The previous evening when Meg was well and truly asleep, I ran off a little message onto 20 address labels and then ran off a series to paste into the cards I am preparing for my carers. I have put the same message into the same card (a 'Peace' card) for each of the twenty possible carers and then I will make sure that everyone receives one by one route or another before Christmas Day itself. Tuesday is the day when we meet up with our Waitrose friends so we popped down the hill in quite pleasant weather. As we got to Waitrose just about on time to meet up with our friends, Meg was feeling a little agitated and anxious. However, after we had had a chat and a laugh Meg's mood lightened considerably so this tells you something about the power of social contact vs. medications. We had a fairly fruitless trip along the High Street and then walked home in a rather unpleasant cold and biting drizzle that just seemed to have arisen since we had walked into town. Nonetheless, when we hot home the carer was waiting for us - we were a little late as was she so we coincided in the porch of our house. Getting Meg indoors is a bit of a performance because it involves cleaning off debris from the wheels of the wheelchair, first outdoors with an 'outdoor' brush and then once again inside with a sponge. We then have to divest Meg of her 'going out' outfit with lots of outdoor clothing and heavy blankets involved. I was feeling pretty tired so Meg and I exchanged stories about our lives with the carer who is fairly new to the agency but is rapidly gaining experience. The client to whom they had been administering extraordinary mounts of care had been taken into hospital shortly after their last ministrations and had then died within a day or so which sounds dramatic but she was in her 90's and extremely ill with cancer. After the 'sitting' carer had departed and the lunchtime carers had come and gone, I set about preparing lunch for us which was mackerel fillets poached in milk, green beans and a baked potato. Although lunch had been somewhat delayed, it did not take long to throw together and was actually very tasty as well as being nutritious. After lunch, we thought we would watch the (ITV) catchup of Maggie Smith's life. But the transmission kept freezing with an internet connection error so we turned to the BBC catchup and started watching the life of Leonardo da Vinci. Although this was very interesting, I promptly fell asleep in front of it and was awoken by the sound of the front doorbell as the afternoon teatime carers came along. It was the two jolly lads with whom we always get along well (in fact they call Meg 'Queen Meg' once she is ensconced in her favourite armchair/throne) Then we listened to J S Bach's 'A Christmas Oratorio' which we enjoy all the more so as Back recycled bits of Matthew Passion into it.
There was a throw away line by Sky News political correspondent that Musk absolutely hates Keir Starmer and I was intrigued to try to find out why. This is what I found out on a social media platform. Like most social media spats, it seems to have escalated by degrees. Elon Musk tweeted something about Britain being a violent Muslim country. Keir Starmer tweeted a rebuttal. So Elon escalated. So Keir Starmer dis-invited him from some public shindig for tech giants in the UK. So Elon escalated again. Honestly, it is just like two teenagers fighting over social media, but with bigger stakes and bigger audiences. Another contributor shared his view that Elon Musk's ego was so big that he hated being contradicted and was doing everything he could to spread his extreme right wing views on Twitter/X and anywhere else. The fact that Trump has given him an important position theoretically in charge of eliminating waste from American public services but in practice with a much wider remit must make all of us shudder. Nigel Farage has pictured with Elon Musk at the Trump mansion in Florida and, by all accounts, is cozying up to the multi-billionaire hoping to extract a donation for the Reform party that is rumoured by some to £85m. Whether this will come to pass is interesting but it adds to the pressure on the Tory party back in the UK.
All war is terrible and the loss of human life is always to be deprecated. But the latest news from Moscow gives one pause for thought. The Ukrainians have successfully targeted a Russian general by detonating a bomb hidden within a scooter that was detonated as the general and an aide were emerging from a Russian apartment block. The act that this assassination was successful in the heart of Moscow and only a kilometre or so from the Kremlin must be a wake up call for Muscovites to whom the war in Ukraine (or 'Special Military Operation' as the Russians insist on calling it) might seem distant. The war is going against them in Ukraine but this must be a massive psychological boost for the Ukrainians. The Russian general was targeted because he was the general with oversight of nuclear (i.e. radiation), biological and chemical weapons. If these weapons have been used (and they probably have in Syria, at the behest of the Russians) the this must be in contravention of the several international treaties banning the use of such weapons in modern warfare.
The government has said it will be compensating women hit by changes to the state pension age, despite years of a campaigning and a watchdog recommending payouts for those affected. It has sparked backlash across the political divide, including from Labour MPs. The story is a tangled one but basically, in the efforts to equalise the retirement ages of men and women, there were a particular group of women who were disadvantaged by this change, some having retired earlier to take on a caring role for aged parents and therefore lacked the ability to plan ahead for any shortfalls. Some of these women may have to work for extra years if they had not already retired or suffer the indignity of a much reduced pension. This again is one of those instances that could not be too difficult to fix but whilst the Labour Party supported their claim when they were in opposition, now in government trey are repeating the mantra (much used by the Tories, incidentally) that they had to be fair to all other taxpayers in resisting the claim.
© Mike Hart [2024]