Some months ago I was browsing the channels on my TV and I came across a programme on one of the Channel 4 stable. It was in French, part of their Walter Presents stream of foreign language programmes, and it was a police procedural. What's more, it involved classical music.

It turned out it was an episode of a Franco-Belgian series called Astrid et Raphaëlle - Astrid: Murder in Paris in the UK. It involves a young archivist working for the Paris police who is autistic, which gives her skills in solving crime, as a police woman discovers. I found the whole series so far was available for streaming. Only the first three seasons have been shown in the UK so far.

I was therefore intrigued to discover a UK remake was in the works. Patience, set in York, started this week on Channel 4. It was intriguing. They've basically transplanted the whole plot of the first episode. Not sure yet if it is as good.

But then, a couple of days later, I noticed an item in a news feed saying how viewers were switching off in disgust because it was plagiarising the original. This amused me. That it was a UK copy was well publicised in advance. Furthermore, copying shows from other countries is fairly common these days. Professor T and Humans come immediately to mind. And American TV are always copying British shows - The Office, Being Human, Life on Mars. I don't know how often subtitled shows are shown on American TV.

And it's been going of for some time. Way back in 1980, on my first trip to the US, I switched on the TV in an hotel room and realised they were showing a US remake of the British sitcom My Wife Next door. The IMDb tells me that the British show was made in 1972. It also lists the US remake, but gives no episodes. Obviously not a success.

So I'm doing some train travel around Europe at the moment. I was in Brussels this morning and went back to my hotel to find my phone was missing. I think it might have been picked out of my pocket when I was wandering around.

I was about to head off to Frankfurt and my ticket was on the phone. I had to retrieve the details from my computer. As it happened, nobody asked to inspect my ticket.

The train was nearly an hour late getting to Frankfurt and finding the hotel without a map was a problem. Then I discovered that the hotel doesn't allow international calls from the room phone and I had to phone from the front desk.

Off to Vienna in the morning.

9 days since I first tested positive.

Got a letter published in today's Guardian. Not bad for someone who took two attempts to pass O-level English.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/24/when--ize-spellings-were-standard-english

During the night I woke up and realised I could hear a beating noise. As I tried to get back to sleep it got louder. It seemed to be someone playing the drums, and getting more intense as they went along. I looked at my clock and it was nearly four o'clock. Eventually it stopped but I had great difficulty getting back to sleep. The sun had come up by the time I did drop off.

Who practices drums at four in the morning?!

So I'm having trouble with a dripping tap. It's a mixer tap and it's not only dripping but where the stem goes into the top of the sink it is spurting water when I use the tap.

A plumber arrived yesterday and said he'd have to get the part. Incidentally, he called the stem the swan.

This was about three p.m. That evening when I went to make a pot of tea, the cold water was barely a trickle. My first thought was that the plumber must have done something, but I'd been with him all the time so unless he'd switched me off in the street it couldn't have been him.

Then the doorbell rang. The next-door neighbour asking me if my water was OK. She was just getting a trickle. We decided it was probably a general problem in our street, but she went off to ask other neighbours.

Last night I had a bath. The bath taps are fed from the cold water tank in the loft (via the water heater for the hot tap) and I had no trouble filling the bath. But when I went to bed I could hear the cold water tank refilling, gurgling away. It must have taken about half an hour.

This morning the cold water was back to normal. And I got a text from the plumbers' saying they'll fix the tap on Monday.

So I was walking across Trafalgar Square yesterday evening, first time in a couple of years and I saw the current occupant of the fourth plinth:



Reminded me of this building I saw in Cologne a few years ago:

When I got out of hospital a year ago I discovered that my notebook PC was giving problems. Within days it failed completely. So I ordered a new one on Amazon. (A Jumper Ezpad Pro8. No, I've never heard of that make either.)

Now, for the first few months after getting home, I was so tired I was going to bed early most nights. So it's possible that I'd not been downstairs at midnight before seeing in the new year. And as the chimes of Big Ben started on the TV my computer started beeping. Slowly at first, but speeding up and stopping after two minutes. I did wonder if it was some sort of happy new year message.

Feeling a lot better these days, there were other occasions when I was still downstairs at midnight, and there was more beeping, on one one occasion drowning out the music I was listening to. What's more, I'd shut the computer down.

I asked on Cix if anyone could suggest what was going on. One suggestion was that I had a nearby smoke detector and that was giving a low-battery alarm. Well, there is an old smoke detector in a drawer in the kitchen, but it's been sitting there unused since I moved in in 1995, and the sound was louder in living room and the door to the kitchen was closed.

Finally last night, I took the computer up to my bedroom before going to bed. The computer did not beep. I hurried downstairs and could still here the beeping in the living room. It is difficult to get the origin of high-pitched sounds, something to do with the way our ears work. But then I noticed the weather station base unit on the mantelpiece. It has alarms built into it and it appeared there was an alarm set for midnight which was switched on. Possibly when resetting the recorded temperatures I'd switched it on. I've switched it off. Let's see what happens next time up at midnight.

I haven't posted for nearly a year here!

For those that don't know, I had a major health scare in January, what's called an aortic dissection, meaning the lining coming away in the aorta. I had a fairly major operation, which caused a stroke. I was in hospital for nearly three weeks. Still have an impressive scar on my chest. Since then I've been mostly going for walks, reading, and watching television. Not much else to do during lockdown.

But yesterday I went to the opera for the first time in nearly two years, a performance of Wagner's The Valkyrie at English National Opera in London, also my first trip to central London for a while.

It was odd going back. London was much more crowded than I thought it would be. The Coliseum had strict rules about wearing masks in the building (which I kept forgetting, every time I went back in). The bars and programme sellers were card only.

The production was five hours long. Not so much dipping my toe in the water, rather taking a running jump into the Atlantic Ocean. And I'd forgotten how much sitting a theatre seat for a long time can hurt my back. My back was very sore last night.

The performance was great. A pity the production was a bit too minimalist for my tastes.

Many of the houses in my cul-de-sac seem to be student shares.

Yesterday afternoon I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea and I could hear a rhythmic thumping sound through the wall. There has been a lot of maintenance work going on in that house - a student house - so I thought at first it was that. But I could hear voices apparently chanting in time to the beat.

I sat down to watch a film I'd recorded off Talking Pictures but after about fifteen minutes the doorbell went. It was a young woman I recognised as living next door. She was apologising in advance. They are actors next door, she said, and they were about to practise their fighting and there could be a lot of screaming.

As it happened, I actually heard nothing more from next door after that. The stairs act as a buffer between my living room and the dividing wall. But it later occurred to me that this could be a great plot for a TV crime show. A group of criminals use the cover of being actors to explain away the sounds of someone being murdered. She was even wearing a mask.