The day did not start well when Meg's hospital bed refused to respond at all to the control unit which raises and lowers it. I searched for various bits of documentation including perusing all of the various ID labels stuck on the bed itself but it was not at all evident how I was to summon help. I did remember, though, that the person who installed it did show me a little key fob type thing that you used to reset the controls when necessary. This did the trick to my evident relief. Then after it had rained so much during the night and the weather was still so gloomy, I thought I would consult the weather app on my iPhone. But it had somehow disappeared from my screen although I could find it in the List of Apps buried within the menu structure. But one of the carers who seemed quite IT savvy with iPhones managed to resurrect the app for me and restore it to its rightful place on my Home screen. I know that the latest version of the Apple operating system is grouping similar apps into an appropriate group and this may have happened but at least that is another thing put to rights. After we had breakfast, Meg and I listened to Brahms 'German Requiem' which we always find tranquil and soothing and is readily available to us on YouTube. We then needed to look at the weather to sort out exactly what little trip we were going to make today. Up to a point, our minds were made up for as our carers who give us details of the next visit 'along the line' indicated that indicated that would be back at 11.30 later in the morning. We started off down to Waitrose with the finest of rain in what I believe the Irish call a 'soft' day and although we got a little damp, it was nothing like a soaking. On our way down the hill, we bumped into our Italian friend who was just on her way out of the house to attend the funeral of a near neighbour. In view of the rain, we only had the briefest of chats, grabbed our newspaper and made up the hill hoping that we would get back in time. But I had been sent a text saying that we had only one carer for Meg's lunchtime call and could I assist but in the event, she was 40 minutes after the scheduled time. This is all par for the course but it does make's one day difficult to schedule.As soon as the carer had left, I pressed on lunch for us which turned out to be quite a tasty affair. But Meg was fast asleep (rather unusually) and did not fancy any of her lunch today which I did not press on her. As she is only two thirds of my body weight and she expends practically no energy during the day, I have a feeling I probably give her slightly too much food in any case so I did not think the absence of a meal would do any great harm. In between other jobs this morning, I filled in a form on the web (which is the way to contact the doctor in our surgery these days) and requested a prescription of which we had run out (through no fault of our own but rather the suppliers) and an additional anti-histamine which I have a notion may just help to get Meg off to sleep at nights.
The Israelis have been celebrating their success in killing the leader of Hezbollah as if there was no tomorrow, I have seen pictures of Israelis in a beach resort raising their glasses in celebration and, by all accounts, a similar mood has been exhibited in the various TV studios - I must say that find this all rather distasteful. The Israeli army are poised to enter Lebanon and their special forces are already operating inside the country. I ask myself whether it is a point of international that firing rockets into each others's territory whilst undoubtedly an act of aggression is not regarded as an act of war but rolling one's tanks in an invasion must surely be so. The Israelis are now fighting on multiple fronts (Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen) but one has the terrible foreboding that all of these military gains in the short run are not designed to elicit a peace in the longer term.
Now that Maggie Smith is no longer with us, I noticed when we popped onto YouTube this afternoon that one of Maggie Smith's definitive films - the 'Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'- was being given an airing. I expect that in the next few days, we may have even more of Maggie Smith's masterpieces rolled out including, perhaps, her portrayal of the vagrant old lady in 'The Lady in the Van' which is essentially a true story. We seem to have a tradition in this country of cerebrating the young talent whilst actresses are in their 20's and 30's and then follows a fallow period in their middle age. But once they reach sixty plus, a whole new vista beckons to them and this probably the case that Maggie Smith made more memorable performances when she over sixty than she did in the 20 years beforehand. The afternoon ended with an unexpected bonus for us. On looking at what YouTube was showing, one choice was an 'An Evening with Kenneth Williams' Ken Williams was a regular on the 'Round the Horne' comedy shows broadcast on Radio 4 in the 1960's. Rambling Syd Rumpo was a folk singer character created for Kenneth Williams for the BBC Radio comedy series 'Round the Horne'. He sang suggestive and humorous songs with invented or double-entendre words, such as 'moolies' and 'nadgers'. So we had a rendition of one of these songs which evidently we have not heard for some decades now but I imagine they are readily accessible on YouTube. Some of the characters performed by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick deployed some outrageous homosexual slang words then in vogue within the gay community but the BBC executives had no idea of the import of what was being said and thought it was just two comic male actors making up funny words that no one would understand. We listened to these shows avidly when they were first broadcast in the 1960's and to the subsequent repeats when the BBC dared to repeat them.
© Mike Hart [2024]