Meg and I had intended to visit an elderly relative in North Wales next Wednesday but have called off our trip as the situation deteriorates. We will now start our ‘self isolation’ from Wednesday onwards but the Government announcements today may mean that we start on Tuesday, 17th March.
Today was an interesting day. I got to the pharmacy to pick up some medication at about 8.0am and then on to our local ALDI which had been pretty devasted the previous day – but the shortages were not as bad as I might have predicted. I did a ‘normal’ weeks shopping, my previous trip having been very light as we thought that we were going to be away. So we are stocked up with about 1.5 weeks shopping and have just learned how to utilise Ocado to have a delivery of supplies next Sunday (and for the foreseeable future)
Our local GP practice now has an online system – I learned how to navigate this to get a query answered about me medication for high blood pressure (I am 10mg Ramipril and I have learned this is an ACE type drug which latches onto the same receptors as the Coronavirus itself making any complication much more severe) I indicated that I had stopped my medication and the community pharmacist phoned me to say he had heard of the same report in The Lancet (medical journal) last week. If anyone wants the link, I will send it on to you! To cut a long story short, the pharmacist consulted with the doctors and they have issued me with an alternative Calcium Channel Blocker (Amlopodine) – I go into all of these details in case anyone else has the same medication issues.
Then onto my local ASDA to pick up one or two last-minute things before my self-imposed isolation – what a sorry sight (devasted, empty shelves, etc) I took some money out of my account using the cash machine to tide me over the next week or so. Now for a pleasant surprise – Holiday Inn in Chester refunded all of the money we had already paid for a three-night stay. However, it is going to be a long battle to get my money back from a holiday in Portugal planned for nest May – the credit card company say to contact your travel agent, the travel agent says contact the airline, the airline (Iberia) have written to say ‘Nothing we can do!’As all of these companies might go bust as people try to get their money back, they are all passing the buck onto everyone else. I am sure lots of you have similar stories.
This has been a long post – tomorrow I will regale you with two funny (and true !) stories about my experiences with the Spanish language
How do I feel at the start of this period of 4 months(?) of self-imposed isolation? Well, I suppose it is not unlike the emotions that people felt in the 1950’s when they were diagnosed with TB and had to spend 12 months in a sanitorium or eve as prisoners might feel at the start of a custodial sentence! I rather think it might have been like this is the world had been involved in a nuclear war and, after an explosion on the other side of the globe, you knew that something unseen but invidious was coming your way…
I started the day by texting my Pilates teacher, Helen, informing her and my fellow classmates that I would not be around for a bit and wishing them all well. Then I sent a message to one of my wonderfully friendly staff in Waitrose down the road to inform other staff members and some of the regulars of my contact details (mobile, email, blog) in case any of them wanted to keep in touch with us. I received a telephone chat call from my good friend Professor Dan Remenyi and we exchanged views on the state of the world we were in. Meg and I then set off for a pre-planned walk in a local park which is about 1km and a half away and we sat on a park bench drinking from our flask of coffee and ensuring that we were at least 10m away from any other park visitors (mainly dog walkers) Then we watched the Politics Today program starting at 12.15 on BBC2 before having lunch of our previously made Fish Pie.
The highlight of our afternoon was a good FaceTime video chat with our good friends Dave and Denise before we had our own tea. We have adopted a policy of keeping to strict meal times so that we minimise social contact with our son and daughter-in-law in case any of us are the unwitting bearer of virus. I had ensured that throughout the day each bathroom as ell supplied with a bar of soap (supposedly much more efficient at removing viruses than liquid soap.
I had promised? threatened? a couple of Spanish stories – apologies to my friends in Bromsgrove who have heard them both before and repeated ‘ad nauseam’ The first relates to our last holiday in La Coruña. Northern Spain when I realised that we were short of a comb. So I walked into a pharmacy and announced ‘Buenos dias, señora – quisiera comprar un nuevo pene por favor’ The assistant looked quite astonished until I realised that I had said ‘Good morning, madam – I would like to purchase a new willy, please’ To make matters worse, I went on to explain that I needed something that was just of the right size that was not too large but would just fit conveniently into my right hand. Too late, I discovered that I had mixed up the word for a combe which ‘peine’ with the slang word for a willy which is ‘pene’ – well, it is easily done.
The second story relates to one of the local hospitals who phoned up about two days beforehand saying, ‘Good morning, Mr.Hart – what are you doing first thing on Sunday morning? Would you like to come in and have a gastroscopy (tube down the throat into the duodenum to check for nasties) I knew it was about two years since the last check-up so I thought I had better get it over and done with. I was ‘prepared’ for the procedure by a little nurse who announced me ‘Good morning Mr. Hart – I am Amparo and I am looking after you today’ Having established that she was, in fact, Spanish we continued chatting in Spanish but I was not at my best at 8.0am on a Sunday morning. The conversation took the following turn: ‘I know what I would be rather be doing at 8.30 on a Sunday morning’ ‘Yes – me too’ ‘What would you rather be doing by doing on a Sunday morning?’ ‘I would like to be snuggled up in bed next to my husband!’ [Then it started to go horribly wrong] – I replied ‘Yes. so I would I – I mean not YOUR husband but I meant somebody else’s husband. No – I didn’t mean that – I meant to say ‘Somebody else’s wife’ No – I didn’t mean that either – I meant ‘Next to next t0 my own wife’ ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Well’, I said hesitantly thinking about what I had just said (in Spanish) – ‘I think so’ “You don’t sound very sure to me!’ she said. ‘Yes, I said (weakly) ‘I am sure’ ‘We wouldn’t want you getting mixed up between my husband, someone else’s husband, someone else’s wife and your own wife, now would we?’ ‘No’ – I said. ‘So that’ got that little confusion out of the way then! We giggled together…
I spent some time this morning going through contacts on my iphone reminding them of my email address and this blog reference so that we have an easy way of keeping touch with each. Also, one of my ‘Winchester’ friends had been a purser on a cruise liner in a past life and gave us lots of practical advice how to protect yourself against rampant virus – rather than reproduce her email here, I will forward it to anyone reading this blog if you drop an email note.
My good friend, Professor Dan Remenyi, has written a letter/article which he has submitted to his local newspaper and it is very stimulating to read. With his permission, I reproduce it here, together with a few thoughts that I had on the matter as well.
We are indeed in a right mess. The government’s response to Covid 19 will destroy tens of thousands of small businesses and will cause millions of people to be laid off. The rescue package announced by the government which consists of, inter alia, a bundle of financial relief including a third of £1 trillion of loans will push the UK further into a financial chasm. Many small businesses struggle on a month-to-month basis and if they have to take out loans from the government in order to continue in the immediate term, their prospects of longer term survival may not be good at all. Providing loans may not be the answer to the problem.
All of this government action seems to be based on a computer model which has told our leaders that by requiring everyone to self-isolate and thus stay away from pub, restaurants and theatres, the potential death toll will drop from 250,000 to 20,000. Even without examining the detail of this model there seems to be a number of loopholes in the apparent logic behind the assumptions. I sincerely hope that the severe economic and social hardship so many of us are about to endure will really save so many lives and reduce the physical misery that is being caused to the nation’s health by this disease.
But this faith in computer models is to say the least surprising. It was a computer model that initiated the reckless financial behaviour which cause the crash of 2008. It was at least computer model thinking if not a particular model itself which led to the Boeing Company designing the 737 Max with its dodgy aerodynamics. In general modelling society to project what will happen in the future is a very or highly dodgy business. I am extremely sceptical of computer models and especially those which have such enormous impact on our society.
There is another issue behind our current situation which deserve some thought. In former times there must’ve been many strange diseases which struck society such as the Black Death or smallpox, the occasional outbreaks of cholera or the Great Spanish Flu of the earlier part of the 20th century. When these catastrophes really got out of hand they caused mayhem on a large-scale. But they were slow to develop and our understanding of disease was very limited. The situation we are facing is quite different and we have a much greater understanding of what we are really facing and how we find ourselves in this situation. There is little doubt that one of the drivers of the current crisis is globalisation. Our ease of access whereby we can travel to almost anywhere on the planet within 24 hours must surely be something which we should now re-evaluate. The great potential we have to spread disease all over the world, surely, should now be considered as a real downside to worldwide travel.
I have no idea as to how we can even begin to think about controlling our appetite for global travel. I think that the genie may be out of the bottle. Freedom to roam the world, if you have the resources to so do, is now so deeply embedded in our culture. But as one commentator recently said on television, “This may not be the last time we will see a pandemic like this sweeps the world”. And if we were to convince the world that travelling far and wide was not ideal what would we do about the tens of thousands of aircraft (which would have cost hundreds of billions of pounds) and the jobs of the millions of people employed by the travel industry?
We are indeed in a right mess!
[End of Dan’s article] – my response
Excellent analysis, Dan – do let me know if the local newspaper publishes your contribution. Looking at the Prime Questions Questions today, I have the feeling that we may not be very far off a Universal Basic Social Income as an ‘experiment’ which like Income Tax (Napoleonic wars expedient?) may become permanent. I feel that society may at a crossroads between (a) a more decentralized, more localized political economy with new lines of cleavage (not social class but a metropolitan elite vs. a more uneducated, localised and more unskilled populace (b) Calls for a ‘strong man’ who with the aid/behest of the military presides over an authoritarian regime prepared to shoot rioters (food stores, hospitals) when it occurs. Whatever – I have a strong suspicion that whatever measures we introduce in society as a strictly ‘temporary’ response will quickly become permanent. I am always keen to know your thoughts. Incidentally, whilst I share some of your doubts about modeling (or any other algorithm in which you do not know the underlying assumptions), are there any alternatives worth considering (lessons from history?) Keep in touch!
For a reason that will become evident shortly, the date of March 19th is always burned upon my memory. As it happens, on this date exactly 47 years ago, I was involved in a bizarre accident at my place of work, Leicester Polytechnic. I was with a couple of my students and I had just given a lecture on ‘Science and Magic as alternative forms of explanation’ (to Combined Science students). I explained that in some western cultures, a belief in magic was an alternative form of explanation (if malaria was caused by being bitten by mosquitos, then why should that one particular mosquito bite me? Answer – because someone was directing magical forces against me, whereas in the West we would tend to rely upon statistical probabilities). I ought to have known something was amiss because the handout that I typically gave to the students was peppered with strange black marks! To make matters worse I had just said ‘Look – if I walk out into the street and get knocked down by a car then in the West we would explain this not as magic but just as a statistical probability‘) A quarter of an hour later, a Hillman Imp approached a T-junction at speed (as the driver had apparently ‘fainted’) although he had been to all all night party the night before. I was sent flying as the car hit me first, severely severing all of the muscles in my right leg and damaging the joint in my left knee. As it was a hospital ancillaries dispute at the time, there was no bed for me in hospital but I was sent home and told to take a couple of aspirins for the pain -ditto the following day until I was finally admitted for surgery some 2-3 days later. And when I woke up from the surgery, my penis was covered in rapidly hardening plaster-of-paris which had to be removed (by a male nurse – sex is the last thing on your mind when in severe pain) Talking of which, I endured three hours of intense pain after the operation and eventually when a nurse asked me how I was, I admitted that I was in pain. The nurse consulted my medicines chart as then said ‘O dear, we’ve forgotten to give you any pain relief!’ [I was angry at that point] So that was our NHS in 1973 – things have improved since.
So what about today? I walked down to the park with my rucsack and a flask of coffee which was a bit difficult to manipulate with the rucksack in one hand whilst I poured the coffee and rummaged around for biscuits with the other. There was only one other dog walker in the park and it was raining and gloomy.
In the afternoon, I spent several hours attempting to claim a refund for a holiday to Portugal in May for which I had paid in January. After several fruitless quaters-of-an-hour hanging onto the end of a phone with recorded messages saying ‘all of our staff are attending to other clients in this exceptionally busy period’) I eventually found a website where you had to fill in all of the details of a claim on a form on the web, which you then had to ‘submit’ – although the form refused to submit. But I did find a telephone number and explained my dilemma to a friendly human at the other end who sighed and said ‘Yes, sir, all of our Expedia clients are experiencing the same problem’ Anyway, I got sent a 6 page form on a PDF for me to fill in, scan and send back so I am sort of making progress.
I have composed a little website with just three items on it that people may find interesting. One is a definitive document on everything you needed to know about COVID-19 (a 33 page document) well written and up-to-date from Harvard medical school. The second item is an article how to keep your immune system well-functioning. The third item is from an email which an ex-Winchester University colleague has sent to me which, as she had been a purser on a cruise liner which was afflicted by Norovirus,is full of practical hints and strategies. Here is the URL:
http://covid.kesland.info
Hasta la vista!
Each day has its own particular ‘timbre’ and today is no exception. Our morning was considerably lightened up by two events. Firstly, one of the very friendly staff in Waitrose has offered me whatever assistance I might need in the weeks ahead. Accordingly, I/we are going to devise a system whereby I can leave a bag complete with my newspaper tokens and she can deliver ‘The Times‘ and ‘The Guardian‘ into the bag without my needing to enter the store – this will be brilliant if we can get it to work. It shows how some people are full of the spirit of altruism of which more later. The second thing that brightened up our morning was meeting one of our ‘Waitrose’ friends in the park – we were able to sit on adjacent park benches at least a metre apart and exchange gossip over how we were coping with the crisis. I think we were both incredibly pleased to see each other as it broke up the social isolation for us mutually On the way home, we called by one of our immediate neighbours and had a brief conversation through a partially opened window. She was telling us a horrendous story of local groups of people who were going into Asda and engaging in all sorts of panic buying before disgorging the contents of their trolleys into their cars, putting on a new set of other clothes and headgear so they would not be recognised and then entering the store again for a second sortie.
In the afternoon, I managed to successfully make a PDF file of my claim to the insurance company complete with accompanying documentation. I managed to successfully edit the PDF file of a page copied twice in error and then used an online pdf compression program to reduce its size from 11Mb to 1.6 Mb before I submitted it. Whether or not, I will get any of our money back from the planned trip to Portugal in May I do not know but at least I have tried one line of attack before I take issue with the credit card company, which will be the last resort.
On a more reflective note, the crisis seems to be revealing a polarisation in our society between a group of largely uneducated, individualistic and essentially selfish individuals on the one hand and a more responsible, altruistic and community-minded set of people on the other. Perhaps ‘thus was it ever so’ but certainly the crisis is bringing it into sharp relief.
The Sky News video of conditions in the Bergamo hospital in Northern Italy which is already completely overwhelmed gave pause for thought, to put it mildly. They are saying that this might only be a foretaste of that is to come in the UK as we seem to be some three weeks behind Italy and the rate of increase in the UK seems worse than other comparable societies such as China, Italy etc. Without being melodramatic, I think I would die peacefully at home rather than eventually in the insulated, chaotic and impersonal settings that we see in the Italian critical care hospitals (which, by all accounts, are better equipped than ours)
Today was a brighter day than yesterday and our spirits were raised by meeting a couple of friends on our walk down to the park - to whom we chatted from a safe distance of 2-3 metres but as the news seems to get more dire by the hour, it is an interesting question for how much longer this can be maintained. In northern Italy, for example, (the UK is reckoned to be about 3 weeks behind) it used to be possible for one person at a time to have a walk with a dog but it seems that even this is now being adjudged as unsafe.
Our son and daughter-in-law managed to secure us our daily newspapers (which we have had to forego since last weekend) and this was a welcome treat. After some messaging with a friendly colleague from Waitrose we are setting up a system whereby we leave a bag containing pre-paid tokens for the newspapers hanging up outside Waitrose and, we are hopeful, that within a few minutes the tokens will have been taken as payment and the bag filled with newspapers ready for us to collect. Our son daughter-in-law tried to go the pharmacy to pick up some routine prescriptions for Meg and myself but the pharmacy as a whole was shut (whilst they are processing enormous backlogs?) and a neigbouring pharmacy across the road had a queue outside and people were only being admitted three at a time. From what we can tell the local supermarkets have been emptied of certain items that we would normally buy week by week (eggs, cheese, milk) so we shall have wait and see if any of these can be supplied by Ocado.
I want to pass on a seemingly bizarre tip but it seems to work very well. After Meg and I had consumed our coffee in the local park, we treated ourselves to a banana each. I was just about to dispose of the skin in a nearby rubbish bin when I stared down at my scuffed walking boots and suddenly remembered an old tip. I rubbed the (inside) of the banana skin over my boots and they did a marvellous job in cleaning and renovating them. I seem to remember somewhere that the same tip works exceptionally well for rubber (not plastic) car mats - I think that the natural oils in a banana skin are very akin to the natural oils to be found in both rubber and leather and hence they do a good job in cleaning and renovating them. I am constantly reminded of what things were like in 1950 when I first started primary school when absolutely everything was in short supply. At schools, our crayons were cut into two so that we could have half a crayon each. If you needed to go the outside toilet to do a 'N0. 2' job, the teacher would assess your size and need and then from a roll of Izal toilet paper which she kept in her desk grant you either one or two pieces of paper. Those days may well return in the current crisis!
Digesting the news from yesterday when the whole of the private sector was subsidised by having 80% of wages to be paid for by the government, it almost seems as though we are living in an Alice-in-Wonderland type world for measures like this were not even dreamed of by Jeremy Corbin and, of course. nothing like this was attempted in the Second World War. One does get the feeling that once a business has been closed down, how many will ever re-open? Even having 80% of staff wages paid for by the government is pretty meaningless if there are no customers or footfall of any kind.
In the late afternoon we had an hour's FaceTime chat with two of our Waitrose friends which was absolutely wonderful. We may meet in the local park at a very safe distance if the weather is fine next week.
To say that the highlight of one’s day has been the delivery of a week’s groceries would, in normal times, seem the height of triviality. However, I was delighted, not to say relieved, to take delivery of my very first Ocado order between 8.00 and 9.00 this morning. I seem to have a superfluity of green vegetables and potatoes (but, apparently, the veg sections of the supermarkets have remained somewhat unscathed whereas the milk, chese, eggs, pasta sections seem to have been stripped). I am going to try my second Ocado order at about 1.30 in the morning as the rest of the time the web access times are incredibly long.
The four us us are settling into a new routine but some things are proving a little difficult. Martin will be working from home from now on but is going on a toilet roll hunt tomorrow (we are down to our last 4). In addition, we are regularly wiping down surfaces, light switches, door handles (including the front door) and the like and our hands get a wash in good old-fashioned soap whenever we are within range of a soapdish.
My son and daughter-in-law used my pre-paid vouchers to acquire our copy of the Sunday Times and Observer and it has been fascinating to have a deep and informed read. In particular, the Observer reproduced Imperial College’s report COVID-19 which completely dismayed the government and forced the abrupt changes in policy. The report indicated that the death toll would rise to 250,000 unless draconian measures were adopted. This evidence and the fact that we are only 2-3 weeks behind Italy where the death toll is already about 5,000, coupled with the harrowing Sky News reports from inside the Bergamo (Northern Italy) critical care units which are being overwhelmed made a goverment re-think inevitable.
Meg and I had our normal walk in the park keeping at least three metres from anybody. But we did meet an interesting lady whose husband had recently died of pancreatic cancer (and we all thought that this might have been a blessing given the present state of the hospitals) and another father-son couple making the best of Mother’s Day (which seems a complete irrelevance). We will still have to see what the week ahead brings where we have some routine GP and hospital appointments which will now be conducted by phone.
A final thought for the day – if there had been any church services in Anglican or Catholic churches where normally part of the Epistle would be a reading from the Old Testament, would we have two readings ‘The Apocalypse‘ followed by ‘Apocalypse Now‘? (Not really the Old Testament I know but you get my drift)
Well, we knew in our hearts that this day was eventually going to arrive and so it has. Of course, if you have already been self-isolating and keeping at least two metres from individuals you pass on a walk then nothing much will actually change. But, inevitably, the most dramatic impact is upon food distribution. Did all of the people who ‘panicked’ and collectively put £1 billion worth of food in their store cupboards act sensibly and rationally: if you tried not to panic and hoard then were you denying yourself essential supplies in the future? About 10 days I signed up for Ocado and actually got a delivery last Sunday. I now have a ‘normal’ week shopping of some £40.00 worth of goods in the Ocado system but no delivery slots are available so what to do? The official government advice is to use online delivery services ‘when you can’ (which are incredibly weasel words from a government which must or should have known/modelled these consequences) As of 8.30 this evening, the entire food distribution system is suspect. I’m not sure I particularly want to be starved into standing in a queue to be let in three at a time into a supermarket with basically no stock, but when the point of starvation arrives I suppose I will.
Today didn’t start off particularly well as our friendly assistant in our local Waitrose with whom I had set up an arrangement to collect my pre-paid newspapers had reported in sick and was self-isolating. However, she had fully briefed one of her colleagues and we handed in our bag and vouchers and got our newspapers for the first (and probably the last) time. We had some nice chats at a distance with friends and acquaintances in the course of the morning. The afternoon was spent composing a little note to send round the rest of the residents who share the BioDisk (mini sewage treatment system for our six houses) reminding them to only flush conventional toilet tissue down the loos in case desperation forces them to use cut-up newspaper or other improvised solutions which could well clog the system. We FaceTimed some more friends at the end of the afternoon and swopped notes about access to food, recipes and the like. Then a nice long chat with our new next-door neighbours that I hadn’t managed to see in quite a long while.
Martin sent me a very interesting article from Roy Lilley, a very well informed commentator on the Health Service. The article ‘Some thinking to do..‘ was essentially trying to predict what new models of economic and social organisation we would develop ‘when this is all over’ as the government’s response to the crisis in paying 80% of the wages of people working in the private sector is ‘pure socialism’ It is surely the case that nothing will ever be quite the same again. In particular, there is. a strong argument that our NHS must always start off from a position where it can respond well to new situations of pandemics which will surely arise again (three in the last century?)
This has been the first full day of ‘lock-down’ but it hasn’t seemed so very different from the days preceding it. The roads were certainly quieter but from our bedroom we can still see (a long way off) lorries making their way up and down the M42/M5. It was a beautiful spring day and one in which felt good to be alive with the birds singing and the trees starting to burst into bloom. On our way down to our normal pitch in the park, we passed a couple of neighbours who we have got to know better over the years – they attend the same church and were keenly gardening whilst they could. We chatted for perhaps half an hour exchanging horror stories and thoughts about the current crisis. The behaviour of fellow walkers was quite interesting. When we started to get within range of any other walkers, we engaged in a mutual swerve in plenty of time making sure that there were at least three metres between us rather than the recommended two. It seemed a reversal of normal patterns of behaviour – one exhibited on’s concern for other people by taking steps to avoid them rather than greet them. We observed just one example of antisocial behaviour in which a couple of parents and their two children and a dog were romping down the path without seemingly a care in the world – we turned abruptly on our heels and took off in the opposite direction so that we would come nowhere near them.
Our son, Martin, spent an hour and three quarters queuing to get into the local pharmacy picking up a couple of prescriptions for us (in a queue of about two dozen) for which we were very grateful. Lunch consisted of one of our own home-made fish pies and I reminded myself that I had all of the ingredients to male another one which lasts for 4-5 meals altogether. When every one has come home. we engage on a deep clean of kitchen surfaces and the like – I am taking over the duties of the light switches monitor, disinfecting each of the light switches in the house (of which there seemed to be a lot – I must do a count of them tomorrow)
Quite a lot of the day I have had my Ocado app running on the computer running down from about 40,000 in the queue only to find there are no delivery slots yet allocated. We are stocked up with enough food for about the next two weeks but I am trying to put in a sensible order for delivery in about a fortnight’s time although this may be a vain hope. Our daughter-in-law is going to try and buy a few essentials from M&S when she comes home from school tomorrow so we shall have to live in hope.
As I was watching the news bulletin at end of the day we learned that the NHS are concerting the Excel exhibition centre in London into a 4,000 bedded temporary hospital whilst Donald Trump is arguing that he intends to ‘open up’ the rest of America to the world by Easter which is now three weeks away, whilst the mayor of New York is pleading desperately for medical supplied as the virus is whipping through the city like wildfire!
Today started with a maximum degree of frustration. To order some groceries online, I am using Ocado which seems very good but is almost completely overwhelmed by the demand for online shopping – it is not unheard to join a queue of 50,000 whilst shopping. In order to maximise my chances of getting onto the system, I logged in about 1.00 am in the morning and was pleasantly surprised to get after only a 5-minute wait (eight hours is threatened if you try during the day). Having already saved a trolley load of groceries, I took on the remaining three delivery slots. However, the way the system works one has to order £40.00 worth of goods. As so many items were unavailable my ‘shopping basket’ dropped to about £20.00 so I was forced by the system to abandon my delivery slot in order to top my groceries to a volume which after allowances would not drop below £40.00. So I topped up with various items but by the time I came to checkout, all of the delivery slots had gone so I was left, as at the beginning of the night with a basket of groceries (a bigger basket in this case) but no delivery slot. On the assumption that slots are released each day in the wee small hours of the morning, I shall try again tonight and see how I get on. To be honest, as we have about two weeks of food, we have sufficient to cover our needs but I am trying to be organised for what is to come a fortnight down the track, as it were. As it happens our daughter-in-law managed to pop into M&S and had topped up with a few things for both herself and for Meg and me.
Today on our daily walk, we found people both friendly but also responsible as tended to swerve ‘outwards’ as it were to give each other a wide berth as it were. I am sure we are quite fortunate, having a large park to walk around only about 1.5km away but I can only imagine how people are feeling if they have been cooped up in a small flat for days on end.
This afternoon, I waited for a telephone call from my doctor to give me the results of my recent gastroscopy (some small polyps were removed but they were benign) and to update blood pressure medication so I spent some of the afternoon trying to get into a really relaxed state listening to ClassicFM before I took some blood pressure readings. As it happens, I am listening to ClassicFM as I type and they are trying to encourage the British public to do what the Italians, Spanish and French are already doing. At 8.00 every evening, people get onto their balconies (in flat-centred societies) where everyone gives a huge round of applause as a mark of appreciation to the NHS personnel who are struggling to preserve our lives in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We had previously arranged to FaceTime our closest friends in Spain and to get news from them. The ‘lock-down’ had been imposed much more rigorously there rather than here – for example, one was allowed to venture out about 200 metres with one’s pet to allow it to relieve itself and then back home. We joked that if they ran out of toilet paper (there had been a panic on this in Spain as well) it would be not only the pets that were relieving themselves on the side of the road. The military (‘Guardia Civile’) seemed to have played a much bigger role in maintaining the new social norms but after some terrible scenes in supermarkets, the access to food seems to have settled down. But Spain has many more smaller shops as well as supermarket chains so I suppose that helps. The view from Spain as the deaths in Spain exceed those in China was that the Chinese could be lying about their figures – but in any case, in a non-democratic regime people could be dragged from their houses and made to conform if it was evident that they were not doing so.
The Ocado website is down until 11.0opm so I wonder if I get any more success tonight – I will report tomorrow. Watch this space!
The day did not start off particularly well because, as I might have predicted, I got to the front of a queue of about 60,000 in Ocado only to find there were no slots available. However, this is not quite as dire as it sounds because our daughter-in-law managed to secure a few provisions for us from Marks and Spencers/Waitrose (the ALDIs and ASDAs of this world are a disaster zone) I may see if Ocado have any priority system for self-isolaters although I doubt it, despite government urging. I have also signed up to my local Iceland who is offering free delivery but there are no slots available (whilst my welcoming letter once I had signed up was promising the earth)
Actually, there is quite a jolly atmosphere in our house at the moment. We are all well and aiming to keep that way by being particularly careful about who we interact with. The house is reasonably stocked with food and we do not feel under any great stress, although I must say the local park is a god-send. This afternoon marked the first outing of the petrol mower and I was delighted that it started on the second ‘pull’ – I have to have the mower on a higher cut for the first cut of the season as the grass is so tufty. Incidentally, did you know that petrol contains 5%-10% ethanol at the moment (the petrol companies are very coy about telling you about this) and you need to buy a special ‘fuel stabiliser’ to add to the fuel in the container you use for the mower. It doesn’t matter too much in cars where the motion of the car joggles it all around but it does matter in the case of containers for your mower as they tend to hang around in the garage. The ethanol absorbs a layer of water from the atmosphere and the water and the petrol then separate and you have horrendous problems with the mower. For that reason, I always religiously drain off the oil and the excess fuel at the end of the mowing season and at the start of a new season I only ever use the highest quality of fuel I can and put in a Briggs and Stratton fuel stabiliser additive which lasts forever. I only found out about this because my mower handbook recommended that I use a fuel stabiliser and I did some Googling to find out why. If any reader also runs a petrol mower, it’s worth a search around.
Tonight we had the first? last? episode of the Clap for Carers event – everyone comes to their windows or doors at 8.00 in the evening and applauded the workers in the NHS who are keeping us all safe. We all found it quite inspiring – the most unlikeliest of our neighbours participated.
Today was the day when the Chancellor of the Exchequer unveiled a scheme giving a grant to all the self-employed of 80% of the profits they declared to HMRC. Has it occurred to anyone that many of the self-employed declared everything they could think of as expenses (cars, clothes, equipment, parts of rooms as office space etc. etc.) to minimise their tax liability and consequently paid very little in actual tax (whilst claiming that it was their taxes that paid for the NHS – not the hefty contributions from the rest of us on PAYE) This means that their actual ‘profit’ which is income minus expenditure would have been declared as very little and now they only receive a grant of 80% of this. None of the commentators have explained that but are declaiming how generous the government has been but I suspect not! Those who don’t qualify have to join the rest of humanity on Universal Credit where they wait 5 weeks for the first payment and an horrendous online assessment process. Hey Ho – the German word ‘schadrenfreude’ occurs to me!
After I have blogged in the past about the inanities of accessing Ocado, the online supermarket, I think I only need to report that I had to wait three minutes in a queue to join a queue which was more than 262,000 long (more than a quarter of a million) – and which now was ‘being paused! ‘ I think, enough said!
Meg and I were heartened to meet with one of our Waitrose friends in the park today and we held an interesting chat as a distance of some three or four metres. I have noticed that when people know each other and evidently have a regard for them then the distance between them actually increases so that perhaps on a subconscious level one is trying not to do harm to friends and kindred spirits. The park was extremely quiet today and it looks as though the social isolation message is really starting to ‘cut through’ – perhaps the prospect of £30 fines is deterring some people. When we got home and turned on the TV it was to the news that Boris Johnson (the prime minister), Matt Hancock (Health minister) and the Government’s chief medical adviser had all been stricken by the virus (but none, it appears, too severely at this stage)
In these very straightened circumstances, I have been reflecting upon the fact that my mother’s generation who had lived through World War II knew about social isolation (air-raid shelters) and privations and certainly know how to make a little go a long way. My mother tended to bake bread every day and had a range of other habits that seemed to date from her war-time experiences. For example, she always conserved what she called ‘good’ water i.e. water that had been used for one cleaning purpose but was not thrown away as it could then be used for something else. As we eke out our meagre and dwindling food supplies in the weeks yet to come, we may need to relearn some of those old-fashioned virtues of thrift and resilience. In the late afternoon, we FaceTimed some of our oldest and dearest Waitrose friends and nattered for practically an hour (which always seems to fly by) We may meet in the park for a distance at a distance if the nice fine days of spring return in a few days. This evening I spent a pleasant few minutes reading and replying to one of our Hampshire friends who had been reading these blogs and whose supermarket experiences seemed to parallel our own.
As I type, I am listening to Beethoven’s 9th (choral symphony) on ClassicFM and reflect that some things have got better. The various radios we have scattered throughout the house are tuned either to Radio 4 (talk programmes) or to ClassicFM with an occasional foray into Radio 3 when ClassicFM goes a bit downmarket by playing a Strauss waltz (does anybody actually choose that?) I suppose my appreciation of classical music started when I was at a boarding unit in a school in Bolton, Lancashire to which I was despatched whilst my mother trained to be a teacher in the mid-1950s. [As an aside, she was so desperate to get into what was then called a Teacher Training College that she altered the 1911 on her birth certificate to 1914 to make herself look three years younger, the penalty for this sin being that she had to wait for an extra three years before she could draw her state retirement pension!] The school did not have a particularly good reputation but I was in the school choir and the orchestra (and two members of the school were actually in the National Youth Orchestra) But much more prestigious was the school brass band (of which I was not a member being a violinist) and it played reguarly at the Catholic Whit Walks held in the Lancashire towns when all the various civic and ethnic groups (e.g. Ukranians who had come to work in the mines) used to parade in their best uniforms/national dress. On my study wall, I still have a Lowry (print!) showing the Whit Walks in the distance which is a reminder of our Manchester and university days.
Well, I sort of struck lucky in the wee small hours of the morning. I had set up an account with Waitrose ‘Click and Collect‘ mainly for cleaning materials, wipes and the non-food items that we were likely to run out in a couple of weeks time (or at least, not find in the store) To my delight, a ‘slot’ came up on Monday next which I eagerly accepted although it entails a jouney (by son and/or daughter-in-law to nearby Droitwich, where the Waitrose store is so much bigger) It will be interesting to see how much of the original order is actually fulfilled – we shall see!
Today, I was also delighted to be the recipient of ‘The Times‘ and ‘The Guardian‘ which had kindly been collected for us by the family on their morning walk. Although we are prepared to forego newspapers during the week, those on a Saturday are particularly valuable as they contain the guides TV programmes in the week to come.
As I was watching TV tonight, I was particularly struck by how pointless many of the advertisements are on commercial TV. Of course, they would have been commissioned months ago and made weeks ago – but an advert advocating a particular brand of cosmetic seems singularly pointless when it is impossible to go to a shop that could sell it for me. I forget who it was who opined that at least half of all the money spent on advertising is absolutely wasted but the difficulty remains that no one can discern which half!
I thought I would attempt to be virtuous today – if the weather had been better, I would have spent some time in the garden doing a bit of a spring tidy up. Instead, I engaged in a stepper routine to which I have a link via YouTube – the presenter is quite a likeable young American lady who with her partner runs a series of programmes called on a website called FitnessBlender.com. It takes me about 15 minutes and gets me out of breath as well as exercising my lower body – in the meantime, to get me going for the day, in the morning and before breakfast I do a series of Pilates style stretches and incorporate a 4kg weight to make sure my arm muscles do not waste away. The way that I know whether these various exercises are doing their job is (a) how easy it is to put a loaded suitcase in an overhead luggage compartment when one is going on holiday (a distant hope?) and (b) whether my muscles ache or not after the first mowing of the season (which tends to be the heaviest one) Whilst on the fitness theme, I am in two minds whether to do the online yoga course which my local yoga studio is putting on to try and gain a bit of income for themselves whilst it is not possible to attend in person. I think I probably will if only I would like their small business to keep going after the ‘crisis’ and a combination of yoga and Pilates exercises ought to keep me in shape.
The news continues to be shocking, of course, and I keep wondering where the ‘inflection’ point of the curve will come i.e. the point at which the rate of new cases starts to moderate, indicating one is nearing the tope of the curve. The following is copied from the MedScape website:
Number of Patients With COVID-19 in ICU Doubles Every 2 to 3 Days
Manca has calculated from the Italian data that the number of patients in intensive care with COVID-19 initially doubles every 2 to 3 days.
This rate slows fractionally every day until, after 3 to 4 weeks, the doubling time is around 4 to 5 days. Around day 18, the rate of increase is maintained for 3 to 4 days without increasing further, known as the “inflection point”, after which the rate of increase in ICU cases begins to drop.
He found that the inflection point was reached in Lombardy 19 days after the outbreak started in the region.
For the rest of Italy, that point will not be reached until the start of next month, he therefore predicts. The consequence is that “every day counts,” he stressed.
On these calculations, we still have 2 more weeks of really bad news. Interesting that exhibition centres (ExCel in London, NEC in Birmingham, GMex in Manchester) are now being commissioned as instant hospitals-cum-morgues.
I always think that the day after the clocks go forward is the first actual day of spring, whatever the date of the Spring equinox - it is nice to get an hour of extra light at the end of the day. Although it seems a big job to get all of the clocks in the house done, my son and I share the tasks between us so it is soon done. I just have to remember the alter the time in the car the next time I take it for a drive. This afternoon, we decided to devote the time to a good clean of the house, now that our weekly help is not available to us. I did a certain amount of tidying up before hoovering and now fully appreciate what a difficult job it must be week by week when I leave little piles of things on the floor. Nonetheless, as a result of tidying up, I have now discovered a calculator which had been temporarily mislaid, two books that were in places that I did not expect them be (although I intend to give both of them away) and some coloured electricians tape littering my study floor (I used it for bookbinding purposes when I run several pages of e.g. a manual and make it into a little book, properly stapled and with tape covering the spine if you really wanted to know!) I sent a message to our home-help with abject apologies for being a miscreant in the past and have informed her that 'There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth.." I have now promised my son that I will clear at least one 'pile' per day (a pile normally consisting of things I have run from the computer, books, newspaper articles, letters to be filed, etc. etc.) Once it is filed I know I will forget about it completely although if it there is on a pile it is a reminder to me to do something with it..
This morning in the park we managed a nice chat with one of (formerly) Waitrose acquaintances who was busy pushing her two twin girls in their buggy. We held the customary conversation at two metres distance and I have supplied her with details of this blog to get bored with. It really is quite amazing that most days we manage to see someone we know with whom we can have a conversation.
My son managed to get me a Sunday Times and an Observer which were very gratefully received. From the Sunday Times, I discovered the following:UK COVID-19 tests per week:35,000 Deaths : 1000+
Germany COVID-19 tests per week: 500,000 (available to all who ask for them- 14x UK) Deaths: 400 - 40% of UK figure
Our populations are similar so that is quite telling statistic! When challenged over the evident delay exhibited by the government before their volte-face, the response by various government ministers is always either complete prevarication or the mantra 'we have always been guided by the science' One wonders when this is all over and we have an official enquiry, what it will actually reveal (although I feel that we could probably write the enquiry report now)
So the start of another week – and the end of our first fortnight of self-isolation. We were really looking forward this morning to taking delivery of our first Waitrose ‘Click and Collect‘ groceries which my son was picking up for us from a larger Waitrose store in Droitwich. However, we only received £13 worth of the £40 worth of goods ordered, many being unavailable alhough the website did not list them as being out of stock. These were mainly cleaning materials and anti-bacterial wipes which we could really have done with but evidently, just as if one were shopping in person, there were none to be had. At least the Amazon website is brutally honest when it says “We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock”
My niece had sent me a link to her local church in Harrogate where they are offering a vew of the special mid-day prayers. As this was a YouTube reference, I put the reference on a website with a specially short and snappy name to help to access it – and then the problems started. On my Panasonic TV I found on the menu where, in theory, you could access the web – I ascertained that I did indeed have an internet connection. I was incredibly pleased to get my webpage up and loaded although it was very tedious typing to type in the name by picking out ony letter at a time on the keyboard so I accessed the link and waited. Then I got a message saying ‘YouTube cannot work with this browser‘ as it was out of date. So I attempted to download an update to FireFox which then informed me ‘Error – FireFox cannot display this page‘ At that stage, I gave up completely and went to view it on the computer in my study where it took only seconds to load. The ‘service’ was a little basic (the pastor sitting in a chair and reading out a few bits of scripture and a prayer/contemplation or so) but out of interest I wondered what the rest of YouTube was up to and discovered that if one wanted one could have complete Catholic Masses complete with video images of the church and congregation, full music and the like (mainly North American or Canadian) and evidently produced at a professional level. So if I need some spiritual consolation (I am not at thet stage yet) we shall have to wait and see!
In the afternoon, I decided to tackle one of my well-known piles and made a fair degree of progress. I managed to throw away about half of the pile and the remainder was mainly newspaper articles and/or printouts from the internet which focussed on the following issues:
(i) bowel and prostate cancer
(ii) how to eat healthily
(iii) how to exercise healthily.
I then discovered to my delight that I had two empty box files (and an empty Apple iPad box which I can press into service) so the task for tomorrow is to do a proper sorting out into the relevant boxes and then finding a location in which to store the boxes (as my study is already rather full) I think it’s going to be a ‘top-of-the-bookcase’ jobby but at least it helps to fulfil the pledge both to my son and our home help that ‘There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth‘ – but I will have to keep on repenting until the study (and the rest of the house) are in a completely ship-safe and orderly state. Another bout of tidying up/sorting out/throwing away/filing awaits tomorrow no doubt. Incidentally, our local park was incredibly quiet this morning – we were approached by several enthusiastic licking dogs (whose owners kept at a respectable distance)
A beautiful bright day today and consequently the park seemed somewhat fuller of dog-walkers than normal – I mean we could see about six people in total rather than two. I was thinking aloud whether if we were spotted sitting on a park bench, we would be moved on by an officious community police person or a park attendant. Mind you, this is an entirely artificial concept, as in twelve and a half years of living in Bromsgrove, I have never seen a uniformed police offer patrolling the streets of Bromsgrove. Occasionally ( once or twice a week), you might see a Police Community Support Officer and I suspect that park attendants were least seen in the pages of ‘The Beano‘ because I do not recall ever having seen once since. When they did disappear? Parking wardens first appeared in 1960 so perhaps one was transformed into the other. On the way home, we spent a pleasant 20 minutes or so chatting with one of our friends from church. We made her appear by the simple expedient of standing in front of her house and waving at a window until we were spotted – these chats help us all to stop having cabin fever.
In the afternoon, I carried on with the organisation of press-cuttings and articles which I had allowed to accumulate over the years. I now have them organised into folders comprising a variety of health conditions (which I won’t detail now), exercise, dietary issues, the ageing process and finally a category I call ‘newsworthy’. These are now housed in a couple of box-files and I am resolved both to keep them accessible and also to constantly file away new material as I find it. In this respect, The Times Health section often contains interesting material and is generally very reliable. In the late afternoon, we FaceTimed some of our Waitrose friends and exchanged news about current supermarket access and the state of the world in general. It’s great to be able to talk over a video-link like this and I wish I had started it sooner with many of my friends and acquaintances. I am resolved to also get to grips with Skype which is a bit of a closed book to me at the moment.
If I were a member of the NHS front-line staff, I think I would feel incredibly frustrated at the government’s response to the absence of sufficient testing for the COVID-19 virus. When faced with direct and sometimes penetrating questions, they resort to evasion, aspiration (‘We hope very much that soon we will…etc’)and occasionally, a direct misrepresentation, for example saying that the shortage of a suitable reagent in the testing process is the source of the problem. It is evident that there has been a massive lack of preparedness over the years and is now manifest by a deficit in the testing facilities, the staff to do the tests and the analysis, not to mention the kits themselves. I am finding that the daily briefing at 5.00 pm is particularly irksome as the journalists can pose quite pointed questions over their video- links but after an evasive reply not answering the question at all directly, the journalist is not given the opportunity to have any come-back and hence this plays straight into the politician’s hands. There will be a lot more of this in the next two weeks, I am sure.
Although as a child I used to say ‘White Rabbits, white rabbits, white rabbits’ and then hold my fingers crossed behond my back until I saw a policman riding a white horse on the first day of the month, I began to think I was too old for such childish nonsense and decided not to go down this road again – finding any policman is rare enough, let alone on a white horse!
It was an interesting venture into the park today although the weather was a bit grey with a lot of overhanging cloud. A police car pulled up into the park (notwithstanding what I was saying just now) – Meg and I wondered if they were going to cast an eye over diverse dog walkers or even, as reputededly happened in Ipswich according to a recent letter in The Times, to admonish a couple for not exercising and who were therefore breaking the spirit of the newly created social universe which we now inhabit. Fortunately, our customary park bench was out of sight of the police car but it appeared that the couple of officers (male plus female) had just pulled in to have a snack of a chocolate bar and was not chasing miscreants such as myself. As we were drinking our coffee, an elderly lady who I know by sight came into view, walking her little Jack Russell terrior dog. As I was born only two days when World War II ended and I am nearly 75, I had worked out that the only people who had any first hand knowledge would have to be about ten years of age or older and thus be 85+ years of age. After explaining why I needed to know, I tentatively asked my acquaintance her age – it turned out that she was actually 85 (but looked younger). I had been thinking that people of that generation would have had to have shown some resourcefulness and resilience to have lived throughout the wartime years and that would probably stand them in good stead for the times that we living through at the moment. It turned out that neither of us had known our fathers – my friend’s father had been drowned (they thought) crossing from Sicily to Italy. Her house in rural Worcestershire had been subject to some bombing but the three bombs dropped nearby had actually missed her house. It turned out that the German bomber had been pursued by a British fighter plane and the bomber had released his bombs indiscrimately in order to lighten his load and make good his escape. I thought this was quite fascinating social hisory – I explained how my own mother was bombed out of her house in Hull before going to Liverpool (for what reason I have not managed to ascertain but my sister was born there) before being bombed out of her house in Liverpool. On our way home, a sight that gladdened the eye was to see a duck with a brood of 10 ducklings swimming towards us in the park pond. They only looked a day or so old and I had not noticed them before so I wonder when they were actually born. The other remarkable fact was the ducks had nested on an island which is sits astride a stone wall at least a metre high so I speculated that the mother duck must have encouraged one or two day old chicks to have plunged that distance to reach the pond (a bit like us leaping at least from the top of a house)
Our daughter-in-law had very kindly offered to do the weekly shopping for us at a branch of Waitose in Droitwich. This was a surreal experience as the queue stretched right around the car park as individuals had to keep at least 2 metres apart and only about 10 were allowed in the store at any one time. However, we managed to get some basic supplies (at Waitrose prices!) to keep us going for the next week or so. I wonder what the COVID-19 death toll tomorrow will be as it was 560 today and can only get worse…
The highlight of our day always seems to be our daily walk to the park where, with luck, we can bump into old friends and acquaintances. Today was no exception as we met one of our Waitrose friends who had been out exercising and was just completing what may have been an hour-long tour of the park and its environs. By a careful piece of foresight, I had brought my daily newspaper tokens with me – although the son and heir is always telling me that I ought to just read it electronically, I am still sufficiently old-fashioned ? stuck in my ways? to enjoy reading the authentic article. Anyway, our friend secured my newspapers for me ( a five minute walk away to our local Waitrose) and I had a book full of ‘schoolboy howlers’ (most of which I had already read before ) which I readily gave her in exchange for her efforts. I remember one of these schoolboy howlers as it was particularly apposite to our current times, assuming that we are experiencing at the moment has its parallels in the Black Death 1347-1353 (Thank you Google!) The question asked was ‘What did a big red cross signify when painted on the front door of a house?’ And the answer – ‘There is a fully trained member of the Red Cross inside ready to administer first aid’ We also struck up a conversation with an assistant from the local veterinary practice who was giving some walking therapy to an injured dog (a poodle and pointer cross since you ask) which had been badly injured in a road accident and had spent some six weeks as an ‘in-patient’ in their clinic. We exchanged some stories about the capacities of dogs to read human body language (researchers from an Italian university have recently investigated this and argue that dogs have the ability to read body language both in humans and other dogs- apparently we as mere humans lost this ability a very long time ago in our evolution)
This afternoon was meant to be a ‘tidying up’ afternoon but somehow, I never got round to it as I got diverted updating/refining some websites which I maintain more as a hobbyist/filing system rather than for any real computing intent. I have discovered a British website that offers ‘free’ unlimited webspace and the ability to create some subdomains which act rather as though they were completely independent websites. Normally, I am a little chary of such things but I am just putting trivial things on them (such as a minimalist HTML template, or a simple HTML lister) so that no real damage if the whole lot gets junked. They make money from advertising not on your website (which is a traditional model) but on the Control Panel which is used for maintenance purposes – which I then block in any case with an ad-blocker (although I do get messages requesting me to unblock my ad-blocker which is, I suppose, to be expected.)
My ex-colleague Eric has passed onto me a URL which gives an up-to-date picture of the latest published COVID-19 statistics so I will pass on it one for those readers who are compulsive followers of such things!
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/f94c3c90da5b4e9f9a0b19484dd4bb14
Just as an afterthought – today being Thursday, we all hung out of our windows and applauded all of the public sector workers (ourselves) is what is becoming a weekly tradition. However, the response was somewhat down on last week which was the first of these events – and as the hour had gone forward, it was still not quite dark so the dramatic effect was a little muted. Still, we did our bit! During the day, I took the opportunity to order 1000 single-use plastic-type gloves – I reckon this is going to go for months and they will always be useful. Delivery time is about 2-3 weeks but we can hang on with some that we already have in stock until then.
It might sound a little strange to say that the highlight of our day is our walk down to the park and the people we meet there, with whom we can chat. Today was no exception for we met one of our Waitrose friends who was pushing her two baby girls out in their buggy. We chatted a lot about the NHS as we all have extensive links with it and our friend and her partner both work in the NHS. We had an interesting conversation concerning the way in which the modern NHS was taking people in some of the ancillary professions and training them up in more than one skill so that workers were, to some extent, multi-functional. Was this the way that the NHS was going to go in the future, we speculated. After having given our friend this blog reference, I regaled her with one of the anecdotes in my ‘Virtually Challenged Anecdotes‘ ( all true stories) concerning our next-door neighbour when we lived in Wigston, Leicestershire. Our neighbour was a very doughty Belgian lady (Flemish to be exact) and when we had known for only a few days she recounted the story of how she had circumcised her husband with a carving knife on the kitchen table. This was all done under the friendly gaze of the local family doctor – whether they used any anaesthetic was not mentioned but I doubt it. As our neighbour proudly announced ‘Well, he was no use to me like that’ and subsequently her husband went on to sire both a son and a daughter. We then went on our merry way and passed a distant neighbour who was out jogging – we both recognised each other vaguely by sight and we found out that she lived in a cottage about three hundred metres down the hill We both speculated that one of the unintended consequences of the present economic worries is that the developments which are threatening to engulf us will probably not now happen – or be delayed by a goodly number of years so that we will be past caring. Finally, we came across our new next door neighbour who was walking the family dog and we exchanged views (which we both happen to share) about the lack of talent in the present government who are trying to make the best of the pandemic for us.
As so many of our creative individuals have been subject to lockdown, their talents still continue to be manifest. On YouTube, there are a variety of COVID-19 parodies of popular song and film. Just entering ‘COVID parodies’ into Google will reveal many of them – for example, there is a rather nice COVID version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. But my particular favourite (and I think the funniest) is the Do-Re-Me song from The Sound of Music in which a new COVID soundtrack replaces the original – extremely funny!
I finally got round to clearing the tray I keep on top of my filing cabinet which houses the kinds of things you would normally keep in a desk-drawer such as paper clips, elastic bands, highlighters, tape, glue etc. etc. This has been threatened for several years but COVID has actually made it happen at last!
Although the weather forecasters said it was going to turn out to be a sunny day (and so, indeed it was, in the afternoon) this morning was pretty cold and miserable. Probably on account of this, the park was practically deserted – Meg and I were keen to drink up our coffee and not tarry, particularly as we did not coincide with any of our friends and acquaintanceships. However, our day was lightened by the fact that our daughter-in-law had managed an ‘intermediate’ range shop up at Waitrose so we now feel comfortable for a week or so. Although I am used to paying cash for everything at the supermarket and not paying by card, I am in a very small minority and cash is very much frowned upon these days (potentially virus-laden) So I am having to get used to a new system of purchases all paid for electronically and I transfer monies over to settle my bills with the rest of the family.
We were greeted with the news that Keir Starmer had won a convincing victory in the election for the Labour party leadership. Now although conventional politics has all but been suspended whilst the COVID-19 pandemic is upon us, it seems as we have a ‘proper’ opposition at last. I was musing to myself what two acts I would do within minutes of being elected and think I would settle on the following. The first thing I would is to offer new posts to Seamus Milne and Karie Murphy (these are the two extreme Left-wing, Stalinist aides who have hijacked the Labour Party since Corbyn was elected) Seamus Milne I would offer the post of a fraternal permanent delegate to the Peoples Republic of North Korea and suggest he could best fulfill his new role by living there. Karie Murphy has already been suggested for the House of Lords and I am struggling to find a suitable position for her. Perhaps a fraternal delegate to Kazakhstan might do the trick) The second thing I would do is to move the Labour Party HQ to Manchester – after all, it was the birthplace of the Trades Union Congress and has a blue plaque to prove it – of course, the proximity to the BBC and the whole media centre in Salford Quays would be important. I would leave a small branch office staffed by a couple of part-timers in London to make the point. Somehow, I don’t think that this is going to happen but we are living in very strange times politically.
This afternoon, as the weather was reasonably fine I managed to get our communal lawns cut (I maintain the communal grassland that serves our six houses and is some 500m²) and it is always a relief when the mower starts unproblematically. I am pleased to report that my efforts were supervised by Miggles, the good looking cat who has adopted us and she acts as a clerk-of-works whenever I am doing jobs in the garden, checking that everything is being done correctly. When I was having my mid-mowing break, she actually came and sat in my lap for a stroke but desiring something more, no doubt (foodwise!) As she prefers female laps to male laps, then this is quite something.
So we are in Day 20 of our self-isolation and it is interesting to see where the ‘peak’ of this will be. According to some optimistic predictions, the pandemic may peak in about 10 days time and it does appear that both Italy and Spain may be able to view the ‘summit’ of their infection in a few days’ time. However, we are about 2-3 weeks behind Italy so that the prediction of a peak in 10 days’ time looks optimistic. In view of the fact that the number of cases is still accelerating, I think a better guess might be the end of April rather than the middle of April i.e. at least three weeks from now. We shall see – I suppose when it happens, I will look back upon this blog and see how right or wrong I was. Today was a beautiful bright day (as forecast) and we enjoyed our trip to the park where we coincided with an old Waitrose friend (and her friend) with whom we exchanged some pleasant chat. And when we got home, I was delighted that my family had managed to obtain a copy of both the ‘Sunday Times‘ and the 'Observer' (with some difficulty, as the supermarkets were assuming you were only going to shop once per week and that for food, not newspapers). I was musing to myself that when the Martians come to visit us again they will report back to their mission controllers that the people on earth all seem to have personal modes of transport in front of their houses (i.e. cars) that they never seem to use, that all of their gardens look incredibly neat and tidy as people have been working on them constantly but all of the men seem to be growing long straggly hair for some unexplained reason!
This afternoon, as the weather was fair the family engaged in a collective pruning of a large Eleagnos shrub which as at the corner of our communal plot and was proving to be a nuisance when we were rounding the corner. Whilst the daughter-in-law was doing the pruning, my son and I were chopping it all into smaller pieces for disposal. This may actually prove quite difficult as the local authority has suspended collections of the ‘Brown Bins’ in which we put our garden waste so we may have to activate the shredder that we keep in a corner of the garden (but do not actually use a great deal)
We are looking forward to a period of fine weather in the week ahead of us. It looks as though that if the public does not obey the ‘keep your distance’ rules assiduously, the government may be forced into banning all walks from the house even for exercise. In the case of Spain, one is only allowed 200 metres to exercise the dog. We must say that we are counting our blesssings as with a fairly large garden and some space along the private road that services our little block of houses then we could always ‘exercise’ by walking around the gardens front and rear and along the roadways without leaving our own property. I think the chances of this are about 40% at the moment but we shall see in the days to come!
It was a beautiful, bright and sunny morning this morning – but on our daily trip to the park, we did not happen to see any of our friends or acquaintances so we had to enjoy our mid-morning snack and coffee in total solitude. In fairness, there were very few people in the park so perhaps the message about self-isolation is really getting home. It is sad to report that after the delight of seeing a brood of ten young ducklings a couple of days ago, the pond is now totally bereft of ducklings. One can only assume that they have constituted a tasty meal for someone – possibly a fox that roams by night or seagulls that predate during the day. In any case, the sum total of ducklings now appears to be zero. When we arrived home, we were greeted with a minor domestic crisis. We have a communal mini-sewerage treatment servicing our six hours and although this has been serviced only 2-3 weeks ago it was starting to smell somewhat. A tanker driver had mistakenly turned up at our property and upon inspection, it turned out that our unit was over-full and in urgent need of emptying. Once the level of the effluent reaches a certain level, a pump should be activated which disperses the ‘grey’ water, theoretically biologically pure, through a herringbone series of pipes that lay underneath our communal grassed area (which we have jokingly called Meg’s Meadow) So phone calls had to be made, one to the company that services the electrical and mechanical elements and to another which is engaged in the six-monthly emptying. The ’emptying’ company at first said that our contract had been terminated despite a direct debit being in place – we suspect that an accountancy upgrade and move to ‘paperless’ billing meant that we had been thrown off their maintenance schedules. So we have to arrange for an emergency emptying followed by an inspection by the maintenance company that no vital component had failed or is malfunctioning. We think we have now got the two firms involved to resume their normal schedules and let us hope that equilibrium is soon to be restored.
In the afternoon, we resumed some house-cleaning duties. I am reminded of the American comedienne Joan Rivers who once remarked ‘The thing about housework is that there is so much hoovering, dusting, cleaning, polishing – and then nine months later you have to do it all over again!‘ In the late afternoon, we had a FaceTime chat with two of our closest Waitrose friends – we exchanged recipes and other tales of how we were coping the crisis (quite well actually) Without this modern bit of technology, we would feel the absence of social contacts with friends acutely, I am sure. I reflect upon the fact that when our son spent an academic year in Mexico just before email became prevalent (1986-87) a letter would take three weeks to get to him in Mexico and the reply another three weeks to get back. If his scholarship to Mexico had been a year or so later then an email would have made keeping in contact almost instantaneous.
During the course of the evening, we get the news flash about Boris Johnson being admitted into intensive care. As it happens, the news media have some footage which indicates just what being in intensive care in the COVID-19 era looks like (i.e. frightening). One is bound to wonder whether the Prime Minister will survive all of this and in any case, he will not be in a fit state to resume office for a period of time probably measured in weeks – if at all. One only hopes that the rest of the political system is sufficiently robust to take the correct decisions and judgment calls that will have to be made in the weeks ahead.
What a beautiful day it was today – sunny with clear blue skies and the modicum of wind. I can report that having been bereft of ducklings, we were delighted to see another brood of four ducklings emerge. Whether it was 40% of the previous group of ten or whether they were absolutely newly hatched chicks born to a different mother (which I can suspect), who can say? We were also delighted to see some of our favourite friends who live just down the road and who we used to see at Mass on a Saturday evening – the latter habit we have got into to enhance our range of social contacts, but we did manage to give some solace to the Monsignor when he was stricken with colon cancer and Meg and I went on a journey to see him at a rather splendid diocesan retreat for sick and retired priests (in a house designed by Pugin) located in Staffordshire. Our friends seemed, like us, to be bearing up quite well – they were going to walk across the public park in Bromsgrove (Sanders Park – donated by a 19th C. industrialist) and round the grounds of Grafton Manor which is an Elizabethan manor house in the vicinity and used, in more normal times, as a wedding venue and up-market restaurant. Bromsgrove has a festival of arts and similar events once a year and Grafton Manor has hosted some concerts there. We attended a concert in which a young violinist played Mendelssohn’s violin concerto brilliantly (if I remember correctly).
We had a quiet afternoon in which I rediscovered the joys of dusting, polishing, etc (our bathroom on this occasion). I suppose years ago, and perhaps even today, there used to be the ritual of the ‘Spring Clean’ and so this was a brilliant opportunity to reinvent the tradition. Actually, whilst turning out our bedroom, I did discover a hardback notebook that I had forgotten about. It was actually a 2019 Page-a-Day diary but I had labelled it up nicely with some of those little stick-on letters that you can buy in some stationers. The idea behind it is this. Often by our telephone and on our working desks, we have little notebooks in which we write down the ephemera of the day. In the course of time, a lot of this can be junked – but the more important bits of information (telephone number, people’s names and addresses) can be written up in the Scrapbook where they will not get lost (at least that it the theory, anyway – it only works, though, if you make a conscious effort to transfer useful stuff from your daily jottings into it on a regular basis) The idea for this came to me several years ago when I got frustrated learning how to do something on the computer (e.g. finding software that puts captions across the bottom of photos that you wish to keep) So I called this book ‘What have I learnt/re-learnt TODAY’ and I notice that I actually started it in March 2102 (evidently 8 years ago) My little system is. like this – whenever I discover a new technique or something I wish to retain, then I will enter it on a new page with the date first and the subject matter second. Opening it at random, for example, the entry for Wednesday, 20th August 2014 was ‘MCH’s own URL shortener’ i.e. a way of taking a long and complex web address and shortening it into something more memorable without going to the trouble and expense of buying a new domain name (although I do do this on occasions) Then, at the back of the book I have an index of all of my entries (they number 92 at the moment) which gives the subject matter and then a date e,g, see entry for such-and-such a date. I must say, that I found this system does work very well for me – how many of us can remember what you did in March, 2012 if you do not use the technique regularly? Anyway, as I thought it was of a thin day, I would pass that tip on to all and sundry…
Yet another fine day – I suppose we had better enjoy it whilst the good weather lasts! As you might expect, there was a sprinkling of people in the park (rather than none) and we spent a happy few minutes chatting with some of our acquaintances. When we got back, Meg had a medical ‘appointment’ but everything is done by phone these days and quite a lot of things do not actually require face-to-face contact. We read one of the many articles that appear in the quality press these days and, of course, the consensus view is that no area of social life will ever be the same again. It looks as though the default medical consultation (GP’s, outpatients) will now be performed remotely as the technology becomes more widespread. As we use Apple technology in our house, we tend to use FaceTime which I must say has already worked excellently. One letter (or was it an article in the Time newspaper?) was arguing that more has been achieved by using the new technology to facilitate doctor-patient interaction in the last three weeks than in the last twenty years. Personally, I feel quite optimistic that the ‘new normality’ which will emerge after the worst excess of COVID-19 (not when it is over, if ever) may mean new forms of economic and social organisation in which as many one third of the population work from home (probable), new patterns of sociability and patterns of cooperation will emerge (more than likely) and that essential local shops and businesses may enjoy a resurgence (a possibility). What the modern-day High Street will look like in the typical town will look like, goodness alone knows, as many of the presently closed businesses will surely never re-open again (if only because there is not the footfall or the consumer spending power) to make them viable. In some ways, this might present more opportunities – e.g. bars/cafes more like their continental counterparts that sell coffee, cakes, alcohol, light meals and so on. We shall see!
In the afternoon, we had the organisation come and empty our BioDisk (miniature sewerage treatment plant) and were relieved that although it was quite full, everything was functioning normally – it will be checked mechanically tomorrow all being well. In the autumn rains, we had a large Hawthorne tree that had been overcome by ivy and was a little precariously growing on a slope. Anyway, it became uprooted and had to be removed which it was very efficiently. But left behind was a large amount of garden detritus not to mention some garden tools that used to be hung up in its branches (to save a journey into the house – don’t ask!) and this had been left all winter. So I set myself the task of a tidy-up which was meant to last 20 minutes but became an hour. I am glad to say that Miggles, our neighbourhood cat that has adopted us (not the other way around) supervised all of my activities, pretending to catch spiders and insects (she missed the two frogs that I unearthed), and checking that everything I did was being performed to specifications. I must say I have never seen a cat like her. When last autumn, I was laying a path and that involving taking slate delivered in a ton bag which had been delivered to our house down in bucket loads to where the path was being laid, my every move was carefully observed and scrutinised. When I filled up my buckets with shovelfuls of slate, Miggles observed and counted out the correct number of shovel loads per bucket and then followed me down the garden path and supervised that it was distributed correctly before the procedure was repeated) I wonder if any readers of this blog have had similar experiences like this with any of their household pets (I exclude goldfish and hamsters from this observation)
Another quite interesting day. Before we enjoyed our daily walk in the park, the BioDisk maintenance company turned up and found that everything was in good working order (and it had been emptied only the day before). However, it was mentioned to us (and we had received the same message the day before) that they had noticed that in the last week or so such communal facilities had come increasing pressure as people were working from home, thus creating demands on the system. I think a note to fellow residents might well be called for, and we may have to increase the number of ’empties’ in a typical year.
As we have come to expect, we enjoyed another fine day in the park and were pleased to meet one of our Waitrose friends there, so we had a good chat. Also, we observed some 5-6 ducklings that looked very young and we surmised that they might be part of a newly hatched brood. One of the regular dog walkers in the park who had evidently kept a keen eye on things wondered whether the local heron, easily identified as it has one club foot(!) might have been responsible for the predation of duckings in the past. He told us that when the park pond was emptied for maintenance a few years ago, it was discovered to be teaming with perch fish. As we were on our way out of the park, we were approached by a volunteer in a hi-viz vest who thought that we might have been tarrying over our coffee somewhat too long on the park bench and potentially providing a bad example. to others. We explained that we understood that Michael Gove had explicitly stated that individuals (related to each other) could legitimately sit on a park bench during exercise – the exchanges were good-natured and I am sure the volunteer was acting according to his best lights. Just out of interest, I undertook some Google searches and found the following advice from the Director of Public Health for Gloucestershire published two days ago on 7th April. I reproduce the relevant bits below…
“Park benches are a really important part of our community because if you are a bit older or frail they are quite helpful to give you a rest when you are on your daily exercise route, and we’ve had a question about whether people can sit on benches together…..
We have had messages with some places closing their benches, putting tape across them. There is nothing wrong with having a park bench, if you are a members of the same family you can sit on the bench together, but if you’re not you have to keep two metre distance.
“This means if the bench is on its own, one person sits on the bench, one person has to stand two metres away.
We spent some time in the afternoon doing a communal shredding – this was quite satisfying but our garden shredder is a little ‘picky’ about the width of twigs that it will accept but after a bit of sorting, we overcame that problem and added the shreddings to our compost bin. Fortunately, I discovered in some of my ‘outside’ garden things that I keep under the eaves of the house some concentrated organic composting accelerator (although, as we all know, all men are very good at producing their own on a daily basis, preferably after some good long drinks of tea or beer). Then we started the long hunt within the house for ‘the bell’. This is quite a long story – when we had a really long (100 yd +) vegetable garden in Leicestershire, my wife needed something to summon me to the house when I was working at the bottom of the garden. And so when we were on holiday on the Norfolk Broads one year we discovered a ship’s bell in a boat-keepers chandlery and hence we acquired the bell which we screwed onto some French doors that opened out into the garden. We haven’t had a use for it in the last 34 years but we really needed it tonight. Why? you might ask. Well, it was to add to the clapping, car hooting, saucepan banging and other celebrations that we engage upon to show our appreciation for NHS workers and several others which is now a tradition at 8.00 pm each Thursday evening. We played our part – but our son who was operating the bell was soon ‘clapped out’ i.e. the clapper fell out of the bell within a few seconds and had to be re-attached.
It is evident that the government is getting increasingly worried that the coincidence of fine weather with what was traditionally the Easter vacation period will bring people out into the parks and recreational spaces. The frequency and stridency of the messaging seem evident because the ‘peak’ of the COVID-19 deaths is not yet actually in sight – all could jeopardised if a significant portion of the population decided to kick over the traces and try to see some friends ‘en-masse’ Although by and large, the police have gone about their law-enforcement with a degree of sensitivity, to some police chiefs the crisis gives the opportunity for the assumption of wide-ranging powers. One police chief suggested that an individual’s supermarket trolly be examined for goods that were not deemed to be essential. Fortunately, this last proposal had to be rapidly withdrawn when it became evident is was both draconian and unenforceable.
We had four interesting conversations with diverse groups of people. The first was with our friend, Julie, who we know from our Waitrose days and who lives on the edge of the park, in any case. Then we bumped. into a youngish couple who were out dog walking and it turned out that the husband worked for the part of the Health Service that evaluates the efficacy and affordability of various drug regimens. As he was working at home (like our own son) we were speculating how this situation might become the norm rather than the exception in the post COVID-19 UK. Finally, we saw two lots of our friends who live along the Kidderminster Road and we adopted our by now usual policy of standing outside a house and jumping up and down until we are noticed and people come out for a chat.
As it is Good Friday today, I also scan the broadcasting schedules to see if any performances are to be broadcast of Bach’s Mathew Passion or St. John Passion. As it turned out, I was not disappointed as St. John Passion was broadcast on Radio 3 and to be honest, some of the cantatas seem quite similar between the two works. I listened to the first hour of this before attending to the cutting of the communal lawn whilst the weather is so good. The mower stuttered once or twice and actually stopped although it started again quickly but I couldn’t find any evident cause (a slight malfunction of the carburettor, I wonder) As I type at the moment, I am listening to Dame Judi Dench who is conversation with John Humphries – and as it is Good Friday she has chosen the closing section of Matthew Passion (the cantata 'In tears of grief') which I always find incredibly moving. Bach wrote this cantata in such a way that one can almost ‘hear’ the sobs embedded in the rhythms of the music. I first heard this when I was 13 going on 14 yeas old in the school music room and it has been a particular favorite of mine ever since.
The news that the daily tally of deaths in a single day (980) now exceeds the biggest ‘one day’ totals recorded in either Italy or Spain seems grim. A more local analysis reported in the Worcester News seemed to show the rate of increase was moderating in Worcestershire i.e. we were getting near the ‘top’ of the curve but the national picture does not look at all encouraging yet.Another really beautiful day here in the West Midlands, only marred by the news that the West Midlands is emerging as a COVID-19 hotspot. I quote from the Health Services Journal:
While London has continually topped lists of coronavirus cases in the UK, Birmingham has the highest number outside of the Capital, with the West Midlands emerging as a hotspot for transmissions last month….The government has said it is investigating reasons why that might be the case, amid suggestions that people’s religious convictions are contributing to the spread.
Now for some more cheerful news. Although I didn’t count any ducklings in the park today, I did see a snow-white duck (which stood our amidst the mallards) and a bird which I surmise from its very long and upright neck was actually a goose. Well, it takes all sorts! As a sight for sore eyes, I was amazed to see a woman runner who, as she approached, appeared to be absolutely naked from the waist down. But as she approached, it became apparent that she was actually wearing exceptionally tight-fitting, flesh-coloured exercise leggings. I am reliably informed that this is quite fashionable amongst the younger women these days but I must confess I had never seen anything thing quite like it – perhaps I don’t get around much!
Later in the morning, I made a large fish pie – I normally do this every 2-3 weeks and it supplies a meal on the day and a further three meals for the freezer. It is not at all difficult to make but would be too fiddly for one meal and hence I make a large casserole of it. Typically it would four different kinds of fish (salmon, haddock, cod or plaice, prawns) with a bottom supplied by sliced (parboiled) potatoes and a topping of mashed potatoes and shredded cheese. I do cheat a little and add some Schwartz Fish Pie or White Wine sauce if I have in stock – the subsequent meals are really quick because it only takes about 3 minutes in the microwave and is normally accompanied by tender-stem broccoli. I realise this is not to everyone’s taste but I am trying to cut down on my consumption of meat (for a host of reasons) and increase that of fish.
In terms of political news, I observed that the Twittersphere was getting incensed by the news that Boris Johnson has been amusing himself during his recovery by playing Sudoku. The particular object of anger was with the rest of the Main Stream Media (MSM) for giving prominence to such trivia at a time when the best part of 1000 people a day are dying – surely there are more penetrating questions that journalists should be asking. Also quoted today was the estimate by a domestic abuse charity that in a single day last week the number of cases which it had to deal had risen by 120%. But most anger (in the press and which I share) was the briefing given by Priti Patel who was asked to apologise the fact that many of the deaths of NHS personnel from the COVID-19 virus ould be attributed to their lack of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). After being asked twice if she would apologise to NHS staff and their families over the shortages of PPE, Ms Patel said: “I’m sorry if people feel that there have been failings. I will be very, very clear about that.’ This must rank as one of the most half-hearted, weaselly-worded apologies of all time – a point quickly picked up by the press.
We FaceTimed our dearest and closest friends in Spain in the evening. I think it is true to say that whilst the death rate in Spain is now at a three week low, the population is starting to feel the pressure of a very strictly enforced lock-down policy – for example , only one person is allowed out of the house at a time and that to walk the dog but only a distance of 200 metres (but it can be done twice a day) It may come to that yet in the UK and some are thinking that if the WestMidlnds continues to be such a hot-spot, that day might not be too far off!
This must be one of the strangest Easter Sundays that any of us have ever experienced but I suppose we will all get used to living in strange times. This morning we were delighted to make our daily trip to the park which, actually, was extremely quiet compared with yesterday. I am pleased to report that the ducklings now number 5 from that we suspect is brood No. 2. Whilst we were having our daily coffee (necessary for the ‘oldies’ to regain their strength after an energetic 1km walk to the park, you understand) we had a couple of conversations, one with the elderly lady with whom we exchanged wartime reminiscences early on in the week, and the other with Julie, our ‘Waitrose’ friend. In the midst of our conversations, a heron swooped and nearly made off with one of the ducklings, only to be beaten off by an assiduous mother duck. And so to home, where we enjoyed a nice dinner of roast beef, cooked in our slow cooker (and I saved half of the joint for another Sunday lunch). In the afternoon, I undertook one of my regular duties which is to round the house, wiping each light switch with an anti-bacteriological wipe which may, or may not, fend off the COVID-19 virus. This task doesn’t take that long but I am amazed how many light switches there are in the house overall (I lose count after the first 20!) I feel that I will have the same degree of success as that enjoyed by the elderly gentleman who used to throw little pieces of pink paper out of the top of a Chapham omnibus in order to deter the elephants. He was always successful, by the way, as no doubt I will be.
In the early evening, I was playing about with the FaceTime contacts list that FaceTime displays when an older Winchester colleague accidentally made me a video-call. He intended to call his son but hit the wrong button! I was delighted and we exchanged notes. They were amazed at the sojourns that Meg and I enjoy on our local park bench as down in Southampton, the local officials have taped up all of the park benches to deter would-be loiterers and aged rest-takers from utilising them – I must say, that I feel that it is a bit over the top. Incidentally, after my encounter with the flesh-coloured tights lady yesterday, we were passed in the park today (at a suitable distance) by a lady runner who was displaying a full face-load of makeup complete with false eyelashes and sporting a fetching leopard-skin leotard (or whatever you call the gear that people run in these days).
In the early evening, we watched the rerun of last Thursday’s Question Time on the Parliament channel (232). We then had a FaceTime chat with my sister (who I didn’t realise had an iPad) so that was a pleasant bonus and we are now arrangements in place to FaceTime the rest of the family as well, once we have suitable times organised. We are also in email contact with one of Meg’s cousin’s daughters who had been re-located before the crisis to Seattle. We received a long email telling us that things were like in the USA from the inside and are making similar arrangements to FaceTime each other as soon as time zones and diaries allow. So all in all, we have had a fully communication-rich Sunday – we wonder what the forthcoming week is going to bring. If the crisis had any benefits whatsoever, it was to appreciate how lucky we are to have family and friends with whom we can rapidly communicate – perhaps this will set up a good model for the future when we don’t neglect the friends that we have as we were forced to do during our working years.
Last night, a brief but very intense squall hit the Midlands – when we woke up this morning, we discovered that two owls had been smashed to pieces and the body parts lay scattered around the patio we have outside the house in the back garden. Before readers recoil in absolute horror, I ought to mention that the owls in question were china owls (well, pot actually) and had been residing on our outside patio table. So what were they doing there in the first place? Well, the story is this. Last summer, I renovated some aluminium garden furniture (table and four chairs) by repainting them with a dark green ‘Hammerite’ paint. However, a local robin had taken to perching on the back of one of the newly painted chairs and was threatening to ‘poop’ all over my handiwork. In order to preserve their renovated status, I scoured the local Charity shops (of which we have at least half a dozen) and managed to secure two pottery owls, often used as money boxes, They were put at slightly different angles and they were used to deter robins and the like from messing up our garden furniture. Unfortunately, the storm arose before I had the chance to lay them flat and they paid the ultimate sacrifice…
This morning the normal pattern repeated itself in that we exchanged several pleasantries with dog walkers in the park but we did not tarry long as there was quite a brisk wind. On the way back home we did have a chat with some near neighbours who live just around the corner but with whom we have not had the chance of an extended conversation before today. They were digging over and renovating a little triangular plot in front of their house and they had been waiting for a spot of rain so the earth would have softened a bit before they started digging and planting. We mentioned to each other that one of the side effects of the present crisis was that once people had got bored with decorating, gardening and spring cleaning they would revert to more traditional modes of indoor entertainment and the experts were predicting a ‘baby boom’ in about nine months from now. We reminisced that the last time a national crisis brought together groups of neighbours was in 1973 when the country as a whole had to endure a three-day week as well as intermittent power disconnections of both gas and electricity. The official (Conservative) government advice, which we followed enthusiastically was that we should ‘shower with a friend‘ to save the country’s diminished energy supplies. ‘Oh, that’s interesting’ the wife of the couple remarked ‘as I was born in 1974!’ We giggled and wondered?
In the late afternoon, we were delighted to have an hour-long FaceTime video link with my wife’s cousin’s daughter (is that called a ‘cousin once removed’?) We found out how at first hand how COVID-19 crisis was affecting the USA – predictably, the Democratic states were blaming the lack of preparedness on President Trump whilst the more red-neck states (inland, Republican) were inclined to believe that it was all a conspiracy to attempt to discredit Trump! Whereas here in the UK, we quickly added shops selling alcohol (off-licenses) to the essential stores such as supermarkets, pharmacies and garages the Americans had decided that it was a top priority to keep open – the gun stores! One really has to wonder. Now that we have discovered the joys of FaceTime-ing, we wonder why we have not done it long before. Of course, it does assume that you have Apple technology at both ends but given that the Apple Contacts pages give you one link to activate, then what could be easier?
A busier than usual day in our local park today. We espied our friend Julie from 200 metres away as she was nearing the end of an hour-long walk and so another long and interesting chat. Julie told us about a flowering cherry in full bloom that had been felled in the recent storm but I think it’s not an unusual occurrence. We have an occasional gardener who tells us that quite a lot of trees in the area have keeled over because the water table is so high after the recent rains so they lose their footing. Incidentally, did you know that scientists think that trees have developed some communication systems with each other via their extensive root systems? It’s not quite as daft as it sounds. We then had another chat with another of ex-Waitrose friends who is the mother of two twin girls. She was in good heart but somewhat tired as she was only getting a couple of hours sleep before it was interrupted by one or other of the girls. On our way out this morning, I decided to make a present of a magnificent hoe made by Wolf tools that I think is technically called a ‘push-pull’ weeder. It has a flattish blade but with a wavy front edge and is magnificent for quickly cultivating some ground if it has been recently been dug over. It works by cutting off any the heads of any tiny little weeds which then shrivel up and die on the surface of the soil. I think this particular hoe was given to me over thirty years ago as a birthday present but as I have another more up-to-date model of this type, I was willing for its older brother to go to a good home. When we got home, we found some Easter cup-cakes had been delivered to us a ‘thank you’ and they were delicious.
We spent a very pleasant afternoon taking coffee with our new next-door neighbours. They have been incredibly busy juggling work commitments and getting the bungalow exactly to their likes which has involved building a conservatory, trying to reconfigure the whole of the garden and so on. They (and we) have been so busy of late that it was great to spend the days in each company – as it happens we think alike on many issues (such as the mutual loathing of Donald Trump, for example). As it happens, I had one or two garden implements that helped my neigbour with some difficult tasks (removing old concrete posts, for example).
We see that the Government has today reverted to its traditional mode of lying to us. We had a graph which showed the UK death rate below other European societies, particularly France – but the UK figures included only the deaths recorded in hospital and were not comparable with the more inclusive figures than the French data which included all COVID-19 deaths, whether in hospital or elsewhere. When one of the journalists pointed this out in the press conference, there was the usual obfuscation, answering a question that was not actually posed, trotting out that it was the government’s intention to… and so on. There happened to be a letter in today’s Times which argued that journalists should only ask one question and pursue it relentlessly until the question that has been asked is actally answered instead of being evaded, met with a half-truth, statement of the obvious and so on. In general, at the daily press conferences, the journalists nearly always do ask pointed and well-directed questions but the resplies are nearly evasive. The favourite seems to be answer a question that was not actually asked or else to think of a answer with a really big number in it that is meant to impress but is really meaningless. My particular gripe is over the claim that the NHS frontline has recently been supplied with ‘x’ million pieces of equiopment which does not answer the question that the front line is evidently short of PPE and needs a lot more!
It seems incredible to me that we are mid-way through April already – the months go faster and faster. Today, I met an acquaintance in the park who knew two of my sets of acquaintances but who I didn’t know knew each other. This got me thinking a bit about how networks of social relationships develop. I am going to be a little more theoretical but bear with me and you will see where I am going. When I was at university in the mid-1960s, one of our tutors was Professor Ronald Frankenberg who compiled a book called ‘Communities in Britain‘. Sociologists and social anthropologists had written a series of studies starting with simple fishing, mining and agricultural communities and progressing through larger and more complex communities including small market towns. The idea was to build a type of continuum of the way that communities had developed through time from simple to more complex. In a theoretical chapter at the end, Frankenberg attempts to arrive at a theoretical and mathematical understanding of the way in which we can describe communities using social network and communication theory. He borrowed from a 1949 work ‘On Human Communication‘ to show how messages arrive from A to B. Put simply, if A is connected to B and the link is broken, then communication cannot occur. If however, there are some other points in the system (let us call then C and D) then if the link between A and B is broken, it is still possible to get a message through the system by going through C or D. This is technically called redundancy by telecommunication engineers – put really simply, the more extra nodes there are in the system (i.e. the more redundancy) the greater a chance that a message will be delivered. If we take an example from the last war – if the British had bombed a railway line between two German cities and they were only connected by one direct line, then the effect would be no trains!. But now imagine the Germans attempting to bomb a railway line shall we say between Birmingham and Manchester. The railway chiefs could always route a train through ‘Didley Squat junction‘ and the train would get through eventually, albeit with a little delay. This must actually be happening all the time on the World Wide Web – if one link is down then a router will despatch messages in different directions to ensure that the email gets delivered. Frankenberg’s great insight was, I believe, that we can define a ‘community-ness’ by the amount of redundancy as well as by the connectedness of the system. Can you see where I started off and where I am going from with this idea?
In the late afternoon, we FaceTimed some of our closest friends who described to us how they ought to have been in receipt of the government letter, sent to all people with complex medical needs (which the husband of our friends certainly has) Put briefly, life had been very stressful trying to get supermarket slots. medication and the like. However, through some kind of systems failure, the letter had failed to be sent or to arrive – but when part of the medical networks caring for our friend realised this they got the wheels in motion and suddenly everything changed dramatically and life got a lot easier as they could now get the priority access through supermarket queues to which they are thoroughly entitled (but which hitherto had failed to materialise) So gradually things are starting to get better.
Some sad COVID-19 related news for us today. One of my daughter-in-law’s relatives had died of the virus (although he was of an advanced age and suffering from dementia) We were also saddened to hear that one of our closest friends in Leicestershire had also suffered a bereavement – first the mother died last autumn and then one of her own sons died of oesophageal cancer in the last day or, with very few family members or friends being allowed to attend the funeral. This must be happening to families up and down the country…
One of the joys of stopping for chats with people is that you discover new points of contact that you never knew that you had in common. And so it proved today when we were chatting with acquaintances along the Kidderminster Road (up and down which we walk daily) only to discover that we had stayed in some of the same places in Spain (Calella. north of Barcelona) Then in turn we chatted to their neighbour who, as it turned out, was a French national by origin and was a teacher of both French and Spanish. So suddenly our number of ‘Spanish’ connections seemed to increase rapidly.
In common with many other people I use the app on my mobile phone called WhatsApp but as this is designed specifically for a mobile, it is not designed to work on a desktop. However, it is so much easier typing on a ‘proper’ keyboard rather than using the fiddly keys on a mobile – I find that even though I bought a slightly bigger than normal iPhone than normal two years ago (an iPhone 8 Plus), my fingers still cover three of the keys at once and despite Apple technology ‘learning’ your particular typing style, I still make multiple errors when texting (and that is before predictive texting takes over). So I was delighted when I found a way to get a version of WhatsApp to run through a browser on one’s desktop, so I spent a certain amount of time last night playing with some of the people in my ‘Contacts’ section (brought over from my iPhone) and sending them a message saying I was experimenting an inviting a reply to see if the messages had actually got through (which they had). Incidentally, one of the interesting features about the command ‘Send‘ is that you actually have started a transmission process (analogous to popping a letter in the post) and do not know whether (a) the message has actually been delivered, let alone read and (b) whether the message was understood. I remember an incident in the comedy series 'Only Fools and Horses' in which Rodney and DelBoy were tested at a local hospital for some condition or other and when they got a message back saying the results were ‘Negative‘, they interpreted this communication from the hospital as though they had contracted a fatal disease from which they would die (a ‘negative’ outcome)
It being a fine afternoon. I gave our communal lawns (500m²) their weekly cut and my trusty ‘Stiga’ (Swedish) petrol mower behaved flawlessly .The only thing I did after it faltered once or twice last week was to soak the sponge air filter in engine oil. After a quick Google search, I have now come to appreciate that this is essential and not just an optional extra – apparently, unfiltered air can rip through and damage your engine but the addition of engine oil makes the filter much more ‘sticky’ as minute particles of pollen and dust which can damage the engine are trapped much more efficiently if the foam air filter is correctly oiled with engine oil. Now I know! When this was done I emailed my very old (in both senses of the word) friend and former colleague with whom I worked in the Central Office of Information (COI) in 1966. I was keen that we both keep in touch during the current crisis so I have given her the choice of communicating via email (which I suspect she prefers), SMS (text), FaceTime, WhatsApp or Skype. I’ll have to wait to get her reply before deciding which to use on a regular basis.
Tonight being Thursday, we had our usual ‘Clap for our Carers‘ session at 8.00 pm. Methinks the response was a little bit down this week but I am still delighted that there are people in our local community who still care. My son rings a bell whilst I bang an open aluminium cooking pot with a spoon which makes a really raucous din. Immediately after this, Question Time was transmitted at 8.00 on BBC1 and one of the panellists, a doctor, argued that wearing a mask may not protect you from the virus but reduces any virus load that you may eject by a cough or a sneeze to 1/36th of the virus load. If true, this makes the case for wearing masks to prevent onward transmission (rather than to protect oneself) almost unanswerable. I think I would like to see it happen but I suspect the government with its present problems would rather not know!
Well, today has been one of those indeterminate days where nothing has really gone right – we all have days like that. The spell of good weather is coming to an end and although a spattering of rain arrived in the afternoon, the weather was sufficiently fine for us to enjoy our customary walk to the park. However, the colder weather was keeping the joggers away and all but the most determined dog walkers so we quickly drank up our coffee and made for home – but we did have the bonus of chatting to two of our closest friends on Kidderminster Rd on the way home. As it happens, they were on the way out to enjoy their constitutional so it was a happy coincidence that we did not miss each other.
In the afternoon, I had set myself the task of trying to chase the insurance claim for the holiday that we had booked for Porto in Portugal in mid-May. As you might expect, this was problematic from the word go. The insurance company, even I contacted them by phone (in desperation) will refuse any claim if Expedia has not issued a cancellation invoice. In the meantime, the Expedia website is completely overwhelmed and speaking to a ‘human’ is impossible. They have an automated system to respond to queries that refused to recognise the itinerary number or my email address although I have the original confirmation in January ready to quote to them. Eventually, I gleaned from the insurance company that even I had been able to speak to an agent at Expedia, they would refuse to deal with me until the planned holiday was only 10 days away. So I put a note on the calendar and resolved to contact them (if I could) a bit nearer our planned departure date. To cap it all, as I started out to write this blog I received a communication from Expedia asking me whether I would like to cancel (which I did) and then intimating that for the outward leg of the journey, the airline Iberia would offer me a voucher for the unused flight and British Airways would do the same for the return leg of the journey. So the whole thing is turning into a logistical nightmare, given that nobody will be flying anywhere for months ahead, so far as we can tell! But enough of these woes and now for more serious issues.
The lack of the UK’s government’s preparation for the COVID-19 crisis is really starting to unwind this weekend. As I write, there appear to be indications that trusts all over the country will run out of gowns which are necessary to don before one can treat patients without putting your own health/life at risk. The official line appears to be ‘see if you can wash it and use it again’ which implies instant turn around laundry and sterilisation issues not to mention wear and tear. I have also some intimations, both personally and through the columns of Health Services Journal that the situation in Accident and Emergency departments is fast deteriorating. It appears that ‘normal’ A&E admissions are not taking place so many suspected heart attacks, strokes, and potential cancers are now not being treated, as potential patients are too scared or unwilling to attend A&E departments. Last nights ‘I’ newspaper, which I haven’t had the chance to read or verify, is arguing that we may be saving some COVID-19 patients’ lives but the collateral damage in untreated cancers, strokes and heart attacks might mean that there are an additional 60,000 deaths (i.e. 4 times of the present COVID-19 death rate) The A&E departments themselves are, anecdotally, being populated by victims of domestic violence, botched suicide attempts, and alcohol abuse problems. I wish I could end on a more cheerful note but it is not possible. I wonder what the inevitable ‘official’ inquiry will reveal if one is held when the immediate crisis is over.
Today was a wet, cold-ish and miserable day throughout most of the Midlands. Meg and I undertook our daily trip to the park and rather than shivering on a park bench, we stood in the deserted bandstand area where we drank our customary cup of coffee and got home as fast as we could. There were no joggers in evidence and even the ardent dog-walkers had been reduced to about two or three as far as the eye could see. At least, we could regale ourselves with a (homemade) vegetable curry when we got home – left-overs from previous curries when I have been in the habit of making them too big! I read in the newspapers today that under these strange conditions, many people are spinning out their food resources somewhat and no doubt re-discovering some of the techniques of ‘making do’. Thinking back to my childhood, my mother used to serve us mince at least two or three times a week. In those days, you had an old-fashioned mincer which was an awesome contraption that screwed onto the side of the kitchen table and would ingest any scraps of neat one had left lying around together with stale bread and anything else to extend the protein. My mother used to bake bread nearly every day as well- I suppose these habits were engrained by living through wartime conditions and they never really left her. I was often told the story that when I was about 4-5 we cook not afford a chicken for our Christmas meal (expensive in 1949) but we made do with rabbit meat which, paradoxically, was more readily available and cheaper as well. Nowadays whenever Meg and I travel to Spain and we see ‘conejo‘ (rabbit) on the menu, we always eat it and it is often served in the form of a cocido (a thickish stew really).
This afternoon was devoted to the delights of house-cleaning – something we had forgotten since we have had someone to clean the house for at least the last forty years (at a conservative estimate) I have discovered that we actually possessed a type of feathery duster which I use for vertical surfaces (book in bookcases), light fittings and delicate things like clocks, whilst conventional dusters are used for flattish surfaces. Then, of course, comes the hoovering. As our old Dyson went belly-up a few weeks ago, we have now acquired a new model (a ‘Shark Lift-Away‘) which splits into two to hoover the stairs and sports a light in the front (like the really old-fashioned Hoovers used to have, which I used to use whilst hoovering the ballrooms of the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate where I worked as a porter (as well as a dish-washer, barman and numerous other jobs) when I was a teenager. What exciting lives we led!
On a more technical note, I thought it might be quite a good idea to string these blogs together into one long HTML This I have now done and if you want to read the blogs in one continuous stream or quickly pass from one to the next, this is now possible. All you have to do is to access http://mch-net.info/all-blogAfter yesterday’s dull and rainy weather, it was predictable that lots of people would be out and about on a bright and sunny morning, and so it proved. We were equally delighted to simultaneously meet two of our sets of friends down the Kidderminster Road so we formed a large circle of six people chatting and wondering whether the police would come and break up a social gathering! Our son and daughter in law had kindly gone to get us some Sunday newspapers and they passed us on the road. In the Sunday Times there was a fascinating article ‘Revealed: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster‘ which documented in great detail how the British political elite had dithered in the face of the forthcoming COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the revelations were shocking e.g. Boris Johnson had not attended 5 of the vital COBRA meetings and it was evident that in late January the Prime Minister was so concerned with Brexit/divorce/holidays that vital days were lost which has resulted in a possible excess of thousands of lives. This is shocking almost beyond belief.
Incidentally, I thought I would let readers of this blog know that I have been appointed as a spokesman for the Government to assist in the daily COVID-19 briefings and press conference. The training for this was actually very easy and consisted of the following 6 steps that had to be followed, whatever was the question. In this, I was greatly assisted by watching the performance of the Education Minister, Gavin Williamson, today. The formula is really very simple and goes as follows. Firstly, given that each journalist has about a five-minute slot, waste a good few seconds by congratulating the chosen journalist for asking a really pointed and penetrating question that required a full and detailed response (this can waste at least a quarter of a minute) Secondly, preface any remarks by the formula ‘I would really like to pay tribute to the dedicated and hard-working staff who have worked tirelessly on our behalf et… etc‘(another half a minute) Thirdly, particularly in the case of shortages of critical equipment such as PPE indicate that the government had been working tremendously hard on the problem of supplies, ‘had all of the supply lines in sight’ and was working round the clock to solve the problem.. Fourthly, and perhaps as a type of response to the actual question asked, give completely irrelevant response such as the following asking whether the social care staff in Nottingham would receive their supplies of PPE in time reply that you would like to thank the two universities in the region who had been doing a magnificent job as part of the local Resilience team…(I am reminded of the schoolboy who, in a Religious Studies exam, was asked to list the Ten Commandments replied that he had forgotten them but he could recite a list of the first 20 kings of Israel!) Fifthly pass the question sideways to Jenny Whats-her-name who is meant to provide a more ‘scientific’ response, as she has a Phd in Obfuscatory Studies particularly when asked a question such as ‘How would you feel personally about having to be in the front-line of patient support without adequate PPE putting your own life and that of your family at risk’ Finally, and sixthly, invite the journalist to say if they had any supplementary questions knowing that you had not answered the first but you were keen to give the impression that you are being frank and open and willing to answer any supplementary questions, knowing that you hadn’t answered the original question so there was no reason to attempt a coherent answer to any supplementary. The great beauty of this checklist is that it works whatever the question is asked from whichever journalist. Watch out for me on the media briefings shortly!
This afternoon, I thought a would do a little gardening whilst the weather was fine. No sooner had I started then the local cat who has adopted us, Miggles, came to supervise my work. No sooner had I cleared a gully of weeds by the side of our communal grassed area, then she came and sat in it, luxuriating in the sunshine. She pretended to try to catch a robin that was singing nearby and then pretended to catch a Holly Blue butterfly to make it look as though she was actually busily engaged before she got tired of her supervisory duties and wandered off. By the way, I suspect there is some hanky-panky going on with another little black-and-white cat who I have nicknamed ‘Peter’ as they seem very friendly together, particularly first thing in a morning. I have my suspicions…
We are promised a few days of fine weather, after which no doubt autumn will commence. Today was another fine and bright day, albeit a trifle windy. We were delighted to see our mother duck was leading out her band of seven ducklings onto dry land for an excursion so several of us captured the event on our mobile phones. In the midst of all of this, we were especially pleased to see our friend Julie who had bought Meg one of her favourite pastries from Waitrose (of which she has been deprived for the last seven weeks) so she enjoyed a delicious coffee break. Having said that, our sojourn on the park bench is always a perilous affair as I have to ensure that nothing touches the hard surface of the park bench (lest it is virus-laden) So we have to balance my rucksack on one knee whilst simultaneously unscrewing the cap of our coffee flask and pouring out its contents single-handed – and then we have our oatmeal biscuits to be extracted from their plastic container. Still, you get used to any manouvre in time. Julie was greeted by a near neighbour and we were saying to each other that never had we realised that there were so many footpaths to be explored, not to mention the park itself whose charms were very much under-appreciated when we used to walk straight on past each day.
This afternoon was very much a gardening afternoon and a typical spring-time clearing task at that. There really is no substitute for getting down on your hands and knees and tackling the weeding head-on. My particular task is to clean out a gully by the side of our communal grassed area and this is always completely overgrown with a combination of couch grass, dandelions, ivy, nettles and a variety of other weeds that I cannot begin to describe. The only way to tackle the job is to cut a section of the overhanging grass about a yard at a time and then clear the gully in about two-feet sections with specially ‘grippy’ gardening gloves that pull out the unwanted growth before cutting the grass again. Although this sounds long-winded and tedious (which it is) at least if you get on top of it in April then the task for the maintenance for the rest of the gardening year becomes somewhat easier. To make matters worse, my task was not supervised by our adopted cat, Miggles, about whom there is speculation in the house that she may be pregnant. I’m not too sure but if you are an avid reader of my ‘Virtually Challenged Anecdotes’ you will realise that I have yet to perfect my skills in performing gynaecological type operations on the cats of neighbours (see VCA No. 29 at the start of the blog website for full details of my earlier career as a would-be surgeon)
This afternoon was very much a gardening afternoon and a typical spring-time clearing task at that. There really is no substitute for getting down on your hands and knees and tackling the weeding head-on. My particular task is to clean out a gully by the side of our communal grassed area and this is always completely overgrown with a combination of couch grass, dandelions, ivy, nettles and a variety of other weeds that I cannot begin to describe. The only way to tackle the job is to cut a section of the overhanging grass about a yard at a time and then clear the gully in about two-feet sections with specially ‘grippy’ gardening gloves that pull out the unwanted growth before cutting the grass again. Although this sounds long-winded and tedious (which it is) at least if you get on top of it in April then the task for the maintenance for the rest of the gardening year becomes somewhat easier. To make matters worse, my task was not supervised by our adopted cat, Miggles, about whom there is speculation in the house that she may be pregnant. I’m not too sure but if you are an avid reader of my ‘Virtually Challenged Anecdotes’ you will realise that I have yet to perfect my skills in performing gynaecological type operations on the cats of neighbours (see VCA No. 29 at the start of the blog website for full details of my earlier career as a would-be surgeon)
Although I haven’t followed tonight’s COVID-19 news in any real detail, it appears that some of the more Republican elements of the USA are out on the streets (with the tacit support of their President, whose lockdown orders they are actually ignoring) demanding the freedom to go out and restart their economy. I suppose that in a rather grisly way, it will be a fascinating social experiment to see what the consequences of a too-early loosening of the lockout policy will prove to be. It always amazes me that ‘freedom‘ is one of the totemic rallying calls of the American population but the freedom to do what (carry guns? exploit your fellow citizens?) I can never actually discern.
On a technical computing note, I was quite pleased to be able to purchase yet a domain name at a specially cut-price (£0.99 + VAT) and then apply it to the text version of this blog which is now available as a continuous ‘stream’ at http://mch-blog.uk
Another fine day, I am pleased to report. Meg and I had an extended walk around the park today, discovering new bits of it that we must explore later such as a small patch of woodland we did not know anything about. We encountered one of our acquaintances who walks a little Jack Russell terrier dog and enquired after a mutual friend who we have not seen for about 4 weeks. The news was not particularly good as our mutual friend had not been very well recently. We suspect that he may not be getting some of his regular courses of chemotherapy he has been receiving recently, so we trust that he is having a temporary setback.
I am a little intrigued by the various sets of figures that are being bandied about by the government, concerning the supply of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) which seems to be in critically short supply at the front line. The government strategy seems to be to quote a very large figure and hope that we will all be so impressed that we give the government the benefit of the doubt that any shortages of equipment are not their fault. These figures seem to be plucked out of the air. For example, according to some of my Google searches, some 240 million pieces of PPE had been despatched by 30th March. On 3rd April, this figure had magically increased to 397 million – had an extra 157 million extra pieces of PPE suddenly materialised, representing an increase of 65% in just 4 days? And to extend this wonderful way of pulling big figures out of the air, the government claimed that two weeks later (by the 18th-19th April to be exact) the figure of 240 million had become 1 billion (1000 million) In other words, the supply had magically increased four-fold in a fortnight which is a remarkable feat by any standards!
I am reminded of the fact that during America’s conflict with Vietnam, it was very important that the American public who were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the war effort, be fed a constant trickle of any enemy combatants that had been killed in order to convince them that the conflict was worth fighting and the USA was actually winning the war. But how many people had actually been killed when you were estimating it from a B-52 bomber? The military hit upon the following strategy. We are going to bomb this village which, according to the 1954 (French conducted) census contained 450 inhabitants. Let us now assume that with little access to contraception, the population would increase at 5% a year. Compounded up, this would make a figure of 848. Now after the bombing raid, we caught sight of 8 people fleeing the village – by definition, we must have killed 840. So that will be our kill ratio for that particular day. Two assiduous journalists trawled through all of the figures supplied day-by-day by the American military over the years and published in the press daily and concluded that the entire population of Vietnam had been killed four times over! I perceive something of the same process going on with PPE. However, if you are a doctor or a nurse on the front line who doesn’t have a sufficient supply of PPE before treating a patient and you are putting your life and members of your family at risk, you know that the government cannot possibly be blamed if they supplied 1 billion? (1 trillion?) worth of gear.
In the afternoon, I finished off a particularly difficult section of weeding in the front garden that had to be wrested back inch by inch and foot by foot (I think creeping buttercup was the principal culprit) Then we enjoyed another good FaceTime chat with our good friends – the audio was clear but as the connection was poor, we only had fleeting looks at each other’s faces. We discussed cooking, supermarket access and the proximity of COVOD-19 in the neighbourhood to cheer ourselves up.
This was quite a liberating day for us today for reasons that I will explain. We had our customary walk in the park on a beautiful spring day and held chats with some of our friends, both in the park itself and on the way back from the park along Kidderminster Rd. As it has been over seven weeks since we had occasion to go out in the car, we realised that we had better go out and give the car a spin, not least to ensure that the battery doesn’t go flat. Bromsgrove is connected to the neighbouring town of Redditch via a fairly fast and uncluttered dual carriageway so we progressed as far as we could until we met the roundabout outside Redditch town and came back at quite a speed – solely for the health of the battery, you understand. On the outskirts of Bromsgrove, we decided to come back a slightly different way and on the spur of the moment decided to call in on of our closest friends, whom we generally see once per week. Although we interrupted her exercise routine, we were delighted to see each other and had a good old natter, exchanging information about relatives and friends. This was so enjoyable that we think we will repeat this once a week, for now on. Incidentally, the Chief Medical Officer intimated today in the press conference from No. 10 something that he could say that no politician dare say- that the lockdown is likely to last until the end of this calendar year (a further eight months) and could even last for a whole calendar year which would be twelve months. The reasoning appeared to be that we would have wait until a vaccine had proved its effectiveness and could be manufactured at scale. Some interesting news emanating from the World Health Organisation is that the proportion of people displaying antibodies post-COVID is actually pretty low. I quote:
There is no evidence that people who have recovered from coronavirus have immunity to the disease, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said…The UK government has bought 3.5 million serology tests – which measure levels of antibodies in blood plasma….But senior WHO epidemiologists have warned that there is no proof that such antibody tests can show if someone who has been infected with COVID-19 cannot be infected again
So bang goes the theory of herd immunity which at least was the initial stance of the government, which they quickly had to abandon.
After lunch, I got to work clearing a triangular plant bed that had been colonised by comfrey. (Needless to say, my work was closely supervised by Miggles, the cat that seems to have adopted us. She sprawled over the ground and evidently enjoyed the sunshine - for some reason, she always locates herelf a couple of feet away from where I am working). Some people quite enjoy the plant of comfrey whilst others regard it as a weed. It is said that once you have it in a plot, you never get rid of it, largely because the roots go so deep and it took a spade to remove them. Actually, some people make this plant into a tea or a tisane whilst some old-fashioned gardeners insist it is excellent manure, not least because the deep roots bring so many minerals into play from the deepest regions of soil. The medieval herbalists used to call this plant ‘knitbone’ and used it in a sort of poultice to treat fractures and similar broken limbs. After consultation with the daughter-in-law, we have decided to try out a selection of dahlias that we had in stock. We also have a seed tray full of theoretically out of date annuals seeds so we thought we would get some going tomorrow and see what comes up. I remember that the author of a gardening book I used to have (Frances Stevenson) always used to say that you could sow any seed in May and it would be guaranteed to jump out of the ground. In the meanwhile, our fruit trees (plum, apple) seem to have the requisite amount of blossom for a good harvest later on in the year but we will have to wait and see.
The spell of fine weather continues and the absence of wind made the morning feel even warmer. We met our friend, Julie in the park (as we do most days) and also struck up another conversation with a gentleman of about the same age as ourselves who was concerned that the police might try to move us on from our sojourn on the park bench. We assured him that we had a piece of paper in our rucksack which indicates what the current rules seem to be – and then reminisced about what could be remembered of the Second World war and its sequelae (I find this is always a good conversation opener as everybody has members of family who were affected in one way or another by WWII).
After lunch, the gardening continued apace whilst the weather was fine. Our daughter-in-law grows superb dahlias – the only trouble is that last season’s display had died back and there was now a tangle of last year’s dahlias, this year’s daffodils and the inevitable encroachment of bracken, dandelions, a weed known as ‘Lords and Ladies’ and so on. We decided that I would meticulously clear the entire patch and then we would do a careful dig over to extract the dahlia tubers. I am then going to give the whole a good composting (hopefully, with my own 2-year old compost) and we thought we would abandon the daffodils which rather get in the way of everything and confine the daffodils next year to a few strategically placed pots. Miggles, our adopted cat, came along late in the day to give my work a supervisory nod of approval and then to sprawl in the newly cleared patch, which she is wont to do. There was a source of much merriment later in the afternoon as I was doing a bit of strategic watering and the cat followed me around the garden to make sure I did it correctly, Then she decided to make her way through one of the plastic tunnel cloches that we had taken off the dahlias so I thought it might be a good idea to train her (like a dog!) to navigate tunnel cloches as though she was in a display. This effort failed miserably – after all, can you herd cats? As it is a Thursday, we started to make our customary ‘clap for the NHS’ applause at 8.0 in the evening, my own contribution being a metal spoon on an aluminium cooking pot which makes a suitably ringing sound. This so startled all of the local cats in the area that they all fled for the safety of their own houses as soon as the cacophony started.
My daughter in law had obtained a copy of ‘The Times’ for today and the top people’s newspapers were actually instructing you how to make your own face masks (out of linen cloth, old tee shirts and kitchen paper respectively) It is evident that there is going to be a change in policy but Amazon is already selling face masks at massively inflated prices so we intend to make our own. I managed to locate some old cotton tee shirts that I will never wear again and also a couple of neckerchiefs that we used to protect our necks in the hot summers of the 1970s. One crucial resource is going to be elastic to hold the whole contraption around the ears. Accordingly, I went on the web and managed to buy twenty metres (the postage cost more than the elastic). In former times (I am thinking if the 1950s) this was always known as ‘knicker’ elastic as its principal use seemed to be to provide a means of support for critical undergarments worn by the fair sex in the days before elasticated fabrics hit tour clothing stores. Every self-respecting and provident woman would always carry a yard of rolled up knicker elastic in her handbag as when the inevitable ‘snap’ occurred, she could step daintily out of her undergarments and then effect some emergency repairs with the said elastic. My last encounter with ‘ribbon’ elastic (the correct term) was in 1969 when Meg needed a small amount to effect some kind of emergency repair. We found a little stall staffed by a friendly Asian lady who had knicker elastic on sale for 1½d a yard. We explained that we only needed a foot but the stallholder was very obliging and said she would sell us a foot if that is all we wanted. I watched her carefully measure out a foot which she rolled up and put in a little brown bag for us. I handed over a 1 (old) penny piece and received a ½d in change. I remember feeling embarrassed at the time – after all, a ½d is worth only about a fifth of the modern 1p coin. Little incidents like that stick in your memory, for some reason!
As we walked down into Bromsgrove this morning, we met with two of the grand-daughters of one of our best friends and received the news that we had been half expecting but was nonetheless distressing for us to hear. Our friend who is 88 had survived bouts of colon cancer and liver cancer and had been receiving regular chemotherapy for leukemia which was at least keeping the illness at bay. However, he is now on an end-of-life pathway and is only expected to live for about two more weeks. We hope to be able to go to his house (his nurses will not allow us inside) and perhaps we say a few words of goodbye to him through a downstairs window. We used to pass our friend nearly every other as he as taking the family Jack Russell dogs for their daily walk and we would always exchange jokes and the like with him. Our friend had been brought up in a Salvation Army household and although he had rejected this in his youth, he and his brother were encouraged to play a musical instrument and indeed played the trumpet for more than 75 years. One particular and very fond memory that we have was when he attended our local 50th wedding anniversary celebrations, he played the Bach chorale ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s desiring‘ using a variety of different mutes. Fortunately, we have this on video to remind ourselves of better times. As it happened, an opera singer friend of ours had sung this chorale at our wedding in 1967, so it was rather fitting that another close friend should help us celebrate fifty years later. We shall miss him tremendously – the only thing we can say is that it does not appear to be the COVID-19 virus which is hastening his end and so he at home surrounded by good medical care and surrounded by his family and friends who all love him. Here is the URL for any readers of this blog who remember Clive and would like to hear his rendition, performed when he himself was 85 years old: Trumpet piece Of course, what is distressing for all of us, his family and friends, is that Clive will not be able to have a proper ‘send-off’ as the funeral arrangements generally restrict the numbers to six close relatives only. We may be able to have a memorial service and ‘celebration of his life’ a bit later.
In the park, we had an interesting chat with a gentleman who, as it happens, was a past Chairman of Bromsgrove District Council (although he himself originally came from Kent) We exchanged views of what life was like in Bromsgrove and were thankful for the legacy of the 19th-century industrialist, Joseph Sanders, whose sisters had bequeathed the whole of the park to the town. After lunch, I cut the communal lawns, and then we spent a very pleasant couple of hours with our new-ish next-door neighbours in our back garden, being careful to observe a strict two-metre distance as we sat around a garden table but with the chairs well pulled back. It must have looked a funny sight but as both households had been busy of late, we had never managed to have a good ‘getting to know you’ conversation with them since they moved in. We were both taken aback by the news that President Trump had actually suggested that people should inject themselves with disinfectant as a way of overcoming the COVID-19 virus.
I experimented with an old tee-shirt to provide myself with a home-made face mask I looked at an online video to complement the diagram found in yesterday’s Times. This sort of worked but as the tags to tie it around your head need extending with spare strips of linen, the result looks a bit weird when viewed from the rear if not the front. I am reminded of a Kenny Everitt sketch of the world’s most incompetent do-it-yourselfer where there was a proliferation of bandages and the end result did look a little like this. I would rely on this home-made mask to escape a blazing conflagration but I not sure it makes an ideal fashion statement! But perhaps practice makes perfect, although a better solution might be just to wear my recently re-discovered neckerchieves.
This morning on the way to the park, we called in at the house of our dear friend who is on an ‘end-of-life’ pathway as we were informed by his grand-daughters yesterday. We were fortunate enough to see his son who is staying with him at all times and we managed to give our friend a (farewell?) wave through the window. We will call around every few days whilst he can still recognise us. We felt a mixture of emotions, evidently feeling sad at the thought that we would soon be without him but also comforted by that fact that he was receiving excellent medical care, was dying with his friends around him and was spared what is happening to perhaps hundreds of people who are dying daily of the COVID-19 virus with no family members present and the prospect of no funeral to speak of. The tragic thing here is the last that some relatives see of the patient admitted to hospital under the COVID-19 regime is that all they can do is to wave at the rear doors of a departing ambulance.
Now for some cheerful news. We met our good friend, Julie, in the park and exchanged notes about mutual friends. Then an elderly lady who we know by sight stopped by and she told us it was going to be her birthday on Tuesday so we have to see if we can get a little cake organised. As we were leaving our customary park bench, she said to us that she was so glad we occupied that particular bench as she had donated it to the local authority after her husband had died – it happened to be located in such a place that she could actually see the bench from her house near the park and she was always delighted that other people could sit down and admire the park that her husband helped to look after for the last fifteen years of his life. On our way out of the park, we encountered the same gentleman that we had met yesterday and he informed us that he had personally organised one of the flower beds in the park to be a permanent reminder of the holocaust – accordingly, he had supervised this whilst he was the leader of District Council. Finally, we met an old Italian friend who was working at home on her incredibly well-tended garden and remembering the fact that her husband had died at this time of year about three years ago. As you might imagine, it was full of emotions of one sort or another – we never know what we are to encounter when we start our journey to the park.
In the afternoon, I devoted about an hour to the (part) clearance of a gully where the land slopes away from the grassed communal area to the boundary fence. This is itself on two levels – a top level which is easy to get at and to keep cultivated and a wilder lower area, the boundary between the two being a fallen tree that forms a sort of natural division between the two areas. I have a sneaking suspicion I forget to ‘do’ the lower area last year – this involves throwing away a lot of brambles and associated debris but replanting the occasional tree sapling I come across (these may be beech or hazelnut (Avellana) – I need a ‘proper’ gardener to give me a definitive answer) This ‘heavy’ bit of gardening only needs doing once a season and, after that, a quick rake should keep it in good condition before I move onto the next job.
The weather is somewhat ‘on the turn’ today and I know that there is a certain amount of gardening to be done before some showers occur tomorrow and the probability of more prolonged rain on Tuesday. Meg had a slight stomach upset this morning so did not accompany me as is normal on the trip to the park so I enjoyed a solitary sojourn on our normal park bench. The park was fairly busy as parents were dragging their children around the park. I heard more than one 3-4 year old complaining that walking around the park was ‘boring’ and they would prefer to be at home. I won’t tell you how I feel about this as I might be blamed for being an old reactionary! On the way home, some of our oldest friends greeted me and we exchanged news and commiserations about my other friend who is approaching the end of his life.
This morning, I was sort of passively listening to the “Sunday’ programme which is broadcast between 7am-8am on BBC Radio 4. Towards the end of this, I heard one of the most powerful and moving pieces of audio I have heard for decades. A consultant at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester, Dr. Mark Tan, was explaining in his ‘Telephone Lament for Coronavirus‘ how he often had to communicate with relatives by phone to discuss the progress made by their loved one in hospital. As his conversations often started with ‘I just called today..’ this reminded one of the famous Stevie Wonder song ‘I just called to say I love you‘ which was played gently in the background to accompany his commentary. Dr. Tan indicated the fragments of conversations that he would have with relatives, explaining the procedures of the hospital and the progress that the patient had been making. The whole piece was incredibly moving and I must confess I was moved to tears by it. If you would like to hear it for yourself, then this is the relevant link:
Telephone lament for Coronavirus
and if you can you need to position the progress meter at about 37.18 on the progress meter. I actually listened to it again immediately after it had been broadcast on BBC iPlayer but it should now be more available and accessible through Google and other search engines. I would urge all the readers of this blog to try to listen to this if you can.
After lunch, it was time to re-commence and try to finish off the big gardening ‘push’ before the weather breaks and I was very pleased to be able to achieve this with about 2 hours hard work (although I feel a little ‘gardening stiff’ after it). It was a very much a ‘hands and knees on a kneeling mat’ job and I was pleased that I managed to reduce the tangle of foliage to something more presentable, having one or two little beech saplings which I re-planted and cursing some of the overgrown holly, ivy and brambles. When I am gardening like this, I am always impressed by the dexterity of the human hand (there is really no substitute) and I always try to ensure that I wear a pair of gardening gloves that have a kind of tacky facing so that I can grip words to extract them more easily. Needless to say, when I had finished one particular section and came up for air to throw some of the weeded material on the compost heap, I observed that my faithful adopted cat, Miggles, was waiting for me patiently along the top. She then accompanied me to the compost heap to make sure everything was correctly thrown away and then had the breakfast that she should have had this morning. Afterwards, my work was duly inspected and Miggles pretended to watch a little hole at the base of a small pile of stones hoping that a mouse would emerge (it didn’t!) Tomorrow, I need to retrieve some two-year compost from my compost bin, rake it in and then leave my daughter-in-law to plant her dahlias for the season (all before the rains come)
The political agenda is now changing before our eyes. I hear that the phrase ‘the new normal’ is being used more and more and I must say that in my numerous little chats with people, everyone seems to know that things will never be the same again and we shall all have to get used to a certain of social distancing perhaps for a year or so to come.
Today, I have reaped the reward of successful compost making by going to my trusted compost bin and using compost that was at least two years if not three years old. My daughter-in-law and I had collaborated in preparing our dahlia bed this year. I had weeded and cleared the ground a few days earlier, As soon as all the perennial weeds had been removed, the bed was dug over- I then added three large garden-tub loads of manure and raked it in. [Incidentally, the contrast between the fairly pale-looking soil and the dark, rich-looking compost could have been taken out of a text-book) My daughter-in-law then carefully planted her dahlia tubers, making sure that each one was protected by a plastic ‘slug’ collar which prevents the slugs from munching up the tasty green shoots and negating all one’s efforts. The rewards will come later on in the year, we trust!
Incidentally, there is a bit of an art as well as good science that lies behind good compost making. In order to provide the best environment in which the microbes can convert decaying vegetation into rich compost, you require a ratio of carbon to nitrogen (C:N) of about 30:1 In practical terms, this means that there should be one part of ‘brown’ materials (dry leaves, cardboard, soil itself) to two parts of greens (recently pulled weeds, grass clippings), Too much green material and the compost heap will be slimy and may start to smell (solution: add more brown) and too little greens (solution: compost accelerator, human urine!) will make the compost heap slow to warm up. Finally, one needs a certain amount of water (judicious watering can every now and again) and aeration (turning it over with a fork occasionally). I attach some advice I found on a compost-making website, of which there are hundreds!
Principle #2: 2 Parts Green to 1 Part Brown
(The best strategy to mix your compostable materials)
Generally speaking, you can get C:N ratios of 30:1 to 50:1 by adding two parts of a GREEN material to one part of a BROWN material to your bin. A “part” can be defined as a certain quantity of the material, such as two 5-gallon buckets of GREEN and 1 packed bucket of BROWN.
All of this is not rocket science – but I include it as I think the principle of ‘browns to greens’ is not widely known and many people just throw garden weeds and clippings into their compost bin without much thought.
Being, Monday our local park was quite sparsely populated, but we did manage to meet one of our good friends, Julie, who is there almost every day (if we happen to coincide) We observed our local heron (he/she with a strangely deformed left foot that looks as though it is pointing the wrong way) being mobbed by a couple of black-headed gulls and even having to duck when one bold one made a kamikaze style bombing approach.
After lunch, whilst the dahlias were being planted, I made myself busy edging the border to our communal green area (technically it called a drainage field for the BiuoDisk but we have nicknamed it ‘Meg’s Meadow’) All of this frantic gardening is being done because of the fact that the rains are coming – certainly a smattering tomorrow and a really sustained downpour on Wednesday, according to the weather forecast. I have decided to name the lower part of the gully bordering our fence ‘Mog’s underpass’ (Mog is the name to which I answer in the Hart household – named after the Judith Kerr children’s author character as in ‘Meg and Mog’ but more likely because the initials spell out ‘Miserable Old Git’ ) That really is enough gardening chatter for several days (if not weeks) from now on!
The long-anticipated rains arrived overnight at last- this is always a pleasant sight, particularly when one is well ‘gardened-up’ and it has been one of the driest Aprils on record. Meg was still suffering a little from what we think is a stomach upset so I made the journey to the park on my own. I did pass by the house of our friend who has not many days left to live on this earth. I spoke with his son who informed me that his father, having not slept not particularly well last night, was now asleep. I bid my adieus and said I would call back in about another three days’ time. When I got to the park, it was practically deserted. I cut a solitary figure, standing alone in the bandstand and drinking the coffee from my flask (even harder to manipulate standing up in my desire to avoid touching any hard surfaces.)
This afternoon, I thought I would try my hand at making a facemask out of a discarded pair of socks. The first method involves making slits and cutting pieces out so that two ‘lugs’ are formed to stretch around your ears. I could not quite see how this would work with the open end, so I adopted Method 2 which seems a lot more successful. Basically, I put an elastic band over each end of the sock and then secured it in position by folding and securing with a safety pin. This initiated a house-wide search for safety pins which hardly anyone uses these days. Eventually, I improvised (as always) by securing each folded over portion with a large paper clip, unfolded and then used as a giant staple before being secured into position – I finished it off with a brief bit of masking tape to avoid scratching myself. The next task is to see how to sanitise /disinfect such a mask. As with hands, it is difficult to better hot water and a fair dolloping of soap although normal washing in the washing machine should also do the trick. I thought we try these out tomorrow (I have made three pairs already) and resolve to wash them every day as part of my new routine.
In the late afternoon, we FaceTimed our old friends who have been feeling the pressure a bit recently. We were speculating whether we could risk an accidental ‘meeting’ in the park in about 13 days’ time. The point is that Mondays are always very quiet and therefore we were very unlikely to encounter many other souls – Monday, May 11th is my 75th birthday so we may be able to celebrate at a distance!
I read a letter in yesterday’s Times which indicated that three countries (France, Denmark and Poland) had intimated that state aid would not be made available to companies in their respective countries who had funnelled their profits off into tax-havens. This seems like an excellent suggestion – if you had deprived the state of so much revenue over the years, why hold out your hand for state hand-outs now? It the type of suggestion that would (a) never occur to the British political elite and (b) certainly never be implemented. A second letter was from a Professor of Dentistry who pointed out that whilst hand-washing was a central part of the strategy to guard against the transmission of the Covid-19, perhaps the same consideration should be given to teeth-brushing. He argued that as droplets of saliva could well act as a vector of the Covid-19 virus, then sanitising the mouth with toothpaste (and mouth-wash, I ask myself?) would seem to be equally as sensible as hand-washing. Food for thought?
Today was the predicted wet day and so it proved. We had a chat with one of our friends on the way down to the park but the rest of our trip was a pretty soggy and miserable affair. As we had no real desire to sit on a wet park bench, we took refuge in the bandstand to consumer our coffee and provisions. I am given to understand that in WWII, all members of the armed forces, the Home Guard and perhaps the civilian population as well were trained in ‘aircraft recognition’ The present-day analogue of this is when we scan the horizon to see if there is anyone we know that we can recognise by their general shape and gait (there wasn’t!) – this enables one to spot friends and acquaintances long before you can see their actual faces. Thus it was today as we scanned the horizon in vain.
Once a week, we consume our by now traditional fish pie which has been made a fortnight or so ago and saved as several portions. The one downside of this fish meal, although it is easy to heat up in the microwave, is that it does tend to smell the kitchen out so that we have to counteract this by flinging a window wide open and keeping the hob extractor fan on at full blast. The afternoon was filled with nothing more exciting than a routine dusting and hoovering but so it is for most of the population. We did receive a text from our chiropodist with whom we have not had contact for several weeks offering us an appointment slot. This we accepted until after consultation with our son and daughter-in-law we realised that this might be a somewhat risky venture as we did not know how many other older clients might have been seen recently harbouring perhaps asymptomatic virus, so we decided to cancel this and try and arrange something in the future when the panic had died down a bit. Our daughter-in-law had done our weekly shopping for us and this is always very welcome but we do feel a bit guilty about accepting it. We have decided to be loyal Waitrose customers in the future using their ‘Click and Collect‘ service and we thought we would activate this again in a week or so when it becomes more apparent whether our daughter-in-law will be attending her school on a regular daily rather than a sporadic basis. Accordingly, I made a dummy order at Waitrose and saw that we were on their priority list and there were a few slots available to us in a few days’ time – so we think we will get this system going in earnest in an about a fortnight’s time.
The media have been full of the news that Boris Johnson has fathered another child, but the interesting aspect of this affair is that Boris will not admit to how many children he already has. I think the answer is four legitimate and one illegitimate but in his election campaign, Boris refused to answer questions as to how many children he actually has. So it was some surprise that in the House of Commons, Wliiam Rees-Meg congratulated Boris ‘as one father of six children to another‘. I am a little reminded of the story of the Irish bishop (was he called Eamonn Casey?) who was forced to resign and flee to America when the story of his illegitimate children emerged in Ireland. It was the time of one of the football World Cups and when the bishop entered the stadium and was looking for his seat, he was spotted and recognised by two Irish wags who shouted 'Dad! Dad! Over here!‘
The month of April seems to have absolutely flown by – to think it is May Day tomorrow (although hardly celebrated in the UK as it is in the rest of Europe) Today was a little chilly in the park as we have come to expect but we did bump into (not literally) the friend of a friend with whom we exchanged some pleasant thoughts. It turned out that the wife of the couple was brought up in Sheffield which was the university in which our son did his degree all those years ago (33 to be exact). To the regulars who come to see if any of the little ducklings have survived we tell them the same story i.e. that they were delicious!
Our son had bought us a copy of the Times today and in it, there was a very full and well-researched article on COVID-19. One thing that I had not fully appreciated was that a third (actually between 35%-40%) of the NHS patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 had died, a rate that was comparable to Ebola wards in Africa. The data sample was huge (17,000 patients admitted to 166 UK hospitals between 6th-18th April 2020). As the Professor of Outbreak Medicine at the University of Liverpool (Calum Semple) indicated ‘people need to get it into their heads the reason the government is keen to keep people at home is that this is an incredibly dangerous disease‘ At 8.00 pm this evening, as has now become the new tradition, we joined with all of the neighbours in a 2-3 minute round of applause/saucepan banging/instrument playing display of thanks to the NHS and allied workers. We wonder when the immediate crisis is over, whether people will be willing to grant them a hefty pay rise and also pay the necessary taxes to pay for it?
This afternoon, I played around with a little bit of Javascript (which all browsers utilise) because I wished to put a ‘Date Website Updated‘ caption at the end of my composite blog. There is a ‘quick and dirty’ way of doing this but the trouble is that the default is in the (American style) format of mm:dd:yyyy which to a British readership is very confusing (is 05/10/2020 October 5th or the 10th of May?) So, I learnt how to do this according to GMT and UK conventions and have got this working OK. As I have explained before (so I won’t repeat myself) when I find out how something works, I write the details down in a ‘What have I learnt/re-learnt TODAY’ hardback book so I can easily find out how to do it the next time I need to utilise the technique without re-inventing the wheel the whole time.
Having just dozed through this week’s edition of Question Time on BBC1, I reflect that a new style of (non-confrontational) politics seems to be emerging. The national crisis we are living through has led, I believe, to a quasi-coalition government (or at least a willingness to cooperate more closely with constructive opposition viewpoints). There is a return to more evidence-based politics, although I am not completely convinced that ‘the science’ as the politicians like to call it is quite as clear-cut or unequivocal on a range of issues as might be imagined. After all, why was ‘Test, Test and Test again‘ never taken very seriously as an over-riding policy option? At the end of all of this, it may well be that we have a reformed set of political institutions (e.g. some form of proportional representation may well be on the cards) and a realisation that certain core parts of our national infrastructure (the NHS, social care) cannot be left to the market and must certainly not be allowed to return to a stripped down version under the mantra ‘it is all the nation can afford’. I think there will be a realisation that the political dogma of the decades since Thatcherism which divides the world into those who provide the wealth of the country (entrepreneurs) and those who consume it (NHS again, education) is just too simplistic. There is a very strong argument that good education, welfare and health services provide long-term capital formation without which a modern economy cannot operate and some of the fripperies of the merchandise that floods our stores on occasions can easily be dispensed with and do not really add to the nation’s wealth (e.g. outfits for children around Hallow’een is my particular bugbear.)
Another showery day which made our daily journey rather a damp one. As the local bandstand was colonised by a family with young children, we decided to sit on a soggy park bench although we were fortunate in that we did not actively get rained upon. On our way home, we ran across a person who we know by sight as he visits his father on a Friday at just about the time. coincidentally, that we are walking home. We always ask after each other but stopped for a longer chat today. It turns out that he was a software engineer so we exchanged some details of programming languages with which we were familiar and had utilised in the past. The day turned out to one of those infuriating days when there are bouts of brilliant sunshine that lull you into a false sense of security punctuated by showers. As it was over a week since the lawns had had their cut, I took a chance on it and managed to get the communal areas and our lawns cut just before the heavens opened which would have given me a good drenching.
The 5.00 briefing from 10 Downing Street was dominated by the news that the government had well exceeded their target total of 100,000 tests to be conducted on one day – a target that they had set themselves before the end of the month (which was yesterday) and which few thought that they would actually meet. As it happened, and as you might suspect, there was a massive fiddle of the figures going on – the announced figure actually included test kits that had been despatched to peoples’ homes but not yet returned (a practice that Downing Street had earlier in the week said would not be included in the returns) It took Channel 4 News and a couple of the journalists to ask pointed questions but the rest of the ‘brat-pack’ were pretty tame. Channel 4 claimed that the true figure should be about 83,000 not 120,000+. It does appear that as the Health Secretary was desperate to meet his target, about a third of the total (39,000) related to kits mailed out but not, as hitherto, actually dispatched for analysis to the laboratory. The government scientific advisors did their usual trick of ‘throwing sand in the eyes of the enemy’ i.e. quoting a lot of other statistics which whilst not being untrue were not related to the pointed questions that were asked and which only served to confuse the issue ( I always thought that ‘throwing sand in the faces of the enemy’ was derived from gladiators in mortal combat who had been disarmed and resorted to the only thing they could possibly do whilst prostrate in the arena and that was to grasp a handful of sand and throw it in the face of their attackers) But I am wrong – the expression dates from the 17th century according to Google.
The other major story was the fact that the death rate for the COVID-19 virus had hit the poorer areas of the country twice as hard as the more affluent areas. The death-rate for the poorest areas was 55 per 100,000, twice the rate for the more affluent areas. Of course, there are a variety of explanations that all contribute to these figures such as the fact that the poorest individuals are in jobs where they are forced to go out to work and do not have the ability to work ‘from home’ And, of course, a decade of austerity means that housing and welfare payments have been slashed for the poorest communities before the COVID-19 virus compounded their difficulties. It is evident that a major task of reconstruction needs to take place but whether this will happen under a government of this complexion will have to wait to be seen.
Meg and I were on the way to see our good friend, Clive, who is on an ‘end-of-life’ pathway and hoped to be able to wave to him through the window of his house. But we were intercepted as we approached the house by a desolate daughter-in-law who informed us that Clive had died at 8.30 the previous evening. This news always comes as a shock when it happens, even though it was expected in the days ahead. On the one hand, we are filled with utter sadness at the loss of a dear friend – on the other hand, we were extremely relieved that he died in the comfort of his own home surrounded by his relatives and people who love him and largely free from pain. At least we have been spared the sight of a departing ambulance which is the last that many people up and down the land are experiencing with the COVID-19 virus. Clive had been a good friend to Meg and myself – we entertained him two or three times for a meal or a Christmas ‘do’ and one occasion had a wonderful trip on the Severn Valley Railway which we all enjoyed. And, of course, he played his trumpet at our 50th wedding celebrations in 2017 and we are so pleased that we have a clip of video of him playing at that event [in this blog, Friday 24th April, 2020- Day 39] and here it is again: Clive Of course, the funeral arrangements are going to be a bit difficult but it looks as though up to 10 family members can attend the actual funeral. All of his other friends and acquaintances will probably gather outside his house at about the time that the hearse is due to depart so that we can all give him a heartfelt clap for a life well-lived, which seems to be a tradition which is rapidly becoming established these days. As we walked around the park, we were really fortunate in view of our really sad news we had just received to encounter three sets of friends. We had chats with all of them and it helped us enormously to get us back onto a more even emotional keel. In the afternoon, as the weather was set fair, I became tempted to do some of the edging and gulley maintenance I used to do before we had some help in the garden. I must say, there is no real substitute for getting down on your knees and tacking things with a gloved hand. These days, I tend to do these things in fairly small bursts (i.e.no more than an hour) so that my back doesn’t suffer, followed by another hour of routine housework.
Now that spring is here, I am starting to think again about my composting routines. Although there is a lot of confusing advice out on the web, the consensus view is 3 parts ‘browns’ (carbon-rich) to one part ‘greens’ (nitrogen-rich) If you are doing a lot of weeding and therefore have a lot of ‘green’ materials, you need to add a fair quantity of browns and for this, I shred whatever cardboard comes my way – particularly in the early part of the year. Later on in the year when you have more dead twigs or leaves, then this ratio is easier to maintain. (I have been known to scour supermarket shelves for ’empty’ cardboard containers at the start of the season) The tip is, of course, to have a shredder but it is not unknown for these to break down as they become clogged with paper dust. The secret is to keep it well oiled (every 2nd or 3 use). Now, for the ‘not many people know this‘ advice. The shredder oil that manufacturers try to sell is 99.9% canola oil so the tip is that you can use any vegetable cooking oil rather than shredder oil and if you want to be particularly careful, you can always buy and use rapeseed oil (which the North Americans call ‘canola’ – originally developed to be more ecologically friendly in the Canadian logging industries) This will prolong the life of your shredder no end and will also aid the composting processes by ensuring that the ‘brown’ (i.e. carbon-rich) components of the compost are already in a broken-down form. But you knew all of this anyway!
As you might imagine, the park has a different clientele on Sundays, being dominated by young parents with associated children (some on bicycles) and dogs. Thus it was today and consequently, we did not meet any of our regulars. It rather reminded me of when I was a barman in my student days at Tiffany’s in Manchester. My fellow members of staff used to joke with each other that if you had forgotten which day of the week it was, all you had to do was look at the clientele and there were always social variations e.g. Friday night was the ‘lads night out’, Sunday was often the engaged couples and so on. At Tiffany’s fire precautions were taken quite seriously – the band was instructed to play Teddy Bear’s Picnic which was code for us that the fire was real, not imagined. As a barman, you were instructed to stand by your till (and burn if necessary) to avoid the till being looted if there was a panic exit. Incidentally, the two girl singers in the band (Eve and Lynn) went on to become the core of the ‘New Seekers‘ if anyone goes back that far.
There was an interesting letter in today’s Observer which gave food for thought. One prominent theory in recent years has been ‘nudge’ theory i.e. you move to achieve a policy objective by a series of small shifts and incremental moves. Sometimes this works well – for example, the use of electronic displays to warn you to keep your speed down. Sometimes, however, the theory results in abject failures such as attempting to warn people of the dangers of tobacco smoking by the use of large letter warnings and graphic images on cigarette packets. What worked in this latter case was actually quite a leap in policy i.e. making it illegal to smoke in public places. Now we can apply that theory to the present pandemic crisis. The first stages were classic ‘nudge’ theory (a series of small steps such as ‘advice’ given to the public, messages that were transmitted but not really adhered to such as Boris Johnson going around. and shaking hands with lots of people). But a more significant policy shift, i.e. lockdown, if effected two weeks earlier, would have saved literally thousands of lives. The moral of this: there are times when a sagacious politician (are there any?) should have taken decisive action. By the way, has anybody else noticed that simplistic slogans (‘Stay home‘, ‘Protect the NHS‘, ‘Save Lives‘) are produced by the same advisers who launched ‘Get Brexit Done‘ on the great British public?
Many of the commentators are saying that the coming week will be a ‘pivotal’ week in political life as the government and other decision-makers grapple with how to unlock the economy. In retrospect, the decision to lock down was incredibly simple compared with the complexities of travelling towards the ‘new’ normality. There are still some certainties, such as the necessity to keep 2 metres apart in social distancing and if I had to make a guess, I would say that certain ‘outdoor’ businesses would cautiously re-open. High on the list would be garden centres, zoos, gardens open to the public, and the like. We would certainly be moving from a type of digital mode of operation (on/off open/shut, allowed/not allowed) to a much more analogue mode in which we need to have gradations of approach. Some institutions will have changed their modus operandi for good – I would imagine that all universities would offer the majority of their output in an online mode from now on and the idea of mass lectures and smaller group tutorials/seminars will be regarded as a relic of the past. The travel industry will also be radically reshaped and I wonder how many would willingly travel on public transport unless there were compulsory face-masks and a radical restriction on numbers travelling to preserve social distance?
This morning was a fine, bright morning and it was not surprising that it brought a fair sprinkling of visitors to the park, where we enjoyed our customary elevenses and a few passing conversations with fellow walkers, including our friend Julie who espied us from a distance on her walk and managed to catch up with us. Most of the regulars are on the look-out for the ducklings and we usually tell them ‘Yes! they were delicious!‘ We despatched a sympathy card to Clive’s relatives on our way down the hill and also a belated birthday card to one of my ‘old fogies’ friends from my Winchester days. The ‘old fogies’ are a group of colleagues from the University of Winchester who still meet regularly two or three times a year to have a meal and to reminisce how much better things were when we ran them over thirteen years ago. Actually, we tend to talk more about politics (which we mostly share) rather than work. We started this tradition before we retired because about five of us all had birthdays in May so we decided to have a communal birthday dinner and we have carried on ever since. After the meal, a few of us often repair to a local pub where we carry on until our wives and mistresses call us home. Later in the morning, we felt that we had to take the car for a spin to keep the battery recharged (is this an essential journey or not we ask ourselves?). On our way home, we stop off at one of our oldest friends in Bromsgrove and chat over the garden wall, exchanging news about family and mutual friends. This always makes us feel good (not that we really feel miserable) and so home to lunch. In the afternoon, I resumed doing some gardening (clearance of the gullies and beds surrounding our back lawn) Needless to say, I had my work inspected, checked for quality, and ‘rolled in’ by Miggles, our adopted cat. Miggles, by the way. is engaging in some hank-panky with another cat I have christened Peter (lots of quasi fighting and almost playing ‘cat and mouse’ with each other – I have my suspicions). I was pleased to be able to utilise some of my cardboard shreddings to go with the other cleared weeds and leaves- almost anything arriving from Amazon now gets the shredding treatment. I still have to add some of my traditional compost heap accelerant – below is what Google in its first entry has to say on the subject:
The COVID-19 news this evening revealed that more than 50% of the British workforce is now being paid for by the government. And it is also reported that 80% of the population are fearful of too rapid an ‘unlock down’ for fear of contracting the virus. But, whisper it gently, could it not be the case that actually at least some people rather like being paid 80% of their wages for doing nothing apart from staying at home and avoiding the sometimes harsh exigencies of work. I have not heard anybody suggest this but it is a thought that occurs to me. I think it makes the case for citizens’s wage (paying everybody in a society the same basic allowance whether they are employed or not) come somewhat closer and seem less of an outlandish idea than a few months ago. In the US, there is now a report that in early June, the daily totals for the number of deaths may exceed 3.000 a day.
Whilst we were in the park today, we had a very pleasant surprise. Two of our friends who live down the hill are keen gardeners and when we were last in conversation with them, I mentioned that I was thinking about acquiring a lilac tree to fill a gap left by a previous tree that we had to have removed. Our friends very generously have donated a lilac tree to us and it is sitting waiting in a pot ready for us to collect. As it is already quite large, my daughter-in-law feels we might adopt the ‘Christmas tree‘ strategy i.e. we use whichever of our cars is the larger, fold down the seats and have the front end of the tree sitting between the driver and the front passenger. This has worked well over the years so we will have to see if we can adapt this strategy to transport our recently acquired tree.
The afternoon has again been filled with intensive gardening i.e. I am pressing on whilst the weather is quite fine. Progress was quite fast until I encountered a section of garden with a small paved motif. The only trouble is that dandelions have overgrown this area so everyone has to be painstakingly removed (and often the roots can be up to 8 inches long) so that has slowed me down quite a lot. Still, I tell myself, once I get the garden in good shape before the middle of May, maintenance should be fairly easy but the reverse is the case if I don’t get on top of it now.
Some readers of this blog have expressed their appreciation and read it every day so I wondered if I could lay my hands on a similar blog which I had written in the days before the term blog was even invented (in May, 1999!) The story is this. Whilst working at the (then) Leicester Polytechnic, we established an exchange relationship with the Public Administration department of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (often regarded as the Cambridge of Spain) We exchanged students for several years under the EU ERASMUS (later (SOCRATES) scheme- the acronym ERASMUS stands for European Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students. Under this scheme, staff were also encouraged to undertake a period of teaching in their partner university and, to cut a long story short, I was invited to spend a term at the Complutense teaching Information Technology to Public Administration students (in Spanish) This I did in the spring term of 1990 but whilst there, I thought it would be useful to record my day-to-day experiences and to post them back to colleagues at Leicester Polytechnic (in the days before email really became established and also before web pages). I rather had in mind the Alistair Cooke programme on Radio 4 which was called ‘Letter from America‘ and so I called mine ‘Carta de Madrid‘ (or ‘Letter from Madrid’). I should also point out that as part of the philosophy of sandwich education developed particularly in the polytechnics, students were encouraged to keep a ‘diary’ (although Meg and I changed the terminology to ‘field notes’ following our social anthropological roots). At the end of their year, students had to submit a formal report which was marked (and graded) so their field notes were a vital raw material providing a record of their activities and also a vehicle for them to reflect upon their experiences during the year. So that is why the ‘Letter from Madrid‘ came into being – some if it is factual, whilst other parts of it are certainly reflective (no doubt of the joys and frustrations that are a part of one’s novel experiences).
On a more technical note, the text was written using a text editor which produced pure ASCII text on the grounds that it could then be fed into whatever word processor one wished in order to ‘prettify’ it. Microsoft Word was only one program amongst many (and nothing like as universal as it is today) – I actually taught Word Perfect which was a competitor (and many at the time considered it superior) The upshot of this is that every line ends in a ‘hard’ CR (carriage return) character and to replace all of these in over 3,000 lines of text would take for ever and a day. Consequent, the simple .txt file has been converted into a .pdf file and this should be viewable in all browsers. Here is the URL if you are interested in dipping in or out of all of this.
http://kesland.info/blog/carta.pdfToday was one of those days when we seemed to be chatting all morning. Firstly, we encountered some of our oldest friends from church, who were out busy gardening. As a plant was being removed only to be thrown away, I begged it in order to fill up some vacant pots which would normally have bedding plants within them but we haven’t been able to procure any during the lockdown. Then we popped a card into another set of neigbours who had promised us a lilac tree so we made final arrangements for collecting the tree this evening. In the park we had a few casual chats with passers-by – we normally ask them about the breed of their dog or mention how well-behaved it is which generally functions as a conversation opener. On our way home, we encountered sets of friends No. 2 who were busy still in their garden and managed to get some delivery of both bedding plants and supplies such as compost. Finally, we saw our Italian friend and ensured that all was well with her. One way or another, we seemed to spend the whole of the morning chatting which cannot be a bad thing. In the afternoon, I pressed on with doing my ‘gully maintenance’ and planted the shrubs that I acquired in the morning. It was a beautiful afternoon and I made reasonable progress with just about 1.5 hours of work left to do tomorrow before the weather breaks again. In the late afternoon, my daughter-in-law and I went to collect the lilac tree which I would estimate was 8-9 ft in height. Getting it home meant dropping the back seats of the car and having the top of the tree jammed up against the windscreen which meant that driving home was like navigating a forest – but it was only 1km home so we managed that all right. Tomorrow I am going to prepare my planting hole for the tree but I will wait for Friday to do the actual planting as I have ordered some of the specialist preparation that enables trees to grow away quickly ( I quote from the manufacturer’s blurb – and certainly the Amazon reviews were almost universally favourable)
There is quite a lot of speculation in tomorrow’s newspapers concerning the announcement that Boris Johnson will make on Sunday next on the ways in which the lockdown might be eased. It looks as though the most likely candidates involve ‘fresh air’ i.e. people may be allowed to exercise more than once a day, some open-air activities such as a meeting of a few friends in a park may be allowed and there is the possibility of garden centres being allowed to open. The trouble is that too much speculation at this point can only lead to disappointment if the measures proposed turn out to fall short of peoples’ expectations – we always knew that lessening the tightness of the screw was always going to be a lot more difficult that proposing the lockdown in the first place. One can only speculate what the typical high street is going to look like in a few week’s time. Most high streets were moribund anyway – Bromsgrove, for example, has about 7-8 charity shops in a 3 hundred yard stretch. What is not fully appreciated at this point is that the income of the typical working family will have received a massive hit so how much actual money will be free to be spent is an interesting question. Even more interesting is the ‘fear’ factor with many people, according to the survey evidence, fearful of entering places where their fellow citizens might congregate.
Every day seems to get chattier than the last! We were fortunate, though, to see a friend of the recently deceased Clive who gave us some intimation of when the funeral is likely to be. Evidently, because of the restriction upon numbers, we will not be allowed to attend but we do wish to position outside his house and give the funeral hearse a good send-off (by clapping) when the fateful day arrives. Then we had another long chat with two sets of friends who are themselves neighbours (making a potential little meeting of six of us – will this be actually sanctioned next Sunday?) Again, we met several acquaintances in the park (normally a dog runs up to us expecting to be fed some tit-bits and this provides an entree for a conversation with the owners) Finally, we chatted with yet another acquaintance on the way back who was extolling the virtues of James O’Brien on the LBC Radio Show. Apparently, he hails from Kidderminster which is just down the road from us. After lunch, I made an early start clearing the gullies in the garden which I really want to get finished before the weather breaks. I found a child’s rake from Aldi to particularly useful in this regard as it has only eight prongs and is about a metre in length i.e. easily manipulated in one hand. Aldi does a whole range of children’s garden tools which are not cheap, plastic bendy rubbish (as you might expect) but real and miniaturized tools (including a rake, a lawn rake, a long-handled shovel, and so on) Although they are designed to be used by children they are just as useful for adults as well as they can easily be used one-handed and they only cost £2-£3 piece as far as I can remember. Then to finish off my gardening activities, I located the exact spot in the wilderness bit of garden we have inherited (and which we call ‘Mog’s Den‘) and dug the hole ready for the tree planting tomorrow. I lined it well with a tub load of my own 2-year old compost and then, as a bonus, thanks to Amazon my mycorrhizal fungi (for the tree roots) arrived so I am all systems ‘go’ tomorrow.
As it was a Thursday evening, our household and all of the neighbours participated in our ‘clap for the NHS’ ritual. This is really quite heart-warming and I hope that the tradition persists for a long time into the future. After this had ended, we paid a visit to our near neighbour to ensure that all was well as we understood that she had not been feeling too well in the last few days. Afterwards, we had a pleasant wander down by the side of the communal grassed area ‘Meg’s Meadow’ and I checked that the little beech saplings I had transplanted about 10 days ago were thriving and I am pleased that they were – even more so, after a good downpour, I would imagine. Actually admiring your handiwork in the garden in the early summer evening is one of the most relaxing things I know.
It looks as though two big scandals are emerging for any post-Coronavirus enquiry to handle are emerging. The first of these is the rampant non-preparedness for the pandemic as it has now emerged that the stockpile that had been built up had been allowed to diminish and at least 50% of the items in it were all past their ‘use by’ date and had to be re-tested or were otherwise deemed unusable. In some cases, new ‘Use by’ labels had just been stuck over the old ones! And the second scandal-to-be is the issue of care homes where it was known that any pandemic would be an immense problem and to which patients were transferred from hospital, perhaps infected with virus, but with no testing at all before reception into the care home. Needless to say, the staff had found it difficult to be tested and were suffering a severe shortage of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) as they were evidently the ‘poor relations’.
Today is the 75th anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) day – as we walked down into Bromsgrove this morning, many houses were decorated with flags and bunting. Of course, the British love to revel in these occasions but my spies in Scotland indicate a much more ambivalent atmosphere. It looks as though lots of preparations are being made for impromptu yet socially distanced parties with friends and neighbours and it is quite easy to understand why. However, a part of me always thinks of the expression ‘Bread and circuses’ – there were regular revolts of the slaves and the underprivileged in ancient Rome but the solution was always to give a free supply of bread (pasta, probably!) and to provide a free circus as the entertainment offered therein helped one to forget potential problems and the revolt was quelled. However, it is fair to say that there was a fairly jovial and relaxed atmosphere as the populace enjoyed the Bank Holiday. [Incidentally, it seems a bit un-British to have Bank Holidays on a Friday, rather than a Monday where it gets tagged onto the weekend. In Spanish and Hispanic cultures, national holidays are generally taken on a Thursday on the principle that the following day, a Friday, is a puente [or bridge} which means that people forget about going to work on the Friday and hence have a break which extends from late on Wednesday afternoon until Monday morning]. On our walk down, we bumped into some of Clive’s relatives who informed us that the date of Clive’s funeral is going to be Tuesday, 19th May and although his many friends cannot attend the funeral, we can at least assemble and give him a good clap as a send-off, which we will do. Needless to say, we had several friendly chats up and down the street which is becoming the new norm for us!
This afternoon was tree planting day but the first the communal lawns and our lawns had to be cut. This worked as well as always – I am so relieved that two years I took the decision to buy a special ‘mulching’ mower made by a Swedish firm (Stiga – normally big in the commercial rather than the domestic market) This machine has a slightly higher dome than normal and no grass collecting gear – the idea is that the grass gets cuts once and is thrown ‘upwards’ towards the mower hood and then is then cut again on the way down, leaving only minimal trails of grass cuttings most of which are mulched. It really does work very well. The tree planting worked well as the hole was prepared and fortunately, I had all the right materials to hand – compost (put in yesterday, tree root fungus preparation, bonemeal (for slow release fertiliser), blood fish and bone (for organic fertilizer), a thumper to compact the soil, a long stake to act as support and finally a sledgehammer to get it well hammered into the ground. However, I am slightly fearful that it might struggle as not much rootball remained and the taproot had been broken but with a lot of TLC and water, we shall have to hope and pray. When this had been completed, I nearly forgot that we were due to FaceTime some of Waitrose friends which we duly did – and we have made provisional arrangements to ‘encounter’ each other in the local park on Monday morning if it is not absolutely raining cats-and-dogs.
One of my Pilates friends had discovered the joy of walking the local fields and has ascertained that there is a public footpath across the field containing sheep at the rear of our house. As Monday is my birthday, she is going to attempt to drop by and I have got an improvised arrangement (a little cardboard box attached to the end of a snow shovel) which means that we may be able to offer a glass of champagne (over the barbed wire fence) to celebrate.
I am feeling a little tired this morning for quite understandable reasons. As I had a wakeful patch in the middle of the night, I came downstairs to interrogate my computer and idly wondered if Waitrose was offering any ‘Click and Collect’ sessions. As it happened they were so I immediately started to compile a shopping list for a few day’s time and I now have a slot booked for next Thursday in the morning. I suppose the next time I shop, the system will have remembered my last shop, and therefore I only have to amend it, but the first run-through is always quite time-consuming so that was about an hour’s less beauty sleep.
The day after VE day and there was still an interesting atmosphere in the streets. It must be a combination of the pandemic on the one hand and a mood of national solidarity on the other but everybody seemed to wish to stop and talk with us today. We met several groups of both friends and acquaintances, both on the way down to the park and also on the journey back up again, with interesting conversations to be had all round. In the park, we had noticed a particularly striking tree and on both sides, there were figures carved into it – a type of wooden sculpture, I suppose you would call it. We enquired with one of the locals whom we know by sight and we were informed that the ‘sculptures’ were of the two daughters, Lucy Sanders and Mary Sanders who inherited the whole of what is now Sanders Park and donated it to the town. They both lived to a great old age (81 and 95 respectively). The original Benjamin Sanders, the great grandfather of Lucy and Mary Sanders had established a button factory and when we first moved to Bromsgrove, I believe that we caught sight of the modernised version of this although it has now been incorporated into a private dwelling house. The grandfather of these two eminent ladies had inherited the Cotton Pool estate and drained the enormous pool which is now the ‘pond’ besides which we sit every day to drink our coffee and eat our biscuits (necessary sustenance after having walked for 1.5 km from our house!) This is only a sketchy history but I thought I would go on the web and Google for a few more details as the contribution of the 19th-century philanthropists who had great wealth and no doubt increased it with their entrepreneurial activities did tend to invest the proceeds back into their local communities. One is reminded of the great Quaker families (Rowntrees in York, Cadbury’s in Bournville (Birmingham) and the Clarks of Street in Somerset).
Late on this afternoon, I set myself the task of clearing a bit of scrubland on a slope near to the point at which my fallen tree had had to be removed. There were quite a lot of brambles (one I swear was about 15 ft long) and ubiquitous ivy but I felt I had made some progress. Tomorrow is going to be really wet but when the weather improves I will need to ‘terrace’ the slope by putting in some retaining boards and then I shall finish it iff with weed control fabric and some forest bark. Fortunately, I already have some of these materials in stock but no doubt I will run out at the most inconvenient point!
Tonight I watched the Churchill film ‘Darkest Hour‘ detailing the events and dilemmas facing Winston Churchill in 1940. I wonder whether Boris has watched the film, probably for the second time, and whether there are parallels to be drawn between the dilemmas of then and now.
As I had finished last night’s blog (in the wee small hours of the morning I must confess) I had a quick look at my emails and saw that I had received an email from Iceland. I was not expecting this but I must have registered my email address with them sometime before. I quickly registered with them and wondered if they had any free slots as they promising ‘free’ delivery the next day if you spend £35.00 on a basket of groceries. A slot was being offered from 6.00-8.00 next Tuesday morning and. not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I set about constructing an order not so much of essentials but of ‘usefuls’ including toilet and kitchen paper, some long-life milk and some other commodities it is good to have in one’s pantry even if not needed in the next day or so. So next week, I shall two grocery consignments (a ‘click and collect’ from Waitrose on Thursday morning and now the delivery from Iceland on Tuesday morning). I think once I get my act together, I might have one delivery from Waitrose per fortnight and another from Iceland in the intervening weeks.
We were very disturbed immediately after breakfast to observe an ambulance outside our next-door neighbour’s door. If there had been a blue flashing light, we might have assumed a heart attack but as the ambulance remained for quite a long time, we really did fear the worst. However, as we were leaving for our walk our neighbour emerged and walked into the ambulance unaided. We discovered subsequently in chats with his wife throughout the day that he had been suffering some angina pains and was admitted to our local hospital in Redditch. He is to be seen by a specialist cardiologist on Monday morning (surely a good thing!) and will probably spend a day or so in hospital for monitoring and routine tests. Apparently, he is in good spirits and we are all mightily relieved, as you might imagine.
The weather forecast indicated bands of rain sweeping across the country and a lot of cold air. We certainly got the cold and blustery winds but not the rain. As we were huddled up on our park bench, one of our best friends who lives opposite the park had espied us and on her morning walk dropped by a carrier bag containing some birthday goodies, which I shall not open until tomorrow. If the weather is not atrocious tomorrow, we may bump into some friends in the park tomorrow, see another long-standing friend later, and then see one of my Pilates friends who will emerge from the middle of a flock of sheep in the early afternoon (see earlier blogs for an explanation). We shall have to wait and see. According to King Boris, it will be quite legal fur us to sit and have a snack on the park bench on Wednesday next and not just as a break in the middle of a strenuous(!) walk which is what we are doing at the moment.
The next week or so will be quite interesting, politically. For once the unions may have a very significant voice (which they haven’t had for about 40 years ago now) because if they advise workers to stay at home until their employer guarantees them a safe working environment, then we could have workplaces that are ‘open’ but with no workers within them. It is quite interesting that the population as a whole do not seem over keen to get back to work – perhaps the graphic images (of which there have been plenty) of what happens when one gets put into an acute care unit and then a ventilator is quite enough to persuade people that home is the best place to be.
So the day has arrived – today I am 75 years of age and rather pleased to have another half-decade under my belt. We always thought that today was going to be quite a busy day and so it turned out to be. We left on our journey for the park and, indeed, got there at just 11.00 am whereby, by complete coincidence, two of our long-lasting Waitrose friends just happened to be waiting for us. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Julie (also of Waitrose ancestry) and within only a few minutes more, another couple of friends joined us. We had a happy reunion and drank our coffee with glee, although if the truth be told the weather was sharp and cold and the wind quite keen and blustery. Earlier in the day, my favourite niece had phoned at just the point I was due to get into the shower and I had to reassure myself that we were not on FaceTime and that I was appearing naked. My sister had also sent me a message earlier on the day so a lot of family-related news was relayed. Having heard so much about the lake, I had been asked to take and supply some photos on my iPhone, which I duly did but the evidence proves that we were all at least two metres apart. And so for home, but not before collecting another birthday card and a wonderful present of some gardening gloves from our gardening friend down the road (as it happened, I had been admiring the gloves she has been wearing a day or so before, not anticipating a prezzie later on) And so we got home only to pick up the car and go to ‘accidentally’ visit yet another friend who had been busy baking a most magnificent cake for me (pumpkin and rhubarb made according to a brand-new recipe) This turned out to be some of the nicest cake I had ever tasted and we sampled some of it after having our lunchtime soup. After this, although it was bitterly cold, a Pilates friend with whom I have a particular friendship, hove into view from a field at the back of the house, emerging from a flock of distant sheep and a bunch of nettles (we happened to be under the surgeon’s knife at about the same time just about two years ago and were commiserating with each and giving each other messages of moral support). I had already constructed an elaborate arrangement of a cardboard box affixed with double-sided tape to a long-handled snow shovel which proved to the perfect way to hand over a glass of champagne and even more cake which Meg, myself and my Pilates friend all had together in what must have been one the more esoteric birthday gatherings of all time! Another photo ensued was taken to record the event for posterity. The afternoon was spent watching Boris Johnson in full burble mode before the House of Commons before we decided that we would treat ourselves to an Indian ‘take-away’ meal. We decided to break the house rule and all eat together on this occasion and we probably ate far too much than was good fur us, as well as polishing off the special birthday cake. We shared the birthday cards we have received and even Miggles, our adopted cat, got included in one of them (it showed an illustration of a cat sitting in its cat-bed with a thought bubble coming out of its head with the musing ‘Here we go .. another day of being wonderful me – cute, fluffy and adorable … with just a hint of evil, psycho, ninja assassin‘. This was courtesy of my Pilates friend who had read the blogs about my family nick-name (‘Mog’) and the exploits of Miggles. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson and his government are busy making announcements about back to work on Monday, only to be corrected as Wednesday and with several ministers displaying ignorance of their own policy in early morning interviews not to mention the fact that the right-wing of the Tory party, exhibiting a strident English nationalsim, are ignoring the wishes of most of the English population, not to mention the Irish, the Welsh, the Scots… we have been here before with the Brexit nonsense and see where that had landed us. The end, however, of one of the most enjoyable birthdays it was ever possible to have, so life can’t be all bad…
Here is a link to some birthday snaps (some a little dark!): Mike's 75th
Well, I thought today might be a little anti-climatic after the jollities of yesterday. As is now usual, we met two sets of friends on the way down into the park where the weather was so much kinder to us than yesterday, with a fairly clear blue sky and a wind that had moderated since yesterday. On the way home, we encountered one of our friends for the second time and commiserated with each about the fate of elderly relatives whose families were not treating them as well as they should have been. In the afternoon, I had set myself to do half an hour’s gardening but this soon turned into an hour and a half. I had pulled some dead branches complete with a complement of ivy from our fallen tree and I now had the task of disposing of it. I decided that it was a better job to sit down and chop it all into 3″-4″ pieces which I duly did, and this will make disposal of one blue sack of clippings so much easier. When clearing a little bit of banked woodland, I was wondering whether ivy was universally to be cleared and should be eliminated, or whether it was worth letting the younger, greener shoots still climb over the tree stumps. I decided on the latter course of action because, otherwise, the tree stumps would have been like blackened rotting teeth and I have a ‘cunning plan’ to let the little triangle of earth which is difficult to cultivate be colonised by a little white plant that I have elsewhere in the garden that may provide some ground cover.
This evening, we had a little domestic drama on our hands. Not knowing what we had done with some socks, washable face masks, and one or two other odds and ends, we hunted through the whole house for them before we found them in a special ‘receptacle’ which is positioned in front of the filtration unit in our dryer. This filtration unit is meant to be cleaned every six months but with this new model of machine, we had somehow forgotten to do it since it was new. However all’s well that ends well as after a collective effort from the household, we managed to retrieve the lost items (and it still a mystery to us how they ended up there!) and put everything else to rights.
Today, I received my delivery of goods from Iceland – instead of being delivered in the slot from 6.00-8.00 in the morning, it arrived at 5.55 (to be fair to Iceland, they had sent me a text telling me that I was first on the list) However an order of £40.00 had been reduced to £31.00 after certain items could not be supplied (kitchen rolls – fancy that), catfood and eggs – all of which we can live without. Now I am getting myself geared up for a ‘Click and Collect’ on Thursday morning.
We didn’t bother to observe the Downing Street briefing which has been a habit of ours in the last few days. I suspect that there if there is a groundswell of opinion, it is that ‘following the science<‘ is not as clear and simple as the politicians would have us believe. After all, the ‘science’ told is to ‘test, test and test again‘ as in South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand and elsewhere that have got on top of the virus much more expeditiously than we have. The truth when it emerges will probably reveal that we didn’t go in for a regime of rigorous testing because we had neither the kit, the laboratories or the personnel to do it. News has emerged that we send 50,000 samples to the USA to be tested because our own facilities could not cope for one reason or another. Some people are already looking forward to what the inevitable enquiry might reveal – one government minister is quoted as having expressed the thought that ‘we might avoid the blame for getting us into the mess in the first place but we shall surely get the blame if we mess up the exit!''
Today is the day when, in theory, there should be some liberalisation of the great lockdown but it has brought with it a series of nonsenses and anomalies. If I understand it correctly, you can sit on a park bench with two strangers provided you are at least two metres apart. If one of them is your parent, then it is permissible to converse with one them – but if both people are your parents this would constitute a meeting of three people and would be illegal (if you were to talk to both of them at once – but not, in turn!). If you were selling your house, then it would be legitimate for your agent to accompany two people who are viewing your property but you are not allowed to join them. Transgressions are to be met with an increased fine (£100 for a first offence) And, of course, this is only in England but not in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland where the previous lockdown rules still apply. And if you go to work and your employer asks you to engage in a practice which breaks the new rules, can you walk out or not? (A government minister on Radio 4 refused to say whether it would be illegal to fail to comply with an employer’s not-legal instruction …and so on and so forth). It will be interesting to see how many fines and/or prosections are actually handed out to deal with all of this.
Our journey to the park today followed its usual course except that we didn’t stop to chat on the way there or on the way back. The amusing thing is that when we are seated on our park bench eating our elevenses (now absolutely legal and of course we can sunbathe as well if we wish to) many of the dogs let off the lease to have a run around make straight for us on the assumption that food is in the offing – their owners are inevitably full of chagrin but we are rather amused by it all. The park was busier than normal and it appeared that most benches were occupied – evidently, people had realised that they could now get to the park and chat with friends and neighbours quasi-legally (but see the above!)
After lunch, I thought I would move a youngish tree from one location to another, such that it helps to distract attention away from the next-door neighbour’s garden which is replete with every kind of outside toy it is possible to have so that the whole approximates to a children’s playground. (There is a hidden irony in all of this as part of our three initially successful attempts to object to the orchard adjacent to our hose being replaced by a miniature housing estate, one proposal was there should be a public children’s playground provided within a metre or so of our simple-wire (stock) fence!) Digging the hole ought to have simple but it didn’t quite turn out that way. I need to explain that the plot of land upon which our house was built was originally a nursery complete with outbuildings and the like. When it came to developing the site, there seemed to be a policy of bulldozing the buildings over, removing the subsequent rubble and then covering the remains with earth. Consequently, any attempts to dig on the outer fringes of the garden are nearly always met with a plethora of half-bricks, stones, bits of concrete and the like – and today was no exception. Having got the planting hole well prepared with compost, root fungus and bonemeal now it came to the transplanting itself. My tree purchased a couple of years ago is, if I remember, a Tilia Cordata Greenspire but I now estimate it to be about 16ft tall. In negotiating it out of its former position, I succeeded pretty well except for inadvertently breaking off (or damaging) the top foot of it. Nonetheless, now it is well in position (exactly where I wanted it to be) and well-watered and it seems to be surviving the shock of transplant already. Time will tell!
In the early evening, we FaceTimed some of our former Waitrose friends whom we had met in the park on Monday last and they seem to have a tremendous problem with their priority order at Asda (systems failure, wiping out their basket of shopping, their priority slot and all future priority slots) but eventually succeeded with Waitrose – I must say I am not surprised that Asda’s systems seemed to be unable to cope as even after a year, the system could not cope with reading my newspaper vouchers when I occasionally tried to use them in store.
Today was the fateful day in which I was to collect my first Waitrose ‘Click and Collect’ order. As it worked out, all was plain sailing – although there was a long and orderly queue, I was directed to enter the store directly and then waited whilst all my order was delivered in a series of carrier bags on a Waitrose staff trolley. I was then supplied with a customer trolley into which I unloaded all the bags and then straight home. I think next time, I will wait until a fortnight has elapsed and then go for a straight delivery service which is available once you spend a certain quantum of money. Once we eventually got to the park having encountered our usual two sets of friends and their grandchildren en-route, we enjoyed the pleasant sunshine. We also passed by Clive’s house where his family was chatting with other neighbours and we made sure that we all have he arrangements in place for the funeral next Tuesday. The grandchildren had prepared an information leaflet giving all the neighbours up and down the Kidderminster Road details of the video-feed from the crematorium so I am sure that after the initial ‘clap-off’ we shall repair to our respective houses and follow the proceedings on our laptops.
This afternoon turned out to be a heavier afternoon than I would have liked. I set myself the task of encouraging a Wegela to grow nice and tall – this entailed attached a length of bamboo cane to an existing cane and then affixing the various branches to it. The trouble was that everything was a bit precarious because I was balancing on a pile of bricks in one hand whilst trying to manipulate string, plant-ties, scissors, etc, with the other. I am not sure that the result looked much better than the original but at least I have had a go. Then I decided to construct a sort of miniature fence halfway up the slope near the area cleared by the fallen tree. Fortunately, I had in my possession a post-boring implement (actually it looks like a giant corkscrew but it enables you to construct the type of hole you want for a fencing post without too much digging or the use of concrete). All that is required then is a lot of hammering with a heavy-duty sledgehammer which was really quite hard work. Then I utilised some timber that my neighbour had kindly let me have as surplus to his own requirements when he was having some building work done and the timbers neatly stacked behind it and were held in position by two more staves (previously pre-creosoted) at the rear. The idea is to store things like bags of compost, topsoil and other garden requisites behind the fence so that everything will look nice and neat once more tidying up has taken place.
As it is Thursday evening, our little ‘close’ participated in the weekly ‘Clap for Carers‘ but perhaps the response was little more muted this week? We took the opportunity to have an extended chat with our new-ish neighbours. The husband had returned home yesterday from a spell in hospital where he was being treated for some heart problems so we exchanged some hospital stories with each other. We have both every reason to be grateful for some high-quality care in our local hospitals but hospital organisation is a little complicated in this area as the local trust covers Redditch, Kidderminster and Worcester and patients often shuttle from one hospital to another in the course of their treatment. This can make life a little complicated at times as Bromsgrove is in the middle of this little ‘triangle’ being approximately twelve miles distant from each but one gets used to it in time.
Another bright day with the weather set fair for a few days more. Actually, I wouldn’t mind if we had one or two really intense rain showers as the gardens are looking pretty dry at the moment. Having just ordered a Hornbeam tree for myself, I know that smaller varieties of this tree are often used as a hedging plant, the reason being that although it is fairly similar to beech, it keeps its leaves right throughout the winter, even though they have turned brown. Therefore the hedge functions as a hedge i.e. as a barrier either in the summer or the winter, even though it is not an evergreen. Having read about this characteristic, I am pretty sure I have seen one or two examples of it in neighbours’ gardens as I walk down the hill so I am making a mental note of the houses and their numbers so that I can confirm my hunches when I next see the occupants. Today, I have succeeded in doing something which has eluded me for the last 60 days of lockdown and daily walk – i.e. I have spilled an entire cup of coffee into my rucksack, as I sat juggling diverse flasks, cups, biscuit containers on my knees. Fortunately, I had plenty of kitchen paper to help to mop up the contents – maybe, I should try a different way of drinking my coffee tomorrow and in the future. There seemed to be a lot of children in the park today, mainly on their scooters, bikes (but no hobby horses). When we returned home, we had a ‘free’ lunch, courtesy of Waitrose – I had ordered some cod fillets in my ‘Click and Collect‘ but as these were within one day of their sell-by date, Waitrose supplied them to us gratis which was very ethical of them. I supplemented the parsley sauce that I had with some fresh parley which we just happen to have growing in an odd corner of the garden.
Just before I went out to do my weekly ‘mowing’. I received a phone call from the son of my deceased friend, Clive. He was phoning to ensure that I had all of the details for the funeral on Tuesday next. Having got a relevant email address, I can now forward the link to the video clip of Clive playing his trumpet at our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations so the family will have another clip to add to their collection. As we suspected, Clive had gone downhill extremely rapidly in the last few days so I am delighted that we managed to make a farewell wave to him whilst he could still recognise us before the very end. My mowing was extended a little as I ran the petrol mower over my neighbour’s front lawn as she has not been feeling too well recently and I thought this might give her a bit of a helping help before our gardeners return. I couldn’t bear to watch the Downing Street briefing this evening as the evasion displayed by the politicians is starting to get to me a bit – interesting how the graph showing international comparisons has suddenly disappeared now that it is evident that we have fared the worst of all the European nations in coping with the crisis.
Two or three little snippets of COVID-19 news that came into prominence today. Firstly, it appears that the rate of infection amongst children is just about the same as the rest of the population. Secondly, obesity and associated diabetes is now an extremely influential factor, being displayed in a quarter of all deaths. And thirdly, the ‘R’ factor (rate of infection) seems to be getting closer to 1.0 as one approaches the deprived areas of the North East of England – which gives one food for thought.
Today has been rather an unusual day, probably relating to the fact that it is the weekend. For a start, we saw none of our usual friends to have a chat with on the way up and down the hill – this is probably a function of the fact that everyone has a somewhat different routine at the weekend and there were certainly a lot more children evident in the park and faces that we didn’t recognise. In the afternoon, I had two little ‘projects’ to carry out. The first of these involved planting a whole variety of seeds with my daughter-in-law We have a large seed-planting tray that helps to confine the mess on our outside table. As we didn’t have any specialised seed compost, we used ordinary compost leavened with a dose of vermiculite which we happened to have in stock. The seeds are some years old now and we have had them in stock for some time so we have not lost anything if they fail to germinate. But if they do, we ought to have a supply of foxglove, sweet peas, hollyhocks and others whose name I have forgotten. We happened to have in stock some lightweight seed trays with attendant plastic covers (a little like a mini-cloche) and we now have 3-4 stored away safely in our airing room (to assist germination) before we will bring them downstairs and outsides to encourage them to ‘harden off’ (if any germinate, that is).
In the late afternoon,I turned my attention to tidying up the neglected corner of ‘Mog’s Den‘ in the garden. But a word of explanation is in order to understand what is going on. Right at the edge of our formal garden there is a sharply sloping bank of hitherto neglected land (I think it was neglected because in formal terms it lay between our formal boundary and a stock fence erected by the owner of the field which used to adjoin our garden) When we moved into the house 12 years ago, this area was full of 5-6 ft high nettles, brambles, holly, ivy and goodness knows what else. I have gradually reclaimed this space (now legally ours) and converted some of it into a woodland garden, complete with a slate path, forest bark to cover the slopes and shade-loving ever-green plants like Skimmia and a couple of fruit trees. But I did have an area upon which I had constructed a knee-high work area with some paving slabs- in the past, I had used to organise some cuttings but it was full of a great deal of clutter which included bags of compost, topsoil, my own sieved soil, spare sand, slate, buckets and containers of every description not to mention a mini-greenhouse with creosote, gardening implements, gloves, knives, string, scissors, plant ties. With a certain amount of neglect and the combined effects of wind and rain playing havoc, then the whole area had become a right mess and needed a good tidying up (to put it mildly) However after an hour and a half of sorting out, throwing away and relocation I had restored a degree of order to the whole so it is now looking a bit more shape-shape. I have set myself a mini-project of constructing a little curving path up a slope to my storage area beyond the fence. Some time ago in Poundland, I had invested in some little lattice arrangements of wood being sold off for £1 (I think to put plant pots and the like) but I think I can utilise them for a somewhat different purpose and use them to construct the steps for my path. I suspect I will going to do some sawing to construct a series of little pegs in order to construct a curve. Mind you, I often think that instead of opting for a mathematical precision, it is better to judge things by eye as it is the overall impression that counts in the end (and one doesn’t have to be too perfectionist about it after all!)
As it is Sunday, Meg and I get our day organised so that we can watch The Andrew Marr politics show at 9.00 on BBC1. However, as the weeks roll by I really wonder why we bother because the politicians never get subjected to detailed scrutiny or (successfully) evade every question. Today, it was Michael Gove who succeeded in his glib way of saying absolutely nothing so that at the end of the interview you think ‘What did he actually say?’ The walk down to the park was uneventful but we did have quite an interesting chat with a lady who indicated that she had been an Ofsted inspector but her comments about teachers seemed to bely this. However, once we got off the vexed subject of whether teachers were right in being pressurised by the government to resume a limited return to school on 1st June and onto the subject of the best local garden centres in which to buy trees, the conversation took on a more fruitful turn. My own (not very educated) guess is that only 50% of parents may allow their children to go to school – in a conflict like this, the Government will claim success whilst teachers will be able to point to the low attendance rates across the country as a vindication of their stance. In the North East, around Gateshead, where the R factor is said locally to be above the trigger figure of 1.0 it seems that the local authorities may follow the Scots rather than London in keeping people away from school and themselves ‘safe’ in their own houses. The next week or so will be interesting to see how this plays out.
The afternoon was relatively uneventful as it was largely occupied by housework. The phrase keeps running through my head, uttered by the American comedienne Joan Rivers ‘The trouble is with housework is that you have all that dusting, polishing and hoovering – and then 9 months later you have to do it all over again!‘ However, there is a slight bonus in that the choice of music on ClassicFM is normally pretty good on a Sunday afternoon and that helps to alleviate the tedium. When this had been completed, I managed to get half-an-hour tidying up the contents of my mini plastic greenhouse, which were in a state of some disarray as the plastic cover had perished and needed to be ripped away. I have an initial search on the web to try and find a replacement cover without success so far so I must make more a more concerted effort in the morning.
I think the country is in an interesting state, politically. Initially, the government had a fairly strong approval rating for its actions on lock-down and this trend can be observed amongst all governments dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, whatever their political hue and degree of competence – the American political scientists have called this the ‘rally round the flag‘ syndrome, However, there seem to have been an abrupt change in political mood in the last week since the lockdown is starting to be released. The government’s approval rating has gone negative i.e. more people think it is doing a bad job than think it is doing a good job, according to a poll published in the Observer today. In particular, the vagueness and lack of precision behind the phrase ‘Stay alert‘ is a huge problem and the population is now confused by the ambiguity of the message compared with the simplicity of the ‘Stay at home‘ message it was replacing. Also, a certain psychological angst is being created by some evident anomalies e.g. (i) you can now accept a cleaner into your house (because of the ‘cash nexus’) but not see your own parents (ii) everybody should stay 2 metres apart from each other but it is quite OK for this rule to be transgressed when getting on a Tube train or catching a bus (iii) as a teacher and a grandparent you will not be allowed to see your own grandchildren but you are being ‘encouraged’ by the government to see other parents’ children 'en masse' if and when the schools resume. No wonder patience with the government is wearing exceedingly thin (and this is putting it mildly!)
Fortunately, we seem to be in the middle of a warm spell and the weather seems set fair for a few days. As it looked as though it might be a good ‘drying day’ we whipped the sheets off the bed and had them into the washing machine the minute we got up. When the washing machine had done its job, we got them out onto the clothes line and in no time they were billowing out as though they were a TV commercial. Speaking of which, there used to be a clothes washing product called ‘Omo’ (which stands for ‘Old Mother Owl’ i.e. wise enough to use this brand of washing powder) A search on the web revealed that it was still being made and available in 4.9kg cartons (although it was ‘unavailable’ when I checked on the web just now). According to the Unilever Website, it was introduced to the market in 1954 and is still available in Brazil, Turkey and Germany, Australia and Romania and has just been re-launched in Kenya where it was first available in 1953 (but it was discontinued in the UK in 1960’s – I wonder why?)
When we got the park, we were greeted by our friend Julie who looked hale and hearty but told us her tale of woe. Apparently, she had been taken ill on Friday night and had to have an emergency admission to hospital by ambulance with symptoms that sounded as though they could have been a heart attack. It turned out that it was a gall-bladder that had been playing up and after diagnosis (and presumably some treatment) she was back home the following day. It sounds as though it must have been a really frightening experience when living on your own but fortunately a good and long-standing neighbour (who we now know) stepped in and gave a helping hand. After lunch, we resumed our house cleaning duties and completed them for another week until they start again. I was itching to get outside and do one or two little gardening jobs which I eventually did. One of these involved hammering a stake into the ground and then pulling an errant branch of an apple tree in a more vertical orientation and this seemed to work out OK. Fortunately, I had in stock an appropriate length of polypropylene rope (thank you Poundland!) which served the purpose well although I generally persuade the ladies of the household to donate to me their discarded tights as this makes for a light, strong rope-like fixing agent which is not harsh on the bark of a tree but has just the right amount of ‘give’ in it when under tension. My second job was to re-purpose a plastic gardening bag so that it would provide a cover for my now denuded mini greenhouse (again, thank God for Poundland) This worked pretty well and I seem to have been just in time because I noticed that later on in the evening the ground was wet. so we must have had a passing shower.
Mid-way through the evening we had the ‘Order of Service‘ for Clive’s funeral service delivered by hand to our front door. This is scheduled to take place tomorrow at 11.45 and we have been supplied with a web reference so that we can follow the proceedings ‘on-line’. Earlier in the day, we had a long discussion with our daughter-in-law regarding the exact preparations that need to take place before some children are allowed back into school on 1st June (or not, as the case might be) It is also interesting that the government has finally added ‘loss of taste’ as a symptom to be added to help diagnose COVD-19 (but won’t even attempt to answer how many more people there are ‘out there’ who may have had the virus and not known it and unknowingly infected many more in the. meantime).
Well, the day has arrived that we were sort of looking forward to and not looking forward to, as it was the day of Clive’s funeral. Instead of walking down to the park, Meg and I made a detour so that we could arrive outside Clive’s house to see his funeral cortege depart. A crowd of some forty people had assembled in total – rather than a clap which I had rather anticipated, the crowd watched in a respectful silence as the funeral cars departed. The poignant moment in all of this was when one of Clive’s relatives held up the two Jack Russell dogs that he had exercised every day for years now so that they could have a final look at Clive before the cars moved off. Not that this would be at all meaningful to the two dogs, of course, but it was still a rather poignant moment nonetheless. Afterwards, we all repaired to our own houses where there was a webcast direct from the local crematorium and a wonderful service that reflected some of Clive’s preferences such as a Shakespeare sonnet, a poem written by one of his grand-daughters and a piece of jazz trumpet by Stan Kenton that Clive no doubt knew very well. [In fact, I recall an amusing story that Clive had told me when he and his brother had been engaged to play at a 50th birthday party. As it happened, the household had a little dog called ‘Delilah’ so when Clive and his brother played ‘No, no. no, Delilah” and got the rest of the birthday celebrants to join in the chorus, the little dog went spare with excitement!]
I had set myself a little project in the afternoon to lay a little path from wooden squares along one of my recently cleared slopes in Mog’s Den but I reasoned I had better try to get the slope moderated by inserting a little timber detente (I suppose you might call it) but I spent some time painting everything I was going to use with a creosote substitute (creosote is now banned on Health and Safety grounds!). I then made a narrow little trench which I lined with builder’s sand and then inserted my timber and held it in place with specially prepared long ‘pegs’ that I had previously prepared (creosoted, put a point on) and which I then hammered in with my 12lb sledgehammer – fortunately, I have done this sort of thing before so I knew what to do and the results were as expected. However, as I somehow thought might happen, although the timber is mathematically in the right place (to the nearest half-inch) the result doesn’t look quite right – it’s one of those cases to which I have alluded before when the human eye can be a better judge than exact mathematical precision might indicate. I think I can ‘soften’ the line by transplanting a few evergreens in front of it so that people won’t notice, so I am looking at my little batch of cuttings to see what I can utilise.
It seems that the government is now coming sustained attack over the COVID-19 deaths in care homes – Matt Hancock the Health Secretary was forced back into the House of Commons today to provide some sort of explanation. It seems fairly clear that in a desperate bid to clear the hospital wards of elderly patients in order to make room for the anticipated influx of COVID-19 patients, many were practically forced into care homes, untested, and the virus spread like wildfire. There was also a semi-admission from one of the scientific advisers that the advice to cease testing came about largely because it was known that testing facilities on the scale required were clearly inadequate. Let us all wait for the official enquiry (which might take years to complete) Another bit of ‘juicy’ political news is that the Brexiteer element of the Tory party are practically salivating at the prospect of a ‘No Deal’ Brexit (where we depart from the EU on minimal World Trade Organisation terms) because the undoubted costs to the British economy will be impossible to disentangle from the economic effects of the Coronavirus and will thus effectively be hidden or lost for all time!
Well, it’s been one of those days today when I seem to have been chasing my own tail all day long. I had got onto the Iceland website yesterday and it indicated that no slots were available but new slots would be available at 11.00 am each morning, from Monday to Friday. So I got onto the website and made up an order of things that I knew I needed as well as doubling up on other items and managed to secure a slot from 8.00-10.00 on Friday i.e. just over a day’s time. This was handy because I am running out of certain things which are in short supply (according to one of our friends, eggs are hard to find because everyone is at home baking away and using up eggs as a consequence) Nice to get this done but it delayed all of our normal routines by about an hour. The park was absolutely teeming and when we first entered, every single bench was occupied although some were vacated just as we approached. There seemed to be a lot of sunbathing, yappy dogs, scootering children (but a bit too warm for serious jogging) On our way home, we saw two sets of friends and had pleasant chats with each of them, helping to set the world to rights.
After our lunch of chicken fricassee, I embarked on my path construction. Before I could really get going, though, I had to supply myself with a set of retaining pegs that involved a certain amount of sawing, putting points on the pegs and finally creosoting. The actual path construction turned out to be just about what I had anticipated with no real problems. I cut a shape around each wooden ‘step’ with an edging tool and extracted about an inch of baked topsoil (which I can use subsequently) before putting down a couple of shovel fulls of builder’s sand and then setting each step in place, preventing subsequent movement by driving in a wooden peg about 7″-8″ long fore and aft to prevent any slippage or drift. The end result was just about what I had expected/intended – any fine-tuning can be dome tomorrow! After I had finished, we FaceTimed our good Waitrose-era friends as we do every 3-4 days and had a good old natter, mainly centering around our differing experiences with online shopping with the local food supermarkets. I am starting to warm a little to Iceland as their delivery slots – only a day or so to wait – seem quite useful if you know you are running short of things although their range is necessarily limited. As you may have guessed, I am missing the regular supply of ‘Unicorn hoof oil essence’ available only in Waitrose stores which is absolutely de rigeur in the modern kitchen.
In the early evening, I received an email from Clive’s son who very much appreciated the rendition of Clive playing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s desiring‘ ( a J.S. Bach Chorale) on the occasion of our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations. I had an iPhone video clip of this as part of the wedding website so it was quite easy to extract this and send it on. I mentioned in my email that the whole ‘funeral service’ was very ‘Clive-like’ and he would have approved heartily – as it turned out, this was no surprise as Clive had largely organised this before his demise. It is wonderful in these days of modern and easily accessible technology to have little movie clips of old friends like this. Meg and I miss him a lot as we used to see him nearly every day or every other day-for once, I was absolutely struck by the finality of cremation where, of course, nothing remains.
Believe it or not, today has been an immensely ‘gardening’ type day – probably just as well before the weather breaks. On our way down the hill this morning, we had a long chat with two of our friends and were invited around the garden of one of them. We exchanged notes about what was what in the garden and indicated what plans we had – this is always the same with gardens and gardeners as one is always looking forward to what is to come and delighted by the unexpected successes as well as prepared for the inevitable failures. Once we actually made it into the park, it was not quite as busy as normal but there were lots of picnics in evidence – blankets spread out on the ground and comestibles being consumed. We had to hunt to find a seat, all our favourite ones being occupied. Once we eventually returned home, we had a salad type lunch based around a quiche – I am always amazed by what you can rustle up without the aid of lettuce or other salad-like greens.
On our way home, we passed the house of an acquaintance who I happened to know had a series of external wall tiles (there was a particular short-lived fashion from about 1965-1969 to build houses with a kind of external tile cladding on the upper storeys – we lived in a house like that in Thurnby in Leicestershire and it was built in 1968, as I remember) To cut a long story short, I asked our friend if he still had his wall-tiles as I had previously discussed him that I thought that they make an excellent edging to a lawn or a flower-bed – and whether he still had any to spare. Very generously, he offered me as many as I wanted and when I tentatively asked for half-a-dozen and tentatively upped it to a dozen, I went down in the car after lunch and picked up a consignment which turned out to be 20! And so to my latest construction. In the slope below the detente, I made a cut with an edging tool and then excavated an area about 18″ in width and I then lined the back of this area with my recently acquired, wall tiles. The idea was to put two large (40cm diameter) black plastic pots into position and fill them with some spare trees that I had growing adjacent to our communal grassed area. The first of these beech trees proved to be extremely problematic to extract as I suspect it had taken root by itself on the top of a buried pile of stones – consequently, every time I put in a spade to get it under the root-ball, I encountered stone after stone. Eventually, though, my efforts were crowned with success and I extracted the tree only to discover it was actually about six feet tall, However, in the plant tub it went with some previously excavated soil, some of my own compost, bone-meal fertiliser as a long-lasting fertiliser around the roots and blood, fish and bone as a top dressing. The second tree was almost the same height but a lot easier to extract. Since transplanting (at not the best time of year) they have both drooped a little but I am fairly confident that with some good compost, watering night and day and a little TLC, they will thrive – if not, I haven’t lost anything. I then finished off by transplanting a little oak tree in the middle (this was only about 8″ tall) and finally dressed the whole area with some large slate chippings that I happened to have spare. All in all, I am pleased with the overall result but the rest of my family have yet to see it an cast an opinion on it. To finish it all off, I have a packet of 150 California poppy seeds on order which I shall nurture and germinate and put in the few remaining triangles of the ‘slope’ remaining. I promise you not to bore you with any more gardening from now on!
We held our usual ‘Clap for Carers‘ tonight – don’t the weeks roll by! We are waiting with great anticipation to see what the Iceland delivery van brings us in the morning…
It comes to something when you look forward to the Iceland delivery of shopping as the highlight of one’s day! But this is not quite as ridiculous as it might sound as I got delivery of a pack of 10 eggs which my spies tell me are hard to find as everybody is going crazy baking goodness-knows-what in which eggs are a vital ingredient. Anyway, the order came as expected and I suspect that the quality is going to turn out OK (although I did change one item when the reviewers said it was the most disgusting rubbish they had ever eaten). Today proved to be a different kind of day as our regular cleaner/domestic help was now allowed to come along (she can come into our house because that’s for money but not into her mother’s house because… the difficulty in applying the lock-down rules) However, we managed fine by agreeing never to be in the same room together at the same time. On our walk down into the hill, we encountered one of our regular husband-and-wife friends who we were glad to see again because their grandson is about to enter higher education and having given advice to countless youngsters over the years at a similar stage in their lives, we were quite happy to make the offer again when these strange times are over (or have at least, moved on).
Friday is grass-mowing day and again this went without a hitch – I say this, because there is always the slightest scintilla of doubt in my mind whether my petrol driven mower will actually start – it is a Swedish ‘Stiga’ model and it always does. I only mention it because I once had a Mounfield which was an absolute ‘beast’ ( polite word!) to start and eventually, I got so fed up with it that I gave it away. I suspect it had never been set up properly form its manufacture but it leaves a horrid memory. Right at the end of the afternoon, I did finish off my gardening ‘opus’ with a swift strategic use of forest bark and the construction of a bed with the slope removed (or at least ameliorated) in which I can plant my California poppy seeds tomorrow. There happen to be one or two poppy plants that have ‘escaped ‘ onto the public highway (footpath) so I will attempt to ‘liberate’ one tomorrow, all being well.
The breaking political news this evening is the ‘revelation’ that Dominic Cummings, the Svengali-like special adviser to the Prime Minister has been caught apparently breaking the ‘lock-down’ laws following a period of self-isolation (definition of Svengali: a person who manipulates or exerts excessive control over another) Other senior figures who have engaged in such hypocritical behaviour have been forced to resign (e.g. Professor Neil Ferguson, the scientist whose modelling led to the lockdown, the Scottish health minister) and it remains to be seen whether the same will prove true of Dominic Cummings or not. It is a sad reflection of the operation of political influence that the nearer one is to the centres of political power, the greater the feeling that ‘rules are only meant for the little people, not for people like us‘ It all depends on whether the press, which is generally Tory-supporting, decides collectively that they are going to ‘go’ for a political figure or not. I think it was Alastair Campbell, the last press secretary in the Labour administration who argued as a rule of thumb that if a negative story ran for more than about three days, then the individual in question was probably ‘toast’ – so we shall watch ‘What the Papers Say’ with particular interest over the next few days…
For whatever reason, I had a wakeful period in the middle of the night last night so I decided to deploy my time productively my updating the Waitrose order I have scheduled for eight days’ time. This all went smoothly and it is always reassuring to be emailed an up-to-date copy of your order which helps to ensure that the extras you have ordered are actually included. The park today was not quite so busy as it has been in recent days – perhaps a function of the fact that the temperature has dropped down several degrees, it was very windy and the sunbathing tendency has abated. Whilst in the park, we met with our friend Julie who now seems fully restored to health after her recent little health episode. She told us though of one of the Waitrose staff who we know well who seemed to have similar symptoms to Julie’s (gall-bladder?) – however, our Waitrose friend had not had a happy time in A&E at our local hospital and was left for several hours with no prospect of a scan or similar investigations. She felt that she had been badly treated and we were speculating whether she got worse treatment by having her husband drive her directly to the hospital rather than calling an ambulance. It might just be the luck of the draw whether you get good treatment or not – Meg and I were hoping that no implicit racism was involved. Whilst in the park, we also ran into our good friends who had bought us an excellent bottle of wine on the occasion of Mike’s recent birthday. This wine turned out to be absolutely excellent so we soaked the label off the bottle to give to our friends in case we saw them – which of course we did. It sometimes happens when you give a bottle of wine as a present, then apart from the price and the label and the vintage, you might have few clues whether it was a good or an indifferent wine so we were glad to pass the label onto our friends so that they could enjoy a bottle for themselves.
I promised not to keep mentioning, ad infinitum, my gardening activities so I will keep this particular entry short and sweet. I finished off the major construction work that I have needed to do once our fallen tree had been removed and now include a little video clip so you can get a mental picture of what is going on. I must mention that the iPhone first records the journey down the steep little slope (a height of 6ft) into what we call ‘Mog’s Den’ and you can then get an idea of the shoring up that has been necessary in what is quite a steep slope. Whether or not my beech trees survive is another matter but they can always be replaced. After a little ‘pan around’ the journey is reversed and you traverse up the path towards ground i.e. normal lawn level. Here is the URL : Mogs Den
The Dominic Cummings story continues to dominate the news agenda, as you might imagine. On tonight’s ‘Review of the Papers‘ (Sky News Channel, 11.30-12.00), I have never seen a journalist so incandescent with rage as was Christina Patterson in her comments. She even used a phrase that I myself had used last night (‘contempt for the little people‘) but, of course, will the rest of the press join in the hue-and-cry? What makes the story particularly juicy was the revelation that, if true, Cummings had transgressed on at least two if not three occasions! There are now calls for Boris Johnson to sack Cummings forthwith – if he does not, then Boris Johnson himself seems to be condoning the moral, if not downright illegal, transgressions that have taken place. Watch this space!
I once asked one of my Spanish students what was the worst time he had ever spent in England and he replied ‘4 pm on a Sunday afternoon!‘ I suspect that is because when he was studying at the Complutense University in Madrid, many of the students used to go to a really atmospheric bar in central Madrid where they could drink coffee and meet up with friends – and hence the contrast with England. Today we watched the Andrew Marr show and noticed how adeptly Grant Shaps managed to evade or wriggle out of tighter corners than Houdini. For example, when confronted with the statement from the Durham police about the contact with Dominic Cummings’ father, we were offered the following (i) ‘You haven’t gone on to give the whole quote and particularly the portion that follows‘ (tending to imply that this would somehow negate the damning quote that had just been read out to him) And how about this for circumlocution ‘The police did not speak to Mr. Cummings père but he spoke with them‘. This was a downright falsification anyway but it only serves to potentially confuse the listener.
Just after we first moved into this house, nearly thirteen years ago, I planted some golden privet hedging (Ligustrum ovalifolium ‘Aureum’) to shield the BioDisc(= mini sewage treatment plant) we have outside the house. At the time, I got 30 plants in the boot of my car. Now it has grown to the extent that it is at least 1.5 metres tall and equally as wide and so, consequently, it was in need of pruning twice a year. My daughter in law had invested in battery-operated hedge clippers but even standing on some home=made platforms it was still too wide to get a completely even cut. Nonetheless, the job was done and cutting is the easy part – the more tedious part being clearing up all of the clippings into plastic sacks (two huge ones) Anyway, we managed to get the contents of these plus a sackful of cardboard shreddings into our compost bin (the right combination of both ‘green’ and ‘brown’ i.e. nitrogen/carbon as the aficionados of this blog will recognise) and all I need know is copious quantities of home-made compost accelerant (aka human urine) to let the microbes get to work. The people next door are having a party (I counted some 8-9 adults+children besporting themselves around a recently constructed garden bar – I am reliably informed these are increasingly popular but I had no idea they existed, until very recently…) I think it is several conjoined families so that is all right then – the distinction between a household’ and a ‘family’ is rather a subtle one anyway!
It is quite possible that this forthcoming week is ‘the calm before the storm’. Our daughter-in-law will be returning to school a week on Monday (June 1st) and it remains an interesting question of how many children actually turn up. But it is quite possible that she will be exposed to many more children than hitherto and, of course, there are several adults running a school as well as the teachers and parents who will be both leaving and collecting children from school – whether they will properly police themselves to be at 2-metre intervals is an interesting question (I suspect not) We feel that we might have to take extra precautions in our household cleaning and domestic routines from June 1st as there may be a very small, but nonetheless increased risk that the Coronavirus may still pose a potent threat.
Politically, it looks as though the Daily Mail is turning against Dominic Cummings. The Daily Mail always thought of itself (particularly under the editorship of Paul Dacre) as having its finger on the pulse of Middle England and if they pursue an anti-Cummings agenda for any period of time, then the future does not look bright for the most senior adviser to the Prime Minister.
Well, today doesn’t exactly feel like a Bank Holiday when most days feel alike. However, we must say that the park was a lot busier than normal and we had to hunt for a park bench upon which to munch our comestibles. Being what used to be called ‘Whitsun’ or ‘Whitsuntide’ put me in mind of the Whit walks that used to take place in Manchester and other Lancashire mill towns in times gone by. I thought the tradition had died out some time ago but apparently, they are still lingering on, according to Google, with a march of 1800 people as recently as 2018. The Catholics used to walk on one weekend around Whitsuntide (perhaps on Whit Friday) and the Anglicans and Non-conformists a week later. What was always so colourful was that as well as the scouts, guides, nurses, trade unions, brass bands etc. it was a good excuse for various ethnic groups (particularly, as I remember, the Poles and the Ukrainians who were strongly Catholic) to process in their national dress. As I write this blog and look upwards, I have a print of L. S. Lowry’s ‘A Procession in Pendlebury’ (showing a Whit Walk procession) on my study wall. I am told that L.S. Lowry who was a curmudgeonly old soul, used to take a taxi to the moors above Oldham and then set up his easel and paint.. pictures of Manchester mill towns!
As I write this, I am listening to ClassicFM and as a special guest they have Prince Charles on his own personal selection of classical music (Only Wagner and Strauss so far, but I have only been listening for 15 minutes) I think that as well as being a guest today, he may actually be presenting a show of his own in the next day or so. Interesting, really (well, it is for me)
Today, after lunch, I spent some time in Mog’s Den putting some finishing touches to the various supports I have put in place but in truth, I was just killing time because we had heard that Dominic Cummings was to have his own press conference later on in the day. I guessed it would be about 4.00 but it actually got going at about 4.30, eventually. Whatever, your view of Dominic Cummings (hero or villain depending on whether you are a Brexit or a Remainer supporter), it was an unprecedented type of event and an extraordinary piece of political theatre. Some of the revelations were incredible – e.g. going a 30-minute round-trip to ‘test one’s eye-sight’ before returning to London by car) In view of this self-confessed break of the regulations (which none of the journalists actually pinned him to the ground on) is surely grounds for a prosection or a £1000 fine (like the rest of us) I bet the Durham police pull their punches though. More of this later – I am fascinated to see Sky TV’s ‘Review of the Press’ make of it all. I will report later when I’ve had a chance to view it!
It seems now that it is quite legitimate to ‘use your best instincts as a father’ to exempt yourself from the lockdown rules you had helped to create. Some aspects of the Cummings account stretch our credulity to the limit e.g. you go on a 60 mile round trip to test your eyesight (incidentally putting the health and safety of your wife and child at risk) – an alternative explanation is that it is your wife’s birthday and you go a pleasure trip before you return to work in London the following day! What is fascinating is that politicians, the clergy, the police, scientists, lawyers, medics and the rest of the media have all universally expressed their disbelief and astonishment at the Cummings account. To read this for yourself, the article is entitled ‘Dominic Cummings draws condemnation from across UK society’ condemnation
As we suspected the Daily Mail is not at all convinced (and neither are the rest of us!)
As you might expect, this was a much quieter day after the Bank Holiday yesterday – quite unusually, we saw none of our usual friends to chat with on the way to the park but we were graced by the sight of our resident (club-footed) heron. The ducks seemed unusually prolific this morning but we suspect that they had been fed some chunks of bread, which is not good for them as it fills them up without giving them many of the nutrients that they might need. A few nights ago, our garden was graced by a hedgehog (observed in the middle of the night when one of our PIR lights was activated) and we know that there are masses of corners full of dead leaves and the like, which they will enjoy. The more the merrier, I say, if they constantly feed on the slugs that play havoc with several of our plants.
Our local authority, for reasons best known to itself, has started a policy of only mowing the central grassy strip that runs along the length of Kidderminster Road to a width of one metre (something to do with the fact that only one man can mow at a time but it sounds a fishy story to me) There is a bonus in that the un-mown areas are starting to sprout some wild meadow flowers. There seems to be an invasion of what at first sight might look a dandelion but is actually a dandelion-type wildflower known as ‘Cat’s ears‘ Tomorrow, I will gather a specimen and see if I can more definitively identify it but comparing it with images on the web. There is also a proliferation of poppies at the moment and I am keeping my eye on a whole series of poppy heads in a vacant house so that I can liberate them for future supplies of poppy seed.
More gardening this afternoon whilst the weather was fine. As opposed to construction work, this was just ‘routine’ gardening which involved clearing away about a year’s worth of fallen holly leaves from Mog’s Den. I decide to enlist the help of a huge plastic shovel which I purchased some time ago to shift snow (but actually looks like one of those huge things that you see stable workers muck out horses with – it might even be called a stable shovel). But in truth, I was just waiting to see what the latest briefing from Downing St. had to make of the Cumming’s affair.
Throughout the day, more and more Tory MP’s were withdrawing support from Cummings and one Scottish junior minister has resigned. Matt Hancock took the press briefing which was almost farcical as it was cut from 60 minutes to 30 and half of this time were the ritual presentations of graphs and statistics. Practically every question was on the Comming’s affair and Hancock allowed no supplementary questions. He half promised the first questionner (a vicar from Brighton) that he and his Treasury colleagues would examine the case for rescinding the fines of all of those who could plead a ‘special case’ à la Cummings – but having made up policy on the hoof, as it were, Downing Street went on to deny that there was going to be a change in policy. This really is like watching a car crash in slow motion but the interesting question remains that half of the cabinet have lined up to support Cummings whilst the other half wants to see him sacked! Michael Gove even suggested that he himself had driven to test his own eye-sight! If the situation persists, whereby every briefing from Downing Street is asked no questions about the pandemic but concentrates on Cummings with more and more influential Tories withdrawing their support, then Cummings looks doomed (and perhaps Boris Johnson doesn’t come out of it at all well either)
Today was the day that we decided to ‘liberate’ some of the wildflowers we have seen growing on a central verge. But first, we had our customary walk to the park which really did seem a lot busier than usual. For the first time in weeks, I did feel a little unsafe on occasions. Those of a certain age (65+) make every effort to avoid you, providing an almost ritualised arc-shape as you walk past each other. But we did notice that as we were sitting on our park bench, young couples with a 3-4-year-old on tow (or a little bike) made no effort at all to avoid you as we were sitting on the park bench, walking, in my estimation, within about a metre of you. not to mention two metres . The same was equally true of some of the residents of residential homes whom I presume were being pushed in a wheelchair by their carers who trundled along the path making no effort to avoid anyone. Given that residential homes may be the lurking-place for virus (more deaths were recorded in residential homes yesterday than in the whole of the hospital sector) then perhaps the trepidation that I felt had a degree of substance to it.
On our way home, I took out a sharp knife I had brought with me and liberated some small clumps of ox-eye daisies, cat’s-ear (similar to but not to be confused with dandelions) and a common poppy. These are, in effect, weeds but I wondered if I get them going in a few small plant pots and use them to brighten up a dark corner. I may not have much success in this particular venture as the specimens I obtained all seemed to have exceptionally shallow root systems but at least it was only about 10 minutes after lifting them before I got them into pots and watered.
After lunch, I busied myself with tidying up the steps that lead down into Mog’s Den but in truth, I didn’t spend a lot of time doing this as, apart from being assisted by the cat, I knew that Boris Johnson was due to appear before the Select Committee chairmen at 4.00 and I particularly wanted to evaluate his performance. A few little things stood out (i) despite referring to evident ‘falsehoods’ in the press treatment of Dominic Cummings, he couldn’t name any (ii) although he indicated that he did check on the evidence supplied by Dominic Cummings he was not going to refer any of it to the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service as he was ‘already far too busy to be troubled with things like that’ (iii) he hadn’t read any of the scientific papers but only relied on summaries of them provided for him (iv) he seemed not to know at all that there were thousands of migrants to the UK who because of their ambiguous citizenship status had no recourse to any public funds (and could be destitute for all he knew or cared) (v) he must have mentioned 5-6 times that it was time to ‘move on’ because that was the great British public wanted(!)
After reflecting upon the day’s events and some of the comments on late night TV, I suspect that three factors will stand out. The first of these is that the rebellion of 40+ Tory MP’s is showing some signs of fizzling out which means that Cummings may survive and hang on. However, Cummings may well be a ‘busted flush’ and will have lost whatever authority/respect he used to muster. But the second thing to emerge is that in the lockdown, the great British public invested a lot of trust in the government and helped to prevent the direst of tragedies (whilst still having the highest number of deaths/related deaths in the world) but this has largely evaporated and government messages may not be heeded (as there is ‘one law for the powerful and another law for the rest of us‘) Thirdly, and this point follows from the second, the ‘Test and Trace‘ system (due to be announced on Monday, 1st June but brought forward two working days in an attempt to ‘move the agenda on’) may well be fatally flawed as it is by no means certain that when contacted by a ‘tracer’ and told to isolate for 14 days the request will be followed as no sanctions are to be deployed in the short term. It is also evident that the fabled tracing app is not ready, that turn-around of test results is far too slow, and that we have failed to learn how to do things properly (as in South Korea, Germany for example)
This morning was fairly uneventful for Meg and I although we did have the opportunity for a brief chat with our Italian friend who lives down the road and then for a longer chat with two of our friends from church. One of their relatives had had an operation yesterday morning and we were all relieved that it seemed to have gone well so far. Another hot day which called out for a salad but we managed to rustle up quite a tasty collection of salad-type things even though we didn’t have what you might call any salad greens.
In the late morning, we got the news about Durham police’s view of the Dominic Cummings escapade. The whole wording seemed a little bizarre to us and designed to help the government get off the hook. For a start, the Durham police said that it was a minor breach (well a breach is either a breach or it isn’t a breach- the argument that it is minor because no social distancing was involved seems curious as surely if there had been a social distance issue this would have been two offences of leaving the house and breaking social distance rules). A lawyer has commented on the case as follows:
The fact that the initial journey from London to Durham was adjudged not to have broken regulations presumably drives a coach and horses through the advice? legal requirement? to ‘stay at home‘ and one wonders what will happen if some of those who have already been fined decide to appeal against their convictions. Finally, one has to say that a wording which says a ‘minor breach’ which ‘may’ have occurred seems to be bending over backwards not to offend Downing Street.
I had a frustrating session this afternoon. Part of ‘Mog’s Den‘ is an area in which I throw stones, bits of brick and other stuff retrieved whenever I go and dig in the garden. To tidy this up a little bit I thought I would put a bit of fencing (Poundland Special) and as I was doing this, I thought I would remove a protruding bit of stone from the route of the fence. Half an hour later and I was still struggling because as I excavated more and more of the ‘stone’ it became apparent that it must have been some kind of lintel, burried by the builders, as it was over 30″ long and about 6″ wide and 6″ deep. Having struggled to free this monster all without success, I reasoned to myself that even if I did free it would be too heavy to move anywhere and I would probably injure my back in making the effort. So I covered it all up again and made the best of a bad job.
Emily Maitless, the lead presenter on BBC Newsnight programme decided she would not appear the following evening after she had intimated that it was evident that Cummings had broken the law but the Government would not admit it. The BBC did not ‘discipline’ Maitless but felt they had to reissue guidance on political partiality but said they were not going to take any further action of a disciplinary nature. It should be very interesting to see what Newsnight says tonight, given that Cummings may have committed a breach of the regulations (subject to a court deciding the case – which of course it never will) The extremely partisan Attorney General has tweeted on Saturday in full support of Dominic Cummings and in which she quoted the full text of the No 10 statement on Boris Johnson’s chief aide in which the prime minister said he had behaved “responsibly and legally”. So the Attorney General’s role is compromised even before the Durham police statement earlier on today…
The end of another hot week – and more hot weather to come. We were particularly pleased to see our domestic help arrive to assist us in the burden of housework and we always seem to have a lot of news to catch up on. We do try to be careful to not be in the same room at the same time so there is a certain amount of calling to each other from doorways! We had a chat with one of our regular friends on the way down the hill and wondered if the park was going to be teeming today. However, despite the proliferation of picnic blankets, the park was only moderately busy and we enjoyed watching various antics with dogs and balls. By the way, by consulting Google, I have just discovered that the official name for the device that throws a ball further than one could unaided is called a ball-launcher – you live and learn.
After lunch, I cut the communal lawns and our own lawn with the trust petrol mower, but in truth, it had hardly grown at all but I succeeded in removing the wispy bits of dandelions. The two ‘weeds’ that I liberated from the roadside verges (an ox-eye daisy and the dandelion-like cat’s ear) seem to have taken in their planted plots and the trees I recently transplanted are just about surviving the heat (I think) Halfway through the afternoon, we took delivery of the lilac bush/tree that was a birthday present from the rest of the family. I also took delivery of a dozen half-round fencing posts with which I intend to construct a hand-rail to assist in reaching ‘Mog’s Den’ in the lower recesses of the garden. Although I have all the materials in place (posts, screws. cement, hole-boring implement) I think this job might be a bit more than a one-man job so I have sent off a text message to a useful contact of ours to see if we could do the job together sometime in the next few weeks (time is not of the essence)
Life next week will start to see some of the ‘turning of the analogue dial’ as the country as a whole is entering the first stages of release from the lockdown. As a family, we will face some changes – our daughter-in-law is in charge of the complicated logistics of getting the primary school in which she teaches ready to receive Year 1 and Year 6 pupils. I am going to enter a regime in which I go and collect my own newspapers which entails going to a small newspaper shop in town. I will go masked-up and will not enter the shop unless it is clear of other customers for a start. I have acquired a collection of face masks which will now come into their own. In addition, we are having the outside of the house receive a routine painting which is another small return to normality. As the government attempts to gradually end the various furlough schemes, the grim reality of how many businesses will be able to survive will become all too apparent. My own feeling is that this stage of the unlock down is going to be incredibly difficult. I suspect that as people have got used to new patterns of doing things (e.g. using online grocery shopping), then the old ways of doing things may never return.
Our local newspaper is reporting that Bromsgrove is in the top 20 of COVID-19 hotspots in the country. Of 329 local authorities, Bromsgrove has the 15th highest coronavirus death rate with a standardised rate of 106.4 per 100,000 (Birmingham was 89.7 per 100,000 and Worcestershire 50 per 100,000) A local consultant neurologist has pointed to the high death rate in residential homes (38 of the 105 deaths reported in Bromsgrove) and has argued that it is the neglect of care homes by the government that has led them to become pockets of infection where it is easy for the disease to spread and to re-spread. A sobering thought!
We thought that today the park was going to be exceptionally busy as people were anticipating the end of the lockdown. But, in truth, although it was a little busier than normal, the park was busy but not teeming. We decided to vary our route on the way back through the park and encountered one of our ‘old lady’ friends that we had not seen for several days and hoped she was OK. The husband of this particular acquaintance had worked for the Parks Department and, upon his demise, the family had donated a bench to the borough council and upon this bench, we often sit. The old lady in question can see this bench from the vantage point of her own home as she lives adjacent to the park – and she is always delighted to see that the bench is in use. We had not seen her as she had varied her routine and got into the habit of going around the park very early in the morning to avoid the heat and the crowds. She was having a few problems with her health but at least she had some hospital appointments lined up in the forthcoming week, although the logistics were getting to be a bit of a nightmare as under the Coronavirus rules one couldn’t be accompanied into the hospital. Still, we were pleased to see her. On our way up the hill, we exchanged news with one of our oldest friends and then bumped into an acquaintance who was visiting his parents and who we often see at the weekend. As it happened, he was engaged in the most humdrum of tasks (sieving through a bucket full of slate chippings to remove the bits of leaves and twigs) What was so coincidental about this is that I had detailed myself to do exactly the same task myself in the afternoon. Last year, I had taken the pains to lay down a whole new path along half of the length of ‘Mog’s Den‘ and, to keep a naturalistic look, I had laid down some weed control fabric and then had a ton of slate chippings delivered in the customary large plastic/hessian builder’s bag in our driveway. I had then made the journey down with loaded buckets of slate chippings to lay the path. This is generally quite maintenance-free but although the weed control fabric prevents the problems of annual weeds growing from below, one still has the problem of dried leaves accumulating on the top. This maintenance job didn’t turn out to be particularly arduous and I finished off the whole job with a Bosch blower that I use just to disperse dried leaves and the like. This now completes the makeover of ‘Mog’s Den‘ and whilst there will also be ‘pottering about’ little jobs to be done, at least it is now looking fairly shipshape and should be easy to maintain for the rest of the season. All it needs now is a good downpour of rain, but we will have to wait a little longer for that.
The political news this weekend looks interesting. It seems that the ‘love-in’ between the scientists/health chiefs on the one hand and the politicians on the other has finally broken down, particularly with the added irritant of the Dominic Cummings affair. In particular, they feel that trust has been badly damaged by Cumming’s failure to stand down and the prime minister’s refusal to dismiss him. In addition, they feel that the failure to set up an effective test, trace and isolate regime means that the safety and well-being of the general public are now certainly at risk. Today was a day when I missed the Downing Street briefing but for the first time, one of the senior scientists has made his feelings known. The government’s deputy chief medical officer Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, with Dominic Cummings in mind, laid his criticisms on the line thus : “In my opinion the rules are clear and have always been clear. In my opinion, they are for the benefit of all and they apply to all.” And so say all of us (or over 80% in an opinion poll published over the weekend).
We speculate how busy our local park is going to be in view of the weather and the release of the lockdown sentiment in the country – as it turned out, it was the most pleasant of days with a gentle breeze keeping the temperature a little cooler than in recent days and the numbers of people in the park being quite tolerable, A few days we watched whilst some of the local authority workers dredged the pond which only has about 8″ of water in it but acquires a certain amount of dead branches and other debris falling into the water. The park caretakers had carefully arranged for the detritus to dry out when no doubt it would easier to dispose of. Our enjoyment of the pond was marred somewhat by the sight of a couple of teenagers, evidently quite bored, who hunted some of the biggest sticks that could find and threw them back into the pond. In circumstances like this, does one intervene with a reprimand? Whilst contemplating what to do, the youths got bored and ran away. In the early afternoon, we got a text from our domestic help with the red-hot news that Asda was selling off 70-litre bags of Forest Bark at 3 for £10.00. Actually, this was very good news to us as we had engaged one of our neighbours in conversation who was giving his garden a makeover and he had unsuccessfully toured some of the local supermarkets (who typically have supplies of forest bark with their gardening requisites outside the store) Accordingly my daughter-in-law and I went down to Asda where they had a well-developed system – whilst I loaded up my trolley with the forest bark, my daughter-in-law went inside and paid for it with crisp £10.00 notes (which the staff preferred not to handle even though virus does not survive for about 11 weeks on crisp new notes) Nonetheless, this was a very welcome little venture as we had contemplated doing it a day or so ago but it all depends upon the local supply situation.
The afternoon was quite a busy one. The principal task was to plant the lilac tree that had been bought for me as a birthday present and I had a green 75-litre pot which certainly ought to be a sufficient size for a young tree. Fortunately, during my make-over of Mog’s Den I discovered that I already had a bag of topsoil as well as one of compost and already had some ‘normal’ soil put by ready for a large planting. As I am always running out of both bonemeal and Blood, Fish and Bone, I had recently bought from Amazon some 10kg bags of both so it was quite easy to make a nutritious mixture (bonemeal at the base, blood fish and bone as a general fertiliser) and planting was thus incredibly easy, I have decided to locate it against a wall of the house in the back garden so that all members of the family can see it from the kitchen window. To make space for it, I relocated the (pot-grown) Corylus avellana which is a hazel bush/tree. My final job of the afternoon was to relocate all of the dustbins, gardening impedimenta away from the sides of the hose so that our painter and decorator has a free run of the outside of the house when he starts off at 8.30 in the morning.
I might point out that in my various activities, throughout the day I have been assisted and supervised at times by Miggles the cat, who has variously supervised my hanging out of the washing, planting of the lilac tree, relocating the hazel tree and preparing for the decorator. At one stage when I had just planted the lilac the cat investigated the pot by standing on her hind legs and then jumped in to roll in the soil (a trait she has exhibited many times before!)
We made a fairly early start to the day this morning because our decorator had come to undertake the external painting of the house – we like to have it done every 5-6 years. Naturally, we had to have a walk around to ascertain that access for ladders was maintained in all of the relevant places and, of course, we have to ensure that relevant supplies of tea and/or coffee are made available from the word go. Well, the day has arrived on what might be billed as the start of the unlock-down and one wonders what social changes might be evident. On the ground, there was not much apparent here in Bromsgrove although the TV channels report that the Birmingham IKEA has experienced a huge queue as the lockdown appears to be easing. It is reported that some people starting queuing at 5.45 in time for the store opening at 10.00. I must admit, I didn’t think that IKEA was judged to be an essential store like a supermarket or a pharmacy but apparently the government has ‘tweaked’ the definition of essential retail shops so that furniture and hardware shops are now to be allowed to open. I had thought that shops could only open in a fortnight’s time of June 15th but apparently, hardware and homeware stores are now regarded as essential – subject, of course, to rigid social distancing rules. Actually, today for the first time in about 11 weeks, Meg and I decided to buy our newspapers directly instead of relying upon our son and/or daughter-in-law to do it for us. As it turned out, the process was ridiculously easy as we choose a little newspaper shop in a not particularly busy street in the town. Having ascertained there was no one else in the store it took all of half a minute to enter, choose the newspapers, hand over my vouchers and then leave. This will be our routine form now on – although I had taken the precaution of having a face mask and disposable gloves with me, this no longer proved to be necessary. The park was delightful today, as it was certainly not too busy and there was a slight breeze to make the day feel really pleasant. On the way home, one of our ‘friends-who-garden’ had consulted their RHS book to ascertain what plant (portion of a plant) some other friends had donated to us. It turns out that it is ‘Lychnis coronaria Abrosanguinea Gp‘ which a quick Google search reveals has the popular name of a rose campion and our little plant is now flowering beautifully.
This afternoon turned out to be a pretty hot afternoon and the early morning breeze had abated, I had started what I call ‘routine’ edging/gully clearing from the edge of our communal grassed area and managed to get about two-thirds done of what I had hoped. These days, I find that having low expectations of what you set yourself to do is the way to happiness – otherwise, you are only dissatisfied with what have you have got done rather than satisfied with what you have achieved. I particularly wanted to get my tasks finished by 5.00 pm so that I could watch the Downing Street briefing but why I bother, I really do not know as it only sends my blood pressure sky high. Today, the Health Secretary was asked the perfectly reasonable question of ‘how much use has been made of the Coronavirus test-and-trace’ regime since its inception. Every kind of evasion was being deployed although Hancock claimed that the system was ‘up and running’ and was ‘successful’. However, there are several reports from the front line that many of the 25,000 testers recruited to do the job (all employed by private-sector agencies’) were sitting around all day twiddling their thumbs and perhaps only 25% of the 8,000 or so new cases each day are getting caught up in the system. When pressed for some statistics, the Health Secretary eventually admitted that the figures would be ‘forthcoming’ in a few days’ time – the truth probably being that the whole thing has been botched from beginning to end with ill-trained contact tracers manning call centres, a promised app that has not seen the light of day and the experienced local authority workers who do have experience of dealing with communicable diseases sidelined. You couldn’t really make it up!
Today, we were going to alter our routine just a little to see how it goes. But first, of course, we have to make sure that the decorators are settled and well supplied with coffee before their work starts. I think that all of us (and particularly the decorators) will welcome the slighter cooler air that is promised for us and the possibility of a refreshing shower tomorrow at some time. We occupied our normal park bench and then I left Meg to contemplate the pond (and chat with other young mothers and their children) whilst I made haste to get our daily ration of newspapers and back to the park bench which round trip took me all of 10 minutes. As we have a plethora of plastic bags left behind from several grocery deliveries, I think I will transport the newspapers home in one of them and immediately discard it once I get it home. Then I had a slightly frustrating experience traying to amend my Iceland order, due for delivery tomorrow between 6.00-8.00pm. I realised that we had just run out of potatoes but the Iceland website would amend my order and then come up with a problem when I tried to pay for the extra. A customer services number was of no use because the recorded message said they were so overwhelmed with queries that they could not cope. Eventually, I texted my domestic help pleading that she brings some spuds with her when next we see her.
This afternoon was the first date upon which I could actually get some vegetable seed sown. Last year, when I laid down the slate path on ‘Mog’s Den‘ I had purchased several of what are technically window planters and they form a line alongside the path so that I can sow and harvest the veg more easily. Luckily, I had some beet seed in stock which was not out-of-date so I used an old gardener’s trick which was to scarify (i.e. scrub the seed with sandpaper) to remove some of the hard husks and then soaked it in water overnight. I sieved some compost and laid down about a two-inch layer in the planters which I then made flat and even using a half-brick (a longitudinal half brick which I had discovered in the garden) which is excellent for tamping. Then using a piece of bamboo cane, I made a couple of pencil-like indentations before planting the seed at 1-inch intervals. Finally. I finished off with sieving (yes, an actual old metal kitchen sieve I had in my vegetable garden tools section) of compost to provide the lightest of layers over the seed before it had a final tamping and watering. If all of my efforts are successful, I would hope to see some germination within 3-4 days and then I must remember to sow at fortnightly intervals. If all goes to plan, I can use the young beet leaves as a salad, pull young small beetroots and bottle them in vinegar and let the more mature plants grow on to their full size. We shall see!
It seems as though the government is eventually being caught out. I read somewhere that less than 50% of the population actually believe the guff which passes for information at the daily Downing Street briefings and the general public prefer to believe the scientists (when they are allowed to speak) and not the politicians. I quote from an ITV news report below:
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been rebuked by the UK’s statistics watchdog over coronavirus testing figures which are “still far from complete and comprehensible”. UK Statistics Authority chairman Sir David Norgrove said “it is not surprising that given their inadequacy data on testing are so widely criticised and often mistrusted”.
He criticised the way the figures are presented at the daily Downing Street briefings, with the headline total including both tests carried out and those which have been posted to recipients but not yet conducted.
Well, I always knew that today might be quite a full day and so it proved. Knowing that I had an Iceland delivery slot for groceries sometime between 6.00-8.00 am, I actually got up and going at 5.00 to be in plenty of time for the delivery – the order actually arrived at about 6.40 and everything was as it should be so that was quickly unpacked and then put away. I then walked down into Bromsgrove and actuated my new ‘newspaper buying’ slot which I started on Monday. I make sure that nobody is inside the shop and today I got in, selected my newspapers and got out again all within 30 seconds. I then thought I would hunt for potatoes which I had tried, unsuccessfully to add to my Iceland order yesterday but the little veg store I thought might be open was closed and the local Iceland store did not open until 9.00 am. So I decided to try my old haunt of Waitrose – I might state, at this point, that I have a particular relationship with the staff in Waitrose as I was actually the second customer through the doors when it opened on my birthday more than two years ago. The staff greeted me like the prodigal son which I suppose I was, in a way, and we had to give each virtual hugs from a distance of two metres away. Anyway, I got my bag of potatoes and shot off, but not before ascertaining that as they opened at 8.00 each morning, then after a little early morning rush their quietest time was about 9.00 am so if I run out of anything, I can make a quick dash into the store in future, not least to get my supplies replenished of unicorn hoof oil essence which I know (!) they stock.
Today, was the day when our incredibly ‘handy man’ who I shall call Len (not his real name, I might add) were going to erect a handrail down the precipitate slope down into Mog’s Den. I had got this job planned out in my mind as I had acquired some half-round fencing poles (round poles, split in half longitudinally and hence one curved surface and one flat surface) I had also acquired a couple of years earlier a fence boring auger which is like a huge gimlet or corkscrew and I know this would be excellent for boring some quite deep holes of just the right diameter. Then, if all works well, all you need to do is to insert the fencing pole (with a spike put on the end with a saw) and then hammer into the ground with a hefty sledge-hammer. When processing the first of our holes, all seemed to be going well until we encountered some sort of obstacle and the auger would not progress any further – on further investigation, Len felt into the hole and we discovered that at the exact spot upon which we were sinking the first hole, we would have to encounter a lump of metal which turned out to be a scaffolding shackle. The rest of the job proceeded satisfactorily and we were both pleased with the overall result which has a sort of naturalistic feel to it as befits the descent into a woodland garden. However, as it was raining (smattering) most of the morning, I was starting to feel the effects of standing around on a cold rainy day. There are some timbers left over so I may use them to provide a type of capping rail as a whole – hence, I was hunting around in the garage of drills, drill bits, chucks, chargers and the like.
