Today was one of those days when you wake up and are glad that there is nothing of any real import that we have to do today. Instead, we look forward to our domestic help coming because we always have a nice chat and do litte things for each other. Today, for example, I have some excess soup that I have put by on one side for her. I also buy large 5L containers of rapeseed oil which is locally grown and produced in Staffordshire so after we have bottled this which is a job I did later on in the morning our domestic help assists in consuming this. We collected our newspaper as usual this morning and though it was ‘touch and go’ whether a walk in the park would be viable this morning, we managed to squeeze one in before the more persistent showers set in. There was quite a blustery wind blowing that was pretty mild so we had a fairly pleasant sojourn in the park to have our elevenses. Late yesterday afternoon, when I was hanging up one of my coats, I thought I espied something that had been lost. In the space under the stairs, we have two clothes rails of outdoor clothing, some of which we use occasionally if the weather happens to be very bad and some of which is lighter outerwear where we hang the more frequently used anoraks and outerwear. Now my beloved and much used leather hat had a few days ago unexpectedly got lost and I had absolutely no idea where it might be. It transpired that the hat had slipped down between the two rails but had not fallen to the floor and therefore was all extents completely hidden and therefore ‘lost’. Even our domestic help who had a good hunt around it a couple of weeks ago had not managed to find it so I was very pleased to locate it and bring it into use once again. Now on its second life, as it were, I was pleased to give it a careful waxing with the shoe polish in an applicator that I purchased recently and it now has an appearance which looks somewhat restored but complete with a slightly ‘lived in’ look. Now that this is resurrected, I managed to put its replacement which I had been using for the last week or so back in its box and the newly purchased ‘reserve’ hat was also put in a safe place so that it can quickly be located when required (hopefully, years hence).
Today was the day when Liz Truss gave her conference speech and this was duly delivered with little gaps put in after every sentence or so that the party faithful can applaud. One of the rhetorical devices used today was to say that she had three priorities for her premiership which were ‘growth, growth and growth’ This rhetorical device sounded quite good when Tony Blair used it years ago to say his priorities were ‘education, education and education’ but by now seems an incredibly tired rhetorical device which has lost its effectiveness. I also learnt from the Liz Truss speech that when an economy grows, everybody benefits from this. This is logically and demonstrably untrue but once you start to enter into a debate wih ideologues, then evidence is unimportant compared with the place taken in the value system of ‘belief’. I have been followed Twitter quite closely in the last few days and two particular contributions caught my attention. One of these was to suggest that Liz Truss, as an ex-Liberal Democrat, had really entered the Conservative Party to destroy it from within – and had succeeded. Another contribution that made me chuckle was that the robot that had been programmed wih the same twenty sentences and which came out with the same utterances time after time (e.g. Putin’s war, 45 tax rate was a ‘distraction’ and so on) needed to be reprogrammed with a more up-to-date set of responses. A letter in yesterday’s Times from Peter Kellner, the founder of YouGov public opinion polling, made the interesting observation that as it was argued that the 45% tax rate was necessary to achieve the target 2.5% growth rate, now that the 45% tax rate had been abandoned, should the aspiration of a growth rate of 2.5% be correspondingly reduced (which of course it has not, by the way). Sky News has invited viewers to submit questions for a special program tomorrow afternoon, so I have submitted a question on similar lines and wonder whether or not it will be one of those selected for answer and discussion. Research conducted by J.L. Partners showed the word people thought of the most when asked about Liz Truss was ‘incompetent’ and this is to contrasted with the word most commonly said to describe Keir Starmer which was ‘boring’ Other words that were commonly used were to describe Liz Truss were ‘useless’, ‘untrustworthy’ and ‘clueless’.‘Unreliable’ and ‘dangerous’ were also among the more common answers.
© Mike Hart [2022]