A day of qualified release

A strange 'four seasons' weather day with sunshine, clouds, gusts of wind, rain and bouts of hail catching us out across much of the country. A day too when more of the covid restrictions are being lifted around the nations of the U.K. Wales is now at Level Two in the hierarchy of restrictions. This permits pubs and restaurants to serve people indoors, small groups of people, not just those in your family bubble to meet, hug each other. Weddings and funerals can take place with thirty people as well as the infection rate is now as low as it was last summer. 

Having said that there are still infection hot-spots where the Indian covid variants are multiplying fast, and being tackled with a fast response in terms of test track, trace and isolate, plus mass vaccination in critical places. The news media talks about it being done with military precision and accuracy. Perhaps that's because the military's logistic resource and management is the basis upon which medics, both civilian and military can deliver this vital intervention and head off another wave of infection. The government has promised easing of restrictions on this date, but warned it isn't risk free. If there was any sign this tactical intervention to curb the Indian variant wasn't working, it might be necessary to halt progress. It's still a time to 'be sober be vigilant, because your adversary ... is about ...'  But, so far so good.

While the British Army is focused on helping to save lives, the Israeli army is taking lives and destroying homes and community structures in the Gaza Strip. 212 Palestinians killed among them about 40 children, and 12 Israelis killed, among them 2 children. There is no justification on either side for the loss of these lives, whether or not the adults regarded themselves as civilian or military. A dialogue of the deaf has gone on for the past eighty odd years between essentially tribal cultures that have been opposed to each other on record in the Bible for the past two and a half to three thousand years. Distrust and resentment seems to be embedded in their collective DNA. Will reconciliation between the historic tribes ever be possible? Or are they destined to play out this pathogenic script until the end of time? It's unfathomable.

Here at home, emails have been exchanged over the past 24 hours between volunteers in the Parish willing to join a rota to maintain on-line Morning Prayer, once Emma and Benedict have gone to their new duties. It's a good initiative to support Mthr Frances when she returns to duty. She won't need to 'hit the ground running', as the saying goes. I'd like to see us switch to on-line audio, and keep video for presentations in which the visual is a key element. Just doing audio is much simpler and less resource hungry, when WhatsApp on a phone so quickly eats up available memory, and requires frequent maintenance. Unfortunately, the habits formed in the past year aren't easily given up. At least it's clear the Parish on-line offer needs reviewing and revising now restrictions are being lifted.

Thanks to the antibiotics prescribed yesterday, the inflammation of Clare's eyelid has started to subside, and she has an appointment tomorrow morning at the School of Optometry to check this out, and to pick up a new pair of bi-focal specs.

I spent time this evening getting my Windows PC up to date and trying to get it to run faster, after reading an article with a series of suggestions about tweaks to achieve this. It needs such a lot of maintenance to optimise performance. According to articles I've read lately my machine is under-powered to meet the demands of current users for slick on-line conferencing and learning, not to mention video editing. The more we expect these devices to do for us, the higher the specifications needed. Linux would make better use of the system resources. I'm thinking that I may be better off making it a dual boot system, with a data partition in common, so that I can continue to use the Windows video editing apps I've learned how to use. Better than finding a Linux open source equivalent and spending hours mastering it. But do I have enough confidence and know-how to go the dual-boot route? That is the question.

Workaround

It rained quite a lot in the night and a strong wind blew. Doors not properly shut banged reacting to strong  gusts in our house and next door on both sides. Mid morning, the rain stopped the cloud broke and the sun shone through intermittently, but the cold wind persisted. Before lunch I transcribed another day from my travel journal, a day when I went on my own by minibus from Amman down to the Dead Sea. I must have forgotten to take my camera with me that day, as I have no photos to remind me of where I walked there. 

My memory of the journey is quite hazy, so I appreciated revisiting the trip with my written recollection. I took sixty eight photos on my Jordanian trip, and another thirty the week after when I visited Palestine and Jerusalem, so perhaps I ran out of film that week. They are all digitized now, but the digital quality, from scans made ten years ago isn't a patch on what's possible today. I'd love to make another trip the the Holy Land and Jordan if the pandemic passes and we are once more free to travel.

