After the funeral of the late Pope on Saturday, one would have imagined that a photo of the ex-Pontiff would have been splashed all over the media. It is true to say that the newspapers have fallen over themselves to give extensive and occasionally flattering photos of Pope Francis but another image has captured their attention and is well represented by all of them. Trump and Zelenskyy are pictured in St Peter's Basilica just before the funeral and this is a simple 'one man to another' with no advisers anywhere visible. Donald Trump has criticised Vladimir Putin and suggested a shift in his stance towards the Russian president after a meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy before the Pope's funeral. The Ukrainian president said the one-on-one talks could prove to be 'historic' after pictures showed him sitting opposite Mr Trump, around two feet apart, in the large marble hall inside St Peter's Basilica on Saturday. The US president said he doubted his Russian counterpart's willingness to end the war after leaving Rome following the funeral of Pope Francis at the Vatican. Now no one really knows what Trump is thinking and whether he has had a real change of heart but was just taking the opportunity for a bit of political theatre and grandstanding. Now that Trump is back in the USA and surrounded by his own men, then his stance may change again and very probably will. But Trump is anxious to pull off a 'coup' to celebrate his first 100 days in office so the rest of the world is looking on anxiously and probably with their hopes falsely raised.
On the domestic front, we are expecting a spell of really fine weather for the next few days so I need to find a way in which Meg and I can learn to appreciate this. The new wheelchair will help in this because she can sit/lie in relative comfort, perhaps at the front of the house to enjoy the morning sunshine. This week brings with it not only the prospect of 1st May but also a planned power outage when the electricity supply company will turn the electricity off for three hours on Thursday morning but we have been well forewarned about this. Our domestic help has also taken her Spring holiday week off so it will be particularly nice to see her after a gap of a fortnight. On 1st May, it is the local elections and the Reform party are expected to do particularly well this time around. People vote differently in local elections than they do in a general election when they are electing. government but this is the first opportunity for the electorate to cast an opinion of the Labour government on the one hand and Kemi Badenoch's leadership of the Conservative party on the other. Despite the fact that I am normally an 'election junkie' and often stay up for the first results to trickle through, I really think that my time is better occupied getting a better night's sleep so that I am ready for what the next day is to bring. Sky News is bound to be chewing over the results 'ad nauseam' on Friday morning so I am sure I can restrain myself until then. Channel 4, I believe it was, had a very well reviewed program on Donald Trump's first 100 days in power but having followed all of the news of Trump's activities day by day, I do. not think I can stomach seeing a review of all of this, however well done.
I need to turn some of my attention to some gardening activities but the de-cluttering of the study with the major part completed has taken a degree of priority. With a sudden burst of activity, I have managed to complete the bookcase de-cluttering part but the last bit was a bit tricky. I had a jumble of cables but they are neatly wound in to coils, secured wit a cable ties and then stored in a cardboard box which I prettified so it didn't look quite so ugly. The second half of the study should be a much easier job as it mainly involves tidying up but I have set myself the deadline of before next Wednesday when our domestic help will turn up. The final job is to dispose of a lot of storage boxes stored on the top of the bookcases but these are normally empty and subject to taking them apart, should be quite easy to dispose of. In the morning, our University of Birmingham came around as he often does on a Sunday morning to have a coffee with Meg and I. In the course of my tidying up activities, I discovered some papers I had written in which I thought he might be interested and we spent some time discussing these (on the topic of the assessment of student work and the calculation of degree classifications). This work is probably quite dated by now as since we were both in work philosophies and rubrics of student assessment have undergone radical change. But in the afternoon, I managed to complete the tidying up of the study, at last, and only have some empty boxes to clear from bookcase tops. I have discovered various pieces of hardware I had forgotten about and some that needed to be junked. One thing I discovered I had was a DVD USB writer which evidently I thought I was going to need to enhance a laptop but it was never brought fully into use. Something else that turned up was a large A4 photo (probably taken normal size and expanded) of Meg and I standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, when I was there for a conference. Meg and I look pretty small figures but that is because the Lincoln memorial is so very large in comparison. Whilst we were in Washington, Meg and I also went round the several of the museums which, as you might imagine, were world class. I also managed to get the front lawns cut as it was a beautiful day and it seemed a shame not to seize the opportunity, even though I was feeling somewhat tired. The weeds are growing pace in various places so I may need to tackle these in bursts of 15-20 minutes when I can.
© Mike Hart [2025]