So after Meg was safely in bed last night, the much-heralded meeting, with consequent press conferences, took place between Keir Starmer and Donald Trump. In advance of the meeting, it was being said that this was the most important meeting between these two leaders and a lot, including the very future of the Ukraine, was at stake. Now Trump on his home ground was never going to concede much or 'lose' an argument and therefore the job of the British Prime Minister was a very tricky one. Having said all that, Keir Starmer put on a very creditable performance with the appropriate amount of flattery and played the Trump card of a personal hand-written invitation from Prince Charles to pay a second state visit to the UK. Whether or not Trump realised he was being played is another matter but the Brits managed to pull off not one visit to the King but two ('no doubt when you are visiting your golf courses in Scotland, you would like to drop in on Balmoral' and Trump's mother was Scottish having left the island of Lewis at the age of 18 to seek her fortune in the USA) The press conferences was full of theatrical bonhomie and the actual meat in the performance was hard to find as there were many statements regarding Ukraine which were vague and of the order 'Well, no doubt we can work that one out') but the one genuine surprise was the promise of an early trade deal between the UK and the USA. Now Trump probably does not realise that 'early' is not a term to be used about trade deals which take a lot of complicated bargaining and years to resolve but it could be that the threat of tariffs against the UK is pushed a little way down the road. The trouble is that Trump still thinks that VAT is a tariff against Americans and, of course, the UK like the rest of the EU charge VAT but perhaps some of Trump's less ideological negotiators can be made to appreciate the true nature of VAT. One recalls the expression which I think originates from the Bible which is to the effect 'never argue with a fool' but as well as Trump's limited understanding of issues, he also changes his mind. Last night, he distanced himself from called the Ukrainian leader a 'dictator' but will be the meeting with him today to finalise the trade deal over the exploitation of mineral rights in the Ukraine? In the Trumpian world view, seizing many of these mineral assets will be a sort of payment for the monies that the USA have 'given' to the Ukraine in the fight against Russia which lie Trump keeps on repeating even after he was corrected by no less a person than President Macron of France in their recent meeting. So, on the British side, I think there are sighs of relief all round and satisfaction that Starmer had played a rather weak hand as well as was possible. On the critical question of whether the USA would provide a backdrop of security guarantees to reinforce the role of a possible peace keeping force, Trump argued that the American investment in the mining of rare minerals in the Ukraine is itself a form of backdrop (which may contain a smidgeon of truth)
Yesterday according to my weather app, although the day started off freezing, the temperature was meant to climb rapidly during the morning. But it was still a bit overcast and chilly when we set off down the hill but things do get better on the way back. On our way down we bumped into some of our Catholic friends who had themselves had a pretty hard winter. Just before Christmas, they had experienced a burglary (and not for the first time, either) and on of our friends had experienced an episode that felt like a heart attack but turned out to be angina. She is now on medication which itself is having side effects. Once we got inside Waitrose, we purchased some 'Pea and Mint' packet soup that was on special offer and which we enjoy in any event. On our way back, we had a few snatched words with a 'park friend' through an open car window as she was passing and a somewhat longer conversation with our Italian friend who was taking a walk to help her exercise a knee that was troubling her. Then we got back in some sunshine and enjoyed some of our soup before the late morning carer paid us a visit. After a bit of a rest, I decided to press on with our Friday dinner in which I was going to pan fry some fresh salmon and serve it with broccoli and a baked potato. But this lunchtime did not exactly go to plan as Meg refused to eat her food by gritting her teeth and refusing to open her mouth (a symptom of dementia which sometimes happens but is a behaviour pattern brought on by the disease process which, nonetheless, is a difficult to handle when I freshly prepared some food only to throw it away). But most of yesterday, I was rejoicing in the fact that February was well on its way out and I feel we have come through a long, black cloud. This winter has seemed particularly long for us but, of course, we had the bad weather well before Christmas and the lung infection which we thought might be terminal around New Year time, so it is no wonder that with the prolonged cold weather and having to cope with the aftermath of the leak in the dining room ceiling that this winter has seemed long and arduous.
This afternoon we have two bits of TV to which the look forward. Firstly there is 'Question Time' first broadcast last night and also a program on James Cook of whom every schoolboy has heard. Cook was a British explorer, cartographer, and naval officer famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean and to New Zealand and Australia in particular. Although the English generally regard Cook through rose-tinted spectacles, it looks as though the TV programme may be exploring some more unsavoury parts of his character but we should learn to appreciate figures in history 'warts and all' I actually have somewhere in my study a copy of one of the James Cook books detailing is Antipodean adventures. The book would normally be considered pretty valuable but someone in the decades or centuries since it was published had excised all of the maps it contained, thus rendering its value practically nil on the second hand book market.
© Mike Hart [2025]