Last night, I remembered how I used to play music on an pendrive through my little portable – it was just a case of connecting up the speakers and inserting the pendrive into a ‘spare’ USB port. The trouble is that although I have a variety of little USB extenders they are always a little messy and I try to avoid too many things hanging off the computer at once. Still, my newly rediscovered pendrive with 60+ Bach tracks on it was recognised by the computer (not always the case) and I can now play Bach as loudly I like in this corner of the room. This is unlikely to happen often but it does complement the adjacent DAB+ radio as well as the Boombox so in this corner of the room I have the choice of four input sources (radio, CD, Bluetooth and now a USB pendrive)
This morning our domestic help arrived and, as always, we seem to have a lot of family news to impart to each other. She arrived fairly early in order to leave promptly so that could take her husband for a medical appointment and we evidently wished them both well. After that I urgently needed to get my accounts up to date, something I like to do as soon as my pensions are paid into in the middle of the month but a little delayed this month. This delayed us somewhat so we stayed in to watch Prime Minister’s Questions which is a bit of a Wednesday morning routine and then we set off to collect our newspaper and just have a quick tour of the park minus elevenses that we had already had. So it has been one of those days when we have been a bit like a dog chasing its own tail as we overslept a little this morning and his has rather put pressure upon the rest of the day. We returned home for a lunch of quiche and then a quiet afternoon. We decided to forego a bit of TV watching this afternoon in order to enjoy some of the CDs which we have recently rediscovered and this little experiment worked out well for us as well as I found that I could do some routine emails whilst listening to music in the background.
The World Cup football which I vowed to boycott might become somewhat more interesting in the days ahead. Last night was the England versus Wales and it had all the elements of a boxing match. After a few rounds of ‘softening up’ i.e. the whole of he first half, two ‘killer punches’ came quite early on the second half when two goals were scored in very quick succession with a third goal somewhat later (and almost a fourth towards the end). So England have won their round and then go into the last 16 to meet Senegal who are a bit of an unknown quantity to the England team. I think that one can expect surprises as happened in the France v. Tunisia game where Tunisia expectedly (and controversially after a late VAR decision) beat France 1-0. Whilst, no doubt, many England supporters may mistakenly believe that Senegal is a walkover, I would not be astonished if England were to come a real cropper. Afer all, we have a clash beteen European football styles (slow patient build up) versus a much more adventurous and free-flowing African style of football. On Sunday, we shall see which style prevails.
Prince William’s godmother Lady Susan Hussey resigns from palace duties after asking black visitor about her origins. Lady Susan Hussey, 83, quit after asking Ngozi Fulani, chief executive of Sistah Space, where she ‘really came from’ during a reception at the palace on Tuesday. What is extraordinary about this story is that we have a very detailed, not to say practically verbatim account, of the questionning and answer. Lady Hussey was forced to resign on the spot and to offer an immediate and fulsome not to say abject apology but Buckingham Palace have acted with the necessary degree of rapidity. This story has a certain degree of ‘backwash’ as the several (black) invitees were made to feel uncomfortable and not as genuine ‘guests’ at the reception. Additionally, it tends to add a layer of credence to all of the complaints that Meghan Markle used to make of the Buckingham Palace hierarchy and one suspects that this story will cause the monarchy a degree of harm.
We are in for a few days of quite cold weather over the next few days as really cold air is being sucked in from the Artic. As a strategy, I am trying to get into the habit of wearing a thin layer of clothing (a thin jumper) before a heavier one. The same policy is being applied to feet (two pairs of socks) and I am encouraging Meg to wear multiple layers as well. I am sure the Scandinavians have been doing this for decades and, of course, the trapped layers of air between inner and outer garments is a wonderful insulator. Gloves are also coming to play because although I dislike wearing gloves, I dislike the cracks in my fingers even more if I do not wear them.
© Mike Hart [2022]