Call of Duty - Israeli style

Another day of sunshine, clouds and gusts of wind. With no sermon to prepare for Sunday, I had time to  prepare texts for next Sunday's Eucharist after breakfast. Thanks to a tip off from Kath, I bought a tee shirt for Clare at the online Abba Voyage merchandise site. No idea how long it will take to turn up in the post. The only one she fancied had the logo 'Dancing Queen' emblazoned on the front according to Kath. I hope I picked the right size!

Then a long walk in the park before a late snack lunch, and got supper ready for cooking. While I waited for Clare's return, I watched another episode of Manayek. She enjoyed the concert, although she needed to wear ear-plugs and wear sunglasses to cope with the loudness of the music and intensity of the light show. A good reason why I wouldn't bother to attend that sort of spectacle. I often find cinema surround sound so uncomfortably loud that it detracts from my enjoyment of the movie. My hearing is still fairly good but I don't want it to worsen. I still have tinnitus in my right ear since we watched the 2001 Monaco Grand Prix motor race from a millionaire's high rooftop garden near the Casino. We were given ear plugs but one just wouldn't fit in my right ear, and it's never been the same since.

We ate supper while listening to the Archers. In a recent plot development a soirée has been arranged by a young character for a group reading of the book 'Lark Rise to Candleford' involving several villagers and this prompts the idea of repeating this at the up-coming Harvest supper. Over the past few weeks the BBC drama department has been promoting this performance as a stand alone Sunday afternoon play, just as it did with a village play based on the Canterbury Tales three years ago. It's an interesting project for the cast of the world's longest standing soap opera to take on. 

After we'd eaten I finished the final two episodes of Manayek, a series of ten episodes, and was pretty impressed that considering six or eight episodes per series is the norm, it held my attention throughout. It was a police procedural of a very complex kind, featuring corruption at every level of the police force, judiciary and politicians. It involved investigations involving several separate departments - Local Policing, CID, International Crime, Anti-terrorism, State Security and the Prosecutor's Office, each with their own hierarchy, ambitions and betrayals, secrets to keep, and no mutual accountability. Corruption and serious crime exposed, and then covered up for fear that the whole system would lose credibility and collapse. Too big to fail, as the saying goes.

As in UK anti-corruption drama series 'Call of Duty' much was made of interviews and conversations with colleagues, but with relatively little violence or exciting chase sequences, and almost nothing to do with sex, which makes quite a change, or religion for that matter, and may reflect the Israeli market for which it was made. Interesting to see the diverse range of characters portraying police officers representing the plurality of the Israeli secular state. 

It seems there's a second series, but as this has only recently popped up on Walter Presents, it may be some time before there's a second series follow-up. The only other Israeli series I've watched was 'Shtisel' some years back, about the life and loves of a Jerusalem Haredi extended family with inter-generational tension and social ambition in play, all very bourgeois in its way. Manayek portrays the dark underside of revered public institutions.

Picasa revisited

Having woken up and breakfasted at the usual time, I spent the morning receiving and sending messages, some of them to do with setting up communication channels for Sway information. Then I cooked a lunch of sardines and veg, rather hastily, as my concentration was elsewhere, but it turned out all right, if late. They were really tasty. It made me miss Spain.

During the morning, I printed off Sunday's sermon, and then decided to hunt for an an installation file for the desktop version of Picasa to run on my desktop. It's a digital antique but contains some useful features absent from the phased out web version and its successor Google Photos. It took me a while to find it on an archive hard drives. Installation didn't take long, but it took even longer, half a day in fact, for it to scan my OneDrive account to collect thousands of linked thumbnails of every graphic file it contained. A useful tool, worth having as a stand alone graphic editor and file manager.

I went for a walk after lunch. I took my Sony Alpha 68 and made some progress in understanding how to get good results from a 50mm prime lens. I took a decent photo of a butterfly I've not seen before and have yet to identify. Funny how I've come across several different butterflies this week alone, more than during the rest of the summer.

After supper, hunting for something new to watch I came across 'Lolita Lobosco', an Italian crimmie about a detective Superintendent who returns to her beautiful native port city of Bari in Puglia after working up north for decades. She had grown up in the heart of the urban village at the heart of the city, so there are flashbacks that help to explain her as a person. I enjoyed hearing the Italian spoke clear and found I could understand most of it, thanks to similarities with Spanish.

The crime story line is worthy of Montalbano, but it's set in what is in effect a family comedy with superb dialogue and a deep dive into social and domestic customs. I've not ever laughed as much at a crimmie. It rang true for a boy who grew up in a village. Delightful to watch. Refreshing. A great treat for the weekend.

Unfinished stories

Late last night I had a request for help with editing the order of service for her son's funeral, and that was my first task of the day after breakfast. Meanwhile another request to take a funeral came in. This time a solicitor is making funeral arrangements on behalf of a nonogenarian lady with no next of kin. The last occasion I had to take funerals with no mourners was in the St Paul's area parish in Bristol, and that concerned destitute homeless men.

Then a walk to St Catherine's to attend the midweek Eucharist and catch up with friends over a coffee in the church hall afterwards. There were eight of us altogether, and rather than sit in the main hall, we used a side room with south facing windows, as it was a bright blue sky sunny day. Too cold to sit outside, so this was the nearest we could get to sitting outdoors.

The weekly veggie bags have re-started after the Christmas break and I went and collected ours before lunch. Finding our labelled bag is harder than ever. I feel sure there are more bags full of fresh picked veggies crammed into the locker than there used to be. The Coed Organics scheme is quite a success.

I walked down to the Castle in the afternoon, and returned through the North Road entrance to Bute Park and along the periphery all the way to Blackweir Bridge. As I walked past the Royal Welsh College with the sun heading toward the horizon, several song thrushes were singing loudly above the footpath, each out of sight in a different group of very tall trees. It's as if they are competing for attention with the  sounds of music being rehearsed by students in rooms overlooking the park. As the sun reached the horizon, the temperature dropped and a bank of mist began to form across the fields for a second evening. This is winter at its best.

I made a home bereavement visit before supper, the second this week. When the next of kin are older and triple jabbed, and there are no children around, it doesn't feel too much of a risk. Older folk are keen on self preservation, and on not infecting others, less carefree, or is it careless than  some younger folk. The deceased was the middle one of three brothers all of whom worked as lock gate keepers in Cardiff Docks. They had lived through the entire Bay Barrage construction phase before retirement, what an extraordinary working experience.

After supper I finished watching 'When the dust settles', a thoughtful observation of people traumatized in different ways by a terrorist attack. In times it was difficult to follow as several of the story threads featured women with long fair hair, making it easy to confuse their stories. Some story threads had a  happy outcome others were sad, several inconclusive. 

The story telling left viewers without closure. Ten often highly intense episodes left me wanting more, wondering how some story lines might continue. In other words, portrayal got me interested in them, caring about fictional characters. The last series which had me caring about its characters was the American hospital drama 'New Amsterdam', which now runs to three long series. Is this inconclusive ending another bid for attention from film investors and producers? We'll see.

Boris Johnson has admitted his presence at a Downing Street drinks party during the first covid lockdown but insists that the independent conduct enquiry reports back to Parliament before considering his position. As it could take a week or so, and public feeling as well as the feelings of many in his own as well as other political party members is already at a high level of indication, one wonders if he will fall on his sword or wait to be stabbed in the back, before grass roots Tory support evaporates completely.