Another wonderful wintry day, cold and sunny. With time to spare while Clare as making lunch, I set to work on next week's Thursday Morning Prayer. It's on the first day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Nothing much happens locally on the inter-church front these days, although food banks and work with refugees and homeless people does engage people from across the churches. Anyway, I decided to use service material from this year's special Churches Together special leaflet in preparing a text to use.
After lunch I drove Clare to the Heath Hospital for a round of minor eye surgery aimed at reducing the eyeball pressure, which is what causes vision loss. After dropping her off at the entrance, I drove to the University School of Optometry in Cathays to book an eye test, then did some grocery shopping at Lidl's.
I went for a walk in the park, while awaiting a call from Clare to collect her but the operation took a lot more time than expected, and in the end she took a taxi back, to spare me having to drive through rush hour traffic in the dark. She returned home not long after I returned chilled from the park. After a cup of tea, we went out again together for a walk around the block to the Co-op for a few more items which were not on my memorised shopping list in Lidl's.
When we got back, I recorded the text I'd prepared earlier in the day, and after supper, wrote a Christian Unity Week reflection observing how, even in this time of decline in Christian adherence, there's been a growth in the international diversity of expatriate Christian communities in the area covered by Canton's Parish churches. This year's Unity Week theme is 'And who is my neighbour'. Noticing our world wide church neighbours is indeed something special to be celebrated.
Much to my surprise I had a phone call from the General Surgery Unit at UHW to offer me an operation to remove my gall bladder a week Friday morning. At last, after five years of waiting!
The death toll in Gaza is now around 23,000 and the Israeli assault continues. The military public relations rearguard is showing video of an underground armament producing factory on a small industrial scale, way bigger than any home industry effort. This is offered as justification for their campaign, but even the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken is becoming more outspoken about the unreasonable scale of the suffering and death this campaign is causing.
Such a huge amount of time effort and money has gone into creating this subterranean world, a huge investment. Where does all this funding come from? It's been shown before how material resources such as water piping and fuel have been hijacked and fed into rocket making, but workers and militia personnel can't survive without being fed, trained and rewarded for their efforts. To what extent I wonder has the money supply been investigated, and what efforts have been made to cut it?
The telly drama about story of the 700 postmasters prosecuted for false accounting here at home has stirred up widespread public indignation, years after it was made public through the quashing of some convictions on appeal. The background story of the faulty software introduced over 20 years ago has been aired in tech' journals, and now at last being aired in mainstream media. Far too late. Only in the past week have questions been openly raised in the press about Fujitsu as a key supplier of the financial software that was unfit for purpose.
Many people within the post office colluded with the lie that there were no problems with the software, dismissing the anomaly of so many postmasters being prosecuted within the same time span. Statistically speaking 700 prosecutions highlights something might be wrong and need a fuller investigation. That's a high crime rate in an institution which would have checked out the people it was going to hired for safely working with money at the outset. An expert software analyst reported that the software wasn't fit for purpose. He was dismissed and discredited by the company. How many top level executives and lawyers conspired to perpetrate this travesty of justice will be revealed by public enquiry. Will their fate entail as much suffering as has been caused to those 700 victims? I wonder.
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