched this week's episode of 'The Team'. It's not merely a 'straight cops and criminals' drama series. Relationships between team members, relationships with spouses are also an interesting and complicating feature of the narrative. Well worth watching. Interesting to observe that while people can and do bridge language barriers with their variety of language skills, there are often problems in communication arising from the intended meaning of the content. A detective finds an encryption key concealed in a couple of lines of romantic poetry. The discovery is then texted to a colleague working on the vital file, but intercepted by her husband, who reads the lines and concludes his spouse is having an affair, creating a crisis and disrupting progress on the case. It's well observed indeed.

No comments:

Post a Comment