Meg and I had a couple of really cheery care workers this morning, which certainly helps to start the week. I have asked Alexa the weather forecast for the next seven days ahead so it appears that we may be in for a spell of fairly settled weather to which we can surely look forward. After we had breakfasted, although I felt fairly tired this morning, we thought we would pop down the hill and possible along the High Street if the spirit moved us. On our way down the hill we bumped into our Italian friend and exchanged some current news. She had just been to visit a friend around the corner whose husband has just been diagnosed with dementia and I told our friend what was happening to my sister. We carried down as far as Waitrose and picked up our newspaper, bumping into one of our Tuesday friends whilst we inside the store but if we had been tempted to have a coffee, the cafeteria was closed for urgent repairs to its hot water system (not for the first time) I wanted to take the opportunity to buy some Christmas cards from one of the numerous charity shop outlets and they all seem to have Christmas cards in stock. I like to buy cards with a religious theme for the committed Christians on our Christmas card list, cards with a kind of internationalist and/or peace motif for those of our friends and relatives who would appreciate them and a choice of other cards for those who could not care one way or the other. In the end, I did buy some cards both from Cancer Relief which always has a huge selection and supplemented these with some from the British Heart foundation who had some of the cards in stock that matched my criteria. On our journey down the hill, I play an app that I have on my iPhone which has quite a huge selection of Mozart on it. One of the tracks to which we were listening is one that Mozart composed perhaps as an extended joke but more likely as a 'show off' piece. This starts with the very simple nursery rhyme that we know in England as 'Twinkle,Twinkle, Little Star' but which is actually a French carol, 'Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman' which translates as 'Oh! Shall I tell you, Mama' Once the simple tune has been laid out for the listeners, Mozart then goes on to compose sets of variations which become increasingly complex with variations upon the variations up to about a dozen in total. I imagine it takes a pianist of quite considerable skill to play all of these variations straight off although Meg and I did hear a performance of these variations performed by a local musician as part of the Bromsgrove Festival of music. When we returned home, I made Meg some chicken soup and then a couple of carers made their late morning call and got Meg hoisted into her specialist chair. Then, as time was getting on, I heated up the special pasta meal that had been given to us by one of our (Asian) male carers who enjoys cooking. This pasta meal was absolutely delicious and so Meg and I enjoyed it tremendously - I may do a trade with some of our left over risotto as an exchange.
Channel 4 can always be relied upon to give us some alternative presentations at Christmastime and now we are into the month of December and ClassicFM has started to broadcast some Christmas carols, I suppose you can see the festive season is upon us. Broadcast yesterday was a contribution which I particularly wanted to see which was an animated carton of 'Mog's Christmas', Mog being a favourite character in a book read by generations of schoolchildren and also as it happens, my family nickname. But I was feeling very flue-laden when the programme was originally broadcast but unfortunately slept all the way through it. However, we looked at 'catch up' TV for Channel 4 and viewed the animated film made of Judith Kerr's famous children's book 'The Tiger who came to tea' This I enjoyed tremendously and looked forward to its sequel which also happened to a replay of 'Mog's Christmas' but was asleep during some of this as well. To round off this afternoon's series of animations, we did watch (again) the Raymond Brigg's story of 'The Snowman' so what with one thing or another, we have had an afternoon full of entertainment originally designed for children but I suspect enjoyed by some adults as well.
In the Unites States, it is quite traditional for the outgoing president to issue Presidential pardons, particularly if there is a deep suspicion that a miscarriage of justice has taken place. But Joe Biden has chosen to pardon his own son, Hunter, who undoubtedly has had a troubled past but was convicted of illegal possession of a gun. This has caused some misquiet even on the Democratic side of the political divide and the Republicans are seizing every opportunity to show that there is really a dual justice system at work in the United States. But the anger expressed by the Republicans may be somewhat synthetic because Trump, in particular, may be secretly delighted that Joe Biden has chosen to extend Presidential pardons in this way. It opens the door wide open for Trump, the minute that he takes office, to immediately pardon all of those who were rightfully convicted of storming the United States Capitol building nearly four years ago and who Trump maintains were the victims of a miscarriage of justice and a Democratic witch hunt. But there is no real equivalence between the pardoning of one errant son (which Hunter Biden undoubtedly is) and the scores of MAGA and Trump supporters who, with firearms, forced their way into the Capitol building in order to try prevent the formal declaration of the results of the presidential election which Joe Biden won fairly and squarely. It also looks as though Trump through his appointment of an ultra loyalist Kash Patel to FBI director will visit retribution across the US's top law enforcement agency and the Department of Justice, who have sought to investigate the president-elect on a litany of criminal charges, now dropped or on hold due to the impermissibility of prosecuting a sitting president. 'Government gangsters' is how the 40-year-old Patel has termed them, the name of a book he has written on what he perceives to be Deep State corruption at the heart of the agency he will be tasked with running and beyond.
© Mike Hart [2024]