Yesterday we awoke to another cold day with a temperature when I got up of 0° although this is projected to rise to about 12° in the course of the day. We are expecting a whole of news to unfold during the day, both domestic and international. On the domestic front, we are going to have the announcement of swingeing welfare cuts to the dismay of great swathes of Labour MPs (who did not feel they were elected in order to pass these policies) but approved of by most of the public. The background, though, is sobering. Ms Kendall is expected to target personal independence payments (PIP) – one of the main forms of disability benefits for those with long-term illnesses or disabilities – amid a spike in claimants. The PIP bill has grown from £13.7bn a year before the pandemic to £21.8bn in the current financial year and is set to increase to £34.1bn by the end of the decade. The number of people claiming this disability benefit is projected to more than double from two million to 4.3 million. The full details are to be announced to the House of Commons later in the day and although it looks as the PIP benefit has escaped being not uprated (ie cut), the eligibility criteria are certain to be tightened and massive efforts made to get those of working age into work and off benefits. The devil is in the detail, of course, and a potential solution would be to continue to allow the full PIP after a return to work but one suspects that this will be taken as evidence that the claimant has overstated the reasons for the original claim which could then be cut. There is a rule that the claimant must have found these medical conditions hard for 3 months and expect them to continue to be hard for another 9 months which can be difficult to assess if medical conditions flare up and then die down again. On the international front, there is going to be a critical phone call between Trump and Putin later on in the day and some newspapers are speculating that this might be a cynical carve-up of Ukraine’s assets followed by an imposed ceasefire. Whilst our attention is being diverted by these issues, the ceasefire in Gaza seems to have broken down and the Israelis have launched massive strikes against Gaza overnight in which Hamas claims that 200 have been killed and over another 100 injured. This may be of course that Trump promised ‘Hell on earth’ could break out in Gaza and this may be a final push by Israel to attempt to achieve a complete domination of Gaza before the conflict burns itself out (if it ever does)

Last night, I received the news from the care agency that the young male Asian carer who often undertakes a visit to Meg has been allocated as her ‘lead carer’ which sounds like good news. When we see him, we will try and get more details about what exactly this means but I think it means that he will be review and oversee Meg’s conditions as he has been caring for her so many months and therefore make recommendations for any variation in the care package, all within the constraints of course of the budget allocated for Meg’s care by Worcestershire County Council (and to which we contribute).After a fairly rapidly taken breakfast, Meg and I made our way down the hill to Wetherspoons where we met up with our regular friend. Just as we were leaving, I received a call from my son informing me that there had been an incident in the vicinity of our house and we might not be able to able to get to our own house because dangerous live electricity cables were blocking our path. A near neighbour had some scaffolding erected around his house and in erecting their scaffolding, the firm had brought down two live, power cables which were snaking and hissing their way across the road. House alarms were going off along the length of Kidderminster Road. Thew entrance of our drive was blocked by the scaffolders’ van and we waited on a neighbour’s forecourt until the fire brigade arrived. Then another neighbour took pity on us and invited us into their house (Meg in her wheelchair) where we could wait until the National Grid repair team could arrive to repair the damage. It was now about 11.15 and we were told the damage would not be prepared until about 4.00pm but, fortunately, the team managed to isolate the cables and we were allowed back into the house at about 12.30. The electricity company had to turn off the power to 750 households in a complete block so the disruption was considerable and over a wide area. Naturally, although we were in the house, there was no power to boil a kettle for a hot drink but then we entertained the carer who, at least, managed to use the hoist to get Meg into her comfortable armchair as it has its own battery power supply. I have to say our neighbours were very hospitable in this mini-crisis and eventually we were pleased to get the power restored to us at about 2.30 in the afternoon.

Today has been a day full of news, both domestic and international. from which we have been cut off with our TV not being available. The timings for the care calls have had to be re-timed in view of this ‘outage’ in the middle of the day. The news from the Gaza conflict seems dire and it does appear that Israel have decided to break the ceasefire as over 400 Palestinians have been killed, many of them women and children and over 560 injured. This appears, at first sight, to be a push by the Israeli military to achieve a degree of dominance whilst the world’s attention is diverted by the Ukraine conflict. There has been a long nearly two hour telephone call between Putin and Trump and details are still to be released but the speculation is rife that Trump and Putin are carving up the Ukraine between them.

Yesterday morning presaged the start of the week and another change to our ‘normal’ domestic routine as the care agency was experiencing more short-term staffing problems and this meant that the number of care workers to get Meg up in the morning was reduced from two to one and I was asked to assist – under the circumstances, I do not mind as I shall be assisting the young male Asian carer who we see several times a week. This evening as well, there will be just one young female carer to put Meg to bed but again I am happier assisting one really experienced care worker rather than leaving Meg in the hands of two relatively inexperienced ones which has happened on occasions. Last night, after Meg had been out to bed, the news came through that Newcastle had won the Carabao Cup (which I gather is the sponsorship name for what used to be called ‘The League’ Cup) and it was the first time that Newcastle had won any kind of major competition since 1955. Although it sounds hard to believe, I have a sort of tenuous connection with this victory in 1955. My mother had decided that in her mid 40’s she would go off to college to train to be a teacher and mature students like my mother were quite a rarity in the 1950’s. My sister was to attend the Bar Convent in York as a weekly boarder but to come home at the weekends to be with her grandmother whilst I was despatched to the cheapest boarding school in the country (actually, a boarding unit of 40 in a direct grant grammar school, Thornleigh College in Bolton, Lancashire) Now my mother had evidently been called for interview in 1955 to the Teacher Training college in Newcastle called ‘Fenham’ which was then regarded as one of the best of its kind in the country- as people used to say of other colleagues that she was ‘Fenham’ trained. Now we come to the connection with the 1955 Newcastle United FA Cup Victory. I remember my mother telling me, and I would be aged 10 at the time, that when she visited Newcastle the whole town seemed to be in an FA Cup fever and wherever you went in the town, shop windows were full of the black-and-white Newcastle colours. Another connection with this era was the fact that I think my mother visited London because she successfully applied for a loan of £2,000 (multiply by about 35 to get it to present day values) from a body called ‘The National Council for the Education and Training of Women’ to finance her and the family during the two years of her teacher training. I asked her to make a particular note of the locomotive that pulled her train, and it was the A4 ‘streak’ locomotive known as ‘Wild Swan’ so even at that age, I must have had the first inklings of an interest in steam locomotives. This interest was to develop in my later years when I went ‘trainspotting’ (with an elder boy who lived around the corner) to York and Doncaster. Doncaster was a particular delight because there were huge engine repair sheds in the vicinity of the station around which we were allowed to wander (provided we kept to the sides of the building) during the so called ‘dead hour’ or lunchtime period when we had the opportunity to spot rare Scottish locomotives called down for repair.

