As it is half term, a slightly different pattern structures the days ahead. So yesterday would normally have been my Pilates class but my instructor is taking a week off with her family whilst they visit Devon and this has entailed a ‘free’ day for me. But as it happens, I have made an arrangement to visit a lady who is part of our parish community but who spends a lot of the day caring for her aged father who had a stroke but who, nonetheless she brings along to the service every Sunday morning. Seeing her manipulate her father into the car whilst the wheelchair got folded and put into the back of her car, I offered some assistance as I know from my own experience how carefully organised these activities have got to be. She was handling these tasks with great aplomb and when we subsequently met with each whilst having our Sunday morning tea and biscuits, I offered her some of my batches of home-made soup and we made an arrangement to have coffee with each other which I hope might be a little sort of respite for her. So we have arranged to meet in the middle of the day and fortunately Pilates has been cancelled for the week which accommodates this. Yesterday was the morning in which my domestic help (and long term friend) calls around and, no doubt, we will have a good debrief on how the cooking went over the weekend and we can restore the dining room table to its normal set of accoutrements. As the room is irregularly used, I have remembered to turn the radiator valve down to zero as there is no point in heating an unused room. I remember that when I was an adolescent in Leeds and used to meet for a drink with a group of old school friends (about 8 or so in total) the landlady in our chosen pub let us have the exclusive use of a room in the pub and she used to light a fire for us so that the room would be heated when we met in it each Thursday night. The evening promises to be an interesting one on the TV. Sky Arts are starting to broadcast the remake that has been made of Amadeus (the biopic of Mozart’s adult life) and there will be a series extending over the weeks. Paul Bettany receives praise for a wax-like, committed portrayal of Salieri, while Will Sharpe plays Mozart as a more arrogant, flat genius rather than the vulnerable, manic prodigy captured by Tom Hulce in 1984. On forums and review sites, opinions lean heavily toward the sentiment that the new series is ‘not a patch on the original’, with critics noting that it feels padded, sidesteps the central music, and flattens the metaphysical war between Salieri and God into a simpler rivalry. Opinions are mixed, with some viewers defending the right of a fresh adaptation to exist while others find the script vapid and unnecessary. But when I was checking out on the transmission time for the programme, I noticed that in the hour beforehand there is going to an hour-long programme devoted to the writing and first performance of Handel’s ‘Messiah’, although I know the outlines of the story already. Before I went to bed the evening before yesterday, I stumbled across a YouTube presentation the content of which I found very disturbing. According to this video, modern online (smart) TVs collect extensive data on your viewing habits, device usage, and sometimes ambient audio, though whether it constitutes ‘spying’ depends on how you define the term. Most smart TVs use Automatic Content Recognition (ACR)technology to take continuous screenshots and audio samples of whatever is on your screen—whether from built-in streaming apps, game consoles via HDMI, or external USB drives—to build a digital fingerprint of your viewing habits. Many sets scan your home network to identify nearby Wi-Fi networks, signal strengths, IP addresses, and other connected devices (like phones or smartwatches). Voice-activated remotes and built-in mics listen for wake words or record commands, and some research into specific brand vulnerabilities has shown local caching or continuous background listening concerns. Manufacturers (such as Samsung, LG, Roku, and Vizio) bundle this data with demographics and sell it to data brokers and ad networks to serve personalised ads. All of this I found shocking and it was claimed that modern smart TVs are often sold at cost price or even a slight loss on the manufacturing price so that extra money can be ‘scraped’ from the selling of demographic data to data brokers and ad networks. But the programme did indicate the ways in which this could be turned off although needless to say the commands to do so are buried deep within the settings and it is doubtful that many viewers are aware of this ‘surveilance’in their own homes, let alone how to switch it off. I managed to switch off the controls in my recently acquired Samsung and a similar voice recognition facility within YouTube before I took to my bed for the night.
This morning, I experienced a pleasant surprise when my son and daughter-in-law unexpectedly called around. My son was donating to me a beautifully warm piece of knitwear made by the ‘Weird Fish’ firm, of which I already have one item. With the gift from my son, I now have a couple of items from this outlet which means that one is in the wash, I have another ready to wear. After I had lunched on another portion of lamb stew (what a surprise!) I set off to visit my fellow parishioner whose house I have not visited before but is only about a mile and a half from where I live. When I got to the principal access road, there was an enormous traffic jam so I turned the car around and set off by going a different way. Again I was thwarted because this particular road was blocked off in one direction so I had to turn back a second time and go back to my original route. The traffic had started to clear by this time so I got a phone message to my friend explaining my delay and managed to reach her only about fifteen minutes later than planned. We spent a pleasant afternoon chatting about things in our past lives (mainly family histories) and then the carers came to administer to my friend’s father so I made the journey back home with no difficulties at all. One of the important international events happening today are the critical elections being held in Israel. Determining the outcome of Israeli elections is not straightforward, as it is all but impossible for one party to get a majority and coalition talks may take months. In 2020, the formation of an eight-party coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz took some 76 days. That said, we will get an idea of who could form the government around 10pm local time (8pm UK time) when the polls close and broadcaster publish exit polls. The final tally is expected to be revealed by 30 October and official results should be published on 4 November. The Israelis have quite a pure form of PR and every government practically from the creation of the state has been formed from a variety of parties. The small Religious Rights party which has evolved into other forms of small, right wing, stridently Zionist political factions has nearly always been a part of a ruling coalition. Some political analysts have pointed out these pure forms of PR can give rise to very small parties exerting a great deal of political leverage if they have to be incorporated in a coalition to make a viable government. These elections being the first after the 7th October, 2023 incursion by Hamas are being regarded as extremely critical and the results may presage the type of society that Israelis want their country to become in the years ahead.