{"id":2879,"date":"2021-08-11T19:42:21","date_gmt":"2021-08-11T19:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2879"},"modified":"2021-08-12T20:01:37","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T20:01:37","slug":"wednesday-1th-august-2021-day-513","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/11\/wednesday-1th-august-2021-day-513\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, 11th August, 2021 [Day 513]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was an ‘ordinary’ sort of day in which it looked as the weather was more-or-less set fair but with the threat of a shower. Meg and I decided to risk going down for a walk without the benefit of rainwear as it so\u00a0potentially humid that outerwear can make you feel quite uncomfortable. We were a little delayed going\u00a0down to the park as we needed to update our Waitrose<\/em> order and I also needed to spend some time getting my accounts up-to-date. I left Meg on the park bench, complete with a copy of\u00a0yesterday’s Guardian<\/em> and this works out very well as Meg can immerse herself in the newspaper for the 20 minutes in which I am away. Also, if she looks up from the newspaper, she can probably see me\u00a0enter the park by the main (lower) entrance and observe my progress up the hill to our traditional bench. On the way home, I called in at the house of our South African friend who had texted me the other day desperately\u00a0searching for a handyman who can do a few jobs for her. I ws delighted to be able to\u00a0recommend someone who does little (and not so little) jobs for us when the need arises. This afternoon, I gave my rusted spade a final attack and that is all I now intend to do with it – practically all of the blade is now in a sufficiently good condition for me to want to keep it that way.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There have been several reports in the last few days of people who are\u00a0<\/span>critically ill, and some at the point of death, who have been\u00a0active COVID deniers but\u00a0have now seen the error of their ways and are\u00a0pleading with medical staff to give them a vaccine now in the hope that it save them (which of course it won’t) This, for me, raises the interesting question of why\u00a0many people believe, almost implicitly, in social media rather than the views of the ‘experts’ who often appear on the Main Street Media channels. \u00a0For me, the\u00a0problem is not who some people believe in the social media –\u00a0after all, there have always been pockets of society of groups who are\u00a0prepared to believe conspiracy theories. Perhaps some of the\u00a0explanation here is that in a world where individuals perceive themselves to be always at the ‘receiving’ end of the system, then a belief in what might seem to be outlandish is a way of exerting some degree of power or even control against the over-arching belief systems within a society. The problem for me is not why\u00a0some<\/em> people over-rely upon the social media but why a\u00a0substantial minority (and, according to some reports, a majority) of people have such implicit faith in social media. Without descending into huge academic debates about the\u00a0presence of culture wars, the following\u00a0explanation I\u00a0believe had a lot of traction. The point about social media is that views are\u00a0promulgated not just by a few powerful sources (the Main Street Media) but stories are shared\u00a0between friends, colleagues and family members. This can then boost the\u00a0credibility of the contents of social media \u00a0with readers. <\/span>This may be \u00a0due to the fact that people may simply “think differently” when using social media from how they might think when watching the evening news. Why wouldn\u2019t we want to believe a story our friends shared?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Meg and I feel we have had a pretty ‘good’ day today and it is an interesting question of what makes for a ‘good’ versus a ‘not-so-good’ day. I think the answer is that is a good thing to set yourself some limited objectives of what you want to achieve in a day (which might be as mundane as completing a set of household chores) or doing some tidying up (or de-cluttering might be a\u00a0more\u00a0accurate term). Then if\u00a0you complete your limited objectives you are left with a slightly virtuous feeling – conversely, if you had set\u00a0yourself fairly\u00a0ambitious objectives, then you might only\u00a0manage to achieve some of them and are left with a vague feeling of\u00a0dissatisfaction that one has not\u00a0<\/span>achieved more. So the secret of\u00a0contentment might be to set yourself certain\u00a0goals (e.g. a walk of a certain length – but not too far to leave you feeling exhausted for the rest of the day) and take satisfaction from achieving them.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Tonight as I was reading my emails, I received a letter from my consultant giving me the\u00a0results of the investigations I had about a fortnight ago. The\u00a0letter was generally reassuring but he does have a tendency to write things like (but ‘nothing for you to worry about<\/em>‘ which does indicate some\u00a0anomalies of which one is ignorant) One test\u00a0<\/span>result has still be returned but so far, so good. I\u00a0must say I am impressed\u00a0by the level of monitoring that the NHS provides – one does wonder, though, about the fate of those with lingering or undiagnosed symptoms that could have been\u00a0targeted\u00a0much earlier were it not for the pandemic.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was an ‘ordinary’ sort of day in which it looked as the weather was more-or-less set fair but with the threat of a shower. Meg and I decided to risk going down for a walk without the benefit of rainwear as it so\u00a0potentially humid that outerwear can make you feel quite uncomfortable. We were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2879"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2888,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2879\/revisions\/2888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}