The morning seemed attenuated as the carer was not scheduled to arrive until 9.00am this morning but I got up at the normal time and did some domestic jobs. Then it took practically an hour to get Meg washed, dressed and transferred to her comfortable chair in our Music Lounge. I discussed with the carer, who is one of the agency’s team leaders, whether we need to retime the visit to Meg first thing in the morning as 45 minutes is allocated but as Meg is getting somewhat more frail, it is taking somewhat longer than this and was practically an hour this morning. After we had breakfasted, I made a telephone call to the Wheelchair service provided by Worcestershire and told them the sorry tale of how Meg had slipped out of the chair a week ago. The receptionist taking the call was suitable horrified and I explained that i though that either additional support strapping was needed and the whole question is indeed raised whether the existing chair (called a ‘transit chair’) is adequate to the job of a round trip of 2½ miles. Then I made my customary trip to town in the car to collect the newspaper and some milk and returned to make us some elevenses, after which time the late morning carer arrived and I made her a cup of tea. We had a simple lunch but when Meg is very sleepy in the mornings, it is slightly difficult to her requisite portion of lunch fed to her because I have a feeling that while she takes it into her mouth, she does not always swallow it as she should (all of which is part of the disease process). In the afternoon, we entertained ourselves with the first part of the ex-astronaut Tim Peake presenting a series called ‘Secrets of our Universe’ on Channel 5 which has some stunning photography and then followed this up with a continuation of the Mozart opera ‘Cosi van Tutte’ which we started watching but did not get through to the end.

I am still evaluating my newly installed browser of ‘Brave’ about which opinions are sharply divided. On the positive side, there are no adverts or tracking activities to follow you around and this is surely a good thing. But the browser has to be financed somehow and the business model pursued by Brave is to allow you to specify the adverts that you want in which you get paid a smidgeon in a type of cryptocurrency. The Brave internet browser blocks ads and other online trackers by default, while other browsers do not. One reviewer noted that he noticed a difference immediately when starting using Brave as, after a day or so, he was not being ‘followed’ online anymore. Blocking ads and trackers is not just about privacy, though as it also speeds the browsing experience by reducing site load times. Most ads and third-party trackers are scripts that run in the background of websites, slowing things down. Chrome, for example, collects browsing information, so Google and its advertising partners can send you targeted ads. Brave downloads only the essential elements for websites, so it loads way faster than other browsers like Chrome—especially if one tends to have a lot of tabs open. Although the cryptocurrency features are off by default, it still takes a certain amount of work and attention to make sure that these features, which many (including myself) want to be well and truly turned off or disabled so that one can appreciate the advantages of the browser without any of the attendant disadvantages. This I have done and so far, so good.

This particular blog entry is quite significant because it is celebrating a ‘double’ anniversary. As well as being St. Patrick’s day, it is also the day when Meg suffered the episode a year ago that meant she ended up in hospital from whence it took about eight days to get her released back home again (and we had a chairlift installed in the meantime) But the other significant anniversary is that this blog is exactly five years old today, being started just before the lockdown for the pandemic five years ago. For those interested in numerology, this blog is [Day 1827] which is 5 x. 365 + one extra day for the 2024 leap year + one extra day for the fact the anniversary date is repeated (as the five years actually ‘runs out’ on the day before) On this particular occasion only, I am going to write a little about how this blog is written. When I wake up in the morning, I make myself a cup of tea and then sit down at my lounge laptop, Meg still being asleep. Here I ‘FTP’ i.e. File Transfer Protocol the relevant files from the day before. This includes the entry actually written the day before but with ‘todays’ date on it – this is why the blog typically starts off with the word ‘Yesterday’ These files which have to have the updated ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ links updated are actually a backup text version kept on a different server to the official WordPress version but kept in case WordPress ever goes ‘belly up’ for whatever reason. Even the backup text version has its own backup as well in case a file ever gets misplaced. Once this has been checked over, the procedure taking about 5-10 minutes, I start to write today’s blog which gets put into WordPress at about 5.00pm in the evening whilst yesterday’s draft in WordPress is actually published. The writing of this log has evolved over the years because I have had to adjust to Meg’s illness and the fact that I cannot spend too much time in each day blogging whilst Meg requires my attention. So now I write using the MicroSoft email program ‘Outlook’ because what I write is saved in the ‘Drafts’ section but not actually emailed to anyone and this means that the work in progress is accessible to me in either of my laptops in the Main Lounge/Meg’s bedroom and also our Music Lounge. I set myself a limit of 1,000 words a day and try to write 400-500 words in this 6.00am start as it takes pressure off me to complete it later on in the day This explains why I now start off with political news as I see what Sky News and links has to offer being a bit more ‘on the ball’ than the BBC regrettably. When the blog for the day is complete, I then copy the entry over to another text editor when it is subject to another spell check and proof reading before it is finally posted to WordPress where it stays as a draft. Then at 5.00pm or thereabouts, all I have to do is get onto WordPress and click ‘Publish’ and so the day’s entry (which actually refers to the day before) is published. But for regular readers, you now know what is going on.

