Bari in view once more

Overcast and cold again with the threat of intermittent showers. Terrible news from Gaza at the weekend. The Jerusalem Anglican diocesan Al-Ahli diocesan hospital was bombed again, destroying the A&E and surgical units, the only ones remaining in Gaza where the other hospitals have been destroyed. The Israeli military insists that a Hamas command post was hidden in a hospital building and that patients were being used as a human shield. It's an excuse the Russian military also uses for attacks on civilian targets despite claiming to want a cease-fire.

Although I got to bed early, I slept badly and woke up with a stiff neck and back muscles. Housework as usual after breakfast, then I wrote a long email to Carol, Geoff's widow, sharing my reminiscences of him and some photos taken during a visit he made to us in Monaco. Clare went out grocery shopping and I cooked curried sweetcorn, carrots and cannellini beans for lunch. It worked quite well.

The sun made a brief appearance through the cloud cover when I walked in the park after lunch. I found it hard going today. It took a long time to warm up and overcome the muscle stiffness, but I felt less ancient by the time I reached home at tea time.

After supper, I watched a couple of episodes of 'Cold Summer', the Italian crimmie I found yesterday on 'Walter Presents'. It's set in Bari, like the 'Lolita Lobosco' series, so the general setting is familiar, plus the odd location of particular scenes, but it also gives shows different city locations as well. It's set in the early nineties, when there were still phone boxes in the street, corded landlines and for those who could afford a mobile phone the 2-3 times the size of today's, with tiny screens. I'm not sure that all the public buildings would have looked quite so clean back then, when pollution levels were that much higher, but never mind the visual fiction.

It well portrays the impact of organised crime, not only on victims' families but also on the local police in a place where so many people know each other, as they used to in villages and small towns.