Today was a day when it was widely predicted that temperatures would exceed 40 degrees celsius perhaps in several places across the UK and this inevitably came to pass later on in the day. Meg and I knew that we would have to be especially careful throughout the day and that we had to take pains not to expose ourselves to any unnecessary degree of risk posed by the extremely hot temperatures predicted for the day. The huge plume of hot air may well move northwards to be followed by thunderstorms perhaps as early as tomorrow so we are aware that today is the type of day to be ‘tunnelled’ through as it were. After we had some cooling showers in the bathroom, we went by car to collect our newspaper and to see if any of the jolly Waitrose crowd were in evidence in the coffee bar. There we met with one of pre-pandemic friends as well as Seasoned World Traveller who made an appearance so we chatted about the events of the day (politics, weather and so on) Having taken advice from several people around me, I made the decision not to attend my Pilates class in the middle of the day. Although the exercise studio is air conditioned, it still meant going by car in the hottest part of the day so I texted my Pilates teacher to say that I was going to give today’s session a miss. She was a little disappointed, I think, but at the end of the day I thought I was probably making a sensible decision. When we got home, we treated ourselves to an ice-cream on a stick which I bought in the supermarket the other day and it was just the job for a day like today. I have a policy of getting us through the day of having a series of pint glasses each filled with cold water and cordial lodged in the fridge and each time we pass them by, we have a gulp of cold water. We had a simple lunch of fishcakes with a few steamed vegetables and some coleslaw and it took the minimum of cooking.
After we had lunched we were eager to see the latest round of voting in the Conservative elections for the party leader and, as expected, Kemi Badenoch was eliminated having has a good run so far and enhanced her chances of a good cabinet post substantially. There is going to be a terrific fight for the second place behind Rishi Sunak but I am pretty sure I know what is going to happen. I reckon that at least 50% of the Badenoch votes will now go to Liz Truss (as right wingers allways support each other massively) and from this stage on Sunak and Truss will go the country. Here, according to all of the opinion polls, Truss supporters will easily outvote Sunak and hence I predict that she will be the next Tory leader, not least as she can sort of claim that she is carrying the ‘Johnson heritage’ forward. Having said this, a videoclip is circulating of her saying what a disaster leaving the EU would be when she addressed the Food and Drink Federation just before the referendum. Also, she regularly cmne bottom in all of the TV debates where viewers were asked to rate the perfomance of the candidates. On the other hand, the Labour Party may feel that she is quite a beatable candidate rather than Sunak. You read it here first!
I had a rather extraordinary telphone call with a representative of BT today. I had got a text on my phone to see if I could discuss my latest upgrade to Super Fibre 500 which as it turns out gives me 10x the speed for only an extra tenner a month. It looked as though some kind of duplicate order had crept onto the system so my contact in BT, who I shall call Susan, quickly cancelled the misplaced contract. Then she asked if there was anything she could do for me and I mentioned the landline I wanted to get back. She put this through the system and thought that all being well it could probably be restored by next Monday. Asked if she could do anything else for me, I mentioned the poor reception that we get one of the bedrooms in which my son works when he calls around. She performed a series of tests upon the line for me and we looked at some settings in the router. Finally, if at all fails, she thinks she could probably solve our problems by some repeater units (up to three) which we can have around the house – if they don’t work, then we have a fourteen day cooling off period so we cancel the order and return the units. She is going to phone me back within a 2-hour time slot next Tuesday when my landline number should have been restored and we can discuss options to increase WiFi reception in the relevant bedroom. But I have experimented with my iPad and we may get the reception we need by altering the location of the desk and the WiFi within the room but we may need to experiment further.
© Mike Hart [2022]