According to the weather app on my phone it’s colder here in Greater Manchester than it is in Edinburgh, which seems illogical. But then, there are places in Scotland where palms grow. So I reckon they just have odd weather. And then there’s the case of a friend of mine who lives on one of the Greek islands; she was complaining this morning about how cold it was, unusually cold for them at 6°, which is what my weather app tells me we have here at present (up from -1° when I got up). Somehow you don’t expect it to be cold in Greece. Late in the morning, as news reports came in of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, she said she felt guilty moaning about the cold. Quite so! Everything is relative. I’m (mostly) happy with the weather we have. Besides, there’s nothing I can do about it.
Some time ago, spurred on by various friends who have very good neighbourhood support groups which sprang up during lockdown, I signed up for an online neighbourhood thing. The problem is that, although it purports to be related to our village, it’s not just our neighbourhood and I get emails about stuff going on in Rochdale and in various relatively distant parts of Oldham. I really don’t think I can help to solve the problem of a missing cat or a stolen car in these places. And I have tried to unsubscribe, to no avail. Such are the problems of the digital age.
We see the digital age all around us. Granddaughter Number Two put a message out on our group chat this morning about a lecture she had missed at university. All lectures are recorded and can be watched by absentees, or re-watched by assiduous geeky need students on the university website. She was glad to have missed this morning’s lecture as it seems they had to leave the lecture hall because of weird electronic noise!
Life was simpler back in the late 1960s when if you missed a lecture you had to borrow someone else’s notes to catch up on the knowledge imparted that day. Granddaughter Number Two tells me she doesn’t make handwritten notes. She types some kind of notes on her iPad and then re-watches the lecture if she needs to expand on what she has. It’s a different world!
One thing the digital-info world does is bombard us with supposedly useful tips on how to deal everyday problems, household cleaning and the like. Here is a rather amusing spoof on such a tip:
“How to clean a really messy frying pan.
Hot water mixed with vinegar & baking soda, 2 cups of Coca-Cola, a dishwashing tablet & half a lemon.
Swirl it for 3 minutes and place the pan in the solution for 45 minutes.
I then brushed it with a toothbrush & it still looked the same. So I went and bought a new one.”
It was accompanied by the requisite before and after photos of the frying pan(s).
So it goes.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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