Tag: Skye

Quiet days and nights this week, as Phil is on night shift, so I am alone at night while he is at work, and alone all day being quiet as a mouse while he sleeps. I get a lot of thinking done. Not that I don’t think at other times, just more so for longer periods of time. I read the newspaper every day, and watch the news, it’s impossible to not think about what’s happening in the world, impossible not to be horrified, impossible not to feel hopeless or bereft too sometimes. The speed at which Trump is upturning everything President Obama did is mind boggling, his obsession with the numbers attending his inauguration is inexplicable to a normal brain, his lies are heart breaking. And I’m not even American. Today I heard the entire senior staff of the state dept resigned en mass. Along with all this stuff I watched 2 TV programmes that did my brain in even more, ‘President Obama in his own words’, how that man was thwarted over gun control background checks, and the affordable care act. I cannot comprehend the stupidity, the lack of compassion, but then, I’m not American. I also watched a BBC drama from 2015 called “The Eichmann Show”, a film telling the true-life story of how the trial of one of the Second World War’s most notorious Nazis, Adolf Eichmann, was brought to a global audience. I can only recommend it, brilliant acting, sometimes harrowing, but felt so important to see. In 1961 former Nazi Adolf Eichmann is captured by Israeli agents and put on trial. American television producer Milton Fruchtman fervently believes that the trial with its witness accounts of Nazi atrocities should be televised to show the world the evils of the Holocaust and to combat any resurgence of Nazism and joins forces with black-listed director Leo Hurwitz. Despite death threats, reluctance to cooperate from several networks and even resistance from the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who fears a ‘show trial’, the pair persist and move their cameras into the court-room. Edited daily and shown in some three dozen countries the ‘Eichmann Show’ becomes the first ever global television documentary. At the end of the programme the real Milton Fruchtman back in 1961 addresses the camera,

“For each of us who has ever felt that god created us better than any other human being has stood on the threshold where Eichmann once stood, and each of us who has allowed the shape of someone’s nose, or the colour of their skin, or the manner in which they worship their god, to poison our feelings towards them, have known the loss of reason that led Eichmann to his madness, for this was how it all began, with those who did these things”

46 years on and this still is relevant today. We should be way beyond this. The programme is still available on the BBC i-player and just needs to be seen.

Today my quiet time was mostly reading a novel set in our country in the time of King Edward 2nd and his lover, a most evil man called Hugh Despenser. I know Henry 8th or Elizabeth 1st is probably the most popular history for people, but this period in our history is fascinating and just as awesomely awful. The cat has been my constant companion. I sit at the table to read, and she lies down in front of the iPad and snuggles up into the curve of my arms and sleeps mostly. She is going down hill now, the tumour is taking her a little bit at a time. She can no longer miaow for some reason, just croaks, and I can feel a lump in her neck so presume a secondary tumour may be causing that. But she can still eat, loads. She eats loads because she is sick twice a day and the other end is liquid 3 or 4 times a day, so she must be eating to try and compensate for losing the nutrients at both ends. She is still agile and can easy jump up onto the kitchen bench, she still adores Phil and sits on him anytime she can, makes do with me when he isn’t here. No sign of discomfort or pain, still chipper when we get up in the morning or come home from work, and I marvel at that, all this stuff going on inside her yet she’s still OK in herself. But it won’t be long I fear, we watch her like hawks, she won’t be allowed to suffer. It’s a painful love for us to feel.

I like to listen to Spotify or the radio when I’m at my computer, and the iMac internal speakers are OK, but our house is one of serious hi-fi equipment, and Phil has populate our rooms with Bowers & Wilkins speakers, I have a B&W zeppelin for my iPod, so the iMac sound is disappointing. Last week I found on eBay a pair of B&W speakers specifically made for laptop/destops, they are expensive of course, but these were half the price as they didn’t come with a power adapter. So we got them, and ordered a power adapter for £15, and it all arrived today, so I have them all set up, and my ears are happy, beautiful sound reproduction.