Farewell series

The temperature has hovered just above zero all day after a proper frosty night. A cold wind is blowing the cloud from east to west, opposite to the most common tendency along the Bristol Channel - the Beast from the East is arriving, and maybe there'll be snow in Cardiff this week, as there is already in mid and north Wales. After a morning of digital tidying in my office, Clare's Christmas present, a new Samsung A21e smartphone arrived just before lunch, both of us received email notifications to say where the parcel was on its way to us. The last popped up to say it had arrived just as the postie knocked the door!

Transferring the old SIM and SD card to the new phone was less fraught with difficulty than I imagine. The Smart data transfer app on the old LG phone to automatically transport it to the new one was a total failure. Fortunately our Google accounts keep a copy of most of the data, and photos live on the SD card. Samsung has its own competing cloud ecosystem which wants to back up all your data and get you to use their apps, and dealing with his is an un-necessary annoying intrusion at set up. 

The phone's instruction manual leaflet came with text exclusively in Hungarian (I think), with a slip of paper containing a QR code linking to the download of the English version. This tells a story of its own. The Curry's European distribution centre is located in a country where I guess the net cost of the imported goods is low enough to provide a margin of profit in moving them on to the UK and EU. Clare was most annoyed. She like an instruction manual to read, whereas for me that's a last resort. I like to see how easy it is to figure out the operating system, how user friendly it is in reality, as opposed to the marketing hype.

My walk after lunch and phone set up took me over the the east bank of the Taff through Bute Park for a change. This too was busy, as can be expected when pandemic restrictions discourage people from going further afield. 

British teachers' Unions are advising members not to return to work, on Health and Safety grounds, unless all necessary covid testing provisions are in place and working, as opposed to promised. The government is facing a legal challenge to produce expert evidence that schools are safe enough as a workplace, and some English local educations authorities are going ahead and delaying the re-opening of schools, as the local health situation is serious enough to justify this. The government is not backing down on its insistence that schools re-open, despite mounting criticism. Nobody wants to see kids deprived of education and the pastoral support schooling provides. Everybody wants to get back to normal as soon as possible, but this is still a worsening situation, and the best everyone can do is hunker down and take no risks of making things worse for others.

Tonight, the first episode of the eighth and final series of the Parisian flic saga. Engrenages in French or 'Spiral' in English. It's been running over the past fifteen years and offers a grimly vivid view of crime in the French capital. Most of the perpetrators of vicious and brutal crimes of every kind over the years come from foreign migrants, refugees or asylum seekers 'sans papiers'. Or so it seems. The entangled worlds of corrupt cops, politicians, lawyers, financiers and indigenous organised criminals, is exposed from every angle, and involves a core cast of about eight characters who have been with the series for most if not all of the past fifteen years. 

Unlike the various iterations of American NCIS crime dramas, and the Italian Inspector Montalbano stories which have elements of family comedy about them sometimes, this has a sober serious dramatic long narrative and offers space for reflection both social and moral, on our flawed humanity, observing that the even the most brave, compassionate people have flaws when revealed under pressure, and are tempted to cut corners to achieve what they regard as justice. It's been interesting to see key characters age and gain seniority, and relationships in the brigade criminelle team develop at work and personal life. It can be tough to watch on times, chastening perhaps, but always worthwhile. There's not many TV series you can say that about.