A change from the norm

It’s a strange Saturday. Usually I spend the morning getting dinner prepared. Often Saturday is our day for a weekend roast. However, today I’m not even cooking. The Fox is making Cider Chicken with Sweetcorn. I’ve not even got some potatoes to peel ready for this even as we are going to have Chinese egg noodles as an accompaniment for change.

We’re hoping to get over to Caton, just the other side of Lancaster, later this morning, as we’ve discovered there is a Farmers’ Market held there the first Saturday of the month. We still miss the one we used to go to in Morecambe. We’ve not found as good of source of meat & game since it closed. For a while we did think we’d found a butcher but that shop has since closed too.

I was bemused to here on the radio news this morning that the London airports are virtually at a standstill due to an IT hitch. Apparently the computer that sorts out the landings & take-offs has gone on to night timings instead of day ones. The repercussions are spreading throughout the world.

When one person was asked why they couldn’t go back to the old strips of paper manual method, it was pointed out that nowadays they have been become so dependent on computers that most air space controllers have never been trained in such old fashioned methods. I recall an episode in the television programme, “NCIS”, when power was lost. The older Jethro was in his element doing without a computer. The younger members of his team were at a complete loss when they had to find out info from paper files etc.

I sometimes think the modern world would ground to a standstill if something made all computers cease to function. Maybe I’m just feeling a bit sensitive on the matter as we still haven’t got around to sorting out our new desktop computer. We’ve decided to wait for the New Year sales. Meanwhile we’re managing on this one laptop, which isn’t attached to a printer or scanner, & we’re not even sure it has the software to run such extras. Still, I’m of an age where I’ve not forgotten how to do things manually. In some ways I prefer to do them that way. I much prefer the handwritten personal letter, even if the handwriting needs a degree in deciphering! We’ve had one of those already, in a Christmas card.