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.
