Wayward alarm

Another overcast day with occasional showers, though quite mild for this time of year. After breakfast, the usual housework chores, then preparing next Sunday's readings for emailing, and making a start on Sway for next weekend. Then I recorded and edited audio for next week's Morning Prayer.

A neighbour asked for help getting her car started, and I took our battery charger across to her lifeless mini motor caravan, as Clare was leaving for the shops. For some inexplicable reason the charging process activated the car alarm and it couldn't be deactivated with the key fob. This immobilised the engine in any case. The alarm could only be stopped by disconnecting the battery. After a couple of hours it had taken enough charge to turn the engine over but it wouldn't fire, the alarm just screeched deafeningly. Another neighbour arrived and got us out of the predicament by calling upon her AA subscription, via a phone app. Not sure how she did that for someone else's car, but the outcome was the car made it to QuikFit where a new battery could be fitted. I will find out in due course how it was possible to deactivate the alarm!

Being thus distracted and my work interrupted, I didn't notice the passage of time. When Clare returned at one thirty I hadn't cooked lunch, but she speedily cooked a veggie curry in the pressure cooker, and we ate lunch half an hour later. After we'd eaten, I made the Morning Prayer video slide show and uploaded it to YouTube. It was gone four by the time I went out for a walk. I met Miriam out in the park and we chatted in a mixture of Spanish and English as it got dark, talking about novels in particular. I walked for about two hours, then prepared supper at the usual hour, so we could listen to the Archers after.

When we'd eaten, I started making some bread dough. While it was rising I watched the finale of the Italian 12 episode series 'Off Grid' was full of surprises and dramatic tension, a hostage taking, a suicide and a murder spree, all within the last couple of episodes, after ten moderately paced episodes which peeled back exterior of family relationships to reveal deceit, betrayal and weakness, and the impact this has on all who are affected by corruption in the banking system, sparking murders and a quest for vengeance against the family of a banker, falsely accused of killing a colleague, and forced to flee into hiding by an aggrieved victim determined to make victims of all responsible for  the failure of the bank. It was complex, and I was wondering how it could all be resolved right down to the last ten minutes. In all this their two children had a very tough time as co-victims and may have come out of it better than the parents, although not enough attention was given to them in the finale, or their eventual relationships with their parents for this to be completely assured.

With this finished, I put the bread in the over to bake and got back to reading the first chapter of 'Travesuras de un Nina Mala' by Mario Vargas Llosa. The Spanish of the narrator is as spoken with words and turns of phrase from Peru, some not found in Google Translate, but guessable in context. I started this a couple of months ago, read the first page and was looking forward to continuing it, but simply havev not found the time, perhaps due to binge watching a succession of new crimmies in French, Spanish or German. Reading a story takes up more time than just watching something and following dialogue with sub-titles for clarification, but reading is fun nevertheless when I have time for it.