A few problems solved

Sunshine this morning with occasional ominous clouds but no rain - 22C and thankfully not humid. I slept better with fewer disturbances last night, and was bemused when my not so smart watch said that I'd only slept for an hour and a half. It's not the first time it's happened. I logged in the missing hours manually, and the data analysis showed I'd been away continuously for two hours before daybreak. It probably means that its sensors are not in good enough contact with the skin sometimes, and fail to take a reading. Or, its data synchronization with the cloud, by whatever route it does this, goes to sleep of its own accord. Why do I bother? As much as anything I'm interested in finding out over a period of time how reliable such consumer health devices really are.

Housework after breakfast, waiting on tenterhooks for a call from Kate our travel agent. It was eleven when she rang, and reassured me that I hadn't done anything disastrous. In fact, last night I nearly succeeded in finding the place our particular boarding passes were stored on the EasyJet website, but was thrown off scent by an server error message which shouldn't have occurred. Kate had checked everything was in order before calling, and talked me through the stages of finding flight details booked by a third party, Riviera Travel in this case. This can be done without logging in to an account, using the boarding pass codes Kate already sent me. This morning it worked as intended. I downloaded PDF files to store on my phone, took and edited screenshots of the QR codes, to add to Google wallet. Apparently Riviera Travel mails us paper copies plus brochure next week. All is well, one more uncertainty disposed of. 

Several weeks ago one of our IKEA dining room chairs started to come apart. A joint in one of the legs had worked loose. On inspection the loosening joint had ended up with a specific curved washer dropping out of place, so the joint could no longer be tightened with the key provided. At that time the washer could not be found, or maybe we were too busy to hunt for it carefully. While I was chatting to Kate, Clare got the tool kit out, looking for a way to remedy the problem, and the said washer turned up. I had assumed it was lost, but maybe we had spares without realising. Anyway, unscrewing the bolt holding the joint in place proved to be a slow and tricky job, but in the end I got it loose enough to be able to insert the washer and tighten it fully.

By the time I finished, Clare was preparing vegetables for a pasta sauce and starting cooking them. Then she went outdoors to hang some washing, and lingered longer than was necessary, when I arrived in the kitchen feeling triumphant. Well, the vegetables were a bit caramelised, but not carbonised, so I took over, finished the job and boiled some penne to give her a few moments of respite before lunch.

I walked along the Taff Trail the other side of the river from Western Avenue to Blackweir Bridge, busy with commuting cyclists as ever late afternoon. Clare had gone out to meditation group by the time I got home. After supper, I recorded next week's reflection on the Transfiguration and edited it.

Lorries transporting aid into Gaza are beginning to deliver now, in addition to air drops. Trump is finally acknowledging the reality of starvation there, as if he's only just starting to watch TV news reports. Two significant declarations have been made by Israeli groups alleging genocide in Palestinian territories on the basis of evidence they ave collected on the ground - one, a group of charitable Israeli medics, the other is the eminent radical Israeli group B'tSelem, which monitors human rights violations in the Occupied Territories. It was active during the second intifada when I was in Jerusalem on sabbatical concluding my time in Geneva at the end of 2000. Let's hope public opinion supports its findings at this time when the Israeli government is in recess. This could well positively influence any cabinet reshuffle Netanyahu makes in an effort restore the credibility of his government's disastrous plan of action.

For lack of anything better to do before bed, I watched an episode of Death Valley on BBC iPlayer, shot on location in and around Llantwit Major's Parish church. I hope disruption filming inevitably entails was richly compensated for in location facility fees.

Experience denied

Waking up to hazy sunshine and clouds driven by the wind. In the news I was struck by a report about the situation in Gaza where emergency aid is slowly moving into the territory. The UN Aid coordinator admits that his remarks a few days ago about 14,000 infants in Gaza being in danger of dying of famine applied in the long term if aid supplies weren't rapidly increased. Whatever he actually said was reported as 'soon' as opposed maybe to 'sooner or later'. Was that an error of anxious communication on his part or indignant reporting on the part of the media? 

Only a third of the aid lorries allowed in a situation where thousands needed to deliver aid urgently. Some are being looted by gunmen already. UN emergency aid response experts say the only way to address this issue is for supplies to overwhelm demand, minimising the $400k value of each truckload that makes them of interest to criminals and worth fighting over. The Israeli government has its own idea, commissioning private companies to replace UN aid logistics experts. Will experience and logic prevail over the logic of fanatics in government? We'll see.

Some Gazans will die of starvation this week in any case, while others will be killed in the Israeli army's continued assault on Hamas fighters. Public indignation against Netanyahu's policy in Israel is mounting by the day. Britain, France and Canada's condemnations have been met with an angry aggressive insulting reaction from Netanyahu against countries Israel considers allies. The emotion with which he lashes might lead you to think he was in a bunker under direct physical assault, rather than in behind a safe government cordon somewhere in Israel. It's not so easy however for him to brush off severe criticism from Jews in the diaspora as well as in Israel. With diplomatic talks happening behind the scenes it's impossible to envisage how close a release of hostages may be. All the world can do is watch and pray.

After breakfast I went to the King's Road pharmacy to collect my quarterly prescription, and was sad to learn that Lindsey our local community pharmacist is moving on to a job in Abertillery, as the company employing her wants to keep her freelance and isn't going to give her a permanent contract. This is such a loss to our locality. I wonder who will replace her at the end of this month, and for how long? 

My afternoon walk in Llandaff Fields after lunch and a snooze took me to see if work on enclosing the Padel court was finished. The roof yes, but not the walls. I was physically tired again today and curtailed my walk, and after supper went to Thompson's Park to complete my daily quota. 

