I am so relieved that the intense cold spell now seems to be over – my Smart speaker which is interrogated each morning as I make my early morning cup of tea tells me that the temperature today is 2° but predicted to rise to 11° throughout the day, which is surely to be welcomed. I have started off the day in a really positive mood so that that even a little mishap with a lampshade is not going to perturb me. Incidentally, the positive march of technology strides on. I have a flashlight which is incredibly useful in case of emergencies/peering into dark corners but I cannot find the recharging cable for it anywhere – I suppose it will turn up but a frantic search of all of my cables used for charging phones and the like has not revealed it. I think a flashlight like this is quite an essential household commodity so I ordered a new one, hoping that the new cable supplied would fit both but the old flashlight was ordered 10 years ago in any case. My newly arrived flashlight arrived yesterday and I could not be more pleased with it. It had a 2 year warranty, cost one half as much as I paid ten years ago but is three times the brightness. As a bonus (if I lose the cable again which I will not, as I am going to find a little bag to keep the requisite cable in – rechargeable like a phone). Then I can also put normal AA batteries in rather than the re-chargeables. So I am mega pleased with this purchase, as you might imagine.
A bizarre international story has emerged this morning. We know that Donald Trump earnestly desires the Nobel Peace prize which is particularly ironic given his warlike intentions towards Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, Syria, Iran etc. etc. The organisation that oversees the Nobel Peace Prize has dismissed claims that Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado could give her recent award to President Donald Trump. The Norwegian Nobel Institute said Friday that once a Peace Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, transferred, or shared.’ The decision is final and stands for all time,’ it said. The statement comes after Ms Machado said she would like to give or share the prize with Mr Trump, who oversaw a US operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.
This is the time of year for New Year resolutions and these nearly always revolve around four themes which are diet (including drink), exercise, better habits to develop and finally new skills to acquire. I am certainly on board with the first three of these but I suppose I now have no excuse not to try to develop some keyboard skills, given that I have my Casio upon which to play (not to mention the organ acquired through eBay for £15.75 but hardly played) I suspect that I need to devote 30 minutes or so each and every day at about the same time to develop my musical skills but I am never going to make concert pianist standard. I have concentrated in the past upon slow and reflective pieces such as Offenbach’s ‘Barcarolle’, Shenandoah (the traditional American folk song dating from the early 19th century but actually of unknown or at least disputed origin) Even ‘Ode to Joy’ can be very simply played with just one hand and hardly anything to remember. My son and I had some plans that he and wife would pop over for some Sunday lunch but it was not to be. The area to which he has moved which is only some five miles away is in the lee of the Lickey Hills (between Bromsgrove and Birmingham) and although not being very high, it certainly means that the area as a whole catches the snow and it had frozen on top of that as well, so digging one’s way was an impossibility. I was philosophical about this but it did make for a much longer and lonesome weekend as my other nearby friends seem to be either away on holiday or confined to the house with cold symptoms. In the evening, there was a film about the pilgrimage routes across Europe by Simon Reeve and he focused on the Camino de Santiago, and the pilgrimage site of San Giovanni Rotondo which is devoted to the Italian Saint Padre Pio in which the Italian authorities have invested enormous amounts of money in the construction of modern buildings to make this pilgrimage site a centre for internal Italian tourism. Naturally the program had to finish with a trip to Rome and to the Vatican seeing the shots of pilgrims in the square outside the Cathedral of Santiago earlier in the programme brought memories flooding back, given that Meg and I used to visit this cathedral every year that we visited in friends in La Coruna. After viewing this program, I had every intention of having a relatively early night by going to bed at about 9.30pm. But before I went to bed, I consulted my emails and discovered a very long and informative email from an old friend of whom so I felt constrained to answer at equal length so it was practically midnight when I actually limb up the wooden hills.
The liberal American media outlets that I access on a daily basis on ‘YouTube‘ are still filled with righteous indignation over the shooting dead of an an American woman who was attempting to flee in her car from the clutches of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) Despite the efforts of the Trump establishment who are attempting to denigrate the woman and called her a ‘domestic terrorist’ a whole volume of video clip exists which proves pretty definitively that the American woman was shot in the head with three shots by an ICE officer who may well traumatised by a previous incident some six months earlier. The Trump regime have already announced that the ICE officer will not be charged with any offence or otherwise investigated and the FBI have announced that they will conduct their own investigation which is a bit of a farce because the ICE officer has already been declared innocent by the president, the vice-present and the head of Homeland Security. It appears to many that the ICE force, using heavy handed tactics and often with no identification marks and masked to boot, are acting as Trump’s own private army to spread fear through all of the cities which are Democrat controlled and where immigration, both legal and undocumented, is high.