Last night saw the culmination of the Six Nations Rugby competition. Everything depended on the last match, France vs. Scotland because, should France fail to win, then England would, quite surprisingly, have won the championship having actually demolished Wales earlier in the day. The Scots looked as though they were going to go into half-time leading France but a last minute try was eventually ruled void because a foot had been seen by the TMO (Third Match Official) to be in touch and so the try was disallowed. The French scored a try early in the second half from which the Scots never really recovered so the French added to their winning score and emerged as worthy winners of not only the match but also the whole Championship. The real surprise about this year’s competition has been the performance of the England team for who it was predicted they would end up mid-table. But they won two matches by a single point and emerged, as we have seen, as runners up to France. My feelings of disappointment at this year’s competition being over is assuaged by the fact that a Six Nations womens’ competition is going to take over for the next few weeks and that, of course, takes us up to Easter.

It was a cold start to the day this morning with a temperature when I arose of -2° but the day would evidently be a fairly fine one. After breakfast and a quick dash into town to collect my newspaper, our University of Birmingham friend called around as is customary on a Sunday morning. After exchanging the week’s news, we invariable find something that excites both of our minds and today we were exploring the different shades of meanings of particular words as well as the characteristics of various regional accents. As I have some mastery of Spanish, I enjoy the way in a different language ‘cuts up’ your experience of the world by perceiving things in a slightly different way. Our friend is a much better linguist than I being absolutely fluent in both French and German as well as some Spanish that he has taught himself. We finished off discussing the ‘Sapir-Whorf’ hypothesis that language helps to shape our perceptions of the world according to what is symbolically important (the Inuits having many different words for snow, for example, as it is a much ore important part of their environment) After I made a telephone call early in the morning, A District Nurse called around to make a check on the Deep Tissue Injury that Meg has on one heel and which may require a specialist dressing in the future – but not, fortunately as it turned out, just yet. Meg and I had a conventional Sunday lunch of beef, carrots/peas mixture and a baked potato after which we indulged in a further episode of the ‘Pilgrimage’ programme which we often view on a Sunday (as it seems so appropriate)

The forthcoming week will be quite an interesting one, although we have no appointments scheduled as such. But Monday sees a particular anniversary the details of which shall be revealed in due course. As Meg and I listened to the repeat pf the ‘Question Time’ program yesterday, one of the panellists made the telling point that ‘there is always money for a war but not for the poor’ This is because the UK is certainly going to increase the proportion of its GNP to 2.5% to deal with the threat to us all in Europe posed by Russia but, at the same time, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is due to announce cuts to disability payments in which as many as a million of us may see cuts in disability benefits. Something has to be done about the burgeoning disabilities bill which we, as a nation, probably cannot afford but we are all fearful where the axe will particularly fall. I suspect that new claimants for PIP (Personal Independence Payments) will be one source of cuts, the other source being those of working age who are claiming disability benefits, often because of poor mental health and the long tail of the population who are still suffering the after effects of the pandemic. The difficulty here is that PIP does actually help to get some of its recipients back into work again, but the axe may not fall with sufficient precision so cutting the disabilities bill may have unintended consequences. Past history reveals that swinging the axe does not always work. When PIP was introduced in 2013, it was thought that the total saving would be of the order of £1.4bn but the actual savings turned out to be about £0.1bn. PIP was introduced in 2013 to replace the old Disability Living Allowance with the intention it would lead to savings of £1.4bn a year relative to the previous system by reducing the number of people eligible. PIP was initially projected to reduce the number of claimants by 606,000 (28%) in total. Yet the reform ended up saving only £100m a year by 2015 and the number of claimants rose by 100,000 (5%). Another attempt in 2017 to limit access to PIP was also reversed. The reason was that many people appealed against refusals that had been triggered by the tightened eligibility criteria. Also, the emergence of cases in the media which seemed unfair meant ministers, often under pressure from their own backbench MPs, ultimately ordered the eligibility rules to be relaxed. There is considerable unease in the Cabinet over the proposed measures and there may be a massive revolt amongst Labour MPs with as many as 80 being a figure that is bandied about which could almost threaten the huge majority that the Labour Party is enjoying at the moment. There is a lot of speculation swirling around that money will be saved by freezing the level of payments to be made in 2026 rather than uprating the benefits in line with inflation which would be an effective cut, but it is possible that Downing Street may have backed off this proposal in view of the considerable unhappiness of the vast majority of Labour MPs.

It was good to arise at the more ‘normal’ time of 8.00am for the carers this morning which means a 6.00am start for myself. After breakfast, we knew that we would probably make the trip down the hill to meet up with our friends in Wetherspoons but, of course, I had to ensure that Meg was well and truly strapped and wedged into her wheelchair so that we do not have a repeat of the incident of a week ago when she slumped out of the wheelchair. We knew that there two vital supplies that we had to purchase before out meeting, one of them being a supply of chocolate biscuits not for myself but for our University of Birmingham friend who may well call round in the morning. The other commodity of which I had run out is printer paper but the price of this seems to have risen enormously in the last year or so, in order to eke out supplies, I am rummaging through past printouts to see if there are any that I can utilise by printing on the reverse of the paper. I am pleased to say that the trip down and up the hill was uneventful, but the weather could have been a little more kind to us. When we got home.I started to prepare the lunchtime meal which was fairly simple to make, being a quiche that just needed heating up in the oven. I accompanied this with a portion of primo cabbage prepared the other day and then parboiled some carrot which I finished off with some petis pois, laced with a drizzle of honey and then finished off in the microwave oven. This afternoon and this evening, there are three Six nations contests to enjoy, the two critical ones being France vs. Scotland which France needs to win to secure the championship and the other being Wales vs. England which has proved to be quite a tight match over past few years.