Then I watched a couple of episodes of 'Memento Mori'. Its story is very dark and horribly violent. The twists and turns in the story have been predictable, and offer little by way of insight apart from that of rivalry and internal politics within the police, albeit this is a minor them cropping up in movies from different European countries. It suggests to me that it's been written more with the intent of shocking consumers than engaging in deep reflection on the perversions of a perpetrator who is also a victim, and the losses of a successful protagonist. I wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't for the opportunity it gives of following dialogue in Spanish. 

Unwelcome complexity

In the morning news, the Gaza death toll is approaching 19,000. Air bombardment and street fighting has continued without any remission. Little aid is getting through and there's no sign of a humanitarian pause any time soon. Violence in the West Bank territories is slowly escalating, and support for Hamas among young people is growing, although there's no love lost between the West Bank authority and Hamas rulers of Gaza. International organisations and governments are losing patience, given the colossal scale of destruction and abuse of the civilian population. The Netanyahu government believes the end justifies the means, and excuses so much suffering and death as collateral damage. The UN General Assembly voted unanimously in support of an immediate cease fire today, but nobody is in a position to force a halt in the fighting. It's just continued to worsen each day since the seven day humanitarian pause ended. Heartbreaking, This cannot end well.

I went to bed an hour late last night and paid for it this morning, as I couldn't lie in. With Clare expecting her study group members to arrive for a festive season session at ten, I had to eat breakfast and then make myself scarce for a couple of hours. I worked on next Sunday's sermon until her guests departed at midday and then cooked lunch. 

I was unsuccessful at dropping off to sleep afterwards, so went and the the week's grocery shopping at the Co-op, calling at 'Jalo & Stitch' the tailors shop on my way to collect my jacket following repair work on the sleeve lining. It wasn't ready to collect however as the shop had suffered a day's power cut yesterday, sowing chaos and delaying completion of work on many more garments than mine. Hopefully it'll be ready by Friday.

After taking the shopping home I went for a walk in the park and bumped into Jan and Peter walking their dogs. Jan had just survived three school carol services and was suffering from a heavy cold. Peter was suffering from a heavy data loss, having accidentally deleted years worth of files relating to books he's written or is working on, while in the process of deleting a batch of work files from decades ago. He'd also emptied the trash file on his computer. The fact that some of these were in an encrypted folder means that he's had to seek the services of a top level data recovery company, handing over his laptop and backup hard drive for them to work with for the next few weeks. I'm crossing my fingers for him. I've been rather obsessive about data security for many years, relying not on handy Cloud storage but the principle of multiple redundancy, keeping backups of my data on several hard drives, memory cards and pen drives. 

When I returned from walking, Clare was about to leave for her meditation group. She told me that I'd printed off the unedited version of our Christmas newsletter, and she'd sent over half a dozen of them out by post already before noticing. A very distressing error on my part, not realising the file I'd used was the wrong one. I reformatted Clare's edited version to fit on one page using my laptop, but must have got distracted and failed to transfer it to a place where I could find it on my workstation with printer attached. I started to reprint her edited version without noticing it wasn't the one I'd reformatted, so the letter was reproduced on one page and the signature on another. I had to stop the print run, find the correctly formatted version, make it into a pdf file and start the print run again. What a waste of paper!

At this point the pdf was opened using Microsoft Edge by default. I've been using Google Chrome since it first come out in 2008, escaping from Internet Explorer, and more recently configuring my Windows computers to avoid using Edge as default browser. Like Chrome, it contains a pdf reader. Whichever browser you use to display a pdf will show up the file with the browser's logo. Annoying and confusing, if you have several shortcuts on your pointing a browser to a frequently used site, rather than a pdf. 

I've hardly ever used Adobe pdf  reader. For ten to fifteen years I used a small quick pdf reading app called Foxit Reader, but since acquiring my present Windows machines haven't used it. Foxit has had facelifts and become more complex over the years, but it has its own identifiable logo when set as default pdf reader. Instead of downloading the latest version of Foxit, I looked through one of my take-with-me pen drives containing an assortment of handy files to have with me when using a foreign computer. Sure enough, there I found an early lightweight version taking little space and working very fast, utterly simple with no ads or pop-ups - a simple basic tool for all situations.

Edge is evidently feature rich, but I prefer the minimal design of Chrome and find it's less prone to distract me when in use. Edge now has the latest AI gizmo from Microsoft, known as 'Co-pilot', which is there to help you make smarter searches for things you're after. It has all sorts of user requirements for you to choose from to minimise your need to think for yourself thereafter. When Co-pilot popped up during the last Windows update of Edge, I googled to find out how I could deactivate it straight away. This feature of Edge browser can also appear separately on the desktop instead, taking up screen space, so further effort is required to get rid of it, for plain simplicity to reign once more.

After a solitary supper, I wrote for a while, then watched the last episode of Michael Portillo's series on Andalusia, featuring Sevilla the one major city in the region we've yet to visit, and Carmona, a town founded by Phoenician traders, where he has made his Spanish home over the past sixteen years, restoring a derelict building in a way that has revealed an arcade of moorish arches, and several floor areas dating from Roman times. Portillo threw a party for the many friends he's made in the town. On top of great food and drink, guests contributed flamenco music and dance, improvised songs and poetry recital. 

It reminded me of parties at home when I was very young, when extended family would join us and sing together with Mum playing the piano and Dad the 'cello. The atmosphere wasn't fiery like it is in Andalusia, but full of romance, sentimentality and convivial warmth, generated by popular ballads operatic arias, hymns and carols when in season. There wasn't enough room to dance when the front room was full. I was meant to be in bed, but would often sit on the stairs and listen, until I was old enough to stay up and join in. How many kids today will grow up with that kind of childhood memory, from the days before television took over our lives? Earlier to be tonight.

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.