It was very cold and windy when I walked after lunch, which drove me to return home early, a couple of kilometers short of my daily goal. While I was out I had an idea about how to sort out a problem my sister June has in finding photos in her Google archive. She's using a digital camera that's so old that the CMOS battery in it no longer keeps information once the battery is drained. When it's been unused for a while and the battery is re-charged, the date needs re-setting, or else all the photos show a date in 2008. She has forgotten how to change the date, and in any case it's easy to forget that you need to keep on resetting the date every time the battery drains, which is often on a thirteen year old camera.

Photos with ancient file dates are automatically sorted and display a very long way down in the archive list. I had the idea of making a special album folder, and then searching for the 'lost' photos she needs and adding them. The album still displays inconveniently far down in the list, unless you include a photo with a current date, then the folder displays on-screed without the need to scroll. That'll save her some frustration, hopefully.

We watched most of a movie from 2008 called 'Hancock and Joan' about the melancholic comic genius Tony Hancock. Ken Stott, the actor who play the part strongly resembled him and imitated perfectly his characteristic voice and mannerisms. Then I went out again late evening for a brisk twenty minutes around the block under a sky that was clearing of clouds and revealing the stars. There wasn't a soul around, not even a night time jogger. If the pubs, restaurants, cinemas and theatres are all shut, there are few reasons left to be out and about. 

Rainy day watching

Another day of rain, cheered with a pancake breakfast. When it slackened off for a while, we went for a walk around the park, and I checked the crab apple trees and picked a pocketful to take back for testing. The hundred grams or so I collected cooked into a puree with quite an interesting flavour, not quite ripe enough yet to harvest for optimum flavour. 

Later in the day we watched the first three episodes of a DVD box set of an Israeli family comedy TV series called 'The Shtisels'. It's about the lives and loves of a Haredi family living in modern Jerusalem, a delightful portrayal of members of a family with a strong commitment to living a devout religious life. It's funny, and not because it mocks its subjects. In fact it's a sensitive and sympathetic portrayal of people and relationships with all their quirks, strengths and weaknesses. I can't imagine how it would be received by a person with no knowledge of Jewish spirituality and culture. It's certainly an advantage that I had to study Jewish religion and practice when I trained to teach RE forty years ago. We had Orthodox Jewish friends in those days as well. Understanding the context, was a source of extra viewing pleasure.

Cousin Dianne accidentally bought the set with French subtitles, and had to re-order the English version as she was evaluating the series as a candidate for a TV award, and didn't trust her French reading ability sufficiently to do justice to the work, so rather than send the set back, she gave it to us. Having watched the first three episodes in one sitting, I can understand her difficulty, as the pace of the Yiddish and/or Israeli Hebrew dialogue renders in French sub-titles at a lively pace for on screen reading. I don't think I missed much. In fact, I was surprised at how easy I found it. 

The French text is clear, and I think my comprehension has benefited from having done a complete French revision course on Duo Lingo a couple of years ago. I keep up my daily Spanish practice on Duo Lingo, and that seems to have benefited my French comprehension, due to the similarity of some vocabulary and turns of phrase. When you learn more than one language in the same language group, knowledge of one benefits the other, it seems, despite the challenge of keeping them separate in use. Clare doesn't find it so easy to read subtitles with her eyesight deteriorating, but found herself listening to the Yiddish instead, as many of its words are derived from the German. 

As it's a domestic comedy, it's mostly set indoors, but the occasional simple street scene is very evocative of the city I remember from twenty years ago, when I had a two month sabbatical in Jerusalem before we moved to Monaco. It awakened in me a longing to return there if the pandemic passes, if my health doesn't deteriorate. I'd like to return again as an independent traveller, rather than as a packaged tourist. I never got around to visiting Nazareth, Galilee, Haifa and the coast, or Gaza, or Jericho. Will it be ever possible?