Nose Pads

Overcast with rain all morning, housework after breakfast, then this Thursday's Morning Prayer video to complete before cooking lunch. It was gone three and had stopped raining when I set out for the University Optometrists School to get my mid-range spec's repaired, and a learned a new term, 'nose pad', that's what the call the tiny pieces of plastic attached to the rim of each lens to relieve the wearer's nose from pressure due to wearing spec's. 

The word is obvious when you think about it, but I had to resort to 'show and tell' with the receptionist to explain my mission, and she introduced me to the word. A quick repair wasn't possible as nobody was free to do it, so I agreed to return tomorrow to collect them. This pair dates from before my cataract operation, but they still serve their purpose well, almost as good as the newer ones, so worth the effort of getting the repair done.

I went into town on the bus as far as the bottom of Cathedral Road, and walked through Bute Park up to the main gate at the junction of North Road and Corbett Road, but returned directly to Blackweir Bridge from the gate, and then home. At Clare's suggestion, I called at Lidl's, next to the School for some packets of nuts and sunflower seeds, and was back in time for tea. I downloaded half a dozen zipped archive files of photos and deleted them from my main Gmail account. It keeps complaining that I'm running out of space, but that's because it wants me to rent more space, which I see no reason to do. It's a chore which I started doing in Fuengirola and it was terribly slow, because of the low broadband speed. Here at home the download speed is 50mbs and upload is 18mbs, so downloading big zipped files didn't take long at all.

In the evening I finished watching episodes 5 and 6 of 'Inspector Ricciardi'. That's the end of the first series. There is a second series of four episodes, eventually a few more, as the fourth only aired in Italy last month. It'll be a while before these appear on 'Walter Presents', but worth waiting for. There's a love story unfolding through the whole series, and each different episode gives you an interesting perspective on Neapolitan life and society in the twenties. 

It's great that the dialogue is so clear. All that I've learned from Spanish and knew from learning Italian fifty years ago makes the dialogue easy to follow, as the languages have so much in common. Maybe the dialect is easier to decode due to the remote influence of the period in which Sicily and Southern Italy were colonised by Spain in the 16th-18th century. My only criticism of the the production is that the streets look remarkably clean, as do the ragazzi who live in poverty on the streets.