Beth Rigby for Sky News is making the point today that Keir Starmer, in his efforts to reform the state of public services in the UK is heavy on rhetoric but light on detail, but the symbolism of abolishing NHS England was clear for all to see as this prime minister is borrowing from a Conservative playbook in an effort to improve services through deregulation, public service cuts and a bonfire of red tape. Whether a ‘slash and burn’ approach to public services improves efficiency in the long run is open to the question. Some analysts are making the point that abolishing NHS England at a stroke is liable to make personnel obsess more about what redundancy package they are to receive than put their hearts and minds into what a reorganised NHS administration should look like. The public services have been hollowed out by successive cuts and by below inflation pay increases in the past few years so the morale of many public service workers is so low that further attacks upon the service may not yield the benefits envisaged.

I think most of us have some knowledge of the workings of the UK NHS will take some time to absorb the shock announcement yesterday that NHS England (the management ‘arm’ of the NHS) is being completely abolished or rather some of its functions absorbed into the Department of Health and Social Care. A change of this magnitude would take tens of thousands of words to analyse properly which is not the function of this blog but I am just going to comment upon some of the language, or rather the words, used by politicians and picked up/amplified by the commentators and the media at large. Somewhere in my academic career, and it may even have been a chance comment in one of the lectures I attended in my university days, I was appraised of the fact that certain words are invested with a cultural meaning quite apart from the technical sense in which they can be used and broadly speaking, we can make a distinction between ‘hooray’ words (which make us feel good and we use approvingly) and ‘boo’ words (where we wish to convey disapproval) So, in the political sphere, ‘democracy’ is always an ‘hoorah’ word and is sometimes appropriated to find a place in the title of the country such as ‘People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen’. On the other hand, ‘fascism’ is always a ‘boo’ word designed to evoke negative feelings as, in the UK, is the word ‘bureaucracy’ or ‘bureaucratic’ Now returning to yesterday’s announcement about the abolition of NHS England, there were two words that constantly featured on the lips of the politicians. One, of course, was the word ‘bureaucratic’ which is always used pejoratively (but interestingly enough, in the political science in Spain where we have many contacts the word is used freely, and often, in a purely technical sense to mean the impartial administration of rules by properly appointed officials rather than the arbitrariness of an authoritarian dictator) The other word which was used so freely was ‘duplication’ often preceded by the adjective ‘unnecessary’ and this is an evident ‘boo’ word. But in modern organisations, heavily if not completely reliant upon their computer systems, there is always a ‘backup’ system or, even better, a ‘disaster recovery’ plan. But what is a backup system if it is not a duplication of computer records but you never hear the words ‘We must get rid of our backup system because it is a duplication’ which, of course, it is. So, this word ‘duplication’ was bandied about yesterday because it is a classic ‘boo’ word and was used to evoke negative feelings to help justify the NHS reorganisation – evidently the public is so gratified to know that ‘unnecessary’ or ‘wasteful’ duplication is now being abolished by ministerial decree. We had the amazing spectacle yesterday of the Tory party, including past Ministers of Health, applauding the actions of the Labour government and you know you must be onto a winner when even the ‘Daily Mail’ has a headline warmly approving of your actions, which is what we saw. Hardly anybody is asking the really hard question of how a huge and complex beast like the NHS is to be appropriately managed and one does get the feeling that various coordinating and sensible rationalisation of data flows are going to be jettisoned in the months ahead.

Yesterday morning, I had been asked if I could act as the assistant to only care worker to which I readily agreed as I get on very well this particular worker who I know very well and with whom I have often shared a task before – the only downside was the morning call was a 7.00am alarm call which meant an alarm call at 5.00am in the morning. But all went well, and we got Meg up and breakfasted, after which I popped out for a newspaper and then started viewing a Michael Portillo travelogue programme on Portugal (Channel 5) which focused on the city of Braga and looked fantastic. I had previously experimented with the ‘Pale Moon’ browser which seemed pretty good except that it would not clear the text from my Word Counter app which it should. So I downloaded an alternative and very secure browser by the name of ‘Brave’ and this imported all of my settings from Microsoft ‘Edge’ and seems to work like a dream. We lunched on some mackerel which I heated up in the rather novel way of immersing it in a pan of boiling water as the packaging states it could be eaten either hot or cold and I supplemented this with some potato and some sliced runner beans. After lunch, we treated ourself to the ‘Question Time’ which was first broadcast the evening before and we save for Friday afternoons. I was enjoying this apart from the discussions on the NHS when it was quite evident that members of the audience had no idea what they were talking about, only having their own experience being treated by a clinician in a hospital session. My enjoyment was interrupted, though, by something which is not rare these days of me falling asleep with a cup of coffee in my hand which promptly ends up on the floor. The solution is lashings of cold water, followed by equally copious sheets of kitchen paper and finally finished off with a steel hot water jug which I rinse out with boiling water and then use as a smoothing iron to absorb the excess moisture. But at least we have the rugby to look forward to during the weekend as the Six Nations rugby competition runs out to its conclusion.

