The two days of Christmas and Boxing Day have left me feeling pretty tired, if not exhausted, so I for one am happy that these two days are over. New Year is another matter because it always feels like a fresh start and the days are getting that little smidgeon longer. So I intended to get to bed early last night but could not resist watching the second half (again) of 'The Queen' portraying how Tony Blair exerted his new found authority as the successful winner of a landslide election to get the Queen to leave Balmoral and come back to London to mourn the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. This was so excellently portrayed it was almost hypnotic not to watch again with Helen Mirren playing the queen superbly. Meanwhile I am reserving the newly made edition of 'Outnumbered' to be accessed on iPlayer later on in the day.
When I wish to look at the current state of a popular debate, I sometimes stumble across the pages of 'Quora' and these I accessed recently to assess the latest received opinion on the use of the 'Comic Sans MS' font which is widely available thanks to MicroSoft. Professional graphic designers hate this font for all kinds of technical reasons and feel that its use should either be banned or severely restricted - on the other hand, there are those who (like myself) feel that under the right circumstances, the font serves a legitimate purpose. One has to say that this is a very informal font and its prime use, for example, is to compose invitations to a child's birthday party written as though by the child rather than the parent. But the font should never be used (as it occasionally is) for serious documents such as any kind of legal work or document for public consumption. There is an interesting twist to the debate, though, that it is said that the font is particularly liked by and useful to dyslexics, perhaps because the characters are drawn in such a way that a 'b' and a 'd' cannot be confused with each other. There is no hard scientific research to demonstrate that this is in fact the case but from a website designed to give practical advice to dyslexics (DyslexicHelp), I gleaned the following: 'So, how does Comic Sans help people with dyslexia? Research has shown that it reduces cognitive load and visual processing issues, which are common challenges for people with dyslexia. The irregular shapes and varying sizes of letters in other fonts can cause confusion and make it difficult to distinguish between letters. Comic Sans, on the other hand, has a more uniform shape and size, which makes it easier to read ...In a study conducted by the British Dyslexia Association, participants were found to read faster and more accurately in Comic Sans than in Arial or Times New Roman. This is just one example of how Comic Sans can be a helpful tool for people with dyslexia.' Once I have found a way to embed the correct code into a WordPress page, I shall attempt to illustrate this for you but I have to find a way to do it first.
This morning, I was happily chugging along getting dressed and preparing for the care workers to turn up at 8.15 when the doorbell rang half an hour earlier with one of the managers and another care assistant. When I expressed my surprise at seeing them, they informed me that the schedules had changed at 11.00pm last night but nobody hd actually informed me (This type of occurrence is rather too common these days) Meg and I breakfasted as normal and then made our way down the hill in not particularly pleasant weather. There we met up with one of our regulars and had a pleasant coffee before I made a purchase of a commodity of which I had run out (sweeteners) and then we got home. It was not too long before the care workers arrived for the lunch time call, and after they had departed I got busy poaching some mackerel fillets in milk (which I do to avoid fishy smells permeating the house) and then using up some sprouts together with a baked potato. One of the best bits of our afternoon TV showing was a by now traditional viewing of 'The Boy, the Mole, The Fox and the Horse' which is a delightfully illustrated cartoon film derived from a little book of the same name and first shown (and repeated) last year. After this we watched a little of 'Jurassic Park' before the teatime carer called around. This is quite a young, college student carer but we get on very well with her (and she with us) so caring for Meg together is quite a pleasure. In the late afternoon, we noticed that we were about two thirds of the way through Martin Clunes in 'Goodbye, Mr. Chips' which Meg and I watched about a month or so ago. However, we did not recognise some of the dramatic final scenes which were well worth watching so perhaps our earlier viewing had been truncated for whatever reason.
Meanwhile, although Christmas is a sort of closed system for politics, a delicious row has erupted between the leaders of the Conservative and the Reform party. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform, has threatened to take legal action against Tory leader Kemi Badenoch if she does not apologise for accusing him of publishing a 'fake' ticker showing Reform UK's membership increasing to overtake the Conservatives. The Reform UK leader has reacted furiously to Ms Badenoch's assertion that he was 'manipulating [his] own supporters' with a ticker that is 'coded to tick up automatically' after it showed the insurgent right-wing party had gone past 131,680 members - the number of eligible Conservative Party members in its leadership election in the autumn. Whatever the truth or falsity of these various assertions, those of us of a non-conservative political persuasion can only take the kind of delight in the discomfiture of right wing parties that he Germans well describe in the word 'schadenfreude' for which there is no exact translation apart from 'a malicious delight in the misfortune of others'
© Mike Hart [2024]