There are warnings tonight that we need to prepare for a second and possibly a third more subsequent waves of the coronavirus to which most of the population has not actually been exposed and to which we are certainly not immune. Also, at 50,000 deaths the UK has the highest death rate in Europe. We await the result of the official enquiry in what has undoubtedly gone wrong in the UK, although the main lines of explanation are already clear (e.g. critical failure to respond with alacrity in the first few weeks of the pandemic as even starting the lockdown a week earlier might have saved about 8,000 lives)
Today we enjoyed a slight variation on the theme of our daily routine. Meg and I went to our little newspaper shop to collect The Times and The Guardian aa per usual. Then, as we had an earlier start in the day, we decided to brave a little venture into the weird and wonderful world of Waitrose. At the door, we were informed that only one of us would be allowed to enter the store but when we were recognised by the staff inside, the previous instruction was overwritten and we were both allowed in. Then we treated ourselves to some dark chocolate Digestive biscuits and some of our favourite oatmeal crackers before escaping the store as fast as we could. Then we sat by the lake in the park and drank our coffee. On our way up the hill, we encountered both of our sets of friends and exchanged some gossip as a six-some – quite legal as we were in the open air and keeping our distance from each other. After lunch, I had determined to do a mini tidy-up of some tools and similar ‘useful things’ whilst at the same time looking for some things that might be useful for some woodworking activities. The bad news is that when I opened a large wooden chest that was filled with spanners and other bits of ironmongery ‘that might come in useful at some time’ I was dismayed to find that we had been visited by our little furry friends who had evidently been on the search for nesting materials – hence what used to be jiffy bags I used for storage had been reduced to a mass of chewed up paper clippings not to mention mouse droppings. I wondered how on earth they could have got into a closed box (which had been housing for a radiogram popular in the 1960s) until I realised that various holes were cut in the back panel to allow for the ingress of cables and leads so the little blighters had just walked in. So there had to be a lot of washing down with a strong bleach solution, throwing away of some items rendered useless and a general sorting out which took most of the afternoon. However, there was a slight bonus to all of this because I discovered three things that I think that I will need in the next day or so when I affix a capping rail to my newly installed handrail, namely a wood chisel, a type of rasping tool which acts as a plain and a chuck for muy little Bosch hand-held drill so I had a certain amount of fortune to offset the misfortune.
Tonight was the end of the Thursday night ‘Clap for our Carers‘ routine. I went outside ready to join in with whatever clapping might take place but there was just silence in the gloomy and rain-filled evening air. The official website had stated that last week’s was to be the final one but as the lockdown was being eased perhaps the movement had run its course. It was good whilst it lasted but had perhaps outlived its purpose. Out of interest, I clicked on a map showing the hotspots of Coronavirus throughout the country (i.e. at least 100 deaths per 100,000 of the population) and there seemed to be a smattering across the South, the Midlands and the North with no evident pattern staring you in the face and Bromsgrove remained one of the hotspots. I did wonder whether the hotspots could have been made ‘hot‘ by having more than the average share of the population in residential homes in each area and this constitutes a reservoir of infection back into the local community as we know that the sector as a whole is under-tested and not well supplied with PPE. This might have to await further analysis but perhaps is too difficult to tease out statistically. Just to keep things in perspective, about 0.5% of the population in the UK have experienced the virus whereas smallpox afflicted 1 in 6 of the population in early Georgian England (the latter rate being about 30 times more than the former)
Every day has a slightly different flavour despite the lockdown and so it proved today. I had left Meg in the park to contemplate her surroundings whilst I went to pick up my daily ration of newspapers. After leaving Meg, I encountered an elderly lady I recognised as having attended our local church way back in the past. She seemed to be coping reasonably well with the lockdown but was feeling a little isolated e.g. some days she had no conversation with anybody at all. So I pointed out Meg to her on a distant park bench so they could meet up and have a good natter, which they undoubtedly did whilst I went on my way and joined them later. It might well be that another member of the congregation who often sits and chats with us may well come along tomorrow so we form a little gaggle (or is it a ‘conspiracy’?) of Catholics together. We had to endure a shower and at one stage took shelter underneath a nearby willow tree and later on the park’s bandstand (which is open on all sides but at least keeps the rain off you) As we were walking back, the sun burst forth and we chatted with one of our friends on the journey back up the hill. Today was a day in which I decided I would make a curry which I accordingly did (a tradition from our student days) and our domestic help was more than happy to help us demolish it (as were we to devour her rhubarb and ginger cake which was absolutely superb)
After lunch, I decided to see how easy it would be to install the capping timber on my newly installed handrail. This involved chopping off a triangular section from the top of each of the supporting posts so that they all pointed down the diagonal slope. What I thought was going to be tremendously difficult turned out to be relatively easy although I was obliged to make a whole series of little adjustments to make everything line up properly. Now for the screwing down process which I suspected might be tricky as my screws had to be quite long ones (2.75″ or 7 cm in length) and therefore quite deep guide holes were required. But all went quite well, overcoming the’normal’ crop of misfortunes that might befall one who is not a regular driller or user of woodworking tools e.g. a broken drill on one occasion or the drill leaving the chuck and getting stuck in the hole on another. However, I used the trick that I often used on similar occasions which is to use a somewhat shorter and thinner screw to make the guide hole and then finish off with the longer and wider screw for the final job. However, everything was nice and stable when I had finished and it looked good as well. I took the advice of our painters and decorators just before they completed their own work and got their recommendation as to which make and shade of wood preservative to apply and then I duly ordered the same from the web (Sandolin Classic Light Oak which I was assured would let the natural grain of the wood shine through) I finally finished things off with a wooden ornamental owl that I just happened to have bought as a folly some months ago but as it happens a perfect emblem to affix to the start of the handrail. Tomorrow, I resolve to go through the collection of garden tools I have got into the habit of storing in buckets under the eaves and rationalising the contents of them so that the outside of the house looks a little less cluttered. Some of them can always be located down into ‘Mog’s Den‘ and some of them relocated into less evident locations.
The shocking COVID-19 statistics for today are (i) total cases now to exceed 40,000 but this figure does not take into the ‘more than expected’ deaths figures so the actual amount of deaths caused both, directly and indirectly, may well exceed 60,000. Also (ii) the death totals yesterday in the UK at 359 exceeded the death toll of 330 from all 27 European nation-states.
Today was quite a lot colder with a high wind and not very pleasant ‘sitting in the park’ conditions. We were pleased to drink up our coffee quickly and to get on our way back home almost as soon as we could. The newspaper routine seems to be working quite well, I am pleased to say, and tomorrow will be a quite big day as we have to lift up all of the supplements to go with the Sunday newspapers. No doubt, we will watch the Andrew Marr show in the morning without a great deal of enlightenment, as per usual. After I had lunch today, I set myself the task of rationalising the various bits of gardening gear that we had in a series of buckets down a ‘private’ side of the house. Why this has developed over the years is because the soffits on this particular house are quite wide and this means that little hand tools and other gardening implements are generally kept quite dry whilst also being accessible. But, I have to admit, this has created a certain amount of clutter over the years so as I had moved it all away from the side of the house to assist the decorators (whose work has now finished), this was an ideal opportunity for an element of rationalisation and tidying up. This took most of the afternoon as I have a variety of aids to help me reach hard-to-reach spots when gardening, hedge trimming or car cleaning. One of these aids is one of the once popular plastic milk crates. These were very rigid and strong and typically were much used by GPO telephone engineers who tended to upload one from their van the minute they had to do some work on the telephone control panels you occasionally see along the main roads. I had acquired one from goodness knows where years ago and enhanced it somewhat with some rubber matting on the bottom (which now become the top) and a reinforcement of my own patent design inside. If you were to check on the web, you would see that these sell for £30.00 which is a tribute to their versatility and utility. Then, of course, there are the buckets and garden tubs of various sizes used in weeding and clearing, a variety of things in plastic containers such as ant control, compost heap accelerant before we actually come onto the handtools of which I have several favourites, primarily for weeding, as well as a variety of ties, clips, string, wire – the list seems endless (as did the clutter) Anyway, eventually order was restored, bucket and tubs were brushed clean, tools were neatly oiled with WD40 if necessary and then stored sensibly at last.
There seem to be two big breaking COVID-19 stories this evening. The first is the ‘about-face’ (forgive the pun) on the wearing of face coverings for all staff and visitors to NHS hospitals i.e. 800,000 staff at one week’s notice. It seems very improbable that adequate supplies will be on place and seems to be another example of the politicians assuming that by announcing that something will happen that this will actually take place. One is reminded that the ‘test and trace’ regime was meant to be ‘world-beating, but it now transpires that the fully-effective service that was promised will not come to pass until about mid-September! Secondly, there seems to be a realisation that bluster and political point-scoring à la Boris Johnson does not really help get effective policies implemented. Johnson is being urged this evening to cut the rhetoric and to prepare for the second wave of the pandemic that many experts believe is now inevitable and may well be on its way. The rather scary thing is that according to a model shown in ‘The Times‘, a second wave might be more vicious and more deadly than the first as only about 5% of the population may have acquired any level of immunity (leaving 95% with none, of course)
The weather did not bode particularly well this morning as there was a smattering of rain. After the Andrew Marr show, I made my way on my own to pick up the Sunday newspapers as Meg was not feeling very well and decided to spend some extra time in bed this morning. Lunchtime included a good portion of spinach – some Dutch clinicians have discovered that a deficiency of vitamin K is often exhibited in those who succumb to the coronavirus so it is well to keep our consumption of broccoli, spinach and particularly kale on the menu from now on. After lunch, I set myself the task of cleaning up some plastic storage boxes that I use previously to grow veg in – this is all part of the rationalisation of my garden tools outfit. This sounds a deceptively simple task but the boxes I have seem to have hidden curves and ridges in them which means that no longer do you think you have one surface cleaned when other springs into view. The overall plan is to keep all gardening utensils neatly stored away so that the boxes themselves are not an eyesore and contribute to a feeling of clutter. Miggles the cat was my constant companion and whenever I had completed one box and lined it with cardboard (to keep it pristine) the cat would insist on occupying it and giving it her seal of approval.
Last night, we watched the Life of Pi on the TV (story of a young boy. shipwrecked alongside some zoo animals of which the most prominent is the tiger) We had both seen it before and enjoyed it the second time around – but if you go on the web, there is an amazing amount of philosophical explanation as to which of the two accounts to believe (as depicted on the film or a sanitised version, without the zoo animals, given to the Japanese investigators of the shipwreck) Unusual and enjoyable, all the same.
The Sunday newspapers are full of speculation that the government is desperately keen to end the lockdown as soon as possible because there is a prediction that 3 million jobs could soon be lost unless the lockdown is eased quickly. But the public mood is quite interesting because three times as many people feel that that the end to the lockdown may be preceding too rapidly as want a quick end to the lockdown. I suppose there is a feeling that having come this far, then why risk the rapid emergence of a second (and more brutal?) 0r and/or third wave for the sake of a week or so? However, it is true to say that other European countries seem to be on a faster trajectory to end lockdowns than is the case in the UK – there does seem to be a long ‘tail’ to the statistical distribution and fears that the ‘R’ rate is already exactly 1.0 in the SouthWest but greater than 1.0 in the North West (which would mean that start of exponential growth in those regions) The consensus view is that the only sensible course to follow is to allow liberalisation only if there is an excellent ‘test and track’ regime in place to immediately pounce on any hotspots. However, we now know that the ‘test-and-trace’ service is woefully incomplete and will only be fully functional in September. This implies that too rapid an end to the lockdown is an incredibly risky venture – but then it was the same bunch of politicians who have progressed with Brexit which again is an enormously risky undertaking.
The other big political story this weekend is the continuing ‘Black Lives Matter‘ protests taking place in cities in the UK and, indeed, globally. I find it fascinating that it not just members of the BAME communities that are out on the streets but the protesters seem to be drawn from every section of society – it seems from the broadcast images that there are as many white as there are brown or black faces. Of course, the original spark that lit the flame was repulsive (a white police officer kneeling on the neck of a black person squeezing the life out of him for seven minutes whilst being filmed doing so).
There are certain dates that stick in one’s memory and today’s date is one of them. It was the date, exactly two years ago, in which I had a bowel cancer operation (technically a ‘low anterior resection‘) to remove a polyp that had turned cancerous. At the same time, I was given an ileostomy, subsequently reversed about four weeks later. Well, here I am to tell the tale – the survival rate over 5 years is about 80%. The one incident that sticks in my mind is as follows. My surgeon asked me, just before the operation ‘Now Mr. Hart – are there any questions you would like to ask me just before the operation?‘ I replied ‘Yes – I just have one question: when you are holding the diseased portion of my bowel in one hand and the rest of my body in the other, can you make sure you throw away the right bit!‘ To which, the surgeon replied,’I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know what question you are asking me?‘ I replied saying that it was all meant to be a joke but it had backfired. But that is enough of that.
Today, the weather had brightened and Meg was particularly looking forward to her walk to the park as she had missed yesterday. I left Meg on the park bench whilst I went to collect the newspapers and noted, upon my return, that about a dozen young mothers with attendant 2-4 year olds had assembled in the open air or in the park’s bandstand and were organising the children into ball throwing games. (This seemed to involve throwing a ball into a large sheet which was then pulled taut so that the ball was propelled into the air and children then had to chase after it) The whole affair had evidently been organised but whether it was spontaneous or part of a pre-school group, I couldn’t really tell.
This afternoon, after lunch and a rest, I decided that the lawns needed their weekly cut, although to be honest, they had hardly displayed any growth after the dry spell we would have had for the last few days. But things do look a little neater now. I had intended to start painting my newly erected fence/handrail into Mog’s Den but I was suddenly beset with doubts that the paint I had been recommended by our decorators could turn out to look awful. So as to not ruin it, I had decided that it might be better to paint a spare timber that I have to see how it looks and whether the natural grain of the wood is enhanced (which I want) or disguised (which I don’t want). But I never got round to this because we had a long chat with our next-door neighbour who is recovering from some angina pains and with whom we have not had a chance to catch up on his latest news for several days now.
One of the really big political stories is the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol by ‘Black Lives Matter‘ protestors over the weekend. Although this was undoubtedly an illegal act, it is fascinating to see how our political leaders have responded to it. Instead of an ‘illegal but understandable’ tone, Boris Johnson and Priti Patel’s first instincts have been to condemn what they have termed ‘thuggery‘. But would the citizens of Bristol really want to see re-erected a statue of a man who was responsible for the transportation of 84,000 slaves of whom 19,000 died in transit? I turned to the web to see if there was any legal opinion as to whether or not you find a jury that would actually convict anybody in the climate of today. One wonders whether the government actually has thought of the embarrassment that would be caused by pursuing a conviction in the post ‘Black Lives Matter‘ days. I did find the following legal opinion (which with I concur, actually) but it will be interesting to see what transpires. The leader of the Bristol City Council hit an interesting tone when he suggested that the statue might be fished out of the Bristol dock but the council had many other priorities at the moment! Here is the legal opinion:
According to the weather forecasts, today was meant to be a bright and sunny day but it certainly didn’t start that way being somewhat cloudy and what I might call ‘brooding’ – however, the sun burnt through the cloud later on and we had quite a warm and pleasant day. On our way to the park, we were delighted to see some friends we had not seen for a day or so, so it was lovely to gossip and exchange news with each other. The park seemed to have more than its normal share of groups of mothers entertaining their pre-school offspring, so it does look as though this is part of a trend. On our way up the hill, we stopped to admire several of the front gardens which are at their best at the moment – yesterday, we had liberated some poppy seed heads from a venue where they were growing wild and unrestrained. I need to go onto the web, which I will shortly, to get some up-to-date advice as the best way to store poppy heads and their seeds. In the afternoon, it had been my intention to empty a dustbin which we have in an outside corner to rearrange its contents (largely things like gardening gloves, twine, supports of various kinds) but I didn’t quite get round to it. Instead, I hunted around for a small bag of pea gravel which I still had in an odd corner. I then divided this into four and carefully introduced it around the base of each of the supporting posts of my new fence/handrail. That having been done, I then located my tin of used motor oil which had been emptied from the mower and was waiting for the next trip to the local authority tip to dispose of it safely. In this case, I allowed the oil to penetrate the pea gravel and then gave it a light tamping with a flat stone I had to hand. The theory behind all of this is that fence posts always rot at ground level due to the combined effect of soil-based microbes, oxygen and moisture. Anywaything that can be done to eliminate these conditions will assist the treated timber posts to survive even longer. Having got this task completed, I then opened the tin of light-oak external wood paint as recommended by our painters & decorators and painted a sample timber with it. The results were quite good i.e. the natural grain of the timber still comes through without the timber taking on an orange-y suntanned hue (sometimes seen on American presidents we know well). As this experiment has worked well, the full painting job can be done tomorrow – and the gloss paint when it arrives might just make a good job look even better but we will have to wait and see.
It looks as though the government has bowed to the inevitable and realises that it not possible to get all children back into school before the end of term. There is also talk of trying to get secondary pupils back into school in September, if possible. David Blunkett (ex-Labour education secretary) was suggesting that with a lot of national will (as displayed by building the Nightingale hospitals in exhibition centres) we could get schools working again. His solution was to use a combination of reducing social distancing from 2m to 1m only for school children, using every inch of space e.g. school halls and gyms, using a shift system (e.g. 7-1, 1-6) or similar. You would have to give teachers a great deal of local autonomy for this to work and giving autonomy to teachers to try innovative solutions is the last thing in the government’s mind!
According to Sky News ‘New figures show around half of primary schools in England reopened to more children last week, as the government scrapped plans for all pupils to return before the summer holidays. According to the Department of Education, around 659,000 children attended an education setting last Thursday, 6.9% of all pupils who normally attend.’
Today was an intermediate day, weather-wise – we wondered if we were going to get a smattering of rain and indeed we did get a few drops later in the day. Today was a little unusual in that having collected our newspapers and had our usual supplies in the park, we didn’t encounter any of the ‘usual suspects’ for a chat on the way home. But before I forget, I must mention one of the best ‘mot-justes‘ that I have heard for a long time, and this coming from the lips of Meg. When we were discussing the fate of the statue of Edward Colston, the notorious slave owner which was dragged from its plinth and dumped unceremoniously into the harbour in Bristol recently, Meg made the remark ‘May he rust in peace‘ to which I added (‘or in pieces’) but, in truth, Meg’s comment was far more funny.
Just before lunch, I thought I would give my new fence/handrail its first coat of point – by sod’s law, it started smattering with rain within 10 seconds of my starting but soon stopped. The first coat took about 3/4 hour to complete and I think the results are going to be OK. Certainly, the timber doesn’t ook as untreated and has a more mellow appearance. Meg likes the overall appearance of it but I am not absolutely sure. I think I will reserve judgement until the second coat is applied and then it has had a chance to ‘age’ for a bit. I still have the option of adding a bit of external varnish to it if I think that will improve it overall. The rest of the afternoon was taken up with tidying up various things within the garage, left rather strewn about when I was assembling various woodworking tools to secure the top handrail. I was eager to get finished by 5.00 pm so that I could see what Boris Jonson had to say for himself in the light of the latest revelations. Tomorrow is going to be quite a busy day as I am expecting several deliveries from Amazon and also the delivery of a 2-metre hornbeam tree that has been on order for nearly a month now but ought to be with me by tomorrow. It will come complete with fixing stake and helpful root fungus so I will try and plant it immediately if it is not absolutely pouring down. Late on this evening, I took delivery of the latest Waitrose order which soon got put away. But the joys of internet shopping – I discovered that the two items of ‘Fishy Fish pie’ I had ordered turned out to be two tins of dog food! I shall try one out on Miggles the cat tomorrow and give the other away.
The astounding political news is the revelation that in the opinion of Prof. Neil Ferguson, one of the most influential of the modellers of the pandemic crisis that if the Johnson government had locked down a week or so earlier than one half i.e. 25,000 lives could have been saved. If I were the surviving relative of one these ‘unnecessary’ deaths, I really do not know how I would feel. It is too early to say whether this revelation has fed back properly into public opinion but it seems astounding that the Conservatives are still ahead – just – in the opinion polls. How is that possible, I ask myself, after having been responsible for so many deaths of the population? It now seems likely that as well as the politicians, several critical errors were made by the scientific community. According to the BBC Radio 4 statistics programme ‘More or Less‘ it seems that the modellers did not take fully into account the fact that the infected numbers seemed to be doubling every 2-3 days (not 4-5 as they thought) or take into account that much of the UK infection came from the rest of Europe and not directly from China. Also, it has emerged today that government advisers did not anticipate how high deaths would be in care homes as they were acting on the assumption that the residents would be shielded. Nor did they build into their model that many carehome workers were employed by agencies and would move from care home to care home thereby contributing to the spread of the virus.
Today was a very cloudy and overcast day with the rain constantly threatening – so it was not a surprise that in our daily walk to the park we did not encounter any of our friends. We did pick up the newspapers, though, in what is becoming an established pattern. We were anticipating several deliveries today from quarters and none of them disappointed, The first of use was a very special spade made by Spear and Jackson that goes by the wonderful name of a ‘Tub Draining Tool’ – the ‘Tub’ is short for Tubular and the whole is manufactured of an extremely strong high strength carbon/manganese steel epoxy coated to reduce rust. What is special about these types of spade is that they are specially designed to make short work of digging fencing posts, moving deep-rooted shrubs or breaking up hard and stony soil. Whereas a normal spade is about 8* wide and 11″ long this is narrower (at 6″) but with a blade that is 50% longer (at 16″) Because of the weight and the design, these types of spade quickly cut through tree roots, submerged concrete, rubble and bricks (which we have a-plenty in our garden) The Amazon reviews included several from landscape gardeners who reckoned it was the most useful spade they had ever bought so at £25.00 (delivered) I thought this was quite a bargain and snapped it up. The next delivery along was the hornbeam tree (‘Carpinus Betulus‘) which I bought complete with a planting stake, tree tie and special root fungus. It arrived in superb condition at 2 metres in height in a special cardboard box and I resolved to try and get it planted this afternoon, which I did. However, the weather was exceptionally windy and not the best in which to try to plant a tall tree but planting was the least of my difficulties. I had already half prepared a planting hole but in making this deeper to receive the tree, I encountered a huge stone which must have been about 18″ x. 10″ at exactly the spot in which I had planned to plant the tree (Now you might appreciate why a specialised digging spade comes in useful) Having got this stone extracted successfully, I then proceeded to drive on the support stake only to be met with more resistance (this time, a Victorian brick in exactly the wrong spot) This seems like Sod’s Law x 2 – but all ended well with the tree well and truly planted, watered and in just the right position. It should grow at the rate of 1-2 ft per year which will help to screen us from the neighbour’s garden. Earlier in the afternoon, I had had a pre-arranged telephone consultation with my cancer surgeon, this being two years after my successful operation. He is going to get a blood test organised for me (but I have to go to a local hospital to get the blood sample taken) and a CT scan – all as part of routine monitoring to check all is well. Thank God for the NHS!
There seem to be three big political stories in town tonight. I didn’t see the Downing St. briefing this evening but apparently, Matt Hancock briefed with the news that 70%-80% of people who tested positive for the COVID-19 virus were not displaying any symptoms. If validated, one can only feel uneasy about this. The major story was the first stats from the test-and-trace regime in which one-third of the people referred to the system would not give (for whatever reason) details of their contacts. If you take the view (which I do) that those refusing details of contacts may have something to hide, then this hardly bodes well for a system that is meant to be our salvation out of lockdown. And finally, there is the real cat-fight between Priti Patel (the Home Secretary) and a group of BAME Labour MP’s who have written to her to say that the views she had expressed on racial abuse she had experienced in the past do not qualify her to make pronouncements on the types of abuse suffered by many of the BAME communities over the decades. Of course, Priti Patel is still responsible for clearing up the Windrush scandal but one wonders if she ever will- sometimes there is no love lost between the Asian and other BAME communities who have shared such different life experiences.
Today was a much better day than yesterday although some rain was promised for later on in the day. In the park, we met our good friend, Julie, who we have not seen for several days now so it was particularly good to have a long chat for about half an hour and get up-to-date on each other’s comings and goings. Julie has been busy with her golf, we had been busy with our fence and tree activities. At lunchtime, we treated ourselves to some special smoked haddock fishcakes from Waitrose which were expensive but delicious. I am sure you can make them for yourselves but it’s a bit fiddly unless you make them in quantity (which I might be tempted to do in future). This afternoon, I had set myself the task of applying the second and final coat of light oak paint to the fence-cum-handrail but this time I was a bit better prepared. In my garage tidying up activities, I discovered that we had two decorators masks we had bought some time previously and one of these proved to be excellent. As it happened, the weather conditions proved to be absolutely ideal for the task in hand as it was reasonably warm and sunny but there was quite a strong swirling wind that kept all of the VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) at bay. Then in the late afternoon, we had a heavy but not very prolonged shower, so I was relieved to get my painting done on time. Readers of yesterday’s blog will recall I was waxing lyrical about a particularly specialised spade which I had recently purchased and utilised and it might well be that it makes a good father’s day present for other acquaintances of ours – we shall see.
We are getting into the pattern of ordering our ‘main’ shopping from Waitrose but this has the slight snag that although we have a sort of priority at Waitrose, we are not part of the government-sponsored priority scheme for those who are registered as shielders. Hence our orders are always for about eight days ahead and it is not very easy to work out what you will have run out in 8 + 7 days time. So, I have got into the habit of using Iceland which has a more limited range but with much shorter ‘slot’ times, generally a day or so ahead and a much lower limit to qualify for free home deliveries. So I was pleased to be able to book an Iceland slot for tomorrow night which will help to fill in the gap before my more major order is delivered from Waitrose in just over a week’s time.
It looks as though my Ceanothus (Californian Lilac) I used to obscure the view from my study of a blank brick wall has actually died. At first. I imagined that my neglect of water was to blame – but a few internet searches reveal that they have an average life expectancy of 10-15 years and this one had lived for 12.5 years! Tomorrow, I shall have to engage in the sad task of chopping down a 2-3 metre high tree and disposing of its carcase. It also seems that ceanothus has sold out of every nursery in the country so I may well have to wait for a few months until they are re-stocked again.
The authorities are worried that this weekend we may see demonstrations and counter-demonstrations from the BAME communities and the extreme right. The Home Secretary (Priti Patel) and the Justice Minister are revising plans to have emergency courts and immediate gaol sentences if we get into the situation in which violent clashes occur. There is a lot of pent up aggression on the streets of London and other large cities – and this may just be the start of a violent summer. I hope I am wrong but I have a foreboding that having let the demonstrators have their head last weekend, there will be quite a crackdown this weekend and the situation may rapidly escalate out of control. Let us hope I am completely wrong!
There is a definite feeling of ‘letting go’ evident when we made our walk down to Bromsgrove this morning – in theory, some of the liberalisations of shops are to start on Monday next but, no doubt, some employees may be in shops installing the ‘social distance’ measures (if they have not already done so) in time for Monday morning. Also, today is the day when two single households can form a ‘bubble’ so it should be possible for a grandchild to see one grandparent – but not two grandparents, if I a have interpreted the rules correctly). Again, we did not encounter any of our typical friends this weekend but often people have a very different pattern of interaction on Saturdays so this is not a source of surprise. The numbers of children using scooters seem to be rising exponentially (I suppose it is so much easier in a park rather than on a pavement where I believe it is legal but the person riding the scooter has no rights of way. But try explaining that to a 6-year old!)
After lunch, I had set myself the task of checking my beet seeds for germination and ‘cleaning up’ the vegetable tubs in which they were sown. I should explain that in the area of Mog’s Den adjacent to the path, I imagined this to be an excellent place for some easily accessible vegetable sowings. In practice, though, the tubs had attracted a number of round holly seeds (whether dropped in or blown by the wind I cannot say). So I set myself the task of removing each of these holly seeds by hand and decided that I use a pair of what are called Long-Nosed Pliers ( sometimes, Snipe-Nosed Pliers) and these proved to be excellent at the task – but better than attempting to do it by hand with clumsy fingers and thumbs. I used the same pliers to thin out the germinated seeds to one every quarter of an inch or so but subsequent thinnings become so much easier. [Incidentally, I am never happy with the philosophical underpinnings of thinning out seedlings because you are, in effect, saying ‘You are a little weakling so you will have to be sacrificed to increase the chances of survival of your already much stronger sibling’) I call this the Fascist tendency in gardening and it does run counter to my general world view that it is not morally right to dispose of the weak to assist in the survival of the already strong! But I am pleased to report that my method of scarifying the seeds with sandpaper and then soaking overnight seems to have worked exceedingly well, so I must remember to utilise this technique in my regular fortnightly sowings.
After the Iceland delivery had been made and all the items put away, Meg and I watched an amazing and disturbing documentary broadcast in primetime on BBC2. It was presented by the historian David Olusoga and was entitled ‘The UnWanted: the Secret Windrush files‘ It showed good documentary evidence that successive British Governments had all contributed to the increasingly ‘hostile environment‘ experienced by members of the Windrush generation (the ‘Empire Windrush’ was the steamer that brought the first influx of Jamaican migrants to our shores in 1948). What follows is a review by Amelia Gentleman which is hard to summarise so I reproduce it in full below:
Anyone who thought that the introduction of the hostile environment was one of Theresa May’s few clear, tangible accomplishments will need to reconsider. It turns out that even this unpleasant creation is not something she can claim as her core legacy since it had already been 70 years in the making.
Although the postwar government estimated Britain needed 1.3 million extra workers to help rebuild a country shattered by five years of war, officials turned out to be more welcoming to ex-SS soldiers from Germany than British subjects from the Caribbean. In his powerful film, The Unwanted: the Secret Windrush Files (BBC Two), the historian David Olusoga manages to explain complex immigration law and decode dense documents from the government archives in an arresting way. He pulls out devastating passages from forgotten files to showcase the hostility of successive governments to non-white settlers.
Everything begins with the British Nationality Act of 1948, which confirmed the right of all British subjects to move freely and live anywhere they liked within the newly created Commonwealth. But the act, Olusoga argues, was intended to ensure frictionless travel for the large white populations of Canada and Australia. “No one imagined that black and brown people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies would use their rights under this act to come and settle in Britain.”
Incriminating archival material reveals the scale of official panic about immigration and the underhand measures taken to discourage residents of Britain’s colonies from settling. Crucially, politicians wanted to restrict access without actually appearing to be racist. The film exposes their shameful contortions as they scrabbled around to justify their prejudices.
We learn how ministers in the 1950s commissioned researchers to come up with reasons for concluding that non-white immigration was problematic, with senior civil servants instructing dole officers to conduct secret race surveys to see if there was any truth in the assumption that migrants were coming to live off the welfare state, and asking police chiefs around the country leading questions such as: “Is it true that they are generally idle?”, “Do they have low standards of living?”, and “Are they addicted to drug trafficking and other types of crime?” Winston Churchill was obsessed by the “considerable” number of “coloured workers” employed by the Post Office, and, by 1955, was suggesting to ministers that they should fight the next election on the slogan “Keep England White”.This gradual tightening of immigration legislation exploded in the hands of Theresa May’s government last April, with the Windrush scandal – when thousands of Caribbean-born citizens, legally settled here since childhood, found that they had been silently transformed into illegal immigrants, and threatened with deportation, detained, sacked from their jobs or made homeless.
Olusoga shows how the roots of the scandal lie in a single line from the 1971 Immigration Act, which put the onus on individuals to prove that they are here legally – something so many people were unable to do, with devastating consequences. “Who keeps receipts from the 1970s?” Anthony Bryan asks, explaining how he was detained for five weeks and booked on a flight back to Jamaica. A letter from the Home Office to his lawyer demands more proof: “Your client has stated that he has been resident in the UK since 1965. As such, the evidence submitted must be continuous, and cover the entirety of the 51 years that your client has claimed to reside in the UK.”
The most moving parts of this film are the interviews with three Windrush victims (all of whom helped expose the scandal in the Guardian). “It was a country I was proud of, but now I don’t think I feel proud of it,” Sarah O’Connor says, after being wrongly classified as an illegal immigrant, despite her 51 years in the UK. “At times I got so low I wanted my life to end.” Sarah died before the film was finished. No one could feel proud of Britain after watching it.
A slightly different routine for today. Last week, I noticed that in our usual newsagents the Sunday Times had all sold out by the time we got there, after our trip in the park. So having ascertained that they opened at 7.30 even on a Sunday morning, I decided to make a quick trip to town on my own (which I did) suspecting that many people pop in quite early to get their papers whilst getting back in time to watch the Andrew Marr show at 9.00 (although I am not sure why I bothered) So I spent quite a nice leisurely morning reading the Sunday newspapers. The newspapers were quite full of the riots on Saturday night but I notice that Boris Johnson and Priti Patel said that the demonstrators last week were ‘thugs’ whilst those who were rioting this Saturday were also …’thugs’ as though there was some kind of moral equivalence between the two. The difficulty here is that using the word ‘thug’ in both contexts is almost like saying that there is no real difference between the BAME communities demonstrating last weekend and the extreme right-wing who were certainly rioting this weekend. But there is a massive difference between the two – the BAME demonstrations were large and generally very peaceful with the odd outbreak of violence from some who had hijacked the event. The riots this week were organised by a variety of those on the extreme right who had come ‘tooled up’ i.e. armed and ready for the fight, fuelled by alcohol as well. So we get the bizarre spectacle of a group of proto-fascists, some of whom were displaying a fascist-style salute applauding Winston Churchill who had led the war effort to defeat fascism. Some of the commentaries in the newspapers were saying that the government are ‘losing the plot’ not with respect of keeping order on the streets but also in managing (mismanaging) the coronavirus crisis, not to mention how to manage the lockdown. The number of COVID-19 deaths in the UK – over 41,700 as compared with 22 in New Zealand and zero in Vietnam both of whom displayed swift and decisive action with evidently beneficial results.
This afternoon was the afternoon for the ‘chopping down’ of the dead ceanothus tree. It took about 20 minutes or less to chop down but about an hour and a half to reduce all of the smaller branches into disposable twigs whilst the larger elements of the branches and trunk I have saved and may well be able to utilise these in Mog’s Den as a sort of mini-embankment to help to stop the downward drift of forest bark. I had also ordered for myself from Argos an outdoor garden toolbox but not ticked the right box which meant that I should have made a journey of some 30 miles round trip to another Argos store to collect it. I cancelled the order (successfully and with a refund available quite promptly) and immediately re-ordered it but this time with a small delivery charge (which I worked out I would have paid in petrol anyway) This arrived halfway through the afternoon and I have still to populate it with the requisite tools – a task for tomorrow. I am also busy taking the rust off an old horseshoe which got delivered in a bag of farmyard manure a year or so back. I have tried this renovation trick and it works up to a point – tomorrow, I will finish it off with the ‘half a potato’ treatment which certainly does work (the oxalic acid in the potato loosens the rust, and dipping it in salt gives mild abrasive action as well) I will report on my success or failure tomorrow.
Quite a lot of ‘un-lockdown’ activities start tomorrow morning – I suspect that many people will react as though the ‘un-lockdown’ is complete whilst a few will still be quite nervous in entering into ‘normal’ retail shops again after the best of three months internet shopping.
We had quite a busy morning this morning what with one thing or another. Our local GP practice had called Meg in for a routine blood test but this entailed getting there 10 minutes early, taking along a cardboard box for one’s clothes (which in the event was not needed) and then queuing as only one patient could be allowed into the building at a time. However, whilst all of this was going on, I took the opportunity to pop along to the garage to get one gallon of high-grade petrol which is to be used in the mower for the rest of the season (I always try to get high-quality fuel to try to ensure it is as ethanol free as possible, as ethanol attracts water and can cause great problems in petrol mowers). This having been done, Meg and I then went by car to our local park for our elevenses and bumped into one of our old friends who was busy making a tour of the park with another friend so we didn’t stop for a chat on this occasion. Then, almost on the spur of the moment, we decided as we were in the car to make a flying visit to Asda to see if they still had supplies of forest bark available, As it happened they had and one of the supervisers we know well was organising operations on the outside so I loaded up my trolley with six bags for £20.00 and then got it paid for quite easily using an assistant at one of the automatic check-out desks to handle the transaction for me. Then we loaded up the back seat of the car (forest bark is quite easy to handle) and got it home so we now have copious supplies. We had a salad lunch after which I spent some time getting the supplies of forest bark in various locations throughout the garden (assisted, as usual, by Miggles the cat). I then need to shift a small aucuba shrub some distance from its present location where it was getting in the way of the footpath down into Mog’s Den. Needless to say, in preparing the planting hole for the aucuba I encountered the by now traditional large victorian brick just where I was digging the planting hole. it is no wonder that the London sewers have lasted for about a centry and a half when you consider how dense and well made these victorian bricks were – I suspect they must weight at least 50% more than a modern brick.
I then turned my attention to my horseshoe to see how effective the white vinegar had been in removing the layers of rust. I have to say ‘very effective’ and then I finished off the restoration process with a good old fashioned brillo pad. The result was a gleaming, evidently low carbon mild steel which positively gleamed and took on quite a silvery appearance. I applied a liberal dose of WD40 once it was thoroughly cleaned up to try and keep it pristine. The next problem, so I have discovered, is whether to affix it, as some way, in such a way that the ends point up, so that the horseshoe catches the luck, and that the ends pointing down allow the good luck to be lost; others say they should point down so that the luck is poured upon those entering the home. I think I have decided to play safe and affix it with the ends pointing up to keep our luck!
One of the news stories this evening is the fact that some two million children have done little or no schoolwork at home during the lockdown, according to a report that lays bare the impact of school closures on education. The study by University College London (UCL) found that a fifth of the country’s ten million schoolchildren had done no work at home or less than an hour a day. A separate academic study found that about four million pupils had not been in regular contact with their teachers and that up to six million children had not returned the last assignment they had been set. This means that eventually in the same classroom will be children who have massively behind their contemporaries who do have access to computing facilities (i.e. without having to share with other siblings) and the pedagogic implications of this are truly disturbing.
Here we are in the second half of June and not too far off the longest day – it seems as though this year is really flying by (at least for us, if not for many others). Today was a rather muggy, humid kind of day in which as we walked to the park armed with an umbrella (in case of a sudden torrential downpour) but we had to divest ourselves of our outer clothing as it was so hot and sticky. On the way, we met with a couple of our friends so we felt cheered by this, as always. We were a little late back and subsequently had a rather delayed lunch but no matter. After lunch, I had set myself the task of using some leftover bits of timber from my fence/handrail construction to create some small barriers to help to mitigate the effects of the slope in the wilder parts of Mog’s Den. To do this, I have to utilise my well-established procedure of creating some long ‘pegs’ some 40cm (16″) in length – this generally entails some sawing in half of longer pieces of timber and then putting a pointed end on each. Then the barriers are put into position on the slope and held in place by four pegs (two on each side) hammered into the ground with the aid of my trusty sledgehammer – as you might gather, I have done this lots of time before. I then utilised some of the thicker and straighter portions of a branch and or trunk from the recently cut-down ceanothus tree to reinforce the barrier before putting the icing on the cake (pouring the contents of the sacks of forest bark into the desired location) This last bit is actually the easier bit of the lot and takes no time at all. I am pleased with the overall look as the sections of half-round poles look quite natural in this setting and I am pleased with the overall result (except that the presence of recently added forest bark shows I need to put a few more bags down into the upper reaches) This was all accomplished before we FaceTimed some of our oldest Waitrose friends that we have got into the routine of FaceTiming every Tuesday and Friday. We were aware that a storm and the long-awaited rains were coming and after an intensely black cloud passed overhead, we did actually get some 20 minutes or so of quite intense rain. The next day or so, we should anticipate even more and there is no more ‘smug’ feeling that you can have is to await the rains when you are truly ‘gardened up’.
More on the horseshoe shoe saga – I asked our Irish friend is she could lend me another three horseshoes and a horse to stand in them (she said she would see what she could do) I reproduce below a bit of my Google research which you can either believe or not as the spirit takes you.
The lucky horseshoe is a big part of Irish folklore and history (despite being typically associated with western cowboy culture). The story of Dunstan and the horseshoe varies greatly depending on where you look. But the gist of the story is that in the 10th century, St. Dunstan (a blacksmith at the time) was visited by the devil himself. The hoofed devil asked for a horseshoe for himself. So then, Dunstan nailed a red hot horseshoe tightly on one of his hooves, and the devil howled in pain. The devil begged for Dunstan to remove it. Dunstan agreed under one condition — the devil must respect the horseshoe and never enter any place where one was hung above the door.
Because of this, people believed that the horseshoe could keep evil spirits out of their homes, and thus bring in (or keep in) good fortune.
By the way, I am delighted that a well-paid footballer has not forgotten his roots. Marcus Rashford has almost single-handedly forced the government to change its mind and let children who are entitled to have free school meals to carry on receiving them during August (rather than starving!) So much for a majority of more than 80 MP’s!
Today started off somewhat differently – my son’s car was booked in for a service but this was now handled like a military operation. He had to drop off his car at a very precise time and the attendant paperwork was all handled to observe the social distancing regulations. As it happens, this particular garage was located just around the corner from a huge Morrison’s supermarket so we made an arrangement that I would arrange to pick him up and bring him home whilst the car was being serviced. As it turned out, all of these operations worked like clockwork so Meg and I could then continue with our daily routine of a walk to the local park. On our way ‘down the hill’, we met one of our constant friends who was herself approached by another friend bearing a birthday gift of a card and a bottle of wine. Realising that we had ourselves forgotten about our friend’s birthday, we made an abrupt change of plan and so, having acquired our newspapers from the usual little newsagent, we decided to make a lightning tour inside Waitrose in order to buy two birthday cards (one for yet another friend), a bottle of Cava and a Rhône so that she and her husband can celebrate in style. Whilst chatting about how the weather is likely to pan out over the next few days, we mutually wondered whether we might meet in each other’s gardens when the weather improves and observing whichever rules that happen to be in force (given that they appear to be changing so rapidly!)
Although the morning was relatively fine, we knew from the weather forecast that more rain was on the way. After lunch, I drove my son to collect his just-serviced car and on the way back decided to drop into my local family-run hardware store in Bromsgrove. This store always has a selection of 80cm (31.5″) staves with their points already machined so these are excellent for gardening purposes. They can either be used just as they are to stake up a large plant or bush or sawn in two they provide nice deep pegs as described in yesterday’s blog. However, they first have to be treated to make them less liable to rotting and for this purpose, I have a supply of a creosote substitute (called Creocote – here is the manufacturer’s blurb)- ‘Similar physical/water repellency/application characteristics of traditional creosote but contains no biocide/preserver. A bitumen/wax based treatment that helps to protect exterior rougher cut timber by repelling water and preventing ingress.’ So there you have it. I generally paint all of my timber staves with this product so that I have one readily to hand whenever I need it, as otherwise, an untreated stave would rot off at ground level within a year or so, or perhaps even after one winter.
To replace my ceanothus tree (and so that my study does not look out onto my neighbour’s brick wall, nice though it is) I am thinking of constructing a little platform but it needs to be about a metre in height. I shall probably need to purchase 4 legs (timber which has not been sharpened to a point this time) and I already have a square block of timber some 25″ by 17″ which I had made into a saw table before I had to ‘deconstruct’ it when the new building was undertaken next door and we had to regularise some of the land I had inadvertently utilised (but that is another and longer story which I won’t go into now except we are now absolutely legal with possession ratified by the Land Registry).
Some political news this evening – there is a particular hard-line Republican ‘hawk’ and former national security adviser, John Bolton, who was employed as an adviser to President Trump and who claims in a book tonight that Donald Trump sought Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s help to win the 2020 presidential election. If these claims are verified and not buried, then this could be a game-changer as regards the forcoming Presidential elections in November. Watch this space, as they say!
After the intense rain that we had last night, the day was still blustery and showery. I spent some time amending my Waitrose order which is due to be delivered on Sunday and, in the meantime, we have had a letter from Waitrose informing us that we are on their priority list (which is good to hear) but it might take 10 days for the account details to be updated. Hopefully, I will get into a pattern so when I have one order delivered, then I need to be about two orders ahead to keep everything flowing at approximately weekly intervals. I went for the newspapers on my own today but took the opportunity to have a quick ‘whiz’ round Waitrose where I renewed acquaintances with some of the old regulars in the staff. I needed to buy some chocolates as a birthday ‘prezzie’ for a friend and 1 or 2 other essentials that had been forgotten about in the rush. Then when I got home I had to hunt around for some present wrapping paper (avoiding anything that had Christmas bells all over it, of which I seemed to have an excess!) Then a traditional curry at lunchtime, appropriate when the day is a bit on the cool side.
As the weather had evidently changed, this was a good opportunity to go through a pile of newspapers, seeking out an article I thought I had read days ago. Needless to say, I didn’t find so I resolve that whenever I see anything that is to be kept, I do it that night before the newspaper is jettisoned. Reading my emails this evening was quite interesting in that some businesses are evidently reaching out to try and establish a more normal trading relationship. My yoga class which I was attending more and more sporadically before the lockdown is now turning itself into a little shop and supplies centre and hoping to resume classes of about 4 or so in a week’s time, so I must have a long hard think whether to attend or not (I think I probably need to). Also the National Trust are opening up their gardens (although not the interior of their houses) but are running a series of timed slots for which you have to book in advance so that they know when to expect you and the overall numbers can be socially destined and kept manageable.
I do not normally comment on TV programmes that I have watched but today is an exception. I have just watched the first episode (0f 4) of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and it remains fresh in my memory because I re-read the book quite recently whilst on holiday in Salobreña, Southern Spain (the hotel had a little library of books for the guests and the Hardy was well worth reading) I have to say that the acting and the cinematography are both superb and I was thoroughly absorbed for the hour it was on. A regular treat each Thursday night for the next three weeks.
It is interesting that quite a lot of attention is being paid to the question of how life will be changed once the immediate crisis of the pandemic is passed. One of the most interesting comments I have read suggests “What we have now is an opportunity, and we have two options of what we can do with it: one is to pick up the pieces and try to put them together as they were before. But the other option is to assemble the pieces in a different and smarter way.” This does mirror my own feelings as it almost feels as though we are pressing the ‘reset’ button and starting all over again. I have to say that having got into the habit of online shopping, this is one particular change in my lifestyle which I think will continue. And although we dare not think about it too deeply, it may well be that in a week or so we might be in a position to think about a holiday in Spain to see our dearest Spanish friends (and see how other societies are coping with the crisis as well)
This morning we had rather a delayed daily routine. Reading my emails, the National Trust (of which we are members) have circulated us to inform us that their properties were now ‘semi-open’ i.e. although the historical houses still remain closed, the gardens are open as it so easy to ‘socially distance’ whilst walking around them. To facilitate this, you have to have a timed slot which must be booked in advance on the web. So I took a chance to see whether Coughton Court (which we have visited before) in Warwickshire was open. As it happened, we managed to get a timed slot in the afternoon of next Wednesday. Although some of the facilities are closed including the coffee shop/tea-rooms, a refreshment bar will be open as well as the rest of the grounds. So Meg and I are booked in which, naturally, will be our first ‘proper’ venture out of the house for nearly three months. Needless to say, we are looking forward to this and it will be interesting to see whether with timed entry and social distancing the whole experience might be even more enjoyable than in more normal times. Also, by next Wednesday, the weather should have improved considerably and we can stay until closing time, although I am sure a couple of hours will be enough. As National Trust members entrance is free in any case. I am hoping that they may have some interesting plants and shrubs for sale as National Trust properties (with a dedicated staff of gardeners) often run this as a sideline (but as the shop is closed, perhaps this facility will be unavailable as well) After I had made this booking, I decided to see what Waitrose had on offer and managed to get a slot for a week on Friday which I then populated from my ‘favourites’ selection – if I think of anything that we need before then, I can always amend the order which is quite an easy thing to do.
The coronavirus news today was interesting and quite encouraging. Firstly. the threat level has been dropped from 4 to 3 (or orange to yellow on a scale that from red to green) Of more use is the fact that the government is now able to publish the rate at which the infection is falling day by day and this seems to be in the range of 2%-4%. The latest indications are also that pubs and restaurants – as well as hairdressers and beauty parlours – are hoping to be given the green light to reopen on 4 July. Finally, there are broad hints given by Boris Johnson that he hopes that ‘all’ children will be back at school by September. I read an article in ‘The Times‘ which mirrors my own thoughts i.e. with a combination of social distancing reduced for children only from 2m to 1m, a morning and an afternoon shift and perhaps utilising some non-classroom space, that it might be quite possible to establish new routines that will help to provide a classroom experience for most pupils. A lot will depend on the extent to which schools have a degree of autonomy to work out the policies that will best fit that particular school.
We FaceTimed our friends this Friday, as we always due nowadays on Tuesdays and Fridays. We are assuming that their own more severe form of lockdown might be terminated by the end of July (if not before) so we have been excitedly thinking about the prospects of visiting a National Trust property (probably Coughton Court again) and also making a trip to Bletchley Park which they really enjoyed but we haven’t had the opportunity to visit yet. And, of course, in about a fortnight, it might be more clear whether ‘air bridges’ will have been established with several European countries including Spain so that we can start to think again about making a booking for late September (to see our friends in La Coruña)
Well, there was certainly a pronounced ‘end-of-lockdown’ feeling in the air this morning as we made our normal trip to the park. It seemed to be teeming with children on their scooters (and why not?) but much busier than even a normal Saturday of late. We chatted with two lots of friends on the way down this morning and we were speculating how long it would be before the churches were open again. Apparently, our local parish priest is making the best of a bad job and is getting the church decorated whilst there is no congregation (but apparently, this has its difficulties in a listed building) This puts me in mind of a postcard which an artist friend of mine once showed me (or even described to me – I cannot now remember which) It showed Michaelangelo putting the finishing touches to his masterpiece on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel whilst the then Pope was remarking to him ‘You really shouldn’t have bothered – all I wanted was a blue sky and a few stars!’ However, this story is quite interesting because when I did a quick Google search I discovered that ‘when Michelangelo began to work on the frescoes for Pope Julius II in 1508, he was replacing a blue ceiling dotted with stars.’ I suppose that the cartoonist who had drawn the joke postcard realised that – but who knows! The morning actually turned out to be quite showery and we did get caught in a light shower on the way home – fortunately, it was of the ‘April’ variety which was quite light and transient rather than the ‘June downburst’ variety. After lunch, I made to my way to my favourite hardware store to buy some pieces of timber so that I can start to construct my little framework to raise up my flower pots to a level where I can appreciate their effect when I look out of my study window. I can see that quite a lot of creosoting needs to take place but I will wait a few days until the weather warms up again which I believe it will in the next day or so.
It is now almost a foregone conclusion that the government will shortly reduce the 2-metres social distancing rule down to 1 metre. I must feel, I have a degree of ambivalence about this. One the one hand, having come this far, why put everything at risk for the sake of, let us say, another month? Of course, there is the argument that backbench MP’s have been pressing pon the government that for many businesses particularly in the hospitality area, the difference between 2 metres and 1 metre is absolutely critical as businesses will never be profitable if a 2-metre rule is maintained but they might just about be viable if the distance is reduced to one metre. This argument I understand but it appears to be made for absolutely economic reasons with no real concern about the health of the population or the possibility of a second wave of the virus (actually the ‘R’ rate in Germany has just risen to 1.7 which is truly frightening and shows what too early a lockdown may lead to) On the other hand, the Office of National Statistics has published some projections that argues that if we have a recession followed by no recovery for a year or so (the so-called ‘L’ shaped recession) there may well be en excess of 12,000 deaths a year which are recession-induced. This figure is about 20% of the present 60,000 odd deaths attributable to the virus and five years of this would mean that as many die in the recession-induced by the lockdown as are killed by the actual virus itself. So what to do for the best – I suppose, no one really knows!
It is amazing to think that today (or perhaps yesterday!) was the year’s longest day and that we now start the long slow countdown to winter as the days shorten little by little. This year seems to have absolutely flown by for us but I am sure that for others the enforced lockdown must have seemed indeterminable. I decided that I would repeat the pattern that I set myself last week not to have a lie-in as one might be tempted to do on a Sunday but to get up and go and collect my copy of the Sunday newspapers before breakfast and the Andrew Marr show. It was the most delightful morning to do this as the sky was blue, the temperature was pleasantly cool at that hour of the morning and the world seemed to be populated only by joggers. Also, as I was on my own, I re-established the pattern that I used to employ when I made these walks as a solo trip each morning. I have an exceedingly old iPhone (iPhone 4, introduced in 2010) which I now use only as a music player. The quality of the reproduction is superb still (for my ears) and somehow in the past, I managed to download over 200 tracks onto it (mainly of Bach and Mozart). I have it on ‘airplane’ mode to conserve the battery life and I find it an incredibly useful bit of kit which is compact and more useful to me like this than the few pounds I could get for it if I ever tried to sell it (a quick Google search shows it might be worth £30.00 but I did find one website that would offer me 50p for it!) Meg and I were intrigued when we got into a conversation in the park today with a young couple with a dog and we wondered what was their breed of dog (sort of pointer looking but very smooth haired). Apparently, it was a German breed called a Weimaraner and another quick Google search shows that they cost around £1500! I must say we had never seen a dog quite like it but we do see quite an assortment of dogs of every shape and size (but the Jack Russell seems to be one of the most popular dogs here in Bromsgrove)
After lunch, I needed to help my daughter-in-law to plant out some sunflowers. Actually. my part in all of this was only to bore some drain holes in the bottom of two rectangular plant pots we had bought in readiness and haul some bags of compost and topsoil over. Then I proceeded to do my ‘weekly’ grass cutting although this had been a bit delayed because of the recent rains. A few days earlier, I had lovingly restored an old horseshoe to a beautiful old silver colour which, on the spur of the moment, I gave away to a good friend on the occasion of her 50th birthday and which is now occupying pride of place in the log cabin she uses as a sort of studio/escape den. I thought I would go onto eBay again and I have just purchased five more used horseshoes (all the way from Yorkshire!) for little more than the cost of the postage. I am going to restore these using my well-established techniques (immersion in white vinegar for a day, scrubbing with a wire brush and then a final finishing off with a Brillo pad and some Duraglit. I have two horseshoes in soak at the moment and I gave them a preliminary look to see if the vinegar had worked its magic (it had!) If the weather is fine tomorrow, I will complete the restoration task and then proceed with the following three (which I am minded to restore and then give away to friends)
The coronavirus news from Germany tonight is very disturbing. They calculate their ‘R’ rate as 2.88 (i.e. each infected person infects nearly three more). In an abattoir, they tested 1000 workers and two-thirds of them tested positive. This must be a warning as to what might happen if you relax a lockdown too soon!
We always suspected that today was going to be quite a busy day and so it proved. We knew that there were several things we needed to do on the High Street today so after collecting our newspapers, we started out on our various ventures. We succeeded in our first foray into a Health and Beauty type shop where we bought some lipstick for Meg. Then our next trip was to the opticians to get Meg’s glasses adjusted but they turned out to be closed (until tomorrow) My venture to buy printer paper was similarly abortive as Staples seem to be shut indefinitely so I have had to resort to ordering some online – at a rather premium price. We also made a trip to the bank to pay in a cheque and this was rather like entering a spaceship but at least the personnel were welcoming and the transaction proved quick and easy. Finally, I couldn’t resist a quick dash into my local Poundland and bought a few garden requisites for a fiver so all I had to do was to feed my money into a machine. So it was a mixed day. On the way home, we met some of our regular friends who we have not met for several days – we started off by chatting about some red campion which I think I have identified growing just inside a side gate into the park. We chatted for about half an hour as we seem to have a lot of mutual news to catch up on (and were passed by our near neighbour as well) so we were well and truly delayed, not getting our lunch until way past 2.0pm instead of our usual 1.30 Nonetheless, we were delighted to catch up with old friends and we hope we can visit each other’s gardens as soon as we both have the time and the weather is set fair. In the afternoon, I had set myself a creosoting job of several staves which involved getting my gardening trousers, a painting shirt and a mask so it was a little fiddly but I got everything I wanted to do. I finished off the afternoon by giving two of my horseshoes a final scrub in white vinegar but it is only when I get the brillo pads and the Duraglit on them tomorrow that I will know whether I can achieve the glowing results that I did last week.
Tomorrow is the big day when it has been widely trailed that the lockdown will start to end. It looks fairly likely that the 2-metre rule will be reduced to 1-metre by 4th July which is still twelve days away. I have rather a foreboding that after tomorrow, people will not wait and will act as though the lockdown has already completely ended. Also, whilst people make an effort (excellent in some cases, minimal in others0 to avoid each other when the distance is two metres), I fear that a one-metre rule will make people behave as though everything is normal and will make no efforts to avoid each other. When Meg and I entered the various shops today, we ensured that we were wearing our masks and will continue to do so every time we enter a shop or a confined space from now on. But on a more positive note, our chiropodist has now texted us to say that she has received government advice that she can visit us as she will be equipped with full PPE. We will accept but ask to be treated outside if the weather is fine which I think it will be for the day or so. What is perhaps not fully appreciated is the issue of time – if you pass someone in the street even at a distance of 1 metre then the chances of exposure to the virus are pretty small but increase rapidly if you were to stand still and have a conversation for 10 minutes or so…
I think that today marks the three-month point since the nation went into lockdown. In any case, the expected major liberalisation was announced today and will probably get analysed to death – of course, these new arrangements are meant to start on 4th July ( a Saturday) but my hunch would be that many people will start to use the 1-metre rule from tomorrow onwards instead of 12 days time. One wonders about all of the signage in shops – will there will be a lot of felt-tip pens and Tippex in evidence as 2-metres of reduced to 1=metre plus (whatever the plus is meant to be). And, I suppose, you can keep the 2-metre markers and just add intermediate markers as from 4th July. We have now arranged a visit from our chiropodist who will be arriving o m Friday in full PPE (but if the weather is fine we will probably go outside). We have also made contact with our hairdresser who is considering how she is going to cope with a tsunami of her regular clients – still, it’s nice to be back into the system.
The major event for me today has been the construction of my 4ft high plant shelf to grace the outside of my study window. This involved various stages – first, the upper legs had to be braced and then affixed using some angle bracket. Then the lower legs had to be attached using steel plates of each side. To make the whole structure more stable, various cross-bracings had to be deployed so a certain amount of sawing was involved. The screwing process was quite involved – I have. a little Bosch handhand electric screwdriver which is excellent for its size. Nonetheless, for every screw hole that I made I first used a small bradawl, then a larger one, finally a hand-drill unto my drill bit broke at the last moment, then a fine guide screw and then the final screw adjudged appropriate for that particular fixing point. I always tighten up by hand, as well, using a rubberised glove that is nice and grippy – I reckon to have done this for above 80+ screws in total. This took me all afternoon but I had a break to FaceTime our friends which is part of our Tuesday pattern, then a quick spot of tea and then a final screwing together and tidying up that took me until about 8.30 in the evening. My hands are pretty sore but I am quite pleased with the overall result. I just need to put a bit of Creocote on some of the sawn timbers and do a bit of refinement and tidying before I move it into position probably on Thursday (as we are going out tomorrow). I am not a natural ‘do-it-yourselfer’ and therefore I am pleased when the whole job doesn’t look incredibly bodged up (whether the rest of my critical family agree is another matter) and I know I haven’t had to make too many compromises en route (there are always some problems that one has to work around). Looking in the garage, I find I have some Poundland adhesive vinyl squares in a subtle woodland effect (Poundland doesn’t often have the word ‘subtle‘ applied to it) so this will help to put the finishing touches to it. I just have to wait for my (Amazon-ordered) Lavatera to arrive and hope it is not too small and weedy – the problem with buying plants over the internet.
Finally, I read in tonight’s news that Americans are likely to be banned as and when the Europeans open their borders as the rates of coronavirus are disturbingly high in the USA. I wonder how ( or whether) this will actually get reported in the USA. Will Donald Trump tweet about it (I doubt it!)
We always thought that today was going to be quite a busy day and so it proved. After we had bought our newspapers, we popped into Waitrose knowing that we were going out on a trip this afternoon and so we bought ourselves some Waitrose sandwiches not knowing what the restricted catering facilities would be like at the other end. Whilst there, we were greeted like long lost souls (which I suppose we were) and got some of the tales from some of the familiar staff. One who we know particularly well had caught the virus and so had her husband who was particularly ill but he just managed to pull round before a spell in hospital was called for. Waitrose always had a good display of plants outside and we were tempted to but an Alstroemeria which is a South American tuberiferous plant also known as the Peruvian lily that produces a proliferation of flowers that cut well and display right throughout the summer until the early frosts, so we had to have one. We were also tempted into buying a rhododendron plant which is just on the point of bursting into a proliferation of blooms so the two of them should sit particularly well on the tall plant stand I have just constructed. But to show you cannot win them all, my lavatera arrived by post this morning and although I was not expecting much, I did anticipate getting a plant that was only about 5″ in height. We had an early light lunch consisting of a good soup and set off with our provisions for Coughton Court. We had not realised it was quite so close as it is only about 18 miles down the road and we had allowed ourselves some ‘getting lost’ time so we set off an hour early. On the gate, they did not seem to mind that we had arrived half an hour before our allocated ‘slot’ time but as they due to shut at 5.00 we enjoyed the extra half-an-hour. The gardens proved to be as delightful as we remembered them from the time of our last visit which must have been over a decade ago. We treated ourselves to a super ice-cream and then, like other families, enjoyed an impromptu picnic beside a large mowed area set aside of picnics although most of us were seeking the shade of the trees. We then had a stroll alongside the lakeside area and were impressed by the ways in which those responsible for the upkeep of the grounds had various information points which were painted onto the flat ring of a tree (when a large fallen tree had evidently been cut into rings, like slicing an enormous carrot) Also, they used naturally curved branches to form bedding boundaries – it is always useful to see how good gardeners make use of whatever natural materials they had to hand, Then we made our way home on what has the been the hottest day of the year so far (although tomorrow may be even hotter and then we may have thunderstorms on Friday).
Politically, it looks as though the Environment and Community minister, Robert Jenrick, is heading for a fall. It is a typical Tory corruption scandal in which the advice of the planning inspector was overridden and the planning application was rushed through in such a way that the developer (who had made hefty donations to the Conservative party) made millions of pounds. The whole thing looks like a classic ‘cash for favours’ row. It also looks as though the medical profession is united in suspecting that there is a very real risk that with the amount of virus still around in the community there may be a second wave (worst than the first) which will hit the country in the middle of next winter coinciding with the normal ‘flu’ epidemics. We have been warned!
Today has been the hottest day of the year so far and may well turn out to be the hottest day of the year. It really is pretty humid and I, for one, cannot wait for a tremendous downpour which I hope will turn up tomorrow. At least, I am hoping that is the case because I have been working on my latest project with the aim of having it completely finished by tonight before the rains come tomorrow. It looks as though the UK as a whole has been hotter than Ibeza in Spain today with the temperature at Heathrow recorded as 33.3ºC which is 92º degrees F. As we walked down to the park this morning, there was quite a strong breeze blowing and this persisted even as far as the journey back. Then we made a salad lunch and prepared for the afternoon’s activities. I was putting the finishing touches to my home-made plantholder which is now completely finished as I needed to put some vinyl squares onto the top surface, even up one of the legs which had somehow finished up being shorter than the rest, applying some wide black vinyl tape to the edges, affixing some guards to the top so that plant pots don’t slip off and finally finishing off with a creosoting of all of the areas of uncut timber that evidently needed waterproofing before it is brought into use. For those whose life would be incomplete without seeing the results of all of this, then you pick a photo or even a video from the last two items in the directory listing which is available at: plantholder
Tomorrow is going to be quite a busy day for us. We are expecting a Waitrose delivery in the morning and our domestic help will be arriving to help to turn the house around. Then in the early afternoon, our chiropodist is going to call to have out feet checked over and then we have a FaceTime with our friends at 5.0 in the afternoon which is part of our Friday routine. Earlier in the day, one of our friends in Oxfordshire has invited us over for lunch together with some other friends the week after next, so there is a feeling of life returning ever so slightly to normal. And as it is Thursday, we have also had our weekly fix of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (full of dramatic tension in this episode!)
There seem to be two big political stories that have broken today. The first is the situation arising in South Brixton (massive illegal street parties with 20 police officers injured) and Bournemouth (people flocking to the beach on the hottest day of the year in clear defiance of the current 2-metre social distancing rules) One does get the feeling that many in the population, and particularly the young, have almost decided that the lockdown has ‘ended’ and do not really care much about the consequences (they won’t die, only the ‘oldies’ and we don’t care about them anyway) One does not have to subscribe to a kneejerk reaction to this news and feel that the moral fibre of the nation is somehow lessening but there must be a legitimate worry that as a nation we are storing up trouble for ourselves. I am sure that in private, the scientists advising the government must have the feeling that current developments are increasing the elements of risk of a second coronavirus spike occurring. The other major development is Keir Starmer’s sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey after her endorsement of what may well have been an anti-semitic tweet. When he woke up this morning he could hardly have dreamt that such a gift-wrapped opportunity would come his way – at one stroke, he could lessen the influence of the Corbynite left, he could help to appease the Jewish community and he could demonstrate that as a political leader he could act really decisively (compared with Boris who has failed to act with any degree of decisiveness over the Dominic Cummings affair as well as the latest Jenrick scandal)
Today was the day when I thought that the long-awaited and anticipated thunderstorms would roll across the country – however, it was not to be and we just had a few spatters of rain at about 10.00 followed by another hot, humid and sticky sort of day. We received our Waitrose order early in the morning and I must say that I rather like some aspects of their policy – for example, if vegetables are a bit near the end of their shelf life they supply them at no charge. Also, if they run out of something that is a small size they give you the large size for the same price (in our case, ice cream which is always welcome these days). On our way home from the home, we had a good gardening natter with two of our acquaintances who live down the hill. One is a Welshman who can talk for Wales and who very kindly gave me a supply of the tiles that used to face the front of his house (a very popular design in the mid to late 1960s but has subsequently gone out of fashion) This meant we had to have rather a lightning lunch before our chiropodist came and was able to resume normal services. Although she came with full PPE, we had our feet done outside which is nice and safe for all of us and exchanged news and gossip about our two families. I told her that one of the very few regrets that I had in life was if I had stayed on at the school I attended in Lancashire from 1956-1959, I would have received coaching from a young West Indian cricketer who was coming over to play (as many did) in one of the Lancashire leagues. His name was ..Gary Sobers! However, our chiropodist rather ‘shot my fox’ by saying ‘Oh yes, I know Gary Sobers well – he used to be my father’s next-door neighbour!‘ So who would have thought that?
Last night was very hot and sticky and I woke up just 5 am and sunrise was only ten minutes before. I then espied our adopted cat, Miggles, on her way up from Mog’s Den shortly followed by her enamorado (Spanish: literally ‘loved one‘) who I have christened Black Peter. When I gave the cat her breakfast (well, she was hanging around waiting for it) she seemed ravenously hungry so I supposed that is what a night on the tryst does for you. I questioned her closely on her nocturnal activities but only got a one-word reply (typical teenager) i.e. ‘Meow‘
This afternoon, I needed to repot some of the plants with which I was going to populate my new plant holder. (Incidentally, when I woke at 5.0am I realised that my new creation needed a drain hole as otherwise, it would flood so I rapidly make a hole in the centre lined with a rawlplug so it should function as a drain in the case of a downpour). I found that I had four plants that needed bigger pots, two of them being homegrown from own cuttings. One was a forsythia which is now about 1ft tall so I am encouraging it to grow tall by encasing it in four little bamboo canes plus encircling string. The other is a viburnum although it often flowers only in the early spring. The other two plants I have bought from outside our local Waitrose – an alstroemeria (although not in flower yet) and an absolutely superb hydrangea – but unfortunately I’m not actually sure what variety it is. So now, I have my little display complete so I had better talk to them nicely, water them regularly and feed them occasionally.
The coronavirus news is not at all encouraging. In the UK, the daily death total rose to 186 (up by a fifth from the day before) whilst in the USA, 37,000 new cases have been reported in the last day. In the USA, several states are attempting to end a lockdown whilst the infection rate is increasing – baffling, or a triumph of ideology over common sense.
Today was meant to be the day when showers swept up the country – we did have three or four transient showers but not the good old-fashioned downpour I had been expecting (and hoping for). Meg and I managed to get our walk to the park without getting rained on either the journey or the way back and we managed a chat without an Italian friend as well. I forgot to mention in last night’s blog that the government has asked me to participate in an antibody trial targeted at a national UK sample. The website was easy to navigate and just took a few confirmatory questions and I expect that I will be sent a full testing kit in a few day’s time. It probably entails a small finger-jab blood sample and then we will have to wait and see what happens. I am (mildly) interested in the results.
This afternoon, I set myself the task of getting a few plants repotted but never quite round to it. The first thing I did was to use a metal tent peg as a type of ‘fastener’ and then applied that to my new plant holder so that tempestuous winds do not send it flying. I then applied a couple of small wood ‘chips’ to the front feet to give it a slight backward tilt and thereby make the whole caboodle somewhat more stable. (Incidentally, since time immemorial I have applied this tip to any freestanding bookcases that I have to enhance their stability – it is not at all funny to realise how unstable an open-ended bookcase can be without some type of offset – I generally deploy small pieces of tile) Finally, to get ready for repotting some of my smaller plants I had to wash and scrub out some old ones that I had lying around but need to be cleaned so that things like slug eggs, ant eggs, plant viruses and the like do not infect the new plants. I really do not like this task at all but my task was made considerably easier by a spare bottle of bleach in a spray carton that I happened to have and which meaks the whole job more tolerable.
And now – here is a question for the really. really nerdy i.e. do long screwdrivers give you more torque (turning power) than shorter handled ones. My reason for asking the question is that, quite impressionistically, I often have the feeling that a longer screwdriver gives that extra bit of ‘oomph’ when tightening a screw to the ultimate and therefore I treated myself to a 14-incher which seemed to be of good quality and reasonably priced. If you look on the web, you find an amazing variety of answers. On the one hand, you get some experienced joiners who will say ‘Yes‘, as for whatever reason they always get extra turning power out of long-handled screwdrivers. On the other hand, there is a mass of mathematical data that shows that the length of a screwdriver can have no relationship to the torque that it applies. The answer may lie in between the classical mechanics and mathematics of turning forces on the one hand and the actual alignment of wrists, arms and shoulders when using a long-handled driver. I shall go out and experiment tomorrow. I did say that this section is for the really, really nerdy – but what is interesting is that people’s real-world experiences seem to be at odds with what the mathematics says.
The Jenrick affair rumbles on, as the Sunday Times leads with the story that civil servants pleaded with the minister not to allow the development but it was pushed through a day or so before the developer would have been liable (under Tory legislation) to £45 million to one of the poorest local authorities in the country. The ministerial code states clearly that there should not be the appearance of a conflict of interests and the appearance is only too self-evident in this case. But the only person who can police the ministerial code is Johnson himself and the ‘word on the street’ seems to be that if Cummings survives, Jenrick should so as well. However, there is a real stench of corruption in this case – but most people are preoccupied with the pandemic crisis in any case.
As is often the case, we start off a conversation with a dog owner in the park when the dog comes bounding towards us attempting to be friendly and so it proved today. The conversation progressed beyond dogs to what was happening in the world of work and it is always fascinating to find out what others people’s preoccupations and concerns turn out to be. Such was the case today where we spent a very enjoyable 20 minutes with a lady who was exercising her dog, discussing a wide range of issues. On our way back up the hill, we encountered two of our sets of friends (who are both near neighbours to each other so not surprising, really) We were shocked to discover that one of our friends had had an accident in her car and had had a collision with an 86 old gentleman. We were even more amazed to discover that our friend’s car was practically a write-off whilst the old gentleman was completely unscathed. I expressed my amazement that this could happen – but only then did it emerge that the elderly gentleman was himself in a car and he immediately accepted liability (and so did his insurance company) for all that had happened.
The afternoon was quite blustery with several showers which was quite frustrating for us as there were several things that we wanted to do. I did succeed in eventually repotting my lavatera and weigela (bought) plants recently, although the latter is such a weedy little specimen I am resolved not to buy plants over the internet again as you cannot see what you are getting! I did, though, on my way down to collect my Sunday newspapers take several little cuttings as May-June is the best time to propagate these and June is nearly up. I’m not sure what I have got but I think I have managed to purloin a weigela, perhaps a skimmia, certainly a laurel and have collected the seeds of both a sycamore and a laburnum which I am going to try and raise from seed (without too many hopes of success). In the late afternoon, I finally got round to rescuing two horseshoes which I had got de-rusting using white vinegar (for the acetic acid) It could well be that Coke (phosphoric acid) will give you the same effect but I haven’t got round to trying that yet- if it de-rusts metal, imagine what it might do to one’s guts! I also managed to get my daughter-in-law’s old exercise trampoline into the back of the car which gives me a good excuse to go to the garden centre just around the corner from the municipal tip so I can cast an eye on what shrubs (or even small trees) they may have on offer, as well as buying perhaps a bag of grit (to help to top out some of my plant pots).
There are two political developments tonight which seem disturbing. The first is the situation in Leicester which is incredibly near the point of a total lockdown due to a resurgence of the COVID-19 virus. There now seems to be 80 new cases a day and it is fair to say that the city is on a ‘knife-edge’ – however, if the city does go into lockdown it may be the first of similar cities. The virus seems to be concentrated in the poorest parts of the city where population densities are highest and perhaps the general health of the population is already poor. The Metro (free newspaper) is also reporting tonight that the UK may be on the cusp of a second wave – as many of the unlock down measures will take place in a week’s time, then the next week or so may prove critical in the UK’s experience of COVID-19.
The other political story is the fact that Dominic Cummings appears to have had his way and the head of the civil service has been forced out (to be replaced by a Brexiter?) When the Cabinet is populated only by those people who agree with Boris Johnson, it appears that any source of opposition to the present government is immediately quelled. One only has to look at the scientists who appeared in the daily briefing who were all dropped, one by one, the minute they did not give 100% endorsement to the government position. So it seems that we are living in profoundly authoritarian times which, in the long run, makes neither for a properly functioning democracy or, indeed, for effective government. It is interesting also to see that the committee which can release the report into Russia’s meddling in the UK’s electoral process has not been constituted (delayed by No. 10 Downing Street) as the report if it ever sees the light of day is bound to be damning!
Today was one of those indeterminate types of day when the weather cannot make up its mind whether to rain, be cloudy or what have you. It was very windy, though, which means that hats have to be constantly held onto for fear of losing them to oncoming traffic. As you might expect, our local park was bereft of children propelling themselves along on a variety of scooters which we have come to expect in the fine weather and so we were able to claim our usual park bench without too much difficulty. Some of my more distant friends have wondered why I natter on so much about our local park and to be honest, whilst I used to walk past it every day when I used to make a regular trip to our local Waitrose to buy my daily newspapers and claim my free cup of coffee (in the days before lockdown), I didn’t fully appreciate its qualities, My only wish is that the local authority would engage upon a venture to label each tree (or provide a list of what the trees are given that they are all numbered) so that we can all be educated about what we can see in front of us. Here is a URL for a video which was taken in the park some years back but it provides a good overall impression: Sanders Park, Bromsgrove
We had decided that we would make a trip out this afternoon to our local municipal tip (which is about 5-6 miles away in the depths of the Worcestershire countryside) to dispose of my daughter-in-law’s old trampoline exerciser. However, we were completely thwarted – I suppose in retrospect, Monday afternoon was not a good time. As we approached the tip, there was a queue of about 20 cars and they all appeared to be stationary so I suppose they were limiting the numbers and there was a great surplus of people wanting to dispose of their junk so we turned the car around and said that we would have to think about it another day (a nuisance when you have the car full of junk) We did, though, go round a local garden centre and bought a Weigela of a decent size (and with blood-red flowers eventually) but it was a wet, cold and windy experience and not the kind of day for browsing so we were glad to complete our purchase as soon as possible and not linger but get home to a good cup of tea!
It has now been announced that Leicester is the first city to be ‘locked down’ i.e. the existing restrictions will stay in place for another two weeks. I am sure this will come as a major psychological shock to the residents of Leicester who may well be asking ‘Why us?’ and it appears that even some of the limited openings of local shops may now have to be put into reverse. The question remains, of course, how many cities and communities there are like Leicester which may also be ‘on the brink’ and I would imagine that, in private, the government are very worried about the situation. Of course, if we had a ‘proper’ test-and-trace service in operation, then this might give us some good, accurate local data to pinpoint local sources of infection. Tonight’s Panorama programme on ‘test-and-trace’ (which some call the Serco ‘test-and-trace’ rather than the NHS ‘test-and-trace’ has uncovered some really shocking evidence how terrible the privatised, cobbled together Serco ‘test-and-trace’ really is. The government subcontracted the service out and 25,000 call handlers were recruited who had only contacted 15,812 people (an average of about one contact for every two call handlers. In the meanwhile, the much more professional 870 public health officials had handled over 98,000 cases (more than 100 each) This made each public health official about 200 times more effective than their private-sector counterpart. But the ideology of the present government is convinced if that it is provided by the private sector it must be good but if provided by the public sector it must be poor. But the discrepancy is absolutely horrific and just shows that the what happens when you hand essential public sector work over to an army of untrained, call-centre workers many of whom were paid taxpayer’s money to not contact a single case! Shocking, almost beyond words!
I made my own way down for the newspapers this morning realising at the commencement of my journey I had forgotten to put my incredibly ancient iPhone 4 (10 years old?) which I use solely as a music player to recharge so I had to make do with my own company. The weather was still changeable this morning but it was not the kind of day when you could really look forward to doing any outside jobs so I resolved to do some tidying up within my study. Some of this time was devoted to unjamming a jammed up printer (which does happen occasionally) but as I am now on a paper economy drive I take once used paper and put it the ‘wrong’ way through the printer so that its gets printed upon the blank side.
On the spur of the moment, I decided to buy myself a Bahco ratchet screwdriver as it seemed to get rave reviews – although originally manufactured in Sweden it is is probably now made in Taiwan. Eager to try it out, I did a little bit of research on the web to discover some practical woodworking advice (of which there is plenty) I now know that for a Reisser 5.0 screw (of which I have a box) I need a pilot hole of 3.5 mm (i.e. the width of the shank of the screw, excluding the actual screw ‘ridges’ and a PoziDriv bit number PZ2) Going to my new plant holder stand, I drilled a pilot hole by hand using my newly Bahco and with exactly the correct width of drill for the pilot hole. Then exchanging the chuck containing the drill with the correct screwdriver head (a PoziDriv PZ2) I then screwed in the Reisser screw so I had taken care to ensure that I had carefully matched the pilot hole drill size, the screw size itself and the screwdriver bit size and I have to say that inserting the screw like this (i.e. the correct way!) was like inserting a hot knife through butter i.e. incredibly easy. So although I had done everything by hand, using the correct materials and dimensions made life easier than if I had used a cordless screwdriver! And I haven’t even mentioned further refinements such as drilling a clearance hole slightly wider than the shaft of the screw only for the ‘top’ piece of wood – or using a lubricant such as bar soap, candle wax, petroleum jelly or a dry spray lubricant. If I had been taught woodwork at school, then this might have been instilled into me – but now I know better, I am resolved to do things the correct way from now on. And to think that I always imagined that screwing two pieces of wo0d together was child’s play and took no intelligence or prior knowledge to sort out.
I see that ‘The Guardian’ newspaper is tonight saying that following the instance of Leicester, more local lockdowns may be on the way. As to why Leicester should be the source of a spike in cases, I quote from an analysis in The Guardian:
I do get the terrible foreboding that the end of the lockdown may have come two weeks too early and that the health of the nation is being sacrificed on the altar of commercial interests. The Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish seem to be handling the whole thing so much more sensibly. In the USA at the moment, new infections are running at the rate of 40,000 per day and there is an informed prediction that this could well rise to 1000,000 per day. The only silver lining to this particular dark cloud is that the response of the USA to the pandemic crisis may well be putting paid to Donald Trump’s chances of re-election in November! We shall have to wait and see.
Today we were fortunate again to meet with one of our closest friends on the way up from the park. We talked over the latest political situation (as we often do) and reinforced each other in the view that the lockdown may be coming two weeks too early and that apart from Leicester, there may well be other communities in the North and the Midlands with a socioeconomic profile not too dissimilar to that of Leicester where subsequent spikes of infection may still occur. After lunch, I was just getting psychologically prepared to give the lawns their 7-10 day mowing when the heavens opened – not for long, but just long enough to write off any thought of grass-cutting whilst the ground was damp. So I turned my mind to other things such as revising my Waitrose order that is due to arrive first thing on Friday morning. Halfway through the afternoon, I received a delivery from Amazon but it was not what I was expecting. Several days ago, I had espied on ebay a traditional hat-and-coat stand of the traditional bentwood variety that I had been looking out for some time and so I ordered it at what I thought was a reasonable price. I wasn’t sure what kind of packaging it would arrive in but what did arrive was a flat box with a self-assembly kit inside. This is not what I was expecting so I went back to the original advert and there was no mention of ant flat-pack or self-assembly. But I set to work with a vengeance following the pictorial instructions (no words of any description) It was one of these jobbies where the advice was to only screw things up halfway because there was a certain amount of jiggling about to get circular supports in place but all went well before I gave things a final tightening of the screws and then polishing of the whole before deploying it where I needed it in our bathroom. I have a variety of PosiDriv screwdrivers which I deploy on occasions like this as I invariably find that if one tool doesn’t work quite as well as intended then another one will. A final ‘tip’ was that I keep in a bathroom cabinet some especially ‘grippy’ gardening gloves – these I keep in pristine condition and use for things that require a good grip but are normally a bit problematic such as the rounded covers that are used when you fit on new shower hoses and the like. Anyway, this proved ideal for those vertical sections that needed a good twist to lock into position and I must say I am pleased with the results of my efforts.
Still on the subject of screwing together any pieces of timber for any construction works in the garden, I am keen to follow the advice given in my searches on the web to provide a ‘clearance’ hole in the top piece of timber that is being used and will eventually accommodate the smooth i.e. shank part of the screw. I had never thought much about why wood screws contain shanks but here is the explanation:
Having an unthreaded shank at the top allows the tip of a wood screw to pull the screw into the wood just as a regular screw would. The difference is that the shoulder portion of the screw will actually slide through the first layer of wood and pull it against the head. This causes compression from the head to the threads. When installing two pieces of wood together then the first will be pulled tightly against the second one. The threads can continue to pull forward as long as enough torque is applied. Coincidentally, this can also make the removal process much easier than trying to remove a fully threaded screw.
Second, when a fully threaded screw is being screwed into wood the screw threads cause friction. This friction results in the screw heating up. This causes two flaws in the material. As the metal heats up it will begin to expand. Once it expands inside of a hole that was drilled for a specific sized screw, the screw will seize in the hole. At the same time, the materials overall strength has now also been compromised due to the heat. Overheating leads to a screw breaking and snapping.
These two factors will highlight any flaws the screw may have and exploit them. This typically results in bending or snapping of the screw. So, how can a shank help? The shank allows for heat dispersion in a screw. As the threads begin creating heat, it moves up into the shank which will take longer to heat up and will not generate nearly the same amount of friction when it goes through the wood.
So another of life’s mysteries solved – something I am sure you always wanted to know!
The latest coronavirus news is that several other lockdowns are being considered. Further local lockdowns are “just days away”, Sky News understands. Sources in Public Health England (PHE) and the Department for Health told Sky News they are “working collaboratively”, focusing on the areas in England where coronavirus cases are rising.
Today was a cloudy day with occasional bursts of sunshine, interrupted by the occasional dark cloud scudding across the sky. In the park whilst we were having our elevenses as per usual, one of our closest friends happened by together with another friend from church. As they are both ‘golf widows’ for the morning, I took delight in telling them the only golfing story I know. It was our next door but one neighbour in Leicestershire whose husband happened to be the treasurer of the local golf club. Our neighbour was deeply resentful of the time her husband spent away from her (with good reason, as you will soon see!) and took it upon herself to fling wide open the doors of the committee room where her husband was meeting with fellow members with the exclamation ‘Peter! You shouldn’t be here -you should really be at home cooking my tea! The two sequels to this story are that (i) the golf club immediately threw out the husband and installed a new Treasurer (ii) When we subsequently bumped into Peter (as I shall call him) and we enquired after his wife, he replied ‘Oh, she’s died‘ and grinned from ear to ear. Meg and I often said to each other that if the local newspaper had run a headline which read ‘Man runs berserk- chops off wife’s head with an axe‘ we would have thought to ourselves, ‘Well, I suppose that must be Peter!‘
After lunch, it was evidently grass-mowing time and I hastily set to work trying to get everything done before the rain threatened at 4.00 pm in the afternoon (I find the timings of the Weather app on my iPhone to be incredibly reliable) After this had been done, I indulged myself to trying out my new 17″ spiral ratchet screwdriver to which I had treated myself – I am sure that in the days just before cordless screwdrivers hit the market, joiners used to use these all the time and it only seemed to take a quick ‘whoosh’ or two to drive a screw in. Looking on the side of its cardboard case, I noticed that in Spanish this type of screwdriver is known as a ‘destornillador de carraca‘ If you keep saying ‘carraca‘ to yourself quickly several times, I convinced myself that this was a classic onomatopoeia and that the screwdriver was named after the sound of the word. However, I turned out to be wrong because carraca is the Spanish word for a ratchet even if not a spiral ratchet. But is one of those words with several layers of meaning, one of which is an ‘old crock’ if applied to a car. You can sometimes be too clever trying to guess at the origins of words, by the way.
I read in the news tonight that the coronavirus infection rate has risen in 36 local authority areas- and that is before the liberalisation if this weekend. So am I being neurotic or merely prescient, by being perturbed by this rise in cases? It does look as though we are ending the lockdown too early – if you look at other European societies who are ending their lockdowns, they are doing it when the infection rate is running at a much lower level and with superior ‘test-and-trace’ regimes in place. The other members of my family have been laughing with a kind of gallows humour at how one manages to have a full class of children in September with teachers maintaining a two-metre distance from the children and with breaks organised in such a way that no years of children overlap. As one teacher explained on Radio 4, how do you organise breaks in a 7-year entry – do you organise it in such a way that the breaks extend over a three hour time period? The problem is that the current lot in government have never run anything properly (often coming up through the ‘political adviser’ route) and have literally no idea how to organise the logistics of anything. When told of practical difficulties, the teachers are told they are being obstructive or even worse!
On these cloudy days, one never knows how the day will eventually work out. Meg and I were pleased to avoid any rain on our trip to the park where we engaged, as is by now customary, with several conversations with dog owners. The sequence is as follows – the dogs have been let off the lease but thinking that food might be in the offing, they come excitedly towards us on our park bench. This actually happened this morning and one enthusiastic spaniel caused Meg to drop her lemon-curded oatmeal biscuit – the owners then apologise profusely for having caused a nuisance as they see it and the conversation flows from there. (Incidentally, I believe that it is not unknown for second relationships and even marriages that may be initiated by dogs playing together and thereby drawing their respective owners into a conversation. Well, I know of two cases. one on each side of the family, where this or something similar to it has actually happened) When we were in the park, we got a disturbing telephone conversation from our son who had emerged from his study only to find two plumbers wandering about the house looking for a stopcock! What had happened was this – the loo in our en-suite bathroom was starting to fill exceedingly slowly so we sent a quick message to our local plumbers who only live about 400 metres away. We were informed that one or two of the sons would call round after 1.0pm but as the plumbers were in between jobs they decided to call around at about 11.30. Our domestic help had let them in but we had not told our son about it at that stage because we were going to wait until we got back from our walk so as not to disturb him. To cut a long story short, we now have a fully functioning loo (and I suspect it had been going dodgy for quite some time). After lunch, I was all geared up to do a bit of planting and one or two odd jobs in the garden, only to be thwarted by a thin drizzle of rain that persisted for a lot of the afternoon. So I busied myself with doing other things (getting my accounts up to date) before we FaceTimed our regular friends as we normally do on a Friday. They are desperately looking forward to a bit of ‘unlock’ time so we may meet them in the park early next week but, if not, certainly on Thursday to celebrate a birthday. On Wednesday, we are off to see old friends in Oxfordshire and I think the weather is going to be fine by then.
An interesting snippet of news from this morning’s Today programme (but not much-reported since) Apparently the Germans have offered to help us to adapt their own coronavirus test-and-trace app which has been used than 14m times – and works! In the meantime, we have spent millions on an abortive attempt in the Isle of Wight experiment (which proved fruitless) and current progress is not much better. So I am delighted to say that we have swallowed our national pride and accepted help from a society that seems to know what it is doing.
More coronavirus stories that have emerged. It now looks as though the government are resigned to dealing with several ‘mini-spikes’ and intends to deal with each of them as and when they occur (a bit like dampening down a forest fire) The Chief Medical Officer for Health in England, Professor Chris Whitty has warned that: ‘If individuals, families and firms do not take them seriously the possibility of a second wave goes up sharply….The virus is a long way from gone, it’s not going to be gone for a long time….Nobody watching this believes there are no risks in the next step.’
There is a dire story that Israel was the model of how to lock down effectively but then entered an end to their lockdown and, as people have relaxed, they now have a second peak of cases worst than the first. And in Texas, a doctor has reportedly said that ‘we are heading for pure hell‘ as the number of hospital admissions has quadrupled in the last month.
As we have by now come to expect, this was another overcast and somewhat cloudy day, but no actual rain was forecast. As it was a little bit cooler and less humid, our walk to the park was more pleasant than usual. Outside the park, we were delighted to bump into of our ex-Waitrose friends who we had not seen for about a fortnight, so we had a fair amount of gossip to catch up on. She is probably going to make a trip to France later on this month and for our own part, now that the travel arrangements seem to be clarified somewhat, we are going to text our friends in Spain and may make some plans to get there in late September if we possibly can. Julie informed us that Bromsgrove High Street was like a madhouse so we are determined to stay away for a bit until the dust settles. The press is calling today ‘Super Saturday‘ and it remains to be seen how the majority of the citizenry respond to an alleviation of the lockdown measures today. The rest of the day was a little nondescript so we contented ourselves to having a lazy afternoon reading the weekend newspapers. Although I do not normally comment on TV programmes that we have seen today is a bit of an exception as I shall explain. In the late afternoon, there was another showing of the Disney version of ‘The Jungle Book‘ and although we have seen most if before, Meg and I thought we would have a second look. Some of the CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) effects were stunning and we put up with some of the banalities of animals bursting into musical type song on occasions for the sake of the rest of the film. Towards the end of the film, the wolf pack were being taught to say ‘Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.’ On hearing these words, I had an intense mental image of the following scene. It was a dark basement of the church’s social club in St. Roberts, in Harrogate, Yorkshire in about 1953. The room was dimly lit by two or three candles, meant to simulate the flickering of a woodland campfire. The ‘Cub’ Leader (‘Akela‘ in Rudyard Kipling’s parlance) was reading aloud sections of the Jungle Book (including the lines mentioned above) to a group of eager, upturned faces who listened in rapt attention, their faces illuminated only by the candlelight. What made this scene so incredibly vivid in my memory was that ‘Akela’ was actually my mother (who led the Cub Pack before she went off to train to be a teacher in 1956) and I was one of the pack of ‘wolf cubs’. I don’t wish to sound mawkishly sentimental but the imagery in my mind was so strong and although my mother died over twelve years ago, this was a wonderful memory to have of her, doing what she loved doing best. Just as an aside, my mother was so desperate to become a teacher that although she was born in 1911 she doctored her birth certificate to make it look as though she was born in 1914 and would, therefore, appear to be three years younger than she actually was. One has to remember how rare it was for mature students to enter teacher training college in the mid-1950’s – the price that she had to pay was that she had to work for three years longer than she normally would in order to retire and claim her teacher’s pension. For anybody who wants to follow up on some of the details of my mother’s life, I include an URL which are the words that I spoke on the occasion of her funeral (Marie_Hart)
More ‘Do as I say, not do as I do time‘ Boris Johnson’s father has flown to Greece in spite of Foreign Office advice not to do so. Nigel Farage has returned from the USA and instead of being quarantined for 14 days has been seen out drinking in a pub – for which he could be fined £1,000. Do you think this at all likely? (Actually, a conviction of a high-ranking member of the elite evidently breaking the rules might set an excellent example of the rest of the population!)
We have a slightly different routine on a Sunday as I walk on my own to the newspaper shop aiming to get there by 8.30 so I can pick up my ration of Sunday newspapers and then be back in time for the Andrew Marr show at 9.00 am. Today was a day which was both cooler and yet brighter so walking even at speed was quite pleasant. We have come to expect Sunday morning in the park to be teeming with children and dogs and today was no exception – nonetheless, we managed to exchange a few words of greeting with some of the regulars. Sunday lunch was cooking in the slow cooker so there was no frantic last-minute preparation to be done. I had aimed to get several outdoor jobs done this afternoon but was somewhat thwarted by the weather. I managed to get the Weigela planted I had purchased recently but how exactly it will develop I am not sure. I wanted to buy a variety with deep red flowers but on the web, it stated that the flowers were clusters of creamy white – I went to check the label where it was stated that the flowers were indeed creamy white but ‘deep red in bud’ whatever that means. Both the nurseryman who sold it to me and I myself must have looked at the label hurriedly and saw the word ‘red’ and hence concluded the purchase. Too late now – I must look a bit more carefully next time. I also took the opportunity to get rid of a mass of creeping bindweed that was growing over a nearby plant and was so similar to it that you couldn’t tell which was which. I also dumped the two beech trees that I had tried to transplant from other parts of the garden and failed spectacularly – I ought to know by now that you really have to wait for trees to enter their dormant phase in the late autumn or really early spring before you attempt to transplant with any degree of success. I am also a bit worried about my Tilia Cordata (lime tree) that I relocated a month or so back – the leaves had suddenly started to turn yellow. However, the gardener who comes to do some routine maintenance once a month and is incredibly knowledgeable about plants thought the yellowing was not a virus (again!) but a reaction to the absence of water as it is planted on a slope and water runs off it very quickly. So another job I have to do is to creosote some more staves, cut them to length and create a kind of barrier which I can pile up with earth and/or compost to help to mitigate the effects of a slope. Anyway, it got a bit cold, blustery and miserable so I decided to cut my losses and come in for a cup of tea and a read of The Observer. There are always things to be done in a large garden and the gardening advice often starts off with a homily such as ‘Choose a nice day to ...’ – chance would be a fine thing. There’s probably better weather tomorrow.
An interesting political development is detailed in The Guardian scheduled for publication tomorrow. A group of health workers and relatives of coronavirus victims are requesting that Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s special adviser, be investigated by the Met and if they take no further action, then it is possible that a private prosecution may be mounted, As one of the lawyers of the specialist legal firm which is backing the case has argued: ‘The broad consensus of public opinion is that he broke the law on public health, and the entire weight of the state has been deployed to prevent proper investigation and proper due process.’ The crux of the argument is that the Durham police only investigated Dominic Cummings behaviour whilst in Durham but the fact that a journey was inititaed in London means that the Met could well inestigate this case if it had a mind to. Probably nothing will come of this case – but it does add to public cynicism when those close to the centres of political power appear to be able to flout with impunity the laws with which the rest of us have complied.
This morning after we had breakfasted, I thought I would pay another visit to our municipal tip to dispose of some ironwork – last week, we had an abortive attempt when the queue was some 20 cars long so we abandoned it. Today, I sailed through as there was only one car in front of me and although there was a degree of ‘social distancing’ within the tip site, it was easy to dispose of my unwanted items. Then upon my return, I spent some time getting all my wood-working bits, drills, screws etc. in some semblance of order. It sounds as though I lead a sad life! However I now know that when joining two bits of wood, you need a narrow drill for the pilot hole, a wider drill for the clearance hole and the PosiDriv bit that exactly fits the screw that you are driving, so one has to be organised. I have also experimented which of the various hand drills I have acquired seems to work best if you are not relying upon a cordless driver. About a year or so back, I acquired a block of beeswax for a £2 or so, so I use this now to lubricate my screws before entry (Some say you can just use soap, whereas to others this is anathema!) Although it sounds incredibly nerdish, I found the following video clip of how to drive in screws to join two blocks of wood incredibly informative (and I actually learnt quite a lot) Here is the URL for the practically minded: Wood Screws
This afternoon, the weather was quite bright and sunny so I busied myself applying my remaining dregs of creosote to some staves which I already shortened to peg size so that I can shore up my ailing Tilia Cordata – hopefully tomorrow if it is not teeming down. Having completed this little task, I then set about refurbishing and polishing a couple of items which I may well make into surprise presents – more will be revealed in the fullness of time. I have had to have recourse to a very old-fashioned remedy (sugar+olive oil or I suppose sugar+washing up liquid) as a means of removing ground-in dirt on some of the fingers and thumbs. It is not an unknown problem for me but I suppose I should always get used to wearing gloves, even light ones when doing any manual type jobs.
I see that Boris Johnson has tried to deflect criticism that the residential care homes have been huge repositories of the COVID-19 virus by claiming that they ‘didn’t follow procedures’. It seems a classic ‘throw sand in the eyes of the enemy’ tactic to disguise the fact that there have been multiple failings in the ways in which this government has handled that end of the pandemic. For a start, care homes were practically forced to accept inmates untested as the NHS went about emptying wards as fast as possible to prepare for the assumed wave that was going to hit them. Secondly, they were at the back of the queue when it came to PPE. And thirdly, nobody properly realised that agency staff moving from home to home would act as efficient vectors for the transmission of the virus. Let us see what the official enquiry says (whenever that is)
Next week, Meg is going to have a routine ophthalmology appointment at the Worcester Royal Infirmary (at which I was treated for bowel cancer two years ago now. Strange to say, I am not really looking forward to the experience of negotiating a hospital out-patient department – I am sure it will be full of masks, hand-gel and social distancing but I think I will regard any hospital appointment with some degree of trepidation from now on. I am sure that the risks are absolutely minimal but as we have got used to avoiding meeting people in any kind of building for several weeks now and although not of a nervous disposition, one does wonder where the virus is still lurking in our community (and hospitals must still be high on the list of suspects)
Today bands of rain were forecast to sweep across the north of the UK with scattered showers on the edges affecting the Midlands so we suspected that today was going to be one in which we had to dodge the rain showers. As it turned out, we were kept in the dry until we sat down for our elevenses which we then proceeded to munch through to alleviate the effects of the constant drizzle. However, as we turned to go home, we got into a conversation with a couple of friendly gentlemen (one of whom recognised us from our church attending days) It turned that these two were long standing friends who had both suffered from heart problems in the past. Apparently with a large group of fellow ‘sufferers’ they had been organised into a walking club which traversed many of the footpaths surrounding Bromsgrove. There had been at least 20 odd members of this fraternity and perhaps even more but they used to meet in the Scout Hut which is located within the park’s perimeter. Over the years, these numbers had dwindled somewhat and the lockdown, whilst the pandemic was raging, had put paid to any of these regular activities. But our two acquaintances had formed a duo and they still used to walk regularly as far as their strength would allow. One, in particular, had some interesting connections e.g. a son who had lived in France and who had been a professional ski instructor. I was reminded of the story of a particularly athletic fellow boarder and member of my year group in Bolton in Lancashire. This lad was a prodigious, natural athlete and in 1958 lowered the record for the 100 yards (for 13-year olds) from 13.9 to 11.3 seconds. He was also extraordinarily good looking which meant that he had quickly acquired a reputation for impregnating at least two of of the local girls and was subsequently expelled (for reasons that to this day remain unclear to me). Looking him up on Friends Reunited in later years I discovered that he had emigrated to Australia and become the equivalent of the General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen. His daughter, however, had become the national surfboarding champion of Australia so athletic genes must have had their play after all.
After lunch, the rain came down pretty hard but I knew that as we were due to make our lunch-date in Oxfordshire tomorrow, I had better get the car checked over. Filling with petrol under the canopy was one thing but bending over in the pouring rain whilst I checked the type pressures was quite another. However, I was glad I did so as I really cannot remember when was the last time we had checked the air pressure and I am sure that it needed to be done before a longish journey. A week or so ago, I was caught up in a national sample in a survey organised by Imperial College, London, to test the level and antibodies for Coronavirus in the population at large. I had previously intimated that I was willing to participate in the survey and had been sent some testing materials which arrived a few days ago. The test was relatively straightforward and involved taking a pinprick of blood from a finger and putting it in a special container, adding some moderating agent and then waiting for 10 minutes, and then observing the result. I tested negative for antibodies (what a surprise) and then had to fill in an online questionnaire and transmit the photo that I had taken of the rest result to the survey organisers. I also intimated that I would be willing to participate in further surveys if required – in the meantime, it will be quite interesting to see what the general results reveal (which I anticipate will be in about a month)
I thought it was interesting that three pubs who had recently opened had been forced to close again as one of the patrons of one of the pubs had tested positive for coronavirus. The publicans had conscientiously telephoned 90+ of their patrons to indicate to them that a fellow drinker had tested positive and they should seek further advice and/or testing. Then Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, had the gall to claim in the Commons that this pointed to the success of test-and-trace whereas the pubic spirited publicans had actually done all of the hard work!
Today was a very different kind of day, as we followed none of our normal routines. Just after midnight, I exchanged a series of messages with my sister as we were evidently both poised over a keyboard in the wee small hours of the morning so we exchanged several messages until we both decided it was time to go to bed. Today was the day that was scheduled for us to visit some of our oldest friends in Oxfordshire who we evidently haven’t seen for months because of the lockdown. I went by a slightly different route which turned out to be an excellent one and we even arrived half-an-hour early as we had allowed for a certain amount of getting lost/fishing around/diversion time. We sat down for the most magnificent Spanish meal that had been prepared for us. These included some of our favourite dishes including ‘pimientos de padron’ (small green tasty peppers fried in oil and served with sea salt)- as it happens it was a favourite of our friends also. They acquired some plants from somewhere and grown their own so they were picked and cooked especially for us. We had that with serrano ham, a freshly prepared tortilla and salad many of the ingredients for which were grown in the nearby kitchen garden. We had contributed a bottle of Cava and a bottle of Rioja so we had the kind of meal which would not have been out of place if prepared by Spanish chefs in a Spanish kitchen. Naturally, each of the ingredients was delicious. We were then taken on a tour of the garden where all kinds of projects had been undertaken with the establishment of specialised new ‘gravel’ flower beds, a tour of the beehives and a look over the magnificent vegetable garden which could easily have graced a TV cookery programme. So we had a really enjoyable day and set off for home which should have been a straightforward journey. Instead, on the M40, we had to cope with a breakdown, three lanes of traffic being channelled into one whilst a central barrier was being renovated and a torrential downpour. All of this meant that we had one of those ‘creeping along, stop/start at 5mph experiences’ for half-an-hour which I am afraid is not particularly uncommon on the M40. Nonetheless, we arrived home enervated by the wonderful experiences of the day We had made our friends a special gift the identity of which I shall not reveal until tomorrow for reasons that I will explain tomorrow night.
If I read all of the various announcements correctly, then the government has spent or is committed to spending £190 billion to cope with the effects of the coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown and rescue efforts for the economy. These sums are eye-wateringly large and completely unprecedented – they amount to the largest state support perhaps for centuries and are the equivalent of 10% of the UK’s GNP. However strange though it might appear, these sums may still not be large enough to perform the necessary rescue. For example, when the furlough scheme ends and employers will have to pay the wages of their former employees for three months from the end of October, will the promise of £1,000 per worker be enough incentive to keep an employee on the books for three months if there is no demand for the services they are providing? One does have the feeling that when the furlough schemes actually do end (and the government is not paying the wages of the workers to stay at home and do nothing), will employers not simply declare many of them redundant and the levels of unemployment will soar?
Boris Johnson’s latest attempt to excuse the attack he made on the care homes recently when he accused them of ‘not following procedures’ seems to be backfiring again. The Prime Minister was arguing in the House of Commons today that nobody knew that many people might not exhibit symptoms of the virus but still be infected and help to transmit the virus. However, as many in the media have pointed out the warnings were clearly there but not heeded so it seems. Finally, in the view of many Tory backbenchers it appears that doling out huge sums of money is making the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Richi Sunak, line himself up to be the next Prime Minister and they are quite prepared to ditch Boris to get him instead. Interesting times indeed!
Today was the day in which we had scheduled to meet some of our oldest Waitrose friends in order to celebrate a birthday. We had made a long-standing arrangement to meet in the park at 11.00 am, an event to which we were all looking forward, not least our friends who have been ‘shielding’ for weeks but were now (legally) taking the opportunity for some social contact. However, the best-laid plans of mice and men! Our friends were expecting a delivery from Waitrose and today, of all days, it was delayed by about an hour after the designated time. So the opportunity for our meeting was lost – and we would have massively rained upon in any case. But to make the best of a bad job, we are resolved to meet at the same time tomorrow so hopefully, it just a case of pleasure delayed rather than pleasure denied. As Meg and I were sheltering under a tree to escape a particularly sharp little shower, I was reminded of an expression that members of the acting fraternity used to use. In the days of touring companies, there was often a system whereby members of the cast would stay in what was termed ‘theatrical digs’ which were really just bed and breakfast boarding houses. There was typically a visitors’ book in which guests could write comments, appreciative or otherwise, and the actors who were staying there would add to the visitors’ book a line adapted either from a well-known play or even the Bible. As we were sheltering cold and hungry under the tree and wondering if we might see any of our friends who might give us shelter, I was reminded of the entry ‘We were cold and hungry – and you took us in!‘ Another one of these which sticks in my memory must have happened on a Friday evening when the guests were evidently served up with some fish that was probably well past its sell-by date. So the entry in the book became ‘This was the piece of Cod (rather the peace of God) that passeth all understanding‘ If the company felt they had been treated particularly badly in any set of digs and they knew they were not likely to return, then they would acquire a fillet of fish and nail it to the underside of the (typically wooden) breakfast table – there to rot for weeks afterwards.
This afternoon passed uneventfully, the rain putting a bit of a dampener upon things but we were looking forward to the concluding episode of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I only mention this because I have a sort of direct link with the very last scene of the book (and the film). Tess had just been executed for the murder of the man who had raped her as a young girl and severely abused her since her husband, Angel, had gone to seek his fortunes in Brazil. Tess knows that she would be caught and executed and made Angel promise to marry her younger sister. In the final scene of the play, Angel and the younger sister are walking up ‘West Hill‘ which overlooks the prison in Winchester as Tess is executed. This became ‘West Hill Cemetery‘ through which I used to walk every day on my way from the railway station to King Alfred’s College (later to become the University of Winchester) So, as you can imagine, I feel as though I have a very direct connection with the closing scenes of the novel (which, I must add, is poignant in the extreme for those unfamiliar with it)
Sky News is reporting the results of an investigation they have made into the ‘chaotic’ testing regime which the government have bungled through. I quote just the main themes of their report below:
It looks as though Keir Starmer has got his teeth into this emerging scandal and will subject the government to a necessary degree of scrutiny. In the 5.00 pm press briefing, the Sky News reporter referred to this ‘hand-cranking’ of the figures but the criticism was just brushed aside with the assurance that the capacity for testing was being ‘ramped up’ (whatever that means, but in an odd kind of way quite true!)
Well, today promised to be and actually turned out to be. a much more pleasant day than yesterday. This was just as well because we had an arrangement to meet some of our long-standing Waitrose friends in the park. We did have the excuse of a birthday to celebrate as well and we had made some plans accordingly. I had been busy renovating (if that is the right word) a special birthday gift which was unusual in the extreme – it was a lucky horseshoe (a real one, that is) that I had bought as a job lot through eBay in a rusty condition and I had then renovated it (the process involves soaking in white vinegar to lessen/remove the rust, following by brushing with a wire brush, a scrub with brillo pads and a final ‘seasoning’ with WD40 and some silver polish). As it happens, I did exactly the same for our Oxfordshire friends and when I wrapped the present up, I include the story, taken from the web, of why horseshoes are considered to be lucky. Of course, they have to be fixed the right way up so that your good luck does not fall out of them – I am amazed how many people actually know this (because I didn’t until a week ago) In the park, we had some delicious birthday cake. Then as a birthday treat, I read out the Gerard Hoffnung classic recording of a supposed bricklayer explaining to his employers how, owing to series of accidents involving bricks and a barrel, he wanted to report sick for work. For those who have never heard it, here is the URL of a soundtrack of Hoffnung’s speech to the Oxford Union (in the 1950s?). It is incredibly funny if you have never heard it before: Hoffnung
This afternoon, it was evidently time to get grass mowing done as after our recent rains the grass seems to have shot up and badly needed a cut – it looks so much better now. As soon as this was done and I had my customary cup of tea, I received a call from my near neighbour who needed some assistance to get her hose pipe properly connected so she could utilise it in the garden. I managed to get connected OK at one end but we may need to acquire an extra piece of hose and connect the two halves together before we can use it fully in the garden.
We received tonight a long and detailed email from our closest friends in Northern Spain indicating to us why they thought it was not a good idea for us to visit as we had planned to in late September. This has given us pause for thought and Meg and I are having to reconsider what our holiday plans might have to be. In the short term, we know that we need to make some tentative plans to see Mike’s relatives in Yorkshire and Meg’s relatives in North Wales but after that, the future is a lot less certain. Certainly, the idea of transiting through an airport does not appeal so we may have to think of the days out we can have and the social contacts which we can sustain whilst the pandemic unlock down is occurring. It is quite difficult to think of what a sensible course of action might be that does not expose one and one family and friends to any unnecessary degree of risk.
There is talk tonight that Boris Johnson wants to reform the NHS again! Whilst the last reorganisation was judged to be a bit of a mess (to put it mildly) one shudders to think what happens if politicians do not want to keep the NHS at arm’s length but want to get involved in decisions that border on the clinical – for example, massive political pressure to cut down waiting lists may mean that the more easily seen and treatable are dealt with first (the ‘low-hanging fruit’) and more difficult cases receive less priority. Again, we shall have to wait and see what transpires but the omens are not good.
My day started off very well in the wee small hours of the morning. During a restless period in the middle of the night, I decided to do my accounts and looked at when my credit card statement was due (although, as it happens, I only use this particular account for ‘holiday’ expenses and therefore had nothing owing on it). I was pleasantly surprised that Expedia, with whom we had booked our trip to Portugal which we could not undertake in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown. had credited me with the monies I had paid earlier for the hotel expenses. To be fair, Expedia had indicated they would do this within 30 days but I wasn’t informed that they had paid me back some money and therefore it was only by accident that I discovered that I had the credit sitting there since early May. I then turned my attention to the flights element of the cancelled holiday, one flight provided by Iberia and the other by British Airways. The Iberia website implied that under the terms of the original booking no flight charges would be refunded so I have to make up my mind whether to spend hours pursuing this element of the holiday. The British Airways flight also offered me vouchers (as they have done to thousands of other people in the last few months) but to convert this back into cash I have to speak to a British Airways customer services representative in person (if I can hang onto the end of a phone line for hours). I will have an attempt to do this on Monday morning but am not hopeful of success. According to information on the web, though, I should be able to claim a cash refund as of right. Knowing that I had a certain amount of credit under my belt, I spent some time looking at accommodation in both North Wales and in Yorkshire should we decide to give either side of our family a quick visit. However, I sent a message to my sister so that we can have a proper FaceTime discussion later this afternoon.
As you might expect, today was reasonably busy in our local park to the extent that we were displaced from our traditional park bench – however, whilst refreshing ourselves we encountered two of our closest friends and spent a few happy minutes in joke-telling and idle chit-chat. Then home to a somewhat delayed lunch and a preparation for the job in the afternoon. I needed to construct a little wooden framework around my Tilia Cordata at the point where the ground sloped away and the roots were in danger of being exposed. This having been done, I then used up my last remnants of some good topsoil and topped off the whole with a bag of forest bark chippings. I am hopeful that the mound of forest bark will help to keep the roots of the tree somewhat more damp and this might help to alleviate the yellowing of the leaves I have experienced to late. Having said that, it seems to be responding to my remedial work (including daily watering) so far.
I then had a couple of conversations with my sister on FaceTime and it appears that her lockdown period lasts until July 31st – even after that, she is still understandably nervous about exposing herself to any risk of the virus because with a compromised immune system and some congestive heart failure, the view of the rest of the family is that she would probably not survive. Although we had intended to spend a few days in Yorkshire at the very end of July, this might be somewhat too premature so we have resolved to leave things until August at the very earliest and then see how the situation unfolds. It really is hard to tell whether such fears on the part of the shielded part of the population are absolutely justified as, on the other hand, the government are anxious for people to get out and ‘spend, spend, spend’ as soon as possible even though this may well trigger a second wave of the virus. So we will put all tentative plans for some mini-vacations to see relatives on hold for a few weeks more.
Another fine day in prospect which is always uplifting. I was a little disconcerted, though, to make sure I arrived at my newsagent quite early for a Sunday morning (8.30 am) only to be sold that they had sold out of The Observer. I was particularly keen to get The Observer as it featured some interesting articles, such as the 20 councils at greatest risk where the coronavirus threat was said to be greatest. The borough of Oadby and Wigston, where I lived for about thirteen years was actually fifth on the list but this is a statistical artefact as these two small towns are only about 4-5 miles from the centre of Leicester. which was way out in front of the rest with a fairly large ‘spike’ in cases. The Sunday Times reported last week that the spike was probably concentrated in the streets where there are a plethora of small textile factories, many paying only one half of the minimum wage – about which nothing has been done for years if all accounts are to be believed. So when we made our daily trip to the park we extended our journey, donned a mask and dived into our local Waitrose where supplies of The Observer were more plentiful. On our way down the hill, some of our close friends were busy gardening (as they typically are) and we were invited in to look at the progress of their various plants which were all thriving.
This afternoon, we treated ourselves to a long leisurely read of the Sunday newspapers and after lunch, I embarked upon some gardening chores. I thought I had an old hose on a reel which I managed to locate in my ‘stores’ section near the compost heap where the combined effect of being stored under some fir trees not to mention the wind and rain over the months had made it all rather grubby. So I gave it a reasonably good wash down and check over before I offer it to my near neighbour whose need of it is, I think, greater in the short term than is mine. Finally, I had a quick ‘go’ at my latest horseshoe to which I am giving the vinegar and wire brush rust removal treatment.
If I am reading a complex situation correctly, it does appear that various societies (such as Sweden, Portugal) which have tried to bounce back quickly from a lockdown (strict in Portugal’s case, more relaxed in Sweden’s case) do experience various flare-ups and spikes just when they think they have the virus under control. Perhaps the same pattern is happening over here as well because the case of Leicester certainly gives us pause for thought. Some of the Swedish analysts are of the view that the advice given to the population only to self isolate if they had symptoms meant that many members of households where the virus was present but they were pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic did not quarantine themselves and might have helped to spread the virus much more in the non-infected community. And we have a case of an outbreak in a Herefordshire where 73 (one third) of key workers picking and packing vegetables have tested positive and I would imagine that might come as quite a psychological shock as a lot of the farm work is, by definition, in the open air (but what about the packing plants, the proximity of the workers to each other, the quality of the temporary accommodation given to migrant workers? Well – it is a very different scenario to a concentration of the virus in BAME communities in packed terrace houses and textile factories in Leicester)
There seems to be total confusion at the heart of government over mask-wearing. Boris Johnson was giving several very strong hints that mask-wearing might be made compulsory in confined spaces such as shops and was pictured in his constituency wearing a mask. And then Michael Gove said that the wearing of masks should be left to the individual and what they deemed to be ‘common sense’. But there is a massive problem here, not to mention sources of outright confusion – although I might think it is absolutely ‘common sense’ to wear a mask in a supermarket, to all of the other shoppers it might be also ‘common sense’ not to wear a mask! Personally, I think the sooner we all wear masks in supermarkets and other large stores the better. And I would encourage all of the large stores to give away masks to all of their customers so that no one could have any excuse.
Today turned out to be a dismal day, weather-wise. It started off cloudy and Meg and I largely avoided the rain whilst we were in the park but started to get rained upon with slight smatters on the way home. However, the rain intensified for the rest of the day meaning that we could concentrate on ‘inside’ jobs (which turned out to be just as well). After we had returned home, I decided to contact British Airways (as their website had suggested) in order to speak to a customer services representative to attempt to get my vouchers turned back into the cash that they extracted from me months ago. Needless to say, my worst fears turned out to be justified. The recorded message on the suggested BA number indicated that owing to ‘unprecedented demand’ and in order to ‘protect their staff’ presumably from abuse, they would not even put you in a queueing system but asked you to call back later. As it happens, their call times are 8.00 am to 8.00 pm so I am currently ‘on hold’ at the moment as I type. I am not very hopeful but I did manage to get an email through to them which has acknowledged ‘automatically’ that has probably disappeared into a BA black hole as well. I can now report that I did manage to get through and speak to a BA staff member who told me that the contract was with Expedia and not with them and therefore I should try to claim from Expedia. Meanwhile, the Expedia website is telling me that flight+holiday trips are not refundable. Tomorrow, I shall have a go at contacting my credit card company who ought to be liable under the terms of Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. We shall see!
As it was a rainy afternoon, this was a good opportunity for me to look over an academic paper which I am reviewing for an academic colleague/friend. The paper was an interesting one and well-written so the task was not arduous as can be the case if the author happens to be a non-English writer first speaker. The author of this paper had written me an email saying he thought he knew me because he had bumped into me at a conference in South Africa. However, I was able to tell him that I actually attended a conference in which there were two instances of a Professor Mike Hart giving papers on widely different subjects – and I was the other one. You can imagine the confusion that caused.
The government, after much vacillation, are now going to announce a change in policy re. face masks – i.e. it is going to be obligatory to wear one as from Friday, 24th July. When the government was asked by the BBC’s NewsNight programme to supply a spokesperson from any government department to explain the decision (or rather the vacillation over the decision), quite mysteriously no spokesperson could happen to be found. So it looks as though the UK is going to follow 100 other countries in recommending the use of face masks. What is so significant about this is that the far eastern countries (South Korea, Vietnam) that have had experiences of other pandemics such as SARS and have made the use of face masks compulsory at an early stage have overcome the ravages of the virus more easily (and almost exactly the reverse is happening in the USA)
The other interesting statistic that is being aired this evening is that in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon’s approval rating is +60% whilst that of Boris Johnson is -39% – in other words, a 99% difference between the two. One the one hand, Nicola Sturgeon appears calm, competent and empathetic whilst Boris is bombastic and disorganised. Is it any wonder that support for Scottish Independence has now gone up to 53% – no doubt, voters thinking that if the Scots could handle as important a crisis as COVID-19 so much more competently then in England, then an independent Scotland is surely very viable!
Today started with a pleasant surprise – some of our closest friends who have been in ‘shielded’ lockdown for weeks but who we met in the park last week texted to ask if we would like to meet again in the park today. This we did with alacrity and it was particularly heartwarming to know that this type of meeting is not only pretty safe (we wear face masks as well just as a precaution) but also such a source of pleasure for all of us. So we all met for half an hour, a little earlier than usual, which was fine as we have commitments for the rest of the day. The weather. although cloudy, was kind to us as well and we were in no danger of being caught in a shower. We will probably repeat this about twice a week from now on and after July 31st/August 1st (the end of shielding for the ‘clinically extremely vulnerable‘) we can probably plan a joint day out to a National Trust or similar property. This is what the Government are saying about this should you be worried about the risks of infection:'The latest evidence shows that the chance of encountering Coronavirus in the community has continued to decline. Four weeks ago, around one person in 500 had the virus. Last week it was even lower with less than one in 1,700 people having the virus.'
This afternoon, Meg needed to go to Worcester Royal Infirmary for a routine eye-check after she a corneal transplant some 9 years ago (they told us). To be honest, Meg and I were a little apprehensive that car parking would be a nightmare (last time I went there for a checkup in took 1½ hours to get out of the car park) and there was always the Coronavirus regime within the hospital. As it happens, absolutely everything was plain sailing. For a start, car parking fees had been suspended and we managed to find a bay quite near to the Ophthalmology Unit. Also, they were only letting people in about 2 at a time so there was no sitting around in crowded waiting rooms. Meg was seen by a couple of nurses who took some questions as a history and then we saw the consultant himself who conducted further examinations using specialised equipment. As we had arrived early, we had a half an hour to wait but I shot off to the haematology department to have a blood test done (as my bowel cancer consultant had requested) and normally one is confronted with a room with about 20 people in it. Today, there was none so I sailed in and got the whole blood sample taken in about 2 minutes before I returned to the unit so that I could accompany Meg through the eye clinic procedures. Having been used to a teeming hospital (in which both Meg and I have been treated) it was somewhat surreal to be in the same surroundings but with hardly any other people around. All of the clinical staff were extremely friendly – perhaps they appreciated not being rushed off their feet which is the norm.
A Tory MP representing a New Forest (Hampshire)constituency is tonight venting his outrage at having to wear a face mask in 9-10 days time. But my impression is from the various clips of vox pop shown on the news channels is that most people are not unhappy about the change in policy and it may yet encourage more people to venture out into the community. It will be quite interesting to see (in a day or so?) what the general public feel about the new regulation, given that we are gradually falling into line behind 120 other countries who wear a face mask with no qualms!
Medical scientists are modelling the chances of a second wave of the coronavirus and believe that up to 120,000 people could lose their lives (the current total in this first phase is 45,000). Of eight respiratory virus pandemics since the 19th century, five have had two or more waves which usually happen in colder months regardless of when the first outbreak occurs. So it looks as though we must all hope for the best (but prepare for the worst). It seems to be a good idea to get a flu jab as soon as they become available in September so as not to be hit by two viruses at once.
This was another dismal day- and just when we thought the weather was going to get a bit better as well. Meg and I endured a slight drizzle as we sat in the park drinking our coffee but the drizzle was not sufficiently serious to strike for home. We got into a conversation with an ex-teacher and her husband whose labrador-like dog was on its first trip out after a serious leg operation. I mused that when we had watched TV programmes featuring surgery on animals, then when the (typically) dogs had recovered from the amputation of a leg and the anaesthetic and were reunited with their owners they incredibly quickly adapted to their new status and were not thinking to themselves ‘I am a disabled dog’ Instead, they just got on with it and adapted to their new circumstances. I wondered if there were any lessons from this we could learn – but of course, we have a much longer memory span than dogs (I suppose).
Having allowed myself to read a feature in The Times on face masks, a particular firm was mentioned which sold high-quality cotton or cotton/silk face masks. To cut a long story short, I decided to buy two good quality face masks for Meg and myself that were both washable, comfortable and also had the facility to incorporate a filter. Although I have a good supply of temporary face-masks, I thought I would reserve these for the occasions when I shoot into my local newspaper shop, gather up the newspapers, hand over the tokens and get back outside again – a process I can generally achieve in about 30 seconds. Of course, it will be compulsory to wear a mask in about 9 days time in any case. But now we have settled down into our new regime of ordering online from Waitrose but the higher quality masks will be reserved for those occasions when we may be having extended conversations with people or else are having a longer shopping experience than 30 seconds. We are now well into the system of having about two or three orders at weekly intervals stretching out into the distance (to secure one’s slot) but we have also to remember that about the day before the order is delivered, it needs to be amended with what one actually needs for the week ahead (rather than having filled up the shopping trolley from an ex-order some weeks back).
There were then three outdoor tasks I had set myself. The first of these was to follow the advice that I had read on the web and ensure that whatever mulch one puts around a newly planted tree, the recommendation is not to form a ‘volcano’ (which I had) but to spread the mulch around over a radius of about two metres because this would be more beneficial to the roots in the long run, particularly by ensuring they were starved not of oxygen. The next task was to pull some sticks of rhubarb which was very easy (and our plant is doing reasonably well this year and not tunning to seed which it often does) The third task was to ‘take out the dustbins’ which entails dragging the relevant bins along our access rods to a point at which they can be more easily accessed by the refuse collection vehicles (one of the downsides of living on a private road is that the local authority has a policy that local householders have to be responsible to dragging their own bins to an access point) Needless to say, each of my outdoor activities was closely monitored and supervised by Miggles, the cat who has adopted us.
There have been two really interesting political developments this evening. The first of these is that the Boris Johnson nominee to head the influential House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee has been rejected. Johnson has nominated Chris Grayling to the committee expecting he could be elected Chairman, However, not for nothing is Grayling known to fellow MP's as 'failing Grayling' that they rejected him and elected another Conservative, Julian Lewis in his stead (who had nominated himself and got the agreement of the Opposition MP's to back him) Grayling's record of incompetence is legendary and I quote from The Guardian to be published tomorrow:'He presided over the collapse of Northern and Thameslink rail services and the granting of a no-deal Brexit ferry contract to a company with no ships. As justice secretary, he part-privatised the probation service and banned prisoners from receiving books from relatives, a measure that was overturned in the courts.' (The privatised probation service was such a disaster that even a Tory government had to bring it back into public ownership as the firm contracted it to run made such an abysmal mess of it) Downing Street has reacted by withdrawing the Conservative whip from Julian Lewis i.e. throwing him out of the party. The second development is that the important report which indicates that the Government should take immediate steps to make sure that we do not have 120,000 deaths in the second wave of the Coronavirus had not even been read by Boris Johnson - he revealed in Prime Minister's Questions only that he was 'aware' of it. One can not really believe this level of incompetence in a Prime Minister - but the electorate voted for him and gave him an 80 seat majority!
Today was an interesting day for us in the park. We struck up a conversation with a couple of locals who lived on the far side of the park but were very knowledgable about the various plans that were being put forward in the locality and we suspected that absolutely none of them could hope to come to fruition if the developers only wanted to build houses but the existing road infrastructure would not bear the weight of the extra traffic. We calculated that of the suggested 500 new houses with 2.5 cars per household (Mum, Dad and teenage children so eventually 2.5 cars) they would stretch for 2.5 miles which is approximately all the way down into Bromsgrove and back again if the cars were actually bumper-to-bumper. If the proposed developments were to take place under the government’s policy of ‘presumed consent’ then it would be the first new development in a town where nobody would go anywhere because the roads would be so clogged up! The developers and the County Council are of the view that many people would walk anyway (presumably on the grounds that gridlock would mean that was the only way to get into the town centre). What is desperately needed is, in effect, a Western bypass but the county council will not even fund a feasibility study for that because it knows what the answer would be (absolutely necessary and therefore undesirable because it would draw funds away from the rest of Worcestershire) The joys of local planning -we speak as one who has won three planning appeals against the destruction of a local orchard adjacent to the house to be replaced by 16 houses but lost on the final planning application (as the developer can keep on submitting for evermore until they are successful and can appeal against a decision but local residents cannot)
This afternoon I had decided if the weather was fair (which it was), that I would pick over my gooseberry bushes which I planted about three years ago. I had noticed that although the leaves had dropped off the bushes (in response to the absence of rain?), the fruit was still hanging intact. I picked 800 grams of berries which is about 1.75lb of fruit. This was sufficient for us to have a delicious meal of them stewed and then served with ice cream but the rest will be despatched to my sister in Yorkshire who, I hope, can turn them into jam for us which we can collect the next time we see her. This having been done, I then turned my attention to my neighbour’s hosepipe where I was attempting to turn two lengths into one. She had an assortment of fittings but even though they were Hozelock they all seemed to leak like mad. Eventually, I was forced into the situation where I had to get a half-inch ‘female’ hosepipe onto the conventional ‘male’ part of the fittings (yes- they do call them that) which took for a lot of manipulation of the female end to make it pliable and a lot of brute force and ignorance to get the male connector to fit. This is what we used to do in the days before Hozelock fittings became standard and I recall the struggles that I have had in the past.
It looks as though there are two big political stories in town tonight. The first of these is that it looks as though there is a split between the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Adviser over whether it is sensible or not to resume working in one’s normal workplace or at home. One has seen the tensions apparent for a week or so now but the divergences in approach are now much more transparent. One report is that the experts recommended a full lockdown at least one full week before it actually occurred (a week is a long time when the infection rate is doubling every three days). It looks as though the politicians and the scientists know that in a forthcoming public enquiry, it is evident that mistakes were made and they are trying to blame the other party first. The second issue is the fact that the Russians may well have interfered in our last general election (as they probably did in the US Presidential election also) and this issue is being conflated (to muddy the waters deliberately?) with a suggestion that the Russians may be trying to ‘acquire’ i.e. steal our corona vaccine research. The government knows that the ‘Russian dossier’ will be published next week and parts of this will make uncomfortable reading for them so releasing reports about Russian interference with the ‘body politic’ in the UK is probably a diversionary tactic on their part. Then, of course, there is the effect of the Russian state in promoting Brexit and undermining the strength of the EU by helping to break it up but this has not really hit the public consciousness yet!
When I used to trek up and down our High Street in Bromsgrove, I occasionally used to see sets of pottery (such as half a dozen plates or saucers) being sold off at ridiculously cheap prices and I tended to purchase them, if they were of a pleasant design, for use as saucers to put under indoor plants. I had, in the past, purchased a set of six small bowls and in fact use one of them every day to give breakfast to Miggles, the cat who has adopted us. Today, just out of interest, I turned to see who was the manufacturer and it was Grindley’s, a well-known potteries firm whose vintage pottery is still in demand. So as my curiosity was now aroused, I hunted around on the eBay websites and discovered that the design I had in my possession was called ‘Tudor Rose‘ and although not what you would call valuable, individual items seem to sell for about £3-£5 so there must be some kind of market for people who either collect them or want to replace some missing items. The next dinner party to which we are invited I shall try and weave into the conversation ‘Evidently we only use our Grindley’s ‘Tudor Rose’ ware to feed our cat‘ which sounds like a line out of Jane Austen.
Today in the park we had an assignation to meet some of our oldest Waitrose friends but first had to buy our newspapers and then make a trip to the Post Office (in W H Smiths currently) in order to post a parcel off to my sister. That having been done, we met our friends on the way to the park and proceeded to our normal park bench only for a local authority worker to come along with a portable, petrol-driven strimmer with which he proceeded to cut off the lower branches of the willow immediately beside us. As we now could scarcely hear ourselves think let alone talk, we had to grab and bits or pieces and make for the safety of an alternative bench where we were now out of earshot of the offending machine.
Lunch was an interesting affair – I had previously bought from Iceland a packet of frozen unspecified ‘white fish’ that turned out to be pollock. If you look on the web, you will find that pollock has the reputation of being a good looking but incredibly tasteless fish. I got around this by making a little concoction of my own which a spoonful of seafood sauce (a la Waitrose) a spoonful of garlic mayonnaise, a splodge of tomato ketchup and a dollop of 1000 Island dressing. This was then all mixed up and given a quick whizz in the microwave and it made an incredibly tasty dish as it turned out. As the potatoes had in my store jar were starting to sprout, I picked out some which I then cubed into very small pieces prior to boiling them and then added to them a raw egg, some butter, some whole milk and some grated cheese which I then mashed together to gave a kind of enhanced mashed potato. I only mention all of this to show that if you start off with some fairly pedestrian ingredients, you can actually turn them into quite a good meal using a little imagination and enterprise.
After lunch, it was time to give the lawns their 7-10 day mowing and they really seemed to need it this time – the combination of a lot of humid weather must have really made the grass grow quite rapidly. Whilst on a gardening theme, I was circulated the other day by a firm from whom I had evidently bought stuff in the past who were selling off a lot of their summer stock at massively reduced prices (they claimed £65 worth of stuff for a fiver) Anyway I succumbed and should be soon be getting 12 dahlia tubers, 100 gladioli corms and 25 oriental lilies which might collectively make for quite an interesting display even if we just put them into pots and distribute them around as ways of brightening up a few borders.
Yesterday was a beautiful and fine day and one in which it was a real pleasure to meet with our long-standing friends in the park. By all accounts, tomorrow is meant to be the same kind of weather, with fine weather projected over most of the country. But today was very much the day in between – it has been a cloudy, humid and glowering kind of day which has really been quite oppressive and quite unpleasant all day long. So it was not really the kind of day in which one could do anything much, so I indulged myself in a really good read of The Times the weekend supplement of which was actually quite interesting for a change (for example, the foodstuffs to eat to keep you healthy in the long run – it was no surprise that broccoli makes it into the list once again, justifying its position as a superfood. Try putting ‘Broccoli: Super Food’ into a search engine such as Google to see what I mean). Just to compound the type of rotten day that today has proved to be, the bad weather in Manchester meant that there was no play in the England v. West Indies Test Match in which a potentially match-winning position that England is in (which would level the series) is put at risk since a whole day’s play has been lost.
Today is the day when our Waitrose order is delivered, quite late in the day but at least it arrived in the allocated time slot (unlike last week where it was much delayed) I always amaze myself that one can spend such an amount on shopping only to see it all disappear into store cupboards and you seem to have nothing to show for it (although we did avail ourselves of spending some money on cosmetics which would normally have been bought in a different type of store) Earlier in the day, my sister had texted me with the excellent news that not only had my package of gooseberries been successfully delivered to Yorkshire (it was only posted yesterday) but she had already turned it into three jars of jam. Rather than posting a jar down to us, we resolved that it could wait until the next time we visit Yorkshire so that will be quite a treat then. We had been in some doubt as to what is the best occasion to see relatives both in North Wales and also in Yorkshire in view of the uncertainties generated by the coronavirus. We have a tentative plan which is to wait until the 1st August deadline has well and truly passed and then go off to North Wales for a few days in the second week of August (assuming hotel booking’s can be made as normal) and then visit Yorkshire about two weeks after that, which would be the final week of August and will coincide with my sister’s birthday at the end of the month.
It looks as though the blame game for the coronavirus debacle has well and truly started. Well and truly in the firing line is the body called Public Health England where there is already a certain amount of dispute whether under the reforms instituted by Andrew Lansley (generally regarded as pretty disastrous) give the Secretary of State (for Health) to power to take direct control or whether the degree of autonomy they were granted meant that ministers lost the power to intervene and control that part of the NHS. In any case, it looks as though Public Health England (or PHE) which undoubtedly made some mistakes will now be the fall guy thus deflecting the blame away from the politicians who dithered and delayed by at least a week thus doubling the total number of deaths due to the virus. We are talking about an excess death toll due to the delay in the lockdown being of the order of 20,000 which is a truly staggering figure (equivalent to about 60 jumbo jets crashing with a total loss of life) The Sunday newspapers tomorrow will no doubt expose the divisions between the scientists and the politicians in forensic detail which I am sure will pass most of the population by (but which news junkies such as myself will surely lap up)
When I walked down to collect our Sunday newspapers this morning, it was a most delightful morning and the air was like champagne. It clouded over a bit later on but it was still a very pleasant day compared with Saturday. Meg and I had several extended conversations on our way down this morning. One of our oldest (and continental) friends had experienced the bereavement of her brother within the last fortnight so naturally, we talked things over and extended whatever sympathy we could – your natural inclination is to give people a big hug under these circumstances but obviously the coronavirus has paid to all of that. We had recently learned of the illness of the wife of my ex-colleagues with whom Meg and I have a particular fellow feeling as she was only a few years ahead of us in the Economics Faculty of the University of Manchester. This was housed in a magnificent set of houses known collectively as Dover Street and it was most famous as the home of Engels who wrote the extremely influential 'Condition of the Working Class in England' which later proved to be a profound influence upon the work of Karl Marx. Other famous alumni of Dover Street had been Elizabeth Gaskell (the novelist after whom a teacher training college was named in Manchester and which provided my first professional employment) and Sir Frank Worrell (the West Indian cricket captain and Meg knew his daughters and had met Sir Frank and his wife as a result) So, a strangely inter-connected world. Then on the way home, we had another extended chat with some of our gardening friends that we meet regularly. The net result of all of these wonderful conversations was that we were too late for a conventional Sunday lunch but what we had in mind could keep so we rustled up a quiche-type lunch that we could prepare quite quickly. We had an enjoyable afternoon lazing around in the garden (joined, naturally, by Miggles the cat) and I put the finishing touches to a horseshoe which I was reconditioning and then made a present of to my daughter-in-law to celebrate a promotion at work and to bring her good fortune in her new role. After the rust had been well and truly removed (my white vinegar trick) it got a polish up using some stainless steel cleaner I had added onto my Waitrose order and a final polishing and conditioning with WD40 to prevent further rust (although I could have used a very thin smear of coconut oil which is also a good rust preventative)
This week is going to be quite a busy week for us in comparison with the comparative lull of the last few weeks. We need to get up-to-date on appointments that have been let lapse such as optician and dental hygienist appointments, for which no doubt there will be huge waiting lists. On Wednesday, our hairdresser will be arriving complete with a set of sheep-shearing shears which she will undoubtedly need at this stage in the proceedings. Later on in the same day, we are are also going to have a visit from our chiropodist. On Thursday, we have made a booking to visit a nearby National Trust property (Hanbury Hall) and again, although we cannot visit the house itself, there are extensive gardens and walks for us to enjoy, We have already made our booking (free for National Trust members) so we are just hoping that the good weather holds out for us.
It looks as though one of the interesting political developments to look out for is for the coronavirus is hurting the ‘red wall’ seats that Boris Johnson’s Tory party took away from Labour in the 2019 election. The North East is projected to be one of the worst-hit regions and they already contain a high proportion of vulnerable local authorities (nearly half compared with 23% across the UK as. whole) It seems that the ‘red wall’ seats could see a 12% permanent output loss against. 5% contraction for the South East. Plus ça change!
Some of our not very immediate neighbours were having renovations to their communal driveway done which meant that some cars spilled out and were parked on our private roadway. As we need to keep access clear at all times for emergency vehicles, one of our immediate neighbours asked the relevant questions and we discovered who was parking in our roadway and why. This occasionally happens and there is generally an innocent explanation but it is not fully appreciated that we need to keep our roadway clear for emergency vehicles (such as ambulances) who have to have unimpeded access at all times (a fact not fully appreciated when other people think ‘Oh, I’ll just pop the car here for an hour or so’). Our near neighbour got the problem resolved but it would have been much better if we had been informed/consulted beforehand.
As you expect on a Monday morning, there seemed to quite a lot of ad-hoc groupings at various places in the park. Evidently, there is some degree of organisation to this as people tend to turn up at a particular time complete with portable chairs and then get round in a circle and get on with whatever they were meeting for in the first place. After lunch, I started to write an email to the wife of my ex-colleague but our peace and tranquillity were disturbed by a variety of vehicles (unconnected completely with the first set around the corner) who had come to undertake a garden makeover of one of our local residents and were using our access roads (without our permission) so that their vehicles could take away soil, deliver slabs and proceed to dump all kinds of materials directly onto the roadway and without the benefit of protective plastic or a tarmac. We were assured that they would completely clear up after themselves and jet the roadway clear to restore them to the state they were in before they started their work – needless to say they only did a rough sweep up and so my son and I were left to do a more complete sweep-up and had to ensure that the excess and other extraneous materials were cleared away. Needless to say, we hadn’t been informed that any of this was about to happen so we had to make our feelings absolutely clear that permissions needed to be sought and the site restored to the kind of condition it was in before they started their work. More is expected in the next day or so and therefore we are anticipating that the contractors/sub-contractors not employed by us have to be watched like a hawk and make good on their promises which were glibly given. Interesting that the French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Satre used the expression ‘Hell is other people‘ although I think that the expression is often quoted in ways that Satre himself did not intend.
There is a lot of news in the bulletins tonight about the likely success of the vaccines that are being developed – and perhaps a lot of false optimism. It was only at the end of a news item that the correspondent let us know that many, if not the great majority, of potential vaccines, fail after having shown initial promise. It may well be that the press is desperate for a breaking ‘good news’story about a potentially successful vaccine for the coronavirus and all normal (and scientific) caution is abandoned. I think the best comment upon all of this came from the commentator Matthew Parris (ex-Tory MP, on the liberal wing of the party) who has indicated tonight that it is a bit like predicting the Grand National winner after a few successful fences have been jumped (and ignoring the majority of fences that lie ahead). We also learn that in the now infamous Downing Street press briefings, the UK’s chief nurse who was due to appear on the podium was immediately dropped from the panel when she replied that she would not give immediate support to the fact that Dominic Cummings (the PM’s ‘adviser’) appeared to have breached the lockdown rules with his well-publicised trip to his parents in Durham. This only reinforces the suspicion that many of us held at the time that the scientists that appeared on the podium during the press briefings were only used a prop to the politicians to give them a kind of legitimacy- but were immediately dropped when basic scientific integrity conflicted with the political message or ‘line’ that was being peddled at the time.
This turned out to be one of those vaguely frustrating days. Meg and I had determined that we would venture out onto the High Street to make an optician’s appointment for both of us at Boot’s opticians. When we got there the store was closed – some kind of annual holiday so we would have to wait until tomorrow. I thought we would walk up and down the High Street (Tuesday is a market day when stallholders sell their wares) to see if a little hardware man who sells bits and pieces was there today as I needed to buy a wire brush. Frustratingly, he wasn’t there so having got all masked up we de-masked ourselves at the end of the High Street and made off for the park (where all of our usual benches were occupied – it was that kind of day) So we drank our coffee, admired the local heron who has a club foot and the locals call ‘Henry’ and made for home, encountering none of our normal friends en route. As we were walking home, the weather clouded over and what started off as quite a pleasant day became cloudy and oppressive.
The principal news of the day was the publication of the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report into the amount of illegitimate Russian influence in some of the recent UK electoral processes. Astonishingly, it appears that the security questions did not ask itself any questions about the amount of Russian influence as it felt that this would drag it into the arena of party politics which it wanted to avoid. However, it now looks as though it is belatedly recognised that Russian influence had been at work in the Scottish referendum. Noting that the Russians had attempted to interfere (and may well have done ) in the last USA presidential election when Trump was elected, it was now recognised that the Russian state liked to dabble in any politics that would destabilise any countries in the West. There is absolutely no official information whether there was any Russian influence in the Brexit campaign. However, the report recognises that London is now the money-laundering capital of the world as the UK welcomes Russian money following the opening of a new visa route in 1994 for foreigners who invested in the county and that few questions, were asked, if any, about the provenance of this considerable (Russian) wealth as Russian oligarchs embedded themselves into many aspects of British society (football clubs etc.) Although no questions were asked of MI6 about the involvement of Russia in the Brexit campaign, it seems inconceivable that Putin would not have seized the opportunity to destabilise the UK (by it being involved in a massive internal debate for years), weaken the EU (by detaching one of its members), aid the break up of the UK (if Scotland then Northern Ireland eventually leave the UK) and, add a stroke, greatly reduce any influence that the UK might have in the world (losing its place on the UK security council, for example). It is all a bit reminiscent of Horatio Nelson putting the telescope to his blind eye and saying ‘I see no flag’ so that he could countermand orders.
Under these circumstances, one has to turn to sources other than the British media which is now so supine. If you were to turn to the Huffington Post (independent of the Murdoch empire) you would read the following:
But there is also a lot we didn’t learn. Including footnotes, there are a grand total of 175 redactions in the report, indicated simply by three asterisks. Of course, there is one inference we can make about all of them – they’re redacted because they’re super juicy and top-secret.
The phrase that is being most commonly deployed is that our security services ‘took their eye off the ball‘. To the parliamentary committee that is meant to oversee their activities, the security services provided only six lines of written comment. By way of contrast, the American authorities treated allegations of Russian interference much more seriously. And a very detailed analysis of the 2016 presidential campaign by Kathleen Hall Jamieson has concluded ‘How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump’ Her meticulous analysis of online activity during the 2016 campaign makes a powerful case that targeted cyberattacks by hackers and trolls were decisive. In the case of our own Brexit campaign, it seems equally likely that Russian money and Russian cyberspace attacks helped to change the national mood (and you would only have to influence two people in a hundred – one person in 50) to reverse the result…
We thought today was going to be quite a busy day and so it proved. We knew that we were going to meet our long-established Waitrose friends in the park at 10.30 am so we started off our walk 5 minutes earlier to ensure we had time to pick up our newspapers and to rendezvous at the correct time. Then after we met we chatted and chatted – it was incredible that we spent nearly an hour in each other’s company before we both realised that the day was slipping away and we both had other commitments to which we needed to attend. Our friends have been in the ‘strong’ form of shielding and so are particularly looking forward to 1st August, a week on Saturday when they can be legally ‘released’ and spend some time on trips out in the car. The week after that we may well form a four-some to visit a National Trust property together. We knew that we had to get home and have a prompt lunch because we had two commitments this afternoon, the first being a visit from our chiropodist at 2.00 pm and the second a long-awaited visit from our hairdresser at 4.00 pm. In the event, our chiropodist failed to arrive and after a quick text, we discovered that our due date was Friday, not Wednesday, so your’s truly must have made a mistake when it was entered up onto the planning board which is a family feature. My son and daughter-in-law left at 7.00 am to get to the South Coast where they were going to enjoy a few day’s respite in a hotel they had chosen. We got a text from them to indicate they had arrived safely which is always reassuring. The haircut was quite a long experience. Meg was having a perm done which always takes about two hours and I get fitted in during some of the breaks that occur when the setting solution is doing its work. Our hairdresser arrived all visored up and, naturally, she had been incredibly busy since the lockdown restrictions were being eased. She told me that if you go onto the Government website, then most of the popular trades have specialist pages indicating exactly what precautions had to be taken and how interactions with clients were to be handled in this transitional phase. We also received some useful tips about the best/cheapest kind of visors to buy which was useful information. Our hairdresser was wearing a type of model which attaches to a type of pseudo-glasses frame which I would never have thought of for looking for – it is always useful to get advice from those who have tried out and tested these kinds of things, particularly as they are not bought every day. They may be less trouble to put on when entering shops than manipulating a face mask over the ears (particularly if you have ear-rings and glasses to circumnavigate at the same time). In the late afternoon, we saw our adopted cat, Miggles, sauntering across our garden grass with something in her mouth (a mouse? bird?) I was mildly disappointed that the cat did not bring it for me to peruse for me delectation (the family cat we had as a child used to love bringing a half-dead mouse into the house for us to witness – and she would then proceed to ‘play’ with it until it was absolutely dead after which time she lost interest in it).
I tend to turn to Huffington Post for interesting angles on the political news that is not covered in the UK Main Street Media. This sequel to yesterday’s news on the potential impact of Russian cyber activity is particularly interesting…They report that ‘the aggressive use of Twitter bots, coupled with the fragmentation of social media and the role of sentiment, could contribute to the vote outcomes’ Tho Pham, one of the paper’s authors, told the Times that 'the main conclusion is that bots were used on purpose and had influence'. The Times had revealed that Russian Twitter accounts – many of which are believed to be bots – had posted more than 45,000 messages in 48 hours during the EU referendum.
This whole area has remained unexplored since the result of the 2016 referendum was announced. There is an argument, not much heard nowadays, that the overspend by the Leave campaign plus the influence of the social media as reported above were grounds enough for the whole referendum result to be declared ‘unsound’ Other countries. more used to referenda as a way of answering constitutional questions appreciated that a narrow majority was not good grounds for making profound constitutional changes (which Brexit undoubtedly was) and required a majority of 60% for a result to be valid. Our own House of Lords even passed an amendment requiring that a result of a referendum is only valid when a 40% of those entitled to vote threshold is reached. In the 2016 referendum 52% of 72% who voted is 37.4%. The House of Lords amendment was overturned, though, in the Commons and the rest is history!
Today at long last we managed to venture forth into Bromsgrove High Street in order to make an appointment for both of us to have regular eye-tests at Boots Opticians. There we were greeted by the manager who has grown to know us over the years with the news that it was very difficult, if not impossible, to make an appointment at this time. Any issue that required urgent, quasi-medical attention, could be dealt with in-branch but in the meanwhile, the branch had to wait for the operation of national guidelines, presumably issued by Boots HQ because the number of tests would now be severely time-constrained (only one third to a half of their normal daily throughput) and of course there were disinfection and deep-clean procedures to be organised after each client. So to cut a long story short, we may be on a list but it is a case of ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you‘ The situation with visits to one’s dentist are probably even worse and one wonders whether it will take a year (or even longer) for backlogs to work their way through the system.
Having got home, we organised a fairly prompt lunch for ourselves because this afternoon we had a booked visit to Hanbury Hall, which is a William and Mary house (although actually built in the reign of Queen Anne) near Droitwich and not many miles distant. As with other National Trust properties, the house itself was still out-of-bounds for visitors but one could walk around and admire both the formal gardens and the surrounding parkland. We made for the Stable Block where we joined a socially distanced queue to buy some refreshments to go with the flask of coffee we had brought with us. Unfortunately, there was a very slight drizzle and low cloud hanging over everywhere so we ate our food/drank our coffee in not very pleasant conditions and then made the best of a bad job and after a brief tour of the gardens decided to call it a day and started for home (Naturally by this time the rain had ceased) The proportions of the house looked magnificent and it will be interesting for us to tour the actual house when it is open again to visitors.
Tonight was the second episode of Jane Austen’s Emma (a book I studied for ‘O’-level) I only mention this because I remember once seeing a hilarious book called ‘The Unexpurgated Jane Austen‘ in a Winchester bookshop (Jane Austen has a memorial to her in Winchester Cathedral) The whole book is evidently a spoof, perhaps written by a postgraduate but very much in the Jane Austen style. Browsing through it, I can only remember one particular fragment of it which was Jane Austen in conversation with her publisher. The dialogue went something like this ‘Your writing is very promising, Miss Austen, but we must get rid all of this gratuitous swearing and foul language you throughout your work. One cannot say, for example, that f*****g Mr. Wickham‘ (I have substituted asterisks for the sake of decency but the book contained the unexpurgated adjectives)
One of the political stories this evening is the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee condemning the lack of preparedness by the government for the COVID-19 crisis. In particular, they condemn the fact that there appeared to be no planning for job losses or school closures. The report is also scathing about the failure to obtain PPE equipment to protect front line staff. And it says despite warnings from medical chiefs in January, the Treasury waited until mid-March, days before the lockdown on 23 March, before deciding on economic support schemes. As from midnight, any member of the public entering a shop should be wearing a mask or face covering, by law. As a social experiment, it will be fascinating to see what the level of compliance will be – although surveys indicate that 2 out of 3 people back the new policy, what will be revealed about which shops and which sections of the population exhibit both the highest and the lowest degrees of compliance? There is also a report that the government want 50% of the population to receive a flu vaccination which shows the degree of official concern about what will happen when the ‘normal’ flu epidemic coincides with a second potential wave of COVID-19 in the forthcoming winter.
So a cloudy day to start off with but it brightened up as we started our walk down into town, where we were due to coincide with our Waitrose friends in the park. On our way, I encountered one of my Pilates class-mates and we exchanged notes as we are both due to start back on 1st September. She had been following some Pilates classes on Zoom (in common with many others these days) but she reckoned it wasn’t quite the same and she couldn’t wait to get back. I explained that our Pilates teacher when I had texted her when the lockdown was being slowly released had indicated that we would probably all have to bring along our own Pilates mats (which makes a lot of sense) On the strength of this, I had gone onto the internet and bought myself one so I will be ready for the off as soon as we get the word. After another pleasant hour with our friends, Meg and I got home and I immediately went off to collect a camping chair from Halfords ready for the days when we are going out on little expeditions like the other day. We already have a National Trust collapsible stool which is ultra-light and hangs over your arm or can be used a walking stick – we must have bought it at least 15-20 years ago but it hasn’t had a great deal of use. The idea is that when we next go on a trip and assuming that we will be roaming around parks and gardens rather than going around the stately home, at least we have some gear that we can transport around with us (including a small tarpaulin purchased for 99p a year or so ago which we can use to picnic upon) After lunch, our chiropodist called and Meg and I had our feet serviced (in the garden as the weather is fine) and then I started the weekly lawn mowing. I was just finishing the communal lawns at the front of the house when the Waitrose van arrived with our weekly order so this had to be seen to (putting frozen stuff away) before I completed the lawnmowing of our own lawns to the rear of the house. In the late afternoon, I went to water my Tilia Cordata which seems to have survived its yellowing leaves trauma as I now water it every day. I disturbed Miggles the cat who was stretched out on the forest bark beneath the tree – she then accompanied me around the garden as I filled up the watering can to water some of the plants that we have in pots which would not survive on the rainfall alone. I was accompanied (supervised?) as always after which the cat deigned to sit on my lap and fall asleep. She had previously tried to make me a present of a small bird but when she opened her mouth to say ‘Miaow’ the bird popped out of her mouth and fluttered away. Miggles didn’t bother to chase after it but merely came over to us to say ‘Hello‘ and then stretched out on the flagstones to fall asleep.
This evening what should have been a quietish night in front of the TV turned into one of those nightmare type repair jobs. We have a downstairs toilet which has a simple locking mechanism to prevent another person from entering the loo when it is already in use. But the locking mechanism had fallen to pieces and it seemed that a tiny little ‘grub’ screw had somehow got detached and was nowhere to be seen (I have a horrible suspicion it had probably been hoovered up and then thrown away) So I searched amongst a collection of screws I had inherited to find a replacement screw but all the woodscrews would not fit the bill. I eventually raided some old electrical spares for an engineering screw that then had to be cut to size as a substitute that just about worked – this took the best part of an evening to fix but at least it is now done.
It is the end of Boris Johnson’s first year as PM and for the first time, we have a sort of acknowledgement that ‘things could have been handled differently‘ There is still no acknowledgement of the fact that the lockdown came a week or so too late, thus costing about 20,000 lives. Instead, it is being claimed that the single thing that we didn’t see at the beginning was the extent to which coronavirus could be transmitted asymptomatically between people, meaning it had spread further than believed in the UK before the lockdown was imposed. But the blame game has started, history is being re-written and there is no acknowledgement that the whole crisis has not been handled well (compared with Scotland, for example).
According to the weather forecast, a heavy band of rain was due to sweep across the Midlands mid-morning and so it proved. We waited until this pulse of rain had passed overhead and done its worst before we set off on our daily walk and although the morning as a whole was still extremely cloudy, at least we didn’t get rained upon. As you might expect, there were very few people in the park today apart from a few intrepid dog-walkers but we did run into some of our oldest friends from down the road, with whom we exchanged a few stories and jokes. They were off on their daily walk as well but I imagine they are well used to the rain by now. Once in the park, I deployed our National Trust portable stool as a kind of mini-table. Why I hadn’t thought of doing this a long time ago, I will never know but it made life a lot simpler (as I have to juggle hat, rucksack, coffee flask, biscuit container etc.) Once we got home, avoiding any showers, we consumed our Saturday lunch-time treat (some really high-quality sausages from Waitrose) and then I set forth to our local garden centre in order to buy some bags of topsoil. I acquired 4 bags at the price of £3.99 each and, out of interest, I looked for the price of the same on the web where you would pay three times this price. (I remember being caught this way before when I ordered a bulk of forest bark from a local supplier only to discover I could have bought the same considerably cheaper and in easier to manipulate 80-litre sacks from my local Asda store) When the weather improves the £65.00 worth of bulbs I acquired for a fiver will be planted out in some rectangular plant pots of which I have a stock and then arrange them strategically around the patio area for a splash of late summer colour.
This afternoon my order for simple face visors arrived for both Meg and myself. These are very simple arrangements and come with several replacement face visors and cost only a few pounds each – they are as simple to don as would be a pair of glasses and will actually fit on over your own glasses. It is unclear whether these constitute ‘face coverings’ within the letter of the relevant law and their effectiveness is as yet, untested – however, one Swiss study found that the wearers of face visors in a Swiss hotel become infected whereas the wearers of face masks did not, Like many things in the current crisis, one has to use a certain amount of one’s own discretion in all of this.
The big political story tonight is the fact that the coronavirus seems to be rearing its head again in various parts of Spain and particularly around Barcelona. The British government has now changed its travel advice for visitors to Spain which means that returning holidaymakers returning from Spain will now have to self-isolate for 15 days. In an ironic twist, this might even apply to Grant Shaps, the transport minister, who is reportedly on holiday in Spain. This will be a massive blow to the Spanish tourist industry as I suspect, many people who had intended a quick holiday break in Spain (including ourselves) will now decide not to bother.
Today, various facilities such as swimming pools and gyms, are now free to offer their services to the public, all with suitable precautions. However, many local authorities are thinking twice about opening up their facilities at all. If the facilities had not been well maintained in the years of austerity, then it might not be economic to re-open them again if this entails considerable investment. So it looks as though a fair proportion of these facilities (a bit like restaurants on the high street) will never open again which has all kinds of implications e.g. for teaching young people how to swim which is a critical life skill upon which their life might depend at some time in the future. As with so many areas of social life, we will shortly discover how many local businesses and services have actually managed to survive.
Today was set fair with no particular rain forecast so we had a pleasant walk to the park. On our way home, we were recognised by one of our erstwhile friends from church who often used to sit in the pew behind us and chat when we attended the service every Saturday evening. Whilst we were deep in conversation catching up on all of our ‘lockdown’ news and experiences, we were joined by two of more regular friends so we had a very animated conversation between the five of us. We were given the news that services in the open air have re-commenced each Sunday morning at Harvington Hall, which is just a few miles down the road. Harvington Hall is not a National Trust or English Heritage House but is owned by the Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham, being one of the centres of medieval Catholicism in the Midlands and it boasts the finest collection of ‘priest hides’ (where Catholic priests used to minister to the local population but were successfully hidden in the house during the Reformation when they hunted by the authorities) So we are resolved to all go next Sunday as social distancing is quite easy in the open air and we hope to see many more of our acquaintances then, assuming of course that the heavens have not opened on us to dampen our ardour. Just after we got home, our son and daughter-in-law arrived back home from their stay in Dorset where they seemed to have a restful and interesting time away for the last few days. It is our daughter-in-law’s summer holidays but she still has a lot of school organisation and planning to do whilst our son is still carrying on working from home as he has done since the start of the lockdown.
The rest of the day was spent quite peacefully enjoying a Sunday lunch, reading the Sunday newspapers and looking forward to the summary of the latest cricket Test Match between England the West Indies broadcast at 7.00 pm each evening. I normally only glance at the business news in the Sunday newspapers but I did read an interesting analysis how the chain of Pret-a-Manger had really lost its way since it had passed from initial business to various hotel and restaurant chains who had then sold it onto private equity owners. The impact of the article was to argue that private equity owners are only interested in ‘sweating the assets’ and milking the last drop of business and this is one explanation why Pret-A-Manger and similar businesses eventually meet their demise. I also read with a great deal of interest the account by Tim Shipman, the principal political correspondent of the Sunday Timeswho always seems to be able to write some incredibly well-informed stories. This week he thought that privately No. 10 (Downing Street) is secretly fearing another Trump victory that might bind us into an incredibly unpopular ‘chlorinated chicken’ deal with the United States as well as being bounced into a much more hostile stance vis-a-vis China that might not be in the UK’s long term interests. (Just in passing, it seems incredible that in these days of Brexit negotiations we are falling out with the EU, the USA, Russia and ambiguous relationships with the US. Who are we going to trade with successfully, I ask myself?) Turning to HuffPost for some inside reporting of the current Brexit negotiations state of play, I read that a government analysis in November 2018 predicted that leaving without a trade deal would cause a 7.6% contraction in the economy, while leaving with an “average” free trade agreement would cause a 4.9% reduction in GDP, compared to the UK continuing as an EU member. There are already reports that the red tape businesses will need to navigate as a consequence of leaving the customs union could leave the UK with a £7bn bill. Of course, there is still room for a deal if there happens to be quite a lot of compromise on both sides but this might be one of those situations where the negotiations really do go to the wire i.e. not decided until hours of the final cut-off date/time. How much negotiation will go in August when most of continental holiday goes on holiday is hard to say so it makes September and October really critical months.
Today was a cloudy, wet and windy day and enough to make one thoroughly miserable – however, the longer-range weather forecast indicates that a high pressure in on its way so the weather should improve dramatically later on in the week. Before our daily walk to the park, we received a wonderful text from the relatives of our old friend, Clive, who sadly passed away a month or so back. They gave us details of where his ashes were to be buried in a local cemetery and as soon as the weather improves (in a day or so) we will make a little pilgrimage there and pay our last respects to him. In the meanwhile, Meg and I undertook our daily journey to collect our newspapers and have a wander in the park but today we were confined to the bandstand of which we were the only occupants. We espied one other dog walker and a lady in the far distance sporting an umbrella but that was the sole occupancy of the park this morning. For once, we were fairly pleased to get home this morning.
Most of the afternoon, I spent on technical work for this blog. The first and important task was to install a new plug-in which would act as a spam filter and so far it seems to have done its job most effectively. Then I installed another editor which allowed me to change the font of these posts to make it a bit larger and more readable to smaller devices than a computer. Although the various bits of advice available on the web gave me the option of tweaking the underlying CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) this did not achieve the desired effect so I ended up manually changing all of the 130 pages to the font and size that I wanted. As with all repetitive tasks, you get it down to seconds at a time once you get into the swing of things.
The government’s reaction to recent spikes of the coronavirus in Spain is receiving a lot of media attention. A very common view, if not a consensus, is that the government has panicked and adopted a blanket policy of asking everybody who has holidayed in Spain to self-quarantine for 14 days upon their return. Luckless individuals are having to hope that their employers are ‘sympathetic’ to the necessity to quarantine but whether this run to paying two weeks of wages is another matter. I have a completely untested theory that the government is secretly worried about hundreds? thousands? of Brits getting abroad and as they are on holiday they will do anything except socially distance, with the consequence that many Brits might actually infect each other irrespective of whatever country they happen to be in and then come home to infect the rest of the population. But notwithstanding all of this, I cannot personally see why the government’s newly imposed quarantine arrangements should not apply if you have been to the islands of Spain rather than the mainland – after all, I would suspect that, at a guess, the islands are responsible for half of the UK tourists and that would help to minimise any degrees of risk.
Lastly tonight, a COVID-19 item which comes under the heading ‘you couldn’t make it up if you tried‘ The government has awarded Serco a £45m contract for test-and-trace – it has subsequently emerged that Serco has outsourced this to 29 other companies and that 85% of those recruited to run this service are not employed directly by Serco. We have been here before and it appears that the government does not appear to have learned any lessons from Carillion’s collapse and other privatisation failures, where outsourcing companies subcontracted the majority of work. This means that accountability for the new contract has practically sunk without trace and is another pure example of the ways in which contracts are being handed out to private sector companies whose experience in this field is extremely limited rather than resources being given to the local authority health teams who know the techniques for dealing with infectious disease and whose track record is markedly better.
Today was a much finer day than yesterday and although a trifle windy, so much more of a pleasant day for our daily walk to the park. There we met some of our old Waitrose friends by prior arrangement and spent a pleasant half-hour or so, mainly talking about cooking (about which I needed some advice from a much better cook). After they had left us, we got into a conversation with another couple of regular bench-occupiers talking about the ways in dogs (and cats) can occasionally dominate the house and make it their own (This is only theoretically true of Miggles, our adopted cat, as we never allow her into the house and, in truth, she is much more of an outdoor rather than than a lying-by-the-kitchen-hearth type of animal).
I have been trying to get my head around the exact causes of dispute between the UK and Spain over the application of quarantine regulations for travellers arriving (or arriving back) into the UK from Spain. Often, though, the figures are not comparable but here are some data I have gleaned from various sources:
While the outbreak remains under control in many parts of Spain, certain areas – in particular Catalonia in the north-east, which includes the city Barcelona, and the neighbouring region of Aragón – have seen a huge spike in infections.
According to data from the Spanish government, as of Monday, the infection rates in the Balearic and Canary Islands were 9.22 and 7.06 per 100,000 respectively.
The same data showed infection rates in Catalonia, which includes Barcelona, was 132.4 per 100,000, and 28.21 in Madrid.
Latest seven-day rates: July 21-27 (per 100,000)
Austria 10.3. Belgium 19.0. Denmark 4.6. France 8.7. Germany 4.6. Italy 2.8. Netherlands 7.1. Portugal 14.9. Spain 29.7. UK. 15.0
[Latest coronavirus news as of 5 pm on 28 July]
Europe is starting to see signs of a second wave, says UK prime minister
UK prime minister Boris Johnson today said Europe is starting to see signs of a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. He said it is vital that people quarantine themselves when returning to the UK from places abroad where there are outbreaks. Johnson mentioned the government’s recent reintroduction of a 14-day quarantine requirement for travellers returning from Spain, and added: “We will continue, throughout the summer, to take such action where it is necessary.” Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez described the UK’s new rules and recommendations as “unjust” arguing that in most parts of Spain the prevalence of Covid-19 is lower than in the UK. Some parts of Spain, including the regions of Catalonia and Aragón, have seen a large uptick in infections recently. The rate of infection in Spain as a whole is 47.2 cases per 100,000 people, compared to 15 in the UK, according to the latest figures from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Today was a somewhat cloudy and blustery sort of day but with enough sunshine to make our walk pleasant and with the promise of more sunshine to come (although it did not quite materialise) We are hopeful of better weather tomorrow because we are hoping that some friends may be able to call around so that we can have a pleasant afternoon tea in the garden. We have been waiting for some better weather for some time now before we could have friends around but we need to make sure that we have a few sunny days in a row to ensure that we do not get rained off. In the late morning, we discovered that we appear to have an infestation of a wasp’s nest in the eaves of one of our dormer windows. As it happens, our next-door neighbour has just had to deal with a similar infestation and had negotiated a good price with a local company. So we got onto them and arranged for a visit sometime tomorrow. As this has happened a few years ago we know what to expect. An industrial strength pesticide will be inserted by a long lance into the wasp nest site and then they receive a blast which should put paid to them. Most of these firms work in the same way because the infestation might not be completely killed off (the oldest die but the younger and fitter ones survive – sounds familiar from somewhere) Generally the firm will come back within the quoted price to finish off the job if all is not clear after a fortnight. So we shall await our phone call tomorrow and see what happens.
There are a few interesting political stories that are springing to the fore this evening. One of these, as reported by Sky News, is that No. 10 (Downing Street) is looking for a new spokesperson to smash the system of the lobby (a cabal-type group of accredited journalists who get privileged information on the condition that they do not disclose the exact source) The Sky News ‘take’ on this is that for a salary in excess of £100k the appointed figure will soon become a controversial and much-lampooned figure. If we look over the pond to see the variety of Press spokesman deployed by President Trump, they invariably leave because they find the demands of defending the indefensible, or the quasi-lying that they have to undertake quickly proves too much for them – unless they are already an outstanding political journalist, which is very unlikely. It goes without saying that they would have to be an ardent Brexiteer!
The second story is that a local council (Sandwell in the West Midlands) has got such little faith in the central government’s test-and-trace regime that they are actually setting up their own, independent of the centre. One has to say that at the very least, they will ‘know their own patch’; and will also have access to the prominent languages (other than English) which are present in the area. I would imagine that they can only be more successful than the Serco, sub-contracted, call-centre staffed outfits can possibly hope to be.
The third story is one that I heard on Radio 4 this morning – it was an interview with the European director of the World Health Organisation who was arguing, along with many others, that we are not so much dealing with a second wave of the pandemic as the dying members of the first wave, only to be predicted when the lockdown is eased. The analogy that I have in my mind is that once a major forest fire is brought under control, there are always a lot of little ‘brush fires’ along the perimeters of the original conflagration that have to be dealt with. Such is what I think we are actually seeing.
BBC2’s NewsNight this evening conducted an interesting investigation looking at how scientific advice had been used to justify policy in dealing with the pandemic. But nowhere could they find any evidence that the public would not tolerate a long lockdown and therefore it was prudent to delay the start of lockdown for as long as possible. It looks as though politicians and scientists had a ‘groupthink’ about how long a lockdown would be politically possible and ascribed this view to behavioural science – they then claimed to be ‘following the science’ for what was essentially a political judgement. We have been here before – one is reminded how elderly men in mediaeval times would minutely the bodies of typically young virginal women who had been accused of witchcraft for any warts or skin imperfections and then use these as ‘evidence’ that that was how the devil had entered the bodies of the young women thus providing the source of their witchcraft. You can always find what you are looking for if you have the right mindset!
A good fine day, today, as befits late July and there are promises that tomorrow may well be the hottest day of the summer. We had hoped that some of our friends might join us for tea in the garden late on in the afternoon but as it turned out they were both busy with other domestic commitments. As we were due to have a pest control firm to deal with our wasp’s nest we were felt that all had probably turned out for the best. In the morning before our walk, I busied myself getting the Waitrose order updated ready for delivery first thing in the morning. In order to do this, I have to mentally walk around the supermarket I used to frequent before the lockdown and then update my list accordingly. The Waitrose pattern involves selecting a slot done 12-14 days ahead, populating a shopping basket with a previous order and then updating it the day before it is due to be delivered. This might sound a little quirky but it seems to be the way that the regular customers get the best out of the system. After this, Meg and I enjoyed our normal walk to the park, only a little disconcerted that we met none of our usual friends and acquaintances for a chat. Once we got home. we acted on a text I had received from my Pilates teacher for classes to resume on 1st September. I was fortunate, I feel, to be one of the four enrolled in the face-to-face class (there were previously eight in our class) and the rest of the class will participate with us doing the exercises but via Zoom. How this is going to work, we shall have to wait and see – I had already taken the precaution of buying my own Pilates mat to take along with me.
It is that time, which comes round every three years when we are due to change our car. To be honest, we are not great car-enthusiasts, only wanting something that is ultra-reliable, gives us enough space for shopping and suitcases when we go on holiday (what is that?) and is easy to park. We are going to go for a Honda again as we have been more than satisfied with the Honda we have had for the last three years but we are going to go for a slightly different model because I particularly want a manual gearbox. I need to explain that I have never driven an automatic in my life and I do not intend to start now. Anyway, we have made an appointment for a test drive and have made an appointment to see one next Wednesday, so we will have to wait and see. We do not anticipate that we need to change until November (our changeover date) so we are getting things organised now in case we have to wait for our preferred colour which is sometimes the case. Enough of cars – except the YouTube reviews make them all sound wonderful but I am sure that there must be some quirks that are not to one’s liking.
In the late afternoon, our pest control man came round and did his stuff as we expected. This basically means that some extra strength powder is squirted from the end of a long lance into the wasp’s nest and the worker wasps get asphyxiated and then basically die as they do not want to enter the nest and so there is no work for them to do (so it was explained to us) If all is not well at the end of a week, then the firm will come to give a final fatal ‘puff’.
Boris Johnson had previously intimated that there 30 areas in the country where the virus was ‘bubbling up’. Tonight we learn that the whole of Greater Manchester, East Lancashire and some parts of West Yorkshire are in a semi-lockdown – people are being forbidden to meet in groups in each other’s houses. Whether this applies to parks and other open spaces, is uncertain. These measures are designed to combat a sudden rise to 846 new cases (the highest total for a month) and a sure sign that the virus is still out there in the community but I am sure the vast majority of the population will be confused by the absence of any particularly clear message or guidance this evening.
And so for the hottest day of the year – it was certainly very warm as we strolled down to the park this morning but gradually got more glowering, overcast and humid as the day progressed (a thunderstorm would have been excellent but one was forecast only in the East). We always like to engage people in conversation in the park. not least the local authority workers who have to maintain it. Today, one of these workers had the unenviable job of emptying all of the ‘parcels’ of dog excrement that are put in special bins throughout the park. Notwithstanding all of this, we mutually sympathised with each about the trio of noisy teenagers who occupied a park bench and played execrable music at maximum volume before becoming bored and wandering off. We eventually got into a conversation about ‘Henry’ our resident heron with a club foot who still manages to sustain himself with presumably some kind of small fish who populate the pond and then we roamed over the kinds of animals we had all kept in our youth (this ranged from hamsters to rabbits to pigeons to ferrets) Without romanticising these categories of workers, I have often wondered how many people pass them by without a word of appreciation of how hard they work to keep the park pristine for us to enjoy.
As it was a Friday, it was ‘lawn mowing’ day and although I have a break in between the public communal areas (twice as large as our own formal garden) and our own formal garden, the humidity made the task not particularly pleasant. However, I did ensure that critical trees, plants and tubs received a good ration of water both first thing in the morning and also later on in the evening. I also had a chance to inspect some of the cuttings I had been trying to root and about 50% of them seem to have put down roots but I cannot necessarily identify what these cuttings are from (as I collected them from a walk down to Bromsgrove one Sunday morning some weeks ago) I was also pleasantly surprised to see that although my plum trees seem to have failed to produce any plums this year (unlike last year), the very aged damson trees at the end of the garden seem to be laden and producing fruit about a month earlier than they should. I am resisting the temptation to pick all of the fruit now but need to keep a careful eye on it so that it doesn’t get shed in any violent thunderstorms that might occur later in the year. The damsons get immediately processed and made into damson gin and then distributed to friends, families and anyone else I can think of!
The latest news on the ‘pause’ of the easing of the lockdown is disturbing, to put it mildly. As England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty, speaking at the prime minister’s briefing on Friday, warned the data showed ‘we have probably reached near the limit or the limits of what we can do in terms of opening up society‘.He said it could mean ‘if we wish to do more things in the future, we may have to do less of some other things…The idea that we can open up everything and keep the virus under control is clearly wrong‘. Well, it could hardly be clearer than that. It is also interesting to note that other councils are considering following the lead of Sandwell and are considering introducing their own ‘trace-and-test’ regime because the service provided by Serco (the national scheme) clearly does not fit their needs and they have the best local knowledge (and the languages) to know what is going on in their own local areas.
Finally, a document released by Sage tonight is interesting (or frightening, depending upon your point of view). A document reveals that serious public disorder could “overwhelm all attempts” to control the coronavirus and “catastrophically” undermine the government’s recovery plans, scientists advising ministers have warned.
A paper written by a Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) sub-committee, and considered by SAGE itself on 2 July, said the current “volatile and highly complex situation” means Britain will face “grave challenges” in keeping public order during the COVID-19 pandemic. Any disorder could be “comparable or bigger in scale” than the 2011 London riots, the scientists warned, with military support likely to be required. And extreme right-wing groups are mobilising as never before. You read it here first!
It was a cooler and much more pleasant day today after the intense and humid heat of yesterday. I started off by getting my Waitrose order in place for about three weeks time and then Meg and I engaged in our traditional promenade. On our journey, we met up with an old Waitrose friend who we knew was going off to France with a lifelong friend and had just got back a few days ago. She seems to have a wonderful time there, so much so that she may be returning in a couple of weeks time or so. All the flights and airport arrangements seem to have gone exactly according to plan and she certainly looked fit and rested after her first vacation for some time. It makes us wonder when the rest of us might enjoy the same because with the recent upturn in the incidence of infection travelling almost anywhere looks somewhat problematic. Upon reading my emails in the morning, I learned that one of my former colleagues from the Univerity of Winchester had decided to take an early retirement one year early to provide employment for a younger colleague and had communicated her decision to the rest of the group of us who meet regularly (we call ourselves ‘The Old Fogies‘ but this name may change!) My previous colleagues and I all sent emails of congratulation and support along the lines of ‘better go now instead of being declared redundant‘ but evidently Winchester, in common with universities up and down the land, are feeling the immense financial pressure imposed by the pandemic and are having to cut their coat according to their cloth accordingly (this is the politest way of putting it but least said, soonest mended as my old mother used to say).
After lunch and a good pore over the Saturday newspapers, we went for a little toddle around the garden where I did some gentle pruning of the plants I have located on my ‘high’ plant holder outside my study window. The Alstroemeria purchased recently from Waitrose is in full bloom about which I am delighted – I am hopeful that keeping it and its neighbours well-tended, watered and fed will keep it that way for the rest of the summer.
There seems to be one story dominating the media at the moment but presented in various guises. This stage of handling the end to the lockdown has got to be handled with a sure and deft political touch, not to mention intelligence and a high degree of political skill. The issue highlighted by the scientists appears to be we are just about at the limit for what, as a society, we can afford to be ‘unlocked’ with the amount of virus certainly circulating in the community. There seem to be two factors at work here but this is somewhat speculative. The first is that the younger elements of the population out ‘socialising; either in or near pubs do not appear to be exhibiting anything like the required degree of social distancing (some of the scenes of youngsters in Soho, London and in Manchester have to be seen to be believed) A second factor is the fact that many people are now meeting up within each other’s houses and the fact that this weekend is the Muslim ‘Eid‘ (equivalent to Christmas Day) has come at an unfortunate time. The massive political dilemma for the government is this – if the advice of the scientists is to be followed and we are already at the limit of what is sensible given the amount of virus in the community, then does a straight political decision have to be taken along the lines of ‘Either get the children back in their schools or the pubs/restaurants opening for business – but not both‘ This dilemma is particularly acute for the Tory party who desperately want the schools to be open so that young mothers can back to work but have traditionally also represented the interests of the brewers in the UK. So it comes to a straight political choice of ‘children’s education’ versus ‘keep the pubs open‘ You wouldn’t normally associate deft political skills with Boris Johnson (compared, say, to Nicholas Sturgeon) but if he doesn’t get the next week or so of trade-offs absolutely right, then this could put paid to his premiership.
Today was going to be a different pattern to our normal Sundays. I walked down to collect our normal supply of Sunday newspapers and got back home by 9.00 am. Then I made up our normal supply of ‘elevenses’ and we departed by car for a church service at Harvington Hall (a beautiful moated manor house originally built in the 1300s and then extensively rebuilt in the 1500s) which is only some seven miles to the south of us. As well as our comestibles we took with us a folding stool and a folding chair so that we could attend an open-air service which started at 10.30, although we had arrived by 10. A great deal of thought had evidently gone into the preparations for the service which is held in the gardens each Sunday and where we all suitably socially distanced! We think we recognised a few emigres from our normal church but as all of our faces were hidden behind masks it was possible to make some mistakes in greeting people. The service as very well conducted and although we had some cloudy moments, the weather was generally kind to us as well. We were greeted warmly (as was everyone) and we were invited to join a smaller band of the congregation for a service inside the actual chapel next Saturday at 10.00 am in the morning. We thought we would give this a go as well. By a strange sort of coincidence, there was a sort of linkage between the gospel reading and our own situation in the garden as the reading was the ‘feeding of the 5,000’ where the crowd was urged to sit down in ranks on the grass in order to be fed.
This blog is written using WordPress, the most popular blogging software in the world but it was only when I bought a couple of books to explore its potentialities that I realised that it was an excellent web-design as a blogging tool. I have a variety of web spaces for different purposes and on one of them, WordPress is provided as a ready-to-load add-in. I thought I would like to experiment and wondered whether to set up a second installation – but then realised that this could really mess up my existing ‘blog’ with a new one. So to cut a long story short, I decided to purchase a bit of extra space at a very reasonable price from a provider with whom I have been working for some 12 years and with who gives a completely individualised service in that they will help you set things up and then help you out if things go wrong. I knew how to set up a website with your own domain name attached to it so I knew the drill. This involves (a) writing a page-holder page for the new site (b) purchasing the name you want to have for the new website – I utilise an American firm which is cheaper than the UK firms (c) actually purchasing the webspace itself (d) going back to your domain name supplier to specify the nameservers for your site (e) configuring an FTP entry so that (using Filezilla) you can easily transfer the relevant files back and forth. Fortunately, I managed to do all of this without a hitch and got things up and running in about 30 minutes, about which I was pleased. In a day or so, I will then activate the new WordPress installation and get playing to my heart’s content!
It looks as though we are deep into analysis time regarding what has actually gone wrong in the COVD-19 crisis in the UK contributing to the worst excess deaths in Europe. As the smoke of battle is gradually clearing, it is becoming more evident that there is no one really simple (and simplistic) explanation of the problem we have in the UK. But we are now pretty certain that we entered the lockdown about two weeks too late (probably doubling the number of deaths) and started to come out of the lockdown about two weeks too early. The upshot is that levels of the virus are quite extensive across the whole of the community and therefore it doesn’t take much to trigger new infections (and Manchester as a whole is now declared as a ‘major incident’ with multiple hotspots in the rise of the infection rates) Two continuing problems are the fact that the younger generation seems to be acting as though the crisis is largely over and the predominance of the virus in areas of high social deprivation (often correlating with poor housing, poor air quality, a population with low skill levels who cannot ‘work from home’).
It is interesting who we meet in the park and today was no exception. A lady wheelchair user who visited the park every day had also noticed us frequently in the park so we struck up a conversation. She was Bromsgrove born and bred so she knew a lot about the local area, particularly as she had in the past visited our local library in order to research its history. She was very knowledgeable as you would expect about the park and its history and reckoned that it was her who gave our resident heron its colloquial name of ‘Henry’ – she also seemed to be able to identify each of the many trees which probably escapes most people. After taking our leave of her and on the way home, we got caught in a tremendously short shower. However, as providence would have it, a large overhanging tree provided some shelter and some of our ‘regular’ friends caught up with us and, as we had not seen them for several days, we exchanged news and gossip about things. As a result of all of this, we got home fairly late and it was rather too late to start cooking a full-scale dinner at that time so we had an easily prepared snack of cheese and biscuits which is always a good standby in an emergency. In the afternoon, I decided to give some of my papers a bit of a tidying up. Principally, I was as involved in downloading and reading some motoring correspondents’ reviews of the car we are going to have a look at on Wednesday. I was trying to find some statistics on the actual dimensions of the boots in our current and intended vehicle but the reviews would only glorify how many litres of space they both had. Evidently, other people had tried to ask the same question because eventually, I read an exasperated post from someone who evidently been on the same quest as myself with the advice ‘go along to a local dealer armed with a tape measure’ (which I probably will).
I have also been doing some preparatory reading about the themes and editors that I need to utilise when setting up a WordPress installation for the first time. Why this is quite important is that in the early stages of a project, one can make decisions that profoundly influences the rest of what is to follow so I wanted to make sure that I was not going to make any crass mistakes before I started. So this occupied the best part of the afternoon but at least I am a little more clear in my own mind for when I get started. Having been used to hand-coding all of my webpages using HTML, it will be quite a learning curve for me to utilise a tool where a lot of the decisions are automated for me but the results might look a little more professional and less ‘clunky’.
According to tomorrow’s Guardian: ‘In a letter to England’s chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser, nearly 70 clinical virologists say they have been sidelined by the government and excluded from discussions on how to respond to the pandemic.’ Experts say decisions apparently being made on ideological grounds and the whole expertise of virologists currently working in the public sector has been either ignored or by-passed in favour of private sector ‘solutions’ that often have found to be inadequate and, in any case, does not link any data back to the health records of individuals or any other NHS data systems. This means that the whole expertise of virologists working in the public health sector has been systematically ignored in favour of private-sector providers. This is a really serious case of what happens when pure ideology (‘private sector good, public sector bad‘) gets in the way of rational decision making and is a disturbing comment upon the ‘modus operandi‘ of the current government in dealing with the pandemic crisis.
Today was one of those slightly indeterminate days when nothing seemed to go quite right! The weather was trying its best to be unhelpful as there seemed to be a layer of cloud as far as the eye could see, so there was a slightly ‘muggy’ feel to the day although we were spared any rain. Our morning trip to the park was uneventful with its normal quota of joggers (not very many). mothers with young children on little bikes (lots) and a few oldies making up the numbers. Social life in the park does show some signs of organisation, however, as every so often there is a grouping of individuals obviously meeting by prior arrangement and equipped with light outdoor chairs that are easily transported in the boot of a car and thence over the grass. We now equip ourself on our morning venture with a little folding stool which is primarily aluminium and hence extraordinarily light and we use this a miniature table which helps us when we are pouring the coffee from our flask.
At lunchtime, I engaged in a culinary experiment making lemon chicken. These results were fine but with a lemon type sauce, some raw slices of lemon skewered to the chicken thighs and a liberal helping of concentrated lemon juice from a bottle, we might have overdone the lemony bit (but I will know next time). This afternoon, I thought I would install WordPress in my newly acquired webspace and all seemed to be going well at first. But then it became apparent that a crucial component, the PlugIns which is an important part of WordPress functionality would not allow one to install any new Plug-ins. After fiddling about with very settings to no avail, I went on the web and found a YouTube video detailing the four things to be done in order to get things put right (none of these worked!) Having deleted everything I could see, then a complete reinstall seemed to be the answer except that the package would not allow me to do that in the vacated webspace (probably down to some hidden and inaccessible file components). It seemed that a complete reinstall into different folders might work and this seemed to get things half working but after several hours of fiddling (not helped by comments read on the web which said ‘I have tried for two weeks to make this work and it will not‘ I was left with a half-installed package in which some things work but others do not (for reasons that are beyond me) It all ought to be so simple, but in practice there seem to be hidden problems which I do not know how to resolve. I will try again tomorrow when I am a little less stressed and rested!
Tonight the big political battleground seems to be whether or not it should be ‘pubs or schools’ in about three weeks time as the reopening of the schools will add significantly to the levels of social activity. On the one hand, we have the likes of Isabel Oakeshott, a very right-wing commentator on Sky’s review of the daily press saying that all schools should resume as fully open as possible for the sake of the most disadvantaged children who have been deprived of education for the last six months. On the other hand, there is a considerable groundswell of opinion from parents, teachers and healthcare specialists who indicate that opening up schools is not just about the infectivity of school children (which is indeed low) but the increased social interactions (mothers dropping children off to school and then going on to work) not to mention the non-teaching adults necessary to make a school run efficiently which all provide new avenues in which the virus can thrive. This particular argument will run and run – the government say that ‘without a doubt’ that schools will re-open but I think a battle royal lies ahead (particularly if a school reopens and then some cases of COVID-19 rears its ugly head and what happens then?)
Another cloudy and somewhat indeterminate day and we had been a little delayed for our morning walk because I was up late last night tweaking my WordPress installation to get it the way I wanted. It’s almost there but there are still one or two little problems to be ironed out. We needed to get home early and have a fairly early lunch because this afternoon we were due to go and look at the new car that we had promised ourselves. As you might imagine, the showroom was quite a revelation. Evidently, although we felt inclined to shake hands with the salesman, that was evidently out of bounds so we donned our masks, sanitised our hands and sat down to wait for our turn (having arrived about 20 minutes earlier by giving us some getting lost time) As it happens, exactly the colour and model that we would wish to have was parked in front of the showrooms, so we could have a quick preview of it before we started our discussions. Then came the test drive which was extraordinary in its own way. Because of the COVID-19 regulations that the garage had imposed upon itself, no one could accompany us so we jumped into the vehicle and drove off into the sunset (or we could have done) As we didn’t know the immediate environs of this new garage, we did not want to venture very far less we got lost but we were directed by the salesman to a road with some ‘speed bumps’ on it which is quite a useful way to test a car out, actually. We were delighted with our test run because the model we have chosen seems almost but not quite as roomy as our present vehicle and the boot, whilst smaller, was still pretty spacious. One particular feature of this model of car is what they call ‘Magic Seats’ which means that you can take the two back seats and then tip them up, cinema-seat style, and lock them into position which then releases a whole block of space which goes from the car floor to its ceiling (incredibly useful is we had to transport any largish objects, particularly tall ones, in the back which is more than likely.) We then completed the formalities, got sold a package which includes paint protection, interior leather protection, car mats, a boot liner and a full tank of petrol – all in all, we came home feeling pretty pleased with the excellent level of service we feel we will receive from this garage in the future. At the end of the day, we feel that the level of service provided by the garage is much more important than details like how fast you can go from 0-60mph (which always struck me as a vacuous sort of statistic).
Tonight, it was reported that both France and Spain had recorded about 1700 new COVID-19 infections apiece (about 800 in the UK) So it does look as though both France and Spain who came out of their own lockdowns a week or so ago are now starting to appreciate the start of a second wave on infection by the virus. Does this mean that we might follow their trajectory in a couple of weeks time? According to the MPs on the home affairs committee, having no special border measures for people arriving from Spain and France during February and March, and only having voluntary self-isolation measures for travellers from Italy until March 13, was a “serious error and had a material impact on the number of cases arriving in the UK, and on the pace and scale of the epidemic”. And in the meantime, the epidemiologist behind the government’s national lockdown warned that reopening secondary schools could see the coronavirus reproduction rate increase “by as much as a half”. Of course, in a few weeks time, children will be returning to school and the interesting political question will be to ascertain what other measures will need to be put into place to counteract the negative effect that the schools’ reopening could well generate.
On our way down to the park, we met our Italian friend who we have not seen for several days now so it was wonderful to have a general chat. We often chat about family matters and today was no exception. As we have shared interests in classical music, we often exchange stories. There are many stories told about Sir Thomas Beecham, who was somewhat misogynistic but also very witty. Two of his most famous asides were these. Once he described the sound of the harpsichord as ‘two skeletons copulating on a tin roof‘ whilst on another occasion he declared that ‘the British may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes‘. The opera story that sticks in my memory is a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in which the stage directions dictated that a swan should glide serenely across the stage and the leading tenor should step onto it and make his exit gracefully into the wings. On this particular occasion, there was evidently something amiss with the mechanism propelling the swan and after a few horrible grinding noises and a long delay, the swan shot across the stage far too fast to be caught and disappeared at the other end. What to do? With great presence of mind, the tenor leant forward to the orchestra and said in a loud stage whisper so that all of the audience could here ‘Pssst! What time is the next swan?‘ This defused the tension of the moment – the audience laughed and then applauded as it was the final scene in the opera. Would that we would all have the presence of mind to something appropriate when disaster strikes!
We have some assistance in the garden once a month and the husband and wife team are very knowledgeable – hence if I have any problems I don’t hesitate to consult with them. Today, I asked them to have a look at my fairly newly planted hornbeam tree of which the leaves have started to turn brown which could be a sign of drought or could be a virus. They were able to give me some reassurance that as the tree was planted on a slope then it was probable that the roots were not getting enough water so I need to do what I did (with great success) to my Tilia Cordata in which I built up a little rampart and then packed it well with good topsoil (and fortunately, I recently bought for myself a supply of the same for another planting job) so I know what is to be done in the next day or so. This afternoon as it was a bit gloomy and cloudy, I ran off several reviews of the new car that we anticipate taking delivery of in November, and in particular, I wanted to know how the internal dimensions compared with our present car. Although the new car will be 11″ shorter most of the internal space remains the same or, at the most, there is only 1″ of difference. For example, there is only 0.1″ difference in the front legroom between our present and the new car which is why in our test run yesterday it felt almost exactly the same.
Tonight, the fear is being expressed that if a second wave of the virus were to develop, the NHS should learn the lessons of this spring and not become just a COVID-19 service. 1 million operations were cancelled (heart surgery, cancer operations) and one cancer specialist hs argued that if left untreated, then there could be anything between 7,000-35,000 deaths in the next year. The ONS (Office of National Statistics) has already calculated that there have been 12,000 ‘excess’ deaths in recent months as treatment regimes have been cancelled or postponed to deal with the COVID-19 cases and as people have been reluctant to present themselves for treatments they would have done in more normal times.
Today was a day in which I had to get going quite early as we knew that the Waitrose delivery van was due to deliver our weekly groceries sometime between 8-9 am and I had no real desire to be seen in my pyjamas (although I am sure the delivery drivers have seen far worse than this). Anyway, all of my ablutions were performed upon time and the groceries were duly received and put away before I made an order to secure a slot in three weeks time (it’s a way of gaming the Waitrose system to get the slots you require) Earlier in the day, I had emailed the chapel attached to Harvington Hall ay which we attended an open-air service last Sunday as it was intimated to us that there might be space in the chapel, although it was small, if I made an application by email for the 10 am service on Saturday. I duly sent off my email and was pleasantly surprised to get a reply later on the morning inviting us to an ‘allocated’ slot this Saturday. When you send emails off to a general mailbox rather than a specific person, you are never quite sure it will be actually looked at but indeed it was so that will be a new experience for us tomorrow. This morning, we walked down to the park on what was quite a pleasant day only to have our elevenses interrupted by a short, sharp shower of rain which we think was completely unforecast. We took shelter under the branches of a large weeping willow which was fortunately only a few feet distant and the shower was over in 2-3 minutes after which we made our way home in brilliant sunshine.
Last night, as I was still having problems with the experimental implementation of WordPress I decided to be bold and take the bull by the horns and implement an entirely new version of WordPress. This I did quite successfully and easily but I made sure it was in a completely different folder to my other version and I also implemented the ‘Single’ edition rather than the ‘Multiple’ edition which allows you to have several sites going simultaneously so that you can flick between them. This had seemed quite a good idea at the time but I found it very confusing whether I was operating in a ‘Super Administrator’ role or a ‘User’ role because some things worked (or didn’t work) according to which mode you were in. So I decided to keep life simple this time and I managed to successfully reproduce the three pages that I had already composed in my experimental version. I now just had one more important problem to fix which I managed to do this afternoon. I particularly wanted to have the facility (as I do in this blog) to be able to choose the font face and font size direct from the editor menu (in the style of Microsoft Word) I eventually found the solution which was I needed to install a plugin called ‘TinyMCE Advanced‘ which enables me to do just that – so now I have things more or less configured just the way I want them so that I can carry on with more experimental pages as I have the essentials in place, including a menu to navigate between them. In a day or so, I will delete the original experimental version and stick with this one which I am calling my ‘Domestic’ version as I will use it primarily to communicate more domestic things such as gardening, woodwork etc. I believe that what I am doing the IBM personnel used to call around playing around in a ‘sandbox’ i.e. you can do whatever you like with experimental data sets or packages to gain knowledge and experience of them before you move onto a more formal implementation. Anyway, it is rather nice to know that if I make a complete ‘pig’s ear‘ of everything I now have the knowledge and skills to start off with a brand new installation.
After the lawns had received their weekly mow, I set to work constructing a little framework around the base of my hornbeam tree which is showing some signs of heat distress (i.e. leaves turning brown) So having constructed a little wooden framework around it about 6″ high, I then filled it with a bag of topsoil enriched with ‘Blood, Fish and Bone‘ fertiliser, gave it 10 litres of water and then protected the whole lot with a thick layer of forest bark. After several days of watering, I will be able to judge whether or not my efforts have been crowned with success.
Today turned out to be a different sort of Saturday for all sorts of reasons. Temperatures were again on the very warm side as we are in the middle of a ‘mini-heatwave’ and it is predicted to last for a couple of days more before breaking down into thunderstorms and rain (we hope!) This morning, Meg and I attended a service at St. Mary’s, Harvington which is completely adjacent to Harvington Hall. There is also a Georgian chapel built within the grounds and even an attic ‘church’ where mass was held in mediaeval times cleverly disguised so that it looked as though it was an extension to a children’s nursery – and priestly vestments could be quickly hidden away in the event of a raid searching out Catholic ‘heretics’. The service itself was delightful – there were a dozen of us and we were well socially distanced from each other, sanitised, masked and/or visored up. There was a very intimate feel to the whole experience and I suppose it must have been like this in the early days of the Christian church where congregations would assemble in each other’s houses and the priest would come to them rather than the reverse. We suspect we will repeat the experience next weekend as we rather enjoyed the aesthetics of it all. Harvington Hall is only 7 miles distant from Bromsgrove so we drove down to the park and hunted for an elusive car-parking space which we eventually found. We were delighted, though, to meet up again with an old acquaintance of ours who has two twin baby girls (growing up fast) and as we had not met up for a week or so, we had to catch up with each other’s news. She had started work again when the children went to a nursery but as a speech therapist, she found to be enormously kitted out with a lot of PPE since she was last at work and this coupled with a new boss made the whole experience of work seem very different to the pre-COVID-19 days. Then we met another mother complete with a dog (sort of a mixture between a poodle and something else) and her children who were helping to walk and train the dog which still a puppy. We exchanged some stories, as we typically do, and then made for home on what was becoming quite a humid morning.
The big political dilemma facing the government whether to press ahead with a forced reopening of the schools in three weeks time still rumbles on. Tonight, the position seems to be as polarised as ever. One the one hand, Boris Johnson and the rest of the government machine are arguing that it is only ‘morally right’ that children should receive the education that they deserve. At one level, it is hard to disagree with these sentiments and is evidently the case that the absence of any formalised education for so many months is causing real damage to the life chances (and the mental health) of a whole generation of children of school age. But the difficulty is this – we know that the incidence of the virus amongst school children is remarkably low. But what we do not know is whether the school population could act as a vector for the transmission of the virus to older people whilst they themselves seem unaffected. As well as school children, we also have to be aware of the Further Education colleges and other institutions catering for adolescents there is much more uncertainty. The crux of the argument is that the reopening of schools is actually the reconnection of several diverse networks and, once reconnected, the virus may well become much more rampant. A former chief scientific adviser to the government is of the opinion that the epidemic will almost certainly worsen once schools are made to reopen, despite the measures that they are undertaking unless compensatory mechanisms can be sought to offset these. The argument most often heard is ‘pubs’ or ‘schools’ – will any government dare to shut down all of the pubs and restaurants if it is the case that the reopening of the schools is generating more opportunities for the virus to replicate?
Today’s date is the date of my mother’s birthday and although she died some 13 years ago, the date of your mother’s birthday is always something that is lodged in your memory (after years of buying cards and presents). As I walked down to Bromsgrove for the Sunday newspapers this morning, I was wondering to myself whether there was any saying or piece of advice that I remember my mother giving to me. There was just one piece of advice, given if we had a family argument or tiff over something, which was: ‘Do not let the sun go down on your anger‘. Actually, over the years I think this is quite a sound piece of advice and so I did a quick Google search as it sounded vaguely biblical (as indeed it was as it was apparently said by St. Paul). My mother was always quite concerned with the political process – in fact when she died, I found an examination paper for some Local Government examinations she must have taken called ‘Civics’ and many of the questions were just as pertinent today e.g. ‘How does Central Government control the spending of local authorities‘ and questions of a similar ilk. Whenever there was a general election as there was in 1955, she felt it was her duty to go down to the village hall (for the village in which we were then living) to ask questions of the prospective candidates. As a local government officer, she always relished the opportunity to act as a ‘poll clerk’ as it was the only way in which a local government officer could earn a smidgeon of extra cash on top of one’s normal pay. Although she started off life as a Conservative, she increasingly voted Liberal (Liberal Democrat) in her later years and finished off stuffing envelopes for the Liberal party candidate. Eventually, as an inmate of a residential home in her later years, she caused quite a kerfuffle when she insisted that she be included on the electoral register and be given a postal ballot. I think that she felt incredibly strongly that whilst women had fought so hard for the vote, then it certainly had to be exercised on every available occasion. Although she could by no means be described as a feminist of any description, I think that she took her part in the political process very seriously.
In the park, we met with an elderly lady who was a regular visitor (in her wheelchair) to the park on an almost daily basis and she showed us a leaflet that she acquired from the local authority (and now available on the web) which details how the great and the good of Bromsgrove’s past were buried in Bromsgrove cemetery and how to find their graves. This is something we might do if at a really loose end! On our way home, we bumped into our Italian friend and continued our conversation of a few days back relating especially to family matters. And then a friend turned up for a Sunday lunch so we continued on our way in what was turning out to be quite a humid day. The weather has continued like this most of the afternoon and we are hopeful that there may be some dramatic thunderstorms (and rain) in the next few days to save me the trouble of watering various pot plants. I even watered my sickly Hornbeam first thing this morning to coax it back into better health.
The new cases of COVID-19 have topped 1,000 for the first time since June so this must be a source of concern. According to a headline on Sky News, ‘Boris Johnson {has been) told teachers and students must get weekly COVID-19 tests for the safe return of schools‘, which advice he almost certainly ignore. For a start, we have to have a much more reliable ‘Test and Trace’ regime rather than the present (private sector) disaster run by Serco and this looks like being a long way off. Apparently, even staff in care homes have only been tested once since the start of the epidemic and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. There has been a hint dropped by the Government, though, that in the very last analysis pubs would have to be closed in preference to schools if there were to be a resurgence of the virus, which looks more and more likely.
Well, you can never tell how a day is going to turn out and so it proved today. We were somewhat delayed this morning because we have an arrangement whereby our oven gets professionally cleaned – we have this done every six months and evidently, the person whose business it is does not mind doing a job professionally that most of us hate doing periodically, so we are more than happy to have done for us. Needless to say, it is always interesting to see how other individuals and families have coped with the COVID-19 lockdown so we had a good chat about this. Then Meg and I left for our daily newspaper/trip to the park walk in what turned out to be quite a fine, albeit muggy day (the rains and thunderstorms are on their way, perhaps tomorrow, but it is a bit difficult to estimate precisely when) On our way home from the park, we came across one set of friends who were busy gardening and we managed to convey several useful bits of information about the church service we attended on Saturday last. Then three doors down we bumped into another set of friends who we had not seen for a few days so we exchanged news and gossip with each other. Then, on the spur of the moment, they invited us into their back garden for what I think the Anglo-Indian community used to called ‘tiffin’ but which was actually sandwiches which were rustled up on the spot, cake, tea and even beer. We have been saying to each other for a week or so now that we would like to invite each other into our respective gardens when the weather was set fair so this an actual case of ‘carpe diem‘ (seize the moment) a phrase popularised in the film ‘Dead Poet’s Society‘ which I know is a bit dated now. Altogether we spent some two and a half hours chatting and the time flew by but it was well to get the opportunity whilst we could because the weather is undoubtedly going to break and they were going away for a mini-break in a few days’ time. I think we managed to get the world set to rights anyway – on our way home we received an anxious message from other family members who assumed we had been captured by the white slave trade as we had left the house several hours ago and not returned. This afternoon, I was full of good intentions to clear up some of the clutter on the desk in my study but what with a good reading of the newspapers, coupled with a trawl through some of the car reviews I have collected over the days, it didn’t actually get done. Incidentally, reading car reviews is always a slightly frustrating experience, particularly if one is trying to compare performance characteristics (it’s a man thing!) when each review seems to be referring to a somewhat different specification or trim level to the one you have intended to purchase.
It looks as though the long-awaited thunderstorms are in the vicinity but it just possible that we may be on their outer fringes. The members of my family have a special app on their iPads that enables them to track the distribution of thunderstorms as they progress across the country – if they develop in intensity, we love to sit in our porch and enjoy the intensity of the storm. Evidently, we have to chase around and make fast all of our windows before the rain strikes.
It now looks as if the government’s ‘world-beating’ test-and-trace regime is having to undergo significant revision. Some 6,000 staff are being stood down (and many of them had nothing to do anyway) whilst a significant number amongst the remaining 12,000 will be deployed to assist the local authority public teams where the real expertise has been located all along – at least for a century! The Serco scheme is starting to look more and more like ‘contracts for one’s friends’ instead of a serious and professional attempt to hunt the virus down as is happening in other societies such as Germany (not to mention the far eastern economies of South Korea from who we could have learnt many a lesson)
Another day in the current heatwave but fortunately for us, it is not too oppressive in the morning when we walk down. Today we met some of our old Waitrose friends in the park by prior arrangement or rather Meg did as I needed to go off and buy a few ‘essentials’ (such as getting a new watch battery fitted) on the High Street. We thought our friends might have told us of lots of exciting places that they had been to since the semi-release from lockdown on 1st August – instead, they have been getting some medical appointments in that had to be postponed over the last few weeks. So we had a rather hurried meeting today but at least we got a meeting before the weather turns really nasty which it might in the next few days if we have multiple rain and thunderstorms. This afternoon, I needed to consult with my neighbour before I started some much-needed edging and gully clearing in our communal area. As it happened, my neighbour and I are going to start our Pilates class together and we had to have some practical things to sort out. We also had several other bits of news to impart to each other, principally on the subject of actual neighbours and soon-to-be neighbours (as a large bungalow just around the corner from us has just been sold) so by the time we had finished our long chat it was ‘Tiffin‘ time i.e. mid-afternoon cup of tea time so the edging had to be given a miss for another day. Quel surprise!
Whilst not wishing to be a ‘car bore’, the various reviews of the new Honda we intend to purchase do all mention not particularly good acceleration for the model in question. However, I did by a series of ‘accidents’ arrive at a website that detailed most makes and models of cars with a plethora of information giving, in particular, what I found to be of most interest i.e. a table of ‘overtaking times’ such as the time taken in seconds to go from 80-120 km/h (which is 50-75 mph) which is just the sort of information you need if you entering a motorway via a slip road and have to slot into a lane of faster-moving traffic on the right-hand side. Armed with this information, I could then draw comparisons between my ‘intended’, a much faster beast from the same stable and cars that I had owned in the past. I discovered that whatever the motoring journalists might have written, there was no difference between my intended and a Mazda 3 which I had owned in the past and only 1.0-second difference between my intended and the faster beast. This leads me to conclude that motoring journalists get fixated on one or two aspects of a car which, whilst real, are not that important in the wider order of things. I also discovered an owner’s website in which owners reminisced about the much older, heavier, more powerful but less ‘zippy’ cars they had owned in the past and which made them more than contented with their present model, whatever the motoring reviews had to say. They also stressed that such things as cargo space are much more important to the average owner than to the ‘boy racer’ in us who is trying to get every smidgeon of acceleration out of his vehicle. And now, I promise I will leave that topic for good.
There are two disturbing COVID-19 stories tonight, no doubt related to each other. The first is that 1148 new cases have been reported in the past day which is the highest total since June – it does look like the start of a second wave of the pandemic. The second issue was a Sky News investigation in which it was shown that in a Manchester suburb (where infection rates are rising) 9 out of 10 establishments are not following the guidelines i.e. that a record of names and addresses of all of these who enter the pub is not being taken and if the video evidence is to be believed, then social distancing is being largely ignored. The requirements are only ‘advisory’ at the moment but the Scots are shortly to give these the force of law (and perhaps we will be dragged, reluctantly, doing the same but two weeks too late!)
Our mini-heatwave continues although there are indications that we may have a storm tonight and almost certainly tomorrow. Last night, as we were going to bed, there was evidently a storm not too far off with sheet lightning every few seconds or so but the winds and especially the rain passed us by. Again tonight, we have had a small intimation of an impending storm but the house is very hot and humid and we are all praying for a tremendous downpour to cool us all down. On the way to the park, we were delighted to bump into the friends who had invited us round for sandwiches in their garden at lunchtime. By way of (a small) recompense I have donated one of my specially prepared horseshoes, all the way from Yorkshire but duly de-rusted, cleaned up and polished up and with a little explanatory ‘runoff’ from Google which explains the story of the Irish saint, St. Dunstan and why horseshoes can be considered lucky. Now all our friends have to do is to find a fortunate spot in their garden or house to hang it, which no doubt they will. We spent some time completing our Waitrose order this morning which is due for delivery tomorrow afternoon. Also, our email has indicated that we are ‘booked in’ to the church service in St. Mary’s, adjacent to Harvingtom Hall as we were last Saturday so we are off to repeat the experience (and it is just possible that some other friends might join us as well).
In the afternoon, I texted my sister in Yorkshire suggesting that it might be that the time is right for us to make a quick visit to Yorkshire when I could see her and the rest of the Yorkshire extended family, particularly as it is going to be my sister’s birthday at the end of the month. My sister telephoned and we discussed a range of possibilities but it seems there still a range of practical difficulties. Other members of the family are either away/working/having house extensions done so the time is not apposite for a visit. My sister and brother-in-law have no desire to dine out in a village pub as we often do on the occasions of our visits so it appears that we had better wait until the times are a little more propitious before we visit. Similarly, we are conscious that we need to pay a visit to Meg’s aged uncle in North Wales who we were going to see at the very start of the lockdown (and had actually booked our hotel room) but which we decided, fortunately as it turned out, to cancel. We are going to text another member of his extended family to see how the land lies and whether it would be sensible/not sensible for us to make a flying visit for a few days to North Wales but again we feel as though we need to ‘play this one by ear’ on this occasion as well.
Tomorrow is the announcement of ‘A’-levels and the current arrangement is that in the absence of exams, an algorithm will be applied that takes account of teachers’ assessments. the results of mocks if taken and the past track record of the schools. But there was a debacle in Scotland where the Scottish government was forced to abandon all of the ‘awarded’ grades and then rely solely upon teacher assessment in order to avoid a situation in which approx. 40% of students finish up with less than their predicted grades. The UK government are suggesting at the very last moment a hybrid scheme where the student can choose between the provisionally awarded grade, substitute the results of ‘mocks’ if they are higher (which they rarely are) or volunteer to take an examine the autumn. Whatever happens, looks both messy and is going to cause a huge political row. My own view is that even though the teacher assessed grades might be inflated and lack a degree of credibility, then this could be viewed as a one-off compensation in view of the absence of proper tuition in the extraordinary arrangement that students have had to undertake under the shadow of the COVID-19 crisis. But we shall have to wait until tomorrow and see what happens…
We did not have a tremendous storm last night but we did have a certain amount of rumbling thunder, some sheet lightning and quite a steady patter of rain which persisted until the small hours. So we were not surprised when we awoke to a day with a much fresher feel to it and the threat of a further shower always there. The morning’s post brought us some unwelcome news. It was from Meg’s cousin who is now living in Bolton and whose husband had had a stroke the bet part of a year ago. The letter informed us that her husband in a weakened condition had contracted a mild version of the COVID-19 virus but had died (and been cremated) some two months ago. We were shocked, but not absolutely surprised, and later on today we wrote a letter of condolence which we will post tomorrow. I consulted with my neighbour over a range of issues because after the lockdown we have to be very careful about what equipment we need to bring to our resumed Pilates classes. So far, we are thinking about Pilates mat, a bath sheet to spread on it, small handtowel to act as a neck roll, some stretch Pilates exercise bands, a Pilates ball – I think that’s about it. Anyway, we have enough time to assemble things before the class resumes on 1st September. Before we entered the park, we called by the opticians ao that we could arrange for an eye test for Meg as she feels that her eyesight is deteriorating somewhat and this was a bit more difficult than you imagine involving a call to the manageress (who knows us quite well). However, we got there in end and got an appointment with the optician who knows Meg’s eyes well having treated her over the years. We also took the opportunity to call by our favourite High Street cobbler to get new ferrules put on our National Trust portable stool (what exciting lives we do lead!)
This afternoon, we texted one of the relatives of Meg’s uncle who lives in North Wales to check out whether a quick visit is feasible. As it happens, the coast seems to be clear so upon the strength of that, we went ahead and made a booking in a Holiday Inn that we know well and is very convenient for us (but we got the 3rd last room according to their website) Having got this all booked, we then made a further booking at a country club down the road at which we eat on the day we arrive and then made yet another telephone call to Meg’s uncle to check out it would be OK for us to call upon him and so he could note things in his diary. This leaves us one free day which we would normally spend on our own in Chester but on this occasion, we intend to make a trip from outside Chester to Bolton to see if we can see Meg’s recently bereaved cousin – as it is a trip almost entirely by motorway it seems to us to be an excellent idea to fit in this visit as we are in the vicinity. So now we have ‘all of our ducks in a row’ having made all of the arrangements that we want without any real difficulty.
As it happens, the predicted row over ‘A’-levels is underway. The government is evidently desperately worried not to let ‘inflated’ teacher’s grades become the finished product but as a result of applying some degree of standardisation the public schools and high performers seem to have come out of it best whilst the pupils whose marks have been moderated (downwards) the most just happen to come from the poorest areas, thus apparently ‘baking in’ the inequalities that already exist within the system. (Thus was it ever so!) It is hard to say at this point whether the political pressure will eventually force a rethink but in purely political terms, a situation in which 39% of marks were reduced by one or more grades does not seem to a particularly healthy one for any government, even one with a large majority. We shall see!
We thought today was going to be an intermediate kind of day but although it started off fairly cloudy, eventually it turned out to be a pleasant summer’s day with a light breeze and the sun eventually breaking through the clouds. We got the letter posted off to Meg’s cousin which was quite an important one as we hope she will be in a position when we make our trip to Chester in about 12 days time. As we have not seen Meg’s cousin for a couple of decades, we suspect there is a lot to catch up on, but after a gap of that period, one never knows how such encounters are going to turn out. Meg had seen a lot of her cousin when she was singing in small opera houses in Austria but we have lived at quite a distance from each other ever since and therefore the opportunities to see each other have been limited. Then we had a further chat in the park with a lady who uses a wheelchair and was looking out for my hat and, not seeing it, assumed we were not there. She found us eventually and we chatted for a while about family history matters. Eventually, we made our way home but we seemed to be running a bit late on everything this morning. We exchanged a few words with our Italian friend down the road but she was busy preparing for visitors. I have to say we had a fairly lazy afternoon – I am sure there were various things in the garden and within the house to which I should have attended but the humidity does make one feel a little disinclined to exert oneself. I had yesterday emailed a friend who was an old colleague to get news of his wife who we knew was going to have an operation. It seems as though as all has turned out well so far as we can tell at this stage, so I was relieved to get this piece of positive news.
Occasionally, after I have answered my emails I look at Sky News to see if there are breaking stories (I must add that although I loathe the Rubert Murdoch stranglehold on the media, I am forced to admit that Sky News always seems to get to critical stories way before the BBC which I suspect has been utterly tamed, not to say cowed, by the past few governments) Apparently. Donald Trump was asked a question whether he regretted the fact that he had consistently lied to the American people during his presidency. One would have expected a complete denunciation of the reporter who had had the temerity to ask the question but instead, Donald Trump swerved the question, turned his gaze to another journalist and gave them to chance to ask another question instead, without offering up either an answer or a defence. Extraordinary – shall we see a video clip of this in the next few days? (Not on the BBC I venture to suggest, in view of what I have just been saying above).
I read a fascinating letter in ‘The Times‘ a day or so back, commenting upon the difficulties that the government is facing over ‘A’-levels in which teacher’s assessments are moderated by an algorithm which looks at the past record of the schools, thus ‘baking in’ inequalities. For example, a pupil with high predicted grades but in a school which performed ‘poorly’ the previous year could expect to be downgraded by applying the algorithm. The letter writer in ‘The Times‘ reminded readers that Michael Gove scrapped the system in which A-levels were essentially modular (each year being divided into two semesters) and with AS levels at the end of Year 1 of the sixth form. So, an A-level mark would be the amalgamation of the marks of four semesters of work – but if this system had not been jettisoned, then by the time of the lockdown students would have marks attained for three out of their four semesters. Under these circumstances, it might have been considered quite fair to base the final A-level mark on these three semesters of work rather than four. However, Michael Gove thought that the pattern that we had in the 1950s ought to be the model for the future (i.e. one exam at the end of two years of study) and reflects the way in which some Government ministers think that we should ‘look backwards into the future’. So a lot of the current mess could have been avoided if the existing system had not been tinkered with for essentially political reasons.
Today was the day when we were booked into St. Mary’s, Harvington Hall at 10.00. Last week there were only a dozen of us but this week there somewhat more of us (about 17) but just enough to make the atmosphere quite an intimate one. We were greeted warmly by the parish secretary with whom we need a booking week by week so it was nice to put a face to a name. After the service, we drove back home, dropped off a few things and went to collect our Saturday complement of newspapers before having our elevenses in the park.
Regular readers of this blog will be aware of Miggles, our adopted cat who we do not own but who adopted us, much preferring our garden to her own. The exploits of Miggles will be well known to regular readers for she insisted on accompanying me to supervise whatever job I happened to be doing in the garden. Today, though, I am sad to say that Miggles is no more. We first were aware that something may be wrong when her rightful owners (we know who they are) could be heard regularly calling for her all day long a few days ago – so they evidently were aware that the cat was missing. She has not turned up for breakfast for five days now and although last time we saw her she was happy, well-fed, playful and basking in the sunshine, now she is only a memory. I have to say that Meg and I feel her loss quite keenly! She was an incredibly good-looking as well as intelligent cat so I shall leave her a tribute of the lines from Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat‘ which I regularly used to repeat to her:
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are!
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’
As she walked into our life we think about two years ago, now she has walked out of it so we shall have to get used to not seeing her bound across the grass to greet us as she typically did. I have a collection of nice photos on my iPhone on the occasions when I would wish to be reminded of her.
Idly seeing what was on the TV we saw that a rugby match was being played for the first time in months (Exeter Chiefs v. Leicester Tigers) but as the Tigers were being soundly outplayed and beaten, it was not the source of pleasure one might expect. We also got cheated out of our 1-hour ration of ‘Today at the Test’ as the (cricket) The Test match had to be abandoned for the day with a combination of rain and bad light. And finally, whilst on a sporting theme, whilst I was getting ready this morning I heard a sports report that indicated that Barcelona (one of Spain’s and Europe’s premier teams) had been defeated 8-2 which was their biggest defeat since 1940 (which is a very long time ago!)
It will be interesting to see which particular scrape the Government has got itself into will hit the Sunday newspapers tomorrow. It will be a tossup between bright A-level students who, because of the algorithm which reduced their teacher-assessed final grades, will miss out on their choice of university course. However, one brave Oxford college (Worcester College) has guaranteed a place to all students holding an offer irrespective of what the diminution of the grades might happen to be. They argued that they had enough information in the round without having to have recourse to a hypothetical final examination grade which was then moderated down!) And the second big story is the holidaymakers desperately getting home from France to discover that they need to undertake a strict 14-day quarantine (they cannot even take the dog for a walk)
Today was always going to be one of those days in which it could not decide whether to rain or not to rain. As it happened, Meg and I walked down to the park in practically cloudy conditions and the park rewarded us by being practically deserted. The rain in the night had well and truly wet all of the park benches which was designed to discourage any casually sitting down. But being well prepared like a Boy Scout (the motto of the scouting movement was ‘Be Prepared!‘), I had with me one of these absorbent sponge clothes which did a great job of removing the excess water before we could take advantage of the park bench. On our way home, we met some of our friends who we had not met for a few days and exchanged some news about their grandson who had been expecting the results of his ‘A’-levels. It turned out that he had been caught up in this ‘A’-level debacle in which in the absence of exams the teacher assessments which are always assumed to be overly optimistic were moderated downwards by an algorithm which meant that 40% students received a lower grade than their teacher assessments and this had severe implication for the universities that they wished to attend. In the case of our friend’s grandson, he was intending to appeal and his first choice university did not reject him but said he would have to wait for the results of his appeal (which might be too late) So he got onto his second choice university who spent a lot of time with him on the phone and armed with all the information that they had about him and effectively a 2-hour telephone interview, he was accepted by them. He was delighted with this offer as his second choice university is of the same general standing in the rankings so things seem to have turned out for the best.
I heard all of this well explained by, I think, a sixth form principal who was interviewed in the media to help to explain what had gone wrong. The explanation seemed plausible and simple. Basically, so she explained, the small colleges (typically found in the public schools) and those new colleges without a track record were excluded from the algorithm – and hence the teacher assessments were accepted. If this were to be universally the case (as in Scotland) then the distribution of ‘A’-level grades would be deemed ‘too high’ and therefore the credibility might be put at risk. So the other colleges in the system (particularly larger sixth form colleges, some FE colleges offering ‘A’-levels and those with a poorer track record for whatever reason) had to bear the brunt of the statistical re-calculation, losing out badly in the process. {Apparently, the Royal Statistical Society had offered the assistance of some prestige members to give expert advice, but this was rejected as the experts in question refused to sign ‘non-disclosure’ agreements that would have meant that they had to keep silent for some five years!) What I suspect the government has failed to appreciate on a purely political level is that not only are the young people themselves affected but also their friends, parents, grandparents, other relatives – all of which is a sizeable part of the electorate. Will a screeching ‘U’-turn be forthcoming? I think not.
Our plans to visit Meg’s cousin who is now resident since her bereavement in Bolton have been put in a certain amount of doubt. We got an email this morning from her daughter who explained that as Bolton is part of the Greater Manchester lockdown area then no such visit will be possible (apart from people already within the bubble). To see what the current ‘lockdown’ rules are in Manchester I did a quick Google search and was horrified to see some video clip of Wilmslow Road, Rusholme in Manchester (which is where we lived in our final year at University) only to see enormous crowds of people (celebrating, I think, Pakistan’s National Day’) but the police had been putting out urgent messages to the younger sections of the population, flagrantly breaching the social distancing regulations and putting the health of themselves, their families and the wider community at risk. No wonder that the infection rate seems to be increasing in certain clusters.
Today was one of those days when you wonder what the day is going to bring if anything, as a certain amount of political pressure has been building upon the Education Secretary throughout the course of the weekend and there are mutterings on the Conservative backbenches. We collected our newspapers and ate our elevenses in an almost deserted park this morning and apart from being inspected by the occasional dog (quite common on a park bench as they are often anticipating a nibble of food!). The rain came down quite softly and had it intensified we could have made for the shelter of a nearby weeping willow, but instead, we braved it out and the shower soon past. We can often judge the intensity of the rain by the pattern the droplets make on the water in the pond but after living in Lancashire for some of our life, the rain down here always seems mild in the extreme.
Meg and I read an intriguing story in today’s Times which has really set us thinking and wondering. More and more families are deciding in these lockdown conditions that now might be an ideal time to acquire and train a puppy as they now have time on their hands and the opportunity to train a puppy which was difficult for them whilst at work. Consequently, sales of, and prices of, puppy dogs have soared and many dogs are in fact being stolen, with reports of dog theft up 65% since the start of the lockdown. According to the charity Doglost, some buyers are paying as much as four times the normal price and the price is often in the £1.000’s. According to research by the insurance company, Direct Line, as many as 360.000 adults believe that a cat was stolen from their care in the past 12 months and some other research indicates that up to a quarter of the cats that go missing are actually stolen – but this is notoriously difficult to prove in the absence of chipping (which is voluntary) and/or a collar. Now we come to the case of Miggles, the cat who had adopted us and has now gone missing. As a previous blog indicated, her true owners were aware that she had gone missing unexpectedly and were repeatedly calling for her. As she was such an exceptionally good looking cat, the thought has crossed our mind whether she has actually been stolen rather than met an accidental death. After all, some new ‘owners’ could acquire a cat at no cost to themselves and the crime would be untraceable (and the police really do not want to know) So the thought in our minds that it is difficult to dispel is that Miggles has actually been abducted rather than meeting an untimely end. Of course, we shall never know!
This afternoon, we were holding ourselves in readiness for the 4.0 pm news bulletin because it was becoming increasingly evident that the government would have to execute the most tremendous ‘U-turn’ over the A-level marking debacle. As first the Welsh and then the Northern Irish devolved administration followed the Scots in allowing teachers’ assessments to constitute the final mark (even at the price of some grade inflation) then surely the English would have to follow suit – which, of course, they did. I correctly predicted that Gavin Williamson would be very slow in making a public apology and, sure enough, the first apology had to come from the Head of OfQual whilst the second came from a junior education minister that nobody has ever heard of (It did remind me of the public schoolboy trick where everybody blames ‘Jones Minor’ who is the little squirt in the system least able to defend themselves in the case of malfeasance – the Tories seem well versed in this particular piece of skulduggery. Compare Nicola Sturgeon, for example, who fronted up and apologised whilst Boris is off playing ‘Monarch of the Glen’ somewhere in Scotland). In terms of public administration, then the creation of executive and regulatory agencies (of which the education regulator OfQual is one) blurs the lines of accountability such that if there are problems, the head of the agency can be blamed (and not the politicians) whereas if there are successes, the politicians can claim the credit. And, interestingly enough, as I wrote I read in tomorrow’s Guardian that the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, according to the lead headline is seeking to blame Ofqual for exams debacle…Well, it is quite evident that he will be got rid off at the earliest opportunity and BBC NewsNight had on it a policy analyst who had advised Michael Gove whilst he was Education Secretary and was amazed that Williamson was still in a job (as are we all)
Today, as we walked down into town, Meg and I were reminiscing about how life used to be like some 25 years ago when we were part of the admissions rota, manning the phones in order to recruit the requisite number of students to make our course (and out livelihoods) viable. I think in those days we aimed for a cohort of about 45-50 students but my memory may be playing tricks upon me. However, life in contemporary universities must be an absolute hell at the moment. After the ‘A’-level results were announced last week, you imagine that your course might be up to quota but suddenly, as a result of the government ‘volte-face,’ you are besieged by would-be students who thought that they had not achieved the required grades and had then been advised to go off and appeal. Now the applicants are enquiring whether they still have a place which would mean expanding the course capacity considerably – but do you have the staff to teach them? Have you the requisite accommodation (because of social distancing, all universities will be having to sort out how students distribute themselves in the available space, even though much tuition will be done on-line) Will you try and persuade some students to take a year off and come back to you in one year’s time, or do you persuade them to accept their second offer or do you try and hang onto them having morally (and legally?) offered them a place? No doubt, all of these critical decisions are having to be taken without having all of the normal planning parameters to hand and with students increasingly anxious (not to mention parents who occasionally slip through the net, although admissions staff should not really be delaying with them as they are technically a ‘third party’) I suppose, one must say ‘It’s a nightmare!’
