Last night turned out to be quite an interesting, not to say productive night, in some ways. The carers were scheduled to come along earlier than usual last night which was not really to our liking. However, as it was to be the first night of this year’s Proms, we got Meg into bed and I got our portable TV installed alongside the bed so that Meg and I could watch this together. This half worked and although Meg did not really follow the concert or go to sleep, she seemed less agitated yesterday evening which was all to the good. After I judged Meg to be asleep or at least dozing, I composed the email to the District Councillor plus County Councillor with whom I am in contact to try to get some amelioration of our ‘absence of pavement’ problem. I succeeded in getting the mail sent off to our District Councillor expressing the disappointment that our County Councillor had not been in contact and asking that the email containing the videolink be sent on to her. I also discovered what I should have no reason to know that, by default, the video files shot on one’s i[phone will have a .mov format but this is not the best format for Windows 11 to access. So I managed during the night to not only access a program which concantenated (= joined together end to end) but also managed to save the resultant file in an .MP4 format which the Windows operating system seems to handle more easily without additional codecs (whatever they are) and then the resultant single videoclip incorporated in to the mini website. All of this generated results and fairly quickly. The district councillor to whom I had sent the email replied quickly informing me that my video was being copied to the County Councillor who has responsibility for highways and transport matters. Just after lunch today, I received a phone call from the County Councillor responsible for our area of Bromsgrove so she had evidently received the additional email plus video link. The upshot of this telephone call was that she was going to have a consultation with the Highways Department and some time in the next week they try and arrange a site visit so that they could assess the situation for themselves. As far as I am concerned, this is excellent news as my previous efforts have led only to an email response and a response that this is ‘low priority to be added to our spreadsheets as and when conditions allow’ But I think the circumstances are very different this time around and I am intrigued to see if the Highways department can come up with any workable solutions. But I think the combination of a degree of political ‘oomph’ if I can put it that way together, with some specialist highways expertise stands a fighting chance of something being done this time around.
After breakfast, Meg and I went down the hill to see our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria as is our wont. I had taken with me the ‘singing toy’ that our domestic help had loaned to us for a week. This is a working doll that sways whilst singing two verses ‘When I’m 64’ which is, of course, first recorded I believe by the Beetles. The young counter assistant who often befriends us on a Saturday morning before she goes off to university in January to start a paramedical course was tickled pink and amazed when all of the oldies managed both to remember and to join in the second verse of the song. So this was the source of amusement for the day. Having got the ‘pavement’ video and videoclip accessible on my iphone, I showed it to our friends who are a little intrigued to see what transpires. I have also learned during the night that the Highway Code has been revised over the past couple of years but with recommendations of which some motorists and indeed pedestrians for that matter are unaware. The principal philosophical twist is to assume a hierarchy of ‘risk’ and those users judged to be most at risk (and Meg, in a wheelchair would come into this category) would have a degree of priority. There is some dispute wether this code/philosophy applies at the exit to a roundabout where it is unclear which principle holds good but, in general, you can see that it is an attempt by those responsible for balancing the competing interests of motorists, cyclists and pedestrians (not to mention horses and the like) to coexist well with each other. This may explain why I find some motorists very accommodating when I am pushing Meg across the road i.e. the motorists either know of or are acting in the spirit of the newly revised Highway Code.
The huge IT outage yesterday in which Microsoft’s Windows installations were badly affected by the installation of a badly behaved, software bug occasioned in a security upgrade is still wreaking havoc across the globe. Some IT experts are indicating that it might even take weeks for all systems across the globe to be brought back fully into operation. Although the immediate bug has been identified and then ‘fixed’, machines have to be rebooted and then, almost inevitably there are some settings that have to be tweaked to get back to full functionality. The NHS is warning of GP disruption next week – as travellers report long delays and lost baggage. Airline passengers have reported long delays and lost baggage, while pharmacies are trying to deal with a backlog in medicine deliveries. The Port of Dover says it is dealing with ‘hundreds of displaced’ airport passengers. In the NHS appointment systems, patient records and prescriptions all seem to have been badly hit by the outage and then there is a tremendous amount of catching up to get done on top of already overloaded systems. It could well be that some holiday plans are disrupted as well as planes and their crews may find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time so I think getting back to normal, as it were, might be quite a long slow and painful operations for millions across the globe.
© Mike Hart [2024]