Prescience

A cold, dry and cloudy day again, good walking weather, but I didn't get out until after lunch. I thought I'd take my Olympus and Sony HX90 cameras out with and take the same shot of scenes using both to compare and contrast their abilities. It was an interesting exercise. The Olympus takes better quality photos, but is limited in versatility by the need to carry several different lenses to achieve wide-angled or distance shots, which one telephoto lens can. The Sony doesn't always respond as consistently or as quickly to changing conditions, and its shots aren't as sharp, but then it doesn't have the same image stabilisation capability to achieve this.

Seven saplings, silver birch and beech, I think, have been planted in a row at the end nearest Penhill, in front of the gap resulting from the felling of elderly trees as part of the smart terraced housing area development replacing a Victorian mansion last owned by the Council's social services department. It'll be decades before they flourish and add to the park's tree-lined periphery.

I  reached home again by sunset and checked the evening's telly programme guide. Not much of interest, but on Channel 4's Waler Presents, I found a new French flic series to watch, the third in a row with the same lead characters in the setting of Lake Annecy, a familiar place to us from family holidays and from day trips in our Geneva days. This one was eerily different, it turned out, when Clare and I sat down to watch an episode after supper. A poor multi-racial housing estate becomes the epicentre for an ebola outbreak, but it seems there's a crime afoot. Either a mad man or a bio-terrorist incident is at work. By the end of the third episode, all watched in one compelling sitting, it's still unclear. The dramatic portrayal of how the virus spreads hapazardly and spills out of the area is quite striking, though how accurate it is an epidemiology expert would best be able to declare. This is what  makes it so watchable. 

What is unexpected about this is the timing. It's not cashing in on the pandemic. It was first aired on RTF in January of this year, several weeks before the covid-19 pandemic was declared. It was made in 2019, reflecting the 'what if' speculation after the African ebola epidemic which started in 2018. I hope it gets viewed widely, simply because it show how easily contagion spreads, without benefit of mysterious power-point charts or maps that are hard to decode. I have yet to hear of this being reviewed by the mass media pundits. I wonder why?