As we might have anticipated, the Ukraine conflict is going to take quite a lot of time to resolve. Putin has announced that he is ‘broadly in favour’ of the ceasefire proposals but has laid down a series of conditions that means it is now up the USA to respond. This is classic playing for time tactics which it is evident that the Russians will deploy as they are making slow but sure military progress and it is in their long term interests to gain or regain as much of their territory as is feasible before a ceasefire comes into effect. If Trump is indeed the skilful negotiator that he claims to be, then no doubt he will be able to fix the problem ‘within a day’ by deploying his much vaunted skills written about (or should I say ghost written about) in his now infamous book ‘The Art of the Deal’.

Before I came to bed last night, I read my emails and was delighted to see that Worcestershire County Council had replied in detail to the points that I raised with them concerning the circumstances of the missed direct debit payment that the County Council were trying to reclaim seven months after the event. The letter contained a full and unreserved apology and agreed with the points made in my letter of where procedures had gone awry. The very welcome news was that although I had made one payment of one sixth of the missing direct debit, under the circumstances they were going to cancel the remaining five months of repayment. The sums involved are not large but are welcome given that I am trying to keep my finances under tight control at the moment. Given the conciliatory tone of the letter, I immediately sent off a reply thanking them for their prompt action to remedy an evident mistake and, at the same time, also sent off letters of thanks to the district and the county councillors who had intervened on my behalf. This is how things are supposed to work, of course, but I wonder how often there is actually a favourable outcome. I suppose the moral of this story is always to complain but politely and in a tone that reflects sorrow rather than anger to get the redress that is needed.

We have awoken this morning to the Trump imposed tariff barriers to be applied to steel and aluminium products on a universal basis and the EU is reacting with the anticipated tit-for-tat retaliatory sanctions. Here in the UK the government have decided (wisely) not to take immediate retaliatory action as the overall trade balance of the UK and the USA is in an approximate balance and the UK is hopeful of concluding a rapid renegotiation of a trade agreement with the USA. This is probably quite sensible but it is calculated that tariffs like this will have a 2%-3% impact over about five years, assuming no further tariffs are erected, of course. The Trump approach in these matters is to raise a tariff, hope for a change in policy in the country to whom it is applied and then to remove the increased tariff if the country complies. But there is quite a hot trade war between USA and Canada at the moment, not helped by the fact that Trump keeps repeating his claim that Canada should become the 51st state of the USA (which is never going to happen, of course) The world’s attention, of course, is how Trump is going to play Putin in the ceasefire proposals for the Ukraine. Having a military advantage, the Russians are bound to play for time, and I expect that Putin will get the better of Trump and not the other way around.

The young Asian carer came around whilst I went off to do my weekly shopping at Aldi. This week, I tried to make into a ‘light’ week and thought hard about the items that I actually need for the next week instead of ‘like to have’ So I got home in plenty of time to get the shopping unpacked and to view the mid-day news. But dramatic news broke in the middle of the morning that the whole of NHS England – the administrative arm of the NHS- is to be scrapped with the sacking of 13,000 staff (which might have included my own son were it not for the fact that he is himself retiring in about three weeks time) NHS England was set up by Andrew Lansley, a Conservative minister, the idea being that there should be an ‘arms length’ body which was to manage the NHS so that politicians could not interfere. This sounds laudable but in practice the NHS is huge and takes a fair amount of management (but far less than would be the case of a privatised health system such as in the USA where the bureaucracy associated with the insurance companies) is huge. The justification for this centralisation is to ‘avoid unnecessary duplication’ and to ‘bring back democratic control’ but it does imply that politicians can now be so much more interventionist over issues close to their hearts such as waiting times. The frustration of politicians can be understood up to a point as trying to effect change in the NHS is rather like steering a massive oil tanker. It is said older oil tankers can take more than two miles to stop. The biggest tanker in the world, the Knock Nevis, weighs 564,763 tonnes, can carry 4m barrels of oil and takes three miles to stop. You could lay the Eiffel Tower down on the deck and still have room for Nelson’s Column, and it is so unwieldy that it is now laid up in Dubai. Ships like the Knock Nevis date from the 1970s and their technology is as crude as their cargo. So an order can be issued but it seems to take an eternity to put into effect Now the effect of the reforms is to remove all of the personnel from the ship and to attempt to steer and sail it with the attention of a few senior officers on the bridge (or, in other words, the Department of Health!) So, I can perceive that the costs of reorganisation could be huge (redundancy payments) and the inefficiencies tremendous (as the centre cannot know everything) so we may end up min a worse situation than before. The Integrated Care Boards’ and the Hospital Trusts have just been told to cut their costs by 50% which sounds as though the American anti-hero, Elon Musk, has suddenly taken over. One doubts whether a change of this magnitude has been sufficiently thought through but it does mean that if the NHS goes ‘belly up’ in 2-3 years time i.e. just before the next election, then it is the politicians who have to carry the can as they have no one else to blame but themselves. There is also ma wider agenda at play here which is to radically reduce the cost of the state in a whole variety of functions because, put crudely, we have run out of money and to not want to tax more or to borrow.

