Waking up again to more bad news of covid infections continuing to rise out of control, and calls for a stricter lock-down. We were twenty adults and three children for the St Catherine's Eucharist, but for how much longer, amidst calls for even tighter restrictions, heaven only knows. Our church warden fell at home broke her leg and needed a few days in hospital after surgery. Then someone on her ward was tested positively for covid, so now she's stuck there in quarantine for ten days, and we're hoping and praying that the rest of the ward doesn't get infected.
When I walked in the park after lunch, I noticed that Coffee #1 and Cafe Castan were open for takeaways. Outside Cafe Castan, despite distancing measures, and a line of people queuing properly to be served, small groups of people stood un-distanced, un-masked, chatting nearby. And no sign of law enforcement.
The BBC seems to be interviewing an 'disproportionate' number of elderly people expressing the opinion that the country should go back to a much stricter lock-down asap. Maybe they can't get anyone who doesn't care a toss about others to stand in front of a camera and be counted, unless they are in some kind of anarchic demonstration in defence of their civil liberty right to be careless and selfish.
Calls for Trump to be removed from office before his term finishes continue to grow in the USA, as public outrage against him and congressional supporters continues to grow. He's been banned from both Twitter and Facebook, and the alternative far right free speech extremist social network is being removed from app stores and deprived of its web server space, as the big companies are recognising how damaging the persistence of their paranoid hateful messaging has turned out to be. The control of both national and international security rests ultimately with a President who increasingly behaves like a mad dictator, to the point of talking about a counter demonstration on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration.
After my walk and before supper, I caught up the third and fourth episodes of 'Spiral / Engrenages', it is turning into a tragically powerful story of undocumented child migrants from North Africa in Paris, and how they subsist by mugging people and stealing phones or wallets. A phone shop dealer not only acts as a 'fence' for stolen phones, but is trusted to perform a social service for them, by electronically transferring ill-gotten euros to family accounts back home.
One child gets murdered having stolen a batch of cocaine from a dealer who has collected it from drug 'mules' bringing it into the country in their digestive systems. It was shocking to hear an airport customs officer stating that they could only catch a fraction of travellers transporting drugs daily in the way. An dramatic exaggeration or not? Maybe recreational cocaine users will watch this series for entertainment, and realise how their demand makes them complicit in such an evil form of exploitation of poor people.
It was Anto's birthday today, and various family members Whatsapped him their greetings and talked on line. No family get-together in this year of covid for any of us.
After supper I worked on this week's batch of recordings of morning prayer, this time in the attic bedroom. At the moment the parish intercession list for the sick and departed needs regular updating. Unfortunately this can happen after I've made a recording, and then it needs doing again, since it's impossible to edit the video and get it to render correctly on Whatapp, the chosen platform for prayer group use. With a four year old phone, uploading the video file is problematic as the phone doesn't have enough memory and the process stalls. I've had to strip all but essential apps from it to free space. Recording ahead is necessary in case I hit unforeseen problems. Doing it on the day carries too much of a risk of failure. Doing it the day before risks not having an up to date intercession list. I wish there was a better way of doing this that'd justify scores of users making the change, but there isn't. It's been hard enough to develop the circle of users to may who have never used Whatsapp before. If only I could figure out what stops edited videos from rendering correctly on a smartphone ...
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