We had a lunch today which was quite typical of a Tuesday (fishcakes) I have learnt how to make a wicked sauce with this, which will enliven any fish dish, including fishcakes, It really is ridiculously simple and involves mixing (in a small receptacle) a desert full of mayonnaise, a desertful spoon of 1,000 island dressing, a good glug of tomato sauce, a shake of Worcester sauce – and then whisk all together with a fork and do one minute in the microwave. What name you would call this, I do now know so I will call a ‘Mog special’. After we had dined royally, we hit the road in the car to get some things into be drycleaned and to replenish our supplies of actual cash (which we use less and less these days as more and more retailers prefer to have things paid for by debit card rather than old fashioned cash). When we returned home, we sent a few emails, tidied up some odds-and-ends and then FaceTimed some of our old Waitrose friends who we have not actually seen for a week or so (unusually). Tomorrow we must ready ourselves for a visit by our chiropodist who ensures that we have thousands of miles left in our feet.)
The news tonight is dominated by the fact that Public Health England (PHE) is being folded into a new organisation and effectively merged in the newly developing test-and-trace regime (which has not had conspicuous success so far) It is to be headed up by Tory peer Baroness Dido Harding, currently in charge of Whitehall’s contact-tracing operation who, as TalkTalk chief executive, refused to apologise for financial losses caused to her customers following a cyber attack which saw 157,000 customer’s details stolen by online criminals.It really does look as though the politicians (Matt Hancock in this case) know that a public inquiry is coming and they are boiund to be heavily criticised by it. So they are trying the shift the blame sideways onto an agency (have we heard this before? As Sarah Wollaston, MP and ex-GP has written
‘a reminder that PHE is the only bit of the health service directly under govt control as an executive agency. Seeking to scapegoat them is extraordinary after cutting public health funding for years & excluding local directors of public health from decision making on COVID.’
Today has arrived at last when we are going to go on our little trip to Chester to see Meg’s Uncle Ken in Penrhyn Bay ( next door to Llandudno). We had set ourselves a schedule of getting off by 9.30 but as it was, we actually left promptly at 10.00. We called in to get our newspapers and then made our way with just a brief stop half way along for a drink of coffee in a lay-by but not requiring a loo visit. We got to the hotel and everyone turned out just as we expected – we had been given a family room with two double beds in it which was welcome. We had brought a selection of wipes and cleansing materials with us and although, no doubt, the room had been ‘deep cleaned’ we still gave it another go on all of the evident flat surfaces before venturing forth for our lunch at the Country Club which is only a couple of miles distant down the main A55. We have never had a poor meal here and we have had meals at least three times before. We felt we both have had a magnificent meal (starter of black pudding and chicken salad, followed by a main course of sea-bass and finished off with a sticky toffee pudding. I suppose it might be a function of not having a meal out for practically six months but we both enjoyed our food tremendously – and of course, thanks to the government we had it with £10 off per person. Afterwards, it was a case of repairing to our room and whilst Meg slept off the meal, I buried myself with unpacking and getting my little hotel systems sorted out. I must say the WiFi works effortlessly nowadays and it really does make a tremendous difference not to have to struggle with the technology the minute one arrives.
Being in a ‘hotel room’ disposition, we idly flicked through the available TV channels and found one which had filmed some of the ‘lost’ Dad’s Army scripts. The BBC had wiped, or failed to save, the original recordings so these episodes were created using actors who approximated to the original cast ( the vast majority of whom must be dead by now) It was marginally amusing but didn’t quite match the original.
Three political stories seem to be Hitting the headlines this evening. The first of these was an asylum seeker in Glasgow who had lost her job and with no food, starved to death with her starving baby beside her. The Home Office said it was ‘sorry’ but crocodile tears, methinks. The second story is one in Sky News ( the BBC wouldn’t run a story like this for fear of offending the government) which documents the 11 ‘U’ turns the government has made, giving the impression of a government completely out of control. And the third issue is the way in which Boris Johnson has had sacked first the chief regulator at Ofqual and then the chief civil servant in the Department of Education. Interesting, isn’t it, how civil servants have been sacked or sanctioned (making it look as though they are to blame) whereas no politician has yet had to ‘walk the plank’ and resign ( or lose office). Of course, the constitutional dictum used to be that ‘civil servants advise, ministers decide’ But in the new style of politics, it looks as though a not particularly bright bunch of politicians ( but all ideologically pure as all of the competent remainers have been got rid off or sidelined) refuse to accept any degree of accountability and blaming the civil service is cowardly. It also lessens the degree of trust between civil servants and ministers that must flourish if a healthy democracy is to flourish.
Today was the day we have been looking forward to for some time when we are going to see Meg’s Uncle Ken. We planned to see him immediately before the lockdown started 160+ days ago but we were rather overtaken by events. We had spent a restful night in our hotel, aided by the gentle playing of ClassicFM on an app called RadioPlayer installed on the iPad. The trick is to have the music playing sufficiently softly to lull you to sleep if that is your desire or just loud enough to concentrate on the item being played if you so wish. It had its desired effect because we didn’t awake fully until 7.30 and had to get showered and organised before our breakfast slot at 8.30 When we got down to breakfast we noticed we were the only non-BAME family in the breakfast room and wondered if everybody was taking the first opportunity to visit members of extended families. Breakfast was traditional or Continental and already ‘plated up’ which felt a bit like a regression to the 1950s.
After breakfast, we made for Conway and then for Penrhyn Bay, the distance being a little further than we had imagined. Ken seemed to in fine shape for a nearly 93 year old – whilst we were enjoying a cup of tea and a slice of fruit cake first the District Nurse turned up to dress Ken’s leg and then one of the army of carers who pops in on Ken to help him with his more social needs. We left Ken in good heart and headed off to enjoy our (pre-ordered) lunch in Conway town itself. When we got to our favourite tea rooms we were delighted to have successfully made a prior reservation as other would-be customers were being turned away but our reserved table was awaiting us. I had a fantastic home made fish pie and Meg had cod and chips – we have never had a poor meal there yet. During the lockdown period the owner had undertaken some renovations, knocking the wall through to liberate the space taken by a small shop area they used to have but now replaced by a serving counter. We also begged some empty Prosecco miniature bottles as a neighbouring table was being cleared, ready for the damson gin I hope to make the minute I have picked all the damsons off the decades old series of damson trees that runs along the bottom of our garden.
Then after lunch we made our way to see some other relatives on Ken’s side of the family who live in Old Colwyn ( not too far away) and we managed to get a bit of sea air into our lungs before the visit. We both had lots of Covid-19 stories to share with each other. In particular, the police in North Wales seem to have interpreted their role very zealously moving anybody from sitting on the benches overlooking the sea even though the guidance at the time said you could tale a rest whilst taking your daily exercise. Some members of the family are currently in New Zealand so it was to interesting to share stories of how they were coping with the virus over there. I made the offer to give some advice on dissertation writing as an MA needed completing within the next few months and whilst I was working I was responsible for providing the material for dissertation writing on all of the undergraduate programs.
When we eventually got home, we turned to see what was on the TV tonight, only to find it all seemed to be absolute rubbish. However on BBC4 they were re-broadcasting the film of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and although initially, I was not sure that I liked the production ( a voiceover giving expression to some of the actions and emotions as though read out from the book itself) eventually from the half-way point onward I got absolutely absorbed, not least because one could never be quite sure what the ‘denouement ’ was going to be.
As a postscript, I might add that this blog has been written twice over because whilst at the point of saving the final draft, the iPad seemed to ‘freeze’ (every computer user’s nightmare!) and I lost everything I had written and just had to sit down and write it all again!
Today was a day on which Meg and I were left to our own devices, so we had already decided that we spend some of our free time in Chester. To access the city centre, it is best to utilise the city’s ‘Park and Ride’ scheme which we did, finding to our relief that the bus was very under-populated with only about four other couples on the bus. Naturally, we were all masked up and sitting with at least one empty row of seats between us and with maximum ventilation so we did not feel any imminent COVID-19 threat. We needed to negotiate some blustery rain but discovered that in our favourite little cafe hard by the city walls, we needed to have booked at least an hour beforehand. But we did find another little more down-market cafe which was open and served us our morning coffee and toasted tea cakes, all of which were delicious. We then bought our daily ration of newspapers and went in search of a restaurant where we thought it prudent to book a mid-day meal. We did not find what we were looking for so decided to go to the cathedral -but right in its shadow, we found an Italian restaurant which accepted our booking for an hour and a half later which just gave us time to take a tour of the cathedral.
In the cathedral, we wondered if we could repeat the experience of several months ago and attend the mid-day service. But as luck would have it, the services are not yet being offered on Friday’s so we had to choose some alternatives. We spent some time browsing in the cathedral shop and treated ourselves to a CD of ‘Essential Organ Classics’ (played by leading concert organists on seven famous organs, accosting to the splurge on the CD cover note.) How many of them we will recognise remains to be seen – we will treat ourselves tomorrow morning on the way home in the car. We like Chester Cathedral – it has the minimum of what I call military clutter which adorns (?) walls of so many Anglican cathedrals. They had an exhibition of the work of Graham Sutherland ( the designer of the huge backdrop in Coventry Cathedral) but we have to say it didn’t exactly get the pulses racing.
The journey home seemed quite extraordinary. No sooner had we strolled down to the bus station but an empty bus awaited us and we drove to the Park and Ride depot as though we were in an individualised taxi (to be fair, we did pick up the odd passenger on the journey through Chester). And so to bed for a siesta and then packed up nearly all of the things in our suitcases ready for our departure in the morning. I mapped a slightly different route on the way back to maximise the motorway component and minimise the ‘driving around roundabouts’ component.
The political news of this evening is that ‘failing Grayling’ (the incompetent ex-minister who failed to be elected as the Chair of the Security and Intelligence Committee) has resigned from the committee. God knows what kind of a mess the country would be in if Boris Johnson had had his way and Grayling had been elected as chair of the committee. One of the most perceptive of comments on the British political scene came from a Tory grandee, Nicholas Soames, who commented on the fact that civil servants are being sacked left, right and centre but no politician has yet resigned: ‘Either this government has had the worst luck in the world – coming to power just as the civil service produced a freak crop of uniquely hopeless leaders – or the worst cabinet in my 36 years in Parliament may have found an alarming way of covering up its inadequacies’
First. I must issue an apology to regular readers of this blog about the appalling number of typos and other errors that crept into last night’s blog. I was composing in on my iPad and these machines are not very good for the production of text (not having a mouse for a start) and all that I can say is that the normal spell-checking/grammatical check did not seem to function on the iPad as it does on my Mac back at home. Anyway, all of these infelicities were soon put right when sitting in front of a conventional desktop. Today was the day of our return but we had done a lot of the packing up last night. As it was, we set the alarm to get up about an hour earlier to give us time to get everything finished off and then we went down to breakfast somewhat earlier. So we had got all breakfasted and the car packed up and ready to leave at a few minutes to 10.00 am. We had mapped out a slightly different route to hit the M6 but we followed the road signs to the M6 and hit the M6 a junction further down than we had intended. We pulled in at Stafford services to have a drink of our own coffee (flask filled in the hotel at breakfast) and made a toilet visit but doing everything we could to minimise exposure to the virus (even to the extent of taking our own pack of wipes with us – or at least Meg did). We had an entertaining moment when we emerged from the exit because we didn’t quite recognise where we were and wondered if we would have to spend ages hunting for the car. We then retraced our steps and realised our mistake. There was an exit right next to the toilet area which we had taken, forgetting that we had entered at another entrance which was actually at an angle of 90º to the exit we had mistakenly taken. So we found the car with no difficulty!
We got home about 1.00 and had a light lunch of soup before starting one of the principal weekly jobs i.e. cutting of the lawns. Actually, with a reliable petrol mower, this is no problem at all and I have got it off to a fine art (40 minutes in the front), then a tea-break and then 20 minutes at the back. The job used to take somewhat longer when I used to cut my neighbour’s lawn for him but with excellent new neighbours, that is one chore less. As I cut the lawns, I surveyed the damson trees which seem absolutely laden with fruit. Actually, I am so relieved that the fruit has survived the tremendous gales of last week and tomorrow is the day when the great harvesting will commence. When you only do jobs once a year, you have to remember where your particular ‘gear’ is kept – Christmas is generally no problem because most families keep all of their Christmas clobber in one place. But with other jobs that you do one a year, one sometimes has to pick up the pieces. I know that prior to picking the fruit tomorrow I will need to (a) sterilise all my bottles and Kilner jars – for this, I use some Boots sterilising fluid used for babies bottles and the like (Time to find this: 2 minutes in the garage) Then, I need to consult my little hardback book in which I keep records of fruit gathered and recipes (Tine to find the book: 15 minutes!) On consulting my little hardback notebook, my record year seems to have been 2015 when I picked 1300 damsons whereas last year was absolutely terrible for unknown reasons and I only managed to pick 170. Why I count the damsons as I pick them is not just pure ritualism but to helps me to assess the kind of progress that I am making and also, more critically, to work out how much sugar and gin I need to buy. My little book tells me that 100-120 damsons are about 600 grams of fruit and this needs 1 litre of gin so I can work out how many litres of gin I need to buy. I generally go to Asda for this and will buy the biggest (i.e. 1.5 litre bottle) and the cheapest gin I can find. I must say, I always feel a little self-conscious about buying so much gin but the supermarket assistants never to seem to turn a hair. A progress report will follow tomorrow.
After the journey of yesterday, it seemed to take Meg and I a long time to get going this morning, so much so that we failed to get into newspaper shop before they closed at 11.30 but fortunately managed to get our supplies from Waitrose which is just around the corner. I generally read Meg my blog’s from the night before but today she had three to contend with as she has rather missed out as we were travelling away. Then on the way home we bumped into some of our old church friends who were busy in their front garden (which is often the case) As we had not seen them for several days, it was good to have a chat about life in general – and I was donated a so as a yellow clump of something that will grow ‘anywhere’ so as I always have some odd corners to populate in Mog’s Den, this was gratefully received. By the time we got home, the morning was practically gone so we did not even our normal perusal of the Sunday newspapers but cracked straight on with lunch.
This afternoon was scheduled to be the great ‘damson’ harvest and as I have mentioned before our old trees seemed to be truly laden this year. According to my records, the previous total that I had gathered was 1,300 fruits so I wondered whether that total would be exceeded this year. Believe it or not, sometimes I can lose track of what count I have got up to, so I relied upon an old cricketing umpire’s trick by keeping a supply of old pennies in one pocket and transferring them (not after every ball but after every hundred fruits) to ensure that I could keep an accurate count. I started picking at 3.00 pm and by 5.00 pm the job was done. Evidently, the first bucket (of 1000 fruits) was relatively easy – as they say, ‘picking the low hanging fruit’ From then on, though, it became progressively harder as I have to resort to a rake which pulls down the taller branches with one hand whilst I pick with the other. However, I was delighted to exceed my previous best which was 1,300 fruits 5 years ago. Today, I picked 1,750 fruits which were 35% more than the previous best. My estimate is that I have picked 9.5 kilos which is nearly 21 lbs of fruit. Again, according to my little book, I am going to need approx 16 litres of gin tomorrow, so I anticipate a very busy day as each damson has to be pricked 4-5 times and then the kilner jars have to be loaded up with the right amount of both sugar and gin.
Tonight there seem to be several pressures building upon the government. The first of these is the re-opening of the school allied to thousands of university students arriving in ‘strange’ cities to take up their places in the now bursting universities. Although in the school and the universities sterling efforts have no doubt been made to preserve bubbles, social distancing and the like, I get a terrible feeling that all might go absolutely ‘pear-shaped’ and these two pressures alone will cause quite an increase in the infection rate. Then, of course, the furlough schemes will progressively start to end, with the result that the unemployment rate will soar. Backbench Tory MP’s will be returning to Westminster this week knowing that according to one opinion poll, the Tory lead over Labour has shrunk to zero, a high proportion of the population feel that the government has not acted with any degree of competence in handling the COVID19 crisis and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is planning big tax rises on the rich to help to pay for it all. The next few weeks are going to be both critical and traumatic aa, after all, handling a lockdown is relatively easy but releasing a lockdown calls for degrees of political sensitivity and skill not yet manifest in the Boris Johnson scheme of things. There is some talk of Johnson stepping down in about six months – and the Tory party did get of Thatcher when it suited them (and for those with long memories Churchill was turfed out by the electorate in 1945)
Today, for whatever reason, Meg and I got off to rather a slow start and consequently only started our morning walk to the park at about 11.00. I had wasted quite a lot of time, though, trying to make a doctor’s appointment through one of the new fancy front-ends that no doubt are springing up all over the country. All seemed to be well until I clicked on ‘Make an appointment’ only to get the message to the effect that no online appointments were available for this GP’s practice. Whether this was a system glitch, or a Bank Holiday type hitch, who can say. There was a mass of information about COVID19 and what to do if you suspect you are a victim of the virus. But what you might have called ‘routine’ or ‘conventional’ illnesses seem to have completely disappeared. The GP waiting rooms in our practice used to be full to bursting but I now wonder if (on non-Bank Holiday times) the GP’s are sitting twiddling their fingers because patients cannot be seen ‘in the flesh’ and getting access through online systems seems problematic if my own experience is typical (which, of course, it may not be) When we eventually got to the park today, though, we met one of our ‘park regulars’ who had been looking out for us because she had a booklet which identified all of the trees in the park and she was going to let us have sight of it (As each tree has an ID number attached to its trunk, then the local authority must have a database and I wonder whether anyone has sought to access this in the past.)
I knew that today was going to be a heavy ‘damson processing’ day so the first task was to scour the local supermarkets for the cheapest and largest bottles of gin I could find (preferably 1.5-litre bottles). Fortunately, the three cheap supermarkets of Asda, Lidl and Aldi are all within spitting distance of each other. I started off in Asda where I purchased some 1.5-litre bottles of really cheap vodka, so I am going to experiment this year with a few bottles of damson vodka as well. Whilst there, I bought a catering pack of sugar which is going to be useful, plus a few bottles of Asda’s rock-bottom price gin. Then I made for Lidl but these seemed to be a dead loss for my purposes as they a lot of fancy gins but nothing to suit the likes of me who just want to but cheaply and in bulk. Finally, I went into Aldi where I used to shop regularly where I purchased 10-litre bottles of their cheapest gin. Incidentally, once I got these home my daughter-in-law expressed horror that you cannot go into a pharmacy or supermarket and buy more than two over-the-counter analgesics (for fear they might be used in an overdose situation) but you can buy 10 litres of gin (which would surely kill you) without any let or hindrance. Then I set to work with my preparations. The first task is to sterilise all of the kilner jars with a sterilising fluid (Boots ‘Baby sterilising fluid’) in my case. Then comes the most tedious and time-consuming part of the process. Each damson fruit has to stabbed about five times so that the fruit can release its essences into the gin. This is a very time-consuming process and I was hard at work most of the evening and only finished at about 10.45. The way I perform this task is to count out the fruit in 100’s so that I have a very accurate count of how much fruit I have. Then instead of constant weighing, I will put the correct number of fruits inside each jar and the requisite amount of sugar – these quantities I know from records I have kept in the past. Then it is just a case of topping up the fruit and sugar mixture with gin, giving it a good shake and then leaving it in a darkish place until about December when it will all got bottled into those little wine bottles or cordial bottles you see (which are suddenly worth their weight in gold). Then they just to have been given a shake once or twice a week to encourage the fruit to release its essences into the gin. Having got this task completed, my hands look a complete mess as they are heavily stained from handling so much fruit but no doubt they will improve over time!
I am ashamed to say that today of all days (the first of the month) I forget to say ‘White Rabbits! White Rabbits! White Rabbits!’ and to keep my fingers crossed behind my back until we saw a policeman riding on a white horse. That’s what we used to do in Yorkshire when I was pretty young but I gather that younger generations used to say ‘Pinch! Punch! First of the month‘ and then pinch? punch? their siblings accordingly. I must say that if I were to wait until I saw a police person riding any sort of horse, let alone a white one, I would wait for ever. Meg and I had made a much earlier start this morning as I knew that we had a quicker turn around before I went off to my resumed Pilates class at the end of the morning. We had some words with our Italian friend on the way down to the park and then went to collect some newspapers from our little (Asian-owned) newspaper shop. I knew that the elderly Asian proprietor was enjoying watching Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy‘ and there was an expression used of one of the principal characters that she was a ‘lipstick girl’ Although I think I can guess at the meaning (a girl who has adopted western styles of dress. modes and behaviour including the wearing of lipstick?)I thought I would enquire of the Asian shopkeeper if he knew what the expression might mean. This is the point at which one must say – never make assumptions. In reply to my question I got the response ‘I’ve never been to India in my life. I come from California!‘ Later on in the park, we met one of our park friends who had kindly brought along a book of trees for us to borrow so that we could identify all of the trees in the park (when we have time) And finally, on the way home, we bumped into another friend but he was busy doing his constitutional walk in a slightly different direction so we had a rapid conversation and then parted. Quite a busy social morning, actually
Today my Pilates class was resuming but, of course, it had ro be organised in a completely different way. We had all brought along with us our own gear (principally our Pilates mat) and some of us remembered that we should also have brought our balls along with us. But the class was confined to 4 of us, each in a separate zone of the studio whist our instructor took up her position in the open door but protected by a screen. One of our regulars was also following us on Zoom as some of the other class members had been doing but I had not bothered. We remembered our exercise routines, largely, and although it been the best part of six months since we had held a class together, altogether we performed pretty well as a group. From now one, it will be only upwards and onwards.
This afternoon was the start of the great damson preparation. In theory it is all very simple – add to a sterilised jar the requisite amount of damsons, then the calculated sugar and then top up with gin (followed by a vigorous shake to dissolve the sugar) The only complication is that as one moves from larger to smaller size of kilner jar, one has to recalibrate by altering the amounts of the ingredients. Gin gets measured out as either 3/4 litre or 1/2 litre by the simple expedient of marking out the relevant portion with a felt tip pen on the side of the bottle. So far, I think I have processed somewhat less than one half of the damsons and will have to press some plastic into service (I only like to use glass kilner jars if I possibly can).
Earlier on today, I had emailed Meg’s cousin’s daughter to see if we could make a lightning visit to pay a visit to Bolton in about a month’s time. Looking at the distance and proximity to the motorways, if looks as though we could there and back in one day quite easily. However, tonight as I write it looks as Bolton is enduring a spike in COVID cases and the council may be asking for an extension of the restrictions that were due to expire tonight. So everything is rather up in the air now and we shall to wait and see how the situation develops to see if our intended trip is still viable or not.
We knew that today was going to be quite busy and so it proved. We made a reasonably early start to our morning walk but didn’t connect with anybody on the way down to the park or indeed on the way back until we bumped into the daughter of some near neighbours who was busy working on her garden. As we had not spoken for months, we had quite a lot of news to exchange about how we were coping with the COVID situation. Our neighbour explained to us that she was due to return to work in a solicitor’s office in the next day or so and was regarding it with a certain degree of apprehension. I am sure that those feelings are shared right across the country. In fact, I saw a headline from the Financial Times which read : ‘Goodbye to the ‘Pret economy’ and good luck to whatever replaces it’ and that is quite an interesting thought. The article continues:
Britain’s first packaged sandwich was sold by Marks and Spencer in 1980 for 43p, and the first ‘Pret A Manger’ opened six years later. It was a decade of economic transformation: city offices were replacing factories as engines of growth, and sandwiches were the fuel they ran on—
What we are seeing, or rather living through, is a transformation of our economy and it is going to look very different as traditional city centres, bustling with people, become less populated and it is possible that well-paid workers might now be spread more equally throughout the towns of the country. As the FT article indicates, the kind of economy in which a young Romanian worker who got up at 3.0am to commute for an hour and a half into Waterloo for a wage of £16,000 was not really sustainable before the lockdown and is even less so now. Many workers will have discovered that working at home, despite the lack of social contact enjoyed in the workplace, had its advantages when you take away the daily commute, having to buy clothes for work, not to mention the daily sandwiches. If I had to make a prediction, it would be that we would see the rise of a ‘sandwich box’ culture which always had a rather industrial tinge to it but may well enjoy a resurgence if enterprising entrepreneurs can tap into a new social trend.
After lunch, Meg had an appointment with the optician who has seen us for years – according to Meg, her eyes have hardly changed and she and the optician spent some time going up and down memory lane together. In the meanwhile, I had run out of kilner jars to process my damsons into damson gin but I was incredibly fortunate to pop into the nearby Poundland and alleviate them of their stock of 1 litre Kilner jars (which, to be truthful, I did not expect to find there). Then after I had collected Meg from her optician’s appointment, we made our way to a Home Bargains store nearby where I managed to locate some 1.5 litre kilner jars which I added to my stock. As soon as I got these all home, I gave them a sterilisng rinse ready for more filling activities this evening.
Tonight I decided to install a specialist text editor for the MAC called ‘Atom‘ onto a laplop I keep in the lounge – the purpose of this is that I can blog, keep an eye on the television and keep Meg company at the same time. Having got this installed and configured just about, I had no idea what key strokes were necessary to activate the viewing of the HTML code as it would appear in a browser – I knew from another version of this software installed on my main MAC how this should work. After a frustrating hour I solved the problem – you actually had to install a specialist plug-in to view your code in a browser. Why this shoud be regarded as an add-on and not an integral part of the text editor, I cannot discern but it is always a relief to eventually get a problem solved and working the way you want.
It was quite a fine and pleasant day today, so our walk down into the park was even more pleasurable than usual – a pleasure compounded by the fact that we managed to pick up the very last Times and Guardian in the store. We had no particular commitments in the morning and we were pleased to have a chat with our Italian friend on the walk down as well as some of our oldest friends on the way home. Lunch was an all-vegetarian affair today being a cheese and onion quiche with some Cavolo Nero kale (black cabbage) and a mixture I often do at the end of a week to use up bits and pieces (onions, peppers, tomatoes and mushrooms with a shake of fruity brown sauce and a touch of garlic salt). This afternoon, I busied myself with getting the rest of the damson gin prepared and I managed to make rapid progress as I now the proportions of damson, sugar and gin off to a fine art for the 1-litre kilner jars I bought yesterday. I finished off in the late afternoon with the preparation of nearly 3 litres of damson vodka which is a bit of an experiment this year. All in all, I have prepared some 17 litres of damson gin/vodka which, if I can accumulate enough 20 cl bottles, should give me some 80+ little bottles to give away to relatives, friends, and acquaintances particularly over the festive season, if I manage the bottling process for early December. All I have to do is to make sure that the bottles get agitated at least once a week to ensure that the sugar is completely dissolved and that the damsons have released all of their precious essences.
I had a bizarre experience in the early evening when I had a physiotherapy appointment timed to start at 7.30. When I got there, the building appeared closed and no-one responded to my ringing of the bell. I assumed that I must have made a mistake and the appointment must have been for 7.30 am! No sooner had I got home but the physiotherapist was on the phone enquiring as to my whereabouts. I raced back down to the centre (only a mile distant) and it seemed that some sort of administrative mix-up had occurred – the front door should not have been locked and the physiotherapist, working late, could not in her treatment room hear the sound of the front doorbell. Anyway, all’s well that end’s well as I was eventually seen and teated by my local physiotherapist who has an excellent local reputation. Our Pilates classes are held in her premises and I have been attending these classes for many years now, so much so that there is great anticipation towards the end of the year of a ritual appearance of Fr. Christmas and his distribution of bottles of damson gin to all and sundry.
One particular opinion piece in tomorrow’s newspapers caught my eye. It came under the headling in The Guardian that ‘Labour’s poll comeback doesn’t yet threaten the Tory brand‘ and it seemed such a persuasive piece that I thought it worth quoting verbatim.
The Conservative brand, relative to Labour, remains remarkably resilient. In a recent poll by JL Partners, taken in the aftermath of the exam results crisis, voters still saw the Tory party as more “competent and capable” than Labour. They also named Labour as the most divided party, by a margin of 15 points. This is important: it does not much matter if voters think the Conservatives are a bit rubbish if they think Labour is even more rubbish. Brands are formed in relative terms rather than absolute terms, and for now, this is an advantage for the Tories.
It is rather parallel to what is happening in the US where the prominent commentator Michael Moore (who correctly and almost single-handedly predicted the Trump victory in the last presidential election) was warning that the bedrock support for Trump is still so fervent that a second Trump victory cannot be ruled out.
I conclude without any further comment except to say that if a Labour government had shown such a lack of direction and incompetence, it would almost certainly have fallen by now…
The weather has turned colder this morning so we had to wrap up a little warmer as well as ensuring that we were not caught in a shower. In the park, we often have interesting conversations with dog-owners and today was no exception – today, it happened to be the lady owner of a magnificent looking golden retriever. I suspect that by now Meg and I have seen more varieties of dog than we have had hot dinners – this is largely because, I suspect, the dogs suspect that some little titbits might be on offer and come bounding up to greet us as we drink our coffee on the park benches. Earlier on today, I wondered how I could process the remaining 90 grams of damsons that I had left over from the damson gin/vodka bottling activities. I did a quick bout of research on the web and decided not to bother making jam but just make a compote of fruit. All I had to do was to add three-quarters a cup of graduated white sugar and then let it simmer for a few minutes. Then I emptied the mixture into two spare kilner jars once it had cooled and put a little greaseproof circle of paper in each one (I have seen other people do this in jam but I am not absolutely sure why). I gave one of these jars away to our domestic help who had a little taste of it and declared it to be absolutely delicious. For our evening meal, we decided to have some rice pudding and try out a little of the compote which we had to flavour it and I agree – it really was delicious! I suppose, though, that it will have to be eaten up fairly quickly as there is no preserving agent in it but that is no hardship. As I had explained to our near neighbour how laden the damson trees were this year, we spotted that she had gone ‘the long way round’ and entered the field at the back of our house and using the footpath (and fighting off the sheep) had taken her pick of what must have masses of fruit growing on the other side of the hedge. Food for free – a thought for our times.
As we seem to have been quite busy with damson-related activities, Meg and I were a little tired so allowed ourselves a restful afternoon. I occupies myself with the really exciting activity of removing the labels from some small 20cl bottles which I will eventually fill once the gin has matured. However, I do need to collect about 70-80 of these within the next few months so I am on the scrounge already.
I don’t normally comment on what is going on on the TV but tonight is rather an exception. As I am writing this blog, I am listening to Ravi Shankar’s daughter giving a stunning performance on the sitar as part of tonight’s promenade concert (but to an empty Albert Hall no doubt) When I was at university and going out with Meg, she and her flatmate had got some tickets to see Ravi Shankar himself and so she actually saw a performance of his ‘in the flesh’ as it were and, in the fullness of time. I wish now that I could have gone along as well. At the time, we were all enamoured with Joan Baez, a Mexican-American folk-singer (and one time ‘amante’ of Bob Dylan, who wrote ‘Diamonds and Rust’ as their relationship was ending) When Joan Baez came to Birmingham about two years ago we went to see her perform in one of her (many) farewell concerts. Whilst there, her road manager was selling off some very early recordings of Joan Baez and I purchased one of these in which, as a 17 year old, she is singing accompanied only by herself on her guitar a version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ Many people will know the raucous Animals version of this but the Joan Baez rendition is something out of this world. She had the most incredibly clear diction – how many people realise that the whole song is about the song-writer’s sister caught up in prostitution in ‘The House of the Rising Sun‘. Enough reminiscences for one day!
This morning, we attended a church service at St. Mary’s next to Harvington (some 7 miles distant but very easily reached) where we formed part of a small congregation of about 14 people. We missed last week because of our Chester trip but this is now going to become part of our Saturday morning routine. Today, as we walked down into town, it was quite a ‘chatty’ day as it turned out because we met a numberof our friends and acquaintances. First we met our Italian friend with whom we chatted for a few minu tes and then, in two halves, first the husband and then the wife of two of our oldest ‘church’ friends. We felt quite fortunate, actually, to get our full complement of Saturday newspapers this morning because Extinction Rebellion and other groups had demonstrated against elements of the Murdoch process (which include ‘The Times’) thereby stopping quite a lot of today’s production. The Saturday newspapers, particularly The Guardian, typically contain supplements and guides to the TV programmes for the week ahead, so it is quite reassuring to get all of the relevant ‘bits’ (as sometimes parts can detached from each other).
Ever since our student days, we tend to make a curry once a week and as it was a little chillier today than normal, it seemed to be a good excuse to make one. Actually, it is a little uncomplicated (starting off with a little mince in the absence of any other left-overs) and then a melange of onion, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms and petit pois to which is added a little gravy made of vegetable stock. But what makes this curry a little more special is that I add some sultanas (and sometimes sliced apple/pear in the summer) together with a little Demerara sugar. I tend to add the curry powder mixed to a paste late on the proceedings so that I can gradate the intensity of the curry according to the tastes of the eventual consumers. Finally when dished up (rice for Meg, low-carb cauliflower rice for me), it gets served with a goodly sloop of plain yogurt which proves a ‘counter-note’ to the hotness of the curry.
There is going to be a story published in tomorrow’s Observer that the COVID-19 virus might be epidemic in areas of the country that combine severe deprivation, poor housing and large BAME communities, according to a highly confidential analysis by Public Health England. The five worst-hit areas are all currently in the north-west. Bolton had 98.1 cases per 100,000 people last week, with 63.2 in Bradford, 56.8 in Blackburn and Darwen, 53.6 in Oldham and 46.7 in Salford. Milton Keynes, by comparison, had 5.9 per 100,000, and it was 5.2 in Kent and 3.2 in Southampton. The article suggests that these parts of the country have never really recovered from the height of the infection. The data on housing is extraordinarily important. Overcrowded households are part of public health history. Housing conditions are so important and always have been, whether it was for cholera or tuberculosis or Covid-19. As one commentator has suggested: “Doing something about housing conditions for someone who has an active infection is extremely important and it is not something that can be handled by a call centre run by a commercial company hundreds of miles away.”
This story is quite an important one as it has all types of implications for the way in which we handle such infections. The current model suggests that we should so develop a local ‘trace-and-test’ regime that any new sources of infection are quickly addressed. But if the virus is indeed, endemic and deeply embedded in our poorest communities, then the policy implications are clear but unpalatable to right wing governments. It implies that only a radical redistribution of income and urgent attention given to the housing conditions of the most deprived parts of the community (massive extension of social housing?) can be the only long term solution, unless of course some protection is afforded by a vaccine which may never appear.
This morning was one of those beautiful, bright crisp days (although it was not to last) and I had decided to take the opportunity to walk down early to my regular newspaper shop in order to secure a supply of my normal Sunday newspapers and then get back in time for the Andrew Marr show starting at 9.0 When I got to the newsagents, I asked the elderly Asian proprietor if he had watched the recent transmission in the BBC Proms series of the concert by Anoushka Shankar (Ravi Shankar’s daughter) – as it happened, he had and we exchanged thoughts as to how enthralled we both were by the performance. I happened to mention that my wife had seen Ravi Shankar play in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in about 1966, whereupon the shopkeeper told me that he and his family had served Ravi Shankar a meal when he was playing in a refurbished concert hall in Coventry in 1966. They say that there are ‘six degrees of separation’ which is the idea that all people in the world are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other – by this theory, assuming that Ravi Shankar had met Indira Ghandi on several occasions then we are only about 4 jumps away from Indira Ghandi if you follow my drift. After we had watched the Andrew Marr show, Meg and I walked down to the park and, upon leaving the house, had a chat with our next-door neighbour who like us is shortly to celebrate birthdays, wedding anniversaries and the like (we made a mental note of when these are!). On our way down the hill, we saw the grandchild of one of our sets of friends (we knew it she had been born last December) that we had heard a lot about but not actually seen until today. Then, on the way home, we had a long, long chat with some other friends. In particular, we wanted to know how their grandson had fared after the ‘A’-levels debacle. It so happened that he was more than happy to accept and keep with his second choice of university (even though his first had come back to him, offering to honour their promise of a place) and was already making active preparations to start his new university term. In the course of our extended conversation, we covered various childhood traumas that had afflicted on of our friends and then ranged several other things, including how our friend Alistair had returned to Ceylon (as it was then called) for a family vacation, missed our wedding but their family showed us with gifts when we got married on September 9th, 1967.
Although this blog is written and published using WordPress, I also keep a parallel text version of it and I thought that as we were up to day 174, it would be useful to keep up some back-ups. I keep two different backups on two different servers so that if one of them went ‘belly up’ then the other would always be available. Whilst doing this, I worked out how to configure my version of CyberDuck (an FTP client) ensuring that I always start off with the correct local and remote folders ready. This means that a backup will be an easy task to do regularly, particularly if it does not become too complicated or burdensome.
We had hoped to go and visit Meg’s recently bereaved cousin who is in sheltered accommodation in Bolton, Greater Manchester. I suppose it is the operation of ‘Sod’s law‘ that of all the towns and cities where Meg’s cousin might have gone to live to be near her daughter, Bolton is the one town which by a large margin is heading the infection ‘league’ with 99 cases per 100,000 – by way of contrast, Blackburn with Darwen which is just next door has a rate of 48 per 100,000. We shall have to wait and see whether this subsides in time for a planned visit on the occasion of Meg’s birthday in about a month’s time. Today, there is even more grim news that the new infection rate has increased from 1,800 yesterday to 3,000 today (which is a dramatic, not to say concerning, rate of increase) So far as we can tell, the new infection rate seems to predominate in the 18-49 age group and there is a rumour in one of today’s newspapers that the Bolton ‘spike’ originated in one traveller returning from holiday, infected (perhaps by fellow Brits not observing social distancing rules whilst on holiday) and then going on a pub crawl leaving a trail of destruction behind him…
Meg and I both slept in a bit this morning, for reasons which we cannot quite discern. In any case, it was not a particularly bright and cheerful day so I went and collected the newspapers on my own whilst Meg stayed within the house. Today, we missed out on our normal walk through the park but yesterday, an incident occurred which, in retrospect, I find amazing. The mother (or it might have been another female relative for all I know) of two little boys who I estimated to be about three years old encouraged them to go and ‘spend a penny’ by pulling down their trousers and relieving themselves against the trunk of one of the nearby trees. Then she thought it would be a good idea to record a clip of their bare bottoms on her mobile phone, to her great amusement. I thought I had seen lots of things in the course of my life, but nothing quite like this.
After lunch, I had prepared myself for a cutting of the communal lawns but a sudden shower put paid to the ‘best laid plans of mice and men’ Accordingly, I thought I would delay things for an hour or so because often the clouds roll away in the late afternoon, giving a window of opportunity if the grass is not too wet to be cut at this stage. I am reminded that sometimes the gardening books would say ‘If you intend to do such-and-such, then choose a nice day…‘ but chance would be a fine thing. As it was a bit of a messed up afternoon, I amused myself with a detailed reading of the newspapers and a comparison of the various engine characteristics of our present car, previous car and next intended car – actually, they are all much of a muchness, so that I doubt that in practice I will witness very much change at all. I did manage to get the lawns cut in the late afternoon, after all (and just before another shower intervened).
Apart from the constantly worrying COVID-19 infection rate (practically unchanged since yesterday at just a shade under 3.000 new infections), there is only one big political story in town tonight. That is the suggestion that the UK may unilaterally rip up the Withdrawal Agreement (which has the status of a treaty in both national and international law) The government is claiming to be just doing little ‘tidying up’ but the EU and the Irish are deeply concerned. Not to put too fine a point on it, if the UK rips up an international agreement and refuses to abide by it, then the UK become a ‘rogue’ or a ‘parish’ state whose word will be trusted by no-one. Whether this is meant to be the ultimate in a negotiation tactic remains unclear as I write – but the consequences of it, as many commentators are saying, are dynamite.
The Northern Ireland SDLP leader is quoted as saying “How could any country come to an agreement with Britain if they’re prepared to rip up an international treaty? Could Britain really be prepared to sacrifice its credibility on the international negotiating stage in exchange for a more politically acceptable outcome to NI-GB trade?"
By way of a change from British politics, I decided to have a quick look at the current American political scene. On the one hand, the polls look very stable and with a consistent lead for Joe Biden over Donald Trump (50% to 42%) and ahead in 11 of the 14 ‘battle ground’ states. So on the face of it, it might look like an easy rise for the Democratic contender. On the other hand, there is an acknowledgement that the polls will tighten before November 3rd (polling day) and some informed commentators are arguing that there might be a massive ‘submerged’ but silent body of voters who will actually vote for Trump but not admit it to the pollsters ( bit like the ‘silent conservatives’ in the UK). In addition, Trump has been saying that he will probably challenge the result if he loses by claiming that the postal votes in the US are fraudulent (although this has never proved to be the case before) And who knows what dirty tricks will be unleashed on social media as polling day approaches? There has already been a ‘doctored’ photo of Biden making him look much older than he already is – this was taken down fairly rapidly on social media but not before it had been viewed by millions of voters (and the damage potentially done)!
We were a little late in walking down to the park this morning and thus missed some of our ex-Waitrose friends who had made a journey to the park in order that we have a surprise meeting – but it was not to be. When we set off the weather was quite cloudy and overcast so we wrapped up fairly warm but then the clouds rolled away and it got really quite warm and almost summer-like. Whilst in the park we noticed several other groupings where up to fifteen people had brought along their own chairs and were having a social (and legal) gathering but we were a little intrigued how the groupings had formed and been organised for their trip to the park in the first place. We had to hurry back up the hill because today was Mike’s Pilates day – classes resumed last Tuesday and we are re-establishing the pattern of several years duration except our numbers are now confined to four (one of us in each corner of the studio, plus one regular member of our group participating the class via ‘Zoom‘) Today we were put through our paces a little – last week we all had a gentle reintroduction but this week we are almost getting back to normal again. No doubt, I might feel a little stiff tomorrow but this must be for the best.
After the exertions of the morning, we had a fairly gentle afternoon but there was some interesting political news developing during the day. It appeared that Boris Johnson’s reported bid to override parts of his Brexit deal “does break international law”, a minister has admitted – as the head of the government’s legal department quit over his concerns about the move. The Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, announced in the House of Commons conceded that the legislation to be published tomorrow it would go against the treaty in a “specific and limited way” and needless to say, this is causing many more traditional Tories to have severe worries about the damage about to be done to the UK’s international reputation (In the meanwhile, of course, the Brexiteers are absolutely delighted because they felt that the Withdrawal Agreement had ‘given away’ far too much already)
In the meanwhile, the COVID-19 infection rate is rising at an alarming speed, particularly amongst the young. The latest data reveals that the fast rate of increase is amongst the 17-21 age group whilst the 20-29-year olds have the highest rate of infection. The number of deaths has risen from 3 to 30. Public health officials are particularly worried that these younger people will soon infect their more frail relatives and we will see a spike in cases amongst the more elderly age groups in about 4 weeks time. What seems particularly distressing is that there appears to be little attempt amongst the young to social distance – lots of hugging and kissing particularly after a certain amount of alcohol has been consumed. Without sounding unduly authoritarian, I am amazed that the police do not move into certain pubs and in the absence of social distancing and the maintenance of adequate records (required by the law) to immediately close them down – for a month at least. One suggestion is that the more vulnerable age groups socially shield themselves – so the youngsters can go out and enjoy themselves! Surely the wrong way round.
Late on tonight has come the dramatic news that ALL social gatherings, whether indoors or outdoors, will be reduced from 30 to 6 as from next Monday. Nor is this guidance but will actually be the law – there are going to be a list of exemptions (churches for example?) but these will be published over the next few days. You can either say that the government is panicking or that it is acting with complete responsibility. [I must add a personal opinion that I am absolutely delighted because there were very clear signs that the COVID crisis was getting completely out of hand and the country as a whole needed (a) clear and unequivocal guidance (b) an indication of the seriousness of the situation]. In effect, we are almost going for a semi-lockdown – although places of work are to be exempt, pubs and restaurants will not be and I wonder whether this will prove to be the death knell for many of them?
Today, or rather today’s date, is rather a special day because it is Meg and my wedding anniversary. Today is anniversary No. 53 which is evidently three years on from the triple celebrations that we spent three years ago (one in Yorkshire for members of Mike’s family, one here in the Midlands for family and friends and the final one in Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain). Today, though, we had muted but equally enjoyable celebrations. We did undertake our normal walk to the park this morning which was uneventful. Then we had a lunch date organised at 1.00pm in our favourite hotel/restaurant some eight miles distant, where we incidentally we had held our Midlands celebrations three years ago. Meg and I chose some fairly simple things off the menu (roasted mackerel followed by sea bream for Meg, a delicious pork chop for Mike) but this was supplemented by a fantastic bottle of Rioja of which we seem to have been deprived for months. We had indicated to the hotel when we made the booking that it was going to be an ‘anniversary meal’ and so we had a pleasant surprise when to go with our coffee the chef had prepared a little side dish with some select chocolates and adorned with ‘Happy Anniversary‘ traced out in chocolate in the dish. We had a pleasant conversation with the restaurant manager (from Lithuania!) and made enquiries of our favourite member of the waiting staff who is ‘on furlough’ at the moment. Always when we have had lunch here, we take the opportunity to have a walk in the extensive hotel grounds which are maintained as a beautiful natural park. It is hard not to remind ourselves that we are actually in the heart of the Worcestershire countryside and I collected some ripe acorns which I hope to grow on. It was a most beautiful afternoon and one our way back in we exchanged some thoughts with our next door neighbour (whose own birthday celebrations were being impacted somewhat by the new ‘maximum of 6’ regulations to be in force from next Monday). We then enjoyed a nice treat of ice-cream and the obligatory cup of tea before settling in to relax for the evening. All of this might not sound very exciting but Meg and I have had a really enjoyable day.
The news the afternoon is still dominated by the two major stories of the new COVID restriction to 6 persons on the one hand and the Government plans to legislate in such a way that some of the provisions of the Withdrawal Agreement (now a treaty in both national and in international law) is to breached. Actually, the BBC News website was full of a quite useful ‘question-and-answer’ section because the rules that sound simple in theory may be quite difficult to put into practice when people have made arrangements in groups such as birthday parties or walking groups. Although there is some over-optimist talk (not least from Boris Johnson) that the new restrictions might be lifted ‘by Christmas’ if all goes well, the ‘vox pop‘ interviews with random members of the public reveal that many people are resigned for the new measures to last at least until the spring. We shall have to wait and see.
In the meanwhile, the shock waves continue from the Johnson government intention to deliberately break some provisions of the internationally binding Withdrawal Agreement. The Irish, in particular, seem to be in a state of shocked disbelief, as they contemplate the possibility that that a hard border might be virtually re-installed in the island of Ireland. It seems that key components may contradict the Withdrawal Agreement passed by parliament last year, by letting ministers hand themselves the power to determine rules on state aid and goods travelling between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Other European countries are dismayed that the UK is attempting to renege on its obligations in such a cavalier way and it raises the interesting question of why any group of trading nations would possibly want to conclude any kind of a deal with the UK if the respect for international law is so low that the UK will walk away later from any provisions that it does not like. Even as a negotiating tactic, this seems like a serious mistake by the government (although the ardent Brexiteers will, of course, be delighted).
Today was very much the ‘day after the day before’ i.e. everything seemed a bit of an anti-climax after the excitement of yesterday. Nonetheless, we ventured forth and collected our newspapers as well as calling in at a cut-price cosmetics store before settling down for our coffee and biscuits. In the park we met with one of our park friends who had previously lent us her book on trees – in return, I had shown her how to access my blog on her phone. She had not been particularly successful in this so I took over her phone for a few minutes and loaded the blog onto her in-phone browser (and everything seemed to work OK) Then we walked home in quite pleasant sunshine where the clouds had cleared somewhat to give us quite a pale sunshine. After lunch, I entertained myself by getting some file listing programs and empty web formats into one folder, instead of scattered in various places. I also refined the footer that I like to copy over into the bottom of each new web page indicating the day/date in UK format/time that the website was updated, made a little bit prettier with some in-line styling to get it the way I wanted (basically a smaller but italicised font in a pleasing but non-intrusive text colouration) This sounds quite straightforward but actually, the different ways of displaying a date in Javascript have to be seen to be believed so it took some web-searching to get exactly the format I wanted without an enormous volume of coding.
Tonight, we witnessed an extraordinary Promenade concert played, without an audience, in the Royal Albert Hall. Tonight was quite an extraordinary night because the principal work was Beethoven’s Seventh symphony. This was first dissected theme by theme and section by section of the orchestra – almost like taking a piece of machinery apart to see how it is constructed before it is all put back tother again. The second extraordinary part of tonight’s performance is that the members of the orchestra performed standing up and, obviously, socially distanced from each other. To my mind, the fact that the orchestra performed standing rather than sitting allowed the members of the orchestra to use their bodies more expressively (and much more so than if they sitting in a conventional way). The other musician who performs this way is Gustavo Dudamel who has forged an outstanding, internationally-renowned youth orchestra in Argentina – their performances are always enthusiastically received not least because the performances demonstrate so much vivacity and excitement. So it was tonight and, to my mind, the members of the orchestra were not also concentrating hard but really enjoying themselves in what is really a most exciting piece with a myriad of paces, colours and timbres. (In case, you think I am waxing lyrical it is because I was the leader of the second violins in my school orchestra at the age of 14 – then I changed schools to a school with no musical traditions at all and all of that investment and pleasure in my musical education came to an abrupt end)
As might be expected, there is a massive stand-off between the EU and the UK tonight. The EU is in effect saying ‘Withdraw this Bill in the next 20 days and/or we will sue you and the trade talks will be at an end‘ On the other hand, the UK is saying an absolute ‘No‘ What is making the EU apoplectic is the fact that the United Kingdom Internal Market Bill lists all the legislation that can now, once this is approved by parliament, be ignored by ministers. This includes, not only, as expected, the Northern Ireland Protocol, and “other provisions of the Withdrawal Agreement” but also – incredibly – “any other EU law or international law“. There is no further detail why this is necessary in the accompanying explanatory notes. Or why it doubles down a few lines later that this law can override “any other legislation, convention or rule of international or domestic law whatsoever, including any order, judgement or decision of the Europe Court or of any other court or tribunal” There is so much discontent amongst traditional Tories that a wrecking amendment may well be forthcoming when the Bill is presented to the House of Commons next week. The House of Lords may well be minded to reject the Bill – after all, their constitutional duty is to act as a brake on a maverick House of Commons. In addition, Nancy Pelosi. the speaker and ‘de facto’ leader of the Democrats in the USA Congress is, in effect saying to the UK that if you press ahead with anything that threatens to wreck the Northern Ireland peace deal, then forget about any trade deal with the USA (the Brexiteer’s long-cherished wish’)
It was a fairly warm day today which made our walk to the park as pleasant as always. On the way down, we met our Italian friend with whom we had a good chat. After picking up our newspapers, we called into the nearby Waitrose in order to buy a big bag of red potatoes, which I forgotten to put in my weekly order. We do not eat many potatoes these days (about one a day, baked in the microwave) Hence purchase of a large bag of the same only takes place about once a month or so. Attendance in the park seemed quite attenuated today – whereas in the past few days we have seen groups of up to about 15 complete with camping chairs, food etc. one wonders whether this will now be a thing of the past once the ‘Meet only 6’ regime kicks in.
This morning’s Daily Mirror has revealed the results of a study by the think-tank Demos in which Britain appears to be more divided over measures to curb coronavirus than it was over Brexit. Their study suggests the “social fractures” triggered by moves to halt the spread of Covid-19 have proved more controversial than the rows unleashed by the UK’s exit from the EU. Their online survey of 10,061 voters, carried out between July 31 and August 7, found 58% of mask wearers have “severely negative attitudes towards non-mask wearers”. Some 68% of people who stuck to strict lockdown rules have “strong negative views” about lockdown rule breakers. In comparison, only 33% of people who did not vote Leave in the 2016 EU referendum “resent, hate, or think people who voted for Brexit are bad people”, while 26% either “admire, respect or think they are good people”, the survey found. The upshot of all of this is just when we thought we had a real ‘culture wars’ between Brexiteers and Remainers, this divide has been replaced by an even stronger social divide in the case of mask wearers v. non-wearers. One can understand where some of this resentment comes from when those who have largely kept to the shielding, social distancing and mask-wearing rules have seen many elements of the younger generation openly flouting these conventions (and thereby putting at some severe risk any members of their family who are much older and/or more vulnerable).
This afternoon was largely devoted to reading (and some computing) with an eye as to what is happening politically. I had found in a web-search a simple directory listing written in PHP but I needed to find a way in which I could format the admittedly simple output into the font styles I wanted (hence combining HTML and PHP) I think more by good luck than anything else, I found a way to do this so, having succeeded, I think I will stop this particular line of experimentation.
The COVID-19 news today is pretty scary, whichever way you look at it. Birmingham has had to restrict the visiting of households (working out that this is how the transmission seems to be occurring) whilst the critical ‘R’ factor (= rate of reproduction) factor has risen to about 1.1 which is the highest value than has been the case since early March. When you consider that thousands of university students are about to travel all across the country to their new universities, one wonders what the effect of this is going to be when added to the return of the schools and the easing of the lock-down on commercial premises. The universities are really trying to do their best before the students return but the implications of all of this must be a bit scary to university chiefs and policy makers alike.
For those interested in the political process, the next week or so will prove to be absolutely fascinating. Boris Johnson will face opposition from Bexiteers who think the bill goes too far and from those who think it does not go far enough. Teresa May has indicated that she will head any opposition to the new proposals but fortunately for her she will be out of the country when some vital votes are taken. Otherwise, we would see the prospect of Teresa May voting against the Johnson government, having the Conservative ‘whip’ withdrawn and thereby being thrown out of the Conservative party. It is now well recognised that the ideological fervour of the Brexiteers is now so great that they honesrtly do not care if the entire economy is wrecked if there is no deal (which is now quite probable)
Today was one of those somewhat indeterminate types of day where nothing quite happens the way it should. For a start, Meg had a rather disturbed night last night so I went to church on my own which is a novel experience – I must say that it is some decades since I have done such a thing on my own, but there we are. Whilst Meg stayed in bed this morning, I wandered off down into town to collect my newspapers (thankfully intact for a Saturday) and then made a rather rare venture along our local high street before availing myself of the delights of ‘The Works‘ to buy some stationery materials for Meg. Whilst in town, I bumped into my ex-Waitrose friends with whom I used to have coffee once a week. We enquired about mutual friends and bemoaned the fact that that our regular sojourn in the Waitrose cafe is now no more. After my little bits of shopping, I had a solitary trudge home but it was made somewhat better because I had with me my ‘i-player’ I should point out that this is an extremely old i-Phone which is about eight years old and has no value in the market place. However, I had managed in the past to download about 200 tracks of classical music onto it and the play-back facilities of this gives it a new lease of life (Top tip – I tend to have it on ‘Aircraft Mode’ nearly all the time which massively conserves the battery life, given that I do now need it for WiFi/Web/phone purposes)
This afternoon was largely given over to domestic activities that are the type usually left to a Saturday afternoon. Tomorrow, though, we anticipate going to Oxford to lunch with some old friends. I haven’t taken the car into the centre of Oxford before but I am assured that car parking on a Sunday is usually unproblematic – now that I have my route planned out, I know how long it should take with a bit of extra ‘getting lost’ time added on in case of delays. This evening, I was trying to sort out a wicked little HTML/CSS problem that I think I have resolved. By the way, nothing is more infuriating when I am trying to get something to work on the computer which I know I had working OK in the past but now stubbornly refuses to be put right. It can be something as trivial as a misplaced semi-colon as I have just reminded myself. In the background, we had ‘Last Night at the Proms‘ going on where there has been some controversy (culture wars?) as the BBC were both unhappy and unsure about to broadcast the amazingly jingoist renditions which are normally quite good fun to watch but increasingly out-of-kilter in these times when we are beset by the COVID-19 crisis, Brexit negotiations and an impending constitutional crisis in which it looks as though Britain does not so much ‘rule the waves‘ but rather ‘waives the rules‘
Tomorrow’s Sunday newspapers are full of the news and the analysis of the news about the Internal Market Bill which Boris Johnson is due to bring before the Commons next week. Tow ex-Prime Ministers (Tony Blair and John Major), who happen to have ‘issues’ with each other, write jointly in the ‘Sunday Times’ that “We both opposed Brexit. We both accept it is now happening. But this way of negotiating, with reason cast aside in pursuit of ideology and cavalier bombast posing as serious diplomacy, is irresponsible, wrong in principle and dangerous in practice.” In the meanwhile, it is evident from the expressions of urgent concern, that Britain is poised on the very edge of another major outbreak of COVID-19. The number of new cases diagnosed today was still of the order of 3,000 and there are fears that the younger generation, realising that they will be confined to a ‘group of six’ for the foreseeable future intend to have a party to end all parties whilst they can. Last night, a 19-year old in Nottingham held an illegal party for 50 in his house and was promptly fined £10.000 for it. Whether this is a sufficient deterrent is hard to say because the number of fines actually issued had been pretty small across the whole society.
Today was the day when we were due to visit Oxford to have lunch with our friends so we made sure that we had breakfasted in plenty of time and checked that we had got the postcode OK for the SatNav. As it happened, we left a little before we had intended but were lucky to get a parking place outside our regular newsagents and secured the last copy of the Sunday Times and the last copy of the Observer as well – required reading for later on. We had left ourselves a certain amount of getting lost/parking time but we arrived half-an-hour before our lunch date, got the car securely parked in a blocked-off road where they had lifted all of the parking restrictions and enjoyed quaffing lasses of Leffe (Belgian) beer before our friends arrived. We always enjoy their company and always seem to have a lot to chat about. Because the restaurant (well. more of a bistro actually) was on several floors and it meant Meg would have a lot of running around to do from the top floor to the basement where the toilets were located, the young but accommodating staff thoughtfully provided us with a place on the ground floor to minimise Meg having to traverse several lots of stairs. I had some sea-bass which I thought was well cooked and delicious but unfortunately, my good friend’s duck was well over-cooked and by the time it had been eaten it was a bit too late to complain about it (although we did – it should have been sent back) We decided to have our after-dinner coffees in another little cafe down the road – the street was stuffed full of eating places so it was not hard to find. There seemed to be many more young women in fashionably stylish and shortish skirts which, to my mind, is a lot more attractive than the ubiquitous jeans but I do acknowledge that it is a very male perspective (although Meg did agree with my perceptions)
We are feeling the need to be extra careful in our domestic arrangements now that our daughter-in-law has returned to her primary school. Our rather pessimistic feeling is that given the catchment area it is only a question of time before a virus is brought into the school but in the meantime, we are being extra careful with surfaces such as kitchen preparation areas, taps and door handles of all types and so on. Of course, this is the day before the ‘Rule of Six’ comes into operation. This seems to an easy rule to remember and put into effect but it is somewhat more complex to determine exactly how support bubbles are to be defined.
After. day or so of reflection, we now seem to be in a strange situation politically when Boris Johnson has two major rows on his hands at the same time (Brexit and COVID-19). Each of these has the ability to blow up in a rather spectacular fashion and, of course, you could say that they were linked. The Government has now made it illegal (subject to a fine) to have a meeting of more than 6 people (the so-called ‘Rule of 6’) but at the same time says that it fully intends to break international law over the status of Northern Ireland in the forthcoming Brexit discussions. The justice secretary indicated on TV his morning that he ‘would‘ resign if he asked to sanction any evident illegalities whereas the Attorney General (Sue Braverman) has been berated by fellow lawyers for bringing the whole of the legal profession into disrepute by not upholding the ‘rule of law’ following an oath that she took upon taking office. Of course, being an ardent Brexiteer, when she sought legal advice it was not from government lawyers (one of whom resigned last week anyway) but from known Brexiteers outside the government, arguing that it was quite acceptable to take legal advice from whichever quarter one wanted. Of course, if she had any integrity she would resign immediately but has indicated that she can ‘live with’ breaking international law even though past Prime Ministers and even past leaders of the Conservative Party and known Brexiteers like Michael Howard have indicated that Britain’s international reputation would be utterly trashed if we made agreements and then broke them immediately they ran foul of Brexit ideology (or should it be theology – a pure statement of faith!)
Past readers of this blog might know that as well as the WordPress version, I also maintain a parallel text version which, whilst not being indexed ‘per se’, allows interested readers to pick any day/date from the past six months to view the entry for that day (available at: http://mch-net.uk) Now that we have had six months of ‘lockdown’ my screen table of entries (7 columns of 26 rows) was now ‘full’ so I busied myself this morning with creating an extra table to follow on from the existing full one (I had tried to extend my previous table by inserting an extra column but this caused some overflow problems so I had to ‘undo’ it all – not particularly easy when there was a mass of HTML code to sort through). However, now is all ready to go so I am shortly to start to populate the second six-months worth of blog. Later in the day, I managed, after trawling the web, to dscover a couple of sites where I could test out the Viewports of a screen (either on a desktop, tablet or mobile) so that I could check out that my amended tables will now display correctly on my various devices without possibility of truncation or scrolling.
On our way down to the park this morning, we met some of our best friends who live ‘down the hill’ and we exchanged news about families, politics and the like. Then having collected our newspapers and done a little shopping in Waitrose, we fell into conversation with a guy who had spent many years in South Africa (and had a slight South African accent) and the subject got around to walking boots. I think this is because having walked down to the park every day for six months (and probably worn my boots for six months longer than that) the soles are starting to wear through (although I must say, they are still supremely comfortable inside). However a point is fast approaching when they will have to be thrown away but I would still like to get as much wear out of them as I can before they absolutely fall to bits. It was quite a warm day so when we eventually got home and to save a bit of time. we made ourselves a salad based around a small Waitrose quiche and that was very filling although rapidly thrown together.
After lunch, I spent some time checking the HTML code which I had needed to tidy up for an extension of the text version of this blog and then Meg and I got absorbed into the debate over the Internal Market Bill which Boris Johnson was going to head up himself. I thought that David Miliband and the SNP leader Ian Blackford made excellent attacking speeches and devastating critiques of the Prime Minister’s position. Altogether quite disheartening, then, that the opposition seemed to win all of the intellectual arguments but the Tories passed the bill this evening with a majority of 77 (which seems incredible). This is after three former Prime Ministers, two former Attorney Generals and a former Tory Leader have all indicated a profound disagreement with the stance of the Conservative party. What may be interesting to observe is what will now happen in the House of Lords (which is largely ‘unwhipped’ i.e. not instructed by party managers how to vote) which is meant to act as a brake on a maverick House of Commons. As all of the ‘Remain’ voting MP’s have now been thrown out of the Tory party or fail to be reselected by their constituency associations) the present Tory party is almost completely a Brexit or UKIP party (in effect, having taken over all of the UKIP party’s policies).
The ‘test-and-trace’ system seems to be in chaos tonight, as I write. As Allyson Pollock, a well-known NHS expert has written “That’s because a key part of it operates not as part of the NHS, but in parallel to it – as a network of commercial, privatised testing labs, drive-through centres and call centres. The chaos this has brought has resulted in huge gaps in the information available to local services, causing delays in accessing results and hampering efforts to control the outbreak. Instead of putting local public health experts and NHS services in charge of contact tracing, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, handed over responsibility to private companies such as the outsourcing giant Serco, which has previously been fined for deaths of workers and members of the public that could have been prevented. The list of problems in the test and trace system is already immense – three data breaches, poor training and faulty online administration systems among them”
Yet despite all this, the Government still hasn’t published the details of its contracts with the likes of Serco. According to the Treasury, £10bn of public money has been allocated to England’s test and trace programme but only £300m of additional funding has been offered to local authorities to support the system (ie.the private sector funded over thirty times as much as the public sector despite the evident failings of the former and the manifest productivity of the latter)
This morning, I noticed on my mobile that Meg and I had received a message indicating that we needed to contact the GP’s surgery to arrange for us to receive a ‘flu jab’. It seems particularly important that we get our jabs now and not delay, as we did two years ago, with the effect that supplies of the vaccine had run out. As it seems important that we receive our flu jab in a timely fashion, I stuck on the end of a phone for some 20 minutes before speaking to a human and actually getting an appointment booked in 13 days time on a Sunday. Last time, it was organised in huge batches like a military operation and I am sure the same will be true this year.
We tried a slightly different routine this morning, largely because we wanted to save some time so that Mike was not to have a tremendous rush-around as today is the ‘Pilates’ day when he has to leave the house for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. So today, we tried a ‘mixed economy’ when we drove to the park and parked in the car park and then went on foot to collect our newspapers. We then walked back to the park but had the benefit of the car for the journey home after we had our elevenses and this saved a critical half hour or so. The new arrangements worked out particularly well and it was a particularly warm and pleasant day for our little venture. We bumped into one of our ‘park friends’ with whom we chatted for a few minutes. Already we are noting that the maximum size of the group we have observed is a grouping of five sitting on the grass i.e. within the ‘Rule of 6’ regulations and it was vaguely reassuring that nobody seemed to be breaking the rules, in force since last Monday. I walked down to Pilates on my own without my neighbour on this occasion so my class had the tremendous number in it of 2 (one of our regulars was taking her son to University) but joined by a third on Zoom. The class went well and we were soon back in our old routines – at least as we have been with the same teacher for years, we have a fair idea with only a minimum of prompting what is required in each move. With a combination of walking, an hour’s exercise then followed by our main meal of the day, I find it almost impossible not to have a little doze after lunch and today was no exception. I am already planning some of the jobs to be done in the garden whilst the good weather holds (not least the lawn mowing) but these are tasks for tomorrow.
Meanwhile, government ministers are struggling to answer basic questions on a range of issues. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, claimed that that the test-and-trace scheme was operating well in Bolton (the worst-hit town in the UK for the incidence of COVID-19) by constantly saying that ‘it was wrong to say that tests are not available’. However, there was clear evidence from reporters and many members of the public, filmed as they queued outside a test centre in Bolton, that the centre was not processing any cases because ‘the system’ indicated that no testing slots were available! In the same interview, she admitted that two groups of neighbours chatting in a group totalling more than six were breaking the law whereas it was permissible to hold a birthday party on a grouse moor as this was a legitimate sporting event! Matt Hancock, the Education Secretary was forced in the House of Commons to admit that the test-and-trace system could take ‘weeks’ to fix – as some schools may have to close as they are ‘running out’ of teachers forced to self isolate but not able to get themselves tested (a story oft-repeated for some GP’s and other health service professionals aired on the media). Meanwhile, in the House of Lords it was claimed that the government minister who admitted that international law would be broken by the provisions of the new bill suggested that the minister ‘had been answering the wrong question‘ and had, therefore ‘misspoke’ Finally, some members of the SAGE group (Special Advisory Group of Experts) are warning that if the ‘Rule of 6’ is not working after a fortnight, then another full-scale lockdown is inevitable. You couldn’t make up this catalogue of errors even if you writing it up as a farcical play…
How the weeks roll by! Since the COVID-19 crisis, we have shopped online with Waitrose and the order is scheduled to arrive each Thursday. But to secure our ‘slot’ we have to put in a make-believe order (based on an previous order) which we then have to refine before delivery. For delivery on a Thursday, we have to update our order the day before and before 12.00pm. As we cannot guarantee to be back from our walk by 12.00 we have to refine our order before we go out. Hence it is a job each Wednesday to update our order for delivery the following day.
Again it was a beautiful day today – sunny but not too humid and so we enjoyed our walk as normal. We met one of our park friends again and made the acquaintance of a couple of labradors who could not resist plunging into the pond and having a wet walk/swim (it is so shallow I’m never get sure whether the dogs who take the plunge walk or swim). They always emerge from the water dripping wet and with a kind of silly grin on their faces when they realise that they ‘may’ have transgressed against the wishes of their owner(s). Again, it was time for a salad- type lunch when we eventually got home.
This afternoon was scheduled to be our ‘lawn mowing’ day and everything worked smoothly although I realise that next time around I will need to buy a gallon petrol (the last of the season?) Miggles, our adopted cat, came along to supervise our activities both before and after the mowing and decided it would be a good idea to lie out on the grass in front of Meg to sunbathe whilst I got on with some necessary weeding (the cat did promise to help but eventually just adopted a supervisory position, checking that everything I did was up the requisite standard) Incidentally, there was a fascinating program on cats on last night’s telly – the average male cat has a range of about 100 metres whereas we reckon that Miggles‘ range might be as much as 400 metres as it is 200 metres from her own home to the end of our garden and I suppose that he/she ranges an equal distance in the opposite direction. The program put trackers and even miniaturised cameras on each of the 50 cats in an English village and discovered some amazing things e.g. although cat’s territories might overlap and therefore be a source of conflict, they learn to avoid/minimise such conflict by essentially ‘time-sharing’ the terrify – one cat might use it only in the mornings and the other in the evenings. Genuinely fascinating.
The COVID second wave is getting seriously scary at the moment – new infections have risen from about 3,000 to 4,000 in a single day. Boris Johnson was forced to admit in a liaison committee of MP’s that Britain does not have sufficient testing capacity and the interviews with distraught people from all over the country is distressing. People seem to be spending hours glued to their phones/laptops to try and get the system to give them a slot only to be dumped off the system, informed that the nearest test centre is in Inverness or similar, or that that there are no slots available and try again later(even though local radio and TV is telling them that the local testing centre is largely empty, but you cannot access it unless the system has allocated you a slot)
Meanwhile,Boris Johnson is engaging in a partial climb-down by suggesting to groups of dissident Tory MP’s that he will allow them a second vote before the provisions of the Internal Market Bill are actually activated. The interesting question is how many of his own MP’s actually believe him? The interesting question is that in the last Parliament before the Tory party purged itself of any Remainers, there was actually a ‘Anybody but Boris‘ movement because several of the older and wiser Tory heads reckoned, quite rightly, that Boris Johnson might be a good campaigner or utterer of simple slogans (‘Get Brexit Done‘) but that he might prove to be a disastrous Prime Minster were he ever to occupy that position – and how right they were!
You never quite know how each day is going to turn out and today was no exception. Remembering that it was our friends’ wedding anniversary yesterday, we decided to take along a couple of presents in the off-chance that we might bump into them. As it turned out they were in the garden, saying goodbye to one of their grandsons who is due to depart tomorrow to take up his university course. He was justifiably quite excited about the whole prospect and I am sure as he is a natural sportsman, he will make a success of whatever he turns his hand to. Our friends invited us into their garden to share coffee and biscuits with them and we were delighted to hand over our couple of presents. The first was a bottle of Cava (Spanish champagne) but the second was a horseshoe the I just happen to have restored to an almost pristine condition. Horseshoes nowadays are made of a mild steel and can be restored with a little bit of know-how and a lot of hard work to a dull silver looking finish – nonetheless, when restored and untarnished, they still look very attractive. Our friends were delighted with this little present and I am taking one they keep in their greenhouse, which has a lot of sentimental value, to restore as I have all of the gear (starting off with white vinegar). We were with our friends for about an hour and a half and as they have friends and relatives strung across the globe (Australia, Canada, Pakistan to mention a few) and absolutely adore travelling in normal circumstances, then we found plenty of chat about. I forgot to mention that on our way down into town we chatted with our Italian friend for a few minutes and then, after seeing one lot of friends, we encountered several more (they happen to be near neighbours) We have just worked out that all three of us couples have a wedding anniversary within eight days of each other so we are starting to wonder whether we dare plan to have a joint celebration next September for the three of us together. It is just a thought – but what started out as a little walk ended some three and a half hours later. We thought we had better telephone our son in case he was wondering whether any misfortune had befallen us. Then home to a curry which I threw together in no time (we have tended to have curry once a week ever since our student days in Manchester – in fat, Rusholme which is the district of Manchester where we rented a flat is now known as the curry capital of Europe, although it was a predominantly Irish community when we lived there in the 1960’s)
Large parts of the NorthEast (basically, the whole of the Newcastle conurbation) will be subject to a semi-lockdown. Basically, this means that there is a curfew on pubs, bars and restaurants which need to close at 10.0pm and there is a complete ban of social mixing in each other’s houses. There is quite a debate whether on a technical level, this will do much to inhibit a virus which can be just as active after 10.0 as it was before. However, there is an argument that if under the influence of some (not a great deal of) alcohol, social inhibitions are lessened and social distancing becomes less and less evident. So a curfew may make a lot of sense from this perspective. However, it seems that the major effect may be the psychological one i.e. if this semi-lockdown does not work then the only alternative is a full-scale lockdown. I think that a judgement is being made that it is better, on balance, to keep the pubs open for limited opening hours rather than shutting them altogether in a full scale curfew (as many businesses will not survive in that event)
When Baroness Harding, the chief of ‘Test-and-trace’ was questioned today in a committee of MP’s, she opined that she doesn’t believe 'anybody was expecting to see the really sizeable increase in demand' for coronavirus tests. Well it was interesting that with the end of lockdown and with schools and universities reopening, there was evidently going to be an increase in the COVID-19 ingestion rate. Every epidemiologist in the country worth his salt had indicated that the we would have a second wave of the virus about to hit us so to say that ‘nobody expected to see an increase in the infection rate of this size‘ seems naive beyond belief, given the brief she had been entrusted with by the government.
I am writing these words in sheer relief because I thought that the whole of my WordPress site (which acts as the host for this blog) had ‘gone down’ because when I tried to log in, I got a message saying ‘There has been a critical error on your website‘ after which, I couldn’t even perform a log-in to attempt to fix it. As I was in despair (and consulting the web itself only confused matters even more) the only thing I could think of was to write to my webspace provider to see if they could perform some kind of ‘rollback’ for me. When I got into my emails, I noticed (in my ‘Spam’ folder!) an email from WordPress itself noting that I had experienced a critical error and automatically sending me a specialised ‘recovery’ mode of access to my blog site. Once I did get logged in, it was quite easy to identify the plugin (= auxiliary application often provided by a third party which WordPress uses extensively) which was causing the problem – it was highlighted in red! From then on, it was only a case of deactivating it (in effect, kicking it off the system) and thereafter, everything seems to be fine. As Safari (my web browser on a MAC) has recently updated itself to a new version, I wonder if there has been a conflict between Safari and the plug-in. Anyway, I cannot start to explain the relief I have felt – but I remind myself I must try and get a specialised WordPress backup system in case anything like this ever happens again. The highs and lows of computing!
Today being the most beautiful day (sunny but with a pleasant cooling breeze) Mag and I had a delightful walk down to our local park – a pleasure enhanced by chatting for a little for the friends we saw yesterday and with whom we shared coffee and biscuits in the morning (but for how much longer I ask myself?) The force of decades of tradition means that we were going to have a fish meal today but we made it into a big extensive salad (as I prepare some specialised little sauces and dressings this makes the whole meal a bit more complicated than you might expect). Before lunch, we had another pleasant chat with our next-door neighbour who is getting to the end of extensive renovations in the next-door bungalow – we confirmed that it actually was his birthday (as I suspected) so I whizzed inside to make a quick ‘prezzie’ of a general-purpose card in lieu of a birthday card and a bottle of Prosecco which we just happened to have in the fridge, waiting for a suitable occasion. After lunch and a snooze I set myself to do a little gardening as the weather conditions were so delightful – warm but with a cooling breeze and, as you might expect by now, my activities were regularly supervised and inspected by Miggles, our adopted cat.
I have been ‘sort of’ following the news as it unfolds during the day and I am pretty sure as I write that we are being prepared for a second COVID-19 lock-down or a ‘mini-lockdown’. Boris Johnson himself is talking of imposing measures that are ‘circuit-breaking’ and is issuing warnings that a second wave is coming, the R-rate (numbers of people infected by each new COVID-19 infected person) is now estimated as between 1.1 and 1.4 and this across the whole country, not just the industrial Midlands and the North, London it is being said is ‘increasingly likely’ to face tougher lockdown condition – if these are not warnings enough, then I do not know what is! (Personally, I would welcome all of this – every day’s delay will only make the situation worse and although the hospitality trade will scream they can still remain open and do some business until about 9 or 10 at night) It does seem a very strange set of national priorities that grandchildren cannot see their grandparents (as they are in a different bubble) but friends who are only slight acquaintances can go off to the pub together (it’s all about money, no doubt!)
After the traumas of my blogging experience yesterday, hopefully today is going to be a much more tranquil day. As is by now customary on a Saturday, Meg and I got up reasonably earlier and after we had breakfasted went to collect our newspapers before we set out for our church service at 10.00am this morning. There were only about a dozen of us in the church so it remains quite an intimate experience. In addition, the drive to and from Harvington village, just outside Kidderminster, passes through some beautiful Worcestershire countryside and it is a pleasure to motor along. When the church service was over, we returned home and picked up or normal ‘daily walk’ gear which is a rucsac, National Trust collapsing stool which doubles as a little table, good walking shoes, outerwear which is appropriate to the weather conditions. Just before we set out for our walk and seeing that our next door neighbour was toddling about (and who had just celebrated his birthday yesterday) I made him a gift of a especially restored horseshoe – and this is such an unusual thing to be given, I suspect that he was genuinely very pleased to receive it. I joked with him that he needed to have three more birthdays to acquire another three horseshoes and then a final year to acquire a big strong animal to put on the top of them (he said he would try and oblige). As we started our walk, I am reminded of the expression attributed to one of the Scandinavian nations – ‘there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing’. That having been said, we did have a rather peculiar combination of climatic conditions this morning as the sum was shining in a wonderful blue sky but coupled with quite a good and gusting wind. To my mind, the park was a little less full this morning but we still occasionally speculate how we would have coped with the COVID-19 lockdown and its sequelae without this regular part of our routine.
In the afternoon, we decided that we needed to buy a few things from one of our cut-price cosmetics shop as well as a tour around Poundland to buy a few more materials necessary to restore a few more of my supply of rusty old horseshoes whenever I can find the time. I decided to walk down into town in order to get a bit more exercise and bumped into some of our good friends (with whom I discussed the contents of last night’s blog as they are avid readers of this as well as following all of the latest political developments) I am not sure how we got onto the subject as I am not really a very ardent or knowledgable football fan but I did discuss with our friends the formidable ‘back four’ of the 1960’s Leeds defence – ‘big’ Jack Charlton in the centre (not a pretty footballer but difficult to get round), Billy Bremmer (who was terror like in his pursuit of attackers), Johnny Giles (sublime tackling skills) and Peter Lorimer (who had a fearsome shot and linked the backs with the forward line) The fullbacks were Paul Madeley, Paul Reaney and Ian Bell – although the goalkeepers played for their respective countries ( Gary Sprake for Wales and David Harvey for Scotland), I suspect that that the famous Don Revie philosophy was not to have goalkeepers in the team that were outstandingly good (as this would motivate the ‘back four-seven’ to let nothing get past them!). What started off the conversation was that Leeds had just gained promotion to the Premier League and had narrowly lost to Liverpool in their first match in this division. Today they are playing Fulham and I thought I would have a quick look at the result (Leeds won 4:3) and YouTube showed all of the goals and terrific goals they all were. It seemed a tremendously good game of football and of much higher quality that I remember in the 1960’s. Enough of boring football!
Tomorrow, nearly all of the newspapers are headlining the proposal? suggestion? that those who refuse to self isolate or break quarantine should be subject to an £10,000 fine. In case this sounds excessive, the govermemt has data to show that compliamce with self-isolation is some of the worst in Europe so, we might say ‘Something has to be done‘!
Today we entered into our ‘Sunday morning’ routine – this entails getting up reasonably early and Mike walking down to the newsagents to pick up our supply of the Sundays before walking back in time for the ‘Andrew Marr’ show. This worked out fine but the Andrew Marr show did not add very much, if anything, to the analyses that had emerged overnight. Then we picked up our coffee flasks and made for the local park but not before quite a long and friendly with our Italian friend who lives down the road. She told us that in the early days of the lockdown she had actually seen quite an unkempt male spitting on each of the keys of an ATM machine in Bromsgove High Street. Just after we had had our coffee I got a surprise phone call from a very old (in every sense of the term) friend, now 95 years of age, with whom I had worked in the Central Office of Information in 1964 – so our friendship goes back 56 years! For the sake of anonymity, I shall call my friend ‘Jan’ and she has had the most remarkable career. In the course of her early scientific career, she had worked in the same room as (and alongside) Alan Turing (the ENIGMA code breaker and the person many would regard as the father of modern computing) Jan and I and our respective families try to meet at least once a year but COVID-19 has prevented that this year. As soon as it is safe (and Jan would have to travel from her home on the South Coast probably up to London) we shall try to meet again with our son and daughter-in-law and Jan’s son and his wife – but that is breaking the ‘Rule of 6‘ already. It was wonderful to hear from Jan and I am going to send her a photo which I took of the view of the park where we usually tend to sit, overlooking the little lake around which some of the local dogs like to race. Then on the way home, we enjoyed another chat with one of our regular church friends (with whom we had coffee and biscuits a few days ago) so it became quite a busy social morning for us. We treated ourselves to a ‘Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding’ type dinner (doing in the slow cooker during the morning) which we enjoyed greatly.
After dinner, I was browsing the TV schedules to see what we might view this evening when I spotted that ‘Doctor Zhivago’ (probably our favourite film) had started 20 minutes previously. This film has quite an emotional ‘pull’ for us because we first saw it in 1968 and as it happened, Meg was expecting our son Martin and, at that time, looked very similar to Geraldine Chapman who played ‘Tanya’ – of course Zhivago himself was torn between the brunette Tanya (Geraldine Chapman) and the blond Lara (June Christie) and it is Lara’s theme (played on the balaika which is so well known even now) The cinematography is, of course, superb but the greatest impact of the film is the emotional pull between the characters and families caught up in the throes of the Russian evolution of 1917. It is impossible to summarise the complex plot in a few words but, for many including us) the film is a real ‘weepie’. It is amazing to reflect that film made half a century ago can still be so powerful.
The Sky political commentator is reported tonight as writing: ‘As autumns go, this was always going to be a tough one for the government…A deadly virus preparing its second assault, a Brexit trade deal stuck in the mud and the usual predicted winter pressures of flu and flooding.’ This seems as good a summary as you are going to get and it quite evident, as Matt Hancock the Health Secretary has been saying all day ‘Britain is at a tipping point‘ A rather under-analysed factor is the fact that in the last day or so, thousands of university students are travelling from their parental homes to the universities of their choice and it could well be that the students, whilst being unsymptomatic themselves, could be carrying the virus into communities all over the country. I suspect that the government know this and are secretly dreading what may be the consequences but after the ‘A’-level debacle feel they do not want another educational crisis to hit them! The next two weeks re going to be quite critical (and of course, we have Brexit rumbling along at the same time)
This morning, I decided that I would re-visit an email client which I have used in the past and use now for mailing-list type entries that I do not wish to clutter up my normal email account. The email client is very secure (ProtonMail) and is hosted on servers on Switzerland which, in theory, keeps any communications out of the hands of the NSA. Wikipedia informs us that, the NSA (= American National Security Agency), according to leaked documents, intercepts and stores the communications of over a billion people worldwide, including United States citizens. The documents also revealed the NSA tracks hundreds of millions of people’s movements using cellphones’ metadata. ProtonMail is a paid service and, as such, does not take money from advertisers or collect user data for nefarious purposes. My subscription had actually lapsed and when I tried to renew it, the card was not accepted so I chose another method of payment and resumed normal service. But all of this proved to have consequences. Whilst we were having our coffee in the park,I received a message from my bank informing me that there may have been fraudulent activity on my account and therefore to contact them. I surmised that what had happened was that th email client had tried to take a payment on an out-of-date card which was then declined and this then triggered a security alert. I needed to speak with my bank in order to let them know that (a) there was no fraudulent attempt but that (b) I did not want the payment to be processed as it had already been paid another way, This ought to have been straightforward but it took the best part of half an hour going through my bank’s security protocols and then waiting endlessly to be connected with the fraud department who then took me through even more protocols before what should have been a fairly simple procedure was effected. I suppose one cannot be too careful but I suspect that what happened to me this morning must happen all the time as credit card expiry dates get exceeded. It then took me longer than I care to mention this afternoon to get my email client de-cluttered and put to rights and I have now determined not to subscribe to the mailing list of WebMD which seems designed to convince the average member of the public that they are suffering from multiple diseases (and are probably in the clutches of ‘big pharma’ in any case.
This morning the governments chief scientific adviser and chief medical adviser transmitted a briefing from Downing Street at 11.00 am (repeated throughout the day) that the country was heading for 49,000 new cases per day by mid-October if no further actions were taken and deaths would exceed 200 a day by November. Meanwhile, the alert level was raised to 4 (5 being the highest) meaning that the coronavirus was an exponential growth path. Tomorrow morning, Boris Johnson will announce what new restrictions or policies are to come into effect. In effect, the Prime Minister is torn between actions which will defeat the virus (meaning a near-return to lockdown) but can only be done at the risk of trashing the economy. If he adopts a ‘middle course’ tomorrow, it is, of course possible that we arrive at a situation in which the virus is not being pushed back whilst, at the same time, the economy teeters on the brink. (Then of course we have Brexit on top of all this!)
Finally, in Bolton (the town mot affected by the virus with about 200 cases per 10,000 inhabitants, a survey by the Manchester Evening News revealed that some 94% of Boltonians did not believe their fellow citizens would follow the semi-lockdown rules.To make matters even worse, Yasmin Qureshi, Labour MP for Bolton South East, said many people in the area believed the virus was a fake, government-constructed concept and as a result were refusing to adhere to social distancing guidelines. ‘There is a lot of confusion about the virus in the area and there are a lot of people now who do not believe it is true’ she said. Qureshi added: ‘They genuinely believe it’s some kind of conspiracy. A lot of them don’t understand the rules either and so there are many who just aren’t following them – they think it is a way of controlling them somehow. It is very dangerous.‘
It seems hard to believe that such a high level of public ignorance could become common place. It does appear that social media (bolstered by #thinkingforyourself) had encouraged many young people to break all the rules and assume that COVID-19 was just a conspiracy! I am speechless!
This morning we had planned to meet our good ex-Waitrose friends in the park and so we got ourselves organised so that we could meet at 10.45 However, on the way to the park we received a text indicating that one of our friends had had a terrible night without much sleep (for whatever reason) so we had to abandon out little assignation. However, to make up for this we arranged to FaceTime each other this evening so the we could catch up on all of our news on both sides. The FaceTime worked a treat, despite the occasional dropout on the video, and we spent a happy hour (that actually flew by) whilst we exchanged news of what we both had been doing in the past two weeks. Meg and I had been enjoying ourselves (with our trip to Chester, our wedding anniversary celebrations a couple of weeks ago, not to mention those of our friends down the road). However, our friends had been having rather a hard time with a round of hospital appointments (and even more to come tomorrow) so we sympathised with them in their plight. However, as we are shortly to celebrate two birthdays (one of friends on October 2nd and Meg’s birthday on October 3rd), then I think a cake may well be in the offing for all of us so we are hoping that the weather holds out for a future assignation in the park. Talking of which, we were just on the point of packing up our gear and walking back home when we were recognised by one of ex-Waitrose acquaintanceship (who I now know is called ‘Sue’) and we spent some fascinating conversation on lock-down news. In the main, Sue was telling us some of the very interesting walks in the vicinity of the park, some of which we vaguely knew about but which we have not actually traversed. As a type of reciprocity for all of this exchange of information, I gave Sue the URL for this blog so that might increase the number of bored readers from 3 to 4 (actually, there is a part of WordPress which details various statistics about number of accesses of the site so I must check it out some time and see how many readers there actually are).
[Just as an aside, and whilst on the subject of visits to websites, I thought I would consult the statistics on a web site that I wrote and used to maintain years ago to help students write their undergraduate ‘final year projects’ It is possible to insert a little piece of code into your website so that, eventually, you can consult who has been visiting your website, from where and with what technology (amidst a welter of other statistics) I will just pick out a few to give you a flavour – the year in which the website was most visited was 2011 , two years after I retired, with a total of 46,809 visits. 32% of the visitors were from India but I did have one from Burkino Faso, one from Togo and one reader whose language was recorded as Uzbek. 55% use Windows XP technology (evidently still much used in the 3rd world), a third had a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, 41% came from Asia and 34% from the USA – and so on and so forth. Fascinating if you haven’t consulted it for a year or so – I think I last looked at it about three years ago!]
However, we knew that we had to make a certain amount of progresss as Tuesday’s are my Pilates class day so I have to organise a quick turn around and then walk back into town again. My Pilates class was fine but there were only three of us and we had our usual share of repartee and badinage as the class progressed (this is normal, over the years).
Tonight, Boris Johnson addressed the nation for 15 minutes indicating why we needed to return to semi-lockdown conditions. The interesting thing about all of this for me (apart from Boris trying to sound ‘Churchillian‘) is the Scots and the Welsh have gone much further than has Boris by effectively ditching the ‘Rule of 6’ being the number of unrelated people who can meet in a house/garden whilst maintaining social distancing. For once, Boris has made a policy shift one can only be described as ‘timid’ – not an adjective you would normally associate with Boris. Of course, he is terrified (as was Teresa May, David Cameron) of the Conservative party right wing who will ditch him as soon as Brexit is over for making a complete ‘pig’s ear’ of the COVID-19 crisis. It would have been far better (in my opinion only, for what is worth) to go the whole hog, follow the Scots and the Welsh and try and give COVID-19 a decisive blow instead of a slow attrition which is what I fear will actually happen.
Today was one of those days that started somewhat gloomy but then got worse. True – the weather forecast had predicted that a band of rain was to sweep up the country but you are never quite sure what that means at any point in time. When Meg and I started our daily walk, there was the faintest of drizzles but this intensified into a more conventional rain shower as we progressed, Having picked up the newspapers, we realised that today was going to be a ‘bandstand’ job – the park has a Victorian style bandstand, octagonal in shape but open on every side which keeps the worst of the rain off you. Nonetheless, we managed to juggle rucksacks, flasks and biscuit containers so that we could have a quick burst of coffee before we made for home. We both had a hairdressing appointment with our longstanding hairdresser who calls at our house to do our hair so we really had to press on to make it back home with 30 seconds to spare. As it happened, our hairdresser was quite late (not unusually) but it shows the Sod’s law does not always work (it would have worked if on the very day that we were late our hairdresser was on time!) Having been shorn, we then proceeded with lunch but had determined that we were going to have a venture out to our local Asda in the afternoon (when, incidentally, the weather had turned benign) The idea at calling into Asda was to see if we could replace our very battered stainless steel vacuum flask that we use for coffee everyday. This part of the plan worked very well but the trouble was that we thought we would take the opportunity to buy some other bits and pieces which are only obtainable at Asda and not in our normal Waitrose shopping. One thing led to another and we finished up with two really heavy bags that we had to carry for a mile uphill to our house. To the riposte ‘Why didn’t you take the car?’ the answer is that we thought that an additional bit of exercise would only be good for us – but we hadn’t reckoned that we were going to buy so many things and that they would weigh so much. You live and learn!
Meg and I are debating whether, now that ‘King Boris’ has spoken to us all last night, whether we could seize an opportunity to make a trip down to the Southampton area in a week or so’s time to see as many of our Winchester/Southampton former colleagues whilst we can. We are aware that the virus situation might only get worse, that the fine autumnal days are limited and that our friends may have lots of other priorities at the moment. I will have a hard think about this overnight and see how I feel in the morning before I send off some emails and perhaps make a hotel booking.
The COVID-19 situation has developed during the day -there have been 6,178 cases in the UK in the last 24 hours, up 1,252 cases since Tuesday. This is a really startling rate of increase and we are now within a whisper of the two worst days we have ever had before – the rate of acceleration is dramatic. I read the the police have started to hand out £1,000 fines to two people in Bolton who have acted recklessly in helping to spread the virus and they are hoping that this may act as a deterrent (I wouldn’t hold my breath). In the meanwhile, we are waiting to see what the Chanceller of the Exchequer is going to announce tomorrow to replace the furlough scheme as it appears that with the latest semi-lockdown unemployment is set to soar. To cap it all, Michael Gove has been ‘explaining’ how we are building a lorry park in Kent to accommodate the 7,000 lorries that may well not comply with the increasing documentation required now that Brexit is upon us and we have ‘taken back control‘ It appears that lorries will need a ‘Kent Access permit’ to show they comply with all of the new requirements and the Government is estimating that perhaps as many 40% of the lorries arriving will not comply (the assumption being that it is ‘all their fault’ as they have failed to comply on time) In a few weeks time, we will have the worst of the COVID-19 crisis hitting us compounded by the Brexit scenario – one really shudders to think how bad things might become. We all voted for it in 2016, of course, as we are constantly being reminded!
Today seemed a bit kinder day and although there was some rain in the air, we did not appear to be threatened by continuous rain as happened yesterday morning. My normal newspaper shop had run out of The Times by the time we got there so I popped round the corner to redeem my voucher in Waitrose. Whilst (briefly) inside the store I enquired of some of our favourite staff whether we could still use the table and benches that they had outside the store and they affirmed that we could. So the possibility arises that when we next meet some of our friends, we will meet not in the park but just outside our old haunts (is there a symbiotic link I ask myself?) Apart from that, we settled into our regular routine and I was reminded of a long-standing joke in Endeavour (TV series based upon the younger Morse). Every time, the elder detective Fred Thursday) was wondering what the sandwiches prepared by his wife would contain that day, Endeavour would reply along the lines ‘It’s Tuesday – so it will be cheese and pickle‘ (He was invariably correct) Thinking about detectives and lunchtime meals, I am also reminded of scenes from Maigret which I think I remember correctly from when I used to read reach novels for ‘A’-levels. Maigret’s wife was a cordon-bleu chef and the meals that she prepared for her husband were always described in loving detail – Maigret by contrast came in and bolted his food with hardly a word of appreciation (My memory may be suspect at this point but I do wonder if Simenon was being semi-autobiographical at this point) As the rain came down, we thought we might have to undergo another coffee-partaking session in the bandstand but, fortunately, I looked skywards and saw that the rain cloud was just passing so took out an old tea-towel, freshly laundered as it turned out, to wipe down the park bench so that we could eat and drink in peace – which we did.
This afternoon, I set myself the task of linking a keyword and mouse on my iPad. When I was last in a stationer’s shop, I saw a Bluetooth keyboard for sale at an incredibly low price so I went onto Amazon and ordered a keyboard-plus-mouse (from the same manufacturer, sold as a set) which arrived yesterday. I am always a little suspicious of Bluetooth technology because although in theory devices ought to recognise and pair with each other effortlessly, in practice I have had my struggles in the past. But having inserted my batteries (not supplied) the keyboard, mouse and iPad did all recognise acth other and work very well. I was a little disconcerted not to get a usual mouse pointer but a little grey circle (whose colour you could change in the ‘Settings’) which seems to be the Bluetooth way of doing things. I am pleased to say that the technology is now working just as I wanted – and I even had a spare Bluetooth Logitech mouse if the supplied mouse were to fail. The keyboard itself is only 4mm in depth (plus a raised area that gives the keyboard some rake ) and some 13.5″ in length – anyway, easily transportable within a suitcase for when we go away, so this will be a permanent feature of my suitcase from now on.
This afternoon, Rishi Sunak, was announcing the Job Support Scheme which is intended to replace the furlough scheme for those already in work. The new scheme will be less expensive (estimated 3.6 billion per year with employers raising their contribution towards the wages of employees from 25% to 55%) – this compared with the eye-watering £40 billion that the furlough scheme has cost so far. Perhaps one of the most significant things that the Chancellor had to impart was that the new arrangements were to be in place for at least six months if not a year. Moreover, we would have to assume that the shape of the economy would be fundamentally altered – this is the first indication that we have had from a member of the government that it is not just a case of getting through this crisis and then back to normal. Meanwhile, we have the highest rate of new infections ever (6,634), Glasgow University are having to cope with 124 COVID-19 infected students and 500 self-isolating. One has to wonder what is going to happen at other universities up and down the country, two weeks behind Scotland. Just as a reminder of old times, Morrisons supermarket is experiencing a run on toilet rolls, disinfectant, bleach …
Today was a fine, bright and quite sunny day but with a tremendously high gusty wind which meant that Meg and I had to incline our heads and hang onto our hats in case they blew away (have you ever see a hat blown away by the wind, by the way? My Australian-style leather hat can get bundled on its side and rolls down hill like a wheel if the wind catches it right!) As the weather was getting colder, Meg and I decided that today was the day when we were going to retrieve our electric blanket and get it on the bed. But of course, it is a bit more complicated than this as thought we had better strip our bed right down, turn the (double) mattress in two directions (bottom to top and left to right) and this does call for some heaving around and balancing skills but we got it done OK. We chose the day today because our domestic help could give us a hand, if necessary with all of the necessary laundry as well as bed-making activities and that is another job well done. Being a fine day, today was the kind of day to get some lawn-mowing done but first I had to make trip out for petrol – the mower only consumes 2-3 gallons a year but I now know that you should only buy the best (hopefully ethanol-free petrol) for one’s lawnmower rather than the cheapest. I had to scour the web in the last week or so to get a new foam air filter for my mower. As it was cheap enough, I bought two of them and a spare cover which was working loose so the fitting of these parts delayed the mowing even further. I didn’t start until 5.15 and finish at about 6.30 which is quite late in the day for me. At this time of year, I may be able to get away with a mow every 10-14 days instead of every week and and I always aim to finish the season on the Friday closest to November 5th (a date which it is not possible to forget)
This evening, I spent some time searching for my second, experimental blog site. I installed this a few months ago and it was meant to be a sort of ‘sand-pit’ i.e. you play about with things without any serious consequences. One way or another, I had forgotten the website provider and the folder where the new blog was located so I hunted through my system in vain for about an hour before I remembered that I had actually acquired some new webspace (at a minimal cost, from my Canadian friend) and a memorable name to link onto it. I had got all of my credentials set up in Filezilla (FTP client) but had totally forgotten about it. Now that I have remembered all of the critical details, they go into my book entitled ‘ Tonight, as I write, it looks as though COVID-19 is really taking off in the universities. According to Sky News tonight ‘At least 32 universities in the UK now have confirmed coronavirus cases, and another one has suspected cases. More than 510 cases have been identified among students and staff since universities reopened, according to data collected by Sky News up to 25 September.’ Of course this was quite predictable, and predicted, but the government were in a mad panic to get the educational system open for business and the university students got swept in the tide. Instead of students going to congregate in the halls of residence where the virus can spread freely and they might not be allowed home for Christmas, perhaps better not to have gone in the first place and done all the tuition on-line at home (at least until January). It was a beautiful fine day with a clear blue sky but with quite a biting easterly wind that swirled around us, making us feel distinctly cool. Part of our Saturday routine is to attend the service at St. Mary’s, Harvington (Hall) and we were a select band of 15 this morning. The church service sheet contained even more warnings from the government concerning social distancing and related measures, so the government has probably written to all of the churches asking them to reinforce the message. After this, a wonderful drive back where we always enjoy the Worcestershire countryside and then we picked up all of our newspapers (and supplements) that tend to sell out early on a Saturday. Then we came home and gave ourselves a Saturday treat (Waitrose sausages) which we bake in the oven supplemented by an onion gravy. After lunch and after pressure from other family members, I set to work clearing the garage of empty bottles which had been generated by the damson gin-making process. Eventually, I need about 70 220 cl bottles in which to put the decanted gin so our domestic help and I are saving these frantically. In addition, whenever I get an empty glass jar, I tend to wash it up, remove the label (not always easily) and these I will donate to my sister the next time I see her. In addition, I keep glass jars in theory to accommodate screws and handyman bits-and-pieces within the garage. I got halfway through the task today but tomorrow will be a ‘gin-shaking’ day (to encourage the damsons to release their flavours into the gin). We are still eating the compote I made from the left-over damsons several weeks ago and it is delicious as it takes only a small spoonful in yoghurt, semolina, rice pudding or what have you. Since I have put a keyboard and mice on my iPad I have been experimenting with software that will enable me to write or refine a document or .html file and then transmit it into the ‘cloud’ or, preferably, to one of my own websites. I had to consult an old diary to see how I had managed to do in a very ‘kludgy’ way in the past but reminding myself of the software I had used in the past, I downloaded the updated version of a special coding and text-editor which goes by the name of Textastic. This is now up to version 12, I think it is which speaks highly for it. Some of the documentation I gleaned from the web indicated that it should be possible to FTP files over to a remote server (e.g. to one of your own web page) and to cut a long story short, I found that I managed to write a .html file (actually adapting another file I managed to download) and then get it successfully uploaded to my webspace. To be able to do this in one package on an iPad is incredibly useful to me as I like to be able to do things when I am on holiday and away from my normal computing resources. The whole philosophy of the iPad was that it was meant to be. vehicle for ‘consuming’ (e.g. viewing) things and is not very well oriented to producing things (documents and webpages) but, over time, developers have found a way to write packages that enables one to do this. In the early days of the iPad, the designers did not let you get anywhere near the file structure which we are accustomed to on desktop PC’s but eventually, I think the users have found a way of bending an iPad to their wishes, as it were. Meanwhile, 1700 students at Manchester Metropolitan University are being asked to spend 14 days in self-isolation after 127 have tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. This pattern may well be repeated at universities up and down the country – at the last count, there were at least 32 universities reporting COVID-19 infections. Unfortunately, halls of residence are exactly the places where it is difficult to socially distance and the virus can rampage unchecked throughout all of the communal areas. Should the student body have been discouraged from attending, I ask myself, as the term probably only starts on Monday! Today was another bright but cold day. Actually, I got up fairly early to get my newspaper supply and get home well before the Andrew Marr programme started and the weather was delightful (aided and abetted by the fact that as I was on my own, I treated myself to some baroque music on my aged but trusted ancient iPhone cum MP3 player). On the way home, as the skies were clear but the sun was low in the sky, I experienced the most extraordinary effect where my shadow was about 20 feet long. My son and I had experienced something similar years ago when we went to an aerodrome in the East of England and watched Britain’s last remaining Vulcan bomber make a journey along the runway. It wasn’t allowed to take off but the event took place in the early evening to intensify the effect of sound and sight of the engines blazing and, on that event at least a decade or so ago our shadows on the aerodrome runways appeared to be about one hundred yards long! After we had had a delayed breakfast and shower, it was time for Meg and I to attend our Health Centre for our flu jabs. This was organised like a huge military operation. We arrived at our allotted time, as did a group of other people and then we were taken along to a ‘holding area’ fully staffed by a full complement of both nurses and all of the doctors who called us forward individually to get our jabs. Mine was actually administered by one of our family doctors and the whole procedure must have taken about 2 minutes. Evidently, the practice are trying to get as many of the ‘oldies’ vaccinated as possible perhaps before a second spike of COVID-19 really hits us. I estimate that they probably vaccinated something in the order of 500 people this morning and perhaps even more. It all seemed incredibly sensible – but after this, we took the car along to the park where we walked and had our normal elevenses (although by now it was half-past-twelves). There was a pretty keen i.e. cold, wind in the park today (I know now it was arctic-type air in place over the British Isles as the jet stream has been pushed south) so we cut our stay down to the minimum and were pleased to get home and have a warming cup of tea. After lunch, we indulged in a good read of the Sunday’s and, in particular, some of the inside stories about how ‘Boris’ is subject to conflicting pressures (health of the nation through locking-down or rescuing the economy). I also read but I am sure that this is only speculation that despite the bravura, Michael Gove is absolutely terrified of a no-deal Brexit landing right on top of a tremendously damaged economy in which unemployment is due to soar. If true, then this might nudge the powers that be into a last minute deal trade deal with the EU. After my success yesterday on getting a webpage written and updated from the iPad, I thought I would see if I could update some FTP apps which I have used before. One I had to pay the princely sum of £1.99 for, whilst the other was updated from the £2.99 fee that I must have paid more than three years ago. I am still playing about with these and have not had a chance to explore how easily I can access the files on the ‘local’ side (ie. actually on the iPad) but it seems as though I can inspect and access the files on the remote side (and even display the .html files in a Preview mode). Late on this evening, I was idly trying to find something or other when I right-clicked on my mouse whilst I was examining some text (yesterday’s blog actually) and discovered an item called ‘Speech’ When I selected some text this was then actually spoken back to me using quite a good computer-voice. No doubt, experienced users of an iPhone knew they could do this all along but it was a revelation for me. I then discovered a way in which I could actually do the same on my iPhone – and gave Meg the surprise of her life when last night’s blog that I had read out to her in the park was now actually spoken for her by the iPhone. Amazing now that I have discovered it! The start of another week and I have a few things to deal with, as usual. Firstly, I sent off an email to the secretary of our newfound church to book our place for Saturday morning and this I did before I forgot about it. Then I got onto one of our good local hotels whose restaurant we use for special ‘birthday’ and ‘anniversary’ meals and got a booking for next Saturday as it is Meg’s 74th birthday actually on that day so we thought we would have a bit of French cuisine. All around me, there seems to be building work going one – our immediate next-door neighbour is having bathrooms and the like installed and the last of a garden make-over, our neighbour across the communal green area is having a wall built down the side of her house, the house just round the garden is having a radical make-over which has involved mini-diggers and the erection of new fences and so on. I suppose a lot of work that would have been done ‘normally’ was delayed during the lockdown and now people are making up for lost time. We enjoyed our normal walk to the park today but attendance was quite down – the normal supply of toddlers and dogs seems to have diminished somewhat. However, there are still groups of ‘oldies’ who seem to congregate in circles of six complete with light aluminium camping chairs. After we got home, our son was giving himself a coffee-break so I played him the ‘speech’ version of the blog which I discovered how to activate yesterday. However, either false memory syndrome or senility seems to have overcome me because in my account of long shadows on an aerodrome tarmac, the aircraft we had gone to see was not a Vulcan bomber but the last of the English Electric Lightenings and the aerodrome was actually Bruntingthorpe in Leicestershire. The other details were correct though! Here is the URL of a photo which my son took at the time and has in his collection: I am reliably informed that these could actually outpace the American U2 spyplanes which the Americans thought invincible but the Brits wanted to go one better – however, given the height at which it could travel and the thinness of the air it became somewhat difficult to manouvre. I thought I could not be shocked by political news any more but the Channel 4 evening News at 7.0 pm this evening was jaw-dropping. At least half the programme was devoted to showing how in the 2016 Americal Presidental campaign, black voters were disproprtionately targeted to persuade them not to vote (‘voter suppression’) and hence give a victory to Trump. Here is the link to the whole story Basically, Channel 4 news had obtained 5,000 files (some 5 terabytes) that had data on 200 million Americans and 3.5 million Black Americans. The latter group had social media messages, primarily from FaceBook targeted at them – many of these messages were ‘dark’ i.e. could not be traced after the sponsors (right wing money) had stopped funding the adverts. FaceBook refuses to release the historic data that they held saying ‘it could not happen now’ which was a tacit admission that it happened then. The black vote turnout seemed to have dropped by some 20% points which was enough to give Donald Trump victory in several key ‘swing’ states. Perhaps I ought not to mention that the same gang (Cambridge Analytica) used similar techniques in the Brexit referendum campaign but it has proved incredibly difficult to inestigate their full involvement as of now – and too late anyway. Meg and I did have in mind whether or not it was sensible or foolhardy to go to Southampton to look up some old friends in the narrow ‘window of opportunity’ that we have before the winter sets in, the COVID-19 epidemic worsens, future lockdowns re activated etc. I got into contact with an old and trusted friend to work things how things are down in that neck of the woods and after we had had an exchange of emails, it seemed sensible not to engage in this little venture. But in the meantime, we have a lunch-time dinner date which has just been arranged to see the Pitt-Rivers (anthropological) Museum in Oxford where the collection of shrunken heads has just been removed from public display (are they stored away somewhere, I ask myself?) Well, you never know what a day is going to bring and today was no exception. As we have now decided that we are not going to risk visiting Hampshire to see ex-colleagues and friends, we wondered whether we might try to ‘Skype’ some of our friends instead. As it happened, I had ‘Skype’ on my computer but had never utilised it, not least because you need to have the person you wish to contact at the other end to see if the system works. When I fired up Skype it seemed to have one of my friends in the ‘Contacts’ list so I fired off a quick email to him last night, saying that I would try to ‘Skype’ him at 9.0am this morning. Promptly at 9.0 I fired up Skype, clicked on my friend’s name and there he was! It ws easier, they say, than taking sweets from a baby (not that I have ever tried to do anything as mean as this!) So we had a wonderful chat fo the best part of an hour which was particularly pleasurable as I have not seen my friend for about a year now or even longer. All of this delayed our daily walk to the park but we were so pleased to establish contact with old friends that we really did not mind. Today was my ‘Pilates’ day so we had to get home to have a fairly brisk turn around and then I attended the Pilates class, accompanied by my near neighbour who introduced me to Pilates more years ago than I care to remember (about 6-7 I think)
Saturday, 26th September, 2020
[Day 194]
Sunday, 27th September, 2020
[Day 195]
Monday, 28th September, 2020
[Day 196]
Tuesday, 29th September, 2020
[Day 197]
The COVID-19 news is worrying today as over 7,000 new cases have been diagnosed today, which, if I am reading the graphs correctly, is the highest daily total recorded. Of course more tests are being conducted now than in the Spring. The proportion of tests indicating ‘positive’ is also increasing which must be a worrying tendency. Just out of interest, I checked on the number of infections in my local postcode area and they had doubled from 18 to 36 in a week. So I think it is a case that, without being neurotic about this, we cannot afford to be cavalier about our normal COVID-19 precautions.
After last night’s revelations on Channel 4 News about the way in which Trump had tried to suppress the black vote in the last presidential election, tonight’s programme followed this up with more revelations. This time, it was revealed how the same algorithms and databases that were used to suppress the black vote was directed to particular sections of the white vote who might be susceptible to the Trump message. In particular, the ‘law and order’ theme played out large and if the same trend is repeated in this year’s election then the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign could serve to energise both a degree of BAME solidarity but also white fears and resentments. It appears to me that the ‘middle’ may well be evaporating in the American electorate and opinion solidifying between those who feel that Trump has stood up as no other candidate before him for their interests (generally, white and without a college education) and those who feel that Trump is an unmitigated disaster and must be stopped at all costs. Tomorrow morning is the first of the presidential debates and I wonder what attack lines the street-fighter in Trump will utilise to further enthuse his support.
Today started off gloomy and we had alternating, drizzle, gloom and then active rain almost all day long. However, we had a bright start to the day because in my new found enthusiasm for Skype, I managed to get into direct contact with a close friend in Oxfordshire – we try and meet every 4-6 weeks to have a meal and chew the fat over a range of world issues. We are going to meet in a few weeks time in any case to see the Pitt-Rivers anthropological museum in Oxford which will be a first for us.
Despite the gloom, Meg and I still managed to undertake our walk to the local park. The park was practically deserted but we had with us a spare towel with which we could dry the park bench and enjoy a peaceful few minutes (bereft of dogs and toddlers on little push bikes which is the norm). Then we came to the ritual of reading of last night’s blog (accessed through my iPhone) after which we were more than happy to head homewards, sustained by the fact that I was going to make us a curry for lunch. Tomorrow we will our friends in the park hopefully to share some (birthday) cake unless we get rained off and then have the joys of the Waitrose delivery to unpack once it arrives. (I am reminded of the famous line uttered by Margot Leadbetter in the classic series ‘The Good Life‘ in which she said ‘Christmas is coming to us this year in a Harrod’s hamper’, the analogue of which is our weekly shopping is by courtesy of Waitrose in a number of plastic bags).
This afternoon, I thought I had better attack the growing pile of half-read newspapers which I have kept on one side in case there was anything that I really wanted to keep. Actually, as my iPhone contract is coming to the end of its contract I did find a useful article detailing the latest (and somewhat cut down) model of the iPhone which I think will serve my purposes admirably when I come to exchange it in a week or so.
Late last night, I received via a friend of a friend, a video clip in which Stephen King (eminent American novelist) had predicted that a character like Trump might arrive on the American political scene. King wrote a book in 1979 called ‘The Dead Zone’ in which an aggressive real estate salesman with a bad mouth and no morals or ethics, became President of the United States. The book was even made into a film and some of the scenes and activities depicted in the novel have actually come to pass. It really does look as though the coming of Trump had been anticipated by 37 years – uncanny (and not a little spooky, even) I watched a few minutes on-line of the Trump-Biden fiasco (aka known as a Presidential debate) and what a glorious advert for American democracy. One of the principal ‘stand out’ moments was Trump refusing to condemn a white, extremist group who are inciting violence in American cities under the wonderful name of the ‘Proud Boys’ Pressed by the debate moderator to condemn the far-right, extemist group, Trump urged them them to ‘stand back and stand by‘. Proud Boys members called his debate comments ‘historic’ and an endorsement and are already displaying tee-shirts emboldened with the message that they are ‘standing by’. One really has to wonder what will happen on election night, only about 5 weeks away, if Trump appears to be losing and the far right merge on the street, toting their automatic weapons…
There was an appearance at 5.00 pm this evening of Boris Johnson flanked by his two scientific advisers and I wondered if a significant announcement of a further lock-down was forthcoming. Instead, we had the usual banalities and journalists’ questions that are not directly answered and I wondered to myself what was the point of it all. The virus rate is still running at over 7,000 (about the same as last night) but university students have been told that they ‘will’ be able to come for Christmas – so that is all right then. Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House of Commons has given the government the equivalent of a dressing down for introducing regulations with the force of law at only a few hours notice completely avoiding any Parliamentary scrutiny (although it now looks as though Parliament i.e. back-bench Tory MP’s, are forcing the government to lay further regulations before Parliament for some degree of scrutiny before their implementation)
Today was a fine, bright day and as we were preparing for our walk, we had a ring on the doorbell from the window cleaner we have used for years now. As it was the first day of the month, I was reminiscing with him that when I was a great deal younger, we used to day ‘White rabbits! White rabbits! White rabbits!‘ and then the more conscientious amongst us kept our fingers crossed on both hands until we saw a policeman riding by on a white horse. Obviously, he was not of the generation to have ever heard anything as outlandish as this but he has heard of ‘Pinch! Punch! First of the month’ which I think use to be popular with the smaller members of a family, complete with suitable accompanying actions. We reflected that the change of expressions told us something about the way in which society had changed over the years.
In the park, we had intended to meet with some of our ex-Waitrose friends, with whom we were going to share a birthday cake (our friend’s tomorrow and Meg’s on Saturday) But our plans were a little thwarted when we got a text telling us our friend had woken up with a cold and felt pretty terrible, so was going to give the park a miss today. We had acquired a suitable birthday card from our newsagent and was going to get it posted to arrive in time for tomorrow when in a subsequent text ,our friend told us not to post it but wait for a day or so when we could actually meet (weather permitting, of course) We held an interesting conversation with a young man who had a beautiful specimen of a German Shepherd dog. I hadn’t realised that this was the former name by which Alsatians were known but fell into disuse at a time of one of our periodic contretemps with the Germans. The dog was called ‘Bear‘ on the basis that as a puppy he resembled a bear as much as a dog. We had just finished our elevenses overlooking the pond? boating lake? when a man strode up with a home built boat that must have been a metre in length. It took him some time to get various parts assembled, including a battery power pack and some electronic controls before he released it onto the water. I put say I was expecting a gentle ‘whoosh’ through the water but instead it carved through the water at the equivalent of speedboat speeds. Rather cheekily, I wondered whether he called his boat ‘Titanic‘ or even 'Marie Celeste‘ but actually, he did not have any name for it at all. Apprantly, he was quite used to giving it an outing in local reservoirs and the like and it was a completely home-built affair so he evidently had modelling skills of the highest order. Then on the way home, we bumped into our Italian friend with whom we had a conversation concentrating upon domestic issues. In the middle of this, my iPhone rang to inform me that I had a FaceTime call from one of my former colleagues from Winchester. He had given me some contact details to put into FaceTime which I did late last night and so he was returning my call later on this morning. Fortunately, we were very near a park bench upon which we plonked ourself whilst we chatted about family and friends. We now have made an arrangement to FaceTime each other at the same time each week as it is likely to be months before we can meet again in the flesh. We were just concluding our conversation when our Italian friend turned up again to say that she had a call on her phone saying that her account may have been compromised so she was going to have to deal with that – it could have been genuine or a scam of course. Finally, we were just approaching the top of the hill on the way home when we stopped to have a chat with a lady who recognised as as ‘regular walkers’ up and down the road every day. She lived in a little development of the Kidderminster Road so that was yet one more contact to add to our list (In parenthesis, I might say that people recognise me more by the distinctive Australian style leather bush hat so it is not unusual for people to stop by and say to me ‘I don’t know you but I recognise the hat‘ We get the occasional toddler who tugs on his mother’s hand when we pass in the street with the comment ‘Oh look, Mummy! A cowboy!’ Of course, I smile indulgently whenever this happens.)
This afternoon we devoted to a good read of the newspapers and awaited our Waitrose delivery only for this to be delayed by an hour and then short of milk and yogurt (important elements of our diet!) so I had to make a lighting visit to our local Waitrose to ensure we were well supplied for the week ahead!
As we waking up this morning, we were greeted with the news that had broken overnight that President Trump and his wife had both tested positive for the COVID-10 virus and as the day drew on (and America 6-8 hours behind us woke up) so this news came to dominate all of the news agendas during the day. More of this later on, as shall see. Meanwhile, storm ‘Alex’ swept across the UK making this a wet and blustery day. It was ‘touch and go’ whether Meg decided to accompany me for my morning walk but eventually she did do so, as the weather was spitting rather than raining hard. Even so, having collected our newspapers, the park was deserted and the benches uniformly wet so we had to make do with standing in the bandstand to partake of our coffee. What followed was a typical juggling act as I balanced my rucksack on our little aluminium tripod stool (courtesy of the National Trust) that we take with us every day whilst I manipulated our trusty coffee flask and our daily comestibles. Needless to say, we saw none of our normal contingency of ‘park acquaintances’ and were therefore glad to strike out for home after the briefest of pauses for refreshment. We then pressed on with a fairly early lunch of a bought fish pie (which could well have run foul of the Trade Descriptions Act because the amount of fish compared with potato and cheese was absolutely minute. I only make comment o this because I occasionally make a huge fish pie (which lasts for several meals, once frozen) which generally contains a layer of white fish (such as cod) a layer of yellow fish (smoked haddock), a layer of salmon and a layer pf prawns with a base of potato and topped with mashed potato and some grated cheese. This generally takes quite some making but the result is worth it because it is absolutely streets ahead of any commercially bought alternative.
We needed to have an early lunch because we were due to participate in a long arranged hospital appointment for Meg which was being organised as a Webex video consultation. After a small initial hitch and a couple of telephone calls, we got this link working well and the whole consultation went very well. Even though I say it myself, this consultation was probably longer and more thorough than its alternative face-to-face might have been, so we were pleased that the whole had gone so well at a time when the NHS is under so much pressure, this was well and truly appreciated.
After the consultation had ended, we were glued to the television to see the story about Donald Trump and the positive COVID-19 test was unfolding. Needless to say, as the day had drawn on, so had the analysis of the potential implications. At one point in the afternoon, we knew that Joe Biden had had a test for COVID-19 so the possibility arose that both of the contenders in the presidential race could be infected by COVID-19 and what would happen then? It soon turned out that Joe Biden had tested negative but the analyses continued to flow thick and fast. In fact, Sky News put on a special hour-long programme at 8.00 pm devoted exclusively to an analysis of the developing situation. The President apparently has ‘mild’ symptoms (so had Boris Johnson and most people initially) but after a few days, this can intensify into much worse symptoms or gradually abate – only time will tell. However, the president’s age (74) and his obesity (BMI of more than 30) greatly intensify the risk factors. I must say I succumbed to the temptation to Google in order to discover the risk of dying from COVID-19 for an obese, 74-year-old white American male and was amazed that the risk of death is actually quite small (about 4% only)
The reactions to the news are actually quite interesting but the more restrained reaction seems to be that ‘you shall reap what you sow’. Naturally, the media who have long been pilloried by the Trump camp for purveying ‘fake’ news have relished in putting together in a long sequence some of the quite ridiculous statements that Trump has uttered in the past concerning COVID-19. The Democrats are worried, though, that if Trump only has a mild dose it will add to a ‘Superman’ type of image in which Trump can argue he was right all along and ‘true Americans’ can throw off the virus easily. On the other hand, if Trump were to get the virus really seriously, would this generate a type of perverse sympathy vote for him? The thought did occur to me as well that whatever the political ideology of the president, would anybody be fit to govern for the next four years, given the accumulating evidence of what is now being termed ‘long-COVID’ (i.e. debilitating consequences that persist for a long time after the acute phase is over) Of course, the same argument could be applied to Boris Johnson as well, but that is another story! This story will run and run…
Today was a special day as it was Meg’s birthday (now 74!) so we were going to have a routine that was out of the ordinary. We made a fairly early start to our day and then went to he church in Harvington, as we generally do on a Saturday, collecting our supply of newspapers en route. Today was a slightly sad occasion for us in that we have now decided to resume attendance at our ‘normal’ church as from next Saturday and hence today is to be our last attendance at St. Mary’s Harvington. Next week we shall return to our normal church which has been redecorated since it has been closed during the lockdown – attendance is now resuming but a booking system is going to be in place so that attendance can be kept down to ‘social distancing’ norms. This is going to seem rather strange next weekend but at least we will manage to resume contacts with old acquaintances.
After we returned home from church, we missed our general walk to the park (it was raining fairly hard anyway) but we indulged ourselves with some cake that had been baked for us by two separate friends. Then we made our way to our favourite ‘gourmet’ restaurant which is about some 5 miles distant where we had a magnificent birthday meal (crab followed by belly pork for Meg, a delicious pumpkin soup followed by beef for Mike) washed down with a lovely bottle of Rioja. Our meal was timed for 1.0pm but it was 4.0 pm by the time we had had our meal and a post-prandial coffee and chat with some fellow diners in the bar afterwards.
When we got home, we turned on the television to see what had happened to Donald Trump. As it happens, I was just posting last night’s blog when the news came through that he was about to be hospitalised in the Walter Reed military hospital in Washington – transported by helicopter. Although it was a rather unworthy thought, I did opine to some of the members of the church that we visited this morning that I was actually in some moral conflict – should I pray for the life of Donald Trump or for his death? Some of the scenes to which we were subject bordered on the farcical. The first was when a list of the medications that Donald Trump had been prescribed was followed by ‘and an aspirin’ The second scene which was hammily stage-managed was when some eleven white coated members of the medical team were assembled outside the hospital to say that Donald Trump was doing just fine. One doctor solemnly announced that it was his responsibility to look after Donald Trump’s ‘cough’ whilst many of the rest did not volunteer their specific role. However, one did get the feeling that there was a certain amount of dissimulation going on e.g. to the question ‘Has Donald Trump received any oxygen‘ we get a rather evasive answer to say that Donald Trump had not been administered any oxygen ‘today‘ which still leaves some questions unanswered. As I write, I did quick flick over to Sky News and it appeared that Donald Trump had been administered oxygen by his medical team in the White House yesterday and also that the president’s vital signs were ‘very concerning‘ yesterday evening – which is certainly not the story we were being fed yesterday the the presidents symptoms were described as ‘very mild’ and that he only being admitted to hospital because of an ‘excess of caution’. When a truer picture emerges in a day or so as to what exactly has happened a day or so earlier, one does get the sense that the news is being massively managed. Of course, we have been there before with Boris Johnson but he ended up in intensive care. The next few days are going to be critical for Donald Trump because if the virus is going to intensify its attack on his immune system, it generally takes a few days for this to happen. I think Joe Biden has done absolutely the right thing by taking the moral high ground and immediately ‘pulling’ any political advertising that was going to be critical of Donald Trump in person in the forthcoming election – of course, this might help to neutralise some of the poisonous advertising that it is going to come from the other side but I won’t hold my breath! The Sunday newspapers tomorrow may be contain fuller details of the inside stories that tend not to get mentioned in the Main Street Media press.
Today started off somewhat gloomily but I raced down to my friendly little newsagent to collect the Sundays and get back in time for breakfast and the Andrew Marr show – which is a part of our Sunday routine. What we did not expect was to see Boris Johnson put in an appearance. Perhaps Boris is starting to realise that his popularity with his own backbenchers is on the slide – indeed, I saw a survey recently amongst recent Tory voters that indicated that about 70% of them would not be unhappy if Boris were to replaced before the next election. To my mind, he made two revealing little slips in his interview with Andrew Marr. Firstly, then asked to account for his waning popularity within the party, he opined that the bluster and elan that he would exhibit when campaigning (for Brexit) or electioneering were not qualities that were very valuable in the running of a crisis like COVID-19. Boris Johnson’s lack of attention to detail, which is well known, is starting to manifest itself in several ways. During the last week, he was evident that he was not sure of the application of his ‘lockdown’ rules as they applied to the Northeast and he ‘misspoke’ as they say – and had to issue a correction later. When asked about the soaring numbers of new infections even in areas subject to increased lockdown he replied that he knew that re-opening the schools would ‘add to the risk side of the equation‘ which was certainly not admitted at the time. Meanwhile, 770 students at the University of Northumbria have tested positive for the virus (which to my mind is both horrendous and predictable once thousands of young people all over the country were urged to attend their universities where a large degree of into-personal ‘mingling’ is inevitable).
On our way down to the park, we passed the house of one of our ‘church’ friends who dashed out to give Meg a birthday card and a belated birthday present – we would have had this yesterday but in view of the weather, we decided to forego our walk yesterday. We discussed the fact that we have abandoned our new found ‘niche’ attending a service at St. Mary’s Harvington and we are going to return ‘to the fold’ next Saturday – but this will involve us making a telephone call to ‘book a place’ and attendance will be restricted to about 36 socially distanced worshippers. This, no doubt will be a slightly strange experience for us all the first time but I am sure we will get used to the new routine. Whilst in the park, we met one of our ex-Waitrose friends who had managed to get to France but know she would have to self-quarantine when she got back to the UK which she actually found very hard. We updated her on all of the news concerning some of our mutual friends. Then we ran into our Italian friend with whom we had a heart-felt chat – we gained the impression that she was actually missing her husband (and brother who only died a matter of weeks ago) quite keenly. Finally, we saw our next-door neighbour was busy walking his dog to the park and we exchanged all of the Trump news (and sentiments – we both felt the same way about him) which we had been following on the news bulletins.
There have been two quite extraordinary stories hitting the headlines tonight. The first of these is that some 23,000 new cases were registered as COVID-19 positive since yesterday and that is an enormous leap. It has also been revealed that some 16,000 cases had been omitted due to a ‘technical error’ and had not been recorded on the system and this will affect the figures reported for the last 10 days or so. At whose door we can lay the blame for this, it is hard to tell at this stage – some fingers are already pointing at Public Health England but that has often been used as a whipping boy in the past. I think we shall to wait and see until we get some in-depth analysis by tomorrow’s newspapers to really get a handle on what exactly has been going on. The other story this evening is that President Trump has seen fit to make a tour in his heavily armoured car (I think they call it ‘The Beast’) in order to wave to some supporters. It sounds like an act of sheer showmanship and nothing to do with being presidential! There is some talk that he may be discharged from the hospital tomorrow but of course, the real ‘crunch’ point to see if the virus is going to intensity in his system won’t be known for about 7-10 days since the start of his infection which should take us up towards the end of this week. In the meantime, we are learning that a week last Saturday, there was a huge reception for senior Republicans on the lawns of the White House to celebrate the latest Trump nomination to the Supreme Court and it does appear that some senior aids and about 2-3 senators were infected (some even by Trump himself). Being Republicans, none of them appeared to be wearing face masks…
This was an indeterminate sort of day not knowing whether it was to rain or not to rain. I did spend a certain amount of time sending off emails in various directions as, with the semi-lockdown existing in many areas, it seems more sensible to try and FaceTime or to Skype friends where I can. In the park, we met with the friend who had kindly loaned us her book on trees and we ended handing this back having had a good read of it. One of my friends had sent me a whole series of cartoons (COVID-19 themed) so we had a good chuckle at these and then passed them onto others who would appreciate them. Of course, when we undertake our walk we can observe the changing of the seasons and there is certainly an autumnal whiff to the air at the moment. Having got storm ‘Alex‘ out of the way which has given us such stormy and windy weather over the last few days, it was pleasant to get back to what you might term a ‘normal’ autumn day.
The day has been filled with the news of the 16,000 cases of COVID-19 cases that have somehow been lost off the system. There are two facets to this problem. The first is that a national data system should not have been processed using Excel software which will work fine for most day-to-day office applications but is not designed to cope with the kind of national data flows that we are gathering in the middle of a pandemic. So the first question is that Excel itself should not have been used but a large relational database, common in the NHS but apparently a mystery to Public Health England and the Trace-and-Test regime. And then, to compound the problem, an out-of-date version of Excel was being used which would only handle 65,536 rows of data. Modern versions of this software can handle millions of rows of data but in this case, data was simply ‘dropping off the end’ when the system could not cope with it. So the root of the problem was an out-of-date version of inappropriate software which is a problem that surely could have been foreseen. The tragic point of this story is that if you examine the thousands of cases not put on the system and therefore not within the purview of test-and-trace then literally thousands of people are in the community infecting thousands of people more with the virus – some of whom will undoubtedly die. Some £12 billion has been spent on this system, equivalent to the cost of two aircraft carriers and equating to a bill of £450 for every family in the country. One has to ask the question – who is going to get the sack for such a monumental (and fundamental) error like this? It seems that the government might have known about this since last July and knew they were coping with a ‘legacy system’ – one commentator has compared this to constructing a car by sellotaping the parts together. One has to say that presiding over a ramshackle type system and then refusing to apologise or acknowledge any degree of blame is rapidly becoming the hallmark of this government. My ‘back of an envelope’ calculations taking into account the current ‘R’ rate and the known death rate is that this data glitch might have caused about 180 deaths – about the same as a major air crash. Can you imagine the outcry that would have occurred if an aircrash could be attributed to a dubious reading on an out-of-date air traffic control system – but, in terms of lives lost, this is about what has happened?
As I write, it looks as Donald Trump is discharging himself from hospital whilst tweeting ‘Don’t be afraid of COVID!” Some medical professionals in the USA are absolutely appalled by the reckless behaviour of Trump last night going for a ‘drive-by’ in his specially fortified car. As this is sealed against chemical attack, then the risks of infection for members of the security staff, in the vehicle with him but without the benefit of PPE is quite high. At the very least, they should quarantine themselves for 14 days and it is is quite possible that some may develop the full-blown virus and then die – just to satisfy Trump’s vanity. Not for the first time, I am lost for words!
Today turned out to be quite a fine autumn day with only a hint or so of rain – fine enough to risk going out without any shower ware of any kind ( I think it is a Scandivanian expression that ‘there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing‘). Meg and I always have to keep an eye on the time on Tuesday’s because it is my Pilates day when I walk down to town with a neighbour to attend my class. We do Pilates together for an hour (as we have been doing for years) and then come home to a somewhat delayed lunch. My neighbour was having some external building work done in her garden (having a wall built) and when this happens, you suddenly develop an interest into how other neighbours and residents in the area have coped with similar problems. The one thing I have noticed is that the better-built walls fronting gardens tend to have a line of ‘blue’ (i.e. engineering style) bricks as a top course laid in a transverse direction. I suppose the theory here is that blue bricks prevent the ingress of water which would eventually make the top course of bricks unstable and the wall would degrade. In addition, better builders have always finished off with a type of coping stone in order to shed water. As soon as the building work is done, I am sure I will lose all interest in how such things get done!
After I had lunched and rested, it was time to make a Skype call which I had previously arranged with one of my friends and ex-colleague from the University of Winchester days. As his wife had been ill recently but was now well on the road to recovery, it was wonderful to have a chat about progress. We tended to roam over world affairs e.g. our reactions to Donald Trump and the various acts of showmanship that were being performed as we saw a COVID-19 infected president appear on the balcony of the White House to which he had been discharged from the hospital before theatrically ripping off his mask and walking indoors, to infect how many more members of the White House I wonder. From what I can tell, at least a dozen of those who had been close to Trump have tested positive for the virus but the White House is being extremely reticent about the actual numbers involved. There are some inside stories that tend to suggest that the ‘staffers’ inside the White House are going round in a state of panic and that no contact tracing seems to be at all evident. The CDC (Centre for Disease Control) in the USA is listing the number and type pf transgressions that are occurring – it appears, in any case, that the White House is exempt from any of the rules and regulations that affect the rest of the population in Washington, DC. The interesting thing about all of this from the point of view of a disinterested observer lime myself (!) is that as members of the Presidents entourage drop off one by one then it becomes difficult to disguise the fact that a lot of spreading of the virus is going on, not least by Trump itself. One item of news tonight is that ‘Twitter‘ has removed one of Donald Trump’s tweets tonight as he was suggesting that COVID was no more dangerous than the ‘flue – which is patently and evidently absurd.
In the meanwhile, it is evident that the virus is spreading really rapidly in the student communities and the areas of town in which students live. The first house that Meg and I was a terrace house overlooking Platt Fields Park in the area of Fallowfield, Manchester. The road we lived on overlooked the park but there was a block of terrace housing near the park built at the start of the twentieth century. This has evidently over the years been either bought or rented by the student community and, in fact, we must have been one of the first ever students to have bought in that area in 1968. Tonight, they had some TV cameras surveying that part of Manchester and it was amazing to see the parts of town in which you used to live the subject of current affairs in the news. It seemed from the TV reports that as well as the terraced housing occupied by students, there were now several businesses catering for the student community – but I haven’t visited there for some fifty years at least so I can imagine what the area actually looks like in 2020. By the way, the house we bought cost £1995 (but it would have only cost about £1400 if it hadn’t been overlooking the park!)
Today was quite a fine day, as the weather forecast indicated it might be, so we had different plans for the day. We knew that we could go off and do several things whilst the weather was set fair so we decided to visit Droitwich, which is a few miles to the south of us and which we used to visit fairly regularly. We made a telephone booking in our favourite cafe/restaurant and then set out having collected our newspapers from our regular little shop on the way out. Once we were parked in Droitwich we decided to call in at a little, old-fashioned ‘Olde World Teashoppe’ that we have visited before the era of the COVID virus. Once we arrived, they had all of their systems in place and we pointed our NHS test-and-trace app at the QR code to get ourselves signed in (which all worked perfectly). Meg ordered an Earl Grey Tea whist I ordered a Mocha coffee which turned out to be the nicest Mocha that I have tasted anywhere. We both treated ourselves to toasted teacakes and felt massively profligate (having restrained from eating too much carbohydrate recently). The cafe proprietor was a very jolly soul and in no time at all the cafe as a whole soon joined in the general merriment. Once a week they put on a special roast dinner at an incredibly reasonable price so we asked for one of their menus/cards so we can book a meal in advance if we so fancy it in a week or so. In fact,Meg and I remembered that when we had eaten there in the upstairs portion of the cafe, we had met a family who came from the area of the Potteries in which she was brought up so there was a lot of wandering memory lane on that occasion. Then we re-parked the car so as not to fall foul of over-assiduous parking wardens and made our way through the town for our lunch date. Although we had booked previously expecting the cafe to be teeming, it was in fact fairly empty so Meg and I ordered a lasagne (which I have to admit was delicious), and they very obligingly swapped the chips element which we did not fancy for some ciabatta bread with garlic butter. After lunch we called in a large ‘Wilkinsons’ hardware store (trading as ‘Wilco’ throughout the Midlands) at which we tend to replenish our supplies of cosmetics and stationery (although gardening, motoring, decorating and kitchenware etc. was available to us had we felt so inclined).
Just round the corner from the hardware store is a shoe shop from which Meg had bought a fantastically comfortable pair of boots about a year ago which she has worn most days on our journey to the park. So we thought that as shoes do not last for ever, it might be a good idea to see if they had any more of the same make. As it happened, they did not have that particular manufacturer’s line in stock but they did they did have some even better ones so Meg was more than delighted to have a new pair of boots (belated birthday present) In my own case, I have a pair of incredibly comfortable walking boots but when I examined them by turning them upside down the heels had worn away to practically nothing. I did a quick calculation that tended to suggest that I must have walked the best part of 1,000 kilometres in them so I thought I would see what the shop had on offer. Eventually, we were passed onto the proprietor himself who was extremely knowledgable about his stock and he found me a pair of Italian walking shoes (which looked good I must say) and these I was more than happy to purchase on the understanding that they might well last for 2,000 kilometres. I have to say it was a real delight to get that degree of personal attention which is all so often lacking in modern shops but the attention that we received was certainly an excellent way to build customer loyalty.
Tonight is the US vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence (solid, white, conventional American male) and Kamala Harris (brought up in California where she became the district attorney – the son of an Indian Mother and a Jamaican father). Normally vice-presidential debates do not attract a great deal of interest, but this time around there is a lot of interest. In the case of Mike Pence, it is quite possible that he might have to take over the Presidency if Donald Trump were to fall over in the next four weeks or at some time in the next four years should Donald Trump actually win. But much more likely is that Joe Biden will win but because of his age be content as a one term president which would lead the field open to Kamala Harris to become president ( the first woman president for the USA) in four years time.The debate starts at 2.0am GMT so I shall have to wait until tomorrow to see who draws blood!
I woke up rather early this morning – well, just after 4.00 am to be precise. I surmised that the Pence-Harris vice-presidential debate might be over by now and very often the media likes to announce a ‘winner’ But on this occasion, there seemed to be no such conclusion and when I listened to subsequent analysis, it seemed that a 0-0 draw was the best approximation. The most exciting point of the whole debate was a large black fly that seemed to embed itself in Mike Pence’s hair and could not extricate itself for the last 10 minutes of the encounter. Of course, Donald Trump tweeted that Kamala Harris had been a mass of evasions (but both candidates evaded some awkward questions). Tonight, as I blog, it looks as Donald Trump may be on the verge of pulling out of the next debate with Jo Biden. It appears that commission organising the debate in Miami on 15 October said it would have to take place remotely after Mr Trump tested positive for coronavirus and therefore it would have to be a virtual i.e. remote debate. Trump has refused this and is trying to renegotiate the timetable with Jo Biden refusing at this point. If Trump does pull out of the second televised head-to-head he will be shooting himself in the foot and handing the moral high ground (and the political ground) to Jo Biden who has just to keep on saying ‘no’ to any renegotiation of the timetable. Again, I have the feeling that this one might rumble on for several days.
On reading my emails this morning, I had a very pleasant surprise. One of my closest Winchester friends had read my blog in which I was reminiscing about the first house we bought on the edge of Platt Fields Park in Manchester. It transpired that his first teaching job In Fallowfield, Manchester at a college with a really innovative design which was known as ‘Domski’ and also the ‘toastrack’ This is because it did resemble a huge toastrack thrusting into the sky with a poached egg i.e. circular building at its base. It housed students studying domestic science and offered courses such as ‘Hotel and Catering Management’ I suspect that in organisational terms it straddled the divide between technical i.e. further education and higher education – it probably offered OND’s and HND’s and the latter would qualify it as higher education. My first teaching job was at Elizabeth Gaskell College of Education and that there was a course in Institutional Management in that college – in the eye of the public Domski and Elizabeth Gaskell College were often confused with each other, perhaps because most of the student body was female. As part of our ‘party scene’ in my first year at Manchester University, we certainly regarded the Domski students as ‘one of us’ as we did the students from the College of Commerce at All Saints and the Royal Northern College of Music which were later to become Manchester Metropolitan University. Whilst on a student theme, my heart is beginning to feel for those students, particularly at Manchester Met who have got themselves to university only to be faced with a bill for £9,000, only on-line tuition and an inability to go out, even to buy food on some occasions. A son of an acquaintance of mine had abandoned his course at Liverpool University where he could only see his tutorial group about once every three weeks and decided to save himself a packet of money (which he doesn’t have anyway) to live and study at home and then go off to Birmingham University to where he has transferred himself. Normally, one would say that the experience common in the UK to go away to university adds a degree of depth to student development but under these extreme circumstances, perhaps there is a logic to staying at home (and close to home comforts, not to mention food!) and then have the occasional face-to-face contact in one’s local university, only a bus ride away.
It does appear that tonight we can only be a few days from more stringent degrees of lockdown. The latest figures for positive testing is 17.540 with 2,000 recorded in the last week in Nottingham alone. The hospitals are filling up rapidly with COVID-18 cases and they are seeing hospital admissions jump by about a quarter in one day. However, there is still quite a lot of capacity in the hospitals at the moment and the death rate is not very high – the more ‘nightmare’ scenario is when the younger populations who have the virus inflict it upon he older populations who will soon fill up all of the hospital beds and then die in great numbers. We are, as the politicians keep saying every day, at a ‘critical juncture’.
As predicted, it was a brighter but colder day this morning so we really have the feeling that autumn is upon us. We collected our newspapers as usual and swung by Waitrose in order to pick up some bottles of tonic water which had inadvertently been left off our shopping list. Then off to our usual comestibles in the park although this time we had been treated to some delicious sausage rolls, handmade for us by our domestic help. Then on the way home, we waved to our friends who live at the bottom of the hill and communicated to them our news that we had got ourselves booked in for the church service tomorrow evening. As it happens our friend will be one of the people who needs to check us in and out of the church to ensure that we are one of the select 36 who has been booked in. We will, of course, be asked to quote our names so I thought that I would call myself Mr.B. L. BeZub to see what the consequences might happen to be. Because it looks as though we might be in some tighter degrees of lockdown early next week, our friends have invited us to have a socially distanced with them tomorrow morning, to which we are looking forward (as always)
We had to have a fairly rapid lunch when we got back and sometimes I used to make a salmon risotto – but have got out of the habit so as to avoid partaking in too much carbohydrate (aka rice). But today I thought I would try a little culinary experiment. The supermarkets sell these days packets of what they call ‘cauliflower rice’ which is, as the name suggests, a rice-like foodstuff made from the finer florets of cauliflower which has much lower levels of carbohydrate than rice. So I prepared some kipper fillets (boil in the bag) and then made a risotto out of the cauliflower rice, onions, peas, kipper fillets, grated cheese and yoghurt. The experiment worked – I will try this again another week.
This afternoon, Meg had another medical consultation via a ‘webbed’ link and, like last week, the technology worked well and the consultation filled all of its objectives. At this rate, one wonders whether one will ever see a doctor in the flesh ever again as I am sure that this type of video consultation will rapidly become the norm. Then this evening we had a wonderful FaceTime chat with one of ex-Winchester colleagues giving us lots of news about our respective families (and some not altogether welcome medical news as well)
Later on in the afternoon, I read a long and fascinating email from one of my Winchester friends who, as it happened, had worked at the ‘toastrack’ domestic science college to which I made reference in last night’s blog. He had a welter of fascinating stories about his early professional life as a lecturer in Manchester and as I am going to Skype him in a few days time, no doubt we can exchange a lot of stories about the parts of Manchester that we had both known so well – but separated by a period of about five years so we did not actually overlap. On Sunday evening, Meg and I are going to Skype a great-niece (aunt’s daughter?) who is currently in Seattle so we are going to exchange lots of news about both families, and then I suspect political news. Although we get a lot of political news from the army of correspondents, it is always interesting to see what people ‘on the ground’ are actually thinking. As you may have noticed, we are trying to keep in touch with more and people by Skype or FaceTime which helps to keeps us sane in the strange times in which we are living.
Finally, we are all getting prepared for more stringent measures, to be announced on Monday. These have been very heavily trailed so far (support of up to two-thirds wages for those whose businesses are forced to close, a three-tier local lockdown system, perhaps some restrictions on travel into/out of the worst affected areas). It will now come as no surprise as the government have been ‘preparing us’ and, perhaps, the sooner the better!
Meg and I had a somewhat different routine this morning because we had been invited to stop by at some of our friends in the Kidderminster Road thinking that a more stringent lockdown might soon be on the cards. We collected our newspapers, replete with supplements and then called by at Waitrose to pick up a bottle of wine. We then spent a most enjoyable hour and a half with our friends who treated us to some beautiful sandwiches and portions of cake whilst we chatted and joked away until we had to make our way home and prepare lunch. We treat ourselves on a Saturday to some Waitrose sausages which we bake in the oven and then have with (pre-prepared) carrot and parsnip mash before settling down to a solid afternoon’s reading of the Saturday newspapers. Halfway through the afternoon, I nearly leapt out of my chair with excitement when it was announced that Donald Trump had been admittted to hospital with a fever and I concluded that COVID-19 must be wreaking an unholy vengeance. I was soon to be disappointed, however, because there seemed to be a remarkable lack of attention to Trump being hospitalised – that is because they running a ‘review of the week’ program and the news of what was happening to Donald Trump related to the events of last Saturday and not today. So I sighed and carried on. I am preparing a metaphorical crate of brown ale which I will have by the side of my chair which I shall slowly consume as the American election results roll in (on what, for us, will be Wednesday, 4th November as the Americans are at six hours behind us) By tradition, my son has generally joined in these usually all-night election binges but he is now resolutely refusing to have any more to do with them. This is because every time he has sat down with me to watch the election results roll in, the side that he is not supporting is making all of the electoral gains. Hence, I am blamed for putting a jinx on whatever election we decide to watch together so I will have to do it on my own (although I may text some fellow election-night junkies) By consulting Google, I have discovered why the American presidential elections are traditionally held on a Tuesday. The assumption was that you attended church on the Sunday, travelled the quite large distances to where you are going vote on the Monday but knowing that Wednesday was sacrosanct as it was market day. So in the course of time, Tuesday became the best available day and was subsequently written into the constitution. I haven’t manage to work out why it should be the Tuesday following the first Monday in October, though.
Yesterday, an anticipated parcel arrived from Amazon which was yet another Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad. I treated myself to another one because this particular one is only 11″ in length (the iPad is 10″) and it does this by dispensing with a numeric keypad. It also makes it much easier to transport together with the iPad if we are putting it in a travel case of any kind. I followed all of the instructions to make the Bluetooth pair up and nothing seemed to happen. As I was preparing to reinstall the former keyboard, the connection suddenly seemed to work and hey presto! For only about a tenner, the keyboard is about as cheap and Chinese-y as it is possible to get but various key combinations work as they should (to give you the ‘Home’ button and the shutdown) so I am more than satisfied. The batteries should last at least a couple of months and perhaps even more – and it really is amazing how much more proactive you can be on an iPad when you have a proper rather than a virtual keyboard with which to work.
Tonight was the first night of returning to church for the 6.00 pm service (our former pattern) and it really did seem as strange as we thought it might. The congregation was limited to 36 and well spaced out (i.e. only every other row of pews and only 2-3 in each pew). I have to say that the atmosphere was not really there at all (although it had been present in similar circumstances in the much smaller church at Harvington) but I am sure we will get used to it in time. We saw the friends with whom we had spent coffee in the morning in church and I duly signed as Mr. B. L. BeZub for which I am sure some divine retribution will shortly be forthcoming. Tomorrow night, we are looking with great anticipation to speaking with a great-niece in Seattle and seeing how the Americans are coping with things…
I set off early for the newspapers this morning with the expectation that I would be back in time for the Andrew Marr show which starts at 9.00 am. I give myself the treat to listening to some tracks of Bach and Mozart loaded years onto my (massively outdated) iPhone 4 which I just use nowadays as a type of MP3 player. As it happened, the first track was the cantata ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring‘ which was played on solo trumpet and organ – as such, it did remind me of my old and good friend Clive who played this on his trumpet at our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations three years ago. Sadly, Clive died earlier on this year, just before COVID-19 really hit us hard so I shed a silent tear in his memory.
As I was on my own and in a reminiscent mood, I wondered when my interest in classical music was first aroused. It certainly was not the influence of my mother for whoever I located and tried to play some classical music on the radio, I would invariably get ‘When are you going to turn that incessant row off?‘ Our family dog did not appreciate my attempts to practice on the violin because on one of the occasions I brought the violin to practice at home, our mild mannered little dog threw her head right back and howled like a wild prairie wolf. So I would have to thank the influential music teacher who taught me at Thoirnleigh College, Bolton where I boarded for three years whilst my mother went off to train to be a teacher in the mid-1950’s. His name was ‘Jock’ McGovern and as a Catholic priest was entirely untrained as a teacher. However, he had some interesting teaching styles and tricks. Each week we would have two music lessons -on of the first of these we would do the conventional elements of musical education (staves, types of notes and so on) On the second lesson of each week, we were taught the life of a great composer. We were told the story of the composer’s life and then played some fragments of music that we would always associate with him e.g. ‘Fingal’s Cave’ for Mendelssohn, ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik‘ for Mozart. Our homework was always the same – from our rough note books we had to copy the story of the composer’s life into the lined pages on the left hand side of our ‘neat’ book whilst the fragments of music were copied onto the musical staves on the right. And then we were asked to draw, with the lightest of touches and using coloured crayons,a collage of scenes from the composer’s life (e.g. The father and son on horseback in Schubert’s ‘The Erl King‘ ) I have to tell you now that as a 11-12 year old (boys) we absolutely hated doing this activity as it made us think we were being infantilised and treated like little primary school children. But – this is the extraordinary thing. After over 60 years I can call to mind almost every one of those stories, complete with illustrations and, of course, the musical fragments that were completely lodged in my memory. All of this was done without the benefit of an ‘modern’ educational theory – ‘Jock’ just devised the system himself (I subsequently, though, read a tribute to him after he died a few years and other generations of school children has been equally inspired) I thought I was quite good at music always getting a mark of about 95%. Only later did I discover that the lad who came bottom of the class got a mark of 92% and the top mark was 99%. By all thinking we had got good marks, did that make us perform better? What Jock was not was an effete, tender-skinned aesthete – quite the reverse. He was a stocky, rough-and-tumble Glaswegian with a temper that was violent and effervescent – hence we both respected and also feared him somewhat. The school was rife with stories of how Jock has chased a miscreant schoolboy all over the school yard striking him with a violin bow (or trying to) for some misdemeanour. This I did not witness, but the following incident I did witness. The ‘runt’ of the class was a little lad whose (surname) was Harrison and who could never remember the difference between a sharp and a flat. In exasperation, Jock seized hold of Harrison who was facing away from one hand and with one hand under the base of his skull, raised young Harrison several feet off the floor, saying to hime ‘Now, Harrison, a sharp RAISES a note‘ Then he released his fingers and when Harrison crumpled to the floor, he shouted ‘And a flat LOWERS a note‘ ( I surmise that Harrion never every forgot that distinction ever again) Jock had a 650cc Norton motorbike and there was rumour that Jock had killed an elderly pedestrian whilst driving at 80mph on Blackburn New Road. In the days when car indicators were a little pop-up sliver of plastic, Jock had a special pair of gloves that had a metal contact between thumb and forefinger. Together with the batteries stored inside the glove, the motor cyclist could give a flashing indication of when they were about to overtake by extending their arm and activating the light by repeating pressing and releasing his fingers. We are naturally intrigued by this (in 1957). To conclude, Jock once gave the 40 boarders and 20 religious staff a 20 second lesson. ‘Well, we are going to try some Gregorian Chant this evening. You all know how staves work but this stave only has four lines, each note is a crotchet, a dot doubles the length of the note and every note is a tone apart. Off you go!‘ and so all 60 of us sang Gregorian chant perfectly after the minimum of instruction. My only concluding comment is that somebody of this ilk would not survive for 2 weeks in a course of teacher training and now he would be thrown out after such a series of transgressions.But think of the generations of students that this man had inspired over the years – is there no room for the unconventional in today’s educational system – I must ask the question! I attach a link to an obituary of this remarkable man:
As I was on my own and in a reminiscent mood, I wondered when my interest in classical music was first aroused. It certainly was not the influence of my mother for whoever I located and tried to play some classical music on the radio, I would invariably get ‘When are you going to turn that incessant row off?‘ Our family dog did not appreciate my attempts to practice on the violin because on one of the occasions I brought the violin to practice at home, our mild mannered little dog threw her head right back and howled like a wild prairie wolf. So I would have to thank the influential music teacher who taught me at Thoirnleigh College, Bolton where I boarded for three years whilst my mother went off to train to be a teacher in the mid-1950’s. His name was ‘Jock’ McGovern and as a Catholic priest was entirely untrained as a teacher. However, he had some interesting teaching styles and tricks. Each week we would have two music lessons -on of the first of these we would do the conventional elements of musical education (staves, types of notes and so on) On the second lesson of each week, we were taught the life of a great composer. We were told the story of the composer’s life and then played some fragments of music that we would always associate with him e.g. ‘Fingal’s Cave’ for Mendelssohn, ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik‘ for Mozart. Our homework was always the same – from our rough note books we had to copy the story of the composer’s life into the lined pages on the left hand side of our ‘neat’ book whilst the fragments of music were copied onto the musical staves on the right. And then we were asked to draw, with the lightest of touches and using coloured crayons,a collage of scenes from the composer’s life (e.g. The father and son on horseback in Schubert’s ‘The Erl King‘ ) I have to tell you now that as a 11-12 year old (boys) we absolutely hated doing this activity as it made us think we were being infantilised and treated like little primary school children. But – this is the extraordinary thing. After over 60 years I can call to mind almost every one of those stories, complete with illustrations and, of course, the musical fragments that were completely lodged in my memory. All of this was done without the benefit of an ‘modern’ educational theory – ‘Jock’ just devised the system himself (I subsequently, though, read a tribute to him after he died a few years and other generations of school children has been equally inspired) I thought I was quite good at music always getting a mark of about 95%. Only later did I discover that the lad who came bottom of the class got a mark of 92% and the top mark was 99%. By all thinking we had got good marks, did that make us perform better? What Jock was not was an effete, tender-skinned aesthete – quite the reverse. He was a stocky, rough-and-tumble Glaswegian with a temper that was violent and effervescent – hence we both respected and also feared him somewhat. The school was rife with stories of how Jock has chased a miscreant schoolboy all over the school yard striking him with a violin bow (or trying to) for some misdemeanour. This I did not witness, but the following incident I did witness. The ‘runt’ of the class was a little lad whose (surname) was Harrison and who could never remember the difference between a sharp and a flat. In exasperation, Jock seized hold of Harrison who was facing away from one hand and with one hand under the base of his skull, raised young Harrison several feet off the floor, saying to hime ‘Now, Harrison, a sharp RAISES a note‘ Then he released his fingers and when Harrison crumpled to the floor, he shouted ‘And a flat LOWERSs a note‘ ( I surmise that Harrion never every forgot that distinction ever again) Jock had a 650cc Norton motorbike and there was rumour that Jock had killed an elderly pedestrian whilst driving at 80mph on Blackburn New Road. In the days when car indicators were a little pop-up sliver of plastic, Jock had a special pair of gloves that had a metal contact between thumb and forefinger. Together with the batteries stored inside the glove, the motor cyclist could give a flashing indication of when they were about to overtake by extending their arm and activating the light by repeating pressing and releasing his fingers. We are naturally intrigued by this (in 1957). To conclude, Jock once gave the 40 boarders and 20 religious staff a 20 second lesson. ‘Well, we are going to try some Gregorian Chant this evening. You all know how staves work but this stave only has four lines, each note is a crotchet, a dot doubles the length of the note and every note is a tone apart. Off you go!‘ and so all 60 of us sang Gregorian chant perfectly after the minimum of instruction. My only concluding comment is that somebody of this ilk would not survive for 2 weeks in a course of teacher training and now he would be thrown out after such a series of transgressions.But think of the generations of students that this man had inspired over the years – is there no room for the unconventional in today’s educational system – I must ask the question! I attach a link to an obituary of this remarkable man:
JockToday’s blog will be a return to ‘normality’ following the excursion of yesterday’s blog down memory lane – forgive the self-indulgence. Today was a ‘spitting’ kind of day in which it was not actually raining as such but there was plenty of water in the air and a type of drizzle. Having collected our newspapers, we had a fairly soggy sojourn on our park bench but got into an interesting conversation with a lady who we recognise who regularly comes to our area of the park and who recognised us. We had an interesting conversation but had to rather curtail it because everyone was getting a little cold and miserable but no doubt there will be other occasions for a more extended chat. I did not mention that yesterday we attempted to Skype (but eventually Zoomed) Meg’s great-niece and her husband living at the moment in Seattle. We spent more than an hour chatting with each with other with family matters and politics being the main topics of conversation – we arranged to have another video-chat on the day after the election in the USA to which we are both looking forward in a macabre sort of way. Actually, all of the focus is on the presidential election but one-third of the Senate seats come up for re-election and it is just possible that the Republicans who have a very narrow lead in the current Senate lose that lead and the Democrats could end up with a lead of one. The American constitution (which we studied at university) is predicated upon a system of checks and balances and it does not often happen that the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives are ALL governed by the same party. Of course, there is till the countervailing power of the Supreme Court which could well have an extra ‘conservative’ nomination approved in the next week or so, leaving the balance of Conservatives to Liberals of 9:3. With an important case shortly to come before the Supreme Court (whether to exclude pre-existing conditions from the Americans ‘Affordable Care Act‘) then the composition of the Supreme Court can have a direct effect upon millions of Americans. So I shall try and follow the senate elections with as much interest as the presidential elections – remember, you read it here first!
Today has been a more technological kind of day. Last night, I managed to get Zoom installed upon my Mac and now I have to learn how to use it! One way or another, I have arranged for a good friend and ex-De Montfort University lecturer who runs her own research consultancy to get into contact next Saturday, so if I get that working OK then I will have most of my most significant contacts accessible on either FaceTime, Skype or Zoom. Tomorrow, for example, I have Skype slots to talk to ex-Winchester colleagues, one at 9.0am and the other at 4.40 (after my Pilates class) As the second wave of COVID-19 gathers pace, ‘winter draws on’ (a phrase once banned by the BBC) and the ability to meet people in the flesh diminishes, the uses of social and technological communication assumes a new level of importance.
As I write tonight, the UK is to be divided into three-tier lockdown levels – medium, high and very high alert levels. Much of the South and a half of the Midlands area in the medium-risk level, whilst much of the North and the North-East are to be placed in the high-risk area and Liverpool will be placed in the very high-risk area. Reluctantly, the central government appears to be conceding that the national test-and-trace regime is not fulfilling its potential and no wonder why when it was subcontracted to Serco and did not utilise the real expertise which the local authorities have ‘on the ground’. It does appear that a metropolitan i.e. London based government is laying down an almost colonial-style regime for the North and the Midlands – who are reacting with a degree of fury. Once totally locked down (as in Liverpool) then the night-time economy will ‘de facto’ cease and the workers will have to survive (or starve) on two-thirds of the national minimum wage (whilst paying 100% of their mortgages and food bills) There is a palpable degree of anger and frustration in the country tonight and a feeling of rampant unfairness. The Nightingale hospitals (emergency large scale industrially built hospitals) are being readied again and the NHS stands on the point of being overwhelmed again (if hospital admissions double every week or so) There is a feeling that ‘something has to be done’ but my own feeling is that it is ‘too little, too late’ I must admit to feelings of dismay when I ty to observe social distancing in my daily walks to the park whilst being dismayed by the scenes of what happens at pub turning out time with hundreds of young people, not generally masked and not observing any social distancing whilst the police stand by helplessly. (Just a thought – I said to the lady in the park today ‘Why don’t they use police horses like the way the used to police large crowds at football matches’ and then I saw a clip of videotape in which the police were doing just that in Liverpool!) But again – too little, too late!
It was an interesting, and somewhat different, kind of day today. At 9.00 am I had arranged to Skype one my Hampshire friends and this went ahead as planned, with the technology behaving itself as it should. My friend had worked in the same area of Manchester as I did back in 1969 but we were separated by a few years. Nonetheless, we spent a very pleasant hour going down ‘memory lane’ of significant points in our teaching career with our experiences when we first starting teaching, through the interesting encounters we had in validating degrees with the body known as CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards) to our more recent encounters with students and interesting colleagues. We are going to Skype at fortnightly intervals from now on but it’s possible that our interests will intensify as the American elections draw nigh. Then Meg and I walked to the park on a most beautiful day – sharp, bright and cool with plenty of almost warm autumn sunshine. In the park, we met with our Italian friend with whom we had a very interesting conversation – mainly reminiscing about the operas which we had been to see in the locality, sometimes in each other’s company. We also ‘tut-tutted’ about those people, fairly few in number and invariably younger than us, who did not seem to observe any degree of social distancing. On the way home, the weather had got more and more cloudy and it felt as though some rain might be imminent. Then we had a fairly quick turn around as I needed to walk down to Pilates with one of neighbours. When I got into the class, I announced that we all ought to be grateful to Present Trump as he announced that he was going ‘to kiss the guys and the beautiful women- a big fat kiss‘ So we worked out that if we had been present in Donald Trump’s rally in Florida last night we would have been thrown a face-mask (which we were not to wear) and then shoulder-to-shoulder (no social distancing) whilst Donald Trump threatened to kiss us all. You couldn’t make it up, could you? In the late afternoon, I had another fascinating Skype video link with one of my ex-University of Winchester friends and we exchanged news and gossip – we are going to repeat this exercise every week from now on.
The government have consistently claimed that in their response to the COVID-19 crisis they have always ‘followed the science’ However, tonight it has emerged that the SAGE committee advising the government (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) has recommended some weeks ago that there should be a 2-3 week ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown similar to what we had experienced in March/April. Whether or not this would include school children is not completely clear but presumably so as there is talk of the coinciding with the half-term break in any case. The government has chosen not to follow this advice (fearing the enormous costs, job losses, difficulty of re-starting the economy and so on) and consequently the virus seems to be spreading at an enormous speed. The Labour Party has now clearly aligned itself with the scientists and so there is now a clear split in the political consensus. The Labour Party view will not prevail because a sizeable faction of the Conservative party want there to be radically less restrictions (at what cost to the health of millions?) I feel, personally, that the intellectual arguments must align with those who argue for a rapid ‘circuit-breaker’ type of lockdown, although the costs (financial, emotional) are undoubtedly enormous. But if we had less restrictions, then the hospitals will be over-whelmed and people will die in their tens of thousands. As I said last night, the government’s present policy of three-tiers seems ‘too little, too late’
In the American elections, it does appear that Joe Biden might be 11% points ahead – according to the BBC poll of polls. But of course, this might be a misleading statistic as there is no point in piling up votes in California which is always Democratic anyway. The crucial factor seems to be the lead in the swing states (equivalent to our ‘marginal constituencies’) which is tending to be in Biden’s favour by anything from 2%-7% (although Ohio is leaning towards Trump still) As all the states have their own electoral laws and voting arrangements there is plenty of scope for ‘voter suppression’ (making sure your opponents can’t actually get to the vote) at which the Republicans seem to be particularly adept. One tactic is to exclude anybody who has been convicted of any offence (e.g. for possessing marijuana 40 years previously) or to make sure that in the predominantly black areas, the polling stations are so few and far apart if it is not physically possible for all of the opponents to vote on the day. To see what I mean. look at the following fragment gleaned from the web
Last week Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, ordered counties to close extra drop-off sites for absentee votes until they have only one each. The move means that the 4.7m residents of Harris County, which surrounds Houston, will all have to converge on the same drop-box if they wish to cast an absentee vote in person.
Watch out for all of the dirty tricks that will be played out for us, particularly in states such as Florida and Texas!
Today has turned out to be quite a busy day, as it turned out. The day before our Waitrose order is delivered, we always have to spend a certain amount of time updating it and, even so, there are always one or two things that you forget. Consequently, we popped into our local Waitrose store to buy one or two things of which we have run out before the order arrives tomorrow evening. Then home to prepare our, by now, traditional curry which we shared with our domestic help (who loves them!) This afternoon as the weather was set fair, I thought I had better ‘gird up my loins’ and go and get the grass cut, which activity takes some 40 minutes for the large communal grassed area we have in front of our house and then some 20 minutes for our own lawns to the rear. This proceeded satisfactorily and I am completing how many cuts are needed before the end of the season – one or two? The last cut of the season I try and time to be as near to November 5th as I can and it is always a bit fiddly in that the hour has generally gone back so I have to press on before the light fades. I am always scrupulous in ensuring that I have not petrol left in the mower to ‘clog’ up things during the winter, so in the last cut of the season I am generally walking up and down, over-mowing the already cut areas whilst muttering to the mower ‘Die! Die!’ as I am waiting for the last drop of petrol to be consumed. Then the season’s oil has to be drained out which is always a bit tricky. I try to ensure that I have a previously emptied tin can, shaped to provide a rudimentary lip before the old oil is stored in a bottle waiting for the next time that I go to the tip to dispose of it safely.
Today has been a day free of ‘video calling’ but I have one call arranged to call an ex-De Montfort University friend on Saturday and am in the middle of an email exchange to get something sorted out to video call an ex- University of Winchester colleague some time tomorrow. I am hopeful that once I get all of my systems and contacts set up, video-calling friends will become easier and easier once you have an agreed time to talk to each other.
Last night, before I went to bed I thought I would just do a quick check on the American media CNN and MSNBC to see what the polls in the American media were saying. The MSNBC results seem to be particularly detailed, giving Jo Biden a lead of 10.5% but also showing an indication of how individual polls were reporting in each of the swing states. Again, the majority of these reported that Joe Biden had a lead but the MSNBC reporting seemed to be highly ethical in that it would indicate ‘lack of sufficient data’ if the poll size looked too small or somewhat suspect. I thought I would also look at the massively pro-Trump Fox News to have a look at their spin which, as you might expect, was to generally agree that size of the leads but then to argue that the polls might have ‘over-sampled’ the Democratic vote. The big problem with all of this is that the intention to vote reported to an opinion poll is one thing, actually getting your vote into the system, regarded as valid (i.e. not excluded) and actually counted is quite another thing in a system where ‘voter suppression’ is so rife. On Election Day itself, we will be able to compare the opinion poll forecasts and what the actual counted votes reveal and I forecast quite a large discrepancy in the case of the Democratic vote.
The British political scene is showing signs of complete fracture. In Northern Ireland, a type of ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown has been announced lasting a month. Wales has banned all visitors from affected areas in England, the Scots are imposing tighter ‘lock-down’ rules than the English 3-tier system, many northern local authorities are pleading/demanding with central government the they receive much more financial resource before they will consider being moved from ‘High’ to ‘Very High’. In other words, the UK looks a complete mess at the moment as the national consensus has broken down with the Labour Party now supporting a 2-3 week circuit breaker for the UK whilst many Tories (on the right) want even fewer restrictions than we have at the moment. The situation does seem to be evolving day-by-day and it does appear that it will only be a matter of time (days?) before a type of ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown will be announced for the UK…
Today, the weather is fine i.e. we are in the tail-end of a high pressure system which is gradually moving away. We are also not in a lockdown at the moment, being in Tier 1 – BUT this may well change in a few days time. Apparently, the good burghers of Worcestershire have been called into Whitehall to discuss why the whole of Worcestershire should not be placed into Tier 2 as there appear to be high rates of infection of COVID in both Bromsgrove (121 per 100,000) and Wyre Forest (=Kidderminter, Stourport) which is 87 per 100,000 whilst the rate for the county as a whole is about 94/100,000. The fellow feeling of the rest of Worcestershire is self-evident as they are arguing furiously that Bromsgrove and Wyre Forest should be regarded as separate from Worcestershire and put into Tier 2 leaving the rest of Worcestershire (and their businesses) alone. It looks as though Bromsgrove (and Wyre Forest) will almost certainly be put into Tier 2 early next week but we shall know soon enough. As the rate of COVID increase is 50% in the past week, then this seems to me to be a cast-iron certainty. When our friends invited us to have some coffee and cakes with the last week, it looks as they knew what was coming – to be honest, they are very well-informed about local matters and affairs.
Meg and I thought we would seize the moment and go off to Droitwich to the little cafe we frequented about a week ago and when we knew they put on a special last dinner once a week. So we popped in to have our morning coffee and to put it our oder for lunch later on in the morning. Then we did our round of charity shops which seem to have proliferated in profusion over the last year or so and we bought a very fashionable type of cardigan for Meg which will go well with some of her kilts and, on the spur of the moment, I bought myself a felt hat which fitted me perfectly and which will be used on fine days if I feel inclined to leave my black leather Australian bushman type hat at home. When we eventually got ourselves seated for lunch, we were treated to the most enormous meal you could imagine. The roast was turkey and we each had about 4 thick slices, a mountain of stuffing, carrots, sprouts, roast potatoes and gravy. We neither of us felt that we were going to manage to eat it all but I packed away almost all of mine and Meg ate most of hers as well. There seemed to be a supply of regulars who turn up week after week – perhaps they do not need to eat anything else for the rest of the week, given potions like that. Then we popped into the local Waitrose to buy some odds and ends that we knew were not coming in tonight’s order.
Last night before I eventually rolled into bed I thought I would consult the American website, MSNBC, which I now know was created as a result of a merger between Microsoft and NBC in 1996 (but perhaps is not very widely known, or even accessible, in the UK). I found a fascinating analysis on that website which served to dampen my optimism at the prospect of a forthcoming Joe Biden election. The analysis examined the contest between Clinton and Trump in 1996 and then the context between Biden and Trump in 2020 in several of the key ‘swing’ states. The analysis was making a comparison at the same point in the electoral cycle i.e. about three weeks out and the startling thing was that Hillary Clinton was typically appearing to be beating Trump by an even greater margin than Joe Biden is at the moment – and then she still lost! This does give pause for thought. However, there are two important differences, the first being that four years ago, America was not in the middle of a pandemic with hundreds dying every day. Also, the news broke 12 days before the election that Hillary Clinton’s email records were about to be investigated again by the FBI with a suspicion that they might reveal evidence of corruption. This added to a very volatile and unstable situation for Clinton which led to her eventual eclipse in the polls – even though she did win several million more votes in the popular vote (but not, evidently, in the Electoral College) and the rest is history. The final point that I shall make about American politics is that as well as observing the Presidential race and the contest for Senate seats, the composition of several state legislatures could well ‘tip’ from Republican to democrat. Given that the Republicans typically pass legislation that makes life difficult for black people to vote (‘voter suppression’) then Democratic victories in some of the contests for the state legislatures could help to redress this balance. So another thing to keep my eye on!
We had a different set of routines for today so up to a point we were running to catch our own tails, as it were. In the morning, we had another video consultation for Meg and this took up most of the morning as it happened, although we were given the opportunity to have a break and a cup of tea in the middle of it! When all of this had been completed, we still needed to collect our daily ration of newspapers so we thought we do the unthinkable and collect the newspapers in the car (which we did), and then we made our trip to the park and a brief sit down and the briefest of walks before we return home in the car. On a Friday we used to make ourselves a ‘risotto’ but as this was principally a rice-based dish, we had got into the habit of doing another fish dish in its stead. But now I have discovered something called ‘Cauliflower Rice’ which is cauliflower florets made up into a rice-like consistency but with a minimal amount of calories. So I made a risotto using the cauliflower rice as a substitute, some kippers which were boiled in the bag and the other usual ingredients (onions, peas, yogurt) and the result was ‘OK-ish’ but I have made better, I must admit. In the afternoon, after a good read of the newspapers, I devoted myself to getting my accounts in order. Although it is not strictly necessary, I tend to write my transactions into a large ‘day book’ and then I have a complete written record of what I did and when. However, I not maintained my records for a long time so it took me an hour or so (the best part of the afternoon) to get all of this done. I am now firmly resolved to attend to my records a little more assiduously in the future. In the early evening, I had a video call with a Hampshire friend – we discussed mainly the American elections about which my friend is extremely knowledgeable but a domestic crisis intervened so we had to cut short our call and resume at a later date.
Being a Friday night, we are relaxing before the normal fare of end-of-week comedy. More unintentional comedy is being provided by Donald Trump who has apparently posted a tweet to a satirical news site that claimed that the whole of Twitter was being shut down to slow the spread negative stories about Joe Biden. The satirical website then claimed that the Twitter boss had smashed “as many computers as he could” with the help of a robot programmed to use a sledgehammer. It looks as though Trump eventually saw his mistake. The article ended by saying that “after hearing the Twitter employees talk about critical theory, the robot got woke and began attacking all the cis white males”. And as the president said ‘This has never been done in history‘ (You couldn’t make it up, if you tried!)
There seem to be two big political stories in town tonight. The first of these is the Brexit negotiations in which Boris Johnson has declared that negotiations are at an end. The consensus view is that this is but the last stage in a last-minute stand-off and, in practice, a deal might be achieved at the very last moment in which Boris Johnson will claim victory and the rest of the supine British press will agree. The second story is, of course, the huge row between Manchester and Whitehall with Manchester refusing to be pushed into Tier 3 of lock-down categories, like Liverpool. The central government will always have the upper hand here as they control the purse strings but there is a feeling that the bitterness created by this dispute will last for a generation. One can understand the frustration of Manchester in this respect as moving to a more complete lock-down means that many businesses in the hospitality business will close down never to re-open. On the other hand, despite its protestations, it appears that the government is actually working on a variant of the ‘circuit-breaker’ approach and we might see a sort of ‘circuit-breaker lite’ appear that will be timed to coincide with half-term and will last for some 2-3 weeks.
I always knew that today was going to be a bit busier than a normal Saturday and so it proved. Meg and I were a little late but then we bumped into two of our friends that we had not seen for a few days followed shortly by another so soon we were five (No. 6 was busy weeding so he had already had his share of attention) Of course, we are all trying to make the best of things before some kind of new lock-down emerges as we will probably move from Tier 1 to Tier 2 within a few days. Eventually we made it to our newspaper shop and thence to our normal park bench where we had a snatched coffee. We knew that we did not a massive amount of time so had to cut short yet another couple of conversations in order to get home by 1.00pm. As it happened, we just had time to throw some sausages into the oven and then settled down in our study to enter a Zoom session with our two of our friends and ex-colleagues from our De Montfort University days (although we have met for meals at approximately yearly intervals since then) It was really good to chat with our friends again but the technology (‘Zoom‘) rather let us down because the quality of the video was pretty poor – we looked as though talking to each from under the sea, and the audio seemed to come and go. Nonetheless, we exchanged what stories and reminiscences we could for over three quarters of an hour but resolved to try another technology (‘Skype’?) in two weeks time.
I knew that after lunch I had to make my way to a nearby hospital to have a (routine) CT scan, ordered months ago by my cancer surgeon after an episode some two years ago. I treated myself to a brand-new face mask as I was going to visit a hospital and, fortunately, the car parking charges were suspended as well. I won’t bore you with details of the procedure except to note that the first attempt to insert a cannula into my left arm failed so I had to have it inserted into the other arm (this was to allow for the injection of the radio-opaque agent which has the strange effect – upon everybody – of making the bottom of your abdomen feel all warm) Removing the cannula seemed to result in the spillage of a certain quantity of blood so I was relieved to get home and have a nice cup of tea! (The procedure itself was relatively quick and trouble-free). Then we had to prepare ourselves for going to our church service from 6.00-7.00. In theory, we should have telephoned to reserve a place amongst the congregation to be one of the 36 allowed maximum. So we got there 20 minutes early and pleaded the we were ‘lost sheep returning to the fold‘ and, fortunately, there was space so we were not turned away. The service seemed a little more intimate tonight for reasons I cannot exactly put my finger on. Anyway, at an appropriate point in the service, a beautiful rendition was made of John Henry Newman’s poem/hymn ‘Lead, Kindly Light – amongst the encircling gloom; Lead thou me on‘ The story behind the penning of these lines is quite interesting. Apparently, it was composed in the middle of a tempestuous storm where all the fellow passengers were being sea-sick and all feared for their lives – Newman just got on and composed the poem (I sent a recording of this to a friend of mine who was living out her last days in a hospice, hoping that it might bring a little bit of comfort to her. Whether it did or not, I do not know)
In the US, Donald Trump and Joe Biden did not debate with each other but each had what the Americans call a ‘town hall meeting’ with the two broadcasts transmitted at the same time. This format is favoured by Joe Biden and he appears to have performed well with a reasonable yet avuncular tone. Donald Trump did not fare so well, however, coming off second best to a feisty female interviewer and not helping to capture any of the middle groups by refusing, yet again, to condemn any of the white supremacist groups who are supporting him. In the meantime, the British political scene seems to be just as cantankerous but I am looking forward to tomorrow’s newspapers that often contain some interest insights/bits of gossip that do not get repeated much in the Main Street Media. It looks as though Boris is cooking up a miniature ‘circuit breaker’ of his own – it could be that something is devised which avoids the use of the term ‘lock-down’ or even ‘circuit breaker’ itself, whilst essentially being the same thing.
We thought that today was going to prove to be a normal, restful Sunday morning but it was not to be. Having collected our Sunday newspapers, I settled down to watch the Andrew Marr show only for there to be a powercut within a few minutes. Going around the house and consulting our circuit-breaker box it became evident that the fault was on the power circuits and only those our living room. Now we had the difficult job of trying to identify which of the consumers could possibly be at fault. My suspicions fell on a large Dimplex electric fire we have which occupies our hearth because it seems to chomp through bulbs at a fairly regular pace and we suspected that that was the source of the problem. However when my son inspected the bulbs in the rear of the fire (I know how to get in and out of it quickly having done it several times before). My son followed his instincts and pulled at the fire’s cable which went through a hole cut in the fireplace surround (by the installers when we had our fire fitted thirteen years ago) and then saw the source of the problem. The fire’s own cable would not extend to the wall socket so the cable was attached to an extension lead. The fire’s own plug had one of those types of fuses that used to be popular when the fuse is visible from outside the casing and can be replaced without unscrewing the whole. The fuse in the fire’s plug and evidently melted and fused itself into the fuse carrier rendering the whole of that useless. Still, having identified the source of the problem I hastened down to a hardware shop, purchased a new plug with a conventional, internal fuse as well =as some spares and then set about rearing the plug. This I hadn’t done for about 20 years but you don’t lose the skills and techniques of a lifetime but the diagnosis and the repair both proved to be effective but only after a certain degree of stress. Meg and I walked to the park and then had a conventional, Sunday lunch, upon our return.
Last night, I came across a fascinating article, probably because as search terms I had used terms like ‘Can Biden Lose?’ and ‘Voter Suppression‘. The article was entitled ‘A Campaign of Voter Subtraction‘ and I found it gave me considerable pause for thought (and some pessimism). I already knew that the Republicans would try a variety of electoral tricks to try and disenfranchise their opposition but I hadn’t realised how systematic this was. The article maintained that whereas the Democrats try and increase the size of the electoral roll by leading drives for voter registration, the Republicans try to actively subtract voters by making it difficult to vote. Although some of your own supporters will lose out in this process, the tactic attempts to ensure that even more of your opponents (generally lower-income and black) are denied the vote. For example, if your signature does not exactly match that they have on file then a postal ballot is liable to be declared invalid. Another tactic is that anyone convicted of a felony, even decades ago, is automatically disqualified. The House of Representatives (Democrat-controlled) is well aware of these abuses and had passed several bills to modernise the voting procedures, only to have this legislation voted down by the Republican senate. In this way, voter suppression has proceeded apace and may reach new heights in this 2020 election. The article concludes that it is quite possible that Hillary Clinton as well as leading in the popular votes had actually carried more states than Trump (i.e. she won) but the disqualified and largely Democratic votes in many cases was larger than the small majority by which Trump had carried several states. So the margins in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania totalled 107,000 across the three states. Of course, this proposition is conjectural but it is undoubtedly true that Trump won with razor-thin margins in these states. By the way, I am predicting that some ‘dirty tricks’ will emerge on about Thursday i.e. 12 days before the election as this is the date (not too close to the election, not too distant) in which any damage that might be inflicted is at its maximum (like the disclosure of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s emails 12 days before the 2016 election!)
Today was a little out of the ordinary as I shall explain. Meg was in bed for the morning after a slight stomach upset so I made the walk down into town on my own. I took the opportunity to pop into my local Poundland where I want to buy some cut-price Tipp-Ex. Of course, Sod’s Law took over and the Tipp-Ex was the only thing I wanted that was out of stock but I took the opportunity to buy a few bits and pieces that are always useful but not the kinds of things you would specify on a normal shopping list. Having got home, I realised that I had not made my weekly
In the late afternoon, we knew we had an appointment with one of my Winchester colleagues/friends who has recently retired and we had agreed to ‘Zoom<‘ each other. It took a certain amount of time to get our technology up and running but eventually we managed to liaise OK and had a wonderful chat, including news of old friends, pet cats and much else besides. We will probably repeat this about once a fortnight from now on and, as always in these COVID-19 days and the joys of video-technology, it is always rather wonderful to hook up in this particular way.
Now that the American election campaign is in its final stretches (15 days to go) I have found an incredibly informative website which gives a very careful analysis of the polling data without hyping up either side although its values do show! The title of the article I read was ‘8 Tips to Stay Sane in the Final 15 Days of the Campaign‘ and I found this to be incredibly informative. I was able to take a smidgeon of comfort from the fact that on average, since 1972, national polling averages had shifted by an average of 1.8 points and a median of just 1.4 points in the final 15 days of the race. Given that Joe Biden is some 10 points ahead in the polls nationally, this is somewhat reassuring. However, I do have to keep reminding myself that opinions given over the phone (or internet) to a pollster re. voting intentions is one thing, but actually getting to vote (or getting your postal vote organised and not regarded as invalid) is another thing altogether.
Meanwhile, pressure seems to be mounting for at least a limited lock-down. 67% of the population are in favour of some type of ‘circuit breaker’ and some 61% do not trust the PM on COVID-19. If we were to have a full lock-down, the models suggest that the number of deaths would reduce from 20,000 to 12,000 (8,000 lives saved!) whereas were we go for a partial lockdown keeping shops and schools open, then the number of deaths would reduce from 20,000 to 15,600 (4,400 lives saved!) Meanwhile the (Asian)MP for Bolton South has just been admitted to a Manchester hospital once her COVID-19 symptoms had worsened – apart from Boris Johnson, is this the first MP to be hospitalised? A quick and not very systematic search of the web indicates that about 3 MP’s have been hospitalised, two from the Manchester area and two as members of the Asian community. Let us hope for the best.
We really feel the season these days as the weather is getting quite autumnal. The leaves are gradually turning yellow and in the case of the acers and the maples a brilliant red so the park is quite a sight to behold at the moment. We made a reasonably early start this morning and so having collected our newspapers we sojourned for a little in the park but knew that we did not have to tarry too long. That is because Tuesday’s is my Pilates day and I need to do a certain amount of food preparation before I venture forth again for my Pilates session. I have inherited a very stout Korean leather jacket (found in the next door neighbour’s garage when it was being cleaned out). I thought I would use it solely as a gardening jacket but that seemed a waste of an exceptionally tough and warm jacket so I had it renovated and it has proved excellent on these bright cold days. Whilst it will stand a certain amount of water, I am not sure how it will fare in an absolute downpour so I need a waterproof jacket which is big enough to cover the leather jacket as well as myself. Fortunately, the second last time we were in Conway we had purchased an outsized jacket and this I now pressed into service. It proved excellent and – as the Scandinavians say ‘There is no such thing as bad weather – only inappropriate clothing‘ and never was a truer word said. The trouble about the UK weather is that you can look weatherwards and get a little streetwise about the likelihood of rain by combining your own knowledge about the height, colour and direction of movement of the clouds with a little bit of assistance from the weather app on my phone. I needed to get into town a little earlier on my Pilates day as Bromsgove holds a street market on Tuesdays and Fridays and there is a lady who runs a bag stall who also sells watches and belts and will fit a new battery for you. But on the day I need her, she wasn’t there so I availed myself of one of the local cobblers who fitted a new battery as required. I also did a quick dive into one of the local charity shops and bought myself a cheap leather/plasticky belt as well. I tend to buy things for an unconventional use and hence my purchase of a belt. As wearers of rainwear-plus-rucksacks will know, the straps have an annoying habit of constantly slipping off one’s shoulders but with a belt, suitable cut down to size, I can ‘tie’ the carrying straps together across my chest so the shoulder slipping problem does not reoccur. This gives me two hands free, one to carry my little lightweight stool that I use as a table for our victuals in the park and the other to link onto Meg to ensure that she does not trip over a kerb. I must add that Meg has form in this respect and a couple of years tripped over a kerb causing a ‘FOOSH’ injury (‘Fall On Out Stretched Hand’) that required surgery to correct and that we do not wish to repeat it unnecessarily.
This afternoon was dominated by the news of the stand-off between the Greater Manchester Mayor,Andy Burnham and the UK Prime Minister,Boris Johnson. Basically, Andy Burnham supported by all of the leaders of the local authorities in the Greater Manchester area was demanding that if the Manchester Region was moved from Tier 2 to Tier 3 then some kind of support package was needed – more than the two-thirds of the minimum wage offered by the government. The whole thing came down to a haggle over money and the amount separating central and local government may have been as little as £5 million (small change to the Treasury when they have spent £12 billion on ‘Test-and-Trace’ i.e. 2,400 times as much) The whole episode is basically a tussle between an authoritarian inclined metropolitan government which feels that it knows best against the level of devolution which having a policy of elected regional mayors suggests. How this will end is unclear at this stage – but the resentments between ‘The North’ and central government may well reverberate for years. Some informed commentators are saying that a clash like this would be inevitable sooner or later and that a policy of devolution-lite had not been really thought through.
We know that the weather might be quite fine tomorrow but it certainly was not today as the morning seemed dominated by windy and squally showers. However, the wind was not particularly cold so our normal walk was not unpleasant but I still had to engage in the daily ritual of wiping the park bench dry – fortunately, we always pack a spare tea towel in our rucksack so we are well used to making the place habitable. From a distance, we spotted one or two of our normal ‘park’ or ‘ex-Waitrose‘ friends but I suspect that none of us wanted to linger for too long in case we got rained upon even more. Meg and I had a hairdressing appointment in the middle of the day (our hairdresser comes to the house accoutred with visors and gloves) and was on time, so Meg and I had had to schedule our lunch so we had got it all over (if not washed up) before she arrived. We now tend to pay people who provide us with services by electronic payments which saves scrabbling around for the odd £5 note (which incidentally seem to be rare as hen’s teeth these days)
As my mobile phone contract had run its three years and expired a few days ago, I thought I would go down into town and work out what my options might be. So I ensured that my existing phone was backed up and 100% charged before I set forth in the late afternoon. Although my contract was with EE, I was pretty sure that there was a CarPhone Warehouse on the High Street and so my game plan was to visit CarPhone Warehouse, see what deals I could be offered and then use this to trade a better deal with EE. But as I have not visited the High Street for some time, then Carphone Warehouse seems to have disappeared (I looked on the web and discovered just now that they have closed 531 standalone stores and made 2,000 staff redundant on 3rd April.) As our attention was elsewhere because of the virus, I didn’t know or even notice the demise of CarPhone Warehouse. Undeterred, I went into my (deserted) EE store, told them I was at end of my contract and wondered what my options were – I vaguely had in mind that I wanted to trade up to a slightly smaller and more convenient model than my current iPhone and had read some reviews of the SE model. Basically, Apple have done a most un-Apple like thing and combined some old technology (screen size, footprint) with some advances in chip design and performance to produce a phone with 90% of the performance of the bigger beasts in the Apple stable for about 50% of the price. I was pleasantly surprised to be told I could have a brand new phone at a price cut of 40% of the contract price I had been paying and they could transfer all of my old phone data over and have it installed on the new one within the hour. This was a pleasant surprise, and not what I was expecting The EE assistant pointed me in the direction of a cheaper shop that here I purchased a screen protector and a new case at a 20% discount and for about £20.00. So made my way home, amazed that everything had been so trouble free (as yet) as well as so much cheaper.
Meanwhile, back into the real world! the COVID-19 cases totalled 26,700 in a single day which is a frightening figure (you have to work out how many become seriously ill, then have to be hospitalised, them progress into a Critical Care unit and then, for some, die of the virus). South Yorkshire have joined Manchester into being promoted to ‘Tier 3’ which basically outlaws any indoor or outdoor meetings, pubs can only stay open if they are serving a ‘substantial meal’ How many business in the hospitality sector can survive? However, having said that, there is certainly the growth of what one can term ‘the night-time economy’ There are 650 licensed premises (principally pubs) in Manchester City centre alone. How many nightclubs there are is anybody’s guess and I have not been able to even make a guesstimate but I would I suspect that it is in the range of 50-100. When I was a student in Manchester in the mid 1960s there were..2! One has to ask the question – how many pubs/nightclubs does a city like Manchester need? (I realise this is a somewhat heretical question to ask but I ask it anyway)
Today was predicted to be a beautiful autumn day so we decided to make the best of it whilst we possibly could. So we decided to repeat the pattern of the last week or so and visit Droitwich, the small town to the south of us and home to a wonderful Waitrose, as it happens! We collected our newspapers and then headed off for Droitwich where we made our way hastily to our little teashop in which we were going to lunch later. Having had our elevenses and a chat and a joke with the locals (it is that sort of teashop) we headed towards the local Wilko store that we frequent almost every time we are in Droitwich. I bought a range of stationery items including things you do not see every day (such as a packet of address labels on sheets that can be fed into my laser printer thus making short work of my Christmas card list). Two years ago, I put in the investment of ‘computerising’ my Christmas card list thus alleviating the tedious chore of hunting through old diaries and address books to find the names of distant relatives to whom you only send a Christmas once a year to prove to them (and yourself) that they are still alive. After this, we did return to our tea shop to have one of their huge roast dinners that they put on once a week (on a Thursday) and partook of a huge lamb meal on this occasion. When we got home, we asked our son if he would like to join us next week and as he is ‘on leave’ he will do so which be a revelation for him. The only thing to mar our enjoyment of the day was to return to the car, only to discover it had been dive-bombed by a local, incontinent seagull who had made a right mess of the roof and both sides of the car. (Incidentally, why should it happen that only my car receives this treatment and not the two on either side which appeared to be absolutely pristine and unscathed) One of life’s great mysteries! So on my return home, I immediately got to work with a bucket of soapy water and a long-handled car brush to remove the offending deposits, As the car has not had a proper clean for a long time, after a cup of tea, I decided to treat it, and myself, to a good carwash in an establishment at the back of a pub run by a group of Kurds. As my contact appeared a little shorthanded today I had to wait about an hour and a quarter until it was ready. I entertained myself by spending a really long, leisurely wander around my local Poundland store – normally, it is a quick in-and-out job as I know what I want and where to find it. As we are approaching Halloween, the store was full of cheap crap which will end up in landfill in a few days time in the second week of November, no doubt. Nonetheless, I did manage to buy one or two stationery items which will add to my store.
It looks as though the Chancellor of the Exchequer has now appreciated the depth of the crisis of the individuals facing severe economic hardship in Tiers 2 and 3. So the scheme he devised in order to replace furlough has already been revised and made a little less mean than it was. Employees now only to work for 20% of the time (down from a third) to receive 75% of their wages (up from two thirds) whilst the employer’ contribution is reduced to a token 5% (down from 33%) and a system of cash grants will operate. The irony of all of this is that only two or three days ago, the government were quibbling about stumping up an extra £5 million to support businesses in Manchester when suddenly up pops a scheme which costs multi-millions of pounds. As Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester who led the revolt against the government plans for the Manchester region said tonight he was ‘open-mouthed’ because suddenly the government suddenly gave him everything he had been asking for a couple of days ago but were denying him. The truth of the matter, as several economists have observed, is the government is way ‘behind the curve’ and reacting to events in a panic/crisis mode rather than trying to plan rationally for what is evidently going to be a huge second wave of the virus.
Tonight we received a long and detailed email from one our closest and dearest Winchester colleagues detailing how very ill his wife had become and the various medical interventions being undertaken on her behalf. One feels so helpless in these situations and the only thing we can do is to reassure our friend of our continuing love and support in the days and weeks ahead.
Today was the last in a series of video-links in which Meg was undertaking some tasks and tests and this took up a good part of the morning, as you might imagine. When all of this had been conducted, Meg and I thought we would make a quick ‘short-circuited’ dash for our newspapers in the car which we did and were also relieved that our NHS COVID-19 app was now working. When I tried it yesterday, the app (on my new phone) said there was a conflict with other technology and so it wouldn’t run. So I dis-installed (i.e. removed) it, re-installed it and today it operated the way it should when I entered the newsagent. Then we made our way to the park, had a quick banana and made our way home after a somewhat truncated morning. We cooked ourselves a risotto (made with mackerel on this occasion) and the results were better than last week, I am pleased to say.
Tonight, as I was starting to blog I got a FaceTime call from my ex-University of Winchester colleagues/friends whose wife was now extremely ill. We discussed various matters at great length and I hope that we managed to exchange some useful information with each other. Actually, we spent quite a long time discussing Floridian politics as Florida is now such a key state in the forthcoming election. There was an extraordinarily good Channel 4 expose the other evening which detailed how the Republicans had got all kinds of demographic data which meant they could target individual members of the Florida electorate with a message tailored to their voting preferences. The Hispanic members of this particularly targeted precinct were illuminating but disturbing. Apparently one quarter were already firmly committed Trump supporters, one quarter was ‘persuadable’ i.e. uncommitted voters and a further quarter were voters who had to be dissuaded by any means possible from voting (for Clinton/Biden) Apparently, the techniques used four years ago had really intensified and the Democrats seemed powerless to contradict the social messages. So although Biden is a few points ahead in the current set of opinion polls, I am not at all sure and would be surprised if for a second/third occasion the Republicans just about sneaked it again. Only about eleven more days to go now, so the Mike Hart crate of brown ale, is slowly being populated whilst I wait for the election night (or rather the day after it)
The COVID-19 data seems a little difficult to interpret this evening. On the one hand, the level of new infections per day seems alarmingly high (about 35,000 new cases in the last day, according to the BBC website but 20,530 according to Sky News) It might be that these figures are capable of being reconciled but without doing a great deal of background work, I am not sure how, as I write this evening. On the other hand, it does look as though the rates of infection amongst the younger population (less than 30) seems to be moderating whilst the corresponding rates of infection for the more elderly age groups seem to be rising. There is also some evidence, tentative at this stage, from Public Health England that in this second wave the rate of increase may be levelling off somewhat i.e. although figures are rising by large amounts each day, it is not by quite the same percentage as the day before. It is certainly the case that Wales has a fairly complete lockdown whilst in England, the Tier 3 infections cover Liverpool, Manchester, Lancashire and parts of South Yorkshire. This pattern is evolving day by day and some areas might be about to be classified as Tier 3 in a few day’s time. The fact that the concentration of virus appears to be so much greater in the older, erstwhile industrial areas of the North and the Midlands must be a source of concern. Whereas there was always a health gradient between these older industrial areas and the more affluent and prosperous South of England, then COVID-19 seems to have added an extra layer (and twist) to these pre-existing patterns. What is needed is a redistribution of power and wealth across the national landscape – moving the capital to the North would help (although plans to move the House of Lords to York were soon squashed) Perhaps, also, the time is now ripe to move away from the ‘winner takes all’ approach in the first-past-the-post electoral system and that we move to a form of PR which would probably mean an almost complete era of coalition governments (which might be a recipe for disaster if the coalitions take weeks or months to form!)
We were a little delayed this morning getting some domestic jobs out of the way before we started our walk this morning. Although there was a little drizzle initially, by the time we made it to the park the heavens opened and we had to make a bee-line for the bandstand in order to prevent a complete soaking. I had forgotten one or two items on our regular Waitrose order so we called in at our local store (the one we used to frequent every day before the great lock-down) Although I only bought about three items, the staff who were on duty treated us like prodigal children and made us a present of a Victoria sponge cake. Once we got lunch out of the way, we had an afternoon of rugby for us to enjoy and watched quite a good match, if a little one-sided between Italy and Ireland. We didn’t see the last five minutes of what proved to be particularly exciting as we were getting ourselves to go off to our Saturday evening church service. After this, we got back home to have our traditional Saturday afternoon bowl of soup before we treated (if that is the right word) to a Wales vs. France match. As I write, the French seem to have got the better of the Welsh as one particularly brilliant fast running French player has scored three tries and has almost beaten the Welsh single-handed. The rugby matches are a completion of last year’s Six Nations and some of the players are in the strange position of starting off this year’s season for their clubs whilst completing last year’s internationals. However, at the end of the day, the Welsh seem to have beaten by a French team who were incredibly good at seizing opportunistic tries and exploiting weaknesses in the Welsh defence.
Tonight, there seems to be a proliferation of political stories. It seems that in Wales, many are objecting to the fact that supermarkets have been instructed to sell only ‘essential’ goods (and then to apply ‘common sense’). In London, there seems to have been some demonstrations against the lockdown (or rather the fact that London is now in Tier 2 rather than Tier 1) and some police officers as well have demonstrators have been injured (this might be the precursor of things to come) There also seems to be a rumbling discontent from some Tory MP’s that the majority of them voted NOT to allow children to have free school meals extended to half term and some councils, including Conservative ones, have indicated that they are going to continue to provide them. Some Tory MP’s believe that for comparatively minuscule amounts of money there is a public relations disaster in the making as the Government itself seems to be happy to let children go hungry – even some commercial companies, as well as local authorities, think this situation is so dire that they are providing funds for school meals. Meanwhile, the number of new COVID-19 infections has risen by one quarter since yesterday to 23,000.
On the other side of the Atlantic, it appears that both candidates managed to land blows on their opponent in the last Presidential debate but there was no clear winner or loser. The format of the debate helped in that the debate organisers had instituted a mute button so that listeners could not hear the interruptions of one candidate whilst the other was speaking (which made the first debate such a disaster) According to the BBC poll of polls, Biden is some 8 points ahead whereas, in the CNN poll of polls, Biden is some 10 points ahead. It appears that some 56.5 million voters have already voted (about 30% of the entire electorate) and the turnout may well be the highest since 1909. If the turnout figure is accurate, this can be an advantage to the Democrats as Democrat-leaning non-voting last time around certainly handed Donald Trump history. Of course, there are still about 9 days to go before the actual election date and a lot of eyes are turned upon Florida. This state is always a crucial indicator and may declare before some of the other big ‘battleground’ states. But if you wanted to be pessimistic, it could be several days (or even weeks) before the final result is actually known. Florida has always had really tight and sharply contested elections and this year will be no exception.
Today in the wee small hours of the morning is when the clocks were turned back one hour so this morning we were engaged in making sure that our various clocks and timers were all pointing in the right direction. Fortunately, our computers and clock radios which receive a signal automatically will update themselves without human intervention whilst everything gets our manual attention. I always find that the clock provided in the car always takes some thought but fortunately I remembered how to do this as well. I ‘cheated’ a little by going down to collect the newspapers by car instead of walking down and back as I normally do. Then, after the Andrew Marr show, which is a regular feature of Sunday mornings, Meg and I walked down to the park and got into an interesting conversation with a cyclist who was out taking the park air together with her father. We found that we both had solved a common problem i.e. at the age when children were old to acquire something like a juvenile or adult size bike but were not safe enough to be let out on the roads on their own, then one or both parents would buy an adult bike and accompany their youngsters on the open roads. We do have a few cycle lanes, of course, but they are actually few and far between an then one has to take a decision whether to risk the main roads (legal but not very safe) or ride along the footpath (safer, but of dubious legality). We then had a rather thrown-together type of Sunday lunch before we settled down to a really good long read of the Sunday newspapers. The Sunday Times had done a massive exposure on the ways in which in the early days of the epidemic (approx April) when admissions to hospital were rising at an alarming rate, then the government introduced a type of rationing system. In this the over 80’s, particularly if they had other contributing conditions such as heart disease, obesity or diabetes, were routinely denied admission to hospital or else were decanted into residential homes (often infected with virus) where they subsequently died. Some of the most severe rationing was eased somewhat when it was evident that the peak had passed but in the meantime, there were probably thousands of people throughout the country who lost loved ones early by them not getting the treatment that they needed. Of course, the government has denied the impact of these reports but the depth of the investigative reporting by the Sunday Times is impressive and it hardly likely that the journalists and investigators would have lied (whereas governments of all political persuasions have often taken the easy way out be being ‘canonical with the truth’ i.e. lying to their electorate)
The American elections, as you might expect, are extensively analysed and discussed by the British media. It is now becoming apparent that as a Biden victory looks more likely than not then the British government is finding itself badly wrong footed. Normally, a British government would make sure that it had constructive links with both sides of the electoral divide in the USA on the grounds that you wanted to establish good relations with whoever won. However, the Boris Johnson government has made practically no efforts to establish any links with the Democrats, preferring to see themselves as a natural ally of Donald Trump. According to Andrew Rawnsley in ‘The Observer‘ then ‘Being Britain’s Trump goes down almost as poisonously being Trump himself among many in Team Biden. They are bracketed together in the minds of the Democrats …because both are rule-breaking populists who have polarised their countries and trashed historic alliances.’ It looks as though this is impacting upon the Brexit negotiations – in the (now very unlikely) prospect of a Trump win then a deal with the USA may be on the cards and therefore a ‘no-deal’ Brexit more likely. But in the absence of any kind of sympathetic deal with the US, then the UK may be ‘forced’ by economic logic to accept some kind of minimal deal with the EU, even though they would ideally like to walk away. COVID-19 and Brexit are related,of course – many on the Tory right (i.e. the majority of the current Tory party) are salivating at the prospect of ‘no- deal’ with the EU because the undoubtedly economic cost would not be identifiable when the COVID-10 induced recession bites really hard.
Today was quite an unusual and atypical kind of day. Firstly, my car needed to go into the garage to get its MOT done before we trade it in within about twelve days. These days, the garages offer the most civilised of services. Instead of driving to the garage, the garage staff will come out to you in a car that you can utilise for the rest of the day. When your own is handed over to them, all the touchable surfaces are disinfected (keys, steering wheel etc) by staff who are all masked and helmeted before the car is handed over. Presumably the procedure is reversed at the end of the day when you got your own car back again but in our case the procedure was going to be delayed for a day whilst the garage’s MOT machine was being repaired) I checked with the garage that all would be well when we pick up our new car in twelve days time and I was reassured that all would be well, and we arranged a ‘pick up’ time for a week on Friday. This week, as it happens, will be our last biggish trip in our present car as we are due to meet some friends outside the National History Museum in Oxford where we are going to visit and then go off afterwards for a meal.
The next rather strange event was a phone call (pre-arranged) from one of the GP’s in our local practice. I had received the results of a CT scan which I had undertaken some ten days before and whilst my consultant (cancer) surgeon said there was no indication of any recurrence of bowel cancer the CT scan had raised an issue for me to discuss my GP. The GP seemed to be floundering about a little and I gained the impression that she was at a bit of a loss to know how to proceed. Eventually, we agreed a course of action which will involve referral to another consultant. I also asked her to recommend a course of physiotherapy for a finger which is troubling me and was informed that all of the physiotherapy procedures were now being conducted by an organisation called ‘Physiotherapy First‘ or something similar. I was given a telephone number to ring which, as it happened, was the physiotherapy centre next to the GP practice where I undertake my weekly Pilates. Having established I was an NHS referral, I then got an assessment interview for later on in the afternoon, which I gladly accepted. As it happened, the physiotherapist and I knew each other by sight both having been at the practice for about eight years. I had my assessment consultation today but any therapeutic sessions will take weeks to come through (but at least I am ‘plugged into’ the system) To complete my ‘medical type of day’ I had also requested a routine monitoring blood-test and this was arranged eventually (but it took half-an-hour in a telephone queue to get this booked) Whilst I am not complaining about the service I have received from the NHS, my experiences today have highlighted both the fragmentary nature of the current NHS with linkages that do not always work, as well as a system under pressure.
Channel 4 News tonight had quite an interesting revelation in a ‘Vox Pop‘ kind of interview with electors in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania (a traditional coal-mining state which Trump just managed to win last time on the promise of regenerating the coal industry!) The ‘Vox Pop‘ indicated that the ardent Trump supporters were convinced that COVID-19 either does not exist or is being grossly exaggerated for the purpose of robbing Americans of their traditional freedoms (i.e. to NOT wear face masks!) and is being used by the Democrats as just an electoral ploy to’steal’ the election which is rightly theirs by playing on people’s fears. I wonder how the state of Pennsylvania will actually go (Biden is narrowly ahead in the opinion polls) and what people will say on the after the polls are declared if Trump does lose Pennsylvania. Incidentally, the sight of so many ardent Trump supported displaying huge amounts of weaponry is undoubtedly unsettling if the election to be decided in Biden’s favour by a very slim majority.
Meanwhile, back in the realm of domestic politics,Boris Johnson is still refusing his policy of not extending free school meals to certain children over the half term period. He continues to say the the existing policy will not change whilst arguing that ‘no child will go hungry’ The government seem to appreciate that allowing children in a rich country to go hungry (at a cost of £21 million per week) whilst billions are spent elsewhere does not make for good politics, or headlines. I suspect that it is only a matter of a few days before there has to be a humiliating climb down but we shall have to wait and see!
This morning our car was returned good and sound having sailed through its latest service and MOT. What was so innovative (for me) was that I received a video with the car mechanic having video-ed each of the tyres with the amount of tread chalked on, the suspension, the exhaust and other bits of the car’s underside (rather like an endoscopy for cars) All of this is no doubt enabled by the ease of taking a video clip complete with running commentary and putting on the web for owners to view, but it certainly is a worthwhile innovation as reassurance for car-owners. Do all the modern, well-equipped garages do this nowadays, I wonder?
The major news of the day, however, was the news that arrived overnight in our email that the wife of one of our closest friends in Hampshire had passed away earlier on in the day. This was not unexpected but nonetheless it always comes as quite a trauma to the grieving partner when the inevitable happens. I wrote what words of comfort I could but on these occasions I find it difficult not to sound trite. I made the suggestion that perhaps we could a have a memorial meal or a similar social gathering some time in the summer when we might all be able to travel to be with each other and commemorate the the life of our friend. Another Hampshire friend had emailed during the night suggesting that we Skype at 9.00 this morning, but when the appointed time came along, so an email arrived saying my friends could not access Skype as the internet was down (and his wife was not well either, manifesting the line from Shakespeare that ‘troubles come not singly like spies but in battalions’). So we will have to Skype and chat on another occasion when the time is a bit more propitious.
Our trip to the park was conducted through rather blustery and rainy conditions. We had to wipe our park bench down with the tea towel which we keep inner rucksack for such a purpose – needless to say, nobody else was actually sitting down as we were.On the way home. we had a rather strange encounter with a man who was visiting Bromsgrove who was visiting his brother who he had not seen for twenty-five years. We were informed, though, that this man’s ADHD was probably the result of his mother’s Narcissism which had itself manifested itself by his mother taking off with another man the day after his father died (you DO meet some people in the park!) On our way up the hill, we were pleased to have a pleasant snatched conversation with one of our friends who we had not seen for several days and we made commiserations with other as to how strange Christmas was going to be this year when particularly extended families could not get together as they normally did. As the weather was inclement, we were pleased to get home and to have the prospect of a good long post-prandial read before our next social interaction.
In the late afternoon, we Skyped another of our Hampshire friends and his wife, with whom we all share some Manchester affiliations. I regaled them with one or two of our Manchester University memories.One of these was my encounter with the Professor of Surgery at Manchester University, long since dead so I can refer to him as Professor Boyd. I had discovered a little lump in my neck and somehow (to this day I do not know how) I finished up in his office requesting that he remove the offending tissue. He readily agreed to this but his post-graduate students seemed to be in a state of some panic as I had not been properly prepped before the operation. I woke up an hour later and was discharged from hospital the following day, only to discover when the swelling had gone down that the good Professor had missed taking up my lump about an inch and a half. I went back to see him and he looked me straight in the eye and said ‘Just don’t worry about it – I’ve had a lump in my axilla for decades and it hasn’t caused any harm‘ So I did just as he suggested until we happened to meet again as he turned up on my ‘patch;’ when I was a Census enumerator of the 1971 census. The good professor used to throw some exotic dinner parties, all seated round the large dining table he had in his living room. These dinners were fabled, not least because Professor Boyd possessed a pet monkey who lived to swing from the chandeliers and regularly used to urinate in a line across the dinner table just as the guests were sitting down to their soup. I heard this story from several old hands who, when they complained to the Professor (‘Excuse me, Professor, but your monkey’s just pissed in my soup’) would be informed ‘Don’t worry – its well filtered and should be biologically pure!” Now have I heard the ‘Don’t worry about it’ epithet somewhere before, I wonder?
Today turned out to be one of the most interesting of days. As we walked down into town this morning, we were called in to one of our oldest (church) friends who live down the hill and, as they espied us walking down, invited us in for a coffee and biscuits. They are such good company that we were delighted to accept the invitation. We engaged in what the Irish term ‘craic’ and I give the Wikipedia definition here: 'Craic (/kræk/ KRAK) or crack is a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation, particularly prominent in Ireland.'' This is very interesting, not least seeing what I suppose is the original Gaelic term – otherwise if you were say ‘we enjoyed engaging in crack with our friends’ this is liable to a massive mis-interpretation. Anyway, we discussed our tentative plans to see each other over the Christmas period – and I had fun putting a bit of flesh on the ‘bare bones’ story (in last night’s blog ) with the Professor of Surgery at Manchester University whilst I was a student there in the mid 1960’s. After a very enjoyable get-together, we carried on into the town, picked up our newspapers, sojourned for a little in the park and made our way home in term for a somewhat delayed lunch.
This afternoon was, to be fair, a little on the lazy side but I do enjoy a good read of ‘The Times‘ before we made a Skype call to one of our ex-Winchester friends. This, too, turned out to be an incredibly enjoyable three-quarters of an hour with stories, jokes, reminiscences and so on. We are both looking forward with a kind of fascinated horror to the US election next Tuesday/Wednesday and will no doubt text/email each other constantly as the story unfolds. In the meanwhile, I have been busy ordering more supplies of my favourite tipple of Newcastle Brown (ale) which I intend to work my through, either by way of celebration or to drown my sorrows, whatever the case might be. (I hasten to point out, though, that if the result is delayed by several days which could well be the case, I do NOT intend to be in a state of permanent inebriation as normal life has to go on!)
As I blog this evening, it looks as though both France and Germany are heading quickly towards full-scale lockdowns similar to the spring (with the possible exception of keeping children still within the schools). If this is indeed the case, then can the UK be far behind? The difficulty is that we do not seem to learn the lessons of history and do ‘too little, too late’ so it could be that delaying the almost inevitable full UK-wide lockdown by a week doubles the number of deaths, infections, hospital admissions and so on. Of course there is a division of opinion between the libertarians who would wish for no lockdowns at all once the extremely vulnerable are protected and the majority of scientific opinion that seems to indicate that a full lockdown is better done sooner rather than later.
Every so often, you get a news story that leaps out at you and this is a story from Wisconsin, USA. There is an incredibly well informed website called ‘fivethirtyeight.com‘ and what they have to say is so extraordinary that I quote their headline in full (it was also reported on Channel 4 news in the UK):
Once in a blue moon, you see a poll that makes you blink twice to make sure you’re not seeing things. This morning’s ABC News/The Washington Post survey of Wisconsin was just such a poll. It showed Joe Biden 17 points (not a typo) ahead of President Trump, 57 percent to 40 percent, among likely voters. To put it mildly, this is a stunning margin in what is supposed to be one of the most competitive swing states in the country — a place that Trump carried by less than 1 percentage point in 2016.
Of course, this might be a completely rogue poll – as there are so many polls conducted in the USA, across all of the states as well as nationally, then statistically one would expect the occasional ‘outlier’ or statistical aberration. But what is so extraordinary about this poll is that it is conducted by ABC News/Washington Post which is regarded as one of the ‘gold star’ polls in terms of the methodology deployed. As I have now learnt, there are three ‘rust-belt’ states across the north of the USA in which many of the traditional industries have declined – these are Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If Biden were to win these three northern states than together with other states that are pretty secure Biden should have enough votes in the Electoral College to gain the magic 270 votes needed (even if, subsequently, he fails to win Florida in the ‘Sunshine Belt’)
Today was a typical autumn day with a lot of low-hanging cloud and weather where the rain was sort of hanging in the air – i.e. not quite a drizzle but certainly feeling a little damp. I walked down to town briskly on my own this morning to collect our ration of newspapers because we had a lunch date in our favourite little cafe in Droitwich, to the south of us. We decided to take our son with us and as a threesome enjoyed a roast of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and all of the trimmings. The dinners are so large that we never have room for the sweets which are homemade (like trifles) and which are, no doubt, delicious. We ate early today because we needed to get back in time for our Waitrose delivery which was scheduled too arrive between 2.00 and 3.00 but in practice, turned up a little later. I have now added to my stock of Newcastle Brown Ale as I am getting well prepared for the election marathon night/day following the US election on Tuesday. It seems that over 75 million Americans have already cast their vote either by mailing in their ballot paper. or else by dropping them off at special ‘ballot drop boxes’ which seem to be a particular feature of this year’s election. Some states have had them for years but the popularity of this type of voting has increased tremendously with the COVID-19 virus ripping through communities. They have to be cemented into the ground and are subject to surveillance by video camera so, in theory, they should be tamper proof. The 75 million is well in excess of the 130+ million who voted in the 2016 Trump v. Clinton election and is probably one half of the 150 million who may well be voting in 2020. This is the point at which the story starts to get confusing. Each state has different laws regarding when the contents of ‘mailed-in’ and ‘ballot box drop’ votes will be counted. Some states will not start counting until the ballot has officially ‘closed’ whereas some other states allow for pre-processing e.g. taking the ballots out of their envelopes, checking that they are valid/legal votes etc. before the actual counting starts.
Now why should all of this matter? Well the following scenario may well play out. Pennsylvania is a crucial ‘battle-ground’ or ‘swing’ state which Trump just captured last time – but all of the indications are that Biden is narrowly ahead this year. However, we know that Republican voters typically vote in person whilst Democrat voters make more use of mailed-in or ballot drop boxes. The ‘in person’ votes are counted first so the initial indications may well be that Trump retained Pennsylvania – but the true result may well be known only in a few days time when the mailed-in votes are counted. So it is quite conceivable that Trump will declare he has ‘won’ Pennsylvania and attempt to use an army or lawyers to delay or invalidate the counting of the mailed-in votes, appealing all the way to the Supreme Court in the process (one of the reasons why he was so keen to get his own nominee, a proven conservative, to be confirmed in their position on the Supreme Court only days before the election). So if the result in Pennsylvania is critical for getting the requisite votes in the Electoral College (the magic figure of 280 vote) then we may now know the result of Tuesday’s election for days (or even a week or so) later. The scenario I have just outlined for Pennsylvania could well be repeated for each of the other crucial battle-ground states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida for a start)- no doubt we will see in the days following Tuesday (I hesitate to even say Wednesday)
And now to the UK domestic scene. The rate at which the COVID-19 virus is accelerating with an intensity and a ferocity not only in the UK but also in France and Germany is a source of real concern. More areas are being moved from Tier 1 to Tier 2 even today – residents in areas of Yorkshire and the Humber, parts of the West and East Midlands, as well as Luton and Oxford City will come under stricter measures. This may put our trip to Oxford on Saturday under some jeopardy but we shall have to wait and see. It looks as though half the country will soon be in Tier 2 or Tier 3 from next Monday – and perhaps most of the country by Christmas!
Today turned out to be an unseasonably mild day – the leaves were swirling around us in a wind that was not the bitter, biting kind you normally get in the autumn and winter but rather a mild and gentle kind. Having collected our newspapers (the very last ‘Times‘ in the shop!) we met with one of ‘park’ friends who we have not seen for a few days. She is a wheelchair user and comes to the park most days so we congratulated each other on keeping going to get our fresh air and exercise even while the intensity of COVID-19 seems to be increasing. On our way up the hill, we encountered our Italian friend who we have not seen for several days and we exchanged some very pleasant minutes together talking about families amongst other things. We made a general arrangement to meet over Christmas in one or other of our houses for a Christmas mince pie and sherry – although that is some way off, it’s nice to know that in the very truncated Christmas that faces us, we still have a circle of friends with whom we can commune. This lunchtime, we treated ourselves to one of my traditional curries (which I share with our domestic help) and now that I have discovered the joys of packets of cauliflower rice, I can eat my traditional curry without fear of sending my carbohydrate balance into overdrive.
Last night, we discovered rather late on that Oxford City is being ‘promoted’ to Tier 2 which puts into jeopardy our lunchtime date with friends tomorrow, where we were going to visit one of the of the Oxford museums before repairing to a meal. So, instead, after some emails and telephone calls, we went onto ‘Plan B’. Now we are going to eat in a Turkish restaurant in Bicester which has an excellent local reputation. The location is approximately equidistant between the two of us and it is quite easy to access from the motorway (and parking can be found quite easily) so we have rescued something from the lockdown restrictions, whilst keeping within the law. To be honest, Oxford was one of the last places I expected to be moved up a Tier and I wonder whether the great influx of students into the University (24,000 converging on the city) a few weeks ago has anything to do with the sudden increase in the COVID-19 infection rate. This seems more likely as I have seen a report that the COVID-19 infection rates in university cities such as Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham are up to SEVEN times greater than in the surrounding areas.
As the USA election approaches, the issue of ‘voter suppression’ is rearing its ugly head. Let us imagine that you are a staunch, and very committed Republican voter, who has followed the polling news given in various websites – you will be aware that Trump has trailed Biden by every poll since last January and the latest ‘poll of polls’ puts Biden at 52% and Trump at 43% – a 9% gap. As you know that approx. 50% of the electorate has already voted, then to reverse this pattern you would need a Trump polling figure of 52% (and Biden at 43%) within the next few days. To put on an increase of 9% in your share of the vote in the last 4 days would seem to be almost completely impossible, given you had been behind in the polls for the last nine months! So what to do? The only viable strategy is to get as many who think like you to come out to vote in person next Tuesday and do whatever you can to deter Biden supporters (more likely than not to be black voters) from voting. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. One is to get every retired policeman you know to turn up with preferably (large) weapons to march up and down the voting lines so as to act as ‘eyes and ears’ for the Republicans. Another technique is to rely upon your legislators in your local City hall to restrict the number of ballot boxes in your local area. So, far example, the Texas (Republican) governor has limited drop boxes to one per county. In Harris county, Texas, home to Houston, that’s one box for 4.7 million people. To round off, this merry section of news, the channel MSNBC (one of the liberal Main Street Media) has assembled a series of clips, including one from Trump himself, arguing that if the size of the electorate increases, the Republicans are always going to lose – and therefore, to ‘win’ you have to suppress the anti-Trump vote as much as you can relying upon the various courts (and the Supreme Court) to back up the decision. This is going to play out in the USA increasingly over the next few days. Watch this space!
Today was a pretty foul day with a lot of rain in the early part of the morning. As Meg and I had a lunch date in Bicester, we decided to play things a little differently this morning. To save a bit of time but also to get our bit of exercise in, we walked to the park (in the pouring rain) and then decided to go straight to the bandstand where we drank our coffee (although I managed to send half of my coffee flying as my rucksack fell off our little tripod stool) We then got home rapidly and jumped in the car, picking up our newspapers and dry-cleaning en-route and thoroughly confusing the sat-nav as we seemed to keep going in the wrong direction) The heavens really opened and we drove to Bicester through masses of heavy rain but fortunately, our timings were perfect and we got there with a quarter of an hour to spare before our lunch appointment and finding some parking quite easily. There we met with our friends for a wonderful Mediterranean meal (in a Turkish restaurant, which we have visited several times before) but I think we were conscious, right throughout the meal, that there was an impending lock-down and this might be the last meal together for quite some time (and so it proved to be). By the time we had finished our meal, we strolled down the pedestrianised High Street to have a post-prandial coffee and then we knew we had to make haste to get home. Fortunately, the heavy rain had finished by now so the journey home was quite uneventful. Then we had a fairly quick turn-around before we departed for our normal Saturday night church service – again, we were wondering if this was going to be the last time for some time. Once we eventually did get home, we were just about in time to catch some of the Downing Street announcements and press conference but availed ourselves of watching the France v. Ireland rugby match which occupied us nearly all of the evening. Then we waited unto the late evening news to get the full story of the new lock-down.
Naturally, we are interested in seeing how the new rules of lock-down will apply to Meg and myself. It seems that our daily walk to the park is still quite legitimate – even sitting on a park bench is now specifically allowed (according to Sky News!) Domestic help with the cleaning of the house will still be permitted, but attendance at church services is now out-of-bounds (except for private prayer – so that puts paid to our Saturday night excursions for a little while) It looks as though gyms are due to close so that means my Pilates class will bite the dust – I will probably join my Pilates’ teacher Zoom sessions if these are going to be put on again. Social mixing with other people inside their houses is now not allowed but the rules allow you to meet with one other person outside the house. (I can see this rule causing all kinds of difficulties as, so often, outside the house you meet with couples. Do you avoid talking to both of them? Or only one of them at a time? I am not sure how this has been thought through and how the police who are responsible for ensuring compliance with the law are going to deal with this one)
It will be interesting for me when I get round to watching ‘What the Papers Say‘ to see what the popular reaction to all of this is going to be. Boris Johnson is trying to sell the package on the basis ‘if we do this right. we might be able to enjoy Christmas a little more’ which I suppose is a sort of lifeline for many – if you think restrictions are going to be lifted after only one month (which I very much doubt). Speaking, absolutely personally, I am quite pleased that Boris Johnson has grasped the nettle and not dithered about any more. It is interesting to the principal correspondents from the main news channels (I am thinking of Laura Kuensberg for the BBC, Beth Rigby for Sky News both asked essentially the same question in the press conference i.e. why did you not act sooner, – say two weeks ago – and save 1,000s of lives. The answer was predictable (‘blather..blatther..blatther .. difficult balance, had to protect the economy as well as people’s lives, blather.. blather…’) I suspect that the right-wing of the Tory party will be incandescent with rage again but will they vote against the measures when they come (eventually) before Parliament? I suspect they may not but I am sure that Boris will now be ditched at the first possible opportunity when the immediate storm clouds have passed!
