Bargain buys

Another pleasantly sunny day with occasional cloudbursts. Clare made pancakes for breakfast with a nice bacon and mushroom savoury filling for me, special treat. Little news from Palestine as few people have the means to report anything from Gaza with telecoms infrastructure out of action. Only people living close to the borders of Gaza who can afford international SIM cards able to attach to neighbouring Israeli cell towers can communicate with the outside world, according to reporter Rushdi Abualouf the BBC's only person inside Gaza.

Netanyahu gave a press conference later in the day announcing a scaling up of offensive military incursions. Delicate negotiations about hostage release have been abandoned abruptly, and movement of aid trucks made impossible. What most disturbs outsiders, whether politicians, diplomats or media commentators is the inability to conceive how this can lead to a long term peaceful settlement. The death of about 8,000 people in Gaza is arousing indignation around the Middle East in countries sympathetic and hostile to Israel alike. The situation is worryingly volatile. Demonstrations protesting at the treatment of Palestinian civilians in big cities around the world, 300,000 attending one in London. There was one in Cardiff too, but it had dispersed before we got to the city centre.

After breakfast I worked on revising tomorrow's sermon, having used the wrong set of readings. There's a choice of two. It was less difficult than I imagined once I put my mind to it. Then we went for a walk in the park before lunch, ending with a visit to Elgano's restaurant on Cathedral Road, where we both had minestroni soup, Clare had seafood pasta and I had a Calabrian risotto. An excellent meal from the people who did the catering for our Golden Wedding celebration in 2016. We learned they no longer do outside catering. Covid put an end to that element of the business sadly. On either side of us were two families occupying a long table - one Chinese, and the other Anglo-French. Their youngest of five children was using DuoLingo for kids on her phone once she'd finished eating. Better than some trivial game, for sure.

It started raining when we were in the restaurant. Fortunately the restaurant has a bus stop outside, so we caught a bus into town for a visit to John Lewis' store. Clare hunted for birthday presents for Rachel and Jasmine and I went upstairs to see if there were any tech bargains. I spotted a Panasonic Lumix TZ95 camera with seventy quid off the ticket price of one on the shelf the other end of the shop floor. It's the only 30x zoom pocket camera on sale these days, and since I damaged the casing of my Sony HX90 making it vulnerable to complete breakdown, I've been looking out for a bargain replacement, so it was an irresistible purchase. There was also a discounted 2TB portable hard drive, which will become a Christmas present from Clare.

We had a cup of tea then headed for home on the bus. The rain stopped so I went for another short walk before supper, and then an evening writing a reflection for use a week Thursday, finishing tomorrow's sermon and printing it off before turning back the clocks and going to bed early enough to take advantage of the extra hour.