The very welcome news from the day before was that it now appears that the collision between the cargo vessel and the oil tanker in the midst of the North Sea might not be as calamitous as first feared. The owners of the cargo vessel are saying that their containers did not contain cyanide which given its toxicity to all forms of marine life was good to hear. Meanwhile the captain of the cargo vessel has been arrested and charged with gross negligence and homicide by neglect, presumably because of the one missing crew member. This story will run and run but the UK maritime authorities appear to have acted swiftly and professionally which is all to the good. The other big piece of breaking news is that the Ukrainians have accepted the terms of an American ceasefire and have praised the efforts of President Trump in bringing this about. No doubt they are learning how to play the diplomatic game and another invitation to the White House may be in the offing. The Americans have restored the sharing of intelligence and some. military assistance to the Ukraine and, one suspects, this is all part of a strategy to bring pressure to bear upon Russia and the ‘ball is now in their court’ Nobody quite knows how the Russians are going to react to this ceasefire proposal and certainly, as they say, ‘the boot is on the other foot’ I would expect a certain amount of prevarication and foot-dragging by the Russians and they may have to be dragged by the Americans to the negotiating table. Now this will certainly be a test of Trump’s much vaunted abilities to broker a deal. I have thought of a negotiating tactic that the Ukrainians might deploy so that they lose too much face when it appears they will have to cede some (already Russian-speaking and Russian occupied) territory. The Ukrainians should press for a plebiscite in the occupied territories and were the Russians to refuse, which appears likely, the Ukrainians could occupy the moral high ground and argue that Russians can only hold onto territory by force and against the will of the people which radically undermines the Russian claim that they are ‘really’ Russian. If, on the other hand, the Russians were forced to concede a plebiscite and were to win it (one way or another) then the Ukrainians could argue to their own people that Ukraine is a democratic society and if a section of the population wishes to ‘join’ another country, then let them do it. If the Ukrainians were to win a plebiscite. but the territories are still ceded to Russia, then the Ukrainians could use this as a lever to enhance the degree of autonomy in the occupied lands within the newly expanded Russian state. In other words, whatever the outcome of a call for a plebiscite, the Ukrainians could appear to have made much political capital out of a situation where they are probably forced to concede some territory in any case.

Yesterday morning was characterised by our domestic help calling around to work her magic whilst Meg and I thought we would have a quiet and restful day and Meg was dozing most of the morning. I devoted some time whilst having a leisurely morning to looking at some of the webspace I rent to ascertain whether I had enough, and I have a spare 32Gb so that is enough for foreseeable needs. I also did a count-up of the folders within my webspace and discovered that I had 50 folders in it, one being huge (this blog) and many being trivial such as a one-page websites. But there are also folders of holiday ‘snaps’ that are well worth a browse. Some time ago, I registered a couple of .eu domain names before we had actually left the EU. I subsequently discovered to my disgust that these had been expropriated, and I can no longer access them. The content of these websites was small and relatively trivial but at the time, and now some years, later it still rankles somewhat. The body that allocates top level domains had evidently taken it upon themselves to remove the right to an .eu address but I thought when I acquired these names that I would acquire them whilst I could.

Around lunchtime, one of the District nurses called around. She is monitoring a pressure sore which has turned into a ‘deep tissue injury’ on one of Meg’s heels and, at the same time, took a photograph of the bruise that is now developing on Meg’s other foot since she hit the pavement when she fell out of her wheelchair last Saturday. She also took Meg’s blood pressure and oxygen levels which were both reassuringly high but in a week’s time they are probably going to perform a Doppler test to assess the extent of the deep tissue injury. The nurse said she would also check up on the progress of the referral I made to the OT service the other day to see if any additional supports might be available so that we do not have a repeat of the wheelchair episode.

Whether the Russians will actually come to the negotiating table is the talking point of today. One of the foremost defence analysts in the UK. Michael Clarke, is of the view that Donald Trump is running the risk of looking like ‘an absolute fool in front of Russian President Vladimir Putin’. He says Trump has the business style of a property magnate but it is not the way Russians like to negotiate ‘It is not the way diplomacy tends to work in reality. It does on TV series, but not in reality. Putin is very, very clever and he is cunning. He is not a terribly bright man, but he is cunning.’ he states. Clarke adds that the danger for Trump is that he will push for a quick deal which ‘looks good for the first couple of weeks and then falls apart’ He says that for that to happen to Trump so early in his second term would not go down well with a man who cares so much about he is viewed by history.

We awoke yesterday morning to an assessment of the consequences of the ship collision in the North Sea. A container ship containing some deadly cyanide crashed into a stationery oil tanker containing jet fuel which immediately exploded creating a fireball which was visible from space. The consequences for the great variety of wildlife off the Yorkshire coast are incalculable and perhaps it is going to take the full light of day to assess the actual damage and its likely consequences. At least the aviation fuel is lighter than crude oil and some of it would either evaporate, be burnt off or could, in theory, be contained by booms. But the cyanide compounds could be the greater problem, and it is unclear as I write how many of these containers were split open or spilt into the sea. But, at its worst, we are facing one of the greatest ecological disasters that the country has ever experienced. Wondering how this collision could occur, come commentators have pointed out that both ships have radar and could have detected each other some 24 miles apart. On the other hand, it is possible that the container ship was on autopilot which meant that there was nobody actually on the bridge keeping lookout which seems almost impossible to comprehend. I have a memory of other disasters that occurred in the North Sea, and this was when I was employed in my first job as a clerical worker in a small company in Harrogate called Skanda Wallpaper Company which imported wallpaper principally from Germany,. In the pattern book, there was a particular design (No. 469) which was wildly popular and decorators and new house builders being desperate to order it. But then Sod’s Law took over (‘If anything can go wrong, it will’) and there was a fire. in the mill in Germany. When production was started again, supplies were laden onto a cargo ship in the North Sea (HMV Fountains Abbey as I recollect) which then itself caught fire. As a young 16 year old teenager, I was left answering the phone to irate customers all over the country who, quite frankly, just did not believe that these two events could have impacted upon their favourite wallpaper and young couples all over the country wanting to move into their first, decorated dream home being left distraught. I was only employed by this company for about four months but in those days, January 1st was a public holiday. and I started work on 1st January, 1962 but my first exposure to the commercial world was not a happy one. I was dismissed because I was ill and needed to go into hospital to have an operation and the company did not want to have expense of paying my wages (which started at £3.17s.6d a week, £3.88 in decimal currency which is less than 10p an hour). Later I was to wash dishes in a local hotel where my wages were 12.5p an hour which was an evident improvement.