Today is evidently the 1st of the month but I resisted the temptation to utter my normal aphorism. As we woke up a little late, I went down in the car to pick up our normal supply of Sunday newspapers and just managed to get back in time to watch the Andrew Marr show from the start. Keir Starmer (Leader of the Labour Party) was interviewed and seemed to me to be very impressive in that he gave full support to the government lockdown but reminded the government that he had been calling for this lockdown together with the consensus of scientific opinion some two weeks earlier. He made the very interesting point that if the lockdown had been called a couple of weeks ago, then it could have coincided with the school’s half term which, combined with two weekends and one or two in-service training days, then you could have had the best part of two weeks with the children not in school. I must admit I had not fully appreciated that government scientists regard the level of infection amongst the older secondary school children as comparable with the wider population, but of course most of the school children will be asymptomatic. Nor had I realised that the SAGE committee had advised university students to be taught on-line and not to return to their colleges which, when the story of the pandemic comes to be told, will rank as another great mistake by the present government in not keeping the university students in their home communities.
We had an interesting chat with one of our oldest friends on the way down the hill and we exchanged news and views about the latest lockdown. To interpret at least one of the rules is going to be difficult. You are allowed to meet one person from outside your household bubble but in the case of our conversation this morning, would this have been legal? Meg and I were speaking to one person which is within the rules but out friend was speaking to two of us which is now forbidden by the rules. Given that a person on their own often meets a couple outside, then who is allowed to have a meeting and a chat with whom? This morning was a much pleasant day after the rain of yesterday for Meg and I to have a sojourn in the park where we were met by our Italian friend who was out for a stroll in the pale sunshine. We walked back to her house together, exchange COVID lockdown observations and speculated that for people like ourselves (enjoying the open air, meeting with acquaintances and friends) the new lockdown would not prove to be especially arduous but for some others who are housebound, then they must be regarding the next four weeks or so with a degree of trepidation. Finally, on nearing our own house we encountered some more near neighbours who we happen to know have both a dog and a cat who happily co-exist with each other, so we exchanged observations about how we were going to cope with the weeks ahead.
Being Sunday, we were happy to spend a lot of the rest of the day absorbing the contents of the Sunday newspapers. I was extremely impressed by a graphic design which I saw on the inside pages detailing how either Trump or Biden can chart their progress to wards the magic 270 votes in the Electoral College. The graphic showed for each candidate a line indicating the seats that they ought to have ‘in the bag’ i.e. a state which alway votes one way, plus a further component which ‘leans’ towards one candidate. In Biden’s case, the certain plus the probable would give him 233 votes – so he needs another 37 to get him over the finishing line. You then consult the graphic for the number of votes available in each of the swing states to work out what was needed. For example, if Biden were to gain Florida which declares early and would give him 29 votes than he would only need one more state to get him over the line. On the same logic, were he to carry the three northern ‘rust-belt’ states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, then he could afford to ‘lose’ Florida to Trump. So as you can see, this is going to be enormously useful to me in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning when I am following the progress of the elections. If Biden gains Florida early, I can go straight to bed – otherwise, it might be a nail-biting finish which extends or days (particularly Pennsylvania, for reasons best known too itself, is only going to start the counts of the postal votes the following day!) Of course, the more the postal vote, the longer the count might be – but it could also be that a very large vote hands victory to Biden sooner rather than later. We have just over two days left now to find out how this all works out!
Today was the kind of day for which the word ‘blustery’ might have been invented. The weather was a little on the cool side and there seemed to be the threat of a shower but fortunately we missed out on that. On the other hand, a fairly keen wind was doing its November job of stripping leaves off the trees and depositing them on pavements – which both children and young dogs loved to romp through. We were a little later than we should have been because we had to make, and receive, a series of telephone calls in the morning. In theory, we should be picking up a new car on Friday but of course Lockdown Mark II has intervened. We originally arranged with the garage to pick up the new car two days early if we could, on Wednesday. However, our existing lease runs on until Thursday and for a reason I cannot really discern, it could not by replaced by a new one (but if it had run out out on Wednesday, all would have been have OK) Anyway, the garage is undertaking various enquiries as to exactly what business can be transacted at the start of the lockdown in a case such as ours but if the worst comes to the absolute worst, we shall have to wait until the end of the lockdown (whenever that is) to pick up the new car.
We got back home fairly late this morning and had the roast we would have had at the weekend if we had not gone out for a meal. Then we kept an eye open on the weather because we knew that one day this week, our lawns needed their final cut of the season. We were aware that other things were likely to mess up our afternoons a little this week (Pilates on Tuesday, election watching on Wednesday, possible car transactions on Thursday or Friday) so we decided to take the ‘bull by the horns’ and get the lawns cut this afternoon. So far, so good – the grass turned out to be quite thick so a last cut was certainly needed. However, the last cut of the season is a bit special, as I like to run the petrol down to completely empty to ensure that there is no residual petrol hanging around in the system. This means that although I deliberately put no extra petrol in the tank this afternoon, when the mowing was completed I was marching up and down my lawn, complete with mower shouting at it ‘Die! Die!‘ which it resolutely failed to do for about half an hour, by which time it was completely dark. I remember vaguely that in these once-a-year a year type of jobs, I really needed to start at 2.15 rather than 3.15.This is because the clocks went back last weekend, which meant that by the time that engine had ‘died’ it was completely dark. I then had to empty the oil (not an easy task) by the light of the patio light and give the mower its end-of-season cleanup as I do not want to store it for months on end with layers of encrusted mud and grass under the mower hood. I managed to finish all of this little lot at 5.45 being a bit cold and tired and dying for a warming cup of tea! But at least, the job is now done until March 25th (my son’s birthday and the date at which I traditionally make the first cut of the new season)
Today is the last day of electioneering in the American presidential elections. Donald Trump knows that approx two thirds of the electorate have already voted and perhaps a majority of these votes will be Democrat and therefore the people who vote ‘in person’ tomorrow will be predominantly Republican. So Trump is suggesting that all counting should finish ‘on the evening of the election’ (i.e. when a majority of the vote is likely to be Republican) when he will declare himself elected. He will then rely upon ‘an army of lawyers’ to attempt to invalidate the 50-60% of the uncounted vote (not to mention a variety of courts including the newly Republican-packed Supreme Court). This is so outrageous a suggestion that all of the Main Street media have said that if Trump does such a thing, they will all collectively refuse to report Trumps claim. By the way, didn’t Hitler come to power ‘democratically’ – I must check up on my history to see if there are any historical parallels? I have a feeling that tomorrow is going to be a long night, unless of course, Florida goes to Biden quite quickly (unlikely, but not impossible) and some other states follow. Not long to go now – but I am not opening my first bottle of beer until the Democrats have won at least one or two of the swing states!
Well, election day in the US has finally arrived but of course, with the time difference of five hours between GMT and EST, the polls do not actually open until 7am at the earliest which is 12.0pm GMT. The news overnight is that some 100 million (actually 99.7 million) of US voters have actually already voted either by mail or by dropping off their voting papers in a ‘ballot box’ (which seem to have grown in popularity this election as a result of the COVID-19 crisis). There are already legal fights going on – first thing this morning, the Supreme Court in Pennsylvania was asked to overturn a ruling that any vote posted in time (according to the post mark) was a legal vote. The Republicans (naturally) suspecting that many of these mailed in votes would be Democrat was asking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to declare these votes invalid – they failed in their attempt. I did see a clip on the MSNBC channel that the Attorney General of Pennsylvania was recorded as saying that the election authorities would stamp down hard on any illegitimate poll-observers engaging in voter intimidation (i.e. the Republicans giving the nod to some of their burley and well-armed quasi-militia to march up and down near the election venues to ensure ‘fair play’) He also announced that the election authorities would count every single ballot even if takes some days, thereby trying to forestall Donald Trump counting up the (predominantly) Republican votes that had been cast in person on Election Day itself and claiming that the election had been ‘won’ and trying to cast some doubt on the validity of all of the uncounted (and predominantly Democrat) votes. To UK eyes and the British sense of ‘fair play’ all of this seems absolutely extraordinary but ‘Hey! This is America! Land of the Free!‘ (i.e. free to intimidate, subvert and otherwise trick your way into an election victory.)
It was a most beautiful day today for Meg and I to walk down into town. We di not see any of our usual friends for a chat but we enjoyed a fine day where we could actually, at times, feel the heat of the sun on our faces. This was not too last – we ran into a little shower on the way home but it was more a really light drizzle rather than a full-scale rainstorm. We knew that we wanted to get home in reasonable time because as it was my Pilates Day (the last for until the end of the lock-down) I wanted to get most of the mid-day meal prepared so that it took just a quick microwaving when I returned just before 3.00pm. We had rather a doleful Pilates experience as we knew that whilst we could participate in some ‘Zoom’ classes organised by our teacher, we would not be meeting again as a group until the end of the lockdown – and we all suspected that the lockdown would ‘de facto’ last longer than the supposed four weeks. I suspect it will be extended by another two weeks and then we will run into a Christmas holiday period so we may not be ‘unlocked’ until January.
However, I did receive some good news in the late morning. I had a couple of telephone calls from the garage from which we hoped to collect our new car later on this week. Our salesman had some good news for us. The leasing company, perhaps armed with some more up-to-date advice from a government agency), had given us permission to pick up our new car next Friday, provided that all of the handover transactions take place outside the showrooms i.e. in the open air. I am sure we shall manage this OK – in the meantime, we are delighted that our original plans have not completely fallen foul of the new LockDown Mark II regulations.
I decided to have quick look at what Huff post (Huffington Post) were saying throughout the voting today. I was think it is fair to say that most of the commentary was apoplectic at the avowed intention of Donald Trump to ‘steal’ the election by force or by fraud. One comment that I read was illuminating:“He’s been laying the groundwork for this for months,” said Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor and the lead lawyer for House Democrats during Trump’s impeachment over his extortion of Ukraine to help his reelection bid. “Mind-blowingly fascist.” I have noticed that many very serious minded and not particularly partisan commentators (not all of them Democrat by any means) have been observing that the whole of american democracy is on trial tonight and not just the election of a president. I think the feeling is that if you win an election by voter suppression, discounting or not even counting some valid votes, using militia to engage in voter intimidation, challenging at every point with an army of lawyers all the way through the various state legislatures, appeal courts and eventually Supreme Courts (even as far as the United States Supreme Court itself, packed with die-hard republican judges) then the whole American democratic ideal has been subverted.
I do not expect that I shall see anything like a definitive result tonight. But I hope at least that the tide of opinion is such that once we have Florida out of the way and some of the other faster-counting states that there might be an indication by about 3.00am which way the wind is blowing and I can crawl into my bed and get some well-earned sleep!
I must be a real masochist watching elections of any type because I never seem to witness the result I really want. I tuned into the election broadcasts at 11.30pm last night knowing that some of the American polls would close at 12.00pm and thereafter we might get an exit poll or something. In practice, nothing seemed to happen for hours except that the predictable (i.e. states not expected to swing) announced first – the eastern seaboard states for Biden and the large empty, agricultural states in the centre of America for Trump. The first state of interest was going to be Florida in which the national polls had suggested that Biden had the narrowest of leads. In practice, it turned out that Florida was not going to turn away from Republican, and is Donald Trump’s adopted home state and the home to a sizeable population of Cuban heritage voters who are vehemently ‘anti-socialist’ and therefore responded to the message that a vote for the Democrats was a vote for ‘socialism’ (very much a ‘boo’ word in the US) Although political analysts talk about the Latino vote (or the Hispanic vote), in practice the ex-Cuban Americans have always been pretty right wing and do not vote in the same way as ‘latinos’ in other parts of the USA. So Florida stayed in the Trump camp and alter a little flurry of excitement in Texas, it too stayed in the Trump camp. I headed off for bed at 3.15 pretty dispirited and not convinced that the situation was rescuable for the Democrats as the later states were due to declare.
Meg and I walked down to the park on a beautiful Autumn day. Whilst there, we got into conversation with an elderly lady who hired a taxi at great expense to come to the park in Bromsgrove where she she said several ‘turns’ of the park to keep herself mobile. Having spent the first period of ‘lockdown’ confined to the house, she was determined to come to the park to exercise (and to chat) at least once a week if she could. It is quite inspirational when you see the efforts that some elderly people make (she was in her 80’s) to keep themselves connected with the rest of the world and mobile as well.
Upon our return home, we switched on the TV to see the latest election results.Donald Trump had assembled an audience in the ‘East’ room of the White House where he held a most extraordinary briefing. With a handle of ‘swing’ states under his belt, he declared that he was well on the way to victory, that he wanted ‘voting’ (by which he meant ‘ballot counting’) to cease in several other presidential races and he intended to apply to the Supreme Court to attempt to invalidate what he claimed was the election being ‘fraudulently’ stolen from him. We knew that Donald Trump was going to try this tactic but the audacity of it shocked the rest of the media. Then, there was just a glimmer of light for the Democrats. Eventually, they cornered the state of Arizona which was the first of the states held by Trump to ‘flip’ sides. Then it looked as though a neighbouring state of Nevada might be heading in the same direction., Finally, at about 8.00 in the evening, Wisconsin was ‘called’ for the Democrats which now puts Biden only 22 votes short in the electoral college (he needs 270 and is currently up to 248 votes so he needs 22 more) Where he to gain Nevada and Michigan, where he is about 0.5% ahead, then he will have secured the 270 votes needed even if does not get the big prize of Pennsylvania. The margin of 0.5% sounds incredibly small until you realise that the votes still to be counted are postal ballots and these are more likely to be Democrat rather than Republican and hence this 0.5% can only increase. As you might expect, the Republicans are already demanding a full recount in Wisconsin (they wouldn’t if they were ahead!) and law suits of every variety are flying thick and fast. I imagine that a lot of this will unwind some time tomorrow or even Friday – for some reason, they have stopped counting in Nevada but will carry on again tomorrow.
Needless to say, my bottles of Newcastle Brown ale have remained unopened – and will do so until some more states have declared. I suspect that with lawyers’ writs, recounts, challenges and the like, this whole election might take several days before we get anything approaching a definitive result. It is said that in China, there is amusement that a society can tear itself apart having a really divisive election – why not just have one political party (the Communist party) to make decisions in a society? However, wins the election, some commentators are already arguing that ‘Trumpism’ is now ‘baked in’ to the USA electorate and there will be a continuing culture wars for years ahead.
Well, today seems an ‘intermediate’ kind of day. This is because several things are due to happen tomorrow (USA election finally ‘called’ on favour of Biden or Trump) and we are due to pick up our new car tomorrow. So today, we contented ourselves with getting bits and pieces done before tomorrow. The weather was fairly fine but a little chilly today (in line with forecasts) and we enjoyed our walk, made more enjoyable by little chats on route. We met one of our oldest friends complete with child (grandchild, actually) who she had been taking to observe the ducks now that the grandchild is about 11 months old. We also ran into the very good neighbour of a friend of ours who has been having a bit of a traumatic time recently, having to undergo a series of tests (endoscopies) which didn’t work out as intended as well as some blood tests. We are hoping that the outcome of all of tis is not unfavourable but she only lost her husband about twelve months ago to liver cancer. Finally, on the way home we stopped to chat with a friendly guy who was trimming his hedges and seemed inclined to talk – it must be the fine weather that encourages people to smile and chat with neighbours. Actually, when I think about it, today was the first day of the ‘Lockdown Mark II‘ so you would have thought that there would been hardly any traffic on the roads and the streets would have been almost deserted. However, the traffic did not seem to have abated much and the number of people in the park about the same as aways (but then, of course, exercise is not only permitted but encouraged under the new regime).
Having got home and eaten an early lunch, I knew that I wanted to make a fairly early start in ‘prepping’ the car before we hand it in tomorrow in exchange for our new one. About a week ago, I had the car quite well valeted by one of a group of Kurds to whom we have been going for years and who operate from a carpark of a local pub (unused during the day!) This afternoon, I got myself into my car washing routine (which, as it happens, involved an assortment of watering cans used for the sole purpose of car washing) and buckets of detergent water. This bit went all right but I knew that when you hand over a car there are a variety of your own mats, boot impedimenta, CD’s, and other bits of documentation which are always kept in the car, such as the permit for the Municipal tip which has to be displayed before they let you in. The car is now in a fit condition to be handed over and we are are almost prepared for the handover tomorrow – I must remember to take along certain documents, handbooks, log books, spare keys etc. After all had been completed (whilst the daylight lasted) I popped over to see a neighbour because we wanted to check out some aspects of her house alarm system and it is always better to have two bodies (and heads) associated with this so that you do not inadvertently lock yourself out. As it happened, all was well so back into the house for tea.
I mentioned earlier that today was a kind of ‘waiting game’ in the US presidential elections. The system that seems to be deployed is that even though the count in a particular state is not complete, then a state is ‘called’ i.e. allocated to one candidate or the other if the gap between the candidates is greater than the number of ballots yet to be counted – even if all of the uncounted votes went to the losing candidate, then the gap is too great to be bridged. This is what you might call the ‘easy’ call of a state. But the American commentators seem to be deploying a much more sophisticated kind of calling that works that likes. Candidate A is 1.0% ahead (translated into votes) but you know that the remaining votes are coming from a county in which y% of people may have voted. If you know from historic voting patterns or other socio-demographic data that an uncounted county will generate so may votes for one candidate or another, then it is possible to ‘almost’ predict what the final result will be. This sounds unduly abstract but a good case in point is Pennsylvania. About 88% of the vote has been counted and Trump is leading Biden by about 1.4% or 90,500 votes. But there is about 12% of the vote yet to be counted which is approx. 870,000. It looks as though the majority of the yet-to-be-counted vote will be Democrat which will be about 470,000 which is five times the deficit. Is it any wonder that the Republicans want the count to be stopped ‘immediately’ whilst they are ahead. We have the strange spectacle (to us) of crowds of Republican supporters where Trump appears to be ahead shouting ‘Stop the Count‘ whereas in the states where Trump appears to be behind they are chanting ‘Count the Vote‘ Tomorrow, we will see how all of this works out!
Well, today was the day that followed last night. I woke up in the middle of the night and wondered what was going in the US Presidential elections – as I thought that Pennsylvania must just get called (what a hope!) I stayed up for an hour watching a variety of things on Sky News (as my Mac decided to update its operating system in the middle of the night, just when I wanted to use it so this knocked out about three-quarters of an hour). In the course of yesterday evening’s viewing, I did see Donald Trump’s rant from the White House and I seriously wondered whether the rant that ensued was a sign of seriously disintegrating personality – or worse. However, worse is bound to follow in the next few days.
Today was the day in which we were scheduled to pick up our new car so we duly made our way there to arrive at 11.00 am. The transaction all had to be completed outdoors to comply with various regulations these days, so we were signing various handover documents on a variety of clipboards, handing over documentation and the like on our existing vehicle before getting a mountain of documents on the new one. All to be seemed to be handled extremely expeditiously so having rescued the car mats from our previous vehicle, we were on our way home. I must say I do not particularly like the first hour or so driving a new car until one is completely familiar with all of the controls and updates. But we made sure that we had the car radio tuned into Radio 4 and Classic FM which suits us 95% of the time and most of the remaining controls seemed to be a ‘carry-over’ from our previous Honda. There is one particular feature which I particularly like and no doubt I will discover lots of others as the days and weeks roll by. In most of the cars I have had, the petrol gauge tends to be circular in nature but in this car, it is a linear scale. But immediately above it is another linear scale which measures the current mpg and so you can tell for any particular gear or road conditions how your mpg is responding. I noted, for example, that reducing my speed from 70mph to 60mph seemed to push up my mpg substantially to about 45mpg, so it is quite easy to adjust your driving to meet your desired fuel consumption. I found this an excellent feature – just the little refinement which makes a new car a joy to explore. When I got home and after lunch, I fitted our old car mats on top of the supplied ones. There is a certain logic behind off of this. I like to have some light-ish car mats as a ‘top set’ as it were and in the doors compartment, I usually store a car wheel brush. Then if I have been anywhere particularly muddy or I have a few seconds to spare at the end of a journey, I can easily remove the light mat and give it a quick brush-over (keeping the under-mats pristine as well)
This afternoon was a particularly delicious afternoon. We were watching the Biden count in the remaining four contested states gradually overhaul that of Trump and eventually gradually increase as new batches of votes (by county?) are gradually added. Much of this pattern is both predictable and predicted – Donald Trump asked his supporters to vote in person on the day which they generally did, thus building up ‘red’ majorities. But then the Democratic vote started what is known as the ‘Blue Shift’ as the votes come in form the larger urban areas in which voters had voted by postal ballot or by drop off box. The Republican voters tended to think that COVID-19 was largely a Democrat myth and did not mind queuing up next to each to vote in person on election day. The Democrat voters did believe in COVID-19 and their vote tended to be counted after the ‘in-person’ vote had already been tabulated.
As I blog, the Democrat lead over Trump is gradually increasing (14.5k in Pennsylvania, 20k in Nevada, 39k in Arizona, only 4k in Georgia) There will certainly be a recount in Georgia as the totals are within 0.1%-0.2% of each other) and in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) there seems to be a lot of military (posted votes) still to be counted. There does seem to be a movement ‘in the air’ that it is really important that each particular vote is actually counted and recorded and this may be the enduring impact of the ‘Black Lives Matter‘ social movement. The Trump rant to the effect that the elections are fundamentally flawed and subject to massive fraud all over the USA is being quietly contradicted by various leading Republicans who are re-asserting their faith in the counting process. We might add that in many of the states, the officials in charge of the counts are registered Republican but the integrity of the officials has been systematically traduced by Trump. It may well take a day or so to get the final totals from all of the states but when the overall result is in no doubt (i.e. Biden has unequivocally won the election, pending court cases notwithstanding), then one can watch with some pleasure. More on this as the days unfold!
What an interesting day it has proved to be today. Meg and I were somewhat late this morning and we would not have been surprised if our little newspaper shop had run out of our regular newspapers. But the Gods must have looked kindly upon us for we got the last copy of The Times and the second last copy of The Guardian. Although the road traffic seemed relatively quiet this morning (lockdown finally having an effect?) the park seemed to be as busy as usual with young mothers, toddler children and dogs in every shape and variety. We met one of our regular friends who comes to the park as we do almost every day and we exchanged little bits of news with each other. When we got home, we had a light lunch of soup and settled down in front of the rolling news programmes as it was evident that the US elections were coming to some sort of climax.
Just before the inevitable announcement came, there was a bizarre announcement coming from the Trump camp that his lawyers were going to hold a kind of ‘press conference’ in an industrial estate and the rumours were rife that the lawyers might be able to produce a witness to an election fraud that they were going to parade in front of the media. However, just before the scheduled time of 4.30 the BBC ‘called’ the election, perhaps slightly in advance of the rest of the media conglomerates. As you might imagine when the news broke that the Biden camp had received another tranche of votes that pushed his lead to 34,000 the dam broke. The world’s media went mad (with joy?) at the news of the Biden victory and there was massive of ‘vox pop’ with crowds in Washington, Philadelphia, New York and elsewhere. In the meanwhile, Donald Trump was filmed off playing golf in Virginia – news of the lawyers’ press conference absolutely disappeared off the media agenda. (For conspiracy theorists, is this why the BBC ‘called’ the result in Philadelphia some five minutes before the lawyers’ press conference?)
In the meanwhile, a little bit of background (courtesy of Associated Press) to explain why the result was called when it was. The election officials knew that were only 60,000 votes left to process and to overcome this the Trump vote would have to have been about 75% of this. As all the postal vote had actually been 75% in favour of the Democrats and the election officials knew that the remaining vote was from very Democrat inclined areas (urban Philadelphia) then it would have been unlikely in the extreme (although not impossible) that Trump could garner these votes. The election officials waited until the gap between the candidates was 0.51% at which point an automatic recount could not be called (as it has to be 0.5% gap or smaller) and then gave ‘the nod’ to the media. I think this is the most likely explanation but election nerds might have to consult the finer print of the quality newspapers.
The political implications of all of this are tremendous. It could well be that Donald Trump serves one term (he will be 78 at the time of the inauguration) at which point Kerala Harris (now the Vice President elect, who incidentally is the first woman and person of colour to successfully occupy the office of VP) will win the next Presidential election and if she has two terms, the the Democrats will have the presidency for the next twelve years. President-elect Biden has been sounding extremely Presidential and is making all of the right noises about ‘healing the nation’ whereas the Trump team are still breathing fire and brimstone and threatening all kinds of appeal to the Supreme Court next Monday (which they may not actually carry out) Amidst the welter of other media interviews there was one that stood out in my memory as he opined ‘if the Democrats were so corrupt and intent on cheating, why did they not do it four years when Trump was elected and it wouldn’t have taken many ‘frauds’ to deny him?’ The other point to make is the absurdity of the Republican position who are almost uniformly crying ‘foul’ but some of them are saying ‘Stop the Count' (in states in which Biden was ahead) but other Republican crowds were shouting ‘Count the Votes‘ (in states in which Trump was ahead). Just an interesting afterthought to all of this – who will be the brave Republican who is delegated to go into the room and say to President Trump ‘The game’s up – you have lost!’
A final statistic – the participation rate in this election has been the greatest since 1900 and 75 million voters (more than any other candidate in history) voted for Biden. This equates to a lead in the popular vote of some 4% (which could be 5% when all of the final tallies have been completed).
After the ‘excitement’ of yesterday, we slept a little heavily last night so we were up a little late. I went down by car to collect the Sunday newspapers and then we watched the Andrew Marr show, dominated as you might expect by the latest news in the US presidential elections. We then engaged in our normal walk down to the park but encountered one of our closest friends who had just completed his ‘bicycle run’. We had both been following the American elections intently and swapped all kinds of interesting stories and tit-bits that emerged over the campaign, particularly in the four days waiting for the count results to be revealed. Although we all know that, in theory, the red Republican voters had voted in person on Election Day and the democrats had generally voted by mail or by drop-off ballot before the Election Day. So that we all knew that there would appear to be large Republican leads in the first count (I think in the case of Pennsylvania it was of the order of 70,000 votes) but there was a fairly nail-biting time when the postal votes – more difficult to process and therefore to count – came in slowly by county (or electoral district) much more slowly. There was always this doubt at the back of one’s mind that if Donald Trump had done it once could he possibly do it again? But, as we now know, the so-called ‘Blue Wave’ rolled in and gradually in Pennsylvania, the Trump lead was eroded and eventually the Biden lead was over 41,000 votes.
In the park, we met up again, as did last Sunday, with our Italian friend who was just returning from a sort of Remembrance Day gathering held somewhere in the town. We had our usual chat and banter and it was wonderful to know that we can carry on to support each other in these difficult times. So we then proceeded home to have a light and leisurely lunch followed by a prolonged reading of the Sunday newspapers, as is our wont at the weekend. Obviously the papers tell us the inside story of the demographics of the whole campaign and how these are gradually shifting over the years, particularly in states such as Georgia which have just gone Democrat for the first time in decades. But there were three other lines of analysis that came out of the acres of newsprint. The first of these was an analysis of the persistence of what might be termed ‘Trumpism’ and the realisation that even when Trump has gone, the fact that over 70 million Americans voted for Trump on this occasion means that there is still a massive chasm which runs deep through American society. The second point of interest was the acceptance speech given by Biden which was skilfully constructed and delivered and appealed very much for unity after the divisions and conflicts of the campaign. But the third and most interesting analysis is how the Biden victory will impact upon the British political scene. It is certainly true to say that Biden has called Boris Johnson ‘a physical and emotional clone’ of Trump which is not the best of starting points. In addition, former Obama press aide Tommy Vietor responded to Johnson’s congratulatory message last night by calling him a 'shapeshifting creep', adding: 'We will never forget your racist comments about Obama and slavish devotion to Trump.' And it is also said that Kerala Harris (Vice-President-elect) has a visceral hatred of Boris Johnson after he had insulted Obama in 2016. One source told The Sunday Times: ‘If you think Joe hates him, you should hear Kamala.’ Johnson reportedly attracted the power-pair’s ire after calling former President Obama’s decision to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office ‘a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire.’ This has been interpreted as a direct racial slur (and, of course, Boris Johnson has a lot of form in making insulting, quasi-racist remarks over the years)
This afternoon, I devoted a certain amount of time ‘repopulating’ the new car we have just acquired with some of the clutter removed from the old one. There are certain things that are always kept in the car such as CD’s and sweets to ease the tedium of long journeys, various car wipes for when they are needed and so on. I am determined that I do not transfer all of the old clutter directly into the new one and as the distribution of space in the door pockets differs (i.e. is smaller) I am having to think carefully what I really need to have to hand when I need it and that which I can do without. For the first few weeks of acquiring a new car, I am always a little ‘new car neurotic’ i.e. one lives in fear and trembling of having a car door opened on you from an adjacent vehicle in a supermarket carpark – this feeling fades over time but I suppose it is only human to keep the new car as pristine as one can before it will acquire the inevitable little clips (nearly always at the hands of other people)
So we now start a week in which the sequelae of the American election will start to manifest themselves. Whilst many off us (but not all) in the UK are secretly relieved that we may be seeing the back of President Trump, the sad fact remains that in the popular vote some 70 million Americans wanted him to continue as their president.We will have to wait and see what consequences flow from this today but of course being six hours behind us, every reaction seems so delayed.
Meg and I enjoyed our stroll down to the park this morning, calling by to pick up our newspapers and paying a lightning visit into Waitrose to pick up one or two things forgotten in our weekly order. Although we normally get a ‘home delivery’ from Waitrose, this week we are going to have ‘Click and Collect‘ on Thursday. This is because as soon as it was evident that a further lockdown was to come, people had evidently gone onto the web as soon as they could and all of the delivery slots for this week had been taken (although we have managed to book a slot for the week after). After we had left the park, we did run into our Italian friend again and spent a very pleasant time (probably at least 20 minutes) discussing family matters. I think this was therapeutic for all of us and again, we were speculating how and whether we can experience another get-together over the Christmas period.
I had set myself a little project this afternoon which was to gradually put some of our ‘indispensable’ things into the storage spaces in our new car. My son helped me to get my iPhone to get plugged into the Honda’s communications and video systems. After a pause in which the Bluetooth seemed not to work, we eventually got the iPhone’s and the car’s systems to communicate with each other so now it should be possible to both make and receive mobile phone calls whilst we are on the move. My son and I tested out that I could actually receive a call but I am sure it should be fairly easy to actually make a call once we have got this far.
The previous car that we owned had a really cavernous boot (very useful for accommodating two suitcases side by side when we went on holiday). To ensure that my shopping did not roll all over the place, I abandoned the system that I had been deploying (a couple of those low sided fruit boxes that supermarkets often use both to transport and also to display fruit such as apples and oranges) and decided to invest in a couple of what are technically called ‘car boot organisers’. There are a variety of these on the market and they are generally rectangular in nature but divided into two compartments – hence a couple of them gives you four storage spaces which are about the size that would each take a small own-brand supermarket woven carrier bag. So a typical weekly shop of about four bags full fits nicely into the boot organisers already in place (really bulky but light items such as kitchen paper and toilet paper goes on the back seat in any case). I transferred the two car boot organisers to which I had treated myself some three years ago into the new car, knowing that the new boot whilst fairly large did not match the capacity of my previous car. Then, I had some really good fortune. The two car boot organisers fitted well but with about a 10″ gap between them. But I also had in my garage a little rectangular bucket (in which I can store some day-to-day car cleaning materials) which was some 9″ in width and therefore fitted perfectly in between the two storage containers. In addition, I had a little rectangle of space left over in which I could completely accommodate the shopping bags (stored inside each other) that we keep in the boot of the car so that we do not forget them on a weekly shopping trip. All of this might sound incredibly pedestrian but it is good to have a nice neat system when the car is new so that you can carry on with the same pattern (although I shall probably persist with the Waitrose ‘Home Delivery’ system now that I am used to it)
The news this afternoon was dominated by news of the vaccine which may prove to have a 90% efficacy rate if it passes through its remaining regulatory hurdles and is is brought into use by the end of the year. The ‘big Pharma’ firms involved Pfizer and BioNTech (American + German ?) described it as a ‘great day for science and humanity’. I am pretty convinced that the announcement could well have been made some days ago but was delayed until the American elections were out of the way in case Donald Trump claimed ‘a cure was at hand‘ and managed to snatch a victory on the back of it.
In the late afternoon, we ‘Zoom’ed one of our good Winchester friends. I commiserated with her over the death of a faithful and long lived cat (who had reached the grand old age of 21) and the two of us are going to join a video link into the funeral of the wife of a mutual colleague/friend on Wednesday next. We have agreed to Zoom again in a fortnight’s time – I really must get myself a calendar which can record the dates and times of all of the FaceTime/Skype/Zoom calls were are now making quite regularly.
It seems hard to believe we are actually one week on from the American election and here we are with still some votes uncounted – Arizona and Georgia remain the two key states yet to complete their counting whereas Alaska, firmly in the Trump camp, seems to be a law unit itself. Away from elections as such, some of the political attention has shifted to the US Supreme Court where a large mass action on behalf of several Republican states is threatening to overturn the ‘Affordable Care Act’ Even though the Supreme Court has a massive conservative majority, whether they want to rip the heart out of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic and with two-thirds support from Republican voters themselves is a fascinating question. It could well be that the Supreme Court will act totally ‘politically’ rather than ‘judicially’ I,e, it could decide that the social disruption to the body politic at this particular time is not a wise thing to do. Of course, they might just sit on their hands i.e. do nothing, until they can see which way the wind blows. Trump still refuses to concede, by the way, supported by most of the Republican Party whose line at the moment is that the president is quite within his rights to pursue whatever legal remedies he can.
It was quite a mild day today as we walked to the park. We decided to call in at the park first and have our elevenses to sustain us as we knew that we have to venture out onto the High Street where we needed to bank a cheque (an incredibly rare event these days – but the supervisor in the branch of Santander guided me how to do via their machine although no doubt I will have forgotten it all by the time I have another check to bank) Thence we trudged our way home, through the cemetery and, compared with our normal walk, we seemed to have covered a fair bit more distance and were pretty tired when we got home. I have no Pilates today was I normally would on a Tuesday (owing to the lockdown) so we looked forward to a lazy afternoon, reading the newspapers. In the late afternoon, we Skyped on of our ex-Winchester colleagues and his wife and we had a long, long chat about the American election results. As they had both spent some post-doctoral time in the States, they were well informed and we marvelled at the way in which the modern American media has the ability to drill down within a state to examine the counties (or electoral districts) from which a further tranche of ballots is due to be added to the main totals. Of course, we do not know how the next few days will pan out as the American prospectors used to say but I am pretty sure we will have recounts and then legal challenges which will prolong the agony even further. To try to understand the delay, the following from The Guardian website is instructive and helps to provide an explanation:
There was no early processing in multiple key battleground states this year, however, because Republican-led state legislatures refused urgent requests from local elections officials to pass new laws to allow extra time for ballot processing. Such a refusal in Pennsylvania produced enormous backlogs in cities such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, which has gone from counting about 6,000 mail-in ballots in 2016 to more than 350,000 this year.
Yet later in the afternoon, we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends with whom we had not been in contact for a few days. We received some reassuring medical news about a mutual friend of ours who has just had a test for cancer turn out negative but she still has procedures to be undergone at the end of the week. We communicated news about new car and, for some reason, they chose not to believe me when I said we had it written off within 20 minutes when we turned into the path of an on-coming lorry. We are in the rather unusual situation of not having any holidays booked, or even visits to friends planned in view of the lockdown, so the car’s first really full outing will have to wait for a few weeks more yet.
Today turned out to be quite a busy day as it turned out. We decided fairly early on that we might make a trip out to a giant Sainsbury superstore on the outskirts of Redditch in order to buy some clothing items for Meg. So we had our customary walk in the park where we met up with a lady who we have met before and who gets a taxi once a week to the park in order to socialise and to get some exercise. She had been watching the Remembrance Day service in Westminster Abbey (shown on TV) and we reminded each other of the fact that Lutyens, the designer of the Cenotaph in London had designed it in such a way that it is also purposefully devoid of any religious symbolism, allowing people to project their own meaning onto the empty tomb, regardless of their faith. In fact, I now know that Cenotaph is derived from the Greek and means ’empty tomb’). A war memorial (admittedly not a Cenotaph) has just been erected in Bromsgrove decorated by a tasteful but undoubtedly Christian cross and I wonder to myself how those of a non-christian faith or none feel about that when it comes to the yearly commemoration of those who have died in conflict? We made our way home knowing that we had to make a lightning visit immediately to Redditch.
We found the Sainsbury’s quite easily – those who know Redditch know that it a series of roundabouts and bypass roads and it is quite easy to lose one’s way. The store which we have visited before turned out to be massive but we managed to get the things that Meg wanted with a fair range of choice. I then made enquiries to locate the ‘car maintenance’ section expecting to find a huge amount of shelve devoted to it, only to find that they only had about a shelf and a half devoted to motoring products. I managed to buy one or two of the things that I wanted and then we raced back home to be in time for the funeral service of our former colleague’s wife which was to be broadcast at 2.30. We had about five minutes to get ourselves a cup of tea and a biscuit to keep body and soul united before we joined the service.This link did not seem to work at first, although the test video said we were connected. So we changed browser and this time we got straight into the service and I doubt we had missed much, if anything, as the coffin was just being borne into the church as we connected. Then we had a very tasteful service ending, much to our surprise with the Bach cantata ‘Wachet Auf‘ (Sleepers Awake) – Meg and I had this played as the opening piece at our wedding in 1968 and we know it well, so this proved to be quite a coincidence. Although these video links into funerals are a relatively recent innovation, they do act as quite an acceptable substitute for those who cannot (or are not allowed to) attend the actual service.
Today is the day when we have just passed the hugely symbolic figure of 50,000 dead due to COVID-19. Even this figure is an underestimate because if you count those deaths where COVID is mentioned on the death certificate (and not just within the last 28 days) then the figure would arise to over 61,000 – and this is before you take account those who dies of untreated conditions which the COVID-19 crisis displaced from their operations or treatment programmes that might have saved their lives (or delayed their deaths)
There is a certain amount of breast-beating amongst the Democrats in the US. One evident question is ‘why were the polls so wrong?' to which the answer is ‘The polls were not very wrong given the margins of error associated with polls'. But two factors are starting to emerge from the pack.One is that getting the opinion of those who have already/are intending to vote by post in huge numbers has proved to be quite difficult. Another factor which may turn out to be quite significant is that many voters will not respond on their mobile phones to an anonymous polling organisation that they do not know and they may well trash the calls. In any event, a huge post mortem is under way and this involves not just an examination of the polls but also the Democrats strategy particularly for the Senate races where they did far less well than expected. It could be that some of the factors such as ‘defunding the police’ (whatever that means) was a massive turn-off for those of a centrist or floating voter disposition.
We made an early start today because we knew that I had to make an early morning trip to Waitrose in Droitwich (seven miles down the road) to pick up my ‘Click-and-Collect’ shopping order. Having picked up my daily ration of newspapers I then headed towards Droitwich but as the traffic was so light, I got there twenty minutes before my allocated ‘slot’ time. However, by making a slight detour from Waitrose I managed to visit my local hardware store, Wilko, from where I could purchase some screen wash and other car cleaning requisites at very affordable prices. And so I then collected my Waitrose order without more ado but I knew this was going to be a one-off, occasioned by the fact that on the news of the impending lockdown Mark II all of the available slots went like a flash. I have now secured slots for the next two weeks ahead as well as a special Christmas slot and know the system that as soon as new slots are released, it is a good idea to order two weeks ahead (which I have now done).
Our normal walk to the park was uneventful but it was a beautiful bright but rather chilly day – nonetheless, it is always heartwarming to have piece of autumn sunshine to raise the spirits. We chatted with our Italian friend (again) on the way home and then proceeded to make the by now conventional curry which is a habit which we have carried over from our student days some fifty years ago.
The COVID-19 news today is quite disturbing as the highest ever one day total (33.470 cases) has just been recorded. However it is being argued that as cases take several days to develop, the spike could only have been caused by infections in the very last days of October. The leak which broke the news of the lockdown landed on 30 October, a Friday night, forcing Downing Street to bring forward its announcement of a lockdown to 31 October, a Saturday. So it could well be that the very sudden ‘spike’ has a rational explanation – in the next few days if the rate of infection seems to diminish then this explanation may prove to be correct.
There is a massive row breaking overnight in which it looks as though some of the extreme Brexiteers who now inhabit the Downing Street fairyland are falling out with each other. It looks as though one ‘Vote Leave’ fanatic (evidently given a position of responsibility with Downing Street) named Lee Cain was promised the position of Chief of Staff to try to bring a semblance of order to the Downing Street organisation but this provoked such a severe counter-reaction from some Tory Mp’s and the PM’s own ‘live-in’ girlfriend Carrie Symonds that Lee Cain has resigned the position before he actually took up the post. If the phrases ‘Byzantine intrigue’ and ‘nest of vipers’ comes to mind, then this is hardly surprising under the circumstances.
There is a massive row breaking overnight in which it looks as though some of the extreme Brexiteers who now inhabit the Downing Street fairyland are falling out with each other. It looks as though one ‘Vote Leave’ fanatic (evidently given a position of responsibility with Downing Street) named Lee Cain was promised the position of Chief of Staff to try to bring a semblance of order to the Downing Street organisation but this provoked such a severe counter-reaction from some Tory Mp’s and the PM’s own ‘live-in’ girlfriend Carrie Symonds that Lee Cain has resigned the position before he actually took up the post. If the phrases ‘Byzantine intrigue’ and ‘nest of vipers’ comes to mind, then this is hardly surprising under the circumstances.
American politics seems just as byzantine at the moment. Trying to understand what sort of game the Republicans are playing, supporting a president who has evidently lost and will never succeed in the courts, then what is their strategy? The explanation I have managed to find is as follows.
‘So the name of the game is patience. They accept that the president has a right to make his claims, give him time to vent his frustration, but figure that there will be no evidence of sufficient magnitude to change the election results. Through their actions, if not their words, they’re acknowledging that come January, there will be a new president. Trump, too, shall pass.’
In the late afternoon, Meg and I just happened to be together in our study checking emails and the like when a Skype call came through from some of our Oxfordshire friends. This was so much more pleasant by being entirely unexpected (a bit like a neighbour dropping by a chat) we exchanged views of the American election and I passed on a tip to type ‘http://loser.com’ into any web browser to see what happens (I think you may be able to predict this, though). Our friends told us several of their stories before I was reminded of an experience of our own. We happened to be small bar in Almuñécar, southern Spain, reputed to have some of the finest hot chocolate in the area. In the bar, stuffed full of locals, a small baby was being passed from bosom to bosom of a group of neighbours – no wonder this (male) child had a beatific smile on his face. I asked an elderly gentleman was who was leaning against the bar whether indeed the baby was his. He replied ‘No Señor, this is a baby of all the world‘ and I could only but agree.
Despite the date, on which I shall not comment further, today was another fine, bright day with a clear sky and just a light cooling wind. We collected our newspapers and could not wait to get them home for a prolonged read because they would probably be full of the Dominic Cummings/Lee Cain story which rumbled out into the media spotlight yesterday afternoon. When these events happen, the TV channels are often very good at showing what is happening but when it comes to the explanation of exactly how these events have come to pass, then the traditional print media comes into its own. Few of the general population consulting their iPads and smart phones want to sit down with their phone for a good quarter-of-an-hour’s hard analysis and this is why, in my view, there is no substitute for a quality newspapers and a steaming hot mug of tea.
I decided to make a risotto using kipper fillets as the main ingredient to give some bite. I used to make a risotto week by week but rather abandoned it to cut down on too much rice/carbohydrate in our diet. Since then, I have discovered the packets of cauliflower rice which is very low in calories and hence I make the risotto in my traditional fashion. This involves browning a couple of finely diced onions before adding some chicken stock (cheating by using chicken gravy granules) and then adding a good dollop of plain yogurt nd some grated cheese when I judge the rest of it is cooked. The whole of it only takes about 15-20 minutes and our domestic help (whom I inveigle into trying some of my prepared lunches) which my son declared to be the equivalent of hot cat’s vomit (but then it didn’t taste it) as it was delicious)
Just before lunch, I went down to our medical centre by car after it had phoned me up early this morning to re-arrange a slot I had for later on in the day. Although it is a bit of a palaver going to a medical centre these days (ours holds you at the door and only allows 1-2 people in at any one time), I got in and out and had my routine blood-test within the allotted 15 minutes which means that I escaped a parking fee by a few seconds in my reckoning. From here, I made my way as in the car to a Sainsbury’s Express outlet (which sells only food) in order to take back an article of clothing recently bought for Meg which doesn’t quite fit. As it happened, they refused to take it back, much to my chagrin, which means that we will have to make another longish car journey in order to get a refund for the same.
After a delayed lunch, we settled down to watch the rolling news channel in the afternoon when I learned that Arizona had finally been ‘called’ by the news media for Joe Biden and the Democrats. This news had apparently been posted late on Thursday evening so it wouldn’t have hit the British news media until 5-6 hours later but I suppose our news media had much bigger fish to fry first thing in the morning and that is why I hadn’t heard the news. I did discern, though, that the Republicans were now offering money for any disaffected Trump supporters to come forward with tales of any electoral malfeasance (but what an American court would make of evidence acquired in this way one can only conjecture) I also saw a clip of film of a ballot box being transported with a tweet from Trump suggesting that something illegal was going on – whereas in practice, the filming of the ballot box being removed demonstrated that everything was perfectly legal and conducted according to the correct procedures. The final bit of American news I received was that the USA equivalent of our Electoral Commission had declared the election fairly won and lost.
There is “no evidence” the Nov. 3 election was compromised, committees within the Department of Homeland Security that worked on protecting U.S. voting systems affirmed Thursday. In a statement, they also called the 2020 election the “most secure in American history.”
And now to British political news. It transpires that after the departure of Lee Cain as the would-be Downing Street, then the ‘villain in chief’ i.e. Dominic Cummings, the PM’s most loyal adviser and organiser of the successful ‘Vote Leave‘ campaign, had decided not to wait until the end of the year but to walk immediately. All of the TV images were of the said Dominic Cummings leaving Downing Street by the front door (why not the back foor?) and walking disconsolately down Downing Street with all of his personal possessions in a cardboard box!
To those who may have forgotten, it was due to Cummings Svengali-type influence that Boris Johnson withdrew the whip (i.e. threw out of the Conservative party) such grandees as Kenneth Clark and Philip Hammond (both previous Chancellors of the Exchequer) as well as trying to organise the illegal prorogation of Parliament to get around some of the difficulties associated with Brexit. I doubt that ANY special adviser has ever had so much influence over a British PM as Dominic Cummings raising the question for the body politic of ‘Who (really) runs Britain?’
Today we slept in for a bit and consequently, I decided to go and collect our newspapers in the car so that this would shorten our eventual journey into the park and this also has the bonus of making sure that we get all of the Saturday supplements before they get sold out. Today was the kind of day for which the word ‘blustery’ might have been coined – we did get rained on somewhat on our journey down the hill but by the time we got to the park, the rain had abated. We went into our daily routine of flipping the water off the park benches with a tea-towel which we keep in our rucksack for this very purpose but we also took the precaution of using some of the excess plastic bags (in which our weekly shopping order is delivered) to keep ourselves dry as we sat down for a coffee. The wind started to get a little cold after having eaten our comestibles we were keen to get walking again and get home. As it happened, we were going to be treated to two international rugby matches today. There is a new competition which is theoretically the eight nations (the conventional six plus Georgia and Fiji) but as a result of COVID-19 the competition has had to cancel the France-Fiji match as some players have tested positive or are in isolation so the eight is already reduced to six. We first watched the Scotland-Italy match in which the Italians played quite well and seem generally the better team but could not quite overhaul the Scots who won in the end. Almost immediately after this was the England-Georgia match which seems like a bit of a mismatch except that the Georgians have a fearsome reputation for the aggressive way in which they scrummage. In the event, the English used the tactics of using their own scrummage whenever they could to make a point to the opposition and won the game easily 40-0.
We had an unexpected burst of pleasure in the early evening when there was a broadcast of Mozart’s requiem played by English National Opera (ENO) at the Coliseum. I wondered to myself whether the spacing of the members of the orchestra and the chorus would give a slightly enhanced and stereophonic effect. In the event, I felt the performance was a little disconnected at first but later morphed into something more successful. I do not wish to sound critical of the practical difficulties in trying to stage any kind of concert under present conditions and I was delighted that they felt it worthwhile to make the effort.
Meanwhile, things are not going well for the beleaguered Donald Trump who refuses to concede the election despite the fact that the votes available in the Electoral College are the mirror image of how he won in 2016 : 306 to 232. The court cases that he has tried to bring have all been thrown out fairly quickly with the judges showing no sympathy for claims brought without a shred of actual evidence (hearsay evidence, is evidently not allowed to be adduced in such cases) There are several more cases scheduled for next week but it seems likely that they will all bite the dust next week and the Republicans might then, bit by bit, concede the election having let Donald Trump have his way in the courts.
If American politics seems to be living in a parallel universe, then British politics seems also to be living in a complete fool’s paradise. At a time when the second wave of the COVID-19 is striking new heights (27,000 new cases yesterday and 462 deaths) and we only have one week to conclude the most critical trade agreement with the EU unless we leave with no deal at all, then what is occupying the British government? Why – an internecine conflict throughout Downing Street as ex-Vote Leave, ardent Brexiteers are being thrown out of Downing Street mid-afternoon (for having, apparently, briefed against the Prime Minister). Apparently, there has no progress whatsoever in the EU negotiations in the last week (when every day is precious) as the government tears itself apart and waits for the results of the American election to emerge (when we made alliances with the ‘wrong’ side i.e. Trump and have built up no relationships at all with the Democrats) One wonders if the Sunday newspapers will be replete with even more stories from the inside. The quote that I read recently which I rather liked was ‘The Vote Leave mob, drunk on their success in the referendum and the election, believed they were untouchable‘‘ and of course they act as a strange type of religious sect in which no criticism was ever allowed – however, as with all such sects they tend to ‘splinter’ and the various groups brief against each with an intensity that has to be seem to be believed. Truly , never was the expression ‘rats fighting in a sack‘ more apt.
I must say we have had a lazy, but fairly typical, Sunday engaged in a thorough trawl through the newspapers. I have marked out one article that I must read in the next few day, which is an account in his own words of Barak Obama’s first few years in the White House – Meg had previously read Michelle Obama’s autobiography and really enjoyed it when it was published last Christmas time. The political news from America is quite interesting today. Although Donald Trump has not (and may never) offer a concessions speech having lost the Presidential election, he has admitted for the first time that Joe Biden may have won the election but fraudulently blaming the ‘Fake and Silent Media’. I might add that the Sky news channel is running an item under the headline ‘US Election results – Donald Trump’s voter fraud claims debunked‘ which examines every fraud it can find and systematically examines them all to find that no claims of fraud can be proved. Later, Trump was to tweet ‘I concede nothing‘ perhaps in case his previous recognition that Joe Biden had won the election might be misinterpreted. A thought just occurred to me, however. If Donald Trump can get financial support of, say, $10 from each of the 70 million voters who voted for him, then he could fund a media channel (a string of TV and radio stations) which could pump out a stream of pro-Trump/anti-Biden propaganda for the next four years – just in time for the next Presidential election and for one of the Trump family to ’emerge’ as the standard bearer of the Trump legacy. I think this scenario is not too improbable – of course, we need to work out whether Donald Trump is successfully pursued and sued by all kinds of individuals once he does have the immunity offered to him by the Presidency. Given what Presidents of the US do in the final days of their regime and before a handover, could Donald Trump pardon himself for any misdemeanours before he actually leaves office – an interesting question?
More COVID-19 related news is the fact that euphoria over a potential vaccine is now abating somewhat under the realisation that the vaccine alone is only a part of the solution and has to be placed in the context of other measures such as social distancing and face-masks which seem bound to continue for the months ahead. A more sombre item of news is the fact that there is now a strong ‘anti-vaccination’ moment building up, with may of the population (17%-20%) refusing a vaccine even when it is offered. The social media platforms (FaceBook and Twitter) have already agreed to remove items posted on their websites which would appear to deny the efficacy of any vaccine (or even worse assume may consider the vaccine as actually harmful) but the time such posts have been removed, the damage is already done. The Labour Party is suggested criminal prosecutions for staff in the social media who do not comply – but is this closing the stable door once the horse has bolted?
Breaking news – to the second! I had just heard on the Sky rolling news programme that Boris Johnson has been asked to self-isolate for the next two weeks as he has been in contact with a MP who had tested as positive. Apparently, the ‘Test-and-Trace’ routine had caught up with him at just at the start of one of the most critical weeks that the government has to face.
Normally in these blogs I do not make any comment on the TV programmes that I watched the night before, but this morning I feel that I must make an exception. Meg and I watched last night ‘Small Axe:Mangrove’ by the noted film director, Steve McQueen. This was the story of a restaurant opened in Notting Hill in the 1960s (the Mangrove) which rapidly became a community centre for the whole of the Afro-Caribbean community. It was, though, subject to repeated police harassment which led eventually to a riot and a prolonged trial – which I will not spoil by revealing the outcome. However, I will say that Meg and I were on the edge of our seats, particularly in the later stages – in my view, it was one of the best bits of TV I have seen in the last ten years. Enough said – although I think there may be more in that series in which case I will be glued to my seat.
Meg and I had decided that we would make a venture out to a large Sainsburys store in the late morning to get a refund on a piece of clothing bought for Meg that did not fit. We nearly went to our local newspaper store but realised at the very last moment, that we had forgotten to bring our tokens with us (it is a weekly chore for Sunday evenings to tear the vouchers out of a little book and transfer them to my wallet for the forthcoming week). Every once in a blue moon – such as this morning, I forgot! So we had our elevenses in the park and made our home. Then we collected our tokens, collected our newspapers from Waitrose (as they had sold out from our local newsagent) and then went on our way to Longbridge. What used to be the home of car assembly in the Midlands has now been flattened and replaced by a series of superstores and quite a lot of new housing, built as a series of flats. We negotiated our way through the deserts of carparks, found our way into a gigantic superstore where we got our refund and then made our way home home. Once home, we had a lightening lunch (thank goodness for some of those bags of microwave vegetables which only take some 4 minutes because there are times, such as today, when you really want to turn around a meal as quickly as possible).
After lunch, I started to tackle a pile of unread newspapers – if we don’t get round to reading them that day we put things on a pile for ‘later’ and at some stage we need a quick flick through these to see if we have missed anything interesting. But what I did find particularly revealing looking at newspapers published just before the American election is that on several occasions, commentators had argued that Trump knew he was going to lose the forthcoming election having been seven points behind in the polls since about last January. So it was a well-rehearsed strategy that he was going to wait until he had some early victories under his belt and rely upon a ‘red wave’ of early Republican voting before declaring himself the winner, the uncounted mail-ed in Democrat votes as fraudulent and then relying upon the courts to add to the chaos and confusion. As things have turned out, this strategy did not work -but it was well predicted and under other circumstances might have been enough to secure him the sneakiest of victories. As it stands today, in American society there have been 11 million cases of infection and practically a quarter of a million have died – in the face of such an appalling pandemic, it is still a source of amazement that some 70 millions of Americans voted for Trump (and at leat a quarter of these believe that the whole election was fraudulent)
The news headlines today have been dominated by news of a second vaccine that seems, so far, to have come though tests upon 30,000 volunteers and seems to have a success rate of nearly 95%. Moreover, the new vaccine developed by a firm called Moderna can be stored at temperatures closer to that of a domestic fridge rather than the -70° of the Pfizer recently announced vaccine so it may well be a winner. However, during the course of the day, we had not taken out only options for any purchase of it (we have options on nearly all of the other leading vaccine contenders). Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, announced in the late afternoon that we now had an option on some 5 million doses (i.e. sufficient for 2.5 million people at two doses per person) available from April onwards. The government have appointed one of their own cronies at enormous expense to oversee the purchase of vaccines but as she had evidently failed in her job or be aware of this vaccine and take out options upon it, she was ‘not available’ to be interviewed on any of the media. In the meanwhile, Boris Johnson had been given a hard time by some ITV journalists on why he did not wear a face mask in a recent meeting with a Tory MP who has subsequently tested positive. This means that by not wearing a mask Johnson exposed himself to danger and is now having to self-isolate for 12 days. Of course, there is one rule for the politicians and another for the rest of the 60 million of us who have to comply…
Tuesday’s used to be the day devoted to my Pilates class mid-day but under the lockdown procedures, that evidently had to go. So we had our normal walk down to the park and bumped into some of our oldest friends who, as it happened, were on their way to a family funeral of an elderly aunt. How much singing they were going to do in church under the new regulations I am not sure but they had some interesting plans to broadcast something from the car radio system. Rather tastelessly I suggested that ‘Highway to Hell‘ would not be the most appropriate song to sing under the circumstances but we settled on ‘Stairway to Heaven’ as a better choice. We picked up our newspapers and set off for the park, finding many of our normal benches occupied. Nonetheless we met one of our regular ‘park associates’ there and chatted away before we made our way home for lunch – fishcakes with Cavalo Nero kale and carrots glazed with syrup once they have been parboiled (to make them a bit more interesting)
This afternoon was going to be devoted to car washing – or more specifically the first wash of the new car. This is always a rather particular occasion because it is the occasion when you may find some slight blemishes (although to be fair I found none as Honda cars are so well built these days). You also learn the individual curves and idiosyncrasies of each car the first time it has a detailed wash. I have a well-worked routine, although I got a little out of practice on the previous car. This involves using some watering cans to spray on the car to loosen the dirt first and a couple of buckets of warm water, one filled with detergent. My routine consists of a watering can routine first, detergent wash with a large soft brush, detergent wash with a specially microfibre ‘mitt’, followed by the wheels, the insides and finishing off with a clean of the windows. I must say that this Honda proved to be one of the easier cars to clean of any that I have ever had – perhaps being a bit shorter and a tad less tall helps. So now, I am resolved to get back into a good routine every 7-10 days.
The COVID-19 news tonight sounds dramatically bad – although the number of new infections had fallen by about 1,000 the number of deaths was up to 598 in a single day. It could well be that the statistics for the next few days will prove to be terrible as we are about 12 days since the start of the last lockdown. When a new lockdown is scheduled to start, many people try and have one last fling in pubs, bars and restaurants and this almost inevitably results in a huge spike in the infection rate two weeks later.
The American news is equally depressing. In the last few days of a presidency, an out-going president can issue a flurry of regulations- Donald Trump has been using his remaining days trying to make it much more difficult to obtain food and disability benefits upon which so many people rely. He also had to be persuaded not to bomb flat nuclear installations in Iran which are being used to enhance their supplies of uranium. This is actually quite a dangerous time for the world in general because goodness knows what an outgoing president of the likes of Trump might be tempted to do. One is just hopeful that there are enough ‘sensible’ people around Trump to try and ensure he does not do anything especially dangerous. On a slightly brighter note, there is also news that Dolly Parton has donated $1 million to aid medical centres in their search for an effective anti COVID-19 vaccine. Apparently, a portion of the singer’s money went towards funding an early stage trial of the Moderna vaccine. Dolly Parton is well known for her devotion to charitable causes. It is not particularly well known that Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a bookgifting program that gifts free books to children from birth to age five in participating communities within the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Republic of Ireland. This does help to restore one’s faith in human nature!
It has been one of those dark, gloomy days all day today – although mild and blustery, the rain seemed to threaten nearly all day and did arrive in some force during the afternoon. Nonetheless, we enjoyed our normal walk encompassing both collecting the newspapers and ending up in the park on one of our favourite benches. The leaves are now falling apace as you would expect in November and, on occasions, can prove a little hazardous. This occurs when you have a large flat leaf (e.g. from a horse chestnut tree) which then becomes flattened to the ground under the trampling of many feet – with the addition of a little moisture, they then become slimy underfoot and can send you flying if you do not take care. (In case this sounds a little extreme, Meg and I remember a guest lecturer from our Scraptoft Campus, De Montfort University days when a fit 28-year old dashed down the path because she was a little late and fell over.) She picked herself up and carried on but in the course of her lecture, she thought she was experiencing some pain in her left arm and shoulder. Later, as an experienced nurse, she returned to work and had a colleague examine her only to discover she had been nursing a broken collar bone. As it happens this is emblazoned on my memory – so I treat large flattened slimy leaves with a certain degree of respect!)
Today being a Wednesday, I treated ourselves to a (by now) traditional curry. I suppose that having done this approximately once a week for the last fifty years, it has become engrained into my psyche but the only variation to a traditional curry that I make is a sliced and diced apple ( or pear) in the summer with a handful of sultanas and a tablespoon of brown sugar. One of my former colleagues said to me ‘Ah – I see you make curry by the Arabic method‘ but of course, I do not really know, apart from the fact that I have always done it this way.
This afternoon, I busied myself gutting the last of my pile of newspapers and getting on with some filing. In the late afternoon, I Skyped one of my old Hampshire friends who, like me, has been keenly following the political news and the American elections. We exchanged commiserations with each other as to what might occur if Donald Trump goes absolutely rogue in her last few weeks. I did do a Google search wondering whether an insane president can be bypassed and found that there is a procedure, albeit cumbersome, in the 27th amendment to the American constitution. I think the difficulty here is that the Vice President has to agree whereas the existing VP says he is looking forward to a smooth transition towards the next Trump presidency. Apparently, the Democrats did think hard about this problem when Trump emerged from his COVID-19 episode declaring he was a ‘young man’ and other non-sequiturs but nothing came of their attempts to institute a speedier procedure to deal with the removal of an evidently incapacitated president. So far, I have not seen any resurgence of this question in the press but if Trump’s behaviour becomes quite bizarre, then perhaps even the American system might be stimulated to act.
There is increasing concern in the UK political system about how to handle the Christmas period. The latest thinking (or is a deliberate leak from Downing Street?) is that the lockdown which is due to expire on December 2nd i.e. in about two weeks time, will be extended by another month in exchange but as a ‘reward’ we will be allowed to have five days of relative relaxation over the Christmas period. Public opinion may be divided on this – I have heard two contradictory views on how to let a late 80’s grandparent experience Christmas. One view is to to forget about COVID-19 and let the elderly person enjoy one last Christmas with their family even at the risk of contracting the virus and then dying shortly afterwards. The contrary view is to keep the lockdown extended, over Christmas if necessary, if it preserves the life of the elderly person until at least the first few months of 2021. This is quite a difficult judgement call but I suspect that government will opt for a month extra lockdown until, in effect, the New Year but allowing a little bit of licence over the Christmas period (although it will undoubtedly come at a price)
The latest bit of advice (a bit late?) is to keep windows open for at least 15 minutes at regular intervals throughout the day in order to dilute the virus micro-particles which can stay in the atmosphere for some time as micro droplets. I am not sure whether the full import of this advice has been fully thought through – but I do remember a nursing book, written in the 1920s that I had read when I was teenager which advocated flinging open the windows of a ‘sickroom’ regularly – perhaps they were way ahead of their time?
Today was an interesting day in climate terms. When Meg and I walked down to the park, there was a sharp wind in our faces, with those tiny particles of rain that seem especially cold. It was touch-and-go whether we could sit on a park bench or seek the shelter of the bandstand but the weather abated a little and we availed ourselves of the bench. And then the clouds rolled away under the impact of a moderate breeze and suddenly the sky turned blue and the air seemed incredibly clear. It might have been a combination of the absence of pollution as there are fewer cars on the road, plus a beautiful autumn light and suddenly we had a vista across the park in which all of the colours appeared incredibly sharp. I suppose it was the sort of day that professional landscape photographers love as they can obtain incredibly sharp images – you sometimes get these type of conditions in February with an incredibly clear sky and dense air.
We had no Skype, Zoom or other calls in prospect today so we settled down for a final clearance of the newspapers. At the bottom of the pile of newspapers were two supplements with the latest Good University Guides where I still check the relative positions of De Montfort University (at which I had worked for 26 years) and the University of Winchester (where I worked for 10). They both tend to rise and fall over the years – more latterly, they seem to fall rather than rise. At the very bottom of the pile came a car brochure for the new car which we have just acquired – I allowed myself the luxury of a slow careful read of this as suddenly the words on the page seem to acquire an additional layer of meaning once you actually have the car in your hands, so to speak. In the late afternoon, I fitted the car boot liner I had acquitted a couple of days ago – this had had to be laid flat on my living room to allow the plasticky material to regain its shape after it had been bent in double for the transit. Having said that, it fitted like a dream plus all my other car boot storage boxes are perfectly positioned.
One big political story emerging this evening is the report into the behaviour of Priti Patel, the Home Secretary – she forced the resignation of of her permanent secretary and another senior civil servant had a heart attack whilst he was attempting to work late into the night to comply with an entirely unreasonable request. Every time I see Priti Patel on screen, I say to myself ‘Director of Publicity for the UK Referendum Party’, the predecessor of the Brexit party. Word emanating from Downing street is that the report will find the Priti Patel did break the ministerial code that enjoins standards of civility upon working with colleagues. However, there is no question of her being sacked as the report indicates that some of her behaviour may have been ‘unintentional’ (this to me sounds like an excuse as lame as the schoolboy’s ‘Sorry, Sir, but the dog ate my homework‘) A convinced and not particularly competent minister would never be sacked by the present PM and particularly not Priti Patel who makes bloodcurdling announcements as to what she like to do do with asylum speakers she deems to be ‘illegal’ (putting them on a deserted South Sea island was one of her ideas from which she had to be dissuaded). I am looking forward to ‘Newsnight’ on tonight’s BBC2 which might spill a few more beans. Apparently there is some delay in publishing the report (which Boris Johnson has had for months) as Patel argues the toss back and other whether an apology needs to be isssued – and if so, for her general conduct (as she ‘has form’ over several ministries now) or for any specific incidents of her behaviour.
The Brexit endgame is now fast approaching. Some Tories are in a real flap over the economic damage to be wrought by a ‘no-deal’ Brexit whereas others consider that as Cummings has now been despatched, the Brexit deal may be massively watered down.To make matters worse, one of the Brexit negotiators on the EU side has been diagnosed with the COVID-19 virus so negotiations are paused for the moment – this is an additional complication when the timescale left for meaningful negotiations is already incredibly tight.
Today was always scheduled by the weather broadcasters as a ‘transitional’ day and it was certainly somewhat colder than the mild spell to which we have become accustomed. However, after collecting our newspapers, we made our way to the park where we sought out the shelter of the bandstand (along with other disparate groups of dog-walkers) to have our comestibles. We did not tarry too long as the wind was blowing a little too coldly for our comfort and after a brief chat with two of our park associates, we made for home. Today was the day when our domestic help was busy in the house and she had very kindly bought for us some Waitrose crispy battered haddock which we heated up in the oven and consumed along with some fresh tartare sauce. So it was really good to have a meal where we had scarcely done any preparation ourselves and we ate the kind of meal we would normally have cooked for ourselves.
Some of the American news is comic, not to say tragic. Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, had given the most bizarre news conference at which he was attempting to explain how Donald Trump had been defrauded of the election that Trump had actually ‘won’ but, as he got all hot and agitated, so his dark red hair dye started to drip down his face making him look like a pale imitation of Dracula. Needless to say, this didn’t help to get his message across (as the assembled journalists were laughing so much) Meanwhile, Donald Trump had summoned some of the ‘Electors’ (formal officials from the state of Michigan) to the White House and encouraged them not to certify the results from Wayne County in Michigan (containing Detroit i.e. predominantly black electorate) this allowing the Republican-dominated legislature in Michigan to award the state’s votes to Trump. Eventually, after much public protest the two Republican electors who wanted not to certify the vote relented and went along with the rest of their colleagues. The state now appeared to be delivered for Biden but the two dissident Republican electors swore some affidavits attempting to reverse their own decision. It is evidently a murky story but it doe show that some of the Republican Party are not at all averse to attempt to ‘steal’ a state that had legitimately voted Democrat to turn it into a Republican victory. If nothing else, this shows how contemptuous of democracy the modern Republican party has now become.
Of course, it is not only in American politics that ‘black is white’ and ‘white is black’ Here in the UK, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has been found by an official report to be guilty of bullying behaviour (swearing and shouting at staff) thereby breaching the Ministerial Code which all ministers have to sign upon taking office. And, by all accounts, she was warned of this behaviour at the start of her spell as Home Secretary. The report has gone to the Prime Minister who has sat on it for months and had now declared that ‘Priti Patel is NOT guilty of breaching the Ministerial Code’ and the matter is now closed. (This is unprecedented behaviour for a Prime Minister, by the way, in cases like this not to endorse the findings of an official, independent enquiry) For her part, Priti Patel has issued a sort of apology in which she states that ‘I’m sorry that my behaviour has upset people and I have never intentionally set out to upset anyone.’ So that’s all right, then! The senior civil servant and adviser who has conducted the enquiry and written the report finding a breach of the Ministerial Code has promptly resigned as his position is now clearly untenable. Boris Johnson has tweeted to his Conservative MP’s that they should ‘form a square’ around Priti Patel which they have promptly done, tweeting messages of support (what a wonderful Minister etc. etc.) Priti Patel has a lot of support on the backbenches (very right-wing, avid Brexiteer – in fact, one prominent backbencher opined they wished had more ministers like Priti Patel) Under these circumstances (i.e. almost universal support from the backbenchers) her position always looked secure despite the fact that (a) Teresa May had to sack her as a junior minister in the ODM for illegitimate bahviour and (b) this pattern of behaviour is not new but has followed her across several ministries. But if you are an incompetent, Brexit-supporting minister you can get away with practically anything.
As today is ‘Day 250’ since I started this blog, it feels like some kind of anniversary – but of course it isn’t. We did have a more pleasant and milder date than of late, so although there was a cooling wind we enjoyed our customary walk to the newspaper shop and the park. On the way down, we had quite a long chat with one of our closest sets of friends who espied us through her window and came out to greet us. Our pleasure was only increased when we encountered some more of our friends who were brave enough be outside doing a bit of autumn maintenance. We spent some time discussing what we thought might be the arrangements for more ‘normal living once this period of lockdown finishes on 2nd December. In particular, we were speculating whether the churches would be allowed to open in the post-lockdown period and what the arrangements might be for the various Christmas services which will be held, all being well, on Christmas Eve. We did rather go down memory lane and exchanged reminiscences of the student parties we used to enjoy in the 1960’s. This was the era before nightclubs so we all had to make our own entertainment. The ideal party lasted for about 12 hours (7.30pm to 7.30 am) and generally consisted of three elements. The first of these was a certain degree of drinking, sometimes with food if we wanted to be posh and to have a ‘wine AND cheese’ party. The stable musical entertainment were Beatles and Stones records played on something like a Decca Dansette record player (remember that Radio Caroline only started broadcasting in March, 1964 and we were at university in 1965 – out of the range of Radio Caroline anyway) The second phase of the party was when a certain pairing off ensued – generally couples sank to the floor and canoodled in the semi darkness for as long as was deemed necessary. The third and most enjoyable part of the proceedings started at about 3.30 in the morning when we would sit round in a circle on the floor and argue about the meaning of life, political and moral questions of the day and so on. We generally had a dim of view of engineers (if, for example, you looked in the Yellow pages of a telephone directory and looked at ‘Engineers’ there was a cross-reference to ‘Boring’). Medics, although well qualified in terms of their ‘A’-levels never got beyond their comfort zone. We seemed to have some of the most stimulating conversations with people studying Law, Geography, Town Planning, Psychology – on occasions I even attended some of their lectures out of interest!)Then you would wander home at about 7.30 in the morning with all of your physical, emotional and intellectual needs fulfilled (well, not completely fulfilled but you get my drift)
This afternoon, we watched a highly entertaining rugby match between England and Ireland which I had anticipated that the Irish would win – in the event, the England team steamrollered their way past the Irish who only made a score late on the game. We had intended to follow this up with watching the Wales-Georgia match but for whatever technical reason we could not get Amazon Prime to deliver us the video of the match today although we were successful last week.
The Priti Patel row is still rumbling on, despite Boris Johnson wanting to draw a line under the matter. There are several issues that are rearing their ugly heads. The first of these is that Boris Johnson had on two occasions asked the author of the report to ‘tone down’ his conclusions but had met with a refusal. In addition, opposition politicians are expressing outrage that the home secretary’s apology was for the upset caused, rather than the behaviour itself. There are also calls for the full report to be published rather than an edited summary of it – this might happen as a result of pressure from a Select Committee which is going to investigate the matter or even have to be produced as evidence in an Industrial Tribunal claim for unfair dismissal. If this continues to run and run, then as well as Priti Patel being damaged, the role of the Prime Minister in over-riding the decision of his own ‘independent’ report looks distinctly sleazy. Ultimately, of course, along as Priti Patel remains the darling of the Tory right wing and the ardent Brexiteers (i.e. nearly all of the newly constituted Tory party since Boris Johnson/Dominic Cummings organised the departure of modern voices such as Ken Clark, Philip Hammond, David Gauke- one could go on and on) then Priti Patel will be safe.
Today is what is popularly known as ‘Stir Up Sunday’. To any people, particularly those living in more rural communities, this is the day traditionally when people started to make their Christmas puddings, giving them plenty of time to be baked and then mature with liqueur before Christmas Day. It used to be the the tradition in some households that grandchildren used to help their grandmothers (typically) prepare the cake – sometimes, small coins (such as a silver 6d was included in the mixture). But the words ‘stir up’ actually relate to a much older tradition – the Collect for this particular Sunday used the words ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people‘ but the words themselves got a little displaced sideways to refer to culinary rather than theological, activities. I dare say that many of these old customs and traditions are dying out but there must be some elderly members of the community who remember them. Before I went down on my walk this morning, I listened to the radio station ‘ClassicFM‘ and heard the classic recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto by Jacqueline Du Pré who career was tragically cut short by MS at the age of 28. She was only 20 years of age at the time she made the classic recording – and is still regarded by many as one of the greatest cellists of all time. Listening to the recording and contemplating why it was so distinctive, it occurred to me that it was the exquisite timing of her phrasing – she seemed to pause for about a fifth of a second before entering each phrase and this gives an additional poignancy to her rendition. In fact, many followers of classical music will listen to a cello recording and say ‘That was the Jacqueline Du Pré recording‘ and as it was made in 1965, it had certainly stood the test of time being recorded more than half a century ago.
I collected our newspapers early as I tend to do on a Sunday and made contact again with my friendly Asian newsagent with whom I hd exchanged web addresses last week. His style of cooking seemed to evoke great admiration both in California and in London and I resolved to see if I could try and sample some of the style of his cuisine when (if?) I ever get to London again. In the meanwhile, he had read some of these blog entries and quite enjoyed them. After we had a pleasant stay in the park we walked home meeting nobody in particular (the Sunday ‘crowd’ in the park does differ quite a lot from the people we meet during the week – after all, the weekends do have a somewhat different rhythm to the weekdays). After a chicken dinner (prepared in the style of what I think is sometimes called ‘Spanish chicken’ – onions, peppers and tomatoes fried off and then added to a white lasagne sauce and baked in the oven for an hour) served with broccoli. Delicious, even though I say it myself. Then in the afternoon, we watched the France-Scotland rugby match where e had anticipated that the French would overwhelm the Scots – it was actually quite a hard-fought much with the scores level at half time but the French eventually prevailed as we thought was inevitable.
I have read in the Sunday newspapers from a usual well-informed source (Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times) that the days of Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, may well be numbered. The word ‘on the street’ appears to be that Boris Johnson has protected her ‘for now’ and to avoid giving the impression that he is bowing to Labour pressure. But come the reshuffle of the government, scheduled for early in the New Year, after Brexit is finally done and vaccines my be in sight to deal with the coronavirus then Priti Patel might be shuffled sideways to become the Chairman of the Conservative party (i.e. concerned with party organisation) as she is already the darling of the Conservative faithful. What is especially interesting is the notion being put about that she is moved because she is not particularly competent in her role. Perhaps if she was, she could resort to intellect rather than having to shout obscenities to her staff – to my mind, this is an indication that she is surely out of her depth. One of her university professors has opined that her MA at the University of Kent was so bad that he practically had to write it for her!
Well, it’s the start of another week. This morning it was dry and cold with quite a heavy fog when we awoke – as the morning developed and the day warmed up, so the mist intensified somewhat. We collected our newspapers knowing that they could be full of details of the post-lockdown arrangements which are to be announced formally sometime today. Our stay in the park was uneventful but we were fortunate on the way home to bump into both of our sets of friends who live down at the bottom of the hill. We made some tentative plans to have a Christmas ‘get-together’ for the four of us on the Monday after Christmas if the regulations then in force permit this. I sent off a quick email to my Pilates teacher to see if our class is resuming and she is going to get back to me on this – however, it seems that there is a relaxation of gym membership over the whole of the country on December 3rd. Talking of gyms and gym membership, I decided to weigh myself morning and was a bit horrified to have put on a few more pounds than I would like. So this afternoon, I started again on my ‘Stepper’ regime (a ‘stepper’ is like a small bench incredibly useful for exercise purposes) I have a favourite video of a routine demonstrated by a very vivacious but quite sensible young American lady who puts me through a series of routines, each only lasting a minute with a 10-second pause between each exercise. The whole routine takes about 10-15 minutes altogether and, to make sure I am in the correct frame of mind, I always change into my ‘tracksuit bottoms’ much as I would if I were actually doing a Pilates routine. The trick, as always with any weight-reduction routine, is to notch down one’s calorific intake a little (but not too much as the body goes Into ‘starvation mode’ and your metabolic rate lowers, thus increasing your weight in your attempt to reduce it). So a slight reduction in calorific intake coupled with a bit of exercise enough to raise your metabolic rate should be just about enough to lose about 1.0-1.5 lbs a week which out to be ideal. In a week’s time, I will report on my progress (or lack of it).
The really big news which hit the news bulletins this morning is that the vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca seems to have an efficacy rate of 70% – or even a rate of 90% if the immune system is (counter-intuitively) primed by a half-doe followed by a full dose some four weeks later. The government is mega-excited about this for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the vaccine seems cheap to produce (about the price of a cup of coffee). Secondly, it can be stored at normal ‘fridge’ temperatures making it readily accessible. But thirdly, and most importantly, the Government has an option to obtain 100 million doses of the vaccine which should be enough for most the UK population. It is hoped that the those who need the vaccine the most (NHS front-line staff, those with especially compromised immune systems) should be vaccinated by Easter of next year. So truly, the end may be in sight. However, I refuse to be swept away in a wave of excitement as (a) there are still quite a lot of safety and regulatory hurdles yet to overcome and (b) we need to use the vaccine alongside more traditional safeguards such as social distancing, facemasks and hand washing. But one has to say that it is a tribute to the hard scientific work that has been done that not one but three vaccines have all appeared at once. The Russians have their own version of a vaccine as do the Chinese but one wonders what degree of rigorous testing has been undertaken compared with the protocols which we have experienced in the West.
Christmas, to which we are all no doubt looking forward, is going to seem very strange this year. On the one hand, there is a feeling of slight anticipation even though the opportunities for social intercourse and for Christmas meals will be limited. Nonetheless, the members of our immediate family will have a Christmas meal and we are making tentative plans for a Christmas tree and other festivities. Yet, on the other hand, I have a feeling that I want to get Christmas over and done with – the days will be getting longer by about a minute or so a day and there is always the spirit of optimism that the New Year will bring. I did float an idea that we should all cancel Christmas and celebrate it on June 21st – the Australians are used to having Christmas in full summer after all!
The month of November has just flown by and it seems incredible that we are only a week away from the end of the month and eight days before the end of the lockdown. The rules have just been announced for how as a society we will ‘celebrate’ (if that is the right word) Christmas this year. It seems that we shall be allowed to form a temporary three-household Christmas ‘bubble’ from 23rd-27th September which by my reckoning is the Wednesday of Christmas week until the Sunday, with Christmas Day itself being on the Friday. I can foresee that there may well be some problems how people are to interpret and behave in accordance with the new regulations. It is being pointed out the the coronavirus does not know it is Christmas and it is probable that we have to deal with a spike of infections in January as the increased social interactions will have given the virus more time to spread.
Today was a bit of grey and overcast day but it did not threaten any rain so we managed to collect our newspapers and enjoy our perambulation in the park as per usual. As well as the normal supply of ducks we also enjoy the presence of flock of gulls, except I am not sure which actual breed of gull it is (not a ‘seagull’ in any case) I counted up to forty of this morning and no doubt they feed on the bread which is often brought along (contrary to the advice given by the park officials) to feed the wildlife in the area.
We met with our Italian friend on the way down to the park this morning. She, quite rightly, takes all of the precautions advise to deal with the pandemic very seriously but it was interesting to know that she is in regular contact with members of her extended family in Italy and none of them, to my knowledge, have succumbed to the virus. In the late afternoon, I went through my ‘stepper’ routine which I am now resolved to do regularly and then we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends. They have been through the wars a little, medically speaking, but had some good news to tell us. As they are in the category of ‘clinically extremely vulnerable groups’ then they were finding it difficult to get out and receive their routine ‘flu jab. However their medical practice had realised that according to the policy of rigid shielding they both had difficulties getting out to the surgery for their ‘flu jabs. However, the practice nurse had come to their house (well, a window actually) and had administered the ‘flu jabs to them both. In addition, she conveyed the news that the army was due to deliver supplies of the new Oxford University/AstraZenica vaccine as soon as it has received approval and they were in the highest priority group to receive the vaccine perhaps even well before Christmas. Whether this is possible or not I really could not say but our friends were delighted to discern a light at the end of the tunnel and were looking forward when they could get out and have a bit of fresh air and a change of scene.
In the US, the General Services Administration has declared president-elect Joe Biden the apparent winner of the US election, clearing the way for the formal transition from Donald Trump’s administration to begin after weeks of delay. The GSA said on Monday that it had determined that Biden was the winner of the 3 November race after weeks of Trump refusing to concede and violating the traditions of the transition of power at the White House. So whilst Donald Trump has not (and probably never will) concede that he has lost the election, he has at least authorised the executive of the General Services Administration to release funding which will allow for the orderly transition of power to Joe Biden. A key date will come in a few days time on December 14th when the Electoral College will meet – and formally cast the states allocation of votes according to the winner in each state. As the situation stands at the moment, Joe Biden has 306 of these votes and Donald Trump 232 – evidently, in a very close election, the winner of the election is the candidate who gets to 270 votes out of a total of 538 Electoral College votes. Sometimes, some individual electors do not vote the way they have been mandated by the popular vote in the state but we shall have to wait and see if there are any such shenanigans this year.
Today looked as though it was going to turn out to be a miserable day but we were a bit delayed in our walk down into town. I was awaiting a telephone call from my local GP surgery to discuss the results of some blood tests – what should have taken place at 9.30 eventually took place at 10.40 after some prompting. So this delayed me somewhat and then I had to update my Waitrose order which I always do the day before the order is due to be delivered. We are now onto a regime where if I can time the advance order correctly, I can get a delivery slot between 8.00am-9.00am two weeks later which is our ideal. I do have to remember to get the order in at just the right time but that is how people who use the system regularly have learnt how to use the online system effectively. So by the time we started to walk down to the park, the weather had cleared somewhat and it turned out to be quite a nice day.In the park, we met with our old and dear Italian friend who often seems to ‘take a turn’ in the park these days and had one of those interesting conversations that range over life, birth and death. As we walked home together, we helped to cement the relationships between two of our sets of friends and for whom we are the common factor – as it happened, they had some acquaintances in common. I think I have pointed out months ago a theoretical notion that one of our tutors at university (Professor Ronald Frankenberg) had espoused that one index of community is the density and interconnectedness of the social network – hardly a completely revolutionary notion in itself but one that is capable of a degree of mathematical measurement. The telecommunication and railway engineers are well aware of this aspect of networks – which can be made more robust if you can route a telephone call (or a train) though a verity of routeways to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ if one of the legs of the network happens to get taken down. This incidentally, was also publicised in a book I read about the haphazard nature of the way in which the railway system as developed in the UK – if the Nazi invasion of Britain had ever taken place, then it would have been quite difficult to disable the railway network because those ‘in the know’ could always route a train through ‘Little Puddleton-on-the Marsh’ (a factitious nameplace) in the event of a link broken somewhere on the system.
This afternoon, after our traditional curry lunch for a Wednesday, Meg and I got to work with a variety of domestic tasks. Meg was mending one of her kilts (well worth the investment in time and effort given what useful garments they turn out to be the autumn and winter) whilst I ordered a supply of new clothes (mainly shirts) over the internet as we have not bought any new clothes since the start of the lockdown some eight months ago.
The political news today has been dominated by the spending review (a sort of mini-budget) given by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The official figures have revealed that the depth of the recession facing the UK. The Office for Budget Responsibility expects GDP to decline by 11.3% this year, the biggest drop in annual output since the Great Frost of 1709, Europe’s coldest winter in 500 years that caused widespread death and destruction to agriculture. Added to this, and now public acknowledged in some forecasts, is that the results Brexit, dire in themselves, may be added to the effects of the pandemic and a ‘normal’ ‘flu epidemic to produce a crisis of almost epic proportions in which social order my well break down. In The Guardian today, there is a photograph of a huge queue of lorries, five miles in length, on the M20 motorway in Kent – all a result of the delays occasioned by the French trying out some new software that may well be needed whether or not there is a Brexit deal. The government last month apparently gave a warning that could be queues of some 7,000 vehicles on the main motorway routes to the Eurotunnel and Dover ferries before you reach for your calculators – if each lorry is twice the length of a car and they are separated by one one yard, then 7,000 lorries would occupy some 28 miles of road. (These incidentally, are the government’s own assessments of the ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’) This might impel negotiators of the UK side to seek some kind of deal as Brexit on top of all of other worries would only be throwing petrol onto an already blazing bonfire. And finally, today is the day when Diego Maradonna (one of the greatest footballers of all time) drew his last breath – at the age of 60.
Today started off with a rolling ground frost (as predicted in the weather forecasts) but this fog and frost was gradually burnt off and it turned out to be rather a nice day with clear blue skies nd a pale winter sunshine when not in the shade. Today was the first day in which our Waitrose order was due to be delivered in a morning slot (and it was, at 8.30am) so the day get off to a good start. We are making some very tentative plans to see if we can venture a bit further afield in about a week’s time to visit a much larger Waitrose store upon the outskirts of Worcester when there are ought to be plenty of choice for us to buy some Christmas food and drink.
Today was the day on which the new ‘Tiers’ were announced that would take over once lockdown is completed on December 2nd. It seems that Tier 1 is going to be used for areas of the country where the incidence of the virus is already very low (Cornwall, the Scilly Isles and so on) Tier 2 is going to be the ‘default’ position for most of the country (including us here in Bromsgrove) whilst Tier 3 is reserved for Birmingham and the West Midlands, the Manchester region and much of the North East. The overall situation is that most people will be covered by Tier 2 which is more stringent than the Tier 1 to which they had become accustomed. Some members of the Tory party are expressing extreme disquiet at the stringency of the new provisions and may rebel when there is a vote in Parliament next Tuesday. They are demanding a full cost-benefit analysis for their constituencies which is felt particularly acutely in these areas of the country here you have large centres of the population (where the virus rates tend to be high) surrounded by a large rural hinterland (where the rates of virus tend to be low) The government evidently has some kind of algorithm as to how allocate areas into the appropriate tiers. Factors that are taken into account are these: the use detection rate (particularly in the over 60s); how quickly rates are rising or falling; ‘positivity’ in the general population; pressure on the local NHS and finally, the local context and exceptional circumstances such as a local but contained outbreak.
There is quite a lot of discontent being expressed in the media tonight. Local businesses in the hospitality business who have just moved into Tier 2 feel very hard done by as do those areas in which there is a large discrepancy between urban and rural areas caught up into the same Tier. The government had promised to review the situation after a fortnight’s operation – but one does have the feeling that once you in a Tier (similar to being allocated to a class in a streamed secondary school?) then getting out of it may be incredibly difficult and the situation may not be resolved until the arrival of Easter and/or the vaccine. Evidently, a lot of businesses in the hospitality industries cannot survive this lack of footfall and subsequent income.
There is news from the Brexit front line, courtesy of Sky News. The government have set up a series of portacabins at which they attempt to show drivers arriving in the UK the complexities of a post-Brexit life. Until now, all they had to do was to wave a passport at the border staff – now they have to complete a customs declaration giving details of all of the goods that they are transporting. Many of the drivers have only a minimal command of English – so border staff are attempting to help with the aid of Google ‘Translate’ In addition, the app which they are supposed to be using does not even work yet. In total, this new pile of red tape will run to 270 million customs declarations a year, and, in practice, responsibility will fall to hauliers and drivers, 3.5 million of whom cross the short Channel straits into Kent, largely through Dover, every year. The Brexit talks are absolutely on a knife-edge. French President Emmanuel Macron threatened to scupper any Brexit deal that ‘sacrifices’ French fishermen, as he continues to stand in the way of Brexit talks reaching a breakthrough. He is said to be concerned that 20 percent of French fishermen risk losing their jobs if quotas are drastically reduced if the EU does not have the same access to UK waters after the transition period. French fishermen have also threatened to blockade lorries carrying Britain’s catch, as most of the fish and seafood caught by British fishermen is exported, with three-quarters of it going to the EU. As we have said often before – you couldn’t make it up!
Today turned out to be quite a fine and bright day, although it was pretty cold at the start. We are evidently in the midst of a high-pressure weather system at the moment and so enjoying the reasonable weather whilst we can. Today was the day when our domestic help arrives and we always have a good chat and a laugh about life’s vicissitudes before we start our morning walk. We met with two of our sets of friends today and enjoyed a chat on their drive – which actually passed quite a lot of the morning away. And so to home and to a risotto made according to my newly developed recipe (cauliflower rice, kipper fillets) which is turning out to be a Friday favourite. This afternoon, after lunch, I decided to have a second brisk walk into Bromsgrove on my own this time. I wanted to buy some cleaning materials and hardware type items that never quite make it onto our weekly Waitrose order – I am always amazed at the bits and bobs of things that you suddenly find you need (mainly cleaning materials) and I ended up buying and lugging home a large bag full of the kinds of things it is always incredibly frustrating to run out of. For example, I always like to have a supply of sponge cloths available to cope with a sudden spillage or other emergency and these start a progression down the cleaning order (ready used get relegated to car cleaning before their eventual demise) Several large parcels arrived including some shirts and other Amazon deliveries to keep us well supplied. I try to avoid Amazon when I can largely for ethical reasons and they are not always the cheapest – but they do tend to be the fastest and with ‘free’ delivery (via Amazon ‘Prime’)
The COVID-19 virus is causing myriad controversies. The Sage group are advising that the Christmas celebrations could cause the incidence of virus to increase ‘by a large amount’. Last night at the Prime Ministerial briefing, Chris Whitty the Government’s chief medical officer said ‘Don’t hug grandma if you want her to survive Christmas‘. So there seems to be an indication that if we do collectively relax our guard a little (for quite understandable reasons) there will quite a price to pay in the New Year. The difficulty is that this is just the period of time when hospitals naturally experience a lot of pressure with ‘normal’ respiratory conditions that require hospital treatment. So this does place most people with real Christmas dilemmas – do we engage in something that approximates to a ‘normal’ Christmas with relatives or do we attempt to soldier on for a few more weeks, knowing the end (via a vaccine) may be within our sight?
The Americans are facing quite an acute dilemma at the moment as they are trying to negotiate how to celebrate Thanskgiving (which is when many American families traditionally get together) with a pandemic that is still wreaking a terrible toll. The incidence rate is approaching 13.5 million and another 8 million have apparently had the virus and recovered. The death toll is 270,000 (more than a quarter of a million) and it could be that if the situation approximates to that of the UK, then this figure may almost double once we take into account the number of people who may have died prematurely because they could not be availed of suitable treatment when resources are diverted to cope with COVID-19 cases. I did read a terrible ‘Vox pop’ account about a week ago where some people who were dying of the virus had so swallowed the Donald Trump line about ‘false news’ that they refused to believe that they were actually dying of the virus – they thought they were dying of pneumonia. There is a conspiracy theory of which the majority of Americans have heard that powerful people actually planned the coronavirus – 5% of people think this is definitely true whilst another 20% believe it is probably true. If we were to stratify the responses by educational level, then approximately half of the American sample (educated only with a high school education i.e. without any form of higher education) believe that this conspiracy theory is definitely or probably true. Of course, this section of the population formed the bedrock of support for the Donald Trump vote so beliefs in the virus have helped to form a chasm in American society similar to that formed by Brexit in the UK.
Donald Trump has finally admitted that he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden (which they will) But he explains that it is hard for him to concede because ‘we know that was massive fraud’ Of course, we do not know whether Trump is so deluded that he believes his own propaganda or whether it is all part of a massive game to keep his support base as high as possible.
Today was a dull and gloomy day and so it stayed all day. Meg and I went to collect the newspapers in a semi-drizzle but fortunately for us, the rain had just about ceased by the time we came to sit on our park bench and have our customary coffee. As the weather was so inclement, the park was denuded of its usual complement of mothers with young children and dog walkers – however, the joggers did not seem to be deterred and I suppose a modicum of rain might almost be both cooling and refreshing. We met with a friend of a friend and her husband who are evidently keen walkers and were not to be deterred – they had been to Hagley Hall ( a local 18th century stately home in the vicinity) the day before and enjoyed a good walk in the bright sunshine until the fog descended later in the day. This afternoon after our lunch we prepared to watch the England v. Wales rugby match which was broadcast on Amazon Prime. Fortunately for us, the reception as good enough for us to enjoy the match although we got the occasional drop-out and buffering factor (as Amazon Prime is delivered over the internet rather than through the airways as such) The England team powered their way to a place in the finals next week in what was an effective but not particularly pretty match to watch. The Welsh put up stout resistance playing in Llanelli but were eventually overhauled and could not prosper even in their home country. Of course, without a crowd, there is no home encouragement as such. To follow this match, we again tuned into Amazon Prime to watch the France-Italy match. The Italians started well and bravely against the French and even scored the first try but eventually, they were completely overhauled and lost the match by a large margin. In the interval, I amused myself (!) by trying on the four pairs of shirts we have recently acquired from a well-known shirtmaker who has a wonderful range of cotton, non-iron shirts (we don’t believe in ironing in our house!) These all fitted perfectly as we knew they would – we particularly appreciate the little metal stiffeners with which they equip their shirt collars to keep them looking straight and not ‘dog-eared’ looking.
The Tory party seems to be in absolute disarray, not to say open revolt this evening, after the publication of the new ‘Tier’ rules to which we are going to be subject once the lockdown ends on Wednesday next. It seems that the Tory MPs who have constituencies in the South of the country or in areas that are largely rural or where the incidence of the virus appears to be low are in open revolt, including even the Chairman of the 1922 committee (a committee that is supposed to represent the interests of ‘ordinary’ backbenchers – i.e. not on the ministerial payroll) and will they will probably vote against their own government in the vote next Tuesday evening. Boris Johnson appears to be back-peddling for all he is worth with promises to end the new rules early, to promise a review within two weeks and goodness knows what else as he is an absolute panic mode) It is a strange situation to be in where the only real opposition to the government comes from its ‘own’ MPs and not from the opposition parties (e.g. the Labour Party) who have yet to determine whether they are going to support the government or to abstain. If the Opposition were to deploy an interesting strategy, they could always vote with the government to ensure that the ‘Tier’ rules were approved – and then taunt the government by constantly telling Boris Johnson that he can only get his legislation passed because the Labout opposition has come to his assistance. This might drive an absolute wedge in the split between Boris Johnson and the rest of his parliamentary party – and will probably lead to his demise within a matter of months if not weeks. My own personal view is that once Brexit is ‘done’ in some kind of weird way e.g. a ‘deal’ which is so thin that it is actually more like a ‘hard’ or ‘no-deal’ Brexit than anything else and the vaccine appears to be alleviating the worse of the pandemic, then the Tory Party will ditch Boris at the first opportunity and get another leade who might prove to be a more suitable and adept Prime Minister (like Rishi Sunak?) to help to lead them out of the mire. I have just a final thought on this – to the casual observer is does appear that the protesting Tory MPs would not mind seeing the NHS overwhelmed and thousands of people dying so long as their own business interests were satisfied. Michael Gove has apparently been arguing that the NHS will be overwhelmed unless the new ‘Tier’ rules are adopted but large sections of the Tory party either choose not to believe him (‘crying wolf’) or else do not even care (which is probably worse)
I thought this blog was not going to appear tonight – or indeed ever again! When I tried to log on to my site, I got a system message to say that WordPress would not run on an out-of-date version of PHP (the programming language in which WordPress is written) and it needed to be updated. Whatever I did I got the same system message – to say I was distraught is an understatement. Not knowing that I do, I wrote a desperate email to my friendly web administrator in Canada from whom I rent the webspace. She suggested a solution which meant that I had to go into a special control panel (cPanel) and then access a specific program that would update every folder in my webspace. I did this with bated breath – and it worked! A heartfelt email went winging its way to Karina – how often do you get personal service like that? But I have rented webspace from her for about 15 years now and its on occasions like this that it is worth its weight in gold. And now to return to more mundane matters!
The day was dull and overcast so I went down and collected our newspapers by car before watching the Andrew Marr show (which is our default for a Sunday morning) Then we walked down to the park today and were a bit dismayed to find that it was absolutely teeming full – cars were parked on the nearby grass verges making a real mess of them as the car park was full to overflowing. Another source of dismay that there seemed to be a feeling that the lockdown had already ended – there seemed to be hordes of people none of whom seem to be making the slightest attempt to socially distance. I wonder of there will be a big ‘spike’ in about a couple of weeks time as the virus has had a field day? As I remember it, the current lockdown was due to be announced on a Sunday but the newspapers had got wind of it. So Downing Street brought forward their announcement to the preceding Saturday and some people must have gone wild in pubs, clubs and whatever because about two weeks after this there was a massive surge in the infection rate. I sometimes wonder how uninformed and ‘lacking in intelligence’ some people must be given the warnings that are all over the place about the necessity to socially distance and so on. I suppose that people get inured to the constantly repeated messages and if they only catch the virus in a mild form or are unsymptomatic then they almost pretend that life must be back to normal.
Tomorrow is going to be quite a busy day for us what with one thing or another. First thing tomorrow morning, Meg and I are attending an outpatient clinic for Meg and this might take a certain amount of time – the appointment was made at quite short notice and then we were phoned up with a list of questions to make sure that we were virus free. Then we will park the car and have our normal elevenses in the park before we go off to the Webb’s garden store to try to collect our Christmas tree voucher. Webb’s (a huge garden store with a national reputation) makes a special offer to its cardholders in that once you buy a tree at the normal price (which we always do) then most of the price is refunded in the form of vouchers in effect giving you the tree for nothing. We are doing that because in the evening my daughter-in-law and I are going to Webbs again to select our tree. Everything seems so much earlier this year – I have never started to think of Christmas decorations until December has actually arrived but there seem to be decorations going up all over the place. I wonder if people are so fed up the lockdown that they are desperate for almost anything to make life seem a little brighter in the meantime.
This afternoon we watched a rugby match (Ireland vs. Georgia) which you would have thought would have been one of the strongest teams against one of the weakest. As it turned out, the Georgians put into an extremely robust, not to say physical performance and performed very creditably against the Irish – so it turned out to be quite an entertaining match after all. Most of our TV viewing this evening got a little disrupted this evening as I was struggling with the WordPress technology.
There is a report this evening that Boris Johnson’s ‘concessions’ to some of the Tory rebels may backfire and instead of solving the problem may even fan the flames of rebellion. The cost-benefit analysis area by area is due to be published tomorrow but may well prove to be vague in the extreme. The vote itself is scheduled for Tuesday next so the next couple of days is going to be very interesting!
We always knew this was going to be a busy day and so it proved. We started off in the outpatients department of our (very) local hospital where Meg was attending for an outpatient’s appointment – all masked up and hand-gelled up as you might imagine. After a fairly long and quite satisfactory appointment, Meg was prescribed some new medication with might prove to be efficacious. Once we had concluded the outpatient appointment, Meg and I went to our little local newsagent where we sympathised with each other because we both had experienced computing difficulties in the past day. And so on to the park where we partook of our coffee on a blustery not particularly cold day. Fortunately, the park was much less busy than yesterday as you might expect on a dull autumn day. Then we jumped in the car and made our way to the Webb’s department store to collect our Christmas tree voucher (available only to club card holders). When we got to Webbs the queues were absolutely horrendous and must have snaked over at least one hundred yards with crowd control barriers that one got used to at airports in the days when we used to fly. Fortunately one of the Marshalls indicated that those wishing to seek Customer Services (as we were) could bypass the queues for which we were truly grateful as otherwise we might have queued for an hour just to get in. So we eventually got our precious Christmas tree voucher and made for home. In the early afternoon, I decided I would make a trip out to the pharmacists in order to get Meg’s new medication prescribed. Whilst it was being dispensed, I took the opportunity for a quick ‘whiz’ around Asda to get one or two things that I know that Waitrose does not stock and a few things that are so much cheaper at Asda. Then I picked up Meg’s medication and made for home. In the early evening, my daughter-in-law and I made a tip to the afore-mentioned Webbs store so that we could pick up our Christmas tree, as we always do. Normally, it takes us about 1 minute and 20 seconds to choose a tree but on this occasion, we did take two minutes and went seconds. Then we met with our next door neighbour (who happens to work in Webbs anyway) and she had very kindly arranged to transport our tree home. This was because both my daughter-in-law and myself have changed our cars in the past few months and as they are both shorter than the Honda CR-V we have used in the past, there as a severe doubt whether we could get the tree home by ourselves. (The problem does not occur in reverse because we chop up the tree into manageable ‘bits’ before we take it back to Webbs for recycling) So we got our tree home and it is now firmly in its stand but now ‘resting’ i.e. we are allowing its branches to settle a little before the act of decoration starts in earnest in a day or do. Although we do put some decorations around our living room and have our own little ‘fibre-optic’ Christmas tree, I have taken the view over the years that the fewer the decorations we use for adornment and the less elaborate is their deployment, then the easier it is to clear them all away on or before the traditional ‘Twelfth Night’.
The economic news tonight is that Sir Philip Green’s Arcadia retail empire has collapsed in the worst single corporate failure of the COVID-19 crisis to date, leaving 13,000 jobs hanging in the balance. Even though he was given his knighthood by Tony Blair, modern commentators are being far from kind to Sir Philip. The consensus view of him now is that he was not a natural retailer but he was very good at asset stripping. Apparently with many of his stores, he sold off the properties they occupied to a property management company domiciled overseas (where they paid hardly any tax) but under the control of Philip Green and his family. The stores, meanwhile, had to pay rent for he premises they occupied which reduced their profitability (and the amount of tax they had to pay) but the net effect of all of this was to make Sir Philip Green obscenely wealthy. It is said that Sir Philip Green’s wife once was awarded a dividend payment in excess of one billion pounds (but I have yet to check on the veracity of this story)
Well, I must say that I am really glad to be shot entirely of the month of November and to be entering the month of December. I always feel that the month of December flies by because of the intensification of social life as Christmas approaches – although this year, Christmas will be a very different affair for most of us. Also, as December 21st approaches, so does the shortest day which means the once Christmas is out of the way, at least the days are getting a little bit longer if only by a minute or so. The bad weather will also bear down on us in January and February but at least we have had a fairly mild autumn so far -when you have bad weather such as snow in the autumn, then the winter seems to go on for ever and a day.
It was a beautiful fine day on our walk down this morning with a clear blue sky and the sun even warm in places where it could strike the pavement evenly and not be obscured by tall trees on the other side of the road. We spoke with one of our acquaintances who was busy putting lights around the denuded branches of a young sycamore tree and we notice that many people are starting to decorate their houses and their front gardens. There is one particular house in a block long since sold off by the council where the owners really go ‘over the top’ when it comes to external decorations in the house and garden. On this one particular house, it appeared from a distance, that Santa Claus appeared to be in danger of an imminent suicide as he clung perilously to a window sill. In practice, Santa was hanging onto a translucent rope ladder, no doubt to be lit up later on this evening, but from the angle from which we were approaching Santa appeared to be in dire straits. When we arrived home, we had a nice conversation with our next door neighbour, mainly on the subject of the atrocious political leadership we were experiencing on both sides of the Atlantic and we were speculating how long our current Prime Minister can survive in office once the immediate crises of Brexit and Covid appear to be in resolution.
We had quite a busy time FaceTimeing in the late afternoon and early evening. Firstly we got into contact with our friends in Hampshire who have been in lockdown since the start of the pandemic – their feelings were very much that having come this far, they were not going to prejudice things over Christmas by too intimate a contact with family. Some family members were going to come and occupy a conservatory where they could communicate but were insulated from each by some glass – no doubt, families all over the country are having to improvise similar arrangements. No sooner had we made a ‘slot’ when we can chat again in a fortnight, then our ex-Waitrose friends FaceTimed us and we exchanged news of each other’s activities. They were slightly on tenterhooks at their end because a new edition to the family was in the process of being born (but had to be transferred from Worcester were there was no spare space in the maternity site to Hereford where they did have a space). Our son and daughter-in-law are busily decorating the newly acquired Christmas tree (another family tradition) so we can FaceTime a video of the tree when we are next in contact next week.
Car wash time has come around again – I am trying to get into a routine of washing once a fortnight (once a week seems excessive as we hardly go anywhere these days with the lockdown in operation) One has to time these operations quite carefully as the days are so short – I started at 3.0pm and had just about completed quite a comprehensive clean by 4.0pm when it was still just about light – but only just. When I get a new car, I always treat myself to some new cleaning materials and treated myself to some micro-fibre towels for a final finishing off. I thought this might have sounded a bit excessive but the results I am pleased to say were really good. So I gave all of my car cleaning cloths a quick machine wash ready for next time.
We expected that the government would get its own way and once the Labour Party, the Lib-Dems and the SNP decided to abstain, the result was not really in doubt. In the event, some 55 Tory MP’s voted against their own government supported by some 15 Labour MPs and some independents. The real question now shifts to about a fortnight’s time because then some of the regulations may be ‘tweaked’ and it is possible that as a result of political pressure and/or wheeler dealing so area might be detached from Tier 3 to join Tier 2. There is also talk of getting more ‘granularity’ in the data i.e. not averaging out the results of a low-virus rural hinterland with a high-virus urban area to get a result somewhere in-between that reflects neither.
Today will go down as those truly momentous days. It was announced first thing this morning that Britain’s medicines regulator, the MHRA, has ruled that the vaccine produced by Pfizer/BioNTech which offers 95% protection against COVID-19 has been approved for use. Of course, this is tremendously good news. This is exactly how the new vaccine works:
BNT162b2 uses messenger RNA that describes one of the spike proteins that stud the outer surface of SARS-CoV-2. Though human cells don’t make spike proteins, they can still read viral messenger RNA and follow its instructions. When someone receives a dose of BNT162b2, their body responds by producing the spike protein, but only the spike protein, and no other part of the virus.
Since spike proteins aren’t normally found in human cells, their presence triggers the immune system, leading to a defensive response where the proteins are removed. Now that the immune system’s had some practice, it’s ready for the real thing. If someone who was vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 was exposed to the virus later on, their immune system is ready to react, and hopefully, fend off the virus.
Messenger RNA vaccines are relatively new on the scene, but have the potential to be safer and more effective than other vaccine types. There is no risk of getting COVID-19 from a vaccine, as the virus is never present in the body.
There is a slight downside to this good news and that is that the RNA is so fragile that the vaccine has to be stored at a temperature of -70º which is often available in specialised biological facilities but not in the typical doctor’s surgery. So it looks as though the initial supplies of the virus will be distributed to hospitals where they have specialised facilities and from here, it will be used to vaccinate NHS and other care staff in the first instance, There is then a descending scale of priorities that run from 1 to 9 with residents in a care home and the carers the first priority, 80+ and frontline health and social care workers the second priority, 75 and over the third priority (I won’t go on but personally I shall be in the this priority order and Meg being a bit younger will be in the next priority zone down the list). I suspect that it may be mid-February at the earliest that I shall personally receive a jab (with a follow up three weeks later) but at least we can say that the end is in sight – but only if combined with more conventional measures such as social distancing, face masks and gels.
Today was a bit of a dull day but nothing to stand in the way of our walk for newspapers and coffee in the park – we did have the bonus, though, that we did not have to utilise our tea-towel that we bring with us to dry the park bench as it had been dry and cold overnight. As we were starting to walk home, we met with some of our oldest friends and received some wonderful news. We informed them that we had consulted the website for our local church and ascertained that church services, subject to the normal restrictions, will start again from this weekend. We will need to make a telephone call to book our place but all being well, we are set to resume our normal church attendance from Saturday onwards (but minus any hymn singing, of course) Then our friends gave us some marvellous news. They were in touch with a group of church members who were organising a type of pilgrimage to Rome in September of next year. This will involve deploying the services of a contact in the English College in Rome (a seminary used for the training of priests) Also involved is a trip to the Sistine Chapel and perhaps even an audience with the Pope. In short, would we like to go on this trip? It took Meg and I about 0.1 second to ponder all of this and to say ‘Yes, please!” but we will have to wait for further details to arrive by email and trust that we can well and truly booked up (and it is not massively over-subscribed)
Tomorrow, Meg and I are going to make a special trip to Waitrose in Worcester. This will be a journey of about 20 minutes so but as the store is a very large and well supplied store, we thought it might be a good idea to make it into a trip here we can buy some Christmas food and drink (some of which will act as presents for some of our friends and acquaintances in any case) We haven’t been to this store before but the directions make it appear simple enough to access and there is always the Sat-Nav of course (the first time in this new car but it ought to operate like the previous one).
Today was an ‘interesting’ sort of day! It was raining cats and dogs, as they say but we were determined not to let it deter us. After we had collected our newspapers (our lucky day – the very last copy of both ‘The Guardian‘ and ‘The Times‘) we had intended to go into the park to have our coffee. But as it was raining so hard, we decided to go on our trip to a distant Waitrose on the outskirts of Worcester which we had been given to understand was huge and therefore full of choice at Christmas time. Although I had taken down the postcode, I had already looked at the directions via Google and it seemed to be just a straight run down the M5 to junction 7 and then a couple of miles along the main road into Worcester. But then we started to run into problems – the road which we though we wanted signposted us to Evesham and so we thought to ourselves – ‘No, not that way- it must this way’ Having gone for several miles long what was evidently a new ring road in the course of construction with massive digging vehicles and traffic jams all over the place we decided to trace our steps, take the road pointing to ‘Evesham’ and finished off where we wanted at the huge Waitrose. This really was like a cornucopia and we filled a trolley full of Christmas goodies (mainly death by carbohydrate such as puddings, Christmas cake, mince pies, stollen) and a quite a lot of alcohol most of which are intended as presents for close family. But we did treat ourselves to a nice Rioja and Cava for Christmas Day, not to mention replenishing our supplies of gin and sherries for when/if people call round. We did feel a little ‘Waitrosed out’ as a result of all of this because e had received our weekly online order from the said store which we are now scheduled to receive between 8.00 and 9.00am each Thursday morning. At this time of year, we have to find extra space in our cupboards and squeeze items in whilst avoiding the temptation to overflow things into our garage (nice and cool – but also a temptation too far for the local mice who have invaded us before)
In this morning’s email, my friend from down the road had sent me detail of the pilgrimage to Rome next September which he had mentioned to us in the park the day before. At the end of the details was an application form which I assiduously filled in at the end of afternoon but there were some questions it that required some chasing around in order to complete e.g. what was the policy number of the travel insurance it was anticipated that you already had, complete with the emergency telephone number to contact them which had already been supplied to you. But I managed to get it all filled in and got it put into an envelope ready to be despatched first thing in the morning. We will need to fly from Bristol Airport which is some 85 miles away but the access will be fairly fast via the M5 and A4 so that should not be very problematic for us – and better than Heathrow. We are hoping that by getting our application fairly early the tour as a whole is not over-subscribed and that our application to join the pilgrimage will be accepted.
Later on in the early evening, I was hunting for an envelope in which one of our Yorkshire friends (in whose guest house we used to stay and who has written a book about his experiences in which we figure) had sent us a Christmas card but with his address written on the back of the envelope – which I now couldn’t find. Somewhat distraught, I rang the contact number I had in my iPhone and was delighted to be able to make contact with our old friend again (who at the same time as myself was having some medical problems) To cut a long story short, we had an incredibly good chat catching up over our plans fo the immediate future – or rather the ways in which both Brexit and COVID-19 had laid waste to them. Anyway, we are now in WhatsApp contact with each other which means that we can use a video call facility to each other in the future. (I have never used this facility in WhatsApp but now is the time and the motivation to learn how to do it) It could be that we meet up in Spain for an extended holiday together when the coast clears, but of course until the E111 status becomes clarified as the result of the Brexit deal/no deal we are both little stuck. Nonetheless, our friend has assiduously been polishing his Spanish grammar (and he is a natural linguist and ardent anti-Brexiteer) so whoever we meet is bound to be a good trip down memory lane for the both of us!
Today was the kind of day for which the adjective ‘raw’ was invented. Meg and I had a rather uncomfortable walk to pick up our newspapers and thereafter, we went to the park and shivered whilst drinking our coffee. We then had a really uncomfortable walk back home with our fingers as cold as ice – I suppose having had such a mild autumn has made us, in a very old-fashioned word ‘nesh’ (OED definition:’weak and delicate, feeble’) but it does also have a rather pejorative overtone. Still, it was nice to get home and shortly afterwards I needed to go out in the car to the physiotherapists in our local health centre to whom I had been referred for an episode of ‘trigger finger’ in my left hand. I was given a range of strength and other exercises to perform and will be seen again in about six weeks time to assess my progress (or lack of it). After I got home, I cooked a special risotto (which our domestic helped to to consume). Then we made an interesting excursion around our garden to find suitable kinds of leaves and holly berries from which our domestic help can utilise her magic to create some nice autumnal displays. In the late afternoon and early evening, we engaged in some video-calls with some of our Hampshire friends. In the first of these we used Zoom but I always find this a bit difficult to get going and end up with a meeting in which I am the only person present until others are invited to join me. The ‘Zoom‘ link was pretty ropy with a lot of internet drop out- we weren’t quite sure whether this as due to the technology itself or the fact that is was an early Friday evening and we might be having bandwidth problems. The second call to a friend using FaceTime was much more successful but of course you both have to have Apple technology to communicate across this link.
The news concerning the EU and UK trade talks is not at all encouraging: it seems that some kind of stalemate seems to have been reached and the talks have been put ‘on hold’ for the time being. Saturday (i.e. tomorrow) will not be used for any more negotiations but rather for a briefing of principle (political masters). In a joint statement, Lord Frost and Mr Barnier said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson would ‘discuss the state of play’ on Saturday afternoon. The deadlock could be interpreted in two particular ways. The pessimistic way of viewing this deadlock is that there no meeting of minds and therefore in the absence of an agreement, the deadlock must point towards a ‘no deal’ outcome. However, there is another way of viewing the situation which is this. If the negotiators on either side have gone absolutely as far as they can go without breaking their mandates, then the ultimate ‘bridging of the gap’ can only take place as a result of direct political decision making. In other words, if Boris Johnson is determined to have a deal, then he can help to create one – but if is determined to leave with no deal, then all of the negotiations will have been in vain. It could be said that Boris Johnson is really on the horns of the most acute dilemma. If he ere to choose ‘no deal’ then the economic consequences will be dire for all kinds of industries in the UK.The compounding effects of COVID-19 and a ‘no deal’ Brexit will plunge the country into a massive economic crisis. On the other hand, whatever kind of minimal deal he manages to live with will be classified by the ardent Brexiteers and the right wing of the Tory Party as a complete betrayal and Boris Johnson will soon be ‘toast’ and will be dumped by the Tory Party as soon as possible. Of course, in the past, Tory Prime Ministers could rely upon a supine and generally supportive right-wing press to hail any kind of deal as a ‘triumph’ and could then could claim to have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.But the press has been much less supportive of the present Conservative Government which has hardly covered itself in glory after its maladroit handling of the pandemic. Watch this space!
Today was a fine, bright day (eventually) and we strolled down to pick up our newspapers and have our sojourn in the park in relatively good conditions. In comparison with yesterday when the biting wind gave a really raw edge to the morning, today was quite mild with quite a clear sky and a breeze that whilst cool did not have the cutting edge of yesterday. We walked home to our by now traditional Saturday lunch of sausages, knowing that we had three rugby matches in prospect. The first of these was Georgia vs.Fiji, two ‘second flight’ teams but who turned out to be a very interesting contest. The trouble is that I only saw about two-thirds of the second half of the match as it had started early and I had to fit in cooking lunch at some point. The matches were being provided over the Internet as a live stream on Amazon ‘Prime’ and this has proved problematic the last time we accessed it to watch rugby. The problem appears to be a live-stream, there is quite a degradation of internet quality, occasional freezes and a need for pausing for buffering. When it came to watching the second match which was Ireland vs. Scotland this problem became acute and I was on the point of abandoning the whole of the second half after I had been treated to several minutes of the screen saver. Eventually, I switched Amazon Prime back off and then back on again and this actually helped to ‘solve’ my problem. Having had a delay for several minutes and then restarting, the program re-started from practically the start of the second half. The program was now adequately buffered so I managed to watch the whole of the second half adequately. Then onto the third match which was Italy vs. Wales. We only managed the first half of this as the second half coincided with our visit to church, which had started to resume after the lockdown of a month. When we returned home from the service, we managed to watch the whole of the second half that was evidently provided a kind of ‘catch-up’ service from Amazon.
Our attendance at church was not exactly filled with unalloyed joy. Attendance was limited to a maximum of 36 and I doubt that there were that many of us. The necessity to socially isolate, a freezing church (as the boiler still had to be repaired) and the inability to meet with other parishioners all made for a somewhat bleak experience. Our mood was not exactly lightened by a chat we had in the car park as we were leaving with one of the parishioners whom we know well. One parishioner who we know and usually sits near us was ill in hospital with the COVID-19 virus. To compound difficulties, she had had a fall in her home but was not discovered where she had fallen on the floor for 24 hours. Another acquaintance had fallen and her glasses had caused her to have an eye injury. Moreover, the parish weekly newsletter informed us that our parish priest was stepping back from active ministry due to personal and private reasons. As he recently had a bout of colon cancer, we can only fear the worst and hope that his absence is only a temporary one. As I wrote to him on the occasion of his last illness offering him whatever support I could (as a recent sufferer myself) so I will do the same again in the next day or so and hope for the best.
The political news tonight seems to indicate that a stalemate has been reached between the UK and the UE over a new trade. I suppose it is theoretically possible that two savvy political leaders could agree to meet and resolve all outstanding issues by splitting them down the middle and then no side would be able to claim either defeat or victory. But I suspect that the issues that divide the parties are so deep and intractable that such a ‘splitting of the differences’ is impossible. For example, the EU is very keen to have a level playing field i.e. we all stick by the same rules and trade within them. But the UK wants to have an ‘unfair’ playing field such as abandoning common standards of protection for the workforce (such as the minimum provision of holiday pay, maximum hours worked) so that we could have a competitive advantage vis-a-vis other EU states. How it is possible to ‘square the circle’ in such fundamental issues of principle is difficult to say – it is quite possible that playing games of brinkmanship such as we have experienced recently can result in a bad outcome almost by accident. As they say, the next 48 hours should prove critical.
Today we entered into our normal Sunday morning routine which involves running down to the newsagents in the car to pick pop the Sunday newspapers in order to get back for the Andrew Marr show (which never quite manages to fulfil its promises these days). Our sit-down in the park was a little on the cold side but not really unpleasant. Whilst sitting on the park bench we were visited by a friendly dog (this is not at all unusual as their magnificent olfactory organs can sense the presence of food from a long way away and hence we are the target of their attentions). Once we got into conversation with the dog’s owners, we ascertained that it had been a rescue dog from the RSPCA. I opined to the owner that you were never quite sure what you were going to get if you acquired a rescue dog but we were informed that before a dog was entrusted to a new owner, it had a ‘behavioural analysis’ done on it. I suppose with a knowledge of the breed and some acute observation, the veterinary personnel who perform the behavioural analysis can have a fair idea whether the dog is going to be OK with children, other animals, not to mention human kind (all of this I didn’t know) On the way home, I got a telephone call from one of our friends whose wife was busy preparing the Christmas wreaths that we had already pre-ordered. As it happened, we were only two minutes away from their house so we called in had our choice of wreaths. Tomorrow we will pass by and pick them up and then when we get them home we will have to decide how and where we are going to hang them. As it happens,I have reel of fishing line wire which is very fine but has a 50lb breaking strength so no doubt I can utilise this when I choose a display point for the wreaths. Our friends also informed us, much to our delight, that they were going to make application to go on the pilgrimage to Rome next September. All of this means that there will be a group of some 7-8 of us who all know each other and it may well be that we can hire a minibus to take us all down to Bristol airport which seems to be our best accessible airport if we wish to avoid Heathrow.
The afternoon was dominated by our watching the England-France rugby final which turned out to have a pulsating finish. Two minutes before the end, England after concerted pressure all during the second half of the match eventually scored a try (and converted it) which managed to make the scores level. From then on, it was extra time and a ‘sudden death’ finish i.e. whoever scored would win the game. England appeared to have won the match only for a penalty kick to hit the upright post, traverse the goal and then not, in the event, go in. So with hearts in mouths, we watched England eventually get a penalty from which they won the match but it certainly, in the words of the Duke of Wellington, ‘a damned near-run thing‘ (said of the battle of Waterloo) Without it sounding too fanciful, I wondered idly if this result would have a deleterious effect upon the current increasingly tense EC-UK trade negotiations in which the French are said to be maintaining a very hard line. I was wondering whether the French might be stiffened in their resolve NOT to yield to the UK having just had victory just snatched from their grasp in the dying seconds of the match this afternoon.
There is no news yet of a COVID-19 negotiation outcome, as yet, as the negotiators have resumed their negotiations for ‘one last throw of the dice.‘ It looks as though day, or even some time tomorrow, might be the critical end-point for the negotiations. If and when the UK reinstate the clauses from the legislation governing the operation of the internal market (removed by the House of Lords) then the EU will probably walk away from the negotiations indicating there is no point in trying to reach and agreement if the UK government intends that it intends to break past agreements (the ‘Withdrawal Agreement’) which has the force of international law.
Meanwhile, there is quite a lot of excitement in the press over the imminent arrival of the recently developed vaccine. This looks as though it is going to be delivered to various hospitals and distribution points over the weekend with final preparations on Monday next and possible start of the injection programme on Tuesday. Various political leaders have indicated they are quite prepared to publicly receive their doses of the vaccine so as to increase acceptance of the virus in the wider community. Even the Queen has indicated she is willing to receive the vaccine (although not in public) and apparently there is a precedent for this in the early 1950’s when the monarch ‘did her bit’ for the acceptance of the polio vaccine.
Today we needed to make one of rare excursions onto the High Street in Bromsgrove and we decided to take the car for reasons I shall explain later. On the High Street, we visited Boots opticians in order to get a slight adjustment made to Meg’s glasses. This was all very straightforward and then made a trip round a cut-price cosmetics shop to get some bits and bobs of which we were short. We had a quick perambulation around the park but it was too cold for a stay on a park bench so we made our way back to the car and thence to the house of one of our friends. We had previously arranged to buy couple of Christmas wreaths (proceeds going to aid our church) and as I had chosen them previously, all I had to had to do was to and pick them up from a pre-arranged spot in their garden and then transport them home. I must say we were glad to get home today because we felt pretty well chilled so it was good to have our coffee and comestibles sitting by our own fire. After lunch, I surveyed our porch and gathered to gather a range of materials to help to hang them in the porch – a job I though should only take about 15-20 minutes. After that, our intention was to treat ourselves to watching ‘The Belles of St. Trinians‘ (the 1954 Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell version) although I vaguely remember that a much more up-to-date version has been made recently in about 2010 (when the girls were notably more street-wise than in 1954). So now to little Mike and his saga of how to hang two wreaths on the brick wall in our porch. The original idea was to hang them on other side of the downstairs (loo) window and to do this, I utilised a couple of stick-on-hooks with their action assisted by some strips of gaffer tape. As I was putting up the second wreath, the first crashed to the floor shattering into 2-3 pieces. So I abandoned the idea of sticking them to the brick wall and plan 2 was to stick them onto the plasticised? surround of the window frame. This resulted in as much failure as effort no. 1 so I needed to think of a third solution. Raiding my box of supplies, I found some picture pins of various sizes. The intention was to put the pin into the space between the mortar and the brick but this attempt, too, ended in failure as the pins bent upon attempting to hammer them in. So onto attempt No. 4 which was to attempt to put a screw again in the ‘weak point’ where the mortar meets the brick. This attempt, too, ended in failure. And so on to Effort No 5 where I had to think imaginatively. I made a small indentation between the mortar and the brick using a bradorl. I then enlarged this somewhat by hammering in a very small nail. Finally, I took a very small screw and using a bit of brute force and ignorance managed to get the two wreaths finally hung on the wall. I need to point out at this stage, that the wreath that had previously shattered into 2-3 pieces was repaired with some gaffer tape – when my daughter-in-law returned home, this too had crashed to the floor (for the second time, I might add) completely disintegrating it. But at least my wall-screw had held so I may be able to get a replacement. Overall, a 20 minute job lasted an hour and a half.
I have started to think that I must try and get my Christmas cards organised – fortunately, this task has been made much easier because a couple of years ago I ‘computerised’ my Christmas card list (i.e. made a text file of names and addresses) with the spacing between the entries so organised that I can easily print off some address labels on the printer. I have ordered a supply of Christmas cards from Oxfam but they tell me that it may take a few days to arrive so I went to my Christmas card box to see what I already had in stock. The first thing to do was to make sure that I had envelopes of the requisite size for each spare card (and I seem to have ended up with more cards than envelopes). I have these sorted into three piles (a) religious (typically an illustration of Madonna + child) (b) quasi-religious e.g.anything with angels or shepherds on it (c) secular, in that there are no religious themes in it at all – typically robins and snow-scenes. Then I have to make a guess as to the degree of religiosity or secularism before I choose a card appropriate to the recipient. Whether other people share this Christmas card dilemma, I do not know but I do not want to wish religiosity upon people who rather be without it.
Tuesday is always quite a busy day and today was no exception. As we walked down the hill towards the park, we called in at the house of one of our friends who had kindly supplied us with a wreath. I was hoping in the off chance that she might have had a spare to replace the one that finally mets its demise when it crashed (twice) to the floor, but alas it was not to be. Bromsgrove has an open street market on Tuesdays and Saturdays so I will try and get a replacement either later on today or, failing that, at the weekend. We collected our newspapers and enjoyed quite a pleasant day in the park. We suddenly realised that we were running a bit short of time so we had to put on a bit of a turn of speed to get home and get myself turned round ready for Pilates. My Pilates class had not met during the lockdown but our Pilates teacher had been keeping things going via her ‘Zoom’ classes. It was nice to be back in a class again (with a lot of jokes and banter) but we are restricted to four only – one in each corner of the room. As I was going through my Christmas card box, I discovered a card I must have bought some time ago. It showed two middle aged ladies observing a grossly overweight torso whilst one remarked to the other ‘It reminds you of our Pilates class on a Tuesday’ (Actually it doesn’t because we are all fairly slim and in good shape but the joke arises from the fact that it mentions Pilates on a Tuesday – so I was very pleased to hand it over to my Pilates teacher for her collection of other joke Pilates cards)
No sooner had I got in after my Pilates class had some lunch and got the washing up done when it was time to Skype one of my closest friends in Hampshire. This went ahead at 4.00pm and we chatted for well over an hour, mainly chatting about the things that had happened to us as academics. One way or another, the hour absolutely flew by and we will have a chat again in about a fortnight’s time.
The news agenda today is dominated by the first injections of the new vaccine at various hospitals throughout the country. As it happens the second person along in the queue happened to be a certain Mr. William Shakespeare from the county of Warwickshire. Whilst the press and the politicians have had a field day celebrating ‘the start of the fight back’ there have also been some words of warning as well. There are some legitimate fears that now the vaccine is here, the general population may relax their guard but there is still a long way to go. For a start, after the first dose of the vaccine a second dose has to be administered in about three weeks time and then full immunity occurs seven days after this – which means that full immunity only occurs some 28 days after the first dose of the vaccine. There are also encouraging reports about the success of the Oxford University/AstraZenica virus and, of course, this will be the really big one once it has been approved. This is because the government has ordered 100 million does of the vaccine and the cost for each dose it about the same as a cup of coffee.
The Brexit Dara is drawing to a conclusion. Boris Johnson is due to meet with Ms von der Leyen, president of the EU commission for some ‘very last minute’ attempts to reach a deal. There is some tittle tattle in today’s The Times that the French have suddenly become very hardline and have insisted that a tougher line has to be taken with the British. The UK has offered a small olive branch indicating that the clauses in the Internal Market bill that would break the Withdrawal Agreement (which has the force of international law) will be withdrawn if there is a trade agreement. But as the gap between the two sides is so wide and with only about one day left to negotiate, it looks extremely likely that we will slide out with a ‘no deal’ . The fact that the rest of the Johnson cabinet is prepared to countenance a ‘no deal’ irrespective of the consequences does not bode well and I fear that this is the fate due to befall the UK in the next day or so.
Meg had a visitor this morning who was a little delayed in getting to us and so most of the morning seemed to be taken up with these activities – whilst we were waiting for our visitor to arrive I spent some time quite productively getting my household accounts up-to-date. So we needed to alter our daily routines a little and decided to do things a little differently. We got to the newspaper shop in the early afternoon and wondered whether our favourite newspapers might be sold out. However, we happened to be in luck and got our copy of The Times and The Guardian with no problems at all. Now that we have been customers of the same paper shop for the best part of nine months, I was speculating to Meg whether or not we could ask the proprietors to always hold back a copy for us. As I was busy handing over my tokens to the boy in the shop, I indicated that I thought that I was lucky and the newspapers might have been sold out. ‘Well – we will put a copy on one side for you, if that’s what you would like‘ was the comment made to me and it felt as though my prayers had been answered. From there, it is just a short stroll to our local Waitrose so we thought we would pop in and replenish our supply of mince pies which is in danger of being depleted. Whilst there, we bumped into one of our regular staff who we remember from months past. We asked how she was keeping and were informed that she had been quite ill and just had a gallbladder removed. As the local hospitals were all concerned with COVID-19 cases, she had the operation performed privately and had only just returned to work in the last few days. Anyway it was good to see her again after all of these months. That remind’s me – I generally buy all the staff in Waitrose a huge box of chocolates for their staff room (and they, in return, tend to make us gifts of running-out-of-date flowers, sandwiches and cakes so there is a rough kind of equality involved!)
Later on this afternoon, I was exploring WhatsApp which I have installed on my iPhone and quite often use to send text messages, photographs and even video clips to friends. Evidently, I hadn’t explored this app to its full potential because as soon as my one of my Hampshire friends suggested that we share some communications over WhatsApp, I decided to test it out and, of course, it worked like a treat. I’m sure it doesn’t have the range, facilities or sophistication of a FaceTime or a Skype but for a quick chat between friends, it is more than adequate (as well as being free) As my friend had just sent me a WhatsApp message, I knew he was at the end of a phone, so organised another quick video call between us. Afterwards, I was sent some hilarious clips of video (which I am sure is probably the main use of the app so that amusing clips can quickly be shared across the globe)
Tonight is the night when Boris Johnson is in Brussels for a critical dinner with Ursula von de Leyen, the president of the Commission. All of the ‘mood music’ tends to suggest that the differences in philosophy between the two sides is so great (the EU wanting to keep the integrity of the market, the UK insisting that UK’s new sovereignty is to be respected’) that we really have reached the end of the road. The only slight prospect that some might hang onto is whether the two sides are inclined to give a little compromise to the other leaving the way open for further negotiations. If Boris Johnson really wanted a deal, it would not have been impossible to have engineered one. But where we stand tonight is a complete clash of ideologies in which neither side feel they can give an inch. My Hampshire friend was speculating whether Boris Johnson dare return from Brussels waving a piece of paper in his hand (redolent of Neville Chamberlain) but we are both agreed, gloomily, that we are on an irrevocable path to a ‘no deal’ by now. Even if we were to get a deal, it would be so thin and minimal, we would still remain outside the Customs Union and times ahead look bleak. Apart from anything else, the hard core Brexiteers seem to drive the whole business of government and nothing short of a complete withdrawal will appease them (I have a mental image of the British government on a sledge being pursued by a pack of ravenous wolves – the ardent Brexiteers) Even throwing them chunks of red meat from the back of the sledge will not satisfy their appetites and they will keep pursuing the sledge for even more – in short, they refuse to be satisfied by anything.
We seem to have been on a much more even keel today with no early morning appointments apart from the weekly delivery from Waitrose, which has become a weekly fixture in our calendar. The weather had improved just a tad so we worked down the hill with only a little adverse breeze in our faces. At our little newspaper shop, I was delighted that our new little ‘system’ seems to have worked because the minute I walked in, I was presented with our two daily newspapers of choice. We then popped into Waitrose to get some eggs that had been missed off the main order and so on to the park. Although we started off in some wan sunshine, the weather had all turned quite cold by the time we got to the park so we drank our coffee in some haste and did not tarry before we struck off for home. We knew that we had to have fairly quick turn around because our regular hairdresser was coming to the house to give Meg a perm (and I get a haircut that is fitted in the intervals between the rituals of a perm). On way or another, these hairdressing activities seemed to occupy a lot of the afternoon. I always ask our hairdresser if she can only snip up the grey hairs and leave the rest intact and she tries to oblige.
The COVID-19 news today is interesting if a little disturbing. Hospitals have been receiving more and more cases and it could just be that we are at the start of a third wave of the pandemic. I might add that the second wave is only just past its peak. In the meanwhile, the whole of London is right on the verge of being moved from Tier 2 to Tier 3 (the highest Tier) and perhaps next Wednesday is the critical date when the distribution of areas between Tiers will be adjusted. There is also some evidence that schoolchildren may be transferring the virus from one section of the community to another – there is a suggestion that mass testing will be rolled out for all school children aged 11-18 across London, Essex and Kent (well, I suppose it makes change from the declining areas in the Midland and the North). The news from the USA is similarly chilling as today, for the first time ever, deaths have exceeded 3,000 and 106,000 people are hospitalised with the virus across the country. The CDC (Center for Disease Control) in the USA are predicting another 72,000 deaths in the next four weeks. Meanwhile 10 counties in California have run completely out of critical care beds – California is the richest state in the richest country on earth but there again, the Americans do not have our NHS!
Boris Johnson is now softening up the population for what appears to be an inevitable ‘no deal’ with the EU by announcing that there is a ‘strong possibility of no deal. The interesting question now becomes what the Brexiteers will make of all this because there is a strand of Brexit opinion which really does not want to leave with a ‘no deal’ One can almost hear the excuses for a ‘no deal’ that are already being prepared i.e. all of the fault of the dastardly EU not to mention the French who will not allow the English to trade with them on an ‘unlevel playing field’ i.e. the UK wants to trade with a competitive advantage by offering lower wages and conditions than the rest of the EU. When the reality of ‘no deal’ hits the general population, there may well be adverse reactions. One of the first of these is that medical insurance at massively inflated prices may make European travel too expensive for many who wish to take a holiday in continental Europe, now that the EHIC card will no longer apply. Phone charges for data roaming will also increase rapidly. We haven’t started to think yet about the food and medical shortages, traffic jams across the whole of Kent, ports brought to a standstill and so on. Of course, there is sways the possibility of a really last minute deal (as in the Greek case) but it looks more and more like the typical Greek tragedy when one can see the inevitable unfolding before one’s eyes!
Today has turned out to be one those busy but interesting days. Having collected our newspapers and drank our coffee in the park, we got into conversation with an Irish lady who was busy entertaining her two small children in the park (or rather putting away their buggies into her car). We told her tales of the Irish/Scottish landlady we had first experienced in Manchester. She ‘didn’t believe’ in baby sitters so gave the children aged about 5-6 a good 4″ of whisky in a glass to knock them out so they would sleep soundly all evening. The following morning, the children would have flaming red cheeks and would be wailing ‘Mummy – I have a headache” which of course the had, experiencing a horrendous hangover. Her husband, Seamus, drank a good eight of pints of beer a night and he explained to us that as his job was to undertake the electrical work upon cranes and they were obliged to crawl out to the end of the jib without any lines or safety harnesses, that he was so frightened that he only dare do it if he was still a little hungover from the night before (that was his story anyway). Then, as it happened, we bumped into our Irish friend and her husband who we will probably see at church tomorrow night and then her next door neighbour (a French lady – as her husband is of an artistic temperament, they have named their cat after Vincent Van Gogh). On the way home home, Meg were thinking to ourselves that in our little coterie we have an Irish couple, an Anglo-Indian couple, an Italian lady and a French lady. So altogether I suppose we form a little cosmopolitan ‘bubble’ contained with the Brexit-supporting majority which is the rest of Bromsgrove.
On Fridays, I often make a risotto with some kind of smoked fish (kippers or mackerel) rounded out with some softened onions, chicken stock, petit pois, yogurt and grated cheese. Our domestic help does not need much persuasion to help us to polish this off with a smidgeon of white wine but then we had a kind of logistics problem. I had previously picked up our domestic help whilst her own car was in for service today but now I needed to drop her back at her house, wait 5 minutes whilst she had a quick tooth clean and then whisk her off to the dentist by 3.00pm. As it happened, there were several reasons for me to visit the High Street in Bromsgrove this afternoon. Firstly, I needed to buy a new pair of rugby trousers from a men’s outfitters in Bromsgrove (the zip having given up the ghost on the previous pair rendering them useless) This was fine as they exactly my waist and inner leg size and then I went on hunt for a wreath (to replace the one that had recently met with an unfortunate accident) I had previously ordered a supply of Christmas cards from Oxfam but they have failed to arrive after several days so had to be chased with an exasperated email after 10 days and having banked my money. I decided to tour the charity shops to get a supply of Christmas cards so that I can start some addressing work over the weekend and managed to get the selection I wanted (some religious, some quasi-religious, some secular). I managed also to also obtain some ‘stocking filler’ presents whilst I was in the charity shops and finally topped up my supply of Vitamin D tablets (now recommended for all of us over a certain age – perhaps even available on prescription although it is more ethical to buy them directly and save the NHS some money).
Boris Johnson has said a no-deal outcome from Brexit trade talks is “looking very, very likely” ahead of Sunday’s deadline for a decision on the negotiations. Instead of using the term ‘no deal’ the Government have resorted to using the term ‘Australian’ deal (which is the same as a Turkmenistan deal – or no deal at all). For the purists, the deal Australia has with the EU even has some advantages for both which not be available to us if Britain accept ‘no deal’ and reverts to WTO terms. The thinking behind using the term ‘Australian’ deal is that it resonates much better with the public and has a positive glow to it (as in Aussie beer, cricket, rugby, and so on). Boris Johnson is increasing upbeat about the situation facing the country if we do crash out with ‘no deal’ , but this apparently upbeat public face does not square with the governments own Cabinet Office assessments of a 2% drop in GDP and a very severe jolt to the British economy as a whole. Many sheep farmers are in absolute despair and there is a well-founded prediction that a no-deal Brexit at the end of this year could lead to the premature slaughter of ‘millions of lambs’. We shall see!
Today was the day when I was due to have my annual eye-test. This has been organised for about a month now so I was quite pleased that the scheduled date eventually came around. Meg and I went to collect our newspapers and then we put our plan into action. This was to park ourselves, complete with newspapers in a local cafe which we did and whilst Meg was tucking into hot chocolate and a brownie I went off to see the optician I have been seen for years now. We spent a long time talking about rugby, of all things, before we got onto the eye-examination itself, proper. As things turned out, absolutely nothing has altered vision wise, during the last year which is always reassuring. The only bit of an eye examination I do not really like is when the optician examines the back of the eye with his special instrument – I am always fearful they are going to find something lurking there that indicates an abnormality (there wasn’t!) I can never get used to the ‘puff’ test either when the elasticity of the eyeball is tested by the puff air shot into the eyeball (and the elasticity is worked out by the velocity of the return air flow, so I understand) After I had my eye test, I went and gathered Meg from the upstairs room of the cafe and instead of going into the park we decided to go straight home and enjoy our elevenses in the comfort of our own home. This we did without stopping for a customary chat with anyone on the way home.
This afternoon, we decided to have a good old ‘tidy up’ of a table we have in our (largish!) kitchen that tends to accumulate the kinds of stuff that comes through the mail where you think 'I’ll have a look at that later‘ Anyway, it is certainly very satisfying to clear away a load of things you intended to file away or throw away at some stage but never quite get round it. Incidentally, when I was at work and accumulated a pile of ‘things to be done, but now now’ I did develop a technique that proved to be quite useful. I would take a pile and then turn it upside down.Then working from the new top of the pile downwards (i.e.from oldest to newest) you generally found you could junk a lot of stuff because the date for action had now passed or it wasn’t that important anyway. Halfway through the afternoon, two parcels arrived – on large and one small. The small parcel was one of some Christmas socks which I particularly needed for my Pilates class on Tuesday next (it is an annual tradition that it is obligatory to display one’s Christmas socks at this time of year). Two pairs had arrived but I only needed one pair so the other pair was donated to son/daughter-in-law to wear when they pay a flying visit to family next weekend.The largest parcel was my big supply of Christmas cards that eventually arrived from Oxfam – as I had bought an emergency supply of cards yesterday whilst I was on the road, I now have enough for two years (fortunately, Christmas cards do not bear a date so the excess will do for next year)
In the early evening, we went to church as we generally do on a Saturday evening. There were only about 28 of us (the limit being about 36) but the church was freezing cold so we were quite pleased when our weekly service was over. We had a brief chat with one of the regular parishioners to whom we have promised some damson gin as soon as it is bottled – and we also met with another parishioner who all being well is coming on the trip to Rome next September, all being well. As we have to make a telephone call to ‘book’ our places at the Saturday evening service, are names/addresses are checked in. One of our close friends was performing the checking in duty so I announced myself as Mr. B. L. Zebub but, extraordinary, I was still allowed in.
The Brexit saga continues tonight. Some talks are continuing through the night (is this a good sign or not?) Meanwhile, the British are preparing the navy ready to board French trawlers in the case of illegal fishing after January 1st, 2021 – so a hot war with France may be one of the first signs that Brexit has actually worked. Finally, an ex-security chief has indicated that in the absence of a deal ‘The British should be very worried‘ and as this observation comes from a non-politician, perhaps it should be taken very seriously.
Well, I have to admit that I woke up feeling a little tired this morning. I had got up reasonably early to make Meg and I an early morning cup of tea. Then I flew to Spain to represent GB in an international athletics competition and then flew home again. I donned a one-piece of athletics wear (called, I believe a ‘onesie’) in a shocking bright pink and then ran from my home to the Pilates studio when I chatted with my fellow course members about my activities of the night before. And then I woke up! Needless to say, all of my athletic ventures were part of a vivid dream which I had immediately after falling asleep again after I had brought my wife her early morning cup of tea. After these little adventures I had a quick wash and jumped into the car to get my supply of Sunday newspapers (which might be particularly insightful on the eve of a ‘no-deal’ showdown). We then watched the Andrew Marr show before walking down to the park. When we set off, it was absolutely raining cats and dogs so we even availed ourselves of an umbrella. We had determined that we would forget about attempt to sit down in view of the rain – but we would have our flask of coffee and then make for home. We made for the park bandstand which is our typical retreat when it is raining hard. When we got there we met an interesting trio. They were demonstrating a sort of adult tricycle (or a bike with two wide wheels at the rear if you like). The young men and his two female accomplices had chosen today to attract some visitors in order to demonstrate their appliance – needless to say, there was nobody around for miles around (apart from Meg and myself) After they half-heartedly pointed the major features of their bike (they were never going to make a sale aspires started at £1.000 and only went North of that) we chatted about this and that. One of the girls came from the British Virgin Islands (and the only thing that comes to mind there is ‘tax-haven’) whilst the others forebears came from East Africa (either Kenya or Uganda) I mentioned to her that Idi Amin, the Ugandan head of state, had thrown all of the Asians out of Uganda in the 1970’s and many entrepreneurial style Asians from Uganda, Malawi and Kenya made their way to England in general and Leicester in particular. (Leicester, to its shame, put out several adverts at the time saying ‘Do NOT come to Leicester‘) Our young friend had only a hazy idea of these events and thought that her grandfather may have mentioned Idi Amin. Anyway, I thought I would enlighten her about some of the interesting facts of past colonial history and how Churchill had granted Asians British passports as an inducement to move from Asia to East Africa to provide labour for the tea-plantations. We were asked how many years we had been married and when I mentioned 53 years (since 1967) and this provided me with the excuse of showing her our wedding photos where Meg was displaying her ‘Mary Quant’ style wedding dress. I hasten to add it was not a genuine Mary Quant – but Meg sketched out the designs and Meg’s mother, an excellent couturier, made it up. It was our chance to show the younger generation a bit of social history in any case.
The news came through late morning that the UK-EU trade deal talks were going to be extended – but we do not know for how long. The Observer this morning (not the Sunday Times!) was full of stories of how the leaders of manufacturing industry as well as ‘Tory grandees’ (Michael Heseltine but who else?) were getting seriously alarmed that with a ‘no-deal’ we might be throwing ourselves over a cliff – well a 6% diminution in our GDP on top of the COVID-10 induced damage. It does appear that none of the advantages promised for us by the ardent Brexiteers are showing any signs of appearance (after ‘the easiest deal in history’, ‘ an oven-ready deal’ and similar nonsenses)
After we had our Sunday lunch and a good read and then I started to update my Christmas card ‘database’ (actually a Word template) This is when the nightmare started! The print images showed several of the entries over-printing each other but this did not appear in the main file. So there were masses of inconsistencies that I tried to resolve but couldn’t. Anyway, I think I have run off 90% of the address labels that I need and then I need some hours (reconstructing? recreating?) the Word file so that next year it runs off easily as it should. The ironic thing is that last year, it ran off with no problems at all so what has happened in the meantime ? Perhaps amending some of the items threw things out of kilter, as they say.
Today started quite early – actually in the middle of the night. I had a wakeful period so I decided I would get up and do something useful. I thought I would apply myself to my Christmas card list problem (yesterday’s blog) and I thought of a solution.Basically, I made a copy of the original file (always a good idea in case you do irrevocable damage to the original) Then I put up two copies of the file side by side and basically cut and pasted from one file to another until I had two functionally working files. At least things are now OK for next year and I can always run off the entries from the later section as and when I need them. Tomorrow, I must concentrate on getting the overseas cards written and posted and I fear that time might already be running out as now there are 10 days to go.
After the rain and bluster of yesterday, it really was quite a pleasant walk into the park. We collected our newspapers as per usual and then, on our trip into the park, noticed a group of ‘oldies’ sitting around in their portable chairs and having a coffee and a natter.This was OK in itself except they were breaking the ‘only meet with 6’ rule as there about eight of them altogether. Hence we made our way homewards, not meeting anyone we know en route (not really surprising for mid December, I suppose). When we got home, I started the give the car its fortnightly wash – I knew that I would not managed to get it all done in time before lunch but I thought I could finish off the interior (quickly) after lunch. En route, Miggles our friendly cat made an appearance, accepted one or two strokes and then wandered off. As he/she doesn’t get fed (by us) first thing every morning, the visits to our garden are much more sporadic than we got used to.
After lunch, Meg had another video consultation with the hospital and this worked out much as we had anticipated. I finished off the car before activating the video link with about one minute to spare. This took a fair amount of the afternoon (at least whilst it was still light) after which I busied myself with a little urgent task. I have got used to buying rapeseed oil five litres at a time, produced and processed entirely by a small family firm. This then has to be poured into smaller bottles which are then easier to handle. We always encourage our domestic help to grab a spare bottle of this in the garage where it is kept (to keep in dark and cool). We tend to use this oil because it contains half the saturated fats of olive oil but a much hotter ‘frying’ point. So it gets used every morning when I prepare the omelette of red onions and cherry tomatoes which constitutes Meg’s cooked breakfast.
There are conflicting signals coming out of the Brussels talks to agree a trade deal. According the the British side, no significant movement has taken place in the talks where negotiators are trying to find a formula to ensure that if the UK uses its ‘sovereignty’ to lever an unfair commercial advantage, then automatically sanctions in the form of tariffs will apply to attempt to keep the playing field level. On the other hand earlier, an EU diplomat had told Sky News there ‘might now be a narrow path‘ to a Brexit trade deal ‘visible', but only ‘if negotiators can clear the remaining hurdles in the next few days‘. Having agreed to extend the deadline which should have been yesterday, there was even some speculation that the talking might continue right up to New Year’s Eve. I have the feeling myself that there may well be some sort of papering over the cracks that might appear in the next few days but before Christmas. Parliament is then going to have a special sitting (for one day?) to approve the deal and give legal force to the provisions contained in any agreement before 1st January, 2021.
As a footnote, today is the day when the College of Electors meets (in various state capitals) so that the 538 electors can formally translate the voting patterns in each state into the votes necessary to gain the presidency (270 votes is the magic number and Biden should have 306 i.e. well in advance of what he needs) Meanwhile, Donald Trump is refusing to concede and rushing through a series of executions from prisoners who have been a long time on death row. It has been the convention that outgoing presidents do not avail themselves of the facility to allow the executions to go ahead but Donald Trump has broken the traditions of the past 130 years.
Tuesdays are typically quite busy days and so it proved today. Having just got our supply of Christmas cards, we knew that one of the first priorities would be to get the overseas cards (to Spain) written and posted – and this would entail a visit to our local Post Office. We had five in total to post and had anticipated that Mondays would be murderous in the Post Office (as people would have written cards and packed parcels over the weekend) so always had in mind to get to the Post Office on Tuesday. To speed things up, we took the car and parked in our local Waitrose car park – as it turned out there were only about six people in the queue in the Post Office and so we were in and out quite quickly. What we did find was a shock, though, was the price of a first class stamp. These are 76p each and due to rise to 85p on 1st January- a 12% increase. No doubt the Post Office is trying to recoup some of the loss of revenues as fewer and fewer people are now sending Christmas cards these days. However, it was a relief to get out cards destined for Spain into the system (and beating the day recommended for posting) by one day. In the park, we happily drank our coffee and chatted gaily away with our Italian friend who was taking a turn in the park. Then we realised that we had precious little time left so we jumped into the car, gathered up my Pilates gear (we have to take our own mat these days for understandable reasons) and walked briskly down into town. I regaled my fellow class members of my (dream!) adventures last Monday morning where I had felt tired after flying to Spain and back and running down to Pilates in a on-piece shocking pink onesie. One of the other class members indicated I must be ‘somewhere’ on a scale! Having said, we had a jocular session as is normal and next week is the week when traditionally in our Pilates class, Santa comes to call with a supply of damson gin. We shall have to wait and see.
I had intended to spend what remained of the afternoon after we had our lunch (delayed by my Pilates venture) by starting to process our Christmas cards. In the event, I spent some manipulating my Christmas card labels program so that I could write a bit of family news onto an address label and then have this duplicated several times so the I am not writing the same thing on card after card. I know that some people from whom we receive cards must do this but I wonder at their patience.
Now that Joe Biden has been ‘formally’ elected president by the US Electoral College, he has come out fighting with a scathing attack upon soon to be ex-President Trump. It is interesting to note that eventually, the leader of the Republicans in Congress has congratulated Joe Biden upon his win but only after congratulations had come winging their way from both Russia and China. One thing that is seriously worrying those who follow politics seriously in the USA is the fact that so many Republicans have still failed to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the presidential election quite legitimately. Some senior Republicans have now recognised and even congratulated president-elect Joe Biden but the sizeable number of Republicans who have not is helping the view to gain credence in a sizeable minority of the American electorate that Joe Biden is not their legitimate president. As I write this, the White House is still refusing to acknowledge the fact of Trump’s defeat.
Tomorrow is the date when the revisions to the Tier levels will be published. But what has caused a greater shock is the fact that the whole of London has moved into Tier 3 and this has proved a profound psychological shock to many Londoners, as well as a threat to many businesses. There is a massive breach building up between the world view of the scientific community who by and large want to see Christmas effectively cancelled or massively curtailed and the political class who recoil from the notion of effectively cancelling Christmas. As I write, Esther Rantzen is on Channel 4 News arguing that Christmas should effectively be moved to the summer solstice (June 21st rather than December 21st) and that three-year-olds should be discouraged from ‘hugging’ (and hence ‘killing’) granny for Christmas. The mantra from government used to be that they ‘follow the science’ but that is not being heard at all these days. Whilst there is quite a fierce debate going on between various columnists, it is interesting that the older generation (of which I am one) is generally holding to the view that having come this far, surely we can go on for a few more weeks of semi-lockdown!
The day started off in a dark and gloomy way and did not improve practically all day. We are always a little delayed on a Wednesday because there were various cosmetic things that we decided to renew via the internet and then there is our weekly Waitrose order to update. This has to be done by 12 midday before our delivery slot tomorrow morning (between 8am-9am). We had intended to walk as usual to the park but it was raising so intensely we decided to ‘chicken out’ and go down to collect our newspapers in the car.Then we parked in the Sanders Park car park and made straight for the bandstand where we enjoyed our coffee in a vertical (i.e. standing) position rather than sitting on a soggy, rain-strewn bench. Then we made straight for home where we treated ourselves to some hot chocolate – we had got a little bit soggy but not drenched through which could have been the case.
When we moved into this house some 13 years go, the first thing I did practically was to use a firm which supplied us with address labels (Able-Label – they have been going for years) We ordered 1,000 labels but we are reaching the stage when they may soon be exhausted. About this time of year, I always use a supply of labels to stick inside my Christmas cards in case the recipient has lost my details and they know who the card is from. A friend of ours with whom we have a regular lunch date when we can had sent me a Christmas card but I realised that I didn’t have an address to send a return card. A few messages later on, we had got some address details to ‘stitch’ into our computer file and we promised each other to meet as soon as we could after the lockdown for another meal where we can catch up on what’s happening in each other’s lives. Anyway, I marshalled together all of the remaining labels that I had and worked out the I probably had just about sufficient for this Christmas cards so I ordered a new supply for when this runs out. The ‘old-fashioned’ way of doing this was, of course, to fill in the details carefully on one of their forms and despatch a cheque to cover the cost. But times have now changed – everything is composed in the firm’s web page and then it is paid for via Paypal (in my case). I took the opportunity to ‘squeeze’ the telephone number line so that I could get my mobile number also added to the address. However, whilst I was at it, I realised that the standard address label (name, address, postcode, telephone number which takes up six lines maximum needs to be supplemented for today’s communication needs. So I decided to order a new set of additional labels which now details my mobile, email address, (no FaceTime details as it happens), my personal website, the WordPress blog address and finally a text version of this blog I keep on another server in case the first goes down completely and all is lost. This new set of labels should prove quite useful if I know I am handing over details to friends and acquaintances who are computer literate so they can access these other information sources if the spirit moves them. Most of the afternoon was actually taken up with getting the labels ‘on screen’ line up as they ought with the sticky labels that are fed into the printer. I needed to print out several ‘trial’ sheets and then match up by eye to ensure the onscreen-entry actually matched up with the label that was to be printed. If you did it any other way, you would run the risk of wasting many sheets of the labels which are quite precious. Earlier in the day, I had ordered a new supply of computer labels ready fo the next time.
In the late afternoon, we had a FaceTime chat with some of our ex-Waitrose friends. We tend to chat about once a week, normally on a Tuesday, but we missed last night for a variety of reasons. Our friend’s daughter had just moved house and it all seemed to have been a somewhat nightmarish experience (some items damaged, demanding payment at overtime rates after a certain time and so on) Moving house can be stressful at the best of times, so we sympathised. When we moved into our present house, the removal men got to the house before we did, got let in by the cleaner who we had inherited and proceeded to deposit boxes willy nilly all over the place – even though we had got them labelled, it still takes the actual owners to know what goes where. I seem to remember the day after we moved in, we went to a hardware store to acquire a trolley so that we could move boxes (mainly of books!) to their intended resting place.
Yesterday was a foul day, weatherwise, with constant rain and a blustery wind that made us retreat to the car to collect our newspapers and curtail our visit to the park. Today could not have been more different as there was a beautiful clear sky and no wind to speak of. So we had a very pleasant trip down into town but this was not to last and the it started to cloud over as we walked home. After we had collected our papers, we made a lighting visit to Waitrose to buy a quick ‘surprise’ (stocking-filler) Christmas present for someone who shall be nameless!. We said ‘Hello’ to some of our friends who were all visored up and then a longer chat with other groups of friends who were busy in, and enjoying, their grandparent duties. When we saw both sets of friends we told them that we had a ‘cunning plan’ i.e. if the weather is beautiful and fine next Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday we will whip some mince pies out of the rucksack together with some sherry and paper cups and have an impromptu little Christmas party outside in the street (or even a front garden) No doubt, Sod’s law might apply in the run-up to Christmas but as I read the weather forecast for the forthcoming week (Christmas Day being on the Friday) we may just strike lucky.
This afternoon, I have been engaged in ‘doing’ the Christmas card. In theory, this is quite a simple process as I all I have to do is to write a similar message into each card (wishing that we all had a better 2021 than 2020) Then I stick inside an address label, further contact details and finally some information about Meg’s medical condition to keep people up to speed. Finally, people get ticked off a list. This all takes the best of 5 minutes per card and I estimate that I am about 70% of the way through the process at the moment.
One of Meg’s cousins together with her husband had relocated to Paris and, following that, to Seattle In the United States. Today, though, we got a Christmas card from their Cheltenham address so I have sent off a quick text message expressing the hope that we might be able to meet (in a park!) in Cheltenham and catch top on a lot of news as well as enjoying a proverbial mince more and sherry that we will drink out of paper cups (We have to have these dreams/fantasies to keep us going by the way)
The result of the Tier ‘adjustments’ has been published today and the direction of traffic has all been one way i.e. a lot of the South East has put into a Tier 3 ‘semi-lockdown’ much to their disgust. After Tier 3 had been visited so much upon the industrial North and Midlands, perhaps there is a certain poetic justice after all. The news is reporting that some 38 million people are now in Tier 3 – twelve areas had moved up from Tier 2 to Tier 3 and only one had moved down. The government privately is now quite worried as the level of infection has increased by 50% over the last week and there is a sickening realisation in government that there will be some kind of crisis in late January/February when the ‘normal’ winter-related pathologies hit their height. The COVID cases are continuing to surge and hospitals are coming under increasing pressure. I think that this time (i.e. in the second wave) there is a growing realisation that accommodating COVID patients means that routine tests and investigations eg. for cancer is going to be postponed or at least delayed. As cancers keep on growing inside patients COVID-19 crisis or not, then delays in diagnosis and treatment will mean more cases and probably deaths further down the road. The NHS chiefs are all too well aware of this and it means that whatever advances we might have made as a society in early diagnosis and then prompt treatment of cancer is being set back, perhaps by years.
Our daughter-in-law has finished at school today and I wonder to myself how many other professions apart from teaching will be ‘winding down. in the few days before Christmas. Of course, practically every family in the land will be having to work out how much (or much little) contact to have with parents and grandparents over the festive season, particularly as many people have not seen their extended family for months now. The experience of the USA (where there was a large ‘spike’ in COVID-19 cases after American families were reunited for Thanksgiving) must be giving many people pause for thought. And Esther Ranzen said the other day ‘Don’t kill your granny for Christmas’ which might sound over-dramatic but is certainly within the realms of possibility. One can only imagine how a child might feel if it could be demonstrated that they had contributed to the death of a beloved grandparent. In the meanwhile, the Education Secretary is suggesting only a ‘phased’ return to school after the Christmas vacation which must be an indication of the degree of concern of the government.
When we set off for our walk today, the weather seemed somewhat blustery and with a little bit of rain threatening, but nothing we thought to trouble us unduly. So we picked up our newspapers and headed for the park and that is when the heavens opened.We decided that discretion was the better part of valour and thought we would head towards the bandstand. It was at this point, we discovered to our dismay that we had left our (exceedingly precious) little portable folding stool somewhere. When we got to the newsagents, fortunately a public-spirited gentleman had found our stool leaning against the window and had handed it to the shopkeeper who promptly returned it to us. The rain shower was really intensifying at this point so we trudged back to the park, drank our coffee and made our weary route home, squelching with every step. Needless to say, we had to rip off several layers of our clothing the minute we got inside the house to get ourselves dried out.
I have been feeling pretty tired this morning but with the remainder of the Christmas cards to be processed, when I woke up in the middle of the night I decided to attack the remaining pile.To cut a long story short, I stayed up for several hours to get the rest of the cards done (about 45 in total, leaving aside about a dozen for our immediate neighbours and friends which will get hand delivered) The bulk of the cards I took to the post office (now housed in W H Smiths!) to ensure they got posted – somehow I dod not trust the traditional red letter boxes which are often full to overflowing at this time of the year. So having got home and dried out, I set about preparing the risotto which I typically cook on a Friday. This was absolutely thrown together in a hurry but was still enjoyed by Meg and myself (as well as our domestic help who is quite partial to a bit of my risotto and has even copied the recipe herself).
The COVID news tonight does not bring any good news – quite the reverse. The ‘R’ rate now stands at about 1.1-1.2 and the rate seems to be on the increase in the South of England. About two-thirds of the population are now living under Tier 3 conditions and there is quite a lot of concern about what may happen over the festive period. Whilst some parts of the population will evidently try and maintain the spirit of the existing semi-lockdown conditions, others will no doubt go a bit wild after months of restrictions. The Americans found that they had quite a spike after their Thanksgiving celebrations and some medical scientists fear that after the festivities, we will see a similar spike in just about a month’s time, coinciding with the period when the winter pressures on the NHS are at their worst. Some hospitals are already near to their capacity already and we have to remind ourselves that we are ‘only’ in mid-December and not mid-January or February.
We have one week left before the Christmas festivities start in earnest. We are going to have a family ‘Christmas meal’ next Monday, no doubt being a little socially distanced from each other. Some of the official advice seems to indicate that one should make every effort to allow any potential virus to disperse e.g. by having good ventilation and all of the doors and windows open. How far we go down this road remains to be seen -for example if two people not in the same ‘bubble’ are travelling in a car then the passenger should be on the opposite side of the car to the driver on the back seat with the windows open.
I sort of look forward to Christmas but only in the sense that once one gets past December 21st, then the shortest day has passed and we can expect it to be getting lighter by about 1 minute or so a day. Christmas occasionally has some good films on offer – for example last night we saw Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd‘ which Meg studied for ‘A’-level. It was a version we had seen before but well worth watching again with superb cinematography. Meg and I look forward to an opera being broadcast but there is generally only about one in the whole of the Christmas period and sometimes not even that. On the other hand, Radio 4 often broadcasts some excellent archive material which is well worth a listen.
Today seemed full of promise and we woke up to a bright blue sky and a modicum of pale sunshine.We walked down into town and as we went, we hand-delivered our Christmas cards to immediate friends and neighbours (about a dozen in total). We then picked up our newspapers (helpfully, kept in reserve for us behind the counter, which helpful when there are a lot of supplements). On the way down, we bumped into one of our ‘park’ friends for whom I had been looking out as I had been carrying round a Christmas card for her for days. Anyway we coincided and she gave us news of an impending eye operation that she was to have in the New Year – we hope that it doesn’t impede her on her mobility scooter upon which she whizzes around at great speed leaving us in the shade.
One of our most pleasant surprises was a Christmas card from our ex near-neighbours in Hampshire. We remember their children particularly well for when they were aged about eight and five they came round to introduce themselves to us. As their own grandparents lived some way away (in Devon) we became sort of ‘local’ grandparents to them and they used to pop in most days for a chat about this and that. Anyway, they are both now well grown up and have both acquired First Class Honours in their respective universities. As they were both working from home (and living at home) we wondered if we might organise a kind of video chat between the six of us so we can catch up on each other’s news (we have been in Bromsgrove for thirteen years now and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge)
Late on this afternoon, we were treated to the sight of Boris making a special announcement at 4pm. This was heavily trailed and as it turned out, we had the most sombre looking prime Minister announcing a new Tier (Tier 4) that was going to apply to London and much of the South East, as well as Portsmouth, much of Essex and Peterborough. Moreover,Christmas has been effectively cancelled as the previously announced ‘Christmas bubble‘ which had been scheduled for about five days had now been reduced on one i.e. Christmas Day itself. What has spooked the government particularly is that a variant of the COVID-19 virus is spreading much more rapidly than the original virus and according to some estimates could be up to 70% more transmissible than the original strain of the disease. So all of London and much of the South East is now subject to, in effect, an almost complete lockdown. Every one is encouraged to work from home where possible. It means people in a swathe of the south-east and east England and London will not be able to mix with other households at all over Christmas. A stay-at-home message will be enshrined in law, and non-essential shops, as well as indoor leisure and entertainment venues, will close. Across the rest of the country, plans for five-day Christmas bubbles of up to three households have been dramatically scaled back. The rules will now only cover Christmas day in England, with Johnson urging all gatherings to be kept short and small.
As one might expect, these new restrictions have produced a massive backlash from the right wing of the Conservative party. They were already deeply unhappy about the size of the areas to be placed in Tier 3 and now these are in Tier 4. One argument being heard is that as Parliament originally approved all the Christmas arrangements in a parliamentary vote, only Parliament can approve the new arrangements in a new vote. However, the restrictions come into force at midnight tonight and a recall of Parliament might take several days, so this is probably a forlorn hope. But Parliament probably needs to be recalled if there is going to be legislation to push through a new (but as yet, not forthcoming) new trade agreement with the EU. It does look as Boris Johnson’s claim to fame night be ‘The Prime Minister who cancelled Christmas‘ To my mind, three interesting questions arise from today’s statement. Firstly, I have to say that the government has acted correctly and there was probably no alternative given the extremely rapid transmission of the new variant of COVID-19. A second question, though, is how many people will obey and how many will openly flout the government (incidentally not just putting themselves at risk but potentially the rest of the country) And finally, will the mood of the Tory MP’s be such that they actually want to ditch Boris? Incidentally, I think that this plays into the hands of Boris Johnson walking away without a deal with the EU as it might just save his skin with the rest off the Tory party. What a mess the country will be in within a fortnight if we have a no-deal Brexit, a massive economic crisis and a raging out-of-control pandemic!
We rather overslept this morning – or rather woke up at the normal time and then promptly went back to sleep again. Consequently, I had to rather race to throw my clothes on after a cat-lick wash in order to get the newspapers before our weekly dose of the Andrew Marr show. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary was interviewed about the latest lockdown measures and he appeared to be showing the strain of the last few months, weeks and days. He did announce that he got up at 5.00am this morning and was defending the government line that they were only informed about the transmittability of the new variant COVID-19 on Friday afternoon. But in a question of ‘Who knew what? When?’ there is a certain degree of dissimulation going on. It was pretty evident to many observers that London and the South East were experiencing rates of virus increase before the data about the transmutability of the COVID-19 was drawn to their attention, so as we have to come to expect by now it does look as the government was again ‘behind’ the curve rather than ‘ahead’ of it.
In the late morning, I started to prepare some of the bottles into which I am going to decant the damson gin which is ripe for bottling now, having been made over three months ago. Most of the bottles had already been cleaned up i.e. removed of labels but some had still be processed. I always remove all of the old labels and especially the glue that is often left behind. Some labels remove easily after a soaking in hot water whereas others are more problematic. The worst cases have to have my special treatment which is a dribble of boiling water to soften the glue, a bit of cream cleaner and some wire wool and then a lot of scrubbing – repeated several times. Then the bottles have to be sterilised – fortunately, this is quite easy using Boots sterilising fluid (used for babies bottles) and the bottle has to be filled with this diluted fluid for at least half an hour. Some of these preparations done, I then carried on to get our Sunday lunch (rather a light one this week as the family are having their Christmas meal tomorrow). Then I had a bit of a doze and a swift purview of the Sunday newspapers.
After lunch, the damson gin bottling started in earnest – although I do this every year, I still have to remind myself of the techniques I use. This year, everything worked quite smoothly. I used to some brand new dishcloths folded into about four to provide a good filtration medium. Then the liquor content of each Kilner jar has to be strained through the cloth into a wide-necked pyrex jar (this is the tricky part because you have to hold the straining jar on the one hand whilst pouring the Kilner jar with the other) One Kilner jar fills about 4-5 little 250cc bottles. The final real trick is to add the minutest quantity of concentrated almond oil essence into the top of each bottle but you only have to insert one or two drops no more into each bottle. Then the labels have to be prepared and I always have a few leftover from the year before but never quite enough so that is a quick trip into W H Smiths in the morning (I have a design I like to keep from one year to the next) I need about 4 bottles for friends down the road and five bottles for the Pilates class on Tuesday. The last-minute job tomorrow morning is to give them a quick wrap in Christmas paper ready for distribution – of leaving on the doorstep for those who are out.
The implications of the COVID-19 variant are still being assessed. and in some cases acted upon. The Health Secretary has admitted that the virus is ‘out of control’ in London and Southeast England. Many other European nations are rapidly putting bans of flight to and from the UK. Our screens showed some terrible scenes of train terminals jam-packed with people late on Saturday night as they ignored government advice and tried desperately to get out of the capital before the lockdown started at 12.00 midnight. As on commentator on the Andrew Marr show commented, these crowds of people, some of whom are probably incubating the virus, will be doing their bit to spread the virus right across the country. Another really worrying statistic is that some of the modelling suggests that the ‘R’ factor of the new strain might be 0.9 ‘extra’ to the underlying rate. As London had an R of about 1.1 then another 0.9 on top indicates why the government had to act, Christmas notwithstanding, to save the nation from a complete disaster.
Today is a day to which I have been looking forward for a long time! That is because it is the longest night/shortest day and after today, I can tell myself that it is getting lighter by about a minute a day during January. This might not seem much but I must say that as the years roll by, I do appreciate the fact that the days are lengthening, even if ever so slightly and we have the spring to which to look forward. Today was going to be of a ‘special day’ for reasons that I shall explain later so we decided to take the car into town and were fortunate indeed to get a car parking space. The combination of a wet Monday, Christmas only a few days away and the fact that the local authority has suspended normal car-parking charges (in an attempt to stimulate trade?) meant that that the car park was under severe pressure and we were fortunate to get a space. Having collected our newspapers, we made our way along the High Street because it was one of those (rare) occasions when we needed to access an ATM to get some money out. Then the main purpose of our journey which was to visit the stationers to get a supply of the stick-on labels I particularly like in order to label my bottles of damson gin. As it happened they had a supply of the labels I like in stock and so I bought five packets of the same which ought to keep me going for this year and next. These labels carry the appellation ‘Chateau Le Cerf‘ and then Bromsgrove, 2020.
Then it was time to start preparing the communal Christmas meal we were going to share with our son and daughter-in-law. The younger generation had generously supplied a magnificent leg of beef whilst my role was to prepare the vegetables. As I have the reputation of providing myself too many vegetables for the Christmas meal, I confined myself to roast potatoes, roast parsnips, carrots, peas, and broccoli. We treated ourselves as a pre-dinner drink to a Waitrose special gin which we might have bought for ourselves last year and somehow never got round to consuming. This was then followed by a rather nice Rioja so all in all we had a magnificent meal. Afterwards, we were treated to some absolutely stupendous ice-cream. Our daughter-in-law had been loaned an ice-cream maker because the whole contraption seemed a little difficult to put together. Nonetheless, we succeeded in getting it working and the overall results were a marvellous way to end the Christmas meal.
In the late afternoon, we ‘Zoomed‘ one of our Hampshire friends who actually lives in Oxfordshire but the postcode might just be Reading. Anyway, we were amazed to discover that our friend had suddenly found herself catapulted from Tier 2 to Tier 4 and this had made all kinds of re-arrangements necessary to make sure that the Christmas meal fell within the correct ‘boundaries’. As it happened we had both picked our damsons at approximately the same time (first week in September) and I had a prodigious quantity of fully ripe damsons this year (9.5 kilos which was approximately ten times as much as last year). So I finished up making about 16 litres of damson gin altogether this year. Now came the time for bottling and I bottled just sufficient for my Pilates class members and one or two friends down the road. This evening, I labelled up the bottles I had prepared and wrapped them in Christmas paper – a particularly fiddly job I have to say. But now all I have to do is to write a few Christmas cards and hunt out my Santa Claus outfit for my class tomorrow. However, everything has to be done in a ‘socially distanced’ way and I shall have to think hard about the logistics of tomorrow. Of course, Santa won’t get his customary Christmas kiss and hug which is one of the perks of the role at this time of year. (Incidentally, one of my ex-colleagues often wondered why the Santa Clauses whose knee he sat upon every year as a child had nicotine-stained fingers and habitually smelt of gin) One of the sights that I remember from the 1970s was the occasion when all of the Santa Clauses in the department stores along Oxford Street came out on strike and paraded in a long line, complete with placards, the length of Oxford Street.
The new strain of COVID-19 which appears highly infectious has caused countries all across Europe to close their borders to the UK. The resultant queues outside Dover are a foretaste of what may well happen when a Brexit ‘no deal’ occurs – there are already predictions of shortages of salad crops within days. In addition, Government scientific advisers have argued that a new national lockdown is urgently needed and have warned that inaction could cost tens of thousands of lives and risk an ‘economic, human and social disaster‘, with the new strain spreading across the UK and overseas. But on the brighter side, there are hints that a deal on fishing might now be on the cards…
We knew there was quite a lot to get done today and we were particularly pleased to see our domestic help come and give us one quick ‘burst’ just before Christmas. Before we undertook our journey, we were having a conversation in the kitchen about the possibilities of Yogic Flying. I promised to do some investigation and saw some instances of
Yogic Flying on the net. As illustrated in the ‘YouTube’ videos which I viewed, Yogic Flying consists of sitting cross-legged and then basically launching along the ground in a series of bunny hop type moves. I am sure it is excellent for your pelvic floor muscles which is how I think the conversation arose in the first place. Meg and I collected our papers and bumped into one of our friends who informed us that he and his wife had just tested negative for COVID-19 – because we were in a bit of hurry we didn’t get the full story why they needed to have a test in the first place. The park was teeming today (no children in school, quite a fine day, dogs to be exercised) but we managed to locate one empty park bench that was fortunately dry. We knew that time was pressing but even so on the way back home we saw an ambulance draw up next to the neighbour of one our friends. We knew that the gentleman involved had had a stroke a few months previously and had just spent another spell in hospital so we just hoped for the best, also chatting with other of our friends about what may have been happening to his neighbour.
When I got home, I had a fly around to get ready for my Pilates class. Today I was going to play Santa Claus (a tradition going back for a few years now) but this was having to be organised in a completely different way owing to the COVID-19 crisis. I resolved to organise the logistics like this. Firstly, I pulled my red Santa Claus trousers underneath my normal ‘tracksuit bottom’. Similarly I donned a ‘Santa Claus’ red shirt and then wore my normal shirt over it. Then I had to transport by Santa Claus outer jacket + hat, five bottles damson gin and all of the accompanying Christmas cards which had to be rapidly written. I took down my Santa Claus ‘Ho, Ho, Ho‘ sack together with my Pilates gear within it by car when I parked on the Waitrose carpark and then walked along to my class. Cards were distributed each to another inside the class by people throwing them in their neighbour’s vicinity. Then we had our ‘normal’ Pilates class, a highlight of which is the 3-5 minutes at the end of our session where our tutor encourages some deep relaxation. Whilst my fellow classmates were deep into their relaxation (and presumably had their eyes shut) I busied myself in my corner off the room divesting myself of my track-suit bottom and shirt to reveal my Santa Claus gear underneath. All I now needed to do now was to pull on my Santa Claus outer robe, don my hat (and mask) and lie down for the remaining few seconds of the relaxation session. When they came round they observed ‘Santa Claus. in the far corner of the room, who then pranced round, distributing to each (and to the reception staff) their bottles of damson gin. The only problem on this occasion was that Santa only had to remember three words of which the first was ‘Ho’ but unfortunately, he kept forgetting the second and third words of his greeting. There was an almost universal feeling in the class that a full lockdown or something very similar was on the cards and therefore we might not be in a ‘live’ class together until Easter (although the ‘Zoom’ option is open for all of us)
Approximately 4,000 lorries are still waiting to get through the ports to get to Continental Europe. The French have suggested a solution which is to offer immediate transit for any lorry driver with a negative COVID-19 test – but the difficulty here is that the ‘gold standard’ test takes about 2-3 days for the results to be processed whereas the ‘lateral-flow’ test will give a result in 15-20 minutes but is regarded as less reliable. How this is to be resolved is not clear at this stage – there are some black rumours that the French are trying to indicate to the British what will happen with a ‘no deal’ Brexit. In the meanwhile, there are signs that a deal might be possible, although fisheries remains a great problem for both sides. There are suggestions that the talks might extend beyond the 1st January but No. 10 has firmly rebuffed any suggestions that this in the cards.
The latest COVID-19 figures are really frightful with 36,800 new infections in a day and nearly 700 deaths. Thee figures are as bad the country has yet experienced and there is a feeling that the worst is yet to come. It seems to be a racing certainty that more severe restrictions will be applied once we have Christmas out of the way. The Home Secretary (Priti Patel) was hinting that the country should get used to more severe lockdown conditions from the New Year onwards – but other commentators are indicating that once we get Boxing Day out of the way then the government may act immediately. What seems particularly worrying is the more infectious variant of COVID-19 seems to have ‘escaped’ London and the South East and is now represented in all parts of the country.
Today, the weather was terrible all day long with wind and squally showers which only intensified as the day progresses. However, paradoxically, we did not mind too much because as we had some Christmas presents to deliver, we had determined that we were going to take the car in any case. Our first port of call was, as usual, our newspaper shop and here I handed over a couple of bottles of our own recently bottled damson gin. I’m not sure if they have any alcoholic prohibitions in whichever faith they were raised but I am sure that there are some members of the family or friends who might appreciate the same. As it was raining heavily at the time, we rather had to dash in and not linger over Christmas pleasantries but this was the first of our missions successfully accomplished. The next venture was into our local Waitrose – we geared that we were going to be faced with a car-park full to overflowing and with a long queue to even get into the store. But fortune smiled favourably upon us because we found a parking space almost immediately and the store was not over-crowded. As I was the second customer along when the store opened two and a half years ago (on my birthday, as it happened) we have always had a special relationship with the staff of Waitrose who have often given little gifts of soon-to-be abandoned flowers or food. We have a tradition which goes back for two years now of buying the biggest box(es) of chocolates we can find and then donating them to the Waitrose staff restroom. We have a miniature easel upon which we place a favourite photo of Meg and myself (so that people know who is making them the present) and a few words of appreciation updated year by year. This worked like a dream this year because the minute we entered the store, we encountered one of our favourite members of staff who had helped us in this venture before. She helped us choose the chocolates, took payment for them at the till and then whisked them off to the staff restroom. I think that in the past, they have assembled a few staff in front of this little display and then posted it to their own online staff bulletin so I hope that the same applies this year. We were also the happy recipients of the news that the Waitrose store coffee bar may be reopening in January/February. As this was such an important social hub for ourselves and for many others, naturally we hope that this will come to pass as they say. When we got home, we treated ourselves to the coffee we would have had in the park if we had ventured that far today and treated ourselves to a (probably) calorie-bursting mince pie.
The weather forecast for tomorrow, Christmas Eve, is scheduled to be cold but dry, bright and sunny. If this proves to be the case when we wake up tomorrow, then we are going to fill our rucksack with some mince pies, a bottle of sherry and some paper cups and knock on the doors of some of our friends down the road. Then we may be able to have a series of impromptu but socially distanced Christmas ‘get-togethers’ which can take the place of that which we had intended to provide in our own house if COVID-19 had not intervened.
This afternoon, we treated ourself to watching the classic black and white film of Casablanca -although Meg and I had seen it several times before, I was still surprised by the twists and turns in the plot. Shot in black and white certainly added to the intensity of the drama and the emotions and forgetting exactly how it ended only added to our enjoyment.
The fairly dramatic news this afternoon was the announcement that yet another strain of COVID-19 had surfaced, with its probable origins in South Africa. Only two cases had so far appeared in the UK but the infectivity of this latest strain even exceeds that of the first variant. So the government has acted with a certain degree of speed and added several more areas to Tier 4, hoping to squash the latest variant. The government has said that emergence of a second variant of the virus is ‘highly concerning’ and, for this reason, millions more have been added to the existing Tier 4 in London and the South East. The new areas include Sussex, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Hampshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. Soon when most of the country is classified as Tier 4 then the whole concept of Tiers will break down and we might as well have one national lockdown. I think it is a fairly certain bet that we will be going into a full lockdown quite early on in the New Year in any case.
Finally, some sort of good news. It does appear that the EU and UK are edging towards a trade deal, perhaps to be settled sometime tomorrow. We are not quite there yet, but the indications coming from both sides is that many differences have been narrowed and negotiated and only a few more sticking points have got to be negotiated before a formal announcement tomorrow.
We knew from the weather forecasts that today ought to have been cold, bright and clear – and so it turned out to be. In anticipation that some of our friends might not be otherwise occupied this Christmas Eve morning, we loaded up various bags with a supply of mince pies, oloroso sherry and some paper cups, and supplies (presents actually) of damson gin. We dropped a bottle of damson gin at some acquaintances round the corner and then knocked on the door of ‘close friends No. 1’ As it happened, they were both in so we made a present of the damson gin and then we arranged an impromptu party in the garage which was airy and windy whilst we could be socially distanced from each other. Then we really got dug into our mince pies and sherry-in-a-paper cup contemplating what a very strange year it had been and how we had had to make adaptations to our normal routines. Then another couple turned up to visit our mutual friends so we invited them to join the party so there we were at our maximum six. As it turned out, we shall see them in church tomorrow morning when we get there at 8.30 in the morning. Then having taken our leave of ‘close friends No. 1’ we knocked on the door of ‘close friend No. 2’ and fortunately they were in as well. Our friends put a little table in their porch so we had somewhere to place our comestibles so we repeated our little Christmas party experience all over again. Our friends just happened to have some of their own home-made damson gin as well as some that their daughter had donated to them (which was actually about two years old) So we seized the opportunity to taste and compare all three of the gins – and I was relieved to say that ours compared very favourably with the other two. By now, full of gin, sherry and mince pies we thought we had better stagger our way to the newsagents. As they had been the recipients of some of my gin the day before, we were favoured by a Christmas and some chocolate treats which we thought we would preserve until we got home. Then we got home very late but just before our son and daughter-in-law were going off to the hotel (French cuisine, very sophisticated) which they had managed to get booked into a few days ago. Fortunately, I had put a ham on my previous Waitrose order and we had acquired some ready-to-heat red cabbage so we managed to rustle up a meal in two shakes of a lamb’s tail as they say. In contemplation of the morning’s events, we have to say that this was of the most impromptu but engaging series of encounters we have ever had!
In the afternoon, I realised that we needed to put our little crib in place and a few tinselly things that we scatter around pictures and the like (the tinsel I got into place in 11 minutes flat this year). Over the years, I have come to the view that the fewer bits of decorations we put around the house, the sooner they can put away on twelfth night – or whenever the deadline approaches when the Christmas tree is due for recycling at the local garden centre. But the major focus of this afternoon was catching up on the news of the trade deal that had eventually been struck with the EU.
The whole of this ‘just managing to get a deal done by Christmas Eve’ was actually tremendously stage-managed. I think it was fairly obvious that Boris Johnson was always going to a deal, or be close to a deal, the day before Christmas Eve. This way, all of the newspapers could say ‘A deal is imminent’ but nothing had been published yet which could be criticised. Some of the newspapers even participated in this ‘deception’ one of them obliging (almost at the suggestion of No. 10) with a cartoon of Boris Johnson dressed up as Santa Claus, pushing ‘goodies’ in the form of a ‘done deal’ down a chimney, making sure that there were lots of union jacks (what else?) Of course, being an ex-journalist, Boris would have known that there would no newspapers published on Christmas Day and by the time any more newspapers did appear (on Boxing Day) people would have lots of other things on their mind (such as Tier 4 classifications) which would distract them from any criticisms of the deal. Although the (subservient) UK press will hail the deal as a ‘triumph’ for Boris Johnson, in the cold light of day it will emerge that the UK has made quite a lot of concessions because we never had a very strong hand to play. Eventually, when it is too late, we will get the full-bloodied analysis of what has been agreed in our name. If we haven’t left the EU, we could have claimed a large share of the 750 billion euro fund that the EU is putting together to cope with the effects of the pandemic. Enough said!
Well, Christmas Day has arrived at last. I imagine that for many families around the country, Christmas Day in 2020 is to be enjoyed for itself but then got over with as quickly as possible. Bereft of family members, Christmas Day will seem a very strange experience for many families and some couples will be spending time along with their spouses for the first time in years – or ever. For Meg and I this is is not a particularly strange experience as we have spent quite a few Christmasses in each other’s sole company but we can imagine that it is a source of some heartache for many families. Knowing that we had to make a fairly early start this morning to get to church at 8.30 we did not want to oversleep and so so employed an additional alarm to make sure that we did not just turn over at 6.30 and go back to sleep. As the night had been particularly cold and we had several degrees of frost, we decided to line our stomachs with a good bowl of porridge before we set off for church at about 8.00am. The porridge strategy turned out to be a useful one as the church’s heating system has been out of commission for some weeks and this, coupled with an absence of hot bodies to warm it up over the weeks, meant that attending church was a pretty chilling experience. Of course, hymns are not allowed but we did hear Berlioz’s ‘A Shepherds lament’ which is a particular favourite of mine. On the way out of church, I did manage to smuggle a bottle of damson gin ready for the priest’s ultimate enjoyment – I am going to remind him when we next meet face-to-face that I hope it doesn’t get it mixed up with communion wine (although I think, in an emergency such as a POW camp priest is allowed to used anything of alcoholic content to act as a substitute). For Christmas dinner, Meg and I know what we like and we generally avoid turkey preferring to have some good topside of beef with a good bottle of Rioja to wash it down.
Christmas present opening time is always a source of pleasure and if we do it one present at a time it fills out most of the morning. I acquired four books which I know will keep me occupied for weeks – and was made a present of a fifth which was ‘All New Dad jokes’ which Meg has commandeered for most of the day. But fair exchange is no robbery because I have similarly requisitioned some classical music CD’s which I bought for Meg as a ‘stocking filler’. Actually, when I was in town a couple of weeks I happened to see in one of the charity shops that they were selling 5 classical CD’s for £1.00 (evidently, 20p each!) One of these proved to be absolutely superb. It was the classic recording of the three tenors (Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti) in that concert recorded live at the Caracalla Baths in Rome in 1990 on the occasion of the World Cup held in Italy of year. This CD has 17 tracks altogether and each rendition is accompanied by the applause of an enthusiastic audience which really added to the sense of occasion. I played the whole CD at quite a loud volume which I would not normally have done if Meg and I had not been alone in the house. As our kitchen is 27′ long and the heritage Sony sound system we keep in the kitchen is hardly ever extended to its real capacities, I really indulged myself whilst I was preparing the Christmas dinner. As I generally do, I had already prepared some parsnips, carrots and sprouts the evening before and had them chilling in the fridge overnight. Then I prepared rather a super onion gravy, supplemented by the meat juices from the slow cooker receptacle in which the beef was cooked. Then came the job of par-boiling the parsnips and carrots before getting them plus roast potatoes plus Yorkshire puddings plus dinner plates into the oven at the right temperature and in the right sequence. I found myself actually working quite heard as I also had to fit in preparing the smoked salmon starters, getting the Rioja wine prepared and ensuring that all of the necessary sauces were on hand. No mishaps occurred, I am pleased to say (because there is quite a lot that could go wrong) so Meg and sat down to our starters at 1.30 precisely. Needless to say, we treated ourselves to another hearing of the ‘Three Tenors’ CD which had given me so much pleasure during the morning.
We had intended to attempt to get into contact with our ‘family’ (i.e. closest friend) in Spain at about 4.00 in the afternoon. After trying FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom, their mobile numbers and their landline – all with no reply – we had to give up on our attempt and hope that nothing untoward has happened. I only mention this because Laura’s last email indicated they were going to have a pretty miserable time isolated and cut off from the rest of the family when Christmas time is normally a time when they are all together! No doubt, we will get the whole story in the fullness of time.
Well, if there was such a thing as a typical Boxing Day then today was it. Meg and I were a little slow to get going this morning, having stayed up a little later than normal to watch a film about Maria Callas, the great 1960’s opera diva. Today was a bit colder and more blustery than yesterday but we were a little dismayed when we got to our normal newspaper shop to find it shut. So we trotted around the corner to pick up our Saturday newspapers from Waitrose only to find that closed as well. That was quite irritating because today would have been the first full day after the EU-UK trade agreement had been completed on Christmas Eve and we were anxious to see what the informed journalists had made of the deal. So we drank our coffee as usual in the park and resolved to go out and collect the newspapers by car. First, I made a trip to our local BP garage and managed to pick up a copy of the Guardian but not the Times. However, this was remedied by another car trip so I could walk down our local High Street where I found a newsagent that had copies of the Times. As it happens, I was particularly pleased to have secured copies of the newspapers today. The Times weekend magazine had devoted itself entirely to a review of the year in political cartoons by their award-winning cartoonist, Peter Brookes. He has the facility to link together what has been happening on the political scene with other elements of popular culture. I will give you four examples of what I mean. The cover of the Times magazine has Boris Johnson masquerading as Vicky Pollard (the Little Britain character, played by Matt Lucas who as an irresponsible teenager will never accept the blame for any of her transgressions) The cartoon shows Boris Jonson in the guise of Vicky Pollard at the Downing Street press briefing. Where the podium is normally adorned with NHS slogans, now we have Vicky Pollard excuses such as ‘Yeah But’, ‘No But’ and ‘Yeah But’. In another cartoon, you have a make-believe film poster for the Good (portrayed by Richi Sunak), the Bad (played by Boris Johnson) and the Ugly (portrayed by Dominic Cummings). The American election is also brilliantly covered by showing Joe Biden at his desk in the Oval Office of the White House saying ‘Phew! I thought he’d never go! ‘ If you look carefully at the cartoon though, you can see a bulge in the curtains and the tip of a long red tie (belonging to Donald Trump) behind the desk. But my fourth example is one of a cartoon which I think is sheer brilliance and displays several jokes at once. The cartoon is as an advertisement for ‘Matt Hancock’s Half-Hour' in which the features of Matt Hancock have been cleverly morphed into those of Tony Hancock, the comedian who made ‘Hancock’s Half Hour‘ famous. Hancock is receiving an injection by a nurse who is saying ‘Just a little prick‘. In the body of the poster, there is a further text explaining ‘From the Blood Donor to the Guinea Pig‘ (Of course, the ‘blood donor’ is Tony Hancock’s most well-known and practically iconic sketch) Finally, across the right-hand corner of the cartoon is a little banner explaining ‘Live on TV’ (as Matt Hancock says he will be shown having the vaccine live on TV) This cartoon, as I have described it, combines at least five jokes into one – sheer brilliance!
In the afternoon, I engaged in that perennial exercise of removing sticky labels from my supply of damson gin bottles. The first fourteen have already been given away so I now need to prepare a second batch. Some labels float off very easily after the usual soaking but sometimes the wine manufacturers of those little 25 cl bottle that I particularly like to deploy reserve their toughest industrial glue for the front label. I find that this takes a combination of fingernails, a stainless steel scrubber, a brillo pad, and for stubborn case a little brass wire tool I have and a bottle of boiling water which, if dribbled on, softens the glue somewhat before being attacked by other implements. I hope to have everything in place to do this tomorrow.
The newspapers have had a preliminary chance to look at the EE-UK trade agreement but the full text is 1,246 pages and has only been published today – in time to be debated in Parliament on Wednesday, where Boris Johnson wants to have the whole thing debated and passed into law in one day. Needless to say, this is not enough time for proper scrutiny but of course, this was the idea all along and rather makes a mockery of the ‘supremacy’ of parliament. Already the fishing industry is crying out that Johnson has sold them out and of course services, including the important financial services which are a dominant part of our economy, are not included in the trade agreement in any case.
After the details of the EU-UK trade agreement had been published, I read that the EHIC card would be honoured as long as it was current but then was due to be replaced (details not yet worked out) So I went to look at our EHIC cards to ascertain when they were to expire only to discover that they had actually expired last September. By rather indirect means, I got onto the website that issues new EHIC cards and put in an application for Meg and myself – they may last as long as 5 years and, of course, are provided free of charge by the government. The issuing authority may take the view that if an application has been made before the deadline of 31st December 2020 and although it indicates that the application may take 10 days for the cards to be delivered, then we might prove lucky and get new ones. On the other hand, the government could take the view that any unfilled order by 1st January 2021 is void and refuse to fulfil our order. Having said that, I suspect the latter but we will have to wait and see. I went down to collect our newspapers by car to get back in time for the Andrew Marr show at 9 am only to find that the show was not on this morning.
After breakfast, we went on our normal walk to the park where it was quite busy with children and dogs as you might expect.On the way back we met with both of our sets of friends. One of the couples informed us that their son and daughter-in-law (I think I have this the right way round) has tested positive for COVID-19, as well as their two next-door neighbours so we really do get the impression that the virus is ‘moving ever closer’ Tomorrow morning, Meg and I may well to go down to the newly opened test centre and see if we can get an ‘on-the-spot’ test. In the meantime, we are determined to be very watchful in the next few weeks until we ourselves get vaccinated, perhaps towards the end of February. The local Arts Centre has also been converted into a vaccination centre so we are just waiting for our number to be called which, of course, will reflect the priorities by age-group ( I am in the 3rd category down according to the published criteria)
This afternoon, I had intended to spend some time betting more supplied of damson gin. I attempted to contact our close friends in Spain as I have done for the last day or so but to no avail. Then we received a telephone call from one of the nieces in Harrogate, N. Yorkshire, where we exchanged a lot of information about COVID-19 and how it was impinging upon various members of the family in Yorkshire. We are resolved to have some kind of ‘open house’ party in the Spring-Summer when the grip of the virus has lessened so that we can see the newest member of the family (now about 15 months old) as well as other family members.
As might be expected, a lot of attention is being paid to how EU-UK trade agreement was arrived at and what compromises had to be made and by whom. I m not sure whether the journalists had access to the full 1,426-page document before they began their analysis. The consensus view that has emerged so far is that we have a deal but an incredibly ‘thin’ deal (e.g. no services are included) which is near to a ‘no deal’ Brexit as it is possible to get. Many of our legislators are going to try and examine the deal in great detail before the one day debate next Wednesday and it seems very likely that, just like a Budget, that which seems OK at first sight, all kinds of little ‘nasties’ will emerge in the fullness of time. The New York Times has published a very good and objective analysis under the title ‘Brexit Deal Done, Britain Now Scrambles to see How it Will Work’ and their conclusion, at the end of the day, is given by the analyst called Kibasi who has concluded that ‘But the way it’ll play out is by damaging investment in the UK, so it’s a slow puncture, not a quick crash‘ Of course, to the ardent Brexiteers, the deal was never actually going to be about trade ‘per se’ because all they ever wanted was a dis-entanglement from the EU in order to regain ‘sovereignty’ whatever the economic cost to the nation.
Today when various members of the family were awake at 5.30am, it was a fairly typical late December day – but an hour and a half later, we had been dumped upon by a huge fall of snow which seemed fairly thick. After we had had a porridge breakfast it appeared to have stopped snowing so my son, daughter-in-law and I decided to brave the weather to walk to the shops. As it happened, walking on the snow was relatively straightforward but road traffic and other people walking to the park (with children and toboggans) was quite rapidly changing the snow into a more slippery slush. I was well prepared with two pairs of socks and two jumpers so I had lots of layers of clothing (as the Scandinavians say ‘There is no such thing as bad weather – only inappropriate clothing‘). Whilst the other family members were busy shopping, I made my way to my usual paper shop where I picked up our newspapers. I made an arrangement with the shopkeepers that if the bad weather were to persist and I couldn’t actually get my walk done to the shop, could they please keep my newspapers on one side and I would come in when I could and settle up with my vouchers. The walk home was uneventful and having had a good taste of the weather conditions and not needing to go anywhere by car, we decided collectively to let the snow clear itself and not bother with a few hours of energetic clearing. We had no snow at all last year and perhaps not even for the year before that but fortunately when the need arises we are quite all supplied with shovels and other snow-clearing equipment. Upon returning home, I did take a brush and push the thawing snow from our Lavatera outside the back window and also from those parts of the hedging around our BioDisk that I could reach.
It was evidently the kind of day to engage in typical Boxing Day type pastimes so I thought I would get to work bottling some more damson gin. I bottled another 19 bottles (four large Kilner jars worth) and had to stop only because I have run out of 25 cl bottles. I may fill up some 50 cl bottles and deploy these as intermediate storage jars in the meanwhile. Of course, I have to write my labels, which is a kind of mindless activity you can do whilst watching TV. When all of the bottling had been done (with the minimum of mess, I am pleased to day), I treated myself to watching a re-run of the Agatha Christie ‘Death on the Nile‘ featuring Hercule Poirot but several the other Boxing Day type films (The Jungle Book, Murder on the Orient Express) I had already seen relatively recently so gave them a miss.
For the first time, the number of new COVID-19 infections has exceeded 41,000 in a single day and 357 deaths. Horrendous though this figure is, there may be a degree of inflation as so many more tests are now being performed (presumably, the more you test you more you find) But what is particularly worrying is that hospitals are now operating at the peak levels that they were when the pandemic was absolutely at its peak last April. The epidemiologists know that two weeks after infection a proportion of patients will end up in hospital and two weeks after that a proportion will die. What the exact proportions are I do not at this stage know but we still have the major months of January and February in front of us. Further Tier 4 zones may well be announced next Wednesday – perhaps a complete lockdown like the initial one last spring is the only answer. I wonder, though, whether the bad weather that is keeping people indoors might help in stopping the virus spreading somewhat (although of course we do have the Christmas Day and New Year family gatherings to factor into the equation)
One of the nice things about this time of year is that people have received your Christmas cards including details of email addresses and so can write to you. One of our friends from Leicestershire who is now working in South Wales emailed me with a long and detailed email and I have taken the opportunity to reply to this, and to other friends as well. We inform each other of the various medical afflictions which are affecting our various family members and give each other a bit of mutual support.
Today was the ‘day after’ the snow storm of yesterday so when we woke up we anxiously looked out of the window to see if we had a fresh fall of snow overnight. We didn’t have any more snow but it did look as though some was threatened for later on. So Meg and I set off for our daily walk knowhing that snow was in the air and initially, we walked through some light sleet. On the way down, we bumped into one of our friends who kindly gave us back the empty bottle of damson gin which they had consumed over the Christmas period. We then popped the Times magazine political cartoons of the year through the door of other friends who we knew would particularly enjoy them. Having picked up our newspapers, the snow started again in earnest and the flakes fell furiously around us. We popped into Waitrose trying to buy essential supplies (dishcloths! our existing stock having been pressed into service and used in a quadruple thickness as straining agents for the damson gin I had just bottled). We didn’t find any dish clothes but we did buy some essential supplies (carrot and parsnip mash, chocolate) before we braved the journey back home again. The weather had eased by this point but nonetheless we were pleased to have made the journey despite the snowy conditions. We then pressed on preparing a lunch of chicken thighs (which we really enjoyed, searing them in oil and cooking them in a in peppers, onions and the remains of a white lasagne-style sauce. Even though so I say it myself, this turned out to be delicious complemented with broccoli and a baked potato.
When lunch was over, I was idly looking through the TV schedules to see what might be our evening viewing when I say that Jane Austen’s Emma was to start in 2 minutes time. This was the novel I studied intensively for ‘O’-level so it it always particularly interesting to see if the portrayal of the characters match up with the mental images formed when you first read the novel (fifteen years old in my case) When I was that age, the family had fallen on some hard times and I remember my emotions upon reading the very first sentence in the book which reads as follows: ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich with a comfortable home and a happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly twenty one years in the world with very little to vex or distress her‘ I can remember now how my lip curled with disgust as I thought to myself that I certainly did not want to read any further than this as I could see no points of congruence whatsoever between the world that Austen was about to describe and my own existence. As it turned out, I quite enjoyed the novel as it unfolded but my feelings of distate having read that first sentence have remained with me over the years. The minute was Emma was over, we repaired to our iPad where we were due to FaceTime some of our oldest ex-Waitrose friends. We were on the iPad for the best part of an hour and a half whilst we recounted to each the kinds of experiences that we had both had over the Christmas period – an experience largely revolving around the food we had enjoyed.
The COVID-19 news this evening is particularly bad, not to say shocking. The number of new infections has risen from 41, 385 yesterday to 53,135 today. That is a 28% increase in a single day! The latest daily figures come after it was revealed that England’s hospitals are now treating more patients than during the peak of the first wave in April. So it now appears that the NHS is facing the most ‘perfect storm’ and the real impact of the worst of the winter crisis has yet to bite (some time in late January or February) There are stories already of several hospitals at absolute maximum capacity with queues of ambulances outside hospital A&E departments as there is no space inside to receive the new patients, staff absolutely stretched to the limit and no space in the wards inside the hospitals. The fact that we have built several Nightingale hospitals all over the country is to no avail because where are we going to get the staff to staff them? Many of our European nurses appear to have ‘gone home’ For example there is a report (dated by now, from the Nursing and Midwifery Council) has shown has shown that the number of new nurses coming from the EU to work in the UK has dropped by 87% from 6,382 in 2016/17 to 805 in 2017/18. It is rather difficult to get accurate figures in this area as sometimes new entrants to the nursing workforce do not have their origins correctly stated but it is undoubtedly the case that the whole Brexit factor has deterred new entrants from entering the UK and several others (perhaps in their thousands) have returned home. Even a large majority of those who voted ‘Leave’ still want European nurses to come and work here but there are so many factors such as the ‘hostile environment’ promised to illegal migrants to dissuade many would be nurses wanting to come to live and work in post-Brexit Britain.
As soon as we woke up this morning, we were greeted with the news that the Oxford University/AstraZeneca virus has received the approach of the regulators and hence can be released for immediate use (from next Monday onwards) Whereas the dosage is normally one jab followed by another some weeks later, the regulators have approved the protocol that the first dose can be administered (giving about 70% protection) followed by a second dose some twelve weeks later. This approach means that the protection is being spread much more rapidly than if you had one jab followed by another some three weeks later. In order to protect the population, though, it is necessary to inoculate some 2 million people a week and whether this is achievable remains to be seen. The manifest advantages of this particular vaccine are its cheapness (about £3 a shot rather than £25 for the Pfizer alternative) and the fact that it only needs normal refrigeration conditions (and not the -70 degrees of the Pfizer alternative) This makes it much easier to get into residential homes. Also the government has taken out an option for 100 million doses of the vaccine should be sufficient to inoculate the whole of the ‘at-risk’ population in the UK. But it is undoubtedly a race between the rapidly advancing new variant of the virus on the one hand versus the rapidity with which the new vaccine can be ruled out across the population on the other.
Meg and I walked down to collect our newspapers in relatively overcast but not snowy conditions. It looks as though the Midlands lay in between two swathes of snow bearing clouds to the north and to the south. However, where the sludge had turned to ice along the upper reaches of the main road had to be negotiated with a certain amount of care so we either walked on the road or navigated our way with extreme caution along the pavements. Conditions improved as we approached the park, though (warmer temperature? more feet to melt the snow?) After we collected our newspapers, we popped into Waitrose for a carton of milk and then swung onto the High Street in Bromsgrove to go to replenish supplies at one of those cut-price ‘health and beauty’ shops that seem to have sprung up recently. This is because we suspect that we may be moved from Tier 2 to Tier 4 later on today when the changes are announced by Matt Hancock so we were planning ahead for a lockdown (or ‘semi-lockdown’) lasting at least a month. When we got home, we had a nice meal of our favourite Waitrose fishcakes and then settled down to watch the latest news on the rolling news programmes.
Today was the day when the EU-UK trade bill was being rushed through Parliament, with the idea being to get all of the stages passed and then through the Lords ready for the Royal Assent later on this evening. The Labour Party has been whipped to support the bill but in the opinion of many, the Labour Party should have abstained leaving the Tories to pick up all of the fall-out that will undoubtedly occur once the full implications of the deal start to become apparent (not least the mountain of paperwork that is now required, the fact that the fishing industry has been left in the lurch and crucially the position of the services industry is still undetermined) The Commons finally approved the ‘deal’ bu 521 votes to 73.
Last night, I wrote a long email to our friends in Spain who seem to be experiencing some difficulties in coping with the long months of lockdown – I get the impression that the Spanish police are much more assiduous with enforcing regulations than in this country (which may be a long felt hangover from the days of Franco even though he died in 1975). I am offering whatever advice and support I can, even including the suggestion that they try some Yoga which may have some benefits in alleviating long-term stress. It is interesting that the BBC is offering an item on their website under the title ‘COVID-19: Five ways to stay positive throughout the winter‘ in which they have assembled the help of several mental health experts who have provided a series of tips that may prove helpful for many.
Meanwhile, we in Bromsgrove (and many other parts of the country) have been moved from Tier 2 to Tier 3. I am not exactly sure how much more stringent this will prove to be in our day-to-day lives. It means that some three-quarters of the population are in the highest possible Tier 4 and most of the rest of the country in Tier 3. From the point of view of the politicians, at least they can say that this ‘Short term pain for long-term gain as the vaccine is on its way’
This is an interesting day that has arrived at last. I have the feeling that many people in the country are really sort of looking forward to today if only to say ‘goodbye’ to the year of 2020. On Thursdays, we are are sometimes a little delayed because we have the weekly order from Waitrose and that means everything has to be put away before our walk and hence we were a little delayed. Having said that, it was a beautiful day with a fine blue sky for our walk but Meg and I had to be careful when starting our walk together. Underfoot, there were places where it was icy in the extreme and we have not been holding on to each other, we both might have slipped twice. As Meg has endured a ‘FOOSH‘ (Fall On Out-Stretched Hand) fracture of her arm some eighteen months ago, we do not fancy a repeat of that when A&E departments are likely to be clogged up with potential COVID-19 patients. So we both exercised the maximum of care and then we got to the lower reaches of the road where the sun had managed to shine on the pavements and then ice had been turned to water. We saw one of our friends briefly (in their car) when we walked down and wished each other ‘Happy New Year‘ This year, in particular, we all seem to be saying to each other that next year cannot possibly be as troubled as 2020 – but of course, none of us really knows what terrors the virus has in store for us before we are ‘saved’ by the vaccine.
Today, I have promised Meg that I will say goodbye to an old and trusted friend (or should I say pair of friends) who have been very good to me over the past few years. I am referring, of course, to my tried and trusty boots which are superbly comfortable and the Vibram soles are still pretty sound. However, the heels are completely worn through and the rubberised section has completely gone and I seem to be at least halfway through a sort of composite which formed the heel. I suppose I must be particularly hard on the heels the way my foot strikes the ground as the rest of the boots seem OK. However, I calculate that I must have walked 1,000 kilometres in these boots and I do get rather attached to items of clothing that have served me well over the years. Tomorrow on New Year’s Day, I shall be breaking in a new pair of boots and I wonder whether they, too, will last me for 1,000 kilometres. I have in mind, though, not to absolutely throw my boots away for a week or so until the really bad icy and snowy weather is well and truly past us – if, for example, I get one set of boots absolutely sodden through in the snow (which can happen) then I will have another set to fall back on whilst the current boots are being dried out. I am going to give my boots some restorative polish before they start their journey but to be honest boots always seem to wear out from the bottom up rather than the other way around.
After lunch, I had said to myself that I would make another journey down into town. We had been a prescription from Meg’s consultant so I needed to get that into the system so that she does not run short of medication. Whilst on my way down, I popped a Kilner jar full of un-decanted damson gin so that one of my friends could either bottle it straight or blend it with some of her own. Whilst down in town, I availed myself of getting some cash from an ATM (an all too rare event these days) and popped into our local Asda supermarket which I do not really enjoy. Nonetheless, I was pleased to get a few items which I know I cannot get elsewhere – and I grabbed a large bag of red potatoes for £1.00 which contained several very large specimens that should be excellent for baked potatoes that I cook in the microwave. I needed to time my visit to town quite carefully because I wanted to get back before dark – and indeed the light held until 4.20 which was the time of my return. Once again, though, I did have to be especially careful not to slip on any of the icy sections of the pavement.
Upon my return, I treated myself to a nice cup of tea and yet another view of Paddington which I think is actually an extended social commentary upon the ways in which we treat and occasionally welcome newcomers to our midst. There are quite a lot of visual jokes which I still find hilarious – one of the best being when Paddington notices a sign on one of the escalators of the Underground which stated ‘Dogs must be carried‘ whereupon Paddington goes and seizes a dog to put under his arm assuming that was the point of the instruction!
Well, it is very pleasant to write 1st January at long last. I am sure that most of the population are only too happy to be getting rid of 2020 in its entirety. Too express our feelings, one of my close friends had sent me a videoclip, German in origin, which shows Santa Claus urinating (simulated by a series of little illuminated lights) on some kind of model which shows ‘2020’ Perhaps these are the feelings of many of us. I was going to watch the New Year in but fell asleep 5 minutes beforehand so was spared some of the celebrations which, of course, were not really taking place this year.
This morning as a beuatiful day to start off with a clear blue sky and some pale sunshine. Much of the ice and snow had melted so walking on the pavements presented no hazard. Today was the day when I was going to try out my new walking boots but first I gave them a treatment of leather preservative and finished off with a coating of dubbin. The boots, Aldi’s finest which I bought at least nine months ago turned out to be supremely comfortable – they fitted like a glove despite my two pairs of socks and had some good ‘D’ ring fastenings which I like on a walking boot. Let us now hope that they manage to last for as much as 1,000 kilometres like their forebears.
After lunch, we thought we would get into contact with some of our relatives. Meg telephoned her uncle in North Wales who is in his 90s now but who seems to be of nature’s great survivors. He seems to have survived Christmas quite well without incident but Meg is going to make another call in a day or so to continue the conversation. I telephoned my sister in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire who had also experienced a Christmas Day bereft of family but other family members had been in touch via a variety of social media which helps somewhat. We caught up on some family news and all expressed the view that having lived through some 9-10 months of coping with the pandemic we could surely hang on for a few more weeks before vaccines head our way. I busied myself with processing the damsons that remain once you have poured off the rest of the liquor as a result of my last bottling exercise.Without bothering to make a formal jam, I merely heated the damsons in their gin-enhanced juice with a modicum of sugar and then allowed the mixture to cool and set. Today I bottled and labelled the compôte and most of the bottles I will give away to friends and neighbours. After a quick Google search, I have ascertained that compôte only lasts about two weeks even when refrigerated but that’s fine. Meg and I had some with a bowl of rice pudding and I have to say it was absolutely delicious – but we will probably consume it quite quickly.
The COVID-19 situation is developing quite rapidly. A quick look at Sky News has just indicated that ALL of the London primary schools are to remain closed and it is not clear when the situation will be judged sufficiently safe for them to reopen. However, the situation appears similar to the first lockdown that we had in the spring because the schools will still remain open for especially vulnerable children and also for the children of key workers. The situation will be reviewed again on 18th January i.e. in two weeks on Monday. The number of new cases has again exceeded 50,000 for the fourth day in a row – numbers this high are especially serious when we know that after a couple of weeks hospitalisation is inevitable for a proportion of cases will die.The figure in the spring was that approximately one third of all patients admitted to hospital will die of the disease but this proportion has been slowly dropping (i.e. patient’s chances of survival increasing) as the medical profession has had a chance to learn from experience and to manage cases. The situation changes so rapidly that it is hard to get definitive and up-to-date stats in this area but it is certainly the case that the older you are and your sex (i.e. male rather than female) count very much against you.
The next situation to keep an eye on is how we are actually going to cope with Brexit, now that it has actually happened. The full situation will only unwind in the next week or so and probably only for exporters. The government has decided only to check for ‘controlled substances’ (alcohol and tobacco)coming in to the country and full checks on impairs will not take place until 1st July, 2021 – an even this might be extended. This sounds to me like a smuggler’s bonanza in the making!
Today was one of those kinds of days when you were not sure whether it was going to stay fairly quiet on the weather front or indeed even rain or sleet or snow. Nonetheless, we decided to venture forth and although there was a slight flurry of snowflakes, we felt it was nothing to bother us much. After we had collected our supply of Saturday newspapers, the weather worsened a little but we thought we would make for the bandstand where we were, at least, sheltered from the rain. Our intention was to drink our coffee and immediately make our way home. Also sheltering in the bandstand was a man we had recognised from some months in the park when we were occupying adjacent park benches. Our fellow park visitor had lived for a lot of his life in South Africa but we spent some time discussing how COVID-19 had implications for people of our age and generation. We shared a similar outlook wondering what the views of the medics might be if they had to make ‘life-and-death’ decisions in the dire event that we were struck by the virus and hospitalised. Would the medics apply a ‘Triage‘ system i.e. only bother to give intervention to those who they had a chance of saving given scarce resources (critical care beds, specialised nursing staff, ventilators) and how would we both fare if a medic was poised over us with a ‘tick-list’ and whether we would be offered any life-saving treatment or not. After these macabre thoughts, we started to discuss racism (particularly in the context of Southern Africa) as our park friend revealed that he was one eighth Sri Lankan and we laughed over the notions of there being such a thing as a ‘pure’ race, white or otherwise. This proved to be an entertaining twenty minutes or so, after which the weather was starting to close in on us and we made for home. However, there was no biting cold wind and the pavements seemed quite sound underfoot.
After a lunch of curry, we decided as a household to remove our Christmas decorations, the principal job being to ‘undress’ the Christmas tree and then carefully disentangle the electrics and store carefully the fragile ornaments. Now we came to disposing of the tree because on the way in, the tree was protected by a type of netting which was evidently removed once we got it inside the house. When we do things in reverse, we snip off some of the smaller branches to make the whole tree slimmer and capable of being taken outside without damage to anywhere. Then I set to work with my trusty bowsaw, inherited from Meg’s parents which is particularly well suited to tree pruning activities. The tree got divided into three largish chunks which will then fit into some garden rubble sacks and thence into the boot of the car without much more ado. We then gave the car a spin (to get rid of the snow lying on its roof) as far as our local garden centre which accepts back the trees you have bought from them and recycles them. After that, it was a relatively simple job to remove the decorations, take down the Christmas cards (which we will give one last read) and pack up our little fibre-optic Christmas tree and crib. I must say it is good to get rid of all the Christmas clutter once you are well and truly into the New Year but there is always a feeling that the livings rooms look a little denuded after them – and of course, the Christmas tree which used to illuminate a corner of our communal hall is now no more.
An interesting situation has now arisen since the Government’s latest U-turn which has resulted in all of London’s primary schools being closed (although still ‘open’ for looked-after children, children at risk and the children of key workers). A leading union has said that staff at schools have a legal right not to return to classrooms due to the spread of COVID, while another has started legal proceedings against the Department for Education. This raises the interesting question of whether schools can be regarded as safe places in which to work. although the government is desperate to keep schools as ‘open’ as possible. But in the face of infection rates that are soaring, is it sensible for school children of any age to return to school and whilst not becoming ill themselves may play a part in transmitting the virus to older generations? The interesting question about a legal challenge is that the government may be forced in any legal action to display the reasoning that has led to some primary schools being ‘closed’ whilst others remain open despite the fact that the local risk factors appear to be similar. it will be interesting to see how this plays out – a fortnight’s delay in returning to school for all school children may buy us a little bit of time and, perhaps, allow more time to have adequate testing facilities to be installed within the schools.
Last night there had been a scattering of snow so I wondered how deep it would prove to be this morning. As it happened, the snow was quite thinly scattered on an underlay of slush – I walked down in my ‘old’ boots thinking that a deep covering of snow might not do my new ones any good but in the event I did not need to worry. After I collected my newspapers, I was walking upon along the road (safer than the pavement!) when I got into a conversation with a lady cleaning the snow off her car. As our conversation progressed from one topic to another, it transpired that she was an evangelical christian and so we started to discuss some interesting points of theology e.g. in the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ the phrase ‘Lead us not into temptation’ in the Latin is ‘ne nos inducas in tentationem’ which could be translated as ‘let us not fall into temptation‘ which is subtly different. There is a massive theological debate in all of this in which the present Pope had expressed his view but time and space to do permit us to enter in the the intricacies of this debate just now. This all made me a little late for the Andrew Marr show but I was quite happy to miss a few minutes of Boris Johnson who was on the show this morning (complete with ruffled hair)
Meg and I made our usual trip to the park (the trip being foreshortened as the papers had already been collected) and we sat on a dry park bench to have our elevenses. As always, we were passed as we sat by the normal collection of young children on their scooters and dog walkers with their unleashed dogs (the latter always approach us thinking that some food might be in the offing, which of course, it never is) After we got home, we discovered that the lamb pieces that we had in a kind of stew and cooking throughout the morning was almost burnt to a cinder. However, I managed to resurrect it with some onion gravy and, in the event, we had quite a nice dinner. The afternoon was devoted to a long and lazy reading of the Sunday newspapers in which the two major topics of the day (the worsening COVID-19 crisis and the full implications of our exit from the EU now that we had a minimal trade agreement in place) were well and truly analysed.
In the early evening, we got into contact with our friends in Spain who were now in a happier state of mind as their daughter who is at university in Madrid has tested negative for the virus and subsequently has been allowed to go home to see her parents for ‘Reyes‘. (‘Reyes‘ literally when translated from the Spanish is ‘kings’ and is the day in Spain when children will traditionally receive the presents from their parents and friends). They might have opened a little present on on Christmas Day itself but ‘Reyes‘ which we know as the feast of the Epiphany is that day when major presents are given and received. In small fishing communities, the ‘Kings’ will arrive by fishing boat whilst on some of the islands such as Tenerife they might actually arrive by camel – all of this adds to the sense of veracity to impress the younger children.
The COVID-19 news continues to be terrible with new infections again at 55,000 and the number of deaths 454. Boris Johnson is insisting that schools are safe for pupils (probably true) and for teachers (probably untrue). Some teachers at the suggestion of their union are sending in letters indicating that they are not prepared to work unless the school can guarantee that they are entering a safe place of work. Even Boris Johnson is saying that further restrictions may need to be applied ‘in the weeks ahead’. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer (the leader of the Labour Party) is calling for an immediate national lockdown (similar to that experienced in the spring) and his argument is that the government is always doing doing too little, too late and we should attempt to be ‘ahead’ of the curve and not always behind it. If the virus continues to infect at the present rate, then perhaps the only solution may be another national lockdown. Some senior Tories (but not the government) are arguing that all children should be kept out of school until half-term (towards the middle of February). The situation is fast moving and it will be interesting to see if schools actually do reopen next week or whether the absence of teachers may force a ‘de facto’ closure. It may be that schools find themselves in an almost impossible situation and the headteachers and school authorities may have to cope with whatever complex situation confronts them when the schools actually resume next week.
Today was somewhat overcast and chilly but no snow was immediately in prospect. The cold spell is going to last a few more days yet but we are relieved not to wake up to a further dump of snow. So we conducted our normal walk, picking up our newspapers and making our way to the park which was not particularly busy. We had our elevenses and walked home without bumping into anyone although I am carrying a spare bottle of damson gin plus a jar of compôte in case we happened to meet with anyone who might be the recipients of further gifts. After lunch, we read our newspapers and listened to some of the rolling news programmes – the Scots are going for something approaching a full lockdown to cope with the COVID-19 crisis so it is a matter of speculation how far behind we will happen to be.
Earlier in the day we had a message from some of our near neighbours in Hampshire when all of the family were going to be at home and therefore accessible to a FaceTime webinar. We arranged a time in the late afternoon when we could all coincide – and we are looking forward to that as we have not seen the younger members of the family for about ten years now and with the passage of time they have got their GCSE’s and ‘A’-levels and graduated from their respective universities. But before then, we Skyped some of our Oxfordshire friends and had a good chat about events that had happened to us both over the Christmas period (which we were both glad to have behind us) as well as matters much more philosophical. We parted saying that we should Skype again in a fortnight or so, which we certainly shall. No sooner had this call ended before we repaired to our iPad which is a better technology for us to make and receive FaceTime calls. It was wonderful to chat whilst we were brought up-to-date on what each individual members of the family was doing – principally, their work life after graduation. The son of the family was shortly to leave to go and work in London – the last time we saw him he was actually the first questioner in an edition of Question Time which happened to come from Cardiff University. The daughter of the family was living locally but under a bubble arrangement could come home to work remotely (as though going to the office!). The family had lost their family dog over the years but acquired another, bear-like looking dog which, if my memory serves me correctly was a cockapoodle (or a mixture of a cocker spaniel and a poodle) or a similar mixture.There are not many occasions in which all of the family would be together ‘en famille‘ so we were pleased to seize the opportunity for a FaceTime chat whilst we could.
Tonight there is going to be a broadcast from Boris Johnson to the nation so it is fairly evident that something approaching a new lockdown is imminent. The important question about which there is speculation before the broadcast is whether schools are to be involved in the lockdown (like last spring) or not. I am continuing the blog few minutes after the broadcast so now some of the details have been filled in. It now seems that the lockdown will be total i.e. like last spring, but essential and key workers will still travel to work and continue to work, Really significant change, for all of us, is that the lockdown will stay in place until mid-February at the very earliest. The political commentators are suggesting that Boris Johnson did not sound at all confident that even some of the most stringent measures could be lifted after mid-February. In other words, the lockdown will last at six weeks and probably for a fair amount of time after that. The provisions will come into effect from midnight tonight but will become law on Wednesday (presumably after Parliament has approved the emergence legislation). People will be allowed to leave the house for essential shopping and exercise (once per day) but all social contact has to be minimised. In the case of the schools, children in general will be asked not to attend school but to engage in distant leaning whilst they can. But, as we have discovered this evening, the list of ‘essential’ and ‘key’ workers is long and complex and schools are meant to operationalise this sounds like a logistical nightmare. For example, is a parent living on a one room flat turns up with a child and claim a ‘carer’ status, what element of proof will have to be supplied to the school to work out whether a child is eligible to return to school or not? As I write, the senior staff in schools are frantically trying to work out how all of this going to work but it sounds as though the next few days are going to be particularly fraught at the school gates (or when the school is telephoned, if nobody can get through, of course, on over-whelmed phone lines)
Today started off with a fairly clear sky which indicated that we might have quite a fine day today. It is going to be interesting to observe how closely the impending 3rd lockdown will be observed today which was only announced by Boris Johnson at 8pm yesterday evening. In law, the lockdown only starts at a minute past midnight on Wednesday morning but we were being encouraged to start the lockdown straight away. As it turned out, the day turned out to be a comparatively ‘normal’ day. The volume and validity of the traffic seemed to be no different to any other day and we made our way to our newspaper shop, wondering whether this was to be classed as an essential service and was therefore going to keep open during the lockdown. We joked with the shopkeepers that the shop was evidently an essential service to the public as it sold both chocolate and wine (as well as newspapers). We then made our way to the park which had slightly more than its normal complement of children – Meg and I surmised that they had probably been informed (by text message) that the school was closed (or at least ‘not open’ for the majority of children) and hence they had come to the park to amuse themselves and/or let off steam. We ate our comestibles but an icy wind developed so we were glad to get going and into some pale winter sunshine. On our way back up the hill, we bumped into some of our oldest friends who were having some problems with the water supply into their property and the water board was there with a ‘gizmo’ which detects the presence of water underground. I have no idea how these detection devices work, by the way, unless it is by the means of some ground-penetrating radar or a similar technology. Whilst we were chatting, I gave them the jar of compôte I had been carrying around with me for a day or so now and I hope that it hasn’t gone ‘off’ before they have a chance to enjoy it.
We had no particular plans for this afternoon and intended to have a fairly easy afternoon. I was pleased to receive my fairly large parcel of address labels which I only order once every few years. I tend to buy them 1,000 at a time and they last for many years but at Christmas time, I tend to use them up in great quantity as I always stick a spare label in each Christmas card I send so that I know that th recipients have our latest contact details. On this occasion, I did take the opportunity of squeezing the lines of text a little so that I could include my mobile access number as well as our landline. However, I find that today there are a variety of other electronic-type addresses that you sometimes wish to convey which will not fit onto a conventional address label. So I am treating myself to an additional set of labels which I shall use sparingly which contains details of my mobile, email, website homepage and a couple of blog addresses (WordPress version and a text-based alternative). This afternoon, I took some time to hunt out our official NHS numbers which I intend to keep easily accessible as I may need them both in the fairly nature future. When we were chatting about the availability of the vaccine which we hope will be offered to us within the next 4-5 weeks, it is quite important that we have our NHS numbers easily available. It is evident (to us) that before we can receive any vaccine, those responsible for the vaccination will have to link onto our NHS records so that our eligibility can be confirmed. At the same time, once we receive our vaccinations, it is evident that our records will have to be updated and presumably the NHS number will act as link between the vaccinator’s own database and the rest of our NHS records. When you go to hospital and hand in a blood or urine sample, the nurse generally runs off a special label with the official patient details which can go onto the sample bottle. I typically ask the nurse if they will run off one or two spares and these ‘official’ labels can then go into my diaries and the like. In my own case, I had a spare label so I was catered for. In Meg’s case, I hunted through some old medical records and discovered a letter inviting her to a radiology appointment some ten years before but this letter contained details of name, address, date of birth and NHS number. These I managed to seal into a self laminating pouch so that means that I now have to hand both my own and Meg’s NHS numbers for when the vaccination call eventually comes. I am anticipating that I may be called in for a vaccine jab within some five or six weeks but we shall have to wait and see.
In the late afternoon, we were going to FaceTime some of our ex-Waitrose friends by prior arrangement but the Prime Minister was due to make a special broadcast so we watched this- complete with the news that something like 2% of the UK population is/has been infected with the COVID-19 virus which is quite a sobering thought. After this, we had a good long hour and a half chat with our friends before we settled down to a light supper of rice pudding plus our own special damson compôte (which was delicious).
Today was quite a fine bright day but we were somewhat delayed whilst I updated my Waitrose order this morning (a job for every Wednesday morning for the foreseeable future). We collected our newspapers and made our way to one of our two favourite seats overlooking the boating lake? duck pond? which is a feature of our local park. On one of our customary benches, we struck up a conversation with a chap we recognised from our past ventures in the park. We started off our chat with each other by comparing our (very similar) stainless steel thermos flasks – and then the state of our walking boots! One thing led to another and we discovered that we had quite a lot in common as our new found friend had recently retired as a lecturer from the University of Birmingham. As it happened, I had with me in my wallet some details of my email, websites etc. so I handed one of these over so that we could keep in touch by email, if we wanted. We promised ourselves a beer together when the circumstances allow – which may be months off yet but it is always nice to have something to which to look forward. We were a little late home and we had to have a fairly swift midday meal because we had a video call scheduled with one of Meg’s therapists in the early afternoon. We got the video call up and running after an initial hitch and then had an interesting and fruitful conversation which took us up to our afternoon teatime.
In the middle of the night, I was following the election results from the two Senate races in Georgia. These are absolutely critical because were the Democrats to win the two seats, then the Senate would be effectively tied at 50:50. However, in the event of a tie, the Vice President automatically has the casting vote and as the VP elect is Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s VP elect, then ‘de facto’ control of the Senate passes from the Republicans to the Democrats. This has enormous significance because, in the past, the Republican Senate majority had the ability to block any progressive legislation and Biden’s presidency would have been ‘cut off at the knees’ at the start. But with control of the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives, then President-elect Biden has the opportunity to press on with such issues as the fight against the COVID-19 virus, the measures to pursue a green agenda to combat climate change and so on. I was following the election detail by detail as the various counties in Georgia reported and I found the websites of the New York Times and a political website called ‘FiveThirtyEight‘ particularly helpful and informative. These websites not only give up-to-date stats of the counts from the various counties as they are uploaded but also some expert and informed commentary. As I write, the Democrats have certainly won one of the seats and are within an ace of capturing the other one, with 98% of the vote counted and the remaining vote to be delivered from areas that were largely black (in or around Atlanta ) and likely 85%-15% to split for the Democrats.
Tonight, as I started to blog, I got an intimation that Donald Trump’s supporters had stormed the Capital Building in which members of the Congress were trying to officially confirm the results of the election. I have to say never before have I watched TV news so open-mouthed as I saw the events in Washington DC unfold in front of me. Trump supporters had been all but encouraged to go and make their presence felt as they were protesting against what they thought was a stolen election. Donald Trump himself inflamed the crowd by suggesting that he had won by a landslide and the election was stolen from him by ‘false’ media and fraudulent Democrats! The very latest news that I have is that 1100 members of the National Guard (i.e. the military) have been sent in to support the local police together with an additional 200 members from Virginia. As Trump supporters almost to a man are armed to the teeth and evidently so are the National Guard then as the hours unfold it is possible that we see an armed shootout within the Capitol building. Members of the Trump mob can be seen wandering through the Rotunda and the New York Times have just published a photo of Nancy Pelosi’s (Democrat ‘Speaker’ of the House of Representatives) office being ransacked with a Trump ‘supporter’ replete with Stars and Stripes and his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. The rest of the world is watching in amazement as ‘American democracy effecting the transition from one president to the next’ is beamed throughout the world. Is the end of Trumpism? Or will it completely fracture the Republican Party between Trump supporters and traditional Republicans who are absolutely horrified by what they see?
Today was a very incredibly frosty day with the weather at about -4 degrees and with quite a misty freezing fog over the whole of the area. We had our Waitrose shopping order delivered an hour later than usual which we think will fit our timetables a little better – but by the time we got everything put away, our walk down the hill was delayed somewhat. We made our way a little gingerly but, in truth, the pavements were not especially icy or slippery. I am tempted to say that the weather was ‘cold enough to freeze the balls of a brass monkey‘ which I always thought was actually a nautical term derived from the old sailing ships. The iron cannon balls were stocked in a pyramid on a brass plate (called a ‘monkey‘) and when the weather was very cold the differential rate of contraction between the iron and the brass was sufficient to give the pyramid a minute nudge and this caused the balls to fall off. However, in all honesty, I did find an internet source that comprehensively rubbished the whole of this explanation, including the fact that iron cannon balls were never even stored on a brass plate in the first place. Nonetheless, I think I will hang onto the first explanation. We collected our newspapers and ate our comestibles on a frozen park bench but the park was practically deserted. We did notice, though, that as the weather conditions seemed extreme, everybody we passed seemed exceptionally jolly. Is just the British tendency to smile in the face of adversity? Whilst we were in the park, we received the very sad news (via a WhatsApp message) that Don Mariano Baena one of our oldest Spanish friends had died. In his younger days he had helped to frame the Spanish Constitution and then became the Head of the Department of Public Administration at the Complutense University of Madrid which is how we came to know him. Later he returned to the Supreme Court but he was under the constant threat of death from ETA – the Spanish terrorist group. This was not an idle threat as several of his colleagues had been assassinated. As Mariano was aged about 90 and had had a stroke, we did have the inevitable pang of sadness but also a feeling that Mariano might well be in a better place (he was a fervent Catholic)
When we got home, we treated ourself to a nice hot curry – a dish we often prepare on a Thursday but one that seemed to be especially called for. We particularly wanted to settle down in front of the rolling news programmes to see the sequelae of yesterday – no doubt, the American nation as in 9-11 will be full of a period of introspection asking themselves ‘How did we allow this to happen?‘ Three particular things are starting to stand out in the cold light of day. Firstly if this was not a coup, then it surely was an insurrection as Trump had urged his supporters on to virtually occupy the Capitol building. Secondly, many, many contrasts are being made between the way in way in which the Black Lives Matter protest outside the Capitol was handled. On that occasion, the National Guard were all protected to the hilt and several peaceful protestors were violently manhandled and even arrested. Meanwhile, the mob yesterday were allowed to roam over the building and were even escorted out with perhaps many not being even arrested or charged. I think the number of arrests is about 60 out of a crowd which at the preceding rally was numbered in thousands and many of them joined in the storming of the Capitol. The FBI are now appealing for video evidence and anything that might identify them. (Why did the police when reinforced by the National Guard did not lock the building, handcuff everybody with plastic ties, put them in a secure location such as an army barracks nearby, try them in a specially convened court this morning and then keep them locked up for about two weeks until the inauguration was over? The suspicion remains that if they black, this would almost certainly have happened) Thirdly, there is now active consideration of the ways in which Trump could be removed from office immediately before he could inflict God knows what damage in the few days remaining. One possibility is Amendment 25 to the Constitution (the Vice President and the majority of the Cabinet with a quorum of 8) could declare the President ‘incapable’ and the Vice President could take over. Another possibility is impeachment which requires a two thirds vote in the Senate as as well as a resolution in the House of Representatives. This vote would pass through the lower house and then could pass through the new Senate if all of the Democrats and one sixth of the Republican senators (to give a two thirds majority) voted for it. This could be passed in one day, given the video evidence. I doubt, though, that either will happen but these are are unprecedented times. I always thought that a coup from the right was much more likely in the USA and the UK than a coup from the left and, of course in the UK, Boris Johnson tried to prorogue Parliament to prevent further debate before Brexit.The German government recalled that Hitler had arranged for the Reichstag to be burnt down before coming to power ‘democratically’!
Today was one of those ‘nothing much happened all day’ type of days. There had been a light scattering of snow overnight but nothing to trouble us on the pavements. Having collected our newspapers and trudging towards the park, though, it started snowing (fairly lightly) so we did not tarry excessively but drank our coffee and headed homewards. Today was the day that our domestic help comes to help so it was great to see her again after the excitement of Christmas and New Year – we chatted away excitedly about the kind of Christmas we had both had but, of course, we have to be particularly careful to keep a fair distance between all of us. We worked out little culinary treats that we are going to do for each other – whenever, I have some curry left over (which is nearly always) a save a bit extra for her and similarly she was to cook for us one of her specialist lasagne which, no doubt, will be streets ahead of anything you can buy or eat in a restaurant.
We had a fish dinner today (some pieces of cod which I found in an obscure part of the freezer that I had forgotten all about). We tart it up a bit by making a specialised little piece of hot sauce (equal elements of Thousand Island dressing, mayonnaise and tomato sauce heated up for a minute in the microwave) and it works a treat. We try the same dressing, incidentally, to make the fishcakes we tend to have once a week slightly more interesting.
Watching the rolling news programmes, it was amazing to see Donald Trump in something like a contrite mood and formally conceding the election as well as promising an orderly transfer of power. It is fairly evident to us what is going on. There is now a real possibility of being drummed out of office either via the 25th Amendment procedure or via another impeachment. It looks as though Trump is now seriously fighting for his political life and hence the strange spectacle of him reading out a statement condemning the rioters (that he had previously egged on) and indicating that the offenders would be prosecuted (but is anyone going to ‘shop’ them to the FBI?) It appears that some 4-5 people have actually lost their lives during this storming of the Capitol building. My son showed me something he had seen on social media that I had not been able to verify concerning how one of the rioters had lost their lives. After being photographed brandishing a couple of rifles in the air, he attempted to steal a picture from one of the walls. In the course of wrenching it off, he had discharged a taser which he was carrying into his own scrotum – in the subsequent distress he had inflicted upon himself, he had suffered a heart attack from which he died. I do not know if this story is correct but, if it is, it gives an extra twist to the meaning of the German word ‘schadenfreude’ which means 'malicious delight in another person’s misfortune'.
The COVID-19 news tonight is truly frightful. In the last 24 hours, there have been 1325 deaths recorded and 68,000 new infections. Of these statistics, the ‘new infection’ rate is always going to be the most important because a proportion of these are destined to become hospital in-patients – if there is any room left in the hospitals. The hospitals in London are at breaking point and the London Mayor has declared that the state of the London hospitals is now a ‘major incident’. As so many commentators are now saying, it really is a race between trying to get as many of the elderly and vulnerable vaccinated before the middle of February and the fact that the hospitals, already at breaking point, are going to have to cope somehow with an intake that seems to be increasing more than their discharge date day by day. Once the wards are full, the A&E corridor space is full with trollies and the ambulances outside are full, then what is to be done? The government is so worried about the next few weeks that they are going to start a major advertising campaign that members of the population should act as they are already infected by the virus and should keep to social distancing religiously – something that even a casual observation in the streets shows is not happening. Another source of worry is that a recent survey has shown that many people think they once they have been vaccinated, then many restrictions may be eased. It could be that ‘easing of restrictions prematurely’ will exceed the benefits to be derived from the vaccination itself which willingly prolong the misery for all of us.
Today has been an interesting day! It started off in a very conventional way as we walked down to collect our newspapers (saved for us behind the counter at our friendly local newsagents!) We then made our way to the park where we met up with our new found friend that we met the other day (an academic who taught OR [Operations Research] at Birmingham University) We had just about finished our chat for the day, social distancing well maintained, when we saw a group entering the park armed with a powerful portable loudspeaker and with a message to spread. This collection of individuals was declaiming that the whole of COVID-19 was a myth, that the vaccine was an abomination against nature, that the lockdown was fundamentally a fraud to deprive us of our liberties and similar scientifically illiterate utterings. If they had come anywhere near me, I would have had a real go at them for being (a) scientifically illiterate and (b) a positive danger to their fellow citizens if they were dissuading them from accepting the vaccine if offered. As it happened, the group turned off at a tangent with a massively amplified message broadcast across the park. We were on the point of leaving but as we did a couple of police cars turned up and two youngish but seemingly well-prepared police officers emerged (not your average ‘plod’) I approached them to report what I had seen and they quickly reassured me that they knew all about the ‘vaccine deniers’ and were on their way to deal with it.
On my way home, I reflected to myself (and to some of our old friends that we met on the way home) whether what we had seen was just the exercise of free speech or whether a threat to public order was in the making. Of course it is often argued that ‘your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins‘ or, to put it another way, given that all freedoms have to be exercised responsibly that one is not free to shout ‘FIRE’ as a member of a theatre audience. I suspect, but do not know, that the group may well have breaking local authority bye-laws particularly as they had been targeting a park. Would they have been equally free to spout the same rubbish up and down Bromsgrove High Street, I asked myself. I did wonder where the motivation of the group came from i.e. was it religious or political? I did a quick Google search and think that I MAY have some of the explanation. It is apparently the case that many climate-change deniers have now turned their attention to the pandemic, arguing in each case that a massive hoax is being perpetrated upon the great British public. This is what I discovered using on a very rapid search of the internet:
In the UK, one of the most prominent voices questioning the science of COVID-19 has been astrophysicist Piers Corbyn (the elder brother of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn). In 2020, Piers Corbyn attended and organised demonstrations across the UK and argued the pandemic is a “pack of lies.”
Corbyn has long rejected mainstream climate science as “fraud,” and has pushed alternative theories of global warming, based on analysis of the sun’s activity, through his company WeatherAction
Of course, it is possible that I am completely barking up the wrong tree at this point and that a more careful and analytical search might reveal a much more complex story. However, the fact that groups might have switched their attention from ‘climate change’ to something much more current which touches everybody’s life such as the pandemic does have a superficial plausibility to it. If conventional journalism or the Main Street Media pick up on these or similar stories then it would be interesting to know. In particular, is it just a Bromsgrove phenomenon or part of a larger nationally organised protest? I do suspect the latter, by the way.
And now to more prosaic matters. As part of my pre-Christmas rummaging about, I discovered a couple of old Nokia 1100/1101 mobile phones that I have not used for about a year. I always used to take one or both of them away with me on holiday because whilst I was struggling, on occasions, to get my iPhone to recognise the hotel’s Wi-Fi networks and protocols, I used to switch on my little mobile which would show a message ‘Welcome to Spain‘ One of them had about £70 of credit left on it (well worth preserving) whilst in the other the SIM card no longer registered, for whatever reason. So I sent off to Tesco mobile for a free Sim replacement (Tesco tend to have a policy of keeping your sim alive rather than ‘killing it’ after six months of inactivity as some networks do) So I spent the afternoon fitting the SIM card (a few seconds) and then spent some time getting some credit on it of a type that would not expire in a month (which is typically the case) As the technology is so simple (ante-dating smart phones and just monochrome screens with block graphics – but the talk time and charge time lasts for at least a week if not more) My efforts were crowned with success and one of the phones is now destined for the glove compartment of the car as a permanent ‘carry around’.
So the day 300 of this blog has actually arrived – it will only be a couple of months until we have completed a year of these musings. Today was a fairly typical Sunday in that I went off in the car to collect the Sunday newspapers before returning to get my weekly ration of the Andrew Marr show. Evidently, with the looming crisis in the hospitals and the fact that the pandemic is almost poised to overtake this, this was the major focus of the discussion. I did, however, think they might have spared some 5-10 minutes discussing the developments in America, considering that we claim to have a ‘special relationship’ with the Americans. Actually, although we claim to have a ‘special relationship’ with the Americans, they never seem to claim the same in reverse. I suppose the last time that the Capital Building was invaded and even set on fire was by the British in 1814. Apparently, the the ensuing fire reduced all but one of the capital city’s major public buildings to smoking rubble, and only a torrential rainstorm saved the Capitol from complete destruction. Also destroyed was their collection of special books and manuscripts from the Library of Congress – the Americans have regarded the Capitol building in which both the House of Representatives and the Senate meet as an almost ‘sacred’ place and hence the sense of violation after the events of last Thursday night were felt only too keenly. I read a most interesting article on the American FiveThirtyEight website which argued, very persuasively, that the storming of the US Capitol was not just a protest against a so-called ‘stolen ‘election or a simple manifestation of the president’s lies about the integrity of his defeat. Rather the whole article argues that like so much of American politics, this insurrection was fundamentally about race, racism, and the white American’s stubborn commitment to white dominance (and hence the Confederacy flags that were borne aloft) no matter what the cost or the consequence. As can be seen from the video footage which is plentiful, the mob of rioters carried Confederate flags, hung nooses, and paraded white supremacist symbols as they violently breached the Capitol. I mention all of this because, strangely, it does not get reported as such in the British media. The British media tend to say things such as ‘Donald Trump’s supporters, emboldened by the words of the President’ etc. etc. and not phrases such as ‘a white supremacist, racist mob invaded the Capitol intent on murdering Speaker Nancy Pelosi if they had happened to come across her‘ It is interesting that the secret service made sure that Vice-President Pence was led away to a place of his safety to protect him from the mob after he refused to accede Trump’s request to nullify the election. It is especially interesting that the members of the British Conservative party who had had snuggled up close to Donald Trump just after his election (but before Brexit) were keeping their mouths firmly shut at the moment.
In the park, we did not meet any of our usual gaggle of acquaintances but still got approached by all of the local un-leashed dogs, suspecting that a tasty titbit might come their way (although I doubt that oranges and chocolate biscuits would do them any good, even if it was offered). We did get into conversation with a lady who at the time of the initial lockdown in the Spring was actually in Portugal. Her opinion was that the Portuguese police handled their function pretty well being firm whilst polite and it was quite a marked contrast to the British police who’s presence has hardly been felt at all (near to where we live, anyway). We thought we were going to have a special lunch of roast partridge, bought recently from Waitrose. But when we got it out it out of its packaging and were preparing to put into a roaster bag, it did smell somewhat ‘off’. So we immediately threw the whole of it away, not particularly wishing to get a dose of salmonella and being stuck in an A&E department for hours? days? on a trolley whilst the pandemic is at its height. I spent some time this afternoon locating chargers for my trusted air of Nokia 1100 phones. Just out of interest, I looked up some of the specifications and reviews for the Nokia 1100 and its variants. It holds the record for being the biggest selling phone of all time. having sold some 250 million units – it had a talk time of about 3 hours and a standby time of some 350-400 hours, which is way over a fortnight!
It was quite a grey and overcast day today – the temperature was actually 2-3° higher than yesterday but there was a slight breeze to make you feel it was actually a bit cooler. We collected our newspapers and sat, as normal, in the park but we it was getting a little chilly so we were not inclined to linger for too long. I knew that the government were speaking about tightening up some of the rules surrounding how people behave in public and the following ‘guidance’ (which probably does not have the force of law) came today.
Mr Zahawi ( the minister in charge of vaccinations) highlighted people failing to wear masks or obey one-way lanes inside supermarkets.“These rules are not boundaries to be pushed at, these are rules that help all of us, hopefully bring down the death rate.” Asked on Times Radio if people should avoid sitting on park benches, he said: “Don’t go out and sit or have that opportunity of social interaction, because you’re helping the virus and that’s what we want to avoid.”
So that puts us in a bit of a dilemma because we are in receipt of some advice, issued in the Spring lockdown, that a sit-down was quite permissible if taken in the context of a long walk (in any case three kilometres) On the other hand, we do not wish to give the impression that we are openly flouting rules and sitting on the park bench each day might give that impression. So we have decided for the next three or four weeks, ur until we get vaccinated, we will stand in the bandstand and a have a quick swig of coffee and perhaps some ‘small eats’ in our hand such as as a banana and a cereal bar. I think we are conscious of the fact that voters may be observing our behaviour and assuming that we are breaking rules although it is not at all clear that we are. This is part of the dilemma of interpreting general regulations and trying to act within the spirit of them if at all possible.
The government are evidently getting seriously concerned about how to deal with the rapidly worsening pandemic. In the spring lockdown, the numbers of people keeping indoors was very much more (and the number of key workers was defined as less than now.) We now have a situation, though, where the new variant of the virus is much more infectious than before, the numbers of key workers seems to have been expanded tremendously, some of the primary schools are about 25% full with vulnerable and key-workers’ children and the population as a whole after 10 months do not seem to be taking things as seriously as they once did. Hence it is no surprise that the number of new infections is rocketing and the hospitals, particularly in London, are on the point of collapse. A vaccine will only give partial protection and is, by no means, a ‘magic bullet’ as the full immunity will not be released until the second dose is administered some 12 weeks later (and then a further 2-3 weeks on top of that) The government is rolling out vaccination centres across several points even including a race course such as Epsom) but I do wonder whether there are sufficient staff, even when assisted by volunteers, to get the jab adminsistered. In my mind, I am writing off ‘the call’ for a vaccination for some 3 weeks from now which is when I reckon the 80’s year olds have been done and they move on to the 75+ into which category I fall.
The news from America also makes some fairly grim reading. The FBI are warning that there could be fifty armed protests in State capital cities as well as in Washington, DC on inauguration day. The Democrats have drawn up articles of impeachment and that will almostcertainly pass through the House of Wednesday., There would not be enough time for the Senate, who act as jury, to one to a consideration before inauguration day. The Democrats, though, seem to be working on the assumption that Donald Trump’s wings have been clipped in the short term and he may not try anything dramatic in the next 10-12 days – but who knows? The Democrats may well wait for at least ‘100 days in office’ before the papers of impeachment are lodged with the Senate. In any case, President Trump will be the only president who has been impeached twice within his term of office. If the Senate (augmented, of course, by some more Democratic senators from Georgia) might just vote for a conviction, although this is a little unlikely and would debar Trump for running for office again. The thing that is really disturbing after the events in the Capitol last week is the number of Republican legislators (about a hundred) who still support Trump even after the attempted coup – and perhaps some 40% of American republican voters are still loyal to him as well.
Today’s date is one of those interesting ones which occur from time to time as it can be written: 12.1.21, which if you examine it means that it can be written backwards and the date will remain exactly the same. This is called a palindromic date and there are various cult groups who both study these things and also make dire predictions about them. For example, one cultish type group is convinced that the world is going to end today (but what happens when they wake up in the morning and find they are still alive?) Notwithstanding all of this, we were a little delayed on our walk down into the town today but encountered one of our near neighbours who we have not seen over the whole of the Christmas period and also our Italian friend who lives further down the hill. The topic of conversation soon turned to when we might receive the call to be vaccinated and our best guess is that this will probably be within about 2-3 weeks time. The government is hoping to have all of the over 70-year olds and the especially vulnerable vaccinated by the middle of February which is in some five weeks in time. Although there are some mass vaccination clinics being set up around the country, whether we would want to go and queue up in central Birmingham (the site of our nearest mass clinic) is uncertain. One rumour is that supplies of the Oxford AstraZenica vaccine actually arrived at our group practice last Friday, but, as with so many things in life, we shall have to wait and see. We were somewhat delayed because a gentleman we have met before in the park engaged us in conversation and the question tuned to politics – I might hasten to add that I never initiate a conversation like this but will not run away from the challenge. When I was asked if I could challenge the fact that the vast majority of the universities and the press in this country were left-wing, I realised that this conversation might not end well. So I got in a few parting shots (e.g. Brexit was hardly the last word in democracy as only 37% of the population actually voted for it, that referenda were beloved of fascist dictators and were generally used on the right to engineer social change and so on) and we then made our way homewards for a belated lunch.
In the afternoon, we had a couple of video calls to make. First I called one of our Hampshire friends whose wife had been ill and had had to have some further investigations but so far, these have turned out to be reassuring negative. We spent a lot of time comparing notes on the minutiae of the American ‘coup’ attempt by the Trump brigade and then turned to more domestic matters. After we had been chatting for an hour, it was time to terminate that call and start another with some of our ex-Waitrose friends here in Bromsgrove and we were chatting for some 75 minutes before we realised that our tea-time was approaching.
The pandemic news as well as the American news continues to dominate. After the announcements of yesterday when the politicians were arguing for more complete adherence to the lock-down rules, we imagined that the police and or some COVID vigilantes employed by the local authority might be more in evidence, but this was not the case. Although Meg and I enjoyed our normal coffee, we are still minded to cut short the quite legitimate (in our view) rests upon the park benches and replace them by standing up in the bandstand and having a quicker snatch of some coffee and some fruit. The American news continues to be of interest to us. Today, the Democrats are going to ask Vice-President Pence to invoke Amendment 25 which allows for the replacement of a president if the Vice President and rest of the cabinet agrees. This is extremely unlikely as Trump and Pence seem to have ‘buried the hatchet’ in the last day so it appears that a resolution will be passed tomorrow for the impeachment of Donald Trump. The current feeling is that the Democrats so as not to cause further distress before the inauguration on January 20th, a week tomorrow, will hold off until President Biden has completed his first 100 days and will then press the Senate for a vote after Donald Trump has left office. If successful (which is by no means certain) then Donald Trump would not be eligible to run for President again in four year’s time, which may be his intention. The news however is a little chilling in that the FBI are preparing for there to be armed protests taking place in each of the 50 state capitals on inauguration day. Were this to happen, is the USA on the brink of a civil war (or a re-run of the last one?)
We are always a little delayed on a Wednesday morning as it is the day on which we have to update our Waitrose shopping order in time for delivery in the morning. At the same time, I need to remember, (a few minutes after midnight!) to book my slot for a fortnight’s time. I have learnt over the weeks that new delivery slots get released just after midnight and although there were a few glitches with the website last night (on the server side), soon was all resolved and we got our order into hit the relevant slot.
The COVID-19 crisis continues to deepen as the number of deaths at 1564 exceeds the rate of one death per minute during the last 24 hours. There are some very slight signs that the rate of new infections (which eventually feeds into hospital admissions and ultimately, for some, deaths in hospital) may be just about lessening. It looks as though the death rate in this second wave of the pandemic has already exceeded the entire death rate from the first wave and we are not yet at the peak of this second wave. It could be that the lockdown measures are starting to have some import but it takes a week or so for these to be reflected in hospital admissions and even more in the death rate.
Meanwhile, many eyes this evening are focussed on the American political system as the House of Representatives may be about to impeach Donald Trump – if so, this will be the first time in history that a sitting president has been impeached twice. The House of Representatives have filed one article of impeachment, accusing Donald Trump of “incitement of insurrection”. This comes following the deadly riots that took place at the Capitol in Washington DC last Wednesday after a speech by Mr Trump to his supporters. Impeachment just means that formal charges have been laid and it takes a two thirds majority in the Senate to convict which is quite a high bar. However, there are other sanctions that can be applied which only require a simple Senate majority so there are several options open to the legislature after impeachment has actually taken place. As I blog, I am following the rather arcane procedures in the House of Representatives where each speaker is only allowed about a minute – this prevents the uttering of filibustering speeches I would imagine.
Returning to domestic matters, readers may remember that last Saturday a group entered the park with a portable loudspeaker declaiming loudly that the whole of COVID-19 is a massive hoax and similar rubbish. I read in a local newspaper feed that four people from the area have been arrested charged with offences against public order. The principal transgression is that this group have been entering local hospitals (often at night) and photographing empty areas of the hospital to attempt to ‘prove’ that the pandemic is a gigantic hoax. Four men have been bailed but with the condition that they are not allowed to enter a hospital, except in a case of medical emergency. I suppose this means that might still try and speak again in a public place but the press reports are very sparse so I only have the slightest of details.
There are several juicy little morsels of news this evening. One of these is that because of the intense pressure felt within the hospitals at the moment, there are plans to ‘decant’ several patients from hospitals into hotels to release much needed hospital beds. What the patients feel about this, I wonder – some might enjoy it but others may feel very nervous and worried by these procedures. A second little titbit of news is that Boris Johnson has admitted that the schools may not reopen after the half-term break in mid February. If this is the case, then we can forget about schools opening at all until well after the Easter vacation. The third little bit of news is the way that British politicians are positioning themselves in the light of the impending Trump impeachment. Boris Johnson for one is still arguing for the ‘special relationship’ with Donald Trump. Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy has accused senior Tories of “sycophancy” in their dealings with the Trump administration. “Ministers were so eager to swallow the Trump playbook of how politics should be done that they abandoned British values, interests and their own self-respect,” she said.
Thursdays are our normal delivery dates for our Waitrose order and so this normally delays us a little. However, today we got things put away in plenty of time and started our walk in weather conditions that although a little cold and dull were not particularly unpleasant. This was not to last, though, and the journey home was somewhat unpleasant with a fine but sharp drizzle or it could have been the start of a freezing fog. The park was quite underpopulated today as, indeed, it was yesterday so I wonder if the message about the virulence and the proximity of the virus is eventually starting to ‘cut through’ with members of the public. Whilst having our coffee, an elderly lady passed us but it does not take long for the conversation to turn to the subject of COVID-19. She and her husband had just received her vaccination at a GP practice which is adjacent to ours. I was sufficiently ungallant to enquire as to her age and she informed me that she was 80 (although she didn’t look it) This means that she is the Priority Level above me (Priority Level 2) so you do get the feeling that the day will approach when we will get the call. All of the 80+ have to be vaccinated before they start on the next Priority level down so, in my mind’s eye, I still think it will be some 2-3 weeks before I actually get the call for vaccination. Whilst on the subject of medical matters, Meg had received her routine bowel cancer screening kit which is done once every 3 years – as I remember it, the procedures last time were quite a lot more complicated but now they seem to have refined the procedure so that you only have to submit one sample instead of several collected over several days. Anyway, we got that all done and dusted and posted off with the results promised in about two weeks time. Finally, I got a call postponing my physiotherapy appointment I was due to attend tomorrow but I am quite relieved about that because by the time the new appointment comes around, I might just then received my vaccine.
Another little ‘faux pas’ has been apparently been committed today in the person of Priti Patel, the Home Secretary. She was trying to provide clarity on whether one should exercise alone or not. (As an aside, Priti Patel is renowned for starting off a statement saying ‘Let me be absolutely clear‘ before embarking on utterances which are anything but clear) Apparently today she said that people should exercise ‘on their own’ giving examples from cycling and running where this might be the case. But she was swiftly contradicted by No. 10 who pointed out the policy remains that you can exercise with someone else in your own support bubble (typically husbands and wives) So not for the first time, we have ministers unaware of the guidance which is being issued to the population. It also transpires today that the Fisheries Minister had failed to read the portions of the Trade Agreement with the EU which details the new arrangements regarding shipping – so this, too, hardly inspires much confidence that the ship of state is in secure hands.
In Washington, the number of troops protecting the Capitol building now exceeds the total number of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan at 26,000. The most elaborate security arrangements with barriers and no-entry zones are now established and even private companies are doing their bit. Airlines are refusing to let people with firearms board a flight for Washington in the next few days. Airbnb, HotelTonight has just cancelled all Washington, DC, metro reservations ahead of Inauguration. Meanwhile, for those addicted to conspiracy theories, there are some reports that the Capitol building received quite a large number of ‘unusual’ visitors in the few days before the insurrection. In The Washington Post, it is alleged that In the days before the Jan. 6 attack, immediately preceded by Trump’s remarks at a rally, a number of Democrats have pointed to speeches, tweets and videos that they have said raised questions about whether the attackers may have been inspired or helped by Republican members of Congress.
So we are counting down the days before the inauguration next Wednesday, hoping and praying that Trump does not do anything completely bizarre in the dying days of his presidency. The one thing that may be helpful is that removal vans have already been spotted in the vicinity of the White House. There are also reports that most of the ‘staffers’ in the White House are avoiding Trump like the plague for the next few days so that they will be not dragged into any controversial actions in the few days that remain of the Trump presidency. Meanwhile, armed Trump supporters may turn up at every state capital throughout the land next Wednesday – you couldn’t make it up!
Today proved to be one of our more interesting mornings. The weather was rather cold with a cold but not excessive wind. We greeted our domestic help as it was a Friday and then collected our newspapers. In the park we met up with our new found friend, the academic from Birmingham University, whose acquaintance we made recently. We met sort of by accident as we both knew the approximate time that we normally coincided. In order to make sure that we complied with the social distancing regulations, we met on adjacent park benches so that we could have a chat from a two-metre distance from each other – we formed a sort of triangle with Meg on one bench, our friend on the adjacent one and myself on the other side of the path. We are mainly discussing some of the literary figures that we had in common – for example, John Mortimer who wrote the ‘Rumpole of the Bailey‘ series, I was reminded of his biography which I believe was called ‘Clinging to the Wreckage‘ As a not particularly competent sailor, he argued that in the event of a capsize, it was ultimately safer in the long run to ‘cling to the wreckage’ and await rescue rather than strike out independently to swim for safety, probably only to die in the process. One journalist who had died in the last few days was Katherine Whitehorn at the ripe old age of about 92. I remember her for the way in which she took the well-known expression ‘Inside every fat woman is a thin woman trying to get out‘ and inverted it brilliantly to observe ‘Outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in‘ In the midst of all of this mirth, we encountered an ‘old’ acquaintance of ours who lives on the edge of the park and therefore used to walk quite regularly in the park with her little Jack Russell dog. Meg and I were saying to each that we hoped she was OK as we had not seen her since well before Christmas and then up she popped. She had received her dose of the vaccine earlier on that morning, so yet again we feel that our turn is not an incredibly long way off. She was pretty well and sprightly but as the cold did not suit her very much, so she was curtailing her walks in the park. And then some friends of friends who attended the local church came along – we had been introduced to them when we were regaling each other with mince pies and sherry at a kind of impromptu party on Christmas Eve, when the weather was quite fine and we entertained each other sitting in an open but well ventilated garage (sort of outdoors) The really interesting thing about all of this is that you don’t really know who you are going to meet on these occasions which makes the occasional encounter into quite a bonus. By this time, we were getting quite cold and the sharp wind had intensified so we made our way home with alacrity to cook ourselves a warming lunch. Although snow was sort of threatened, it looks as though some is definitely on the way together with some biting winds. It looks like a case of ‘winter draws on’ tomorrow (a phrase which the BBC under its first Director General tried to ban in the 1930’s as it suggested an extreme licentiousness, but there you are)
The vaccine news sounds reasonably encouraging. Although it is very early days yet, it does appear that the government attempts to roll out the vaccine may be starting to bear some fruit. This government tends to ‘over-promise but to under-deliver’ and this may well prove to be the case here. One closely guarded secret is the data on the supplies of vaccine as the government fears that some of this data is subject to commercial confidentiality. However, the Scottish government inadvertently let some data slip out before the relevant website was pulled but it could be the case that in Scotland it is possible that most of the population could be vaccinated by the end of July. Of course, a lot of this is speculation and I suspect that the next week or so are going to be really critical when several new vaccinations centres will get into full swing. As from Monday next, all air corridors into the UK are too be closed. As I write, there is an advert on the TV warning everyone how infectious the latest variant to the COVID-19 is so I surmise that the UK is seriously worried that the hospitals whilst at full capacity are not yet at their peak (expected in some 2-3 weeks yet?) and that some variant of the virus which is not susceptible to the vaccines may well appear on these shores.
Despite a prognostication of rain and even snow, today turned out to be quite a fine day. Meg and I appreciated the faintest glimmerings of the warmth of the sun which reminded us that although some bad weather is undoubtedly to come, at least we have some slight indications of the spring to come. Before we collected our newspapers, we came across two of our church friends who were having a chat with a neighbour whilst they caught up on news not having seen each other for about a week or even longer now. Then we collected our weekend complement of newspapers (bulging with supplements) and made our way to the park where we met with our new-found university friend. We now have a well-established routine of sitting on adjacent benches which helps to ensure social distancing. Just as yesterday, our elderly lady trotted along none the worse for her virus jab yesterday and we chatted variously amongst ourselves. Finally, on our way up the hill, we met with even more church friends (our oldest) and again caught up with each other’s news. Needless to say, it was quite late by this time but we enjoyed a lunch of liver and onions which we had promised ourselves for some time but not actually eaten for months. This afternoon was spent on a good long read followed by some necessary tidying up which is always necessary to avoid the clutter building up on my desk and computer work areas.
A big scandal is emerging at the Home Office where due to a ‘human error’ some 400,000 police records were wiped from the national police database. Apparently, Home Office computer engineers were urgently seeking to develop some code which might help to restore some of the lost records and ensure that this does not happen again. The mind boggles as to what kind of system the Home Office deploys if so many records can be deleted accidentally. As we all know from our own personal (and professional) experience, when you hit the ‘Delete’ button, things rarely disappear for good but are removed to a type of archive from whence they can be retrieved. This happens regularly with our emails, for example, and if our simple domestic systems can deploy a methodology to ensure the safety of even trivial (as well as important) records, surely there must be a back-up system that ensures the safety of critical police records. It will be interesting to see how much data the engineers manage to retrieve – and I wonder who will be fired as a result of all of this. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, is being called to account although politicians grasp of technical detail is typically woefully deficient.
Naturally, we are all waiting to see what preparations are being made for the inauguration of Jo Biden next Wednesday. It has been reliably reported that President Trump will leave the White House at the latest possible moment before he takes a flight for Florida and his ‘stately’ home. One account is that he will initially fly to an Air Force base where he will have a little leaving ceremony (perhaps with brass bands, certainly with much flag waving) so it appears that he will be a showman to the last. I would think that this last gesture is just meant to provide some video so that his huge band of supporters can still be energised. Meanwhile, the CNN website reveals some shocking details of the events of last week:
Emerging details paint an even grimmer picture than the shocking images of violence broadcast live around the world last week. Evidence suggests planning by the insurrectionists, and there are concerns that they may have received support from some Capitol Police, current and former members of the military, and even some members of Congress.
As rioters broke into the Capitol building and some chanted “hang Mike Pence,” the seditious mob ripped through the “thin blue line” many claim to revere, kicking and beating police with their own batons, spraying them with chemical irritants, threatening to kill them. One policeman and four others died that day.
Sky News reports that some 3.5 million people have now received a vaccine – more than the total number of people who have been infected with the virus itself. The Sky News website even has an on-line tracker so that you can see in real time how many in the population have actually been vaccinated and the progress being made towards the government target of 15 million by mid- February. Entertaining if nothing else – and it is one small way of holding the government to account given its proven record of over-promising and under-delivering. The news from the COVID-10 front line is that the COVID patients are getting both younger and sicker – and the peak is still some 7-10 days away as of tonight.
Another conventional Sunday morning dawns. I popped down into the car to collect our supply of Sunday newspapers after which we watched the Andrew Marr show as usual. The weather was a little more mild than of late so we walked down as usual, meeting a couple of our friends (one out gardening, the other couple preparing to go out on their own ‘constitutional’ walk for the morning) The park was fairly busy with its usual complement of young children on their little bikes and a goodly supply of unleashed little dogs. However, we did not meet any of our usual park friends which was not unusual for a Sunday as you tend to have a different ‘flow’ of people who use the park at the weekends rather than those who are its daily visitors. For some reason, the weather seems to get a bit colder as they morning progresses (perhaps the cold air flows down hill) so we were pleased to get home and cook a very conventional Sunday lunch of roast beef (in the slow cooker) and Yorkshire pudding. After that, we indulged in a good in-depth read of the Sunday Times and the Observer which occupied most of the afternoon.
The forthcoming inauguration of the Joe Biden presidency on Wednesday next continues to occupy our thoughts. It will seem to be a very strange inauguration indeed with the Capitol building turned into an armed fortress (with some 21,000 troops) and the crowds will be kept a long distance away. Because of the pandemic crisis, the crowds are being urged to keep away which will guarantee that the crowd attending the Biden inauguration will be dramatically smaller than the Trump inauguration. Incidentally, as I remember it, Trump insisted that the crowds attending his inauguration four years ago were larger than those of his predecessor, Barak Obama. When photographic evidence was produced to show this was certainly NOT the case, then a series of rancorous exchanges ensued between Trump’s new press spokesman (he had so many!) and the White House Press Corps and these ill-tempered exchanges set the tone for what was to follow through much of the Trump presidency. When Joe Biden does take over, he is letting it be known that he will immediately issue a series of Executive Orders (i.e. with no debate from Congress) to immediately rejoin the Paris climate accords, to reunite families split at the USA-Mexico border amongst other things. When you think about it, President-elect Biden will be at his most powerful in his first 100 days when he can set agendas, institute programs and start to roll back some of the worst excesses of the preceding regime. I have a view (not shared by many of the commentators) that Joe Biden may surprise us all and prove to be quite a decisive and forceful president. Evidently, he is in a unique position because of his long experience as a senator of ‘working across the aisle’ (i.e. working collaboratively with the opposition parties who are the Republicans) as well as being the Vice-President to Barak Obama of course. I think he may realise that at his age (78) he is not going to run for office again so he has four years rather than eight to make a decisive impact. So time is short and he may well realise that he has most room for manoeuvre in the early days of his presidency whilst the Republicans are in some disarray so we might expect quite an exciting first few months. Many people think he will just ‘mark time’ so that his Vice-President, Kamala Harris (the first female and ‘person of colour’ to hold the office) can be primed as the next Presidential candidate for the Democrats. I am quite willing to be proved wrong in all of this but I remember well the case of Archbishop Roncalli who became Pope John 23rd. Most of his fellow cardinals thought that they were electing a real ‘patsy’ but he proved to be one of the most innovative popes in modern times, reconvening the Vatican Council to reform and update the institutions of the Catholic Church. So actually, Pope John 23rd turned out to be quite radical and achieved a tremendous amount in the five years before he died. I think you can probably see the parallels I am drawing here without labouring the point.
The numbers vaccinated here in the UK has now reached 3.8 million and several new vaccination centres are to be opened from tomorrow, Monday. It now looks as though the target of vaccinating 2 million jabs a week might even now be achievable. Incidentally, I am quite pleasantly surprised about the innovative thinking that has been at work in commissioning cathedrals to act as vaccination centres. They should be easily found, there is lots of space for people to sit down before and after the jab at a safe distance, being large and airy buildings will help to disperse any remnants of virus that might be in the atmosphere, cathedrals are part of a mission to ‘provide succour for the sick’ and so on. I think this is a brilliant idea – it has been adopted by Salisbury, Lichfield and Blackburn cathedrals for a start. Some cathedrals have hit on the bright idea of providing soothing organ music as well. All in all, I think this is an imaginative and innovative solution to a national crisis.
We were a little delayed this morning because we had an call from Meg’s support group and this took about an hour of our time that we were not expecting. Eventually, though, we got going but as we were a little delayed, we decided to vary our routine somewhat. I left Meg in the park chatting with our new ex-Birmingham University friend whilst I made haste rapidly to collect our newspapers. Then I rejoined our little meeting in the park and we chatted until the chill got to our bones a little and we decided to call it a day and make for home. Then we had a rather delayed lunch which we threw together (life being made a little easier as we had cooked our joint yesterday so all we had to do was to heat up some slices of the joint and then prepare some vegetables)
I have just given myself an amusing few minutes as I read that someone on Sky News has worked out that Donald Trump published 57,000 ‘tweets’ in ten years and has collected together some of the more outrageous of them. Here is but one to give you an idea of the flavour of some of them. Donald Trump is arguing that he possesses a tremendously high IQ and so he tweeted: ‘Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest – and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault’ But on a slightly more serious note, the esteemed Washington Post decided some time ago to establish a database of all of the lies that Donald Trump had ever told (while in post) The newspaper identified what they called a ‘tsunami’ of lies emanating from the Oval Office. The paper’s fact-checker reveals that on 9th July last year, when 62 false claims were made in one day alone, the total reached 20,000. Many of these came in interviews with Fox News (the incredibly right wing news channel which was Trump’s favourite but which ‘dumped’ him before the end of the presidential election campaign) The column also noted that Trump had expressed 1,200 lies about the pandemic alone. On this topic, there is now a plethora of concern about the legacy of a president who had lied so extensively and repeatedly about almost everything. Matt Frei, the respected TV correspondent for Channel4 News, posted an extremely thoughtful piece on the Channel4 news today about the dangers of the Trump election campaigns and presidency to American democracy. What is self evident to us now is that every little item of news that was remotely favourable to the presidency was lauded and magnified massively through the right wing channels. However, anything that was critical of Trump (of which there was a lot) was immediately labelled as ‘fake news’ as though it had been entirely made up. The really interesting question for commentators and observers is the fact that some 70 million of Americans were either persuaded that the so-called ‘fake news’ actually WAS fake, or that they know they were being lied to but did not really care as long as he stood up for ‘us’ (us being the downwardly mobile, trapped white working class population in the main). What we shall see in the next few weeks in court houses in USA (or at least in Washington DC) is what the courts will make of the excuses given by the rioters when they are eventually charged and they claim in defence that they had the ‘honest belief’ that their country was in danger because a ‘stolen’ election and they ere only acting out what they believe the president wanted them to do to save the country from ‘danger’ What is undoubtedly true is that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have defined the internal dangers to the USA as coming from the left and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and not from the racist, white-supremacist Trump supporters which is where the violence has actually emanated. We shall see!
I thought I would end on some really depressing news, for a change. An Oxford University research platform has recently computed that the UK death rate, expressed as 16.5 deaths per million of population, is actually in the highest in the world. Of course, we must hasten to point out that some countries will more readily put COVID-19 on a death certificate than others and hence world-wide statistics may be somewhat misleading. However, they will not be massively wrong – the USA death rate is about 10.0 per million which is about two-thirds of the UK rate. It is by now quite a commonly known fact that the British Army was seriously worried by the abject state of physical health of many of the young men called up to fight in the First World War – I have read a figure that as many as 40% were rejected on medical grounds but I suspect that as the Army got more and more desperate for manpower the minimum physical requirements were ‘tweaked’. It may well be that when (if?) we have an official enquiry into the UK’s preparedness for the pandemic that a similar moment occurs to the more thoughtful members of the British elite that more than a decade of Tory austerity has seriously weakened the ‘body politic’ i.e. the ability of the population as a whole to withstand a pandemic.
Today we carried on with the series of self-help sessions that Meg is undertaking via a Webex link with the local hospital so this took a little ‘chunk’ out of the morning. We texted our Birmingham University friend to say we would be a little late today and indeed did coincide, by chance, outside the newspaper shop. Once having collected our newspapers, we made our way to a pair of adjacent park benches where we could continue with our daily reminiscences and dreamt of the barmy summer days when we hope we can peregrinate up and down the Severn Valley (preserved) railway line, hopefully taking in some nice beer en route. In fact, in Bridgnorth station, there is a pub (‘Railwayman’s Arms‘) accessible from the end of the station platform that serves good range of beers (including a superb mild if they still stock it) which is always worth a visit. This afternoon, we read our newspapers assiduously and then FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends in the late afternoon. We were swapping news with each other for over an hour, mainly wondering when the vaccine will be offered to the four of us which we hope can only be about 1-2 weeks by now. The government rather ‘jumped the gun’ by announcing that the vaccination regime was to be rolled out to the 70+ age groups. However, they did not bother to inform the GP practices of this policy and many (or most) of them up and down the country had to cope with masses of telephone calls asking when the vaccine would be available. The actual story is a lot more complex than this. The government was attempting to indicate that IF all of the 80 year olds had been vaccinated, then a GP practice COULD start to extend vaccination to the 70 years if they had a mind. In practice, though, across the whole of the country only about one half to two thirds of the 80+ age group have actually been vaccinated and there are reports of shortages of vaccine to complete the job. To complicate matters, if a practice has a temporary excess of vaccine and is tempted to vaccinate the 70+ age group then these supplied will be diverted to those areas that have already run out of vaccine. Once again, we have seen an example of the ways in which the government is so desperate to generate ‘good news’ that it actually runs far ahead of what is the actual situation on the ground.
Tonight, we stand on the eve of the Joe Biden inauguration. This is going to be an inauguration like no other that anyone can recall, given that that there is the backdrop of the pandemic (which would be intensified if large crowds were allowed to gather as is customary), together with the foreground of the recent attacks on the Capitol building by the the Trump white supremacist mobs. In practice, the Capitol is guarded by some 25,000 members of the National Guard. The FBI have had to undertake some rapid background checks to ensure that no Trump sympathisers were embedded in the National Guard – in the event, some dozen members of the National Guard were ‘stood down’ when it was revealed that they had extensive links with extremist right-wing groups. In the place of actual people, there will phalanxes of American Stars and Stripes flags. In addition, the FBI said last week that it had separately identified more than 200 suspects threatening violence at the ceremony and had picked up an ‘extensive amount of concerning online chatter’. As it happens, the Capitol is so heavily guarded with troops and extensive barriers that it is unlikely in the extreme that tomorrow’s inauguration will actually be disrupted. But there must still be legitimate concerns that Trump mobs might turn up at any of the 50 state capitals across the country and threaten to overwhelm the local defence forces. The situation is confused because there is an enormous mount of right wing ‘chatter’ across the social media to make one last effort to prevent Joe Biden’s inauguration. On the other hand, there are some of these groups who are urging these members to stay away from these local conflicts as is is likely to be radical ‘left’ elements such as Antifa (= Anti Fascists) who are only pretending to simulate Trump supporters in order to discredit them. At this point, I have to admit that is is difficult for us Europeans to get inside the mindsets of the American right – listening to the ‘Vox pop’ interviews with some of the members of these groups, they have such a visceral hatred of Barak Obama (the preceding president) that one can only conclude that a deep vein of racism is actually fuelling their hatreds. Donald Trump himself seems to have been spending his last day in office cloistered with members of this family deciding how to distribute about 100 ‘pardons’ which traditionally is in the gift of each departing president (and is often shockingly abused, this year being no exception)
Today after a somewhat delayed start we wondered whether to brave the elements for our daily walk or not. Instead, we decided to compromise so we took the car down to collect our newspapers and then headed for the park. It was spattering with rain as we are still on the edge of Storm Christoph, which seems to be hitting parts of the North of England more severely. Having got to the park we decided to seek the shelter of the bandstand where, almost alone in the park, we met up with our Birmingham University friend. We braved the wind and rain together, surveying an almost empty park but still glad of a chat with each other. As we had the car, the journey home was relatively swift so we we did not get soaked through which is always a danger.
Today is the day which we thought would never come but here it is at last – the Inauguration Day for Joe Biden to be installed as the 46th President of the United States. Evidently, it was going to be a very different inauguration – for a start, President Trump vacated the White House (without being prised out!) and made his way to the Andrews Air Force base where he was greeted as president for the very last time. After a fairly perfunctory speech he wished the new regime well without referring to the name of his successor by name and eventually to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s ‘I’ll do it my way!‘ then AirForce 1, the presidential plane, took off for Florida and Mar-a-Lago, the Trump retreat where he stay closeted with members of his family for a while. Meanwhile, back in Washington, DC the inauguration organisers had to make the best of bad job, in the absence of any crowds. So instead of a Mall filled with flag-waving crowds, we now just had the flags placed at strategic intervals but fluttering nicely in the January breeze. The overall effect was visually quite effective. Then we had the arrival of the members of the political elite, principally all the ex-Presidents and their wives. The one exception, for understandable reasons, was Jimmy Carter who is 96, a survivor of both liver cancer and brain cancer, and whose health was too frail even for an inauguration. We had the normal patriotic songs and prayers followed by the swearings-in and the oath of office by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, then to be followed by the inauguration speech. This was full of appeals to unity (and was in marked contrast to that spoken by Donald Trump four years ago) To my mind, this was quite an effective call for national unity in the face of a raging pandemic, a faltering economy and a democracy whose fragility had been exposed by the invasion of the Capitol Building a fortnight ago, on January 6th. A theme of the Biden speech was that ‘democracy has triumphed‘ which is evidently the case after the earth-shattering events within the last fortnight. Normally, there would be an inauguration ball in the evening after a day full of ceremonies – I suspect that they have decided to cancel this in view of the pandemic. If my memory serves me correctly, Bill Clinton went off and played his saxophone on the occasion of his own inaugural ball years ago. The Biden presidency has started off with three acts of presidential empathy which must have hit the right tone. Last night, he went with Kamala Harris to the Lincoln Memorial, lit by an avenue of lights, and paid tribute to the 40,000 Americans who have died in the pandemic. He then paid tribute to them again in the midst of his presidential address by calling for a moment’s silence where people could offer their thoughts and their prayers for the dead. Finally, he went straight off to the Arlington National Cemetary again to pay tribute to past American heroes (and the burial place of past presidents). I suppose one has to say that if any presidential hopeful was capable of riding the huge divides in the American political life, then Jo Biden as a centrist who has often worked ‘across the aisle’ in the Senate is the best-placed person to do it.
Meanwhile, we have more grim news from the home front. The number of deaths is now at an all-time high of 1,820 (and a total of above 93,000 in total). Just to compound this diet of bad news, it is also a source of concern that the South African variant of COVID may be resistant to the latest vaccines – in time, of course, they could be tweaked like the ‘flu virus but there is still more time for more deadly mutations to arise. Meg and I are still awaiting the call for our vaccination which we suspect may still be at least two weeks off, amidst some reports of shortages of the vaccine in various places (who would have thought that?)
It was technically this morning (well actually. few minutes after midnight) but Sky News were indicating that they were going to broadcast the first Press Briefing from the Joe Biden White House. This turned out to be fascinating, if only for the massive contrast with the Trump counterpart. The initial Trump briefing started off with a massive row between the accredited press correspondents and the new Trump spokesman who was attempting to argue that the crowds at the Trump inauguration were the biggest in history – a ‘fact’ easily disproved by recourse to the available photographic evidence of how far the inauguration day crowds extended down the Mall. Relationships with the press started off on a bad footing and never recovered. The Biden press briefing was entirely different. The new spokesperson was very experienced having done a similar job at the State Department for years. She promised a policy of complete openness and transparency and the whole atmosphere made you feel as the years had just rolled away and what had transpired under the Trump regime was just a bad dream. One correspondent asked her whether the Joe Biden regime would prove to be boring to which she replied ‘I certainly hope so!‘ – none of the fireworks and press rows as previously but just old-fashioned boring government news!
Our Waitrose order came today and got put away, fortunately with nothing having been forgotten. Then we walked down under a fairly blue sky but quite a ‘nip’ in the air to collect our newspapers and thence onto the park. There we met with ex-University of Birmingham friend again plus the old lady who we know lives near the park so we had our normal pleasant chat before it was time to strike homewards.
This afternoon, I busied myself with going through a pile of old newspapers to see if there was anything worth preserving. What tends to happen is that any unread bits of newspaper from the day before get put onto a pile which gradually grows until it gets ‘attacked’ (as this afternoon). I find that I tend to keep any interesting cartoons from the Times, plus any important media/diet/exercise bits. The Times publishes its health section each Tuesday and this is generally worth a read. I happened to find an article on Joe Biden’s wife (who has a PhD in education) so this obviates me having to traverse the web for something similar. I have managed to get most (but not all) of this task completed by the early evening.
The COVID news this evening is interesting. The number of people now successfully vaccinated is approaching 5 million but it looks as though there are still a proportion of the 80 yr olds to be vaccinated before the next tranche of vaccines is administered to the 75+ age cohort. As you might expect, we are awaiting our call day by day but do not know whether it will be a letter, by a phone call or by text message. By my calculations, this call ought to come within the next week or so which will take us well into February. There is a certain amount of discussion going on about the efficacy of a ‘one-shot’ virus with a second dose following within 12 weeks rather than the three weeks the manufacturers recommend. The UK government scientists are arguing that it is better to ‘save’ the second dose that would normally be received three weeks after the first and to use to give a measure of protection to another person. This is following the utilitarian principle of the ‘greatest good of the greatest number‘. However, Israel has been enormously successful in vaccinating way over 90% of their population already but the scientific data is revealing that the amount of protection may be quite low. Amongst the over 60-year-old’s who need the vaccine protection most, the efficacy has been reported as only 33% – which still leaves them quite vulnerable. This question may take time some time to resolve – the Israeli data is the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine whereas in pure numbers the UK Oxford University/AstraZeneca accounts for a greater proportion of vaccination. Whether the government will admit it is wrong and has over-estimated the effigy of a one-dose shot of the vaccine is an interesting question. After all, it would not be the first time that the government have proved to be ‘economical with the truth’.
Returning to American politics to conclude, Nancy Pelosi the Speaker of the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives seems keen to press ahead and try to secure a conviction against the impeached Donald Trump. She has argued that ‘you don’t ignore a president’s actions because people think we should be nice-nice and forget that people died here’ Although it may consume a lot of the Congress time and not help to create a bi-partisanship working relationship in the new Congress, then if you do not impeach a president who has urged, stimulated and abetted the invasion of the Capitol by a white-supremacist mob, then who would you ever impeach?
We always knew that today was going to be a different kind of Friday and so it turned out to be. I had a (routine) appointment for a CT scan in one of our local hospitals and the arrangements for this were interesting. Instead of making my way through the bowels of the hospital towards the Imaging Centre, instead I was directed towards a ‘mobile’ scanning unit which was situated in a pair of relocatable buildings erected in the hospital car park. This arrangement is no doubt safer because you are not breathing in potentially COVID-19 infected air or touching surfaces inside the hospital but rather the improvised treatment unit can (by design) only handle one patient at a time which must enhance the safety. I got there way before time but the car park was full to bursting so it was a nightmare trying to find somewhere to park. Nonetheless, I made my way to the unit and had my scan which must have only taken ten minutes for the whole procedure. Whilst waiting for my cannula (for the injection of a radio opaque die) to be removed, I chatted to the nurse who happened to be Spanish so we spoke in a mixture of castellans and English, swapping experiences of COVID-19 across our two societies. Needless to say, ‘Silvia’ had not seen her family for months and months – her husband, it transpired, hailed from Porto (Opporto in English) which is where Meg and I had a holiday booked last May but which we evidently had to abandon. So I got home to meet the happy throng of our son, wife and domestic help before a much needed cup of coffee. As it was a fine and bright day (but pretty cold outside), Meg and I decided to make a lightning visit to the park for a mini constitutional little walk in the park. There we met with some of our park friends who were not really expecting us because I had told them of my hospital visit. I was explaining to my new found ex-Birmingham University friend how I got into the string of research which was to climate in my Phd because a happy chance. After the fall of Maggie Thatcher, John Major took over and he wanted one ‘big idea’ to follow Thatcherism. This turned out to be the Citizen’s Charter. and then the Patient’s Charter in the NHS. One of the key metrics for the latter was that all visitors to the hospital out-patients’ departments should be seen within half an hour. Through the good offices of one of my part-time students who worked in Quality and Infection Control at Leicester General, I was asked to give some help in devising a measurement instrument for measuring outpatient waiting times. To cut a long story short, we devised a measurement instrument and I provided all of the statistical analysis in the form of reports divided by consultant. The hospital management then used the data I provided to institute whatever changes they could to reduce waiting times. The end result of all of this was that we reduced the waiting times from only about 48% seen within 30 minutes to about 85% in the course of three months. A stream of further papers followed, around which a ‘Quality Management’ PhD was written which was then submitted to de Montfort University which had changed its regulations allowing a a PhD to be submitted around a series of published papers. Having got my PhD in 9997, I was then a bit more marketable and went off to get a job as Professor of Business Informatics at King Alfred’s College which later became the University of Winchester. And the rest is history.
Tonight, there is the news that the Kent variant of COVID-19 appears to have a higher mortality rate than its predecessor, which is the kind of news that none of us particularly wants to hear. But there is some news to mitigate the gloom. Firstly, whatever evidence there is tends to suggest that the vaccines that we have are just as effective against the new variants of the virus as well as the original. And today, it appears that 400,000 more people (0.4 million) have been vaccinated in a single day, which really is a marked acceleration in the rate of vaccinations (largely as a result of new centres coming into service) The final hint of good news is that the ‘R’ rate seems to have dropped to between 0.8 and 1.0 which is good news as it stands. But the hospitals are still having to bear the brunt of whatever the infection rate was some three to four weeks previously, a proportion of which ends up in the hospital wards. There now seems to a near consensus building up that whilst the second wave is proving much more traumatic than the first wave, the numbers of people at work (and children of ‘key workers’ in schools) are so much greater than first time around and this is almost certainly aiding the increased rate of transmission of the virus.
Today when we awoke it was evident that we had had a short sharp snow shower the previous evening. All of the trees and shrubs, as well as the countryside in general, looked magnificent in the snow, particularly as by now we had bright sunlight and a clear blue sky. We made our way with a degree of caution down the hill but the snow was quite crunchy underfoot and indeed had quite disappeared on sections of footpath that had received the full complement of the sun’s rays. On our way to the newspaper shop, we bumped into Birmingham University friend so whilst he and Meg went off to the park together, I made a quick dash to collect the newspapers. Whilst in the park we adopted our customary juxta-position of our friend on one bench, Meg on another and myself forming the third point of the triangle. I am not quite sure how we got onto the topic but we got onto the subject of plagiarism in universities and what was to be done about it. Eventually, we explored some mutual interest in the philosophy of science where we discussed the work of Karl Popper and the principles of falsifiability. Although all sociology students will have been exposed to the work of Karl Popper, many physical scientists had not. We quickly established that both of us preferred slightly to be at the edge of our respective disciplines and hence sort of moved sidewise into cognate fields. Hence I started off my academic career as a sociologist but via teaching Research Methods and statistics finished up as a teacher of IT. Similarly, my Birmingham University friend’s discipline was in Mechanical Engineering but he had moved into Operations Research. So all in all, we found some interesting areas of communality in our various academic endeavours. We were speculating whether the journey home would prove treacherous but everything was fine. In fact, the sun had melted quite a lot of the snow on the pavements so compared with an hour previously, we had quite a quick journey home. Just outside the park we caught up with some of our church friends and as always happens got onto the perennial topic of vaccinations. As it happens, the husband of the couple with whom we had been chatting had just been vaccinated the day before whilst his wife was waiting impatiently for her own jab.
This afternoon, I thought I would bring a Bluetooth portable speaker into use that I bought several month ago but only used occasionally until now. As it happens, I often listen to a Piddock recording of Handel’s ‘Messiah‘ which I have playing on earphones through an old iPad which I have in the bedroom and which generally sends me off to sleep quite quickly (something to do with alpha brainwaves, I surmise). So this afternoon, I ran off a copy of the manual for the portable Bluetooth speaker (long since mislaid) and then found the recording I wanted on the net, courtesy of YouTube. I then paired my iPhone with the speaker and Meg and I listened to the recording during the later part of the afternoon. Having done this once, I might try it with other classic recordings that I enjoy.
According to the Weather app in my iPhone, we should have a continuous dump of snow between 9.0am and 12.0am. If this proves to the case, then we shall have to spend a lot of the late morning digging ourselves out because our daughter-in-law needs to leave for work at about 6.0 am on Monday morning. We have about 150 yards of driveway that services ourselves and four sets of neighbours but we are pretty well equipped with snow shovels so we shall have to wait and see. Actually, it is a few years since we had a large dump of snow so I suppose it is about time that we were due for one. I tend not to attack the snow the minute it had fallen as some people do but wait for the sun to do some of the work for me, if possible.
Politically, it seems that the government seems to have switched its tactics somewhat and does not seem as desperate as it was to appease its own right wing and ease the lockdown as fast as possible. The discovery of the new variants of the virus which seem to transmit much more easily militates against quick and easy of the lockdown in any case. It looks as though instead of ‘over-promising and under-delivering’ the government has decided that it is much more judicious to ‘under-promise and to over-deliver’ It does appear the vaccination rate has really picked up over the last few days but it is an interesting question whether they can get all of the vulnerable and over 70 yr olds done by the middle of February which was one of their promises.
Today was a snow-laden day and we were speculating how much snow had fallen overnight since our dump of snow the previous day. We got up at a reasonable time and I set out on foot to get our supplies of the Sunday newspapers. The snow was reasonably thick and crisp but relatively easy to walk upon. Although I took my ‘three-legged’ portable stool with me (which doubles as a walking stick), I did not really need it. The most unpleasant part of the whole journey was a stinging snow in my face as I walked down the hill – as the wind was heading towards me, I finished up at the newsagents looking like an abominable snowman by the time I had accumulated snow all the way down my front. I was relieved to see newsagent was open and so having collected my newspapers, I ate my customary banana for a quick burst of energy and then headed for home and the snow seemed to be falling a little less intensely. I must say I felt fairly tired having trudged through the snow so I was pleased to get to watch the Andrew Marr show as is customary on a Sunday. To get ourselves warmed up, I treated myself to a cup of powdered soup as I felt rather chilled to the marrow and then felt all the better for it. We had a quick consultation with the rest of the family as to when we would clear the snow from our communal driveways (about 150-170 metres all in all) and decided that we would eat in the middle of the day and then start to clear the snow at at about 2.30. We actually started off a little earlier this with a trusted team of myself, son and daughter-in-law (for whose benefit we were clearing the driveway in case she has to make it into work in the morning). We had a combination of tools to help us – my son was utilising a conventional plastic snow clearing implement whilst the daughter-in-law and myself were equipped with huge plastic shovels which, I believe, are designed primarily for mucking out the cow sheds. These proved to be worth their weight in gold as they prove highly effective in snow clearance. Whilst we were at it, we cleared the driveways of our immediate neighbours such that emergency vehicles, postmen etc. can easily get to them. The temperature is predicted to be -5° tomorrow and we suspect that our driveways will be especially slippery tomorrow. We need to get in a supply of rock salt and/or ice clearing material – I think that cat litter might prove to be a good anti-slip agent but I haven’t tried this. I did a quick web search in which I found enough information to discourage me – ‘Just don’t put the cat litter on your walkways. It’s clay and will form a paste once it’s saturated with water. You’ll have a hell of a time getting rid of it. You’ll track grey muck into your house all winter. And it’s somehow, slippery and sticky at the same time when it gets wet‘ . Having ascertained this, we will stick to rock salt and/or sand in the future- we managed to get all of our work done within the hour. Our daughter-in-law had to communicate with a lot of her staff using social media to ascertain how many of them can get into work in the morning.
I had consulted my emails and so on first thing this morning and I get a feed from a local news gathering app called ‘InYourArea’ which can be a good source of local news. We used to have a local Arts Centre called the Artrix which doubled as a cinema/theatre/performance space. In the past, we have seen films of operas transmitted there. Under the impact of various lockdowns, this has had to close its doors. However the whole building has now ben re-purposed as a specialised vaccination centre which is capable of performing 2,500 vaccinations per day (which according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations is ¾ million per year). According to their press release, opening day should be tomorrow and we should expect letters to arrive on our doorsteps on Monday or Tuesday. As there is plenty of car parking and it has a reasonably central location, I wonder if this will become the permanent vaccination centre for the whole of Bromsgrove – what with 2nd dosages of the COVID-19 vaccine and the ‘normal’ flue jabs, it should be quite well occupied in the foreseeable future. Tonight, the total vaccination rate in the UK has hit 6.3 million (approx 12% of the population) so what with lots of new centres like the our local Artrix centre, then perhaps the government target of having all vulnerable and 70+ people (some 15 million) vaccinated by mid-February could well be achieved. For once, the government might actually hit its own target but the debate whether it was wise to extend the period of time between the first and second doses of the vaccine from 3 to 12 weeks rages on.
Today has been the most interesting – and eventful- of days. The day started off well with a phone call from our local doctor’s surgery inviting me along for a COVID jab next Friday, which I was very pleased to receive, needless to say. I thought they ought to be getting around to the 75+ age group quite soon now. Although we had a fresh fall of snow yesterday evening, it was only a thin layer over the recently cleared paths and driveways so walking down to the park was a real pleasure as it was quite nice and crunchy (and not slippery) underfoot. On our way down, we met with one of our acquaintances who we know very well and is a supervisor in a local supermarket (name starting with an ‘A’) She was at home because the test-and-trace app told her she may have been in contact with an infected person so she was staying at home for the relevant number of days (despite pressure from her employers to get back into work!) Outside the park, we met with our Birmingham University friend so whilst he and Meg progressed on to the park I made a quick detour to collect the newspapers. After that and another detour to buy milk (having porridge in the morning makes us run out!) we all coincided in the park and had yet another interesting and fascinating chat. I was telling our friend the experiences I had had in Leicester when I was run over by a driver who had ‘fainted’ at the wheel (after a heavy night of all-night partying the night before) so there were quite a lot of stories about the accident and its sequelae with which to bore our new found friend. We made for home and met with some of the oldest of our church friends so we communicated the good news about the fact that I had been called in for our vaccination jab. On our final stretch of the way home, we were stopped by a couple (but I didn’t recognise them) They live on the new estate built where the orchard happened to be adjacent to our house and after they had moved in and their ‘cess-pit’ alarm was ringing constantly I had gone round to explain how the whole thing worked and what they needed to do about it (none of it explained by the builder/developer by the way) We exchanged news about the progress with vaccinations because as it happens they attend the same surgery as we do and they had received their invitations for a jab next Sunday.
In the middle of the afternoon, the fun started! Our next-door neighbour called round to thank us for clearing the snow in front of their house – useful as my neighbour has had some heart problems so a lot of energetic snow moving is NOT what the doctor ordered (one of my family doctors, when I was a teenager, died whilst digging his car out of the snow whilst doing his rounds). Our neighbour informed us that the newly re-purposed Artrix Arts Centre (see last night’s blog for details) was in operation today but they still had a degree of spare capacity as fewer people than you might have thought couldn’t get to them because of the overnight snow and ice. So I quickly grabbed my wife and we went down to the vaccination centre. As I had previously been a ‘wise virgin’ and got the NHS numbers for Meg and myself kept in a laminated card in my wallet, then processing ourselves was quite easy. We had to socially distance and then take our turn at one of four processing stations – fortunately, Meg and I were allowed to be ‘done together’ after answering the routine battery of questions. Meg did not feel a thing and I only experienced the slightest pinprick and so we were all done and dusted within about ten minutes. So all in all an eventful day and so what if we have a sore arm in the morning because we both feel quite good having had the vaccine (but realise it takes three weeks for your immunity system to be ‘primed’ and then another twelve weeks before we get the 2nd dose).
So this is V (for vaccination day) + 1 – in other words, we are waiting to see if the vaccine will inflict any of its side effects on us or not. We got up at our normal time, having had a night of untroubled sleep, and then settled into our normal routine. On the way down the hill, we were summoned to the door of one of our church friends and informed her we had been fortunate in being vaccinated the day before. We then collected our newspapers passing our Birmingham University friend en route and we said we would catch up with each other later. When we got into the park, we were hailed by our next-door neighbour who was busy giving his little dog a walk. We expressed our effusive thanks to him for having tipped us off the day before and we explained how we had all successfully received our jab. Then we resumed our conversation with our Birmingham University friend where we discussed a paper I had come across as a postgraduate student by Sir Peter Medawar, the principal executive of the Medical Research Council. His seminal paper was called ‘Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?' (or something similar). His whole thesis is that the typical scientific paper proceeds by laying out the literature base of the extant theory, then some new theoretical insights arising from current work from which hypotheses are drawn, data is collected and then a conclusion reached as to whether the new theoretical formulation receives support (wholly or in part) or fails to be confirmed by the available data. The point of the Medawar paper is that describes the formal logic underlying the scientific paper – actual research, however, does not proceed like this and is actually quite a melange of data collection, hypothesis formulation and reformulation, some working adjustments in the light of the data – in other words, quite a messy and complicated business which is not at all like the ‘formal’ procedures outlined in the paper as it is actually presented for publication.
So you can see that we had quite a busy morning and came home to a meal of fish cakes. I busied myself getting some of our medical documentation in order (some of which will require copying and then a careful filing) In the late afternoon, we had a couple of video calls, the first of which was a Skype call to a colleague/friend from Hampshire – we then went down memory lane exploring some of the ways in which as external examiners or PhD candidates we had come across some current problems and concerns. Immediately following this, we engaged in a FaceTime call with some of our ex-Waitrose friends who had eventually secured a ‘slot’ for them to receive the jab. Actually, the husband should have received his call-up weeks ago because of his medical history but somehow the appropriate ‘flag’ had not been set on his records so he had got missed off the priority list. Anyway, better later than never.
Although I generally do not discuss medical matters, the reactions of our bodies to the jab is interesting. Meg and I have generally felt OK and it seems to be a characteristic of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine that the older you are, the fewer symptoms you appear to have. Having said this, Meg and I are starting to have a few flu-like symptoms so we have switched the electric blanket on early and will probably go to bed an hour earlier tonight. The symptoms are signs that our immune systems are working as they should and are not a cause for alarm but they should last for 24-48 hours.
Today is quite a dramatic day in the history of the pandemic in the UK for it is the day when the death total since the start of the pandemic has topped 100,000 lives. One the government’s medical advisers had stated at the start of the pandemic that 20,000 deaths would be quite a ‘good’ outcome but this has now been exceeded five times and we are not near the end of the second wave yet. On the more encouraging side, the number of people vaccinated is now 6.85 million. It does appear that the death rates in hospital are less than the first wave of the pandemic as the medics have discovered new ways of treating (if not actually curing) the disease.
Meg and I went to bed an hour earlier last night as we were experiencing some slight flu-like symptoms after our receipt of the vaccine (an indication that our immune system is working the way it should). We enjoyed the benefits of an electric blanket and later on, when I awoke with a coughing fit, I treated myself to some genuine honey-and-lemon mixture which I made up into a good supply, had a good glass of it and then slept like a baby after it.
Today we knew we were going to be a little time-constrained as I needed to get to our local community hospital in the late morning for a (routine) blood-test. So we took the car down into town to collect our newspapers and then peregrinated towards our favourite park bench in the park. There we met our Birmingham University friend (which seems to be an almost daily occurrence nowadays) and talked about some of our joint interests in the way in which statistics are presented, communicated and interpreted. (We both enjoy a Radio 4 program called ‘More or Less‘ which does an extremely good job in uncovering and sometimes debunking statistical measures).
As we had planned, we made a fairly rapid exit from the park and I dropped Meg at home before I set off for our local community hospital. In order to effect my progress my system, I had previously taken a little stick-on print out I had acquired from a previous visit to a hospital and this contains your name, address, date of birth, NHS number and a bar-code which I suspect is your NHS number as well. This proved to be incredibly useful as I had to go through a COVID-19 screening first and needed to be logged in to the hospital system. Then I went on to the ‘bloods’ department (where I was the sole patient) and taking the required sample was easy and straightforward. I must admit I had not been looking forward to visiting a hospital but, in the event, I must have been incredibly safer than I would have been wandering around the aisles of a local supermarket where customers did not socially distance, where goods were handled before being put back on the shelves and the COVID-19 is reputed to be rampant. (I had read somewhere that supermarkets are the greatest simple source of infection ranking with people getting too close to each other not observing social distancing).
There is a massive row going on between the EU and AstraZeneca which is getting more acrimonious by the day. The first source of contention is that the EU provided some money upfront to AstraZeneca to help avoid the production difficulties which the firm is now claiming it is experiencing (I think this complaint may be justified). A second source of complaint is the feeling that the UK is getting preferential treatment, although it had signed contracts a lot earlier than the EU. There are some ‘insider’ stories that the UK contract stressed continuity of supply over price (giving the company the opportunity to charge a higher price so long as the supply was forthcoming?) The UE because of its bargaining power had prioritised price, no doubt because of its superior bargaining power. (In this respect, I think the UK is probably correct in having drawn up the contract to expedite delivery and well before the opposition) And then thirdly the EU is angry for the simple reason that all this plays into the idea that Europe’s approach to vaccination has been stuttering and sluggish, particularly in contrast to the UK. It is reckoned that about 11% of the UK population has now been vaccinated. The best-performing country in the whole EU is Malta, with about 5% of the population vaccinated. It looks as though the UK is administering 4.5 doses per 100 of the population whereas the comparable figure for Germany is only 2.1
Boris Johnson is now indicating that schools will not reopen until March 8th ‘at the earliest’ Personally, I think this is just to placate the right-wing of the Tory party (desperate to have the schools reopened, and not for the purest of motives) More realistically, rather than opening the schools for some children (they have already been ‘open’ to key workers’ children and others) I suspect that schools will not reopen until after Easter which is probably just as well to be on the safe side. The number of vaccinations in the UK is now 7.1 million but the argument is increasingly being heard that vaccines are not a ‘magic bullet’ but will have to be complemented by a variety of other strategies, not least social distancing and the avoidance of anything resembling a large crowd. The government have also put into place a rather half-hearted attempt to curb new strains of the virus entering the UK by requiring entrants from certain ‘red-list’ countries (e.g. Brazil) to stay in government-provided ‘quarantine’ hotels upon arrival. But, of course, anybody determined to get in will just arrange a flight so that it appears they are arriving from another country e.g. Holland. Too little, too late it seems!
This morning proved to be one of the most entertaining of mornings. Our Waitrose delivery was delayed as the SatNav on the Waitrose delivery van had directed the driver down flooded roads in the area so the driver had to take a roundabout route to reach us. We collected our newspapers and then on our way to the park we met one of the Waitrose staff that we know well who had a trolley full of bunches of daffodils. Somehow, somewhere Waitrose had finished up with masses of bunches of daffodils far in advance of what they could sell. They had already reduced the price from £1.00 a bunch to 5p a bunch and then decided to give the rest away to clients of a local veterinary centre and a local garage. We had a long chat with the Waitrose staff member and we exchanged stories (what else?) about how members of our respective families were coping with the pandemic and whether they had received the vaccine or not. At the end of our conversation, we finished off with five bunches of daffodils and so made our flower-bestrewn path to the park. After our elevenses, we proceeded up the hill and called in at two of our friends to donate each of them a bunch of flowers (gratefully received?) Naturally, we all compared our various vaccination procedures which almost invariably dominates all of our discussions thee days. Finally, we popped in one of our neighbours to donate to her our last bunch of daffodils. She had received her call-up to be vaccinated at our local surgery in a few days time but had tried to get vaccinated at the local Artrix centre. If she had made it before 10.0am they could have squeezed her in but after that time they were absolutely inundated (and the word from the street was that they had managed to vaccinate at a rate of approximately 2,000 each day) So she decided, having waited for 10 months, to wait for a few more days.
I do not intend to tread much into the AstraZeneca row which is boiling at the moment. But I will offer just two thoughts, both of which give pause for thought. The first is a quote from The Lancet (read by many if not most GP’s) published on January, 9th 2021. Here is the relevant quote: ‘Only 1418 (12.1%) of those assessed for efficacy were older than 55 years of age meaning that…we cannot yet infer efficacy in older adults’ This would appear to be quite a damning quote, admitting that we did not have the evidence base for older populations. On the other hand, UK medical scientists have been piling in this evening with statements of support, indicating that they had seen data that tends to suggest that the immune response in the 65+ age-group is high (but where is the evidence?) This is one of those situations where only time (and the availability of more evidence) will prove one side right or wrong.
We are right in the middle of a fairly mild spell of weather at the moment – that, plus the fact that the days are getting lighter to the tune of 1.0-1.5 minutes per day surely makes the spirits rise a little. Also, when we handed out our bunches of flowers (courtesy of Waitrose!), it was amazing to see how they lifted the spirits of the recipients. Of course, our own crocuses are out at the moment and daffodils will follow quite shortly. We also observed a Japanese flowering cherry which (I think) is on the point of bursting into bloom. One of the memories that we have when we used to Spain in January was to make a trip in the Alpujarras (mountainous area) to visit some of the highest villages in Spain. At some of our stopping off points, we used to marvel at almond blossom in full bloom right in the middle of the winter snows. I have been collecting empty boxes because I have a half-remembered idea (from somewhere) that I can get some seeds going at this time of year (perhaps some beet, leaflet, early lettuce) and get them going on a window sill. Then they should be quite easy to thin out and even easier to plant (as the fibre of the egg boxes should just rot away and of course, spacing becomes incredibly easy) As soon as I have acquired some more small wine bottles, then I can carry on with my damson-gin bottling activities as I still have several litres left to get processed. I must admit that of the two seasons, Spring and Autumn, I have a marginal preference for Autumn but after a year such as we have had with the pandemic, who can fail to look forward to the spring, particularly as the end is just about in sight!
Today started off as quite a bright, blue day so Meg and I enjoyed a pleasant walk down to the newsagents this morning. Then we struck out for the park where we coincided, after a day’s absence, with our Birmingham University friend. One little conundrum which were trying to puzzle out together is the exact meaning of the phrase ‘to have all of your buttons sewn on‘ which I have used in the past but the origins of which are lost in obscurity. It tends to imply that someone is completely rational i.e. in touch with the world (‘ he has all his buttons‘) but my two sources do not help. I have on my bookshelves a dictionary of idioms and their origins but no entry is listed here so that is no help. Nor is the internet (which tends to be very USA-oriented when you trying to track down British expressions) I think I may have an explanation for the origins of this phrase but I may be entirely wrong. I believe it is a tradition in parts of the navy, or perhaps just the merchant navy, that you cut the buttums off your dress uniform and transfer them from one dress uniform to another – to ‘have all your buttons sewn on‘ then becomes to have everything in order. I am quite happy to be told the correct explanation for this expression. Whilst on this subject, I did discover at the bottom of a hole in a wooded area which bordered on my garden a button which when cleaned up I identified as probably worn by a submariner captain in the 1940’s – how it got there in the wood, one can only imagine.
On our way home. we bumped into our two sets of friends who live near to each other so we had a genial chat. One of our friends is having some drainage work done which necessitates having a trench cut along the length of their drive. I reminded them if one partner reports to the police that their other half has suddenly gone missing and has not been seen for days, the police will look carefully at the patio to see if there is any signs of recent digging activity or irregularities in the patio surface – it seems in the light of experience, the best place to start looking.
After we had a lunch of risotto made with kipper fillets and cauliflower rice. Actually topped with cheese and with a big dollop of yogurt it turned out to be more delicious than you might imagine. Our domestic help enjoyed her portion anyway. After lunch, I walked down into town for the second time this day. The first thing I needed to do was to pick up some of the unsupplied portions of Meg’s medication – the pharmacist we use often seem to run out of things and give you a supply that will last for a few days but then you have to go back for the rest. My second port of call was to visit Boots in order to pick up some electric pre-shave which I buy from thenm when I can. As they never have any in stock, I decided to buy a couple of bottles online and then go to the shop to pick them up. This part worked OK and then I thought I would check the open shelves and, sure enough, Sod’s law appeared to be in operation because there on the open shelves were four bottles (which I never seen in stock for years)
Today, the media has got very excited about another two vaccines that appear to have extremely good efficacy. One of these has an 89% efficacy whilst the other Johnson and Johnson is 66% after a single injection. Each of these viruses work in a slightly different way so it is surely reassuring to have several arrows in one’s quiver so to speak. The EU, worried about its own sources of supply, is putting export controls upon vaccines manufactured in some EU-based factories and this has exploded onto the political scene in the context off Northern Ireland – which is evidently a potential border to be crossed between the EU and the UK. So this has the possibility of becoming really, really messy. One just hopes that cooler heads prevail and that everybody realises that it should be the virus that we are fighting and not each other. But again, national interests have sprung to the fore and the Germans, for one, may not recommend the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for their 65+ population (but is has just been approved for the rest of Europe)
Finally, we are keeping a careful watch out for a further bout of snow. We might get this in the next day or so and I, for one, hope this may be the last snowfall of the winter. At least we are fairly well prepared with snow clearing gear if we do get dumped on once again.
Well, we knew that the weather forecast for today was not good and so it proved. The day started with some swirling rain then turned into sleet which eventually turned into a rather light snow – but given the wind, one that looked as it would not settle anywhere. We decided to cut our losses and go in the car to collect our newspapers which we did. Then it was onwards to the park and we made for the Bandstand which is always our haven when it is raining/sleeting/hailing/snowing. As were enjoying our coffee (if enjoying is the right word) we were joined in our refuge with a young father who was looking after a four-year-old as well as a babe-in-a-pram. It was noble of him to brave the elements under the circumstances. It turned out that he was an environmental officer at Birmingham University whilst his wife was busy doing on-line tuition as an English as a Foreign Language tutor. You meet some interesting people in the park – needless to say, we were the only people in evidence save for a solitary dog walker in the far distance. We were pleased to jump in the car and have more substantive elevenses at home when we eventually got warmed up.
As it was a dull, wet afternoon, we decided to indulge ourselves with any old films being broadcast this afternoon. As it happened, BBC2 was showing the 1948 version of St. Joan with Ingrid Bergman which I assumed would be in black and white but was actually in colour. It was quite a brave film to make as WWII had only ended three years earlier and most of the films made in the era tended to be uber-patriotic and certainly anti-German with one or two exceptions (Rommel coming to mind) Actually the French squabbling between themselves did not come out of it too well and might well have fed into latent English prejudices about the French. I always find it interesting that UNESCO tried to write an ‘objective’ comprehensive history of Europe but couldn’t find enough consensus to bring their project to fruition. For example, the English always tend to trump their victories at Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt (particularly in Shakespeare’s plays) and consign to a small footnote the fact that the English actually lost all of their French possessions at the end of the period. The French, by contrast, will acknowledge some temporary defeats at Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt and stress, that at the end of the day they were victorious in repelling the English. They say that history is written by the victors, which of course is true. Before leaving this subject, how many of the British population realise that the USSR with a population of 170,000 million had quite a lot to do with the defeat of Hitler (and lost 20 million of their population in the process)
There are several distinguished diplomats in the EU who have been pulling their hair over the rushed decision to suspend part of the Brexit deal agreement on Northern Ireland, in its rush to impose restrictions on Covid vaccines, or components of vaccines, exported from the bloc. This decision was so ill thought-out and taken without the knowledge of the governments of the UK, Northern Ireland or Eire that it had to be reversed in a matter of hours. As a German newspaper put it, succinctly, ‘Brexit 1, EU 0’ and it does really look as though, at a stroke, the EU committed an enormous blunder and must fuel the Brexit-like feelings, wherever they exist in the UK or elsewhere in continental Europe.
Our ex-Waitrose friends had texted us halfway through the afternoon to say that they had received their doses of the vaccine (as had our friend in Hampshire, so we learnt last night). I am sure it will be a massive relief to them as they have patiently locked down for the last 10-11 months and have borne this with a great deal of patience and fortitude – but glad that the end may be in sight so that they can re-connect with members of their family. In the meanwhile, the numbers vaccinated has now reached 8.4 million out of the projected 15 million (to be reached by mid-February). The UK is vaccinating at the rate of 12.3 per 100 people (and Germany, by contrast, is only 2.6 per 100) and the UK has vaccinated some 16% of its population which is an impressive achievement given the timescales involved. Meg and I have entered ourselves in the COVID-19 computerised system which recognised that we had been given our first ‘shot’ and allocated us a date and a time for our final shot which will be 11 weeks after our initial jab. So this will be on 12th April so we have to be especially cautious until then (and subsequently). And to conclude, one public health expert is warning the population tonight that we might have to reconcile ourselves to a two-year wait (when vaccination rates in the rest of the world catch up?) before anything approaching a semblance of normality returns.
This morning I did not oversleep as I sometimes do on a Sunday morning and was therefore in plenty of time to walk down to the newsagents and get back again in time for breakfast and the Andrew Marr show. When I am walking on my own, I often use an incredibly old iPhone that I generally use as a music player – somehow (and I am not quite sure how how I did it) I have about 200 classical tracks stored it (a good selection of Mozart and Bach amongst other things. And now for the coincidence I am about to explain. At the time of our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations, I got out our large album of wedding photos to digitise them (which I did). Out from the middle of the album dropped a lined sheet of paper torn from a notebook and on it was the original organist’s notes detailing what we had played at our wedding in 1967. Meg and I can remember most of what we had played but it was nice to have the ‘definitive list’ as it were – and for this, I managed to go onto the internet and get recordings which very closely simulated what one would have heard 50 years ago. One of the things that we had sung at the wedding was the cantata ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring‘ by J. S. Bach (incredibly well known to almost everybody). It was sung for us by a close friend of Mike’s called Austin who was training to be an opera singer but we have lost contact with him decades ago (and he may no longer even be alive) Anyway, a very good acquaintance of ours was Clive who used to walk his two Jack Russell terriers every day and we often stopped to engaged in conversation and jokes. Clive had played the trumpet for about 80 years and was very accomplished – we asked him if he would like to attend our wedding celebrations which he did and played ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring‘ for us at our reception. Now for the coincidence. The recording of this I got from the internet was a trumpet solo accompanied by an organ (a stunning combination, by the way) and, as it happened, this on my iPhone. Now for the coincidence. As I was passing Clive’s house, what came up on the iPhone as a random shuffle was the track of the trumpet/organ version of the cantata. Is this coincidence? fate? Beyond the grave? I am not ashamed to admit that as I was only own, I shed quite a tear in remembrance of my very good friend Clive, who departed from us in his 80’s about this time last year.
We picked up our newspapers and proceeded to the park where we met with a couple of our park friends. One we had not seen since about Christmas time and I had been carrying round a bottle of damson gin in my rucksack for weeks but we had not coincided. Now at last I could hand my little gift over and I hope she doesn’t drink it all at once (although there is more where that came from) Then we met our Birmingham University friend and caught up on several things we have been discussing over the days (I told him my ‘Clive’ coincidence by the way) Then, on the way home we met with some of our oldest church friends who were waiting patiently for their turn of the vaccination jab.
We had a normal Sunday lunch and treated ourselves to Part 1 of the Channel 5 series on ‘The Great Plague‘ – we have seen this before but it was well worth watching again and we look forward to the next two parts. Tonight, by way of experiment, I tried to see if I could access YouTube from our TV. I can, and after fishing about with Gmail usernames and passwords managed to get myself onto the YouTube system. Now we are really enjoying a production of Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’ (a production with stunning voices but I’m not quite sure in what theatre it was filmed and I don’t want to pause it or mess about with it in case I can’t get it back again – I can see to that in the morning no doubt) Now I can treat myself to all kinds of things that YouTube offers (in particular Amadeus, the story of Mozart’s life which is may favourite film of all time)
I see that the number of vaccinations is fast approaching 9 million (8.97 at the last count) so that looks well on track. I wonder whether the 70 year olds are easier to process as they find they can access the vaccination centres more easily compared with the 80 year olds. I also read tonight that the 100 year old Captain Sir Tom Moore is in hospital being treated for COVID-19. Apparently, he had not been vaccinated as he was suffering from a bout of pneumonia. Wouldn’t it be a terrible comment on the year if he succumbed to it? The nation must be holding its breath.
The 1st of the month – and I forgot to say ‘White Rabbits! White Rabbits! White Rabbits!‘ and all the rest of it, which I won’t repeat here. Having said that, I was mightily relieved to get January behind us – February is one of those months (like November) which just has to be lived through with better things in prospect. We collected our newspapers and I remarked to my local newsagent that I had found out how to access operas via YouTube on our Smart TV and we had entertained ourselves with watching a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the Zurich opera house. My favourite line from this opera is that uttered by Don Giovanni when upbraided by his servant Leporello how he could be unfaithful to all of the 1003 women he had successfully seduced across various countries in Europe. His reply – ‘Well to be faithful to one would be unfaithful to all of the rest!‘ (Obviously, I couldn’t possibly comment on my reaction to all of this)
Having collected our newspapers, we made off for the park but via Waitrose where we pick up some extra milk (our porridge creating a dent in our supplies) There we met, a little later than usual, with our ex-Birmingham University friend. I had managed to find for him on the internet some examples of ‘Bullshit Bingo‘ which is a board game to amuse organisation members during boring and interminable meetings. You wait until you hear one of those incredibly trite expressions like ‘touch base’ or something similar. The rules are that when you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout “BULLSHIT!” (I’ve never seen this done, by the way).
We had not been very long home when the doorbell rang and there, on the doorstep, were some of our friends from down the road. They had very kindly cooked us a Lemon Drizzle cake in exchange for a jar of damson gin I had donated to them (as I have so many spare!) we thanked them profusely for this and shared it with our son and daughter-in-law before promising ourselves a carbohydrate treat with ice-cream for our supper later on this evening. During the afternoon, I had intended to give the car a wash but as it so cold and miserable with a sort of freezing fog, I wonder why I never got round to it. Instead, I amused myself with creating some ‘Day of the Week’ labels to complement the flip-over calendars of which we have one or two around the house. It is interesting how difficult it is to get calendars complete with days-of-the week. I had actually cut these out from an out-of-date Guide to the week’s TV and stuck them onto some pieces of thick white card (part of a box containing Christmas shortcake in an earlier life) and the finished product has a sort of ‘not bought but sort of home-made’ feel to them. I also got my iPad successfully reconnected with a 11″ Bluetooth plus mouse – I had successfully got them to communicate with each some time before Christmas but had neglected them for a few weeks so thought I would get them back together soon. The 11″ is quite significant because to make it transportable, you need a keyboard which is quite compact (i.e. does not stick excessively out of whatever little carry-on case you utilise for these sorts of things) Although the model I purchased is a bit tinny it was undoubtedly cheap (and so much cheaper than the Apple alternative) and so easier it is to produce text on than even the ‘virtual’ type keyboard available on the iPad.
I have just read the following on Sky News – it sounds almost unbelievable here it is:
Steven Brandenburg, who pleaded guilty last month to intentionally destroying more than 500 doses of the Moderna vaccine at his pharmacy, has been described as a gun-toting flat-earther who indulged in conspiracy theories, according to the FBI.
Brandenburg apparently believed the Moderna vaccines contained a microchip and would “turn off” birth control.
The FBI said: “Some of the conspiracy theories Brandenburg told [his colleague] about included: the earth is flat; the sky is not real, rather it is a shield put up by the Government to prevent individuals from seeing God; and Judgment Day is coming.”
Remember – you read it here first! The ‘innoculation count’ is now up to 9.3 million and proceeding satisfactorily. I also read that that the Oxford vaccine (which was the one that Meg and I had) was up to 80% effective when the second dose was delayed by three months. The jab already provides 70% protection 22 days after the first dose, according to the UK’s Joint Committee of Vaccinations and Immunisations (JCVI), which advises the government. Meanwhile, the government is getting seriously worried that the ‘South African’ variant of the virus might have escaped into the community and is mass-testing in about half a dozen post-codes across the country.
Today, if my memory serves me correct, is what Catholics/some Christians call ‘Candlemas‘ day. According to our friend, Google, this is because it is the day when all of the candles used throughout the church year are traditionally brought into the church to be blessed. It is also the day, 40 years after the birth of Christ, when Mary the mother of Christ would be brought into the synagogue for a ritual purification (part of the Judaic tradition) I also speculated whether today was also the feast day of St. Blaise when a pair of sacred candles are held across the throat to act as a holy remedy against sore throats. I was not completely wrong but out by one day as the feast of St. Blaise is celebrated on February 3rd, which is tomorrow. But enough of this superstition. It was quite a mild day today but with quite a heavy hanging mist blotting out the son but nonetheless the warmth is surely appreciated. As we passed our park on the way for our newspapers, I espied our Birmingham University friend, so Meg was left with him whilst I sped off to collect the newspapers on my own. When we reconvened as a threesome, we espied some personnel with bright yellow HV vests on and thinking that they might be the COVID-19 rule enforcers (we call them the ‘thought police’) we made sure we were properly socially distanced from them until they had gone on their merry way. They might just have been local authority parks department workers but we didn’t want to risk being caught ‘in flagrante delicto‘ so we made sure we were on the straight and narrow. I remembered to bring with me some copies of ‘Bullshit Bingo’ handouts which I gave to our friend and we reminisced about the meetings we had attended where many of these phrases were bandied about. I must say that being employed at one time in a school of Business and Management, with the two halves sharply delineated from each other (Business tended to be CNAA undergraduate courses whereas as the School of Management concentrated on professional and post-experience courses). I have to say, from years of experience, that one has to listen to members of a School of Management to fully appreciate how relevant a game such as Bullshit Bingo can prove to be! Then we met some other mutual friends and had a fairly snatched conversation because it looked as though we were turning into a kind of social gathering (but, I hasten to add, we are certainly not alone in stopping to have little chats with people all over the place because ‘there was a lot of it about’) Perhaps the milder weather was encouraging people both to walk and to chat.
After a traditional Tuesday lunch of fishcakes, I knew that I needed to pay a flying visit down into town so I took the car down to break the back of the journey before I journeyed along an almost deserted High Street. I managed to replenish our supplies of money from an ATM which had to be done from the street – I had not realised that the building societies that have in-store ATM’s seem to have a policy of shutting at 2.0pm. Not having ventured along the High Street since the start of the latest lockdown, I was unsure of the local norms. But I managed to get a watch battery for Meg’s watch (surely indispensable) and one or two cosmetic-type items. Tomorrow is the day when I have to update my Waitrose order before 12 midday and to book my slot for a couple of weeks time.
The airwaves this afternoon have been dominated by news of the death of Captain Sir Tom Moore, the ‘centurion’ who captured the hearts of the nation and who raised £32 million fo the NHS by walking laps in his garden – he initially intended to raise some £1,000 but as news of his exploits was broadcast abroad, the donations flowed in. It is remarkable that the flags in Downing Street and even Buckingham Palace were immediately flown at half-mast – this is the kind of tribute that might only be paid to an ex-Prime Minister for example. When the media announced that Sir Tom was in hospital but his family were at his bedside, one did get the feeling that the virus might claim another victim. But what an inspiration to his family and to the rest of the nation! Having actually reached 100 years of age, there were not many peaks left to conquer but I am sure that the inevitable feelings of sadness at his demise must be mingled with admiration at Sir Tom’s exploits at his age. Amongst other things he performed in a cover version of the song ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ sung by Michael Ball, with proceeds going to charity. The single topped the UK music charts, making him the oldest person to achieve a UK number one.
Some fascinating tests results by the University of Oxford, published in a pre-print report with The Lancet, showed a 67% reduction in positive COVID-19 swabs among those vaccinated, which may have a ‘substantial effect’ on the transmission of coronavirus. In the report, the university also said that a single standard dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is 76% effective from day 22 to day 90 after the jab. This means protection is not reduced in the three months between the first and second dose (which rather vindicates UK government policy of delaying the second ‘jab’)
The mild spell continues as we are getting a nice taste of quasi-Spring sunshine. However, I fear that this is the calm before the storm because the weather forecasters are telling us that another cold snap is on the way. Hopefully, we may just about evade the snow but ‘wintry showers’ are the order of the day. We were a little delayed this morning because it was the appointed day for our house alarm system to be checked over, which we do once a year about this time. The reason for doing it now is that it is the time of year when our house insurance has to be renewed and we always tick the box to say our alarm system has been checked – if we had not ticked the box or even worse had lied, then our house insurance might have been rendered null and avoid. After three quarters of an hour with the alarm whooping at various intervals in order to test it, we were given the all-clear for another year so that is a relief. We were also reminded how to press the ‘panic mode’ which is useful to know but not mentioned in the manuals, for some strange reason. We then enjoyed a pleasant walk to collect our newspapers and on the way, we met with our Italian friend who had been vaccinated on the same day as Meg and myself. We enquired whether she had endured any ill-effects (and she had not) so I said I was owed a ginger cake at least for taking her to the vaccination centre. From here, we made our way to the park, where we met up with our Birmingham University friend. We were discussing matters of a statistical nature – particularly the way in which statistics tend to get reported even by doctors. For example if a patient’s risk factor is to be increased by 50%, this sounds dramatic. But if the risk had increased from 1 chance in a 1,000 to 1.5 chance in 1,000 then for all intents and purposes this can be ignored. Whilst we tend to have a chat every day, we are going to try an experiment tomorrow and relocate ourselves to a different set of benches overlooking the park so that we can survey if anyone is going to approach us indicating we may be bending the rules. On our way home, we met with an old lady who we know well from our walks in the park – she was having a conversation with her son and grand-daughter and they were doing this whilst standing in a porch whilst the relatives were standing in the driveway. The things we have to do to comply with the spirit (and the letter) of the regulations. Finally, we met again with some of our old church friends and had another of our pleasant little chats before we returned home in reasonable time.
By this morning’s post, we received a letter from Meg’s cousin who is in the business of relocating herself from Cheltenham in order to live much nearer to one of her daughters in a small village just outside Derby. We had a wonderfully long and informative letter and Meg’s cousin does seem to have a routine which is not very dissimilar to ours in that it involves a circular walk, a chance to pick up a newspaper and one or two items of shopping. She also sent us some estate agent’s ‘blurb’ detailing a bungalow that she intends to buy and it seems, to our eyes, to be superbly adapted for her needs. The blurb did actually use the words ‘deceptively spacious” (this phrase is now so hackneyed I wonder that it is still actually used). Basically, this is a two bedroomed bungalow but the whole of the loft space has been converted into a potential third bedroom or even a work room which should our cousin’s craft activities down to the ground. In the reply I am going to draft tomorrow, I must work out what modes of communication we can now deploy other than a letter – FaceTime of course would be ideal if her daughter has equipped her with an iPhone.
Tonight, we were exhorted by Boris Johnson to ‘clap for Captain Tom’ which the members of the family duly did at 6.00pm. I actually use a metal serving spoon banged on the back of a large anodised cooking pot which makes a beautiful loud ringing noise right across our little square. Having just seen a programme on the plague, I was also tempted to cry out ‘Bring out your Dead’ which seemed funny at the time but was actually in the worst possible taste. Next time, I think I shall engage brain before mouth. I am slightly ambiguous about doing anything that Boris Johnson urges one to do but the case is truly a worthy one and Captain Tom was a life well to be remembered. I wonder if a statue will be erected to him, which is one suggestion doing the rounds this evening.
Today is the day when we receive our weekly delivery from Waitrose but it was a little delayed this morning (unusual as the delivery slots are generally very reliable). It is always reassuring to know that I have not omitted any crucial items but I did make a mental note of one thing that I needed to buy. As Meg was doing a ‘webex’ type consultation this morning, I busied myself on another computer with writing a reply to Meg’s cousin who is now relocating to Derbyshire. In the letter, I suggested that we might try communication methods somewhat more up-to-date than letter writing (pleasant though it is to receive one) so I suggested that via her daughter we might try whatever of the FaceTime/Skype/Zoom video links we can to see what we can arrange between us. Every few weeks, we have a gardener who comes and does the pruning of bushes and the like. We have arranged to perform a resurrection effort on a timber archway replete with honeysuckle that was rotting at the base- we arranged a plan of action for next Friday when I can act as a ‘gofer’ and act as an extra pair of hands whilst we re-construct the archway. We did intend to do it last year but COVID-19 got in the way, as with so many other projects. The weather was a tad cooler today after the recent mild spell but it was not actually raining for which we were duly grateful. We met our Birmingham University friend in a different location in the park today which proved to be fortunate. In our more usual spot by the side of the boating lake, the park workers are doing a lot of drainage work which involves digging trenches and laying a water conduit cable from one side of the park to another. Today we occupied a higher seat which afforded a better view of the park. Our friend had arrived before us and had had a word with the COVID-19 wardens. As it happened they were very friendly and informative and quite relaxed about allowing people like us to sit on adjacent benches and have a chat with each other, even on a daily basis – so this put minds at rest, as it were. I popped into Waitrose to buy some onions (how is it possible to start off any kind of cooking without a supply of onions, I ask myself) Again, we chatted with friends and friends of friends until we all started to feel a bit chilled and decided it was time to beat a retreat in a homewards direction.
After lunch and a good read of the newspapers, I decided to engage in one of those mindless activities with which one can amuse oneself whilst listening to ClassicFM. As it happened, I had a set of old University of Winchester business cards (now out of date) plus a set of address labels of a slightly non-standard size. It just so happened that one label would exactly cover the out-of-date details on one side of the card but it required a careful positioning of the requisite label (accurate to with half a millimetre in my estimation). I can now populate the other side of the card with both name and address as well as ‘electronic’ information – now all I need is a supply of people to whom the cards might be offered.
I see that some snow and ice is being forecast over the next few days, which I could do without. Although we have plenty of snow-moving gear, it does tend to slow up one’s daily walk but it has the bonus of making people much friendlier when you pass them in the snow – oddly enough, some of the friendliness disappears as the snow recedes as well. But I must say that my regular wearing of a Korean-made cow leather jacket (snigger ye not – I was given it by a neighbour who was clearing out his garage and it has proved to be a god-send, together with some new boots that are proving to be a worthy successor to the 1,000-kilometer boots to which I have recently had to bid a reluctant farewell. I am hanging on to them until the end of the ‘snow period’ in case I need them though and get one set of boots thoroughly wet)
Something rather odd politically is happening at the moment. Despite the fact that the government has made mistakes after mistake after mistake (not locking down early enough, not securing our borders, spending £12 billion on a test-and-trace which is a joke) the vaccination routine seems to have been a runaway success. The political conundrum is this. Normally, a government would suffer the penalty in the polls of making a multitude of mistakes. It looks, though, as though there has been a ‘rally round the flag’ moment in the first few months of the pandemic (i.e.the public are loathe to criticise their government when faced with a huge crisis) and now the positive feelings evoked by a successful vaccination may be wiping all of the bad memories of what preceded it (a bit like childbirth if you follow my drift)
The end of another week is fast approaching and Meg and I reassure ourselves that as each day goes by our immune systems should be getting just a little more primed in the fight against the COVID-19 virus. The press, in particular, is sensing the end of the lockdown and there is a lot of optimistic talk today about possibly getting most of the 50+ segments of the population vaccinated by May. I suspect that the public at large would welcome a fairly cautious and gradualist approach to any lockdown but some of the press and many Conservative MP’s seem to think that any end to the lockdown is just around the corner. Today we went to occupy our newly found position in the park and whilst I left Meg to contemplate, I made a rapid journey into town and back, complete with newspapers. In the park we met with friends of friends and chatted for a few minutes, seeing even more of our church friends en route. We knew that we could not stay too long in the park today because we needed to get home and make a fairly rapid lunch as Mike had a physiotherapy appointment in the early afternoon. I walked down into town and had my physiotherapy appointment, all duly face-masked up of course. Afterwards, as I was in town I grabbed the opportunity to visit a local hardware store and availed myself of getting a few bits and bobs that we needed.
There seems to be more ‘good’ data emerging around the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Recent analysis seems to indicate that the vaccine is just as effective against the ‘Kent’ version of the virus which caused cases to balloon last September. This variant of the virus also appears to be responsible for much of the very rapid growth of the pandemic particularly in the United States so it is particularly good news that so far the AstraZeneca vaccine seems to be equally effective. Also, the emerging data is seeming to indicate that this vaccine is effective against the transmittability of the virus as well. The other vaccine manufacturers are rapidly examining the data as soon as it emerges so again, there are grounds for cautious optimism. The whole point is, of course, that when the virus is rampant, there are many more possibilities for new variants to appear and to gain ground and vice versa. What is going to be of most interest, of course, is to see whether in practice the AstraZeneca vaccine is equally effective for the 60+ segments of the population. I suppose that we shall just have to wait for a week or so until there are sufficient numbers of the population who have been received both doses of the vaccine before more definitive conclusions may be drawn – several European societies are restricting distribution of the vaccine to the younger age-groups until more data is forthcoming.
I decided to follow some of the American political news, and in particular what was going to happen to the Congresswoman who was a supporter of the bizarre QAnon sect. The US House of Representatives has voted to expel a Republican congresswoman from two committees over incendiary remarks she made before being elected last November. Marjorie Taylor Greene had promoted baseless QAnon conspiracy theories and endorsed violence against Democrats. Before the vote, she said she regretted her views, which included claims that school shootings and 9/11 were staged. Eleven Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the motion by 230-199. This is quite an extraordinary move, even by US standards because I do not think that such an event has ever happened before. The Democrats had ‘invited’ the Republicans to disown their recalcitrant member but when they refused, the Democrats having a majority in the Lower House, promptly voted to disbar her from membership of two committees to which she had been nominated by the Republicans. Given that at one stage Marjorie Greene thought that all Democrats (and particularly Nanci Pelosi, the Speaker) should be shot, then such a fate should hardly be of any surprise to her. Here is a reminder of how mad this woman is! Addressing her colleagues, Greene tried to dissociate herself from her “words of the past.” Contradicting past social media posts, she said she believes the 9-11 attacks and mass school shootings were real and no longer believes QAnon conspiracy theories, which include lies about Democratic-run paedophile rings. But she didn’t explicitly apologize for supportive online remarks she’s made on other subjects, as when she mulled about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi being assassinated or the possibility of Jewish-controlled space rays causing wildfires. And she portrayed herself as the victim of unscrupulous “big media companies.” She said in her search for more information about “things in the news that didn’t make sense to me,” she found QAnon conspiracies online and that she was “allowed to believe things that weren’t true.” You just have to analyse the nonsense of that last remark to really wonder what tortuous knots the American right are getting themselves tied up in.
Today was one of those days when we seemed to meet person after person. On our way down into town I bumped into a near neighbour who works in the hotel up the road. Her husband and son who has health conditions had already received jabs and our friend was due to get hers shortly, either by dint of being a carer or in her own right. We used to know each quite well because we used to occupy adjacent mats in our weekly Pilates sessions but our paths have diverged a little since then. Nonetheless, we always catch up on local news whenever we happen to meet. In the park, we went to a ‘new’ vantage point where we met with our Birmingham University friend. Whilst Meg and he sat chatting on adjacent benches, I made a rapid trek into town to collect my Saturday ration of newspapers. Here too, the lady in the newspaper shop had just received her jab (about an hour beforehand), so we exchanged notes. Then I went to meet up again with Meg and friend and a couple of our church friends (who we know very well) popped into view so we had a multi-lateral chat as we wont to do. Actually, the path in this ‘new to us’ location is quite a lot broader which certainly helps with social distancing when people come by with their dogs and parents supervise their children on a variety of wheels (normally, tiny little bikes with stabilisers for the very youngest) After all of this chatting, we were were a little late in getting home for lunch which had to be prepared a little more rapidly than usual as we were keen to get sitting down for 2.15 in the afternoon when the first of the ‘Six Nations’ rugby competitions was due to start. The first match was a rather one-sided affair between France (who were superb) and the Italians who struggled hard to make a match of it. The second match later in the afternoon was the Calcutta Cup, awarded each year for the match of Scotland against England. This match turned out to be memorable in many, many ways. Firstly, I have to say that the Scots have played better than I have seen them play for years. Conversely, the English played worse than for many years. The net result of all of this was the Scots won the match (11-6) with the Scots scoring the only try in the match. This was the first Scots victory at Twickenham since 1983 which is evidently thirty-eight years ago (half of my age!) The English coach, Eddie Jones, was magnanimous in defeat and observed ‘I take responsibility. I didn’t prepare the team well enough. We just had one of those days. We don’t have many, but we had a bad day today‘. Even Brian Moore who won a total of 67 England caps between 1987 and 1995 and now an esteemed commentator for the BBC tweeted: ‘Congratulations to Scotland, outplayed England all over the park and deserved winners’.
The progress towards the vaccination target continues apace with the latest figure being 11.47 million (the target being 15 million by the middle of February i.e. in 10 days time). It looks as though this target may well be hit on time as we need to conduct about 350,000 vaccinations each day for the next 10 days. Confident of meeting this target (even a day or so early) the Government is now promising a new target of all of the aged over 50 and over by the end of May. Of course, this could be do-able but if a new variant of the virus were to emerge, this might knock us of course. The figures of new infections, deaths etc, issued at the weekend are always a little unreliable as many statistics do not get processed over the weekend but the figures are all pointing in the same direction i.e. downwards!
I decided to look up some figures to attempt to gauge the magnititude of the vaccination task ahead of us. There are 4.7 million people in their 60s and 5.2 million in their 50s. In addition, there are 7.3 million people with vulnerable health status aged between 16-64. Adding up all of these figures we get a grand total of 17.2 million to be vaccinated between mid-February and the end of May. According to my calculations, there are about 105 days left between February 15th and May 31st which is about 164,000 (to the nearest 1,000) per day. Again this looks quite do-able at the present rate of progress but of course we do not know (a closely guarded State secret!) how much vaccine we actually do have and what the supply line looks like. As usual, we may need the fine print in the inside pages of the Sunday newspapers to work out whether these targets (and the calculations behind them) are correct.
I set the alarm for half-an-hour earlier this morning so that we could enjoy a cup of tea in bed and then I could leap out and go and collect our Sunday newspapers bright and early in the morning. This I did and the weather was a little on the chilly side but quite bearable – I consoled myself as is I always do on these occasions to listening to a selection of Bach and Mozart on my out-dated iPhone which I now use as an MP3 player. I was back well in time for the Andrew Marr Show which was reasonably informative, evidently concentrating on questions to do with the pandemic, vaccine efficacy, end-of-lockdown and so on. After we had breakfasted and watched the politics programme, we set off for our daily walk to the park but there was a bitterly cold and biting wind coming from the east which made our stay particularly unpleasant. I has just texted our friend that we meet in the park every day to say we were were bitterly cold and were going to strike for home and then he hove into view. Moreover, he introduce us to a couple of good friends of his who happened also to be worshippers at the same church as ourselves in normal times. We exchanged gossip about parish matters and then made for home, almost chilled to the marrow. When we did get home, we treated ourselves to some packet soup in a cup to warm ourselves up and have actually felt a bit chilled and ‘flu-ey’ all day long so perhaps we tarried too long in sub freezing temperatures. If the same weather conditions exist tomorrow, we shall still make the trip for the good of our health but keep walking and not sit on the bench as we normally do.
This afternoon was a real treat for us because it was the Ireland-Wales Six Nations rugby match. The two teams were very evenly matched and the lead changed hands several times but eventually, the Welsh overcame the Irish who were weakened by a red card issued to one of their players (a swinging knee straight to the head but more a product of over-enthusiasm than viciousness) Anyway, we really enjoyed the match but it was one of those where with a fortunate bounce of the ball and passes going to hand the Irish could well have sneaked a victory in the dying seconds of the game.
Tonight is another case of self-indulgence – we have located several copies of the opera ‘La Boheme‘ on YouTube so we are playing a production first performed in Monte Carlo. The singers are evidently not up to the calibre of Pavararotti/Freni which we could have chosen but the Monte Carlo production seemed to have the more imaginative sets and we thought this add to our enjoyment even more. So I can listen to the music whilst I blog but break off for the more dramatic arias as they occur.
The vaccination total has now reached 12 million which is quite a milestone. The infection rates and death rate are also heading in the same, downwards direction (but the figures reported at the weekend are always somewhat lower and under-reported.) Nonetheless, more than ½ million were vaccinated yesterday so the target of 15 million in just over a week seems achievable. Nobody seems to be saying loud and clear that this is a total tribute to the organisational efficiency of the NHS (comparing so well with the ‘Test-and-Trace regime which is having to rely upon dodgy use of statistics to make their performance appear somewhat better than it actually is)
I see that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is floating proposals that he raises revenue by putting a sales tax on the likes of Amazon. Given that sales of good and services have practically collapsed and Amazon successfully avoids paying its fair share of tax, this sounds like a thoroughly good idea. Of course, the argument is that things like sales taxes ultimately get passed onto the consumer but the Amazons of this world have been making money hand-over-fist during the pandemic as so many people are ‘forced’ to shop online. It seems that Amazon’s profits have soared by 51% to nearly £20bn in 2020 but it only had a tax turnover ratio of 0.37%.
Tonight, there is rather disturbing news concerning the efficacy of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. South Africa is suspending its rollout of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine after finding it offers limited protection against mild disease caused by the COVID-19 variant discovered there. It follows disappointing results in a trial conducted by the University of the Witwatersrand, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said. The government had been intending to give the AstraZeneca jab to healthcare workers soon after receiving a million doses produced by the Serum Institute of India on Monday. The South Africans are going to use alternative vaccines. It will be interesting to see how news of this will be reported in the UK and indeed whether other vaccines that work in a slightly different way are any more efficacious against the South African variant of the virus (the manufacturers have been silent on this point so far) The makers of the AstraZeneca vaccine are confident that their vaccine can be tweaked ‘by the autumn’ but a lot of people can be infected and can die before then!
The ‘Beast from the East’ more properly known as Storm Darcy was still very much in evidence this morning. Actually, it felt a tad less severe than yesterday and when the gusts of icy wind abated, there were hints of spring sunshine but we are having to get accustomed to sub-zero temperatures. The BBC weather app says ‘heavy snow showers and a gentle breeze’ for my postcode area but in practice there was only the slightest hint of a few flurries of snow in the wind which you would not have described as ‘gentle’. Nonetheless, we collected our newspapers and trudged up to see our friend in the park who had thoughtfully already dried the park bench for us with a towel he keeps for the purpose (and we ourselves have an tea towel reserved for park bench drying duties in our rucksack) We chatted for a little while mainly about the rugby (about which our friend is much more knowledgeable than are we – but then he used to play rugby in his younger days) Eventually, the cold got the better of both of us so we bid each other adieu and headed homewards for a cup of warming soup. Lunch consisted of chicken breasts which were seared and then add to the remains of the tomatoes/peppers/onions/sauce mixture left over from yesterday. This was delicious, particularly when complemented by baked potato and some freshly prepared greens.
This afternoon, after a good newspaper read, I promised myself that I would go through a pile of newspapers and other mailed items that I had promised myself I would read and then sort out. I notice that at this time of year, the newspapers seem to be full of supplements along the themes of keep fit/coping with the pandemic/ensuring your mental health (which are really inter-connected themes when you think about it) So eventually stuff either got thrown away or filed or put into the ‘books I got for Christmas which I haven’t had time to read yet’ pile.
There is quite a degree of concern that the South African variant of COVID-19 has popped up in various places throughout the UK including an area in North Worcester which is just about 15 miles south of here in Bromsgrove. The variant of the virus has differently shipped ‘spikes’ enabling it to lock onto human cells more easily and this makes it more infectious (although the severity of the disease does not appear to differ) The AstraZeneca vaccine seems to have limited power to vaccinate against this variant- the figures quote as ‘22% effective’ but I am not sure what this actually means. Does it mean that only 22% of viral particles are treated by the vaccine and the 78% escape the bodies immune system? The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is slightly less effective against the South African variant but certainly more than the AstraZeneca version. This situation is a little confused not to say worrying. The Government’s has been has been keen to stress all day that the AstraZeneca vaccine – the most popular one – is effective but it is in the public domain that it doesn’t to appear to stop mild or moderate versions of the disease in younger population. This leaves open the question of how effective it is against more severe infections of the virus? There seems to be quite a degree of ‘radio silence’ on this point but there is talk, not particular reassuring, that the vaccine is being ‘tweaked’ and that a third dose might be offered to people ‘in the autumn’ None of this, I must say, do I find particularly reassuring but I keep saying to myself that as it is two weeks since the initial jab and about another nine weeks to go before the final one, that I must take pains to be especially careful in the few weeks ahead of us.
We bumped into some of our church friends as well as our Italian friend on the way down into town – she was muffled up to the eyeballs both against the cold and also with her face mask so we only recognised her at the last moment. I am promised to a bottle of wine as soon as conditions permit by way of thanks for taking her to be vaccinated. This bout of bad weather is due to last for several days and Meg and I have acquired some sniffles and cold-like symptoms after braving the weather. We will have to make a careful judgement whether it is with while venturing out tomorrow but the weather is so changeable that when you set forth it does not seem too bad and then can take a turn for the worse. Whilst our daily walks probably do us more good than harm, it will be frustrating for us if our little sniffles turn into a full scale cold. We are taking some cold-and-flu preparations when we go to bed as a precaution in any case.
I wouldn’t say it was the most major of domestic tragedies but we happen to have quite a tall 1-litre capacity Pyrex measuring jug that is constantly in use – or at least twice a day. I use it to prepare the coffee for our elevenses every morning and also, because of its height, I tend to use it constantly to microwave green vegetables because we have a lid that just fits it nicely. To my display, I discovered that the tip of the lip had broken away and a crack was in the process of appearing over what might have been a seam. As I use it so constantly, I thought I would try and Amazon/Ebay search for a replacement, only to find it extraordinarily difficult. Most of the 1 litre jugs tend to be squat and wide rather than taller and narrower so it took a lot of searching on the internet to find a replacement at quite a price (about £14.00) but at least it was a ‘genuine’ Pyrex. Now for Sod’s law in operation. Meg may have caught a chill after yesterday’s stay in the park so she went to bed a little earlier last night and decided to stay in the warmth of the house today. So I went to collect the newspapers on my own and then made a quick detour into Asda (which I normally avoid) to see on the off-chance whether they stocked any measuring jugs of the sort I wanted. As luck would have it, they did have one which is an exact replacement of the one that had died a death but at a price of £2.70 which is about one fifth of the internet price – but how was I to know that what I wanted would be so readily available locally and so hard to find on the internet? I took the opportunity, though, to buy one or two things that I know only Asda sells though by inclination I feel like avoiding the store as much as possible.
Today was a very interesting day in the park. Near the entrance, I met my Birmingham University friend who was deep in conversation (about dogs) with a dog-walking couple. We then acquired the customary cup of coffee and went to take up position in our ‘by now’ usual vantage point only to meet friends, friends of friends, dog walkers that we know and so on. At one point, there were as many as eight of us in a gaggle but we quickly moved on so as not to constitute a ‘gaggle’ and to keep out of the purview of the COVID-19 rangers. By this stage, I was thoroughly chilled as the temperature is about -3° which is not too cold if you are constantly on the move but can get to you a little if you are stationary. So I got home a little late and prepared our lunch time meal of fishcakes dressed with yesterday’s sauce and some fresh broccoli.
This afternoon, I brought back into use a radio which is designed to be used in or near a shower. This I bought years and years ago for about £5 and it was cheap even then – it seems to keep going on two AA batteries for about 3 months so is evidently designed to perform well at a very low power consumption. The proof of the pudding will be tomorrow morning (I have it permanently tuned to ClassicFM which is the only radio to which I would want to listen in the shower) At 4.00 in the afternoon, I Skyped one of my oldest Hampshire friends and we regaled each with stories from our pasts. I enjoyed retelling the story of how members of Leicester Polytechnic enjoyed moments of ‘Schadenfreude‘ (= malicious delight in another person’s misfortune) The then director of the polytechnic wished to avail himself of the flat at the top of the Queen Anne mansion which was a feature of the Scraptoft Campus in order to entertain his current ‘amour’ at weekends (and for no cost!) To make his pleasure complete, the Director had ordered a double bed which the delivery men struggled for hours to try to get up the narrow spiral staircase of the Queen Anne mansion. Eventually, they failed and the bed had to be returned back to the delivery van from whence it came, much to the amusement of the members of staff who had watched the late Friday afternoon’s proceedings unfold with a fair degree of mirth. After this Skype call, we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends as we do every Tuesday afternoon and caught up all with all of the week’s news. We generally take the best part of an hour and pass on any local news or gossip about things happening in the area. Tomorrow, if we are lucky, we should be getting our central heating engineer to come and see to our boiler which appears to be functioning OK in the exceptionally cold weather apart from the fact that a crucial pressure gauge is tending to read ‘zero’ which is a definite malfunction. As the boiler is fairly new, we trust that is a part has failed, we should be able to make a claim under the warranty.
Today was another fine but very cold day. The wind had abated somewhat and whilst the temperature was probably sub-zero, it was actually quite a pleasant day and, on occasions, you can feel the rays of a weak sunshine on your face which is always good to feel. We had a brief chat with some of our church friends on the way down the hill and then, having collected our newspapers as normal, made for the park where we met up, as usual, with our Birmingham University friend. We were having a chat today about some common pedagogic problems that we had faced e.g. I contended that ‘every teacher was a teacher of English‘ whilst our friend bemoaned the fact that standards of numeracy seem to have dropped over the years. We also discussed the fact that English is the most comprehensive of languages in that if it is an animal, cold and wet and standing in a muddy field, we call it by the Anglo Saxon name (cow, sheep, pig) whereas once it is cooked and served on a plate we tend to use the Norman-French derivative (bouef = beef, mouton=mutton, porque= pork) Another non-culinary example is that we use the French word for a room (chamber) but invest it with a new layer of meaning which in this was is a large, ceremonial room. All of this is well explained in Melvyn Bragg’s book which I think is called ‘The Adventure of English‘ which I would recommend to anyone who is interested in how our language has developed over the centuries.
Again, we chatted in the park until we got particularly cold again and then made for home just in time to cook our lunch at the normal time. This afternoon, after a good read of the newspapers, I ventured out to our local hardware store to pick up some bags of quick drying cement that are used to cement posts into position. Our gardner who calls by about once a month and I had decided that we needed to do something about a type of pergola, be-topped by a heavy growth of honeysuckle which forms a kind of archway down one side of the house. This has become rotten at the base (typical – this is water, air and microbial activity do their worst and why posts always rot at ground level and not, as you imagine two feet under) So on Friday, I am going to act as the ‘gofer’ and a second pair of hands whilst our gardner does the bulk of the work. I had previously let my neighbour have some spare cement and I wondered if he had any left over – as he had used it all up, I needed to go out any but some more. Actually, in the post I have acquired a wonderful tool designed to dig holes for fence posts. It is known as an ‘auger’ and in reality if just a giant corkscrew but in the past I have found that a good clean ‘corkscrew’ type hole only needs the post inserting into it followed by a few hefty blows of a sledge hammer which I have also in my stock of ‘heavy’ gardening implements. I hope the weather is not too cold on Friday next when we are scheduled to do the job as I do not fancy standing around much in this cold weather. However, I think the worst of the weather should be blown over by Friday.
As I write this blog, there. is a programme being broadcast on Sky News on ‘Learning the lessons of the pandemic‘ This may well prove to be very interesting because with the benefit of hindsight, it might be useful to reflect on where as a society, we went badly wrong and finished up with one of the highest (if not the highest) death-rates in the world. Of course, we all have our personal ‘takes’ on what has gone right/wrong and no doubt there will be an official enquiry eventually. But in the meanwhile, there might be a useful kind of stocktake so that we can learn the lessons. But do politicians learn the lessons from history – even a recent history?
From my own perspective, there are certainly highlights and lowlights. The outstanding success must be the brilliant way we have researched and brought a vaccine into use in a remarkably short turn around time. A ‘lowlight’ had got to be the abysmal performance of the ‘test-and-trace’ regime on which we have spent £22 billion – the money should have been spent on the local authority teams who have been doing infection tracing for a century and know how to do it. And, it is almost certain, that we started the first lockdown a week too late (where the infection rate is doubling every 3-4 days a week is a long time) and lifted our first lock down far too early. (Jeremy Hunt, previous Health secretary. has just said the very same thing on the Sky news programme)
I make no apologies for starting off commenting on the weather as last night was the coldest night in the UK for 25 years – a temperature of -23° was recorded in Braemar, Scotland. I had thought that this cold snap might be ending today but tonight might be just as cold, if not colder. This has an impact on things that I had intended to do tomorrow. I was scheduled, together with our gardener who calls by once a month, to replace a kind of wooden arch support down one side of the house. We were going to saw off the rotten base and then re-plant it in concrete (which I have already purchased in anticipation of the event) I was not looking forward to being out in the cold for several hours tomorrow morning so after a brief telephone chat with our gardener, we both agreed that the ground would be too hard for us to do anything so we had better postpone things for a week or so until the weather improves. I have to say I am not at all sorry about that! This morning was quite busy as our central heating engineer was fixing the unexplained loss of pressure in our boiler. He may (or may not) have cured a slight leak that we have somewhere on the system by introducing some sealant into a radiator but it will take some 2-3 weeks to percolate around the system. Then we had our normal Waitrose grocery delivery after which we set out on our walk, picked up our newspapers and met our Birmingham University friend ‘en route’ We called in at Waitrose for one or two forgotten items and made our way to the park. However, we jointly took the decision we would not loiter in the park but just drink our respective coffees and then get on our way – just to keep moving and hence keep warm. When we got home, we warmed ourselves up with some cuppa soups and then made a lunch of Swedish style meat balls (which I made a bit more piquant by adding them to some fried onions and peppers and then adding a modicum of gravy tarted up with a good dollop of brown sauce). It all worked out well, although it stands a little pedestrian. After a good read of the newspapers, I busied myself getting my accounts up to date (a process which involved working through my online statements and then recording the transactions in a large ledger that I keep) and I like to do this so that I do not get too many weeks behind. All my incomings and outgoings tend to take place in a flurry in the middle of the month which is now fast approaching.
I have been sort of following the Donald Trump impeachment proceedings in the senate, although the result is a foregone conclusion. The Democrats have put together a video presentation drawn from a variety of sources (and some of them not in the public domain) which shows that the mob were quite close to capturing some key members of Congress – including Pence, their own Vice-President. This video is apparently quite impressive whilst Trump’s defence lawyers are abysmally bad – I suppose it doesn’t help that he sacked one set about a week or so ago and is now working with their replacements who are definitely ‘second tier’. The Democrat case is primarily that Trmp had incited and ‘de facto’ given orders for the Capital building to be invaded. As the Democrats say “He invited them with clear instructions for a specific time and place – and with clear orders: ‘Fight to stop the certification (of the election result) in Congress by any means necessary’.” For a conviction to take place, 17 Republican senators out of 50 are going to have to vote against their own president and this is not going to happen. However, given the compelling nature of the video evidence any Republican senator who votes to save Trump must be doing so for reasons of pure ideology rather than any dispassionate discussion of the evidence.
British medical researchers have been trying to see if any existing drugs can be ‘re-purposed’ to assist them treat victims of COVID-19. They have discovered that a combination of two drugs may prove to be quite efficacious. These two drugs combined, tocilizumab and dexamethasone should cut death risk by about a third for patients on oxygen and halve it for those on a ventilator, the researchers say. This is quite a dramatically good result and may well to keep the death toll from the virus quite a lot lower than it would have been. Again, one has to pay tribute to the dedication of medical researchers who have discovered these drug combinations which makes COVID-19 more treatable than it would have been even a few months ago.
The icy cold weather still continues but, fortunately, we only have about two more days to endure before some milder air appears on Monday. After a chat with our domestic help, I went down to collect the newspapers on my own this morning. Fortunately, I had already agreed with our gardener to postpone the outside task we had got detailed for us this morning – Meg had decided to give today a miss as she has got pretty frozen in the last couple of days so I ventured forth alone. I did bump into a couple of my oldest ‘church’ friends who were busy giving their new granddaughter a push out in her buggy and we paused to chat but not for too long as it is best to keep moving in this kind of weather. Having picked up our newspapers, I made for my usual park bench and had taken the precaution of taking a flask of coffee along with me. Although I was on my own, no sooner had I got up to go but my Birmingham University friend spotted my Australian bush-stye hat from afar and made over to join me, sporting a similar one of his own. No doubt, we will soon have the reputation of the couple of old geezers who wear practically identical hats, although it does help to spot people at a distance. I have noticed during this pandemic and subsequent lockdown that I have learnt to recognise the shape and stance of people from hundreds of metres away, even though I could not actually discern their faces. I imagine that during World War 2, various members of the population (Dad’s Army?) were trained in aircraft recognition from the shape of the aircraft and perhaps also the sound – one had to learn to distinguish whether they were friends (i.e. one of ours) or one of ‘theirs’ in which case you might have to take rapid evasive action. (I am reminded of the not very amusing story that during the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, when an Exocet missile was seen winging its way across the surface of the sea towards one of our ships, a radar system was turned on called ‘IFF’ (interrogate French or Foe) only for the system to respond that as it was an Exocet owned by the French, it must be a ‘friendly’ missile, despite the fact that it was heading towards and actually hit one of our ships). A certain amount of re-programming of military computers then had to take place to indicate that even though it was manufactured or utilised by the French, they had taken the opportunity to sell it on to the Argentinians and therefore we could not infer that it must be ‘friendly’
We had a spare piece of cod leftover in our freezer and I baked this in the oven for lunch. However, under the expert tuition of son and domestic help, I managed to make a roux sauce, filled it with a packet of parsley sauce and then ‘spiced it up’ with some mustard and black pepper. The whole effect was delicious – so much so, that I am resolved to perhaps make an order to Iceland for another supply of Atlantic cod for the freezer. After a good newspaper read, I then devoted the afternoon to finally get all of my bank accounts up-to-date and ensure that all of my savings plans are as they should be (I tend to have separate savings pots for such things as vacation, car renewal, computing needs etc.)
Sky News is running a series of TV programmes and web-based presentations under the heading ‘Learning the Lessons‘. I am finding this quite interesting as it is a fairly contemporary account of how, as a society, we have done some things well and other things abysmally. No doubt, we will have official enquiries in the fullness of time but it is quite obstructive, as we are not far off from a complete year living with the crisis, of doing an ‘interim’ assessment of how were are doing. There is quite an interesting argument between medical scientists and epidemiologists going on within the Channel 4 news this evening. One side of the argument is that we have no real evidence that a delay in the administration of a second dose of the vaccine will be efficacious – this is probably true as most of the evidence from the initial trials were based upon very small samples. The counter-argument is ‘the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (of an effect)‘ This argument derives from everything that we know about how vaccines in general work and how our immune systems respond. According to this side of the argument, we can infer that a delay in the second dose does not reduce, and may even increase. its effectiveness. This argument will probably resolve itself as we collect more and more data on different age-bands within the population but, of course, we had to wait until this evidence accumulates over time. It will be interesting for us to learn which side of the argument has more force i.e. is either confirmed or disconfirmed as the evidence does become available over the weeks ahead.
We are braced for only two more days of this particularly cold ‘snap’ which we trust will be over by Monday. Meg and I braved the walk to the newsagents today but the conditions were not at all pleasant as the icy winds were driving in our faces. Nonetheless, we survived and collected our complement of Saturday newspapers (which are always replete with supplements of various kinds, some of which go straight into the recycling bin) In the park we did meet with our Birmingham University friend but we all decided that as it was so very cold today (-3°but the wind-chill factor made it seem a lot colder than this) so we decided to drink our respective coffees and get on our way home so we did not catch cold. When we did arrive home, we regaled ourselves with some hot soup which is always a useful way to get warmed up from the inside. We then prepared a fairly traditional Saturday lunch which involves baking some of the specialist sausages we get from Waitrose and give ourselves the occasional treat.
The highlight of today was certainly the two 6-Nations rugby matches, one played in the early afternoon and the other in the late afternoon. The first match was England vs. Italy and England certainly improved on their abysmal performance of a week ago, when they were beaten by Scotland. Today, England had an easy win over Italy which was to be expected and their performance had certainly improved but they still have some way before they meet the Welsh who will be playing on their home ground in a fortnight’s time. The second match was Wales vs. Scotland and this proved to be pulsating. The Scots soared to several points ahead but then had a man sent off ‘(red-carded’) for foul play in the ruck and the whole tenour of the game changed with the Welsh coming back strongly. In the event, the Welsh won by a margin of 1 point and in the last few minutes of the game either side could have won with a last minute score. Actually, the Scots captain was heading for the line with the ball in hand and only 2-3 minutes left on the clock – but then he slipped on the wet Scottish turf and the opportunity was lost. This is just to show what fine margins there can be at this level and how often rugby games are won or lost with only a minute or so remaining (quite unlike Association Football)
The government is well on target to get 15 million vaccinated by Monday. The total tonight is 14.5 million so could well be exceeded by the end of tomorrow and certainly will be by Monday. The target seemed incredibly ambitious when it was set about a month ago so for once, the UK government has actually delivered to a target on time. This means that by Monday, all of the 70 + segments of the population will have been vaccinated, including some others whose health status is such that they need to be vaccinated immediately. The next target will be get all of the 60-69 year olds vaccinated and then all of the 50+ in the population. This last milestone when it is achieved may prove to be highly significant and important in the campaign against the COVID-19 virus. When all of the 50 and upwards have been vaccinated (in about a couple of month’s time) then Including the over-50s covers 98% of those who die from coronavirus – and about 80% of all those who go into hospital. Furthermore, as Professor Whitty has stated 'If we then vaccinate all the way down to people over 50 and those who have actually got pre-existing health conditions, you then get through virtually all the people who have a high chance of dying.' So it is hard to overstate the importance of this stage of the vaccination process once we get to it. Of course, the protection will need to be enhanced by a second dose some three months after the first (in the case of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine) and, then potentially, some additional boosters in the autumn to cope with strains such as the South African variant (and any others that might have emerged by then) And, of course, we will have the normal ‘flu vaccination programme starting in the Autumn, so I feel that we will have to get used to vaccinations for many months and years ahead.
Now for a piece of absolute trivia. When the Flying Scotsman first started its non-stop journeys between London and Edinburgh and offered a high class dining facility, what to do if you ran out of salmon half way through the journey? The solution was to put a message on a piece of paper and stick it into the cleft of a potato and then throw that into the vicinity of a passing signal box. The signal man would then telegraph ahead for fresh supplies of salmon which which find its way (somehow!) into the Flying Scotsman cab no doubt travelling at speed. How this was achieved was not actually revealed by my source (A BBC programme called Full Steam Ahead playing in the background)
Hopefully, today will be the last of our current cold ‘snap’ as a front of warm air is moving across Britain from the West, bringing with it a lot of rain and higher temperatures. I got up at 6.0am this morning and after a St. Valentine’s cup of tea (ever the romantic!) I got myself muffled up and stole off through the cold for our Sunday newspapers. After that I watched/dozed through most of the Andrew Marr Show, then Meg set off for our visit to the park where we met with our Birmingham University friend. We exchanged little bits of news and gossip, mainly talking about the rugby that we had so enjoyed on Saturday afternoon. But as it was still bitterly cold, we did not linger for long but had our coffee and comestibles and headed for home. The park, as you might expect, was well populated with dogs and their owners and although it just an impression, I am convinced that the number of dogs has increased since the lockdown last March. At least on the way home. the wind is behind us rather than in our faces and this makes the journey home seem a little less severe.
This afternoon was another Six Nations rugby match, this time between Ireland and France, played in Dublin (without any teams of supporters in the stadium) Wales was a little weakened owing to injury and a suspension and had a clutch of injured players in the course of the game. In the event, the French proved to be the superior team but only just and it was a hard-fought match with only a couple of points separating the two teams at the finish.
Today, as we suspected, the vaccination total surpassed the 15 million that the government had promised before mid-February and the total is now standing at 15,062,000. This means that all the 70 years and older should have been vaccinated (or at least been offered) vaccination and now the target moves onto the 60+ band of the population. Some research has just been released by a leading epidemiologist who has analysed data from 50,000 users who have been vaccinated with either the Pfizer or the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. The very interesting results show that irrespective of which vaccine was used, then one dose gave 46% protection after two weeks but this rises to 67% after three to six weeks. This result had been anticipated from the initial trials of the vaccine but this data is collected from the first cohorts to be vaccinated from about a month ago and is especially interesting. As it happens, it will be three weeks tomorrow since Meg and I received our initial dose of the vaccine and we already have the second ‘booked’ in the system for 12 April with is about eight weeks away.
As we have to expect, ex-President Donald Trump was not convicted in the US Senate yesterday. A vote for conviction would have required a two-thirds majority which, given that the Senate is divided absolutely equally between Republicans and Democrats, would have meant the 17 of the Republican senators would have to have voted for Trump’s conviction. In the event, only 7 of the 50 for a conviction, thus leaving 43 out of 50 Republican senators who were unmoved by the mob ransacking the Capitol building and then seeking out the Speaker (Nancy Pelosi) and the Republican Vice President (Mike pence) presumably to try to execute them. If you do not convict for that, then what behaviour is liable to conviction? Our very own Boris Johnson has issued a statement to say that US democracy remains ‘strong’, despite the ‘kerfuffle’ over former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. If the result of the Senate failure to convict is regarded as a sign of the strength of American democracy then words fail one – it shows rather than approx 80% of American voters and Senators are not unhappy about mobs rampaging throughout the Capitol building so long as they, presumably are ‘on our side’ American society must now be so polarised that one wonders of any centre-ground still exists in the gulf between the two parties.
This week is going to be another ‘bottling’ week. After waiting to get a supply of miniature (200 cl) wine bottles, I am now faced with the task of removing all of the labels (some of which is easy, some of which requires a variety of implements and techniques) so that I can to bottle some more of the 16 litres of damson gin with which I started. Any tradesperson who comes to the house (e.g. service of the central heating boiler) gets a bottle of damson gin to help to keep them onside. All in all, I hope to bottle another 15 litres or so this week which is about twenty bottles or so and then they just have to be carefully labelled and they are ready to be dispensed again.
Today started off ominously with a brown envelope from the NHS but on opening it, my forebodings turned to delight. The origin of all this train of events lies in the Brexit negotiations at the end of last year. Everything got done in a tremendous rush towards the end of the year and it was touch-and-go whether or not we conclude a deal by 1st January. I had read in the press that one of the casualties of Brexit was the EHIC card (European Health Insurance Card) which allowed all members of the EC to enjoy treatment in other’s hospitals. What was agreed in the case of the EHIC was that any time existing on the issue of the card would be honoured but not thereafter. On reading this, I went to check the EHIC cards for Meg and myself only to find that they had both expired (not having been on holiday, evidently I didn’t bother to check them) I decided to quickly make a reapplication for two new EHIC cards, hoping that as as I was making application whilst we were technically still members of the EC, then it might be possible to be issued with two new ones. When I opened the iron envelope this morning, some seven weeks after making application for replacements at the end of December, I found to my delight that Meg and I had been issued with Global Health Insurance Cards (The word ‘European’ has been replaced with ‘Global’ as there MAY be some non-EU countries with reciprocal healthcare arrangements with the UK) Moreover, these are valid for the next five years i.e. until December, 2025 so we can make use of them in a few months time. (It is interesting, by the way, that the word ‘European’ seems to be banished from any situations in which it may encourage citizens of the UK to think well of the EU. For example, the EU has promised to fund 50% of all of the foodbanks in the UK but as this was a requirement for a notice to be displayed that ‘this project was part funded by the EU‘ then the government refused to accept any help from the EU as it probably felt that many of the population would say a heartfelt ‘thank you’ for being fed by the EU – and that would never do, would it?)
The day today was almost balmy as the temperatures of about -3° had given way to a temperature of about 5-6°, which is certainly a welcome change. We met our Italian friend on the way down into town as well as the cycling partner of one of our Church friends who was taking advantage of some non-icy conditions for a bike ride. We collected our newspapers and caught up with our Birmingham University friend but we had to keep a careful eye out for the COVID wardens who were doing their rounds at quite a leisurely pace. We timed our chats so that having them in our field of vision, we could ‘separate’ before they got at all close to us. Having said that, the day being the first day of half-term, there seemed to be kids and dogs absolutely all over the place, but that was to be expected.
This afternoon, I emailed the daughter of one of Meg’s cousins because we are hoping to set up a Zoom call on Wednesday so that about five of us can participate in a chat. I am not very sure of my ground when it comes to Zoom but our cousin’s daughter seems to have it well sorted it out so I have asked her for last minute instructions so that we can conjoin without a hitch. Incidentally, I felt a little sorry for the young adolescent couple who lived in separate towns in the West Midlands but had arranged to meet in a carpark for a kiss and a cuddle – whereupon, they were set upon by the local police and no doubt fined (would they each be fined, I ask myself)? All of this, the day after Valentine’s day as well.
There is a bit of an interesting twist to the success story of the vaccinations so far. That is Britain’s BAME community seem far more reluctant to be vaccinated than the rest of the UK population. According to SAGE, nearly 72% of black or black British groups say they are unlikely or very unlikely to be vaccinated. This may be a dramatic mis-statement of the true position but the latest data does seem to reveal that adults in minority ethnic groups were less likely to receive the vaccine than those in white groups, by between 10-20%. Misinformation spread within ethnic minority communities often plays on religious concerns — that the vaccine might contain gelatine, or other animal products and is not halal, or that it can result in modification of DNA. In the face of this rather disturbing information, there has been a bit of a fight back as community and religious leaders have been enrolled to spread much more positive measures. Locating a vaccination point actually within a mosque seems to work well as well (after all, we used cathedrals in the early stages of the mass vaccination campaign)
Every so often, computer manufacturers release new copies of their operating systems and it is generally beneficial to upgrade whilst one can. The major upgrades used to be once every two years but Apple now releases a major upgrade every single year. As the new releases come on stream, so support for older MAC models tends to drop away i.e. you cannot upgrade and the more cynical will say that this is Apple’s way of making you change your hardware every five years or so whether you want to or not. As it happens, the new operating system will install on the desktop MAC I have in my study and the portable I have in the lounge (on which I am typing this blog) and as they both date from 2015 that makes them both about 5-6 years old and therefore ‘just’ upgradeable. So when I had the chance to update my main system in the study, I did so – and that’s when the problem started. Every major release of operating system means that some programs which are well-loved and useful but ‘aged’ are no longer supported and therefore one had to learn to do without them. In my case, the update seemed to take most of the night and then the whole computer failed to start. I was in complete despair and thinking that I would probably have to buy a whole new system. What I did not know, but fortunately my son did, was that there is a special ‘Recovery mode’ for a dead MAC which enables a user with an apparently dead machine to reboot it with a special keyboard combination of keys and this forces a reboot using an internet connection. Anyway, this worked and I eventually got the new operating system installed. But then my son and I spent about four hours getting the system cleaned up of redundant and dead programs, ‘clutter’ and other things that might potentially cause problems. we still have a little tidying up to do but I was mighty relieved to get my system up and running and in a ‘cleaner’ state than it was in before the upgrade (If you install or re-install new programs, all computers accumulate clutter so this is well known to most of us) So all is well that ends well.
After a night of precious little sleep and a lot of concentration in the morning, I should have felt terrible but in practice felt quite OK – I suppose it was a sort of delayed exhilaration in getting a system working again. We were were delayed in getting into town but passed by two of our sets of friends en route as well as coinciding with our Birmingham University friend who we had not expected to see this morning. After an extended chat about our various academic experiences of how we award classified degrees to our students, we returned home to a very, very late lunch but managed to rustle together a meal which was actually ready in about 20 minutes, which was just as well. Then I spent some time playing? learning? some of the new features of the newly installed operating system with which I need to familiarise myself.In the late afternoon, we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends that we communicate with every week on a Tuesday at about the sam time. It was good to catch up on current news (although neither of us had that much new) but I did manage to tell our friends about my success in getting my EHIC cards upgraded to the new GHIC cards which will be current for five years.
Tomorrow night, we will Zoom some of our cousins in Derby and fortunately, the entire system has been set up for us so with a bit of luck, all I need to do is to click a link and enter the appropriate password (sent to me in an email). Also on Wednesday evenings, there is an excellent series exploring the legacy of Donald Trump particularly from the perspective of other world leaders and this has been a fascinating watch for us. Tomorrow morning, in the wee small hours of the morning, I need to update my Waitrose shopping list for two weeks time – once in the groove, it is quite easy to get the slot you need with a bit of forward planning.
Yet another variant of the virus has been identified which may have the ability to bypass the vaccines so far developed. Although this sounds frightening, it is the fact that UK medical science leads the world in virus genome sequencing which means that we identify new mutations far more rapidly than other countries. There is some evidence that these newly occurring mutations are both deadly and can evade current vaccines which sounds bad. But on the other hand, as the rate of infection drops overall, it is easier for us to ‘jump’ on new mutations that do occur and hopefully try to prevent a rapid and harmful transmission process.
Last night, we had quite an interesting experience on our TV set. I had done a search on YouTube for Amadeus (the film of the life of Mozart) and saw an entry for ‘Amadeus – the Director’s Cut’. Excitedly, we started to watch it only to discover that was an advert for a particular version of Amadeus. Disappointed, we trawled the rest of YouTube but did find a full version of the film but with the dialogue dubbed into Spanish. As it happened, we did not mind this too much and could follow most of the dialogue but in any case we enjoyed the music and the way the plot unfolded. After a little lie-in this morning, we were again delayed whilst I updated my Waitrose order for delivery tomorrow – this, by now, is part of our regular Wednesday morning routine. As the weather was so mild, the park was absolutely teeming with both children and dogs so we won’t be sorry when it quietens down for a little. On the way down we met with some of our church friends who who were a little distressed that nothing at all is happening in our own parish church whereas other parishes are taking a much more pro-active stance by keeping church services running whilst radically restricting the numbers. We seem to have been caught in a vicious spiral of the lockdown, our parish priest who has somewhat mysteriously retired from public view and one of the other major organisers of the parish is in infirm health. What is distressing is that other churches are making the best of a bad job and it appears that many members of our church community are deserting it in favour of services in other towns and it is problematic whether or not they will return.
After lunch, my son and I got the rest of my computer system sorted out. This involved making sure my backup system was working correctly – we formatted one of my pocket drives and then got Time Machine to make a backup. This is one of the best possible utilities on a MAC – the first time it runs, evidently it makes a full backup but thereafter it performs hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month and weekly backups for all previous months. The backups are incremental i.e. it only backs up what has actually been changed in the last hour, day or whatever and works well in the background. Perhaps PC’s have a similar facility these days but it means that you always have a ‘roll back’ in case anything has gone dramatically wrong whilst you are working.
Whilst we had the computer more-or-less decluttered and the backup systems working as I wanted, then I turned my attention to the desk itself. I cleared everything off it and onto some large trays on the floor. Now I can go about carefully putting back only what I need and discarding an awful lot of junk along the way. I did discover two things that I knew were at the bottom of the pile – the button from a submarine captain’s jacket which I discovered whilst digging in the garden and also a roman coin which I shall have to clean up a bit to discover its actual denomination. Whilst on the subject of working with a tidy desk, I know that in these days of ‘hot desking’ that one has one’s laptop and absolutely nothing else – I have coasters for coffee, notebooks, pens, stationery items and I dare not mention what else besides. But as I often say to members of my family ‘I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety-nine just persons, which need no repentance’ – however, they are not convinced by this I am told that I need to keep on repenting (i.e. keep things tidy) I will admit to one foible, though, that I think is widely shared. If I leave out a letter, a document or whatever, then I know that some action needs to be taken on it but once it gets (neatly) filed away then the pressure to do something about it diminishes.
Tonight, by prior arrangement we Zoomed Meg’s cousins over in Derby. We had a wonderful hour together and are going to repeat the experience at regular intervals, perhaps once a fortnight, and are looking forward to the days perhaps in late April/May when we go and have a little ‘get-together’ even if is only own a socially-distanced way in a garden. Meanwhile, I read that in Germany the (British) Oxford/AstraZeneca virus is not being well received and there are reports of many fevers and headaches following the vaccination. However, there are no similar complaints about the Modena or the Pfizer vaccine which is preferred. Strange that, isn’t it?
As I reported last night, I was very pleased to get my computer system up and running again and all seemed to be well. I did, though, wondered whether or not I could use a client other than FileZilla which is a very reliable FTP program. I did have an app installed called Forklift which had good reviews when I installed it and automatically remembered your login credentials when in use. However, I updated my FTP password because the new operating system indicated to me that my previous one had been found in a data breach and so there was a theoretical possibility that my security could be breached. So I updated the password and used it once or twice but then my problems started (possibly my new password conflicted with a legacy password on the FTP server) Anyway, I got myself locked out of my own system and couldn’t access any of my website (or this WordPress installation) whatsoever. In desperation, I wrote to my extremely friendly Canadian web host provider – we have known each for at least 15 years and she often gets me out of scrapes. It transpired that I had made several unsuccessful log-in attempts after which the server automatically logged me out – and hence the system was completely inaccessible. I was in quite a deep cloud all day worrying about all of this but eventually Karina came to me rescue, unlocked my account and here we are. I think as a lesson learnt, I am going to uninstall the slightly dodgy software that got me into this mess in the first place.
Meg and I were a little late going for our walk this morning. In the first place Meg had a scheduled webinar that went on for an hour. I was unpacking the Waitrose shopping when it arrived and set to in my major task for the day. I am ashamed to say that after about fourteen years in this house, my principal computer desk had acquired all kinds of clutter so I took the ‘bold’ decision to clear absolutely everything off the desk and put everything on the study floor in a collection of plastic bowls which I keep in the garage for clearing up jobs of this type. Generally one bowl was filled with pens and stationary and the other with masses of bits of paper e.g. letter headings from when people had written to me in the past. So I did a massive, massive clearing out job which involved a ruthless weeding out of anything that was not strictly useful. I did make a little bundle though of ‘business card’ sized cards (colleagues, useful contacts, restaurants) and then another mini file, inside a notelet card of those letters and addresses that I particularly did not want to throw away. And so I now completed my comprehensive reordering so I now have besides the Apple Mac a scanner (behind the monitor) my two pocket drives for operating the backup systems, a plastic envelope complete with old pen drives, my correspondence cards and stationary now neatly filed, Tippex, staplers, sellotape dispenser and finally some desk tidies populated with important bits of paper to be actioned in a day or do. So as you can see, not much there then! At least I have some clear work space on which I can write and perform my other ‘office like duties’ I know this is a long way from a clear, empty ‘hot desk’ solution that many prefer but at least it looks very neat and tidy and I intend top keep it that way. This tidying up job took all of the afternoon by he way and I only finished it at 6.30 in the evening.
Three important bits of news are merging this evening. The first is that the new infection rate seems to be falling rapidly and this has to be good news, unless we all lose our heads and end our lockdown far too soon. Another piece of breaking news is the results of an investigation that reveals that those who die of COVID-10 lose on average 16 years of their lives, which seems dramatic considering that most of the deaths occur in the elderly anyway. But the third breaking bit of news is that the Australian government is trying to extract more money from FaceTime for its news content. FaceTime has responded by ‘unfriending’ practically the whole of Australia locking almost the entire population out of their FaceBook accounts. This conflict between media giant and democratically elected government had to come at some point of time, I surmise, and how this plays out with have implications for the rest of us. Needless to say, most of Australia is incandescent with indignation and although Google has backed down in a similar situation, FaceTime has not so we will have to see who blinks first in the situation.
Today was one of those kinds of days in which there was a degree of low-hanging cloud and showers always threatening but not quite materialising. We collected our newspapers and were in two minds whether or not to seek the shelter of the bandstand in the park – in the event, we decided to try our luck on one of the local benches and it although it was blustery and lots of water in the air, we were not being actually rained upon so we judged it better to try our luck on the bench. The poor weather kept some of the mothers with young children away whilst the ardent dog walkers were there in force as always. Talking about mothers and young children, I saw a young mother made up to the eyeballs who was dragging a two and a three year old through the mud. They were both howling and covered in mud but their mother dragged them along anyway, no doubt encouraging them to stand ‘on their own two feet’ which they didn’t. Just a little scene from park life. We didn’t meet with Birmingham University friend today as he had other things to do but we will probably meet on Sunday, all being well.
Today, I thought I would try something different for lunch. We had ordered some coley from Waitrose which actually came cut in the form of blocks of fish (but not reconstituted) I made a background mix of onions, peppers, tomatoes and mushrooms and then added the fish. Under the instruction of our domestic help, I made a type of roux which went over the fish and then slopped half a jar of onion and garlic ‘goo’ onto it before the whole was baked in the oven. It did actually turned out OK and I am sure I have tasted something similar in a Spanish restaurant but I couldn’t recall what they actually called it.
This afternoon after a slight snooze and a read, I decide to carry on cleaning up the study because having cleared some much ‘clutter’ off the desk, I did need to do something with it. One of these items was what I think is called a Digital Picture Frame and I had purchased one about four years ago, principally with our (then forthcoming) 50th wedding anniversary in mind. During my cleanup, I had an extraordinary stroke of luck because I discovered an unlabelled pen drive near to the picture frame but I had no idea what was on it. Inserting into the computer, I found that it actually contained the ordinal wedding photos (from 1967) which I had digitised and soundtracks of the music that had been played. This afternoon, I took the picture frame, inserted the pen drive into the slot provided, turned on the ‘On’ button and wondered what would happen. What we actually got was a rolling display of the digitised wedding photographs from 1967, all of the photos of the guests that we had taken at the celebration we held in a hotel near Kidderminster in 2017 (some three and a half years ago) complete with all of the tracks of music (internet derived copies of the original playlist that approximated very closely to the originals). I felt that all of this was an absolute bonus so now that I know what a fantastic record that we have of the memories of both the original service and our celebration some fifty years later. I must box it up carefully and as soon as the lockdown ends, we can bore some of our friends rigid with it all when we next manage to socialise in each others houses. (I suppose I could take a big video of all of this on my iPhone but the resultant file might be multiple megabytes in length so perhaps not.)
More interesting vaccine news is forthcoming tonight. A study in The Lancet (weekly medical periodical) has shown that the efficiency off the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is raised from 76% to 81% if a gap of about three months is left between the initial and the second dose. The report also said that a single standard dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is 76% effective from day 22 to day 90 after the jab – meaning protection was not reduced in the three months between the first and second dose. The infection rate in London is also reducing very rapidly. What would be very interesting to know is how much of the reduction in the infection rate is due to the lockdown, how much to the vaccinations provided and how what is the ratio of one to the other. Perhaps in the fullness of time, we will tell. To round off the week, I FaceTimed one of my Hampshire friends who seems incredibly busy organising various Zoom events and we had a good old catch up on the last week’s news.
As today was one of those ‘raining all morning’ days, we decided to pop down and collect our newspapers in the car and then make our way to the park. Once there, we made for the bandstand as it was too wet to take a seat – but then we were joined unexpectedly by our Birmingham University friends. We spent about twenty minutes chewing the fat until we all decided we had got a little cold and decided to call it a day. Fortunately as we were in the car we got home without getting wet and immediately started cooking our mid-day meal. Then we had a lazy afternoon, reading the Saturday newspapers until I decided it was time to complete the tidy up of the study. On top of my book cases in the study, I tend to store the empty boxes of any hardware that we have bought in the past (in case anything needed to go back within the guarantee period) I located a little stool that I had underneath a desk and ‘liberated’ it so that I could make some space on the bookcase tops for things that I needed to store but keep accessible like our Photo Frame (which we may need to drag out once we make contact with members of the family). One thing that I re-discover was a type of hard-drive which we used to use with an Apple Mac – this particular model, whilst expensive, is the kind that film producers and professionals of a similar ilk use to make sure that their work does not get lost. To cut a long story short, it was already formatted for a MAC so I tried it out as an alternative backup mechanism and was delighted to find out it saved 16 Gbytes of data in about 8 minutes, which is a good reason for doing it regularly from now on.
It will be interesting to read the Sunday newspapers tomorrow morning to see how the world at large is responding to the imminent ending of the lockdown. The most immediate point of contention is whether schools should all be re-opened in almost the form of a ‘Big Bang’ on March 8th. Were this to happen against the advice of teachers and many in the scientific community (including the Government’s Chief medical officer, Chris Whitty. There is a strong feeling that whilst the right wing of the Conservative party are baying for schools to re-open, it may prove to be an incredibly risky procedure. I had not realised that children whilst not suffering much from the virus itself can certainly pass it on adults with whom they come into contact. Most of the scientific community are of the view that the current R rate of between 0.6 and 0.9 will rise to 1.0 and over if the schools get reopened in a ‘Big Bang’ sort of way. The Scots and the Welsh seem to be heading for a much more measured and phased return of children to school which is surely the way to go – but of course political considerations come dramatically to the fore. Whilst there is a consensus that this has to be the ‘last’ of the lockdowns, it it is far from clear how carefully we need to tread, as a society, to make sure we do not throw away the efforts we have made during the last 10-11 months. For example, most of the population are of the view that pubs should not reopen until about May at the earliest.
On the more positive side, it does appear that there will some liberalisation of the contacts between members of a family and their aged relatives in residential homes. What is being suggested is a very limited form of contact where holding hands will be allowed but no hugging or kissing – and members of the family must wear full PPE. Meg and I are anxious to try and see Meg’s cousin in Lancashire who is in sheltered accommodation. We will have to see what the actual norms are but I will wait until about Tuesday (the final versions of the regulations may well be published late on Monday afternoon). We hope that it may be possible to make a visit at least in a garden if we were to wait until mid-April and the regulations permit members of facilities to meet in the outdoors. Anyway, we shall to wait and see. I see that BBC are running an article in their website called ‘Coronavirus: What Europeans have learned from a year of pandemic’ and at first glance, it appears to be interesting to see how other societies have coped with the common threat. I think that we in the UK are particularly bad at learning from other societies – always assuming that we know and do things better than anywhere else on earth. But if do imitate other societies, it always seems to the worst of practices in the USA rather than our European neighbours.
Today was the type of day in which the poetic would say that the clouds were ‘scudding’ across the sky – in fact, I don’t know if we use that verb for any other object or activity except clouds. Anyway, I got up fairly early-ish and then walked down to the newsagent for our normal Sunday supplies, all done at this hour in the morning in order to get back in time for the Andrew Marr show (which, I am ashamed to say, I largely slept through). Then we made our way down to the park, being met on the way by some of our church friends. We continued our discussions as to what has (not) been going at our local church and the news to date does seem very encouraging for us. In the park we met with our Birmingham University friend and another park regular who occasionally seeks out our company and has a lot to say for himself. Enough said for the moment. We met some more of our church friends who told us that the police had been called out about 6.00 am to a large disturbance in the vicinity of the park involving several young males so I wonder whether some kind of illegal drinks party had been organised.
After lunch, and a brief rest, I thought I would busy myself with the tidy-up of the study. I had ordered several things from Amazon and I hoped that would package them in a fairly large box- which fortunately, they did. I could then use this box to store some competing ‘hardware’ which was adding to the clutter but now they are safely boxed up, labelled and put on a bookcase top where I cannot forget about them but quickly access them when needed.
There is still quite a debate going on as to whether the schools should be ‘open’ on 8th March (not that they ever closed as they catered for the children of key workers as as well as disadvantaged children) The government argue that they will be driven by ‘the data’ but all will be revealed tomorrow afternoon (to Parliament) and then other address to the nation by Boris Johnson at 7.00pm. What is interesting is that Meg and I watched the replay of Thursday night’s Question Time which is broadcast on the Parliament channel between 6.00 and 7.00 on a Sunday. The consensus view (even agreed to by the Tory MP who was part of the panel) was that any lockdown should be gradual in the extreme and there should be a pause after each step to ensure that the R factor does not increase.
The BBC seems to be taking its role as a public educator in these troubled times. I notice that on their website tonight, there is a contribution entitled ‘Lockdown review: What are the risks of schools, pubs and shops reopening?‘ The article appears interesting and informative and was written by a member of the BBC Reality Check unit. There seemed to be plenty of graphs and reference to the latest research evidence so this is probably worth a good read once I have the time.
his morning, acting on a whim, I turned to a section of Google called Google which will detail for any researcher who has published a series of papers how many citations have been received. In this context, a citation is a reference by another author to one’s own published work. In this way, it is possible to measure if only in a simplistic way whether one’s paper had any points within it that another academic wished to reference. I was surprised to find that the most popular paper (twice as many citations as the next highest) was a paper written on the subject of plagiarism.(By the way, my son commented ‘Who did you copy it from?‘) I think that myself and my co-author had just hit the rising tide of concern at just about the right time and also had it published in an electronic journal (which would it easier to find in a wide-ranging Google search, I imagine). The ‘citation indices’ are heavily used in the academic community to help to assess the quality of published work in what was called the Research Assessment Exercise, to which all universities had to subject themselves at regular intervals (every four years as I remember).
The latest data seems to indicate that some 17.5 million of the population (about a third of the adult population) have now been vaccinated. There is also a suggestion this evening that jabs may reduce the amount of transmission by about two-thirds. But we have a difficult job statistically to work out how much of the reduction in transmission is due to vaccine and how much is due to the generalised effects of the lockdown – perhaps this type of analysis might be forthcoming in time, but it is evidently far too early to come to firm conclusions at this stage in the proceedings.
After a somewhat delayed start, we decided that it was not going to rain today so Meg and I walked down to collect our newspapers and journey into the park as part of our normal routine. We found the park reasonably quiet after the weekend which is obviously always a busy time. We did appreciate the little bit of peace but found that every park bench was muddy as children had evidently clambered all over them in their muddy shoes. Fortunately, we came prepared for all contingencies and have an old tea towel which served both to wipe the mud off the seats and to dry them at the same time. Apart from a wave from a car, we did not bump into any of our sets of friends today, of the park genre or otherwise, so I read yesterday’s blog to Meg which I can access via my mobile phone.
This afternoon, I decided to tackle a pile of old files which required some rationalisation – and I hope to reduce the clutter a smidgeon by seeing how much of the contents I could dispense with. As is the way with things, quite a lot of things that seemed important at the time could now get junked so I helped to fill our outside paper-waste bin to overflowing before it gets emptied on Thursday morning. One of the tasks that I quite enjoy is to recycle some of the old files which I do by carefully peeling off the old labels – I noticed that on one, which had a label ‘stuck over’ a label, the original referred to the applications my son was making when he went to university which makes it about 34 years old! I also discovered a photo of myself with my ‘Spanish’ baby – well, not mine exactly, but the baby belonging to a professor from Barcelona who was a fellow examiner of a PhD in La Coruña, Northern Spain, about 6-7 years ago now.
As part of my clearing up activities I came across an old ‘pocket’ hard disk drive that I must have bought years before – when I looked on it, it did not have a great deal of data but it did have some oldish photos that I had forgotten about. So I copied these across to a legacy folder on my principal computer and then reformatted the newly discovered disk (it was FAT32 and I wanted to make sure it was NTFS compatible with the MAC) and then copied the files back over on it. As I was congratulating myself on a new discovered extra source of computer storage, I thought it might be a good idea to try to discover how old the disk drive actually was. By putting the serial number into a Seagate database, I discovered that it was about 9 years old. A bit of research on the internet indicates that most portable hard disk drives are only anticipated to have a life of about 5-6 years so I already appear to be living on borrowed time. So do I need to buy a new disk drive as a backup when the newly discovered one seems absolutely fine? I need to have a think about this one.
This afternoon’s political news has been dominated by the much-trailed ‘roadmap’ for the way in which the lockdown is be gradually released. Whilst I am not a fan of this particular government, I do feel that they have got the roadmap about right. They are suggesting a series of four gradual easing of restrictions and always subject to four criteria which are that vaccination rates continue, death rates are still reducing, infection rates are not surging and finally new variants of the virus do not threaten us. The innovative part of the proposal is that there should be a gap of five weeks before one stage and the next – this is to allow for an examination of the data to show that adverse consequence are not flowing before the next wave of the ‘un-lockdown’ continues. This all sounds incredibly sensible but as predicted the the right wing of the Conservative party (all ex-Brexiteers by the way) are still calling for restrictions to be eased at the earliest possible moment i.e. in time for Easter. The reaction of the popular press and any opinion polls gathered in the next few days will prove to be extremely interesting reading.
One treat I am saving for later on this evening is to view that new footage released by NASA of the ending of ‘Perseverance‘ onto the surface of Mars. This is said to be ‘stunning’ but I think it relates principally to the way in the craft was landed without damage, on the surface of Mars via a type of ‘sky crane’ from which the craft was lowered on a series of tethers. Whether is actually is stunning or just ‘hype’ I will be able to tell later on the evening.
It was quite a dull day today but the weather was quite mild so Meg and I walked down to collect our newspapers as usual. There I discussed with our newsagent the fact that we both owned Apple Macs and he told me that he had, at one stage, owned one of the very earliest MACs which he had actually given away. If you look on the web, you can see that vintage MACs are now a collector’s item and can be worth up to $1,000 each – or perhaps even more for a really early, vintage model. My newsagent told me that he thought that the MAC he had given away might now be worth thousands of dollars.
Having picked up our newspapers, we made our way to the park and there we coincided with our Birmingham University friend. We had a chuckle about colleagues that we had both experienced in the past who had proved to be irksome to us. I recalled one particular colleague who upon my return from the Complutense University in Madrid teaching Information Technology (in Spanish) to public administration students, informed me that he was ‘proud’ he could only speak English and no other language. Although we were a friendly and non-argumentative department, I did rather ‘express my displeasure at his attitude’ (and this is putting it mildly). But to put things into context, I only had one or two matters of really serious dispute in the whole of a teaching career and, in general, worked with a very amiable and professional set of colleagues in the two universities in which I worked.
Out of an idle curiosity, I thought I would look at the comparative merits and prices of hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state devices (SSDs) and memory cards in variety. Whilst I browsed for various items on Amazon and noted some prices, navigated away and then navigated back again, I noticed that one items I had been looking at had jumped from £80 to £100 in the space of a few seconds. I think this is an Amazon ‘ploy’ ultimately to extract a degree of profit as they might work on the principle that if you want something urgently you may be willing to pay a premium price for it. Anyway, I have come to no firm conclusions on this subject except that in my researches to examine which medium has the best storage properties, baked clay tablets that have lasted for thousands of years may have something to be said for them. But given the speed at which technology is advancing, can one be sure that the media one is using today will still be readable by a future generation in, say, 10-15 year’s time? The solution, I have discovered, is to think about a backup strategy rather than storage devices. A good backup strategy is to think of the 3-2-1 rule i.e. ‘The 3-2-1 backup rule is an easy-to-remember acronym for a common approach to keeping your data safe in almost any failure scenario. The rule is: keep at least three (3) copies of your data, and store two (2) backup copies on different storage media, with one (1) of them located offsite.’ So I will continue to have thoughts and ruminations about all of this.
In the late afternoon, I caught up with my emails only to discover that a Hampshire friend was suggesting we Skype in 20 minutes time. Then I discovered there was an ominous ‘question mark’ over the Skype desktop icon which suggests that the newly updated operating system could not use the out-of-date application in my computer. So I quickly deleted it and then managed to reinstall a more up-to-date version which fortunately worked like a dream. So I Skyped my friend and we had an entertaining few minutes before we FaceTimed some of our other Bromsgrove friends as we have a regular arrangement each Tuesday afternoon. So all in all, about an hour and a half of non-stop ‘chatting’ via video technology.
There is an interesting political ‘brew’ developing this evening. The Tory party has firmly set its face against anything that sounds like a ‘vaccine passport’ which may well be demanded by airlines, other holiday destinations and so on. But civil liberties organisations are alarmed about the project. “Vaccine passports would create the backbone of an oppressive digital ID system and could easily lead to a health apartheid that’s incompatible with a free and democratic country,” says Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch. “Digital IDs would lead to sensitive records spanning medical, work, travel, and biometric data about each and every one of us being held at the fingertips of authorities and state bureaucrats.” Nonetheless, the idea is gaining a degree of traction and the government may well be approaching a volte-face on this issue. Already some of the technological and ethical issues are being explored within government and something akin to the old yellow card, more formally known as the International Certificate of Vaccination may well emerge. I can firmly predict, however, that the government will call it anything but ensure that the old ‘passport’ is never actually used!
Today was a different kind of day and we knew that we were going to break our normal routine today. When we buy our Christmas tree, which we do from Webbs (famous garden store down the road), they give us a voucher which covers most of the cost of the tree. This voucher has to be used by the end of February and as it is worth £35.00 it is not to be sneezed at. The days of February are rapidly running out so it was a case of ‘use it or lose it’ So today Meg and I went down in the car to collect our newspapers and then headed straight for Webbs – once in the store, we replenished our supply of wild bird food (fat balls, peanuts and the like)and that was that. The catering facilities within Webbs were not open and there were warnings at the entrance to the store not to bring in your own food and drink. So we tracked backwards and went to our familiar haunts in Sanders Park where we drank our pre-prepred coffee and our snacks.
This afternoon, we made for lunch a huge curry (I always prepare too much but the remainder is always gratefully received by our domestic help when we see her on Friday) After this and a snooze, I thought I would tackle the on-line renewal of my driving licence. This proved to be remarkably straightforward so far as I can tell but it calls for the interrogation of three national data bases (DVLC, the National Insurance computer and the the Passport office) and, so far, the process seems to have gone as smoothly as I would have hoped. There is always a slightly ominous warning that ‘we have received your application and are checking that the supplied information is valid‘ or words to that effect and, all being well, I hope to have the new licence supplied within the week. Past the age of 70, your licence still needs to be renewed every three years and it does rely upon the integrity of the applicant e.g. to tick the box to say that you meet the eye-sight requirements. When I was last having my annual eye checkup, I asked our friendly optician (who we have known for years) what kind of checks were made once you had ‘ticked the box’ He thought that there none to speak of and we surmised between us that probably people lied about their eye-sight all over the country – which is slightly frightening when you think about it.
I have been been exploring some modern SSD external disk drives (Solid State Drives) wondering whether or not they might have a life of more than the five years associated with a typical HDD (Hard Disk Drive) – it is interesting that Apple seems to install SSDs by default in the computers it build these days. I have my eye on a particular Seagate drive which is offering a three year warranty (and a half-promise that if it fails Seagate will rescue information from it and return it to you!) and also some included software that means that every time you change or update a file on your main system the Seagate software will ‘mirror’ it (i.e. incrementally back it up) on the SSD which, given the speed at which they operate, I should imagine one scarcely notices. I am tempted but will do a little more research before I commit myself finally.
We got an email from our Spanish friend last night and she told us, that in common with both France and Germany, the Oxford/AstraZeneca i.e. UK developed vaccine was not being offered to anyone over the age of 55. This ‘excess of caution’ or is it just xenophobia may be due to the fact that the initial trials of the AstraZeneca vaccine did not include many people over the age of 55 in its initial trials and therefore might be said to be ‘unproven’ . However, in the last day or so, a study has been reported on the effects of the vaccines on ‘real’ populations and it shows the four weeks after vaccination, the Pfizer-BioNTech cut the chances of going to hospital by up to 85% but in the case of the AstraZeneca vaccine, this was 94%. In other words, both vaccines have shown that when used in actual (i.e. not trial) populations, they have a fantastically beneficial effect at preventing serious illness. Even in Germany, the best selling newspaper of ‘Bild‘ is saying ‘Dear Britain – we envy you‘. It used figures from 21 February showing the UK had given 17.7 million people at least one vaccination, with Germany lagging behind on 3.4 million. 'While the British are already planning their summer vacation, Germany is stuck in lockdown' the newspaper added. It seems to me that there a certain amount of ‘not-invented here’ syndrome evident when it comes to evaluating the various vaccines against each other!
It was a beautiful day today and felt extremely ‘spring’ like – in fact, I think, the temperature at the moment is above the seasonal norm. This wonderful weather did not last for too long, though, as a huge black cloud soon intervened. Nonetheless, we were glad to get to the park and we resumed conversations with our friend from Birmingham University and another friend/acquaintance of his who is a dog walker but also very interested in all things to do with local history. We chatted until we all started to feel a little cold and, as we had been some time out of the sun, we all thought we had better strike for home. As this afternoon was quite bright and fair, I thought I had better give the car a wash as, with one thing or another, it had got missed for a week or so. As I washed the car, I thought there was a very fine film of something resembling dust but according to the weather forecast this evening, what we have actually experienced is a very fine layer of Saharan sand. Every so often when the weather conditions are right, we do get a thin layer of Saharan sand/dust which has whipped up high into the atmosphere by strong winds. The raindrops in the clouds acquire particles of dust and then they get deposited, the water evaporates and we are left with a very fine covering of sand which shows up on our cars (but it must be everywhere)
We have some interesting bits of family news. First of all, Meg’s cousins in Derbyshire have emailed us to indicate that as we all enjoyed the Zoom session last week, shall we have another one soon? We will probably settle for a fortnightly pattern from now on – our cousin had very kindly given us a link so that we can now view Amadeus (the famous film about Mozart) in English rather than in Spanish. So we might try that over the weekend. The other fantastic good bit of news we only got a few minutes ago. We have heard from Spain that our Spanish god-daughter has just won an Erasmus scholarship to come and study for a semester in the University of Gloucertshire (this is about 40 miles down the road) This means that we can see quite a lot of her (if she would like this) and, of course, there is a comfortable home to retreat to at the weekends. We are short on details at the moment but no doubt I will get a lot more once I have emailed our oldest Spanish friend to get all of the ‘inside’ information. I just hope the UK government is not going to do all kinds of daft things to make the lives of Erasmus students difficult (e.g. visas, enormous charges in case you ever need to use our NHS for any reason and so on) Of course, we should be able to do lots at this end just in case anything does go wrong and it needs a little sorting out.
After the complete mess-up last year over the ‘A’-level gradings, the education secretary has done a volte-fee and allowed the teachers to undertake their own assessments of their students – a massive degree of ‘grade inflation’ is being predicted. Even some of the pupils who are affected seem a little unsure as I think the more ‘streetwise’ among them realise that passing a public examination has a certain degree of credibility but a grade based upon teacher assessments might not be regarded so highly by future employers and the universities themselves. But when we were at school, we often used to pass our books to our next door neighbour in the classroom to be marked and then handed back again – would it be beyond the wit of schools to pair with a partner and to ‘mark’ each other’s work? I am sure this could be made to work fairly easily if a little bit of thought was applied to it.
An interesting question is emerging this evening. We know that the rate of vaccination is quite high across the whole of the UK and is now up to some 18.7 million. However, it does appear that in London and large cities such as Birmingham and Manchester the rates of vaccination are well behind the rest of the country. This is associated both with ethnicity and also with deprivation (as well as the interaction between the two). Why this is a source of concern for policy makers is that whilst the rates of vaccination increase for the rest of the country, we are, in effect, leaving behind ‘reservoirs’ of virus that could continue to infect the rest of the population. One solution to this problem is to create much more active ‘intervention’ strategies that would go and seek out those who need vaccination (using mobile clinics with a bus, more active use of community facilities such as pharmacies) and in this way help to avoid problems building up for the future.
This morning as we woke up, we realised there had been a slight ground frost and so we surmised, as it turns out correctly, that a fine day or at least a fine morning was in prospect for us. The air was like champagne and the sky was blue, all with a liberal dosing of pale spring sunshine. So we had an extremely pleasant walk down to our newsagents where we picked up our Saturday complement of newspapers, popped into Waitrose to pick up some frozen vegetables and then made our way into the park. As the weather was so kind to all of us and it was the weekend, then every man (and his dog) seemed to be present in the park. We kept on bumping into people that we know that included friends, friends of friends, park acquaintances and so on. It was so pleasant that we lingered awhile in the park and did not get back for lunch until way past our normal lunchtime. I rustled up a quick risotto (which I now make with some kippers and cauliflower rice – it might sound odd but with a normal complement of yogurt and grated cheese actually turns out to be a lot nicer than it sounds). I have recently developed a facility to communicate with the souls of dead pets (animals) and it works like this. I ask for the name of the favourite animal and then try to establish a line of communication between them and their long deceased pet. I then ask them to think of a number between 1 and 10 and ask them to perform a series of mathematical procedures on it. I then establish a link of communication with the dead ‘pet’ and then communicate a number which the deceased pet is ‘correctly’ communicating to the mind of the owner. Although this sounds complicated, it worked beautifully with our University of Birmingham friend AND with our Irish friend down the road AND with our domestic help who was still in the house when we returned home.
We are now at the total of 19 million of the population vaccinated which is 35% of the entire adult population. A figure just released is that 94% of the population indicate that they have either received the jab OR they intend to have it when their turn becomes due. Although there has been a slight hiccup of supply in the vaccine the UK as a whole still seems to be streets ahead. However the rates of infection are increasing in one of five (20%) of local authority areas. The ‘heat maps’ shown in the Downing Street briefings still show some worrying areas where rates of vaccination are lower, indices of social deprivation are higher and the rate of new infection may be increasing slightly. The government advisers are evidently worried that the population as a whole may ‘relax’ particularly as the weather is fine and that people might be ‘3-0’ up in a game of football only to relax and eventually lose the game 3-4 (an example given in the briefing tonight)
I sent off a long email to our Spanish friends expressing our delight that their daughter has just gained an Erasmus scholarship in the University of Gloucester (some 35 miles down the road) and promising all the help and support that we can give. We imagine that the university will give priority in university accommodation to Erasmus students (who cannot be expected to organise their own in the open market like indigenous students) We also sent them all of the information taken from ‘The Times‘ which details all of the stages to be undertaken in the ‘end-of-lockdown’ scenarios outlined by the government. A source of some dissatisfaction, though, is that police and schoolteachers are not to be given any degree of priority other than provided by age alone -figures are being quoted that, the government argues, shows that teachers and the police die at a somewhat lower rate than the rest of the population and should not therefore receive any degree of priority.
Later on this evening, we FaceTimed one of our Hampshire friends as we do regularly on a Friday evening, and spent an incredibly pleasant hour chatting on a whole variety of topics. Our friend is organising a lot of Zoom meetings for ex-IBM employees which is taking him some time and keeping him out of mischief.
The government seems to be edging slowly via a ‘review’ into a ‘de facto’ acceptance of a vaccine passport, although not to be called that. I read a letter in one of my daily newspapers that indicated that, as a newly qualified nurse, she had to show evidence of a BCG (anti-TB) inoculation before she could enter employment, so what is the difference in principle between that and a COVID-19 vaccination? It would appear to me to be axiomatic that one needs to be vaccinated before exerting a patient-facing role in the NHS so where is the problem?
Today was another fine and bright day with a brilliant blue sky and very much the ambience of an early spring day. In fact, I was reminded of the time that I spent a term at the Complutense University of Madrid in which the mornings were frosty and cold but the skies were blue and clear. The dining room in the Residencia (= Hall of Residence) in which I lodged opened at about 7.30 in the morning but I had to leave at about 7.33 to walk to a metro station, catch a metro and then eventually a bus to the University campus of Somosaguas. When the dining room opened, I used to dive in, gulp a quick cup of coffee and a small boccadillo by way of breakfast whilst also grabbing one or two to go in my pockets for a mid-morning break. Some other fellow diners who were also there when the restaurant opened use to say to me ‘This is terribly bad for your health, grabbing a little bit of food like that‘ to which I used to reply ‘I know- I know – but I haven’t got any more time!‘ However, it did make he breakfast on a Saturday and a Sunday morning a particular pleasure when you could have a leisurely breakfast and a civilised conversations with the many and varied visiting professors who were accommodated in the Residencia.
So we collected our ration of Saturday newspapers and made for the park where we met with our University of Birmingham friend and another mutual acquaintance of ours. Here we discussed the various statistics on the efficacy of the competing vaccines and racked our brains to see if we could remember the exact sequence of what is allowed when on the timetable of ‘end of lockdown’. We do remember that on Monday, 8th March i.e. a week on Monday, we will be allowed by the powers-that-be to have a coffee whilst sitting on a park bench and chatting to a friend (whether with or without a mask I am not sure – and do you have to be at opposite ends of the park bench or not? Decisions..decisions). We made our way home knowing that in the afternoon we would be able to watch a couple of rugby matches i.e. Italy versus Ireland and then Wales v. England which is billed as the ‘big one’ of the current 6-Nations. This last match seemed to be extraordinary insofar as the (French) referee made a serious of bizarre and controversial decisions which awarded Wales two tries they were not expecting in the first half. England fought their way back to a 24-24 draw with about 20 minutes to go and then threw it all away with a series of tactical errors and unnecessary penalties although the referee was behaving like a normal human being by this time (One view, shared by one of the commentators at half time was that if the very well known Welsh referee, Nigel Owens, had refereed the match, then the whole dynamics of the match would have altered and it is not inconceivable that England could have won the entire game).
By this evening, the total number of vaccinations has reached 19.7 million which must be about a third of the adult population. As we are approaching the month of March (from next Monday) it looks as though the 60-69 year olds and then the 50-59 year olds will be called forward to receive their ‘jab’. Tho 40-49 year olds will be started on 4th April. Then the 30-39 year olds will be started on 24th June and finally the 20-29 year olds will be started on 13th July. There are about 7 million persons in each category and the official government target is to have all adults vaccinated by the end of July, 2021. Of course, this does depend upon uninterrupted supplies of vaccine, a small overall refusal rate and no great sudden panic with the discovery of a new variant.
They talk about the power of words but I had not fully appreciated how the staunch (not to say rabid) Republicans were weaponising the word ‘Democratic’ as in ‘Democratic Party’. Here are some examples that Republicans of a certain hue are using. For example, rallygoers in Washington were urged to ‘put the fear of God in the cowards, the traitors, the RINOs, the communists of the Democrat Party.’ Yet others have argued that the claims of election fraud meant that Republicans were in a ‘death match with the Democrat Party‘. It does appear that the conservatives on the American right are seeking to identify themselves as members of the same tribe by seeking to define the opposition through demeaning language. Another example with which to conclude follows. After Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was removed from her House committees for espousing sometimes dangerous conspiracy theories, she tweeted: ‘In this Democrat tyrannical government, Conservative Republicans have no say on committees anyway.‘ In other words, the word ‘Democrat‘ or ‘Democratic‘ are always used in such a way that it evokes a negative sentiment in anything to do with the Democratic Party in the United States.
This morning was our by now Sunday morning pattern i.e. I get up a little earlier and then walk down in the cold, clear light of the morning to pick up our Sunday newspapers. Sunday morning is always a little treat for me because as I am on my own, I treat myself to a little concert on my trusty very old iPhone and this morning played some Bach and Mozart to myself. After breakfasting during the Andrew Marr show (not particularly informative, I must say), Meg and I walked to the park. The air was like champagne and we wonder how long this glorious little spell of high pressure is going to last but we think it is a few more days yet. The number of children on scooters in the park reached its typical Sunday morning ‘high’ but we met with a couple of park acquaintances and passed our time of day trying to solve the following (almost mathematical) puzzle, which is: ‘Why is it when you are waiting for a bus there is always a bus coming first in the opposite direction ? (Assuming that buses travel on each side of the road at 10 minute intervals)‘ I will leave this conundrum for others to sort out.
We dined on chicken this lunch time using our normal ‘chicken’ recipe. We sear the chicken and in the meanwhile fry off some onions, peppers and tomatoes. Then the chicken, fried vegetables and half a jar of lasagne type white sauce go into a casserole and then into the oven for about 30-40 minutes (served with tender stem broccoli and a baked potato)
There was no France-Scotland rugby match to entertain us this afternoon as half of the French team are laid low with the COVID-19 virus. (My son was of the opinion that as they hadn’t sufficiently self-isolated in training they should have made to field a 2nd or 3rd team of 15 or forfeit the match is necessary – I have some sympathy with this view) I found that the sports writers had no sympathy whatsoever for the English team and their performance and praised the Welsh diligence in keeping their discipline (and hence no penalties) as against the English who again offended considerably.
This afternoon is one of those little statistical ‘milestones’ in that we have passed the total of 20 million of the population having received at least their first jab – I think the proportion is well over a third of the adult population by now. But perhaps of some concern is that a cluster of six of the Brazilian variant of the vaccine have appeared and most of these cases occurred in travellers from Brazil but before the most recent lockdown. This tends to indicate that we should have locked down much more stringently and much more urgently. The present cases have been discovered in South Gloucestershire but there has been plenty of time for the virus to have spread much more rapidly. Apparently in Auckland in New Zealand they discovered ONE outbreak of the virus and immediately locked down most of the city for a few days! Meanwhile, the spell of really good weather is encouraging people to flock to the parks and to socialise as if the restrictions had already been lifted. I would not be surprised if we were to find that after this burst of fine weather the ‘R’ (reproduction rate) of the virus actually increases and this can well threaten the rest of the unlock down process. One of the scientists on the SAGE committee has already admitted that this is a ‘great worry to us‘ and one can understand why. What is so frustrating is that we have endured eleven months of turmoil and it doesn’t take much more self-restraint to ensure that we are not knocked back by a fair amount. But, I must admit. if the park is anything to go by there is already a feeling (probably unjustified) that we are nearly at the end of the lockdown and can therefore let go a little.
There are two political events of some significance during the forthcoming week and both on Wednesday. Firstly, we are having a budget on Wednesday – although it used to be the case that Chancellors of the Exchequer used to ‘go into purdah’ and make sure the budget contents remained a closely guarded secret. But today there seems to be a tendency to extensively ‘leak’ or ‘brief’ the budget contents several days beforehand, perhaps so any good news can be announced at least twice over. So we already know that billions of pounds are going to be offered to businesses to help them over the next month or so. The next big political event is going to be Nicola Sturgeon giving evidence to the Scottish parliamentary committee. It is really difficult for us down here in England to ascertain the exact cause of the dispute between Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmon but it is a question of who knew what and when – somebody, somewhere is lying through the teeth but we may be a little nearer to the truth next Wednesday.
I suppose to be true to form, I should have started of the day by chanting ‘White rabbits! White rabbits! White rabbits!” (as it is the first day of new month) but I resisted the temptation. Having said that, I am very pleased to have got February behind me and March in front of me. The postman brought us some interesting news. We in this house (and presumably lots of neighbours) had received a circular inviting us to join a neighbourhood ‘support’ area for Kidderminster Road. It seemed genuine (i.e. not a scam) and quite a good idea, so I joined up as, apparently, a lot of my neighbours have done. I am taking the view that if a more ‘communitarian’ rather than ‘individualistic’ philosophy pervades our lives than in these COVID-19 days that only be a good thing. I said in my introductory statement that I walked to the park every day and how I could be recognised so I wonder how many (more) social contacts this might generate. We shall see! On our way down (and up again on our way back home) we bumped into near neighbours and had a good chat with them. Having collected our newspapers (and some extra milk!) we made our way into the park and quickly met up with some friends and friends of friends. There we had a laugh and joke before the bad weather overcame us all. Whereas yesterday, the temperature was a warm 11°, today the temperature had dropped to about 2-3° and we were enveloped in a kind of freezing fog with a chilling breeze to boot. So we could not wait to get home, as you might imagine, and Meg thought she hadn’t been so cold for years so she had to have a sit by the living room fire to get warmed up again. I cooked the remainder of the chicken for lunch and supplemented the special sauce I had made – if anything, it was even nicer than yesterday’s so I have saved a little for future use.
There has been some interesting (and encouraging new research evidence) announced today. To summarise this, briefly:
Infections fall from around three weeks after one dose of both vaccines
Protection against symptomatic COVID in those over 70, four weeks after the first jab, ranged between 57-61% for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 60-73% for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine
As well as the protection against symptomatic disease, people who had received a Pfizer jab had an additional 43% lower risk of emergency hospitalisation and an additional 51% lower risk of death
Those who had been given the first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine were found to have a 37% lower risk of emergency hospital admission, but there is insufficient follow-up data to assess its impact on death
If nothing else, this MAY help to persuade some fellow-Europeans that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine might have something going for it after all. But as it stands, there is still a marked reluctance for Europeans to accept this vaccine (although it is actually manufactured in Belgium) and one suspects an excess of ‘NIH’ (not invented here) syndrome. There is still quite a lot of concern about the ‘Brazil’ variant of COVID-10 of which six cases have been discovered in the UK. Five of these have been tracked down to individuals (and presumably their contacts) but the sixth case remains a mystery as they ‘failed to fill in in a test registration card’ according to PHE (Public Health England). It sounds as though there has been some sloppy work going here but it really does underline how insecure our borders might actually be in practice. I did hear some inside stories about the Border Agency’s inability to grapple with all of the complexities of the process of travellers arriving in the UK with a variety of vaccination records (in different formats and different languages) All that I can say without sounding too xenophobic at this stage is that what I heard on Radio4 did not inspire confidence.
The other major items of news this evening concerns the health of the Duke of Edinburgh. I do not follow the comings and goings of royalty with very much attention but I did receive my MSc from him 1969. As his mother or another near relative had died a day or so beforehand, we assumed that he would not turn up for the degree ceremony at Salford University but he did – I suppose it it is a part of the old-fashioned devotion to duty. The fact he has been transferred to Barts where an existing heart condition might be monitored is somewhat worrying – I do hope that he manages to make until the age of 100 sometime in early June. Presumably his wife will write him a special congratulatory letter if and when this happens (I believe the Queen writes to you when you reach the magic age of 100)
We wondered how today was going to turn out as the skies were initially grey and looked somewhat threatening. But once we got underway, the sky gradually changed from a freezing fog grey to a light blue and it turned out to be quite a pleasant day. I left Meg in the park in the company of our Birmingham University friend and walked quickly on my own to pick up our daily supply of newspapers. Upon my return, I found a little gaggle of friends, friends of friends and those of us who just happen to be exercising at about the same time of day every day. We laughed and joked for a while and then we get onto the more serious business of discussing backup technologies and strategies for the computers that we own. We swapped some bits of information and then departed as soon as the park police (actually two very young PCSOs – Police Community Support Officers) – were spotted in the distance from our vantage point and we judged it diplomatic to gradually start to disperse and make tracks for home.. It was a delightful walk home with some pale spring sunshine and a promise of some more to come in the days ahead. Although it was only about 1-2°warmer than yesterday, it felt a lot warmer as the wind had dropped. But I gather from the weather forecast that I have just heard that the weather is going to get colder and the winders stronger and keener in the next few days so we had better not greet the arrival of spring too soon.
We know that tomorrow is going to be a big day, politically as the two main events of the week unfold. One of these is the Budget which is more or less predictable (and has been predicted or at least well-trailed) But the other much more explosive issue is going to be the evidence that the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, will give to a committee of the Scottish parliament. If she has found to be lying or at least ‘economical with the truth‘ then she may be found to be in breach of the Ministerial Code which would normally lead to a resignation. Whether this is going to happen tomorrow or in the few days that follow, only time will tell but it looks as though Nicola Sturgeon will have the fight of her life tomorrow. I think it would be a pity if one of the most effective of the current generation of politicians (and one who has had a ‘good pandemic’) were to fall at this stage. There is a saying attributed to Enoch Powell, though, that ‘all political careers end in failure‘ (actually part of a much longer and less snappy quote) but of course this is a truism, usually determined by an election or a ‘defenestration’ (literally death by throwing someone out of a window but now used in a much more metaphorical sense vide what happened to Margaret Thatcher).
Tonight as I am writing this blog there is a wildlife programme on the television in the background when the young female commentator was commenting on the problems of an impala buck having to defend his territory during the mating season. The commentary that came floating over the airways explained ‘mating with fifty females whilst keeping an eye over your shoulder for any potential challengers can be quite an exhausting business‘ with which sentiment I can only say that I agree. I utter a silent prayer that I was not born into a religious tradition in which I might have be re-incarnated as a impala at stud – there again, envy is one of the most destructive of emotions. But in the same nature program, I did learn that 50% of black rhinos are killed in fights with other black rhinos but I suppose for an animal of that size there are not many natural predators.
Tonight, we FaceTimed some of our closest ex-Waitrosefriends and caught up with each other’s news for the week.It should only be about four weeks to go before we can (legally) meet in an open space somewhere – perhaps in the garden attached to the residential block where our friends live. We are not in the business just yet of making too many active plans at this stage but we will wait until we are about a week to go before we make firmer plans.Tomorrow night, we are going by appointment to have a Zoom call with Meg’s cousins in Derby so that will be another opportunity to catch up news but this time with much more family-centred news.
There is slightly better news on the Brazil variant of the virus this evening. Apparently, the one missing case has been narrowed down to one of a batch of 379 kits despatched out so with a certain degree of foot-slog, the miscreant person who has tested positive but failed to fill in the record card may well be identified – for all of our sakes!
After we got up this morning, there was an item on the Radio 4 ‘Today‘ programme which was genuinely uplifting. It was an interview with the well known singer/songwriter/benefactor Dolly Parton. She had taken her own song ‘Joline, Joline, ‘Joline‘ and had re-worded it so that it was rendered as ‘Vaccine! Vaccine! Vaccine!' Perhaps many people know by now the Dolly Parton is an exceptionally shrewd businessman as well as being a huge benefactor. She has started an ‘Imagination Library‘ in 1995 and, starting with her home state of East Tennessee, the program distributes 1 million free books a month to children at each month from birth to the age of 5. It has been calculated that 100 million books have already been given away FREE and not for nothing is Dolly Parton just as well known for being ‘The Book Lady‘ as for her country and western prowess. Dolly Parton donated £1 million dollars to the ‘Moderna’ vaccine program but she had only just today received her jab because she did not want other people to think that she was ‘jumping the line’ (i.e. queue). This is all quite inspirational stuff really – there are still millions of Americans who need to be convinced about the benefits of accepting the vaccine.
Today was a ‘grey’ day and the Midlands seemed to be swathed in a a cold mist which was not incredibly cool as there was no accompanying wind to increase the chill factor. Nonetheless, we picked up our newspapers in the normal way, meeting on the way one of park friends who is in his mid 80’s but still walks about 7-8 kilometres a day (but monitored at a distance by his daughter who can keep track of him, presumably via an Apple-type watch) We hope that we can sustain ourselves with such an energetic daily routine when we are his age but we can but hope. When we got home, it was straight on with cooking the mid-day meal and then watching the news unfold on the television. Today was Budget Day but a lot of this had been trailed beforehand in any case – I think the real surprise, though, was that the furlough scheme was going to be extended until September (as well as the £10 supplement to Universal Credit). I suppose it is quite easy to be a popular Chancellor of the Exchequer if you are still in the ‘giving out lots of cash’ stage but tax rises are on the way in a year or so. This will be done by the old-fashioned expedient of not increasing the actual tax rates but rely upon freezing the income tax threshold levels which means that owing to ‘fiscal drag’ more and more people get drawn into greater contributions of tax from 2025. After that, there is a prediction that the tax burden borne by the population will be the highest since the 1960’s and corporation tax will be increased in a year or so to a rate which is higher than now but below the level of other G7 countries. We all knew that the expenses created by the pandemic would have to be paid for how somehow. The other major story is the Nicola Sturgeon evidence before a Scottish parliamentary committee but this is is labyrinthine and tortuous to put it mildly and who is lying about what is difficult to disentangle.
This afternoon, I busied myself with one file tidying and I started on one of Meg’s old medical files. Some of this stuff went back for more than 15 years so it was a case of seeing what could be safely be junked straight off into our green bin, those documents that had to have identifiers removed and shredded and that which it is prudent to retain even if for historical purposes. This is but part of a much longer process of tidying up files but I intend to keep up this good work until a lot of junk has been removed. At 5.00pm, we Zoomed some of Meg’s cousins in Derby and this time we were joined by another family member still in Cheltenham so it was good to have a kind of family get-together. We find these occasions quite enjoyable so we are going to repeat the exercise at about fortnightly intervals from now on.
Various European societies (principally France and Germany) are now re-tghinking their opposition to the AstraZeneca virus. Although it was subject to a lot of ‘black’ propaganda, we now have the evidence from the several millions vaccinated in the UK over its effectiveness in stopping the rate of infection, keeping people out of hospital and so on. Given that the UK is so far ahead of other European societies in the vaccination race, it now looks as quite a re-think is going on in Europe but decision makers do not like to admit that they were actually wrong or mistaken!
Today was another cold day in the current spell of cooler weather with the thermometer just above freezing, but only just (about 4°) Tomorrow is going to be cold as usual and we have a few days more before the weather gets a little milder over the weekend. One would think we would be used to pretty cold weather at the start of March but we had got used to a few glorious days of spring-like weather a few days ago and I suppose we have got a little spoiled because of it. We collected our newspapers and sought friends and friends of friends in the park and we had a jolly good chat until the weather got to all of us (as we are standing around socially distancing) and so we made for home. I was telling our friends of an embarrassing incident that we had when we were students in 1968. Below the maisonette that we rented was a series of little stalls in some converted shops and one of them was a haberdashery stall, run by an Asian lady. At that time, we needed, in order to effect a minor repair, some knicker elastic (it is called ribbon elastic today) and it was on sale for 1½d a yard (i.e. the old money) We explained that we only needed a foot and the stall-holder told us ‘That’s all right – I will sell you a foot’ So she carefully measured it out, wound it round into a little ball and popped it into a little brown envelope. So we were asked to pay ½d – we handed over our 1d and got ½d in change. We felt a little embarrassed about this transaction even at the time – ½d is worth approximately a fifth of the modern day 1p coin.
News is emerging this evening about Sir Philip Putnam who was the previous principal civil servant in the Home Office and who was suing the Home Office for constructive dismissal. It has been announced that an out-of-court settlement has been reached and Sir Philip was to be awarded more than £1/3rd million after it was acknowledged that he had been subjected to a campaign of bullying and abusive behaviour. The Standards chief Sir Alex Allan found that Ms Patel had broken the code governing ministers’ behaviour and ruled according only for Boris Johnson to not accept his findings (and thereby exonerated Priti Patel) whereupon he promptly resigned. My own stance on this if she had the intellect to argue her case, she would not have to resort to bullying and obscene language. Every time I see her on the TV I am reminded that she was the communications director of James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party which then transmogrified itself into UKIP. Eventually she found a natural home in the right wing of the Conservative party here she is quite popular with the rank-and-file (although there are rumours that she is destined for the chop in the next government re-shuffle, probably forthcoming in June). I am reminded of the minister in the first Labour Government who was not given a new portfolio in the Labour Administration from 1945-1950. He sought an an interview with the (very headmasterly) Prime Minister, Clement Attlee who, when asked why he had not offered a new ministry to the disappointed politician merely drew on his pipe and uttered the immortal words ‘Not good enough!' And that was that. However, since then we have a legion of ministers who have shown the most astounding incompetence but still retained office (they are all right wingers needless to say) The most outstanding example was Chris Grayling (popularly known amongst MPs as ‘failing Grayling’) whoo is estimated to have cost the taxpayer some £2,778,072 (i.e. nearly 3 billion pounds) in a succession of eleven failed ventures.
There is some dark talk tonight of yet new variants of COVID-19 that have emerged in the last few weeks. These are always worrying in the extreme, not least because they appear to be ‘super-infectious’ and seem to have evolved by evading all of the current vaccines.It is possible (as with the ‘flu vaccine) to reformulate the current range of vaccines to cope with these new variants but in the meanwhile even more variants might appear. The one real answer seems to jump hard on even a single case that appears. For example, Auckland in New Zealand discovered one case of the virus appearing and immediately put the whole of the city in lockdown for several days (it goes without saying that New Zealand is coping with its COVID-19 pandemic much better than we are). But to be slightly more positive, we are now up to 21 million having received their first ‘jab’ which is practically 40% of the adult population. Meg and I are counting off the days until April 12th when we are scheduled to receive our second dose of the vaccine and about three weeks after that, our immune status should be as high as it can be.
Another cold day beckoned but we set forth with our usual vim and vigour, not least because walking at a certain speed helps one to keep warm. We collected our newspapers and made straight for the park where there was quite a gathering of the clans. We met up with our Birmingham University friend, another person who is a wheelchair user but who is often in the park with her battery-powered chariot which has fair turn of speed on it, and finally more friends of friends. Our conversation started off with a discussion of lithium-ion batteries such that we surmised would power mobility vehicles. From this we moved onto a discussion of lithium-ion battery technology (inspired by the impressive figure for the wheelchair performance) and came to a kind of consensus from things we had read in various places that it was less stressful to the battery of e.g. a mobile phone to give it two charges from 30%-80% rather than one complete charge from 0-100%. Like many of these issues, there is ‘street knowledge’, ‘informed knowledge’ (depending upon how good your internet sources have proved to be) and a sort of ‘everyday knowledge’ which that strange amalgam we carry round in our heads. On our return, I set to work preparing a risotto which I often prepare and eat on Fridays and prepared for a nice restful afternoon.
As it happened, I got anything but. I thought to myself ‘I’ll just run off an (internet) article before I sit down to a cup of coffee' only to find the printer completely dead. As it was working fine yesterday and he only thing that had happened overnight was an operating system update, I immediately came to the conclusion (wrongly, as it turned out) that the refinements of the operating system could not cope with out-of-date printer drivers so I tried to download some more. When I looked at them, though, the file was 9 years old and I thought it would be a bad idea to replace current drivers with 9-year-old ones so I abandoned that line of investigation. I then wondered what price a new printer would be but the current model I own is out-of-stock at Amazon (superseded?) As I have a supply of toner ready to hand, I thought I would explore a range of comparable printer models who use the same toner cartridges but this too drew a blank. Eventually my son and I solved the problem by getting rid of my little USB extender I was using to extend the number of slots beyond four and this proved to be my salvation. But USB slots quickly run out when you have keyboard in one, a printer in another, a scanner in a third, backup disk in a fourth and none left for memory drives and the like. One has to be careful in whipping USB plugs in and out in the case of external drives in case data is in the process of being written so you have to ensure they are completely quiescent and then (on a MAC) ‘unmount them’ i..e making them invisible at least temporarily to the operating system. Also I have decided to be a ‘good boy’ and not use any hub extenders at all but rather do a bit of judicious swapping (e.g. printer for scanner and vide versa) when required. I DO have powered hub but this adds to the clutter not to say confusion in a table of cables behind the computer so I am going to see if I can make out with the system supplied quota of four. As it happened, this took all afternoon to sort out so restful it certainly was not. At least I am now slightly bettered informed about what happens when you allow USB ports to proliferate and what to do about it.
At the risk of being somewhat trivial, there have been some stunning photos released from Mars as the ‘Perseverance’ trundles its way across the Martian surface. There again, a friend of mine did send me another photo, ostensibly from Mars in which a lot of little creatures who look as through they were dressed in potato sacks are lined up in front of a banner which stated, in bold letters: ‘F***k off’ and then another banner stating ‘Go Home’. I thought that was wonderful and wondered how it had been staged before it was released onto the world.
Finally, there’s good news about the Brazilian variant of COVID-19 as the ‘sixth’ person (who had failed to fill in a record card) has now been located. This, in theory, means that it should be possible to contain the Brazilian variant before it goes rampant but, of course, it might be lurking in lots of other parts of the country as well. One of our church friends caught up with us, very excited, as she was due to be ‘jabbed’ later on in the day. I think most people experience a sense of relief once the vaccine is actually in their arms.
Before we came out today, I received a text from one of my church friends indicating that church services were to resume in about a couple of weeks with a type of ‘rolling start’ but a booking system was being introduced so that would-be worshippers can ‘book their place’ several days beforehand. It looks as though things ought to be in place by ‘Palm Sunday‘ which will be on Sunday, 28th March i.e. in three weeks time. I got onto the church’s website to download some particulars of the new procedures that we have to follow before we can attend services again and I am glad that things are starting to move again. It looks as though a new priest may be installed before the Easter celebrations start but so far information is exceedingly sparse.
Because we were slightly late this morning we popped into the park first of all where there was a mini ‘gathering of the clans’ – well six of us anyway. The conversation got a little esoteric e.g. how likely is life on other universes? At what stage after the ‘singularity’ (i.e. the ‘big bang’ which may have started off the universe given that it is still expanding) did the laws of Newtonian physics start to apply? – the consensus view is that can be measured in milliseconds but needless to say, all of this is conjecture by the cosmologists. Anyway, we were fairly relieved to break off from these lofty not to say esoteric discussions, collect our newspapers a little late (although they had been kept in the back room for us) and so on up the hill. On the way home, we bumped into two more of our church friends and, again, we swapped whatever information we had concerning the resumption of services.
I had a heavy ‘computing’ afternoon where all finished very well in the end. The Apple operating system contains an app (‘Time Machine‘) which, once running correctly, will save backups hourly for the past 24 hours, daily for the last month and then weekly for all previous months (with the oldest being deleted when your backup disk becomes full). Although this seemed to be working OK for the first few days after I specified it be saved on my newly acquired portable drive, then I kept getting error messages to say that Time Machine had encountered errors and could not save. A quick search of the web indicated that the backup disk needs formatting in a particular way (Apple has about three different types of format, just to be confusing) Then I couldn’t ‘unmount’ the disk (make it invisible to the operating system) or reformat it so the whole disk seemed to have become useless. I was just on the point of packing it up and sending it back to Amazon and make a claim for a new one when I suddenly had a brain wave and managed to get it reformatted in the way I wanted on an ‘old’ i.e. legacy Mac that I have. In the meanwhile, I pressed an a former (very high quality) backup drive into action (made by a firm called GTech) and this seemed to work like a charm i.e. just as it should. Then I used the newly reformatted 2TB drive to store backups of most of my ‘every day’ files which must go aback about 20 years by now (e.g. all of my old lectures and teaching materials that I really ought to throw away but can’t at this stage!) Things seemed to back up more quickly than I might have imagined (I managed nearly 1½ Gbytes a minute using only USB 2.0) so I am well pleased. So now I have a Time Machine system which seems to be working the way I want and a more ‘personalised’ backup system if there is anything I desperately need to get hold of. Hopefully, everything will be fine from this point onwards with no more hassle.
Tonight, we were going to treat ourselves to a Mozart opera (‘The Marriage of Figaro) via YouTube but it would clash with a police series which we are watching on Saturday evenings, so we need to postpone that pleasure until tomorrow night.
There is a big row going on tonight over the pay-rise to be awarded to NHS staff i.e. 1% when the rest of the public are having a pay freeze. What is making the nurses and others so angry is that they had been promised a pay-rise of 2.1% (which only just about compensates for inflation) and Teresa May had indicated that this would be covered by the NHS revenue settlement announced in June, 2018. So having had expectations raised, they have now been dashed on the grounds that ‘we can’t afford it‘ which wears a bit thin when £22 billion had been spent on a barely functioning ‘Test-and-Trace’ regime. Again, the Sunday newspapers might play an interesting role if they carry opinion polls which the government might choose to ignore, being several points ahead of Labour following a ‘successful vaccine rollout’ bounce for the Tories.
The weeks roll by and yet another Sunday morning has dawned. I get up half an hour earlier on a Sunday morning and this gives me time to get up, showered, dressed and breakfast prepared before I trot down to get our supply of Sunday newspapers. I generally enjoy these trips down into town because I give myself a little concert on my trusty old iPhone – in this case a good dose of J.S.Bach’s ‘Brandenburg Concertos’ (full of early 18th century ‘joie de vivre‘) After our customary viewing of the Andrew Marr (politics) programme, Meg and got ready to wander down into the park and see who we might meet. As it is ‘back to school day’ tomorrow, we anticipated that the park would be less populated by young children – perhaps the coolness of the weather has something to do with it. We met a couple of park friends and enjoyed a scintillating conversation on the subject of computer ‘heat sinks’ before we struck for home. We had a largish ham joint cooking away slowly in our slow cooker but the Sunday lunch traditionally takes a little longer to prepare as there is onion gravy to prepare amongst other things.
This afternoon proved to be a typical Sunday afternoon for us. We spent a lot of the afternoon reading the print off the Sunday newspapers with a David Attenborough wildlife program on the television by way of passing interest. When we looked out of the window, it seemed to be a glorious Sunday afternoon – very inviting for a walk if we hadn’t already got our exercise done for the day. We treat ourselves to a re-run of Thursday night’s ‘Question Time‘ which is broadcast on the Parliament Channel at 6.00pm each Sunday. Tonight, we are going to treat ourselves to a roam through YouTube and hope to be able to get a viewing of an opera – tonight, hopefully, we will try and find and play Mozart’s ‘The Marriage of Figaro‘ That ought to set us up for the week (if only because the arias keep running through your head for a day or so after the viewing)
The political story that is running on and on (which we thought it would) is the 1% pay deal offered to the nurses – after they had been promised at least 2.1% a year or so back and this had been built into both government spending projections and even legislation. What must give the government pause for thought is that according to an opinion poll in the Observer, some 72% of the population think the nurses should be offered more than 1% (i.e. what would actually be a pay-cut in real terms once inflation, council tax rises and the like are taken into account). A clear majority of Conservative voters/supporters feel that the offer of 1% is too low so surely there must be a screeching ‘U-turn’ on the cards, particularly as there are local elections coming up on Thursday, 6th May which is not too far off once we get Easter taken into account. But I read tonight that the organiser of a protest over the proposed 1% pay rise for NHS workers has been handed a £10,000 fine by police. This is because about 40 people had gathered in contravention of current lockdown legislation but even so, this works out at about £250 a head! Perhaps the organiser ‘had form’ and had already been warned by the police but a fine of £10,000 for a first offence (if it were) seems to me to be unduly harsh. There is always the possibility that the organiser could appeal and have this fine adumbrated or massively reduced but we shall have to wait and see.
As we enter March, we start to think of birthdays and the like as our son’s birthday and that of our daughter-in-law are fast coming into view – and what to do for celebration in these days of (just about) lockdown? Evidently, we can’t go out for a meal so we decided to treat ourselves to a communal fish-and-chip supper on a date that bisects the two birthdays. I also have an eye on the end of the month because March 25th is the day that I traditionally like to think of as the start of the mowing season which involves getting new supplies of petrol, engine oil and so on. Once you start the mowing process, you have to carry on at approximately weekly intervals not least because of the act of mowing releases a hormone in the grasses which stimulate them to keep on growing. The first cut of the season is always a bit off a pig anyway as the grass is so tufty and I have to do it on a high setting to get the job done. But we have a bit more bad weather to face yet as there seems to be a horrendous Atlantic storm heading our way which is going to hit us with high winds and plenty of rain about next Wednesday.
Today had a morning characterised by what I think you would call ‘watery sunshine’ – the temperature was quite mild and our walk down to collect the newspapers was reasonably pleasant, particularly because as you go, it is just possible to discern which perennial shrubs and trees are starting to bud. My observation of this process is that many plants and shrubs may start in the late autumn and then undergo a halt in early spring, perhaps anticipating a late frost or snow and then suddenly burst into life with a flying start when the days lengthen and the temperature warms up. Just before I get onto our park bench meetings, today was the day in which you could legally sit down with a friend on a park bench and enjoy a cup of coffee – without the ‘excuse’ of the park bench bench being a necessary break in the middle of exercise which was the legal regime under which we have been operating since the start of the current lockdown. In fact, Channel 4 news devoted to a little item to the joys of the park bench and how it had (and will) continue to be the ways in which we can meet with old friends now that coffee shops and pubs are generally closed (as yet) to us. Anyway, we met with our Birmingham University friend and had a really useful chat about how we were going to manage our gradual ‘unlockdown’ transactions from now on. At least a couple of our park acquaintances met up with us and we chatted about how much we were enjoying the mildish weather, particularly as the children have returned to school today and the park had returned to a quiet and relaxing haven after the bustle of the weekends. There were several little things we had wanted to chat over with each other but this is not always possible when you are joined in conversation by others and then it is time to go home.
Today, I carried on looking at bits of my computer system and which I could usefully prune, move elsewhere and/or make part of my backup routines. Over the years I have collected a range of pen drives as the price has dropped dramatically over the years. I found one that was a SanDisk Extreme 32GB and when I checked out the current price, Amazon were selling it for £8.99. So I reformatted it and used it as an additional backup source for my system. I reformatted it to a MAC format and then was amazed that I could easily get most of my important files on it, writing at the rate of 2.34GB per minute and this only using the slow-is USB 2.0 rather than the more up to date and faster drive (on more modern machines than mine) which is USB 3.0. So at the end of the day, I do now have three backup systems – one being Apple’s own Time Machine, a second being a conventional and recently purchased Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and the third being the flash drive. In the course of poking around in my system, I found an audio file (and subsequently, on the web some movie files) of our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations in 2017. So Meg and I enjoyed watching these again, some 3½ years after the event. There were three video clips which were of great interest – one being of Meg and her observations on 50 years of marriage, one of me telling a range of tall (and largely true) stories and a third of ours who was a close friend, now deceased who came along to our celebrations and played some Handel for us on his trumpet. So this took a fair amount of time but we enjoyed looking at it was well as the range of photos which we took on the day itself.
Today the media has been dominated, as you might expect, by the Meghan Markle interview which was shown on the American media overnight and is going to be shown tonight on ITV at 9.0pm. Very much is being made of the fact that one member of the Buckingham Palace outfit had speculated as to the skin colour of the yet unborn baby and everybody (particular Oprah Winfrey) had reacted to this as though it was the purest expression of racism! On the hand hand, it could be that the person uttering the remark was imbued with a racist ideology but an alternative explanation is that a courtier of liberal views was expressing delight that the British royal family was modernising by including mixed heritage members within it. Anyway, I am thoroughly bored by the whole media blitz and attention and the programme has not even been broadcast yet.
Back to school today for millions of school children under some conditions (e.g. lateral-flow testing 2-3 times a week to be continued at home, face mask wearing for senior pupils etc.) I believe that some members of the SAGE committee are already of the view that this is bound on the ‘R’ factor (pushing it up from 0.6 to 0.9?) but, in any case, Easter beckons quite soon and provide a bit more respite.
Today was a beautiful day, at least to start off with, and Meg and I enjoyed a really pleasant walk down to collect our newspapers. However, it was not so much a case of ‘now is the time for the turtle dove to be heard in our land‘ but rather one gets used to the whirr of the lawnmower as the population gets geared up for the spring. Whilst in the newsagents, I indicated that I had managed to solve one of the great mysteries of life i.e. how is it that the newsagent can sell a bar of Cadbury’s Bournville dark chocolate for £1.00 whereas Waitrose sells the same bar for £2.00? The answer lies in the fact that although the bars look alike (width x. height) they nonetheless differ in their height or depth i.e. the Waitrose bar is twice as thick and consequently has twice as much chocolate and the commensurate increase in price.So now we know. In the park we met with our Birmingham University friend who, as it happened, had received his jab the day before and was feeling a little under the weather. We conveyed our condolences and told him that when he died from the after-effects of the jab, we would go to the local cemetery in order to pick up some flowers which we would then recycle for his own funeral – he was very grateful for this offer. We also met another long-standing park friend who is a wheelchair user but it transpired that during her working life she had been an NHS manager in a small local hospital, now long since closed down and the site developed as a housing estate. We also engaged in some gossip about other park acquaintances that we all know well but prefer not to get into arguments with, if we can avoid it. The park was pleasantly quiet today and we met a few friends of friends as well as the variety of dogs some of whom we are starting to recognise.
This afternoon, we sent ae email to Meg’s cousin in Bolton, wondering with the easing of the lockdown situation whether we might make a flying visit to see the family in early April. As it happens, the weekend we were thinking about is going to be quite busy with family reunions so we are probably going to settle for a date some time in May. This might suit our purposes quite well because it is my birthday towards the beginning of May so it may well be that we have a family reunion which includes a little birthday celebration at the same time. However, it is a thought that a lot of population think they are ‘safe’ because they have received one dose of the vaccine and there may be lots of family reunions and events all over the country. Then this might have all of the ingredients that we need for another surge of the virus.
After the Harry/Meghan interview, Buckingham Palace has tonight released but a terse but incredibly well-written statement. This indicates that they will tackle the issues raised, particularly racism, within the family and offering their continuing love and support. To my mind, this hits absolutely the right note and shows a degree of dignity and restraint – with absolutely the right words chosen for the occasion. The interesting question is whether the media is going to keep this particular story rumbling on and on or whether the public as a whole will get bored with it and public attention moves elsewhere. After all, there is an expression in the newspaper world that yesterday’s newspapers become today’s fish-and-chip wrapping paper.
One of the government health ministers (Lord Bethell) has tonight given his opinion that nurses are well-paid for the job they do. While he praised the ‘heroics’ of health workers during the pandemic, he said they had secure jobs that many people would ‘envy’. Given that a government re-shuffle is on the cards, this sounds like one of the most inopportune things that a government minister might admit to. Of course, the whole question whether nurses are to receive a pay-cut (given that a 1% pay increase when the rate of inflation is more than this) is still under active political discussion. It seems very likely that the government are going to receive a bloody nose over this particular conflict.
Late on this afternoon, we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends, as we generally do on a Tuesday evening. We exchanged news of the various ventures which we can both look forward in the next few weeks. Our friends had got a trip booked in July to see both York (where Meg and I, incidentally, decided to get married) and then Harrogate (where I lived as a child from the age to 5-17) Meg and I don’t have any trips planned as such but we might make a lightning visit to see Meg’s cousins in Derby some time in April (i.e. after some restrictions end on March 29th)
Today was the blustery day in which a large storm moved across the Atlantic and hit the UK with high winds and attendant rain. As it turned out, the weather was somewhat blowy when we walked down into town and it did turn out to be one of those days when you had to hang onto your hat because it was in constant danger of blowing away. We needed to pop into Waitrose to get one or two things that we had run out of before the order arrives between 9.0-10.0 tomorrow morning. Whilst there, I exchanged some information with one of the friendly staff who mentioned that she had now seen another person we used to see regularly who is a history teacher in a local school. She had a beautiful baby boy who is now old enough to be at nursery so our friend (of our supermarket friend) was returning to work. I gave our friendly supermarket assistant one of the cards that I keep in my wallet to pass onto our mutual acquaintance because I would like to reestablish contact after a year. At the very least, she can read our blog to see what kinds of things we have been doing in the last year. And so we made our way to the park but by this time the wind was blowing quite hard. We did not really anticipate seeing our University of Birmingham friend in the park today because he had only had the vaccination at the day before and may have been feeling under the weather. As it turned out, we did not see our friend but we did receive a telephone call informing us that he was having a big computer problem back home and he was trying to get it fixed remotely – the best of luck in this venture. Eventually a gust of wind blew my cup of coffee off our little portable stool so we thought we had better make for home – there was hardly anybody in the park to speak of anyway. But just before we left, we bumped into another local who frequently walks in the park and she had often noticed us (and even stopped for us in her car on one occasion) So, again, I passed over my blog details because she and her husband were quite regular bloggers so it might be quite interesting to have a look at what each other is saying.
When we got home, we had a quiet afternoon reading and then a little parcel arrived from Amazon. This was a superior quality memory card I had ordered from Amazon which was very frequently recommended as one of the best quality one could buy and was the first choice for many professional photographers (including our own son, so I discovered in a subsequent conversation with him at memory cards) This particular one (a SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB cost me a shade under £16.00) and I immediately used it to make a complete backup of my main computer system. I was pleased to see that the entire 32GB of my system was backed up in 18 minutes which means it was writing at almost 2GB a minute or about 32Mb a second which is fast enough for me, as it happens. This particular memory card claims to have a ‘limited’ lifetime warranty but SanDisk do offer a service that if the data on the disk cannot be read or recovered, then they will recover if for you using their own specialised facilities within a two-year window from the date of purchase. I think this sounds quite a good deal really, considering the not exorbitant amount of money that the memory card cost in the first place.
Tonight it has been reported that the test-and-trace regime is now costing us £37 billion (£22 billion + another tranche of £15 billion handed over the the Chancellor). This has been branded by the Public Accounts Committee as ‘staggering‘ and ‘no clear evidence‘ that it had cut coronavirus infections. Just to put into context, this extraordinary amount of money is approaching one half of the projected cost of the HS2 hi-speed link between London, the Midlands and the North. So here we have one system, the test-and-trace regime largely handed to the private sector and recognised as ineffective and an extraordinary waste of money. Meanwhile the vaccination programme performed by the NHS, i.e. in the public sector, is an astounding success. To my mind, there could not be a clearer illustration of the fact that really big and universal systems are best left to the state to organise and not left to the vagaries of the private sector. One interesting quote is provided by Lord Macpherson, who until 2015 was the most senior official at the Treasury, and called it ‘the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time‘. But do the public really care about this enormous waste of money – after all, the Tories are still ahead in the opinion polls so it doesn’t appear that wasting money on a colossal scale has any adverse consequences.
The remnants of the storm which raged overnight were still somewhat in evidence this morning. There was quite a (hat-removing) wind that was in evidence and the temperature was on the cool side. We picked uo our newspapers and then popped into our local Waitrose where we needed to buy birthday cards for family members needed in the next few days. Then it was into the park and we met up with our Birmingham University friend. We had an interesting discussion about things historical and particularly the way in which certain presenters very much have the ‘common touch’ and manage to convey well the importance of history to our everyday lives. After that, it was a fairly unpleasant walk home as the wind intensified but we managed to regale ourselves with a curry that we prepared for lunch.
This afternoon we had a typical lazy afternoon, largely concerned with reading our newspapers.The news rooms have been filled, though, with the case of the young woman who has gone missing and subsequently a member of the Metropolitan police has been arrested amid a lot of conjecture that he was responsible both for her abduction and her murder. The fact that occurrences like these are so rare has not helped to dispel the widespread feeling of unease, not to say fear, experienced by the majority of young women if they have to venture out at night. It goes shout saying the men do not share similar fears, nor in general do they need to. But to act as some kind of corrective, we are being reminded tonight that of the women murdered each year, most of the blame can be attributed to a partner or an ex-partner and not a complete stranger.
Whilst thinking about the whole brouhaha surrounding the Meghan and Harry interview with Oprah Winfrey, the question came into my head whether Roman society was inherently racist (given that the Romans were great colonisers) I genuinely did not know the answer to this question but the consensus view is that whilst the Romans referred to the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa as ‘‘ (from which we derive the designation Ethiopians?)this was not used in a racist way. The answer was quite surprising. The conventional historical view is that the Romans did not have a racist social structure – their ‘slaves’ were largely drawn from other European and Mediterranean peoples and were therefore ‘white’ (The story was told to us in primary school that when a couple of young Anglo-Saxon children were shown to the Pope of the day and with their long blond hair and blue eyes were said to be ‘Angles’, the Pope is reputed to have said ‘Surely, not Angles but Angels’) In Roman Society, black people were not excluded from any profession or strata of society and there are quite a lot of illustrations of black individuals (and traces of black DNA) found in places as far as Hadrian’s Wall. But there has been a counterblast in a book entitled ‘The invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity‘ in which the author says that, contrary to prevailing opinion, the roots of racism we have experienced in the west does have its roots in Antiquity and specifically in Roman and Greek Society. The problem with all this is that white historians have generally found little examples of classical racism whereas black historians show the reverse. So does historical truth lie in the ethnicity of the historian? Whilst admitting that one always has to ask for whom the historian is writing and for what purposes (e.g. see the way in which Tudor propaganda systematically besmirched the reputation of Richard III), it is somewhat troubling if one is a seeker after truth and trying to find ‘the answer’ to a question.
Meanwhile, the unwinding of Brexit is chugging in the background, but generally out of the public gaze. Last week the Chancellor accepted the OBR’s forecasts of a 4% reduction in national income once the full effects of Brexit are felt. Far from sovereignty driving prosperity, the government’s forecaster seems unpersuaded that the much-vaunted regulatory freedoms of Brexit will do anything to offset this macroeconomic damage. Quietly, a Vote Leave prime minister and chancellor have accepted that so-called project fear was right all along. The consequences for household incomes are bad, but so is the impact on the public finances. The OBR forecasts that tax receipts will hit £1,038 billion by 2025-6. But without the economic drag anchor of Brexit, revenues would have been around £42 billion higher. As we always suspected, the effects of Brexit and the pandemic are so intertwined, that it will be difficult for the professional statisticians to attribute which effect to which cause. But I am reminded, as we were talking about Roman society, that in order to distract the population from rioting and expressing its discontents, the roman elite of the day used to engage in ‘bread and circuses’ in order give out a free distribution of food and throw some general public spectacles to divert the gaze of the population to the true source of their discontents.
Today started off as a beautiful fine day – Meg and I enjoyed our walk down into town where we picked up our newspapers and one or two little items from Waitrose which is on our way back. We seemed to have been running a little bit earlier today and we made our way to our benches overlooking the park, knowing that we would have some time to wait before any of our acquaintances showed their faces. However, the weather started to worsen and some squally wintry showers swept along to spoil our enjoyment and we even had a brief smattering of hail for good measure. Whilst we were waiting, we were passed by a young Irish mother we have chatted to before – we have some things in common because she attends the same church as do we but normally for the Sunday morning rather than the Saturday evening services, so our paths have not crossed for quite some time. Then our Birmingham University friend hove into view and several other people we have come to know quite well. One is an elderly gentlemen of 87 years who is quite remarkable because he walks for at least 8 km per day (even more by the time he gets home) His progress is checked on a ‘smart’ watch so he knows just how far he has walked and a GP daughter keeps track of him remotely. Our acquaintance had had a career in Export sales and in the course of his work had worked in both Kuwait and in Cairo. You never know what interesting lives people have led until you ask them of course, but I never fail to be surprised by the interesting facts that emerge from our gentle questioning. Later, we were joined by one of regulars (who happens to be a wheelchair user) so I was pleased that she stopped her chariot in time and did not run me over (which was quite a possibility) Some others joined us so we finished up as a little gaggle of six but by now the weather was turning against all of us so we decided universally that we had better strike for home.
This afternoon was devoted to some routine domestic matters. One thing I do at this time of the month is getting my accounts in order (I record transactions in a large ‘day book’ and then reconcile this with my online statements) This was a task quite soon accomplished so we returned to our newspapers to complete the afternoon. Earlier this morning and still preoccupied by ‘back up’ routines, I had a bit of a lateral thought and thought that I would use the memory card recently populated with my backup data in a different way. On checking that I had plenty of space in the external drive attached to the portable that I have, I thought I might as well as put a backup on there as well as on the hard-disk drive of the portable itself. So I now have my most recent backup on 2-3 different media in 2 different locations so were disaster to strike, I should be able to restore my files fairly easily.
As a greater proportion of the population get vaccinated and the weeks roll by, so data is starting to accumulate concerning the efficacy of the vaccines. The number of people vaccinated is now over 23 million in the UK. There have been a few reports of people suffering blood clots just after receiving the vaccine but the WHO and others hasten to reassure us that that there seems to be no causal link with the AstraZeneca vaccine. Whilst cases in the UK are falling very rapidly, the rates in central and in Eastern Europe seem to be rising quite rapidly. It could be, of course, that all countries are a slightly different stage in the life cycle of the pandemic but it is surely reassuring that the data is generally moving in the right direction in the UK. Infections are up very slightly compared with a week ago but the number of fatalities is 61 less than a week ago when it was 236. I will personally feel a little happier once we have Easter out of the way and hope that the ‘R’ rate has not been forced higher by the great influx of schoolchildren going back to school this week. The Easter break may well give us all just a little bit more breathing space.
We have just spent a very pleasant hour chatting with one of my ex-Hampshire friends. As well as being a fund of good stories (and a repository of a great deal of knowledge) he used to work for IBM which means that if I can struck on any little computing issues, my friend and colleague can generally supply me with the answers!
Today turned out to be a fairly typical Saturday. The big storm which had swept across the UK from the Atlantic had done its worst but there were still the remnants of some following winds and rather lowered temperatures. We picked up our complement of Saturday newspapers, replete with supplements ready for a good read later on today. And so we made our way to the park which seemed a bit more empty of children on bikes and dogs which is normally the case for a Saturday morning. There we met with our normal crowd of park habitués – we tend to sit on the same benches every day and as people pass us by, they stop for a little chat. In this colder weather, the older amongst us have realised that it is not a good idea to stand for too long nattering as our knees get set and our bodies get cooler so most of the passers-by just stop for a few minutes to exchange gossip of the day. Nearly all of us have been jabbed by now and some of us are awaiting our second dose of the vaccine in about 3-4 weeks time. We are all making tentative plans for the things that we intend to do during the summer when the lockdown has been alleviated. However, many of us of us are working out the people (generally relatives) that we would like to meet up with again as soon as we can and the crucial date is March 29th which is two weeks on Monday. On that date, up to six people drawn from two households will be allowed to meet in an open space such as a garden, so I imagine that many people will take that opportunity.
Quite a lot of COVID-19 news has surfaced today. For a start the number of (first) vaccinations has now reached 23.6 million which by my calculations is over 50% of the adult population. One would have thought that there would been much celebration at passing the 50% milestone but. if this has occurred, I have missed it. The number of new infections is down to about 6,000 a day which is approximately one tenth of the daily rate announced at the height of this phase of the pandemic (last January). In the last two weeks of March, however, is looks as though the UK is due to receive some extra batches of vaccine and therefore the rates of vaccination might increase dramatically. Various vaccination centres have been put on maximum alert to greatly accelerate the rate of vaccination and asked to ready their staff in preparation for this. There is a target to get all adults inoculated by the end of July but it is quite possible that with an acceleration of the rate, all UK adults may be vaccinated by early June. In today’s ‘The Times‘ an analysis has been reported that the cost of the lockdown is some £18 billion per month in GDP. So every month earlier that the vaccination target is brought forward should more than pay for the costs of the vaccines themselves. Of course, there is ‘many a slip t’wist cup and lip‘ as they say but we do, as a country, seem to be a long way ahead of any of our fellow European countries. The last set of comparable figures that I have seen published put the UK at 34% but the average for Spain, Italy, France and Germany is about one fifth of this (at 7%) Of course, there is always the possibility that new variants may arise (against which our existing vaccine will not be very efficacious until they have had the chance to be reformulated)
This afternoon proved to host one of the most exciting rugby matches in years – in this case between England and France. Had the French won, they would have been on-course for the ‘Grand Slam’ i.e one team beats all of the others in the competition. The French certainly had the better of the first half and actually scored their first try after about 80 seconds of the match in a piece of brilliant French flair and opportunism. The French led at half-time but the English gradually overhauled the French in the second half. However, they were still behind three minutes before the end when Maro Itoje (who had a terrible game against Wales conceding a clutch of penalties) squeezed over the line and was adjudged by the TV official to have just about grounded the ball, thus earning the try which secured victory.
Tonight there have been disturbances in South London as several women’s groups were planning a vigil in honour of Sarah Everard (murdered by a serving police officer). The vigil was not allowed by the police despite promises by the organisers to social distance – but a lot of women turned up to the vigil in any case only to run into clashes with the police. Under the circumstances, the police probably ‘called this one wrong’ even though mass gatherings are against the law under current COVID regulations.
Today is a day when two events are taking place on the same day – the first of these is Mother’s Day (or more accurately ‘Mothering Sunday’) and the second is my daughter-in-law’s birthday. So we have masses of cards, presents and calls coming into the house associated with either one celebration or the other. I was a little puzzled why ‘Mother’s Day‘ appeared so early this year – I tend to think of it as a Sunday near to March 25th (the ‘Feast of the Annunciation’) but I find after a little more investigation that the date (in the UK) is the fourth Sunday of Lent. Therefore, if Easter is early, then Mothering Sunday will also be early so that is one little mystery solved. Today being a Sunday, we engaged in our normal Sunday morning routine. I get up an hour earlier and then stroll down to collect our Sunday morning newspapers, getting back in time for the Andrew Marr Show which I am hoping might be particularly illuminating this morning in view of the fuss that is taking place over the Metropolitan Police’s catastrophic handling of the vigil taking place last on Clapham Common to commemorate the murder of the girl by a serving police officer. As I was making my way home complete with newspapers, I tend to take a banana with me to sustain me until I get breakfast. When I came to disposing of the banana skin I remembered an old ‘tip’ and decided to use the banana skin to give my walking boots a quick wipe. Although this sound odd, it is quite well documented that the large amount of potassium in banana skins is the beneficial agent when it comes to shine up leather. Incidentally, the same trick works with rubber car mats (not the cheaper plastic variety) – it appears that the natural oils found in banana skins are very similar to this occurring naturally in rubber products which may be drying out. This is all strange yet true – fortunately, at that hour in the morning, there was none around apart from the occasional jogger to see me cleaning my boots with a banana skin. On my journey down into town, I treated myself to a little concert on my trusty old iPhone – this time, I was playing J.S. Bach’s B Minor Mass and parts from the Matthew Passion. So all in all, I quite enjoy my little trips on a Sunday with a ‘free’ concert thrown in. We walked down to the park and there we met with some of our usual ‘park’ friends – as we all know what parts of the park we inhabit and congregate in, we tend to coincide more often than not. Needless to say, yesterday’s Rugby match (between England and France) was a great talking point. After a while, Meg and I struck for home and we bumped into one of our church friends who told us that we now had a priest to take services when we next go in a couple of week’s time. Nobody seems to know anything about him (not that that should matter at all) but it looks as though he has been installed in the presbytery already. Of course social contact with him and with fellow parishioners is bound to be limited until we are in further stage of lockdown.
This afternoon, as you might expect, was devoted to watching a 6-Nations rugby match – this time between Ireland and Scotland. It was a hard fought match and only decided in the last five minutes when the Irish clawed themselves ahead – it never ceases to amaze me how many rugby matches are decided in the last fine minutes or so of a game.
In the late afternoon, Meg and I decided to see if we could see anything that Mary Beard might have produced on the subject of ‘race’ in Roman society. We did find a well-illustrated lecture by Mary Beard which was fascinating and answered some of our questions indirectly. Whereas the far right in both Britain and America tend to look to antiquity for the ‘roots’ of white western civilisation, Mary Beard manage to dispose of the most facile of their arguments. She showed that how many statues although often displayed in museums as white marble, at least initially many of them would be coloured (garishly according to present day sensibilities) in which we can infer the skin tints and tones of ‘typical’ roman citizens. In short, there is quite a lot of indirect evidence that Roman society was relatively open and cosmopolitan and also with a degree of social mobility for some. For example, one gravestone found near South Shields shows that the person who had their monument erected for him had married one of his slaves who therefore became his wife (almost impossible to think of similar events happening in past centuries in the UK when slavery was still legal)
Well, here we are at the start of another week and we wonder what this week will bring for us. It was a bit of an indeterminate day today with a fair bit of cloud but with a mild temperature and only the modicum of wind. As we walked down to collect our newspapers, we bumped into the friend of a friend outside the park and then, once inside the park, a little gaggle of 5-6 of us (including ourselves) met and exchanged pleasantries and then, as the weather turned cooler, we all made for home. We generally turn on the rolling news programmes on the TV when we return home and as anticipated, the airways were full of the reaction to the way in which the Metropolitan police handled (mishandled!) the vigil held by women on Clapham Common. One particular image has gone around the world i.e. a slight 5′ 2″ physics student pinned to the ground and restrained by several burley police officers. All of this, of course, in a vigil which was designed to honour the memory of a woman who had been killed by a serving police officer as well. There are more idiosyncrasies attached to this event as well. There just happens to be a huge bill being presented to Parliament today (the rather ungainly entitled ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill‘) which is a portmanteau type of provision designed to gave the state and the police many more powers than they already have. Before Saturday’s vigil. the bill seemed to aimed at Extinction Rebellion type protests as well as the current concerns about what to do with the statues all over the country erected to ex-slaver traders and which many now wish to see removed. It has been pointed out in Parliament that there are several references to offences against property in the new bill but nothing which would address the concerns of the omen who feel unsafe on the streets of our cities and towns. A senior minister has defended plans to increase sentences for violence against statues, amid rising fury at the government’s failure to tackle violence against women – the Tory Police Bill, to be debated in the Commons today, will allow judges to hand down sentences of up to 10 years for damaging statues based on their ’emotional, symbolic value’. There are some who argue that in the UK legal system offences against property tend to attract high penalties than offences against the person but I haven’t managed to track down any evidence for this oft-quoted remark.
As it was a beautiful afternoon I decided to give the car a wash as it hasn’t had a wash for a couple of weeks. When we bought it new, we did have a special treatment to help protect paintwork against things like bird droppings (which can be a particular nuisance if you happen to park the car in the wrong place) Anyway, I was particularly pleased that the car seemed to get itself cleaned particularly easily today – I suspect the trick is not to let it get too dirty in the first place. I have had the same large container of car shampoo for several years now but it seems to do its job OK- one particular car washing aid I have which is particularly useful is a smaller size watering can with a very long spout (designed, I imagine, to water handing baskets and the like). This I use to deliver a small but constant steam of water to wet the car before I get going with a soft brush (and then a multi-fibre mitten).
Tonight, many European countries (Germany at first, followed by France, Italy and Spain) are pausing their use of the AstraZeneca vaccine over fears that it might be implicated in a number of incidents of blood clots after people have received the vaccine. This is probably excessively cautious as there will always be a certain (low) proportion of blood-clotting in the population as a whole, vaccine or no and so the epidemiologists have to ascertain whether there is (a) an excess of blood clotting and (b) whether there is a causal relationship with the vaccine in any case.
Tomorrow afternoon will be quite full of video calls. First we are going to have a natter with one of my Hampshire friends/colleagues. It transpired that we inhabited the same haunts of Manchester but separated by a few years so we never actually met whilst we were both working there. Then we will FaceTime some of our oldest ex-Waitrose friends as we do every Tuesday afternoon. They, like us, are making some plans as to what they might do in a few weeks time when the lockdown starts to ease. But the news from Europe is now grim. Italy, France, Germany nd Poland are now all in the grip of a third wave of the pandemic and their failure to vaccinate enough of their population in time means that the third wave is proceeding apace. Can we be isolated from this, I ask myself?
For the various numerologists who read this blog, you will notice that a particular type of milestone is recorded today. It is blog no. 365 which means that this blogging exercise has continued for exactly one year. As it happens, a lot of the media are talking about the first anniversary of the ‘lockdown’ (No. 1 that is) and it is rather a strange anniversary to celebrate as so many at the time thought that it would be for a month or so of some privations and certainly not a year. It is interesting that according to the ‘official’ account, the lockdown began on 16 March 2020, when Matt Hancock told the House of Commons that all unnecessary social contact should cease. Mr Hancock did say this, but it was not until 23 March 2020 that Boris Johnson told the country that people ‘must’ stay at home and certain businesses must close. Government ministers have previously described this second date as the start of lockdown. There is no official government definition of ‘lockdown’. So there is a certain degree of confusion, even now, when the lockdown is supposed to have started but today is 16th March and therefore the anniversary of the Matt Hancock (if not the Boris Johnson) announcement.
Today was a little on the dull side but at least the weather app on our phone indicted that the sun might make an appearance a little later in the day. We collected our newspapers, picked up some milk from Waitrose and then wondered who we might meet in the park. Eventually, we ran into a little gaggle of four of the regulars and we exchanged some details about what the various members of our families were up to, particularly as there is now the possibility that we might make some arrangements to see some of the more distant members in only month or so now. When we have lived throughout twelve months of the pandemic, then another month seems quite a trifling amount of time. We all chat happily away until the standing around makes us realise we are feeling a little cold and want to be on our way as it nearly always approaching lunchtime.
This afternoon, we knew we were going to have a good time with video calls to friends and ex-colleagues. The first of these was a call to one of our Hampshire (ex University of Winchester friends) and we exchanged reminiscences about some of the earliest computers and software with which we cut our computing teeth (when we were younger, in the late 1970’s and then the 1980’s) We were recalling a particular type of computer (the Amstrad) which became massively popular as a fairly cheap consumer product. In fact the name ‘Amstrad‘ was brought to the market by Alan Sugar (of ‘The Apprentice’ fame) as the name ‘Amstrad‘ is derived from Alan Michael Sugar (Ams) and then ‘trad’ from trading. We were thinking about some of our earliest computing experiences and both of us expressed the desire to see the Museum of Computing which actually lives next door in Bletchley Park to the wartime code-breaking project to which Alan Turing contributed so much. We have made a tentative commitment to meet each other at the Museum of Computing when travel conditions allow- it should be approximately the same distance of travel for both of us and will certainly be a good day out. We then discussed strategies of decluttering our respective houses, in which our Hampshire friends seem to have made a considerable degree of progress whereas we in Bromsgrove have scarcely started. After this lengthy but really entertaining chat, we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends here in Bromsgrove as the time is rapidly approaching (after March 29th) when we can make some tentative plans to meet with each other in some open space somewhere (our garden, their garden, or even the park) Next week, we might be able to see our way ahead to make some more firm arrangements.
The COVID news still proves of interest to us all. Although the infection rates and death rates are dropping dramatically in the UK (and vaccination rate seems to be holding up), the situation in Europe is still grim. In about three quarters of European societies, the COVID rate is increasing although concentrated in Central and Eastern Europe. But Italy is feeling the need to go into a full national lockdown again, as from today, so that if is persists our little vacation scheduled for Rome late September might be put at jeopardy. Tomorrow might prove to be quite an interesting day as well for we are to be in touch (via Zoom) with Meg’s cousins in Derby and the time is fast approaching when it might be possible to arrange a visit (if only in a garden). If and when we meet, this might be quite interesting because Meg’s cousin is actually buying a house in Derbyshire near to her daughter and we might be at a stage when we can view it (if only from the outside)
It seems strange to start off this blog with ‘Day 366’ but I thought I would stick with the absolute number of days since we started this blog rather than using any other numbering system. Today is always a delayed start for us as we have to complete our shopping order ready for delivery from Waitrose tomorrow morning but we got going at last. At last, though, we got under way and caught up with some of our church friends after our way back from collecting the newspapers. They informed us (but I think I already had a note of it) that bookings for our church services was going to start tonight, organised by Eventbrite, so that is something I must get organised later on tonight. Having seen one set of friends we cut across the road into the park and saw our University of Birmingham friend who was wondering where we were, as were a little late this morning. We chatted about this and that, thinking about how we were going to get our social lives organised in a week or so. For a start, our friend will be resuming a lot of his tennis activities as soon as these reopen on March 29th for outdoor sports but I suspect that my Pilates classes, being indoor, will have to wait a little longer. Last time we were ‘in between’ lockdowns we had a Pilates class with only four in it (one in each corner of the room) whilst our instructor occupied some open space near the door so we may go onto a similar regime this time around. Another friend who is a wheelchair-user hove into view and, as promised, I just happened to have another bottle of damson gin in my rucksack ready for her to enjoy.
We knew that this afternoon, we were going to have a ‘Zoom’ session with some of Meg’s cousins. So after lunch, a snooze and a paper read we were ready for the Zoom session which involved Meg’s cousin, her daughter and son-in-law in one house in Derby whilst another daughter and son-in-law were at their house in Cheltenham. We had a rather jolly time with quite a lot of discussion about how the nature of work would evolve in a post-pandemic world. We all agreed that the nature of work would alter radically and it may well be (I conjecture) that a pattern will evolve of 1-2 days in the office (around the water cooler!) to maintain social contacts and those things best handled face-to-face and with a corresponding 3-4 days working from home (if you have the space) I suspect that those who can, released from travelling time to/from work. may well decide to work 10 hour days and then see if it is possible to have a four day ‘working’ week and a three day ‘week-end’ or leisure time at least. The ultimate irony in all of this is that for the foreseeable future, one’s leisure time is likely to have a large internet component to it.
Tonight, when our ‘Zoom’ session had finished, I decided to consult our church’s website to see what arrangements there would be for services this weekend. To my delight, there as a clickable link to the Eventbrite booking system which worked like clockwork and I managed to get two places booked for myself and Meg at the Saturday evening service without any difficulty. I presume that we have to show the QR codes that have been sent over the email to secure our admission into church on Saturday and I wonder if we will be scanned in – much like the coffee ships before lockdown. We have a new parish priest ready to take over the parish so we are all rather curious – I thought I might take along some damson gin for him to enjoy but I suppose it can always double for communion wine if pressed into service.
There is a massive row going on in Europe at the moment with vaccines at their core – it really does look as the supply of vaccines is being ‘weaponised’ and is to be used in the developing contretemps between the UK and its EU neighbours. It looks as though supplies of the AstraZeneca vaccine are going to be severely limited throughout the whole of April – so the long-term hope that we may start to think about vaccinating those under 50 seems to have evaporated. As always the argument is a complex one and hinges upon who promised what supplies of vaccine to whom and when and a lot of this is subject to legal agreements as well. But it appears that the government target of vaccinating all of the 50+ section of the population is still a government objective. Meanwhile, more than 25 million of the UK population has now been vaccinated and the point must be approaching (quite soon? within a day or so?) when we hit the milestone of 50% of the adult population having received at least one dose of the vaccine.
Today was quite a mild, cloudy day but no rain was forecast. We are a little delayed as we often are on a Thursday morning as the Waitrose order had been delivered and we needed to put all of the provisions away before we set out on our walk. Having collected our newspapers, I could not resist telling our newsagent a joke that had been running through my head for the last day or so i.e. ‘How does an agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac spend their time?‘ to which the answer is ‘They lay awake all night, wondering whether or not there is a dog‘ I know it’s a crap joke but it is a little quirky. After we had picked our newspapers, we needed to go into the town to send off a condolence card following the death of one our oldest academic mentors and friends in Spain. – so we needed to go to the Post Office (now housed in W H Smiths) to get this posted. On our way, we passed a little ‘ecological’ shop that sells all kinds of sustainable products and we purchased a little bar of soap, complete in its tin. Actually, if the truth be known, I only actually wanted the tin because I had spotted it some time beforehand and I thought that it might make a suitable heatsink to help to keep an external disk drive cool. This is because according to my researches, disk drives might only have a life of about 5 years (although I have several considerably older than this) and excess heat is one factor that could well shorten their life. Having completed our little foray into the High Street, we made our way into the park and coincided as we almost always do these days with our University of Birmingham friend. We had two very long and interesting but not-connected conversations. The first of these was a discussion of a video that Meg and I had stumbled upon by the classicist Mary Beard on the subject of ‘whiteness’ (with reference to skin colour) in Roman society. I said that I would hunt out the video link as we had only watched it recently which I did later on in the afternoon and then sent it on. Then we got onto the topic of the statistical connection between ‘O’-levels and ‘A’-levels and academic progress in degree courses. I had researched and then written up a couple of papers, one dating to my time in the (then) Leicester Polytechnic and the second written when I was at King Alfred’s College in Winchester. We were so delayed by our extended conversations that it was terribly late when we got home for lunch being practically 2.00pm in the afternoon so we had to raid our store cupboard for a tin of quality stewing steak which we employ when we need to get an instant meal in about two minutes. After lunch, I thought I would see if I could hunt out the couple of papers I had written and by some kind of miracle, I managed to locate them after about one minute of looking for them (one paper was 30 years old and the other was 20 years old so I impressed myself with my own efficiency – or good luck!) Anyway, I will pass these on to my friend to read to see if the findings from the students that I taught all of those years ago had the same degree of applicability to our friend’s students.
After lunch, I needed to make a lightning visit into town to return a defective disk drive back to Amazon (it worked for about a week and then refuse to format) I had got a QR code on my phone and so, in theory, I could go into one of the shops that are an agency which will scan my phone, print off the label and then return the item to Amazon. The first shop to which I went and which I had used before shut its doors about 10 seconds before I got there. So then I went off to a newsagents that I know had a system of Amazon lockers but they didn’t have the label printing facility. So I went off to a third shop but they were only agents for Hermes carriers and not UPS so my QR code was not recognised. They recommended me to another shop at which I also drew a blank. Frustrated I came home for a consoling cup of tea and consulted the web as to which shop in the area I could use for an Amazon return. I found an off-license that accepted my parcel back (and gave me a receipt) and the ironic thing is that this shop was the next door neighbour but one to the first shop I had tried. All I have to do now is hope that the refund systems within Amazon work the way they should (they have aways worked superbly well in the past, I must say)
Today was a bit gloomy but not excessively cold and we collected our newspapers and got to the park in plenty of time. There we met with our University of Birmingham friend who I was especially pleased to see as I had managed to locate a couple of papers I had written that examined the relationship between GEC O-levels and A-levels and the final degree results. The analysis used a statistical technique called ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and it is excellent at solving the problems where you lots of categories of input (e.g. score from a number of GCE’s put into bands) and corresponding output (class of degree) and you trying to establish the statistical relationship between them.The papers were not written with a view to publication and hence had no references, literature reviews and the like – they were just straight analysis of the records of our students that were susceptible to a statistical treatment but they both came as very useful documents in policy terms when we were resubmitting our degree courses or attempting to prove that we were ‘adding value’. Anyway, my friend is going to cast his statistical eye over them nd it will be interesting to see what he makes of them both.
Today is rather a strange anniversary for me as it is 48 years according to the date when I was run over by a Hillman Imp (whose driver claims to have fainted at the wheel) when I had just finished a lecture at Leicester Polytechnic and was on my way to another class. I will spare you all of the gory details except I was hit first and thrown out of the way, both legs being smashed up in the process. My two students were carried on the body of the Hillman Impthrough some iron railings outside a residential home. My legs were put into a temporary plaster but the tendons to all of the muscles were severed – but it was the middle of an ancillaries dispute so there was no bed for me in the hospital either that day or the following day (I was told to take aspirins for the pain) The third day afterwards they did take me into hospital and when I came round from the operation I remember peering timorously underneath the sheet to see how many legs I had left. As it was, the answer was two but as they had told me that they had no idea what they were going to do until they got me onto the operating table and so there was a possibility I would end up legless. Enough of all of this – but 19th March as well as being the feast of St. Joseph is a date which I find it hard to forget.
Tonight was also the night when we decided to have a celebratory meal for the birthday of our daughter-in-law (last Sunday) and our son (next Thursday) so tonight’s meal was an occasion approximately in the middle. As we are still in lockdown and cannot go out for a collective meal, we treated ourselves to a fish-and-chip supper delivered to the house and we had quite a jolly occasion of it all, considering the circumstances.
We have now vaccinated some 26.2 million of the population and record number in one day of 660,000 (nearly two thirds of a million in one day) Also, the record tonight seems to indicate that we have vaccinated some 49.9% of the population – and I wonder off the government will ‘explode’ with the good news once we actually hit the 50% proportion. At the same time, the situation in Germany seems to be going from bad to worse and is definitely at the start of a third wave of the pandemic. The Germans freely admit that they do not have enough vaccine to give more of their own population the vaccine that they need so the ‘politics of vaccination’ may start to rear its ugly head. The situation in Europe is now sufficiently serious for experts here in the UK to wonder whether despite the success of our vaccination programme, a third wave in the rest of Europe might seep into the UK in the summer/utumn and we are certainly not out of the woods just yet.
There is quite some concern in official circles that the virus seems to ‘target’ the UK’s poorest and most deprived communities, and once entrenched the virus seems difficult to shift. Rotherham is one of those towns that has struggled to get infection rates down. Even when they do fall, they do so slowly, and cases remain stubbornly over 100 cases per 100,000 people – while the average area in England has 45. So it is become more and more evident that COVID-19 is almost ‘seeking out’ and then intensifying existing social and economic inequalities. The problem for these communities is that poverty strikes at the economic base, the educational system, the local health resources and these inequalities only seem to reinforce each other. The policy implications are clear (but unpalatable for a Conservative government)
Today was full of little hints of the spring about to come. We are noticing that flowering cherries and flowering hawthorns are starting to bloom nicely and in a few days these flowering trees might be at their best. Similarly, the forsythia in several people’s gardens is similarly in full bloom so I am inclined to have my camera at the ready so that I can capture these flowering images at their best. Today is also the date of the Spring equinox and I have discovered why it is not always on March 21st. The explanation is that each year is 365¼ days (hence we need leap years every four years) and the spring equinox occurs 6 hours later than the previous year. A consequence of all of this is that the equinox can occur on either 20th or 21st or 22nd of March in any particular year. But after a pleasant walk into town, we collected our newspapers and then on into the town where we met, as usual, with a couple of park friends. Then we made for home, knowing that the afternoon was going to be dominated by rugby.
This afternoon was ‘Super Saturday‘ in which there are going to be three 6-Nations rugby matches to round off the season (almost) The first game was Italy v. Scotland which was a bit of a non-match as Italy haven’t won a game since goodness knows when. The second match was England vs. Ireland in which the English seemed to be at the wrong end of every refereeing decision but in the end the Irish won very convincingly. But the match which was a cracker was the Wales v. France which both needed to win in order to win the whole championship. Wales seemed to have it won as they were 10 points ahead 10 minutes before the end. But the French displayed supreme pressure and the pressure on both teams was so intense that the game ended with the French one player down (red-carded) and the Wales team two players down (yellow carded) In the event, French won the game with a try in the third minute after the clock had ‘gone red’ which must make it one of the tightest finishes of all time.
Tonight was the night in which church services were resuming. We had to book our places with Eventbrite, much as if we are booking a tour in a National Trust property or similar. In theory, there could have been up to about 45 places in the church but tonight there were about 33 – the places for tomorrow are, we understand, fully booked. Of most interest to the congregation, though, was the fact that we have a new priest allocated to the parish. How long the new priest will remain with us is a bit hard to say because it seemed as though he was ‘on loan’ from another English discuss altogether. Meg and I were very interested in the character of the new priest and were impressed – he seemed to have the right combination of a common-sense approach to liturgical matters whilst also exhibiting a dry sense of humour whilst he was introducing himself. Although we haven’t had the opportunity to speak with him yet (or nor will we, until lockdown conditions are released) but to ease his entry and show him some goodwill on taking over our parish, I left him a bottle of our own Damson Gin (which we hope does not get mixed up with communion wine, not that that is very likely)
As we suspected, today was the day when, as a nation, we crept over the 50% milestone of proportion of the adult population vaccinated. However good the news is from the UK, the news from continental Europe where the virus seems to be entering a third wave is a source of great concern. Many scientists are worried that the European infection rates will thwart our simmer holidays. In particular, exponential growth in cases in countries like Germany puts in doubt roadmap proposals to restart international travel by 21 June. It has been a record day for the UK as 711,156 vaccinations have been given and more than 26.8 million first and 2.1 million second doses have now been given in the UK since December.
On Friday afternoon, we had a Zoom call with one of our closest friends in Oxfordshire – in normal times, we often meet half way in Bicester for a ‘get together’ meal. We are looking forward to the magic date of Monday March 29th (a week on Monday) because, in theory, that is the date when according to the roadmap up to six people can legally meet in a garden or similar open space to have a meal or a social get together. So as soon as the weather gets nothing like reasonable, we will see if we can meet up in a garden to see each other face-to-face rather than relying upon technology the whole time.
Today started off in an ‘interesting’ way, computing wise. As part of the WordPress suite that I use for writing this bog there is an ‘plug-in’ called Jetpack. Apart from collecting statistics about your website and much more besides, this plug-in monitors whether your site is ‘live’ and sends you an email if anything is amiss. I received an email from the Jetpack system telling me that this site was ‘down’ which, indeed it was. After about an hour, I sent off an email pleading for help to my webspace provider – as it happened Jetpack informed me, again by email, that the site had been restored to working order after a downtime of some two hours. What had gone wrong, I really do not know but it is rather nice when ‘errors’ correct themselves. Of course, it could have been a fault at the server end and ‘nothing to do with me’ but that is one problem less to worry about.
Today is the official Census day and later on today, we are going to complete it ‘en famille‘. Census Day is always interesting for Meg and myself because we were recruited as census numerators in 1971 (50 years ago!) What we had to do was to go round the houses on our patch – about 200 houses I think, and distribute the census forms to each household. We then had to call back one week later to pick up the census form and, as far as I remember, we had to do some basic checking on the doorstep to make sure there were no gross errors. When we got the census forms home, we had to do a more detailed checking and then had to transfer some basic information onto special sheets which we had to mark with an HB pencil. These were to be read by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and it enables the census authorities to get some basic information (numbers, age, sex of individuals and where they lived) very quickly – we are talking about a week or so. Meg and I were probably recruited as we were social science students and had been taught about the census and how it operated in our course. We had a course in statistics which had two components, the first being conventional statistical theory and operations and the second was called ‘Social Statistics’ and it was a fascinating course. We had a certain amount of demography in the course and learnt how government statistics were collected and used – it really was an incredibly useful course (and I don’t even think it was examined either) As part of our census enumerator role, we had a brief training course in which it was stressed that we should leave no building unvisited and indeed, I did pass a ‘deserted’ Anglican Church only to discover it had been converted into a mosque and hence was eventually caught up in the census exercise. If we encountered a ‘difficult’ situation on our patch, we were encouraged to use what persuasive skills we had to extract whatever (basic) information we could, rather than submit a nil return. On my patch, I did encounter a hippy commune who railed against the authority notions they discerned in the census questions such ‘Head of Household‘ and ‘Relationship to head of household‘ After a period of negotiation, I was very pleased with myself that I got the whole commune enumerated with each describing themselves as the ‘co-spouse’ of the other – the members of the commune were delighted to describe themselves this and I was delighted to get the data.
And so we come to today’s on-line form. It took about 10 minutes or so for each of the four of us to complete and I thought that technologically it had been made as fool-proof as possible. I am sure that the amount of information collected has been scaled back somewhat compared with other censuses that I remember – but I suppose the government already holds an extraordinary amount of information on each one of us anyway. After submission, I got an email acknowledgement so I know the form is truly lodged. We were also asked to comment upon any particular features of the form so I did add one comment, at the suggestion of my daughter-in-law. The question on religion assumed that you had ‘some’ religious affiliation or ‘none’ and there was no way in which a humanist could identify themselves as such on the form. In fact, I suspect that they have had this battle with the census authorities for some time. We were speculating what the role of ‘non-completion’ might be and I an wondering whether it will be quite high on this occasion. Ten years ago, the non completion rate was about 6% (higher amongst some of the BAME community) and I would venture to speculate that despite the threat of large fines and the legal compulsion to fill in a census form, the non-completion might be 10% or more on this occasion
Today is evidently the start of a new week and it means that there is exactly one week to go before some of the restrictions under the current lockdown are to be eased. From next Monday, it will be possible for six people or two households to get on with each other in an open space such as a garden. So we are hopeful that the weather will turn fine and sunny next week so that we can meet up with each other for extended chats not just on the pavement as we pass. We picked up our newspapers as per normal but on the way met with our University of Birmingham friend so we all walked to the park together. Once there, there was an aggregation (I hesitate to call it a crowd) of park regulars so we split into little groups discussing this and that. Although the morning started off quite fine, there seems to be a tendency for the sky to cloud over and it starts to get chillier rather than warmer as the morning wears on. At a certain point, we all realise we are getting a little cold so we all continue our journeys or strike for home. Actually, I owe our University of Birmingham friend a favour because he unintentionally did us a good turn. I had let him have sight of a paper I had written over twenty years ago which was unpublished but was quite an important piece of work because it analysed statistically the relationship between GCE O-levels, A-levels and final degree results across a couple of Business Studies degrees at the University of Winchester (and threw in some comparators from an earlier paper with a similar type of analysis done at Leicester Polytechnic some eleven years before that) Armed with the title of the paper, I used the Apple app ‘Finder‘ and located the paper in an archived folder which dated from a computer that I used to own with the brand name of Evesham. Having found the paper, written as a MicroSoft Word .doc document, my version of Word would not open it as it regarded it as too old and out-of-date! Fortunately, I have on my system a small, light ‘clone’ of Word which retains 90% of the functionality for about 10% of the size (not for nothing are Microsoft products known as ‘bloatware’) This opened it OK but could not cope with some of the clipart I used to decorate the title page but the rest of the text seemed to be there OK so I was delighted to be able to hand over a copy of the paper to our friend. At the same time, I realised where some of my archive material was that I had forgotten all about, so hence the gratitude to my friend.
In the late afternoon, after a read and a snooze, the weather seemed quite delightfully sunny so I decided to keep up a good habit and give the car a wash. The more regularly I do this, the easier the task seems to become and of course there is no ingrained dirt to have to shift. Regular readers of this blog will be relieved to know that Miggles, the local good-looking cat that has semi-adopted us turned up at the start of the proceedings to make sure that I was doing the job correctly. He then wandered off, bored with watching me and went in pursuit of mice, birds or whatever to stalk. Being unsuccessful in this venture, Miggles strode into view as I was finishing off the car to give it my efforts the nod of approval and check that I had washed the car to the relevant standard.
We seem to be in a strange place viv-a-vis the. vaccines saga. The UK is progressing very well with up to 30 million now vaccinated (which is over 50%) But the EU seems to be threatening to withhold supplies of the AstraZeneca virus manufactured in continental Europe despite the complexity and interconnectedness of the supply chains. At the same time, there is a great loss of confidence in this vaccine after a degree of ‘bad mouthing’ by European leaders which has resulted in stocks of this vaccine not being used as some members of the European public do not wish to have this particular inoculation. But the figures show that some 12% of Europeans have received their first job whereas the comparable figure for the UK (when the figures were collected) was over three times this proportion at 40%. In the meanwhile, the Americans have concluded a large study amongst 32,000 volunteers which shows over 70% efficacy in preventing an infection in the first place and with an astonishing 100% absence of a severe form COVID once inoculated. Another very large cloud on the horizon is the increasing third wave across many European societies which may well ‘wash over’ these shores in the autumn and is rapidly putting paid to any prospects of a holiday in parts of continental Europe.
Today, we were a little delayed because I had promised our University of Birmingham friend that I would scan a copy of my 1990 paper to which I referred yesterday so he could have his own copy of it. The scanner failed to work and I assumed that it had lost its drivers after the recent MacOS update so subsequently went on the web to attempt to update these. In the event, I didn’t need to because of course it is obvious to me (now!) that the scanning sofware cannot find the scanner if you have neglected to attach it onto the USB bus (which I had!) Working against the clock, I discovered that I had missed out p. 311 (on a series numbered 309-317 (numbering derived from its position as an Appendix in a re-submitted Ba(Hons) In Public Administration) so I resolved to sort out the problem later on when I got home. When ‘later’ came, I could not find the original of p.311 but I did have two different pages numbered 314. So the error had been dormant in the original document where it had remained undiscovered for some 31 years but at least I managed to get it sorted out in so I can give my friend a copy.
Today was a mild, not quite spring-like day so we popped straight into the park so that Meg could make contact with her park acquaintances whilst I shot off on my own to collect the daily ration of newspapers. We had the normal jolly chat over a range of issues but my University of Birmingham friend wondered, after I had given him an updated copy of one of my statistical papers, whether I still had the original data set so that he could do some analysis of his own – regrettably, I had to tell him that after 31 years the data file (which would have been fed into a statistical program that we both used called Minitab) was not readily to hand! I suggested that we might make upside randomised figures but I am not sure whether even this would fit the bill.
Today is the one year to the date since the first lockdown was announced. The media has been full of ‘one year anniversary’ film clips of which the media is so fond as it gives the opportunity to recycle a lot of the footage that they have accumulated during the year. But to try to ensure that there is no celebratory atmosphere, Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer has warned of the potential dangers that are still to be faced. In his view, there will certainly be a new surge of infections and of course the interesting question is to what extent a more or less fully vaccinated population can withstand the onslaught from a resurgence of the virus which appears to be rampaging across much of Europe at the moment. A second major problem, related to the first, is the emergence of new variants of the virus which may well evade all of the efforts of the various vaccines to combat it. Of course, it is possible to ‘fine tune’ our existing vaccines to cope with these new variants (just like the ‘flu jobs, reformulated every year) but by the time they are developed, tested and ready for injection yet more variants could have arisen. And, of course, there may well be problems in the supply lines of vaccine which can cause some of the hiccups that we are experiencing at the moment. And, for good measure, he also highlighted the ‘very big job of work’ in preventing ‘lifelong’ problems related to the effect of lockdowns, such as increased deprivation and non-COVID health issues.
Believe it or not, I am not an avid follower of football but there was an obituary in The Times the other day recalling the life of a famous Leeds United footballer, Peter Lorimer. He was part of the formidable Leeds United team in late 60’s whose half-back line (Jack Charlton, Johnny Giles and Billy Bremner) were reputed to be one of the most formidable defences in the country. The point about Peter Lorimer is that he was reputed to have had the hardest shot in football and to test this out, Leeds United organised some trials so his formidable shot could be measured and it exceeded 100mph. Lorimer was often deputed to take penalties for Leeds and when you work out that the average goalkeeper had ¼ second to respond to the penalty kick, it is easy to see why. I wonder, by the way, if any statistics were ever collected of how penalties that Peter Lorimer took were actually saved?
Our vaccination total has now exceeded 28.3 million. Meg and I are counting off the days until we receive our second dose of the jab which ought to further enhance our immune status. We have another two and half weeks to wait until our appointed time comes and in the meantime, of course, we have a lifting of some of the restrictions on the current lockdown to which to look forward and this will be on Monday next, 29th March.
Today really did feel like the first day of spring. There was quite a lot of pale spring sunshine and many of the trees are starting to bud – and we notice that the flowering cherries and flowering hawthorne are already in full bloom. Having picked up our newspapers, we ambled towards the park where we soon met with several groups of acquaintances. As it happened, I had an old briefcase with me in which I had a couple of books I was loaning to my University of Birmingham friend. One of them was one of the finest statistics books in my collection – American in origin, it was very comprehensive (899 pages long) and explained the theory and practice of practically each statistical test you were ever likely to need and then illustrated each test with the output from the very popular MiniTab program. I found it brilliant when I used it regularly and just as brilliant now, even though I have not had occasion to consult it for years now.
As I do not have any hardware capable of running MsDOS programs (in which all of my statistical software was written), an idle thought occur to me whether there were any ancient DOS-only based laptops lying around in anybody’s bedroom cupboards gathering dust. If so, then I could give them a whirl to see if any of the suites of programs I wrote on them still work (just think of it as an old man’s whimsy) I found I could still buy very early laptops some of them with Windows on them but I suspect that there may be quite a few pre-Windows machines around if only I can locate them (and promise them a good home!) I put the call out to a couple of my former colleagues as I suspected that they had some old kit lying around but I forgot to mention that I only have Apple based technology in the house at the moment as I was happy to abandon Windows based routines for all time several years ago.
This afternoon, I popped out in the car to get some new petrol for the intended lawn mowing tomorrow (if the weather holds) I discovered that I still had the best part of a gallon of petrol hanging around since last autumn so I needed to decant it into a wide-necked jar, then a narrow-necked bottle and thence into the petrol tank of my present car. This took a certain amount of fiddling about as you can imagine before I actually hit the road. Then I measured out my remaining engine oil only to discover I did not quite have enough. So I hit the road again and popped into Halfords only to be faced with a bewildering variety of (expensive) motor oils. I managed to see an assistant to ask from some advice and she informed me who what I wanted was in the (small) gardening section. This allowed me to purchase exactly the right kind of oil that I wanted for the mower, incidentally at about one half of the price of the more expensive varieties destined for cars.
Tonight, it does appear that after a certain amount of jousting, the UK and the EU are taking about sensible means of working with each other to secure supplies of vaccine across the whole of European society. To the outside world, struggling to make do with the limited amount of vaccine made available to them, it must seem to be a terrible prospect that advanced, rich societies are fighting with each and threatening a trade war when the pandemic afflicts us all equally. Meanwhile,Boris Johnson seems to be saying rather odd things at the moment. For example, he told MPs at the 1922 Committee: 'The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed my friends.' Having said that, he has immediately tried to row back on himself by saying that he regretted saying it and asking MP’s to forget what he had just said. But what so seems to odd about this remark is that the most successful vaccine by numbers inoculated, the AstraZeneca virus will be available on a non-profit basis ‘in perpetuity’ to low- and middle-income countries in the developing world. And the cost per dose does not immediate seem to indicate profit-making as the cost per dose seems to be about £3 which seems pretty good value for money.
Boris Johnson was appearing before a group of his own MP’s this evening and several little ‘gems’ emerged. First, it looks as though France might be placed on a ‘red list’ all but ruling out holidays there this summer. Secondly, it may well be that pubs will require proof of vaccination or a recent test before they will serve customers when they finally do re-open. Finally, all care staff in residential homes will be required to have had a vaccination – what this should be considered problematic I do not know as tin the past staff had to show that they had had TB and hepatitis vaccinations before they were allowed anywhere near patients!
Today’s date was one of those that sticks in one’s memory if only because it is my son’s birthday today. I remember the original day of his birth quite clearly as they happened to be short-staffed in St. Mary’s Maternity Hospital in Manchester when he was born and as they were short staffed that night I helped to deliver him. Today, though, was just a normal working day for him and so he opened his various cards and then set himself down at his computer to start his normal day’s work. We were a little delayed in our daily walk routine this morning as it is the day of our Waitrose delivery – this arrived within seconds of the end of our allocated time-slot (from 9-10) and then, of course, we have to put everything away (and wonder if we have missed out on any essentials). We knew that today having picked up our newspapers (well, The Guardian hadn’t been delivered to the newspaper so we had to pop into Waitrose for our copy) we needed to make a lightning visit to the High Street. In common with much of the population, an increasing number of everyday transactions are now done electronically but we still need a supply of cash to pay some of the people who do jobs for us. Accordingly we have to visit an ATM to replenish our cash reserves but this only happens about once a month or even less. I imagine a lot of the population are finding themselves in the same situation.
In the park, we were delighted to bump into various groups friends – church friends, park friends, friends of friends so we stood around for quite a long time chatting. One of the topics of conversation was the idea that not everybody has had an absolutely miserable lockdown. Whilst we all empathised with the plight of those who had been stuck in a flat (particularly a high rise one), most of the park felt we had a pretty good ‘lockdown’ so far. For a start, the fact that we all had a daily walk to the park was one thing and the good company we enjoyed was another. I recall an article I had read in The Times (I think) that ‘whisper it softly’ some people are not at all displeased to be released from the treadmill of work as we used to experience it – now individuals have a judicious mix of work, exercise, voluntary work, some time helping family members and so on and they are not at all sure having experienced these new ways of filling one’s life-space, they are not at all sure that they want to go back to the way things were before the lockdown(s).
This afternoon was designated as the lawn cutting afternoon and I was pleased that the clouds had held off and the weather was fine for mowing.For the very first mow of the season, the mover has to be filled with oil (and petrol naturally), the oil filter cleaner has to be conditioned with engine oil and the height needs adjusting to the highest possible cut (to cope with the clumps of grass that has grown since last November) I was delighted that the mower actually started on only the second pull of the starting handle which bodes well for the season. Normally when I mow, I overlap the preceding row by about 1/3rd to 1/4th of the width but today, the grass was so thick that I overlapped the preceding row by about 3/4 of the width making the task so much longer. The cutting process seemed particularly arduous with the mower constantly threatening to ‘baulk’ (choke on the volume of grass) and then stop so I had to do a first cut using very small increments of grass. The first cut was both time consuming and energy-sapping so I treated myself to a cup of tea and some chocolate biscuits before I ventured to cut the grass transversely rather than longtitudinally for its second cut. I thought I would examine the mower height again and found to my chagrin that the difficulties I had experienced in the last hour was because I had mistakenly set the mower on its lowest rather than its highest setting (normally, after the first cut I put it into the middle position of five where it stays for the rest of the season) With the height properly adjusted, I did the second cut in no time at all and then whizzed round our back lawn as well.
Before we set off for our walk this morning, I had received a very welcome telephone call from our close friends in Oxfordshire. Like us, they have been keeping an eye on both the calendar and also the weather forecast, so on the basis of this (and following the easing of some restrictions on meeting next Monday) we have a lunch date scheduled for next Tuesday. Naturally we are very much looking forward to this (and it is the first long run for our new car picked up last November as well).
Today’s blog will be somewhat concerned with some technical computing issues for which I apologise in advance but I think you will understand why before I conclude. In the middle off the night (what other time is there?) I thought I would hunt around in a cupboard to see if I could locate any copies on 3½” diskettes of any of the suites of statistical software that I wrote in the 1990’s. Whilst looking for something else, I discovered one stray floppy disk with the interesting label which read ‘PhD_2.doc’ (Seems complete! Saved: 15/7/1999) This would have been saved approximately 2½ years after it was written but we are talking about things that were written about ¼ century before to put things in context and where the originals were presumed lost. My next thought was to see if I could locate a USB (external) disk drive which could read the file from my 3½” floppy and rummaging around underneath a bookcase, I did find the disk drive. I then saw if I could read the file into my present computer system (even though it was formatted as FAT32) and in this I was successful. So far, so good. Then of course problems start to mount up. My existing version of Word for the MAC refused to read a file composed under versions of Word far too long before for it to be able. But, the current version of Word did suggest I try an Apple program (TextEdit) which must have had the ability built into it to read earlier version of Word.doc documents. This I succeeded in doing more or less. The problem was that something had appeared to garble the program towards the very end when half of the references appear to be garbled in a strange way – characters were increased in font size to about 1000% or something mad. So I made a copy of the file I had and chopped out all of the extraneous bits that appeared garbled so I finished off with a file that was about 98% complete – good enough! Then my problems really seem to multiply. In my first theoretical chapter, I had made considerable use of tables constructed as boxes in which I was developed some typologies. The problem is that the lines of the boxes were written by a once-popular font called ‘MS LineDraw‘ The trouble is that Microsoft in its wisdom has decreed that using MS LineDraw is not the MicroSoft way of doing things – one is instructed only to use the ‘official’ Microsoft drawing packages and routines to draw boxes ‘ab initio‘ The trouble is that there might be thousands, not to say hundreds of thousands, of computer users all over the world who have considerable investment in DOS based programs in which box-drawing is still important. The arrogance of a large corporation like MicroSoft making users conform to ‘its’ way of doing things is mind-boggling. Now I suspected that copies of the MS LineDraw font are out there ‘in the wild’ as it were and I did manage to locate a copy of it and download it into the computer. But now although incorporated into my Fonts list, my current version of Word just refused to accept it. So I go on the web again to see if there are any other fonts functionally equivalent of MS LineDraw that I could use and, of course, I met a barrage of people with the same complaint but no apparent solution. However, one reply to a plaintiff plea for a solution suggested that an alternative font that might work is a Lotus font called ‘lotuslinedraw’. This I found and I did manage to incorporate it into my fonts and it worked (just about – only a regular font and not one that cab be emboldened but I am not complaining) So at the very end of the day, I managed to get a readable (and electronic) version of my PhD and as our University of Birmingham friend has a parallel interest in quality matters, this is something else I can press into his hand.
Whilst on the hunt for various past statistical programs, I did discover the text-based version of a DOS program called EzeStats which I had written as a self-tuition package for social science students to teach themselves/refresh some elementary (and not so elementary) statistical concepts and procedures. This I ran off as a couple of ‘landscape’ oriented pages (to simulate a computer screen) so I bound them together using my now familiar techniques to stapling and binding and pressed a copy of this into my friend’s hands as well. The whole software was actually included in another statistics textbook so it has seen the light of day but I must confess I haven’t bothered to look at it for many a long year. It is amazing to think about it of all the things you might have done in the past that now you have completely forgotten about and such is the case here!After the beautiful spring-like weather of yesterday, today was both cloudier and cooler but we know we have better weather to come next week. We picked up our bulging ration of Saturday newspapers (replete with supplements) and paused by Waitrose to see what offerings they had so that we can buy some of their plants in the next day or do to take down to Oxfordshire for our dinner date on Tuesday next. Our normal park benches were full by the time we got there so we started to unfold our little camping stool and intended to park Meg upon it – but when some of the occupants of the park benches saw our plight, we seemed to be offered a bench in no time at all. Once there, we were joined by our University of Birmingham friends and several other acquaintances stopped by a chat. Eventually we were joined by a chap we know quite well who hailed originally from Karachi and we walked some of the way home together. When the weather (and the lockdown) improves, we may well pop round to see him as we have an open invitation to partake in a nice cup of tea together. Half way up the hill, we paused to chat for another fellow church attender who we know by sight – and just then some of our church friends appeared so to finished up with a new recruit to the flower arrangers circle attached to the church. At the top of the hill, we bumped into neighbour who we know by sight and in transpires that she hails from Durban. I have seen this lady and her children on quite a few occasions because they live in big old semi in the main road and they used to have a Honda-CRV of exactly the same colour and model that we had intended to buy. So I often used to linger and have a good stare at it as there are not many Hondas around in Bromsgrove and I was trying to assess whether it was the right size (and height) for Meg to access. Our near neighbour recognised us by sight as we have walked up and down the road for a year now and my black Australian style bushman hat is quite distinctive. She was intrigued to know where we actually lived and as she wanted to get het quota of ‘exercise steps in’ (this indicates one’s generation and life-style) and so she walked round the corner to have a look at our residence. I say this because even long established residents of Bromsgrove are not aware of that particular bit of infill which is where we are located. When the weather and the lockdown further improves, we will probably extend an invite so that she and her children can have a tour of the garden and we would probably quite like exchanging some of our travel experiences. It seems extraordinary how our little circle of friends and acquaintances are slowly and gradually increasing – so much better than having one’s range of contacts decrease in these uncertain times.
This afternoon was a fairly quiet afternoon because we know that in the early evening we were going to attend our normal church service. We decided to get there five minutes earlier than our normal time because we had a wreath hanging about (literally!) since Christmas time and on the maker’s advice, we decided to place it on the grave of Tolkien’s mother who just happened to be interred in the little graveyard attached to the church. We introduced ourselves to our new parish priest and indicated that we were the people who had left him a bottle of damson gin last week. This was complete news to him so the bottle of gin must have stayed where we left it in the presbytery and then mysteriously disappeared – well, we all know that the presbyteries of Catholic Churches are dens of venality. There is plenty more where that came from so its disappearance is no problem for us.
Tonight, the clocks go forward and so we are losing an hour’s sleep – not that that will trouble me a great deal. We must say, though, that we are looking forward to next week when we may with some good weather be able to meet with friends in back gardens (ours or theirs) The COVID news is quite interesting. Vaccinations are approaching the 30 million mark and both the infection rate and the deaths are still dropping. But, for once, Boris Johnson appears to be amazingly realistic about the way ahead. It is reported that he said there were still unanswered questions about the impact of a third coronavirus wave from Europe, as he said 'bitter experience' had shown a wave like the one in Europe would hit the UK three weeks later. So I suspect that at the heart of government, there are some very real fears about new variants of COVID against which vaccines have a limited effect and a possible re-infection from the the rest of continental Europe.
Today was the day in which the hour goes forward and we lose an hour of our beauty sleep. I had set the alarm to go off half and hour earlier than normal which is my normal Sunday morning pattern. Having got up, washed and dressed, I then had to turn my attention to putting forward all of the clocks and time pieces which we have in the house, of which there seem to be several. Thank goodness that things like radios and computers themselves often perform this updating without human intervention but there are still some appliances (e.g. like the clocks on our cooker and microwave) that do not and one has always to remember the instructions for that particular device. All of this got done in plenty of time and I popped down to collect the newspapers, treating myself to my weekly ration of Bach on the trusty old iPhone (used as an MP3 player) before settling down to the Andrew Marr show and breakfast upon our return. Then it was time for our daily walk to the park but there was a lot of rain ‘in the air’ as it were and we encountered a fine drizzle. Once in the park, we met up with our University of Birmingham friend but the frequency of our visits will shortly be attenuated because shortly as a keen tennis player he will be involved in participating in his favourite sport now that participation in outdoor sports is permitted as from tomorrow. We had a very long conversation discussing our separate experiences in the use (and abuse) of statistics in the the classification of final degree results and, as we have come to expect, our philosophies of how this should best be done showed a remarkable degree of congruence. We left for home and met the husband of one of our church friends and this was the start of another long conversation, equally fascinating, on the way of life of the Anglo-Indian communities in India and Pakistan. I said I would dig out my copy of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children which explores these themes in a rich and fascinating detail. Eventually we got home and gratefully accepted some ‘Coq au vin’ which our son and daughter-in-law kindly donated to us as a Sunday lunch. After this fairly long and extensive morning, we were pleased to have a good after-lunch rest and a good read of the Sunday newspapers.
There is some more interesting COVID-19 news today. The most important headline is that, as a country, we have now inoculated some 30 million and achieved a rate of 57% (for the first jab) However, there is a big push now towards getting the second jab of the vaccine into the arms of people who received their first jab over two months ago. One only hopes that the logistics of this have been properly worked out so that when we turn up for our second jab in just over two weeks time, the supplies of vaccine are relatively forthcoming, Boris Johnson has also announced that he will be able to say more on the subject of the availability of foreign holidays on April 5th. If I had to make a guess at this stage, it would be that a trickle to flights to foreign destinations may be allowed from mid-August onwards. As Meg and I have a trip tentatively booked for Rome in late September, we are very cautiously optimistic but I still think the chances of this are only 50:50 at best.The most difficult factor in this whole equation is how far the third wave has extended in various continental countries and the rate of vaccination in this countries as well (very much behind us, of course). After tomorrow’s milestone for the gradual relaxation of the lockdown, the next critical date if going to be 12th April (only two weeks away now) This is the earliest date on which shops, hairdressers, gyms, nail salons, libraries, and outdoor attractions such as theme parks will be allowed to reopen. But no indoor mixing of different households will be allowed. We are due for a period of quite fine weather and one hopes that the population ‘en masse’ do not go mad and assume that all restrictions have now gone. There are some grounds for cautious optimism, however, as I understand that the majority of people in the country think a slow and gradual release of the lockdown is absolutely correct and although the libertarian wing of the Conservative party are pressing for much earlier end to the lockdown, it looks as though wiser counsels are prevailing. It is being said in government that we cannot have a ‘third’ lockdown and therefore it is critical that we get the current timetable absolutely correct. All that one can say is ‘So far, so good‘ and at this stage let us hope that we do not get derailed in the few weeks ahead.
It was a little cloudy and overcast today but there is the promise of warmer weather to come. We had a slightly different routine today because we had decided to do some outline household jobs this morning and then take the car down to town to pick up the newspapers and also also to pop into Waitrose. There I had espied a basket full of spring bulbs and also a nice little container with a young rhubarb plants within it. The latter seems to be an odd present but I am sure that our friend in Oxfordshire can find a good use for it in a small corner of her vegetable garden (but rhubarb is best left for a year before pulling it in its second year) When we got the park, we bumped into several people who we had met in the past and who were vaguely looking out for us – being an hour later than normal might have helped us coincide with these folks in any case.The ‘upper’ seats were occupied so we had to contend with the lower seats that we used to occupy before we decided to migrate. And so, after several chats, we made for home and had a fairly light lunch as neither of us felt particularly hungry.
In the early afternoon, I had a ‘package’ delieverd two days earlier than I had been anticipating. Having dug around in my computer system, I had discovered some statistical software that I had written in my pre-Windows and pre-Mac days – evidently, I had no technology upon this would run but that had not troubled me over the years. However, the thought occurred to me that it might be possible to pick up a rather out-of-date laptop which would be sold ‘for a pittance’ on the grounds that nobody would want one in these internet days. Anyway, I trawled the web and thank that an IBM ThinkPad was on sale – the build quality of these was considered so good that it was rumoured that NASA had forbidden its employees to buy anything else but these. The keyboard alone is reckoned to be one of the finest ever made (by the cognoscenti) To cut a long story I put in a bid for this machine which was said to be in perfect working order save the battery needed replacing but the operating system was Windows XP which I always thought was particularly good and stable. My bid, which was less than 5% of its original selling price was, to my amazement, accepted and the machine loaded with Word and Excel and in in a brand new case arrived today.
Well, I have now had he chance for a little play and how pleased I am! To get me going I had indulged in a very good Windows XP book (subtitled ‘The Missing Manual – the book that should have been in the box‘) which I had possessed and disposed of before but at £3.48 for over 600 pages and incredibly well written, I was happy to replace this. Having had to update some details the BIOS (date and time settings), I fairly soon got going with the XP home page and of course all of the old memories come flooding back. I was delighted to navigate my way to the DOS prompt (which I need to recognise a pen drive and some USB-based flash memory) I had already ordered a 32GB little usb stubby flash memory unit which Amazon sold me for £6.18 which was not going to break the bank and almost acts as a small-scale external drive. Having got used to some basic navigation, I formatted my flash memory as FAT32 so it could be both read and written to in MAC and in IBM-PC machines. Then I located some of my statistical folders which were ridiculously small by modern standards as the two folders with two quite large statistical programs within them were only about 3.5 Mb. I got these copied over to me flash memory and saw the programs running for the first time in about 20 years which was quite a pleasant surprise. As the programs run within a sort of DOS-box within Windows XP there is no Windows clutter and overload to cope with and they were blindingly fast. So a very pleasant first day of playing in my sand-pit! Whilst I was rummaging in a storage cupboard thinking that I may have some old 3½ floppies, I did discover some more software that I had written as well as several copies of my PhD that I stored on several floppies.When I wrote it in 1996-1997, I must have taken the view that hard disks were relatively unstable and so had stored it on floppy after floppy – that does explain why it does not seem in any places that I might expect in the legacy folders of my hard disk. No doubt, I will bore you with more of this in later blogs…
Today was a day for which we have looked forward for a very long time i.e. the opportunity to see friends once the COVID-19 regulations are starting to ease off. Knowing that we were going to Oxfordshire later on in the morning, we did not rush around too much this morning but did go down in the car to collect our newspapers. We then carried on to Oxfordshire where we arrived within a minute of our appointed time. It turned out to be the most beautiful spring day it was possible to imagine and in fact the news was reported this evening that it had been the warmest March day since 1968 (53 years ago). We ate with our friends outside in their delightful garden and had a magnificent meal of salmon washed down with some excellent beer and wine. We had taken down a collection of wine and plants for our friends and they, in turn, collected some eggs from the hens that they keep so we can look forward to these. As you imagine when we had not seen each other for so long we talked over families, friends, ways of coping with the lockdown, quite a lot of politics and lots of other things that took our fancy. After a fantastic lunch and very happy few hours, we turned the car for home at arrived back at about 6.00pm.
Tonight, we are going to treat ourselves to some classic comedy programs. No doubt, to keep the nation’s spirits high, there is going to be a repeat of ‘Yes, Minister‘ and a classic ‘Fall and Die of Reginald Perrin‘ episode. I think the ‘Yes, Minister‘ episodes are particularly well crafted and there are some well-founded inside stories that most of these stories are elaborated around episodes that actually occurred. One of the ‘leakers’ was Harold Wilson’s secretary, Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender) who met with the scriptwriters over a good lunch revealing to them some of the stories that were eventually to find their way into our our television screens.
My exploration of my recently acquired IBM ThinkPad is still proceeding apace. I am setting myself the mini-task to see how much of the accretions that computers appear to naturally acquire such as log files and out-of-date remnants of installation routines can safely be deleted. There is always a slight reluctance to get rid of a program wholesale in case it takes out a vital component upon which another program relied. It is the case that some programs can be entwined with each ‘like a pig’s entrails’ so one has to proceed with a degreee of caution. However, with a playing-about type of machine like the, it doesn’t matter in the long run if something does go awry occasionally.
Today, whilst reminiscing with friends, we were almost inevitably starting to wonder what the shape of civil society will be once the worst ravages of the pandemic are over. Rather as disclosing agents are used in dentistry to reveal the existence of a film of plaque not immediately discernible to the human eye, so I wonder whether the COVID virus will have cruelly exposed some of the weakest points in our body politic. On the one hand, there will be individuals whose lives have been completely devoted by the virus. They might have lost relatives to it, they themselves might have suffered from the virus and may still be suffering the consequences of ‘long-COVID’ which seems to affect many organs within the body. And of course, the disruption to economic life will have been severe in the extreme for very many families. On the other hand there may be a small but significant part of the population who have quite a ‘good’ COVID. (I am reminded that in World War II there were some individuals who had quite a ‘good’ war if they happened to have a large garden so they could feed themselves, who might have been in a reserved occupation which meant that they didn’t have to join the front line of the armed services and who might have found some opportunities for self-enrichment via the ‘black market’) The argument for a good COVID runs like this. Some people might rather like the idea of only working a 2-3 working week at home (if you work 4 10-hour days you can have three ‘leisure’ days or at least non-working days). These ‘non-work days could be devoted to voluntary work, some opportunities for outdoor exercise for which one barely had the time in a past life – and, of course, some people’s social contacts have expanded enriching the lives of their friends and associates. So it makes one wonder whether in the ‘new’ normality, there might not quite a large percentage of the population who have no real desire to return to the ‘status quo ante‘ but are are actually quite happy with the opportunities that have been afforded to cut up one’s life space in a completely different way. Just a thought for the day?
After a beautiful day such as we had yesterday, today seemed to be equally as good. We know that this beautiful spell of weather may end fairly soon to give rise to neat Artic conditions if the weather forecasts for the forthcoming Easter weekend are to be believed. But Meg and I are enjoying the sunshine whilst we can and sauntered down to town a little later than usual as we felt some lassitude after the travelling of yesterday. Meg made straight for our usual park bench whilst I popped off to get the newspapers. When I got back, Meg was still alone but we were soon joined by our University of Birmingham friend and other close friends from church. The latter two we were particularly keen to bump into because we are booked in to quite a long Eastertide service on Saturday evening and whilst we received intimations that it would be long we are not quite sure what is the nature of the ceremonies are to be held. We will find out in a day or so in any case. I chatted away to my University of Birmingham friend about my excitement in bringing my newly acquired IBM ThinkPad into use. I have got some of my ‘easier’ statistical programs safely transferred into flash memory from whence they can be run easily (I am trying to keep quite a clear distinction between Windows programs and associated files on the hard disk of the Thinkpad whilst my own programs, Dos utilities and datafilee are kept in a portable flash memory) As an aside, it is amazing how ridiculously cheap such flash memory is now becoming. Courtesy of Amazon, I have just purchased a little USB thumb-sized SanDisk flash memory drive for which I paid £15.00 for 128GB (actually 125,000 Mb) and, once you have done the maths, this works out at 12p per Mb. I can divulge that in my newly acquired (very old!) ThinkPad, I only have a 40Gb hard disk and about 23Gb was ‘free’ for my own uses. But my recently acquired flash memory drive increases this memory by nearly 5½ times at what you must say is a minimal cost. SanDisk offers a five year warranty on this flash memory and I suppose you back up somehow on a really old-fashioned Hard Disk Drive (HDD) which might fail over time and not dramatically as is the case with flash memory. Just to conclude my little computing section for today – I was delighted to see that both MicroSoft Word (2007) edition and Excel (2007) edition had been left on the computer. I read in the file of my PhD recently re-discovered and was delighted to see that it read in perfectly with every bit of formatting (including line drawing and box graphics perfectly) In the late afternoon, I showed Meg a slide show of our original wedding photographs (black and white, which retain an original type of crispness as professional photographers know) and she managed to identify everyone on the phots from 52½ years ago which is astounding (not to say gratifying).
Tomorrow,if the weather continues to hold fair, it will be time for the lawns to receive their second ‘hair-cut’ of the season. I am always reminded that the very act of cutting releases a hormone which encourages grass to grow – in other words, once the cutting season starts, one has to carry on assiduously. There is still quite a lot of grass-cuttings lying around from the very first cut of the season last week but once the lawn has been cut (at the correct height this week) the mulching effect of the mower ought to dispose of this quite easily and the lawns will start to look tidy again. We are not the possessor of really fine lawn grasses and the like which can give a striped lawn effect – rather, we have a more ‘meadowy’ look which suits us fine.
The COVID-19 situation in France seems to be very rapidly worsening. President Macron is due to announce a range of sweeping measures including a night-time curfew. Major shops will be closed and the new measures will last for a month. President Macron is saying that ‘we will lose control if we do not act now‘ and France ‘is now facing a race against the clock‘ It looks as though medical facilities are on the brink of being will overwhelmed. Returning to the domestic front, there are several photos of absolutely shocking scenes of parks and public spaces having been extensively littered after the crowds had been out enjoying the sunshine yesterday. There are horrific scenes of parks in our major cities and whilst the British have never been very good on litter, the scenes confronting the authorities are horrifying. I am glad to say I haven’t seen any of that in our own local park but it is evident that the local police, if they had tried to intervene, would have been absolutely overwhelmed.
Well today, 1st April (‘All Fools Day‘) has dawned with no evident April fools in sight. There are two famous ones that I remember particularly well. The first was The Guardian’s special supplement on ‘Sans Serif‘ complete with encouragement for people to invest in the small country – many scurried for their atlases only to discover that San Serife does not exist. The second one, which I actually saw at the time, was the late but famous Richard Dimbleby looking at the start of the spaghetti harvest (they are draped several stringy type things over the branches of low hanging trees and had the native ‘villagers’ going round to ‘cut’ the spaghetti). This fooled an awful lot of people at the time – people remarked to each other ‘Well, I never knew that spaghetti grew on trees!‘ A few days ago, though, it was announced that as VW (Volkswagen) is going to produce only electric cars then an American subsidiary was going to rename itself from Volkswagen to Voltswagen. This is almost believable and fooled a lot of people a few days ago.
Today was always going to be a slightly different kind of day as we knew that some of our friends were going to be off playing tennis and the like. Our Waitrose order was delivered this morning and I realised that there one to two things I had forgotten to put on the list yesterday morning so we popped into Waitrose to collect these.We also bought a couple of cards one of which will serve as an Easter card from a friend from whom we had received one recently and the other will serve as a bereavement card for a friend of a friend whose husband had been very ill following a stroke and for whose family his demise might well have been a blessed release. We then popped into Poundland to collect one or two cosmetic things for Meg (not out first choice of retail store but any port in a storm) and having got these popped into the park where the coffee was particularly appreciated as it was appreciably colder and windier than yesterday). There we met with one of our regulars who, although in his 80’s, does a round walk of 10 miles a day – tomorrow he is off to play a round of golf. I wonder if I can do that sort of thing in about 10-11 years time – I doubt it somehow.
This afternoon was scheduled to be ‘lawn mowing cutting’ day. After the trials of last week, today was, as they say, a ‘breeze’ and I got the large front lawn cut in two directions (North-South and than East-West) within 40 minutes. Then the back was easily done and I must say that both the lawns are looking so much better now that the grass-cuttings left around from last week’s mowing were now effectively ‘mulched’ (I have a mulching-style mower) and their appearance has improved tremendously. After a cup of tea, I had a look at a shelf where I keep one or two computer ‘mice’ and was very lucky to marry a Logitech bluetooth mouse up with its nano-receiver (which plugs into the USB port) These small receivers can get separated from their ‘parents’ very easily but now that I have another working Bluetooth mouse I popped it onto the new ThinkPad where it works a treat! Another pleasant bonus for me today which I was not anticipating.
Now for absolutely ridiculous statistics time. Most of the polytechnics at the start of the IT revolution thought that it would be better to invest in small scale laboratories of PC’s rather than mainframe terminals – so in 1997, Leicester Polytecnic had about a dozen of these labs with about 16 machines in each. When I left the Scraptoft campus to take up a new job, each machine was equipped with 20Mb of memory (admittedly, this was on the point of being updated) If every polytechnic was the same, then the memory I purchased recently (128GB flash memory purchased for £15) would have been enough memory for each machine in each lab in each of the 30 polytechnics around the country. Another way of expressing this ‘story’ is that I could have equipped eacb lab throughout the country in each of the 30 polytechnics for about ¼p per laboratory.
If you want something really scary, then consider this quote from Boris Johnson today. Looking at the situation in France which he describes as ‘very, very sad‘ then the following stark comment might make us sit bold upright in our chairs. ‘All the experience of the last year is that, when they get it in France… two or three weeks later it comes to us‘ says the PM. Of course, we have a much higher vaccination rate than in France but taking the PM’s at face value, then perhaps we are being forewarned not to be complacent and that a third wave will soon hit us emanating from the near continent.
The day turned out, weather-wise, not to be the kind of day we were expecting. After the fairly dismal and cool day yesterday, we had a fairly bright and sunny day today with the added bonus that we were not really expecting it.The weather forecasters tend to be full of gloom and doom about the cold weather (including perhaps snow) which is going to sweep over the whole country on Monday next and it might even persist for a few days. The forecasters are indicating that ‘no part of the UK will remain immune from snow showers’ on Monday next. However, I suspect that the powers that be might well be rubbing their hands in glee because the cold weather may well keep people at home and hence not contribute to the large crowds that could well threaten a resurgence of the virus. On the other hand, people who would be meeting with their relatives in the open air in gardens and the like may be tempted to go indoors which would not be a good thing. After collecting our ration of the Saturday newspapers, we made our way to the park in which, although not teeming with people, most of our favourite benches were occupied so we had to seek out alternatives down by the side of the lake. On our way home we had two extensive chats, the first with some of our church friends to whom I had lent a copy of Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children‘ which won the Booker prize at the time. Then, as we progressed up the hill, we had another chat with our Italian friend and informed her of the death of a husband of a mutual acquaintance of ours. We wished each other well for the Easter season – I had previously bought some general purpose cards from Waitrose and sent one of them as a quasi-Easter card to Meg’s uncle in North Wales. However, upon posting it, I discovered it might not be collected until Monday (for which, read Tuesday) because of the Bank Holiday so he might not actually receive it until about next Thursday which is way after the event. However, as they say, it is the thought that counts after all.
The COVID-19 news still seems to be in the balance. Having sunk to a low level of infections, the ‘R’-rate is estimated to be in the range 0.8-1.0 so if it were to be 1.0 then this would imply threat the level of new infections was relatively stable i.e. each person infected would go on and infect exactly one other person (but not more). Boris Johnson is going on record to persuade people not to meet indoors, even if vaccinated (we know from the Christmas period that these ‘family get togethers’ can have very deleterious consequences as young people may infect older people) Although Meg and I will have to wait another 10 days before our second dose of the vaccine, we suppose that some people may imagine that once they have had two injections they are relatively safe. The truth is, of course, that even a doubly vaccinated person is still a risk to others and perhaps even to themselves. The degree of risk has been reduced by vaccinations but is still there.
Tomorrow evening, Meg and I are booked into an ‘Easter vigil' in our local church. At this point of time, we do not know exactly what we have let ourselves in for but whereas our normal service starts at 6.00pm this one will start at 8.00pm and may well last for about two hours. We understand that as well as a Mass and benediction, there is likely to be some periods of reflection, some processions around the church and perhaps even some singing of sacred music performed for us. Meg and I have never been to one of these Easter vigils before and hence we can only speculate about its length and contents. This Easter Sunday might be quite a strange, not to mention surreal, experience. One always imagines that Easter is associated with pale spring sunshine, a proliferation of flowering trees, shrubs and plants and the opportunity to meet particularly with family and friends. This Sunday and Monday, though, may be bitterly cold, snow-swept and generally unpleasant. Family gatherings under these circumstances will be characterised by the chattering teeth because of the cold and a general inclination not to spend more time than is necessary in the cold. Of course there’s always the TV in days like these and, in the absence of anything better, Meg and I may well raid the archives of YouTube to see if there is an opera that will take us out of ourselves. An interesting philosophical conundrum of a familiar nature rears its head at this time of year. The question is ‘At what age do children cease to expect Easter eggs from their parents? ‘ Evidently children in their pre-teen and teen years can expect to have these ritualised presents but does the same apply when you are in your 40’s or 50″s? I just thought I would pose the question without knowing the answer.
Well, today has been a most interesting day. We keep on expecting the weather to drift colder and, although it was a little cooler, the skies were clear and the spring sun was shining. So Meg and I had a very pleasant walk down into town. Having picked up our newspapers, we knew that we were going to make a flying visit into Waitrose, primarily to buy Easter eggs for the kiddywinks (son and daughter-in-law) before tomorrow. Then the bottom dropped out of our worlds when we were told that not only had Waitrose sold out of Easter eggs but so had every other store in Bromsgrove. Some of the assistants who know us well guided us towards a substitute telling us knowingly that we would get a lot more chocolate if we followed their suggestions. So we bought some miniaturised boxes of Cadbury Creme Eggs but complemented this with a good thick bars of some exotic dark chocolate. This will have to suffice under the circumstances but I never confess that in a month of Sundays I never thought actually that the stores would run out – normally they are teeming with stock at this time of year. We met with several of our groups of friends and as the spring sunshine was so pleasant, we spent longer than perhaps we should in conversations with each one of them.After all of this chattering it was pretty late when we actually did get back home. Fortunately, I had taken the foresight to buy a Chicken and Leek pie from Waitrose and all that this needed was to be popped into the oven and complemented with some green vegetables.
We knew that later on in the evening, we were booked in to attend an extended church service (an especial liturgy for Easter Saturday) so we had a fairly lazy afternoon and a put-me-on tea knowing that we were going to attend church at 8.0pm and we needed to leave the house at 7.30 to secure a parking place. Bu this afternoon, after an early BBC News, there was a special rendition of Handel’s Messiah (one of our favourites) and this was staged in an most interesting way. Instead of being in a church or the Royal Albert Hall, the performance took place in the London Coliseum. All of the orchestra was ‘socially distanced’ upon the stage and the conductor who was also playing some harpsichord continuo was conducting from the harpsichord standing up (so he could be seen by all of the members of the choir) The choir, meanwhile, were socially distanced across the whole of the normal audience space whilst many of the soloists performed their pieces from within one of the boxes. The way it was filmed made each soloist appear as though they were performing in their own miniaturised theatre and the whole effect was stunning. The choir was the chorus of the English National Opera who also provided the orchestra. I noticed that many of the instruments used were either originals or copies of originals e.g. some of the trumpets were side valve and looked remarkably different from their modern counterparts. The quality of the imported soloists as well as the choirs was superb and whilst it must have taken a certain amount of planning, I did wonder whether the experiment might be repeated (although, of course, they generally need a paying audience to finance the whole lot)
When we got to church, we anticipated rather a long and perhaps drawn-out service. In the event, the service lasted 1¼ hours which was a little shorter than we had been led to expect and there were several special liturgical insertions as well as music to make the whole service seem different. Before the service started, I merged to sneak into the presbytery and have quick chat with the priest as the first bottle of damson gin seemed to have gone missing.Anyway, I had brought along another one but apparently he had taken possession of the first so now he has two bottles to make a merry clergyman of him.The service was conducted briskly but with all of the necessary decorum so we think that the congregation and priest should get along fine together.
Yesterday, the new battery arrived for the IBM ThinkPad and it seems to be working OK. The little instruction sheet indicated that on first use, you shouldn’t charge it up from its semi-charged state but rather run it down to about 2% (but not lower) and then immediately attempt a recharge up to 100%. I wonder if this indicates its is an ‘older’ generation of battery (nickel-based ? and not a modern lithium-ion that should have this kind of memory effect) Last night, getting fed up of the Chrome browser telling me it could not be updated, I went on the web and found a browser specially dedicated to older computers particularly XP which first saw the light of day about 19 years ago. I installed a blindly fast browser called K-Meleon (which I only to use for internal file browsing purposes anyway). Their own blurb maintains:
‘K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser based on the Gecko layout engine developed by Mozilla which is also used by Firefox. K-Meleon is Free, Open Source software released under the GNU General Public License and is designed specifically for Microsoft Windows (Win32) operating systems
This sounds ideal for my purposes as it is small, fast and functional (for what I want to do)
A few days ago, we thought that today, Easter Sunday, would be gloomy and overcast. In practice, today had clear blue skies and there had evidently been an overnight frost. I made my way down into town fairly early to pick op our newspapers – the streets were deserted at about 8.00am apart from the very occasional dog-walker and the even more occasional jogger. Meg remained in bed as it was possible that staying out late last night was a bit too much for her system to bear, so whilst she slept, I breakfasted on cereals on my own. Then Martin and Mandy delayed their walk into town whilst I went down to see if I could rendezvous with our University of Birmingham friend. As it turned out, he did not ‘swing by’ so I spent about an hour in the sunshine waiting for him and tidying up my bag at the same time. I spent quite a lot of time hunting for a writing implement and then some scraps of paper – once I had located these writing materials I reminded myself of the procedures I have developed to get any files I might need from the internet onto my IBM ThinkPad (via my computer and the judicious use of thumb drives) I am discovering that my new found little friendly ThinkPad is a little picky over the ways in which various USB peripherals are brought into play. I turn it on with one USB permanently populated with a thumb-sized pen drive which is about 26GB and effectively doubles my memory. Then I attach the hub extender and switch on the nano-receiver for the mouse (next) and finally the second flash memory disk I use as a transfer disk from my main iMAC computer for material I may have downloaded for it from the web. To the uninitiated, Windows XP is amazingly insecure and virus writers, knowing that MicroSoft has ended all support for XP, can target it in the hope of rich pickings or random damage. When I eventually did get home, I finished off the Waitrose pie which we started yesterday – I somehow couldn’t bear the thought of too much cooking so this was a way of getting a lunch fairly quickly.
This afternoon, Meg and I ‘stumbled’ into watching two University boat races. Because of the insecure nature of Hammersmith bridge, the Boat Races have had to be routed away from the Thames and the chosen location was north Great Ouse river in Cambriedgeshire where the course was long and straight which, in the absence of bends, made the races much closer than normal. As it turned out, Cambridge won both the Women’s race and then the Men’s race in each case by a similar margin (just a bit short of a boat length). In races this close, it was always possible that Oxford could ‘catch’ Cambridge but their tacticians (and home river advantage?) won the day, despite the Oxford teams being the favourites before the race was actually run.
Tonight, I have just had my usual struggle trying to get a reply of Handel’s Messiah from last night (for Meg’s benefit). Faced with the ‘Black Screen of Death’ I had to take out the Firestick, reinsert it, get some new batteries inside it and then fumble about to get what I wanted. I cannot work out why but the technology seems to work fine on my son’s and daughter-in-law’s TV but ours always seems to take an enormous amount of fiddling about with all kinds of hit-and-miss before I get anywhere. They used to day ‘A child of five can operate this technology – send for a child of five‘ so I had better try and kidnap one from somewhere.
Tomorrow it is claimed to be ‘three jumpers a day’ as the long predicted bad weather sweeps over the whole of the country. Arctic winds will cause temperatures to plunge back to winter levels on Easter Monday and bring a ‘significant’ wind chill. Overnight on Sunday, figures could drop as low as -7C (19.4F) in some areas of Scotland, with sub-zero figures also forecast in parts of northern England. A high of 17C (63F) in southern England on Sunday afternoon will drop to just 6C (43F) on Monday morning. I hope that this is just one blast of bad weather and then we can get back to watching a normal springtime return. The weather conditions are a little strange because my car also has a very fine sprinkling of what I think is Saharan sand thrown high into the atmosphere and then deposited on our cars. Well, it needed a wash tomorrow in any case but I think that will have to wait until Tuesday now.
The COVID-19 deaths and cases are now at their lowest since early September – but after the children have been home from school for two weeks and there are going to be a lot of family reunions (in theory in the open air), one wonders what the ‘R-‘ rate is going to be in a fortnight’s time.
Today has been a kind of day to defy all expectations. According to the weather forecasts, we should have had an incredibly stormy day with a blast of Artic air to boot. We certainly got the blast of Artic air all right but the skies were blue and clear. The wind was bitingly cold and our hats were anything but secure – but we obtained our newspapers and then went on our way to shiver in the park. We met up briefly with out 10-mile-a-day walking octogenarian but as it was so cold, none of us wanted to stand around for too long chatting. In fact, there had been flurries of snow earlier on this morning and some is still possible in the hillier regions of the country. It was still quite late when we got home and we had to throw together a quick kind of lunch (thank goodness for some Quorn which appears as type of simulated mince – tasty enough with a few spices and brown sauce!)
This afternoon, I spent a certain amount of time trying to configure the versions of Outlook which I have found on my ThinkPad to work with an email account I already with Outlook.com. This ought to be straightforward and despite a plethora of advice on the web I haven’t yet succeeded. I know it is possible to have a web-based email client but I am trying to avoid the web on the XP to avoid the ‘virus storm’ which is out there. I have one or two more options yet to try before I give up entirely.
We have had a further announcement from Boris to the effect that the Roadmap to the gradual end to the lockdown is still on schedule. This means that as from next Monday, shops, hairdressers and pub beer gardens will all be allowed to open. Mind you, Boris is urging a degree of caution and I suspect that as well as socially distancing, we shall all be wearing masks and providing contact details when we enter any establishment. We still have still to make contact with our visiting hairdresser to make sure that we are booked into her schedules. Together with most of the population, I am sure we cannot wait until we get ourselves well and truly shorn. It also appears that gyms will be allowed to re-open so I imagine that means that my Pilates class will resume – I must remind myself to get in touch with my teacher to see if she is going to get us all organised.
Almost inevitably, with the end of lock-down in sight and spring just about upon us, our thoughts are beginning to turn to the next few months ahead. Many of us would have organised holidays, preferably in warmer climes for our major summer break. But the difficulty here is that foreign holidays now seem quite a distant prospect. Even if we had been vaccinated with a couple of jabs and the rate of infection was reassuringly low, what would be the situation in whatever countries we intended to visit? Even for an ardent Francophile, France seems to be absolutely not the European destination of choice. On a similar vain, we cannot start to think about when we can see our closest Spanish friends again. Meg and I have an option for 10 days in Rome (a pilgrimage, no less) in late September but we are putting the possibilities of this coming off as well below 50:50. So forgetting our foreign holidays for a moment, the word of the moment is a ‘staycation’ in which many will stay at home and have lots of trips out. Many of the holiday destinations in England and Wales that have been abandoned in an era of cheap flights are now almost full to overflowing with bookings (so we are given to understand) and I am not sure I particularly want to holiday in over-crowded resorts with lots of my fellow countrymen. Apart from holidays, though, we will probably take the opportunity to visit various parts of the country to visit relatives who got missed out last Christmas. We have at least four trips that we need to make in the next few months ahead but one is wary of booking them at this stage. Meg has three cousins/uncles that we need to see and I have my family in Yorkshire to see but planning is somewhat difficult, in view of the fact that a ‘third wave’ could suddenly rear its ugly head and put all of our plans into the melting plot again. Turning to the world of work again, one wonders how after a year may people will retain a pattern of working for at least one if not two days at home and office attendance will be as valued as ‘gatherings around the water cooler’ i.e. social gossip as well as the work for which one is ultimately attending the office. And if we wanted to really depress ourselves, there is a hidden tide of undiagnosed but developing cancers that might be afflicting some of the population as well as the thousands of children who will be attending secondary schools with depressingly diminished standards of literacy (and numeracy).
Today our weather had evidently moderated somewhat – the very clear skies of yesterday had given way to some interesting clouds (some white and fluffy, some evidently moisture-bearing) and whilst there was a coolish breeze, it did not have the severity that we experienced yesterday. So our walk to gather our newspapers was quite pleasant and then we made our way into the park where we thought we would coincide (as we did) with our University of Birmingham friend. After quite a chat and joined by one or two others of our acquaintances (including some who have actually read this blog), the weather suddenly seemed to take a turn for the worse so we willingly decided it was time to return home. On our way home, though, we paused outside the house of one of our oldest friends down the street. We discussed the likely date of the funeral arrangements for a near neighbour whose husband had died and we speculated that, as soon as the weather improves, we would be in a position to drink tea (or champagne!) in the gardens of each other’s houses. I must say that with the plethora of spring flowers and with all of the flowering trees and shrubs in profusion then all of the gardens down to road are looking a treat. However, there were certainly flurries of snow in the wee small hours of the morning as well as another flurry of snow in the late afternoon. I suppose that it is quite within the bounds of possibility that in a few day’s time we have ‘snowstorms’ which are a strange mixture of actual snow flakes mingling with the blossom from the various trees that are swept off by a gusts of wind.
After we got home, we had one of those rare moments when all of the family members were starting to think about their prospects in the year or so ahead. I suppose there is something about both the time of year and also the start of the end of the lockdown that encourages one to start to raise one’s eyes slightly towards the horizon and wonder what our various prospects for the year or so ahead. Meg and I know that in the fullness of time we will eventually move into our very last house where all the relevant goods and services (not to mention friends) are well within walking distance. This is assuming, of course, that one no longer uses a car (the occasional taxi can be cheap enough) and that you have a house that is perfectly adapted to one’s needs. Why some English people think that retiring to a little village which I could call ‘Little-Puddleton-by the-water’ with one bus a week and no village shop or other services is beyond me. I suppose that the ‘rural’ ideology is strongly implanted in the minds of the populace by estate agents amongst others. I am always amused by the fact that when a new bit of ‘infill’ occurs, there is a desire to advertise it with the symbolism of oak trees and squirrels and exotically sounding names, preferably with the name ‘Orchard’ in it – and this evocation of a rural idyll will sell the houses. I am not sure that other countries romanticise the countryside to quite the same extent that the English do, but I may be wrong in all of this.
Last night, I was playing about with my IBM ThinkPad and wondering if I could get some virus protection on it. Having trawled the web I downloaded an apparently ‘free’ antivirus program with excellent reviews and decided to try it out. It turned out that the ‘free’ bit was only the ability to use it ‘free’ for about three days of evaluation built into it before some money was demanded of you. However, it did have within the suite various functional bits that removed some redundant programs and ‘clutter’ from the computer (which seemed to work very well), as well as removing some ‘start up’ programs which one did not need but which slow the whole start up time. I vaguely wondered if I might happen to have an installation disk for Windows 7 which, indeed, I did locate. However, if you try to install this over XP you have to physically remove all of the XP first and then install Windows 7 in the empty space. I contemplated this for a moment and decided it was better not to upgrade but to be happy with a limited system which I knew did work rather than one which aborted, leaving you with nothing. I also found a legitimate copy of a Norton Internet Security 2011 (complete with its cellophane wrapping) and gleefully installed it – only to discover that the Norton system refused to accept its own Product Key (indicating its authenticity) Nonetheless, some of this suite works as intended and when I have time I will take a camera shot of the product key, send it off to Norton, and ask them to supply me with a code that works (or an updated product).
Today it was evident that we were going to get some cooler days – but not the biting artic winds of a few days ago. We collected our newspapers and popped into Waitrose for the odd one or two things we needed before our on-line order arrives tomorrow. As the weather conditions were quite cool, attendance at the park was down this morning but we fortunate just to have a brief respite from the winds whilst we drank our coffee. So it was no great surprise that none of our normal friends would made an appearance today although we did bump into some friends of friends just outside the park gates. So we made our way home in plenty of time for a much anticipated lunch of fish cakes (which we tend to have about once a week) In order to give our fish cakes a bit of a boost in flavour, I have developed a quick little sauce which just provides a piquant touch (equal quantities of mayonnaise and ‘1000 Island’ dressing with a good squirt of tomato ketchup) then heated up for about a minute in a little glass tumbler in the microwave. This afternoon, we devoted ourselves to glancing through a pile of newspapers and then throwing all of them away as there was nothing of worth to note – this is done at quite a timely time as our ‘green’ recycling bin ia due for emptying tomorrow on a 2-weekly schedule.
The news this afternoon has been dominated by the view of the regulators that there may be an incredibly small risk of a blood clot (approximate risk of 1 in a million resulting in death) with the AstraZeneca virus. There will be a lot of ‘I told you so!’ from some of our continental rivals who always seem to have had their doubts about the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. The UK advice is now to offer an alternative vaccine to those under 30, probably the Moderna variant. However, the regulators are trying to reassure the population that a vaccine preventing COVID-19 still outweighs the risks of side effects for the vast majority of people. One is left with the thought that it will not take much to deter some people from receiving their jab and they may well be putting themselves at risk. When we were nearly home, we passed one of our near neighbours who told us that the local vaccination centre, a re-purposed Arts Centre, was practically closed as they had run out of vaccine. As Meg and I are due to receive our second jab next Monday, we hope that the authorities know about us and that they have some supplies of vaccine held by for us. Apparently, this lull was known about but supplies should increase in a week or so. We know that supplies of the AstraZeneca virus have been impacted with supply problems at the manufacturing centre in India (who probably need every dose they can possible lay their hands on).
The trial the police officer accused of the murder of George Floyd in the USA is still receiving a lot of media exposure with live testimony streamed from the courtroom. The fact that the prosecution is bringing along witnesses such as the policeman’s own Chief of Police (as well as an army of training instructors) to say that kneeling on a suspect’s neck for 9 minutes whilst they lay prone on the ground was not a legitimate use of force. Conviction would now appear to be a certainty but after the conviction that there may be some weeks before sentencing is passed. It may be the first time in American history that a white policeman is judged to be guilty of a black suspect and hence the massive amount of interest in the case. I have a feeling that there will be a lot more to this case as the days unfold.
When this pandemic started, Meg and I said to each other that this would present us with an ideal opportunity to go through lots of things and ‘declutter’ the house (or the parts of us that we live in). Now that we have been over a year since the start of the pandemic, we might reflect how much progress we have actually made, The answer is ‘ Zilch’ i.e. nothing. One way or another, we seem to be busy as our walks to the park and chatting with friends and acquaintances has assumed a higher priority (as it should, of course) rather than tidying up old cupboards. When I used to speak with people who had to move house for occupational reasons (in the 70’s-90’s), they used to argue that moving house proved to be the best way of not accumulating too much. We have now lived in this house for 13½ years which is quite long enough to accumulate more than we should. There must be a moral in that somewhere.
Today was a sad day in the way in which it started – Meg and I received a phone call from the son of an ex-colleague to inform us that his father had just died the day before. As it turned out, his father was 98 years of age but in his later years had suffered from dementia but was also both deaf and blind so I suppose his existence may have been a pretty miserable one. His son and I exchanged some reminiscences about how his father – an ex-Royal Navy Commander- never entirely got rid of his military ways and some of his ‘bon mots‘ went down in the annals of our department’s history. One of the most famous of these was the example of a how a group of female students who had just returned from their year of work experience (in which the Polytechnics specialised) were chattering excitedly around a noticeboard when our colleague espied them. He then announced ‘Ah! young ladies! Come into my office and let me debrief you all!’ The students all giggled and I said to him ‘You can’t say that‘ whereupon he responded ‘Well, I really do want to debrief all of these students here and now' Collapse of stout party. We could multiply these tale over and over – but Meg and he worked very closely on the placement of students for about 10-15 years. We expect that the funeral arrangements will consist of a video link into the crematorium proceedings but this will not take place for some time yet.
The morning walk turned out to be more pleasant than we expected – certainly better than yesterday. Having picked up our newspapers, we made our way into the park where the fine weather had brought out the families with masses of young children on their scooters. A glance at the ‘top row’ of seats showed that they were all occupied so we had to satisfy ourselves with our erstwhile resting place by the side of the boating pond. But then one of our park (wheelchair) friends espied us and as we had not seen each other for several days we exchanged our various bits of news. Our friend was due to have second dose of the vaccine tomorrow and as she had been a little poorly after her first dose was not looking forward to the experience. We tried to reassure her that all would be well and we passed on the nostrum that ‘there is nothing to fear but fear itself‘ We gave her our best wishes for the day ahead and got home a little later than usual (our morning walk having been delayed by the Waitrose delivery and by the telephone call concerning our ex-colleague’s demise).
After lunch, we did a most unusual thing and stayed glued to the TV all afternoon. Sky television are broadcasting the live proceedings of the trial of the policeman who murdered George Floyd. This was the famous (infamous!) case of the policeman who knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 9½ minutes after which he was pronounced dead. The prosecution had called as a witness a world expert on the physiology of breathing (who had written the standard textbook on the subject) and he gave a very detailed and fascinating account of the anatomy and physiology of one’s neck. His conclusion at the end of a long and detailed explanations complete with diagrams, annotated video-stills and even mathematical equations showed the relationship between force and constriction of the windpipe and that the death was due to an absence of oxygen. This expert witness – Dr. Martin Tobin- may prove difficult to challenge but we shall have to see what unfolds tomorrow. As it stands the evidence seems to be beyond compelling. The second piece of TV which absorbed us was the the new US President, Joe Biden and his deputy, intending to row back some of the excesses of the gun lobby and a bring some degree of moderation to the American obsession with guns. I had not fully appreciated the ways in which the controls on guns are easy to evade in the USA – for example, if you buy a gun at a gun store you have to prove documentation on ID and place of residence but none of these restrictions apply if you buy a gun from a gun fair! Also you can buy a ‘ghost gun’ in which you purchase the various parts and assemble them yourself. This is all quite legal and there are no serial numbers on any parts of the guns so can be used by criminals and others. Jo Biden is seeking to use executive orders to order an immediate ban on some of these practices but other measures will require the support of Congress where he is liable to make very little progress, if any at all. So it may be that the mass shootings continue as well as the appalling death toll. Some of the facts Biden adduced are incredible to us in the UK. For example, every day in the US, 316 people are shot, with 106 of them dying. The cost of gun violence, according to the president, is $280bn every year – that’s in hospitals, lawyers, prisons, physiotherapy and lost productivity.
Today started off as what you might term a ‘normal’ day but it was not to end that way, as we shall shortly see. The day started off with quite a lot of rain in the air and developed into kind of thin drizzle when we started off to go down into the town. We picked up our newspapers and then made for the park where we were pleased to unite/coincide with our University of Birmingham friend who we had not seen for several days. We had quite a lot of news to exchange with other – in particular, we recounted the stories about our ex-Leicester Polytechnic colleague about whom there were many stories to relate, many of them amusing in nature (as yesterday’s blog reveals). On our walk down, we received a call on my mobile from our visiting hairdresser who had been trying to make contact with us for some time. We have an appointment now in our diaries for about a month’s time so we will have to endure our shaggy locks for some time yet. We were exchanging a lot of stories with our friend about what is often known as school boy ‘howlers’ i.e. things written by school children which are the results of stress and half-remembered facts but which now are incredibly amusing. One of these that springs to mind is the story that ‘Sir Francis Drake played with his bowels whilst the Armada sailed up the English Channel‘ whilst yet another reveals that ‘Migration is a headache that birds get when they fly south for the winter‘ Whole books have been written full of stories like these and a few are still genuinely amusing, even to this day.
Whilst we were in the park, I turned on my phone to check something or other and received the news flash that the Duke of Edinburgh had died. Like the rest of the population, I felt a sense of loss for the other members of the royal family but knew that the minute we got home we were going to get ‘wall-to-wall- coverage’ of the sequelae to the death of the husband of the monarch. I was prepared for the fact that the news channels would be dominated by this but not that the BBC went into blanket coverage, broadcasting the historical tributes and stories of the Duke’s life in the most extreme detail on every single channel. I suppose that they must have masses of material ‘in the can’ waiting for this event to occur because it was evident that the Duke was getting increasingly frail. At the age of 99, there were some of who thought that he would not survive his latest stay in hospital where he had yet another heart operation designed to keep him going (was it another stent, I wonder?) I did have the feeling, though, that is he had managed to hold on for another couple of months or so, then he might just have made it to his 100th birthday (on which occasion, the Queen would no doubt have to send him a special letter of congratulations) But having said that, he has probably got at least one letter of congratulation having married to the Queen for over 70 years (73 in fact)
.I have a very slight personal recollection of the Duke of Endinburgh as follows. His mother was known as ‘Princess Alice of Battenberg‘ although she had many other titles by which she was known, including Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark. (Her story is quite a long and convoluted one if you want to follow up that sort of thing via Wikipedia). She had suffered several traumas in her life including deafness and schizophrenia and was given shelter by the present Queen and Prince Philip in quarters in an obscure part of Buckingham Palace. Anyway, she died in December, 1969, three days before the Duke if Edinburgh was due to attend a graduation ceremony at the University of Salford. Although we had been looking forward to receiving our MSc’s at the hand of the Duke when we heard about the death of his mother three days beforehand and we said to each other ‘Well that’s it – he will never come to Salford now‘. (I checked out the veracity of this statement by rummaging around to find the exact date when I did graduate with my MSc and my recollections were correct) Well, he did come to Salford University and gave us our degrees, exhibiting, no doubt, the old-fashioned sense of duty and devotion to the advancement of the young that we have by now come to expect.
Last night, I was attempting a procedure on my newly acquired IBM ThinkPad and succeeded in somehow messing it up so much that it became unusable. Thinking that I had nothing to lose, I decided to reformat it with a copy of Windows 7 which completely overwrites the version of XP on the hard disk. This has just about succeeded and the version of Windows 7 works OK except it cannot establish any wireless contact with the internet and also seems to have lost all of its sound drivers. Whether this reparable or not, only time will tell.
After being told of the death of one of our ex-colleagues from the then Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University), I decided to have a rummage through one of the drawers of our filing cabinet where I suspected that I might have some photos from our Leicester Polytechnic days. My rummaging efforts were rewarded in that I managed to find one photo in which there were ten of us featured, standing up (i.e. not in front of a dining table) in a posed photo with Meg and myself and some 8 other colleagues from the Business School at De Montfort. I am trying to work out from various clues when the photo was taken – we were dressed in rather late 70’s clothes but there again, it was a student ‘do’ so we would all have raided our wardrobes and grabbed some smart-enough clothes i.e. not just especially bought as if for a wedding. If I had to put a time frame on it, I would date it between 1985-1990 but that is still the order of 35 years go. I then established an email contact with the son of our recently departed colleague and told him about the photo I had unearthed. I am probably going to scan it and then make a PDF of it. If I can I will also make a copy of it on some glossy paper and then I can despatch the whole towards Leicestershire. The family may be making some kind of archive of their father and, as we know, it is quite interesting after somebody’s death that the recollections of the departed one very much depends on the role occupied (family member, friend, colleague and so on) In the fullness of time, it might be that we meet with the family and share some reminiscences but this will have to wait until the lock-down measures are such that we can all meet indoors to have a lunch-time meal in a restaurant.
After all of this, we walked down into town and got our newspapers as well as a visit to Poundland to pick up some of the routine things that only that store seems to sell. We then made our way into the park and eventually located ourselves on one of the top benches where we were soon joined by some of our park ‘regulars’ We were all discussing the latest debates concerning the Oxford/AstraZeneca virus and whether or not the ‘brouhaha’ over the blood-clotting dangers are a significant risk or not. One of our regular friends told us that some of the doctor’s clinics were being overwhelmed by people phoning up to enquire of their doctors the relative risks of the AstraZeneca virus and they had neither the time nor the resources to cope with a flood of enquiries like this.
This afternoon when we turn on the TV there is still yet more coverage of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh. But even as I blog tonight, there is a somewhat more critical tone being displayed by some aspects of the media. For example, Channel 4 is broadcasting a documentary revealing things that could not (tastefully) be discussed until an event such as this. For example, Prince Philip felt incredibly excluded from the royal protocols as his first two children were only known by the surname of ‘Windsor’ But how many knew that Prince Philip with the aid of Louis Mountbatten managed to get the family name changed to ‘Mountbatten-Windsor’ before the birth of the 3rd royal child. So it is now being revealed how Prince Philip as the ultimate ‘outsider’ was managing to transform some of the more conservative elements of the Royal Family into something more akin to the 1960’s. Another fact that is emerging is that several films were shot of the royal family in a more ‘domestic’ and less ‘regal’ role – but many of these films having been made have not then been shown – until now that is. Channel 4 might be quite an interesting watch on this subject in the next few days (the BBC would never dare do anything like this of course)
Tonight, we went to church as usual and were part of a congregation of about 45 or so (the current limit) As it was raining cats-and-dogs when we came out of church and we are encouraged to depart quickly, all we managed to do was to wave to some of the regulars that we recognised but at some time we will no doubt be able to socialise a little more easily (e.g. there are occasional functions in normal times in the adjoining parish hall). We will have to wait and see what tomorrow brings, weather-wise, but I want to get the lawns cut again as soon as I can. And, of course, the Sunday newspapers may be full of some reflection and meditation upon the life of Prince Philip and future directions for the monarchy which may be worth a good read.
It was our normal Sunday morning routine this morning where I go and collect the newspapers almost first thing in the morning and then we watch the Andrew Marr show before setting off for the park. Today when we walked down, there were the occasional blasts of very Arctic feeling air – when these moderated, there was some nice but pale spring sunshine but often so often the icy blasts would return chilling one to the marrow. Not sooner were we seated on our customary bench but we had to ensure a hail storm which was not pleasant to put it mildly. Then we almost had a gathering of the clans with lots of us regulars all coinciding so we had multiple conversations all round. We did have considerable sympathy for an elderly Irish couple that we meet almost every day in the park. Yesterday, we bumped them in Bromsgrove High Street as they were looking for a local Ladsbrooks so that they could place a bet on the winner of the Grand National. They intended to bet on the woman jockey (who may have been riding an Irish horse) In the event, we heard subsequently that this particular jockey had won – the first time a woman jockey had won the Grand National. When we saw the Irish couple, we assumed that they would be flush with their winnings but it was not to be – they hadn’t managed to find the bookies and hence had not placed their bet (and hence no winnings). Then as we were absolutely chilled we made for home where we had some lamb being prepared in the slow cooker. This I prepared last night before went to bed – coating the lamb in flour and then searing in a frying pan before transferring it to a slow cooker, adding some quickly prepared chicken/vegetable stock and the cooking overnight for some 6 hours. Then I chopped some carrrots and parsnips into minute squares before they got a good boiling (as they were due to be mashed eventually). Finally we washed some ‘pimientos de Padron’ and had them slowly cooking in some olive oil/rapeseed oil before we brought all of the elements of the meal together into our final dish.
As you might imagine, the Sunday newspapers were filled with end-to-end coverage of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh. Most of his numerous ‘gaffes’ were repeated again (probably for the last time) Of the may indiscreet stories that were told about the Duke, I rather liked his quip when Kenya was just about to declare independence. The formula is nearly always the same i.e. just on the stroke of midnight, a spotlight will illuminate the fluttering Union flag, shortly to be replaced by the flag of the newly independent nation. Just before the Union flag was lowered for the last time, The Duke of Edinburgh turned towards Jomo Kenyatta (the first president of Kenya) and quipped ‘I don’t suppose you would like to change your mind?‘ – his reply was not recorded. The second and more contemplative post I got from the newspapers related to the Queen herself. There was some very sympathetic coverage of the grief that the Queen might be experiencing and some analysis that after 73 years of marriage, she might find her few remaining years without the presence of her life long companion very difficult to bear. Let us hope she finds the resources from somewhere to manage the years ahead.
As I was checking the actual date of my graduation with an MSc (see last night’s blog), I discovered one or two things I had forgotten about. The first was a Certificate in the Schools Religious Certificate in which I gained a distinction just before my GCE ‘O’-levels and this certifies me as competent to teach religion in any Catholic school (but this would have to be seen to be believed) The second thing I discovered again was the results sheet from the Civil Service Open Competition examinations I took in 1964 ( which largely mirrors ‘O’-levels – five papers in English, Arithmetic and three voluntary subjects of French, Chemistry and Physics) In these examinations I gained exactly 600 marks out of a total of 900 which evidently gave me an average grade of 66.7. All of the results were placed in order from the highest to the lowest and I remembered that I had been placed 77th/6085 (which is 1.27% in the distribution). The numbers who passed (i.e. gained 400 marks or more which is about 45%, the same as GCE ‘O’levels) was 2662/6085 or 43%. I suppose that in today’s scales of A,B or C these results might have been classified as an ‘A’. Before the GCE was amalgamated with the CSE to produce GCSE, there were five grades of pass (A-E) and it possible, but I can’t be sure, that these marks would have given me an ‘A’ in the old system as well. The first time around, I did actually fail my ‘O’-level Physics which is a bit strange as I had good marks in my mocks, secured a 60 when I reset the exam the following year and it was one of highest grades when I sat the Civil Service exams two years later. Strange but true! Perhaps the examiner had turned over two pages at once but you did not (and were not allowed) to challenge results in those days.
Well, this is quite a significant date. For most of the population, today’s date is memorable because it is the date when some of the COVID-10 restrictions are being lifted. Of concern to many people (especially the younger elements) is that you can now have a drink with friends but only in a pub garden (and today, as it happened was the most unsuitable day for it as the weather is still pretty cold for April) But of most use to many people is the fact that ‘non-essential’ retail can now open. In particular, this means that hairdressers are open and if reports are to be believed, many have bookings that extend anything up to a month into the future. In addition, those retail outlets that haven’t gone bust are cautiously re-opening and with the restrictions on numbers entering a shop, this might mean that shops do not so much make money as minimise their losses. Gyms are open but only for individualised sessions – they are not open for group sessions which means that I will probably have to wait until May 17th (i.e. five weeks) for my Pilates class to reopen and, even then, I expect we shall be restricted to the four corners of the room. Shopping for the sake of shopping does not hold any particular attractions and it does make one wonder how many people having got used to shopping on the internet will ever want to go back to their old habits.
I mentioned in the past that I managed to put Windows 7 onto my IBM ThinkPad but without any drivers either for the WiFi or for the sound card. Anyway, I discovered a local firm that advertised ‘No fix,no fee’ and having ascertained that there was no call out charge as such, I decided to give it a go. A computer technician called round to the house this morning and confirmed for me that Windows 7 is no longer supported (hence, no drivers) and that Windows 10 basically could not run on such a machine specified at least 15 years ago. However, he took my machine away and was going to put some of the missing drivers on it but now I know that it is basically un-upgradable and also that Windows 7 has as many security ‘holes’ in it as has XP which it replaced. However, I am much better informed than I was having spoken to an expert so now I know that if/when I get this machine back, I should only use it for looking at my statistics programs (written in the 1980’s) and my PhD (written in a version of Word in 1995)
However, today’s date was a much more significant date for Meg and I because it was the date, eleven weeks on from the date when we received out first vaccination, that we were scheduled to receive our second vaccination. Accordingly, we altered our routines somewhat for the day. We went down in the car to collect out newspapers and then on into the park where we had a little walk and a quick elevenses. The we made our way to the Artrix Centre (= repurposed Arts Centre) in good time for our re-vaccination at 12.00pm. There all of the systems worked like clockwork, all the way through from being checked in at the door, then at another check-in desk and finally to the vaccination point. The staff were very caring and cheerful – we expressed our delight in getting our second dose of the vaccine and they mentioned that many people had mentioned the same thing to them. We wondered how many people had got ‘over’ concerned about the 1 in a million chance of dying from a blood clot and they mentioned to us that they had heard that A&E departments were being inundated by people worried about possible side effects. We received our vaccine jabs which we scarcely felt at all and then made our way home where we could have a leisurely lunch and afternoon, just in case we felt poorly. We were meant to be having a Skype call with one of my ex-Hampshire colleagues but this had to be called off at short notice which gave us a clear afternoon. The sun was shining and the weather looked set fair so we immediately thought it was a good opportunity to get the lawns cut. If we were going to feel poorly, this would be in a day or so and not immediately so this was an ideal opportunity to get the lawns cut as it was now ten days since the last cut. Without wanting to sound too neurotic about this, it is necessary to keep up a weekly schedule of lawn cutting until about mid-June as the grass grows so quickly at this time of year. Anyway, this was all done in plenty of time. As a nice bonus to end off the afternoon, my son and daughter-in-law went off to get their own vaccinations a couple of hours later than us. In the absence of anything else, we have some little cards with both our vaccinations dates on it which is the only ‘proof’ that we have been jabbed twice. Our daughter-in-law kindly laminated our cards for us whilst she was doing their own so it is nice to have this record until a more official ‘vaccination certificate’ will be in place (which it surely will be).
Well, this is the day after our second jab so the interesting question is whether we will get any side-effects after the second jab or not. Last night, I just had the hint of a temperature rise but this could have been imagination. Similarly, this morning, I felt that I had the slightest bit of tenderness around my jab site but this, too, could have imagination. There is rather an odd feeling about the state of the anti-lockdown this evening. Boris Johnson is saying that people must just understand that ‘we will have increased infections and increased deaths’ as we un-lockdown. He also gave us the news, if it is news , that all of the benefits we have seen is largely the result of the lockdown and not the effects of a mass vaccination campaign – I wonder what the science is behind all of this? The sight on the TV bulletins of lots of youngg people going out to drink and celebrate and not observe any social distancing does not exactly fill me full of joy. It seems to be an odd paradox that those who have vaccinated and even double vaccinated (like Meg and myself) are staying at home in the evening whereas the streets are generally filled with the younger elements of the population who have not been vaccinated. I know that some in the epidemiological community are watching current developments with a degree of apprehension. After all, what we are doing is really a massive social experiment which could go horribly, horribly wrong but is now a certainty that Boris Johnson is following ‘the dates, not the data‘ The fact that as a democratic society, we are going to have national elections shortly is probably not in our long term interests as politicians choose policies that they imagine will buy some them some short-lived popularity and votes.
Today, though, was. a beautiful day for us to walk down into town. We picked up our newspapers and then headed off to the park, noting that there were a lot of cars parked in the vicinity of the park which is usually an indication that the park’s car parks are full and people are parking in the streets nearby. But as we got into the park, it seemed not particularly busy and we were soon involved in lots of conversations with a variety of our park friends and park acquaintances. This even extended as far as the two COVID wardens who patrolling order to give ‘advice’ to members of the population who may be transgressing the rules. Some friends who live any the bottom of Kidderminster Road told us of a terrible car crash that had happened quite near to their house. At least one car was severely damaged, several young men tumbled out of the car and the police almost had to close the road until the accident debris was cleared up. One can only speculate but I did wonder of some younger people had consumed too much alcohol and pushed their car beyond sensible limits (the accident occurring on a corner)
In the meanwhile, we have yet more horrifying stories from Mineapolis where another young black man was shot dead by the police. The young black person was pulled over by the police for a minor offence and when he struggled to get into a (police) car he was shot by the policewoman – who thought she was firing her taser and got ‘mixed up’ between that and her regular firearm. The police officer, herself experienced, has resigned as has the chief of police whilst the black population of Mineapolis is literally up in arms (being met with shows of force and arrested by members of a white police force) One has to wonder whether the deep racism in American society together with a rampant gun culture makes the whole society a deeply unattractive one. It is also interesting to speculate what influence this is going to have on the minds of the jury in the George Floyd case (black man whose neck was knelt on by a white police officer and who subsequently died) This case is being heard in a court house a few miles away from the present shooting and the defence are starting their case shortly.
Tonight, I finally got to work bottling a lot of the remainder of my damson gin. This is not a difficult process but is a little fiddly. First, my little wine bottles have to be sterilised and I do this with a Milton solution (or the Boots equivalent). Now the tricky part – kilner jars full of damson gin (and damsons) has to be emptied into/filtered into a jug. I generally use an old man’s vest (the type with little ‘vertex’ type holes in it) with a thickness in which the vest material is at least doubled, it not quadrupled. The to the top of each jar, I add literally 1-2 drops of concentrated almond essence which gives the final product a little extra kick of flavour. Then I will label up my 27 extra bottles of gin before they get distributed again to friends and neighbours.
Wednesday is always a day when we are running a little hard to catch up with ourselves because it is the day when we have to refine our Waitrose order, ready for delivery the following day. Upon my son’s instigation, though, we decided to see if we could book a special excursion on the Severn Valley Railway in one month’s time on the occasion of my birthday on Tuesday, May 11th. The arrangement is that you can book a carriage which can contain four people. So my son can take a day off work and make up a party of four which will include the three Hart family members and also include our University of Birmingham friend who has also been looking forward, we know, to a trip on the railway. Basically we start off at Kidderminster and make our way through five interesting stations before arriving at Bridgnorth, where they have a pub with lots of real ale at the very end of the platform. So we are all looking forward to this trip immensely – even if the weather is bad, we are under cover for a lot of the time. Also, as a bonus, because of my son’s membership of the SVR, we managed to secure quite a substantial discount for our day’s excursion. So our walk to the park was a little delayed, as is typical on a Wednesday even without the railway booking. On our way down we were stopped and engaged in a conversation with an acquaintance which eventually led to a discussion of military matters and why firearms that are ‘rifled’ are more accurate. The process of ‘rifling’ means that a system of helical grooves are incorporated into the body of the rifle which makes any bullet basically spin. This spinning motion effectively neutralises any slight variation in the weight of a bullet (and there is no longer a ‘light’ side or a ‘heavy’ side) and makes it more accurate both in flight and the ability to reach an intended target. Actually, for someone who is totally ignorant about all things military, I knew all of the facts that our acquaintance was trying to convey but I couldn’t say how and where I acquired this esoteric knowledge. Eventually, when we got to the park we could see at a glance that all of our more normal benches were occupied so we had to make do with a seat by the side of the pond/lake so we ate our comestibles without any chats with anyone. The weather was starting to look a little threatening and it had clouded over quite markedly – however, by the time we got home the weather had brightened again and it looked as though we were set for for a fine afternoon.
After lunch, I started another bottling process and in this case, cooking oil. We buy our cooking oil in 5-litre containers and buy a rapeseed oil which is half the saturated fat of Olive Oil, rich in Omega 3, 6, 9 and Vitamin E. This has the advantage that I never run out off cooking oil when I need it as I generally have a stock of about a dozen bottles in stock. Also our domestic help (and her husband) loves this oil to cook with as it has a much superior ‘fry’ temperature to other oils and quite a delightful nutty flavour. In addition, we are cutting down on food miles and utilising an ‘almost’ local product.
In the late afternoon, we had a visit from our local chiropodist who provides a domiciliary service for Meg and myself. We tend to have our hooves ‘done’ about every 4-5 weeks or so and this keeps us mobile. As the weather was so fine this afternoon, we decided to sit on our bench at the front of the house as it was a beautiful spring afternoon – this proved to be so pleasant that we might chose to have our feet done like this for the rest of the summer.
The political news this afternoon is quite interesting. In the House of Commons, Boris Johnson has successfully beat off a challenge from the Labour Party to establish a special Commons committee to investigate what is being called ‘Tory sleaze’ i.e. David Cameron, the ex Tory PM attempting to get a commercial firm with which he was associated to be awarded some privileges by the Treasury. If successful, David Cameron would have made a great deal of money – but instead the firm involved, Greensill Capital, has collapsed. However, a very powerful and influential Commons Select Committee, the Treasury Select Committee, has decided to investigate the whole of this affair formally and they would have the power to call whatever witnesses they required which would include both David Cameron (ex-PM) and Rishi Sunak, present Chancellor off the Exchequer, whose hands do not seem to be entirely clean in this affair. We shall have to sit and see!
Today was a beautiful spring day which started off with quite a severe ground frost but which rapidly gave way to a wonderful blue sky and a cool but pleasant breeze. We had to delay our walk to unpack our Waitrose order but this having been done, we were both keen to get out and enjoy the spring sunshine. As soon as we had popped out of the house, we had a long and pleasant chat with our next door neighbour who we have not seen for some time now. But as the weather was so beautiful, we took the opportunity to ‘chew the fat’ sharing with each other the news that we had now both received our second vaccination. Our neighbour has a magnificent collection and an encyclopaedic knowledge of popular music from the late 1950’s onwards. We were reminding ourselves of singers that we both liked such as Mary Hopkyn, Connie Francis as well as our particular favourite of Joan Baez. As it happened, Joan Baez (in her 70’s?) did several final farewell tours of the UK a year or so back and we went her to see her perform although I suspect she must be in her mid 70’s. Having picked up our newspapers, we popped into Waitrose on our way home picking one or two vegetables which I knew we had missed off our main order. And so on we walked on to the park which was quite thinly populated this morning and we occupied our usual seats lingering in the spring sunshine and noting the stages of blossom in various trees within the park. Already some of the flowering cherries both in the park and along the Kidderminster Road are already slightly over the top and starting to shed some of their blossoms as though in a miniature snowstorm. We noticed particular today that we have an abundance of blossom on our damson trees (or rather to be more technically accurate in the damson trees in the thick hedge which forms our rear boundary line – to whom the trees actually belong would be hard to ascertain)
This afternoon, I spent a certain amount of time writing some new labels for our newly bottles supplied of damson gin. I know that some people go to the expense of having such labels professionally printed (which gives the home-produced product a professional touch) but I am quite happy to make do with a particular design of sticky label which I try to ensure I always keep in stock. Fortunately, my next door neighbour keeps me well supplied with the small wine bottles with a screw top which I find particularly useful for my own bottling activities. However, I am always scrupulous in removing every bit of the old label and whilst some soak off easily, some labels seem to have been on with an industrial-strength glue. I have a variety of techniques to get these put to rights including a little brass rotary wheel (designed for an electric drill) which I use for the occasional really stubborn case.
Now that we are at this stage in the unlock down proceedings, Meg and I are starting to look at options for the next month or so. Of course, the next big ‘unlock down’ date is May 17th and I think that is the date when we go ahead and book hotel rooms if we wish to make more distant trips. We do have Saturday, 15th May, pencilled in to see Meg’s cousin in Bolton, Lancashire, but we are going to make that a one day lightning trip. There are quite a lot of National Trust properties within an easy motoring range so we are starting to think of where we might visit if the weather holds out. Top of our list is Coughton Court (home to the errant Guy Fawkes of Bonfire night infamy) but this was years ago and we have probably forgotten most of the key features. At this stage, we suspect that the Houses themselves may still be closed to the public but the grounds will be open to the public – and generally the ex-stables have been converted into eating places of various kinds. I need to do some internet searches to see what is open and what facilities are available in the National trust properties that are open.
The ‘sleaze’ scandal seems to be gathering speed as Parliament is announcing a variety of investigations ( I believe that up to seven enquiries may be projected at the moment). One particular bit of scurrilous gossip that is doing the rounds at the moment concerns a rivalry between Boris Johnson and David Cameron that dates back to their days together in Eton. There they never really liked each other and it may well be that Boris Johnson is quite happy to see David Cameron get his ‘come-uppance’ as a result of these sleaze investigations. This might sully Cameron’s reputation and enhance that of Johnson so you can see the ulterior motives involved!
Today was another fine and bright day, albeit a little cooler than yesterday. Nonetheless, we enjoyed our walk down into the town, chatting with one of our church friends en-route. When we eventually got to the park, we had a good old chat with our University of Birmingham friend who we had quite missed over the last few days as he was off playing tennis which is his grand passion during the summer months and when lockdown conditions apply. Then we were joined by another of our regular acquaintances and our conversations turned to the subject of the statistics pertaining to the various vaccines. As always, we didn’t arrive at any really firm conclusions but I suspect that we like to test out our understanding of the issues through discussions with each other.
This afternoon turned out to be quite busy with one thing or another. I had spent some time yesterday evening preparing the 27 labels that I needed for the newly bottled damson gin and now needed to label up the bottles with them. I had intended to do all of these in one fell swoop but I only did half a dozen as I got diverted into taking some of the labels off the mini-wine bottles with which my neighbour keeps me supplied. As a couple of new empty bottles turned up in my porch today, I went round with a full bottle of damson gin by way of recompense and was shown round some of the various improvements that my neighbour is gradually making to his back garden as the weather permits. After I had done some damson gin bottle housekeeping, I decided that our dining room in which we have an iPad (and miscellaneous computer-y type things) badly needed a tidy up and I was half way through this exercise when I was interrupted by a telephone call. The call came through from the son of our ex-Leicester Polytechnic colleague who had died recently (in his mid 90’s) wondering whether we could attend the funeral in a couple of weeks time. We have other commitments that are unmovable on that particular day so we have accepted, gratefully, the offer of a videolink into the funeral service proceedings. In return, I scanned a photo that I had managed to find and send it off to Leicestershire with the observation that we are not sure exactly when the photo was taken. We now know that it could not have been later than 1982 as that was the date upon which our ex-colleague retired but I suspect that it was a year or so before that which would make it 1980. The clothes and hair of the 10 of us look very 1970’s but the trouble is that academics (like us) were never fully up-to-date with the latest fashion trends so what we are wearing when the photo was taken was probably newly fashionable 5-10 years before that. Through the good offices of my daughter-in-law, we tried get a copy of the .jpg file printed on glossy (photo) paper but their printer refused to play ball. Anyway, the photo has now been transmitted and can be added to the family’s own collections (and recollections) of their late father.
Tomorrow afternoon is going to be the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh. To be honest, Meg and I have never been particularly interested in royal celebrations – in fact, the day that Charles and Diana got married, we were shopping for furniture in an almost deserted Leicester city centre. But I think tomorrow might be quite a special occasion and probably worth a watch. Having received my MSc at the hands of the Duke of Edinburgh just some three days after his mother had died, I do feel now that I was the fortunate recipient of the Duke’s sense of duty in that he turned to turn to perform his duties as Chancellor of Salford University. I saw the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, being asked today what he thought the Duke’s reaction would be to his own funeral. He opined that the thought the Duke would probably have said ‘Oh, just get on it with it‘ which does sound exactly the sort of thing that the Duke would say. Apparently, the Duke had planned his funeral down to the minutest detail, including the specially designed LandRover which is to bear his coffin through the Windsor castle grounds as far as the chapel.
Just to end on a really gloomy note, the latest COVID-19 news, despite a reduction in the ‘R’ number, has some worrying features.The new Indian variant of the COVID virus that’s been detected in the UK has all the hallmarks of a very dangerous virus. It has two new significant mutations in the spike protein that help it infect cells and evade the immune system. Some 77 cases have been discovered in both England and Scotland and it is probably the spread of this variant which is leading to spiralling rates of infection across India.
Well, it was a beautiful bright day today and Meg and I were delighted to stroll down to town in the spring sunshine. We picked up our supply of Saturday newspapers (particularly full with a variety of Saturday supplements) and made our way to the park where we were happy to coincide with our University of Birmingham friend. All the upper benches were occupied so we had to ‘make do’ by sitting by the side of the lake but the morning was to prove not without incident. The resident black-headed gulls on the park were joined by a heron which was evidently very much larger. Consequently, the heron was being constantly mobbed and dive-bombed by the gulls but it was a bit like a David and Goliath contest. When the heron had been pestered for several minutes he took flight and headed in the direction of the flock of gulls who instantly scattered. After a little while, things settled down and the cycle of constant mobbing followed by a delayed retaliation repeated itself. There is some debate amongst the park cognoscenti whether the heron we say today is the habitual ‘Henry the Heron‘ we used to see months back but was distinguishable because he had rather a gammy left foot (whether genetic or the result of an accident we do not know). Whilst we were laughing and joking in the park, I told them the story of a conversation I had had with my friendly Asian newspaper shop owner. I told him that I was feeling a bit tired that morning (it was a Monday) because over the weekend I had flown to Barcelona and back as I was representing the UK in an international athletics competition. Having arrived home, I then ran all of the way from my house to our Pilates studio in a one-piece bright pink ‘onesie’. My friendly shopkeeper was very sympathetic to my plight, even though I told him that none this had actually happened but was all portrayed in a particularly vivid dream I had had the night before. My park friends who know me well were of the opinion that the detail of running through Bromsgrove in a bright pink ‘onesie’ was probably correct and I was probably just in a state of denial over it all.
This afternoon was dominated by the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh which was a scaled down affair because of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. I must say that with 750 military from various branches of the armed services, it did not feel initially like a particularly scaled down event but the number of guests allowed inside St. George’s Chapel, Windsor was restricted to 30 who were all members of his immediate family. The funeral had been planned by the Duke himself over several years. One of these highlights of the funeral was the fact that Philip had designed his own custom-built Land Rover to carry the coffin at his funeral. The modified Land Rover Defender TD5 130 chassis cab vehicle was unveiled two days before the service. The duke first began the long-lasting venture to create the bespoke hearse in collaboration with Land Rover in 2003, the year he turned 82. He made the final adjustments to the vehicle in 2019, the year he turned 98. The Defender was made at Land Rover’s factory in Solihull in 2003 and Philip oversaw the modifications, in collaboration with the company, throughout the intervening years. The duke requested that the original Belize Green bodywork be switched to Dark Bronze Green, a colour used for many military Land Rovers. The service itself was one of stark simplicity and was suitably poignant. The Queen had to sit alone and with all the members of the royal family as obliged to wear a mask. Under the circumstances, this was just as well because a certain amount of the naturally felt grief would be obscured by the mask and the television cameras were certainly not visually intrusive. One has to say that the whole funeral was probably a case of ‘less means more’ and one felt that the Duke of Edinburgh had the sort of scaled down service of which he would have approved. As an aside, and without wishing to sound particularly nationalistic, I must say that the English are extraordinary good at arranging events like this at spectacularly short notice. Of course, the last event of a similar nature was the death of Diana, the Princess of Wales and on that occasion, too, the whole funeral was organised in about a week. I know that these things are well rehearsed and also that they have manuals of ‘timings’ (down to the second) to coordinate the various activities. Having said all that, I still think that the English? British? tradition of organising pageants at short notice is probably second to none in the world. Because of the the media onslaught, I feel I know a lot more ‘facts’ about the Duke of Edinburgh than I did previously – for example, one particular story is that as a baby he was stowed away in an orange crate and smuggled aboard /rescued by a British ship after the Greek royal family (with baby Philip) was forced to flee from Corfu.
Today being a Sunday, I walk down to the newsagents on my own first thing in the morning, treating myself to a little concert of my trusty old iPhone as I go. Then it’s a case of having some breakfast on our knees whilst we watch the Andrew Marr (politics) show at 9.00am. At least we seem to have the overkill coverage of the royal funeral out of our system and, perhaps, nowadays we are starting to see the resumption of ‘normal’ news items and political discourse. Meg and I enjoyed a pleasant walk down to the park this morning where, after a little wait, we made our contact with some of our regular friends and we chatted about what we are all going to do in the week ahead. Compared with past weeks, this is going to quite a busy week for Meg and I but, no doubt, we will treat each day as it comes. On returning home, there was a Sunday lunch to prepare and although we had some beef cooking in our slow cooker, there always seems quite a lot to prepare such as onion gravy as well as the heavy cooking vessel to clean out. Eventually all was done and we started to look forward to a lazy afternoon, reading the Sunday newspapers which, as you might expect, were quite full of details and analysis of the funeral of Prince Philip in St. Georges’s Chapel, Windsor, yesterday afternoon. In the eary part of the afternoon, my daughter-in-law was busy planting out some seeds and, in particular, some sunflower seeds on the one hand and sweet peas on the other. Sometimes, these get sown a little too late but we trust with the fine spell of weather we have just had, the timing is just about right. However, I think we are all starting to feel the absence of a proper rain-shower by now. It seems to be weeks now since we have had a really proper downpour and the gardens, whilst looking very colourful at the moment, are surely in a state when a sky-full of rain would be appreciated. Tomorrow our gardeners who come about once a month are coming by for a special attack on a large privet hedge we have surrounding our BioDisk. This has grown enormous over the years and its width as well as its height is making it difficult for us to keep it under control.So we are going to reduce its height and girth by about between a third or a half and I am sure that were will be quite a volume of material to dispose of. We are resigned to the fact that our hedge might look pretty ravaged for a while but then we can rely upon some new growth to give us a green top once again.
There is a news story on the Sky news channel tonight which indicates that we may be on the brink of a European super league in football. This would ‘cream off’ the biggest and the most successful football clubs but it is said that it would have a ‘seismic’ effect upon the rest of the game. It means that our national leagues would be decimated and the whole financial edifice of football thrown into disarray. Wether is is going to happen or not and whether it would have the dire consequences proposed is a moot point. But I suppose one can be pretty certain that if the money, players, TV rights and the rest of the footballing paraphernalia is siphoned off to follow a ‘super league’ then this is going to have a massively destabilising effect on the rest of the game.
The ‘Greensill’ scandal as I suppose we now have to learn to call it continues to evolve. Perhaps the root cause of all of this was when governments did not trust the impartiality of the civil service any more when they their favoured policies were found to be over ideological and/or impractical. There was then a move to make sure that senior civil servants could be ‘seconded’ to private industry (presumably follows the mantra ‘public sector bad, private sector good‘) in order to better ‘appreciate’ the world view of those in private industry. This has led to a revolving door between the civil service and private industry (senior civil servants retiring and immediately taking up lucrative jobs in the sectors they were meant to be regulating whilst senior figures in the private sector are jetted into positions of responsibility within Whitehall) The culmination of this was the revelation tat the senior civil servant in charge of the Government procurement programmes, presumably with a budget of billions of pounds, was simultaneously allowed to held a position in a private firm whilst also being still within the civil service. Perhaps it is not at all surprising that words like ‘sleaze’, and ‘cronyism’ are increasingly bandied about but the Main Street Media does not seem too concerned about it (assuming that politicians of both major political parties are equally culpable) and this only lowers the confidence of the general public with the body politic even further.
We always knew that the pattern of day was going to vary from the norm today and so it proved. By a prior arrangement, our gardeners who help us with ‘big’ pruning jobs were going to come along and reduce the height of the the privet hedge around our BioDisk by anything up to a half. Accordingly, I went down into town by car in order to pick up our daily supply of newspapers and that went fine – I got back in time to help our gardener after Meg and I had had a quick breakfast. My role was to act as a ‘gardener’s mate’ and as the cutting was being done, I was on hand to dispose of the privet cuttings in large 1-tonne sacks. We managed to get half of the job done today and second half will have to wait until tomorrow. After our gardener left for the job he had booked for the afternoon, Meg and I had a light lunch and then we walked down to the park in the mid afternoon. The light on the trees shows the park in a subtly different light to that we get in mid morning and evidently the visitors to the park differ as well. As the weather was so fine, we actually saw quite a distribution of sun-dresses on display in the park this afternoon – a sight we have yet to behold on one of our morning walks. After we got home, we enjoyed a nice cup of Earl Grey sitting on our bench at the front of our house which receives a full blast of afternoon sun. As I walked around our garden over the weekend, I realised that there some areas where I really need to get to work, clearing out some weedy patches before the rains come (which they inevitably will) and any latent weed seeds go absolutely mad.
As I anticipated in last night’s blog, the story about a footballing European Super League has really taken off and hit popular consciousness. It is interesting to see that fans, politicians, footballing authorities and the like all seem to be united against this new ‘plan’. The driving force seem to be American owners and American investors who are using the model of the National Football League in the USA to erect similar structure (i.e a fixed group of clubs with no promotion or relegation). Not being a particular footballing fan, I do not pretend to understand the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of all of this but whose who do follow football much more closely than I all seem to be appalled. The word I have used most often is this whole debate is ‘greed’ and it is interesting that the people most interested in promoting this new League seem to be investors as the share prices of some of the elite clubs who may join any such new League has actually arisen. We may see periods of internecine conflict as it is quite possible that any players playing in such a Super League may be banned by UEFA (European football authority) from representing their country in European competitions.
In terms of the evolving political scene, it is interesting to see that India has now been added to the ‘red’ list of countries i.e. travellers from a country have to be quarantined immediately on entering the UK. This is no doubt related to the fact that the ‘Indian’ variant of COVIFD-19 may well be causing quite a degree of private concern. It appears without being unduly technical, the Indian variant of the virus appears to incorporate a double mutation which makes it more likely that it can evade some of the defences afforded by our vaccines whilst at the same time having increased transmissibility – some epidemiologists are suggesting that it could become the dominant strain before the end of June (not too far away)
Here in the West Midlands, there is a fascinating contest for the post of mayor – both candidates (Andy Street, the incumbent Conservative mayor and Liam Byrne, his Labour opponent) both agree the result might be incredibly tight. There are two competing ‘narratives’ only one of which will prove to be correct. One narrative is that the traditional Labour voters only abandoned Labour because they didn’t care for Corbyn and they wanted to ‘get Brexit done’ and therefore they will return to the fold. The alternative narrative is that these traditional labour voters are now within the conservative camp and are unlikely to return. The election itself is on Thursday, 6th May and whatever the result is will probably have quite a degree of significance for the national as well as the local political scene because it will be a test of whether remnants of the ‘Red Wall’ of traditional Labour seats still exists or whether Boris Johnson and the present Conservative party have actually ‘captured’ this important part of the electorate.
Well, I suppose it is some kind of landmark to have reached day 400 in these blogs – who would have thought I would pass this milestone when I started well over a year ago. Today was always going to be a ‘chewy’ kind of day because in the morning I had to finish off helping our gardener finish off lowering the height of the golden privet hedge which surrounds i.e. screens our BioDisk. This was accomplished on time and when we sat on our front garden bench and surveyed our work we were pleased with the result i.e. the hedge is delightful (it wouldn’t be the first time gardeners try to lower the height of a hedge and its gets wavy or sloping) Now it is this size, we are going to give it a bit of a tickle with some Growmore fertiliser or perhaps some Blood Fish and Bone.Our gardener was pleased with the result as well and we think that the bare top may well have greened over in 3-4 weeks time as we have pruned this particular privet at just the right time of year. Of course we could do with a skyfull of rain because at the moment, the earth is starting to look incredibly parched. So to recoup on a little bit of time, we took the car down into town and collected our newspapers and then went onto our normal ‘top’ bench expecting to see our University of Birmingham friend. After some three-quarters of an hour, we reckoned that he was not going to turn but as soon as we got to our car, another park friend with whom we had been chatting caught up with us and told us our friend was sitting on one of the lower seats, also looking and waiting for us. What hadn’t helped is that the local authority had erected a temporary tent type arrangement whilst they are doing some work on a drainage pipe or something similar – as it happened, this tent completely obscured or view each from the other and hence we missed. Anyway, we caught up with other and had a few jolly moments of conversation before making our way home. We won’t see each for several days now as we off to Coughton Court (National Trust property) tomorrow and our friend is engaged in tennis matches here and there so we will probably not see each other again until Saturday (quite a long time for us park regulars!)
In the mid afternoon, I thought I had better get to work mowing the lawns, even though the fine weather had suddenly become rather overcast and gloomy. Still, I got the lawns all done in good time as I like to keep a regular weekly schedule at this time of year. Just before I started on the lawns the doorbell rang and it was a computer technician bringing me a reconditioned HP laptop. Although it is not a very highly ‘specified’ machine, even when new, it does have Windows 10 on it, 4Gb of memory and a hard disk sufficient for my needs. The idea is that I run my statistical software on this machine as well as resurrecting my PhD written in very old version of Word and needing modern machine to access it. When I was offered a laptop like this for £99.00, I thought that the offer was too good to miss so the machine duly arrived. Naturally, I haven’t had time to play about with it yet but the technician helped my get my Outlook email account up and running. We both of us had a quick bash at running my Dos-based statistical software without a great deal of success – it looks as though I may have to get a DOS-emulator on the machine as thought I was going to play a DOS-based game. However, I am sure this has been done lots of time before so it will just take a little playing about time.
We are just on the brink of two big news stories breaking in the next day. One of these is going to be the jury returning to give their verdict in the George Floyd case in the next day (probably) and there is a lot of tension in the air to see what result is going to be returned. Anything other than ‘Guilty’ is likely to start the most intense black backlash right across America (as to British eyes, this is an an ‘open-and-shut’ case) but we shall have to wait and see.(Stop Press: Guilty on all 3 counts)The other more domestic issue is the case of the new ‘European Super League’ where it appears that at least two of the six English clubs (Chelsea and Manchester City)Stop Press: All 6 English clubs (led by Chelsea) have now pulled out of the proposed new Super League – which is now effectively ‘dead’.
Today started off as quite a gloomy and overcast day and the temperature seemed to have dropped markedly since yesterday. We had plans to make a little trip this afternoon so we hoped that the weather would gradually improve in the afternoon. Knowing that we were going to make a trip out, having collected our newspapers we popped into our local Waitrose for two purposes. We had made some online clothing purchases for Meg from John Lewis and organised delivery (at no charge in our local store) Although the order was theoretically ready for collection on late Thursday afternoon (and hence, Friday morning actually) I got a text to say it was ready for collection this morning, which was very welcome. At the same time we picked up some sandwiches and biscuits ready for later on in the day. We had organised a fairly early lunch for ourselves and set off for Coughton Court (a nearby National Trust property) by 2.00pm, having had to call off and fill the car with petrol. As it happened, we got to our destination, guided by SatNav about 25 minutes before our timed entrance but we were still greeted with open arms and allowed in. By this stage of the day, the weather had brightened considerably and once having negotiated our entrance we went straight to the outdoors cafe, not least for the pleasure of having an outside snack once again conscious of the knowledge that we were helping the National Trust finances anyway (admission being gratis for National Trust members) Then we went on a most pleasant woodland walk, encompassing a walk by the river Arden and feeling ‘at one’ with nature. A particular feature of Coughton Court which has impressed us greatly is their use of natural materials to enhance the nature of any walks you undertake. Thus at various information points, the message was provided by the expedient of writing the message (black paint, white background) on the ‘slices’ taken from a large tree which had fallen (imagine slicing a carrot and you will get my meaning) Also, any large branches are used to provide natural edging materials for the paths in the woodland walks so the whole experience is an incredibly naturalistic one. Having got most of the way through our intended trip we espied a strategically placed bench upon which we gratefully sat ourselves. We had taken a couple of portable chairs with us because we know from experiences in the past that suitably placed benches can be short supply so we had equipped ourselves not only with portable chairs but also a tarpaulin in case we needed to camp out on the grass. So we sat and drank coffee, ate some absolutely delicious rice cakes coated with an orange and dark chocolate topping and observed the distant rooks – and a flight of birds that seemed to soar a little like raptors but which we couldn’t really identify. So we had a delightful day out, only encountering the normal rush hour when we returned to Bromsgrove at about 5pm in the afternoon.
As indicated in last night’s blog, the two crucial decisions that I was expecting today actually came late last night. Looking firstly at the collapse of the plans for a European Super League for elite football clubs, it looks as though ‘fan power’ from below has caused the whole project to collapse – demonstrations at grounds all over the county displayed the sentiment that the ‘beautiful game’ was being expropriated from them. The government having said that it was going to create an enquiry into the whole affair, it is not going to abandon it but is probably using this as an occasion to engineer some changes in the structure of the industry in the UK. It is interesting to note that no German clubs were involved, nor could they be, as fans are entrenched much more in the ownership of their clubs. Whether any of the elements of the German model can be used in the UK is a moot point as so many British clubs are now owned, or controlled, by oversees companies, owners and entities. (As an aside, the Brexit slogan of ‘take back control‘ is particularly apposite here but not from European institutions but from other varieties of an aggressive and rootless capitalist model that can buy and sell football clubs whatever the ultimate wishes of their fan base. Who ‘owns’ a football club – the fans ‘morally’ or the large commercial interests ‘legally’?)
The second interesting question is the ramifications of the ‘Guilty’ verdicts in the George Floyd case in the USA. The view is being strongly expressed that this court case is only the start of a very long road for the institutional racism which permeates American society (or at least American police forces) to be addressed. Of course given the American legal system there is still a long process of appeals to follow and a gap of eight weeks before sentencing so the verdict is one one battle in the course of a very long war. Some of the ramifications of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement are washing up onto UK shores as well because black people in the UK justice system are probably not treated as well as they should be.
We woke up this morning to a really bright and beautiful morning but not one we could enjoy in the usual way. We were somewhat delayed this morning by the arrival of the Waitrose order which had to be unpacked and then put away. We were aware of the fact that Mike had an appointment for a CT scan in the Kidderminster treatment centre (some 14 miles day distant) at midday – so we needed to alter our routines somewhat. We went down in the car to pick up our newspapers and then had to pop into Waitrose in order to return a garment to John Lewis via their Waitrose network. Actually, this bit worked pretty well as the original delivery note contained a returns address and a QR code. All we needed to do is to get onto our John Lewis’s account get a RMA code, then include it in the packed and readdressed parcel and hand it in to Waitrose. I already had an email acknowledging the safe receipt of the returns package back into the system and a refund will no doubt shortly follow. The we went back home by car and had some elevenses in our front garden (delightfully sunny). I then went by car to Kidderminster and got there about 10 minutes early, got scanned very quickly and was back home at only a few minutes after 1.0pm. In the afternoon, we decided to make a trip out to Marks and Spencer’s in Longbridge (on the site of the old Austin assembly line) to do some clothes shopping for some much needed items for Meg and then got home in the mid afternoon. It was a glorious day and we had to forego our normal walk to the park but hopefully, the high pressure system will persist for a day or so yet so we have a nice clear day tomorrow, all being well.
There seems to be something going wrong with our various friends computer systems at the moment. Some of the regulars who we FaceTime or Skype seem to be having a variety of computer problems which means that we haven’t been able to communicate with each other over the last few days. The modern technology is wonderful when it works but systems can be a nightmare if things start to go wrong – we are hopeful that these problems will soon be sorted out so the we can start to chat again.
There is a World Climate summit organised I believe by the Americans in which various leaders are appearing to pledge allegiance to new emissions targets. To get the ball rolling, as it were, Jo Biden has agreed to cut greenhouses emissions by 50% by the year 2030. The interesting question is whether both China and the USA as the earth’s two biggest polluters will be able to generate the changes needed in our whole economy and ways of living to achieve meaningful objectives. One suspects that the Chinse government, once it puts it’s mind to it, might be in a better position to deliver than the Americans. The Americans are apparently concerned that the Chinese might be a long way ahead of them in the deployment of solar technologies. Whilst some argue that as the Chinese who have access to cheap capital and labour, then it is no surprise that they dominate some 60& of the available market in ‘solar’ technologies’. But a better explanation of China’s success in solar is that the energy industry prioritises low costs and China excels at cost-cutting and scaling — not just from cheap resources but from a superior ability to innovate manufacturing processes to drive down cost and scale quickly, known as process innovation. One also wonders whether Jo Biden can push the necessary legislative procedures through Congress at the moment as there are so many vested interests still in the energy industries.
The Greensill affair rumbles on with revelations that David Cameron lobbied the Treasury so much that he was in danger of morphing from ‘Dodgy Dave’ to ‘Desperate Dave’ as he sought, repeatedly, to get the Treasury to favour the firm which was now employing him (and which eventually went bankrupt) At the same time, Boris Johnson has been revealed as almost being at the beck and call of James Dyson (vacuum cleaner manufacturer who was an ardent Brexiteer but who eventually took his business off to Singapore to lower his costs) What is some concern to some senior civil servants is that Boris Johnson shows himself as being susceptible to exchanges of messages via WhatsApp – as such, these are not ‘meetings’ and therefore are not subject to the Ministerial code of accountability and so on. The combination of these types of stories seem to ensure that the Tory party seem to be the absolute party of sleaze – not that they care as the public does not seem to mind so much apparent sleaze as the Tories are so far ahead in the opinion polls. It is a strange world!
Another beautiful day today to wake up to. Meg and I were a little delayed because Friday is the day when our domestic help calls around and we took the opportunity for her to work some magic wonders on Meg’s hair which is getting a bit ‘out-of-control’ until we have it done a week on Tuesday. I asked our domestic help to make over Meg’s hair so that when we went to bed this evening, I would feel I was climbing into bed with a different woman (and I think she succeeded.) As we were a bit later that we would have liked, we picked up our newspapers and then tried to occupy one of our preferred ‘top’ park benches but they were already fully occupied. So we made do by sitting and looking over the lake which is, of course, what we used to do at the start of the year. But then, on our way home uo the hill, we ran into both of our closest (Catholic) friends and to cut a long story short, we have invited them both round to have a nice English cup of tea (or something even stronger) next Monday afternoon. We are just hoping, of course, that the weather holds out until then but it is true to say that once we have a high pressure established like this, they tend to persist for quite a few days (I think that low pressure systems ‘bounce’ off them) We do not mind the weather being a tad cooler so long as we do get completely rained off. Actually, we intended to have a similar little ‘soiree’ last Christmas time but evidently one of the COVID-19 lockdowns intervened.
Our domestic help has forwarded me a recipe for rhubarb gin which sounds simple enough to make. According to the recipe, as well as rhubarb some orange peel is involved and a rather exotic ingredient of either a vanilla pod or some vanilla bean base (which I must admit, I have never even heard of) I have been sent the Jamie Oliver recipe and all seems straight forward but I never thought of baking the rhubarb to release ? enhance? some of the flavours. As we have a small clump of rhubarb growing, I might as well as make it something useful and, at least, I have all of he gear such as Kilner jars and sterilising fluid.
Last night whilst I was playing with my new HP computer, I found a way of getting my old DOS statistical software to work under Windows 10. I downloaded a specialist piece of software called DosBox which enabled my old software to run. I had to find out how to ‘mount’ a specific folder after which the software would run. I even found a way to configure it so it utilised more of the screen surface and was centralised. One piece of software I was glad to resurrect was a program I had written called EzeStats After development, this was eventually bundled with a statistics textbook ‘Jon Curwin and Roger Slater with Mike Hart: ‘Numeracy Skills for Business‘(Chapman Hall, 1994) Having looked at this piece of educational software some decades after it was written, I was struggling to remember exactly how I did it. This is what I think I did. I utilised a simple text editor to write the words for one screenful of information. Assuming I could work with 80 characters a row x. 25 lines, each screen could contain 2,000 characters. But each character occupied two bytes – the first was the ASCII code of the character itself and the second was a colour encoding for that particular byte (making 4,000 per screen). I think I then utilised a utility called ‘Paint’ (nothing to do with the Windows program of that name) which enabled you to ‘paint’ the foreground (or ‘ink’) and the background ( or ‘paper’) for each screen. Some screens asked you to choose a character which gave an answer to a tutorial type of question – to capture the responses and to send you to the screen which told you whether you had the correct answer or not, I think I used a batch file which could send you back and forth amongst the various pages. Somehow, all of these pages get stitched together (perhaps via the batch file) and then I think I used a program to take a batch file and turn it into an executable file (.com or .exe) This is how I think I did it all, but it certainly still runs incredibly slickly and I think the entire tutorial course runs to about 40 screens of information, all stitched again into a fast, colourful and incredibly concise little system – I think the total size of the two main .exe files only cane to about 20k in total (and the public domain version of the MicroStats program was only about 37k). Those were the days when memory was expensive and programmers had to make every byte count!
It was another fine bright day in this wonderful spell of weather we have been enjoying. It was a bit cooler than yesterday with a cooling breeze but nothing to spoil our enjoyment. We ordered some more clothes from John Lewis (to be delivered in a day or at no charge to our local Waitrose) and then made our way to our normal bench. There we met with one of our regular friends and we congratulated her on her recent birthday (in her mid-70’s) In the expectation that we may see her, I had included in my rucksack a large bottle of my own damson gin. As it was happened it was her birthday last Thursday when we didn’t get round to going to the park – the cafe in the park (run by people she had known for decades) had made her a present of a lovely large cake and she had other treats on the day itself. As it happens she is only about three weeks older than I am so we keep a check on well (or badly) we are doing for our age. We expected to see our University of Birmingham friend but we had a ‘no show’ – at least initially. However, as we were walking home he caught up with us in his car – we hadn’t coincided earlier as he had an appointment in Kidderminster just down the road. We admired his lovely Saab car, now about 14 years old but since Saab went bust, our friend has his car serviced by an independent garage who mage to get hold of Saab spares when they need to without too much difficulty. We chatted by the side of the road for several minutes but will have a more comfortable assignation tomorrow when we meet in the park.
As I write this blog, we decided as it was a terrible night on the television to see a YouTube production of Verdi’s Rigoletto. The two principal singers are Luciano Pavarotti and Ingvar Wixell (the Swedish baritone) and this production was evidently made when they were very much in their prime. The production is a German one and as one might expect, the quality of the singing (naturally), the quality of the acting, the staging, the camera angles and so on are of the very highest standard. Rigoletto is one of those operas which is full of really good tunes (and no doubt the Italian audiences would come away from a production singing or humming many of them). Anyway, when there is a really stunning aria, I break away from my blog and soak up some of the glorious moments from the production – this is a sort of multitasking becausse it is quite easy to listen to music and blog at the same time.
This afternoon was the final of a women’s rugby competition between the two best teams in the tournament who happen to be England and France. We knew this was going to be a tough match and the two teams having quite easily beaten the opposition in the course of the tournament were fairly evenly matched. Having said that, the French had vastly superior scrummaging, better backs, a somewhat more imaginative approach to their forward play – but still lost. To be fair, both teams displayed some nervousness and the kicking at goal meant that some easy attempts at goal were fluffed. In the event, both the French and the English teams had a conversion where the conversion ball hit the post and then, just, slid inside. The English forwards were pretty brutal in an effective but not particularly pretty fashion. The French were only about 3-4 points behind about 10 minutes before the end and could have sneaked the game but the English team managed to snaffle balls away from their line, get it upfield, force a series of penalties from the French and eventually won the game. So neither team played particularly well and the windy conditions did not help.But I would not have been disappointed if the French had gone on to win the final because in many ways they did everything right – but not at the crucial moments as did the English team (e.g.by scoring the only try of the match about 60 seconds before the end of the first half of the match)
If I had to make a guess at the stories dominating the Sunday newspapers tomorrow morning, it will be one or both of the following. For a start, the row over who paid for the ‘over the top’ refurbishment to the PM’s Downing Street flat, fuelled by a particular animus between Boris Johnson himself and Dominic Cummings (the Brexit ‘master mind’ and at one time the principal advisor to Boris Johnson) will occupy a great deal of space and attention. And secondly, there is a culture war going on as Oxford Street shoppers are heckled over face masks as thousands protest coronavirus rules in London. But we have now passed the point where more than half of the population have received at least one dose of vaccine.
We were very pleased that this day had dawned because it was the day,if the weather was helpful, when we were scheduled to entertain our friends in the back garden. In the morning, I busied myself giving the garden chairs and garden table a wash down (with a specially soft car brush so nothing gets damaged) After a rinse, they were left to dry in the sun and I organised the cushions that we utilise on occasions such as these. Then we picked up our newspapers and made an excursion into our local Waitrose to buy some comestibles. Waitrose had a very good selection of sandwiches, cakes, cordials, wines and ‘party things’ so we bought what we need, loaded them to the car and set off for home, giving the park a miss for the day. Once we got home we treated ourselves to a coffee at home and enjoyed some of the goodies we had just bought for the afternoon ‘get-together’. Then we had a light lunch, quickly put some pieces on plates and there we were.
After our friends arrived, we had great pleasure in opening a bottle of champagne and I have to say we had been looking to this moment for a long time. We had intended to have a similar little party, indoors, just around Christmastime but of course the lockdown intervened. On that occasion, we sat around in chairs. socially distancing in our friend’s garage with the door open and imbibed our own damson gin.That only added to the surreal nature of the experiences at the time so we were delighted today to have a more normal ‘get together’ in our own back garden. The weather was reasonably sunny and there was a bit of a cooling breeze but we chatted our way through it. As it turned out, it proved to be an excellent opportunity to appraise our friends of our longer plans in the housing sphere. We had always intended that in the fullness of time we would downsize somewhat and the households of Meg and myself and my son and daughter-in-law would disaggregate. We had always intended that our final resting place would be within walking distance of all essential goods and services including shops and transport links thus making a car unnecessary. However, we are determined to stay in the area and keep up the regular friendships that we have made in the last few years here in Bromsgrove so we are seeing our eyes and ears open for anything suitable that comes up within the next year or so. So it was a useful opporunity to let our lowest friends know what we were thinking and why so that nothing would be a surprise to them. After we had eaten and drunk our fill, we had great pleasure showing people round the gardens both front and back. There is a certain amount of explaining to do as we have bought the green space in front of the house which houses our (discreetly hidden)BioDisk from the builder/developer several years ago and this has helped us to make sure that an access road is not driven past our houses to service the new development which has been built in the last few years immediately next to your plot. Both of our friends are very keen gardeners (even arranging flowers for the church) so they very much appreciated the wild, woodland feel which characterises our garden. There is a certain amount of cutting back yet to be done but it is always very interesting to have your house and garden viewed though the eyes of another as it were. When we looked at our watches it was practically 6.00 and as we started proceedings at 3.00pm the last three hours had absolutely flown by. I have a feeling that if the summer is fine, we may be repeating this very pleasant experience quite a lot.
Today has not been the kind of day when we have watched any TV news. But the evidence of the top senior civil servant, Simon Case, appears to have been underwhelming and uninformative. Amid MPs’ exasperation with the top Whitehall official, former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell accused Mr Case of delivering a 'badly-scripted version' of 1980s TV sitcom ‘Yes Minister‘. One can understand, I suppose, why senior civil servants do not want it to appear that they ‘betraying’ their political masters. However, it has to be said that there appears to be so much skulduggery, chicanery and pure sleaze surrounding Downing Street at the moment that civil servants run the danger of being drawn into the same sleaze-ridden culture. After all, as master wordsmiths, there is always a way of distancing yourself. One is reminded of Francis Ewan Urquhart,a fictional character created by Michael Dobbs, whose catchphrase became ‘I couldn’t possibly comment‘ said in a certain way and with a certain look that certainly conveyed what the character thought about events swirling around him.
The spell of really good weather is gradually coming to an end and today was certainly cloudier than yesterday. Nonetheless, we popped off down to collect our newspapers and then onto the park where we enjoyed the company of several of the ‘park regulars’ – I was joking with them whether we ought to form a lodge or one of those funny societies you occasionally used to see. In my youth, I vaguely remember that there was an Independent Order of Oddfellows which sounds broadly like an offshoot of the Masons but it is not. (To confuse matters, many masons are also Oddfellows but not the reverse) They have their roots in the 1700’s in England but faced a degree of suppression but they seem to have a much bigger and more vigorous movement in the United States. By the time we had chatted anyway and even met up with one of our friends from yesterday, it was nearly 2.00pm when we got home so we had to organise a pretty fast lunch for ourselves, which we did. After all of the excitement of yesterday, we decided to have a nice peaceful afternoon whith we did but we had some telephone calls to make and receive so the afternoon seemed to shoot by, one way or another.
I am trying an experiment, not succeeding to get audio drivers to installed onto the Thinkpad, to get our composite .mp3 of our wedding music loaded onto my iPhone. You would have thought that it would have been as simple as emailing yourself a copy of the relevant .mp3 and then saving it into your ‘Apple’ music collection but this is not the Apple way of doing things. To be fair, Apple do not allow you to to do this directly as it is a route by which viruses and other nasties could infect your phone so Apple has its own way of doing this which is to get your .mp3 file uploaded into iTunes and then sync this with iTunes on your iPhone. But to complicate matters, iTunes no longer exists in the latest iteration of the operating system but you do have Apple Music. When you read on the web how to perform the procedures of getting a mp3 file onto your Phone, it all sounds so very straightforward but it didn’t seem to turn out that way. Many people suggest a third part app and, indeed, I already had got DropBox installed on both my computer and also on my iPhone. I must have previously uploaded my wedding music some two and a half years previously but I discovered that with DropBox you can actually download a file such that it can be played ‘offline’ This seemed to work fine and I tested out that it works by turning off my WiFi and Bluetooth and making sure that the music I wanted on my iPhone was actually there as it would play OK. There is a point to all of this which is this: if I want to play the moving slide show of our (original) wedding photos and have a facsimile of the original music playing alongside (on the iPhone) this I can now do. We are thinking about when we go and visit Meg’s cousin in Bolton in just under three weeks time.
As it is approaching the end of the month, the weather forecasters are casting an eye backwards over the last month which has been pretty strange, historically. I had not appreciated that it actually been the frostiest April for 60 years and rainfall has been only 10% of the average. Of course, there will be a few days of rain at the end of the month to moderate these statistics but is hasn’t all been ‘down’ side because we got some gloriously sunny days last week associated with a stationery high pressure system.
The political scene in the run up to the elections in interesting, to put it mildly. There are a swirl of allegations swirling around No. 10 on a range of issues but the most important is whether the redecoration to the flat in Downing Street was done legally or not (if a Tory donor had put up the money and then Boris Johnson repaid him this would not be within the rules) But the extraordinary thing is that many political journalists think the Prime Minister’s problems, which are largely of his own making, are potentially very serious. On the other hand, the Tories seem well ahead in the opinion polls and no amount of sleaze appears to have done them any harm as yet. One explanation is that voters know that Johnson is a serial liar and untrustworthy but they are prepared to overlook these failings as a price for having got Brexit done. A not dissimilar view ix expressed by some Tory MP’s for as one senior MP told me on Monday: ‘The Conservative Party’s relationship with Boris is very transactional. He wins us elections and we put up with his crap. If he starts being a vote loser, well that will change.’
Today was one of those days when we knew that we were going to have quite a busy morning (for us) and so it proved. We are usually a little later than normal because Wednesday morning is our ‘update’ morning for the Waitrose shopping order which we have delivered tomorrow. This having been done and being a bit later than usual, we cut off into the park and had our elevenses (as it was more like a midday snack being an hour later than normal) Then we popped by our newspaper shop to pick up our regular supply of newspapers. We ventured after this onto the High Street in Bromsgrove in order to access an ATM – with these strange lockdown days, we tend to get a block of money to last us for several weeks as everything else tends to get paid by card over the internet. Having got our money out of an indoors ATM, we wandered down to Waitrose but, on an impulse, ventured into one of the local charity shops which are now re-opening. The one we entered was the British Heart Foundation shop and we had a quick look around to see if there was any item that might take our fancy. Just as we leaving, we caught sight of a small display with about 3-4 lady's handbags on it and one we immediately thought would be just the job for Meg – so we bought it. Now that we have it home and I have subjected it to the most minute examination, I am pretty convinced that it is unused and although the label inside says ‘Made in China’ one cannot really tell whether it is actual leather or a leather substitute which is so good you cannot tell the difference. But I did notice at least a couple of men’s barber’s shops where I could have wandered in and had a haircut (which I sorely need) on the spot i.e. without their being a queue or an appointment system. Our own hairdresser is coming to us next Tuesday morning so having waited this long, we can sure hang on for six more days. Being on the high street, we also took the opportunity to dive into a local shop to buy some toiletries which we like and typically in stock. We then visited our local Waitrose which serves as a drop-off point for any clothes purchases that we make online with John Lewis. We were pleased to pick this up today as the item of clothing was ordered a few days ago and John Lewis had despatched it to the wrong Waitrose store. We got an apologetic email from them (after being invited to call them) but as things were only delayed by a day or so, we did not honestly mind.
On our way home and halfway between Waitrose and Bromsgrove School, we were delighted to meet up again with an acquaintance of ours who we used to meet some 2-3 times a week in the Waitrose coffee bar when it was open. Our friend is a local teacher of ‘A’-level politics and had also attended university in Leicester so we always had quite a lot in common. At least a year ago, I had rounded up some of the politics textbooks I was never going to need again and made her a present of them – if they were not useful to her then they could always be donated to the school library or even used as little gifts for some of her students. Our friend told us that the coffee bar in Waitrose may well be scheduled for re-opening on July 21st so we may have to wait for several more weeks before the old gang can reestablish itself. I asked one of the staff inside Waitrose whether each visitor on reopening day would be given a bottle of Champagne as a mark of loyalty – she thought not but hope springs eternal! Anyway, I have quite missed our friend (not seen for over a year) and her little child who is now rapidly growing up and was at nursery school so having waited for a year, we just need to show a little more patience so that we can eventually have friends re-united. By the time we had made these various shopping excursions it was fairly late when we got home so lunch was quite delayed, even by our standards.
In the late afternoon, we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends whom we normally contact once a week but we had to delay our normal call a week ago because of some technical problems. Anyway, it was great to catch up on each other’s news and, of course, as the weather has been fine we have all taken the opportunities to make little excursions. Our friends were delighted to make the acquaintance again of their latest grandchild who they have hardly seen in the last five months. Naturally this caused a great deal of pleasure but it does raise the interesting question – for many people – whether young children may find it a little difficult to recreate the social relationships (e.g. with grandparents) which the lockdowns have denied them over the months.
Some readers of this blog may vaguely be aware that very occasionally (!) if I am finding it a little difficult to sleep it is not unknown for me to get up and play for a little on the computer. The IBM ‘ThinkPad‘ I recently acquired has a very loyal following amongst its aficionados and has an amazing history of being used in space! I take the following para from a website entitled ‘IBM ThinkPads in Space‘’ and it reads as follows:
IBM ThinkPads first flew aboard the U.S. Space Shuttle on Dec. 2, 1993 on the Shuttle Endeavour’s flight to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronauts used the ThinkPads 750s to view color images and sketches of the telescope that were loaded on the computer’s hard drive….
As the 20th century drew to a close, the only notebooks certified for long-term flight on the International Space Station (ISS) were the IBM ThinkPad 760XD and the 755C. Five 76OXDs and one additional 755C were placed on ISS during the May 1999 shuttle mission (STS-96), and another seven 76OXDs and one 755C were delivered on subsequent flights. (In 2003, IBM ThinkPad A31p computers were flown to the International Space Station for in-flight testing. The A31p is scheduled to become the new ISS Portable Computer System, replacing the ThinkPad 760XD.)
The website referred to above is full of some history and NASA have only ever allowed IBM ‘ThinkPads‘ anyway near their space shuttles. I think I can remember seeing a photo of an astronaut with a ‘ThinkPad ‘in one hand (no gravity!) and a repair tool in the other – presumably following video instructions. So what I am referring to here is a kind of loyalty towards a machine which is not a great games machine, is not the fastest or the slickest but is certainly one of the more robust, being designed to last for decades if necessary in an office environment. Now I had upgraded my ‘ThinkPad‘ from XP to Windows 7 where everything seemed to be OK but without the benefit of any sound drivers. Naturally, I searched the web and tried one or two things but nothing seemed to work. But eventually I stumbled across a disk on eBay which cost the princely sum of £1.85 entitled ‘Windows Universal Driver Installation DVD – 2020 Drivers‘’. This DVD contains a program which scans the whole of your PC noting any absences of drivers and giving you the opportunity to install whatever you wanted. It noted the absence of sound drivers so I gratefully accepted the offer of installing these but neglected the opportunities to update other drivers just in case it sent the whole computer haywire. Imagine my delight, when the icon on the TaskBar went from ‘not working’ to ‘working’ – and of course, eventually, the sound seemed to be working OK. However, the volume was pretty low but I managed to discover some software settings (in different places) to boost the volume level – and then discovered two specialist keys, (not Function keys) on the ‘ThinkPad‘ which were evidently sound increase/decrease buttons and eventually I had a system with fully featured sound. I also happened to have a small, USB-driven, loudspeaker which is somewhat more than golfball size but is nonetheless much larger than the thin strip of a speaker which laptops utilise. So all in all, I must say that I am a very happy bunny having a laptop which enables me to do what I want (principally show my 30 year old statistics programs) as well as the ‘marriage’ between my digitised wedding photos and an .mp3 music file which runs alongside them which is a very accurate representation of all of the wedding music played at the original ceremony in September, 1967.
Being reminded that tomorrow is the 25th wedding anniversary of our domestic help, Meg and I decided to alter our routine somewhat. We went down into car and, having collected our newspapers, popped into our local Waitrose where we bought some anniversary presents (‘Prosecco‘, a couple of sweet pea arrangements complete with their own netting and bamboo hoops). By an extraordinary coincidence, I encountered a lady within the store clutching the same two items so we evidently had similar thoughts in mind. So we got home not particularly late but laden with gifts appropriate for the occasion, we hope! Meg also passed on a brand-new item of clothing which was no longer wanted or needed but proved to be an exact fit.
In the extraordinary maelstrom which is contemporary UK politics, it looks as though the noose is tightening around Boris John’s neck as it now appears, more likely than not, that a donor to the Conservative party had quite illegally paid for Boris Johnson’s flat renovations (now rumoured to be £200,000 whilst the taxpayer provides the first £30,000) Some reports are indicating that one of the reasons for the expense is that Johnson’s ‘girlfriend’ has a penchant for gold wallpaper. Meanwhile the great British public do not seem to care at all as the Conservatives are now polling at 44%, unchanged from a week earlier. whilst Labour was down a point on 33%.
We were somewhat delayed this morning as Meg nd I had some domestic jobs to get done before we went on our walk. We did not want to rush in any case as it had started raining at about 5-6 in the morning (and perhaps even earlier) and was spluttering on even in the mid morning. As the morning wore on, though, the sun eventually broke through and we finished with quite a sunny morning Again, we had a slightly different routine this morning because having picked up our newspapers, we knew that we had better make a trip to W H Smiths (which also incorporates the Post Office these days) in order to buy some birthday cards and one, in particular, which needed to arrive by tomorrow in time for the birthday on Sunday. There was a group of colleagues at the University of Winchester who all had their birthdays strung out through various dates in May. We decided about twenty years ago now that we would have a large celebratory birthday meal to accommodate all of us, and this has carried on even after the year that many of us retired in 2007 or shortly thereafter. In fact, we call ourselves ‘The Old Fogies‘ and when we meet we exchange news of families,current politics an so on, I would like to think that we remind ourselves how excellent things were when we in charge and how things have gone to the dogs ever since then. We don’t actually say any of this but we might secretly think it, all the same. This year, one of our number has busily organised a large Zoom session for us on the night of 11th May (which happens to be my birthday) so that we can raise a virtual glass to each other (although, come to think of it, they could be real). Another of our number is 60 this year and would have dearly loved to have a party at home but that pleasure may have to wait for another year (and perhaps even longer than that if a third wave strikes us).
I had another little ‘play’ on my IBM ThinkPad this afternoon. From somewhere, I have found about a free utility suite named ‘Glary Utilities’ which does all kind of housekeeping things on your computer. These include examining the Registry for any error or inconsistencies, getting rid of any tracks you may have left around whilst browsing, using a Disk Cleanup utility, examining the processes and start-up items on your computer and so on. Most of these things are forgotten about by the average user but a set of utilities like these helps get rid of the clutter which eventually slows all computers down. As I only have a small amount of installed memory by today’s standards (1.25 Gb rather than the more common 4Gb) I am trying to run a ‘clean and mean machine’ whilst I can. I also have given the sound system a good workover by installing and then playing from my Music Library a whole series of Mozart tracks. Just out of interest, I wondered how easy it would be to get my favourite Paint Concerto (Mozart’s No. 23) onto my system and found it ridiculously easy. I located and downloaded the relevant mp3 files I needed onto a pen drive on my main computer (I intend to use the Thinkpad to go on the web only when absolutely necessary) and then transferred them into the ThinkPad – the whole process must have taken about 2 minutes. I was then giving my little external speaker system a good workout – it looks a little like a golfball but the top twists to add some miniature bellows to give a bit of extra volume. The whole caboodle has to be charged up beforehand and lasts, I think, for about 5 hours but has the advantage that it doesn’t occupy a precious USB port but all you have to do is to plug in the audio lead. I am quite astonished by how good the quality is for such a tiny (and cheap!) device so this helps to extend the functionality of the sound system as a whole. I discovered that the sound card is by Realtek (very good reputation for quality) and is part of the motherboard whilst the video controller is built into the chip itself. Incidentally, one of my acquaintances in the park today handed me a leaflet for a little firm housed in the upstairs of a store whose function is to recycle unwanted furniture into the hands of ‘needy’ people. The little firm advertises some incredibly cheap laptop deals with laptops with a 2.5Ghz CPU, 4 GB of Ram and a 250GB hard disk at prices ranging from £60 for a Lenovo to £90 for a Toshiba. If I need to install any new memory (quite a possibility) or have a need for a more specialised cable, then I know where I will be heading for in the future.
The 1st May has dawned with a bout of distinctly cloudy, or at leat variable, weather. Meg and I did not start our walk into town until nearly 12.00 and when we started off, the weather was set quite fair but it was soon to change. By the time we were sitting on our bench, it had started to rain and neither of us had coats on. So we packed up our camp and headed down the hill where we decided to head for the bandstand – together with several others sheltering from the rain. There we bumped into University of Birmingham friend and another of our park regulars and we engaged in one of our long and rambling conversations. In the course of this, and à propos nothing in particular, I regaled them with a story from the days in which I used to work in a big, 4-star hotel in Harrogate. This hotel was huge and about 375 bedrooms with a very high occupancy rate, so it was no surprise that occasionally a guest died from natural causes.The problem is – how to you safely transport a body through the hotel without attracting the attention of the police, ambulance crews, other guests etc (I am talking about the period from 1959-1964 here) The answer is, of course, that we rolled the body inside a carpet and brought it down in the service lift. After all, nobody gives a second glance to a group of hotel workers bringing a roll of carpet down in a lift and I think this happened on one or two occasions whilst I was working there. I started washing dishes – 12½p an hour, graduated to washing silver (15p an hour), then washing glass for the bar (20p an hour) and finally worked in the main bar itself only to be rewarded, eventually, with my own little cocktail bar (25p an hour). As you can tell, there was a minute stratification structure to the hotel which had managed in its entirety by about 3-5 managers. When we went back to the hotel for a 70th birthday treat, I espied an organisation chart where there were now about 5 times as many managers (including occupations that didn’t exist in the 1950’s such as ‘website manager‘) but the number of rooms had been reduced by a half (as they knocked rooms together to provide en-suite facilities, I imagine) This, if course, happens in the ‘private’ sector where the bureaucracy had grown over the decades as it has in the public sector of course.
We got home incredibly late after all of this chattering (we had also stopped to have a natter with some of our church friends going up the hill) so it was getting on for 2.30 when we eventually got home. So to save time preparing and cooking a meal, we just had a thick soup which is a Waitrose specialty to which we treat ourselves. The rest of the afternoon was a deliberately lazy affair as we knew we had to get ready to go to church at at about 5.30 in the afternoon.We only just booked in time to get into the service on this occasion and I think that the church was full to its new ‘semi-lockdown’ capacity which is about 45 people. We do see and wave to other people at a distance but perhaps it will not be too long before we can have the normal types of social discourse that occurs between members of the congregation once we start to experience what will be the ‘new normal’ times.
The Sky News website hosts an interesting graphic of ‘Covid-19 around the world‘ and by putting your mouse over a country of interest, you will be informed of the number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases expressed as a rate per 100,000. Some of the comparisons are amazing – for example the rate in France is 824 (15 times the English rate of 55), in Argentina it is 772 (14 times the English rate), in Mongolia 541 (10 times the English rate) and in Vietnam 0.2 (0.04 of the English rate) It makes you think, does it not?
Next week is going to be a busy week, what with one thing or another. On Tuesday, we are looking forward very much to getting our locks shorn by the hairdresser for whom we have both been waiting for weeks. Then on Friday, we are scheduled to go to Marks and Spencer in Longbridge (site of the old Austin production line) for a specialised (free) underwear fitting session which they offer but for which you have to book way in advance. We will probably need to hand deliver our voting papers for the forthcoming election because the Bank Holiday has rather crept up on us and if we were put our postal votes in the postbox, they would sit there until Tuesday and not get delivered until Wednesday which would be cutting it a little fine – so we will have a run out in the car and hand deliver the votes through the door of the council offices themselves.
Today was the day that yesterday ought to have been i.e. it was bright, sunny and springlike and was the kind of day that you associate with May Day (1st May) rather than May 2nd. So we were straight into our Sunday morning routine which involves me going and getting the Sunday newspapers early and before we settle down to watch the Andrew Marr show. My newsagent who is busy writing a book at the moment asked me if I knew of any editors in Bromsgrove – by this, I think he means a proof-reader plus ‘second pair of eyes’ to oversee a manuscript so ever keen for this sort of thing I volunteered to do it for him chapter by chapter whenever he wants to let me have it. As he uses MicroSoft Word on a Mac (as do I) then there should be any compatibility issues. After the Andrew Marr show, we walked down into town and, believe it not, soon met up with about 2-4 of our park ‘regulars’ where we had a jolly time but recognised that tomorrow might be quite a wet and soggy day according to weather forecasts so tomorrow we will feel less inclined to linger if the heavens have opened above us. On our return home, I got to work on the pork joint that we had slow cooking throughout the morning. I always make some onion gravy and then divide the whole joint into two halves -freezing one half for future weeks. Then I cut off some slices from the joint and pop it in the gravy thickened with instant potato (a cheat, which I buy from Asda incredibly cheaply when I see it) and finally a splash of Sarson’s ‘Browning’ (colouring agent) which is yet another cheat to make the gravy look richer than it is. Finally this gets complemented with Cavolo Nero kale and a baked potato. As you might expect, most of the afternoon is devoted to an intense reading of the Sunday newspapers.
In the not quite middle of the night, I was playing about with the little speaker I have popped onto the resurrected IBM ThinkPad, when I suddenly remembered that I already had some quite decent little speakers tucked away somewhere. Actually,I had bought them to complement a little Samson machine I had a few years ago and then disposed of. Excitedly, I hooked up the speakers to the Thinkpad and although it was the middle of the night (and therefore I had to keep the volume right down) nonetheless the tone and quality seemed excellent to me. They were little squat Logitech speakers, made in China but well constructed with some interesting little detail.The speakers themselves were about 1½” which is surely enough for a laptop, for which they were designed. The speakers housings were about 4½” tall and had little rubberised strips incorporated into the base so that they wouldn’t slide around all over one’s desktop. Another design detail that I had not fully appreciated when I bought them a few years (current price £15) is that the back of each speaker contains a cable management arrangement around which you can wind any excess length of cable so that you only have the amount of cable lying across your desktop that you happen to need. They achieve their power through a USB which does take to take up one precious USB slot. But then I had a bit of a brainwave. I had bought from Poundland about a year ago a ‘Power Bank‘ (for the princely sum of £1!) designed to give your phone an emergency boost of power if you need it whilst out on the road. Anyway,I had one of these units already charged up and found this was an excellent power source for my speakers (which at half volume are only about 0.6 watts anyway) Remembering my ‘O’-level physics (Watts=volts*amps) I worked out that this power brick might give me 50 hours of play time before it needs to be recharged (if I got this wrong by a factor of 10, 5 hours is still quite a decent whack) I went on the web on my main computer to find a review of these Logitech speakers and the reviews that I found were incredibly sniffy about them (e.g. ‘with the volume cranked up to only 50% the speakers emitted a distorted and jarring sound..the bass and mids tended to fade away as the volume got higher’) I have to say, they sounded incredibly good to me and I played a variety of classical tracks on them this morning – I wonder if audiophiles and audio experts get anything intolerant of a system that doesn’t cost hundreds of pounds! Anyway, I am delighted by what I have and I suspect that I will be giving myself a good diet of my favourite classical tracks to give them a good trial whilst I am busy reading and writing my emails first thing every morning!
Today, you might say, was a typical Bank Holiday Monday i.e. it was wet , cold, windy and blustery. To be fair, it seemed to be like this all over the country so we did not feel relatively deprived – but it is amazing how many times Bank Holidays in the UK just happen to coincide with a spell of really awful weather. When Meg and I were wondering whether or not to walk into town, we decided to brave it as the sky was only spluttering a little and we thought the walk would do us good. Eventually, though, we made our way to the park where we were about the only people to be seen – apart from one lonely dog walker in a hi-viz vest about 300 yards away. So we consoled ourselves by having our snack absolutely alone and feeling a little wet and miserable – I kept remembering the line written in a Blackpool theatrical digs establishment in which a rather disgruntled thespian had written in the guest book ‘We were cold and hungry – and you took us in’ As we were leaving we glanced towards the duck pond/boating lake only to discover that six little ducklings had made their presence known. They have a rather precarious existence having to contend with ‘Henry’ the (resident) heron on the one hand and some rats who we know inhabit the island in the middle of the lake. Last year, I remember seeing the mother duck paddling cross the pond with all of her ducklings spread out behind her in an orderly line. This made me remember something we once saw in Coruña in Northern Spain. A group of Japanese kindergarten children who must have been aged about 4-6 were being taken out by their teacher. The children held onto a long length of blue rope and they were placed alternatively and were similarly equally spaced on each side of the rope – they had evidently been told ‘Whatever you do – keep hold of the rope’ and all the teacher had to do in order to get them across the road was to wait for a gap in the traffic and then hang onto one end of the rope and then lead them across. A simple solution to a problem, really.
This afternoon although it was still very blustery, I decided to make a special expedition to our local Asda in order to buy a few particular things that I know cannot be bought anywhere else – for example, we quite like tins of rhubarb that we have with a hot bowl of custard but only Asda seem to stock it. Anyway, I had about eight little items on my list and, fortunately, I managed to buy each one of them. The fact it was a Bank Holiday and so wet and windy made the store practically empty which sorted my purposes down to the ground. In particular, now that I am ‘in the know’, I bought a couple of what I now know to be called ‘Power Banks’ i.e. little stores of energy a bit like a battery but where you can top up your mobile phone if you out on the road and find your battery has run out completely. In my case, I am using these power banks to power the speakers on my resurrected ThinkPad which means that a precious USB port is not taken out of commission. Incidentally, I managed to find other reviews that contrasted with the rather scabby review that I read about the Logitech speakers I have brought into use recently. These other reviews were YouTube reviews and the presenters were very enthusiastic about the quality and functionality of these speakers (as indeed I am). I gave them a good test by playing the whole of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 whilst replying to my emails this morning and I personally found the quality and the tone to be excellent. When you think of the number of variables (the quality of the actual sound card, the drivers, the speakers themselves and the inevitably subjective impressions of the hearer) perhaps it is not a surprise that one can get such a variety of opinions concerning the sound quality that the user is experiencing.
Today Boris Johnson has been declaiming that the end of the lockdown may well be in sight and that we can start to look forward to both the end of social distancing and also also the prospect of overseas holidays. It looks as France, Spain and Italy may well end up not in the ‘green zone’ but in the ‘amber zone’ which means that visitors to the countries will have self quarantine for a number of days upon their return. Quite frankly, I think it is a little too soon to be holding out such promises because there is plenty of time for new variants to arise and for all kinds of problems to manifest themselves. For example, some experts are explaining that when travelling through an airport terminal those from ‘red’ ‘amber’ and ‘green’ zones will all be mixing and queuing up together which exposes everyone to all kinds of cross-infection. The fact that an election is due in three days time is probably explanation enough for the fact that a proper degree of caution is now being abandoned – and we may all suffer in the long run.
Today was a day to which we had been looking forward for quite some time because it was the day when Meg and I were due to be shorn of our lanky locks i.e. receive our long promised haircuts. It was last December when we were last ‘done’ so we have had to be quite patient. Knowing that our hairdresser was due to come mid-morning, our morning walk had to be foregone. Instead, I went down by car to collect our daily ration of newspapers and then, whilst in the car, made a trip in person to hand in our postal ballots. I could have popped them into a postbox but with the Bank Holiday they would stayed sitting in the postbox from Friday afternoon until the following Tuesday with delivery on Wednesday at the earliest. So I handed in our postal votes, hoping that by saving a day they would get into the system and be counted as they should be. Then when I got home, we spent some useful time waiting for the hairdresser by doing some tidying up and filing of one sort or another. Eventually, our hairdresser turned up – about half an hour late- but Meg had a perm and I had my typical haircut, so we feel we have entered the ranks of the ‘normals’ for a change. The weather was very variable today and seemed more akin to April than to May and for a few minutes we actually had rain that turned to sleet and eventually to little round pellets of hail – before giving rise that is to bouts of brilliant sunshine. That is why it is sometimes said that you can have four seasons in one day.
This afternoon was a lazy type of afternoon. and I alternated between bouts of reading, bouts of tidying and bouts of getting my ‘Power Banks’, purchased yesterday afternoon, properly charged up and loaded to go. I intended to search on the web to load Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 (popularly known as ‘Elvira Madigan’ after a Swedish film of 1967 in which the second movement features prominently) This was a slightly frustrating search as most of the offerings available on the internet feature the second movement only. Indeed, the second movement ‘Andante’, of sublime beauty, with its few notes and bare outline, is incidentally a classic example of the manner in which Mozart frequently left himself room to improvise within the context of his own concertos. It is incredibly well known and frequently played on Classic FM for example. I did manage to find a complete recording but it seemed to be in mono, not stereo, and sound pedestrian in the extreme which is why, probably, it is made available in its entirety on the internet because nobody wants to listen to it!
We FaceTimed our close ex-Waitrose friends late this afternoon and they told us a tale of woe concerning her daughter. Whilst motoring slowly through the centre of Bromsgrove a youth dashed in front of her car and then proceeded to vandalise it. Apparently this 17 year may have been high on drink and drugs and had fallen out with his girlfriend. The police eventually proceeded to apprehend the offender whilst the youth was busy inflicting damage on several other vehicles in his crazed state. The police had been round to take statements but were, apparently, unwilling to take any further action as the youth, despite causing mayhem, was ‘under the age of 17 and of unsound mind‘ This sounds to us like a complete cop out (sorry about the pun!) and it did remind me of my own accident in 1973 when I was run over by a probably drunken driver but the police did not show any inclination to be involved as the driver had knocked himself unconscious and one cannot perform a blood test for alcohol on an unconscious subject (but one coming round, he immediately caught the next flight to Florida where we eventually served a High court writ on him five years later) We advised our friends to get some legal expertise focussed upon their options in this circumstance as soon as they could and before any evidence trails grow cold even though they might have to pay for it in the short term.
There are several other little snippets of political news this evening. The Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer is admitting that the party has a ‘mountain to climb’ before the bye-election on Thursday of Hartlepool, formerly a rock solid Labour stronghold but now one in which, according to one poll this evening, the Tories have a 17-point lead. It sounds as though Keir Starmer is already conceding defeat. In the meanwhile the political analysts are all saying that the amount of sleaze swirling around No 10 at the moment is not having any severe consequences because the voters ‘have already priced this in’ i.e. they know that Boris Johnson has a proven track record of lying and duplicity but they tend to vote for him anyway (like Trump and other populists)
Today was a very rainy and blustery day and although there were hints at some sunshine in between the showers, it was certainly raincoat weather. We were a little delayed this morning getting our Waitrose order in place ready for delivery tomorrow so we felt it was prudent to make a journey into town by car. This we did, collecting our newspapers, popping into Waitrose to get some extra milk and finally making our way into the bandstand in the park, which is our normal retreat in bad weather. Needless to say, we are about the only people in the park this morning although the car park seemed full enough – do people park here (free) and then walk down into town, we asked each other? Then it was time for lunch at a fairly normal time and we settled down for a good read in the afternoon.
This was not to be, however. The IBM Thinkpad I am gradually resurrecting and upon which I have recently installed Windows 7 kept informing me that I needed to validate my installation of Windows as otherwise dire consequences might follow (what MicroSoft archly call ‘Reduced Functionality Mode‘ which probably means that it will not run). I tried to validate using the automatic process (online) but only got an error code when I tried this. I was given the opportunity to attempt to validate by telephone and this is when the fun and games started. I phoned a Microsoft number that the machine gave me but their system needed to validate my phone by entering some validation digits. This worked (eventually) on the 3rd attempt and then Microsoft needed to validate my email by sending me an email with another validation code. Having got through these hurdles, all of the menus were assuming I was trying to validate Windows 10 (support for Windows 7 having finished some 15 months ago) By a series of accidents and lucky guesses on the phone, I eventually go through to a human operator (in the States, I imagine, judging by the accent) I tried giving them my Product Activation key (25 digits of alphanumeric characters) but this was not required. Nor was my Product ID code what was required. Eventually I was asked to read out another group of codes supplied to me by my Activation screen- this was about 9 groups of six which I had to read out. In return for this, I was then asked to enter about 48 other numbers (eight groups of six?) which I did – and my version of Windows (which I always knew to be legal) was eventually activated. Naturally, I was relieved to get this done and have a fully activated copy of Windows 7 but there is a reason for all of this. Because there is so much illicit copying and fraud throughout the world, Microfoft have to ensure that the same copy of Windows is not being installed on more than one system. The activation procedure involves a procedure whereby about six details of your configuration (CPU, memory, hard disk, motherboard etc.) are transmitted to Microsoft so that they can ascertain that this combination has not been used before. So, for example, if you had a desktop machine and also laptop you would have to have a fully legitimate copy for each of these installations. One can understand the reasons for all of this, I suppose, and having an ‘old’ operating system was not ever going to help but at least my efforts have been crowned with success (not guaranteed in the world of computing). I have just invested, though, in a ‘Windows 7 – the missing manual‘ which is part of an excellent series and would have cost me $40.00 when first published in 2010 but I acquired for about £3.50 post-free recently.
Facebook has confirmed its ban on Donald Trump’s utterances. Twitter have banned him permanently but FaceBook’s oversight board is keeping him banned until ‘the risk of violence has decreased‘ That form of words seems to give Facebook plenty of scope to rescind the ban whenever they like. It seems that a way round the ban is already being found as Trump has launched a space on his website where he posts messages that can be shared by others on their own social networking pages. So it looks as though he has found a way, despite being banned, of getting his message across to whoever he likes. Under the banner of ‘From the desk of Donald J Trump‘ and complete with his photos, his prominent supporters can promulgate whatever message he wants on their own websites.
It is the day today before the local elections (and the Scottish elections) but although TV programmes are going to run from midnight tomorrow night there does not seem much to stay up for. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, a lot of the counting is going to be delayed until Friday so news will no doubt dribble out during the day – so nothing much to waste good sleeping time for.
Today seemed quite a nice bright day, albeit showery, in the morning. We were a bit delayed, as we are often are on a Thursday with our Waitrose delivery and the arrival of our domestic help as we always seem to have a lot of news to catch up week by week. So eventually we got to walking down to the park and, for a change, the weather was very pleasant although a tad cold for us. Whilst Meg sat on the park bench, I went off quickly on my own to collect the newspapers – in the meantime, when I returned, Meg had been joined by our friendly octogenarian who walks at least 10km a day come hail or shine. Then on our way home, we bumped into our Italian friend who we have not seen for quite a long time (but she had seen the backs of us as we beetled down the hill one morning) Anyway, more pleasant chats for us both but it was very late when we go home for lunch. Fortunately, I managed to raid my store cupboard for one of those tins (chicken, steak) that we tend to keep in the cupboard to raid ‘in case of emergency’. So we managed to make a pretty fast risotto which was just as well as we tend to share a little of it with our domestic help. After lunch and a doze, the weather looked set fair so the lawnmower beckoned as it is now a couple of weeks since the last mow. Fortunately the rains held off and the grass got well and truly cut -as the gardening books often say ‘Choose a fine day to…‘ (as though one could)
The political news last night and again today was quite interesting, particularly if you are of cynical frame of mind. There are the Tories 10% ahead of the Labour Party the day before some of the biggest elections which we are holding today (some having been held over from last year, postponed because of COVID-19). Suddenly, eager to make a mark with the more Brexit and xenophically inclined sections of the electorate in the so-called ‘red wall’ (i.e. Labour seats in largely declining industrial areas) and handed to them on a plate was a fishing dispute with the French off the territory of Jersey. The British government immediately sent two warships to the area, which immediately generated headlines such as ‘Boris sends in the warships‘ and similar headlines. It is a well known ploy of right wing governments to have an aggressive foreign policy, almost deliberately picking fights with enemies to ‘unify the nation’. But in this particular case, it is evident that Britain sending warships to defend ‘our’ fishing industry against the French is bound to create waves of approval, particularly from the more Brexit-inclined portions of the electorate. You could not have handed a ‘gift-wrapped’ bonus to the Government on the very eve of an election if you had tried. I am trying to fully understand the rights and wrongs in this situation. As I understand it, no Jersey fishermen have been allowed to land any of their catch in France so they are one casualty of Brexit. The French, on the other hand, have traditionally fished all around Jersey (it is only 14 miles from the French coast). However, under the Brexit agreement, their rights are guaranteed but the Jersey authorities are demanding proof from each particular trawler skipper that they have ‘traditionally’ been fishing in the area which sounds a bureaucratic nightmare. However, after a flurry of ‘gunship diplomacy’, it does look tonight as though the Jersey authorities and the French are sitting down to thrash things out in a relatively cordial fashion but I suspect that this is one of these loose ends from Brexit will rumble on and on.
Whilst I must admit to being an ‘election junky’, tonight is going to be an exception. Normally, I stock up with several bottle of Newcastle Brown ale which it is always my intention to slowly consume throughout the night as the election results roll in. The theory is that I will be celebrating if the party I support is winning or gaining seats or to console myself if the parties I support are actually losing. But this evening, there will be nothing to keep me from my bed. In the first place, the Tories are about 10% ahead and reportedly 17% ahead in Hartlepool which I think has only been Tory on one occasion in the past century. Anyway, 17% behind on the day before the election makes the prospects utterly dismal for the Labour Party. Many of the councils will not start counting until Friday morning and some are even delaying the start of the count until Monday (because of the difficulties that COVID-19 creates for the count, presumably) So I suppose when the polls close at 10.00pm tonight and when the political analysis programs start at 12.00pm, probably there will not be much meat to chew over apart from some exit polls that may well have been conducted.
So we had a beautiful, spring-like day today and it was a delight to walk down into town when we eventually did. Our walk was a little delayed so I left Meg on the ‘top’ bench (i.e. one of the three that overlooks most of the park and hence one of our favourite perches) chatting with one of our regulars who espied us from afar and whizzes along at a fantastic speed in her battery-driven wheelchair. and so on. Having collected our newspapers, I made my way back through the park and now we had a little congregation of about 5-6 of us who seem to coincide at about the same time of day in the park. On the way home, we were pleased to have a little chat with an elderly French lady who we know quite well (neighbours of some of our Catholic friends). She recently lost her husband who was pretty aged and had been very ill so we agreed that he was probably in ‘a better place’ right now. The funeral arrangements had gone quite well but of course the numbers were very restricted in these COVID-19 lockdown days. We intimated to the French lady (who I think has taught French in England for several decades during her working life) that we would be delighted to have her round into our garden to drink either tea or champagne according to our mood. We have only had conversations in the street but would welcome the opportunity to share some of our life experiences with each other. When Meg and I used to go on holiday regularly to the South of Spain with the Saga group (catering for the over 50’s) we often found it fascinating to have extended conversations with various people that we met about their life and careers. Everybody we met seemed to have such a fascinating ‘back history’ and I am sure the same is probably true of the people we meet here in Bromsgrove. And we had yet another cbat with our Italian friend on the way home – it was certainly the right kind of weather fo stopping and chatting all the way home.
We had to have a lightning lunch of cheese and biscuits because we had booked a fitting service for some clothes in the Longbriege branch of Marks and Spencer. Longbridge is where the assembly track to the Austin mini used to be and the site as a whole is now dominated by some large retail outlets and social housing. It makes the days of strikes in British car factories in the mid 70’s seem so incredibly distant – well, of course, it was half a century ago.
The political news this evening is almost completely unprecedented. Firstly, the Tories have won the parliamentary bye-election in Hartlepool with a massive majority (taking approximately two thirds of the vote in what had traditionally been one of the safest of Labour seats) This is the first time the Tories have gained this seat since its creation about fifty years ago. The explanation is not had to find. Election analyst professor Will Jennings, of the University of Southampton, said the 2021 results showed the Tories were ‘making largest gains, and Labour feeling most pain, in areas that voted strongly for Brexit.‘ Conservatives are hoovering up Leave voters Prof Jennings said. ‘That’s the stomping ground where the Conservatives are doing really well.‘ In terms of a broader analysis of the British political scene is is quite remarkable that a party should be in power for about 11 years and then make massive gains in the heartlands of its opponents. I am not sure whether this has every happened before in British political history and once would have to delve into political history books to find a parallel. All of the voters who voted Brexit/Leave seem to have fallen completely into the lap of the Tories. Added to this, of course, we have the ‘rally around the flag’ sentiment concerning the successful implementation of the vaccination regimes . To give a pithy illustration of this, the leader of the Conservatives in Walsall (where the Tories made enormous gains) was asked why the Conservatives had done so well in Walsall. For a local politician campaigning on local issues, his answer was revealing: ‘Well it’s all down to Boris Johnson and the success of his vaccination campaign‘ Enough said! In the meantime, the Labour Party seems to have strengthed its position in Wales and in Scotland, the SNP have also gained ground – whether enough to form an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament it is too early to tell. It does look as though, right across the UK (excluding Northern Ireland where there were no elections) that members of governing parties (Tory in England, Labour in Wales, SNP in Scotland) have generally reinforced their position. Is this a vase of ‘rally round the flag’ as the pandemic crisis is starting to recede?
When we woke up this morning it was evidently raining quite hard and carried on splattering for most of the day. A quick look at the Weather app on our iPhone confirmed that there was an 80% chance of rain all day so we certainly did not rush to walk down through the rain. In conditions like this, it is always a tight call whether we walk in the slight drizzle but at the risk of the heavens opening and us getting completely soaked through or whether it is more prudent to go by car. In the end, prudence prevailed and we made our way to the paper shop by car. When getting back into the car, I must have put the control in my back pocket and sat upon it because the car mysteriously opened every window and then its ‘moonlight’ roof as well. Mystified as I was by all of this I set about closing all of the open windows and the ‘moon-roof’ and a semblance of order being restored, we made our way towards the park. On our way there, we were behind a car and I said to Meg ‘Is that a nodding dog on the back window of that car?’ As it turned out, it was a dog that happened to be nodding rather than a nodding dog (= toy!) if you get my drift. We parked the car and were just making for the band stand when our University of Birmingham friend turned up – he had been in the park for some time and we were very pleased to see each other. By this time the rain had stopped but our friend always has a spare towel in his rucksack (as do we) so between us, we managed to wipe the park benches dry and then sat down and had a really pleasant chat. I can never remember exactly the subject of our conversations but we seem to flow easily from seemingly disconnected topic to the next. As we are all going out on a joint birthday trip next Tuesday, it was just as well to make some last minute arrangements and timings – for example, Severn Valley Railways requires us to attend some 40 minutes before the departure time in order to comply with some COVID-19 precautions.
When we got home, we had a traditional Saturday lunchtime treat of some Waitrose sausages which we always enjoy. Then we settled down letting the trickle of election results flow past us whilst we were gently reading. Many of the results were completely predictable eg. the County Council where I am living (Worcstershire) showed the Tories increasing their representation in the County Council whilst the Labour Party had another atrocious night. But apparently the Liberal Democrats picked up a seat in Bromsgrove which is quite a coup for them (in a strongly Conservative town). Nationally, there were one or two surprises. Cambridgeshire County Council went to ‘No overall control’ which was very much against the prevailing trend. In the West of England mayoral election, Labour had a rare success securing about 60% of the vote and taking the mayoralty I think from the Tories. In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has been remarkably successful increasing the SNP seats by just failing by 1 seat to secure an overall majority (64 seats out of 129 – one more seat was needed for an absolute majority). However, Nicola Sturgeon can still claim that a majority of those casting voted have voted for there to be a vote on independence as some 8 Green MSP’s have been elected as well (and they are even more strongly pro-independent than the SNP) Meanwhile the Labour Party is full of recriminations as the Deputy Leader, Angela Raynor, has been made the sacrificial lamb and has been sacked – despite the fact that the maladroit planning all came from the office of the leader (Keir Starmer) and not his deputy. So the Labour Party is turning into a vicious fight with each other – so what changes?
Still fine-tuning my IBM ThinkPad, I have been looking around for a browser/search engine which as a very small footprint i.e. is a very low consumer of resources such as RAM as I have so little to play with compared with a more modern machine. I have settled on a little browser called Pale Moon which is basically FireFox without a lot of the extra bits added on and optimised so that it works best in 32-bit mode (i.e. older hardware like mine) For a search engine, I am using DuckDuckGo – behind the really strange title is a browser dedicated to making sure you cannot be tracked when you are surfing the web and therefore nasties are far less likely to come your way. So far, I have had a limited play with Pale Moon but as it loaded both my blog and one of my websites in about 1-2 seconds, i.e. practically instantly, then this is exactly what you want in a browser which you are going to use for the very occasional foray into the internet i.e. not browsing as such but going to a known site such as one of my own websites. More about this tomorrow!
Today being a Sunday, we were on our normal Sunday routine which involved me getting to the newspaper shop early and then getting back in time for the Andrew Marr show at 9.00am. At this hour on a Sunday morning, the only people you happen to meet are joggers, often in pairs, and as they are watching their breaths, they generally do not relish any type of a conversation. Instead, we each make do with a grunt (if that!) as we pass in the street. After we had watched the Andrew Marr show and breakfasted, Meg and I walked down to the park in the most beautiful spring sunshine. As we walked down we saw one of our Italian friends and spent a few happy minutes with her and then we met some of our Catholic friends and we exchanged our thoughts on the current political situation (we largely think alike on such issues, as it happens). Eventually we got to the park where we really enjoyed the spring sunshine. We take down with us every day a National Trust portable stool which is incredibly light-weight and seems a little like a walking stick but in which you can pull down the seat and you have a three-legged stool. We use this every day to act as a little table whilst I pour the coffee and it always attracts a great of admiring comment from the various passers by, many of whom know us by now. We met 3-4 of our friends (with whom we generally coincide at about midday) and exchanged some stories. Then we reluctantly made our way home as we know there was a Sunday lunch to cook but we felt we had a very enjoyable and entertaining morning as the fine weather encouraged us to stop, linger and chat.
Sunday afternoons are generally well occupied with newspaper reading but today as result of late declarations and a lot of analysis of the recent elections, we let this wash over us during the afternoon as well. We sometimes tend to watch the Parliament Channel at about 6.00pm on a Sunday because they have a repeat of Question Time which is first broadcast act about 8.30 each Thursday evening. As this had been Election Day and therefore no results had been announced, we thought we might give this program a miss but thought we would give it a try for 5 minutes or so. But one of the programme’s panelists was John Bercow, the ex-speaker of the House of Commons, and he was extremely erudite and well worth listening to. So we stayed with the whole of the programme which, ss it turned out, was particularly interesting this week in both the questions asked and the analysis offered.
As I woke up early this morning, I judged it not worth going back to sleep again so I went on to my IBM ThinkPad to explore some new possibilities. As Windows 7 is massively insecure, I am going to confine my ventures on the web to the absolute minimum but I was speculating to myself whether it was possible to access the internet but without using a browser. I know that in the text editor which is my favourite editor for the MAC it is possible to just type in the full address of a website (complete with its http://) and then just click on it and this link will take you straight to the URL. So I wondered if there was a PC equivalent and after a bit of searching through bulletin boards and queries, I discovered that I was not alone in seeking for a text editor (nothing as full blown as a word-processor) and eventually settled upon NotePad++ ( a free program but which does exactly what I want) So now for my ‘regular’ visits to websites that I know about (e.g. some of my own) then I have them in a simple computer file and click the link. This worked very well and I realise that I am actually using the browser (because whether the browser gets its data from the keyboard or from a clickable link, the end result is the same and it has to ‘do its stuff’ to locate this on the internet). Anyway, I figure that this method will cut out key logging problems and means that as I am not actually firing up the browser then this might make the process a tad more secure (but I may be completely wrong on this point). I then realised that as my new browser Pale Moon is essentially FireFox and it accepts most of the early extensions written for it, whether it would be possible to locate and add on FireFTP – an FTP client which is incredibly concise and works very well. But Firefox dropped it in their later versions as it didn’t fit their latest profile but I managed to locate it, install it and run it to my satisfaction. Having installed it, I didn’t know where it actually was but Pale Moon has a clickable list of options when you click on the Pale Moon name and there, lurking at the of a section called ‘Developers’ was the program I had just installed. So yet another bonus for a little bit of playing about.
Today was one of those days, weather-wise, when it was very hard to predict exactly what kind of conditions one was to endure. Before our walk, I read my emails as is usual and was delighted to receive one from our university flat-mate and life-long friend who hails from Sri Lanka (Ceylon in our day). It was not particularly surprising to get such an email because our birthdays happen to be be on exactly the same day (ie. tomorrow) and therefore it is easy for us both to remember. I sent off a reply, giving our friend some more up-to-date news, informing him of Meg’s medical problems (as he may be suffering in a similar way) and pointing out to him this blog so that he could thoroughly bore himself with all our comings and goings in the last 419 days. We then got a reply in which our friend indicated that he had been bi-polar for 35 years (absolutely unknown to either of us) but it was kept under control with medication. So we finished off wishing each the best for tomorrow and I said that we give him a toast if we happened to be anyway near any alcohol tomorrow. When Meg and I set off for our walk, somewhat delayed this morning, the sky was blue and the sun was shining. By the time we got to the park, however, the black clouds had rolled over and whilst sitting and having our coffee and biscuits the heavens opened upon us and we got quite a wetting (but were not drenched to the skin as could have happened if it happened to be a cloudburst which is not unusual at this time of year). As we walked down to the park this morning, we came across our long-established Italian friend who had bought me a bottle of something (as it is a present it remains unopened until tomorrow). On our way to the newspaper shop, we were intercepted by our oldest Waitrose friends who again had bought me a bottle of something and also baked a special cake, divided into four quarters to drink with our coffee when we are on the train for our expedition tomorrow. Having picked up our papers, we decided to pop into our local Waitrose to remind them of tomorrow’s date.The store opened exactly four years ago tomorrow (which is one of the reasons why I always remember the date).On that occasion, four years ago, I wanted to be the first person through the store doors when it opened but in the event, I was beaten to it by a rather pushy young woman in her 30’s – nonetheless, I am proud to wear my status as their second oldest customer. Several of the staff I knew remembered the date but they didn’t think that the management had got anything special organised for them. As their second oldest customer, I intimated that the staff should remind the current manager of the significance of the date and reward all of the long-serving staff with a bottle of Champagne (or Prosecco) – this they promised to do but also thought I should grace them with a visit tomorrow. I will take one of our blank (useful for any occasion) cards and give the whole store (and its staff) a suitable greeting tomorrow.
By the time we got home for our lunch, it was already past 2.0 pm so we had to make ourselves a lightning lunch (which is happening quite a lot these days) We raided our emergency supplies (ie a tin of chicken) and this having been heated up in the microwave we then served it on a bed of onions, green papers and a dollop of pesto and then the whole was served on a bed of cauliflower rice. So the whole meal took about 10-15 minutes to prepare, which is just as well given the lateness the hour.
Not last summer but the summer before, I had constructed a special kind of plant-pot holder. This is designed so that we have a display of potted plants on the same level of my study window – when I look out, instead of seeing the blank wall of my neighbour, I can see a wonderful display of whichever plant I have acquired. This arrangement took quite a long time to construct and, it must be said, is strange to look at but it fulfils its purpose very well. But last summer’s plants had died off so I needed to get the plant pots off the stand, pull out and dispose of the dead plants and their roots and then preserve all of the ‘good’ soil, ready for any new plantings. I did this afternoon because it is just possible that I might acquire a colourful pot plant tomorrow so I wanted the staging to be all ready for it. As I was finishing off my preparations, there was a tap on the window and there was our domestic help who had called round with a few more goodies for us to enjoy tomorrow and in the days ahead!
Today has arrived at last and we knew that it was going to be quite a busy day as it was Mike’s birthday. After breakfast and a very pleasurable opening both of cards and presents, I popped the various plants that my family had bought for me on the plantstand outside my study window and then went down in the car to pick up our newspapers. This having been done (and learning, incidentally, that my newsagent’s wedding anniversary is exactly the same as ours), I then popped into our local Waitrose. I had already prepared a birthday card for the store (four years old!) and all of its associated staff and this I handed over, as well as a bottle of homemade Apple juice (i.e. non-alcoholic) which I hope that staff will be able to share whenever they have a mid-shift break. I then turned the car homewards and picked up Meg and my son and we made our way to Kidderminster station (or rather the preserved railway station of the Severn Valley Railway line). There we got plugged in to the well worked out procedures to cater for passengers in this almost post-pandemic situation. After our bar coded documentation is handed over, we are issued with a wrist band which we wear all day and which allocated us to our unique carriage compartment. This has evidently been cleaned for us and we were left with a plastic bag for own rubbish and a bottle of sanitiser for our use throughout the day.The train left on time at 11.00 am and takes an hour and a quarter to get to Bridgnorth in Worcestershire. Our son who knows every inch of the line (having undertaken Driver Experience Days driving Class 50 diesel locomotives several times up and down the line) was evidently on hand to give us expert commentary of different facets of the line. As the train passes over the West Midlands Safari park, we had more than a fair glimpse of some of the rhinos who roam there. In our own carriage, we finished off the bacon butties and coffee with which we had fuelled ourselves with in the refreshment rooms at Kidderminster station immediately before our departure.We arrived at Kidderminster, just about on time but with glowering skies and some spits of rain. We decided to walk up into the town in search of a watering hole that would serve us beer and some hot food and found a good place in one of the streets off the High Street which our son had remembered and which gave us good shelter from the drips of rain which were around us. We had to wait a fairly long time for our food but we did not really care as we had so many matters of mutual interest (generally on the subject of engineering matters and particular types of engines found in planes, ships and trains) We then wandered back down through the town and fortunately the sun had now come out to grace our day. We finished up in a beer tent (adjunct the usual ‘Railway Mens Arms‘ which may reopen again shortly) where we topped up the alcohol quotient in our blood before tumbling into our allocated carriage. There we treated ourselves to a drink of coffee (from our own flask), a slice of lemon drizzle cake (courtesy of one of our friends) and a box of delicious dark chocolate truffles (courtesy gift from Waitrose as of this morning). When we come to reflect upon the day, we have had an absolutely marvellous day out with family/friends and would certainly seek to repeat this again at an early opportunity.
This evening, we had a special Zoom meeting organised by one of my University of Winchester colleagues and involving three of my former colleagues as well as Meg and myself. Basically we all enjoy each other’s company so in normal times we tend to meet up once or twice a year (calling ourselves ‘The Old Fogies‘) and enjoy a good meal followed by a drink in a pub often in the Winchester area. We are trying to see if we can meet up again with each face-to-face and so we think that a date in July might be OK. Basically, having waited for 15 months, it shouldn’t be too hard for us to wait another two months which might fly by quite quickly now.
We are now making arrangements to meet with Meg’s cousin (ex-opera singer) and her daughter some time in the neat future. As it stands it looks as though a week on Sunday may be the best available date! Now that the lockdown is easing, I am sure we are all scrambling to meet with each other. I am saying to my friends that I am scouring the local bookshops for old encyclopaedias which may have a designation of ‘How‘ to ‘Hug‘ in case we have forgotten how to do this.
Today, we very much had the feeling of ‘the day after yesterday‘ We had such a wonderful day out on the Severn Valley Railway with family and friends, so today inevitably feels like a bit of an anticlimax. We are always a bit delayed on each Wednesday morning because we have to complete our Waitrose order in time for delivery the following day. In addition, I was sorting out (successfully) a little glitch I had in installing and running a secure email client I had used years before called ‘TopMail‘ and whose virtues I am just rediscovering. This morning, I popped into Waitrose as though it was my local corner shop and bought some milk and also ‘on spec’ a tin of Haggis which is always a bit of an unknown quantity. We then made our way to our normal bench in the park, the black rain clouds having rolled away and giving us some pleasant spring sunshine. We got into conversation with several dog owners not least because some of the pooches under their control think that there may be some food in the offing and come bounding over to see you, with eyes and mouths wide open in anticipation of titbits. Eventually, we made our way home but we were very late at this stage and knew we were going to be quite busy later on the day. At 4.0pm in the afternoon, I was due to Skype one of my ex-University of Winchester friends but between us we could only get Skype working somewhat sporadically (with good vision but very poor sound). Nonetheless after struggling with the technology for about 15-20 minutes, we made the best of a bad job and exchanged lots of gossip about computer-y type things. Then promptly at 5.00pm we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends and thanked them profusely for the magnificent slab of cake that they had so thoughtfully baked for us in time for Tuesday. We knew that we had to be finished by 5.00pm because all four of us in the house were due to meet with a financial advisor who was due to advise us on some joint financial matters in which we all have an interest. So we finally set out to watch the evening news starting with Channel 4 at 7.0pm in the evening. In truth, we have quite a busy afternoon not having time even to barely glance at our two dailies, collected earlier.
It looks this evening as though Boris Johnson has bowed to a certain amount of Parliamentary pressure and agreed to a public enquiry into the whole of the pandemic. The track record for proceedings of this type do not bode well – the Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq way took seven years to complete from the end off the war until publication date whereas the ‘Bloody Sunday‘ enquiry took some twelve years to complete. For a government desperate to play for time then an enquiry that takes ten years to complete (11 years from today) could be the best of three Parliaments away. The major interest comes from the fact that key witnesses cab be interviewed under oath, document trails including emails have to be revealed and so on. But the political danger can be minimised by the passage of time and the fact that memories can fade and the public may feel that the issues have moved on. So it is probable that Johnson can wriggle through from any structures that might ensue, particularly if the vaccination campaign continues to be a resounding success.
As from Monday next, some of the lockdown restrictions are due to be raised. The principal item which concerns most of us is that some indoor events will noy be allowed, subject to some continuing restrictions. For example:’Indoor hospitality will reopen, which means that pubs, cafes and restaurants can once again serve indoors. They will not have to serve a substantial meal with alcoholic drinks; nor will there be a curfew. Customers will, however, have to order, eat and drink while seated.’ What this means in practice is that not only individuals but also friends can go for a meal together. So from next week, there are a variety of things that we can do, subject to the vagaries of the weather of course. We may well go to Droitwich and a favourite little eating house that we go to there and we can do various little bits of shopping that we need to do in a shoe shop and a general-purpose hardware type store – Wilko – that sells all kind of reasonably priced toiletries, stationary and other useful household things!
It really was a very gloomy day today – it looked as though it might rain nearly all of the day and so it proved to be with periods of gloom, interspersed with spatters of rain, followed by quite a downpour from the evening onwards. We have our deliveries from Waitrose on Thursday mornings so this always makes us a little later than normal in the morning. But upon reading my emails, I had some really good news from an ex-colleague from the University of Winchester. Some five years ago, he had suffered from a leukaemia type complaint from which the survival rate is only 30%-40% over five years. Anyway, the five years is now up and my colleague is delighted. He quoted with great approval the dictum of his consultant that ‘There’s no point in curing you if you don’t live a full life….. You can now go away and die of something else.’ So we are all celebrating the good news and long may it continue – perhaps it won’t be too long now before all of the ‘Old Fogies‘ can meet face-to-face and celebrate in the usual fashion.
Today, as Meg and I walked down into town we were trying to remember various family relationships and the connection between them – we wondered if some sections of ‘Meg’s family’ are a little vague about other members of the family. We were trying to work out the exact relationships between ‘x’ and ‘y’ and now we think we have solved the conundrum – at least to our satisfaction. Meg is the first cousin of one family member when traced through Meg’s mother’s side of the family – but also first cousin to another family member when traced through Meg’s father’s side of the family. Now how well these two branches of the family have attended family events in the past is a little unclear to us but when we are next in contact with any of the relevant family members it will be interesting for us to sort out how well each branch of the family is cognisant of the other – Meg is, of course, the point of articulation between these two branches of the family and the relationships are by marriage. Does this make for ‘second cousins’ or ‘cousins once removed’- having come from a small (i.e. not extensive family and my mother was an only child) then these sorts of relationships are always a bit of a mystery to me (not that I let it bother me one little bit)
When Meg and I got to the park, we were somewhat later than usual but the park was pretty deserted as everyone was dodging the rain. We did, though, bump into one of our park regulars and had quite an interesting discussion about politics and political systems – although we come to our discussions from different philosophical traditions, we are just about coinciding in the middle as it were but no doubt will work out exactly at what points we can agree or disagree when we are not completely rained off. I was speculating to myself whether in discussions of this type one should not seek to dissuade the other party of the falsity of their position but rather the veracity of one’s own.. That’s another discussion point for the next time we meet.
We were in contact with one of Meg’s cousin’s daughters via email to work out how the impending house move is going. It turns out that one house is sold but the new house will not be ready for occupation for about another three weeks until some more legal work has been completed. So tomorrow, we are going to have a ‘Zoom’ meeting when no doubt we can get all of the up-to-date information. It shouldn’t be too long now before we can make a lightning visit over to Derbyshire for a family re-union.
Quite by accident this morning, I stumbled across a mega-secure email client called ‘Posteo‘ and this I am in the process of investigating. Evidently with no income from advertising, a service like this has to be financed through a subscription only service. I had a quick look at it this morning and it seemed incredibly comprehensive (e.g. with forwarding facilities and so on) so I decided to invest my 12 euros for a year’s worth subscription to see how it works out. If one so chooses then every incoming and outgoing email is encrypted, including the headers, that would make unpenetrable by practically every hacker on earth. But is there a ‘back door in’ for civil authorities trying to track down terrorist or paedophilia type communications? This I don’t know but most of the reviews (and consumer reaction) is incredibly favourable so I will give it a go for a few months to see how it works out. An email account like this is quite useful if you are asked to give an email address for anything you might buy over the net. If you have some aliases (and TopMail give you unlimited aliases) then if you are liable to get spammed you can delete the alias and all of the spammer’s output goes into a black hole (i.e nowhere near your main email account!).
We are still in our gloomy period but at least we are not being actively rained upon at the moment which is beneficial for us. Our domestic help arrived this morning, as is usual on a Friday morning, and we exchanged news of various domestic comings-and-goings which affect all families. Earlier in the morning, I had emailed the daughter of the cousin of Meg’s that we anticipated going to visit in eight days time In Bolton, Lancs. The effect of the email was to say ‘You know the situation best on the ground – let us know whether we ought to pay a visit or postpone it’ and when the situation clarifies, then we shall know whether the visit is on or not. I must admit that I paid particular attention to what Boris had to say at the PM’s COVID-19 briefing this evening. The whole question revolves around the Indian variant of the virus and, in particular, its degree of transmissability. The government scientists seem to believe that it is already more transmissible than other COVID-19 variants and it is quite likely that this will become the dominant variant of the virus in the UK. The particular point of concern appears to be this – if the tranmittability turns out to be high (say 50% higher than the Kent variant) then we could be in for a particularly bad spike which could well surpass even the peak of last January – and this would overwhelm the NHS this time.There are a few ‘India’ variants, but one called B.1.617.2 appears to be spreading more quickly than the other two in the UK. Sources say it is now being seen in lots of places, with few cases linked to travel, and numbers have been ‘grossly underestimated’. The government is seriously worried as the press conference was called at short notice – and then delayed for half an hour. When Boris Johnson was using phrases such as ‘hard choices may lie ahead‘ and ‘I must level with you‘ then it is clear that the ground is being prepared for some choices that are politically unpalatable. When we read inside stories that say that there have been serious disagreements within Whitehall, then this evidently an argument between those who believe ‘we should follow the date not the dates‘ (i.e. probably members of the scientific community) and those who argue ‘we should follow the dates, not the data‘ (members of the Tory right wing who would be absolutely furious if Boris were to depart from the unlock down timetable now). So we have a situation in which next Monday’s easing of restrictions may well occur but an end to the total lockdown at the end of June is now looking more and more unlikely. We are in for a classic race between the Indian variant on the one hand and the rate of vaccinations on the other. It now looks as though the gap between the vaccination periods may be reduced from 12 weeks to 8 to boost (short-term) some levels of immunity in the general population although the latest scientific evidence seems to indicate that for all vaccines, a 12 week gap between the first and second doses of the vaccine has proved to generate the highest levels of immunity. Another inside story runs as follows:
The decision to delay putting India on the red list of countries, from which travel is heavily limited, and the decision to implement this not immediately but with a gap of just over three days – during which thousands of travellers from India entered the country amid a surge of demand for flights.. will prove to be a grave error.
If this latter story proves to ‘have legs’ as the journalists say, then this inaction may prove to be as costly as the decision to delay a lockdown at the very start of the pandemic. If we have learnt anything in the last few months it is that swift, bold and decisive action – whatever the political consequences – nearly always turns out to be a better course in the long and and vice versa.
We had a bit of a disrupted afternoon for a variety of reasons. Although we have a ‘house planning board’ so we know what activities are taking place on which day, we had forgotten that our chiropodist was due to visit shortly after 2.00pm. After we had had our treatments and some foot advice for Meg, we had a delayed lunch – only to fall asleep and miss a ‘Zoom‘ appointment with some of Meg’s relatives. We sent off an email of apology and are going to rearrange the same for a few day’s time. Then after our tea this evening, we FaceTimed one of our closest Winchester colleagues and our conversation went on for an hour and a half – time rather flies when we get going.
Now that we are at the end of one week and starting to look forward to another, inevitably we are starting to wonder what the next few days holds in store for us. If the weather takes a turn for the better, we can start to plan who we are going to see and in what sequence. We have stopped compiling the list once we have got to seven but could no doubt extend it even more.
It was one of those indeterminate mornings this morning when you were not quite sure how the day was going to turn out, weather-wise. We did not rush for our morning walk having spent some time having a pleasant chat with our daughter-in-law who was busy cooking (or at least preparing food) whilst our son was out at a ‘Diesel Gala’ in the nearby Severn Valley Railway. Our decision to go down into town was vindicated as the heavens started to open again and we would have got quite a soaking if we had walked all the way. Having picked up our newspapers, we paid a visit to Waitrose from which we needed to pick up one or two cooking ingredients for our daughter-in-law and whilst we were at it, we bought a Cornish pasty to act as the basis for our midday meal. The afternoon was a little attenuated because we usually get ready to go to church at 5.30 which is part of our normal Saturday afternoon ritual.
We knew that today was the day of the FA Cup Final which is something that we do not normally follow, unless there are special reasons to watch it. The Cup Final is typically played on a weekend very close to my birthday and today the finalists were Chelsea vs. Leicester City. Whilst not particular supporters of Leicester City, we did live in Leicester and its environs for 26 years so it was quite easy for us to become Leicester City fans for the day, reinforced by the fact that Chelsea have won the FA Cup some nine times but Leicester have never won it in the entire history of their club. The match started at 5.30 which was just about the time we left to go to church but when we got back home we turned on the TV to discover to our delight that Leicester City were leading 1-0. There was about 30 minutes left to play so this was well worth a watch. They replayed the Leicester goal several times and it really was a stunning strike, struck from a distance and aimed like a rocket into the top corner of the net – their goalie did not stand a chance. The Leicester goalkeeper, Schmeichel, pulled off an absolute stunning flying save some 10 minutes before the end of the match, saving what would have been a draw. Then there was a sustained Chelsea onslaught as you might expect and they did in fact ‘equalise’ with only 1½ minutes left to play. When the goal was scored it did look as though a Chelsea forward was offside – in the subsequent VAR (video replay) then at the moment that the ball left a Chelsea mid-player’s foot for a long ranging pass then the Chelsea forward was offside by some centimetres (about a player’s foot worth it seemed to me) So the ‘equaliser’ was declared invalid and Leicester went on to win amidst signs of absolute delirium (even by football standards) amongst the few Leicester supporters who were allowed by the COVID unlock-down experimental rules to attend the match. It goes without saying, this result gave us particular pleasure – particularly as Leicester must have been rated as very much the ‘under-dogs’ before the match.
Earlier in the day, I had engaged in a little bit of computing work in which I think my efforts have been crowned with success. A week or so ago, I had found a Microsoft Outlook ‘clone’ called OEClassic which is a standalone program (i.e. not part of Microsoft Office 365) and which seemed to install and run beautifully whilst preserving all of the classic look and feel of Outlook which for many of us was the de facto standard with which we used in the decades when we were at work. OEClassic (as well as Outlook itself) allows you to not only install a default program but allows for several ‘identities’ when you could install additional copies of your email client or even completely new ones. The point of this, I suppose, is that in a family computer it would be possible for Mum, Dad and each child to have their own ‘identity’ and associated mailboxes so this would be a way of making sure that everybody’s emails did not collide with each other. A day or so, I had successfully installed another secure mail client called TopMail as another identity. Today, I took another even more secure and comprehensive email client called Posteo and successfully installed that. You have to get into the documentation of each client to understand the port numbers for both receiving mail (IMAP) and sending mail (SMTP). Then there is a certain amount of tweaking to get things right – if you try and fail, then a ‘Log file‘ of errors helps you to ascertain what you have got got wrong so that you can tweak it and get ir right. Now that I have now got to this stage, I have the inputs/outputs of each of my three email clients all available as separate identities in OEClassic. Things can often go wrong in installing and tweaking programs like this so it is particularly satisfying when you get things to work correctly.
And so the weeks roll by and here we are at Sunday morning again. It seems almost unbelievable that at 12.00pm today (half way through the day) May will be 15½ days old – i.e. half way through the month of May. Meg was feeling a little under the weather this morning so she stayed in bed whilst I walked down to collect the newspapers and then watched the Andrew Marr show at 9.0am Afterwards I wandered down too the park, again on my own, and arrived at our normal bench, meeting our University friend within 20 seconds. We were soon joined by another of the park regulars and we had the most entertaining discussion between the three of us. We were exploring how people navigated the educational system and how examinations were often a poor guide to the intelligence and potential of individuals. We all brought something to this discussion from our own biographies and so ‘a good discussion was had by all’. We negotiated (and discussed) one or two badly behaved dogs and our conversation also included the ways in which ‘man’s best friend’ had learnt to live alongside us for so many millennia. After this it was homeward bound and starting to think about lunch.
Meg and I had intended to pay a visit up to Bolton, Lancs in about a week’s time but we had sent an email to the daughter of Meg’s cousin to help us all assess the gravity of the situation in Bolton. As it appears to be the town worst affected by the Indian variant of the virus and it appears much more transmissible than other variants, we have jointly decided to call off our trip for next Sunday. Instead we have arranged a date in late June in about five week’s time and we suspect that by that time things might be very much better (or conceivably, worse) and we shall have to assess the situation all over again. Tomorrow is the date when we go inside and have a (seated) beer or meal in a pub, hug each other and a few of us meet in each other’s houses. Personally, I would have liked this stage to have been delayed by a fortnight (no time at all!) but I suppose that beer especially brought in for tomorrow would have to be poured down the drain again.
After we had our lunch and a rest, I knew that I had to seize the opportunity to get the lawns cut as the sun was more-or-less shining and the lawns were looking terrible. The dandelions and buttercups had gone mad in the last few days after the amount of rain that we had is I needed to seize the opportunity. The communal green area in front of our houses takes some 40-45 minutes to cut (although I do cut it twice -once North-South and than a transverse cut East-West) which although not strictly necessary does make the whole look better. At least, with a mulching mower (which is the variant that I have) you do not have to stop to pick up grass cuttings every so often. Then I have a quick 10 minute break and straight on the with the back lawn, before my muscles get cold and this takes some 20-25 minutes. The rain intervened a little on the edge of some clouds as they passed over but it was sufficiently light not to put a damper on the proceedings. I have to say that the front of the house looked a real treat once we had a burst of afternoon sunshine and the newly cut lawns were framed by the trees and shrubs that are now in full bloom.
According to Sky News, the highest concentrations of the Indian variant of the virus (specifically B.1.617.2) is in Bolton, followed by Blackburn with Darwen, Leicester, Nottingham and Bedford. According to some experts, this situation is serious enough to want a delay to the ‘unlock down’ due to start tomorrow but, of course, Boris Johnson is more concerned with the politics rather than the science (despite protestations to the contrary). It looks as though the government is engaged in a most horrendous gamble by hoping that the number of those vaccinated will manage to hold at bay the undoubted spread of the Indian variant. Of course, it might be that Boris Johnson is extraordinarily lucky and we get a semi-unlock down with no serious spread of the Indian variant – but it seems almost as likely that the virus will ‘outrun’ the vaccine and we end up in quite a plight. I suppose the fairly evident thing to do is to impose an almost total lockdown on the badly effected areas and to grit one’s teeth to cope with the inevitable political consequences. However, I feel it is almost certain by now that the total end to the lockdown timetabled for 21st June, 2021 will almost certainly not be met as things stand.
Well here we are at the start of another week and the weather looks to be set a bit more fair than we have got used to over the past few days. We eventually got ourselves going this morning but we knew that our University of Birmingham friend was off playing tennis so we did not rush down to the park. It was quite a delightful day today and, unusually, we did not bump into any of our usual friends down the road this morning. Nonetheless, we picked up our newspapers and had a pleasant sojourn in the park until we made our way homewards a little late in the day. Tomorrow we know we will be on a slightly different schedule as my Pilates class is due to resume so this rather dictates what time to leave the park and I start my walk down into town for my exercise class. After lunch, we should have done some tidying up but to be honest I was quite glad to have a long, slow and relaxing read after yesterday when I had to jump up and mow the lawns.
Today was the day when many of the most irksome lockdown restrictions were being relaxed. In particular, two families may now meet with each and socialise but indoors this time inside and not outdoors. Of most significance is that pubs and restaurants are now allowed to have indoor customers (albeit sitting at a table i.e. not queuing at the bar and with some social distancing still in place) Finally, of course, we are now allowed to hug each other – although the government dare not intervene in relationships between husbands and wives so presumably hugging has never been off the agenda (but does the virus know that?). So we can now go ahead and hug each other provided we do it ‘carefully’ presumably breathing past each other and not into each other’s faces. Incidentally, I have been highly amused by the supplements in The Times and The Guardian which are full of practical advice as to how couples who have not been able to share intimate moments with each may now do so and to how resolve any difficulties they might encounter (I kid you not!) Mind you, I still have the feeling that the lockdown might have been extended for another fortnight to allow us to gather some more data on the Indian variant of the virus which is now present in at least 86 local authority areas. According to Sky News then: ‘A total of 2,323 cases of the Indian coronavirus variant have been reported in the UK, the health secretary has said. Delivering a COVID-19 statement in the Commons, Matt Hancock said 483 cases have been confirmed in Bolton and Blackburn with Darwen, where the variant is now the dominant strain.’ Surge testing is due to start shortly in Bedford so it is not just Bolton in the North West of England which is problematic. I am still firmly of the view that the government is taking the most massive gamble and all could still go horribly wrong – and who suffers then?
On my IBM ThinkPad, I had installed a fantastic program called NoteTab which I used to use extensively (an therefore with which I am getting reacquainted) Its prime use is as an HTML editor which means that you can code and then see the results instantly in your bowser of choice (which you access directly from the program itself. But NoteTab itself is most famous amongst journalists as well as academics and other professionals, for having a system which is like a miniature database. How it works is this – using the NoteTab special notation which is very easy to learn – you would make an ‘entry’ and then all of the information associated with it (usually a page full). All of the entries are then shown in a column on the left hand side and on clicking an entry all of its associated information is then shown on the right. In the past, I have used this system to provide me with ‘instant’ information concerning my computing activities as when I have learnt to do something, I make a new entry (such as, for example, how to add a name tag to a photo) and then I have all of the information I need at my fingertips. You can see what journalists have loved this system – I think the size of one’s little database can extend up to 2GB and the system can handle up to about 5,400 entries (equivalent to nearly 15 years of a daily blog) before you have to start a second file. The third feature which it has and I have been using today is that you can create a little file with an URL reference within it (for example, external mail programs) Then with only a highlight and a couple of clicks you can access the program directly so instead of loading up one’s browser and then clicking a tab this little system does the same for you but so much more quickly and snappily. Brilliant! (at least for me)
We are today the day ‘after’ the relaxation of some of the more stringent COVID-19 lockdown regulations and it is now permitted to attend indoor sports classes and the like. So today was the day in which my Pilates classes were due to resume after a gap of several months. To be fair, the gap was for me but some of my fellow class members had kept going with ‘Zoom‘ so apart from the pleasure of being in a room together, my fellow class members had kept themselves going. As it was, there were only three of us in the class today, the fourth member being on holiday (or visiting relatives) in the West Country somewhere. I must say that after an absence of several months, I did not find the exercises too taxing and nor did I feel too tired immediately after the class had finished. But having come home and had a delayed lunch (and a doze) I am starting to feel a little ‘achy’ at the moment, but this is only to be expected. Earlier in the day, I had received a latter from my colo-rectal consultant advising me of the results of a recent CT scan and informing me to make an appointment with my doctor to be referred on to a pulmonary consultant to discuss some changes observed in one of my lungs (about which I refuse to be panicked) This is where the nightmare started! I got onto my local surgery but could not remember my username (this is because it was actually my email address which I had forgotten could be used as a proxy for a username). So the website suggested I register directly with the NHS. This required an email address (OK), a password (OK) and then a verification sent to the phone (also OK) Then the nightmare started. The website stated that they needed to know who I was so could I upload a scan of my driving license. This I did but the system told me that it was too fuzzy to be read so I could I do it all over again. This I did and then the system said it was going to scan my face – but the app froze. So I started all over again and at this point, the website could not make a match between its own scan and my driving licence. So I started all over again and this time uploaded my passport – the system ignored a scan of my face and said it was going to make a video of me repeating four numbers. But then I was told by the system that my Apple Mac could not take a video – I should contact the NHS directly so that they could explain to me that my technology would not work that I needed to make an appointment with the doctor – so basically after two hours of trying and retrying the system, I got nowhere. Is it any wonder that patients are not being treated for cancer and other conditions? However, some good came of all of this. My son suggested to me ‘Why not use the NHS App?‘ which I downloaded and everything seemed to work OK. Apart from the fact that I could not book an appointment (because there is nobody manning the system until 8.00am in the morning!), I nonetheless managed to get confirmation of the fact that I have received two doses of the vaccine and I have the QR code to prove it! Tomorrow morning, I shall download the app for Meg and get her into the system so that we have both of our statuses recorded on our iPhones. Moaning apart, how many elderly/confused/non-IT people get no access to the system because now everything (like our banking, groceries, shopping and every other kind of household bill) is now done on the net?
The COVID scene is proving to be entertaining. In Blackburn, Lancs. where the rate of Indian variant is very high, the health authorities on the ground are stretching the rules so that anyone over the age of 18 can receive the vaccine if they can show that they are a carer (who is not?) or have an underlying health condition (who has not?) This is interesting because the ‘official line’ is to vaccinate people in strict age order – but where the rate of infection seems incredibly close, they just want to get vaccine into as many people’s arms as they can! The Health Secretary Matt Hancock said most of the 19 people admitted to hospital with the Indian variant in the hotspot of Bolton were eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine but had not had it. So this raises the interesting conundrum whether the anti-vexers (if we can call them that) are now starting to feel the consequences of their own action/inaction. It seems to me that those who are refusing the vaccine are saying ‘My right not to have the vaccine overrides your right not to be infected by (unvaccinated) people like me!‘ Years and years ago, one had to provide proof of having had a TB immunisation before one was allowed near patients – the principle is practically the same.
After the traumas of getting myself registered with the NHS IT systems (detailed in last night’s blog), this morning I tried the ‘old-fashioned’ way of talking to a human by hanging onto the end of a telephone. The upshot of all of this was that I can expect a telephone call from one of the senior partners (who I know and respect, as he gave me some ‘hands-on’ treatment after one of my returns from hospital some three years ago now). The phone call is due some time this afternoon so we are having to abandon some of our plans to visit Droitwich today as we need to be near the end of a telephone to receive the telephone call from the doctor some time this afternoon. Whilst on this subject, the doctor did phone through at about 4.0pm and whilst I am being referred on as a result of some anomalies in my latest CT scan, it appears (as I suspected) that the radiographers trying to interpret the scan have no idea as to what is really going wrong. Anyway, it looks towards the trivial rather than the serious end of the spectrum so I shall to wait for an appointment and see what another group of medics has to say. But I did get the opportunity to get a referral done for my somewhat knackered shoulder (you will appreciate I am using specialised medical terminology at this point). After a late telephone call this afternoon, i have even got it organised for a session immediately before my Pilates session next Tuesday which could scarcely be better.
Today being quite a fine day, Meg and I followed our normal routine of picking up our newspapers and then making for the park. Fairly unusually, we did not bump into any of our normal ‘park friends’ this morning but the park seemed to be very quiet, for a change. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful spring day and we enjoyed the ambience.In fact, when we got home we threw together a kind of salad from bits and bobs – bit was still quite a full meal and quite satisfying, nonetheless. In the late afternoon, we had a flurry of excitement as we thought that we saw a fox gambolling in the sunshine at the distant end of our communal green area. Although we all thought we saw a fox, when a striped tail was waved in the air, we realised that is was rather a large ginger cat (not one of our regulars) and at a distance it was quite easy to mis-identify it. As we had rather a ‘chewy’ afternoon, we thought we would see if we get to Droitwich and have a meal out in on of favourite cafes/restaurants overlooking the town square. Tomorrow morning, I need to make a telephone call to make a booking (if that is possible these days)
In the COVID news today, the government have announced the first clinical trials for booster jabs (tweaked to be effective against all of the by now well-known variants?) to take place next month with the hope that a wave of using booster jabs may start in the autumn. Meanwhile, the number of Indian variant cases in the country as a whole has just hit 3,000 and has increased by 28% since Monday. Professor Van-Tam is saying that in the virus hotspots, then people should ‘think carefully’ about exercising their new freedoms – in other words, they should think very carefully about the freedoms that they have, weigh up the risks and be very cautious. This is tantamount to saying that whatever the end of the lockdown in the rest of the country, those in badly affected areas should act as though the lockdown was still in full force.
We are just starting to get some first analyses of the way in the whole COVID crisis has acted as a searchlight into the structural weaknesses of UK society. Broadly speaking, those communities that were already disadvantaged before the onset of the virus have been affected much more severely than the rest of the country. Next week, Dominic Cummings, the one-time influential special adviser to Boris Johnson and the current government is said to have a document which demonstrates conclusively some of the poor decision making over the implementations of the lockdowns. This is all going to be revealed next Wednesday to a House of Commons committee and the ‘trailers’ for this event are saying that these revelations might be explosive. However, one has to say that the highest death rate in Europe and an abundance of incidents of sleaze (contracts at the height of the emergency being handed out to friends with no routine tendering) the government is still far ahead in the opinion polls. It seems that the normal rules of politics have been reversed – whenever inadequacies are exposed in both the timing and the content of the government decision-making, the electorate seem not to be perturbed and allow Boris Johnson the benefit of whatever doubt exists.
We knew from the weather forecasts that today was going to be a rainy and a blustery day all day so we made our plans accordingly. Earlier in the morning, I had telephoned one of our favourite restaurants in Droitwich, just down the road, in order to make a booking for lunch. This was accepted with alacrity – I imagined that this popular cafe and restaurant might be bursting at the seams but it is difficult to tell in these immediate post-lockdown days. We went by car to collect our newspapers and then made our way to Droitwich where we managed to park in our usual spot. We had intended to make a little shopping trip around Boots and also Wilko (a popular hardware store in the Midlands) but as we walked up through the town we were diverted into one of the charity shops that has now reopened. I treated myself to a box set of National Trust coasters (can one ever have too many?) and Meg espied a high-quality skirt,lined and made with a brocade fabric which seemed to be just about the right size. Once we got to the cafe, just about at our allotted booked time, the cafe was almost deserted. I suppose the weather might not have helped. Meg and I had a delicious meal of home-made salmon fishcakes which we consumed with salad and some baked potatoes (which we ask to be substituted for the chips that were on offer) So we had an enjoyable meal and then slowly sauntered back to our car, popping into the local Waitrose to buy one or two things that I knew we were short of and had missed the update of the order which I did yesterday. We knew that when we got home, our Waitrose order would be delivered in the next hour after we had got home. Fortunately, we coincided for a few minutes with our domestic help (and style guru) who admired Meg’s recently purchased skirt and suggested some colours and styles of tops to go with it. The dress was an absolute perfect fit, by the way, which is a bonus when you don’t have any fitting rooms. As it was so windy this afternoon, one of the plants pots on my tall display stand outside my study window had blown over but nothing was damaged. So I availed myself of quite a heavy brick which, when placed in a strategic position, may forestall any more plant pot adventures.
Late on this afternoon, I went down to the end of our access drive to rescue my ‘green bin’ which has to be placed near to the main road for the convenience of the refuse men. After being emptied, the bins are left by the side of the road so I rescued ours and the one belonging to my neighbour who I bumped into as the bin was being delivered. My neighbour told me the good news that he had recently had a medical procedure which had helped alleviate the blood vessels near his heart and this had improved his health considerably. So that was good news for us to share. He also told us that he was planning quite a large birthday party for his wife’s 70th and this would involve marquees and the like in the garden and all of us were invited. Naturally, I offered to help with anything that might be needed e.g,. spare outdoor chairs but we are both hoping that the weather might be fine for us on that particular day.
On the national front, I am actually getting interested in the fact that Boris Johnson wants to give the Australians a zero-tariff trade deal but apparently the cabinet is split down the middle on the issue. If the Australian deal goes ahead as Boris would like then both the Scottish and the Welsh beef and lamb trade would be massively impacted. There is no way we can compete on cost with the Australians for whom land (and pasture) is plentiful and whose welfare standards do not match our own. The cabinet dilemma is this. If the ‘free market’ solution is adopted, then this would be at the expense of our domestic industries that would be decimated. If, on the other hand, we protect our own markets somewhat, then the rest of the world will not find trade deals with the UK so attractive if the UK industries are going to get a measure of protection. So the Brexit slogan of ‘take back control’ means that we lose control of our businesses which cannot compete, or do we keep control of our own industries to the detriment of any prospective trade deals? Is this what is called a ‘wicked problem’? and can the circle be squared? The ardent Brexitreers in the cabinet are conscious that the rest of the world is watching this deal with the Australians and ‘where the ball lands’ may well provide the pattern for trade deals (or the absence of them) with the rest of the world.
Today I heard a weather forecaster say ‘Well today, it has seemed rather autumnal’ and so it has been all day. It was certainly drizzling most of the morning and when it came to be time for our daily walk, we have to make a judgement call whether we are going to brave a walk or ‘chicken out’ and go and use the car. The weather, although cloudy, looked as though it might settle and so we decided to brave it and undertake our normal walk down. By the time we reached the park, however, the drizzle had turned into a drip-drip – nonetheless, we met up with our University of Birmingham friend who was fortunately equipped with a large golfing umbrella under which we all huddled. I was explaining to our friend, having worked in a Business School for so many years, that in the Business Studies family, you got a range of subjects ranging from the more mathematical/numeric (Economics, Econometrics, Statistics, Accounting, Operational Sciences) through subjects like Law and finishing off at the ‘softer’ end of the spectrum in subjects like Psychology and Sociology which fed into subjects like Personnel Management. But it was true to say that in some of the subjects with ‘Management’ in the title (I exclude Management Science though) there was plenty of room for what might be pejoratively called ‘bullshitting’ in which all kinds of anecdotal knowledge were passed off as though it were an academically respectable subject. I was explaining to our friend that whereas most of us academic staff by definition were good at one or two things (which is why we got good degrees in the subject and eventually came to lecture in the subject) our Business Studies graduates were like the grammar school boys who were good in a whole range of subjects without excelling in any one of them. We often used to speculate in our staffroom how well we would have coped in a degree regime which ranged from Statistics, Law, Accounting on the one hand to Psychology and Sociology on the other) We never quite arrived at an answer to this question. Eventually, the rain started to come down in earnest and so we trudged home feeling somewhat wet and soggy. It was a case of ‘coats off and into the garage to dry out’ time.
After lunch, we were settling down for a good read when we got a telephone call from our friend in Oxfordshire. As part of his online business, he was running a webinar on the subject of business ethics so I used as a pilot to help him test out some of his material. In a range of some ten little scenarios, the respondent was asked to identify in a couple of sentences the nature of the crucial ethical issues involved. What will be fascinating to see when the webinar is actually run is the degree of consensus (or lack of it) in the range of replies. Of course it is quite possible that as a ‘guinea pig’ I might have missed some of the crucial issues that I ought to have identified – and it could be that I have thought of some issues that hadn’t occurred to anyone else. Time will tell when my academic colleague and I have a debrief.
In the early evening, I FaceTimed one of my erstwhile colleague from the University of Winchester. We generally have quite a good old natter about things in the news that have taken our fancy and go down memory lane a little to recall amusing incidents in our academic careers. I felt rather mortified that I had remembered my friend's birthday a few days late but nonetheless a belated birthday card is winging its way down to Hampshire.
It looks as though the Government and the authorities at Heathrow are finally tumbling to a solution to a problem that has been staring us all in the face. Travelling destinations have been categorised as red zone (strict quarantine upon one’s return to the UK, amber zones (some quarantine at home) and green zone (no restrictions to speak of). Passengers from all of these destinations may well intermingle at pressure points such as check-in areas, communal shopping, security and so on. The solution to be adopted is as follows. All red zone passengers will be allowed only through Terminal 4, just as soon as this can be operational organised. This leaves the amber and green passengers free to intermingle but at least insulated from the probably highly infective nature of the red zone passengers. This all sounds eminently sensible at this point of time but the question arises why the policy not thought out before the delineation into different zones. And after the loosening of the lockdown restrictions, it looks as though the infection is starting to creep up again and the June 21st date (for a complete end to restrictions) is starting to look more and more problematic.
We are still in the phase of a whole succession of rainy days – in fact as last month (April) was the driest for 60 years then I think I have heard recently that this May is proving to be on the wettest on record. Today was a glowering kind of day with quite a lot of oppressive low hanging cloud but nonetheless, we decided to risk it and walk down for our newspapers and our park run. Meg and I went straight to the park this morning and it wasn’t too long before we got joined by our University of Birmingham friend. He is busy teaching himself some Spanish and I think he is doing an online course – in any event, he is more than happy to try out some phrases and short sentences with us. Needless to say, Meg and I are happy accomplices in this venture. I raided our bookshelves for some ‘Teach yourself Spanish‘ books of which we have accumulated quite a multitude over the years. After we had explained sone Spanish constructions we were joined by another park friend who, I think, is quite interested in mathematics and cosmology. I am not sure how we got onto the topic several days ago but I mentioned a short-cut way of multiplying by 25 (multiply by 100 and then divide by 4 or half and half again) In the course of our conversations, I mentioned the ‘Trachtenberg System of Speed Mathematics‘ or something similar. When I was a young civil servant in London and living in a civil service hostel (way back in 1964 i.e. 57 years go), I came across a battered old book (the Trachtenberg book mentioned before) and already I only read the first few chapters I remember being quite captivated by it. Our other park friend had also heard of the book or even come across it and the back story is quite interesting.The author who was Jewish was interned in a Nazi concentration camp and the book was devised in his mind as a way of passing the time and/or keeping hold of reality. I went onto Amazon and was amazed to discover that I could buy a recently re-issued version of the book for about £8.00 so I indulged myself and bought it. As soon as we have a moment, we are going to read the book and pass it around ourselves (the three of us) but we all have slightly different priorities at the moment. What I think is amazing is that I can remember the author and approximate title of a book I first came across 57 years ago. Whilst on the subject of mathematics, I remembered that the number 104348/33215 is an incredibly good approximation for ‘pi’. In practice, if you were to use this to help you in calculations for the circumference of the earth (24,900 miles) then with an error rate of 3 parts in 10 billion, an estimate of the circumference of the earth would only out by about ½” (not many people know that – or even care)
The weather forecast for tomorrow is pretty dire so I decided to push myself on and get our front and back lawns cut. Fortunately, we had some pale sunshine during the afternoon and the clouds seem to have rolled away.I must say that although it was six days ago that the lawns were last cut, the rapidly growing dandelions and dandelion-heads had made all the lawns look very tatty. So, I was very pleased for the lawns to get cut and then bathed in some late afternoon sunshine before we had to leave to go to church in the early evening. On our way as we parking the car, we bumped into our next door neighbour who is deep into quite elaborate preparations for his wife’s 70th birthday celebrations a week on Sunday. I was delighted to see our neighbour because I happened to see a certain ‘something’ when we were in Droitwich last Thursday. I checked out that this would be acceptable (which it certainly would be) as a birthday present so I am going to make a lightning visit into Droitwich next Monday morning to grab this particular item before it goes – at the same time, I can pop into my favourite hardware store (Wilko) where I am sure I will find lots of things that I really need to stock up on.
It looks as though the fallout from the Martin Bashir interview which is trashing the reputation of the BBC is continuing. To my mind, this situation is getting a little Kafka-esque – after all, Prince Charles and Princess Diana had both admitted adultery which must rank as being a lot more serious than an interview gained under false pretences, (although compounded by management failure to properly investigate) What is happening at the moment is that those on the right who absolute hate the BBC (i.e. many members of the present government) are now coming out of the woodwork and muttering all kinds of hard threats about how the BBC should be reformed (read emasculated, made into a pale imitation of a Russian/Chinese propaganda regime if the right had their way)
Another Sunday dawns and as we have come to anticipate, we awake to another gloomy and cloud-filled day. I get up and collect my newspapers early which is part of my normal Sunday routine and I didn’t even pass my usual quota of joggers and/or dog-walkers which is more typical of an early Sunday morning. Then as usual, we listen to the Andrew Marr Show before we get ourselves turned around and walk down to the park as usual. We meet with our University of Birmingham friend plus ‘Park Regular No. 2’ and we start our early morning discussions by wondering about the results of last night’s Eurovision song contest in which the UK excelled itself by scoring a total of 0 points from the specialised panels and also a total of 0 from the popular vote taken across Europe giving a grand total of zero or ‘nul points’. The UK has received this rare distinction once before – but at least both Austria and Norway have received this dubious honour on four occasions. At last, when the UK result of 0 was announced, there was a sympathetic cheer (not, I think, ironically meant) across the auditorium. The Dutch, by the way, had done an incredible job in staging the Eurovision Song Contest in the most challenging of COVID-19 circumstances. We discussed a lot more than last night’s TV, as you might imagine, and as usual our conversations seem to swirl around cosmological questions such as ‘Is the universe infinite? Is it spherical?‘ And to be really mind-blowing a Google search term such as ‘What is the Geometry of the Universe‘ will keep you lost/amused/amazed for hours if you can follow the logic of all the arguments here. By the time we had amused ourselves with all of this, the weather started to get a bit cool so Meg and I made tracks for home. On our way back through the park, we were recognised and stopped by a lady who recognised us from our Saturday evening church attendance. We chatted a little about church activities and resumed our journey home. As we were now so late, we had to abandon our normal plans for Sunday lunch and, instead, rustle up a quick rice-based lunch. We then spent a pleasant and restful Sunday afternoon digesting the Sunday newspapers which needless to say are full of the recent BBC fracas- I, for one, cannot wait for the object of media interest to move on.
Although we do not have much in prospect this week, Wednesday may prove to be quite an explosive day – or a damp squib. It is the day when Dominic Cummings, the ex-advisor to Boris Johnson, is due to give evidence in Parliament. The day’s highest-profile event will probably be the appearance of the former chief adviser to the Prime Minister, Dominic Cummings, before the joint inquiry into lessons learned from the pandemic, by the Health and Social Care and the Science and Technology committees, to talk about the government’s decision-making. The interesting question to be determined is this: does Cummings have evidence that Boris Johnson initially followed a policy of ‘herd immunity’ (protect the elderly and let everything get and then recover from the virus)? On the other hand, Cummings evidence might be regarded as totally suspect and Johnson loyalists on the two committees may try to cast doubt on the whole of his evidence (which he may not be able to give, in any case, as it breaks the ‘Official Secrets Act‘) As with so many things in politics, we shall just have to wait and see.
Tomorrow might be quite an interesting day. In the early morning, I am due to take accompany my son as he takes his car in for a service – then having dropped the car at the garage for what might be a full-day job, I will bring him home and then progress onto Droitwich (just down the road) where there are one or two two items I particularly want to get my hands on. All will be revealed if I am successful in that which I am looking for but we shall see.
Some interesting virus-related news has emerged over the weekend as research evidence slowly accumulates. It seems that both the Pfizer and the AstraZeneca vaccines are equally effective (at a rate in the 80% range) against the Indian as well as the earlier so-called Kent variant of the virus. However, both of the the vaccines may only be about 33% effective some three weeks after the initial vaccination. If these findings are confirmed by much more detailed studies, then this would point to the importance of getting the second jab into people’s arms, after a suitable interval, and still to exercise caution until the second jab has been received. It also reinforces the government’s intention to put a full -release from the lockdown into effect from June 21st onwards, although I suspect that there might still be a recommendation to wear face masks as a precaution and other recommended restrictions even after that date.
Today was a day when our normal routines went by the board as we were engaged in some different appointments today. Practically first thing in the morning, my son and I drove to Redditch so that my son’s car could receive a software upgrade – this procedure takes most of the day, apparently. So we needed to drive in convoy so that having dropped his car off, I could transport him back home again. Then I proceeded on to Droitwich as I needed to pop into a cafe/restaurant that Meg and I had frequented last week and we saw a piece of artwork that we particularly liked. Having checked with our next door neighbour that his wife would appreciate the piece of artwork we had seen for her forthcoming 70th birthday, I was more than pleased to secure the same i.e. it had not been sold in the meantime. I did have to go and get cash out in order to complete my purchase as this is handed over straight to the artist without going through the books of the cafe but that’s OK. I then go round a local hardware store (Wilko, popular in the Midlands) and purchased one or two little things whilst I could. I had also seen a copy of Bill Brysons ‘The Short History of Nearly Everything‘ which I had noticed on display outside one of the charity shops in Droitwich. I intended to buy a copy of this (for about £1) so that I could put it in the hands of my local park friends but of course Sod’s law was in operation and the book had evidently been sold. However, I have managed to locate a (cheap enough) second hand version on eBay so this should be with me by Friday. When I eventually got home, we were in the middle of a hail storm and we could, in theory, have waited for the rain clouds to pass over and then walk down to the park. So Meg and I decided to give our walk a miss this morning as the weather seemed so variable – the occasional shower is one thing, but at this time of year it is quite possible to be subject to an instant cloudburst and get absolutely soaked to the skin.
We had purchased as part of our Waitrose shopping a Waitrose chicken, complete with herbs etc and in its own metal tray and cook-in-the-oven plastic bag. I evidently had not bought a chicken like this – the technique I used to use was to flour the inside of a ‘roaster bag’ and then put the chicken inside and roast this way. Anyway, I followed the Waitrose instructions – after the cooking was about two thirds done, you cut a large window in the top of the bag to allow for a more complete roast. I have got to say this turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and tastiest meals of chicken I have had in years! We tend not to eat a lot of chicken here in the UK and when we do we tend to buy only chicken thighs, complete with bone and cook them in their entirety before removing the (too fatty) skin and leg bone at the point of serving. When we are in Spain, we are not averse to eating chicken but I suspect they are more ‘free range’ and more flavoursome than would be their counterpart on the UK.
On my IBM ThinkPad, I have installed a copy of OEClassic as an email client and this works OK on the additional identities I have installed (for web-based emails) – however, the Outlook bit seems to be a bit ‘iffy’ for a reason which is a bit beyond me. I suspect that my original account was with Hotmail and this was migrated over to Outlook and then somehow stitched (by Microsoft) into their Office365 suite so I am not surprised if there seem to be occasional glitches. However, I have installed a copy of the super secure email system called Protonmail and paid them a subscription for the full version. However, they do allow you to install a ‘free’ version of the program which is essentially the same and with some limited functionality (which you would expect in a free version anyway) but with an mailbox that will only store 500MB (i.e. 0.5GB) of emails. On consulting the number of emails on my main system and looking at how much memory they consume, I think that 500MB should give me approx. 4,000 emails before I run out of space – as this will only be for occasional use (e.g. when you have to supply an email address to access some shopping-type websites) then I am sure this will more than suffice for at least a couple of years.
Meg and I have just watched the classic episode of ‘Fawlty Towers‘ in which a guest died (not that Basil noticed when he served him his breakfast) and the staff had to make frantic efforts to hide the body. Incidentally, when I worked in a 375-bedded 4-star hotel In Harrogate in the 1950’s about once or twice a year a guest would die in bed. How to dispose of the body? Answer – wrapped in a roll of carpet and transported downstairs in the lift (and the guests suspected nothing!)
Today was one of those days when you seem constantly be running to catch up with one’s self – as they used to say ‘Like a dog chasing its own tail‘ We knew that we would have keep a careful watch upon our timings because of a couple of appointments in the middle of the day. Nonetheless, I dropped Meg on her normal park bench where she met with our University of Birmingham friend who is busy teaching himself some Spanish. Naturally, Meg and I were happy to step in with our little bits and it is always interesting to note that the books tend to teach you one thing whereas ‘colloquial Spanish’ (what you hear people speak on the street) is quite another. We were taught an important lesson when our son spent a year in Mexico and had to teach himself Spanish in as short a time as possible. His tip was a good one – never bother to learn the future tense of a verb in Spanish (although it is useful to know of it when you are reading a more formal report in a newspaper, for example) So instead of saying (in Spanish) ‘I will catch a train’ we can use the much more colloquial (and sloppier way of saying something) such as ‘I’m going to catch a train’ where all you have to remember is the ‘I ‘m going’ to bit and then the infinitive of the verb ‘to catch’ and hence ‘Voy a coger un tren‘ rather than ‘Cogeré un tren‘ which is more formally correct (but perhaps harder to remember). Anyway, I left Meg and my friend exchanging little bits of colloquial Spanish which our friend assiduously wrote down in his little notebook whilst I went to collect the newspapers. Then we had to race home and I had to quickly fill in an on-line COVID assessment form before I raced down to the physiotherapy clinic to have my knackered shoulder looked at (in the same building where my Pilates class was die to start 35 minutes later). I was 2 minutes late for this appointment but then we ran over a bit and I was five minutes late for my Pilates class – but it was that kind of day. At the very end of the class, one of my Pilates classmates of several year’s standing let something slip about a widow’s pension. It was only then that I was told that her husband had died last November of a massive heart attack. With the COVID-19 restrictions in place, their daughter could not come back from Australia to attend the funeral and the funeral itself was the by now all too familiar Covid-19 restricted affair. I felt particularly sad on their behalf because I do not know how much of a happy retirement they had managed to spend together.
By the time we had a delayed lunch (typical on Pilates days) I carried on with some newspaper tidying before we suddenly realised it was time for our weekly chat with our ex-Waitrose friends which we generally do using FaceTime. With the lockdown gradually easing, our friends had managed to make more sustained contact with members of their family which was a great source of pleasure to them. It looks as though the weather will change for the better in the next day or so and then we might have a series of fine days – if so, we might be able to go to Webbs (the nearby large garden centre) where we may be able to share a socially distanced coffee and cake in the next few days ahead. We are particularly pleased about the weather because our immediate neighbours are planning an outdoors 70th birthday party on Sunday next – although contingency plans are no doubt in place, it will be so much easier to mingle and chat if the weather is fine.
The government is evidently in a dilemma and in some disarray this evening. It is evident that the Indian variant of the virus is taking quite a hold in various areas of the country (all starting with a ‘B” – Bolton, Blackburn, Bedford,Burnley) as well as Kirklees, Leicester, Hounslow and North Tyneside. In order to counteract this, the Government quietly introduced a policy of ‘de facto‘ lockdown in which travel into and out of the area was to be severely discouraged (to put it mildly) The trouble is that nobody bothered to tell the relevant local authorities what was meant to be happening in their own areas. After the most tremendous row (behind the scenes) between local and central government, the advice on the Government website was withdrawn – sorry, ‘updated’ in government speak. This little episode can be interpreted in one of two ways. Either one can argue that central government have an autocratic disregard for the wishes of the local populace and did not see fit to inform them. Or else, it was a massive communications ‘cockup’ which only displays the government’s lack of grip on the levers of government.
So another Wednesday rolls by and, as usual, I had to update my Waitrose order ready for delivery tomorrow. Fortunately, I remembered to book my slot for about three weeks time which I did whilst waiting for a few minutes after midnight on Tuesday at which time they tend to release new time slots for the weeks ahead. So after all of this was done we walked down to town, picked up our newspapers and then popped into Waitrose where we picked up some milk and a birthday card for our next door neighbour for next Sunday. Whilst we were there, we bumped into one of our ex-Waitrose friends that we used to see quite regularly in the park during the wintertime when she was involved in undertaking long walks around Bromsgrove. But we haven’t seen her for some time because she is quite busy off playing golf – she has a good and supportive circle of good friends in the golfing community (which is great, as she lost her husband just before the pandemic really got underway). Whilst we were in Waitrose, we noticed a sign to say that the cafe – the hub of many social activities – was due to reopen again on Wednesday, June 17th which is some three weeks away. We reminded the staff to reward their first few customers with a free bottle of champagne when we walk through the doors in three weeks time and the staff promised to send the message onto the manager. On our way down to the park this morning, we were delighted to have a few words with our Irish friends who live down the road. They were looking after their grand-daughter for the day (which they do for a day or so in the middle of the week) and were delighted to be going off to spend a few days in Llandudno next week now that the restrictions are being lifted and the weather is set as a high pressure system sets in for the next few days.
Today was the day when Dominic Cummings (ex principal adviser to the Prime Minister) gave evidence to a Parliamentary select committee. The word used most often by the media today is ‘excoriating’ and one has to say, that at least superficially, his evidence seems compelling in the extreme. Cummings has argued that Boris Johnson is completely unfit for office and that Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, should have been sacked for lying on multiple occasions. A picture is painted of a complete lack of preparedness at the start of the pandemic, a reluctance to lockdown (initially and on subsequent occasions) and a dysfunctional, ‘rabbits in the headlamps‘ approach to government (i.e. paralysed into inactivity) Cummings himself is apologetic for not having pressed the ‘panic’ button and added new information to ‘explain’ his flight to Barnard Castle at the height of the pandemic. What I think is often forgotten is that a long way before Boris become leader of the Tory Party and therefore before Brexit, there was a large group often Tory MP’s who were arguing for a ‘Anybody but Boris‘ candidate. I think it was well anticipated that Boris Johnson might have great skills with his rhetorical or journalistic flourish but as a practical decision maker he would prove to be a disaster. Privately, many of the current crop of Tory MPs would agree but they do not really care so long as Boris Johnson managed to secure 80 strong majorities for the Tory party. As I blog, Channel 4 news is attempting to interview a Tory MP (Tobias Ellwood) and asked who he would believe when Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings completely contradict each other. Of course, no answer was forthcoming, despite repeated questioning and all we got was the the typical politician’s evasiveness. The particular question to which everyone would like an answer is that Dominic Cummings says he heard Boris Johnson say he would rather ‘let the bodies pile high‘ than hit the economy again with a third lockdown and this is the oft-repeated quote which Boris Johnson denied in the House of Commons (was he lying to the House of Commons?) and which Dominic Cummings claims he overheard (was he lying as well?)
Apart from the raw politics involved, what has been fascinating about today’s proceedings has been the spotlight that has been thrown onto the machinery of government. It is well known that ‘scientists advise, politicians decide‘ but even so it sobering to realise that our whole machinery of government was not very good – and the South East Asian economies of Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea and so on dealt with COVID-19 so very much better than we did. Also, the Prime Minister comes out as a person who does not seek advice or even consult with cabinet colleagues (e.g. Michael Gove seems to be almost completely lacking from today’s accounts). As the days roll by, we can expect to hear rebuttals of what Cummings has to say, not least from Matt Hancock who Cummings felt should have been sacked for multiple transgressions.
As predicted by the weather forecasters, today was a beautiful fine day – and not before time as we have to endure so much rainy weather over most of the month of May. So we collected our newspapers and then made our way to the park where we enjoyed the sunshine. We were joined by one of our park ‘regulars’ in the seat which has a commanding view of the parkland and chatted over matters political, cultural and cosmological (as is our wont) Then we progressed gently home, not meeting any more of our regulars on the way home. We made ourselves a meal which finished off the chicken which we have enjoyed over the past few days.
There is quite a big political story, following the attacks by Dominic Cummings on the Health Secretary in yesterday’s committee hearings. We know that a year ago last March when the first wave of the virus was really hitting our society, the hospital authorities were desperate to clear beds – so any elderly resident of a hospital bed who could be was immediately discharged back to the care home from whence they came in order to release the bed. The nub of the political argument is this – apparently, Matt Hancock had promised the PM that anybody discharged from a hospital to a residential home would be tested for the virus before discharge – but did this actually happen? There were lots of anecdotal stories at the time that actually hospital patients were being discharged but without being tested as Hancock promised the PM they would be. But when questioned in the House of Commons today and, even more so, at the Downing Street press conference held at 5.0pm onwards, journalist after journalist quizzed Hancock as to whether hospital patients had actually been tested before discharge. No clear answer to a very clear and specific question was at all forthcoming and indeed, to quote Sky News: ‘In his responses he suggested testing could only be introduced for people being discharged to care homes once testing capacity had been built. He said his “recollection” was that he had committed to building up testing so it could be in place in the future, but avoided an explicit denial of Mr Cumming’s accusation, saying ‘there’ll be a time we can go through all of this in greater detail’….One of the key claims made by Mr Cummings was that Mr Hancock lied about COVID-testing people before they returned to care homes from hospitals in the early part of the pandemic. Mr Cummings told MPs on Wednesday that the Prime Minister was furious to discover in April 2020 that untested hospital patients had been discharged to care homes, adding Mr Hancock had told the PM a month earlier they would be tested.
The importance of all of this is hard to overestimate as it does look as though the elderly residents discharged back to residential homes might have been a massive source of infection which spread like wildfire through the residential homes sector. One estimate of this tangled statistical story by the Nuffield Trust indicates that perhaps as many as 35,000 excess deaths may have been due to COVID-19. So the results of a panicked government response, desperate to clear hospital beds but in effect transferring the problem to an under-resourced residential home sector led to deaths in the tens of thousands. In the face of all of this, one can see why the politicians are being evasive the whole of the time – imagine Matt Hancock saying ‘Yes we made a massive mistake as a result of which over 30,000 deaths have occurred’ One can only hope that some journalists will not let this one rest but will pursue the politicians relentlessly – I think that Newsnight on BBC2 might be quite incisive in tonight’s edition but we shall have to wait and see.
If we are going to have a spell of fine weather, then I really do not have excuse not to get out into the garden and do some tidying up which is badly needed. Of course, when we had so much rain recently, there was plenty of excuse not to get out out and about but now after a lot of rain followed by bursts of sunshine, the weeds might be going mad in various areas. I have an area of the garden which I call ‘Mog’s Den‘ down into which one has to descend via some steps where the land slopes away sharply at the end of our plot of land. I have some fruit trees in this area and on the slopes under the trees I am trying to grow the kind of shade loving plants like Skimmia and periwinkle. These plans have generally worked out but there are some areas that badly need an hour or so of hard gardening to get things back into shape. I know from hard experience that if a garden ‘gets away’ from you in May, then you have a struggle for the rest of the year – and vice versa.
Today was the day when our domestic help calls round to do her weekly stuff for us and we always have a lot of family news and gossip to catch up on. As it happens, her part-time job in the retail sector went ‘belly up’ but she has acquired a new one in the care sector where her many skills and talents will no doubt be put to excellent use – so we exchanged a lot of news about this as she has just had her induction day and it looks as though she and her new employers are going to get along very well together. Meg and I engaged in our normal routine and installed ourself on one of our regular benches in the park (fortunately there are three adjacent to each other so it is a rare day indeed when all of them are occupied by the time we got there) We were soon joined by one of our regular park friends who has taken a very keen interest in what you might call the ‘politics’ of the pandemic. So we spent some time this morning, speculating in the light of Dominic Cummings revelations, what it must have been like in the febrile and chaotic atmosphere in 10 Downing Street at the height of the epidemic (going back to March, 2020) when the virus was out of control, the hospital beds were filling upon rapidly, a vaccine might well months away and so on. We were trying hard to think what decisions we ourselves might have made at that time – although it is not an enviable thought. The one metaphor that Dominic Cummings has helped imprint upon the popular consciousness is Boris Johnson as a shopping trolley i.e. uncontrollable, liable to lurch from one side to the other, capable of banging into one wall and then another in an uncontrolled and random way… need I say more? It is certainly a powerful image – I wonder if the cartoonists will manage to pick upon that?
In the late afternoon, I espied my next door neighbour in his garden and wandered over to have a chat. This is because on Sunday, he is organising a special birthday ‘bash’ for his wife’s birthday and as the weather forecast is set fair, then hopefully all of the proceedings can take place outdoors in the fine weather. I popped round to see if there was anything that he might run out of at the last moment (outdoor chairs, paper plates and so on) but everything seemed well in control. We admired our neighbour’s garden which he has radically turned around and improved since the days when I used to roughly maintain it for the previous occupants for whom it was all a bit too much. After that, we turned to politics (fortunately, we tend to share the same political outlook on the world) so the antics of Dominic Cummings and his revelations about the chaotic days in the early days of the pandemic were quite a source of fascination for both of us. On Sunday then, as it is a happy birthday occasion, all discussion of politics will be strictly out of the question but we are looking forward for a chance to mingle and converse with our fellow men.
In the early evening, I FaceTimed one of my ex-colleagues from the University of Winchester – we normally have a chat each Friday evening. As my colleague used to work for IBM, he is a mine of information about all computing matters in which IBM is, of course, a major player. We then turned our attention to gardening implements and the kinds of implements we used when keeping deep holes for fences and so on.
The virus news this evening is not particularly reassuring – in fact, quite the reverse. It seems as though the Indian variant of the virus now accounts for 60%-75% of the total new cases. Also, the number of cases is now rising and the number of new infections has now exceeded 4,000 – this figure represents a doubling in the last week. As the Indian variant is making an impact across various parts of the county (i.e. not just in the North West) and nowhere seems to be going down, it does appear, as some of the politicians have been saying, that we are in for a real race between the virus on the one hand and the vaccinated population on the other.
Glancing sideways at American politics for a change, it looks as though the Senate Republicans have organised a filibuster to ensure that there will be no Congressional investigation into the invasion of the Congress building after the last presidential elections. This means that one of the greatest attacks on American democracy will never be fully investigated by the Congress itself. It is said that most Republican voters still overwhelmingly support Trump and his policies despite what happened on Jan. 6 2021 and most believe he did nothing wrong. One has the feeling that if the attack had come from the far left rather than the far right, the result would have been a vote for an instant Congressional investigation.
Today could best be described as a 'glowering' kind of day- although the weather is meant to be set fair for a few days, it was one of those days today when there seemed to covering of low white cloud and a generally muggy feeling. Despite this less than promising start, we nonetheless made it to the park where I deposited Meg on a bench before I set off to collect the newspapers. Then we soon acquired our regular cohort of park friends (well, at least two of them) and discussed the affairs of the day. Then it was home to have a fairly swift lunch because there was a job that needed doing in the afternoon. Basically, this was to get our communal lawns cut and this for a particular reason. The lawns were only cut a week ago but the combination of rain and sun has made the dandelions proliferate - and basically they look a mess. But tomorrow is the day when our next door neighbour is due to hold a birthday party on the occasion of his wife's birthday. The whole Hart household is invited so we are looking forward to that and there may be up to 30 guests all in all, I must admit I didn't want people turning up while the lawns looked an absolute mess so I was determined to get them cut and looking in good shape for the benefit of visitors. We got this done and then had to have a fairly quick turn around before we off to our Saturday evening church service where we leave the house at 5.30. Once we got the church car park we were greeted by one of the regulars (a vivacious Liverpudlian) who used to sit by us when we last had regular church attendances. She is now attending Harvington Hall where they have a regular Sunday morning service outdoors and therefore it is easier to comply with the COVID-19 regulations but one has a short car ride to get there (about 8 miles away)
The COVID-19 news seems to be quite worrying this evening. Sir Tim Gowers - whose argument against herd immunity helped trigger England's first lockdown last year - told Sky News that the recent increase in coronavirus cases 'worries me'.'They seem to be multiplying by a certain fraction each day - in other words, growing exponentially,' he said. Yesterday, he warned that the UK's fight to contain coronavirus could turn bad 'very, very quickly' unless the government acts cautiously on easing lockdown further. How many other epidemiologists share his concerns in uncertain at this point. Certainly, if you wanted to grasp a smidgeon of comfort, it is that whilst yesterday's infection figure was 4,182, todays is 3,398 i.e. nearly 20% less than the previous day. But evidently, as has been said before, we are racing between the vaccination rate creeping up day by day and the virus trying to reproduce exponentially. I think the June 21st deadline is still incredibly tendentious - Boris Johnson and the right wing of the Tory Party are incredibly anxious to maintain the original timetable but it all remains a huge gamble. As always on a Saturday night, it will be interesting to see what the Sunday newspapers have to say on this topic.
On my IBM Thinkpad, I have recently started using a very secure German mail system which goes by the obscure name of 'Posteo' As they are a subscription only service (adverts are evidently anathema) the rate is only 12 euros a year. This program contains within it a feature called 'Notes' which means that whatever scribbles you might have made, it is automatically saved for you under whatever 'Notes' title you have chosen and in a folder called 'Notes' (This can be made to share data with the Apple app of the same name if you really want to) This little Notes feature seems incredibly useful but it I designed just to get text onto the screen (as if you were using a scrap of paper) and therefore has no formatting capacities of any kind. In fact the only 'controls' are 'New Note' (which is self-evident) and 'Send to email' (self-evident again) I wondered if it would be at all possible to get any degree of formatting into the text (e.g. bold,italics) and experimentation revealed that if using an external email client (such as Outlook) one could copy a say an emboldened character into the Clipboard and thence into Notes. So I have made a sort of toolbar for myself with one emboldened characters on it. To get, say, an emboldened heading, I copy the emboldened character (which is a 'B' for bold) into my Notes file, carry on typing immediately after it and the subsequent text incorporates the preceding formatting. I then delete the 'B' at the start of the heading and there I am with an emboldened heading. This might sound incredibly 'kludgy' as the Americans say but it works fine for me - and makes my Notes files more readable. I tend to put in them little computing 'tips and hints' on how a particulate program works and whatever I write is automatically saved whenever I leave to the program.
Today started off (and continued) as the most glorious of days. The sky was completely cloudless and an azure blue from almost first light. In fact the weather forecasters were predicting that today temperatures in Britain may well exceed those in Ibiza (Spain). I walked down early as is customary on a Sunday morning in order to collect our Sunday newspapers. Then after indulging in our weekly Andrew Marr Show, I walked down to the park (on my own) where I hoped to meet up with our University of Birmingham friend, but when I got there I had received a text from him telling us that he was going out for the day with a friend and we would meet up again some time during the week. After I got home, I had a quick change of shirts (having walked to town twice on a very hot day) in preparation for our neighbour’s garden party which was due to start at 12.00 noon. We arrived fairly promptly and handed over our present (a large picture of an owl) which was much appreciated and then started to mingle and drink with the guests (mainly family). We discovered that one of the guests was a friend of our neighbours who knew southern Spain quite well and so we exchanged reminiscences of some of the towns we knew in Andalucia such as Antequera and Ronda. Just as soon as some delicious food was being served, Meg started to feel quite unwell – we had to get her back home (only next door) and then she lay down and had a good sleep after which she felt a lot better. We are not quite sure what happened but we are surmising that a couple of glasses of red wine on an empty stomach in a very hot midday sun was probably a bit too much for her constitution to bear, particularly as she was feeling a bit wobbly in any case. Our neighbours were absolutely wonderful and, given that we missed out on some of the party, promised us that we can have a nice little party as a foursome when the weather and time permits. Meanwhile, our neighbour is actually starting a new job on Tuesday morning which is quite enviable for someone who has had their 73rd birthday. In some ways it appears to be a continuation of the job he had before retirement but this one calls for someone who has a lot of experience within the industry so our neighbour is well suited.
After the Dominic Cummings outpourings last week, the news media are still feeling some of the consequences. In particular, a spotlight has been well and truly focused on the UK’s preparedness (or lack of it) to face the COVID-19 pandemic. Lord Kerslake, a former head of the civil service, is of the option that nothing short of a revolution is required in the way that our civil service and other British institutions are run. Probably Dominic Cummings would agree. Although we thought of ourselves as being well prepared by for a conventional influenza epidemic, this was certainly not the case when combatting the coronovirus. By contrast, some of the South East Asian economies had had experience in the past of SARS, MERS and other similar pandemics and they fully appreciated the necessity to lock down hard and early. If we were to look at Vietnam, for example, we discover that in total they experienced 1347 cases and 33 deaths (compared UK with 4.4 million cases and 128,000 deaths). Lord Kerslake also attacks what he calls ‘British exceptionalism’ by which I think he means ‘it could never happen here’ Although UK TV screens were filled with the most horrendous images of hospitals in Bergamo, Northern Italy there seemed to a feeling that it alll might stop at the Channel Tunnel. The UK’s lack of preparedness for the epidemic will no doubt be chewed over at length in any future investigation. It is also becoming crystal clear that in an absolute panic to clear hospital beds, there was a huge decanting of patients (untested for the virus) back into residential homes. Instead of ‘throwing a ring of steel’ around the care home sector, it is now fairly clear to most journalists and informed members of the public that the influx of hospital patients would only serve to ‘seed’ the virus inside residential establishments but the figures for those who died of COVID (as opposed to other things from which they might have died sooner or later) will be difficult to ascertain. One would have thought that there would be a huge popular revulsion over the fact that this happened but the great British public seems not to care (as the Tories are so far ahead in the opinion polls, even putting another 3% last week) It seems that a combination of the vaccines being successful rolled out and the fact that Brexit is sort of delivered is persuading people that Boris has done quite a good under the circumstances!
And so the ‘Spring Bank Holiday’ dawns i.e. that which used to be called Whitsuntide decades ago but which got secularised some time ago now. This was the week (and actually the day) when in Manchester and the Lancashire mill towns one used to have the ‘Whit walks‘. On Whit Monday (or it might have been Whit Friday) all the local Catholic institutions used to get dressed up in their finery and would then walk beneath a banner and to the sound of a local brass band. Actually the school I attended in Bolton, Lancashire in the mid-1950’s has one of the finest brass bands in the area (but I was in the school orchestra, not the Brass band) The type of organisations that would march would be the Legion of Mary, the Boy Scouts, Cubs and Girl Guides, the local Catholic nurses with rather specialised capes and finally all of the various ethnicities in the area (usually Ukranians, Poles and other Eastern Europeans who had come to work in the mines and the textile industries). For all I know there were probably several other local urban collectivities who used to take part in the Whit walks as well. This was illustrated in one of L S Lowry’s famous paintings and, as it happens, I have a copy of this particular Lowry on my study wall to provide me with an occasional reminder of my Lancashire/Manchester days. If all of this sounds excessively sectarian, then the Anglicans and Non-Conformists had their own march the following week but without sounding unduly partisan, I think these were often a pale imitation of the Catholic versions. For those interested, a Google search with the terms ‘Whit Walks in/around Manchester‘ will reveal a lot of interesting history, complete with photographs. I was consulting Google to attempt to find out if the Whit Walks still took place but COVID-19 over the last year or so are certainly hastening the death throes of this once thriving cultural highlight.
And so to return to Bromsgrove on what has turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far. The thin layer of mild white cloud very quickly burned off and Meg and I had a delightful walk down into town, accompanied by a slight breeze which made the walk very pleasant. We noticed on our walk down the hill that all the local poppies seem to have sprung up in the last day or so – I suppose it was the combination of quite a dampish soil followed by two days of blazing sunshine. On our way down the hill, we noticed a mature tree which looked very maple-like in its appearance, at least judging by the shape of the leaf. But what was so extraordinary was that there must have been masses of seedlings, or at least seeds, which had fallen into/onto some loose gravel.Consequently, the seedlings had gone mad – out of interest, I pulled one out and it seemed to have grown some good roots. Tomorrow, I will take down a plastic bag and rescue some of these seedlings – the person who was living in the house next door thought his neighbour would be done a good turn if I ‘liberated’ him of some of these seedlings tomorrow so I will do this with an easy conscience. When we eventually got to the park, we met with two of our regular friends and discussed some of the findings (in a Daily Mail poll, of all places) indicating the Daily Mail readers were reacting to the Dominic Cummings/Boris Johnson contretemps. Some of the findings were quite interesting – for example, if I remember it correctly, there is quite a division of opinion whether the lockdown should end in three weeks time. Several prominent scientists are already arguing that the next wave of the virus might already have begun and we should be extra cautious. Even sources inside No. 10 are saying that there this a 50:50 chance that the forthcoming end to the lockdown in three weeks time may have to be delayed or softened somewhat. The next week or so will be critical whilst the data on new infections, their transmissibility and likely impact on the NHS and risk of spreading to the rest of the UK is very carefully assessed. Eventually, though, our conversations drew to a natural conclusion and so we made for home and prepared a very late salad type meal for ourselves.
As the past few days have been quite warm, I remembered in time that the plants that had been bought for me for my birthday needed to be dead-headed and then receive a good supply of water. This having been done, we were delighted to get a phone call from our good friends in Oxfordshire who have now decided to make a journey up North (probably to Scotland) for a mini-break. They are calling in to see us next Monday (and of course we will be delighted to see them) so we will probably prepare a nice hearty soup for them so they cay be sustained and get on their way as soon as they are sufficiently rested.
The spell of fine weather is continuing and after one of the wettest Mays on record, we are now facing a spell of warm weather in which the temperatures here are said to exceed those in the island of Ibiza – one of the Balearic Islands off the eastern coast of Spain. So we made our usual trip to the park and there met with a couple of our usual companions and as we normally do enjoyed half-an-hour of banter and amusing conversation. We were joined briefly by someone we know who quite regularly walks 8-10 km per day (as his daughter-in-law checks on him with an Apple Watch) and we find this amazing for someone in their mid 80’s. He doesn’t stay and chat for too long in case his muscles get cold! The other day when I was in the park I remember watching a father playing with his daughter who looked about 8-10 years old. They were throwing and catching a kind of spaceship shaped object to each other and I noted how, even over the space of 15 minutes, the young girl’s ability to throw and also to catch the aforementioned object improved considerably. It did make me wonder how important it was for hand-eye-brain to be stimulated in order to develop and how children, deprived of such stimulation, might exhibit a failure to thrive. One thing we have noticed in our daily visits to the park are the kinds of bikes that the very young children are riding. The very simplest for the 3 year old seats have no pedals but are just propelled by their feet – this, I suppose, helps the child to develop the feels of balance and coordination required. After that they may graduate to a two-wheeler bike with stabilisers – the rather old fashioned three wheeler bike seems to have had its day. The point about stabilisers is that they can be removed once a child has acquired the necessary confidence and presumably fixed back again when the bike gets handed on to a younger sibling. Then, of course, there are a variety of scooters not to mention skateboards and the adolescent (males, usually) can whizz along the paths at a fantastic speed upon these on their way to the skateboard part of the park which is always very popular. Eventually, Meg and I collected our newspapers and then progressed to home where we enjoyed a nice meal of lamb, delayed from the weekend.
Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I enjoy messing about on my newly acquired IBM ThinkPad running Windows 7. As I have so little memory (about 1.25GB) and a 1.4GHz CPU it is one of my aims in life to find the least resource hungry applications I can find – to fit the specifications of a machine probably first specified about 15 years ago. Now I want you you to imagine the following scenario – on your Windows computer screen you have nothing else displayed apart from two icons – one indicating the Microsoft ‘Word‘ program and the other representing the Microsoft ‘Outlook‘ program. How would you use each one? The answer is evident, of course – if you had to compose a document for work or other purposes you would use Word to compose a ‘Word’ document. Turning your attention to the Outlook icon, you could dah off a quick email to a friend and even use Outlook to send the document you had just created to wherever. Then, as I was staring at the formatting toolbar in the Outlook clone I have just acquired (actually, OE Classic which stands for Outlook Express Classic) and noticed the formatting toolbar (which, in essence, we have noticed in the various versions of Word going back probably for 25 years). Then, as they say, something has been hiding ‘in plain sight’ over the years (I have used Outlook on and off for probably 25 years). I thought to myself ‘Why don’t I use Outlook as though it were only a word processor‘ – after all, via the formatting toolbar I can choose the font, size, colour, background, bold, italic, strikethrough, margin indents, link insertion, bullets, numbers etc) So I started a series of experiments in which I used Outlook as though it were only a word processor and using a bit of native cunning managed to produce a document complete with header, miniature table with coloured cells to remind me of the various formatting options) and variety of formatted text (bold, italics and so on) To which the question is : why on earth bother? And the answer is that I can produce a document (in html format which I tend to want anyway so it would display on a webpage if necessary) with a program which loads in about 5 seconds and occupies about 12,000k in memory rather than the official Word program which takes about 60-70 seconds and occupies 27,000k in memory and then you have my answer!
Wednesday morning is always quite a busy morning before we have a chance to think about our daily walk. The first and most important thing was to write a reference for a close friend of ours- although I only got the request about a day ago, the accompanying letter indicated that no employment would be forthcoming without a completed reference so I was anxious to get this completed and despatched. It used to be said that in the ‘bad old days’ (and I am going back about thirty years now) that employers in both the private and the public sector used to give terrible references on the people that they wished to retain and absolutely glowing references on the people with whose services they wanted to dispense i.e. hoping that they would get another job and leave. I am sure that things are much more professional nowadays but it is quite a long time since I have actually written a reference for anyone. After this had been completed, I refined my Waitrose order, ready for delivery tomorrow morning and finally prepare our elevenses ready for the park. We had a most delightful walk down the hill with beautiful sunshine and a very gentle breeze. When we finally got the park we encountered two of our regular park friends and enjoyed both the weather and the good conversation. Meg is teaching one of our friends some Spanish (or at least Spanish phrases) and whilst I shoot off and get the newspapers, Meg is busy teaching all she knows. The point about languages, I suppose, is that when you are in the country itself you hear little phrases repeated over and over again and this seeps into your consciousness, as it were – the grammar books evidently aim to be comprehensive and ‘correct’ but of course people actually talk in all kinds of unconventional ways.
Later on this afternoon, I Skyped one of my Hampshire friends and we rather went down memory lane, talking about the early computers which we had either owned or upon which we cut our computing teeth, as it were. I remember quite well my early Commodore-64 days which I learned how to program in 6502 machine code. Where to put one’s code ? Actually, there was a bit of space in what was called the ‘second cassette buffer’ which nobody actually used and this space ran from 828-1022 i.e. 192 bytes of space which is less than one fifth of 1k. So anything you wanted to do (e.g. sorting programs, graphics programs) had to be fitted into this space. It used to be said by one of my favourite authors that the machine code ‘fitted together like polished mahogany’ and there was certainly no room for viruses or the like. Talking about things that have to be adapted, on my Thinkpad there is no Windows logo key (IBM refused to pay the royalties to Microsoft which the latter were demanding as the price to be paid for putting this key on your keyboards) So I found out how to alter the registry entry so that the Caps Lock key (which hardly anyone actually uses) is remapped so that it now functions as a Windows logo key. My friend and I were using Skype for over an hour and a half as we had a lot to catch up but we always exchange tips, hints, things in which we know the other will be interested) These chats are always so enjoyable so we will catch up with each other again in about a fortnight’s time.
The political rhetoric is getting quite interesting at the moment. I notice that the right wing of the Tory Party (e.g. Ian Duncan Smith) always seem to be willing and able to be interviewed on any contemporary political issue. This time, of course, it is the ‘finally balanced’ decision as to other to lift the lockdown completely on June 21st or whether to retain some residual restrictions. The rhetoric being used currently is that the scientific community are ‘bullying’ Boris Johnson into an incomplete release of the lockdown. Now the use of this term is really very interesting as scientists are only in a position to advise and their collective advice can be accepted or rejected by the government. On the other hand, the right wing of the Tory Party knows a thing or two about bullying as they can dispose of Johnson in a moment should they decide to withdraw their support from him. As it was, there was a massive rebellion when we had ‘Tiers’ and it looks as though Kent (yes, Kent!) was going to be placed in Tier 3 as it was then. This revolt on the Tory benches were right-wingers to a man and I find it fascinating that they would collectively use a term like ‘bullying’ to describe legitimate pressure on the government coming from the scientific community. It does look, by the way, that several scientists are now calling for Step 4 to be delayed by several weeks as the Indian variant of the virus looks threatening.
Today has been an interesting day for us. We were a little delayed in our normal walk because the Waitrose shopping was delivered (back onto our normal schedule from 9-10 on a Thursday morning) and, of course, all of this needs putting away. It was a day for our gardener who calls on us about once a month and for whom we rely to do some of the heavier shrub and bush trimming. Once we had a chat with him we set on our way and I dropped Meg on our normal bench whilst I went off to collect the newspapers. This sort of routine may only carry on for less than two weeks because the famous Waitrose cafe is scheduled to reopen on Wednesday, June 17th. When it does, we will call in there for our morning coffee and it will be fascinating to see how long it will take for the old networks, current about 17 months ago, to manage to recreate themselves. Beyond a doubt, some of the regulars will have go themselves in new routines, watering holes, friendship groups and the like so will have to wait and see. I have asked the Waitrose staff that I see when I pop into the store for a quick forgotten item (as I did this morning as we were in danger of running out of coffee) to remind the manager that the old regulars should be rewarded with a bottle of champagne or similar on their reopening day. Although Waitrose do sell newspapers, I shall continue to patronise the little newsagents around the corner in order to keep the more personal relationship going. My newspapers are always put on one side for me which means that they get delivered to me from where they have been put aside in the back room of the shop and I know that they will always be there for me.
I knew that after lunch, I needed to walk down into town for one or two urgent things. In particular, I needed to get into the local branch of Santander because my debit card cannot be introduced into any of the ATM machines. Within the store, it was indicated to me that I could have a replacement card with the same number on it about which I am mightily relieved. What I feared was that Santander would give me a whole new card with a new number on it and this would mean contacting quite a lot of online payment services where my card. details are ‘lodged’ in order to update the details. I know that from post experience, this can be quite troublesome not to mention time-consuming, so if I can get an exact replacement, so much the better. Whilst in town, I availed myself of some of the local charity shops that I have not frequented for months now. I acquired an incredibly well-illustrated guide to Spain for £2.00, beautifully illustrated with some excellent high quality photos. I thought I was buying myself yet another travel guide to Spain but in practice this is more like a mini-encyclopaedia on the history, art literature etc. of Spain. As such, I think it will give Meg and I lots of pleasure but no doubt it will fill us full of longing to get back there again but I suspect that next Spring may be the earliest date that we can realistically expect. I could not resist the temptation to go into my local ‘The Works‘ (which sells remaindered books and a variety of stationery) and as I was completing my purchases, the shop manager plonked a ‘long’ 2021 calendar which appears to have a psalm for every month of the year. The complete package, which I haven’t had chance to open or examine yet, also contains a small 2021 diary again replete with psalms. The shop manager practically threw this item at me (marked down from £10 to£2.50 to 50p) saying to the assistant ‘This is for the gentleman‘ so I suppose I must have looked badly in need redemption or something. Now an interesting question arises whether I keep this little package or not because I happen to know one of my friends would quite like a ‘long ‘ calendar but she probably won’t thank me for suppling her with one with religious motives on every page!
The COVID-19 news this evening looks particularly grim this evening. The UK has reported 5,274 new coronavirus cases and 18 further deaths and this is the highest daily jump since 26th March (two months ago). Also, this news comes as Public Health England (PHE) revealed the number of cases of the Indian (Delta) variant have almost doubled in the past week – rising by 5,472 to 12,431. This is surely sounding the death knell for any immediate release from the lockdown restrictions. As it happens, Boris is pictured receiving his second jab today but in the race between ‘second jabs’ and increase in the Indian (Delta) variant of the virus, it looks as though victory is going to the latter.
Today, the spell of fine weather continues and so we were delighted to start our walk, after our customary chat and exchange of news with our domestic help who has been ‘doing’ for us for at least the last ten years. Then we made our way into town but did it in a series of ‘three hops’ so that Meg could manage the various stages in the heat without undue distress. First we popped down to our local Waitrose and Meg sat outside on some benches whilst I popped around the corner to pick up the newspapers. Then we both ventured forth into town and bought some toiletries from a local ‘Health and Beauty’ type shop – having completed the second leg of our venture we could not wait until we continued to the park and consumed our coffee and comestibles (the only slight problem being that any of the local dogs who have been let off the lead bound towards us in the inspection that they might get fed). After that, it was home for a fairly quick lunch before we settled down to our Friday afternoon activities. The principal activity was to get the lawns cut which includes the communal green area which is in front of the house (and which I have affectionately in the past nicknamed as ‘Meg’s Meadow’) and then our own private lawn towards the rear. The lawns look so much better once they have been transformed from their wispy appearance once the dandelions have done their worst to a much tidier condition which looks great in the afternoon sunshine. Then I needed to get some heavy stone pots which I had recently acquired into the positions I had chosen for them. My daughter-in-law helped me with some of the heavy lifting involved and then we scoured the garden for some plants with which to populate them. Our daughter-in-law had already been busy with her dahlias which she had uncovered ready for the new season and she had sown and planted some sunflowers (in variety) in various parts of the garden so we just have to give them a bit of TLC now in order for them to thrive.
In the early evening, one of my ex-colleagues from Hampshire FaceTimed me (we generally do each Friday evening and he always seems to have such a busy life with organising this, that and the other) We are still vaguely wondering whether it would be possible to book ourselves away for a few nights in North Wales and, as things stand, we should be seeing Meg’s cousin in about three weeks time. Last night, I made some tentative attempts to make a booking at the Holiday Inn we have used several times before but did not get anywhere. So this morning, I telephoned them only to be informed that they are not contemplating opening again until July at the earliest. (I am not quite sure whether this is because they come under the Welsh lockdown rules which differ a little from the English, in any case).
I am finding it interesting that a lot of political heat is being generated today by the Government’s decision to move Portugal from the ‘green’ category (no quarantines) to the ‘amber’ category (which implies a fortnight’s quarantine plus a couple of tests upon your return) It seems that one of the factors behind the government’s decision is an understandable nervousness about exposing British holiday makers to the ‘Nepalese’ variant (which seems to be a variant upon the Indian variant) It might be the the UK government are being over-cautious at this point, but I don’t think so. They were rightly criticised for delaying putting ‘India’ in the ‘red’ zone thereby exposing the great British public to potentially hundreds or even thousands of people flying in from India perhaps carrying the new mutant strain of the virus with them.Now without wishing to sound ethnocentric, it must be of concern when a variant itself mutates because the so-called ‘Nepalese’ variant could evade all of our current vaccines and our subsequent defences.
The COVID news tonight sounds genuinely scary to me as coronavirus cases in the community rocketed by 76.5% in just one week, official data for England indicates. Waves of infection have got to start off from very small beginnings and this looks incredibly like the start of another wave to me. Also, the R rate has moved up too a figure in the rate 1.0-1.2 which probably means about 1.1 This means that every 10 infected people will generate a further eleven infections and so on. The date for the end of all lockdowns (21st June, only 17 days away) is now looking very uncertain at this stage. If we were to completely unlock down then, we might be releasing the whirlwind!
Tonight, Donald Trump has been banned from FaceBook for the next year and a half at least.The timing means Mr Trump will not be able to use his accounts ahead of the November 2022 national midterm elections, when his Republican party will be competing for congressional seats. But tens of millions of Republican voters are still providing Trump with their support (at least nominally)
We have another beautiful day in prospect, so it is a case of enjoying this spell of fine weather whilst it lasts. However, I am finding that I need to religiously water some of my pot plants in the evening as they could quickly become dehydrated. Some of the trees bordering our communal grassed area are growing beautifully tall and are doing a good screening job but some of the leaves are looking a little heat distressed and look as though they could benefit from a good soaking. Although we did get plenty of surface rain in May, I am not sure whether we got the really good soaking that helps to fill the underground aquifers and wherever else surface water eventually gets stored. We walked down into the park and soon teamed up with a group of regulars for a pleasant chat. However, only for about the second time in about fifteen months, I dropped the full flask of coffee just as I had opened it and spilled practically all of its contents on the ground. So after I popped off to collect our Saturday ration of newspapers, I had a good look in on of the compartments in my phone case and was relieved to find an emergency £10 note which I needed to press into service. With this, I treated myself to a bottle of refrigerated ginger beer which I have not drunk in years but sounded superior to peach flavoured tea and other offerings in the newsagent’s chiller cabinet. This morning, I was hunting out a short sleeved shirt (which I rarely wear because I prefer long sleeved shirts if only to obviate the need to plaster arms with sun-tan lotion) After I had located my short-sleeved shirts, I was delighted to espy a particularly psychedelic tie (which screams 1960’s at you) and which I thought I had mislaid. Anyway, despite the weather, I decided to wear this tie if only to prove to my park friends that I really am a child of the 1960’s. Mind you, to complete the outfit I feel as though I probably need a kaftan, some beads, some John Lennon/Yoko Ono style sun glasses and perhaps a stock lot of popular phrases such as ‘Make Love! Not war! (which I do believe in, by the way) I think I will have to work on all of the other items and then, of course, what are the occasions (apart from garden parties in one’s own garden) when you would actually want to wear the full outfit. Having said that, I took off the tie and decided not to offend God , the priest and the rest of the congregation by wearing it for the evening service this evening.
This afternoon was a quiet afternoon which it always is when I know we have to bestir ourselves to leave the house at 5.30 in time for the evening service. We have to book in for this as soon as the subscriptions lists open at 6.00 on a Wednesday evening and it is easy to get caught out and miss one’s slot – it happened to me once only a month to so so back. We get sight of some of the regulars in the congregation but we cannot really stop for a chat until the present regulations, which may well soon be lifted in any case.
All the signs are present, at the moment, that our press is preparing to come to the aid of the government which looks set for a ‘U’-turn on the complete unlocking on June 21st (two weeks on Monday) There is quite a lot of speculation as to what measures may well continue after the ‘end’ to the lockdown. Top of the list is the use of face masks which looks set for continue. Another hot favourite seems to be advice to carry working from home, where possible. A slight delay to the date of the unlocking, say for another fortnight, may well be on the cards as well. Apparently, the government is going to be faced with a really difficult policy decision in a week or so because the government ‘line’ has been that the unlock down is going to occur ‘come what may’ on June 21st or the government feels that it will lose all credibility (not to to mention the wrath of the right wing of the Tory Party but as we know, this always be taken as a constant). The problem for the government is that much of the data seems to be pointing in the wrong direction and we will have to wait until almost the last moment to have a more complete date set (with projections about projected numbers of hospital cases and so on) At least they do not have the problems being experienced in Belgium were the country’s leading virologist is being targeted by a far right military shooting instructor who is pursuing a vendetta against virologists and Covid lockdowns and is on the run with a rocket launcher and a machine gun (and the Belgian police cannot find him).
Today was an indeterminate kind of day – the kind of day in which Denis Nordern the famous comic who used to broadcast regularly on Radio 4 when asked to make up an ‘un-newsworthy’ news item that might appear in a footnote to an obscure column in ‘The Times’ would venture ‘Small earthquake in Chile – not many killed’ The pattern of the day followed the normal routine for a Sunday in which I walked down to town in order to collect our newspapers crossing the path of absolutely nobody (typically a jogger or a dog-walker) whilst en route. Then, of course, we watch the Andrew Marr politics show and again we have an appearance by Matt Hancock who must be by now of the most visible’ Health Secretaries on record. He was rebutting the argument that he sent people unvaccinated (certainly untested ) straight from hospital wards (in order to clear them) back into the residential homes from whence they came. His rebuttal has become second nature to him by now i.e. to repeat like a mantra that ‘we put a policy in place’ to vaccinate the elderly (repeating the fact that they had reached their target of 100,000 or whatever) completely ignoring the question that although they had a plan in place, people actually did progress straight from hospital to residential homes. At one point, there was a slight chink in his armour when he let slip well ‘it was a question of priorities‘ but Andrew Marr did not seize upon the remark as he should have done. Matt Hancock was in effect right – as a ‘question of priorities‘ then the elderly occupying much needed hospital beds were a ‘lower priority’ then COVID patients. Eventually, I walked on down to the park alone this Meg because Meg was having a slightly ‘off’ day and was resting at home. In the park, I met up with one of our park regulars and we had quite a long quasi-theological discussion whether it was legitimate to seek to persuade people from holding whatever views that they may have with conviction. We were of a like mind in that that we did not think it was legitimate to dissuade somebody from whatever view which might be deeply and sincerely held, even though we might disagree with it. On the other hand, we both agreed that we were rankled if we had an encounter with someone of pronounced religious views who were convinced of the truth of their own position and had attempted to teach us the error of our ways.
In the late afternoon (and thinking about our friends who might be visiting us tomorrow and who are keen gardeners), I decided to plant up the stone planters I had recently acquired from a friend. In these, I put a combination of both top soil and some of my own 2-year old compost but I had run out of bonemeal/Growmore that I generally deploy on such occasions. Anyway, they got planted up with some spare plants that I had around the garden and are sitting on the front of some decking to form a sort of leafy boundary or instant wall. However, after a good watering I must keep on remembering to water until the plants are established/reestablished.
I have just this evening experienced one of these really frustrating half hours that beset us from time to time. As we all know, the Sunday newspapers are replete with supplements of various kinds. Various things such as ‘Style’ or ‘Fashion’ goes straight into the bin whilst other sections are flipped through incredibly quickly to see if anything catches your eye. So I spent at last 45 minutes scanning each of the supplements of todays (and yesterday’s) newspapers, trying to discover an advert for a patio cleaning fluid which I am sure we need. Of course I couldn’t find the advert even though I had recourse to the vertical filing system (aka. green wheelie bin) Eventually, I found what I was looking for as I had already detached the relevant page and saved it ‘in a safe place’ but that was a fruitless half or so spent on a fruitless search.
Tonight, there are more and more hints that a full end to the lockdown is not to be forthcoming in two weeks time. Matt Hancock is quoted as saying that he is ‘open’ to an incomplete end to the lockdown on June 21st. Given that the infection rate is 70% higher than a week ago and the Delta version of the virus is judged to be 40% more transmissible that the previous variant, then one can understand that the government is going to backtrack like mad. What I find interesting is that the right wing of the Tory party and much of the press are constantly urging an end to the lockdown but my judge of the public mood (Vox pop on TV, people I meet in the park) all seem to think that having endured 15 months of COVID restrictions, then one month more is not going to make a lot of difference.
Today was the day when we knew that some of our close friends from Oxfordshire were due to break their journey here in the Midlands. So we had a complete change to our routines this morning. As it happened, Meg had not been feeling too well and spent the morning in bed – in the meanwhile, I raced off down to the newsagents in the car and thence to our local Waitrose. As I had gone down to town in the car, I did not bother to wear my trade-mark Australian leather hat and the newsagent almost failed to recognise me as, hatless, my appearance had changed so much. – at least I did not have a repetition of what happened last week when a 3-4 year old tugged at his mother’s arm upon seeing me in my hat and exclaimed ‘Mummy! There’a a cowboy who has lost his horse!‘ This morning when I was wondering what to wear, I looked through some of my range of shirts and reminded myself that I had a Batique shirt that I had bought when working in Indonesia – as I had not worn it for about 20 years, I thought now was quite a suitable occasion to try it on for a change. Batique shirts are meant to be worn close fitting and I must say I have probably put on a little rotundity over the course of the last 20 years but I could still get it on without every button straining at its fastening so I gave it a go. Batique designs are a little difficult to describe if you haven’t seen the design before but it is intricate, with many interlocking swirling shapes and motifs that look vaguely like flowery or fiery shapes – anyway, it is a special occasions type shirt and the Indonesians tend to wear them for particularly smart and/or formal occasions (without a tie). Dressed in this, I popped into our local Waitrose and bought a selection of breads, cheeses, patés and salads such that we could throw together a meal when my friends arrived. I needed to do a minimal degree of wiping down of our external garden furniture and then I complement the metal chairs with some large cushions that I had bought in bulk from Oxfam a year or so back and which we keep in the garage for just on those occasions when we are going to eat outside. Our friends arrived shortly after midday and I was delighted that Meg had sufficiently recovered to come downstairs and to eat a meal with us in the beautiful sunshine. Normally, I would have erected a parasol to shade the outside table and this was sorely needed today. Anyway, the last time I got out the parasol, the mice had had a good old nibble at it all the way around the edges making it look like Cinderella’s dress on a good day (and so it had to go) Today we started off in the sunshine but decided to move the whole table into the shade as the midday sun was so hot. We had a wonderful couple of hours chatting and enjoying each other’s company until was time for our friends to depart and carry on in their journey through the Midlands (where they are due to call in on another of their old friends) with their ultimate destination being Scarborough (on the basis they had never been there before).
Our avenues of unalloyed pleasure is set to continue tomorrow. We had made some tentative plans to meet with some of our Waitrose friends that we FaceTimeregularly but who we have not met face-to-face for over a year now. Tomorrow is my Pilates day which rather messes up the middle of the day- we had made some outline plans to meet in Webbs,the huge garden centre down the road, but we decided to rip those plans up and come and have some afternoon tea in our garden. Our friends had seen the outside of the house but not the inside or the garden so we are going to negotiate access for our friend’s wheelchair down the side of the house (which we think we can do with no difficulty) and eat out in the garden again. If all of this comes to nought, we still have lots of options to eat at the front of the house (as we are quite private and some of our neighbours do the same). We are looking forward very much to tomorrow and our friends are going to bring a cake and we have lots of salad-y things left from today so we shall not go hungry. I must say that I felt that Meg felt so much better having made the effort to get out of her bed and see our friends and they have certainly given her spirits a huge fillip. Whilst the weather is good, we are making the best of seeing our friends whilst we can – next Wednesday, if all goes to plan, our local Waitrose cafe may soon reopen and let us see then how many of the old crowd will reconvene.
Our busy social whirl continues – well, not quite! We made a very rapid trip to the park this morning and then had only the briefest of chats with our University of Birmingham friend because we knew that we had a fairly tight turn-around as I have my Pilates class in the middle of the day. After we got back we had about ten minutes for me to change clothing etc. before going down to my Pilates class. Here we have the same four regulars but it was our first week back after the break of a week for the Spring holiday. At least one of the four us (not me!) had been busy doing Pilates in odd moments in the kitchen (peeling vegetables seems to be a particular favourite at the moment) Then after a rush home and a scrambled lunch (from the leftovers of yesterday’s repast) we then awaited our particular ex-Waitrose friends who we expecting to call round to see us at 3.30. As one of our friends is a wheelchair user, we had to ensure that we didn’t have any wheelie bins occluding the back entrance to our garden (everything was OK as it turned out). We also, on purpose, did not lay any tables or the like in case we needed to change plans and arrange for our repast in the front of the house rather than the rear. But all is well that end’s well so our friends managed to gain access by our side entrance without difficulty and we sat down to scoff that which took our fancy from yesterday’s assortments of breads, cold meats, patés and cheeses. Then we had the most enjoyable afternoon catching on various bits of news, not to mention Bromsgrove history (about which our friends are extremely knowledgeable). One of the particular pleasures to be had on occasions like these are to show relatives and friends the points of interest in your own garden (or in our case the communal areas) Having explained the history of how we came to purchase the plot of land in the front of the house, I then went on to explain some of the improvements for which we could claim some credit. One of these is my ‘pride and joy’ and that is a tree, now some thirty feet tall or even more which I rescued as very young and self-set seedling about twelve years ago. This started off its life about 4″ high and sitting in a small plant pot but it got repotted as it grew and when it about a metre high I transplanted it into my neighbour’s garden (which I was looking after and helping to maintain at the time) And so my ‘acer campestre‘ or field maple to give it its English nomenclature feels as though it is getting on for the height for a house or about 8 metres tall but they can grow as much as 20m in total. It has some lovely dense maple style leaves but many of them will turn orange and then red in the autumn. Another particular favourite of mine is the silver birch which I bought and then planted about ten yers ago to fill a gap. Finally of course, we have the recently pruned golden privet around our BioDisk which after a heavy pruning is now showing signs of bursting back into life again. Suddenly, it was not too far short of 7.0pm so we had to let out friends depart so that our daughter-in-law could get her car correctly parked.
The latest virus news is anything but encouraging. It looks as though the total number of new infections has increased to over 6,000 new cases in a single day, which I think represents practically a doubling within a week. More seriously, the Greater Manchester and Lancashire area are to receive a ‘strengthened package of support’ to help them to cope with the increasing incidence of the Delta version of the virus which is so much more transmissible than its predecessors. We had been intending to make a trip to Bolton in about 2-3 week’s time in order to pay a much postponed visit to Meg’s cousin. However, this too is starting to belong to the category of a forlorn hope and it looks as though we need to postpone the trip for about the third time. At the same time, we know that our Irish friends from down the road have had a magnificent time Llandudno in North Wales. By way of contrast, we had tried to book into a Holiday Inn in North Wales and been told that no booking would be entertained until July at the earliest. Meanwhile, some of our park friends announced to us that they were going to go off for a days ‘rest and recreation’ in mid-Wales and informed us that they had no difficulties of any kind making a booking. So the situation in Wales is varied (and confusing, at least, for the likes of us). We need to perhaps start to think of pointing in a different direction as perhaps it is now OK for us to head towards Derby where one of Meg’s other cousins is in the process of buying a house (and may well have moved by now).
Today was an interesting type of day. We were a little delayed as we composed our Waitrose order which is part of our normal Wednesday morning but that having been done, we proceeded on our way down into the park. As we walked down our access road (which is privately owned by us) we noticed that one of our near neighbours had a fence panel removed in order to allow access to their rear garden from our roadway. This is all fine and dandy but our permission should have been asked first. Also (and we have been here before) when this sort of thing has happened in the past, generally for the delivery of building materials such as paving blocks, sand, cement and other building supplies then it is not unusual for all kinds of mess to be left behind on our driveway which we then have to clear up. So I stuck my head through the gap in the fence and informed the garden makeover people that they had parked their vehicle on a private road – and I wanted/demanded that any mess be left behind be cleared up. Then we went on our way to the park and met one of our ‘usual suspects’ when we were sitting on our bench. We also bumped into our two sets of close friends who live down the road and were pleased to see them both as we missed each other for several days. One set of friends we made an assignation to come and have some coffee and cakes with them in their garden next Tuesday – the other set of friends had just returned from North Wales and we caught up quickly on some of the to-ings and fro-ings of the last few days but we still have some catching up to do when they had completed some of their grandparenting duties. I think we are all a little anxious to try and see each other whilst we can because the spell of fine weather is bound to break down after a few days so we all want to ‘make hay whilst the sun shines’ So Meg and I eventually returned home and prepared a quiche-and-salad lunch which was easy to prepare.
Halfway through the afternoon a hand-delivered note had been popped through our letter box. It was from the neighbours who were were having a garden makeover and the letter (belatedly) asked for permission for delivery vehicles to utilise our driveway. I spent some time composing a diplomatic reply – and had just about got to the end of it and read it out to another neighbour who was effected in the same way as we were when the program containing my reply crashed and I lost everything. So I had to start all over again but, fortunately, I could remember most of what I had just said and I then liased with my son, working upstairs, to make sure that we had got the tone of the reply just right. Without being melodramatic about all of this, emergency vehicles such as ambulances need to make their way down our access road which involves two 90° degree turns to get to our house. Of the houses who contribute to our Residents Association, half of us have had to have ambulances accessing their properties within the last three years so this is not just a theoretical but an actual concern. We are going to have a final pair of eyes upon the reply which has been seen by several of us before it all gets hand delivered back again. The important thing is that all of this can be and will be handled amicably but we do not want little issues to fester, quite unnecessarily. Also, we have noticed before that firms who deliver building materials are often extraordinarily cavalier about the way in which they leave a trail of sand, cement and god knows what else behind them before they drive away. They always seem absolutely amazed that they need permission to enter a private road and we have to inform them that as well as owning the roadway we also have to maintain it, clear up any of the mess that they might make and so on. Actually, with cluttered garages and an inability to get to back gardens through the ‘normal’ side entrances, it is not uncommon for fence panels to be removed to provide an easy/easier delivery point for the supply of building materials but of course the permissions should have been sought first.
There is now a substantial risk of ‘a substantial third wave’, with Delta R number estimated at 1.5 – 1.6 which sounds seriously bad to me. Third waves have got to start somewhere and this has got all of the hallmarks of a start of a third wave to me (a non epidemiologist!) More than 1,000 people are now in hospital, largely as a result of the Delta variant – the whole progress of the ‘third wave’ seems to be the result of a race between those vaccinated on the one hand versus the progress of the virus on the other. So far, it seems a bit like a 1-1 draw with my suspicions that the virus may win the penalties shoot-out.
Today was the kind of day when you knew your typical routine was going to be amended and thus it proved to be. The shopping lorry arrives on a Thursday morning and we thought that the fridge needed a good clean out before it got repopulated so this took up quite a bit of time this morning. We knew that our hairdresser was due to arrive around midday so one way or another, we knew that our timetables would go awry. In conversation with our domestic help, she spoke in glowing terms about the super AirBnB in which she has stayed whilst visiting her son in Devon so we speculated how something might be available in the Conway area. Whilst we were just vaguely looking we found what seems to be a super place not far away from Meg’s Uncle Ken who we badly want to visit when we can.So, almost on the spur of the moment, Meg and I booked up for three nights away in just a fortnight’s time in one of the AirBnB’s with a ‘Superhost’ commendation. The booking was all very easily done but we rather had fun and games getting registered with AirBnB to make sure our booking was accepted. Fortunately, I had a copy of the relevant page of my passport in my computer system so this bit was easy to supply. Then what was needed was an up-to-date photo of you which had to be matched up with your passport photo within their system. I opted eventually for their system to upload a photo of me taken with our own webcam – then we had an anxious wait to see if this would match up with my passport photo (which I must say looks fuzzy and blurred to me) After 20 minutes or so the confirmation came through and I could then go ahead and confirm the booking and exchange a message with our ‘Superhost’. I was relieved the technology worked OK on this occasion. The last time I tried anything similar, when applying for an NHS app then the images did not match and were rejected, the application froze, the computer crashed – quite a nightmare which took hours. However, ‘all’s well that end’ well so we are looking forward to our three day stay in a fortnight.
After we had our haircuts and a light lunch, I knew I needed to get into town principally to visit the local branch of Santander. When I go there, I was actually two minutes late after their closing time (of 4.30) but I was very grateful be let in. I had been sent a new debit card through the post and as it was the first time in use, I was relieved that it dispensed me my money (and I could withdraw some cash, which I do once in a blue moon) but also revalidated my pin which I suspect might only have possible from the big machine inside the bank. This worked OK – but I still have to do the rounds of the people who have my card details on file in order to get the details updated. I hate this part of getting a new card but I hope it will see me all right for a year or so. After my visit to the bank, I picked up my newspapers ( and they were amazed to see me so late in the day but at least my papers were secure) and bought a few cosmetics. Then I spent quite a long time in our local Waitrose trying (and failing) to match up the incredibly good low-alcohol lager which I acquired through my Waitrose order recently but which seems to have disappeared both from their websites and, judging by today, from their shelves as well. I found a substitute but only consuming it will let me know whether they simulate the flavour of a lager or not. I also bought, on the spur of the moment, a low-alcohol milk stout which, again, may prove to be an interesting drink experience.
Today, in the House of Commons, Matt Hancock the Health Secretary has been given his own evidence of a type of ‘rebuttal’ of the claims made by Dominic Cummings a fortnight ago. The committee have asked Dominic Cummings for some documentary evidence to back up his allegations – this has not been forthcoming as you might expect (if only because the documentary evidence to support ‘who said what’ in a heated conversation is hard to find) This will then allow the committee to disregard as much of the Dominic Cummings as they like which will keep them in the good books of the Prime Minister and make any final report that they are to issue so much more anodyne (i.e. with any criticisms muted, which will suit Boris). It also appears that we are still a long way of ‘herd immunity’ as although the doubly vaccinated adult population is now over 50%, there is still a huge ‘reservoir’ of the virus in the bodies of schoolchildren who, it appears. might carry the virus but not get sick from it.
Another day dawns in which we were going to diverge from our normal routines. We had set up in advance a day trip out with our University of Birmingham friend so we went through our normal daily routines and picked up our newspapers before we made a rendezvous-vous with our friend at the gates of the park. Then we made our to Arley deep in the heart of the Worcestershire countryside. Arley is most noted for having one of the most picturesque stations on the whole of the Severn Valley Railway – it has been used in a number of tv and film productions because it is maintained as a Pre Dr Beeching Railway Station. The second thing for which Arley is particularly famous is Arley Arboretum. I quote some of the blurb I have found on the web: These beautiful historic gardens and arboretum dating back to the late 1700’s are surrounded by over 1600 acres of countryside within the picturesque village of Upper Arley beside the river Severn. In addition to providing wonderful walks through the 300 ancient trees of the arboretum there are walks along the banks of the river, all set in the beautiful Worcestershire countryside with far reaching views. Meg and I have visited the Arboretum in the past and really enjoyed it but that was not the point of our trip today. Instead we made for a delightful little cafe which straddles a little lane – on one side of the road you order your comestibles whilst on the other side there are some benches laid out with a magnificent view of the River Severn. The day turned out to be a little overcast and glowering – nonetheless, we thoroughly enjoyed the hot bacon sandwiches which the young staff of the cafe prepared for us. We had just about finished our repast and were treating ourselves to some tea and cake when there were a few spots of rain. The two young girls who ran the cafe very assiduously ushered us to the inside of the cafe in case the rain came on apace (which it failed to do) and then we carried on with out tea, cakes and interesting conversation. By the time we had finished, the sky had brightened up somewhat and we made our way home in a leisurely fashion through Kidderminster. We were very impressed by the old Saab that our friend had bought some six months ago – it cost only a little over £2,000 and was magnificently equipped with beautiful leather seats and the like on the inside. Really quite tempting, I suppose, if you do not want to drive particularly fast but you want to do it in some comfort and style. In addition, I imagine, you would have to know a very good garage or service mechanic who could keep it well maintained but I must say these older cars have a charm all of their own.
In the early evening, we spent some time as we normally do on a Friday with a FaceTime chat with one of our oldest University of Winchester friends.We spent some time talking about computery types of things (our friend used at work at IBM and then taught some Computer Science so he very knowledgable about such things) We then finished off comparing notes about the various kinds of low alcohol beers that we had purchased from the likes of Lidl, Aldi and Waitrose so I have been given some ideas what to look for when I next browse the shelves of a supermarket. I know from my last trip to Waitrose there is a bewildering variety of beers now on sale, mainly from very small, independent brewers but short of a ‘Consumer Guide’ to low alcohol beers I suppose you have to buy them and sample them bit by bit. Whilst on this subject, I am reminded of one of the most innovative Christmas presents I have ever been bought. At the suggestion of a friend, my son had equipped himself with a large cardboard box and then went off to his local off-license were he bought one of every type of beer that they had on their shelves.The shop keeper was no doubt delighted to get rid of some of his old stock whilst from the point of the recipient, the pleasure of the present slowly unwinds week by week if you allow yourself one special beer per week as a kind of treat.
The COVID information is now worrying in the extreme. The number of new infections is now increasing at the rate of 1200 a day (and reached 8,125 today) and the R=rate is now between 1.2 and 1.4. The Delta (Indian) variant now accounts for 90% of the new cases. Today the BMA have called for the ‘end of the lockdown’ on 21st June to be delayed and it looks as though tomorrow many other medical bodies are going to declare their opposition to a premature end to the lockdown. We have have been warned!
As might be imagined, we have a slightly different routine on a Saturday and today was no exception. Meg and I did some routine jobs this morning so our morning walk was a little delayed. Once we had both walked to collect the newspapers and the day was quite warm, we were more than happy to collapse on one of the lower park benches where we could oversee the peregrinations of the ducks and a few ducklings. Nonetheless, we ‘touched base‘ (as the Americans would no doubt say) with a couple of our park regulars and had the kind of conversations we generally do (not a million miles away from the latest state of play regarding the various virus variants and the UK government response to date) We started off home for lunch fairly late (at about 2.0pm, which is late for us as we have to prepare lunch when we get home). But not far from home we were hailed from the open window of a house where we used to stop and admire the Honda CR-V on the drive and we have subsequently got to know the owner of the house (an Asian lady with roots in South Africa) We had not bumped into each other for quite some time, although we did have an ‘understanding’ to try and have a cup of tea with each other in our garden as soon as weather and work conditions permitted. It transpired there was a good reason why our paths had not crossed. Upon trying to turn right from the main road into her own house she was run into from the rear by an on-rushing ambulance. As in the course of a 20-30 minute walk we see about 2-3 ambulances, many with blue flashing lights, then the fact that a collision had occurred with almost anybody was not a great surprise to us. So to cut a long story short, our friend had received some injuries including concussion and her car was extensively damaged – but the ambulance were trying to claim it was no fault of theirs (is this their default response I wonder) As the weather is still set fair for several days yet, our friend has been invited round here for tea with us next Thursday afternoon and we shall look forward, very much, to filling in each other’s back stories, Whilst we were chatting at the open window, we were joined by her aunt who had been staying with her for a few days. We learnt that she had recently (i.e. about a year ago) got her PhD in nursing from the University of West London which started off life as Ealing College of Higher Education and went through several transformations subsequently. Our friend took a selfie of the four of us and I was pleased to get this through our messaging links. So roll on next Thursday when lots of news will no doubt get exchanged.
This week is going to be quite busy – I think we are all trying to see each other and ‘socialise’ whilst we can and before the weather breaks. On Monday, we need to pop into Waitrose for a few things (‘cake-related’) and then on Tuesday our University of Birmingham friend and ourselves have been invited to take tea with two of our church friends just down the road. We have kept missing each other with one thing or another so it will be great to have a nice old chin wag not outside in the street but in the privacy of our own gardens. Then on Wednesday, our local Waitrose is going to re-open (we think and hope) so we intended to be there fairly early on to savour the delights of Waitrose coffee and cakes once again. Then on Thursday, we are seeing our friends from around the corner and on Friday I am not sure but we might have some more tea in prospect.
This afternoon, I got to mow the grass which badly needed it. Although it was only a gap of eight days since the last mow, the wispy dandelion stalks not to mention the daisies and the buttercups all contributed to a very untidy sight. Now it has double mowed (first in one direction and then a cross-cut at right angles to this first cut) it looks a treat in the late afternoon sunshine. As I was mowing our own back lawn, though, I was dismayed to discover that we had practically no damsons on our damson trees (last year I collected enough to make 16 litres of gin!) I did a quick search on the web and it seems that a wet May might have contributed to the fruit not setting when it should. But another contributor gave forth the opinion that her damson tree tended to have a super abundant year (as we had) followed by an almost barren year – so perhaps this is just to be expected in the cycles of damson tree development. Incidentally, we noticed out gooseberry crop seems to be non-existent this year as well – I suspect the very wet May might be the culprit here as well.
Today being a Sunday, it was a day when the alarm gets set a little early and I get up ready to make my progress down to the newspaper shop bright and early in the morning. There is always quite an interesting atmosphere around first thing on a Sunday morning. For a start, I am generally listening to my trust old I-Phone I utilise as an MP3 player and this morning was a Mozart morning. I particularly enjoyed the track of a tenor singing ‘Il mio Tesoro’ from Don Giovanni – I remember this because the melody is sufficiently simple to be played on an instrument. In this case, my son played it on his clarinet for some sort of examination (Grade 3 I wonder?) All if can remember of this is that the junior headmaster had asked my son how the examination had gone and received the answer of ‘Brill’ Later on he was to win the school prize for music in his year group playing the 2nd (slow ) movement of the Mozart Clarinet concerto. At some stage after this, a combination of three things entered my son’s life (photography, girls and classic locomotives but in which order I couldn’t say) Walking down to town at that time in the morning, one does not encounter many other souls but they tend to fall into the category of serious joggers (often in pairs) and dog walkers. To make life even more interesting this morning, there is evidently some cabling or other kind of activity gong on in the pavements in the town. All of the underground services are labelled in a variety of spray paints and I counted at least six colours of paint (white, yellow, cyan, blue, orange, red) as well as some white chalk marks. I suppose these represent water, sewage, gas, electricity and TV /communications and more besides) but evidently there are all sorts of codes and symbols represented by these symbols but with their meaning obscured to the general public. Also at this time, the owners of some classic vehicles take to the road and I spotted this morning one person on a Vespa scooter (the last one I saw must have been decades ago) and I think I noticed a classic sports car called a Triumph Stag but as it swept past me, I was having to rely upon memory as to whether my identification was correct or not. After breakfast and the Andrew Marr Show, Meg and I wandered down to the park where we met up with a couple of our park regulars before we departed fairly early in order to have our lunch before kick-off in the England-Croatia match in the Euro finals. Actual, as it turned out Meg and I thoroughly enjoyed the match although football is not really our game. The match was enjoyable to watch, not least cause England secured a (deserved) 1-0 victory but also because the young English team demonstrated some enterprise and initiative. The goal was well-deserved and the Croatians were lucky that an earlier excellent England shot had rebounded from the upright. Tomorrow’s matches are going to be Scotland vs. Czech Republic and Spain vs. Sweden so there is something in both of these matches that might well attract my attention tomorrow. Of course, as the matches are played in European time zones, then one doesn’t have to get up in the middle of the night or ridiculously early in the morning which can happen if it is the World rather than the European finals.
Although I did not really want to do it, I thought the it was so long since the car had a wash that it badly needed a wash down. We haven’t been on the kind of trips that generally makes cars dirty but a fine dust had descended upon it over the last week or so. So I gave it a rather cursory wash, compared with normal, as it is the hottest day of the year and not the best day to engage in car washing although I did wait until 5.0 before I started. Tomorrow is going to be the day when the government plans will be announced whether the lockdown is to continue or be lifted. Boris Johnson will, in all probability, announce that the lockdown shall continue for 4 weeks more.This does have the ‘advantage’ of any eventual end of a lockdown being in the middle of July ie. approximately when the schools finish. Also it appears that more than half of the population agree that the restrictions should be in place for another month.On a societal level, we are waiting for the rate of vaccinations (and particularly the second vaccination) to proceed at a faster pace than the virus can spread. However, this Delta variant seems to spread 60% more rapidly than its predecesors. It would appear on the surface that any government that did not extend the lockdown for a further month would be guilty of the most severe dereliction of duty.
The start of another week and we are taking pains to maximise our social contacts whilst the weather is fine and we can have tea in each other’s gardens. We were a little late down to the park, having popped in Waitrose for a few ‘essentials’ (ice-cream of which we have been consuming a lot in this warm weather). Once we actually made it to the park, we were delighted to run across our University of Birmingham friend who we had not expected to see. He was on his way to a tennis tournament but ran into the most horrendous traffic jam so he decided to call it a day and pop into the park (where he can be guaranteed to find people to chat with). So this was an unexpected bonus for us – we took the opportunity to make some final arrangements for tomorrow when we are invited around to some of our oldest friends for coffee. At it is so warm currently, we are popping round the garden two or three times a day to give our pot plants some much needed water. As it happens, I am keeping an eye on a group of plants called ‘verbascum’ which grow to a tremendous height (well, the best part of 6′ anyway) and eventually finish off with a flourish of yellow flowers. Then, apparently, they are very liable to be the host to a particular variety of moth caterpillar that threaten to overwhelm them. The caterpillars apparently creep out at night and do their worst. The official advice to get rid of the caterpillar is to have a ‘hostage’ wild verbascum plant nearby and transfer all the caterpillars you find to the hostage plant in the hope the hostage plants will get eaten and none of the rest will. I am going to follow this particular wild-life cycle with some interest – even if they fail we have some other fast growing plants (sun flowers in a variety of colours, sweet peas which make lovely cut flowers one you get them going) When I last cut the lawns, I decided to see if I could propagate some softwood cuttings from a large Elaeagnus bush that we have growing in one of the borders to our communal lawn. In theory, you take softwood cuttings by taking a cutting some 6-8″ in length, remove nearly all of the leaves part from the top two or three and then plant in a mixture of grit and sand to encourage rooting behaviour. When I have tried things like this in the past I have either had abject failures or a measure of success but on this occasion I have my cuttings planted in a little pot (suitably kept moist with a kind of plastic cover) and then put in the shade of a larger plant so that it gets watered (and not missed) every day. We shall see.
Today, as completely anticipated, Boris Johnson has announced that the lockdown will continue for another 4 weeks although his choice of language was confusing -‘taking the foot off the accelerator’. The press conference at 6.0pm was excruciatingly bad – every time Boris Johnson was asked a straightforward and easily understand question (e.g. will all university students have received the vaccine by September) all we got was waffle, obfuscation, evasion and so on. I think our Prime Minister is incapable to giving a direct answer to a straight question. There seems to be some interesting reactions on the political front. Whereas more than 50% of the population appear to agree with an extension to the lockdown, the Tory right wing are furious. There could be a rebellion when the measures are debated in at the House of Commons on Wednesday. In addition, from a quick glance at Channel 4 News, there seems to be an angry crowd demonstrating in front of the gates which block off Downing Street from Whitehall so it could be that we move into the interesting territory that Downing Street wants to extend measures which the rest of the Tory party will attempt to vote down. They won’t succeed because the Labour Party will vote in favour of the extension but the size of the rebellion might be a pointer to political developments in the future.
Tonight I am going to settle down with a bar and watch Spain play Sweden in the European cup finals. Having watched Scotland play the Czech Republic, I am very much reminded of the reply that Clement Attlee (immediately post war II Labour Prime Minister) gave as a reply to a minister who was asking why he was not reappointed to a ministerial position. Clem’s reply was delightful and apocryphal ‘Not good enough‘ was his sole reply and this was very much my emotion when I watched the Scottish performance. What else do you say when the Czech lead striker hits a ball from just over the half-way line only to lob the Scottish goal keeper who had come off his line and score a second goal?
Today was the day to which we had been looking forward for some time as we shall see. But first of course, we had to get some of our daily jobs done. One of these was to get a basketful of clothes washing to be done and then hung out on the line. As I was doing this, I was kept under the watchful eye of Miggles, our friendly neighbourhood cat who has adopted us (or at least our garden) and pops around in the early morning for a stroke and a bit of fuss. As it was so sunny even first thing in the morning, the cat stretched out for a sunbathe. I asked him/her to keep an eye on the washing and if it were to rain, could it be brought indoors for us? The cat replied saying it would bring in any items of washing that it could reach.
Having collected our newspapers, I popped into Waitrose in order to buy a ‘Happy Anniversary‘ card for our son and his wife. The we established a rendez-vous with our University of Birmingham friend and then we repaired to the garden of our friends for coffee and cakes. Actually to call it ‘cakes’ is rather a misnomer because our wonderful hostess had got up at 6.30 and had baked a magnificent cake replete with both strawberries and cream. So we ate our fill with these delicious goodies and then filled up on even more strawberries and cream so a good time was had by all. As it happened, our University of Birmingham friend and our Catholic friends had quite a few acquaintances in common – with lots of good conversation the time absolutely flew past as we started off at 11.30-ish and didn’t finish until three hours later. I think we are all conscious that this wonderful spell of fine weather must break down in a day or so and, in fact, the weather services are maintaining that we may have an outcrop of thunderstorms sweeping across the country from about 6.00pm tomorrow night.
As you might imagine, after a very belated lunch (if you can call it that), we were destined to have a very lazy afternoon. But towards the end of this afternoon was the time when we generally FaceTime some of our ex-Waitrose friends and this we did, catching up on all the news since we saw them ‘in the flesh’ as it were when the came around to our garden last Tuesday. We explained to them how we had got an AirBnB trip booked on the North Wales coast starting a week tomorrow. The location of our accommodation is only about a mile away from Meg’s godfather/uncle so we can see him for the first time in over a year. Having stayed in the area several times before, we know some of the good eating places/parking places/ ways of getting into Conway so we are looking forward to this little trip in just over week’s time. Our friends too were looking forward to their trip to both York and to Harrogate in early July and as they have seen neither town before, we are sure they will be delighted and enchanted by what they will see. It is our friend’s birthday in about three weeks time so we have made plans to pop around and have some tea and cake either in the garden or the house (depending on the weather). Tomorrow is also going to be a special day for us because it is the day when the Waitrose coffee bar is due to reopen after period of at least 15 months when the COVID restrictions precluded its use. We are not quite sure how they are going to manage the social distancing regulations for us tomorrow but no doubt they will have a little plan worked out. I have asked that they raid their store and roll our the red carpet for us when we attempt to pick up the pieces again after such a length of time – mind you, we still know most of the staff because we still go into Waitrose about once a week to pick up anything special that we may have short of during the week.
I have just tried to replay myself a videoclip (presumably from YouTube) which shows a BBC journalist (Nicholas Watts) being verbally assaulted and abused by a crowd of anti-lockdown protesters who, presumably, think that BBC reporting of the news is contributing to all of society’s ills. Whilst one must tolerate freedom of speech in an open society, it is very disturbing when a fascist-inclined mob tries to shout down legitimate reporting of the news, particularly if you do not happen to like the message. As one of my previous work colleagues used to argue ‘Should one tolerate intolerance‘ and this particular question is even more salient now that we have lived through an era of ‘fake news’ and the whole episode of Trumpism (which I must say now feels like a particularly obnoxious nightmare)
Today is another one of those days this week to which we have been looking forward for some time. We needed to update our Waitrose order ready for delivery tomorrow and this was quite soon accomplished. Then we made our way through the now familiar sunshine to pick up our newspapers. Finally, we made our way towards the Waitrose store, knowing that today was the scheduled date on which their coffee bar was due to reopen. We imagined that there would be a red carpet, a brass band playing, a bottle of champagne for each customer with chocolates and flowers to match.Did we get all of that? The answer is – no, we did not but we did have lots of cheery smiles and ‘Nice to see you back after a gap of some 16 months. We sat and surveyed the street scene and the rest of the store, much as we always used to do. It did not feel as though we had been away for any length of time as the decorations were the same and the staff were largely the same. We did have to check in the QR code using the Covid app on my iPhone. Although it worked on the ‘big’ version of this displayed at the front of the coffee bar area, it did not seem to work at all on the little QR codes which they had got pasted onto each table, so perhaps a little bit of fine-tuning is needed there. We saw two of our regular Waitrose friends there but they were just on the point of leaving as we were arriving so we only had the time for the briefest of chats. We had thought it might have been teeming with members of the Waitrose fraternity but instead it was fairly quiet. No doubt news of the re-opening will take some to circulate and it is always possible, of course, that everyone had developed new routines and perhaps patronage of the local watering holes. We chatted at length to one of the employees whose first day it was in the coffee bar. She told us that she had been employed in the (huge and iconic) John Lewis in the centre of Brirminham next to New Street station. It had come as an amazing shock to the staff to be told that they had all lost their jobs and our friendly assistant told us she had cried for two days when she got the bad news. But at least, she is now re-employed within the Waitrose family as it were and I am sure that ‘good’ jobs in retail are as rare as hen’s teeth.
After we had eaten and drank our fill, we slowly made our way to the park. There although we did not tarry as we normally would upon a seat we did bump into two or three of the old faithfuls. There we received some sad news from one of our regular friends as she comes to it nearly every day in her electrically powered buggy. A very common sight adjacent to the island used to be that of ‘Henry the Heron’ was was very distinguishable because he had an injured foot – either a genetic fault or the result of a past injury we know not. Some of the park regulars had noticed that Henry was painfully thin and was off his food – and therefore seemed to be wasting away. The RSPCA had been called and anaesthetised the bird – upon a good examination they was able to ascertain his age (about 11-12 we think) and his overall condition was such it was decided that it was in the bird’s best interest to say goodbye to this life. So that is a regular sight of which we will now be deprived, unless, of course, another heron comes to take his place.
Today’s political news has rather been dominated by the Biden-Putin summit abroad and Dominic Cummings at home. The latter has just published a 7,000 word blog (that is about the length of 8 of these daily entries) and In the most explosive of these entries, Boris Johnson is shown to have said of Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary that he was ‘totally f****** hopeless‘ A similar sentiment was repeated on more than one occasion as well. Of courses, this is hard to deny given that we now the evidence in black-and-white as it were. What Cummings has to say about Boris Johnson is no less revealing. Cummings claims that then PM wants to quit shortly after the next election to ‘make money and have fun‘ He also claimed Mr Johnson has a clear plan to leave Downing Street ‘at the latest a couple of years after the next election’, which is scheduled for 2024. The ex-adviser claimed this mattered because a public inquiry into the government’s handling of the COVID crisis had been ‘designed to punt the tricky parts until after this PM has gone‘. Asked about the claim Mr Johnson had already planned when to quit, a Number 10 spokeswoman said: ‘The prime minister has been asked about this before and described it as utter nonsense.‘ Finally Cummings claimed that the PM ‘pegs it out of the room before anybody can disagree‘ Stories from the inside!
The long, sunny spell is gradually coming to an end and it may well be that the day finishes with thunderstorms. When we awoke this morning, it was evident that overnight we had a smattering of rain but no more. The longed for thunderstorms had not made it as far as Bromsgrove but it is quite possible that some will make it by this evening. As the day has worn on, the atmosphere has got more and more oppressive and there is a feeling all round that our gardens, in particular, would welcome a sustained downpour for an hour or so. Meg and I are resuming our daily pilgrimage to the shrine of the coffee bar in our local Waitrose and we went shopping for bits and pieces to complement the main Waitrose order which arrived at about 10.0am this morning. When we got home, we could not stand a full meat-and-two-veg type of meal so I made something in which I put together some left-overs and served them a bed of cauliflower rice – which actually turned out to be a lot tastier than it actually sounds.
Later on this afternoon, we were ‘at home’ to a new found friend who lives just around the corner. She is an Asian lady brought up in South Africa and has lived for a period in California so we were interested in getting to know each other a little better. We had bought some things that I suppose I can label as ‘party food’ but seemed interesting for us to try out including some duckfilled sushi and similar delicacies. Our friend came around on cue and we spent a couple of very happy hours chatting, eating and drinking red wine until the weather really started to threaten and it was time for us to bid farewell to each other. I have recommended the book ‘Watching the English’ by Kate Fox which I have always found to be one of the most interesting and stimulating of books (and I have purchased several copies and given them away to numerous friends in the past). This book is written by a social anthropologist well used to observing the mores and minutiae of a culture but made particularly interesting when her attention if focused not on an exotic country but on our own society. Hopefully, we can have a good chat about the things that our friend finds particularly interesting having been brought up in the Asian community of Cape Town.
Interesting but disturbing news is now emerging about the Delta version of COVID. It looks as though the symptoms are changing somewhat and it is more than possible that this is not fully appreciated in our communities. A headache, sore throat and runny nose are now thought to be symptoms of the virus, according to data collected by ZOE, instead of a cough and loss of smell or taste – though a fever is still common. Last week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the Delta variant now makes up 91% of new cases amid a warning from Public Health England that infections are rising ‘rapidly’. So, what are the most common symptoms of the Delta variant? According to Prof Spector, a headache is now the most reported symptom, followed by sore throat, runny nose and fever. A cough is even rarer, coming in at the fifth most reported symptom and loss of taste or smell doesn’t even make it into the top 10.
The UK has reported 11,007 new COVID cases and a further 19 deaths in the latest 24-hour period – but in four weeks infections could be lower than they are now, according to an expert. The figures compare with 9,055 cases and nine deaths reported yesterday, and 7,393 cases and seven fatalities this time last week. Today’s number of new infections is the highest reported since 19 February when 12,027 cases were recorded. It comes as a leading COVID researcher says he believes the current wave ‘should be peaking around 10 to 14 days’ time and in a month’s time cases could be lower than they are now and more manageable‘. All of this looks to me like the third wave of the pandemic. Prof Ravi Gupta, from the University of Cambridge, said although new cases were ‘relatively low’ the Indian variant had fuelled ‘exponential growth’. But what appears to be interesting is that the fact that we might be at the start of a third wave is not receiving as much media attention as it surely deserves.
We are starting to look forward to our few days away which will start on Wednesday next. The fact that some of our friends have had little trips away is making us feel a little relatively deprived so we having to make sure that we have all the arrangements put in place. For example, I had to remember to cancel next week’s Waitrose order which we will no longer need. At the same time, I have taken pain to purchase a few biological and handy wipes so that on our journey and in our AirBnB abode we will be able to wipe down whatever surfaces we feel need our attention.
Today was one of those days that I describe as ‘chewy’ i.e. we felt a bit out of sorts with the world. Matters were not helped when Meg woke up this morning with a very bad neck – it might have been that she had slept in a somewhat awkward position but from the word go her neck has been troubling her. More of this later. Our domestic help texted as she was without a car today so after breakfast I had a quick shower and went to pick up by car (never a chore!) She was chattering excitedly about her job as an activities assistant in a residential home and from what she tells me about it I am sure she will prove to be excellent and a real asset to the home. Having got her into the house and had our normal chat, Meg and I decided to go down into car as it was drizzling quite heavily – and it has been all day. I am sure that the gardens need all of this rain and we are not massively disappointed but it does come as a bit of a shock over the last few days. Having picked up our newspapers, Meg and I went to reestablish our customary relationships with the Waitrose cafe – but we have to say it was incredibly quiet and I hope that trade picks up or the powers that be may decide to devote the floor space to something else, which would be a great shame. After we had had our comestibles, we decided to go to the park to see if anyone we knew was foolhardy enough to be taking a turn in the park. We parked in the car-park and did a circular tour (in the rain) to give us ourselves a breath of fresh air as much as anything. The park was practically deserted and, needless to say, we met none of the usual crowd so we made for home. Then I cooked lunch for Meg and I but she was quite a bit of distress with her neck. So we got prepared by downing some paracetamol and organising some heat in our living room, the electric blanket bing switched on in the bedroom, a specialised ‘neck warmer’ warmed up in the microwave and finally a tube of ibuprofen gel that had been presided for my ‘trigger finger’ but which could be pressed into service. Meg had a good sleep in the early part of the afternoon so a lot of our remedies did not need to be used but we might have try some of these if things do not improve.
The political news is interesting this evening as overnight and, almost out of the blue, the Liberal Democrats have scored a stunning victory in a true-blue Tory seat of Chesham and Amersham, replacing a Tory majority of 16,000 with a Liberal Democrat of 8,000. Of course, it is often said that people vote differently in bye-elections compared with the General Election i.e. prepared to cock-a-snook at the government in a bye-election but returning to the file at the time of the next General Election. There two particular factors that riles the good voters of Chesham with Amersham. Probably the most significant is the whole issue of HS2 which, as they see it, destroys some of the beautiful countryside surrounding them (and not benefitting them but only people from the Midlands the North with whom they share no fellow feeling!) A second factor about which the Tories have been repeatedly warned is the provision new housing. The Tory Party needs people who are house owners (they feel) before people vote Conservative but this is difficult when prices are so unaffordable so the solution is to build a lot more houses- but where? The present government policy is to encourage housebuilders to build houses almost wherever they want to but this means that the Tories who are sitting in good housing in beautiful countryside do not want this ‘ruining’ by lots of new housing all over the place, even including areas that were formerly protected by the so-called ‘Green Belt’ Yet a third factor is that fact that the voters felt they were ‘taken for granted’ as the Tories poured resources,and promises of investment, into the former Labour-held ‘red wall’ seats in the Midlands and the North. But of course, the feelings in the minds of suburban Tory voters, is that ‘more money for them means less money for us‘ and Tories in the South have never shown themselves to be over-keen to share their own good fortune with less fortunate areas. Yet a further factor is that the more educated the population, the less likely they are to have voted Brexit or even regarded it as a good idea. Boris Johnson himself, on the quiet, is not well regarded by well educated (and well-heeled) Tory voters. So this while cluster of factors have come together in a perfect storm to help the Liberal Democrats to claim a famous bye-election victory.
Today was another overcast day and we assumed that we would not rained upon but nonetheless we had to endure one of those rather ‘glowering’ kinds of days. Meg and I did a tour of the park to see if we could make contact with any of our normal park acquaintances but it was not to be. Having done a tour of the park we went to pick up our newspapers and then made sure that we frequented the local Waitrose cafe that we wanted to see if we could keep in business – as attendance seems to be right down at the moment. Waitrose used to sell a range of cups so that people could avail themselves of the ‘free’ coffee when this was offered. They offered rather a super collapsible cup (a brand called ‘Stojo‘) which comes complete with lid.These used to retail at £12.00 each and perhaps it is not surprising that hardly any were sold at this price. But then Waitrose have reduced them to £1.19 and at that price, they are an absolute bargain. We bought a couple for ourselves and they will be very welcome when/if we resume coffee drinking in the park. I asked our domestic help if she would like any at that price and this morning we bought couple for her as well. I have taken to having a soup at Waitrose rather than relying upon a cappuccino and some excess carbohydrate – so far the two soups on offer have been so incredibly spicy that I ended to request a glass of cold water to make sure the soup could be ingested OK. Then it was home and a fairly quick lunch so that we could settle down to the football.
I am not an excessive football fan but the European championships have a certain fascination at this stage because in in the initial phases you get well-fancied teams together with teams who are delighted to have qualified and, you might say, are in different league to some of the major footballing nations (Germany, Italy, France, Spain). What happens in the pool stages is that you occasionally get a match where you assume it is going to be a ‘walkover’ for one team but it doesn’t work out that way. For example, in the last few days we have England versus Scotland, Framce versus Hungary, Spain versus Poland and the assumptions before the match is that the ‘first’ team in the matches just announced are by far the stronger term and the result seems to be a foregone conclusion. However, they all seem to have played out to a different script but one with a pattern in it. the ‘stronger’ team is all over the ‘weaker’ team for a portion of the match and may even score a goal. Then there is a quick breakaway and the opposing team scores an equaliser – and then hangs on for dear life so as to secure a draw. The ‘stronger’ team is disappointed to only have a draw (although they score one point with it) and the ‘weaker’ team are absolutely delighted to have held their ‘stronger’ opponents to a draw, and of course. they too have scored a pint – sometimes for the first time ever in the history of that country’s European cup runs where they have struggled to qualify and expect to be soundly beaten in the pool stages. What I am saying is that we have a series of 'David’ and ‘Goliath’ contests which have a certain fascination – and the delight of the ‘weaker’ team is always a joy to behold when the referees’s final whistle is blown. and just to reinforce the point, plucky little Wales is scheduled to play torment favourites (and do far, very impressive) Italy to morrow evening.
The pandemic is still making an impact on our travel and vacation pans. The good news is that Meg phone up her uncle in North Wales who will be delighted to see us (particularly as he is his mid-90’s and is now confined to the house). We are travelling up to North Wales to lodge in an AirBnB for the first time next Wednesday and will pay a visit to Meg’s uncle the following day. We have already got booked into one of our favourite restaurants on the day that we travel so we will not be hunting around for somewhere to eat. We will have two clear days on Thursday and Friday before we return home next Saturday. We did have plans, though, to visit a cousin on the other side of Meg’s family in the neat future but Bolton in Greater Manchester is the last place to visit at the moment. Meg’s cousin’s daughter is in contact and they are having some domestic upheavals so we have pencilled in a date for about two months time and hope the things might be clarified by then. We know this is affecting lots of people – one of our friendly staff in Waitrose is South African and he has to re-arrange and cancel 3-4 trips already. Many of us are now writing off all our international travel and trips until next Spring of 2022 in any case.
Sunday morning when I walk down for the newspapers on my own is always my opportunity to engage in some indulgence as I listen to certain classical tracks I have on my aged iPhone. Today the first track along happened to be the overture to ‘The Marriage of Figaro‘ and the first time I heard it when I was aged 14 in the music room at Thornleigh College, Bolton (the school which I attended whilst my mother trained to be a teacher). The music teacher, a stocky Glaswegian built like a tank, told us that the syllabus had just been published for the ‘O’-levels we would take in two years time. We were informed that although it was a sparkling 7 minutes worth, we had better get used to it as we would study it in detail for the next two years (which was the length of time deemed necessary to prepare you properly for the GCE ‘O’-level in Music). This was thought at the time to be one of the most demanding ‘O’-levels that there was, on a par with Physics. My memory may not serve me correctly but I suspect that at the time we had to know the score in some detail and might even have to engage in some composition as well. I know that when I changed schools the following year (when my mother had returned from her teaching training course) then I had a massive culture shock as I moved from school with an average plus reputation in music (we did have a school orchestra, choir and brass band – of which the brass band was by far the best known and the most prestigious) to a school where the only music was a lesson in singing for the 11-yr olds taught by an obscure little teacher in a back room somewhere. Later on, I listened to the aria ‘The Queen of the Night‘ and the film ‘Amadeus‘ on the life of Mozart had a brilliant scene win which the incradibly high, not to say shrieked nature of the soprano part was transmogrified into the face of his mother-in-law. A similar psychological transformation takes place in the same film where the voice and image of ‘The Commendatore’ is transformed into the face and image of Mozart’s own stern father. The Commendatore is a military hero, the father of one of Don Giovanni’s conquests, who is slain by him in the opening scene of the opera whilst the closing scene is the statue of the Commendatore who comes to life and drags off Don Giovanni to the flames of hell) You really have to see the whole opera to appreciate the drama of all of this. On my way home, I was ‘overtaken’ on the road by one of my acquaintances who I used to see quite regularly when we were members of the same Pilates class together. She was on her way to the hotel at the top of the road where she has worked for the past few years. She had her hours progressively reduced from five hours to two with the same volume of work expected in the two hours. She had had a new boss who was threatening her with disciplinary action for some of dispute she had had over time off over holidays – so eventually, she had decided to leave. It does make you a wonder whether this a microcosm of what is happening in the overall economy where (some employers at least) very much have the whip hand, but I found it all rather saddening.
Eventually, Meg and I drag ourselves off to the park, really in search of some of our regular park friends who we have temporally abandoned whilst we patronise the Waitrose coffee bar. We did not run into any but we did run into several interesting dogs and their owners. One of these was a ‘labradoodle‘ (a cross between a Labrador and a poodle) which really is quite an interesting looking dog with curls of woolly hair and quite a striking physique. Another hybrid puppy cane along ( a cockapoo?) and the owners happy chatted whilst the dogs enjoyed each other’s company. All very touching, really.
This afternoon, the weather looked gloomy but not actually raining so I took a chance and decided to get the lawns cut before the football started at 5.00pm. Fortunately, I got the lawns cut in time, the mower (and myself) cleaned up, a cup of tea prepared and was sitting in my chair one minute before kickoff. As we might have expected, plucky little Wales was completely outclassed by a very dominant Italy but by keeping the score down to 1-0 victory for Italy (although in truth it should have been several more), Wales managed to quality (on the basis of one win, one draw and one loss) in the pool stage and will then progress to the knockout stage of the competition – where I do not think they have ever been before so that are quite happy bunnies tonight.
Today is the longest day but it does not quite feel like it as we have endured quite a humid cloudiness for most of the day. Meg and I did our usual walk into town, bumping into one of our near neighbours on the way down and it was quite useful to inform her that we would be away for a few days, starting on Wednesday, although our son and daughter-in-law would be keeping the home fires burning. Meg and I are settling into a rather different routine now as we go straight to the Waitrose cafe and have our elevenses there. I have started to partake of their spicy soup which I have instead of a coffee and a pastry which I reckon is probably better for me carbohydrate-wise. Then I go up and pick up our newspapers which is 2-3 minutes around the corner and then I call back and meet up with Meg again. In the cafe, we did bump into one of our previous Waitrose acquaintances for a brief chat – also we just missed a young lady complete with young son with whom we share quite a lot of interests as she teaches Politics and History at Bromsgrove school. In the past, I have off-loaded to her some of my collection of politics books which are probably of much more use to her and some of her pupils than it would be for me. I must get round to slimming down my collection of other academic books once I found a reasonable home for them. Actually, some months ago before the lockdown I was in contact with a firm who would take them off my hands – but every book had to be catalogued first and I reckoned that for several hundred books this would probably take for ever so I never got started doing it.
When we eventually got home, we had a rather delayed lunch and then after a bit of a rest got going with the major task that we had set for ourselves in the afternoon. This was to get packed up for our mini-holiday starting on Wednesday. We have a fairly simple rule given that we are not going to be away for long and that is to have one clean set of clothes for when we start off and two copies of other items (e.g. underwear) to go in the suitcase. Things like our nightwear always goes in last of all, of course, and I am never quite sure whether we provide our own towels or not but we had better be prepared. We have made an arrangement, confirmed by telephone conversations, to see Meg’s uncle and godfather on Thursday morning. I am sure he will be delighted to see us and he is, of course, Meg’s oldest living relative. On Wednesday, we are already booked in for lunch at an establishment at which we have dined several times before. It is a restaurant attached to a golf club in a country park just off the A55 North Wales expressway, so all being well we will have a good rest there before we progress to make the rest of the journey (another 30 miles or so) after we have been fed and watered.
The COVID news continues to be mixed. The number of new infections is still quite high at 10,000+ but at least the rate is not rising exponentially. Boris Johnson is simultaneously trying to sound optimistic about July 19th (which he is calling the ‘terminal’ point) but pessimistic about the prospects for international travel until next year and the prospects of a resurgence in the virus to coincide with the winter months cannot be discounted. We are now in the position where all 18+ adults can at least book a vaccination – there may be a waiting time and then of course quite a lag between the first and the second jabs before the immunity really builds up. A Scottish player in the Eurofinals has tested positive so he will miss the remaining games – meanwhile a couple of English players are having to self-quarantine as a precaution. The interesting question is how the virus has managed to evade the protective bio-security cordons that ought to be protecting both of the football teams.
The big ‘infected blood’ scandal that hit our country in the 1980’s is finally facing the scrutiny of a public enquiry. In a nutshell, haemophiliacs who suffer constant bleeds and need to have their blood supplemented by blood products such as plasma received supplies that were infected with AIDS and hepatitis-C from which many (thousands) subsequently died. The point of all this is that the initial days of the NHS, this would have been impossible because all blood was donated. Then someone had the (not very bright) idea to import blood products from America where it is common knowledge that blood is often sold by drug addicts, down-and-outs and the like because no doubt it was ‘cheaper’ than the administrative costs associated with taking blood from the volunteers in the UK. A prime example of where ‘the market’ does not provide the best (actually, the worst) solution to problem of shortages.
Today was one of those days when I seem to have been like the proverbial dog chasing its own tail. We were a little late getting up this morning but knew that we had quite a lot to fit in. Our domestic help had promised to come along for a few minutes to work her magic with a hair-dryer and make Meg’s hair more presentable before we set off on our jolly little holiday break tomorrow. I was just on my way into town when our domestic help asked me if I could wash Meg’s hair first. This I did – Meg and I have a well-worked routine but it meant I was delayed by several minutes. I walked fairly quickly into the town and picked up our daily ration of newspapers. Then on my back, I made a slight detour into the park to see if I could espy our University of Birmingham friend on one of the high benches. As it happened, I couldn’t see him so I struck straight off for home knowing that I had to have a quick turn-around when I got home (changing into my track suit bottoms in which I do the Pilates exercises, gathering my mat and a few things together) before I met one of my fellow class members on the way down. The other two regular members of the class were away on holiday so we formed a little bubble of two in the class and it is so much more difficult to hide when there are only two of you. We had a fairly rigorous Pilates routine today and I remembered to pay for my sessions, some in arrears and some in advance. Then it was a brisk walk home in order for me to prepare my traditional, ‘fast’ lunch for a Tuesday which involves fish-cakes heated up in the oven and some microwaved vegetables. After the briefest of rests, I took the car down into town because I needed to fill up with petrol and check the air pressure and water. I know is is outrageous these days but at the BP garage at which I like to fill up on petrol one has to pay £1.00 to get a supply of air and you have to race around and try to get it done in a minute. Then some frustration set in as I needed s supply of water to top up my detergent bottle and this needed an (outrageous) £2.00. The machine was filled with £1.80 worth of coins but refused/was not designed to cope with the 5p coins I had to make the amount up to £2.00. All I got a smidgeon of detergent water left over from the last user to top up my washer bottle but the machine refused to deliver the proper complement of water as it hadn’t been loaded with the correct money – so I finished off losing £1.80. Having got the car filled with petrol and checked over, I then repaired to an ATM where I got out a supply of money to help us with casual purchases over the days whilst we are away. I then went on a tour of cosmetics shops trying to buy some cosmetics of a particular type and was eventually successful after quite a frustrating search. Whilst in Boots chemists, I got a FaceTime call from our Waitrose friends with whom we had an arrangement to FaceTime at 5.0pm each Tuesday. As soon as I did get home, it was time for a quick cup of tea and then a meal of ice-cream and fruit before setting down the football at 8.0pm.
The COVID news is quite interesting to analyse this evening. The rate of infection is at more than 11,625 which is the highest since mid-February. But there is some limited evidence that the rate of infection in the North West may be starting to abate somewhat. The more startling news is that the highest rates of increase are in the 20-29 years old olds (i.e. the unvaccinated) in multiple hot spots throughout the country. This points to the importance of getting the vaccine into the arms of the younger generation in all parts of the country. Also for most of the pandemic, the admissions numbers were dominated by those aged 65 and over. Today, for the first time in this pandemic, those under 65 are outnumbering those over 65. Also it does appear that the link between infections and the ultimate death rate is becoming more tenuous – whilst the infection rate has increased, the death rate does not seem to have increased at the commensurate rate.
There is quite a lot of concern expressed by the WHO amongst others about the UEFA semifinals and finals to be played at Wembley. The stadium will be quite fullish at 60,000 and there will be a fairly full complement of Uefa officials who are demanding a quarantine-free stay in the UK – this, at a time, when the infection rate in the UK is worse than the European average. One suspects some kind of financial stitch-up here i.e. the rules get ‘bent’ in order to keep the economic advantages of semi-finals and finals to be played at Wembley.
This was the day when we were due to travel to North Wales and we made a reasonably early start at 9.20 this morning. Everything proceeded satisfactorily until we made a stop at a Starbucks near Shrewsbury in order to make use of their toilet facilities. There we had a panic when Meg lost her handbag (not for the first time!)and eventually found an assistant with a master key and opened up all of the locos until the missing handbag was located. Then we proceeded on our way only for the car information system to display a big tyre meaning, I suppose, an inflation problem. I pulled into a service station and checked all of the air pressures but the ‘tyre’ symbol remained. So this means either a faulty sensor, or the sensor needs to be turned off, that actually do have a slow puncture or any combination of the above! We proceeded on our way cautiously but seemed to be OK. We arrived at the restaurant in the country park where we had pre booked a meal in the restaurant and had a delightful meal of sea bass. We then set off for our AirBnB but got there about 30 minutes too early. As we were fiddling about parking we met another couple from Birmingham and decided to have quick cup of tea with them before we set off for the AirBnB which we had previously located. When we got there, there was no space to park and we were greeted by the mother of the host who was friendly but! We have found somewhere to park the car down the road and in the meantime we have to work out how we can use internet access without a password. In the short term, I am managing to write this blog by ‘hot spotting’ my iPad onto my iPhone but feel this is only a short term solution. However, now a little later I have managed to establish contact with the owner, several little things have improved. First and most importantly, I have managed after several false starts to get this IBM Thinkpad connected to the BT network. This involved quite a long and involved password with a variety of upper and lower case characters but eventually after some errors (all of which were my own because I had failed to copy some of the characters correctly. Also I had forgotten my mouse but I am having to learn how to use the ‘nipple’ on the Thinkpad keyboard but of its type, its quite good really. We now have a front door key so I can pop out to the car and get some bits of pieces. Also, I begged from the owner a black plastic bag which we can now use as a dirty washing bag (important if you are aware for several days) The absence of a kettle so that we can have a hot drink is a little irksome – but of course we are applying the norms of a ‘normal’ B&B to an AirB&B which of course we should not. When I get to know the owner a little better, I can ask her whether it is legit for us to pop down and make ourselves a quick cup of tea downstairs and then take it up to our room – one is a little frightened to ask. The TV remote has gone walk-about so we are having to manipulate things through an obscure (to us) Sky box so far from ideal or restful.
The European Cup finals were in the final stages of the initial group stage this evening. In the event there were several dramatic touches in the matches. At one point, when Hungary were beating Germany 2-1 10 minutes from the end, it looked as though Germany might not progress beyond the group stage. Instead, we have the situation in which Germany equalised, they progress onto the knockout stage and will meet England next Tuesday. I suppose it is pretty self-evident how this one will end, given the nature of the encounters between England and Germany in the past.
The COVID news seems pretty grim, in some respects, this evening. The number of new infections has leapt from 11,000 to 16,000 in a single day. Nonetheless, the death rate and the hospitalisation rates do not show commensurate increases so it does look as though as the infections seem concentrated on the younger sections of the population and therefore it can be argued that ‘the vaccines’ are winning this particular battle. Tomorrow we will see Meg’s Uncle Ken (who is in his 90’s) and then we hope to a meal in our favourite little restaurant in Conway (specialising in lovely home-cooked recipes like fish pie) and have a toddle around our favourite shops in Conway. We hope the weather will improve tomorrow because here in Wales we have run into a ‘North Wales drizzle’ the likes of which Meg remembers well from several wet holidays in Wales!
Today was the day upon which we had planned to visit Meg’s uncle and everything worked out as planned – or rather better than planned.Given we had our first night in a strange but very comfortable bed, we eventually got ourselves showered and ready for breakfast. We had been shown how to help ourselves so the cup of tea was particularly welcome and we complemented this with some cereal and slices of toast which is not our normal breakfast but very welcome all the same. By the time we had finished all of this, we washed up after ourselves and then went off to meet Meg’s Uncle Ken. Considering we had not seen him for about a year and a half we found him to be in remarkably good heart. At nearly 95, he is evidently very frail but not as frail as we suspected that he might be. We were joined almost immediately by a very close family friend who we knew very well and we chatted for most of the morning until it was decided by all of us that it would be nice to have a family meal together. We decided to have fish and chips so our family friend telephoned through the order and collected it half an hour later. We were then treated to some home-made ‘Bara Brith‘ (translated from the Welsh ‘Speckled Bread’) which is like a moist fruit loaf and which is one of the most delicious we had ever tasted (to a home-made recipe of course) So we took our leave of Uncle Ken and made our way to the classic little city of Conwy. There we parked in our usual spot and the sum had come out his afternoon so it was quite sunny. We repaired to our delightful but little known tearooms where we have several stairs to negotiate but if has a delightful, what I call a Jane Austin atmosphere inside. There we not only had a delicious pot of Earl Grey tea but treated ourselves to some fruit and ice cream. We also made a booking for lunch tomorrow about which we are delighted and although the owner does not know it yet, we are going to treat her to a bottle of our own damson gin (labelled up as ‘Chateau le Ceuf‘ or ‘Hart(=male deer) Chateau)‘ for evident reasons) After we had our afternoon tea, we popped into the camping shop to see if we could buy a little camping kettle (we couldn’t) but we saw some excellent bargain weather proof anoraks that we have bought before from that store and which has proved to be excellent. Then we popped round to a chemist’s shop and bought some toiletries and finally into a Spar supermarket where we bought a few things to eat in case we get hungry in the evening. If there had been a little hardware store, I would have bought a little cheap kettle to keep our blood diluted with tea during the evening. We will probably be able to manage now until Saturday morning when we depart. I must say we are quite looking forward to our little ‘poddle around’ Conwy in the morning. There is always a bit of sea wall to walk along if we want to get some fresh air but also the centre of the city is particularly compact. Of course we have our favourites, amongst we would number the National Trust shop (great for little gifts for people), the Welsh Wool Shop (the equivalent of Edinburgh Woollen Mills) and a range of little curio and antique type shops.
I have entertained myself this evening if ‘entertained’ is the right word manipulating the intricacies of a Sky box which is what controls the TV in our B&B. Apparently, the previous TV remote had gone walkabout (and this rather reminds me of what happened three years ago when the control to the TV in the hospital day-room had been pinched by past visitors, thus depriving the recovering patients of a much needed source of diversion). Meg is in bed (which is her wont after she has got over-tired throughout and I am rather struggling with the hit-and-miss vagaries of a control I do not really understand so quite a lot of trial and error is involved) At the moment, I happened upon an old recording of Fawlty Towers which I had seen only about a couple of weeks ago but any port in a storm. However, I now get a message on the system to say the system was going to turn itself off – which it did. So I am now watching another episode which I also happen to have seen in the last week or so – but again, I suppose I mustn’t grumble. Anyway, I am fairly used to making out in hotel rooms having survived a hotel in Jakarta whilst I was doing a stint of teaching out there for De Montfort University in the 1990’s.
Having seen Meg’s Uncle Ken yesterday, today was a day when Meg and I thought we allocate to ourselves having a pleasant little toddle around Conwy. We both had a very good’s sleep last night and so didn’t get down to breakfast until just after 9.00am. As we were breakfasting, we got into conversation with the owner’s mother who was charged with looking after things whilst her daughter was at work. We had quite an extended chat with one thing leading to another – it transpired towards the end of the conversation that our host’s mother had engaged in some missionary work so we swapped quite a lot of stories particularly as Meg’s cousin had engaged in very similar activity in Sierra Leone. It is amazing how many points of contact one can find when you get into a deep conversation and as we had nothing pressing to dash into town for, we were happy to swop some life stories. When we eventually got as far as the car for our journey into Conwy, the heavens opened and we made our journey in pouring rain and a very blustery wind. Yesterday, as we made our way into our favourite tearooms, we noticed in the Mountain Warehouse shop so thought we would call in there today as we noticed that they seemed to be running some excellent reductions.We saw one particular form of outerware that seemed as though it would be fine for Meg but the very helpful owner directed us towards something that was more Meg’s size and colour and as it was raining so hard we were glad to wear it straightaway. Then we progressed along the street looking for a coffee shop and as it was raining so hard, the places were evidently at a premium. We had the frustrating experience of seeing the last available table go in our coffee house of choice as were beaten to it by a few seconds by another couple. So we wandered up and down for a few minutes more and when we returned to the coffee shop, we were now lucky to be squeezed in and enjoyed a very nice toasted teacake and coffee. By the time we had finished this, it was time for us to visit our favourite restaurant and we delighted to order one of their wonderful home made dishes of chicken, leek and bacon. As were waiting for our meal, Meg twisted somewhat on her chair and finished off sliding quite gracefully onto the floor. One of the young waitresses was quite alarmed to see a guest of theirs on the floor but I assured her this was quite normal for Meg and the fact she was now on the floor might have been the result of the gin that Meg had been ingesting all morning. How else does explain that one’s wife is on the floor but this is nothing especially unusual as I have scraped Meg off the floor in more establishments than I have had hot dinners. I had taken along a bottle of our our own Damson Gin to give to the proprietor as I seem to remember that the last time we visited, we had promised her a bottle of the same. Rather unfortunately, both the actual owner and the contact we have made over the years were not on duty at the time we were due to leave but I explained the reason for the little ‘gift’ to the bar staff who were on duty and asked them to pass the messages on which is not quite the same)
Meg and I returned to our B&B room and our intention was to have rest and then do the packing. Instead we got rather diverted by writing various emails and watching old comedy programs such as ‘Fawlty Towers‘, ‘The Good Life‘ and ‘BlackAdder‘ and thought that we would leave the packing until the morning. On the way back to the B&B from Conwy, we just happened to pass an Asda store so on a whim I decided to have a quick dive inside to see if they were selling household utensils such as a kettle. I must say I could not believe my eyes when I found they were selling an absolutely serviceable, 2KW kettle for the princely sum of …£5.50, complete with a two-year warranty. I must say that having previously bought a container of milk and now with the facility to have hot cups of tea, then it made our last evening’s stay in the B&B so much more enjoyable. Tomorrow morning, we should be able to pack up fairly quickly, get away soon after breakfast and then be at home well in time to watch the Wales v. Denmark match which is being very heavily anticipated here in Wales, as you can imagine. The weather may be somewhat better tomorrow which might make the trip down the motorway a little less tedious.
Well, I have to say that today has turned out to be a really curious day. Last night, we noticed the the WC in the ensuite bathroom in our B&B room had started to malfunction – specifically, the ball cock was evidently not functioning and so the loo was burbling away, loudly, right throughout the night. This meant that Meg and myself had a rather disturbed night’s sleep as the burbling kept us semi-conscious for most of the night. So when 6.00am came, it was as a kind of blessed release as we could get then up and start to pack our suitcases ready for our return journey. The total packing did not take us too long – just over an hour actually – and, of course, it so much easier to pack to come home because you basically pack everything that you have within the room. So we got down to breakfast some time after 7.00 and were on our way at about 8.15 which is quite early for us. The roads were relatively uncluttered at that time of the morning so we retraced our steps along the A55 Express Way towards Chester and cut south down the A483 to eventually link up with the A5. We know that places where we can stop for a coffee break and a loo visit are relatively scarce along this particular route but I half remembered that there was some sort of ceramics centre and tea shop just north of Shrewsbury. What we landed up in was some kind of strange ‘adventure park’ full of animals both familiar and unfamiliar all quite realistically made, some with natural materials and some in steel. After we followed the winding path, we had to wait for the establishment to open (as it did at 10.00am a few minutes later) and we followed the path to a point that indicated the coffee shop. Then we came to the entrance and we could only be let in after paying an admission fee of £3.00 each. So we abandoned all of the and went on our merry way, looking for the place that I had confused it with. So we resumed our journey and eventually found a strange place that advertised itself as ‘services’ This turned out what looked to be an old railway carriage with a queue of about 20 bikers outside it and a rather obscure toilet block, adorned with warnings that the whole block was under constant police surveillance and any illegal activities (such as what!) should be reported to them immediately. So Meg and I spent the proverbial penny and decided to look for a third place to actually have a coffee break. Eventually, we did find a place which was Telford Services area and by stage already we have travelled about 90 miles we reckoned that we were only about 45 minutes from home by fast motorway, so we decided to press on. Eventually, we did get home a little frazzled by the events of the morning and made ourselves an earlyish lunch. After lunch, I went down into town and picked up our newspapers for the last few days and also popped into Waitrose to pick up a few fresh vegetables to keep us going for the next few days. In reality, we were just waiting for the Wales-Denmark match which is one of the first matches in the knockout stages, which starts today. Apart from about the first 10 minutes when Wales made quite a bright start to the match, the rest of the game became more and more dominated by Denmark. A stunning goal from beyond the penalty area put the Denmark team ahead and after that, it started to turn into a defeat and then a rout (with a score of 4-0). Of course, Denmark had a lot of support from the neutrals because in their opening match one of their players had a heart attack on the pitch. Also they had a lot of supporters who managed to get into Holland where the match was being played but this is not to detract from an excellent performance by the Danes where every single player performed excellently.
Whilst the football was on, the news came through of the resignation off the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock. To many commentators, this was only a question of time since the ‘still’ of a videoclip was widely circulated showing him in a passionate embrace with an erstwhile Oxford fellow student who had, quite mysteriously, managed to land a plum job in the Department of Health where she seemed, by all accounts, to be as heavily involved in policy decisions as Hancock himself. The whole point here is the rank hypocrisy of a Government minister enforcing isolation and distancing rules upon the rest of the populations whilst fragrantly breaking the regulations himself. Also Hancock was not well regarded in the Tory party – was he too cautious (i.e. not reckless) in relaxing the lockdown regulations for the liking of the modern Tory party? By all accounts, members of the public were expressing their fury with his actions throughout the day and there is the promise of even more juicy revelations in the Sunday newspapers, so his resignation (which should have been demanded by Boris Johnson yesterday) is of no surprise.
Today being a Sunday, I got into my usual routine of walking down early for the newspapers which promised to be a particularly good read this Sunday, after the resignation of Matt Hancock (the Health Secretary). As usual, I treated myself to a selection of Bach on my little iPhone player and it was particularly gratifying to hear again this morning the organ cantata ‘Wachet Auf‘ (Sleepers awake) which I think used to accompany a Lloyds Bank advert years ago. This was the aria that was played as Meg walked down the aisle of the church (or more technically, the knave) on our wedding day. Later on my little morning ‘concert’ I got the Bach ‘Toccata and Fugue ‘ which of, course, is a glorious and riotous expression of joy which is, of course, why Meg and I chose it to walk down through the church all those years ago (1967 to be accurate). On my way down into town this morning, the only thing that I really noticed were the bikers (i.e. motorcyclists) who often seem to come out in force on a Sunday morning. When I did spent my few weeks in Jakarta (Indonesia) whilst working on the De Montfort University MBA program, I was always amazed to see that on a Sunday morning the streets were often bereft of cars but in their stead one got swarms of cyclists (well, they seem to number anything from 20-50). Then it was home to watch the Andrew Marr Show as per normal but given the gravity of yesterday’s resignation, I felt they ought to have a much more in depth examination of the rampant hypocrisy which led to the resignation of the Health Secretary yesterday. Instead, we had a Tory Minister, Brandon Lewis, who seemed to be defending Boris Johnson for not sacking Matt Hancock immediately. The general type of argument I have heard is something along the lines of ‘Well, because Boris Johnson has hardly lived the life of a monk, has had a plethora of relationships and will not even admit to the number of children he has actually fathered‘ then this might help to explain why Boris Johnson has not received much more explicit criticism himself. The extraordinary aspect of this whole affair hads been the way in the infamouus ‘passionate clinch’ was captured on a camera, apparently installed (and disguised) with a smoke detector. Two questions stand out. First of all, who installed the device? Was it MI5, MI6, The Chinese or who? The of course the video clip had to be transmitted to someone and released to all of the media. Is it normal for all minster’s offices to be bugged in this way? Whether we shall ever know any of the answers to these questions is a moot point.
In the park, we were delighted to be joined by our University of Birmingham friend who we have not seen for days- we exchanged some texts and telephone calls to make sure we actually coincided this morning. Meg started to feel a little wobbly even whilst we were sitting on the park bench so my friend and I walked Meg home slowly between us to make sure she didn’t do a sudden collapse on us. Once we got her walking, she seemed to recover some of her composure but her balance mechanisms are not very good these days. We used to joke that Meg’s mother was probably a mass murderer because she used to stagger and knock people over (once in a shop in Wigston, Leicestershire and one in the residential home in which she eventually lived). We suspect that either one or both of the people sent flying may well have suffered broken hips or other life-threatening consequences as a result of being sent flying. Of course, we shall never know for certain.
This afternoon, we watched Holland v. Czech Republic, in which the Dutch were beaten 2-0 (probably quite deservedly) Tonight is going to be a clash of the titans as Belgium take on Portugal and th rest of this is completely too close to call.
An interesting little story tonight on Sky News is a report on the numbers of police officers who have broken the COVID lockdown rules but not been sanctioned. At least 167 officers were found to have breached coronavirus restrictions since March 2020 – but the actual number is likely to be much higher as nearly half of UK police forces failed to say how many had flouted the measures . This raises the old question ‘Quis custodet custodes‘ or ‘Who guards the guards?’ and no doubt adds to the general air of cynicism when the vast majority of the population agree to abide by the rules but they are flouted by those in authority. What is a little under-reported, I feel (and for good reason) are the numbers attending the demonstrations in London. One in the last few days attracted several thousands of protestors, some of whom threw tennis balls with messages written on them into the garden of 10 Downing Street (apparently)
Today was a rather gloomy day with quite a lot of low hanging cloud without actually raining. I was somewhat delayed this morning for a variety of reasons. For a start, Meg was not feeling very well and decided to spend the morning in bed. I needed to make two medical appointments – one was an eye appointment and the second was with my GP for some checkups.The first appointment was quite easily made as it was all done through the web but the second involved a long wait on the telephone to make a GP appointment. I do not find it any surprise that several conditions are not being treated in time when it is so difficult to make a GP appointment. After listening to all of the routine messages, I then had to choose an option from a list none of which was the normal ‘Would you like to make an appointment with a GP?’ Instead you had to choose option No. 5 (Other) and then hang on the phone for 15 minutes until the phone was actually answered and you got a human being at the other end who could book an appointment. For some reason which I cannot comprehend, the all-singing, all-dancing website which my practice offers does not give you the opportunity to book an appointment with your GP – or at least, when I have tried I get a ‘Service not available’ message. I do not know whether it is like this all over the country but an effect of the pandemic seems to make make life almost impossible for what you might term ‘routine doctoring’ Having got these appointments made, though, I started to go into town but coincided with our gardener who was busy doing a neighbour’s garden but was scheduled to come to us next Thursday. This was a heaven sent opportunity for me as I have a little area of garden known affectionately as ‘Mog’s Den‘ which is at the bottom of quite a steep slope on the edge of our property. Under normal circumstances, I like to keep this well tended but this year things have rather got out of hand and this area had got tother neglected. Some of the nettles are several feet high but I feel sure that it can soon be got in hand if I can spare the time. Anyway, I have enlisted the help of our gardener so that we can put in a couple of hours and I feel that working side-by-side, we can probably make enough impression on the plot to make it quite manageable from now on. I carried on walking into town and collected our newspapers before getting a few provisions for our daughter-in-law from our local Waitrose. Then it was s straightforward walk home (meeting no-one on the way as I bypassed the park) and finally came home to make preparations for lunch.
After lunch, I gave myself a little bit of time to read ‘The Times’ and then I was determined to do half an hour’s ‘rough’ gardening on the border by the side of our communal green area in front of the house and then half an hour doing some computer-based work before setting down to watch the football at 5.00pm. In practice, the gardening proved to be a lot tougher (with some historic bracken intruding from what had been a field next to the house before it got built upon) so the 30 minutes became 45 minutes and there was just enough time to get cleaned up and settle down for the football. This was the match between Spain and Croatia and it proved to be one of the fascinating – and tense – of the whole competition. The Spanish gave away a particularly silly goal in the first half when the goalkeeper casually handled a back pass to him from one of his own backs and watched the ball dribble into his own net. The Spanish managed to equalise and then went ahead to score two more goals so that it looked as they were cruising to victory with only about ten minutes to spare. Then Croatia scored and it was 3-2 and finally Croatia scored another in injury time and it was 3-3 – and injury time. So it was extra time but the Spanish managed to score two quick goals to make the score 5-3 and it appeared that they were cruising for victory but with one or two scares on the way. The relief all round when the final whistle came was palpable.
The Covid cases are climbing quite rapidly now – the latest reported figure ws 22,800 which sounds horrendous. But two additional factor are kicking on on this occasion compared with earlier waves of the pandemic. Firstly infections are not leading to hospitalisation as it did earlier on. An analysis in today’s ‘Times‘ reports research that the death rate from the virus is now 1 in a 1,000 (0.01%) – even amongst the vulnerable 75+ age group, the death rate has dropped from over 15% at the height of the pandemic last winter to less than 2% now. Perhaps this is why the rapidly increasing infection rate is not causing too many alarm bells to ring.
Tuesdays are a little bit of a rush round because of the Pilates session which is my weekly commitment (and has been for a good few years now). After our return from our little holiday in Wales, the time had come for us to make an evaluation of our B&B which will be published for the clients to read. The system that AirB&B utilise takes part in three stages. First you can send private comments to the owner of the B&B which are ‘private’ and not intended for publication – so I took the opportunity to mention the malfunctioning toilet which kept us semi-awake for most of our last night with its constant burbling. Then you write the review which is actually going to be published on the web for others to read. When this has been done, you can then read the comments that the B&B owner has said about you, the clients. So an interesting little set of procedures.
Meg and I in order to save a little bit of time altered our normal routine a little. Now that Waitrose has liberalised itself a little, it has some benches outside for the use of clients to eat and drink (presumably?) Waitrose food and drink. So whilst Meg sat and waited, I popped round the corner and got our newspapers – our newsagent is very much a tennis fan and is following Wimbledon intently including the career of Any Murray. For him. the attraction of the game is the fact that ‘much of it is in the mind‘ and that ‘you have nobody to blame but yourself’ I suppose this is quite true but I have stopped being a very keen of Wimbledon ever since the big serves (and grunts) dominated the game. I made a lightning visit into the store to pick up some milk and oranges and then we headed homewards. I always have a quick turn around on a Tuesday but as the weather was so humid, it was one of those occasions when you feel the need to change one’s shirt in the middle of the day. I undertook my Pilates class with my by now ‘normal’ three Pilates class members and as usual, a few jokes went chasing round the room. As we exercise with the door open, shielded only by a screen we often wonder what the reception staff make of the peals of laughter which occasionally emanate from inside our exercise studio.
We have a quick but conventional lunch of fishcakes on Tuesdays and today was no exception. After lunch and a bit of a rest, I put in a 20 minute shift ‘gully clearing’ in our front of house communal area. I discovered quite a few little young saplings but I am not quite sure what they are – they could be ‘Acer Campestre‘ or field maple saplings but I shall ask our gardener when he calls around on Thursday to make sure. In the meantime, I have transplanted them to a safer ‘nursery’ bed area where I can keep my eye on them before I grow them on. I have to say that about 12 years go, I discovered a little field maple sapling under one of our hedges. This I grew on in a pot and then transplanted into my neighbour’s garden whilst I was looking after it for him. When this tree was about a metre and a half tall, I relocated it into a gap in one of our row of trees and it is now quite mature and must be some 7-8 metres in heigh (and is my pride and joy).
Of course, we knew that the impending football match between England and Germany was going to be the highlight of the afternoon. I thought that the result was going to be quite predictable in that I suspected there would be a 0-0 or a 1-1 draw, even after extra time and that Germany would eventually win the game on penalties. I have to say that the England team after an initial ten minutes were reasonably good without being outstanding – and the German team certainly lacked the penetration, menace and sharpness of German football teams we have known in the past. The second half was a fairly pedestrian affair with no team seeming to have the ‘killer punch’ but with about a quarter of an hour left to play, Raheem Stirling scored a stunning opportunistic goal and suddenly England were 1-0 ahead. Then the English captain, Harry Kane, who had had an arid time over the last few games and hardly seemed to have touched the ball in this entire game scored an incredibly good header and there we were 2-0 against Germany. The very last time we were had knocked Germany out of a major competition was the World Cup which England won in 1966 – as this was 55 years ago, I doubt whether I shall ever see the likes of it again in my lifetime. England will now meet the winners of Ukraine vs. Sweden (currently being played) in the quarter finals and, whisper it softly, now that we have beaten Germany our route to the final does seem within the bounds of of both hope and possibility.
It seems extraordinary to me that here we are on the very last day of June which means that after today, the year is half over. To add the air on unreality about it all, as well, we are waking up with the realisation that England has beaten Germany and knocked them out of a football competition for the first time in 55 years. Moreover, England progressed to the quarter finals by winning the game within 90 minutes and therefore having to endure extra time or the almost inevitable penalties. When I got my copy of ‘The Times‘ I see that in their regular supplement (called ‘The Game’) they have devoted no less than 9 pages to analysis and comment. What happens if we are get to the final (which now seems less improbable than it did), we shall have to wait and see. But there is a strange feeling in the air that life is not supposed to be like this – the normal order of events is a national malaise and breastbeating after we lose to Germany on penalties. I suppose a fair comment is to the effect that here were two teams with a moderate ability to excite crowds with scintillating football but England manage to make the most of their very few chances whereas Germany fluffed theirs. If Mueller’s shot hd equalised very late in the day then Germany would probably have gone on to win the match. Enough of football – except that that the plucky little Ukrainians (with whom we had considerably sympathy when they were giant killing Sweden) will be our immediate opponents on Saturday next.
We were a little delayed this morning whist I completed my Waitrose order, ready for delivery tomorrow. I was more than a little disconcerted when my Apple mouse seemed to have given up the ghost and I had to make do with a little temporary one that I use on occasions like these. I think the system had updated itself during the night and the mouse charge might have run down to zero – but recharging it seemed to have no effect. My son hearing of my plight took the mouse, rubbed it on his jumper for a second or so, clicked it and everything sprung into life again. I am at a loss to understood what had happened or why but at least all is now restored to normality. This morning Meg and I were due to make a visit to the dentists, not having been for about 18 months or so. Under more normal circumstances, we would see the hygienist for one appointment and then see the dentist some three months later and repeating the pattern so that we seem them both each six months. We were a trifle apprehensive about how today was going to go, but in practice it was fine. Whilst Meg was being seen by the hygienist, I was examined by the dentist and then we swopped over. After so long a gap, I was fearful that our dental health might have deteriorated somewhat. But it was the most pleasant of news for both us that our teeth and gums seem to be fine and have stood up well to the deprivations of the last year and a half. So it was a quick run home and a lunch of quiche which is often our Wednesday bill of fare.
This afternoon, I had set myself the task of trying to get more of the gully/border cleared by the side of our communal area. This is no easy task and there is no substitute to getting on a kneeling mat and doing a painstaking foot by foot clearance. The most important thing is to get hold of the invading bracken and pull it up so the stem is pulled up from the rootstock. Then, there are the nettles but the ivy and the counchgrass prove to be the most troublesome to remove. I reckon that on average it takes about 20 minutes a foot to restore some sense of order and I think I have another 8-10 feet yet to do before the job is completed. Tomorrow, our regular gardener and I are due to tackle the overgrown ‘Mog’s Den‘ and I am hopeful after a couple of hours of hard work, we will have got this, too, restored to some sort of order.
The latest COVID-19 figures are 26,000 new infections which seems to be a horrific increase on yesterday. Yet the government seems curiously unconcerned about all of this as the link between infections and subsequent hospitalisations and a consequent death rate seems to have been broken, at least in part. It also looks as though ‘the vulnerable’ are now to receive a third, booster, jab in the autumn onwards, so the government is evidently trying to make plans for when we see a resurgence of the virus in the winter months, perhaps coupled with a ‘normal’ flu which will no doubt fill the hospital beds (and the mortuaries) quite rapidly.
I suspect that we all know that the moment we wake up we know we are not really going to look forward to the day ahead. Today was one of those days for the following reason – down in the lower area of ground below the main lawn, there is an area known as ‘Mog’s Den‘ which as an area in which I am trying to cultivate a slight ‘woodland’ feel. The slope is very severe and there are several overhanging trees so what will grow in the area is severely limited. Some of the area is planted up with periwinkle (Vinca major) which seems to be spreading over the area that I wanted it to, making it quite a pleasant and tranquil site. But the rest of the area which can be in full sun has been neglected and I was horrified to discover that some annual weeds and shrubs had gone absolutely mad – in particular, rose bay willow herb, nettles and a shrubs called Leycesteria formed an absolute jungle where the weeds had grown to an average of 5′-6′ high. I tried to reflect how this part of the garden had got into such a terrible shape but I think I know how. We had a terrible May with it being the wettest on record and I did not think about doing any gardening under these conditions. Then, of course, we had some periods of intense sunshine in June and the combination of these circumstances (plus neglect on my part) resulted in the jungle which I now perceived. However I asked our regular gardener for a couple of hours assistance and between us, we got the worst of these weeds taken up (and they themselves make a pile 5′ high!) So after a couple of hours of intensely hard work, we got things restored to the point where I can do lots of fine tuning myself. In the midst of all of this, our local neighbourhood cat Miggles made an appearance from out of the jungle and we also came across a frog which is always nice to see. I also discovered a self-set foxglove, a young lilac tree I had planted from a cutting, a little tree we cannot identify but which may be a young cherry and diverse other plants I have nurtured in the past. I have decided to cover sub-area of the whole with forest bark and, fortunately, I already have some in stock which I can deploy in the next day or so. So after a hard morning’s work, Meg and I treated ourself to a trip down to Waitrose in the car where we picked up our newspapers and then treated ourselves to a coffee and a cake. Then we came back home and enjoyed a curry.
After lunch, I know that it was time for ‘Gardening Session No. 2’. I had 2-3 yards left in the front garden gully still to clear and fortunately the sun came out and I got this done under quite pleasant conditions. Needless to say, I had my usual quota of bracken, nettles and couch grass to deal with which is always a foot-by-foot clearance by hand but this, too, got done eventually. Our gardener identified the young plants I had been saving in my clearance activities as wild hazel plants – I have taken a photo of my plants and compared them with images I have discovered on the web and there seems to be quite a good match but I am not 100% convinced. Nonetheless, I will grow my little plants on and then can always be used to make a natural border between one section of the woodland garden and the next. I think that after today’s exertions, I may treat myself to half an hour earlier in bed and a session with an electric blanket to soothe aching muscles. A few years ago, I could have thrown off some hours of heavy gardening with ease but now I have to take a bit more care of myself. I am determined to make sure that I spend about 20 minutes every day from now on (so long as I am not completely rained off) to keep things ticking over from now on.Needless to say, I am determined to make sure that I never let ‘Mog’s Den‘ get into such a run-down state ever again. Although I have some forest bark in stock, I will do the rounds of some of the local supermarkets tomorrow to see is they readily available supplies of forest bark. Just over a year ago, I did treat myself to a ton bag of forest bark from a garden supplier I had used before- and was dismayed to find subsequently that I could have bought the same quality cheaper from my local Asda and in easier to handle plastic sacks as well.
The latest Covid-19 news is that the number of new infections is now 28,000 which sounds to be horrendous. Several commentators (particularly In Germany as it happens) are arguing that the Euro competition is helping to spread the virus as ‘super-spreader’ events. When you see the results of crowds celebrating when England overcame Germany the other day, it seems no wonder that the virus is spreading so rapidly. On a slightly more reassuring note, Public Health England are indicating that two AstraZeneca jabs give 94% protection against dying with coronavirus in over-65s.
Today was one of those rather cloudy and humid days and we were a bit delayed making our usual venture down into town. We spent quite a lot of time chatting with our domestic help who comes round on Fridays. In particular, she was was eager to know how we had got on with our AirB&B in North Wales and her own view was that the catalogue of little things that were not quite right (no kettle in the room, parking at a distance, dodgy toilet) was such that she, too, would have found it unacceptable. Anyway, we are over that by now and have emerged home with one or two items of Meg’s clothing such as a gilet and a lightweight waterproof anorak (not to mention the kettle that we eventually purchased) all of which will prove useful to us. To save a bit of time, we decided to go down by car to collect our newspapers and I treated Meg and myself to our usual fare in Waitrose. When we eventually got home, we neither of us felt particularly hungry so we indulged ourself in some fruit and ice-cream which is all we fancied. In the afternoon, I had set myself the task of getting our communal lawns cut and this task generally takes about 40 minutes for the main grassed area, then a rest period, followed by another 20 minutes to do our back lawn. In the interval between the two cuts, Miggles the local cat who had adopted us popped round to say hello (and to get a few cat treats, courtesy of Waitrose) Then quite unusually, Miggles decided to have a period on my lap which is quite unusual for him/her – she tends to prefer the lap of my daughter-in-law whenever she gets the opportunity. Anyway, I just about got the lawns cut and everything put away before it was time for the Spain vs.Sweden European Cup quarter-final which Spain won eventually on penalties (although their record in winning matches by penalties is not at at all inspiring) Later on, I watched the Italy vs. Belgium match which was pulsating, end-to-end stuff and incredibly exciting to watch. It was such a contest in styles between the way in which the Spanish play (keep possession and have a long slow buildup) and the way in which the Italians play (go direct for goal with long ranging passes to assist) These two teams are to meet each other in the semi-finals so it is pretty obvious who is gong to win (I think)
Before I started my mowing, I did a quick reconnoitre of the garden to see if there any hidden shrubs (or even little trees) that I can relocate into Mog’s Den. I did discover one healthy looking shrub that was being a bit crowded out and would not be missed from its present location, so that is one candidate. It is a laurel I believe and they are generally quite vigorous growers given enough light and space. Also, I think I have discovered a hazel lurking away in an obscure part of the front garden – it was probably self set but it, too, could do with a bit more light and won’t be missed from where it is (as I hardly knew it was there in the first place) Some time ago, I bought a very special kind of spade which has a very long thin blade. They go by a variety of names none of which are very descriptive – I think Spear and Jackson call their version a Tub Laying Shovel and as the blade is narrow but long, a lot more force is concentrated on the cutting edge (and therefore it slices through roots more easily) It is particularly useful, though, when transplanting trees as it helps to ensure that you get the entire length of the root (in which the tap root is much longer than in a shrub)
The extraordinary thing about today’s political news is that the Labour Party did not lose a bye-election. This was Batley and Spen and Labour won it by only 323 votes. The noteworthy thing about this seat is the seat held by the Labour MP (Jo Cox) who was murdered by a far right fanatic in 2016. Campaigning for the referendum was in full spate – but the campaign was halted for a day or so an then carried on. The seat is now won by the sister of the murdered MP and the campaign, by all accounts, has attracted a lot of candidates and there were masses of dirty tricks. It was hoped that a negative result would help to unseat Keir Starmer and the was the motivation for some of the shenanigans in the by-election. In the event, although the Tories hoped to take another seat off Labour, it was not to be and the seat was just kept within the Labour fold.
Today is the day which most of the English population have been waiting for – that is, the quarter-final match between England and Ukraine (the slayers of Sweden when the decisive goal was scored in the first minute of injury time added onto the second period of extra time) This morning, Meg and I walked down into town and I left Meg sitting on our normal park bench. Fortunately, though, I had the foresight to take with us our old bit of tea towel plus one or two sheets of ‘big’ kitchen paper to mop up the inevitable damp park bench.Incidentally, there are two park benches almost next to each and a third which we often used to sit on as it was shaded under a large tree (horse chestnut I think). However, this third bench is by now almost completely unusable because several of the local birds have taken to roosting in it and to relieving themselves liberally on the park bench below. I wonder if the park workers have noticed this and are prepared to take any remedial action- I will mention it to them if I happen to see them. For lunch, I made a kipper fillet risotto (made with cauliflower rice to radically reduce the carbohydrate load) and I finish this off with a bit of grated cheese and yogurt which makes it additionally tasty.
I knew that I wanted to go into town scouring the local supermarkets in search of forest bark and a few other gardening consumables. My first port of call was Aldi where I was delighted to see that the simulated oak planters that they. used to sell are still in stock. These particular planters are made of recycled plastic and from a distance, they look incredibly realistic complete with a ‘faux’ simulated copper band around the top. To be honest, these look quite sophisticated as I am getting a bit fed up with the large 42″ black planters which are starting to look a little ‘naff’ by now. The only downside is there is no evident weak point in the base through which one can drill a drainage hole. This is absolutely essential as otherwise, in an outdoors location, they would gradually get filled with soggy water and one’s plants would perish. The little label inside says ‘inside or outside use’ so I can see why are intact at the moment but some careful drilling is absolutely called for.However, no forest bark was in evidence and so I took myself off to a local ‘Home and Garden‘ cheapish store across the road to see if they had any forest bark. As it happened they had not but I did buy some ‘Growmore‘ (which I badly needed) ‘Blood,Fish and Bone’ (which I also badly needed), some concentrated seaweed liquid fertiliser, some weed control fabric pegs and a 6-litre watering can, all for less than a tenner. Finally, I shot off to my local Asda where I purchased three bags of multi-purpose compost again for a tenner (but no forest bark) So then I struck off for home feeling moderately pleased with my afternoon’s set of purchases.
As is normal on a Saturday evening, we attended church for the Saturday evening service. However, I suspect that everybody’s minds was on the football match which was due to start in Rome at 8.00pm. I have promised myself a beer if England are leading at half time – which they are. However, having scored only 3½ minutes into the game, England have had a fairly pedestrian ‘keep ball’ first half and I fear that a certain degree of complacency might creep in as the Ukraine look dangerous once they have players in the penalty area. I think I will wait are two goals ahead before I relax sufficiently to open the beer!
There is some interesting COVID news tonight. It looks as though half of the countries in Europe are planning to vaccinate school children over the age of 12 – and a further six are planning to vaccinate children with underlying health conditions. Meanwhile we know that schools are a repository of the virus and whilst not suffering COVID themselves, they can certainly transmit it to their elders and grandparents. Evidently, there is a groundswell of opinion against the vaccination of UK school children but I am not sure whether the resistance is coming from the scientific community, the government – or a combination of the two.
Earlier on, I said the Ukraine players looked utterly dejected – as anyone would, with two goals scored within about 4 minutes early on the second half and at that point, England were three goals ahead (and I opened my beer) A fourth goal was added later on the half and after that, England just coasted to victory. There is a semi-final next Wednesday against Denmark (the winners of another of the quarter finals) – if we get past Denmark (which must be a 50:50) then we would meet either Italy or Spain in the final next Sunday.
It was raining quite hard when we woke up this morning. I contemplated going for a walk in the rain to pick up our supply of the Sunday newspapers but eventually concluded that after about 40 minute walk in the rain, I might just about get soaked to the skin – and I did not particularly want to catch a cold. So I made life easy for myself and went down to collect the newspapers in the car. When I returned, Meg was in bed and in fact stayed in bed for most of the day, as she was feeling rather tired and ‘wobbly’. When I returned home I turned on Classic FM (which I am rarely without, particularly when I am on my own) and heard an incredibly beautiful rendition of the hymn ‘Abide with me‘ which, as well as typically being played at funerals up and down the land, is also traditional sung at the English Cup Final each May. I had always imagined that the tradition arose because an aged family member had died and therefore had missed the Cup Final. I had always assumed that the tradition arose because those attending the Cup Final had wished that their older family members could have had the same privilege. So I decided to do a bit of research on the web and discovered that it was first performed at what was then called (according to the programme issued for the day) the ‘Final Tie’ (not the Cup Final) when Cardiff City beat Arsenal 1-0 (the only time a Welsh side have won) The General Secretary of the FA had approached the King (George V?) and asked if there was a particular anthem or tune that he would like played as well as the English and Welsh national anthems. The King replied that he would like his wife’s favourite hymn. The hymn was actually composed by an Devon Anglican vicar – Henry Francis Lyle – who composed it when consoling a dying friend – he and the friend searched for several Biblical texts for comfort until they found some phrases that conveyed the sentiment of ‘Abide with me‘ and it was subsequently set to the music we know – it was first sung at Henry Lyle’s own memorial service in Brixham.
Upon researching all of this, I discovered something else I did not know. I dare say we are all familiar with the expression ‘Back to Square One‘ but do we know the origin of the saying? It dates from the time that the BBC were going to provide a running commentary on the Cup Final for the first time in 1927. In order to help listeners build up a mental picture of where the action was taking place, the Radio Times published a diagram in which the whole of a typical footballpich was divided into a grid of eight squares – four in each half, with two squares contiguous with the centre line and the other two with the goal line. Rather confusingly, although the squares are numbered 1-8, the numbering started on the right hand side and proceeded leftwards i.e. grid squares 1-2 being on the right hand goal line and 7-8 being on the opposing goal line. This is where, apparently, the phrase ‘Back to Square One‘ originated – but my sources do not indicate for how long this system persisted. Another curiosity in the diagram published in the Radio Times is that the familiar ‘D’ shape which forms the front of the penalty area was not shown in the diagram – and subsequent researches revealed that the penalty arc was added later in1937. The ‘D’ is technically called the ‘penalty arc’ and no player may enter it when a penalty kick is being taken and I now know that it does not form part of the penalty area itself. The idea is that no other player other than the penalty taker can be within 10 yards of the penalty spot.
I had quite a busy morning because my Irish friends invited me in a for a coffee and a natter (welcome as it was still raining) nd I subsequently onto the park to meet with our University of Birmingham friend. When I got home I made Meg and I some lunch and then after a little read of the Sunday newspapers, I wondered if the weather would hold up for a spot of gardening in ‘Mog’s Den‘ as I intended. As it happened, the little spots of drizzle turned into a more prolonged downpour but I did manage, before the heavens opened, to make drainage holes in two the four planters I purchased yesterday.
The latest COVID news appears to be that after ‘Freedom Day’ on 19th July, the wearing of face masks will be a matter of personal preference rather than being mandatory. I would imagine that all of the younger generation will still be wearing masks but not the other way around (which it should be – the young and unvaccinated are more likely to be transmitters of the virus than the old and vaccinated part of the population). Personally, I am waiting for the enterprising manufacturer of a face mask to print supplies with the slogan 'This is keeping you safe – are you keeping me safe?’ or something a bit snappier and more direct which conveys the message.
Today seemed quite a full day, what with one thing or another. We walked into town and collected our newspapers as per usual and then called in at Waitrose for our daily coffee. Whilst in the coffee shop we were were greeted by a couple of ladies who had been my yoga teachers in the days before the pandemic and when I was attending more or less regularly. The younger one had acquired a sixteen week old daughter since last we met (and a very good looking baby she was as well) Evidently she had been using lockdown time to good effect and I was very pleased for her (not least because I think she may have lost a baby before successfully rearing this one) We exchanged news of how we had both survived the pandemic and then one of our friendly Waitrose staff told me that another of our erstwhile Waitrose coffee drinkers had been seen in the store and although we did a quick reconnoitre of the shelves we did not coincide with her as we had hoped. Outside the store, we bumped into yet another of our regular crowd and exchanged a few words with her as well. So Meg and I started walking up the hill and noticed an ambulance with a blue flashing light parked outside a house whose occupant we know (as they are the next door neighbours of some of our best friends down the hill) Apparently he lady had got herself to the GP’s who immediately called an ambulance to have her admitted to deal with some incipient heart problems. The lady persuaded the doctor to let her go home (presumably so that she could pack a few things before a hospital stay) and when we arrived on the scene, here was the ambulance, blue light flashing, ready to whisk her away into hospital. We wish her well and hope she has a speedy recovery – not least because she is only just recovering from having nursed her husband thought the traumas of a stroke from which he subsequently died only about a month ago.
The weather was going to be fine all day which is just as well because I wanted a good session this afternoon to get a little section of Mog’s Den prettied up a bit. But my trip out into the garden was delayed when a neighbour called round who acts as the Treasurer to our local Residents Association (I am the Secretary so we have to collaborate over joint signatures on mutually agreed expenditures and the like) He had received a communication from the Bank who looks after our Business Account asking him to confirm his identity as part of their updating procedures. He had gone into the branch in person but there was no-one there who could deal with business accounts so he had to do it online or by telephone. Our neighbour had called round to see if I could assist him (as I am one of the two authorised to sign cheques) and I tried to get through by phone. Eventually after a wait of about half an hour and subject to the constant message ‘All of our advisers are busy at the moment but please hang on… Your business is important to us‘ (have I heard this before, I wonder) but eventually we decided to call it a day. In the next day or so, I will probably have to go down to the branch, take along some ID, be told none can deal with me but hopefully be connected to a telephone line where there is somebody at the other end) I cannot do any of this online as I have lost my log-on details and I know from bitter experience how fruitless these on-line sessions can be if you do not have the correct credentials to start off with.
Eventually, I started off with my little stint of gardening. This involved measuring and then laying the requisite shape of some weed control fabric – fortunately, I have a big roll purchased years ago and it’s aways useful when laying paths and the like.Then I covered the fabric with three bags of forest bark (fortunately, I happened to have some of the in stock as well) Then came the business of heaving some big tubs of existing plants around, clearing old tubs that had got waterlogged and generally rationing. I relocated a couple of foxgloves from a different part of the garden (they were self set but I now have three in a row) Pride of place had been granted to the nice looking young shrub/tree whose identity may be a bit of a mystery to me but our gardener seems to think if might be a variety of cherry. Then there is rather an untidy area that I use for odd bits of wood sawing, obscure one-off jobs like cleaning up old horseshoes and the like. I have a lot of useful but untidy bits of garden equipment lying around in here (such as some creosote) l housed in a mini greenhouse whose cover has long since ripped and been thrown here so I protect it with a variety of large plastic bags and the like. I have decided that the whole lot, complete with empty plant pots and the like is all looking a bit of a mess so I may clear it all away and replace it with tubs of flowers.
Tuesdays are always quite busy days because it is the day when I have my Pilates class in the middle of the day. So to save time more than anything else, I took the car down to the Waitrose carpark where I installed Meg partaking of her elevenses whilst I popped off around the corner to collect our newspapers. I had quite a lengthy discussion with the Asian shopkeeper on the psychology of tennis players – we both agreed that probably some of the young players may not have been adequately coached on how to cope with failure rather than with success. Once we got ourselves logged into the system at Waitrose we were delighted to bump some of our ex-Waitrose friends from about a year and half ago. The husband had been diagnosed with dementia but we were recognised straight way and we were delighted to see that he still seemed to be quite alert and in touch with the world. We imagined that COVID-19 and the experience of lockdown might have resulted in a deterioration of his mental condition but this did not appear to have happened – so we were very pleased on his behalf. We have agreed that we might be able to coincide with each other next Tuesday when we can no doubt catch up on the last year’s news. Whilst we were in Waitrose we got a ‘Get well soon!’ card for the neighbour of one of friends from down the hill and this can be posted through the door when I traverse this route again on the way to my Pilates class. This proceeded with only three of us regulars (the fourth being on holiday) and it was one of those weeks (which happens in both Week 3 and also Week 6) of our block of classes when our Pilates tutor gives us the opportunity for 10 minutes of ‘relaxation’. It is a standing joke amongst my fellow members that I will always fall fast asleep in these precious 10 minutes. However, to be fair, I am never absolutely asleep because I am always just about conscious that instructions are being given to us to gradually come around from our relaxation session – however, I try not to disappoint these days and it is very much the case that I can (and do) fall asleep very quickly.
This afternoon, I knew that after lunch and a brief rest, I could go into the garden and complete a fast 20-30 minute job in ‘Mog’s Den’ However things did not quite turn out that way because although the weather was fine when I was walking home, there was a very intense rain shower just after I arrived home and was preparing lunch. Then we discovered that our 2-metre tall Lavatera (English name – mallow) which we have growing in a pot immediately outside our kitchen window had been caught by the wind and had immediately blown over. I tried a few little ‘feet’ under the pot but this was not enough to stabilise it – so I resorted to a length of fencing pole (I just happened to have one spare) and this was secured in the ground by some hefty blows from my sledge hammer (or do you call it a lump hammer?) Anyway, it’s worth its weight in gold on occasions like this and the Lavatera in its pot is now rock solid secure. We FaceTimed our friends as we always do at 5.00pm on a Tuesday evening (I made it before our iPad with 3 seconds to spare!) and as well as chatting for an hour, we made arrangements to go round and see them on Friday next, celebrating our friend’s birthday the preceding day. As soon as we had finished our FaceTime call and had some fruit-and-icecream for tea, I went outside to Mog’s Den to finish off the job I intended to do earlier.This involves laying a small portion of weed-control fabric and getting the forest bark evenly distributed over it (the easy part), whilst tomorrow, I just have. small section to dig over and some clipping back, tidying up to do to keep myself on schedule.
Tonight we watched the Italy vs. Spain semi-final which Italy eventually won 4-2 after extra time and in a penalty shootout. Both Meg and I thought this was one of the finest football matches we had ever seen – Spain perhaps deserved to win playing a much more attacking game whilst I felt that the Italians actually played a little below themselves. We are steeling ourselves for the England-Denmark semi-final which will be played tomorrow night and I, for one, am not completely filled with confidence. I suspect that the game will be decided on incredibly fine margins.
A final thought on COVID news. Is not wearing a mask (soon to be made ‘legal’ again after July 19th) the equivalent of blowing smoke into someone’s face (which is technically illegal) And is an infection rate of up to 100,000 a day a ‘price worth paying’?
I consulted my wife’s iPhone this morning (whilst my own was being charged up) to reassure myself that we were going to get some fine weather so that I could get some outside jobs completed. Specifically, I really wanted it tit to be a fine day so that some of the clutter in ‘Mog’s Den‘ could be either cleaned and stored or thrown away before the reuse disposal men pay us a visit early on tomorrow morning. The app on Meg’s phone assured me that we were gong to have a cloudy but rainless day all day today until about 4.0pm. We did some of our ‘normal’ Wednesday morning jobs and determined that we would go down to Waitrose in the car having collected the newspapers and I would leave Meg with a coffee and a bun whilst I want to shoot off to Poundland to buy a few gardening requisites (putting the finishing touches to Mog’s Den) But whilst we were in Waitrose, the heavens opened and we had a really intense downpour – nonetheless, I waited until the worst of it was over and then did make a trip to Poundland where the things that I really wanted were ‘out of stock – try again on Friday‘ Nonetheless I bought some cleaning materials (don’t you just love washing out muddy old plant pots!) but the gardening books tell you that these really do need to be clean so that you don’t transfer virus from old stock to new. I even bought myself a ‘dog grooming brush’ which has wires on one side and a brush on the other which I believe (thinking laterally) may be exceptionally good at removing crusted mud from old plant pots and renovating them. This morning I allowed myself to be swayed by an advert in my Inbox offering me an end-of-season sale of a Large Standard Weeping Pussy Willow Tree (on a 80-100cm stem) theoretically marked down from £30 to £8. The blurb tells me that it will not now taller than this but is an idea ‘patio’ tree which will only get thicker and bushier over the years (with lots of catkins) but not necessarily taller. I can always find space for this in Meg’s Den where it can joon my other section of small but growing trees which I am busy populating as I write but it might even grace our patio at the back of the house.
This afternoon proved to be on of those frustrating afternoons when one was dying to get into into the garden to get one’s jobs done. Although we had several showers I was counting on the fact that in the late afternoon – about 5.00-ish the clouds tend to roll away and you have the start of a fine evening. I took the opportunity to get the little patch of garden dug over and now its awaiting something colourful to get planted into it. Next I started to tackle the area around my old little mini-greenhouse (soon to be replaced as the original cover ripped and got blown away – quite a common fate I should imagine) In my pottering days, I had evidently filled several pots with some sieved soil and then topped off with gravel but whatever the original intention was, they now looked a mess. So a lot of them got thrown away as I have a couple of empty Forest Bark bags which are quite strong and can take a lot of junk. So a lot of that is now thrown away but I have discovered that evidently I had a penchant for buying plastic buckerts of which I now have about half a dozen. The next job along is to clean out a matching set of plastic pots which is a job which I actually hate doing. But the upside of all of this is that I can plant out the hazel plants I have rescued from my clearing of the border in the front of the house and that means that if they grow well enough, I might end up with a row of hedging plants to make an instant hedge were I to need one as a border.
As I write, the build up to the England-Denmark semifinal is reaching a crescendo. I must admit that I have very mixed emotions about all of this. On the one hand, like most of the rest of the country, I want the England team to do well and to progress, on merit, to the finals if they deserve to win and play the better football. On the other hand, I do not really like the rampant nationalism that surrounds all of this – nor do I wish that Boris Johnson should take any credit for any English success that may ensue. It is not axiomatic that the better team wins as we saw with the Spanish last night – rather it is the team which seizes the moment (and doesn’t make any crass mistakes in the meantime)
Today has been a day with a bit of drama thrown in at the start of the day. My son and daughter-in-law were pretty sure that they heard an ambulance enter our Close late last night but it could just have been turning round and did not linger. This morning, we were just putting away the deliveries from our weekly Waitrose order when the relatives of our neighbour from across the communal green area called round us to see us. They gave us the grim news that their mother seemed to have had quite a major stroke – it looked as though she had fallen and perhaps banged her head but certainly been on the floor for hours. Her daughter had evidently tried to make contact throughout the day with no success and had called round to find her mother on the floor. At the moment, she is in a specialist unit in Worcester Royal but we have no more news until her relatives have themselves been briefed by the hospital. The stroke appears to have been quite a major one and therefore we have to speculate that our neighbour’s capacity for self care is severely compromised and she may not have the capacity for independent living any more. The gardener who looks after our garden every few weeks also looks after our neighbour and he happened to be working there this morning. So I popped across to brief him on the news of the morning and also took some cash with me so that the gardener could get paid and I could settle up later. But the relatives and the gardener did coincide this morning so they managed to fund his bill. I asked the gardener to keep on coming on a regular basis as he knows what is to be done – and I promised to keep the front lawn mown with my own petrol mower at the same time as we do our own. As time was now passing, we decided to go into town by car but were a bit dismayed to find that the Waitrose cafe was closed for the day – although the staff indicated to us that it should be open again tomorrow. So we bought ourselves a tin of peach tea (which was actually much nicer than it sounds) and a sandwich and then made our way to our normal bench where we munched and drank and contemplated what might happen in our little ‘coin‘. Then it was home for lunch – but as it was so hot and humid we decided to forego a cooked meal and indulged ourselves with our special mixture of peaches (tinned), ice cream, yogurt and a drizzle of honey.
I had an outdoor task detailed in my mind, assuming that the weather held up. Down in Mog’s Den, I have a little mini-greenhouse with only an improvised cover as the original got ripped and blew away some time in the past. Consequently, I have treated it as a little store of plants pots, gardening tools and requisites but I thought this afternoon I would turn out all of the contents. Then I would clean up and store (in another place) that which I wanted to keep and junk the rest. But the weather turned a little threatening, so I started another job which needed doing which was to clear off the mud and generally tidy up the steps leading down into Mog’s Den. This is a little job best done regularly but needs doing when the weather is fine and the soil is baked dry. I had just about finished this task when the raindrops started falling and I judged it best to beat a hasty retreat. But by the time I got my tools cleaned up and inside, the rain seemed to stop. So I started a major task I know I have to do which is to start to attack the 4′-5′ high stack of weeds that the gardener and I had cleared off and ‘process’ them. Basically, the thick stems of the brambles might take years to rot down so I find it better to strip off the small branches, chop them up with my secateurs and get them into my compost bin. The major bits of stem get put into the brown bin system where they eventually be collected by the refuse disposal team (once per fortnight).
Did I mention that England are through into the European Cup final? For the record, England won 2-1 after a rather dubious penalty decision – it looked particularly clear cut to almost everybody, including the referee, but the video replay system indicated minimal contact – whether deserving of a penalty is the moot point. But if England had not been awarded the penalty given their domination of play in the latter stages of the match and the Danes had got through on penalty kicks, then perhaps the best team might not have won. So at at the end of the day, I think that England deserved a little piece of luck given the amount of attacking football played in this semi-final. The country is going mad – until we get beaten by the Italians (which is a near certainty) on Sunday next.
Today turned out to be quite a fine day, once we actually got onto our walk. We spent a certain amount of time chatting with our domestic help which is quite usual for a Friday. We had got up a little bit earlier than normal because I had spent a certain amount of time sorting out some financial things during a sleepless period in the middle of the night. Specifically, one particular account had matured and then it got whizzed from account to another until I located where the money had eventually lodged itself. This is because I prefer to budget using lots of little individualised accounts whereas my son prefers the approach in which he uses one account but a spreadsheet to organise between one heading and another. I can see the advantages and disadvantages of both ways of doing things but good and up-to-date record keeping is always the recipe for an easy life. I had a routine health monitoring appointment this morning with one of the nurse practitioner team. This was not particularly stressful as certain routine measures were taken (blood pressure, blood samples for a variety of assays) but a more crunch moment will come in a couple of weeks when I have a telephone appointment to discuss some of the results that will have been returned by then. Passing past my local Asda, I noticed that they had quite a range of hydrangea plants for sale for £10. I noticed when I was showing the practice nurse the laminated cards on which I keep the NHS numbers for both my wife and I that I tucked a spare £10 note into one of my mobile phone case slots so I decided to treat myself to a plant to help to populate Mog’s Den. I have a few more cut-price plants arriving from a web source so hopefully if the weather holds out, I will manage to bring my plan to fruition to install several tubs of flowering and/or colourful shrubs. One in particular I thought to be quite interesting as it was a buddleia in which three different colours of flower are grafted onto one root stock and the various colours are meant to intertwine and to complement each other. We shall have to wait and see if the promise of the advertising actually gets fulfilled. Having walked home from the medical appointment, Meg and I went down into town by car but, once again, having picked up our newspapers we discovered that the Waitrose cafe was closed for a second day. So we did what we did yesterday which was to buy an iced tea drink, couple it with a sandwich and make for a set in the park here e consumed our snack in glorious sunshine. Then we made off for home, knowing that we had an afternoon appointment to see our friends at 3.00pm in the afternoon.
Our ex-Waitrose friends had long since wanted us to view their apartment and its surroundings and it was truly impressive, once we had a little guided tour. The building itself had been built especially to provide good quality apartments for members of the Bromsgrove business community. We had to acknowledge the fact that the quality of the internal layout and fixtures were superb – also, the accommodation had some well maintained gardens in which the residents could entertain visitors as well as some communal areas which of course were utilised to the full when there not COVID regulations in place. We spent a very pleasant afternoon, drinking tea and eating some delicious cake, especially prepared for yesterday’s ‘Birthday Boy‘ in the gardens overlooking a pond sporting a variety of vegetation and even wildlife (although we didn’t see any frogs today). When we got home, I carried out a little outside activity in which I am making a series of drain holes in the planters I have recently purchased. This involves making a pilot hole and then gradually enlarging it with a variety of implements until each hole is about 1cm in diameter which I feel is just about right to make sure the whole planter does not get waterlogged.
An estimated 400,000 tested positive for the virus last week which sounds scarily high to me. Although the link between incidences of the virus, hospitalisation and eventually deaths is now a lot more tenuous than it was, it is still there. Also, as the numerate of incidents continues to rise, so too does the possibility of new variants which might be immune to existing vaccines – then we would be in a mess. There are signs that the rate of increase is moderating a little but the R-rate is between 1.2-1.5. I do feel that the government is running the most dangerous game of ‘chicken’ at this point – and of course the huge crowds of football fans jumping up and down and exhaling vociferously is just what the virus really likes.
Today turned out to be quite a busy day.The day started off fine but cloudy but with the threat of rain until about midday, after which the temperature rose and the clammy feeling alongside it. We had quite a few chats in the course of our peregrinations this morning. First we bumped into one of our oldest friends who was busy gardening until we interrupted him. We exchange some gossip about church matters because we will both be attending the 6.00pm service this evening. Then Meg and I made for one of our favourite benches and were relieved to find that one was unoccupied – and no sooner had we started to fall upon our flask of coffee when our old estanblished University of Birmingham friend hove into view. As we had not seen each other for the best part of a week, we had quite a lot to catch up on, not least the sporting news from Wimbledon (currently) and Wembley (tomorrow night) We chatted for a few minutes when one of our wheelchair friends sped into view – she comes to the park most days and patronises the little refreshment kiosk near the main entrance to the park. She was telling us that the little cafe for whatever reason has run out of bread and several other day-to-essentials. As our friend likes her slice of toast she shot off to Waitrose which is probably ¼ mile away, got the cafe the supplies that she needed and then returned to provision them. Our friend is no slouch in her wheelchair – I think that the top speed may be approaching 20mph but she certainly whizzes along at the tremendous pace whoever she has a mind. I then left Meg and our friend in the park whilst I walked to pick uo our supply of newspapers. I know I could get the same newspapers from the Waitrose store but I prefer to patronise the little Asian-owned newsagent around the corner not least because, as a daily and regular customer, they keep my supply of newspapers apart from the main supply in the back office. This means that whoever I turn up, I can be assured of my supply and I want to keep this relationship going as long as possible. We were then joined by another of our park regulars who we have not seen for several days and then I went off to collect the newspapers. Upon my return, seeing the there of them together, I wondered if they had time yet to solve Fermat’s last theorem. Fermat himself claimed to have a proof but it was too big to fit on the margins of his notebook (a claim which is since disputed) Eventually, after 358 years of effort by mathematicians, the first successful proof was released in 1994 by Andrew Wiles ( a British mathematician), and formally published in 1995. As it happened the three of them had not solved the problem so we decided to leave that for another day.
When we did get home (eventually), we had a light cheese-and-biscuits type of lunch because I knew that whilst the weather was fine, the garden beckoned. I would dearly liked to be getting one with the finishing touches to Mog’s Den – instead I told myself that getting the lawns cut was undoubtedly a greater priority. This went fine and half-way through I bunped into the wife of my immediate next-door neighbour. We both had important bits of news to impart to each other. My neighbour informed me that her husband was going into hospital on Monday to have the last of a series of heart operations. Some of the others had provided some technical challenges to the heart surgeons so this was to be their last attempt to get things working as well as they could. At the same time, I needed to inform our next-door neighbour about what had open to our neighbour ‘across the green’ who had suffered a stroke recently but about whom we have received no more news from the relatives. After all of this, Meg and I attended the evening service which was quite quiet and contemplative – for whoever reason we had no music (as the person who operated the ‘BlueTooth’ was away on holiday and I suppose the same might have been true of the regular organist).
The whole of the day today has been the country poised in anticipation of the Euro Cup Finals between England and Italy tomorrow night. Why the commentators are frothing with excitement is that this is the first finals in which England is a finalist since the World Cup in 1966 (55 years ago) So any commentator (practically each one of them, plus all of the array of football pundits) has never experienced England in a final before and are therefore as much carried away by excitement as the rest of us. I think that Italy is far the better team but funny things happen in finals- a deflected ‘own goal’ gifting 1-0 to the opposition followed by ‘do-or-die’ defence for the rest of the match could actually mean that the weaker team eventually wins. In just over a day, it will all be over and the post-mortems will begin!
My day started in the middle of the night, really, when I had a little sleepless patch and had wondered what to do with my little patch of 3′ x. 2.5′ when I decided to sow some beet seeds in it as beet is one of the few vegetables that you can sow as late as mid-July and still have time to get a crop by October/November. I really needed to acquire a packet of beet seeds but in the meantime, I reached for my hardback notebook in which I record all my gardening and planting activities. Too my surprise, a packet of more-or-less in date beet seeds dropped out of the notebook (and what it was doing in there for the first place?) so I set about an old gardening trick that I know. Beet seed are actually a cluster of seeds with an incredibly hard husk so they can take some time to germinate. The trick is to ‘scarify’ the seeds – this means rubbing them in between sheets of sandpaper to make the seeds a little more porous. You then soak them in warm water for a period of 8-10 hours (too little and the water has not had time to do the softening, too much and the seed starts to degrade) Then I discovered another packet of beet seeds in the location in the garage where we keep our spare seeds and I scarified them as well and calculated that the needed to be sown at about 3.00pm this afternoon. Whilst I was at it, I know of a location where there is an overhanging laburnum tree and I have it in mind to ‘liberate’ some of the seeds when I am by myself (probably first thing on a Sunday morning). I had in mind to take a little pair of scissors with me to snip off some of the seeds I can see forming but when I did a bit of further reading, it seems that the best time to sow laburnum seeds is September/October. So I think I will wait a month or so before I start on the particular venture. I did happen to have a jam jar with some of our own acorns in it (from an oak tree bought with us from Hampshire when we lived there and from an acorn actual collected in the New Forest) As you might have gathered by now, I quite like the concept of growing a tree from seed (or, at least, an incredibly young cutting) and although they will not come to fruition until the point of time when I am pushing up daisies, I quite like the sight of them developing from a seed to a viable plant. As it was a Sunday morning, I walk down on my own to collect the newspapers and treated myself to a fragment of J.S.Bach’s B-minor Mass and a later excerpt was a cantata from Matthew Passion so, as always, I enjoyed myself. Them we watched the Andrew Marr show but I must confess to dozing through some of it.
In the park, we met with our University of Birmingham friend and were soon joined by another regular with whom we have quite philosophical discussions. I had to make a confession that in the past few days when I referred to Fermi’s last theorem, I was actually in error – it should have bee Fermat’s last theorem (and Fermat is not to be confused with Fermi, the Italian physicist). We evidently turned to a discussion of football and the various ways in which England might either win or lose the game, the role of the referee, of the VAR system and so on. Then we left for lunch as I knew I was going to have a fairly busy afternoon.
My jobs this afternoon were essentially quite simple. The first was to get my beet seeds sown in the 8′-9′ of space that I had allocated to them. This task seemed to go OK – I had previously spread ‘Fish Blood and Bone’ organic fertiliser and worked it into the tilth so now, we shall just have to see how many days it will take for my own seeds to germinate. If I am lucky, I might some evidence of germination within about 3-4 days – if, of course, I am unlucky I might get a complete plot of failures (it happens sometimes in gardening) Then I needed to take all of the clutter out of the mini greenhouse which was lying in tatters. I got the various contents and associated garden implements and utilities spread out on the lawn, deconstructed the old greenhouse and got it disposed off (apart from some metal bits) and constructed the new one which is just a tad deeper than the previous one (which may or not be critical by the time I start to put some germinating seeds with in it) Then my luck changed and it started gentle raining. So I had to race around, doing a rapid ‘keep it or junk it’ before I came home to prepare for tea, write this blog and get ready for the Euro Cup final this evening.
Last night was the Euro cup finals (after yesterday’s blog was written) in which England were eventually beaten by Italy. England scored within 2 minutes which is almost a record in itself and had the better of the first half. Then the Italians came out to play and had about two-thirds of the possession (perhaps even more in the second half) and inevitably scored an equaliser after masses of sustained pressure. Then it was extra time where honours were just about even and so it came to the ‘curse of penalties’ Italy scored from three of their five penalties but the young English team missed three of theirs (cruelly, all of the young black players) and so Italy won 3-2 on penalties. If the truth be known, Italy were probably the better team and deserved to win – if England had got through on penalties then perhaps ‘the wrong team might have won‘ as happened in the Italy-Spain match. What is particularly disappointing is the undercurrent of vile racist abuse thrown in the direction of our younger black players via social media. Actually, what I remember of the Brexit campaign is that in last few days, Europe was hardly mentioned but there was much talk of potential immigration from Turkey which happens to be Muslim and to be a neighbour of Syria (home of Middle East terrorists). The wider point here is whether there is a deep underbelly of racism within British society which manifests itself in all kinds of ways whoever there is an opportunity. Our chiropodist called today to do our feet and she showed us some of the vile racist tweets that a friend of her’s had forwarded on to her – and I must say, I was shocked beyond all measure at the vituperative and crude messaging doing the rounds. Can social media deal with this problem, I ask myself?
Meg and I were a little late going down into town today and we thought we would pop into Waitrose to have our normal coffee. These plans were put into disarray when some of the friendly Waitrose staff informed us that the cafe was closed and likely to remain so for about a fortnight (‘staff shortages’ was the official reason but it makes you wonder whether because the pick-up of trade was so low that it might never re-open as it used to be). We bumped into one of our park friends who often scoots around in her wheelchair and asked for her recommendation as to which coffee bar to frequent in the absence of Waitrose. We were directed to one which evidently put post-pandemic precautions in place because there were perplex screens permanently screwed into place between each table appear to be in its own carousel as it were. So we treated ourself to (expensive) coffee and cakes after which I shot off into town to get a cheque entered into the system at Santander and to pick up some plastic decorative plot dividers from Poundland (quaintly called ‘Georgian’) but a bit less naff than this description indicates. They are actually very effective at demarcating one area of a plot from another and I have used them to stop the rhubarb from drooping over onto or lawn.
After lunch our chiropodist called and we always enjoy having a chat (mainly about football as you might imagine but also about family matters that we share with each other). Immediately my feet were done and received their MOT, I popped into our local Asda superstore because they were still selling three bags of blue slate clippings for £9 and three bags of compost for £10. I had intended to ask Asda to supply a lusty young man to help to carry things into the boot of the car but I was fortunate enough to get one of those ‘high loading ‘ trolleys into which I could load the clippings quite easily, get them into the car and then load up with compost. I managed to do within the time allocation (umpublicised) whereby you can exit the car park without charge. I think it is about 10 minutes ‘loading time’ that is allowed but nobody seems to know what the exact limit is. When I got home, I dumped this lot outside the back gate and then after we had our tea, used a set of wheels I had to take take my purchases to the top of Mog’s Den. From here, there was a certain degree of humping to get them down the slope and ready for use.
Today Boris Johnson announced the ‘end’ of lockdown from next Monday, July 19th. All ‘optimistic’ talk of ‘Liberation day’ has been quietly forgotten and we are now being urged by the government to use use facemasks ‘when the situation demands and at our own discretion’. All legal sanctions have been withdrawn (to the delight of the Tory right wing, I imagine), although The Observer poll published yesterday showed that over one half of the UK public feels unhappy about the threats posed to us by too rapid a loosening of the lockdown.
Today was a ‘chewy’ kind of day but not without its compensations. I had been phoned up yesterday by our GP practice who indicated that one of their GPs needed to have a telephone consultation with me concerning some of the results from the recent array of blood tests I had taken. I sat by my phone at the appointed time but was eventually contacted some 40 minutes later and had an inconclusive consultation in which it was indicated that they wanted to see me ‘in the flesh’ either later on this morning (which I couldn’t manage) or some time tomorrow. I refuse to be worried excessively by such things but evidently some alarm bells are being rung somewhere and we shall see what transpires. The upshot of all of this was that Meg and I couldn’t get our ‘normal’ walk in down to the park so we decided to take the car into town, pick up our newspapers and then make our way to the park for a bit if a walk and our elevenses (Waitrose being out of action for about a fortnight, so we were told yesterday). When we got to the park we were dismayed that parking was incredibly difficult. Anticipating the end of lockdown, no doubt, and with the school holidays imminent, a fair-ground was setting up its machinery for its big rides and so on. Are hoop-la stalls only a distant memory, I ask myself? Evidently, we had not exposed to anything like this since the 484 days that this blog has been written and the fairground suppliers must have been chomping at the bit to get their act up and running as soon as possible. So we had roadways blocked off, other ones being resurfaced and general mayhem but we managed to locate a parking place and eventually made our way to our normal watering hole. There we met a husband-and-wife pair who are one of the park regulars but they had been on holiday to Cornwall so we had not seen them for about a fortnight or so. We had a pleasant chat and then proceeded off home, having to rely upon the good nature of another car-owner without whose assistance we would have been blocked in by fairground vehicles before making it home for a quick turnaround ready for Pilates. The Pilates went ahead with the normal four of us (one in each corner of the room) and we had our normal jolly banter before it was home for a delayed lunch.
This afternoon, I had a little border-laying project in mind to get done. I have a little curving path in Mog’s Den but it needs a border of some kind so that the forest bark does not constantly impinge. I had previously bought a log-roll (little pine staves attached to each other by wire) and this has the advantage of being able to be shaped around curves. However, it needs some ‘legs’ to get the whole thing sunk into the ground. So I prepared four ‘legs’ (which involved sawing a couple of 80cm staves so that I finished off with 4 x 40cm staves) each with a point on. I then screwed the log-roll onto the legs which fortunately went very smoothly as the pilot screws were easy to make in the fairly soft pine of the log-roll and I happened to have some very high quality 60mm ‘Spax’ screws which screwed in quite easily and then made a perfect fix. After that, it was a fairly simple job to make some guide holes (of almost exactly the same shape using another of my 80 cm staves, of which I always have some ready for use) and a progressive hammering down with a small lump hammer until all was finally in position – and looking good as well. I am not a natural wood-worker (not having had male relatives to guide me who young or the benefits of woodworking in my boy’s grammar school) but over the years I have learned the importance of both pilot holes and also the highest quality of screws (which, if they are well designed, have a thread making them easy to screw in but with excellent fixing power)
I heard in the background that every single one of the nine water and sewerage companies in the UK had failed to meet the environmental standards set for them by the regulator and discharge of sewerage into our rivers was now rife. Channel 4 news to which I had been listening in the backgound approached representatives of the water companies, and the regulator (OfWat) and finally the Environment Agency for a comment on this situation but in every single case there was ‘no-one’ available to give a comment on this situation. One has to ask what is the point of regulators and agencies if they are so much in league with the people they are meant to be policing that they refuse to be interviewed – or to be democratically accountable. Tonight, as well, the Tories have passed the legislation allowing them to cut the overseas aid budget which will will result in a large loss of life and lack of opportunities for women. Theresa May lead the ‘rebellion’ but the rebels were outvoted.
As the day dawned, there was not a cloud in the sky and we knew that we in at the start of a period of high pressure which is going to remain stationery over the British Isles for the next few days. As we had nothing particularly pressing this morning apart from updating our Waitrose order and the weather was so fine, we allowed ourselves the luxury of lingering in the back garden (and Mog’s Den of course) to assess which flowers and plants are doing particularly well this year. After some rain but also some warm days then the garden is at its finest so we took a lot of enjoyment lingering over various plants. For example, there is a beautiful little shrub with a host of ruby-red flowers called ‘Penstemmon‘. A small plant was sold to us by a friendly trader down in Bromsgrove some years ago. The ‘Penstemmon‘ has now spread to about a yard wide and a year deep so I may be able to detach part of it and start off a new clump elsewhere. Eventually, Meg and I started on our walk – I left Meg on one of the ‘top’ benches which overlooks the rest of the park whilst I went off to collect our newspapers. But Meg was soon joined by a mutual friend and I was pleased that Meg had that little bit of company and then we struck off for home.We had a salad type lunch which was easy to prepare – just as well as I needed to leave the house just after 2.00 for a doctor’s appointment (rare these days)
After I had been to the doctor’s for a series of checkovers (generally OK) I popped into our local Asda primarily to see if they had a gardening section and specifically if they had any seeds. I had in mind to buy some Swiss or Ruby Chard as they look colourful and grow well in the shade (of Mog’s Den) but Asda had hardly any seeds at all. But I did pick up a couple of rectangular vegetable troughs which were being sold off at a discounted price of £2.00 and then got home and treated myself to a low alcohol lager. Then I started a major task that I had set myself for the day which was to attack the mountain of weeds (brambles, nettles and other lovelies) which I needed to chop up into 8″ size portions and then bag them. As our brown (i.e. garden waste bins) are being emptied tomorrow morning, then today was an ideal opportunity to attempt to attack the pile of weeds and get them disposed of tomorrow morning. In the event, I managed to fill about five sacks and then these got disposed of via our own and neighbour’s bins – this has got most of the job done but there is still about one quarter of the total to be finished off in the morning. I must admit that the combination of thick and long brambles on the one hand and the slimy branches on the lower layers makes this a most unpleasant task but thankfully it will soon be over. In the middle of the afternoon, my plant arrived – a heavily discounted pussy willow which is about a metre and a half tall and which will not get any taller but should get bushier and eventually give us a display of lots of pussy willow catkins. Once the old vegetation had been removed, I shall be moving into the more pleasant phases of finishing off Mog’s Den. Basically,I need to put my planters in place (hardly an arduous task), fill them with a mixture of compost and topsoil (again, not a difficult job) and then sit back and wait for a few more of my ordered plants to arrive to populate the planters. I am of a mind to make the smallest of vegetable gardens near the beets and I thought I might transplant a bit of mint from another section of the garden and then sow some coriander seeds (or even get a complete coriander plant from a local supermarket)
Earlier today, I had called in to see how my two neighbours were doing health wise. My immediate next door neighbour is recovering from a heart procedure undertaken last Monday and my other neighbour is recovering somewhat, from the stroke she suffered last week. The family has been given precious little information and, in truth, the MRI scan was only done yesterday – a positive sign is that our neighbour can walk with some physiotherapists’ assistance. Then it looks as though she might go to a specialist unit which helps both to rehabilitate stroke sufferers and also gives the opportunity for longer term assessments to be made.
The government’s ‘mask’ policy seems to be in some disarray tonight. Although, in theory, all legal constraints will disappear on Monday next, ins practice many organisations (Transport for London for one) are insisting on their use.Tonight, more than 1,000 scientists sign letter urging 19 July to be postponed as they accuse government of pursuing ‘herd immunity by mass infection’
We knew that today everything would run a little later than normal. For a start, we had our Waitrose delivery which all had to be put away. Then we received a fairly long telephone call which we were not really expecting and this all conspired to delay us. So Meg and I decided to take our car down into town today. I must say that I had an ulterior motive because having picked up our newspapers, I was keen to visit a store called Broad Street DIY (formerly Broad Street Hardware) This is the kind of store to which all the local plumbers, decorators and jobbing builders will make their first port of call because it will nearly always have the specialised ‘thingamobobs‘ that they need in their day-to-day work. The particular attraction for me is that they always have a collection of wood offcuts outside the door. In particular, they typically have several staves which are 4cm square by 80cm long and with a goodly point put on them. As such they are can be used to secure large shrubs, small trees and goodness knows what else. I can only speculate what other people use them for but apart from their gardening uses, with a notch in the side to accommodate a rope they could no doubt be used as a guy rope to tie down a tarpaulin. The next time I go to Broad Street DIY I must ask them what other people typically use them for. Whilst I was there, I bought some coriander and mint seeds (about which more later) and some of those nice hefty rubble sacks much beloved of builders – but why are they always bright blue and never green I ask myself? We then went to the park and bumped into our amazingly energetic 87-year old who regularly walks at least 7km a day at a fair old pace as well. We exchanged tips (well observations, really) how to keep on going and going into one’s advanced years. One can’t always say that exercise is the elixir of life as one of my mathematics colleagues at De Montfort University in Leicester dropped dead of a heart attack whilst jogging – and he was only in his 30’s as well.
After lunch and a customary doze, I knew that I had to complete the project that I had set myself for the afternoon which was to finally despatch the remains of the chopped-down-but-decaying vegetation to our brown bin. Everything had to be chopped into about 8″ pieces first and the bottom of the heap was rather a slimy (and slug-infested) mess to which I was not looking forward. However, Miggles the cat came along to receive her mid-afternoon treat, have a drink of water, jump on my lap for a stroke and a fondle and finally jump off my lap to supervise the rest of my afternoon’s activities. I had intended to start on a job to put a brick edging down the side of my curving path in Mog’s Den but time rather ran away with me and I got diverted into ‘doing something’ about a scrubby piece of sloping land. I have a sort of plan for this will come to fruition tomorrow. At the very top, I have put some of my ‘push in’ plastic fencing to stop detritus rolling down the hill after a heavy rainfall. Then I have cut a narrow trench into which I am going to ‘peg’ a piece of board purchased from the hardware store this morning and just about the length I need. Then I am going to put in a little bit of willow fencing (courtesy of ‘Poundland’) and in the reclaimed area I am going to put two vegetable troughs with basil in one and coriander in the other. Finally, I have a bit off bare earth without any evident use but I suddenly decided to try and transplant some mint from elsewhere in the garden. But when I went to explore where I knew I had some mint growing, the mint plants have been rather overrun by a holly hedge and not helped by an absence of rain water, nutrients and sunshine. But there are some individual little mint plants so I think by the time they are rescued, transplanted and get more some light, fertiliser, watering and a bit of TLC, I may have another mint bed in operation. They say that mint spreads like wildfire but I must say I have never been so successful with it. However, what has emerged in Mog’s Den, in a type of unplanned way, is a miniature herb and veg garden and I am hopeful that in the fullness of time, I will manage to dash out of the kitchen and cut a handful of mint, basic or coriander whenever I need them. I also intend to eat the beet leaves this year as well as the globe roots themselves which are, of course, incredibly good for you.
Another day dawns but the news from the continent appears to be terrible with, as I blog, over 120 dead and 1,300 people missing across Germany and Belgium. The fine weather which we are having is due to a high pressure system over the British Isles – but this so called ‘blocking high’ makes low pressure systems bounce of it and hence there has been a huge low pressure system locked over Germany and Belgium which has resulted in huge floods. Although the local population are used to flooding periodically, the suddenness and ferocity of the rainstorms has taken everybody by surprise. Although one should not jump automatically to conclusions, this extreme weather pattern allied with what is happening in Canada, the USA, Japan does lead one to conclude that climate change is ultimately responsible. Whilst the loss of life is terrible beyond all measure, this might be a ‘wake up’ call for Europe as a whole so suddenly we may see massive political pressure for changes at a societal level.
We were a bit slow getting going this morning, for reasons a bit difficult to explain. If Meg and I wake up between 5.30 and 6.00 we pop downstairs and make a cup of tea and in no time at all, we have slept for another two hours and suddenly we are running late. We walked down into the park this morning but one could sense the weather was getting hot, hot, hot and we were actually quite pleased to seek out the shade of the trees in the park. We did have a brief conversation with one of our park ‘regulars’ and she chatted with Meg whilst I went off to collect our newspapers – but she was keen, understandably to seek out the shade again once I had returned form the newsagents. So Meg and I were quite keen to get back home reasonably quickly as I was going to have a telephone consultation with one of the practice nurses at 2.00pm and we needed to lunch before hand. She actually phoned up at 1.45 when I had just dished up our meal but fortunately was not on the phone for too long.
This afternoon was scheduled to be lawn-cutting day and everything ran to plan, although I was a little late starting. When this had been completed, I carried on with my mini-construction work in Mog’s Den. Today, all I had time to do was to peg a board into position to help to mitigate the effects of the sloping ground. Then I enriched the very poor soils with some spare compost I had in a bag – at least I think it was compost! Into this I sowed my mint seed and I have to say that mint seed is about the finest seed must be the finest and smallest seed it is possible to imagine. One sprinkled it into the ground rather than sowing it as otherwise it would disappear beyond trace. Tomorrow, I have in mind the last major bit of ‘heavy’ work in Mog’s Den but not incredibly heavy in the scale of things. I am going to scrape off about 2″ of soil from the last remaining ‘bare’ area. Then I have two half -size paving slabs to put in place – they are probably only about 45cm square so they should cause no particular problem. I have a little bit of builders sand left over which will help to ‘seat’ them nicely. I have decided to leave them 1-2 cm proud of the surrounding area on his occasion but I have some blue slate chippings to surround them and when all is done, the completed surface should be completely level.
