Have you ever seen the inside of your own stomach? I got to see mine, live when I had a capsule endoscopy on Wednesday. You swallow a little capsule, about 20 mm long, with a camera and some LEDs at each end, and a couple of coils around the middle, and it sends a video feed out to a recorder box via some antennae wrapped around your trunk.

They don’t even care about the device afterwards: it goes into the toilet and is forgotten. I suppose, like Bluetooth earbuds, the technology of miniaturised radio devices is now so common that the cost is minimal. In fact, the technician told me that it’s cheaper than a gastroscopy because the labour costs are minimal.

Oh, and as for what it looked like: pink and rugose.

We have shutters. There’s still a final piece of work left – filling the gaps around the edges once they’ve had a week to settle – but we can already enjoy the functionality. They look stylish, and they give good control of light and privacy, especially as they all have an invisible split allowing the top and bottom slats to be adjusted independently.

We’ve made do for months with only velcro’d-on blackout sheets upstairs, and some packing paper taped to the living room window for privacy, but it was worth the wait.

The boiler no longer leaks. There was a small leak from within the boiler, which has been fixed with a new pressure gauge. That revealed the bigger problem: the people who redid the plumbing just forgot to plumb in the condenser pipe from the boiler. Instead of being piped into the drain, it was just dripping out the bottom. This was manageable for hot water, but when running the central heating it would quickly overflow the pot I had placed beneath.

The boiler engineer was incredulous. I was not happy. On the upside, the company that did our house were quick to come back and fix it, although it meant another half a day stuck in at home for me.

I can now turn on the heating, just in time for winter.

We took part in the March for Palestine on Saturday. It was huge: by the time we’d reached Downing Street, there were still people leaving the start point in Russell Square. I found myself standing next to China Miéville at the start. A news media photo I saw later revealed that Jeremy Corbyn had been only a few rows in front of us, on the other side of a huge banner.

A crowd of people with flags (Palestine, Lebanon, Ireland) and signs

Palestinian flags, one with the message Saoirse don Phalaistín (“Freedom for Palestine” in Irish), and the inevitable Socialist Worker placard.

41,870. That’s the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli forces since last October.

A further 97,166 people have been injured, according to the health ministry, while repeated attacks on healthcare facilities have damaged 31 out of 36 of the hospitals that previously operated in the region.

Does Israel have a right to defend itself? Defence doesn’t look like that. Killing 2% of the population of Gaza and destroying over half the buildings and almost all the hospitals in the space of a year is not “self-defence”. It’s crime.

Contrary to what Keir Starmer may claim, I would never “stand with” a genocidal land-grabbing apartheid ethnostate.

الحرية لفلسطين

Links: