As I believe I have said before here, I have been opting out of watching the news. It’s not that I don’t want to know what’s going on, it’s that I find the news overwhelmingly bleak. However, tonight, I tuned into C4 at 7pm. Maybe not watching the news on a daily basis makes difference to my responses. I’m less desensitised to the horrors depicted. So I found myself in tears more than once. The images of the destroyed Gaza city people to which people were returning were devastating. Years ago I watched the film The Pianist. The image that has remained most clearly in my memory is the devastation, the wasteland. In Gaza that is echoed. The rubble, the lack of any buildings which could possibly be habitable, the daunting task, let alone the expense, to rebuild, the tearful man holding pictures of his family, all now dead. We human beings have a lot to answer for. Really, what does a war such as this achieve, particularly for non-combatants who die in greater numbers than members of the armed forces?
Later there was an interview with an Israeli family. The father was killed 7th October. The then youngest child refuses to believe his father is dead as he has not seen a body. His mother was pregnant in October 2023, so the child she was carrying, who was born some months later, will never know his father. What can you say? Both sides continue to suffer. I say sides, but it seems to me it is largely a vendetta between Hamas and Netanyahu. Many Palestinians are opposed to Hamas. Many Israelis are opposed to Netanyahu. The innocent on either side of the border suffer most.
More comfortable television has been in the shape of new autumn series, Bake Off, Blue Lights, The Graham Norton Show, HIGNFY. It is television season. I’m about to watch Bake Off, an Extra Slice. Not sure if this exported as Bake Off is but often I prefer it to the main event. It features the baker who has had to leave the tent that week, a panel of (mainly) amusing folk. Only tonight, Jonathan Ross, who I don’t like, don’t find funny and often find offensive, is on. Surely that’s the second time this series. Once was more than enough.
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