The COVID-19 news this evening seems terrible to me. Yesterday, there were 51,870 new cases and 49 more deaths and all of this only three days before the so-called ‘Liberation Day’ on Monday next. The Chief Medical Officer is now saying that we are in for a ‘scary’ time. The ‘R’ number is between 1.2 and 1.3 and the latest wave is showing about a third increase over the week. Something like 57% of the population admit to feeling anxious about the end to the lockdown next Monday and 64% of the population are going to carry on wearing face masks even from Monday onwards. Travel to and from France its looking increasingly problematic – not exactly France being moved from amber to red but nonetheless people returning from France must now quarantine themselves. This may well effect tends of thousands of people and the government has done little to prepare the population for this. Of course, there is a massive trade-off going on here but put at its crudest, it is non-lockdown for some businesses (like pubs) but at the expense of an increasingly large number of infections some of them leading to death (or an unspecified number of long COVID cases) As the great social theorist R H Tawney remarked several decades ago ‘Freedom for the shark equals death for the minnow‘ and whilst not being exactly zoologically correct, the sentiment surely applies to what we see unfolding before us at the moment.
The hot weather continues – today has clocked in at 29°-30° which is in the mid 80’s F. Knowing that the weather was going to very hot today, I reversed my normal routines and decided to garden in the morning and collect my newspapers afterwards. Today was the last day in which I was going to do anything approaching ‘heavy’ construction work. But the first job I had to do was to get some willow edging by the side of my curving path. I found the easiest way to accomplish this was to make a narrow and deep slit with a long bladed spade. I then inserted the willow edgings and hammered them in using a block of wood. But what started out straight finished off being a little bit wavy but I did not have the heart to pull them out and start all over again. Then I started on my major task which involved removing about 2″ of soil from a section about two yards long by one yard wide. This having been, I then deployed my last remnants of builders sand (that is one fewer sack left hanging around), seated the three flags I had managed to rescue from other parts of the garden and did some final bits of levelling up. I then filled the interstitial spaces with some blue slate clippings recently purchased from Asda. Actually, this was quite a fine one with somewhat smaller pieces and I must say the smaller pieces made the finishing job easier as well as being aesthetically more pleasing. So overall, I was quite pleased with my morning work although you can always perceive the imperfections. The rest of the family who were busy enjoying their elevenses even descended down the tortuous series of steps and cast a judgement on the overall finished product. From now on, it should be just a pleasant job to put my planters into position, fill them with a mixture of topsoil and compost and populate them. I am going to put the recently arrived pussy willow in a particular corner plot and tomorrow plant my hydrangea (recently purchased) in one and plant some ‘Penstemmon‘ (split from a large mother plant) in the other.
I walked down the park on my own, hugging the shaded areas (Meg gave our walk a miss not feeling too well this morning) There I encountered our University if Birmingham friend and another of our park regulars – we had a fairly long and quite a deep discussion about how we had overcome particular problems in the course of our lives. One thing is sure and that is we are going to regard ‘Freedom Day’ next Monday with a kind of fascinated horror. None of us feel in the slightest bit ‘liberated’ and in practice the rate of infection is now 54,674 which is a 5.4% increase over the day before. The WHO is regarding what is going in the UK as a terrible experiment as basically we are trying to achieve herd immunity by allowing the virus to let rip amongst the younger, not yet vaccinated part of the population. Tonight, we learn that the Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, has tested positive for the virus even though he had already received both is vaccine jabs. He has reported is symptoms as ‘mild’ but the interesting question is to work how many other people, including the PM, were in his near vicinity within the last few days. Another unintended and unanticipated consequence of letting the virus ‘rip’ is that the ‘Test and Trace‘ app is now ‘pinging’ more and more people requesting that they self isolate. This is having major effects of the staffing of some of our utilities – for example, London’s Metropolitan line has been suspended and East Yorkshire bus services have been cancelled and some private sector employers are reported to have major difficulties with staff shortages. There has been talk of making the app a little less response by tweaking the software but so far, these calls have been resisted.
I think that tomorrow’s Sunday newspapers are going to provide a fascinating read. Boris Johnson, the great libertarian and populist, is now in a position where the majority of people think that progressing with the lockdown will be unsafe, two thirds of us will still carry on wearing face mask and the infection rate is soaring. We now have a situation where much of the UK population is doing what it can to protect itself without feeling ‘liberated’ and whilst the right wing of the Tory Party may appear to show some delight, did they anticipate the way in which the ‘Test and Trace‘ app will create so many problems for employers? The question is whether the Sunday Times is still going to support the government or whether they will throw their weight behind some reformulation of policy (otherwise knows as a ‘U’ turn)
The hot weather continues today and we knew from the start that we were going to be in for a scorcher – or as the famous comedian Harry Enfield used to say when presenting a weather forecast from a generally hot country, it was a case of ‘Scorchio’ all over the place. I walked down to our newsagents early on as I normally do on a Sunday but sometimes the newsagent is shut for 5-10 minutes and so it was this morning, Whilst waiting outside, I noticed that the newsagents had to post various messages warning schoolboys from the local school against the pilfering that had evidently taken place when a crowd of them had entered the shop. This sort of adolescent behaviour is not unknown in sweet shops particularly of the smaller variety with Asian proprietors (who are seen as fair game?) I suspect that what happens is a group of schoolboys enter the shop and whilst one is making a legitimate purchase and the shopowners attention is diverted then other members of the crowd help themselves. So now once the headmaster of the school and the police had been informed, it was just a case of reminding any would be miscreants that their faces might be recorded on CCTV. I spent a few minutes with the Asian proprietor, commiserating with him over his troubles and hoped that he had nipped the problems in the bud. Then it was a walk home and a viewing of the Andrew Marr show (who should have had Sajiv Javid as a guest but we had a substitute as the Health Minister himself is having to self isolate for at least 10 days) After this, we were prepared to walk down to the park, which we did complete with suitable head gear as the temperature must have been approaching the 30° mark by now. In the park, we were delighted to meet with our University of Birmingham friend and another mutual regular and we spent some time chewing over the immediate political situation and how the pandemic response was likely to develop. Then we were joined by another of our regular park-walking couples and we exchanged views over the best ( and the worst) of low alcohol and other forms of beer about which we are rather fantasising in the heat. Then it was homeward bound and a case of rescuing the Sunday roast from the slow cooker and preparing the meal for our Sunday lunch -although the hot weather certainly plays its part in depressing your appetite.
After lunch, it was a question of getting some plants in position in Mog’s Den now that the construction work has been done. The first thing I wanted to plant was my ‘pussy willow’ but in its preferred location I had to abandon my plans as the roots from a neighbouring silver birch (which we planted about a decade ago) ran transversely across my preferred spot. So I put in a Hydrangea which I bought from Asda a few days ago but I intend to give this one some special treatments (which I happen to have in stock) to turn it bright blue – as they often are at the seaside. One of the special treatments is to add ‘Sulphate of Iron’ (of which I just happen to have a supply in stock) but I also think that Epsom salts and a few rusty nails might be called for, I had better consult the web to see if I can find a few gardener’s tricks to help me in this venture. Then I went ahead and planted my pussy willow in one of the tubs I had bought earlier (and ensured that it had drain holes) and I am hopeful that if all goes well, I should have a showy display of catkins at the end of next winter and in the early spring. Finally, I split the Penstemmon that I have in another part of the garden and I trust that this will grow and multiply and provide a perennial splash of colour. So basically, I had got the planting done that I needed to do and all that remained was to give several good waterings (which I did immediately, of course) and several other times in the course of a very hot evening.
In the early evening, the rooms inside the house were so unbreakably hot (timber framed houses like ours are famed for preserving heat) that the whole family retreated to the outside to savour some of the cooler air of the evening. We regaled ourselves with some stories from the joint family holidays we have held together in various regions of Spain – for one reason or another, these have not always worked out well. For example, we spent one family holiday in Barcelona but our son had an incredibly bad episode with his back and spent most the holiday on the bedroom floor. Our daughter-in-law helped me to identify one of the plants which is growing particularly well in Mog’s Den but which we can’t identify. The phone app identified it as ‘Chinese privet’ but we think it may well be a Forsythia. A close examination of the leaves (and its probable parent) tomorrow might help to identify it.
Today I needed to make an early start because I needed to be at our local Health Centre for (another) routine check – eyes this time. That seems to have gone OK apart from the fact that drops are put in your eyes that expands the pupils which means that driving is not an option. I then took the opportunity to pop into Asda to collect a few things that only Asda sells, then went down the High Street In Bromsgrove to pick up some cosmetics products, called in at the newsagents to collect the daily ration of newspapers and finally popped into Waitrose to pick up some wine, beer and ‘party food’. When we saw our immediate next door neighbours the other day, we invited them round to share either a beer or a cup of tea with us in the garden at 3.00pm this afternoon. It was a question of seizing the moment, actually, because the fine weather will not go on for ever and our neighbour has a part-time employment during the week and is seeing his own family at the weekends. So it was rather a question of ‘now or never’- any way our neighbours came around and we had a really pleasant couple of hours discussing neighbourly type things such as the improvements we have made to our various gardens and our little projects for the future. As our parasol shade had been nibbled to bits by the local, hungry mice whilst stored in the garage, we had to relocate our garden table and chairs into the shade provided by the leas of the house. But we had a wonderful time, particularly as I treated our neighbours to a zero alcohol beer provided by Waitrose where the brewers have performed a magnificent job in keeping practically all of the flavour of a conventional beer whilst removing all of the alcohol. After our neighbours had left, I spent a certain amount of time in the late afternoon creating drainage holes in the last of the (plastic) oak-barrel shaped planters I had acquired recently. Making drainage holes is actually s little complicated as first I make a small pilot hole with a bradawl, then widen it with a small hand-drill, then widen it a bit further using a large heavy duty screwdriver and finally finish off by using a pair of small utilitarian scissors in which I keep the blades shut but a circular motion which actually widen my drainage holes to the desired aperture size.
Considering that this is the first day of ‘Freedom’ when all (or nearly all) of the pandemic restrictions have been removed, the images and messages have been as mixed as they come. One could expect that the TV crews would be present at night clubs where at 1 minute past midnight, everyone could in theory enjoy themselves and there were lots of shots of throngs of teenagers singing, dancing (and no doubt exhaling billions pf particles of virus) Meanwhile, the night club staff themselves were all masked up! I heard some ‘vox pop’ from the city of Leicester where the virus has struck particularly hard and no doubt to give a sense of balance, we had one interview with a boutique owner who had thrown away her mask and hoped it would never return (‘because it made you look as though you were ill’) and another with a local barber who was going to wear a mask himself and was going to insist on it for all of his customers (because he was frightened of the potential of the virus to bounce back) The confusing messaging continues apace.Whilst nightclub owners might have been filled with joy on Day 1 of their ‘liberation’ their joy would have been short-lived as the government announced that from the end of September all entrants to nightclubs and other crowded spaces would have to show evidence of having been vaccinated twice. What are the manpower implications of policing all of this, I ask myself? Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has announced (from Chequeurs, where he is self-isolating) that all critical care workers will not to have self isolate after being ‘pinged’ by the Test and Trace App but presumably they will have to give themselves a ‘Lateral Flow’ test every day. The Americans are advising their citizens that none should consider visiting the UK as the rate of infections is now so high. It looks as though the UK infection rate is one of the highest in the world and is mainly amongst the young, unvaccinated portion of the population. The infection rates are somewhat alarming – approx 45,000-50,000 per day (which is 10x. the USA incidence) and this rate may rise to as much as 100,000 now the end of lockdown has occurred. The one saving grace is that the rate of new infections is rising extremely rapidly, the rate of admission to hospitals whllst increasing rapidly, are at a lower rate than when the pandemic was raging.
The heatwave continues – can one have too much of a good thing? In about 2-3 days time, the heatwave may break down in a series of thunderstorms and I think we can’t wait until this happens. We got some of our daily jobs done and then decided to take the car into town and treat ourselves to a coffee and a pastry in Waitrose. I have been looking at the display of flowers and plants stocked outside the store and eventually, I was tempted by a fuchsia which advertised itself as a hardy variety and goes by the magnificent name of Alice Hoffman. Looking at prices on the web, I think that the Waitrose price of £6.50 is quite reasonable so I have given this pride of place immediately outside our back door. We do have a large earthenware pot outside but the sunflower we had planted in there failed miserably and so I was delighted to give it a good home. I made sure that it had a good soil preparation of ‘Blood, Fish and Bone‘ (my fertiliser of choice, being completely organic) Now that Mog’s Den is all ‘gardened up’, I am now at the stage where I can do little things to tidy up the overall. Today, I found an innovative way to hang a series of miniature garden tools which I use constantly down in the den. These miniature tools were sold in the hardware section of Aldi sone years ago and I find them to be excellent. They are designed to be children’s versions of adult tools so they are generally about one third size of these and I would estimate one tenth of the weight their adult-counterpart. Why I like them so much is that as lightweight and miniature tools, they can be operated one-handed. Anyway, I have a small triangular spade, rake, lawn rake, brush and shovel and I have got them either hanging off garden fence and cunningly hidden in my little ‘wood store’ of staves and useful timber so that it is almost impossible to discern they they are there- this makes them accessible and also concealed so that the whole site appears to be much less cluttered. After we returned home after our Waitrose repast, it was already quite late so we did not allow ourselves a walk in the park so we came straight home. As it was so very hot inside the house, our appetites were well and truly depressed and we made do with a hearty bowl of soup followed by a choc-ice (Waitrose produce them in packs of eight and they are excellent)
After the completion of the external work on Mog’s Den, I now have another great project in life which might take months to achieve. That is, I want to do a radical de-cluttering and throwing away of the surplus ‘stuff’ accumulated over the years. When I recall the last four houses in which I have lived (including this one) then the following pattern emerges – 14 years, 10 years, 11 years, 13 years. You can see that there is an evident pattern here in that I have moved house on average once every 12 years and, of course, when you move, you throw away an awful lot of stuff you have accumulated over the years and never actually used. When we moved from Bromsgrove to Hampshire, I think we filled three skip fulls and I can honestly say that I have never missed anything that got thrown away. The obvious place to start is on my collection of academic books and doing a quick count of one shelf followed by a multiply, I suspect that I have over 500 books accumulated over the course of a teaching career. I did make some enquiries as to whether I could find a ‘good home’ for some of these rather than consigning them to landfill and I did find one organisation that would have taken them all – but only after I had catalogued them and given full bibliographical details on each one. As this would take at least 40 hours of continuous work, I think you can see why I never got round to it. Apart from books, though, I am trying to reduce clutter wherever I find it (which is all over) but I probably need to spend at least one hour a day for months to get to where I want to be.
In the late afternoon, I engaged in a little horticultural experiment. I have discovered in my collection of vegetable seeds some dwarf beans and some sugar snap peas. These are beyond the stated date on the back of the manufacturer’s packet so I have filled a couple of yogurt pots with five seeds in each. With a bit of TLC and some regular watering and observation, I may strike lucky. Certainly, the beet seeds I sowed about eight days ago are now showing through, so I am just waiting for them to grow large enough to thin out to about one per inch.
Today we were determined to keep on where we left off last night so we carried on with a spate of tidying up and and de-cluttering of the house. The only trouble is that in my zeal I have ‘put’ my newly acquired Philips razor in such a safe place that I cannot now found it so I am having to fall back on a trusty old reliable which is past its best but at least it works. Then our plan was to walk down to Waitrose, treat ourselves to a coffee, pick up our newspapers and have a gentle stroll back. However the ‘best laid plans of mice and men‘ as the Scottish poet Robbie Burns would have said – by chance we bumped into two best friends who live down the hill and they had just come back from giving their grand-daughter a walk in her buggy. As we had a lot of news to catch up on, we all repaired to their delightful back garden for an impromptu ‘chin wag’. Actually, we had a lot of news to impart of one sort or another, including some medical investigations that I am going to have performed on me in about eight days time so I will issue a communiqué on that later on. We must have spent the best part of an hour and a half chatting about this and that and drinking some lovely ice-cold drinks. In this very hot weather, we are all finding that we are taking every excuse to keep ourselves well hydrated – and even the plants in the pots need a drink of water some 2-3 times a day.
After we had walked home very much in the heat of the day, we had a fairly prompt lunch as I knew that I needed to get into town to visit one of the local banks before about 3.30 in the afternoon (when branches tend to shut) Our little group of houses are formed into a Resident’s Association and we manage our own financial affairs (which is just principally maintaining the communal Klargester BioDisc system and the surrounding roadways). We have a business account with a local bank (HSBC actually) and have had reasonably good service from them for the last ten years. But now under the latest banking regulations, we have to prove who we say we are and this is proving problematic. Our treasurer has been hanging on the phone for 40 minutes with the message ‘All our operatives are busy at the moment but your call is important to us..etc. So having drawn a blank, he passed the torch over to me and I too had a 40 minute wait without success. We decided that I would call in at the branch to see if I could get anyone to sort us out – difficult as the local branch does not handle business accounts any more but we might be able to use their private lines to get through to the unit that wishes to check our credentials. When I got into the bank I was confronted with a row of self-service machines but absolutely no staff anywhere in evidence. But then I saw a notice to say that owing to staff shortages they would not have anyone available after 2.30 in the afternoon and please come back at 9.00 tomorrow. So that was an absolutely wasted journey but I took the opportunity to pick up our newspapers and buy some ‘good’ ice-cream from Waitrose. I say ‘good’ ice-cream because all of the shelves had been stripped bare of conventional ice-cream leaving only the specialist ice-creams to be bought.
After I got home and put my purchases away and then looked around for my mobile phone which I could not find anywhere. Trying desperately not to panic, a thorough search (including the car) did not reveal a positive result. In desperation, I telephoned Waitrose to see if my phone had been left there and handed in but this drew a blank. I thought of telephoning my own number only to receive a ringing tone (nowhere inside the house) and a message that the number was not available. At this stage, my son intervened – his solution was to stand right outside my car and call my mobile. With great delight I can say that we both heard it ring – my phone had evidently slipped out of my pocket and fallen down the gap between the two front seats where even the bright red of the case barely revealed its existence. The feelings of despair if you have ever lost your mobile phone are hard to exaggerate. It is not just the voice calls that one receives (very few in my case) but the text messaging is vital from all kinds of agencies, particularly the medical and health related ones who use it to give appointment details. Also, to access many bank and savings accounts these days, the mobile is used to send an OTP (OneTime Password) to access a particular account so your mobile suddenly has become completely indispensable.
Every so often I get up early and whilst the temperature is comparatively cool, I review my finances, including savings plans and saving ‘pots’. So I spent an hour or so this morning getting things in order to my satisfaction. Then it was breakfast, a shower, (and ditto for Meg) and then we walked down to the park together. Instead of throwing away yesterday’s Guardian, I have started to take it with me so that having parked Meg on one of our favourite benches and partaken of our coffee she can read it. Then I pop off and get today’s newspapers. Upon my return it was a fairly leisurely stroll home and lunch – except it was so hot we just made one of our favourite mélange of tinned fruit (apricots), yogurt, ice cream and a drizzle of honey. We felt that we would be better to leave our main cooked meal until this evening, which indeed we did.
This afternoon, my much delayed consignments of extra plants arrived from the online company. I have purchased a Buddleia which I know is almost a weed-like plant (think of railway sidings) but this particular one is somewhat unusual in that the horticulturalists maintain that they have grafted three colours of Buddleia onto a common rootstock. I suppose these are white, pink and purple so we will have to see if it fulfils its promise.I made a little wigwam of canes to support it as one or two of the fronds had suffered a bit in transit but overall, it looked in pretty good condition. Then I had ordered two more little bulbs that were almost thrown in as an afterthought and were being sold off for £1.00 each. One of these was an miniature orange canna lily which, I must admit, I have never actually seen before. The other was an orange peony and, as before, I have never actually seen an orange peony before either. Having got these three plants planted, I had three more little tasks to perform. One was to put some sulphate of iron around the roots of my recently planted hydrangea. In theory, this ought to turn the whole plant into a really vivid shade of blue (such as you often see by the seaside) Whether this works or not, only time will tell. The second little job was to adapt one of my staves such that I could add an additional support to one of the steps leading down into Mog’s Den which appeared to be slipping downhill a little. I have done this sort of task lots of time before and everything worked OK. The final little task was to transplant another bit of mint from a neglected part of the garden to my newly established mint bed. I then have just one more little seed sowing job in front of me. Whilst I was in Poundland the other day, I bought to my amazement (for £1.00) a packet contains six different type of spicy and aromatic herms i.e. Serrano Chilli, Coriander, Japanese Greens, Chilli Cayenne, Cinnamon Basil and finally Pak Choi (Chinese cabbage).I honestly cannot see many of these seeds germinating but if I get half a dozen plants from each variety of seed, the venture will have been well worth while.
There are two bits of COVID-19 news this evening. The first is that more than 600,000 people have been ‘pinged’ by the Test and Trace app in the last week and they therefore have to stay at home and self-isolate. This is creating mayhem in the economy with supermarkets being quite badly hit as delivery drivers are not available. The government is so worried about this and tonight they have published a list of sixteen sectors where fully vaccinated workers do not need to quarantine provided they also take a daily test which proves negative – and. these exemptions will only run to the 16th August in any case. Many different parts of the economy are being adversely affected tonight – but Test and Trace is only just doing its job and do we want to get on top of this pandemic or not? The second major areas concern is that rates of infection are now very high amongst the (unvaccinated) 20-29 year olds and some vaccination points are returning vaccine to their headquarters perhaps destined for ultimate destruction because not enough are. coming forward. to be vaccinated.
A Labour MP (Dawn Butler) has taken Boris Johnson to task for misleading the country. As she says:
I am disappointed that the prime minister has not come to the House to correct the record and to correct the fact that he has lied to this House and the country over and over again.
The deputy Commons speaker was asked repeatedly to withdraw her comments but she refused. She then had to withdraw for the rest of the day (actually only an hour as the Commons is going into recess for the summer) but Dawn Butler is unrepentant arguing that:
I have been thrown out of Parliament for saying what we all know: Boris Johnson has lied to the House of Commons and the country over and over again.
Under the rules of Parliamentary etiquette, one MP is not allowed to call another a liar so one must either withdraw the offending remark (even if true?) or be suspended from the House of Commons.
What a very strange day today has been! We spent some time chatting animatedly with our domestic help who had given us a miss last week as she was busy with family matters and had to give us a miss. Anyway, as soon as we could, we went off to town and the weather is just starting to moderate itself from a very hot and sticky heat to something a degree or so less but with breezes that are almost cooling. We knew that we had to get home and have a fairly rapid lunch because it was absolutely vital that I get down into the local branch of HSBC which I did by about 1.20. As we shall see, the timing is quite important here because I explained to one of the two staff on duty in the branch of the bank that I needed to get in touch with the HSBC Safeguarding team. I explained that both myself and the treasurer of our residents association had hung on the phone for about 40 minutes without making any contact and could they help. The local staff were fairly sympathetic and let me have access to a desk and a phone to telephone their HQ. All in all, I waited for about 25 minutes and then made contact with the Safeguarding team – this appears to be a big drive against money laundering, fraud, scams and other internet-based ills. I managed to convince the Safeguarding team of my bona fides but then needed to be put onto their internet banking team as myself and the treasurer had not used (or forgotten) our log-in details. This time, I was put on hold for about 40 minutes although, in theory, it was only a transfer from one department within HSBC to another. Eventually, though, I got through a real live person but again the staff member had to be called who had then to give of all of her codes to establish her identity as well as mine. The upshot of all of this was that I finished off with our little business account verified, my user-name communicated to us (as I set it up 12 years ago and not used it, I had forgotten it) and when I returned home, I would be sent a password through my email. Once I get this part done at home (and I haven’t tried it yet), I then need to get onto my account details and fill in an on-line questionnaire which, once completed, I have to print off on my own printer. Then I have to take this completed document back to the branch where they have to scan it using their own scanners and their own secure lines for transmission to their HQ. So we will have to see how all of this works out. All in all, I was in the branch office for 1½ hours and the staff joked with me that they would provide me with a bed if I needed one. I then had to race to my own bank to get some money out of the ATM (and this worked as it should have done). Finally, I had to go and get my Pilates session paid for by card – I had tried to set up an online payment system but as the bare sort code details and account number generated a Germanic sounding back name and my own bank informed me that the payee details were not recognised by this system, I decided that this might prove foolhardy to set up with ‘iffy’ details. Although I had paid for a couple of hours parking, I only had about two minutes of legitimate parking time so I had to sprint (well, walk briskly) to ensure I did not end up with a parking fine.
After I had had a smidgeon of a much delayed lunch (ice-cream based as usual) I popped round to see my next door neighbour with whom I had set up a little arrangement to have a chat over some issues. There are some matters of mutual concern to our two adjoining properties so we had a very useful discussion (lubricated by a wonderful bottle of cooled ‘Newcastle Brown‘ I must say)
Earlier on today, I just caught snatches of some of the opening ceremony from the Tokyo Olympic Games. My own personal feelings are that it is rather ridiculous to have the Olympic Games held with no audiences, a majority of the host community opposed to it and the possibility of the most massive of ‘super-spreader’ events. From the bit that I saw which was the cauldron lighting ceremony lit by a young Japanese athlete. This seemed incredibly tastefully done and I must say I was impressed by the simplicity and the elegance of it all. Whether my views of the Olympic Games will change over the next week or so it is hard to say – the whole could end in disaster if more than a small number of athletes actually do get infected with COVID-19.
The weather is evidently on the turn and when we woke up this morning, there was quite a breath of fresh air when we popped our noses out of the back door. There were occasional smatterings of rain throughout the early morning but not the prolonged and sustained downpour for which we had all been hoping. So we decided to make our journey down into town by car just in case the heavens opened – but as it happened, they did not. Having collected our newspapers, we then bumped into our University of Birmingham friend so we all dived into Waitrose to have our mid-morning coffee. As it happened, we had quite a lot to catch up on with various happenings throughout the week so we spent quite some time explaining the various things we have been up to in the last week. We explained that next week is going to be a little fraught for us because I have to Worcester for a COVID-19 test, then three days of isolation before I have some investigations performed on me next Friday. So I think the week ahead may be a little ‘chewy’ bit just has to be managed one day at a time.
In the afternoon, I spent a certain amount of time spreadsheeting some of our finances so that we could make some plans for the post COVID era. It looks as though our planned trip to Rome in late September is now looking more ‘on’ than ‘off’ and we have also an offer from the tour organiser to forgo one day’s vacation but to fly from Birmingham rather than Bristol. We will have to see, of course, whether Italy is still enforcing five days of quarantine to travellers from Britain but there is about seven weeks to go before the flight is scheduled to depart. The skies were still threatening a little this afternoon but I was determined to try to get the lawns cut before we left for church at 5.30 this afternoon. I was fortunate because although time was tight, I still managed to them cut in time. Then it was our customary attendance at church on a Saturday evening, Up until now, we have been having to book in for the service every week but now we have booked in the ‘last’ time as all of the data for this week will form the template for the weeks to come so the attendance record will ‘roll on’ week by week. Outside church, we managed to have a brief chat about the week ahead and they were not to be surprised if they didn’t see us as we have to self-isolate from Tuesday to Thursday.
It is being reported tonight that UK airports have been the busiest they have been since the start of the pandemic but the system of COVID-19 testing (or showing that you have been tested) is taking a wait of at least two hours. What is not clear is whether people are actually missing their flights because of these enforced delays or whether the airlines themselves are having to reschedule their flights. I suppose that it was fairly predictable that having been subject to pandemic restrictions for the best part of 500 days, people are desperate to get away particularly as the schools have just broken up. From the brief snatches of videotape I have seen, it looks as though airports might become a magnificent venue for the spread of the virus. Some members of the SAGE committee are showing their exasperation with the present government strategy. One of them broke ranks yesterday and argued strongly that the government attempting to generate herd immunity by letting the virus rip through younger sections of the population (20-29 year olds) by giving free reign to the nighttime economy of pubs and nightclubs was immoral. On the other hand, there is a glimmer of hope that the infection rate may have peaked and may just about be starting to fall consistently. The amazing thing is that the government is starting to lose its popularity but still seems to be ahead of the Labour party in the opinion polls.
Tomorrow should be an interesting day for us as we are meeting some old friends for a lunch date in Oxford (we will ‘sat-nav’ the restaurant to find it OK) I only hope that there are not devastating storms and floods because Hampshire, where we used to live, seems to have received a real battering since the hot weather broke down and the almost inevitable flooding now occurs. I must say the I am really looking forward to a period of prolonged rainfall – but I say this from the rather smug position of having all of my lawns cut, all my plants planted and the garden in generally good order and receptive to being trained upon!
Today was a different Sunday, as it turned out. I went and collected our newspapers and then, in place of the Andrew Marr show, I indulged myself in watching a bit of Olympics action. This was the concluding stages of the Women’s Road Bicycle Race and it turned out to be very exciting as a young, unknown Austrian rider broke away from the pack (45 kilometres out?) and eventually secured her gold medal as she built up an assailable lead. We had a lunch date in Oxford with two of our oldest friends so we set off in plenty of time, got parked in a reasonably secure location and then found our way to the restaurant. We had allowed ourselves plenty of ‘getting lost and parking time’ but still arrived at the restaurant a good half an hour early so we had a leisurely cup of coffee whilst we waited for our friends who turned up absolutely on time. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about so we had a good enjoyable chat. The restaurant was a Thai restaurant which our friends had used before and we enjoyed our food but there wasn’t very much of it. So we decided after lunch to have a coffee and a pastry in a different venue – that part of Oxford is stuffed full of interesting little cafes so it was no problem to find somewhere and carry on chatting. As has become customary between us, we exchanged some little gifts of home made produce – our friends gave us some of their own home-made honey which is always absolutely excellent and in turn we exchanged some of our damson gin which I suggested they do not drink as such but try as a flavouring in ice-cream or yogurt. I am told by some of the recipients of our damson gin that using it as a flavouring gives excellent results but that is something that we ourselves must try. And so it became time for us to part and we made good progress getting back to Bromsgrove in what seemed a very space of time (probably just over an hour)
When we got home, we had received a message from our gardener who we have about once every three weeks to see if he could come along to help to fix our ‘honeysuckle’ arch. Basically, this is a timber construction where the support posts have rotted at ground level. I am going to act as our gardener’s ‘gofer’ or at least a second pair of hands. The plan is to lay the honeysuckle flat on the ground, chop away the rotten parts of the support posts and then relocate them into the ground making the while structure lower than before. Then we will try to relocate the honeysuckle over the re-sited posts and the job will be done. All of this sounds so easy to do in theory but I wonder how it will work out in practice, I have some specialist post-setting concrete (purchased earlier) so I hope this has not degraded over time as I have stored it under the eaves of the house which is quite, but not absolutely dry. This job has got to get completed by the end of the morning as tomorrow afternoon I need to drive to the Worcester Royal Infirmary to have a COVID test before the investigations on me start on Friday.
In the early evening, the whole family (myself, Meg and our son and daughter-in-law) spent some time in the quiet of the evening talking about some of our knowledge of, and reminiscences, of the songs of the 1960’s. But a little bit of background is in order. Meg and I met at Manchester University in the mid 1960’s. The Faculty of Technology of the University (later to become its own University – UMIST) had its own Student Union facilities which was the whole of one floor (‘J’ floor) of a large Victorian building. There they had a folk singing evening every Sunday singing songs by ‘The Seekers‘, ‘Peter Paul and Mary‘ and singers of a similar ilk. Meg and I used to really enjoy these evenings and occasionally we were treated to songs sung by Anna Ford, the president of the Owens Student Union who later went on to have a distinguished career as an ITN newscaster. To supplement this picture, I then worked a cocktail barman in the only nightclub in Manchester called ‘Tiffany’s‘ They had a resident band with an unbelievably 1950’s name (‘Ross Mitchell and Les Nocturnes‘) However, they had two incredibly good female vocalists – Eve Graham (brunette) and Lynn Paul (blonde) who later became part of the ‘New Seekers‘ This group recorded the world famous ‘I’d like to teach the World to Sing’ and eventually represented the UK in 1972 in the Eurovision Song Context coming in at second! So that is the connection (in fact the only connection) that Meg and I have with the world of folk/popular singing – but that is why we know and remember some of these songs. I must confess to a particular liking for ‘Foggy Dew’ which is a traditional English song song first recorded in1959 but best known for the version by Roger Whitaker.
Today was the day when our gardener was going to call on us at 9.00am and, between us, we were going to repair the archway trellis, replete with a heavy honeysuckle, that had become both overgrown and also unstable as each of the supports had rotted at the point where it made contact with the soil. This proved to be a much more demanding – and heavy – job that either of us had anticipated. The first thing that had to be done was to give the honeysuckle a radical pruning and this took about an hour and was the easy part. Then we decided to dig (or rather dig out) four new fence post holes. Rather than using a thin narrow spade which is typically used in operations of this type, we used a specialised tool which I already happened to possess. This was an augur which is like a giant corkscrew and operates in a very similar fashion. If you are working on virgin, un-stony ground then this tool will work exceptionally well. Its diameter is just slightly larger than that of he average fence post and, I general, you get a lovely clean hole in which the new post is located and which requires the minimum of specialised fencing post concrete (‘postcrete’). But this is the point where we ran into problems. Evidently the original fence erectors had used concrete and about 5-6″ down we met this layer of concrete. In order to circumvent this we needed to deploy a large, heavy metal 2-metre tall implement (it might be called a wrecking bar but I cannot be sure.) This tool has a wedge shape on end and a point on the other and it requires a certain degree of concentrated thumping with this to make an impression on the concrete. We eventually broke through with a combination of thumping and hammering with a sledge hammer and of course we needed to do this four times over. You would have thought that all we had to do was to pop the structure into its seated holes but nothing in life is this straightforward. We soon discovered that the old and thick honeysuckle branches acted in much the same ways as metal ties on a bridge – at one point we had the ‘support’ hanging in the air over the support holes with the thick branches holding everything up. So we then had to identify which branch was providing the most impediment and started on a policy of snipping these right around the structure. Eventually, we got the structure more-or-less in place and more-or-less stable before we started to make the structure a bit more stable by the simple expedient of getting some old Victorian style building bricks, bashing them into several large pieces and then using the irregular pieces as wedges around each post. Then we started to pour the fence post concrete around each post and finished off by tamping down with some of the decorative stone which was already in place. So what with the screwing, the thumping and the heaving around, I had an intensely physical morning which I did not particularly want. Still, we got the job done and as it been postponed on at least 2-3 previous occasions we were mightily pleased to get it done at last. We just want the concrete to stabilise and harden now – the gardener filled his wheelbarrow with water and sloshed around the while structure just before the tidying up part.
This afternoon, I was scheduled to go off to Worcester Royal Infirmary to have a COVID-19 test of the PCR type (before my investigations on Friday) I got there in plenty of time and was actually half an hour early but there were only about a couple of cars in front of me so it did not seem to trouble the staff. The entire swabbing procedure takes place inside your own car and went more or less to plan. I must admit then when the nurse was taking the throat swab I gagged several times as it touched the vagus nerve (which makes to retch if you touch it) but one way or another she got her sample. Then it was a swab up each nostril and although this was unpleasant, it was not massively so and therefore I could be on my way home very quickly – I actually got home before the swab procedure was theoretically to have taken place.
I spent the afternoon by a certain degree of quite pleasant ‘pottering’ in the garden. I managed to rescue and support a bit of a red campion that I had in an obscure corner of the garden. But the principal thing that I did was to resurrect one of those plastic contraptions designed to grow a multiplicity of herbs and actually planted acorns in it (14 in total) I think these might be my own acorns and I do not recall having gathered them but they have been in a clear glass jar in the garage waiting for a suitable moment at which to be planted, We shall see!
Today has been a very strange day in lots of ways. I suppose you could say that it started off in a unique way as in a slightly wakeful patch in the wee small hours of the morning, I decided to come downstairs and turn the TV on in order to catch up with the latest news from the Olympics. No sooner had I turned the television on but I caught the closing stages (about the last 5 seconds) of the 100m men’s freestyle swimming in which Team GB got both gold and silver – this is the first time that this has happened since 1908 which is evidently 113 years ago. After the commentators had recovered their poise, the coverage switched to the women’s triathlon and this was equally exciting in its own way. Georgia Taylor-Brown has won silver for Team GB in the women’s triathlon, despite a flat tyre, caused by hitting a pothole, in the final lap of the bike race. She lost 20 seconds and dropped to fifth place although at that stage, the gold was within her grasp. She gradually clawed her way back through the runners in front of her and gradually overtook one of her best friends to eventually claim silver. So it was quite an eventful night – at that point, I took to my bed for the rest of the night.
Today I have been subject to self-isolation which I have to keep up for three whole days until I have my investigations next Friday afternoon. It is rather a strange experience to not even walk as far as the park which I have done every day for approximately the last 500 days. Fortunately, the day was the kind of day when you never knew whether it was going to rain or not. It was a little overcast and we had the slightest smattering of rain this morning but it did rain a bit more systematically – but not as heavily as we would have liked – later on this afternoon. This morning between 8.00 and 9.00 the power was cut off across our immediate neighbourhood. We had been given plenty of advance notice about this but the burglar alarm in my neighbour’s unoccupied house was squawking in a kind of alarm mode once the power was eventually restored. Our neighbour had let us have a front door key together with her daughter’s telephone number and the code to activate/deactivate the burglar alarm. I let myself into my neighbour’s house with a degree of trepidation and was relieved when the code deactivated the alarm so it was not screeching all day. I think these systems might turn themselves off after 20 minutes but I did not wish that any internal batteries got exhausted.
As it has been wall-to-wall Olympics for most of the day, this has helped to alleviate the strangeness of keeping myself to myself all day long. The pre-paid vouchers that I have for my daily supply of newspapers were taken down to the newspaper shop by my daughter-in-law and activated so we have enough reading matter for the day. Tuesday is the day which The Timesdevotes itself to medical issues and I read the results of one research finding to the effect that if you exercise regularly you run less risk of developing cancer – even if you have currently do have a cancer, then regular exercise can get to alleviate the symptoms. So this is another press cutting for the files.
The COVID-19 data for today is interesting in that UK records 23,511 new coronavirus cases and 131 more deaths. This means that the new cases is sharply down (for the seventh day in a row) but the death rate is sharply up and is the highest rate since mid-March. Government scientists are slightly puzzled by all of this but some tentative explanations are as follows. It could be that in the recent hot weather spell, people spent more time outside and this helped to reduce the amount of ‘free-floating’ virus in the air. Also, I have seen it argued that as Scotland got knocked out of the Euro finals quite early, then this, too, helped reduce the crowds following the match on TV’s in pubs and squares. In yesterday’s Times, I read with interest that ‘it is well known that schools are massive reservoirs of infection for the COVID virus and now that schools have closed for the summer vacation, this may help to avoid further infection‘ The bland statement that it is ‘well-known’ that schools are a reservoir of infection is certainly not one that would be admitted by the government. The government ‘line’ has always been that schools are safe places for the children within them – but the government have been deliberately vague, silent or contradictory on the fact that the adults who work in or near schools (teachers, teaching assistants, admin staff, some catering staff, anyone visiting the school, parents at school gates and so on) might have been massively at risk by insisting that the schools should re-open and the Tories seemed insistent upon this whatever the consequences (which subsequently, we may learn, has helped to fuel the infection rates)
Today I was carrying on with my isolation procedure and fortunately it was quite a fine day. This morning I had a telephone conversation with a financial adviser who had also advised my son and daughter-in-law recently. This turned out to be quite a brief telephone call and confirmed that the long term plans I had been putting in place were quite sound, so this turned out to be very reassuring telephone call. We have arranged another one for several months ahead to check that everything is still sound so we can now make progress with some degree of confidence. The rest of the morning was a fairly restful affair – we watched the dressage in the Olympic Games in which the British rider gained a bronze and were mightily impressed by the way in which the horses, in particular, performed their particular routines. This afternoon I needed to take the car down to our practice surgery in order to hand in a sample for analysis – fortunately, if you can get in and out of the car park within 15 minutes than you can do this without charge. I had a little job to get done this afternoon which was to clean up a storage box which I keep down in Mog’s Den – the whole idea of this was the I could keep some essential tools dry and easily to hand so that I would not be constantly running in and out of the garage for any gardening requisites that I happen to need. I always seem to need a handy supply of green garden twine to hand, plus a little pair of scissors, so that plants can get tied up in plenty of time and before the wind and rain can batter them down. I had almost completed this little cleaning up job when the thunderstorm and hail rolled across the garden so, not for the first time, I had to do a rapid clearing up and retreat into the garage to finish off my little cleaning job. Needless to day, the minute I had finished, the storm clouds rolled away and we got a wonderful burst of late afternoon sunshine which 1s often the way.
Halfway through the afternoon, I got a telephone call from the hospital where I was due to have some investigations on Friday afternoon – however, could I go in a day early and get into the hospital for tomorrow afternoon rather than Friday. I had to get do a quick check with the rest of the family to make sure that they could still take me and bring me back from these procedures so all being well that means one day less waiting. I suspect a certain amount of mis-communication has been taking place because the initial telephone call inviting me along to the procedure indicated Thursday, the official letter when it arrived said Friday and now we have another urgent call to reinstate the Thursday. To be fair, juggling appointments in these COVID days must be awkward with a combination of patient ‘no-shows’ and any other emergency events that throw the best laid plans awry.
The political news today is that the government intends to lift quarantine restrictions from the EU and the USA if it can be demonstrated that they have had a double vaccination – to be effective from 2nd August. What is the great unknown is whether other countries will reciprocate in a similar way – at the moment, for example, if you want to go on holiday to Italy (which Meg and I do, in late September) then as things stand at the moment we would have to quarantine ourselves for five days out of a ten day holiday. But to be fully reciprocal, we would want the Italians to let us holiday without quarantine in the same way that Italians will be able to do when coming to England. The other major change is that the government is intending that as from 16th August, double vaccinated people who are ‘pinged’ by the Test-and=Trace app will not be under a legal obligation to self isolate or to undertake a COVID test unless they are exhibiting symptoms. This is all part of the gradual winding down of the COVID regulations but, of course, if we were to have a sudden upsurge in infection rates then all of this might have to be put into reverse very rapidly.
I have been thinking a little about the tremendous efforts that some of our Olympic athletes have made in order to compete in the games and, in particular, the ways in which training regimes might impinge upon the lives of other family members (e.g. conveying offspring to far-off swimming pools that might open early to accommodate a training session for would be Olympic athletes). Does one have to be self-centred to an extraordinary degree (and be massively ‘selfish’) to fulfil one’s ambition? (The same thought applies to prominent academics who might have acquired their PhD through the dedication of other family members who sacrificed their own careers for the sake of another family member?)
Today was the day of my medical investigations and I promise you that I am not going to dwell on medical maters whatsoever. However, there is one little incident which ardent readers of this blogg might be able to identify as having been written about 18 months ago. My son kindly took me to Evesham hospital some twenty miles distant which is evidently being used as a unit for the conduct of clinical investigations well removed from other potentially virus-threatened major hospitals in the area. My little incident was as follows. When I got into the hospital system, I was ‘received’ by a male nurse whose role was to take my particulars, go through my medical history and other formalities. I happened to mention to him that last time I had had such a procedure in the hospital in Kidderminster, the analogous role was performed by a little Spanish nurse who announced her name has ‘Amparo‘. Upon learning she was Spanish, we conducted a conversation in Spanish (which was not very good on my part, first thing on a Sunday morning) This is how the conversation went:
Me: I know what I would rather by doing at 7.00 on a Sunday morning.
Amparo: Yes, me too.
Me: What you rather by be doing then?
Amparo: I would like to be tucked up in bed snuggling up to my husband!
Me: And so would I – No (desperately thinking in Spanish) – I mean snuggled up in bed not with your husband but with with someone else’s husband. No – I mean snuggled up in bed with someone else’s wife. No – I meant snuggled in bed with my own wife.
Amparo: Are you sure ? You seem to be getting awfully mixed up between my husband, someone else’s husband, someone else’s wife and your own wife!
Me: (weakly) Yes, I’m sure…
We had a giggle together and promptly went on to forget the whole incident (apart from the blog of course) Now my whole point about reporting the story now becomes plain. The nurse who was inducting me at Evesham hospital happened to be – the husband of Amparo! He shot off to get his phone and showed me a photo of Amparo so that I could confirm her identity. Then, to add to the surprise, he showed me a photo on his phone of their little boy that they had had about six weeks beforehand. So in some ways, this was a most amazing coincidence – and yet in some ways not given that nursing personnel tend to marry each other.
Tonight, as I was still in a recovery mode (my son having collected me and brought me home from Evesham) I decided to crash out and indulge ourself in a re-run of the film of Brideshead Revisited. Whether I want to be regaled with the cavortings of the British upper classes is another thing, but the film was shot at Castle Howard in Yorkshire and some of the cinematography and story lines are superb. Given the paucity of good films during the summer season, I was more than happy to indulge myself for once.
The COVID news today is quite interesting – and disturbing. For a start, the number of cases has risen for the second day in a row. This makes the recent 4-5 day dip in new infections seem to be only a temporary dip. More disturbing is the fact that monitoring of wastewater sites (sewers and the like) has shown marked increases in the virus in the last month. People shed fragments of coronavirus through daily activities like going to the toilet and blowing their nose, and these subsequently show up in the surveillance of wastewater at sites throughout England. This sounds like a very indirect method of measuring the virus but when you stop to think about it, it seems a remarkably comprehensive way of measuring the distribution of the virus. The BBC website reveals that: ‘Generally, the more people with COVID-19 in the community the more viral RNA (ribonucleic acid) will be shed into wastewater,” the report says. “Therefore, the concentration in wastewater is indicative of the prevalence of COVID-19 in the community..’ In the meanwhile, the fact that we are going to let in lots of travellers from other parts of Europe and the USA is raising some serious concerns amongst some sections of the scientific community who are more than worried that new variants might be imported. After all, we have been there before (as in the case of India)
This afternoon, my daughter-in-law took Meg along to Webb’s to divert her whilst I was having my hospital visit. Webb’s just down the road is a remarkable institution – although starting life as a garden centre at which it still excels it has expanded into all manners of household goods. it has several interesting sections such as a cookshop selling kitchen utensils and a range of homemade local products.It will also sell you a range of household pets (rabbits, fish) if you prefer. But one of the start attractions is a riverside walk with a delightful calm atmosphere and many interesting shrubs, trees and flowers which are now in full bloom.
I suppose in last night’s blog that I should have commented upon the fact that this blog is now 500 days since its inception which is about a year and a third in total – it is amazing how quickly the time has flown. Today has been very much ‘the day after the day before’ as I have been recovering from yesterday’s medical investigations which, whilst not being particularly traumatic, were certainly invasive – so I am taking life in the slow (slower?) lane for the next day or so. Today was a particularly rainy day about which we were relieved – it is quite easy to feel smug when the rains come but you are basically ‘gardened up’ and you are quite happy to let the rain work its magic on recent plantings. We spent some chatting, as is customary, with our domestic help who visits us once per week. In truth, we do discuss cooking, diet and many lifestyle things with her and I suspect that we learn a lot more from her than she does from us. This morning we went down to Waitrose by car and treated ourselves to our customary coffee and what-have-you. We explained to the regular staff who know us well why they had not seen us for several days. Then I went round the store buying a few things that I knew I had omitted from our weekly order and a few extra things that I intend to try out and substitute for other parts of our weekly diet. In particular, I need to avoid anything with seeds in it so I am trying to get used to some new variety in our normal diet.
This afternoon, as it had been raining quite hard, I devoted myself to getting my accounts and bank statements up-to-date and reconciled – this is a task I should really do once a week but occasionally things get let slip and I have a few weeks to catch up on. The trick is to get a regular day each week, I suppose, so I suppose I had better develop some better housekeeping habits from now on. Next week, I intend to seriously get our house de-cluttering underway but, as always, this is evidently easier said than done. I think I am going to start on two fronts simultaneously – excess clothing upstairs on the one hand and excess books downstairs on the other. I somehow think the excess clothing will be an easier problem to solve – if it hasn’t been worn in the last two years, then it can probably go to one of the abundance of charity shops that have {eventually) reopened along the Bromsgrove High Street.
The COVID situation is interesting, to put it mildly. One the one hand, it looks as though the amount of ‘Test-and-Trace’ referrals is reducing. But as Sky News reports:
While the government dashboard shows reported cases fell by a third in the week to 24 July, new data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows the real trend was in the opposite direction. The ONS estimates that almost 952,000 people in the UK were infected during that week – a rise of more than 14% on the previous week. The ONS does random tests every week of large numbers of people, whether or not they have symptoms. This gives the most comprehensive picture of the UK situation because it includes asymptomatic infections
Now this is all very interesting. On the one hand, one part of the government machine is showing data that might appear to show the infection situation is improving. One the other hand, the government is in possession of data from the authoritative Office of National Statistics (ONS) which shows that the situation is much worse than would be good for public consumption. Incidentally, the ONS data is reinforced by the survey of water treatment facilities which also shows that the incidence of the virus is much worse than might be imagined. So it looks as though the 3rd wave of the virus is far from over. It is possible that infections could absolutely soar – at one stage, 100,000 new cases was mentioned. On the other hand, if people continue to wear masks, socially distance and take recommended precautions (including the now prominent messages on the importance of good ventilation) then the infection rate could be put into a ‘real’ reverse and eventually decline. There are many implicit agendas going on here. One is that the government is not too unhappy in high infection rates amongst the young to eventually achieve a level of herd immunity whilst the summer months are with us and before COVID cases coincide with the ‘normal’ winter flue patterns which, combined, could put the NHS under almost intolerable pressure.
Some interesting American political developments are in the offing. It looks as though Donald Trump’s tax returns must be handed to Congress according to the US Justice Department. This does remind one of Al Capone – wasn’t he eventually ‘done for’ by his evasion of tax returns? The parallels are striking.
Well, today was a very different kind of day. Although Meg and I have a TV in our bedroom and very often watch Newsnight and similar programs in the evening while we are getting ready for bed, we hardly ever watch the TV first thing in the morning. However, this morning proved to be the exception because as soon as we woke up and were ‘compos mentis‘ we realised from the news broadcasts on our bedside radios that Team GB had won the mixed triathlon – the first time this event has ever been part of the Olympics schedule. So we turned on the TV straight away and we did not have to wait for too long before we were rewarded with a very full video summary of the race form start to finish. So Meg and I just sat on a large blanket chest that occupies a position at the foot of our bed and watch the whole race as it unfolded. It did not detract from the enjoyment of it watching a summary of it like this – although Team GB were the pre-race favourites, this did not mean that they held the lead at all times and indeed the at the various ‘transitions’ from one phase of the race to the next the lead did keep changing according to the strengths of the individual competitors in their various disciplines e.g. some were much better cyclists than swimmers and so on. So the way you watched the race unfold was by observing the gap in seconds between the first and second.We really enjoyed all of this but I did delay us for the morning. [Actually, as I was writing this blog, the BBC compilation program was showing the whole of the Mixed Triathlon completion again so I stopped blogging in order to watch it all over again – and it was just as exciting the second time around]
Eventually, Meg and I after a delayed breakfast walked down into town and we decided to adopt our normal routine which because of my isolation we had not managed for about a week. Everything worked brilliantly, actually, because as we approached our usual bench one of our regular crowd was already there. No sooner had we served ourselves with some coffee than our University of Birmingham friend showed up and I departed to collect our Saturday complement of newspapers. On the way back, I met up with Meg and two (male) companions and then another married couple who know us well stopped by and we had a very pleasant chat as we had not seen each other for about a week or even longer (this seems quite a long time when you are used to bumping into people nearly every day) So we set off for lunch quite late – so late, in fact, that we did not really have time to cook a conventional lunch so we made do with a cheese-and-biscuits followed by ice cream type of lunch.
After lunch and a bit of a rest, we suddenly realised that we were scheduled to FaceTime our oldest ‘Waitrose’ friends. We knew that we had a lot to chat about, not least because they wanted to know the results of the medical investigations that were performed on me on Thursday. We were able to give them some reassuring news that whilst multiple non-life threatening conditions had been found, the endoscopists had found no evidence of any cancer which is always the fear at the back of one’s mind. so I live to fight another day – although with our friends on FaceTime and in the park I did joke that whilst they were sticking various instruments into various orifices, at least I meant to successfully fend off the stake through the heart with which I felt be threatened at any moment. So we would had a long and very informative chat with our friends that went on for about an hour and twenty five minutes. Then we broke off to have a cup of tea and biscuits before we got ready for going to church at 5.30.
When we got home, we had our normal Saturday evening tea of a really good Waitrose soup and then turned on the TV to see if we could get any of the latest Olympics news. Whilst idly channel-hopping, we found we were half an hour into one of the best films of Pride and Prejudice ever made – it was the 2005 version with Keira Knightley, Donald Sutherland, Judi Dench etc. I think this production was nominated for several Oscars. In face, I think one of the best (and wittiest) lines in the whole film comes from the lips of the paterfamilias, Mr. Bennet, who having seen three of his daughters get married off or at least affianced, said about his other two daughters: ‘If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, for heaven’s sake, send them in. I’m quite at my leisure!’
The 1st of the month and I even forgot to say ‘White Rabbits! White Rabbits! White Rabbits!‘ which we used to say as kids on the first day of the month. Although there was no Andrew Marr show to dash back to from the paper shop, nonetheless I went down early the morning and treated myself to a good selection of Mozart as I walked. Often, I see a combination of dog-walkers and/or joggers on a Sunday morning but not today, so I suppose that the holiday season is kicking in with a vengeance. I was back by 9.00am and we indulged ourselves in watching some of the Olympics whilst we at our breakfast. I think the major point of interest was the fact that Max Whitlock retained his gold medal for his performance on the pummel horse in the men’s gymnastics. He had to put down a stunning performance (which he did) and then watch another eight competitors try to better his performance. We also gained a silver medal in one of the swimming relay races and one of the team, Duncan Scott, has won in these games a gold and three silvers and this is more medals won at a single Olympics[pics than any other British competitor. Finally, Charlotte Worthington won a gold medal in the BMX bike freestyle competition narrowly beating the American – what what was particularly noteworthy about this was the fact that Charlotte had to ‘crowd fund’ to help fund her passage to the Olympics. One has to make a comparison with rowing which has incredibly well funded but with scarcely any medals to show for it (although, to be fair, we seem to have secured an extraordinary number of 4th places – way above the average for other nations but still leaving us bereft of medals).
Meg and I had a very conversation rich morning this morning. For a start, we walked to the park and occupied our normal bench and in no time at all we we were joined by five of our park ‘regulars’ Part of the time we were discussing a Wikipedia entry I had run off for one of our acquaintances under the search term ‘economical with the truth’ – it was used prominently in the ‘Spycatcher‘ affair in which Margaret Thatcher had tried to stop publication and/or dissemination of the ‘Spycatcher‘ book in the UK and sent Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, to the Supreme Court of New South Wales to, in effect, ‘lie’ for the government. Since then, it has passed into the political discourse and is seen whenever the government is trying to be evasive or does not want the whole truth of any particular situation to be revealed. Then on our way up the hill, we bumped into one of those ‘over the garden fence’ type conversations with a near neighbour. We had liaised quite a lot with each other when we had a joint interest in trying to preserve a small wood (by the side of our house) which was eventually chopped down to make room for a 18-house development which has taken place next to us. After chatting about plants and dogs, we carried on our way and met with the lady who lives just around the corner and who is a manager in one of the local supermarkets. We chatted with her and her partner about the price and availability of housing in the area because the minute a house is built or put on the market. As a case in point a four bedroomed house has just been out on the market for 450k but despite the fact it had only been on the market for three days, there were already three people with their own houses sold and money in their hands forming a queue in order to buy it. We were interested initially ill this property because Meg and I had always considered our present house to be our second last house and we thought that in the fullness of time, we might downsize and get nearer to the town (but sill within the orbit of our friends) and make sure the house is perfectly adapted to our needs as we get older.
In the late afternoon, Meg and I engaged in some gentle gardening. Meg busied herself deadheading the Lavatera which is in full bloom immediately outside our kitchen window. I engaged myself getting rid of some of the weeds in Mog’s Den before they could do their worst.Weeds is a slight misnomer because it was actually old bits of nettle root which engaged my attention and so I ensured that I had on a pair of really thick rubber gloves before they got pulled. I have also some ‘spare’ gardening tools which I keep in Mog’s Den (a spade and a couple of long handled hoes which get ‘hung’ by well-placed hooks previously inserted in an old ash tree which is now covered in ivy which serves to hide the tools from public view) These needed a bit of renovation so I set to work with a wire brush, some Brillo pads and a scourer restore them to a decent condition.
It proved to be quite a bright and breezy day today with just a hint that showers might come along later in the day to disrupt things. After a somewhat delayed start whilst we did some household jobs, Meg and I started off walking late down to the park. On our way down, we met some of our church friends and we were very pleased to see them because we had not coincided for a couple of weeks. They were just off on holiday for a week so we quickly told them all of our news and they sped off to spend a week in a forest retreat somewhere. Meg and I progressed as far as the park where we bumped into one of our daily park friends and we chatted for a few minutes before I went off to collect our newspapers for the day. We tend to ask ourselves unanswerable questions such as ‘If you are flying in an aircraft from west to east faster than the rotation of the earth, do you actually get younger? Which army in the Second World War actually exhibited the most discipline when confronted with civilian populations? Did the Americans know that Japanese codes had been deciphered and therefore they had forewarning of the attack on Pearl Harbour’ and so on and so forth.Then it was a leisurely walk homeland a lightish lunch before we settled down to watch the Olympics. In particular, we watched the British team secure a gold in the Eventing (Equestrian) category – the first time we have secured a gold medal in this event since 1972 – fifty years ago. I think it was an Olympics game some time ago in which we were enjoying success in cycling, rowing and equestrian events when an Australian commentator remarked, with a degree of feeling,’What is about you Brits? You only win things in the Olympics when you are sitting down!‘ This was a wry observation but quite amusing when you think about it.
This afternoon, I had two little jobs I had set myself, neither of them particularly onerous. Firstly, I had ordered through Amazon a mini-dustbin in which I am going to store a large bag of grit which I had previously ordered and had in stock. This involved making a little brick platform so that the little dustbin (and my storage chest) sit a little proud of the rest of the surface to keep themselves clear of water, slugs and the like. I then had a couple of bags of blue slate clippings which I put down and these spread fairly thinly, so I think I need to pop down to Asda where I can pick up an extra three bags of slate for £9.00 and thicken up the layers of slate that I spread this afternoon. Then inside for a cup of tea and a pleasant little job. I buy rapeseed oil in 5 litre containers for a specialist little farm in Staffordshire where the whole family business is growing the rapeseed and then producing and clarifying the oil itself. I have a series of empty glass cordial bottles and my 5-litre supply fills ten of these but I find it useful just to be able to grab another bottle of oil when I run out. I share the oil with my domestic help as well.
The COVID news stories are developing as well. The principal story this evening is that under pressure from many Tory MPs amongst others, the Test-and-Trace app has been ‘tweaked’ so that, basically, it will ‘ping’ fewer people than previously which save them (and the economy) from further self-isolation. This move has been on the cards for several days now but I have to smile at the ‘chutzpah’ of the government. Basically, if you have a measuring instrument (‘Test-and-Trace‘) that gives you results that you don’t like or are inconvenient then just adjust the measuring instrument. Mind you, the Tories have form in doing things like this. At a time when the rising unemployment rates were a matter of deep political significance, the government kept on changing the definitions of how the unemployed were counted. The first two changes to the rules actually increased the claimant count but the Social Security Advisory Committee found the unemployment definition had been changed 20 times between 1979 and 1988, and that almost every change reduced the number of people defined as unemployed.
The second major change that has come into effect basically allows people to enter the UK without a quarantine if you have a double vaccination and come from a major European country or the USA. No doubt, the government is hoping that other European countries will reciprocrate but this is a huge question. In theory, Meg and I are due to go on holiday to Rome in late September but unless the Italians change their quarantine policy in a reciprocal fashion, then our holiday looks in jeopardy.
Today was the day when our son and daughter-in-law were flying off to Jersey on holiday. Yesterday was evidently spent in packing up and they left by taxi at 7.30 this morning. It is always reassuring when we receive a text from them to say that they have landed safely and got to the hotel which is their favourite holiday haunt. They did communicate the news, though, that the airports seemed particularly quiet so presumably ‘stress points’ such as getting through security is so much easier when there are fewer people around. We eventually got ourselves organised and set off for our daily walk but we knew that timings were always going to be a little tight as Tuesday is my ‘Pilates’ day. On our way down the morning, we ran across some of our oldest friends who are off on holiday to Ireland for a fortnight so we must get used to not seeing them for quite a while. As time was tight, we went up to our normal park bench but decided to pick up our newspapers later on in the day so that we could save a little bit of time. On our way back, we saw a lady who is the neighbour of our friends and we have often had brief snatches of conversation with her but never any conversations in depth. She has quite recently lost her husband who had been ill for quite some time and we often wondered if the opportunity arose, then we would invite her round for a cup of tea (or something stronger) in our garden if the weather is fine for next week. As she is a French lady who was a teacher of French in one of the local schools and Meg had lived some of her early adolescent years just outside Paris, then I am sure we will have quite a lot to chat about once we get to seize the opportunity to get to know each other a bit better. I remember telling her the story of the (female) French Minister for Culture ( think) who had somehow acquired a cat. This cat seemed a rather truculent character who was constantly mewling wanting to be put you. Once put outside, though, the cat seemed to adopt a truculent and obstreperous attitude and seemed to want to get back inside again. The big problem was what the cat should be called (it appeared nameless when given to the French minister) Anyway, the most appropriate name for the cat was quickly chosen given its behaviour and characters – namely ‘Brexit‘!)
After we got home, I had a quick 5-minute turnaround before I walked down to into town for my weekly ‘Pilates’ session. There were only three of us regulars today but I felt I had a fairly good workout considering that I have been nursing a sore back for the past few days. This was acquired in the most unfortunate of little incidents – I had been undertaking my little 5-minute routine of stretches that I normally perform first thing in the morning when I sneezed hard in the middle of a stretch and gave myself a right ‘jerk’ at just the wrong moment. Fortunately, it is settling down now after a day or so and I discovered (as my Pilates teacher confirmed) that a regime of walking is pretty good for helping a sore back to repair itself (and a prolonged period of sitting is actually quite bad for it).
After lunch, I made a little trip out by car as there were some errands that needed it. The first was a trip to the garage in order to pick up a gallon of prime petrol which I need for the lawnmower. It only takes two gallons a year and so is incredibly economical but I do now know that in order to guarantee yourself some ethylene free (and trouble free) lawn mowing, it is a good idea to get the most expensive petrol on offer and to overcome the ethylene problem by adding a special petrol stabiliser to it. Anyway, that will see me all right until the end of the season. The next job along was to call in at Asda to collect another three bags of blue slate chippings to provide some finishing touches to Mog’s Den. Normally, I ask for some lusty young men to help me get these into the car but in view of the absence of the same, I made do by a high loading trolley and then a quick heave into the back of the car (without, I think, doing further damage to the old back). Then it was on to the newsagent to pick our our newspapers (much later in the day than normal) The minute I got back we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends as we normally do each Tuesday evening and we made some tentative pans for a face-to-face meeting for tea and cakes in the forthcoming week if the weather is still set fair.
Today was one of those beautiful days – almost spring-like with some bright, sunny weather but not too hot and with no prospect of rain until a lot later in the day. We walked straight to the newspaper shop to pick up our newspapers but ‘The Guardian‘ was missing so we needed to pop into Waitrose to pick up a copy. At the same time, we picked up a carton of ice-cream which we seem to be constantly running out of these days. And so we made our way to the park having a chat with one of our park regulars en route. Then it was coffee and biscuits as normal but we didn’t meet with any of our other regulars as they are either on holiday (or preparing for them). Whilst on the subject of holidays, Meg and I hope to be able to get to Rome on a pre-booked holiday in late September. I still think the chances are only about 50:50 but if the Rome holiday falls down, we thought to we would develop a plan B. Of all of the picturesque locations through England and Wales, we have never actually been to the Brecon Beacons in mid-to-south Wales. So I did a quick internet search and was pretty impressed by the publicity put out by the Brecon Beacons National Park. If the Rome trip does fall over, we thought we would try the Brecon Beacons for about 5 nights or so. We would probably make Brecon or Abergavenny our base and then sight-see from there. In addition, it is only just over 70 odd miles from Bromsgrove and quite accessible via the M5 and M50 so relatively reachable. If the weather is poor rather than good, we may even improve our chances of getting a last booking in one of the local hotels.
This afternoon, being a fine afternoon and as I was well supplied with petrol for the lawnmower, I had allocated this afternoon as a lawn mowing day. This worked out fine and as the sky was getting slightly overcast, paradoxically this helps with my mowing as it becomes easier to discern the last ‘track’ of the wheels and therefore one starts in the correct position for the next row of the cutting. After I finished the mowing, the sky clouded over a little and we got a few minute spots of rain so I started straight away on the second little job of the day. This was to take the three 40kg bags of blue slate chipping and get them over into their ultimate position. I utilised an enormously useful little garden trug on wheels which belongs to my daughter-in-law but really comes into its own when you are transporting large (ie heavy) objects around the garden. So I got the three bags of slate humped down the steep steps which affords access to Mog’s Den and laid one of them in some of the bare areas that needed to be covered. This is much easier than it sounds because you just get the bag into position, cut it open, spill out the contents and then use a boot or a gloved hand to get the slate clippings the way you want them. After our tea, the rain started a long, constant drip and I was delighted as that is what the garden (or rather the plants) needs right now. Then, with a sickening ‘thud’, I realised that I had to wheel our two large grey wheelie bins into a position at the end of our road so that they can be collected early tomorrow morning. (As we live a road which is ‘private’ to us and we are responsible for its maintenance an so on, the refuse vehicles will not come down – and they might not be able to negotiate the 90º bend in any case) By the time I had taken one full and very heavy wheelie bin to the end of the road, I calculated that it was a distance of 120 yards – so by the time I made the journey there and back two times, I reckon I had covered 480 yards which is more than ¼ mile in the rain. Tomorrow we are going to treat ourselves to a little trip to Droitwich (incidentally, that is the town in which my mother was born but that is a long and complicated tale going back to 1911 which I will not go into now) We have two treats in store. The first of these is a trip to our favourite hardware store (‘Wilko‘) where we can stock up on cosmetics, kitcheny type things, stationary, gardening things, etc. Then we are going to have lunch in a kind of ‘Olde Worlde‘ type cafe in which they specialise in putting on a roast dinner with all of the trimmings once a week on a Thursday. So we have booked our slot for a beef dinner – the food is just simple, home prepared food with nothing fancy but served at an incredibly cheap price. The locals are always friendly and everyone chats with each other as well, which is a bonus!
We always knew that we were going to have a bit of a different routine today as we had to planned to go to Droitwich later in the morning. The day was always smattering with rain and so it proved all day long with the weather alternating between a slight drizzle and longer bouts of more prolonged downpour. We had got a little itinerary mapped out for us when we got to Droitwich but we beset with roadworks, temporary traffic lights and all kind of traffic hold-ups. This was not a massive surprise as the Waitrose crew who were due to deliver between 9.00 and 10.00 this morning were a good 20 minutes late because they, too, had been diverted all over the place until they could actually reach us. So by the time I had put all of the shopping away, we had a slightly delayed start but still collected our newspapers in the car. Then we made it (in fits and starts) to Droitwich where the first point of call was our favourite coffee shop. There are several coffee shops in Droitwich but this one has a slightly Wetherspoonish feel to it (books round the walls etc) which we quite like. We ordered a couple of cappuccinos and one toasted teacake as well as muffin – when the teacake was delivered to us it was enormously which I mean about 5″-6″ in width. Nonetheless, we tucked into with masses of butter (and jam for Meg) and the taste of the cinnamon really came through which I always think of as the mark of a good teacake. Then we progressed to make our pilgrimage to our local ‘Wilko‘ hardware store and whilst Meg was buying some cosmetic items, I busied myself in the gardening and stationary sections. We were a bit short of time but I finished off buying a big box of gardening lime (which you do not see that often these days) and I bought several packets of seeds (half price) of the kind that you can sow either indoors or outdoors in early August i.e. some rocket, mixed lettuce and coriander. I will get these going in the next day or so all being well as I have the appropriate seed trays and some plastic covers. I also bought a small plastic storage box (but one which, at a distance, you might confuse with a basket weave) because I have a particular purpose in mind for it.I intend to keep this filled with topsoil so that I always have just enough on hand top fill a medium size flower pot. The storage box was some 12″ x 7″ x 5″ which translates through to about 6 litres worth of content. When I got home, I rather wished that I purchased another of them (although I think I have seen something similar in Bromsgrove) and in this I intended to keep some garden compost, the idea being that I always have a bit if both topsoil and compost on hand (i.e. stored in my mini-greenhouse in Mog’s Den) whenever I feel the urge to do a quick bit of potting. As necessity is the mother of invention, I looked around in our garage for a small cardboard box of about the same dimensions but it needed a bit of reconfiguring so that it opened the way I wanted. I got the various ‘leaves’ of the box stuck together with sellotape but reinforced it all with some strong Gorilla-type tape. I also reinforced the bottom with some spare cardboard and found a bit of adhesive vinyl floor/decorating tile which I used as a sound base. (Incidentally, Poundland sells quite a decent supply of black and white squares of these tiles and they came for about 4-5 in a £1 bundle so I try to always have some in stock)
Now it was on to our ‘lunch’ date, in the Olde Worlde cafe I mentioned yesterday.When the beef dinner arrived it was enormous – about as big as the most laden Christmas meal you could imagine. We had about 5-6 slices of what I think was silverside to which was added 3-4 some large roasted potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower complete with an onion gravy. Needless to say, we couldn’t quite finish a meal as large as this but the very kind proprietor gave us a ‘doggy bag’ so we could take the bits of beef home to eat later. All of this for about £8.50! I popped into Waitrose to buy some ‘All-Bran’ and was amazed to see that the original Kellogs price was £3.00 a packet but Waitrose sold their alternative for £1.80. When we got home, we just collapsed in front of the TV in order too passively follow the Olympics (although skateboarding is not really our ‘cup of tea’) I did ensure that our large seed planting tray that we bring into use when we are sowing seeds into seed trays on our outside table was cleaned up and pressed into service as a rainwater collector ( to go into our new 6-litre watering can which Wilko were selling for £2.00 and which I could not resist!)
Today is the day when our domestic help calls round and we always seem to have a lot to talk about, even though it is only a week since we last met. She is bringing round a big root of mint for me to help to populate my mint bed in Mog’s Den. In addition she has donated a couple of planters to me and I now just have to think of something really colourful to put in them – perhaps some fuchsias or geraniums. We decided to go down into town by car as there were one or two gardening things that I wanted to buy from Poundland. It was one of those frustrating days when the layout of the store had been changed around and the various things that I wanted seemed to be quite elusive or the design had changed and it was not quite what I wanted. Whilst we were having coffee in Waitrose, one of old friends that we often met there so we had quite a long chat. I did have an ulterior motive in wanting to see her again because she and I have both had a similar type of medical investigation and I wanted to know what ‘post-operative’ advice she had been given. So it was fairly late when we got home but we rustled together a quick curry type meal. After lunch, I was dismayed to find that one of the cheap storage containers I had bought from Poundland had a flaw in it (a hole in the incredibly cheap plastic it was made of) and I couldn’t find the receipt. I decided to make the best of a bad job and effect an emergency repair with electrician’s tape so the container will serve for the purpose intended (quite light peat for the garden) Then I planted the mint, got my peat and topsoil containers filled and had a general sort- out within my mini greenhouse. Tomorrow I have scheduled for myself a cleanup of some of my gardening tools, some of which need a de-rusting as I store them outside. I have a technique to do this which involves a dousing in white vinegar followed by either a wire brushing and/or a treatment with a Brillo pad. I try to get into the habit of regularly treating my garden tools with WD-40 or the Asda alternative (much cheaper!) so that in general rust is not a problem for me.
It is said that most people dream but we don’t tend to remember any of them. But just as an exception, I had rather a vivid dream the other night which must have resembled the ‘Theatre of the Absurd‘. In the dream, I was playing the part of the producer of a play called ‘The Vigil’ (which is actually very easy to stage as it essentially a ‘court room drama’).The play revolved around the evidence for the ‘Resurrection’ and therefore is basically on a religious theme. I cannot recall now how I came to be involved but basically I got drafted into the play which was being put on by an amateur dramatic group in Wetherby in Yorkshire. On the strength of this, Meg and I put on the same play when we were university students as a ‘one night stand’. Because it is dark when one is on stage and gazes out into the void, you do not know if you have an audience of 8 , 80 or 800 but I suspect that the entire audience was nearer 8 than anything else. But now to return to my dream. I was trying to persuade one of my colleagues at De Montfort University in Leicester to accept a role in the play. My colleague was affectionately known as ‘Auntie Pat’ by the students and had a buxom figure and a sweet, typical ‘English’ style face. I was trying to persuade ‘Auntie Pat’ to accept the role of Mr. Pinchas who was a Jewish store keeper (who sold the material for Christ’s shroud). I was saying to Pat that if you don’t want to accept that role, I have another part that needs to be filled, namely a kitchen door. I was trying to persuade her to accept either role by saying I would have to accept the role she did not choose. Just then, my son wandered in, grumpily, complaining that he could not get a good signal on the radio he had clamped to his ear (think large 1930’s radio with a mahogany surround) He complained that he could only pick up Hilversum or the Light Program and then only if he located himself just outside Paris. (I know know that Hilversum is a Dutch complex of radio and TV stations and was always well represented on the old-fashioned radio dials). At that point, I woke up and realised why I would never be successful were I to ‘tread the boards’ and try to produce ‘naff’ plays more regularly.
We suspected that it would be fine this morning and might rain a little later in the day and so it turned out. On our way to collect the newspapers, we ran into our University of Birmingham friend whom we have not seen for almost a week (as most days of the week he is off playing tennis) Meg was feeling a little tired so I handed Meg her to our friend to accompany her to the park whilst I went to collect the newspapers. In the park, we met up with one of our park regulars and carried on conversations regarding the Olympics. One thing I have noticed, which has received a little but not an enormous amount of publicity, is the impact of technology on both running shoes and the track itself. The modern running shoes are incorporating some carbon fibre and the effect of this is to add a little bit of ‘spring’ to the athlete as well as lowering impact resistance. Various kinds of technological improvements have also been built into the track. Immediately ‘below the surface’ is a type of honeycomb or lattice arrangement (filled with what?) which has the effect of making the track operate like a series of miniaturised trampolines. The effect of these two technological improvements (running shoes, track) is that world records are being broken quite regularly. In one of the men’s races over hurdles ( I cannot remember which) then the world record was broken in the heats and again in the final. The person who came in second (i.e. silver) would have broken the previous world record whilst not winning the race. Whilst not arguing against the march of technological advance, I am left with a slight feeling of unease that world records are being broken with the aid of thee technological advances as well as the individual efforts of the athletes themselves.
As we made it home for lunch, a little earlier than usual, the smattering rain looked as though it was going to intensify during the afternoon so I made sure that I applied one of my ‘rust-removal’ routines to a spade which I store in Mog’s Den. This is basically a wire brush, followed by a brillo pad treatment and then a sponge off and clean and dry with kitchen paper. When all of this settled down, I will give it (and my other gardening tools) a good spray with WD-40 (or a near equivalent) which helps to build up a degree of rust protection if I apply every time the tools get used and ‘put to bed’. Halfway through the afternoon, an order arrived from Amazon which was a complete collection of hand tools for £17.00 Evidently, at this price it is Chinese made but you get about three different kinds of hand rakes, five different trowels in a variety of shapes and sizes, some secateurs, a miniature garden spray, some gloves, a series of coloured labels, some wire twists complete with cutter and finally. a fabric gardening basket to hold all the tools. All of this lot is destined for the toolbox in Mog’s Den so now there is no excuse for not keeping everything well trimmed and cultivated.
This afternoon, we were generally watching the culmination of the Olympic Games. Team GB seem to be winning medals until the end with a boxing gold for a local Birmingham lad and a gold in the modern pentathlon. This was invented by Pierre de Coubertin (father of the Modern Olympics) and was a variation on the military aspect of the Ancient pentathlon. It focused on the skills required by a late-19th-century soldier, with competitions in shooting, swimming, fencing, equestrianism, and cross country running. I also watched some of the obscure events such as artistic swimming and artistic gymnastics and have to say I was incredibly impressed by the athleticism and gymnastic skills displayed. In the late afternoon, we went to church as we always do early in the evening on Saturday. There we made contact again with a lively Liverpudlian lady who can talk for England but also, at a fairly advanced age makes regular round trips in her car visiting members of her family in Sheffield and Liverpool. We had not seen her for the best part of a year (although she says she has seen us whilst we are walking up and down the road towards the park each day). I promised her a bottle of our damson gin to which, I gather, she might be somewhat partial. Tomorrow evening will no doubt be closing ceremony of the Olympics and I may well watch this as I am sure that the Japanese will stage it particularly well. In addition, I do like to see the faces of the genuinely happy athletes as the pressures of competition are behind them and they can party for the first time in years. I wonder how many cross-cultural liaisons are made during events like these?
So it was my Sunday morning routine this morning where I go down early in the morning to collect my Sunday newspapers and I treated myself to a Mozart concert on my old iPhone en route. On the way back, I had espied two escaped plants that I thought I would ‘liberate’ and for this purpose I took with me a gardener’s knife which is basically like a penknife but has an incredibly strong blade once it has been successfully locked into position. The first one of these was a piece of errant mint that had escaped one of the gardens so I cut off a little section of root and put it into a plastic bag I have brought with me. I then progressed onto the second of my ventures. In a nearby garden, there is a very old and mature sycamore tree (I think) which has evidently cast its key-like seeds all over the place. A cluster have evidently landed in the loose gravel of a neighbouring garden where the seedlings have taken root (simulating what happens when a gardener is trying to develop cuttings – the young seed/plant reaches through the gravel in search of water and nutriments and tends to develop good root systems. Anyway I liberated about three of these and into another plastic bag they went, waiting to be popped into a spare bit of pot or earth as soon as I have the opportunity. After breakfast, Meg and I walked down to the park and we were delighted to see with our University of Birmingham friend as we often do at the weekend as well as out 86 yr old avid walker who fits in a circuit of at least 9km a day. Today was the last day of the Olympics and we watched a Welsh girl win a boxing gold, Jason Kenny win yet another gold to add to his collection and Laura Kenny endure a terrible crash in the ‘Omnium’ bike race. Several riders were involved in the crash which looked horrendous : Laura Kenny herself had her bike fly in the air and then on top of her, two other riders ran over her (from what I could tell) and she slid down the track until her (helmeted) head hit the side of the track. The amazing thing is that after this she was expected to get on her bike and complete another series of races including a sprint which she may have won. Under the circumstances to come 7th was an absolute miracle – I think shortly afterwards as well she was expected to be the Team GB flag-bearer at the closing ceremony. And so we bid a restrained and dignified farewell to Tokyo – I was rather expecting to see hordes of young athletes invading the arena to party but I suppose the numbers (and celebrations) had to be severely curtailed because ofCOVID. On to Paris in only three years time and then the Paralympics starts in a couple of weeks of time.
This afternoon after lunch, I had just one little project to do which I thought would take 5 minutes but turned out to be a hard half hour. I have a spade which I keep outdoors for easy accessibility in Mogs Den. This had got rusted so I treated it first with raw vinegar and then a specialist rust remover which is really Phosphoric Acid (almost completely) Although the spade had been brushed with the rust remover several times I though the residues would be easy to move but this proved not to be the case. I attacked it with a combination of wire brushes, Brillo pads, Chemico (which is just being re-manfactured again after being common in the 1950’s) and half an hour’s elbow grease. It is still not absolutely right so I will give the stubborn patches another ‘working over’ and that will be that – I will condition it with oil and put it back where it lives tomorrow.
Some interesting COVI+D news has emerged today. It seems that researchers have found a clear link between the Scottish participation in the Euro finals and the rise (and fall) of COVID infections. The rate of infections dropped quite dramatically once Scotland had failed to progress any further – it will be interesting to see if there is an ‘English’ effect once the data is analysed. The overall rate of infections seems to be fairly stable at the moment but the scientist have calculated that the ‘R’ rate may well have topped below 1.0 which if it sustained, means the pandemic is somewhat on the retreat (for now!) The Health Secretary is concerned (like the rest of the us) at the huge disparity in prices for a full PCR test (required if one is going abroad on holiday) – another example of the private sector ‘making hay whilst the sun shines’ whilst the government’s showing no interest at all in any degree harmonisation or regulation.
Well, the start of another week and at least some of our friends should be returning from their holidays. After we collected our newspapers, we made a quick call into Waitrose because we had run out of one or two things that I forgotten to specify in the last order. As always, the staff in the store were delighted to see us (and us them) and we managed to tell a joke to brighten up their lives a little. When we got outside, we encountered one of the Waitrose regulars we used to see regularly once or twice a week but we have hardly seen her at all in the last year (with the COVID-19 restrictions in place). We now know that she often goes along to the cafe on a Saturday morning so we can visit and coincide a bit more frequently from now on. Once we got to the park, we bumped into one of the park regulars and we exchanged news and pleasantries. The weather forecast today indicated that we might have heavy showers in the morning but they would moderate in the afternoon. As it turned out, the morning was a quite fine although a trifle humid – as Meg and I had put on anoraks in case we had a violent shower, we were feeling a little over-dressed considering the weather.
In the afternoon, I decided to take the car and go for a mini-shopping trip to Asda. I started off with a little list of about nine items and they are all things that I can only get in Asda and nowhere else. The first few items on the list I managed to get very easily but the last item took as long to hunt for as all of the rest. In the past, I had bought an excellent LED torch from Asda which I use constantly (I use it if I need to get up in the middle of the night but I don’t to wake Meg, or myself, up too much with a bright light). Needless to say, it wasn’t stocked any more and Asda had reorganised the section from which I last bought it so I drew a blank. On the other hand, I did find one or two very useful things including a miniature (and cheap) sort of wastepaper basket which I am going to use in Mog’s Den to store things that will clean up my tools such as an old washing up brush, some volatile oil (think WD-40) which I can use to clean off the tools before they get stored. Evidently, this needs a lid to prevent the Ingress of rain but I have liberated a plantpot ‘saucer’ which complete with a handy brick will serve the purpose of a lid. I also bought some extra bits and pieces from Asda I did not realise I needed until I happened to see them so, all in all, it was quite a worthwhile little trip.
One thing I am trying to do for a variety of reasons is to try and increase the amount of fibre in my diet whilst also incorporating some protein. One of the best sources of fibre plus protein are beans and I seem to remember, years ago, I used to particularly enjoy little tins of Heinz curried baked beans. As I remember them they were a combination of beans, some sultanas and a subtle, i.e. not overpowering, curry sauce. When I hunted around in Asda, these did not seem to be in stock (or even manufactured any more) soI am going to try and recreate the same. Whilst in Asda I bought a tin of mixed beans as well as a jar of Chinese curried sauce and I already have some sultanas in stock. So tomorrow breakfast time will be an experiment. Incidentally, buying half-size tins of food is always what I call ‘sad’ food. This is is because when I was commuting between Leicester and Winchester, staying in lodgings in Winchester during the week and coming home for the weekends, I needed to go shopping to buy ‘meals for one’ which is generally a half-size tin. You could tell the males who were in a similar plight because at about 5.30 on a Monday morning, you would see a succession of cars with shirts hanging up in the back of the car and evidently a lot of people on the road at that time were on a similar commuting experience to myself (Annie Nightingale on Radio 2 produced the most empathetic radio broadcasts as well just for this group although I am not a regular Radio 2 listener). In the late afternoon, I finally completed the renovation of my spade involving a radical de-rusting. Now that I have got it into good condition and protected by a volatile oil, I am tempted not to store it outside again where it acquire new patinas of rust.So now I have got my Mog’s Den garden too;s on gapped condition, I really do intend to keep them that way.
Today was the day when our son and daughter-in-law were due to return from their holiday in Jersey. We knew that they would be returning today but assumed that the flight would be later on in the day and we would expect to see them in the evening. However, we got a text early on telling us that their flight from Jersey was at 9.00am this morning and therefore we should expect them home from Birmingham Airport at about 11.00am. This stimulated me into an activity I would rather have done without. I suspected that there ws a slight odour of something going ‘off’ whenever I opened the fridge door. The only thing to do was to strip bare the whole of the fridge, see if there were any offending articles (and I did find something in a bowl that I think was the source of the problem) Then, of course, you have to take out all the shelves, give them a good wash down, replace them in the right order if you can remember what that is and then replace all of the food items. This I now have done but the whole process took an hour and a half and I finished it a few seconds before 11.00am which is when my son and daughter-in-law were scheduled to return. I was glad, in a sort of way, that this had happened as you do need to do it periodically, particularly in the summer time. I am also determined to keep the fridge somewhat understocked in future so that errant items are less likely to be forgotten and I also decided to introduce a more logical order for things such that they can be located more easily. We have another little domestic drama which is causing some annoyance. One of the taps in the utility room adjoining our kitchen sprung a leak from somewhere around its base. Eventually the seepage became a drip and then a more-or-less continuously running tap and I had to report to all kinds of binding cloths to attempt to stem the flow and stop what what was rapidly becoming a type of Chinese water torture. Evidently, I had left messages for the plumber last Thursday and Friday but in the nature of the beast, a dripping tap is the very last of a plumber’s priorities when there are boilers to service. The refrain from Woodie Allen kept running through my head ‘not only is God dead but you try finding a plumber on a Sunday!‘ My son took charge of the situation and gave the tap unit as a whole a tweak which I dare not do for fear of making a bad situation worse. We have finally got a time for the plumber to call round but we will have to wait until Thursday afternoon. As we were running a bit short of time, we raced down in the car to pick up our newspapers, had the briefest of elevenses breaks in the park, raced back home again in the car and then I do a quick change before heading off for my Pilates class (routine every Tuesday) Perhaps because of all of the running around this morning, I was not feeling in top form and subsequently the Pilates session proved a bit more difficult for me than is usual. Then it was home and a lightning quick lunch which we just about finished by 3.30pm
By arrangement, I then Skyped one of my ex-colleagues from the University of Winchester. We tend to have an extended chart every fortnight or so but this time round it had been a longer gap than this and we had a lot to say to each other (and not the kinds of things to go into a blog anyway) All in all, by the time we had exchanged accounts of what had happening to us in our day-to-day lives we spent the best part of a couple of hours together which absolutely flew by. We will probably chat again in a fortnight’s time but we reminded each other go jokes, stories and reminiscences which permeates our chats with each other.
There are two news stories dominating the media this evening, one foreign (sort of) an the other domestic. The ‘foreign’ story concerns Prince Andrew where a woman claims she was sexually assaulted by him when she was 17 twice at locations in the United States and once at Maxwell’s home in Belgravia, London. Sky news incidentally have an amazing graphic dawn upon the flight logs of various aircraft in which the young woman question had been flown all over locations in the US as well as London, Paris and southern Spain as part of the Epstein sex-trafficking operations. The interesting question is actually the writ can actually be served upon Prince Andrew given his policy of non-cooperation and non-availability. Also, once entered into the legal system, the rich and powerful have tremendous options to delay and hinder a full court hearing so one imagines the this particular scenario will go on for months or even years.
The second domestic story today is that it is ‘A’level results day and the headline figure is that practically 45% of pupils entered for the examinations have achieved a grade of ‘A’or ‘A*’ Those responsible for teaching the pupils argue that the results indicate a lot of incredibly hard work from pupils whose educational progression has been far from smooth in the last couple of years given lockdowns, distance leaning and the innovations having to be shown to deliver education in the most trying of circumstances. On the other hand, are these results fair when measured across the generations (people might not have got into course/ universities of their choice last year when they would have done this year)?
Today was an ‘ordinary’ sort of day in which it looked as the weather was more-or-less set fair but with the threat of a shower. Meg and I decided to risk going down for a walk without the benefit of rainwear as it so potentially humid that outerwear can make you feel quite uncomfortable. We were a little delayed going down to the park as we needed to update our Waitrose order and I also needed to spend some time getting my accounts up-to-date. I left Meg on the park bench, complete with a copy of yesterday’s Guardian and this works out very well as Meg can immerse herself in the newspaper for the 20 minutes in which I am away. Also, if she looks up from the newspaper, she can probably see me enter the park by the main (lower) entrance and observe my progress up the hill to our traditional bench. On the way home, I called in at the house of our South African friend who had texted me the other day desperately searching for a handyman who can do a few jobs for her. I ws delighted to be able to recommend someone who does little (and not so little) jobs for us when the need arises. This afternoon, I gave my rusted spade a final attack and that is all I now intend to do with it – practically all of the blade is now in a sufficiently good condition for me to want to keep it that way.
There have been several reports in the last few days of people who are critically ill, and some at the point of death, who have been active COVID deniers but have now seen the error of their ways and are pleading with medical staff to give them a vaccine now in the hope that it save them (which of course it won’t) This, for me, raises the interesting question of why many people believe, almost implicitly, in social media rather than the views of the ‘experts’ who often appear on the Main Street Media channels. For me, the problem is not who some people believe in the social media – after all, there have always been pockets of society of groups who are prepared to believe conspiracy theories. Perhaps some of the explanation here is that in a world where individuals perceive themselves to be always at the ‘receiving’ end of the system, then a belief in what might seem to be outlandish is a way of exerting some degree of power or even control against the over-arching belief systems within a society. The problem for me is not why some people over-rely upon the social media but why a substantial minority (and, according to some reports, a majority) of people have such implicit faith in social media. Without descending into huge academic debates about the presence of culture wars, the following explanation I believe had a lot of traction. The point about social media is that views are promulgated not just by a few powerful sources (the Main Street Media) but stories are shared between friends, colleagues and family members. This can then boost the credibility of the contents of social media with readers. This may be due to the fact that people may simply “think differently” when using social media from how they might think when watching the evening news. Why wouldn’t we want to believe a story our friends shared?
Meg and I feel we have had a pretty ‘good’ day today and it is an interesting question of what makes for a ‘good’ versus a ‘not-so-good’ day. I think the answer is that is a good thing to set yourself some limited objectives of what you want to achieve in a day (which might be as mundane as completing a set of household chores) or doing some tidying up (or de-cluttering might be a more accurate term). Then if you complete your limited objectives you are left with a slightly virtuous feeling – conversely, if you had set yourself fairly ambitious objectives, then you might only manage to achieve some of them and are left with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction that one has not achieved more. So the secret of contentment might be to set yourself certain goals (e.g. a walk of a certain length – but not too far to leave you feeling exhausted for the rest of the day) and take satisfaction from achieving them.
Tonight as I was reading my emails, I received a letter from my consultant giving me the results of the investigations I had about a fortnight ago. The letter was generally reassuring but he does have a tendency to write things like (but ‘nothing for you to worry about‘ which does indicate some anomalies of which one is ignorant) One test result has still be returned but so far, so good. I must say I am impressed by the level of monitoring that the NHS provides – one does wonder, though, about the fate of those with lingering or undiagnosed symptoms that could have been targeted much earlier were it not for the pandemic.
We had made plans for today several days ago along the following lines. Down at the bottom of the Kidderminster Road and neighbour to some of our closest friends is a French lady who has been widowed quite recently. With walking up and down, we have had snatches of conversation with her but felt it would be nice if we had the opportunity for a more extended and leisurely chat. So about a week ago, we agreed that we should meet for tea in our garden and, of course, today is the agreed date.We decided to go down in the car because we thought we would pop into Waitrose and get a few things necessary for this afternoon and then we would make our way to the park. When we got to the park it was absolutely teeming with a huge fun fair that had been organised primarily for the benefit children of the younger school children. So there were masses of organised activities for the children as well as the more usual collection of slides, bouncy castles and the like. The park was so busy that some of the local authority staff had had to tape off various areas of the grass to act as an overflow carpark and, as you can imagine, the whole park was teeming. With a heavy heart, we suspected that every bench would be occupied but we were fortunate enough to find an unoccupied bench so we sat down to have our elevenses in the midst of the hustle and bustle. We were quite pleased to start off on our way home and have an early light lunch, knowing that we were going to eat again during the afternoon.
Our guest arrived at 3.00pm, absolutely on cue. We have a well-worked routine by now where we throw some cushions on the metal garden chairs, a table cloth on the table and then prepare the food for the afternoon. We had a very entertaining chat with our guest who had come over to England as a French ‘assistante‘ and then met her future husband in the school in which she was employed teaching Modern Languages and where she carried on working for much of her professional life. We exchanged a lot of stories about the places in Europe that we had both visited in our earlier lives and then wistfully tried to imagine what trips we might make in the future. However, her son had visited Italy recently so perhaps there is hope for us yet. The Foreign Office website mentions the necessity to quarantine until August 30th so perhaps this restrictions are time limited and might be lifted after that date.We shall have to wait and see.
In the late afternoon, we received some very sad but not completely unexpected news. Our near neighbour who lives across the way from the communal green area in front of our house had had quite a severe stroke but was currently in an assessment unit in one of the local hospitals. This afternoon, her son called around to say that his mother had had another massive stroke from she had died at about 5.30 this morning. Apparently, the doctors had told the family that they were surprised given the severity of the first stroke that she had actually survived it – she appeared to be making some progress as recently as yesterday as she was walking about and her power of speech was gradually returning. However, I sensed that the emotions of the family as well as a natural grief were a sense of relief that their mother had not lingered on for months in a kind of twilight world.
Our neighbour had introduced me to Pilates several years ago so we used to walk down the hill to the class together every single Tuesday, without fail (but of course the pandemic put to a halt to all of that) She came from Huddersfield so we shared some Yorkshire roots in common and indeed found that we shared many similarities inner outlook on life. As well as our Pilates classes, we joined with each other to attempt to stop the housing development which took place immediately adjacent to us when an apple orchard was mercilessly chopped down (but paradoxically would have an automatically protected status if it had come under the jurisdiction of Worcestershire County Council rather than Bromsgrove District Council.) We were actually very successful in opposing the planning application and were successful on the first three occasions but ultimately lost on the fourth one. A developer is allowed to appeal a decision for ever more until successful whereas residents are not allowed that right. We also, with another neighbour, bought the communal green area in the middle of our houses and this effectively stopped any would-be developers from driving a roadway straight past our houses which would have made our lives hell. I also wonder whether the additional stress of having to cope with the vibration cracks that appeared all over her bungalow as a result of heavy earth moving vehicles moving in the vicinity whilst the new estate was being built actually contributed to her ill health. She will be sadly missed.
We woke up to a nice bright day this morning and although it was a little cloudy this morning, the day seemed to be set fair. In a wakeful period during the night, I attempted to use the cPanel system to investigate a couple of websites that I have. To my display, I kept on getting a ‘clogin not valid‘ message so I had to have a think about how to put it right. Eventually, I hit upon a solution which was to use my conventional FTP transfer program on my IBM portable where I was relieved to discover that an updated password seemed to be working OK. I am pretty sure that cPanel uses the credentials from an FTP program and this did the trick for me. Once I gained access to the site, you can have a fish around and use Disk Statistics to discern (up to a point) which applications and programs are taking up most space. There is also a utility called File Manager which enables you to explore features of the website not accessible to a browser. However, some of these are system statistics, log files and web statistics so some of these ‘housekeeping’ files can be deleted but some evidently need to be preserved. I managed to do a certain amount of tidying up and eventually recovered a little of disk space so now the I am using 1.5Gb of my 2.5GB allocation – so I think 1Gb should be enough for the immediate future so long as I keep an eye on things.
Meg and I had a pleasant walk down to the park this morning. Fortunately, the fairground activities of yesterday have all been packed away so we were relieved to enjoy the pleasant and more tranquil ambience off the park again. I collected our newspapers whilst Meg read the edition of yesterday’s Guardian and then we made tracks for home,knowing that our hairdresser was due to call at 1.30 so lunch would have to be delayed. By the time Meg’s hair and been done and my own fixed in-between sessions, we had to work out how to have a really fast but delayed lunch. This dilemma was solved by toasting some of the sandwiches we bought for yesterday’s afternoon the but did not use and this proved to be tasty warm snack finished off by a chocolate ice cream in which Waitrose happens to excel.
One little thing I did in between the hairdressing sessions was to get onto an insurance company who sold us some term assurance (i.e. they only pay out if you die before the end of the time) This ‘expires’ at the start of December and I needed to know exactly at what point the direct debit should cease – after all this was set up 20 years ago. The personnel in the insurance company confirmed that the direct debit should cease after the last payment had been made in the month before expiry which sounded reassuring – nonetheless, a bit nearer the date, I will probably do a check to ensure the direct debit is well and truly cancelled and the money saved diverted to a more worthwhile savings ‘pot'.
This morning as we went down on our walk we noticed that some of the relatives of our recently deceased neighbour are clearing out the contents of the garage. As is often the case of people who pride themselves on their handyman skills, the garage was stuffed full of tools some conventional and some esoteric collected lovingly and used over the years. As I saw tin after tin of god-knows-what get disposed of I did feel a quick pang – I am sure that some of the chemicals were out-of-date and needed a rapid disposal but I wonder what was going to happen to the clamps, lathes and sometimes faintly exotic (not to say quixotic) tools that were lurking within.
My son and daughter-in-law having returned from holiday are busy throwing things away, recycling them to charity shops and generally de-cluttering themselves of years of impedimenta. I suppose I ought to feel really inspired by their example and start to do the same. Up to a point the ‘mañana’ syndrome strikes and tomorrow always seems the better day to start. I had intended to get our lawns cut day and to do a little bit of pottering which means taking a few of the cuttings I have been nurturing and putting them into more conducive surroundings. But our French friend who we entertained in the garden yesterday brought along a beautiful little patio rose so I know exactly the spot in which I want that to grow. I have a series of herbs (coriander, basil and the like) that in theory you can start off on a kitchen window sill and then transplant out later but it is really getting a little late in the year, even for fast growing herbs like that.
Today was a fairly conventional Saturday with no particular things in prospect for us, apart from going to church in the late afternoon. Having completed a few household chores, Meg and I wandered fairly slowly down into the town and thence to the park. Here we were delighted to meet up with our University of Birmingham friend and another of the park regulars – I quipped that we are now the Bromsgrove Literary and Philosophical Society having their weekly meeting. Having had our coffee, I started off to collect our weekly supply of newspapers and it started to smatter with rain. So I organised an emergency umbrella and having ensured that the rest of the group could more or less keep themselves dry, I set off to collect our weekly ration of newspapers. Upon my return, the little group had relocated themselves to a spot where the trees afford a little more cover and the bandstand was in close proximity in case we need to make a sudden dash for it. Realising that the weather may be worsening, Meg and I struck off for home and our two friends were going off to the little cafe in the park to treat themselves to something warm. As we set off, though, the rain stuttered to a halt so we did not get really wet on the way home but just a little damp.
Lunch was a little special today because I had ordered some lambs’ liver for lunch. Having cubed this and dried it off, I then panfried it but added a goodly layer of onions and some onion gravy I had made to complete the meal. As vegetables, we had a baked potato and some Cavolo Nero (kale) which is particularly delicious. In the past, I am pretty sure that I have added a little red wine to my lambs liver but I forgot to do it today and the results were still pretty good. After lunch, I had intended to give the lawns their weekly cut but, in truth, whilst the sun was shining the grass was still pretty wet from this morning’s showers so I decided to postpone this particular treat until tomorrow.
Halfway through he afternoon my small-scale dustbin arrived, courtesy of Amazon and well before the anticipated delivery date of next Tuesday and Wednesday. I have bought one of these mini dustbins before and it is now residing in Mog’s Den, filled with a large bag of gravel. I now intend to use this new one as a storage container for garden peat and/or topsoil. They are about 18″-19″ in height and have a lockable lid with some clips to hold on the lid. Whilst these are a little ugly to the purist, it is well worth having something with a completely secure and lockable lid as I know to my cost that light plastic dustin lids can easily blow away in the winter gales. Also they are superb height and have a capacity of 50 litres. My original intention was to mix peat and topsoil in approximately equal proportions so that I would always have a handy supply when it came to planting out. But then I had some second thoughts and thought it would probably be a better idea to have peat in one container and topsoil in another so that I could mix them in absolutely the proportions that I needed for any particular planting. Although they are cheap enough at less than £12 (delivered), I toyed with the idea of buying yet another but decided to improvise. Going to my compost area (nicely hidden behind some tall fir trees), I resurrected an old builders bucket and found one of these plastic trug affairs that would serve as a huge but highly effective cover and so I utilised this for my topsoil whilst keeping my shiny new dustbin for garden peat. I wanted something a bit more professional than half-filled plastic bags which however well you try to close them always seem to attract slugs and snails from somewhere.
This evening we went to church as we always do on a Saturday evening and attendance was a little down as you would expect in the middle of August when so many are on holiday. I had brought with me a little bottle of damson gin which I intended to bestow upon on of our chatty Liverpudlian parishioners to whom I promised it last week – as she wasn’t there this week, I shall have to used to taking it along each Sunday until she reappears. Tomorrow, I hope that the weather is a bit better because I want to get a little bit of planting done and the lawns cut. Our lawns generally look OK and then suddenly look straggly and overgrown and I have to, as the gardening books say, ‘Choose a fine day‘ to get the mowing done.
Another Sunday has come round again and, as always, I went off to collect our newspapers early. Normally, I get back before 9.00 in order to watch the Andrew Marr show but today it was watching the events unfold, hour by hour, in Afghanistan – more of this later. After we had breakfasted and got ourselves turned around, we were off to the park where there was an open session of the Bromsgrove Literary and Philosophical Society– Meg and I brought the numbers uo to four where we were regularly inspected by the local dogs and their owners who stop by for a chat. I think this morning the subject that engaged us was interesting films we had see recently as well as the news story which lead the Sunday Times in which it is argued that the Chinese had effectively nobbled the World Health Organisation and ensured that a full investigation of the origins and history of COVID-19 will now never be known. After we got home for lunch, we cooked ourselves a chicken dinner (made easy by Waitrose where you merely pop the tinfoil container into the oven) After lunch, I needed to gird my loins and get the lawns cut – postponed from yesterday. When I started off, the weather was a little cloudy but as I was finishing off about an hour later, it started smattering with rain. Fortunately, it was nothing much to worry about and did not hold up the proceedings at all.
Throughout the day, we have following the fall of Afghanistan (or more accurately the fall of Kabul) to the Taliban which seems to have happened with the most extraordinary rapidity. It is not as though the Taliban have forced a victory – rather whatever opposition there might have been has just melted away so they seemed to have into walked into provincial capital after provincial capital (and eventually Kabul itself) with hardly a shot being fired. First thing this morning (UK time) we learned that the Taliban had entered the suburbs of Kabul, then that they had actually entered the presidential palace and eventually that the President himself had fled leaving only his generals behind who were no doubt wondering what to do. The whole speed of the take-over rather reminds you of the fall of Saigon all of those years ago – The British and Americans are sending troops not to fight but to oversee the evacuation of their nationals as fast as they can. The reaction of the British government is interesting and quasi-comical – Parliament is being recalled next Wednesday but by that date everything will be a ‘fait accompli‘ so what is the point, I ask myself? The Foreign secretary is actually on holiday at the moment but is making his way home (as I suppose he feels he ought to be at his post given the circumstances). I seem to remember standing in the basement of a stately home somewhere and reading some archived documents which detailed how badly British army had fared in Afghanistan in the 19th C. If we go back to 1842, of course, we can read about the ‘1842 retreat from Kabul‘ which ranks as one of the worst military disasters in British military history. In total the British army lost 4,500 troops, along with about 12,000 civilians: the latter comprising both the families of Indian and British soldiers, plus workmen, servants and other Indian camp-followers. It does make you wonder if our policy makers have read any of this history and one suspects that the Americans have certainly not done so. I am also noting that the Americans do not like losing – hence all kind of blame is being thrown about at the moment and Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from one of the USA’s longest wars in history, being some twenty years, may lose him a lot of popularity in the American opinion polls. Of course, once the Americans withdrew, then the British had no option but to follow suit, appearing as always as nothing more than the lapdog of the Americans. How one must feel if one had a son or a daughter who had lost their life during the Afghanistan conflict, one must inevitably ask the question whether it was remotely worthwhile – and whether such a young life had been lost in vain. Being of a particular age, I can remember how Harold Wilson when he was the Labour Prime Minister skilfully kept the UK out of the Vietnam conflict, although the Australians and the Canadians contributed forces. And in case you happen to be wondering, Donald Trump successfully evaded the draft on at least five occasions, four of them whilst he was at college and on the fifth occasion arguing successfully that he had ‘bad feet’ caused by the growth of bone spurs. There is some talk that this last medical condition was not verified and could have been entirely fictitious.
Today was quite a dull, cloudy and not particularly warm Monday morning so it was not a day for too much lingering in the park or anywhere for that matter. Meg and I decided to go down into town by car because we needed to make an optician’s appointment with the optician who has been testing Meg and I for years now. We got the appointment made without fuss and then I made a favourite foray into Poundland where I bought some cleaning products and one or two items for Mog’s Den. We had rather a hurried lunch because we knew that our chiropodist was due to call at 2.00 pm in the afternoon. I had bought a huge cauliflower over the weekend and didn’t want to cook it over the weekend lest it smelled the house out (a potential problem with cauliflower) I overcame this to some extent by adding a layer of brown sugar on top of the cauliflower before I steamed it and had the kitchen window wide open. I made a cheese roux to go over the cauliflower and I am not sure that I made it correctly as I haven’t made a roux for a year or so. I started off with some melted butter and then added the grated cheese and some full-cream milk but I substituted some white gravy thickening granules instead of flour which I think now was a culinary mistake. However, it tasted OK and used it together with some carrot-and-peas mixture accompany the chicken breasts of which I cooked half yesterday. All of this was quite tasty and everything would have been OK but our chiropodist, uncharacteristically, arrived at our house about ten minutes earlier than anticipated and this really messed up our luncheon timetable. Meg had her dinner after she had received her treatment and I ate mine far too quickly than is good for me, trying to get it eaten on time.
This morning, I put into effect something I have been meaning to do and today was the day. After about 56 years of reading The Guardian, I have finally decided to cancel my subscription. I get the Times and the Guardian every day and I tend to read the Times quite carefully but the Guardian only in a more cursory fashion. I am rationalising some of my expenditures to fit in better with my anticipated saving and spending plans and I reckon the £54.00 I spend each month can go to a much more worthy cause. I often read the Guardian’s News headlines and Comment section but I am pretty sure these can be accessed via the internet so I am not really losing out. What was interesting was the fact that the sales team at the Guardian subscription department tried to keep me within their scheme by offering me a half price deal for three months but I was not to be tempted. I have a term (time limited) assurance that is due to run its course by the start of December so that is a bit more money that can find a better home. I did feel a slight pang of regret after ending an association that had lasted so many decades but now is not the time for undue sentimentality.
This afternoon was not devoted to anything very much apart from a doze and a read. Naturally, the news media is still full of the news of the fall of Kabul which is so redolent of the images that we remember of the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. On the occasion, though, there were scenes of hundreds of desperate citizens trying to escape the clutches of the Taliban and trying to get into the plane by whatever means they could. There were some rumours that some desperate people hung onto whatever they could from the plane’s fuselage and fell to their deaths once the plane had taken off. The scenes from Saigon were of people trying desperately to climb into helicopters whereas this time it was transport planes but the motivation was the same. Everybody is speaking of the speed of the collapse of the existing Afghanistan regime and, according to reports, even then Taliban themselves were somewhat amazed at the pace of events. Of course, the interesting question is whether ‘the leopard has actually changed its spots‘ and whether there will be reprisals galore for having collaborated with the Americans or whether the Taliban are going to offer a different public face to their reputation since the 1990’s.
In the late afternoon, I popped into Mog’s Den to do a frenetic 15 minutes of weeding. I reasoned that if I removed the largest and more persistent of them, I would solve the problem getting worse. For the more minute weeds, I am going to use a combination of vinegar (acetic acid) and washing up liquid (just a splash) This is an incredibly effective low-cost and ecologically friendly weedkiller. The acetic acid in the vinegar dries up and desiccates the plant whilst the bit of washing up liquid helps to reduce the surface tension and therefore makes the whole solution that bit ‘wetter’ A bit of hot sun an hour or so after spraying is ideal for this system to work completely effectively.
Today being my Pilates day, Meg and I knew that we had to keep a careful watch upon our timings. We walked down into the park and I left Meg with one of regular park acquaintances discussing geopolitics whilst I went off to collect our newspapers. I also took the opportunity to race into Poundland and grab another couple of storage boxes (for topsoil) before they disappeared from view. Poundland can be great if you shop very selectively and these particular lidded boxes at £2 each will be excellent for storing some of my supplies of topsoil. As they contain 14 litres each, the three stacked on top of each other will occupy less space than even my mini-dustbin but each box will be excellent for one load of topsoil per plant. Tomorrow, I need to plant out the nice little rose that our French friend bought for us and where I already have a nice space (and container) waiting for it as soon as I have a little bit of time and a smidgeon of fine weather. After we got home, I started off some ‘boil in the bag‘ fish wedges which will mainly cook before I go but can be quickly completed when I return from my Pilates class and we have a ‘quick turn around’ style of lunch.
When I went to my Pilates class, it fell to me to announce the sad news of the death of my neighbour and long term member of our Pilates class. The news was evidently a shock for the teacher and the other class members because although we are used to the occasional member coming and going, the death of a member of the group had a kind of finality about it. Needless to say, a certain black humour soon took over and we pleaded with our Pilates teacher not to push us too hard as it could have dire consequences. But my neighbour’s loss will be quite keenly felt as she introduced me to the Pilates class some 9-10 years ago and we have regularly walked up and down the Kidderminster Road to attend the class each Tuesday (sometimes in pouring rain, sleet and snow as well as blazing sunshine)
When I did get home, the plumber was already here installing some new kitchen taps in our utility room and I must say that he produced a beautiful job for us with new taps which absolutely fitted the design of the existing sink. We now employ a central heating firm who are only about half a kilometre away from us. This has got all kinds of advantages for both of us as they can pop into our abode at the end of another job for an investigation and also fit us in if we have a small job that needs doing. Having ensured a week or so of misery with a dripping tap, we are mightily relieved to get it sorted once and for all.
We had the bizarre sight this afternoon of the very first Taliban press conference when they had only taken over the reigns of power last Sunday and not had even formed a government yet. There seemed to be extremely long winded answers and discourse followed by what seems to be only a sentence or so the English translation. The Taliban were asked more than once about their attitudes to women and they replied with emollient type phrases as follows: ‘Of course… we are committed to women’s rights, to education, to work and to freedom of speech, in the light of our Islamic rules.’ Of course the sting in the tail here is the expression ‘in the light of Islamic rules’ and this can be used to justify almost anything they choose. Many with long memories remember when girls were denied any school type education, were sent home from their places of work to have their work taken over by men and in the more extreme cases were subject to forced abduction which could rule in a forced marriage or even rape. Naturally, there was a great deal of cynicism amongst the assembled reporters whether we were actually seeing a Taliban Mark II or not. As evidence that there may be some change in the air, we saw some clips of film in which male Taliban members were being interviewed by female interviewers which would have been unheard of in the 1990’s.
Whilst waiting for another program to commence, I tuned into the rolling news channel ‘Russia Today‘ where I heard the following news item. Russia’s embassy in Kabul said on Monday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in. It is interesting that this news item does not seem to have been reported on the BBC News nor is the word ‘corruption’ mentioned. After all, it wouldn’t do, would it, if members of the population with sons and daughters who had been killed or severely wounded in Afghanistan had offered the supreme sacrifice in favour of a leader who only seemed to be hell-bent on enriching himself?
Today was one of those days when even the weather forecasters were given to explain ‘The only word we can use for the whole of the country today is cloudy‘ and so it proved to be. Meg and I walked straight on down to the newspaper shop and then retraced our steps as far as the park. On our way down, we encountered the French lady who we had round for tea in the garden about a couple of weeks ago. We were commiserating with other that the one Arts Centre that we had in Bromsgrove called ‘The Artrix’ was initially ‘dark’ at the start of the pandemic when all public places of entertainment were closed. It was then ‘repurposed’ as a vaccination centre which I think was quite an inspired choice of building. Given that it couldn’t be used as an Arts Centre until the end of the lockdown, I think a vaccination centre was a brilliant idea. It could process up to 2,000 vaccinations a day, there ws plenty of car-parking and ‘The Artrix‘ was on signposts all over the district and just off the arterial A38 road. Although we are getting to the end of vaccinating most of the adult population, it now looks as thought the vaccination regime will extend into the secondary schools and the the more elderly sections of the population, there is talk of combining the normal autumn ‘flu vaccine with an updated COVID-19 booster in the autumn. Perhaps, eventually, we might get our Arts Centre back but in the meantime, I think there will be plenty of work for the repurposed building for the foreseeable future.
Halfway through the afternoon, the daughter of our recently deceased neighbour called by. She gave us the date when the funeral was going to be, now that then post-mortem had been conducted. The daughter was explaining that whilst her mother had had a stroke followed by a second one that we to prove fatal, she had no predispositions that one can think of such as high blood pressure. She also led an abstemious lifestyle with no alcohol and an avoidance of ‘junk food’ so we commiserated with each other that there was no justice in the world. As our neighbour’s daughter is in the final stages of completing her PhD, I tried to proffer what I hoped might be some useful advice , namely to choose one’s external examiner with care. I say this because in the course of my academic life I have seen 2-3 rampant injustices where deserving candidates were denied their just desserts because an external examiner had a hidden agenda or a point to prove by turning down the applicant.
In the late afternoon, I finally got round to planting out the nice rose that our French friend brought round with her the other day. I rescued some topsoil from a bag I scarcely knew I had, laced it liberally with chicken pellet manure and then planted out a rose and also a companion stone container which is awaiting a nice plant to go in it. I am also minded to take the small collection of hazels I have put in a temporary location in the front garden to start to form a little hazel hedge along the front of the raised wooden beds I painfully constructed down the side of the house some years ago now. If this comes off, we shall have effected our ambition to have a good ‘green screen’ between ourselves and the newly developed housing estate (now some three years old built on the site of an orchard down by the side of our house)
Today the House of Commons was recalled for an eight hour emergency debate on the situation in Afghanistan. The Commons was in a sombre mood and the government were peppered with questions, many from their own side, about Britain’s lack of preparedness for the scenario unfolding before us. The mood in the House of Commons was almost non-partisan – in some of the contributions it was not easy to discern whether the MP who was speaking was a Tory or not. In fact, Teresa May, the previous Prime Minister, was particularly scathing. The fact our Foreign Secretary was on a beach when Kabul was falling speaks volumes. Boris Johnson himself reinforced his reputation for being unprepared, if not asleep on the job. I think the House of Commons is at its best on occasions like this – the previous debate of a similar nature I remember was when the Commons was recalled for a Saturday debate after the invasion of the Falklands (the Malvinas to the rest of the world). I have been considering whether to not to pen a one line letter to the Times posing the following question -‘In view of the long historical association of the UK with Afghanistan and in view of the commitment to promote the education of women, why does the government not suggest that it should build and fund a university in Afghanistion solely for the education of Afghani women?‘ Were the Taliban to refuse such an offer, this itself would speak volumes about their real intentions.
This week we thought we would try a new pattern of shopping. We have got used over the last year and a bit to getting our provisions delivered for us by Waitrose – this evidently means that we had to get our online shopping organised and we needed to get used to the system of online shopping. This has, though, worked very well over the past few months. We have to make sure that we have a slot booked and this generally has to be done 2-3 weeks in advance to get the day and the time slot that you want. The Waitrose system works (and I suppose all of the others are the same) by ‘reserving’ a slot and then you have to have a basket full of goods which you go through the process of paying for and which would be delivered at the appointed time. But then, not later than the day before, you have to go though the order and order what you actually want and so this has become part of my weekly routine – revising the list on a Wednesday and having it delivered the following day, on a Thursday. Occasionally, you forget to take things off the list and you add to your supply of biscuits or what-have-you. Conversely, occasionally things get left off the list which is no great disaster – and it is always possible that you didn’t read the number of grams correctly and you tend to get a much smaller item than you were expecting. However, Waitrose has given me excellent quality and good service over the past year and a bit and I am grateful to them for it. Now though I thought I would experiment, now that the worst of the pandemic is over. So as soon as I got up I threw some clothes on so that I could go shopping in person at the Waitrose store in Droitwich the minute it opened at 8.00 am in the morning. Shopping was almost like heaven – there can only have been 2-3 people in the store and the only people you encountered were the shop staff as they were restocking the shelves. A few days ago I made a very comprehensive ‘master list’ of everything that we might normally buy – then, last night I made a sub-list of only those items that I definitely knew that we needed. As I shopped, I stuck to this rigidly, not allowing myself to be tempted by other items that caught my fancy. What was so amazing was when I cane to the checkout where the bill was about £30.00 less than I was spending online. There must be a logical explanation for this – perhaps some of it is that I am better able to judge quantities e.g. of fruit. But I must say I am delighted by the result. As a result, I may adapt my habits again slightly and shop once a fortnight in the large store at Droitwich and in the intervening weeks ‘make do’ with the quite adequate little Waitrose at the end of Kidderminster Road.
Every week, we see if we can have a little venture out somewhere to help break the normal routine. Our favourite little venture out is to the neighbouring town of Droitwich and although I had been there already this morning, we decided to undertake our Droitwich day out routine. First we frequent a rather little cafe which is a little Wetherspoon-ish in appliance but does the magnificent toasted teacakes. From here we progressed on to our favourite hardware store – Wilko. Meg was despatched to buy cosmetic type things whilst I indulged myself getting round the gardening and hardware sections where I bought a few useful things like wire brushes. Then we made way to our favourite cafe-bar restaurant where we had already reserved a table. I had a salad type meal (trying to avoid too much carbohydrate) whilst Meg had a wonderful dish of chicken, leek and penne pasta in a creamy sauce. We exchanged halves of each other’s dishes so that we could both enjoy what the other had ordered.
The news story is still dominated by the plight of the Americans, British and particularly Afghanis who are desperate to escape the clutches of the Taliban – at one point even handing over a toddler to am American marine so that the child would be saved and have a better life even if the parents cannot escape. With a bit of careful planning and imaginative thinking on the part of the British amabassador,I am sure this could have been handled much better. First get one’s own military to put a ring of steel around the embassy. Then encourage those who can to get to the embassy by what ever transport you can. Then ‘process’ the applicants within the embassy grounds. Finally organise helicopter journeys to straight inside the perimeter fence of the airport. Simple, innit?
Friday has come around again and it is the day that our domestic help ‘does’ for us so we always have a chat which takes up little longer in the morning than I suppose is good for us. We did have one domestic help, sadly departed from us for at least two decades, whose name was ‘Pep’ Smith. The ‘Pep’ bit came from her initials and she was known as Pep to everyone, including even her husband. Anyway on this particular morning I was taking a shower in the downstairs shower room that we had recently had constructed and I pranced gaily up the stairs in my birthday suit, totally obvious to the face that Pep Smith was hoovering away downstairs. Anyway, so as to not seem impolite, I called out ‘Morning, Mrs Smith’ as I bounded up the stairs. I did not dare to look down the stairs to see if Mrs Smith was gazing after my departed form and I do not even know to this day whether Mrs Smith actually looked up from her hoovering but neither of us mentioned it to the other. It cannot be the first (or the last time) that a similar thing has happened.
Meg and I decided as it was late in the day to go down to Waitrose by car to save a bit of time. When we got home, we just had a very light lunch of soup because we knew that later on in he evening we were going to have a family meal of fish and chips where we were going to discuss some joint financial thongs that we needed to discuss (quite amicably) round the dinner table. Halfway through the afternoon, we got the email that we had been half expecting. The travel agent who had been organising our little trip to Rome had written to say that the budget airline we were using had decided to cancel the flights both from Bristol and also from Birmingham and therefore the whole of the planned holiday vacation was ‘off’. We always knew that there was a 50:50 chance of this happening anyway so the news did not come as a great surprise. Anyway, at this point ‘Plan B’ swung into action. I immediately got onto the web to see what accommodation was available in the Brecon Beacons which has scenery similar to the Lake District but we have never actually visited before. After a few minutes of research, I was lucky to secure accommodation in a farmhouse only three miles out of the centre of Brecon which offered us five nights for what seemed to be a very good price. On the basis of good reviews from ‘Booking.com’ (an average score of 9.2) and some very good reviews, it now looks as though we have secured ourselves a holiday even if not of the type we had at first thought. To be honest, even if it rains all the time (which it probably will) we can do our bit toddling around the sights and sounds of the Brecon Beacons before hunting out somewhere for a good lunch after which we will have our normal ‘siesta’ and crash out in the B&B which is equipped with a good TV and a kettle for late afternoon snacks. So at least we now having a holiday to which to look forward. In the last day or so, I have also made a more than tentative arrangement to shoot up the M6 to make a long delayed visit to Meg’s recently widowed cousin who is living in Bolton, Lancs. We are in contact with her daughter and will meet in her garden (if fine) or house (if not) and the date we have chosen is Sunday, October 3rd which just happens to be Meg’s 75th birthday. So if all goes well on this occasion, we can have a family reunion and a birthday celebration at the same time – hopefully the traffic will not be too bad at that time on a Sunday.
The COVID news does not look too good this weekend as the infection rate (and deaths) are up at about a rate of 11-12% over last weekend. I think the powers-that-be are worried that if the infection rate accelerates up during the autumn, then we will not be in a good position when COVID meets the ‘flu infection rates and we start another period of time when yet another lockdown may well be on the cards. So far, I think we are living in a more or less fool’s paradise where I suspect that things might start to get a lot worse than might be imagined. Of course, a crucial vector might be the rate of infection in the school based population who might go and infect the older generations. What I learnt during the week was that even the doubly vaccinated might still harbour enough of the virus particles to act as an infecting (and transmissibility) agent without their knowledge.
Today was a really gloomy day and it was one of those days when it never really seems to get light all day long and there was a constant drizzle to dampen the spirits. In view of all this, we decided to go down into town by car and in Waitrose, we met our good friend from the University of Birmingham who we have not seen for a week. We seemed to have quite a lot of news to catch up (as well as stories to tell) so we spent a good hour, I should imagine, chatting in Waitrose until it was time to get ourselves home and prepare for lunch. On our way home, we loitered in the car outside the house of our Irish friends who have just returned from their fortnight’s holiday in Ireland until our friend spotted us and came out for a chat. We have agreed to pop into their house mid-way through the morning tomorrow as we have quite a lot of catch up on. We had both received the news by email that the Rome trip was ‘off’ and, it was on that basis, that we went ahead and booked our little stay in the Brecon Beacons. However, we have received another email from our bespoke travel agent who was organising the Rome trip for us and it could be if were to agree this collectively that our Rome trip might be ‘rescuable’ if were to choose other available dates such as late December to January or February. Meg and I quite fancy a January holiday (to help to draw the sting of the winter) but we need to have a collective natter with our friends to see if we are all of like mind. Another thing that we need to discuss is our wedding anniversaries. On September 9th, Meg and I ought to be celebrating 54 years being married to the wrong partner and our friends’ wedding anniversary is very proximate to that date so we are trying to see I we can organise a collective meal for ourselves to help ourselves to celebrate (or is commiserate?) Roll on tomorrow and our plans might clarify somewhat.
This afternoon and this evening we have been watching the finals of ‘The Hundred‘ which is a cricket format designed to appeal to the young- each side has only 100 balls and the batting team attempts no cricket finesse apart from the fact that they try to hit every ball for 6 (or at least a 4). As a lifelong ticket fan, I feel somewhat ambiguous about this form of the game. One the one hand it is entertaining (and the teams are dressed in colours and with names to reflect the new form of the game such as ‘Birmingham Patriots‘) The young seem to love this form of game and it has certainly attracted an enthusiastic fan base from those who have never played or watched a game of cricket in their lives. It is true that cricket needed to do something to attract the younger age groups and this certainly fits the bill. On the other hand, to purists this form of the game is doing nothing to enhance the traditional cricket skills. In particular, the patience involved in constructing a long innings is entirely lacking in this form of the game – instead we are seeing incredibly beefy individuals who have the power to hit a ball for six have to display a degree of athleticism on the pitch where typically they have to run around a boundary (to save it) or to catch a ball out in the deep. So cricket as we know it is not – but I am trying (hard) to appreciate it on its own terms.
The scenes from Kabul airport (or rather the approaches to it) that we are witnessing today are horrendous. The pressure of the crowds if proving so intense that fairly young British soldiers are forced into a front line where individuals are dying before their very eyes from a combination of heat-stroke, dehydration and crush injuries. The British soldiers and associated medics are rushing from casualty to casualty covering those who are too far gone (and have died) with white sheets whilst trying to save others from the crush injuries which almost inevitably occurred when a large crowd panics and attempts to rush an entrance. The Americans have decided to actually close the airport for a full 48 hours so that the some of the existing crowds, many without any documents, can be processed. One thing that seems to be happening is that even those with a fully documented right to leave Afghanistan cannot get past the ring of Taliban controls outside the airport – and those who are undocumented are actually blocking the safe exit from those who do have the documentation. This sounds (and is) an absolute nightmare. The BBC website puts it cogently:
‘Looking back, putting the processing centre in place at the end of a long narrow street, publishing a press release saying the UK would take 20,000 Afghans without explicitly explaining it would be over the next five years, and then deploying a small group of soldiers given the job of processing people in the first instance while also maintaining military security – is morphing into a planning catastrophe’
Today has been a wonderful day in many senses of the word. Firstly, the weather was set fair and I enjoyed ny Sunday morning walk early for the newspapers, together with my (by now) traditional music concert on my ancient iPhone (Bach in the the main). I time my journey for the Sunday newspapers so that I can get back in time for the Andrew Marr show but, of course, I had forgotten that in the middle of August all of the political elite are on holiday (even when countries like Afghanistan are falling to the Taliban) We sent a quick text to our University of Birmingham friend because we were having our customary weekend meeting with him half an hour earlier than planned because we were seeing our other lots of friends after 11.0am. We were very pleased to have a long chat with our friends over coffee and cakes because they had just returned from Ireland and we had a lot to catch up. The first thing wa to coordinate our plans for possibly ‘resurrecting’ our planned little holiday to Rome. Having conferred with out friends, we have decided to go for a date in March if the flights are still available and the UK/Italiam governments have lifted their quarantine regulations by then. Of course, it is also possible that we are in the middle of yet another wave of the pandemic by then but we shall have to wait and see. A second pleasurable task lay before us and that is to see if we can coordinate plans for a joint wedding anniversary meal for 9th September which is, of course, only just over a fortnight away. Our friends were going to contact some other mutual friends whose wedding anniversary is incredibly close to ours. So to cut a long story, we are going to hold a 6-strong wedding anniversary meal in just over two weeks time. This is the first time that we have ever participated in a joint wedding anniversary celebration of this type but it makes a lot of sense and is really something to which to look forward.
We have some more good news of a family nature – we have now firmed up completely that we are going to journey up to Bolton on October 3rd which just happens to be a Sunday on which Meg’s birthday falls. So this means we can have a great reunion plus birthday celebration rolled into one and, again, that is a family occasion to which we can look forward. Even more family news came through to us as we were blogging this evening. Meg’s very aged uncle who we used to try and see as regularly as we could (in North Wales) has moved into a care home in Alsager, Cheshire, in which his sister is already resident and his nephew lives quite near by. One of Meg’s uncle’s relatives phoned up this evening and we have all of the news about the care home that he is in (which sounds absolutely marvellous by the way) Knowing how frail a 94 year old can be, Meg and I feel quite relieved because as he was getting so much more frail, he was only a fall away from some kind of tragedy so we are relieved that he is a much safer place than his own home and with staff (in theory) available at the touch of a button.
In the later part of the afternoon, I finally got my accounts up-to-date. What I mean when I say this is that I like to copy each of my transactions into a large day book and so I have a permanent record going back over the months and the years. Then I have a few spreadsheet pages going back over the months for about a year – once my system is up-to-date, I record current balances and regular payments on the spreadsheet so that I should be able to see what my available balance is but also what commitments are likely to turn up one during the month. I have most of my regular payments organised around the date when my pensions flow in but there are one or two in the latest stages of the month and these can be a nuisance if you don’t have an accurate spreadsheet page with commitments detailed on it as you might think you have more money than is actually the case.
A little household ‘system’ that we have is a largeish whiteboard in which the various comings and goings of family members are detailed with a dry marker and updated every month. Then we can see, ‘at a glance’ what is coming up in the forthcoming week, fortnight or month. Looking at next week, for example, Meg and I have only thing which we must not forget which is Meg’s appointment with the opticians on Thursday next
Today has turned out to be one of the ‘chattiest’ of days. It started with a near neighbour of ours – as we were commiserating about the lack of a pavement on the stretch of road between us and the main Kidderminster Road, we were complaining to each other about the ways in which the local traffic often reaches the speed of 40-50 mph despite a 30 mph speed limit being in place. There is a sort of explanation for this. If one to examine the road which acts as a distributor road to us, it is a ‘de facto’ inner ring road but in practice had not been widened or upgraded in decades whereas the traffic has increased exponentially. Also, there are a great variety of speed limits along the road with very frequent changes (variously 30mph, 40mph and 50mph) but absolutely no speed cameras in place, so when the local populace reaches this stretch of road, they tend to let rip (particularly as the first bit is downhill). Further on down the road, we were particularly pleased to make contact again with some of our close (church) friends who live down the road but who we have not seen for a week or so whilst they have been off on their jolly holidays (in England) We confirmed the fact that their wedding anniversary is within about a week of ours so that that makes three of us couples (the two near neighbours, plus Meg and I) who have decided to ‘push the boat out’ and have a celebratory wedding anniversary meal two weeks on Thursday. I still have to organise this with the hotel but that will happen later on this afternoon – as indeed it did (after, frustratingly, it seemed to be difficult for them to answer my call). So we had a good old natter in the sunshine and then struck off, very late, to collect our newspapers. Meg felt she would appreciate a stop off at the Waitrosecoffee shop so I left her there munching away whilst I went to collect our newspapers. Then I needed to collect a few things that unfortunately made my rucksack extraordinary heavy – I needed to buy just a few baking potatoes but finished off with 2kg of King Edwards plus 2 times 2 litres of milk so the resulting load was so heavy that Meg couldn’t even lift it off the floor. Nonetheless, we trudged home even though we were incredibly late by now but half up the hill we were stopped by someone we know well by sight who had only just heard that the Honda Civic was no longer to be manufactured in Swindon but either in Japan or in Turkey for the UK market. As our neighbour was an absolute fan of all vehicles made by Honda, he was a bit dismayed to learn they are no longer to be manufactured in Swindon. But is in the nature of modern manufacturing that vehicle production can be switched from location to location as often the same model is manufactured in more than one plant.
We had a very, very delayed lunch. I improvised by trying out a tin of chili beans into which I stirred some cubes of beed that were to be eaten up, petit pois, a stirring of chinese curry and topped with some plain yogurt. If this sounds absolutely foul, then it really wasn’t too bad – and I did get the meal prepared in just about 5 minutes flat. We did treat ourselves to a smidgeon of ice-cream to help to compensate for the earlier culinary ventures. In the late afternoon, I had set myself the task of putting a restraining ‘tie’ on one of our plum trees which is fairly heavily laden with fruit but which could snap or shear away from the main tree if not supported. For tasks like this, I always implore the women of their household not to throw away their old tights but to donate them (having been washed) to my ‘ties’ bag. Because of the material of which they are made, nylons make an excellent tying up agent as they are strong and rot-proof but with a tiny bit of ‘give’ in them which is just what is required. To put this in place, I had to balance on two of my home made devices – one is an old (heavy duty) plastic milk crate which I must say is well prized by those in the know as they can easily bear one’s weight. The other is a stool arrangement which I use to balance on the milk crate.In case, this sounds precarious, it was but at least I didn’t fall off and I managed to get the job done in about 5 minutes.
The Afghanistan pull-out is proving to be incredibly problematic. The Taliban say they are going to allow no extensions but the USA are saying that it will take 3 days (70 hours) just to pull their own troops and equipment out, only leaving four days as from this moment to pull out civilians. I have potential solution to this: why do the British and Americans not pull out (complying with undertakings given to the Taliban) but leave it to the UN to organise whatever evacuations need to take place over their own timescale?
Today is my Pilates day so we have to organise things a little differently to ensure that we do have a very rushed late morning. We were helped in this respect because we had an appointment for a joint GP appointment for both Meg and myself – the telephone consultation was due to start some time between 8.40 and 8.50 and we did get a telephone call in the middle of this time slot. Meg and I had quite a lot to discuss – in Mike’s case it was a more formal advice session after the investigations that were performed on me about three weeks ago whilst in Meg’s case, she has not had any ‘routine’ doctoring for about a year and a half now and almost inevitably for people in their 70’s there are some issues that need discussion with a doctor. We felt that we had a pretty good discussion with the GP and we are both having some extra blood tests ordered for us. However, the news was generally good, or at least reassuring from the GP, so we were left with the feeling that we had both had quite a satisfactory consultation.
We started walking down to town about half-an-hour earlier than we had thought and ran across our Italian friend who lives down the road. She had just finished mowing her lawn but had had the misfortune that has happened to all of us at one time or another of severing the electric cable. Armed with a knife, a pair of scissors and some white tape, I managed to splice the two ends together to effect a repair. As a teenager, I seemed to be forever splicing together sections of cable if only to extend a length of flex in the days before extension flexes were readily available.We checked that the repair was working OK and then resolved that we would have a nice Italian meal together as soon as circumstances allow. Then we progressed on our way but I left Meg in the park whilst I went off to collect our newspapers. In the shop, I was waiting to be served and, perhaps for the first time started to observe the kinds of comestibles that the shop sold. In a display rack in front of me, there were some different kinds of biscuits and as we had run out of chocolate digestives, I went ahead and bought a packet. This reminded me of the period when Meg and I were university students and in the long vacation in 1966 we were working in adjacent factories. Mike was working in a cardboard box factory with the most casual of recruitment policies – I just presented myself to their personnel department and said ‘I am a mate of Jimmy _____’ and that was enough to land me the job. In the meanwhile, Meg was working in the McVities biscuit factory as part of an ‘industrial’ placement that all social administration students at that stage were obliged to undertake. Meg worked on the line that produced ‘home wheat’ and also ‘chocolate covered digestives’ . On that line, there was also a bevy of youngish female workers who had their eyes set upon one object of desire, who they would have dearly loved to have married, namely a ‘chocolate man’ The task of handling large vats of steaming hot chocolate was judged to be work only suitable for a male worker and hence a ‘chocolate man’ The girls on the production line often indicated what they would do if one of the objects of their desire actually cast an eye in their direction and they would chatter what they would do if they got their hands on one. The crowing epithet belonged to the girl who exclaimed ‘if I got myself a chocolate man, I would lick him all over until there was none of him left‘ to which I think any riposte has got to be superfluous.
So I joined Meg and in the park and then we made our way home and I prepared most of the lunch so that I could quickly get it heated and served once I got home. Meg was able to look at the opening ceremony which was being broadcast for the Paralympics whilst I was at Pilates – once home, we did a quick turn around before we had a Skype session which had been arranged for one of our Hampshire friends. These calls are always very interesting and entertaining – our friend was faced with the problems of an incipient planning enquiry which we also experienced when we lived in Hampshire and were faced with a firm who wanted to drill for oil underneath our local primary school. After this call had ended, we had a five minute break for a tea break before we FaceTimed some of our oldest Waitrose friends. Although we FaceTime at the same time each week, we always seem to have a lot to say to each other, particularly as there seems to be an intensification of social life as the summer progresses and the pandemic is slowly unwinding.
Meg and I have no real commitments today so we decided to have a more lazy type of day. Consequently, we did not rush to get ready too rapidly this morning and made our way into town at a fairly leisurely pace. It was one of those gloomy, overcast days that is always a little oppressive but we strolled on to the newspaper shop to pick up our newspapers and then onto the park. In the park we met one of our regulars who was busy looking after a child in her charge whose thirteenth birthday it was today so we wished him well and occupied our traditional park bench before we struck off for home. Meg and I consulted the TV schedules imagining that the paralympics would be on all day but it was not to be. Although the more conventional Olympics were shown in repeated bits during the way, the Paralympics is shown live in the morning and then there is only a half-hour résumé of the highlights later on in the day. As we tend not to watch things in the morning, it looks as though we shall have to rely upon this summary program to keep up with the games.
We were somewhat late for lunch but nonetheless I busied myself preparing a roux to act as the basis for a cheese sauce to baste over the half cauliflower head I have left over. I must say that the roux I made on this occasion was somewhat better than on the last occasion but I have some way to go to perfect my technique. I made far too much sauce but I have kept some back just in case I can use it up in the next day or so. At least the result was very tasty even though I had probably made a lunch that was far too big for the two of us. Late on this afternoon, I knew that our lawns badly needed a cut and so I started on this task fairly late on in the after noon. However, I had the task completed by 6.00pm which is a kind of ‘shut-off’ point for gardening activities at this time of year. The grass seemed to have grown enormously thick since it was last cut – that must be the combination of masses of rainfall and some quite warm days.
The COVID news continues to be a source of concern. The number of new infections is about 36,000 and the number of deaths just reaching 150 per day. The available data seems to show that it the young, unvaccinated who are increasingly likely now to end up in hospital and the government, for its part, is trying to get all children from the age of 16 upwards to get the jab. A little disturbingly, some of the evidence is pointing to the fact that the various vaccines are effective for about 6 months and then their potency seems to decline somewhat so this point to the fact that as some of the older sections of the population received their jabs about six months ago then there is a strong case for a ‘booster’ jab. Whilst on the subject of jabs, we received a message on our mobiles today inviting us for a mass flue vaccination event on Sunday, 12th September. The last time our surgery ran an event like this, it was run like a military operation and with military precision. We queued outside and were then invited in about 30 second intervals into one of several vaccination ‘lines’ Every member of staff I.e. the entire complement of doctors and the nursing staff were all on duty – I was amazed that by a coincidence I actually got vaccinated by own preferred ‘family’doctor ( the sort that it would normally take three weeks to see if we lived in normal times) I suspect that they are trying to get as many as 1,000 vaccinated with the ‘flu jab in one day which is very sensible when you come to think about it. The thing that I am unsure about is whether this mass vaccination event is just the initiative of our own surgery or whether it is part of a huge NHS drive and in practice, most surgeries throughout the country are being encouraged by the Department of Health/ NHS England to vaccinate in this particular way.
I had an interesting discussion with members of my family regarding the prevalence of iron in one’s diet. It may well be that in my desire to cut down on red meat over the last year or so, I might have gone too far in the opposite direction. Therefore I may try and ‘rebalance’ my diet to include more iron-rich foods (such as liver, some seafoods) so I will have an early opportunity when I go shopping first thing in the morning to start my ‘diet re-balancing’ activities straight away.
Today was a day which either started off well or badly depending upon which way you look at it. Under my new regime, I now get up at the crack of dawn (well 7.00am actually) and throw some clothes on so the I can leave the house at 7.40 and arrive at Waitrose in Droitwich at 1 minute to 8.00am when the store opens. I was the first customer through the doors when the store opened and I think altogether there may have only been about three of us in the store at that time. After discussions with my family, I have more-or-less decided that I need to amend my diet slightly to include some more ‘red meat’ within limits. I did find some venison steaks that were beng discounted (quite heavily for Waitrose) and these I bought. When I eventually did some research on the web, I discovered that venison per 100g portion actually contains almost twice the amount of iron as the equivalent portion of beef and twelve times the proportion of iron to be found in chicken. Not only does it contain gram for gram two and a half times as much iron as spinach or broccoli – moreover, the iron is of a form (‘haem’) that can be more easily absorbed by the body. Now that I know all of this, I am resolved to eat venison fairly regularly if I can find but I suspect that stores like Waitrose will always have some supplies of it. Whilst I am it, I intend to keep my consumption of pulses and dark-green vegetables at an optimum and perhaps to eat fish twice rather than once per week. So I was feeling quite pleased with having to managed to get everything on my list (and one or two things that really should have been on the list in the first place) when with a sickening thud I realised that I had left all my money (and credit cards) at home. I approached the help desk full of contrition as I had a trolley full of food and no way of paying for it. However, I have to say that the staff could not have been nicer or more understanding about my plight. The customer services manager did a quick scan of things in my trolley to find out things that might melt or unfreeze (like ice-cream) and we put these back on the shelves. Then my trolley full of food was parked with my name on it whist I raced back home to pick up my cash and then back again to the store (a trip of about 6½ miles each way, which wasn’t too bad) I then returned with the cash and paid for my purchases. Like last week, I find that I am actually saving money by shopping directly rather than relying upon online shopping even though I had bought one or two unanticipated things so again, I am more than happy to be getting into my stride in the new system. Then it was a case of unpacking the shopping and getting Meg to her optician’s appointment at 11.30. Naturally, I took the opportunity to wander around Poundland whilst her eyes were being examined and bought one or two little things that might come in useful. Then we went by car to the park and parked in what is a ‘top’ car park so that we can avail ourselves of our normal vantage point. We heard some distant sounds of what seemed a children’s entertainer and a crowd of exuberant children. Chatting with the couple (who we know by sight, plus their dog) on the next park bench to ourselves we were were speculating whether it was an old-fashioned ‘Punch and Judy‘ show which we could hear in the distance but not actually see. We were speculating whether the ‘wife-beating’ is still a regular part of the show or whether modern sensibilities means that some changes are observed. Just out of interest, I wondered a little about the history of Punch and Judy and discovered this on the web:
In one apparently representative Punch and Judy performance in 1827, Judy appears as an ugly and “disorderly” wife, slapping Punch and then leaving their baby in his care. When the baby begins screaming, Punch throws it out the window. Judy returns and, learning of her child’s death, begins hitting Punch, who eventually kills her with a stick and celebrates the murder with a song. While Punch was also known to beat and murder a cast of other puppets, including a blind man and the devil, the conflict with his wife remained the most consistent and popular aspect of the shows
This afternoon seemed fairly quiet and I had a quiet read of The Times whilst at the same time absorbing some of the terrible news from the rolling news programme about the bomb explosions outside the airport in Kabul where about thirteen people have been killed and even more injured. I then successfully persuaded a credit card company to alter their payment date so that it aligns more clearly with my pattern of expenditure.
Today started off as a gloomy day and we hoped that later on in the day, perhaps in the late afternoon, we would get a burst of late afternoon sunshine – but it was not to be. When we eventually got down to the park, I left Meg with a copy of yesterday’s ‘Guardian‘ whilst I knew that I needed to make my way to an ATM to replenish our supplies of cash.This having been done, I popped into Waitrose because I needed to buy some extra bits of seasoning to accompany the sea bass that I bought yesterday. This having been done, I was delighted to see that Meg and not been left on her own for long as our University of Birmingham friend had decided to make a trip to the park in the morning as his customary tennis was postponed until the afternoon. We were delighted to meet with him and we are going to pass onto him a Spanish course that he may well be able to make use of as he is busy teaching himself the language at the moment.
When we got home, we had a minor domestic issue with which to deal which could have turned nasty but everyone was all right in the end. We had noticed that our bathroom wash basin was draining quite slowly so we decided to ‘have a go’ at it using both a conventional plunger and also a wire ‘drain unblocker ‘I had purchased from Poundland yesterday , thinking that I might need to us it. I think the source of the problem is that during the pandemic, we have been using conventional soap rather than hand wash as we had read (somewhere?) that ordinary soap was much more effective pitted against the COVID virus than other agents. However conventional soap leaves quite a lot of scum, as we know, and therefore a build up of deposit is only to have been anticipated. My initial plunging attempts resulted in the slightest of improvements and then I tried my wire drain unblocker to no effect at all. If anything, I think we might have made the problem worse as the sink had turned from a very slowly basin to a never draining basin. So we turned to ‘Plan B’ which was to use a combination of soda crystals and kettle fulls of boiling water. After a strange gurgle about a metre or so away, the water started to flow and so I think the problem is resolved, for now. To prevent this happening in the future, I think I need to avoid conventional soap from now on and to give the wash basin a soda crystal treatment fairly regularly (once a week or once a fortnight) from now on. Having got over the plumbing traumas of the morning but also having eaten a magnificent meal of sea bass, our domestic help informed us that the local Asda was selling a particular type of casserole dish complete with a glass lid on a half-price offer. So I shot off down to Asda to get one of these before they sold out and was successful. The manufacturers claim that the non-stickiness is 5 x stronger than their competitors and they are giving a warranty on it which is meant to be a ‘lifetime’ guarantee but only subject to ‘normal and tear’. I doubt many people will claim under this provision but I wonder what a court would make of something as vague as ‘lifetime’?
One wonders how the Afghan situation is going to play out in the next few days. It seems to have dawned on the American and British military leaders that an absolute deadline of August 31st for the withdrawal of ‘occupying’ troops is fast approaching.Given that 3 days are required to remove all of your own troops not to mention equipment, then counting backwards means that all non-military personnel must be removed by Saturday at the latest. The word on the street is that the Americans are having to leave behind vast quantities of military equipment including attack helicopters and night-vision goggles and therefore the Taliban will be grateful recipients of all of these once the Americans have actually left. There is also a story that the Russians have left behind quite a store of military equipment but without a regular supply of spares, not to mention manuals, then a lot of this is unusable. Imagine having to translate Russian military manuals e.g. for helicopters both to fly them and to service them, into the two official Afghan languages Pashto and Dari. Somehow, I feel this is not going to be done. I also get the feeling that once the actual withdrawal of the UK forces has been undertaken, there will be a long slow fuse of resentment about the military blunders involved. Will there be an official enquiry into the conflict to parallel the Iraqi war enquiry – I think not!
Today dawned as a beautiful bright summer day and it looks as though we are going to be in for several days of fine weather. Meg and I were left a little to our own devices today as our son and daughter-in-law were off to visit relatives, not being back until tomorrow, so we have a day or so to organise a wild party. Instead, though, we headed for the park where Meg and I met up with our University of Birmingham friend and another mutual friend – whilst they were chatting, I went off to collect our newspapers and buy a birthday card for my sister. As the Bank Holiday will take place on Monday, today was the last day on which, if I got the timing of the Post Office collection right, I could almost guarantee that the card would arrive by the appointed day which is next Tuesday. Our is-called Post Office is now embedded within the local W H Smiths so, having written the card in Waitrose where it was bought, I could get down the High Street to get it posted in the main postbox. Hopefully, this will arrive OK. I take the opportunity to pop into one of our many ‘Health and Beauty’ shops to buy a couple of items and then made my way back to the park.
Lunchtime was going to be quite experimental for me as a cook. Firstly, having bought some venison in my quest to buy (and consume) some iron-rich red meat, I wanted to cook it well to maximise its flavour and not to overcook it (to which I am prone, I must say). So in my brand new lidded casserole dish, I followed the same basic instructions as per the fish that I cooked yesterday under the instruction of our domestic help. This involved getting a small amount of rapeseed oil to a high level heat and then ‘searing’ the meat by cooking it for 2 minutes on one side and then two minutes on the other. The idea, of course, is to get the mere seared (and sealed) on the cooked side whilst leaving it still somewhat ‘sanglang’ i.e. bloody) on the inside. This worked out well but instead of serving the meat as a ‘slab’ I cut it into quite thin slices that were then layered against each other. The vegetables (broccoli and some fine beans) were then steamed for a total of about minutes which left them a little ‘al dente’ but incredibly flavoursome. So the whole meal, completed with some jacket potato, did not take too long to prepare and was incredibly flavoursome, so I must repeat (or rather put into practice). Incidentally, I decided to see what was the official NHS advice on the eating of red meat and this is to restrict the quantity that you eat to some 70 gram (approx. 2.5 ozs) per meal. Although this might not sound very much, Meg and I felt quite satisfied by the end of the meal so we must get ourselves accustomed to eating very small portions of red meat on the occasions that we do indulge ourselves. We now have enough venison for another couple of meals so I don’t have to panic if I do not see any more on the supermarkets selves for a week or so.
This evening, as it is a Saturday, we attended our ‘normal’ church service – this is normally over in 35 minutes which means that we still have a nice long evening in front of us. On the way in, we stopped by our plum tree bordering the communal green area in front of our houses. Several of the plums were ripe to the point of falling off and one or two were actually on the ground. Nonetheless, we collected about eight pretty ripe specimens and had these with our tea this evening, accompanied by some raspberry ripple ice-cream and some natural yogurt. So this was bonus number 1 for the evening. The second pleasure was watching ‘Today at the Test‘ where England and India were locked in an interesting conflict, the Indians having capitulated in their first innings but made a much stronger showing in their second. However the English bowlers were superb today and the Indian team were blown away and so England won by an innings. The third pleasure was turning over for a few minutes of the paralympics and seeing Team GB athletes securing gold in both the swimming and the cycling arenas. Tomorrow we should start to see the start of the athletics competition where some well-known stars from the last Paralympic games in Rio should be self-evident.
Tonight, I read that Italy had described to scrap quarantine regulations for double-vaccinated travellers from the UK as from 31 August. This has come too late to ‘save’ the booked holiday we had to go to Rome – but the organiser is hoping to organise a similar one next January to March so there may be some hope left for us in the New Year (although we have booked up for a few nights in the Brecon Beacons once the Rome trip was cancelled)
Today started off somewhat dull and overcast and the the temperature seemed to have drifted down a degree or so. I walked down for the newspapers at about 8.00 am as I generally do – and didn’t even come across the usual crop of joggers and dog-walkers who are the only other people to populate the streets at that hour. Nonetheless, I was back by 9.0 am and instead of the Andrew Marr show, we had plenty of Team GB successes in Tokyo to watch and to celebrate. After we had our fill of the paralympics, we engaged in our normal walk down to the park where we met with our University of Birmingham friend. Before he turned up, though, we had a fair share of the regular dog-walkers to entertain us. Most people bring with them a special long handled plastic ‘thingy’ (called a ‘launcher’ in the pet-shops) which helps to propel a standard tennis ball a long way – hence, those in possession of one of these implements can send their dogs crazy by launching their ball a long way and there are always some breeds of dogs (e.g. collies) which love chasing after the projected ball. Other breeds of dogs, though, seem to be indifferent to a flung ball – I suppose it must depend upon the volume of ‘retriever’ type genes that are in the dog’s heritage. We must have spent at least an hour in the park deep in conversation which we both enjoy before we realised that we had better get home and cook some lunch. We had a conventional lunch of beef, cabbage and baked potato before we settled down to a good read of the Sunday newspapers.
In the midst of all that was written about the fairly ignominious retreat from Kabul, one particular offering stood out for me. This was a cartoon brilliantly drawn by Riddell in today’s Observer in which one sees a ghostly line of soldiers, all drawn correctly in the military dress and with the contemporary weapons of the day, trudging away in the road that leads away from Kabul. Each soldier’s kitbag or uniform is labelled with the year of the retreat in question and they are in order: 1842, 1880, 1919, 1989 and finally 2021. The whole cartoon is titled ‘Retreat‘. The post of the cartoon is clear – Britain had had many military ‘adventures ‘ in Afghanistan and they always ended in disaster and a military retreat. In what has been termed one of the greatest disasters in Britain’s military history, in 1842 some 16,000 lives were lost in the retreat and there was only survivor who limped into Jalalabad on his mortally wounded horse. When asked what had befallen the rest of the army, the survivor pointed out ‘I am the army’. The point here is to wonder any of our military high command or senior civil servants in the Ministry of Defence have ever read any British history – did they not know (or care) that campaigns in Afghanistan nearly ends like this? Another related point is the realisation that any so called ‘special relationship’ with the United States is only in the fevered imagination of the British – and seems completely moribund. There are also columnists who are arguing that Jo Biden is not up to the task of the situation in which the USA finds itself. Although most American citizens are in favour of their troops not being in Afghanistan any longer, they also recognise a blunder of a withdrawal when they see one. So the presidents short term popularity is at an extreme low and may never actually recover. There are still folk memories of the retreat from Saigon decades before. Finally, the Sunday Times lead story is that the recriminations in Whitehall are reaching fever pitch. One particularly shocking revelation is that MP’s and ministers to asked to log concerns about individual Afghans that were particular worthy of rescue (in the main, interpreters) by email to the Foreign Office. it now transpires that at least 5,000 of these are logged onto Foreign Office computers and have not even been read, let along entered in to a spreadsheet or similar. The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab is due to appear before a select committee next week and in view of his already manifest failings (being on holiday and not returning the minute that the fall of Kabul was evident), he looks as though he might receive the most severe of grilling from MP’s. Many think his days are numbered in any case. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s national security adviser has suggested the West faces another 9/11 if it abandons Afghanistan for a second time. It seems that the only sensible way forward is for British diplomacy to seriously engage with the Taliban to try to establish a ‘modus vivendi‘ for the months ahead. Certainly, there are many with military experience (sometimes in Afghanistan) on the back benches of the Tory party who are deeply unhappy with the government’s performance – so we may see quite a lot of blood-letting in the weeks ahead!
Today was a Bank Holiday – and true to form, it was a dull and uninspiring kind of day. In fact the temperature seemed to have drifted a degree or two cooler but, undeterred, Meg and I made our way to the paper shop to pick up our daily ration. Tomorrow, I am going to inform my newspaper supplier that I have formally ended ny subscription to the Guardian Meg and I occupied out normal bench and marvelled, yet again, at our 86-year old who regularly works 7-8 kilometres a day on his daily rounds. Although he has a little rest when he sees us, he does not tarry for long as he reckons his muscles might seize up unless he keeps himself going. He has a special app which ‘pretends’ that he is navigating a world famous trail somewhere else in the world and, no doubt, this adds to his motivation. We popped into Waitrose and picked up one or two things of which were were running short, including some green veg, so then we struck off home and finished off the beef for yesterday.
After lunch, we had a bit of a household drama with which to deal. We noticed that our downstairs toilet seemed to be draining a little slowly – more critically, when it was first flushed it looked as though it was not far from overflowing. I was keeping a careful eye on it and if it was evidently getting better, then whatever blockage there was might cure itself. My son did a quick inspection of some of the outside manhole covers and discovered nothing amiss so we decided that the fault must lie in the toilet unit itself. We consulted our ‘household’ file ( which is several inches thick) to find the name of the firm we might have used some 5-10 years ago when we thought we had a blockage and it turned out to be blockage in a feeder drain (it could have been a nappy or something else in the system) We decided that it was a bad idea to call anybody on a Bank Holiday so we decided to tackle the problem ourselves insofar as we could. I have a ‘mighty plunger’ which I call into service on occasions like this but it seemed to have no effect on the problem. Much against my better advice and instincts, my son decided to tackle the problem himself by inserting his arm as far through the system as he could. At first he located some wedges of toilet paper and then, to our mutual delight, discovered the obstruction. It turned out to be one of those plastic toilet rim disinfectant units – and this happened to be a particularly awkward size as it was one of those that appeared to be five little circular units in line with each other. Once we had located this and extricated this, the source of the problem was clearly identified and cured. We were left to imagine what a professional firm of drain unblockers might have charged had we actually needed to engage their services. Anyway, I told my son and daughter-in-law I would reward thereby paying for a ‘home delivered’ meal the next time they decide to have one. In the meanwhile, although we still have a replacement toilet rim unblocker in place, I have attached it to a large and cumbersome weight such that this problem could never reoccur. I must say that in my years of being a householder, I have never experienced a problem like this ever before and, of course, one always resolves that a similar problem will never reoccur in the future.
This afternoon, I decided that my little patch of beetroot was never actually going to come to fruition. Although in my little beetroot patch, the seeds had germinated within a few days, the resulting plants were very weak and spindly and were in danger of being overwhelmed by weeds. I am not sure whether the soil underneath trees) is basically a little sour and denuded or whether the beetroot seed had deteriorated with age. So I decided to call it a day and basically dug over the whole patch – as it was only about two yards by one yard, this did not take long. The last time I was in Wilko in Droitwich I had bought a box of lime so I used some handfuls of this to ‘sweeten’ the soil before I try some new re-plantings. Tomorrow, we hope to be on a more even keel as we will have got the Bank Holiday over and done with – on my way back from Pilates, I will see if Asda are selling some begonias or other colourful plants towards the end of the season and put them in the plot to brighten it up a bit during the autumn months.
The gloomy weather continues today – the weather forecasters tell us it is because of a ‘blocking high’ to the north of Britain which is encouraging some cooler winds to flow around it. So we may have to endure this gloomy spell for a little while longer yet but there is a hint that things might get a little bit better in a few days time. Because today is my Pilates day, Meg and I thought that we would go down into town by car and we would treat ourselves to a cappuccino and a cake (which was very enjoyable) We then went by car knowing, that as usual, I have quite a quick turnaround to start my walk down to my Pilates class. All of this worked out well and the class went very well with five of us in attendance altogether. On the way home, I called in at our local Asda because I needed some home-made remedies to clean toilets and washbasins. If you look on the web, you will see a whole torrent of articles that extoll the virtues of a combination of bicarbonate of soda (which the Americans call ‘baking soda’) and white vinegar which will react together to form a foaming mass which should, with a little bit of friction, help to remove ground in dirt. So having bought these ingredients, I shall have a fun time doing a little bit of home-made chemistry. There are some sources on the web that argue that these ‘natural’ and ‘home-made’ cleaning agents are both more effective and also less damaging to surfaces than the conventional commercially available cleaning agents.
Meg and I had the lunch which we reserve for my Pilates day which is normally fishcakes accompanied by some of those greens that only take a few minutes in the microwave. So after our lunch and a coffee, we FaceTimed my sister as it was her birthday today. I had taken great pains to try and get a birthday card to her in time for her birthday – unfortunately, it had failed to arrive. When I got through to my sister, she was not having the best of birthdays as her husband had been admitted to hospital the previous day and they were running some scans on various parts of his anatomy to identify the source of his problems. We only had a few minutes chat with my sister because the time was approaching when we normally FaceTime our ex-Waitrose friends and so terminated the call with my sister, having agreed to call her later. Then we had our normal weekly session with our ex-Waitrose friends and we updated them with various bits of news (some medical, some culinary, some domestic and family) by which time we were ready for tea.
After tea, I had just started this blog and my sister returned my FaceTime call (fortunately, I was sitting right in front of my portable which I have in the living room so that I could respond quickly) We got the full blow-by-blow account of what had been happening to her husband (my brother-in-law) so we are hoping that his stay in hospital his short and that the various scans will help to suggest some treatment options for him. Once he returns home, then certain adaptations may have to be made to their accommodation. My sister had taken it upon herself to order a specialist ‘riser’ chair for her husband which will assist him in getting out of his chair and keeping a degree of mobility and it seemed that a firm with which they had been dealing for decades was helping to expedite all of this. So we will have to wait until my brother-in-law is discharged from hospital and then, no doubt with plenty of assistance from other family members, we have the situation in which my brother-in-law had been my sister’s principal carer but now their roles are going to be reversed – at least temporarily.
Earlier in the day, our good Italian friend called around dressed in her ‘going to a funeral’ gear had turned up to our house, thinking that the funeral of our near neighbour was going to be today rather than Thursday. Our friend had tried to telephone us on our landline but as I was in the shower and Meg was simultaneously at the wash basin, we neither of us heard the telephone. To cut a long story short, we have now got our plans aligned for next Thursday (the day after tomorrow) and we have arranged to pick up our friend and we will all go to the funeral together. This is bound to be quite an emotional day for all of us but we are a little sustained by the thought that our neighbour did not linger too long (after her first stroke) and died in her sleep (from the second stroke). So we trust that she did not suffer in her final days and we are just left with lots of memories (all generally happy ones)
I suppose to start off this blog saying ‘yet another gloomy day’ is not saying very much – I suspect that the whole nation is getting rather fed up with this weather pattern. Of course for schoolchildren, it is their last week of ‘freedom’ before the new academic year begins. For the rest of us, it is the start of another month and one is beginning to sense that autumn will soon be upon us. This morning we had a morning punctuated by telephone calls and text messages. I had sent a text to my favourite niece in Yorkshire, asking when was a good time to have a chat with her about the health problems of both her mother (my sister) and her father (my brother-in-law) who was currently in hospital. I felt my niece, as she is the eldest of my sister’s four children, would be in a good position to assess what domestic changes might need to be made once her father is discharged from hospital. She texted me to say that she on the way to see her mother and we should expect more news later on in the day. Then my professor friend from South Oxfordshire phoned for a friendly chat. He and his wife had spent a few days in the city of Liverpool and were extolling its virtues to me. They had found a place to stay near to the waterfront and were incredibly impressed by the various museums they had visited there aa well as the two cathedrals. I know that the new-ish Roman Catholic cathedral being built in a circular shape is known to the locals as ‘Paddy’s wigwam‘ But our friends told us that the footfall in the Anglican cathedral was actually much greater than in the Catholic rival. From the glowing picture of Liverpool that our friends painted (and it had, quite recently, been a ‘European Capital of Culture’ in 2008), we think that it may well be worth a short break of about 5 days or so. Later on in the morning, I got an extraordinary phone call from my sister whose birthday it was yesterday. I had bought her a card in Waitrose and then addressed it and posted it in the local Post Office. What actually arrived was an envelope, correctly addressed but unsealed and with no card inside. It looks as though in my haste to get the card off and into the system I had put a message inside the card and then forgot to put it into the envelope unless it came out in transit. Another of life’s little mysteries.
When we got home from our daily walk, we had lunch and then I contemplated the tasks for the afternoon. After lunch, I got a phone call from the energy company from which we are purchasing our gas and electricity but from whom I am moving to another company which is offering me a deal which is £50 a month cheaper and with no price rises guaranteed for the next three years. My existing company are evidently desperate to retain my business but when they kept offering me ‘new deals’ I argued back with them that they were offering too little, too late and if they had really valued me as a customer they would have offered me a better deal before I threatened to take my business away. Eventually, when I insisted I was certainly going to move my account. they go so frustrated with me that they put the phone down. As we are going to a funeral tomorrow, I felt as though I needed to give the car a quick wash. I always have a feeling that is a mark of disrespect to turn up to a funeral in a dirty car so it had a wash for the first time in a month or so. We are picking our Italian friend up tomorrow and we are making our way as a threesome to the cemetery and then to the refreshment afterwards. I also needed to fit the car up with petrol, nothing that out the first day of the new E10 regime where ethanol constitutes 10% of the petrol that you buy. The government argues that most modern cars will comply with ease to the new fuel and, altogether, the government argues that doubling the proportion of ethanol from 5% to 10% will reduce emissions to the equivalent of taking 350,000 cars off the roads. Having got the car filled up with petrol I then popped into the local ‘Home and Garden’ stores to buy one or two bits and pieces.
In the late afternoon, we got a call from my niece which did not contain welcome news. Her father’s prostatic cancer had now spread to his spine and had actually cracked some of the vertebrae. After a case conference on Friday, they may well be offering some targeted radiotherapy which I hope will relieve some of his symptoms a little. All I could actually do was to say that I would phone or FaceTime my sister much more regularly to giver her whatever kind of emotional support I can in these difficult times.
We knew that today was going to be quite a day out of the ordinary, what with one thing or another, and so it proved to be. It started off well at 1 minute past midnight when my son and I turned to our National Savings Premium Bonds app to see if we had won any ‘prizes’ (in lieu of interest) this month. We were delighted to have won three prizes totally £75.00 which was particularly welcome as it has come at the end of what seems to have been quite a lean period for us. Some years ago, my son and I decided to pool some of our savings and buy Premium Bonds and if we win anything, then we share the proceedings between us. I think the ‘lean’ period we have had can be explained by the absolute collapse of interest rates in the last year. The current rate for some of my savings accounts seems to be 0.5% and I suspect that people all over the country have been coming to the same decision, reasoning that as interests are negligible, they might as well pile their savings into NS&I where you get no interest but there is always the (remote) possibility of winning quite a big prize. As the pool of National Savings has got so much bigger, so one’s chance of getting a prize had diminished. In fact £8 billion has been piled into National Savings in the last 5 months, £1.8 billion in July alone. Meanwhile, the Government is quite happy to act as home to a mountain of people’s savings (no foreign holidays to go on – do you need a new car when you are working from home so much?) The second bit of good financial news came when I checked my account details of my new energy supplier which will become active in 11 days time. My new combined fuel bills are going to be £75.00 a month cheaper than my existing supplier – I get a £25.00 bonus for switching and a two-week cooling period should I wish to return to my old supplier and pay £75.00 a month more. Thursday is the day when I started to shop in person at Waitrose in Droitwich but I was 15 minutes later this morning and the store was starting to fill up. Nonetheless, I got everything on my list (and a few extras that I really had forgotten about) Then Meg and I put on our ‘funeral going’ clothes for which we were going to attend our neighbour’s funeral today and had already agreed to take along our Italian friend who knew our neighbour as well. The funeral service was fine with long recollections of our neighbour’s life and then some photographs of various stages of her life. As the head of midwifery, she had a lot of professional colleagues and I suspect that as many 50-60 people turned up for the committal.
Afterwards, we had been invited to attend a local golf club with large catering facilities. But this is the point where things started to go a little wrong. We had a little fishing about to do even with our SatNav to get to the venue in plenty of time. When we got there, all of the tables were full up (after all, the locals knew how to get there quickly and bag the available spaces) – or worse, empty seats whilst friends were queuing for food. As there was nowhere to sit and we knew no-one in the reception, we decided to cut our losses and strike straight for home. We dropped off our friend and got home to a treat ourselves to some good homemade soup that we already in stock. Then the rest of the family came home and as we had variously had a rather trying day, we treated ourselves to a family meal of fish and chips (which we do occasionally)
Throughout the course of the day, Meg and I have been thinking about our brother-in-law in Yorkshire who has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has now spread to his spine. We will understand a bit more tomorrow when I am in touch with my sister again because her husband is going to be the subject of a case conference where his various specialists will discuss his conditions and treatment options. My brother-in-law will remain in hospital for about another week and, I suppose, that gives the family just a bit of time where they can work out collectively what degree of support they are able to give to their parents. All that I can offer at this stage is a degree of emotional support but I have in mind to write my brother-on-law a long letter (as he is profoundly deaf and a letter might be a different kind of reading matter for him).
The international news apart from Afghanistan is rather dominated by the the various floods and fires which are raging across different parts of the USA. If there can be a brighter side to all of this, it might be that American society finally wakes up to the challenge of climate change and puts in place some policies which help to avert, or at least postpone, the impending crisis.
Today seemed as though it was going to be a tad less gloomy than we have been used to over the days so Meg and I made our way to the park after our usual ‘chat’ with our domestic help who makes a visit to us every Friday. We exchanged news (gloomily, about family illnesses) before we set off for the park but once there, we were delighted to meet up with our University of Birmingham friend who we had not expected to meet in the park on a Friday as his tennis commitment had been postponed until the afternoon. I collected our newspapers and then popped into town to access an ATM – we don’t tend to use these very often as we now get out a block of money which lasts us for several weeks. Then we got home and eventually after our domestic help and I had a joint effort to give Meg’s hair a bit of a tweak with a special hair curling implement that our domestic help uses on Meg. Our domestic help tried to teach me how to use it but I think I can say that Mr. Teazy-Weazy (hair dresser star of yesteryear) does not have a rival in this house. After lunch and a bit of rest, I decide that the lawns badly needed a cut. The sun came out to give us a gloriously fine afternoon, so it seemed a shame not to avail myself of the opportunity to make hay whilst the sun shines. Half way through the lawn mowing our neighbour came out and seeing me had a chat – both Meg and our son joined is so we had a jolly few minutes as neighbours do when they are in a relaxed frame of mind. Our neighbour had just bought some large original whisky half barrels (still smelling of of whisky) so I went round and admire the trees he had planted in them – bamboo in one and fir trees in the other. I must say our neighbour has put a lot of investment of thought, design, materials and not to mention money transforming the back garden of his house which is now a sheer delight to visit. Before our new neighbours moved in, I did my best to keep the garden of our former neighbours ‘ticking over’ as I cut their grass once a week and tried to keep the borders weed-free whenever I could spare the time. However, the garden is now transformed with several new raised beds, new fences and a variety of additions so, subject to invitation, it would be delightful to pass an afternoon drinking either tea or beer as the inclination takes us.
There is quite a debate going on between the the Joint Committee on Vaccine and Immunisation (JCVI) and the government at the moment. The decision of the JCVI is not to vaccinate the 12-15 year school population unless there are underlying health conditions but the decision is evidently quite a balanced one as the committee are saying that they will keep their decision under constant review. One suspects that the government may want to over-rule the committee as there are reports from other parts of the scientific community that the COVID rate may well surge enormously once the schools return next Monday.
Each Friday night, we are in the habit of FaceTiming one of our erstwhile University of Winchester colleagues and we always seem to have a fund of stories with which to regale each other. Some of these relate to incidents that we found amusing whilst we were both employed at the University of Winchester but many of them relate to our student days that we seem to remember with an alarming clarity as the years proceed. We reminded ourselves that in those days, the mid-1960’s before the sexual revolution had really swept over even the universities there were a variety of institutions and rules to keep the female of the species in a degree of obeisance. For example, at Manchester University they had a ‘Women’s Moral Tutor’ but what she actually did in her day to day work was rather hidden from the rest of us. Meanwhile, at the University of Oxford, our colleague informed us that some of the women’s colleges had a rule that no men were to be allowed in a female student’s room after 7.0pm – for which one could infer that if two young people were very much in lust with each other, then anything they did before 7 in the evening was regarded as quite ‘legal’.
Next week, if the weather remains fair, we shall to think picking some of our soft fruit. We have a plum tree which has some clusters of plums but very high up so we may have to adapt a long handled pruner to reach these. Similarly, we need to think about collecting our damson plums (from old trees at the bottom of the garden) and the new season of making damson gin will start all over again (but we still have some of last season’s gin in stock to give to unsuspecting recipients)
Today was one of those ‘nothing’ like days – there was some autumnal sunshine and a few clouds but it felt neither warm nor cold. Having said that, I was very pleased that we got the lawns cut yesterday evening because my neighbour and I concurred that when the weather is a little muggy then the grass seems to grow much faster. So it always a source of satisfaction to look over our communal green area between our houses (sometimes nicknamed ‘Meg’s Meadow‘) and see that is always has a particularly tidy appearance the day after mowing. We walked down to the park as normal and I left Meg in the company of the Bromsgrove Literary and Philosophical Society (aka known as our University of Birmingham friend and a mutual friend with whom we tend to discuss geopolitics at the drop of a hat). After we had set the world to rights (I think we were looking at the world from the perspective of a Russian submarine captain who surfaced near the Arctic Circle and for whom the actual map -and mental map- would have been a Russia surrounded by hostile forces – America, China. Europe.) You really need to look at a globe looking down on it to fully appreciate the point we were trying to argue. Anyway, having discussed our little geopolitical problem for today, I went off to collect our newspapers. There I handed in a little bit of card to exactly tell the newsagent when our subscription to The Guardian runs out and I have to remember to destroy my remaining vouchers and not to use them. So it will be ‘The Times‘ during the weekdays, the Sunday Times on Sundays from now on and I will read the Guardian /Observer online. On our way home, we bumped into one of our Catholic friends whose wedding anniversary is practically on the same date as ours and we discussed some of the transport arrangements for the joint dinner which we are going to enjoy together with even more friends whose wedding anniversary is also proximate. Then it was home for a somewhat delayed lunch nd we had a generally quiet Saturday afternoon.
Each Saturday, we attend our local church for the 6.00pm service and tonight was no exception. We chatted for a little while outside the church and informed our priest that on Thursday we would have been married for 54 years and that we were married by a member of Jesuit religious order in the Church of the Holy Name just besides the Catholic chaplaincy in Manchester. Our new priest has quite a sense of humour which can occasionally be liberating when he quipped that ‘None of the marriages conducted by the Jesuits are now regarded as valid‘. So we got home and treated ourselves to a meal of strawberries and ice-cream which was bought on Thursday but we had been saving until tonight. Meg and I made ourselves made ourselves a little miserable by looking at ‘Today at the Test‘ (which just coincides with the time we are ready to eat) only to see the English bowling put to the slaughter by the Indian batsmen who seemed to have found just the form they needed when it was needed to win the match (probably) and the series (probably)
As I was getting up this morning, I heard a report from America which almost made my blood run cold. One of the enduring legacies of the Trump administration was to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court with (really) conservative judges and I think the present balance is about 6 conservative to about 3 liberal. As Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, then a 40-year old could serve for about 40 years until they die and so the balance of the Supreme Court far outweighs a presidential term of office (4 years in the case of Trump) Now that a really conservative Supreme Court is in place the Pro-Life ,anti-abortion Christian Right can try and get passed the most draconian legislation that they can rely upon not being overturned. A new law has been passed in Texas which allows anyone anywhere to sue anyone connected to an abortion in which cardiac activity was detected in the embryo as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, before most women even realise they are pregnant. This means that any ‘bounty hunter’ can sue anyone connected with an abortion (e.g. a texi-driver taking a pregnant women to a clinic) for about $10,000 which they can then keep. This has the effect of almost, at a stroke, abolishing any abortion (even for victims of rape or incest). Normally legislation as draconian as this would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court – by not intervening when they could and before the law comes in force, the Supreme Court has effectively condoned the type of legislation, which then be ‘cut-and-pasted’ into laws anywhere where the Republicans/fundamentalist Christian Right have a majority (many of the states in the whole of the USA)
Today being a Sunday, I got up earlier than normal and set off for my Sunday morning walk to the newsagents, wearing my trusty old iPhone which I use on these occasions as an MP3 player. The first track I played was actually the ‘Hallelujah‘ chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Whenever, I hear this chorus, it always sets me in mind of the Huddersfield Chorus Society whose renditions of the Messiah are well known. This reminded me of our neighbour whose funeral we attended the other day as she came from Huddersfield – as I was born and bred in Yorkshire and there was only a sixteen month gap between our birthdates we felt very mcuh part of the same generation. Indeed, we seem to have many values and attitudes towards life from having been reared in similar ‘soil’ so to speak. Our neighbour and I used to chat about all kinds of things when we went down to our Pilates class each week, and so I had one of those strange feelings that you sometimes have when someone ‘s death has been recent that you cannot believe that they have actually ‘gone’ and may not suddenly reappear. In the case of ‘the Messiah‘ it used to be the case that if you were reasonably musically competent and could read a score you could go down to the Town Hall Square in front of Leeds Town Hall and you could actually sing in the chorus of the society (tenor, bass etc.) I think that this tradition is actually carried on in other northern and midland towns and cities but I haven’t heard of any performances recently. After this track, there was a track from Mozart’s opera ‘Don Giovanni’ entitled ‘Il mio Tesoro‘ which our son played on his clarinet for one of his music exams when he was aged about 10 – certainly at primary school. He carried on playing the clarinet and actually won the school music prize for playing the second slow movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto when he was about 13.(By a weird coincidence, this is actually playing on Classic.fm as I blog) Shortly afterwards, a combination of locomotives , photography and young women became his abiding life interest and the clarinet was abandoned. In fact, to this day, I am not even sure what happened to it. Anyway, we were extraordinarily proud of our son having won the music competition when he did but then he musical tastes changed to Marillion and the like (late 1970’s and early 1980’s)
We had a lunch of pork which had been cooking in the slow cooker all morning whilst we had been out in the park. Then it was a typical lazy Sunday afternoon whilst we slowly digested the newspapers. Then we treated ourselves to watching the progress of the English cricket team in ‘Today at the Test‘ where the Indian batsmen built up quite an impressive lead, leaving England a total of over 350 to reach in their final innings which has hardly ever been done before. However, the English batsmen managed to make a score of about 70 without loss, setting the scene for an incredibly exciting run chase tomorrow. We will resist the temptation to listen to it on the radio but will wait until we know the best (or the worst) when we tune in tomorrow.
In the early evening, I gave my sister a FaceTime call to see if there was any more news about her husband (my brother-in-law) who is currently in hospital. We know that they are going to try a shot of radiotherapy to alleviate some of his symptoms but this might take several days to organise. The only bright spot about all of this is that he is hospital in Harrogate, Yorkshire which was a very good reputation. We were FaceTiming for quite a long time with my sister because she is alone in the house and I felt that she needs as much moral support as we can give her – particularly as the immediate future is somewhat uncertain. When I get some time, I thought I would write my brother-in-law a long letter to give him some diversion. My sister informed me that they have taken away all of the TV’s normally over each patient’s bed as an infection risk. One of his sons has managed to get his a little radio upon which he may be able to follow the Test Match (as an ardent cricket fan) but he of the generation that finds even using a mobile phone phone problematic, let alone an iPad so he can FaceTime. I imagine the next few days in hospital are going to be rather a miserable time for him (particularly as he quite deaf so communication with hospital staff may be problematic).
The newspapers are full of the dilemma facing the government as they intend to make a long-delayed announcement about the funding of long term social care – a ball which had been ‘kicked into the long grass’ for about a decade now but decisions do have to be made. I gather the preferred option seems to be a rise in National Insurance contributions but large part of the Tory Party are up in arms about that (as the burden falls upon those who are younger and in work but most of the recipients are the older generation who have been quite well provided for over the years) This autumn is going to see quite a lot of fireworks politically – watch this space!
According to the newspapers, we are due to have a mini heatwave over the next day or so and today the weather was certainly even warmer than yesterday. Tomorrow is going to be a really hot day with a temperature of 28º which is 82ºF in the ‘old’ system. Then, on Wednesday, the weather is due to break probably with thunderstorms and some much needed rain. Meg and I were a little delayed because we were in telephone conversation with our building society getting some details of our accounts regularised. As you might expect, this is still a complicated business as it involves going through a series of apps to get at your accounts online, then we have to send them a secure message (presumably to prove who we are), then they are going to send us some forms which we have to fill in and finally we have to go in person, together with two kinds of ID to see them in person (which we will do next Monday) to get the account details altered to our satisfaction. I suppose one can see the point of all this to overcome potential fraud but you still have the feeling that a genuine fraudster might be able to circumvent the system a little more easily. Eventually, and a little later than planned, Meg and I wandered down to the park which, as you might expect, was particularly quiet as it was both Monday morning and also it was the day when all of the schools returned after their long summer break. One did wonder, though, why the occasional young adolescent was to be seen on the skateboard board and even on the swings for the younger children. We had an enjoyable time and I left Meg to enjoy the late summer sunshine whilst I went to pick up the newspapers.
When we returned home, it was fairly easy to prepare our lunch as we had cooked our ‘main’ joint yesterday. Today, we had pork, Cavolo Nero (kale) and a smidgeon of baked potato and it was delicious. After we had our post-prandial nap, we decided not to avail ourselves of one of the rolling news programmes that we generally watch at about this time of day but throughout we take the feed live from Parliament to see what Boris Johnson had to say for himself. The session started at 3.30 and carried on until 4.45 so the Commons organised itself in such a way that a greater number of MPs then usual could question the PM about Afghanistan. Boris Johnson put on a fairly typical performance for him. Most of questions from MPs (on both sides of the house) put fairly direct and pointed question, mainly entering upon the plight of those still trapped in Afghanistan or their relatives. Boris Johnson’s replies were a typical mixture of bluster, political point scoring, evading the question and often avoiding the main point of the question altogether. Of course, all politicians do this particularly on the media – to the frustration of many, including myself, the interviewers often do not pursue the point that the question has not been answered and move onto the next question in their schedule. The politicians know this and often fill up the available space by always starting an answer with a preamble that is only generally loosely related to the question and then going on to answer half the question or quoting a statistic in their favour that does not really answer the question that was asked. Because all politicians do this (I make an exception for Nigel Farage whose politics I detest but who generally did answer the question that he was actually asked) I wonder whether they engage in this evasive mode almost by force of habit. So I found the questions asked by the MP’s generally hit the point but the answers do not. So, for example, many MP’s asked why so many emails remained unanswered in the Foreign Office system. The response was that all emails would be ‘attended to’ by the end of this evening – which in practice meant that they might have been opened and then immediately ‘filed’ in a kind of pending folder without the substantive point ever being addressed. Another case in point was a very intelligent question asked why there was no coordination or cross-referencing between the various schemes of headings under which people could apply for admission to the UK – the reply from Boris Johnson just stressed how many people had been aided by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in the last few days which, of course does not answer the question.
In the late afternoon, I undertook a task I had been meant to do for days. I had an old adjustable spanner soaking in a tub of white vinegar for several days to loosen/get rid of the rust. Then it had a good hard scrubbing with a wire brush, several rinses with cold water and finally a drying off and a good treatment of WD-40 before it will get put carefully away.
In the middle of the night (when else?) I was reading my emails and got some rather disturbing news from our closest friends in Spain. We had not heard from them for a week or so which is quite unusual and we hoped that nothing was amiss. Their daughter was due to come to the University of Gloucester as an ERASMUS student – the acronym ERASMUS stands for European Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students. Our close friend had been one of our earliest Erasmus students at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University, Leicester) and now about thirty years later, it was the turn of her daughter (who we know very well, having watched her grow up since she was a baby) to undertake a year’s Erasmus experience in an English university. Naturally, I was distraught to discover that the daughter would not now be coming to England as we were expecting her shortly. So what to do? I sent off an email in the middle of the night to the University of Worcester, one of our nearest universities, to see if there was anything that could be done. Then I got onto the international pages of the university in Madrid where the daughter is studying and sent these pages off to our friends in La Coruña, suggesting that they might contact the international office of the university themselves to see if they had any other contacts with UK universities which could take over the contract reneged upon by the University of Gloucester. Then I did some internet searches and discovered that whilst Boris Johnson and his Brexit mates had withdrawn the UK from the Erasmus scheme (on the grounds that ‘they could not afford it’), this did not apply in Northern Ireland. Apparently, the universities in the Republic of Ireland (Eire) had stretched out a hand to their ‘cousins’ in the north and whilst the UK universities were withdrawing from the Erasmus scheme, the Irish had extended a massive hand of friendship to their colleagues in Northern Ireland offering them the opportunity to continue participating in the Brexit scheme. So this is a bit of a lifeline – but it all depends whether the university in Madrid has any contracts with any universities in Northern Ireland which might not be the case. Anyway, I must communicate all of this to our friends in la Coruña but I haven’t had the opportunity yet. Then, of course, the evident idea occurred to me (a little late) that I could contact the international department of De Montfort University to at least speak to an informed academic from within the UK system – this is a prime task for tomorrow.
I am just in the process of transferring my fuel accounts from my old supplier to me new one. My new supplier sent me some helpful emails (and a very clear website) which just says ‘Enter your existing Gas and Electricity meter readings‘ So I went outside to my external meters which I have not at looked at for a long, time long time and was faced with a blank screen on the gas meter and a blank screen with three buttons to activate the blank screen on the electricity meter (which gave unhelpful options such ‘Consult’ ‘Engineer’ which was not particularly helpful) I then pressed several buttons several times on the ‘gizmo’ which we have in our kitchen and, fortunately, the meter reading numbers of the gizmo and on the external meters seems to agree. Now to enter them into the system – easier said then done. The Gas reading went in fine but the Electricity one needed the correct number of zeros before the digits before it would enter correctly but at least the deed was done.
This task having completed, we got some very bad news by phone. We had planned to go out with our two closest friends whose wedding anniversaries are very similar to ours for a joint meal on Thursday next. But the phone call revealed that the wife of one of our friends had had a heart attack yesterday (and perhaps two smaller ones) but at least she had been got into hospital within an hour or so of it happening. Evidently, she would have had some clot-busting drugs or similar but we know she is more comfortable than she was and had a good night in hospital last night. We have no more news than that but, evidently, we are very anxious that one of our closest and dearest friends makes her a speedy recovery. We bought a card from Waitrose which we popped through the door on the way to Pilates. To save a bit of time, we had earlier gone down to town by car and picked up our newspapers (and much needed ice-cream for this hot weather) It looks as though tomorrow we should have a really hot day (28° to 30°) before the weather breaks down completely on Thursday. Of course, we may have spectacular thunderstorms and/or rain but I hope our damsons remain undamaged (as I due to pick them this weekend)
Today may well have been the hottest day of the year so far. It looked as though temperatures around the whole of the UK were about 30° which is in the mid 80’s. However, the weather forecasters had warned us that this was going to be a short-lived heatwave as the whole weather system is due to break down tomorrow and it looks as though cooler and stormier weather will spread over the whole of the country spreading from the south west. First thing this morning, I spent some time getting my accounts up to date and then I texted one of my friends to get the telephone details of another – Meg and I were anxious to know how our friend who had been hospitalised after heart problems was doing. I managed to make contact and got some up-to-date news (and quite by accident ran into him in the paper shop as well) They are transferring his wife to a more specialised coronary care unit in Worcester and to be in the hands of specialists and with better equipment must be a good thing. They have diagnosed some problems with her heart valves and I just hope that with some modern treatments and drugs our friend will be able to get a new lease on life. She is a really avid gardener and organised a lot of the flower decorations within our local church so she is bound to be missed for a little while now. When I bumped into her husband, I told him to forget about the normal clothing things that you take into hospital but just take along some perfume to wear. In the park, we had quite a long conversation with one of regular park regulars. Knowing that we meet several times a week, he had asked me to get a specialised product from Amazon which I was happy to oblige. The package arrived yesterday so it got handed over (and I was repaid) so that worked out well. We were joined by Gloria, our wheelchair friend, and spent some time chatting but to be honest, whilst there was a pleasant breeze, the temperature was steadily arising as the day wore on. We walked home fairly slowly as we did not want to ‘push it’ in the extreme heat. Once we got home, our house was delightfully cool after the heat of the midday sun outside and we adapted the quiche we were due to eat to make it into a salad-type meal.
This afternoon, Meg and I spent a certain amount of time watching some of the debates in the House of Commons over the Health and Social Care proposals. The Labour Party MP’s were generally arguing that the government proposals to spend over £12 billion supporting the NHS and finally addressing the funding problems was little better than a sticking plaster on a gaping wound. Also, there was very much a feeling that ‘ordinary workers’ would bear the brunt of the cost through National Insurance contribution increases but the very wealthy (and their houses) would emerge almost unscathed. The reaction of many Tory MPs was fascinating. They absolutely loathed the concept of spending a lot more money on the NHS (needed to address the backlog after the treatments cancelled to cope with the COVID crisis). Also, as one or two them argued with a degree of passion that once you had a temporary ‘NHS’ tax it would become permanent as to go to the electorate saying ‘let’s get rid of the NHS tax‘ would be electoral suicide. So they felt that they were being asked to support and to vote for the kind of proposals that might well have been advocated by a Labour government – if there was no difference between themselves and a socialist government, why would any one vote Tory ever again particularly in view of the manifesto pledges (at least two that had been broken) But despite all of the ‘chuntering’ and grumbling, the Tory MP’s voted 'en masse' for this huge extension of the role of the state and the highest taxation levels seen for 70 years whilst the Labour Party actually voted against. I have a feeling that there may well be quite a cleavage in the Tory party which is difficult to resolve. It is being said, though, that these spending increases sets the tone and the terms for the next general election and signals what type of prime minister Johnson he wants to be. The wager is clear as he believes voters will grudgingly forgive him for breaking not one, but two manifesto commitments if it means a huge increase in spending on the NHS and social care.
In the later part of the afternoon, I spent some time preparing some of the documentation (largely form-filling) before we go off to see the building society which is hosting our savings accounts. Although the branch is closed to the public from about 2.30 we have been told to turn up at about 3.00 next Monday so that our documents can be processed – naturally, we are having to take along lots of ID at the same time.
So the day has finally dawned to which I had been looking forward for some time now. It is the day of our 54th wedding anniversary and the day seemed very similar in temperament to the way it was in 1967. One thing I particularly remember about that particular day is the fact that one of Meg’s cousins and the parents of Meg’s bridesmaid were both coming from afar to Manchester – one from South Wales and the other from Solihull. These two sets of guests both had particular and distinctive sports cars. From my memory (which may well be faulty) one of these was a Daimler Dart and the other may well have been one of the more distinctive Triumphs. Anyway, the owners of these cars had each taken note of the other whilst they were proceeding along the motorway (the M6) into Manchester and were regularly overtaking each other turn and turn about (as sometimes cars do, travelling at about the same speed). Imagine the astonishment when one followed the other through the suburbs of Manchester and they eventually landed up outside the same church (i.e. Church of the Holy Name, opposite the main entrance to the University of Manchester) when they discovered that they were each coming to the same event i.e. our wedding, Naturally, there was mutual amazement when they finally met having chased each other for miles. We have a series of the original wedding photos on my iPhone, scanned from the original photos at the time of our 50th 4 years ago and the photos, with the passage of time, are quite revealing (black and white, of course) In one photo, six male friends of Mike’s are shown all in the prime of their lives. Who would have thought that over 50 years later, three of these would be dead (one of them my own best man), a fourth suffering from prostate cancer and a fifth with dementia. There appears to be one member of the six apparently unscathed but it does tend to show dramatically the frailty of the male members of the species. Another fact revealed in the photos is Meg’s wedding dress, which is actually a Mary Quant copy. (Mary Quant was said by some to be the inventor of the miniskirt and was was certainly an icon of women’s fashions in the 1960’s) If Meg’s wedding dress had been a Mary Quant original it would have cost £1,000’s but what happened is that Meg sketched out some of the designs she liked which epitomised the Mary Quant ‘look’ and Meg’s mother, whom was an excellent couturier, bought the materials and made the dress, When, in occasions like this, we show the wedding photographs to people that we meet, practically ever female of the older generation will have heard of Mary Quant and can therefore relate to the design. As well as being above the knee (just), the outfit also sported a wonderful lace bonnet which was very much ‘a la mode‘ in 1967. We have one more fairly remarkable fact about our wedding photos. When I was getting them out of their retaining album for our 50th, a piece of lined paper fell out which was actually the organist’s original notes of everything that we had played at out wedding. From this list, I have managed to scour the internet and get practically identical facsimiles so we now have the facility to run a slide show and play the wedding tracts which is almost as good as a video might have been (or a cine film, I suppose, in 1967). This all comes to mind because Meg and I went went to Waitrose by car, discovering some champagne and cards left by a friend when we were on our way out. Once we go into Waitrose, we showed the photos on my phone to a few of the regular staff who know us very well and were rewarded by a bunch of flowers as well.
Knowing that we were going out in the evening, we had a light lunch and I spent one time getting my building society accounts all made accessible through an app I have installed on my phone. Then we got our ‘glad rags’ on and went out for a meal to our favourite hotel/restaurant, starting at 6.30 and carrying on until 10.00pm. We had a really marvellous dinner with lots of good food and scintillating conversation with laughter and merriment very much in evidence. Our friends had also bought us some birthday wine and cards to help us make our day really memorable. As another sort of coincidence, my local friendly newsagent is going to celebrate 45 years of marriage in two days time – his wedding anniversary can never be forgotten as it is the by now ‘infamous’ 9/11 (i.e. 11th September) in which the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York were attacked and destroyed some 20 years ago now.
After all of the excitement generated by yesterdays’s celebrations of 54 years of married bliss, today rather had the feeling of ‘the morning after the night before‘ about it. After we had got ourselves dragged into bed and seen a little of the late night news, then I got up to write yesterday’s blog which might explain its slightly ‘offbeat’ character. So this morning, we were a little slow in getting up and getting going – and of course our domestic help calls around on a Friday so we always seem to have masses to talk about. Eventually, though we did get going and had previously arranged to meet with our University of Birmingham friend in the park – as it turned out, we were only half an hour late. There wasn’t time to pick up our newspaper (now confined to ‘The Times‘) and we spent about an hour and a half chatting about all kinds of things. One matter which was absorbing our attention, though, was a problem manifest over practically the whole of the UK. This is how to have an adequate consultation with a GP when it is so difficult to have any face-to-face contact with a GP these days when the default method of consultation is via a telephone appointment. We were reminiscing with each other that an old-fashioned GP in the former pre-COVID days could have gathered all kinds of impressionistic data from the moment you entered the room until you were beckoned to sit down in a chair adjacent to the doctor’s work station. Now, I think it is true to say, that a GP is likely to be staring at his computer screen and wave you towards a chair before entering the opening gambit of ‘what can we do for you today?‘ Just by chance, there is an article in today’s ‘Times‘ which is detailing how the senior coroner for Manchester is highlighting in ‘Prevention of future deaths‘ reports in which five cases of death over the last few months could have been avoided if face-to-face consultation had taken place rather than a telephone consultation. One of these cases involved the case of a 99-year old resident of a residential home who had a telephone consultation with a doctor who did not diagnose a broken femur from which the patient could well not have died. These cases are no doubt the prominent tip of a vary large iceberg but when you consider that for the past year and half a huge amount of ‘normal’ doctoring has been squeezed out by the impact of the pandemic, it not surprising that mistakes will occur and diagnoses not be made on time.
When we go home (late) it was time for me to prepare what is now fast becoming a Friday lunchtime special i.e. fresh sea-bass bought from Waitrose only the day before. Now that I know exactly how to cook these correctly so that the skin is nicely crispy and, once turned over, the flesh is nicely cooked without being over-cooked, we are really enjoying our mid-day on Friday treat. I serve it with some capers (previously bought in a jar), some fresh lemon juice, garlic butter and purple sprouting broccoli. This is a dish which is both extreme delicious as well as healthy so I am more than happy, having just established a Friday tradition, to carry on with it. To be honest, I used to make a big fish pie about once a month with 4-5 different kinds of fish and then, having cooked it, save several portions for future meals but it does take quite a lot of preparation and I have rather got out of the habit of doing it in the last few months. Today, after lunch, I went down on my own by car in order to pick up my copy of ‘The Times’ which I now intend to read rather more assiduously now that I am bereft of The Guardian. I did take the opportunity to pop into Waitrose where I bought a bottle of Cava and a card for my friendly Asian newspaper whose shop is just around the corner. When we were discussing our own forthcoming 54th wedding anniversary celebrations, it emerged that he was due to celebrate 45 years of marriage on that most memorable of dates i.e. 9/11 (as the Americans would put it, 11th September for us in the UK). In the past week, I did watch a documentary of how 9/11 unfolded hour by hour as captured in air traffic control messages (still quite laconic) and a lot of footage shot on people’s cellphones (mobiles to us Europeans) that had never been broadcast before. I have no doubt tomorrow, twenty years after the events of two airliners crashing into the Work Trade Centre in New York, one into the Pentagon and one brought down in a field in Pennsylvania, our airwaves will be filled with all kinds of footage of the attack. One fact that I have just heard on tonight’s news that I did not know was that some 10,000 New Yorkers were directly impacted by the collapse of the twin towers mainly though the release of toxic materials and a number of these developed cancers from which they subsequently died. I have seen one source that indicates that nearly 3,000 people died directly but that over 4,000 survivors and first-aiders may have died since 9/11 itself.
Today was a typical Saturday morning – we seemed a little delayed as we did not have rush too much as we were not due to meet anyone in particular in the park. I left Meg on our usual bench chatting with a couple of our park regulars whilst I went off into the town to gather our newspapers and collect one or two bits and pieces. At the newsagents, I received a pleasant and unexpected surprise. Yesterday, I had dropped off a card and a bottle of bubbly to help the newsagent and his wife to properly celebrate their 45 years of successful marriage. Today, Meg and I were the recipients of a very interesting looking bottle of rosė bubbly and card as well (as it was our 54th last Thursday) so we have both helped each other to celebrate our respective good fortunes. En route, I also passed a hardware stall where I bought as a speculative purchase a large adjustable spanner. This was bought as much for the fact that being a tool of not-recent manufacturer, it is quite heavy as it is made from drop-forged steel and consequently is reasonably heavy (and so useful for weighing things down as occasion demands)
When we got home, it was pretty late so we had to ‘make do’ with an instant meal. On occasions like this we tend to make use of a tin of corned beef which can be made into an instant mince when added to some fried onions and a bit of instant gravy. To this we added a baked potato and some petit pois – well, I have tasted better and tasted worse, but at least we rustled a meal together in just over 10 minutes. We treated ourselves, though, to a specially concocted ‘sweet’ which starts off with a banana and after some ice-cream, yogurt and a Waitrose special choc-ice special topped off with a drizzle of honey. It sounds (and is!) indulgent but has to be tasted to be believed.
This afternoon, we were more than happy to have a lazy afternoon because we knew that we were going to go to church leaving the house at 5.30. When we got to the church car park we ran into one of the friends whose wife is in hospital. We were delighted to get some good news that our friend’s angiogram proved negative and we are hoping to see her home fighting fit as soon as she can be discharged – they are waiting for the artery into which the angiogram is inserted to heal somewhat before she can come home again, hopefully before new Thursday which just happens to be her wedding anniversary.
Tonight, as I blog, I am half-listening to the ‘Last Night at the Proms‘ as it is that time of year again. I feel deeply ambiguous about this programme now that we are living in a post-Brexit era. I used to enjoy (if that word is not far too strong) the eccentricities of the English letting their hair down once a year in order to be straight-laced for the rest of it. But now in these post-Brexit, English-nationalist type days, I feel deeply unhappy about the rampant xenophobia, flag waving and generally denigration of foreigners (‘Britons never, never will be slaves‘ etc.) I think it would be more appropriate now to sing not ‘Britain rules the waves’ but rather ‘Britain waives the rules’) I always suspected that all of the xenophobes and English nationalists used ‘Last Night‘ as an excuse for their posturing but now it seems to have received official endorsement from the establishment. Incidentally, I think the BBC does a magnificent job not allowing too much attention given to the extremes of flag raising and the hunting out of spots of rampant xenophobia and they do try hard to focus on a few non-UK type flags being waved to try and present some ‘balance’ The traditional medley of songs etc I shall avoid but I do enjoy listening to how witty the conductor chosen for the last night can prove to be.
Last night, we did listen to the whole of Bach’s ‘St. Matthew Passion‘ and really enjoyed every minute of it (broadcast from 7.00pm until 10.00pm. I first heard it when I was about 14 and in the school music room in Thornleigh College, Bolton, getting prepared to travel home by train for the Easter vacation. The very last cantata (‘In tears of grief, we leave thee Lord‘) in English translation, held me absolutely transfixed, as it does to this day – if you listen careful to the cadences of the music and it is skilfully interpreted you can almost hear the sobbing of grief played out in long cadences. Incidentally, to any musicologists out there, does the very, very last chord of the cantata end in a deliberate mis-chord (like an ‘E’ and an ‘F’ played next to each other) – written by Bach (who was a deeply religious man but although a Protestant, his music and I think much of his religious work was performed in catholic cathedrals such as Leipzig), I think he may have been a very subtle point in writing the discord right here (but of course, I could be wrong)
Another Sunday and the weather dawns as one of those grey and indeterminate days. I get up early-ish and walk down for my copy of ‘The Sunday Times‘ (the pleasure of The Observer now being foregone). On my way down, I left a bottle of wine outside a bush which graces the front of one of our friend’s houses (a present for their wedding anniversary) and, on the accompanying card, reminded them to look behind the bush for their bottle. On the way home, I noticed that the bottle had disappeared which either means that they have taken it safely inside the house or there are a lot of opportunistic thieves roaming the streets of Bromsgove first thing on a Sunday morning. On the Andrew Marr show, we had the Health Secretary Sajid Javid (our local MP) announcing the fact that a health passport, under consideration by the governnment, had now been ruled out. What is significant about this, is that one hour earlier on a rival show, he had intimated that this policy was still under consideration so there was a rapid and dramatic change in public policy in the space of one hour without any evident consultation with colleagues. Strange! But we are unfortunately having to get used to bizarre modes of government and contradictory announcements from this government – as the opposition and the press do not seem able to ‘lay a glove’ on them.
We knew that in the late morning, we were both due to go along and have our routine ‘flu jabs which is part of our normal autumn routine. We texted our University of Birmingham friend to say that we would have to leave him at a precise time – but we chatted with some of our other regulars before we had to announce our departure. As we have come to expect, the whole surgery and vaccination process was like a military operation. We walked in before our annointed slot, booked in, followed the arrows, bared our left arm, received the jab and were then outside of the building by another entrance all within about two minutes or so. I managed a brief chat with the health service professional giving me my dose saying how difficult it was for the vaccine makers to call the correct ‘strain’ of ‘flu which they feel might be prevalent in the autumn as they have to make a judgement call in February and a few years back they didn’t get it quite right. My vaccinator explained to me that to try and minimise the risk of this happening, what was actually administered was a cocktail of about four variants to maximise the chance of success. I must say that today, for about the first time, the injection site in my left arm is a little on the tender side and I can feel that I have been ‘jabbed’. This will settle down in a day or but in the past I have had the vaccine with no ill effects whatsoever so I wonder if COVID-10 antibodies are putting up a fight? Anyway, we returned home to a chicken dinner hoping that one of those whole chickens that you get these days (on its own tray, complete with cooking bag) had not exploded and wrecked the entire oven. I am pleased to say it had not but an awful lot of fluid seemed to come of this partticular fowl which formed the basis of our gravy.
The media today is full of the success of the 18-year old Emma Raducanu who was the first ‘qualifier’ to ever win the American Open. I hadn’t realised that Channel 4 had broadcast the match live last night becase we were busy watching Last Night of the Proms and then went promptly to bed. She seems to be a very level headed young woman and, after Wimbledon, has coped with the pressure well – let us hope that she continues to do so and does not ‘crash and burn’ as can happen if success comes too early. I did just wonder by what criteria her parents (father from Romania,her mother fom China) had gained access to the UK but as they were evidently not short of money, perhaps they fulfilled the criteria of ‘high net worth’ individuals when her parents emigrated from Canada when she was two years old. Their loss is our gain, though.
The Sunday Times is running a story today to the effect that Boris Johnson has surrounded himself by incompetents within his cabinet and hopes that he can remain PM for about 10 years, hoping to rival Margaret Thatcher. Much as I thoroughly disliked Margaret Thatcher and she had her favourites amongst the ‘Drys’ rather than the ‘Wets’, I think she did not overlook talent. One does get the impression that with the possible exception of the Chancellor, Boris Johnson has surrounded himself with people who cannot challenge his authority. Although the vast majority of the Tory party hate the provisions they have just voted through in the Health and Social Care Bill, if Boris Johnson keeps on winning elections with 80 seat majorities, then do they care? As one prominent politician said (I must look up the source) ‘Look if you don’t like my principles, I have lots of others‘ which sounds like Broris Johnson to a tee.
The start of another week and the weather is starting to feel a tad autumnal. Meg and I have commitments both today and tomorrow but we are looking to a little spell of fine weather on Wednesday (and no storms before then) so I can have a chance to pick this year’s crop of damsons before a storm comes along and shakes them all of the branches. After we had got showered and some morning jobs done, Meg and I were wondering whether to go down to town by car to save some time because we knew that we would have to have a pretty early lunch so that we could set off for our afternoon trip in plenty of time. One of the little jobs I engaged in this morning was a bit of spreadsheet work to get my finances (or rather my record keeping) shipshape. As I was doing this, a thought occurred to me which is hardly original. That is, whenever you are working with a spreadsheet, perhaps you are working with TWO spreadsheets – one on the computer in front of you and the other which is actually in your head. Then when you examine the physical spreadsheet and you see something which is not quite right, unexpected or anomalous you automatically cross check with the spreadsheet ‘in your head’ to reconcile the two. I suspect that accountants (or good ones) always work this way – you don’t just look at a spreadsheet full of figures and say ‘x must be the answer’ but have a fair idea what a value (or a spreadsheet cell) ‘ought’ to say. When I discussed this with my son, he argued that a combination of check sums and pivot tables always made the answer a ‘correct’ one so it could just be my own ideosyncratic way of working. As we were going into town by car, we spotted our friends whose wedding anniversary it was today just on their way home from a funeral. Anyway, it was good to stop by and give them our congratulations ‘in the flesh’ as it were – in my card to them, I pointed out that the generally speaking, the first fifty years of married life were the worst and all was plain sailing after that. So we picked up our ‘Times‘ and had quite a pleasant coffee and comestibles in the park before setting off for home and then an early lunch.
Then, at 2.00pm we set off for Solihull where we had an appointment at the building society where we have several savings accounts. All that we intended to do was to make our accounts into joint accounts – I suspect that we hadn’t done this in the first place as it always a bit of ‘pfaff’ having to gets two lots of ID and what have you and, in general, it is easier to set up an account in single rather than in joint names. We needed to fill a four page form for each one of our accounts (serving a different ‘savings pot’) and then in the building society, these had to be checked over and then our four lots of ID neded to be physically examined. It took two of the clerical staff the best part of half an hour to do all of this and we waited patiently. However, the staff did not appear to mind – one wonders if they did not have much work to do if people like us had not turned up with our demands. They were very gracious and accommodating about all of this but once it had been done, we wandered along the High Street and treated ourselves to a cappucino and ‘tarte de pommes’ in a recently opened and refitted coffee bar cum cocktail bar. Then, as we had not visited this high street for a couple of years, courtesy of the pandemic, we took the opportunity to pop into the Cancer Research charity shop where we bought a Bill Bryson book and an anniversary card, noting that they had a magnificent range of Christmas cards of the type we like (both religious and secular) We made a mental note to come back before Christmas so that we could get a good supply – we always used to get our Christmad cards from the Oxfam shop in Bromsgrove but this has unforunately closed down.
Tonight it has been announced that a single shot of vaccine is to be ‘offered’ to all schoolchildren beteen the ages of 12-15. The science and politics behind all of of this is that whilst the risk of infection is low, the disproportionate effects of school disruption should be minimised if possible. It is also well known that most of the public health scientific community know that schools transmit virus rapidly and the summer holidays acted as a type of firebreak – now that the schools have gone back, it might only be a week or so before rates start to rocket. So are we vaccinating school chidren far too late – most of Europe and the States have been doing it for weeks now and we really ought to have started this in mid-August!
Today was a gloomy and overcast day with squally rain showers very much in evidence. Because we had a medical appointment in the middle of the day, we always knew we were going to have a rather truncated morning. I spent some time playimg about with a spreadsheet and then we set off for our newspaper on foot, realising that we needed to get a little bit of exercise done. The park was practically deserted this morning and the park benches were still wet after the recent rain showers. But we had been ‘wise virgins’ and had come along prepared with sponge-like cloth and an old tea towel which made the bench habitable for us. Then having left Meg in the park, I strode off quickly to collect the newspaper and upon my return, then Meg and I immediately set off for home. We knew that we had to leave the house shortly after 1.0am so we had a quick ‘put me on’ of rice cakes in lieu of lunch before setting off for the hospital in Redditch (some 14 miles away). Meg was due to have an X-ray on her neck and this procedure worked liked clockwork, with the added bonus of not needing to pay exorbitant car-parking charages either. When we got home, we had a light lunch of soup, not really wanting to start cooking at that hour. In addition, our hairdresser was due to call and although we can rely upon her running a little late, nonetheless we had a fairly narrow window in which to get ourselves fed and the washing up done.
Today,we have a day long-trailed and filled with some important COVID announcements. The most important weapon in the armoury of the present government is to rely almost excusively upon the efficacy of the present regime of vaccines coupled with some exhortations as to how to keep ourselves safe. All schoolchildren from 12-15 are to be offered one dose of a vaccine – only one dose at the moment because in the very rare event that complications arise, this seems to be after the administration of the second dose. All 50+ in the population will also be offered a ‘booster’ jab (making it their third) together with all health workers and some other key workers. However, it remians the case that daily infections and hospital admissions are running at a rate several times that of last year – and so, the NHS coping with the backlog of cases over the course of the pandemic, is still under severe pressure. If the pressures on the NHS becomne intense and the infection rate ‘spikes’ (or should we say ‘soars’) then the Government will move to Plan B. A little bit of disturbing news that has only just ‘trickled out’ is that is that the efficacy of the various vaccines seem to decline fairly rapidly and after 20 weeks ( a bare 5 months) the Astra Zeneca vaccine is only 50% and the Pfizer 70% effective. The implication of this is that people vaccinated several months ago might think of themselves are being quite ‘safe’ buit they may be much less protected than they thought. It is true to say, though, that fully vaccinated individuals make up just 1% of coronavirus deaths.
Plan B basically is concerned with powers that the government already has but has now decided that they should bring back into use if absolutely necessary. These include complusory use of face masks, vaccine passports and ‘last resort’ lockdowns.
Various virologists and public health experts are interviewed quite regularly on the media and I think it is fair comment to conclude that there is a degree of worry ‘out there’ in the informed scientific community. In the words of one of them, it really looks as though the politics is driving the government decision making and certainly not the science. Hence Scotland, for example, is going to keep vaccine passports for nightclubs and similar large crowds of people. I think that one of the sources of concern is that if the infection rate is high, you are always opening the door to a variant that will prove to ‘escape’ all of the current vaccines. Should this occur, no doubt a new vaccine can be formulated but if we lose several months getting production ramped out then new variants might have got a headstart on us and we might be back to the ‘bad old days’ of a year ago. I feel that the whole of the government decision making seems to be dominated by fear of the right wing of the Conservative party – if they are not placated, then Boris might be de-throned and somebody more compliant to their politics might be installed. We seem, not for the first time, to be very much behind the vaccination of our young people compared with the rest of Europe. For example, France has been moving quickly with 66% of those aged 12 to 17 now single jabbed, and 52% fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, we are just starting to rollout our vaccination programme for these youngsters next week.
Today has been an interesting day in all kinds of ways – but first things first. We knew that it was to be a little cloudy this morning but the weather forecast indicated that we might have quite a bright and sunny afternoon which was just as well given what I had in prospect for later on today. Meg and I walked down into the park and I left Meg, as now is customary, on our favourite bench with a copy of yesterday’s Times. I knew that I had several errands to perform on the road and the first of these was to replenish our cash supplies with an all too rare visit to an ATM. This having been done, I then popped along to pick up our copy of today’s newspaper and then doubled back to visit our local Waitrose. Here I bought a bottle of Prosecco and also a nice bowl of something akin to succulents which I thought might make a particularly good wedding anniversary plant as our friend had just been discharged from hospital and might need to take it easy for a few days. I thought this little pot would grace a window sill or a place in the greenhouse but would not have to be replanted if bending was out of the question. Whilst in Waitrose, I was greeted by one of our favourite store staff who was not on duty when it was the day of our own wedding anniversary last Thursday. To cut a long story short, we were the grateful recipients of a whole bunch of red roses (in addition to the flowers we were already given last week) and a wonderful box of chocolates as well. As you can imagine, none of this was expected but when I met up with Meg in the park I was burdened with plant, wine, chocolates and newspapers. Meg was chatting with an old lady we know well and who often comes into the park – her husband, whilst alive, was a local authority gardener and the family donated a bench in his honour (upon which we used to sit upon occasions). So Meg and set off for our journey home but we decided to unburden ourselves en route. I popped round to the back garden of our friend’s house (as they were not in) and left the present of the wine and the plant outside their back door. Then I knocked on the door of our other Irish friends a couple of doors up and presented the lady of the house with the bunch of red roses saying they were from a ‘secret admirer’ (which fooled no-one) We still have a card to hand deliver tomorrow but at least the heavy lifting has already been done.
This afternoon, after lunch, I had set myself the task which i perform annually of picking the damsons from the incredibly old hedge which forms the rear boundary to our garden. Having done this over the years, I have got everything off to a fine art and go equipped with some plastic buckets which I reserve just for picked fruit, a long handled rake to pull down some of the upper branches and a couple of old milk crates which I use in the garden as an instant platform if I need a bit more height. I count the damsons making sure that I transfer a penny from my left hand pocket into my right hand pocket so I do not lose track of the 100’s. This year the crop appeared a little disappointing – the damsons were of a good size and inhabited some lower branches for me but the crop seemed a lot thinner than usual. I would regard 300 as a complete minimum and had only picked 115 (about a couple of lbs). But last year, my neighbour had availed herselves of damsons on the field side of the hedge so I decided that I would do the same but would have to negotiate a barbed wire fence at the bottomn of a slope at the end of the garden. Having got my milk crates in place, I tried to negotiate the barbed wire fence only to take a wobble and a tumble – I finished up like a turtle with my feet enmeshed in the fence but I took great care to fall in such a way tht I didn’t leave any dangly bits on the fence. Once over, I managed to collected 550 damsons in total, well supervised by our friendly neighbouhood cat, Miggles, who always wants to acxcompany me whenever I am doing jobs in the garden. I calculate that I will need six litres of alcohol this year (three of gin, three of vodka) and 3kg of sugar so I will get the fruit prepped tomorrow, However, my shoulder aches from much stretching, as does my left knee (old war-wound), the place on my leg where I entangled with the barbed wire, a few scratches and assorted nettle stings. I am going to traeat myself to an early night complete with electric blanket this evening to recover somewhat.
Today has been a generally fine day – although a little cloudy and overcast this morning,we knew that we would be in for quite a long fine afternoon. This morning, I engaged in my new routine which is to leap out of bed, get dressed in a hurry and than wait, panting, for the Droitwich Waitrose to open at 8.0 in the morning. I must admit I was about five minutes late this morning but the store was practically deserted when I got there. As we are going away on Monday, I needed to shop for what is only half a week. I had not made a list but relied upon memory to buy only what was needed as there is no point buying stuff only for it to go ‘off’ and then have to be thrown away later. The Waitrose staff are always very friendly and as my checkout operator came from Monmouth, so we were soon reminiscing about wet Wales could be and generally was. This morning, we were a little delayed by some routine jobs but eventually made it to the park where we met with two of our park regulars. I’m not sure how we got onto the object but we ended with a long and intense discussion of our experience of working in organisations and the qualities that people bring with them which makes them successful (or not) in an organisational world.The discussion might not be everybody’s cup of tea but half way through, we were regaled by a round of chocololates which one of our regulars had brought along – I can’t quite remember the occasion they were meant to celebrate. Eventually, though, we were so late that we had to send a litle text to our chiropodist who was due along at 2.00pm to say that we might be delayed by five minutes (even though it was two or three) After we had our feet done, I set to stripping the carcass of a chicken of the fragments of meat which we were going to make into a curry. We do not seem to have done this for ages as we seem to have got out of the habit of having a weekly curry – a tradition that dates back to our student days which is, of course, more than half a century ago.
After lunch and the invitable post-prandial snooze, I knew that I needed to do about three things which was to go by car and collect a copy of the newspaper, do a tour of the local supermarkets to find the cheapest price for 6 litres of gin (or 3 of gin and 3 of vodka, in readiness for my damson gin preparation) and finally mow the lawns which seem to have put on a sudden growth spurt in the last few days. Something had to go and it was the gin-seeking ventures was abandoned – I started to get the lawns done and finished them all off by about 6.30 (in other words, our teatime) We treated ourselves to half a punnet of strawberries just bought this morning and settled down to watch a pretty naff night on th television this evening.
Now that the cabinet reshuffle is into its second day (and into the ranks of more junior ministers), several commentators have put their minds to the task of working what what the sackings and new appointments mean for the current government. One can quite understand why rank incompetents like the ex-Education secretary, Gavin Wliiamson, were removed without ceremony. According to all accounts he started saying his ‘goodbyes’ before he was actually sacked so that must have taken all of 30 seconds to do. But some sackings today have raised eyebrows – Nick Gibb and John Whittingdale were two competent, middle-ranking ministers who had performed competently but still got the push. The analysts are starting to put forward the following scenario. It is looking as though Johnson is getting rid of anyone at least vaguely allied to the chancellor – Rishi Sunak, who may be a challenger to Johnson’s own position. Also, it is now increasingly clear that anyone towards the top the the Conservative Home website ‘popularity of ministers’ poll has either been promoted or retained (such as Priti Patel) whilst anybody towards the bottom has been sacked. It look as though Johnson has his eyes very much on the next election and wants to surround himself with ministers who look as though they might be effective but will constitute no leadership threat to him. It has been noted that Liz Truss, appointed Foreign Secretary on the strengths of negotiating several trade deals has actually just done a ‘cut-and-paste job on the deals that were originally negotiated with the EU – in others, with no net effect but good ‘optics’ as regards the Tory grass roots. Another analysis is showing that the proportion of the Cabinet who have attended public schools (two thirds) is twice the proportion (one third) in Teresa May’s cabinet – interesting but predictable?
The day started well for us when we got a phone call from our University of Birmingham friend who was enquiring whether we were going to be in the park later on today. Indeed we were but after a delayed start (chatting with our domestic help whose day it was today on a Friday) we finally made it to the park. After a lovely chat, we bumped into the husband of our friend who had just recently been discharged from hospital and whose wedding anniversary it was yesterday. We were delighted to get the news that our friend is recovering from her little ‘heart incident’ and was discharged last Sunday. Now, though, she is taking it easy and having to adapt to a slightly lighter routine – I fear that her days of shovelling a ton of topsoil into place before breakfast are probably now over. And so we progressed home for lunch where we were due to try some of the ‘giant’ fish fingers (made of cod) that Waitrose sell on their fish counter. This turned out fine, particularly when accomapnied by some tenderstem broccoli.
After lunch, I knew that it was time for our damson gin preparation to commence. I have a little record book in which I have recorded my yields from one year to another plus details of the recipes which have proved their worth over the years. In particular, I need to know the correct proportions of damsons, sugar and gin and the quantitites appropriate for each size of kilner jar that I possess. I have calculated that this year, I am going to purchase three litres of gin and three litres of vodka – naturally, I buy the very cheapest I can find. Having done a tour of supermrkets to assess what prices and quantities were available, I finished off in my local Aldi where I purchased my three litres of gin and three litres of vodka for this year’s manufacture. I always feel a bit guilty when I take this volume of alcohol through out supermarket tills but it always amazes me when the checkout operators process this lot without so much as a smile or a comment – I wonder of there are lots of people buying this quantity of booze and how they consume it if they are not also in the business of making home made gin-based products.
In the late afternion, I started this year’s preparation of the damson gin (and damson vodka, which I am making for the first time this year.) The fruit has to be prepard by making gashes in each fruit so that the gin/vodka can penetrate the flesh and extract its essences. For this, I use an old-fashioned tin opener which has the kind of blade which might be likened to a chick’s egg tooth but much sharper.I hold the fruit in the left hand and rotate it whilst making gashes with the implement held in my right hand – if this sounds complicated, it is actuually incredibly efficient and I managed to get all 550 fruits gashed withoin an hour and a half. Then I have to sterilise my kilner jars and I use Boots baby sterlising fluid for this – one bottle lasts me for years and you fill the jars with cold water, add the sterilising fluid and leave it dor 20-30 minutes followd by a quick rinse. Now for the filling itself I use an old yoghurt pot which, if filled to the absolute brim, brings you very close to the 450 grams needed per jar. Naturally, my kitchen scales are heavilg involved in all of this. Then in goes 350 grams of white granulated sugar followed by three quarters of a litre of either gin or vodka. Each jar requires a vigorous shake (to dissolve the sugar) and basically that is all there is to it. I inspect the stock once a week and give each a quick shake but I didn’t do it last year and it didn’t seem to make any difference. All in all, I filled 9 kilner jars with three-quarters litre of spirit which is obviously nearly 7 litres (or practically a gallon and a half if that i what you prefer) Straining and bottling can be a bit fiddly but that is three months away yet – hopefully, I will have a supply ready for the Christmas festivities. I am about a week later this year than normal – on the other hand, the fruit seemed bigger, riper and with a skin that was less fibrous than past years so perhaps the week or so delay in the preparation will not matter so much. Now I have to make sure that I have an adequate supply of those little wine bottles (and if you go out for the day then things like elderflower pressé get served out of them). These are about 20cl and like gold dust and I hoard them whenever I see them – I should have prepared enough for about 30 little presents this year.
We had a beautiful fine day today and although a litle cloudy, nonetheless it was a real pleasure to walk out in the autumn sunshine. We struck off for the park where our two regular friends were busy putting the world to rights. Today we were reminding ourselves how the Tom Sharpe (humourous) novels were widely read in the past. It was not an unusal sight in the late 1970’s to be on a train and see an elderly gentlemen quietly reading whilst sitting in the corner of a railway carriage – suddenly,he would be convulsed with laughter and the rest of the ‘normal’ population had no idea what was going on until they realisd that the elderly gentleman was reading a Tom Sharpe novel. I can’t remember which novel it was – it could be the first named Wilt – in which a colleague murders a rival and disposes of his body in a meat canning factoy in which the body is minced up and sold in sausages and meat pies over the whole of East Anglia.
Having collected our newspaper and then taken out a wad of cash to utilise in our forthcoming holiday we made for home. Today it was a case of liver and onions that we had been promising ourselves for some time now. In the late afternoon, I thought I would consult my computer system as I thought that I might have an old NS&I (National Savings and Investments) number. that I might utilise again in the future. The trouble was that I had forgotten my password and the system that they had was to generate not an OTP but a recorded voicemail when, if you expecting the call, you pressed the # sign to acknowledge it – but often your phone was not in the number pad screen and by the time you got there it was too late. Even when I set the keypad stage to the default, the # sign only repeated itself and did not work. After three unsuccessful attempts, the system then shut you down and the only alternative was to fill in an online form with questions that I had to guess at the nswer ( e.g. What type of account did you hold?) and then I might, after a wait of several days, be sent to a sceeen where I could generate a temporary password. I even tried a helpline where I was directed to the same online form I had already filled in so if that draws a blank I see some fraught telephone calls ahead when we return from holiday.
We went to church in the late afternoon (part of our normal Saturday routine) and were delighted to see both of our sets of local Catholic friends, including the one recently discharged from hospital following a ‘heart’ scare. Naturally, we were absoliutely delighted to see her in our midst once again but no doubt she is going to take life a little easier in the foreseeable future. We chatted for a while and finally departed after our stand-in priest was regaling us with an account of a particularly difficult baptism in which the 20-month infant was in the most belligerent of moods and managed to take evasive action against the baptismal water which is really the ‘sine qua non’ of the whole exercise.
Tonight the fragility and interdependence of our industrial system is being exposed for all to see. There has been a massive rise of gas prices for a variety of reasons – but Russia is one of them. The price of gas is so high that two fertiliser factories in the North East have ceased production in the short term which also implies a reduction in one of the most impiotant side products which is carbon dioxide. In the absence of this, then pigs cannot be stunned befor slaughter (by lowering them into a ‘sea’ of carbon dioxide) and something similar may happen wih poultry. Food shortages on our supermarket shelves has been predicted in the next week or so ahead as a direct result of all of this. In addition to all of this, we might add into the mixture some recent pandemic effects on the labour market and, of course, there are also the Brexit effects in the background whose effects are real but difficult to distentangle. I am not sure what the British government can do about all of this but most ‘normal’ governments would make a release of the strategic stockpile which the government holds against emergencies (such as a really hard winter) Most European countries keep sensible reserves of strategic raw materials but I have an idea that after Brexit the government felt released from these ‘onerous’ regulations and so it is quite possible that the UK stocks of both oil and gas had been really been cut back to the bone. The Sunday newspapers might provide a more in-depth analysis of some of these problems, however.
© Mike Hart [2021]