It’s another dull Saturday. When I went out running first thing it felt strangely still, not especially quiet as there were geese honking past in the sky and other birdsong going on. There were very few people about - maybe they all knew something I didn’t. It almost felt as though we were waiting for a storm to break but fortunately that did not happen.
Later, after quite a late breakfast, I went out to the local Tesco to replenish supplies of this and that. In the short time since I was last there - but that’s almost three weeks ago - they’ve done that thing where they move goods around on the shelves and you have to hunt to find the items you regularly buy. Right now some of that is because they are filling shelves with Christmas items - mince pies, festive cheese and pâté collections, but no Christmas cake as yet - but I swear they also do it to tempt you into buying something you might not otherwise notice.
The Christmas trees have arrived too, supposedly “living” trees in pots, which rarely survive from one Christmas to the next, and taller cut trees all wrapped in netting so that you can’t tell what shape it is until you have taken it home and unwrapped it. You might then discover that it is not all what you were looking for - a bit like buying a pig in a poke!
I am not buying a tree this year. Two Christmases ago I was late purchasing a tree and ended up with a funny sort of bush in a pot, not quite a Christmas tree but close enough. It survived outdoors in its pot but some of it’s branches lost their needles and by this time last year it was clear that it really wasn’t fit to bring indoors for another Christmas. I bought another “living” tree which promptly died after Christmas. The funny little bush, however, made a miraculous recovery this year. I’ve had to chop off the very bare top section, where a star or an angel might have perched, but otherwise it is perfectly serviceable and is just waiting for the appropriate time when my elves, the three smallest grandchildren, will decorate it for me.
I was very efficient in my supermarket shop: out for a bus just before 12.00, a quick trolley dash round the store, and back to the bus stop for home on the bus that arrived just after 1.00. Most impressive, though I say it myself.
Enough of that.
They do say money can’t buy you happiness, although most of us would agree that it helps make things run more smoothly. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, however, is not having everything his own way. Advertisers are withdrawing their business because of antisemitic content he is said to have posted. He said he’s filing a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against various organisations.
And now there is this:
“Sat 18 Nov 2023 13.38 GMT
SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft Starship, developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, reached space for the first time on Saturday but was presumed to have failed minutes later, in a second test after its first attempt to reach space ended in an explosion.
The two-stage rocket ship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica in Texas, east of Brownsville, on a planned 90-minute uncrewed flight into space.
More details soon …”
Well, well! Just think what he could have done to help the poor of the world with the money he has just sent up into space!
Meanwhile, in the continuing chaos of the Middle East, there are reports that the director of the Al Shifa hospital was given an hour to evacuate everyone from the hospital complex. Quite where they will all go, even if they manage to get everyone out, remains a mystery. But the Israeli Defence Force is determined to find evidence of Hamas using the hospital as a base. So far the evidence is not vey convincing … except maybe to Israel and America.
Now, we’ve been watching a French detective series, an episode each evening. In the latest episode a Protestant religious community in France doesn’t want a mysterious death on their property investigated as a murder … because their own investigator has examined the body and declared it an accidental death. It’s amazing what you can prove when you arrange for investigations and searches to be done by your own people! Just saying!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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