Quarantine day two

I woke up in the night a couple of times, wondering about how to alert the local health authorities to the inconsistencies in the messaging. After breakfast I decided to contact the Local Health Board 'concerns' team and explain the problem. I still had the contact details, as I opened a complaint procedure two years ago when communication about appointments and waiting list was poor and contributed a great deal to my distress at the time. I explained my concern and added some photos as back up evidence. 

I received an auto reply straight away with a form to fill in. I did that two years ago, and never formally closed the complaint I made, and won't do until the surgical saga is over and done with. My contact details must be on their system somewhere (if not why not?). Somewhere will get around to reading it eventually and do what I asked, and forward my email to the NHS Wales comms team. 

Later I discussed the issue with Owain as he's a comms professional and knows from the inside what the problem is. As far he's concerned the government's communication systems are dysfunctional from the top down. It was badly designed and implemented piecemeal from the outside, so agencies don't all talk to each other or collaborate on information output, a malaise in every area of government. Ah well, at least I did what I could to highlight a problem there'd nothing I can do to resolve.

On the statistics programme 'More or Less' following the nine o'clock news, on Radio Four, there was an item about vaccination rates. It was revealed that Wales has the highest proportion of people vaccinated at least once in the world, and is set to complete the target population two months ahead of the UK target date. Israel is world leader in the number of its nine million citizens vaccinated, but Wales with three million citizens has done better proportionally. 

The Welsh Assembly Government developed its own logistic strategy for the roll-out of vaccines, different from that of England, Scotland and Wales, and it has proved effective. When I think of the way BBC Radio Four's Today programme interviewers subjected First Minister Mark Drakeford to a most hostile interrogation when he announced there would be a planned pause in roll-out at an early stage, I felt it was entirely unjustified. Poor journalism in fact. I wait to see if he is interviewed on the programme in the light of his re-election and the success of the Welsh vaccine roll-out.

A warm sunny day today, an opportunity to walk outside, and take photos of bees browsing flowers in the garden. I'm not over pleased with the results. I'm out of practice at taking close up photos of tiny creatures but a few days of nice weather confined to the house and garden will give me plentry of time to practise.

This evening I recorded Morning Prayer and Reflection and uploaded it to YouTube ready for tomorrow. My Samsung phone ran out of memory three fifths of the way through, so I had to move the incomplete file to the SD card and then record the rest and join the two files in a video editor  it is very annoying and consumes extra time. An eleven minute recording edited and uploaded consumes over an hour of time when you include the initial time spent on setting up the recording. Can all this be done more quickly with a more powerful better equipped phone? There's been no technical discussion of 'how to' among parish contributors so far. Or is it me? Am I the 'dinosaur' with only a five year old phone which works for most purposes just fine? 

At the moment, I don't have WhatsApp on my newer work phone. I could just swap the SIM cards over and install WhatsApp, but am reluctant to do so until the work SIM expires and revert to having only one phone. Yes, I am being awkward and will put off adapting until I must as I have no idea if the Blackberry will be as good to use for videoing as the Samsung. I've never tried videoing with it. Never needed to. As long as you have a device that works and fulfils your current needs and purposes, you learn the minimum you need to be remain functional. It's when you need to adapt to changes in use that you have to learn a few new things, and change well worn habits. That's a key problem in living with technology, and explains why people so easily get left behind by surges in innovation.

Overdue phone upgrade

Another visit to St German's this morning to assist in funeral arrangements for Angela Brown, who grew up as a member of the congregation and was married there nearly forty years ago. Her brother Fr Chris Lea is Curate in Caerau with Ely parish. My task was to make sure everything was in place for Angela's parish priest, another Chris, Fr Chris Burr of Lisvane, to officiate at the funeral office and preside at the requiem Eucharist, part of the service. There was yet another Chris, Canon Chris Clark an old family friend also taking part in the service plus former Vicar Fr Roy Doxey, and several more clergy in the congregation of over 180 as well.

Often, on occasions like this a quarter of the congregation will take communion, but on this occasion it was more like two thirds, as a great number of fellow church members from Lisvane and other parts of the city, who knew Angela attended as well. The home team of servers and stewards did her proud. Although a moving and sad occasion, the worshipping community was charged with consoling warmth and affection. It's amazing the way St German's and its core community generates a relaxed atmosphere for a congregation of 30-40 on the regular basis, yet can scale up with ease and respond to having 200 or 500 in church. Essentially the regular members love what they do, and this in its turn influences all who turn up and join in. For once I had a background role, and enjoyed just being part of the crew.

I returned home for a late lunch then walked into town, having decided to buy a new phone. My three year old Samsung Galaxy III Mini feels comparatively sluggish, now I'm not using the Blackberry Q10 I had for work purposes. I've passed over several opportunities for a new phone after the 18-24 month renewal cycle, not approving of early redundancy which new technological innovation pushes consumers towards. Tending to be a late adopter, I hang on to working products as long as seems useful to do so. Now I use my personal phone a lot more, the difference is noticeable between a 5 year old and a 3 year old phone. Following a recommendation from Owain, I bought a Samsung Galaxy J3, for just £85 from the EE shop on Queen Street. That's almost half the price he paid for the same phone six months ago. It's amazing how quickly phone prices tumble when new ones come out. Some 'state of the art' phone features, I just don't need. Owain says the phone camera is not good, but that's no bother to me, as I prefer a proper pocket camera with real knobs and buttons rather than a device with only touchscreen controls.

I was delighted by the way the J3 copied my installed apps and email messages and phone numbers from the old one, leaving me only to log in or re-register some of them. The only thngs that wasn't copied across were SMS messages. So, I back them up from the old phone to my PC using Samsung Kies software only to find that Kies refused to play with the new phone, requiring me to use an app called 'Smart Switch', which I also had installed, to connect with the phone. Thankfully this automatically found the text message backup just made, and transferred the content to the J3. It took me a while to achieve this. After all, it's not that often I have to do this, so I forget how to. Now the new phone is running, nothing is lost, apart from a few hours figuring it all out. Not that it matters. There was nothing on telly worth watching this evening anyway.