It was with some trepidation that I approached the task of getting Meg in her wheelchair in a good and upright posture, but I supplemented the raised seat swabs with a back support to help to keep her back more vertical and, thus prepared, set out down the road a little gingerly. But she seemed to survive the trip down the hill OK so I popped into Waitrose for a flagon of milk and our daily newspaper before journeying onto Wetherspoons where I was delighted to see our two regular friends (the elder one having made at last) Whilst I was ordering breakfast at the bar, I bumped into ‘Seasoned World Traveller’ from my walk-in-the park days and I gave him a quick update on Meg’s progress. Then it was the consumption of an egg and bacon crumpet with a mug of hot chocolate where I realised too late and to my dismay that I was breaking my self-imposed Lenten ordinance of avoiding fast cars, loose women and chocolate. Then it was the acid test of whether I get Meg up the hill safely again. I did extra care to avoid any of the especially ‘rumbly’ bits of pavement and went to the roadway when I deemed it safe as the tarmac is so much smoother there. In fact, a delightful young woman saw me making my way slowly up the hill and, very kindly, volunteered to help me push Meg some of the way home. I do not normally decline help, but I did so on this occasion because I was going so slowly up the hill not because the task was particularly arduous but because I was going slowly to keep the journey as smooth as possible. I got Meg home with no problem and was delighted that Meg’s posture had been kept more or less intact so all of my little adaptations seemed to have worked. I treated Meg to some pea-and-mint soup and then we were joined by the young male Asian carer who we know particularly well. He and I made Meg comfortable and then I prepared my Tuesday meal of a mackerel risotto and as I made plenty of this, I had two portions left over one of which went into a container for our domestic help tomorrow and the other as a little offering to our young carer. He, in return, as he was here for a ‘sit’ session ordered some doughnuts from Greggs so Meg and I indulged in one of these. We had a couple of female carers turn up but Meg had already been made comfortable so I treated the migraine of one of the carers with some paracetamol and off they went. So Meg and and I had a very pleasant early afternoon as we chatted with our young carer who was telling us about the plans he is making to move into new accommodation in the Spring. As he is a bit of a ‘foodie’ himself, he is going to share one of his signature pasta dishes with us which he has done before and which is exceptionally good. Then we settled down to a peaceful afternoon with good weather outside and an MSNBC tirade against the iniquities of Donald Trump’s lies playing on YouTube in the background.

There is a story that is circulating which I read with a certain amount of dismay. Given the whirlwind start. that Trump has brought to his presidency, a reporter had ventured into Pennsylvania (which was a crucial swing state) to see what the public at large made of the first 50 days. What the reporter found was that people were delighted, the most common comment being was ‘that he is rattling the cage and making a real change’ Trump’s lies were readily believed such as the claim that a 165 year old women was in receipt of a pension and when the reporter indicated that this claim was false and had been debunked, the response was ‘Well, there is probably fake news on both sides’ In the meanwhile, the stock market is crashing and inflation is set to rise but the impact of the imposition of tariffs is hard to gauge because having introduced them, Trump has immediately put on pause the two most important walls against Canada and Mexico. One does get the feeling that the Trump presidency is bound to crash and burn and here are already all kinds of legal challenges to the mass firings but it is unclear as I write whether these will be obeyed or just ignored until they get to the Supreme Court.

Yesterday, I was a little puzzled because the media was observing the 5th anniversary of the COVID pandemic. I knew that the anniversary was fast approaching because next Monday on the 17th of March, this blog will be exactly 5 years old and I started it the day before the lockdown. But the date of 9th March was the day when the pandemic was officially declared and the actual first lockdown started a few days later and hence the discrepancy. There were many stories of utter sadness as relatives waved goodbye to their loved ones as they went to hospital where many of them died, The case was highlighted of one man with an oxygen saturation of 58 (it should be 95%) and he was given the option of an induced coma with a 50% chance of survival or to not have the treatment and have a 0% chance of survival. He chose the induced coma which lasted for over 40 days, and he emerged alive but minus the hearing in one ear and the sight of one eye. In some ways, it seems hard to believe that we actually survived all of that, but Meg and I walked down to the park every day to get a lot of fresh air (and to boost our immune systems) and were scrupulous in our mask wearing and social distancing. The enquiry into all of this is still proceeding and will still take years let and one wonders whether any real lessons have actually been learnt. We know already, though, that a lot of the Tory party friends made a lot of money supplying dodgy PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) a lot of which was subsequently destroyed having been supplied to the government at a premium price.

We experienced two ‘social’ events yesterday, both heart-warming in themselves. Firstly, our University of Birmingham friend came around as he often does on a Sunday morning, and we had a wonderful gentle conversation chatting over politics and other things as well as listening to some superb renditions of baroque music courtesy of YouTube. Then in the middle of the afternoon, two neighbours, who live in the recently constructed houses next to us, called around to see how I was faring. They had observed me pushing Meg out in the wheelchair and were solicitous about my welfare. I said they must call around for a coffee some afternoon. when we could have a more extended conversation rather than simply on the doorstep. As it is a couple of weeks since the would-be county council councillor had called and to whom I had intimated my concerns about Worcestershire County Council but no action had been forthcoming But my original email of complaint (which I have re-read and am still pleased by its succinctness and directness) has been forwarded to the Director of Finance so it will be interesting to see what, if anything, will emerge from this quarter. A complaint forwarded by a county councillor though carries a bit more ‘clout’ but of course it will take days to investigate, then to consider what course of action to take and then to reply. I am requesting not a ‘refund’ but a ‘mitigation’ of the 7-month delayed direct debit, but one lives in hope.

