State of Alarm - day rwenty nine

After a fair night of relaxed sleep, I woke up at dawn to the sound of rain. Happily the temperature and humidity at night as well as day has risen just enough to take the shiver out of life. I said the Office of Morning Prayer in bed, but then just before nine, the house lost internet connection, and that means phone too, for four hours. Not that I was expecting much digital traffic Easter Monday morning, but it's unnerving to be without a landline connection. 

The cellphone network is pretty robust, to be fair, but being of a generation brought up only on hardwired landlines and coin boxes as dependable infrastructure, it's hard to get used to anything less reliable! In fact, global reliance on the internet and all its children (much as I love it and depend on it daily) still worries me greatly as the infrastructure is so complex and reliant on even more human maintenance. I'm aware that the infrastructure is rendered more robust and secure by multiple copies of traffic servers and built in fail-safes, but that's nothing a giant radiation burst from the sun couldn't cripple. We've built an interconnected web based world, but the concept still owes much to the notion of spider's web, strong, resilient, but still fragile in the face of brute force.

When Jayne came with my birthday cake on Saturday, she also brought a lentil based cottage pie for me. I heated it up for much today. I twas delicious and a welcome change from my own cooking, although it inspired me to make a pot of Ann Marie's butternut squash, lentil and lemon soup, as the half a squash in the fridge looked sad and needed cooking. So now I have three day's ready portions in hand. Yesterday cooked and ate half of the large salmon cutlet which came in last shopping order. That will be very nice eaten cold tonight.

Among my birthday digital goodies was a couple of MP3 albums I didn't have, downloadable from her OneDrive archive. This morning Anto sent an MP3 album of Sephardi Ladino songs by Yasmin Levy, some of them of mediaeval in origin, with a decorative melodic ethos which could even have originated at the time of the Babylonian exile, and travelled west across North Africa into Southern Spain at the time of the Moors, if not earlier. I think these songs come from the tradition of women singers in Morocco and Andalusia whose ancestry was Sephardi Jewish, even though they may have lost their ancient identity. The album was recorded in Israel, and features Andalusian and Oriental instruments and musicians. It's powerful listening. 

Owain also sent me half a dozen very varied MP3 albums using a facility called 'We Transfer' I've never heard of. One of them is 'Disraeli Gears' the first album recorded by Cream in 1967, and one of the first in the 'psychedelic music ethos'. We bought a copy when it first came out, very trendy. I think Owain keeps that original disc, a valuable antique first edition nowadays. Funny how I recall the album sounding much heavier in those days. Sure we played it very loud, but it was many more years before small digital sound systems could reproduce that sound quality.

Ah memory lane! I still have in my wardrobe at home the hand made silk floral 'kipper' ties Clare made for me in those days. Apart from long hair and full beard, that was as close as I got to hippie-dom. No psychoactive substances either. Already having an active creative imagination, I never felt the need. And no regrets!