Yesterday morning, I made my main task to get in touch with the Occupational Therapy team to see if they could suggest some more specialist wheelchair straps to keep Meg and her wheelchair united. This took a couple of phone calls to get through to the right people and after a referral was made, I am awaiting a phone call to discuss with the team what needs to be done. This may take some days but in the meantime, I am hopeful that my home-made solutions will work. I cooked some chicken legs for lunch but Meg could only eat some of it before I had to abandon efforts to feed her any more. Then for the whole, of the afternoon we watched a superb production of Mozart’s opera ‘Così van Tutte’ provided by the Vienna State Opera House. The production was sumptuous in the extreme and the singing divine and what was particularly interesting was that subtitles were provided both in Italian (what was being sung at the time) and also in English – and I have never seen this done before.

The American economy seems to be in a Trump-induced freefall at the moment. A little earlier, Sky News gave a bleak analysis of the US economy, with one economic indicator suggesting it was shrinking at its fastest pace since the pandemic. Things are hardly looking up after markets opened a short while ago, with Wall Street’s main indexes falling amid fears a trade war could spark an economic slowdown. The tech-heavy Nasdaq and the benchmark S&P 500 were at near five-month lows after falling 1.3% and 2.03%, respectively. The Trump team will deny, of course, that this is anything to do with them but we are told constantly that the business community needs a stable environment to operate effectively, and this is the last thing we have with tariffs imposed one day and removed a day or so later. Trump trades upon the fact that he was a ‘successful’ businessman but some of wealth was generated by chicanery and fraud and, of course, he was convicted of false accounting by a New York court.

Last night, conscious of the way that Meg had slumped out of her wheelchair, I set to work to see how I could remedy the situation. I knew that one way or another I needed to construct a backward sloping seat but eventually I think I am going to utilise three pieces of kit that might assist. The first of these is a little triangular wedge arrangement which our domestic help had given us and I had secured inside a cushion cover. In the past, I had used this as a sort of levelling up device so that I could place a plate on Meg’s knees but since her new chair and the fact that I am feeding her, it has fallen into disuse. This, for a start, is going to go underneath the swab cushion to give a degree of tilt. The second is a piece of kit which the OT’s had supplied in the past but at the time, was of limited utility. It was like a small thin cushion but covered in an elasticated material that would only move in one direction but not in the other – I think the idea behind it at the time was an anti-slip device, but this is now going to be pressed into service as well. The final piece of kit is something which I adapted last night. I looked in my study and found what I was looking for which is a ring binder which, when nor filled with filing materials, assumes a triangular shape. This I then covered with the last piece I had of that elasticated stretchy type of fabric which is quite often to be found in hardware stores, and this completed my assembly of three items. Today, we are not going to go out in the wheelchair, so I am going to experiment with these three pieces of kit in various combinations to see what works best. I have also discovered a long thin ladies belt which I think I had bought for myself as a way of making sure that keys did not slip out of a back pocket and, although it sounds a little drastic, when next we go out which will be next Tuesday, I will see if this can be utilised with the existing laptop type of seatbelt to provide a belt and braces. Although I need to speak to the wheelchair people to see of a more ‘professional’ solution is available or, indeed, feasible then I am reasonably hopeful that these short-term fixes will do the job for me. I have consulted the Amazon website and there seems to be a good range of retaining straps available but I am still on an Amazon-avoidance type of spree and will only go down this route if all else fails. Looking on eBay, though, there is a good range of straps to prevent elderly people slipping out of wheelchairs so this must be a common problem. In all of this, I am the supreme pragmatist and ‘if it works, it works’ whatever the professionals might think. I did find the elasticated knee and elbow supports very useful to secure Meg’s ankles before the wheelchair specialists fitted some more specialist straps so a home-made solution to Meg’s slumping problems is possible,. The ultimate source of the problem, of course, is Meg’s complete lack of body strength to be able to hold herself upright in the correct posture as the rest of the able-bodied population in fact do.

There was an amazing story in the Observer/Guardian yesterday morning. Britain performed worse than most other developed nations in its response to the Covid pandemic, according to an Observer analysis of international data, five years on from the first lockdown. The UK spent more money than most other countries on economic help yet still ended up with larger drops in life expectancy, more people too sick to work, huge levels of homelessness and soaring mental health problems among young people. Siva Anandaciva, director of policy at the King’s Fund think-tank, said the UK had not bounced back from Covid in the way other developed countries had. ‘We haven’t seen the bounceback that other countries have. When I look at the one big global indicator of how healthy we are, which is our life expectancy, we’ve gone backwards. We’ve fallen back to levels of a decade ago, while other countries have kept motoring on in western Europe and leaving us behind. It’s a pretty damning indictment of what happened.’ Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy, said inequality was ‘the primary story of the pandemic. You still find that people from poorer backgrounds are more likely to have been impacted,’ Shah said, adding that the rate of long Covid in the most deprived households is double that of the most wealthy. The UK spent 19.3% of gross domestic product on extra spending and forgone revenue, and gave loans worth a further 16.7%, according to the International Monetary Fund – more than almost every other developed country except Japan, Germany and Italy. Yet the return on this investment was poor. After the lockdowns ended, every other G7 nation except the US saw more adults rejoining the workforce. However, the UK, which has historically had a better than average number of people in work, saw the reverse. There has been a 0.5% increase in the number of people not working and classed as economically inactive, with about 2.7 million too sick to work. In life expectancy, one of the most fundamental measures of how a country is able to look after its people, the UK is in a worse position than most other developed countries. Women can expect to live to 82 years and 10 months, about three years less than in Spain, Australia or Italy, while men can expect to reach 79, about two years less than in the same countries, reversing more than a decade of lifespan increases. OECD figures show that, in similar countries, homelessness is static or has been falling, but it has more than doubled in England since 2010. About 45 out of every 10,000 people are either sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation.