One can only expect bad news to emerge from America. these days but there is one persistent story that fails to go away. These are reports about conditions on board the USS aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea sine November 2025. The extended deployments of carriers during the war have raised concerns about the impact on service members away from home for long periods, as well as the increasing strain on the ships and their equipment. Naval deployments are typically between six and nine months, but can be extended in times of conflict. Democratic lawmakers have called for a Pentagon briefing regarding the conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which defence secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed as ‘completely misrepresented’. At least one sailor has attempted suicide by throwing himself overboard and the ship appears to be running short of basic supplies such as food, toiletries and other life essentials and morale is said to be at a rock bottom. Donald Trump has dismissed any adverse reports (well, he would, wouldn’t he) but military commentators are talking about dire the situation is becoming for the 5,000 men onboard. It looks as though the ship will shortly be replaced by another, the USS George Washington but a military deployment of this length is unprecedented and there is no clear end in sight to the Iran conflict. Some are laying the blame squarely at the door of Pete Hegseth the ex-Fox News anchor and a Trump ideologue who was promoted to the post of Secretary of State for Defense although he himself has no military experience of which to speak.  The week ahead is going to be a slightly unusual one as there is no Pilates class for me this week as my teacher is on holiday and the Tai Chi class which I normally undertake later in the week is being displaced this week as I shall be attending the funeral of a a prominent parishioner with whom I used to serve on the committee of the Church parochial Council before Meg’s final illness. After the excitement of the Football World Cup and then the European Athletics world championships held in Birmingham, the evenings are going to be a little bereft of our usual excitement. But is is true to say that my American friend and I are enjoying the spell of somewhat cooler weather and looking forward to our four-day stay in Harrogate in about ten days time. In a few days time, I shall no doubt have to start thinking about packing my suitcase which will contain not only clothes but other essentials such as good supplies of tea and coffee and other essentials to make hotel life enjoyable. I am very much assisted in all of this because across the road from a hotel is one of those shops, much frequented by bed-and-breakfasters in the area of some essential supplies such as newspapers and even some foodstuffs if we decide to forego a full English breakfast. We may even have to cater for some wet weather as well although one forecast has predicted that the country as a whole may not receive any supplies of deluging type rain until about October. Every time I visit Harrogate, the town in which I lived from the age of about 4 to 18, I often wonder whether I shall chance across anyone I knew with whom I was at school. But I suppose most of my contemporaries may have moved away, died or be restricted  in their mobility and Harrogate is such a very different place now to the town in which I grew up in my teens before the family moved to Leeds (where my mother was employed as a school teacher)

I had decided that I ought to resume regular walking down into town as used to be my custom. I had previously made a quick visit into town by car to ensure that I picked up a copy of my newspaper  before supplies ran out. I was interested to read the page-long obituary to Jason Arday (the ex-Cambridge professor of sociology who committed suicide) and reckoned that most of the obituary was taken from the Wikipedia entry which shows how Times journalists source their stories. During the course of the morning, I viewed a podcast by James O’Brien, the iconoclastic podcaster who presents on LBC each day. He always finds o different topic upon which to fulminate but this video clip was particularly interesting. He had noted that the ‘Daily Telegraph‘ had written a vituperative piece in which the newsoaper had accused the BBC of a basic lack of good journalistic practice and editorial control  when they had (wrongly) pieced together parts of the Donald Trump speech which immediately preceded the invasion of the Capital Building on January 6th, 2021. But O’Bren went back to the original Donald Trump broadcast attacking the BBC and claiming, amongst other things, that the BBC used AI and other sources  of ‘fake news’ in order to discredit him. Bt what O’Brien discovered was that some of the most egregious lies uttered by Trump in his attack on the BBC were omitted in the Daily Telegraph account, whose readers would have been given a completely misleading impression of what Trump had actually said. So whilst the BBC were being sued by Trump for misleading journalism, the Daily Telegraph was deploying completely misleading journalism by omitting parts of the Trump diatribe that were palpably false. O’Brien explained that this rampant hypocrisy had not been noted by any parts of the British media and was particularly ironic as it was on precisely the grounds of misleading reporting that constituted the grounds of the Daily Telegraph attack on the BBC. During the late morning, I walked down into town and availed myself of a free coffee before walking back and cooking myself a ham omelette for lunch. After lunch, I caught up with the later episodes of ‘Ann Droid’ which is an innovative, comic but poignant account of a recent widow and her robot companion. The whole series may well be a humour-filled programme of what may become common-place in about ten years time given the advances in AI and robotics and the demands of a rapidly ageing population. After catching up on some emails and texts, I shall be undertaking my normal visit to the park later in the day for my evening stroll but have some domestic chores upon which I need to catch up to occupy my late afternoon, not least going through a pile of recent newspapers to see if there are any articles that need to be retained.

We awoke yesterday morning to something like ‘normal’ temperatures with a predicted temperature of about 22°. Some rain might be on its way in a day or so but of a very patchy nature and not the sustained downpour for which so many of us have been waiting. However, it appears that the UK’s groundwater supplies (water trapped in aquifers way underground) which forms most of the storage of water is actually holding up quite well and some 40% of supplies are actually at normal or even more than normal levels which is surprisingly good news. I suppose this explains why we have not seen water restrictions or even disconnections which one would have thought was on the cards. The evening before last, it was particularly  enjoyable to watch the GB success in the 100 metres sprint relays. The male quartet won their race fairly convincingly whereas the UK female team won by a huge margin. Amy Hunt will now attempt to become the first athlete to win four gold medals at a single edition in the event’s 92-year history when the mixed 4x100m relay takes place on Sunday. Her team-mate Asher-Smith, meanwhile, achieved her seventh gold at the championships – 10 years after capturing her first. Given the success of both the women’s and the men’s team, one can only hope that the mixed relay team will enjoy similar fortunes, but even excellent teams can fail the baton changes unless they have practised very hard together so we shall have to wait and see. The Reform party have unveiled their plans for welfare reform which would entail the withdrawal of the benefits from very many and is predicted to save some £50bn. It now seems unlikely that Reform will ever come to power, however. Robert Jenrick claims a Reform UK government would cut £50bn from the welfare bill, in what it’s describing as the biggest shake-up in a generation. The party’s treasury spokesperson says the plans would result in almost three million people seeing disability and sickness payments withdrawn or modified. The Telegraph reports Reform would abolish personal independence payments (PIP) and the health element of Universal Credit for working-age adults under the plan, due to be unveiled in detail on Monday. Jenrick says 6.9 million people were receiving disability benefits, but adds ‘this is not an epidemic of broken backs and lost limbs’, as since 2002 the share of working-age people claiming for mental health and behavioural conditions had tripled. He adds that under the planned reforms, a new, regularly reviewed, health security allowance would provide support for the ‘gravely ill and severely challenged’. What I find interesting about these proposals is how these proposals are regarded in the wider electorate. No doubt, Reform thinks it will please its natural supporters with these proposals but I wonder how it play out with the wider electorate and whether it will turn out to be a vote winner or a vote loser. There is no doubt that the UK’s welfare bill needs some degree of moderation so as not to be constantly increasing but whether cruel and swinging cuts are the way to achieve this is problematic.

After I had attended church this morning, I made my way to my normal garage where I fuelled the car and the, after a wait, managed to give my car a much-needed wash as it has missed out for a couple of weeks now. I spent some time reading the Sunday newspaper and then started to make some preparations for Sunday lunch which I am going to share with my American friend. This weekend, we had decided on a fish meal so I oven-baked a couple of salmon fillets together with one of a trout. The salmon had a teriyaki sauce which was spread onto the salmon fillets and  then finished off with five minutes in the oven. Ny friend had brought along some asparagus spears and some pak choi whilst I had prepared some broccoli. We parboiled these vegetables and  then gave them a final tossing in some olive oil and this worked out very well and made for a delicious meal. After we had had our post-prandial rest, we ate a delayed sweet and then went down the garden to pick some blackberries and despite the fact that the birds must have helped themselves to a meal. we picked sufficient for us both to enjoy some of our own home grown fruit which we can eat with either yogurt or ice-cream. In the late afternoon, we viewed some of the highlights of the Franco Zeferelli production of ‘La Bohème’. We decide not to watch the whole of the opera but confined or viewing to the first two extended scenes where the two principal characters meet and fall in love before enjoying some Christmas Eve festivities in the Cafe Momus. Then we skipped to the final act in which Mimi is brought into the garret accommodation of the four bohemian friends before she dies of the all too prevalent consumption (tuberculosis). We both find this a very emotionally compelling opera to experience but then we had the conclusion of the European athletics competition to help to lift the mood. The highlight of this was the mixed male-female 100 metres relay race in which the GB was not only successful but in which Amy Hunt won her fourth gold medal in these games, a feat never before achieved (two individual and two part of relay teams) The Italians won the competition with the GB team being placed second. But if the female long jumper had jumped one centimetre further or the final runner in the 4 x 100 metres men’s relay race had run 0.06 of a second  faster, then the GB team would have secured an extra  gold meals which would have made them overall winners of the championships. Tomorrow night a viewing of the film ‘Brassed Off’ beckons and my friend and I will watch this together once we have had our early evening walk in the park. One quite interesting philosophical discussion in which my friend and I engaged following the Jason Arday suicide was the incidence of compulsive lying by some individuals in our society. We were speculating whether the loosening of family and community bonds as well as the increasing incidence of evident lack of candour in our political and commercial life had lowered the thresholds for lying behaviour. Certainly. if never challenged, then some people, may continue to lie their way through their social lives and perhaps, if not challenged, they ‘get away with it’ and incorporate the use of lysing as a useful tool to help get on in life

As I was preparing to go to my bed the night before last, there was a news flash which indicated the probable suicide of Jason Arday, the youngest ever black Cambridge professor who resigned last week amidst numerous accusations of plagiarism of his PhD thesis. Certainly, there has been a massive culture war surrounding this man with detractors and supporters lining up on both sides. To the claims of plagiarism, the reply is that some ‘errors’ may have been made but Jason Arday had been the subject of a vicious and sustained campaign to underline his credibility. To throw some light on this, I located and then ran off the 22 pages of his Wikipedia entry. I think the fairest judgement on this academic is that he was subjected to bouts of fantasy and most of the claims of his CV were never fully checked out. He claimed to have a form of autism which meant that he did not speak until the age of 11 and could not read or write until the age of 18 (the fact that he acquired some GCEs ‘O’-levels whilst being unable to read or write is one of the many unexplained facts in his biography). Some of his claims were to the effect that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, raised millions of money for charity, was a visiting professor at several universities and suffered severe memory loss following the removal of a benign brain tumour just before his viva voce examination for the PhD. As my first degree was in sociology and I acquired my own PhD at the age of 52, I have followed the Arday case with some interest and have concluded that apart from the man himself, a terrible light has been thrown on several parts of the academic community. For a start, what kind of supervision was offered at Liverpool John Moores University when the title of the PhD contained a greengrocer’s apostrophe (elementary spelling error) and did the first and second supervisors do their job (or even read the thesis)? I also wondered whether it was routine to submit the electronic version of a PhD to a plagiarism detector such as ‘Turnitin’ as is the case nowadays with Birmingham University. To this we might add the role of the examiner(s) of the PhD itself and whether they had performed the necessary rigorous examination and to this we might add the role of several universities which offered employment to Arday. One of his claims was that he fulfilled his role at Glasgow university by flying back and forth to Glasgow each day by plane as he was domiciled in London. Then we come to Cambridge University itself and rather than exulting in the appointment in the youngest black professor, did the appointments process ever check up on any of the claims made in the application or perform elementary checks upon their veracity? As the post was in the sociology of education, I wondered from whence Arday had acquired his knowledge of sociology to which the response was that he had read up on it in private study times in the evening. In short, there is no doubt that Arday’s life and career has been weaponised by both political left and right but I think that as a detached observer and evaluating all of the available  published evidence, it is fair to conclude that chunks of the PhD were plagiarised and this academic had led the life of a ‘chancer’ whose claims had never been subject to claims of verification as they should have been. One letter to ‘The Guardian’ written anonymously claimed that academic dishonesty was not uncommon and did occur in ‘white’ candidates  but without arousing any of the scrutiny that occurred in the Arday case.  In conclusion, I feel that my own rigorously examined PhD might now be regarded with some suspicion with some on the political right who are claiming that the whole of higher education has been gripped in a ‘woke'( i.e. exceptionally liberal) culture in which academic standards have slipped over the years.

I had a quiet morning at home, having ensured that I got down to collect my Saturday edition of the newspaper in plenty of time as I know from bitter experience that the Saturday editions end to sell out quickly. I had been intrigued by the Arday story detailed above and so I returned to the Wikipedia article mentioned above and found that at the click of a button I could read the whole of the Arday thesis for myself and attempt to reach some conclusions. What I read astonished me as for his primary field research Arday had contacted 43 students by email of whom some 24 replied. Many did not reach the criteria that had been specified for the research  so the whole thesis was based upon extensive workshops and interviews with – four students! This was surrounded by a lot of academic verbiage but I was astonished that a sample size of four was not ridiculed by internal and external examiners alike. Probably one of the most succinct comment on the whole affair that I read and which echoes my own feeling was  ‘It is fair to say that some of those taking him down are driven by a form of sneery, reactionary racism, but ultimately he sounds like total fantasist who has brought this upon himself. The worst part is this may damage the perception and opportunities of the 000s of bright young people from disadvantaged backgrounds going into academia.’ Turning to more mundane matters, it is a relief that the temperature is slowly drifting downwards. Last night when I was in the park before starting my evening walk I was initially alarmed by a loud, squawking alarm on my iPhone but to turned out to be our national government giving a warning to most of the population to be especially vigilant about the prospect of external fires. Some on the political right have criticised this as an over-reaction but as someone who lives 10 miles away from Stourbridge where 19 houses were burnt to the ground, a further 18 were damaged and this could have happened almost anywhere in the Midlands or the South East then I believe it to be completely justified. Looking ahead to what I might view on TV during the coming week, I was delighted to find that a viewing is to be transmitted of ‘Brassed Off’. I spent a frustrating half an hour trying to locate a version of this on YouTube but only got trailers for it, a few clips or the whole thing in Latvian! When I have been in a charity shop, I have quickly perused the shelves to see if I could obtain a DVD of it (and I am sure I had one of my own at one time) but I shall look forward to Monday evening with a great deal of anticipation.

We have collectively survived what might have been the hottest day of the summer and the temperature outside my back door reached 35° yesterday but is predicted to drop to a cooler 29° the following day. My American friend and I spent most of the day together keeping each other cool and well hydrated and we enjoyed a salad lunch together. When she left to go to her own home the evening, there was a burning smell in the air and I wondered if any vegetation near to me had caught alight. There has been a very significant fire in Stourbridge which is only some ten miles distant and at least six houses were caught up in the flames. In fact the whole of the West Midlands was quite affected, including Stoke on Trent. On consulting the web, I discovered that the smell of burning could be carried for many miles. A significant fire in South Wales that is believed to have sent smoke drifting 70 miles away across Worcester continues to burn. Residents in the city, the Malvern Hills, and in Herefordshire have reported smoky air and the strong scent of burning. Hereford & Worcester Fire and Rescue Service (HWFRS) believes that the source is likely to be a fire in Llangynidr Reservoir, near Ebb Vale, which has been burning since Friday evening. South Wales Fire and Rescue Service said this morning. The moorland fire near the Llangynidr Reservoir is still ongoing and crews have been at the scene all weekend and have been containing the spread of the blaze. The other significant domestic news which cane through in the small hours of the morning was Nigel Farage’s ‘success’ in the Clacton by-election which he had won easily as the other major parties refused to participate. So Nigel Farage’s major challenge came from Count BinFace (dressed, of course, as a dustbin) who managed to secure 27% of the vote compared with Farage’s 63%. So Count BinFace managed to secure three sevenths of the vote won by Farage which may count as a moral victory of sorts. On his return to Westminster, Farage still faces investigation over his acceptance of a gift of £5 million which, in theory, could trigger another by election in Clacton. Looking forward to our mini-holiday in Yorkshire, another of my nieces has got into contact with me about which I am particularly pleased. Because I now have so many great nieces and nephews and even a couple of great-great nieces and nephews, I am going  to write all of their details n a little hard-back book so that my American friend will have some idea who she is interacting with when we all meet in about a fortnight’s time.  Her own family is much smaller than this but my Yorkshire family being so much larger, my friend who will no doubt assume the soubriquet of ‘great aunt’ and needs some more systematic guidance. When we journey up by train, I will give my friend a full briefing so that  she can come with a degree of preparedness. When you imagine that the news from the USA could not get any worse, it just has. The ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agency in the US are equipping themselves with special gloves which render a dramatic electric shock to individuals as soon as they are handled causing them to fall to the ground in agony and therefore, presumably, make them easier to arrest. Apart from the absolutely inhumane methods of treatment, may of those detained by poorly trained ICE agents turn out to be citizens who have the right to stay in America but who may have been subject to the most inhumane treatment in the meanwhile. It looks as though a budget of anything between $10-$20 million has been allocated for the purchase of these horrendous control agents which one can almost predict now will be inappropriately used by poorly trained ICE agents. The ICE have become a sort of shock troops for the Trump regime and their excesses are already well known as being directly responsible for a number of deaths in the US.

In the morning, having collected my newspaper I had a leisurely stroll along the High Street but I was assiduous in keeping to the shady sides of the street whenever I could. My journey this morning was quite fruitful as I managed to get some items f stationery of which I had run out and also took the opportunity to buy some household goods (principally some fly and wasp killer) which are not stocked in my usual Aldi store. I also called in at my local bank so that I could get some living money from their system. Whilst in one of the charity shops, I bumped into a couple that Meg and I knew quite well in our park-walking days. In fact, this particular couple were very kindly both to Meg and myself and we went for a lunch with them on a couple of occasions whilst Meg was quite ‘compos mentis’ – they had spotted my trademark black Australian style bush hat and concluded that it must have been me. When I returned home after quite a lengthy stroll, I did not feel particularly hungry so just had some ice-cream and a slice of melon, kept in the fridge and both items were enjoyable as they were quite cold. I eventually made myself a tomato and grated cheese omelette which is all I felt could face in these hot conditions. The local fires in Stourbridge hav  destroyed nineteen houses and damaged a further eighteen more. According to the local fire services, what had made the fire so difficult to fight is that it seemed to have started in multiple grassland areas at about the same time and the area was quite close to a residential development. One neighbour said that the fire had spread so rapidly that she had only time to grasp her cat and no other possessions before fleeing. The seriousness of the incident is underlined by the fact that the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has paid a visit to the area declaring that the whole country is like a tinderbox. We are also hearing stories of another train derailment (caused almost certainly by rails buckling in the heat) but fortunately on this occasion the carriages have remained upright. I have ensured that I have kept myself well hydrated today and also happen to have a good supply of zero alcohol beer to refresh me during the evenings when I am enjoying the last day of the European athletics meeting.

So the evening before last, the long predicted eclipse arrived to much excitement. The eclipse reached 92% here in the Midlands but as much as 95% in Cornwall. I started to watch it on BBC 24 hour news and it certainly became like a rapid dusk. My American friend came around and at the exact moment of the eclipse here in Bromsgrove which was at 7.16pm we went outside to appreciate the rarity of the moment. Given  that the next event will not take place in the UK until 1990, 64 years hence, then neither of us are going to be around to witness it. The TV channels are full of stunning images in case any of us want to replay the moment. But as the new day dawned, there is the extremely hot temperature to contend with a high predicted of about 35% here in Bromsgrove where we seem to be marginally just outside the extremely hot regime which the South East will experience. The BBC weather app has just been enhanced a little so that for your postcode you can click a timeline that will progress you though the temperatures to be expected that day and the next. So once we have tunnelled through the 35% expected later in the day, this may drop marginally to 29% for the following day and the prospect of some slight breezes (rather than a cloudless sky) over the weekend. This has put me into a little bit of a dilemma. as normally I would feel inclined to absent myself from my Tai Chi class. However I think I might attend it and immediately strike for home for the rest of the day as the following week my Tai Chi class will be displaced  by a funeral that I going to attend and the following week we should be up in Yorkshire. So I want to explain to my Tai Chi teacher why she will not see me for three weeks  but this does not indicate a lack of interest on my part. Turning to more domestic news, we have learned that economic growth grew by 0.4% during the last three months which would normally signal that the economy is not performing well. But, paradoxically, it also shows that the UK economy is quite resilient and is withstanding the effects of the ongoing conflict in Iran and the Straits of Hornuz so the fact that the economy has grown at all is quite remarkable. The undeclared war in Iran is creating a massive political problem in the United States as Trump has practically no options left to play. One option is to end the unpopular war abruptly but this would entail a massive loss of face for the American military and the presidency as a whole. A second option is to continue the conflict, even though America’s missile stocks are being depleted and there is no sign that repeated bombing of Iran is weakening the resolve of the Iranian people to continue the conflict. Meanwhile the mid-term presidential elections are approaching after the summer break and the more the war continues, the more it bodes ill for the President and the Republican party. So in every sense, Donald Trump is between ‘a rock and a hard place’ and he is learning, as most of knew, that it is easy to start a war but quite difficult to end it. The supreme irony is that one of Trump’s slogans to help him win the last presidential election was ‘No more wars’ and the predilection he is in is entirely one of his own choosing. I suppose he believed his own propaganda that the American military was the most powerful in the word and assumed that any conflict would be over within days. But as well as the Iranian conflict, we still have the situation in Gaza in which the Israeli leader Netanyahu is blatantly ignoring the supposed ceasefire because he, too, is facing elections and a premature withdrawal from the Gaza conflict would spell electoral suicide for him. And, of course, the war in Ukraine rumbles on as both Russia and the Ukraine carry on fighting by sending drones into each other’s territory to inflict what damage they can. As is evident by now, I am following American politics quite closely and have noted with a degree of grim satisfaction that after the birth of her second child, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post. Leavitt noted that since returning from maternity leave after the birth of her second child in May, she found it difficult to balance the intensive demands of the White House press office with raising two young children and all of this is quite plausible. But it means that one of Trump’s principal attack dogs is leaving the fray and perhaps she all too fully appreciates the bad news for the Trump presidency which is coming down the line. We also have the saga of the state of Trump’s health in which there are visible signs of him gradually failing and there are quite frequent video clips of him falling asleep during cabinet meetings and the like. Donald Trump has been publicly accused of falling asleep or dozing off at least 25 times during his second presidential term, in addition to multiple well-documented instances during his 2024 Manhattan criminal trial. Because these instances rely on observations by journalists, cameras, and critics rather than medical confirmation, the exact number is highly debated but the unofficial liberal media loves to record and to document these instances when they occur.

So I went along to my Tai Chi class and there were about ten of us altogether so the heat had not deterred many of my class mates. Afterwards, I went for a coffee with by bank manager friend in my normal coffee watering hole and then got home at about midday. My American friend joined me as we were going to avoid the tremendous heat today and my thermometer read 35° in the mid afternoon. We lunched on some  quiche and salad and cooled off with some melon slices that had been kept cool in the fridge. We enjoyed a pleasant afternoon together and then settled down to watch some interesting finals in the European athletics competition broadcast n the late afternoon and evening. Once we have got today’s heat and well truly coped with, then the temperature is predicted to drop to 29° and to drift even lower in the days over the weekend. We have a massive fire raging on a golf course in Stourbridge just down the road and I think the fire has spread to at least a couple of houses and perhaps even more as the day unfolds.

The evening before last was another meeting of the Curry Club and I arrived at the large car park in plenty of time before our meal was scheduled to start at 6.00pm. I had a pretty good evening’s chat with the people around me and one of my fellow diners reminded me of the next meeting of our Classical Musical Appreciation group where we needed to do some preparation before  the event. This involved listening on BBC Sounds to the First Night of the Proms which we are going to discuss and then we will follow that with a discussion of the life of Bach. The lady informed me that she was shortly to go with a friend across the three Andaluz cities of Granada, Cordoba and Sevilla and I expressed my envy at her trip which I have myself made a couple of times before. I am pretty sure that I have some travel books in my ‘travel’ bookcase so I said that I would try and hunt these out and lend them to her when I see her next Wednesday. She is going with ‘Riviera Travel’ which is a well known travel company for this type of tour so I am sure she will have a great time. At the end of the meal, I got into conversation with a couple who had just recently joined U3A and this was their first Curry Club outing. They hailed from mid-Wales so I informed them about the Dylan Thomas I had heard at the weekend and I could inform them about Meg’s Welsh relatives from both the North and the South. The man in the couple explained he used to run the Bromsgrove Rambling group so evidently he knew the Lake District quite well. After a few minutes conversation, he said that he recognised me from the ‘Chatty Table’ discussions we typically have each Wednesday when the Methodist centre is not closed for a summer refurbishment and so we had probably met before without realising it – wheels within wheels! I think I will try and sit next to them at our next Curry Club do because I am sure we can explore some fascinating items of mutual interest. I got home just after 8.00pm and followed the European Athletics competition being run in Birmingham but with sparse crowds in the evening. This is not surprising  because it involves a journey from a Birmingham suburb after 10.00pm at night and I imagine this is enough to deter many from attending. However, I was rewarded by witnessing GB take first and second place in the last event of the evening which was the Men’s 100 metres. These two black sprinters were predicted to run well, and securing gold and silver helped to pin the GB team to the top of the leader board. Upon consulting my phone when I got home, I received some more good news. I had sent out text messages to some of my nephews/nieces telling them about my stay in Yorkshire in just over two weeks time. One of them had responded very quickly and my American friend and I are going to dine with him and his family in a restaurant booking he had made for the six of us the day after we arrive. I think this restaurant is only recently opened and specialises in authentic Andaluz (Spanish) cuisine, and I think that eating there will make us imagine that we are actually eating a meal in Spain. As a bonus, the restaurant is only 2-3 minutes from our hotel as well so this is a real treat to which we can look forward, as well as the pleasure in connecting again with my Yorkshire family. In the evening, we have the eclipse to which to look forward so my American friend is to come round shortly before six and we can experience the eclipse together probably on the TV as we do not have the special glasses to view it directly.

Immediately after I had breakfasted, I hunted through my travel bookcase and was pleased to discover some guides that I could loan to my fellow U3A member who I shall see next week at our Classical Music Group. I find I had a guide to both Granada and also to Cordoba but not to Sevilla which has perhaps gone missing. But I did have  a very comprehensive and copiously illustrated guide to  Spain, one being a Baedeker and the other being published as part of the DK ‘EyeWitness’ travel guide series. These last two guides have many pages devoted to Seville and to the pile I have added a Spanish-English dictionary and a guide to Lille which my friend may be visiting in the not too distant future. This will certainly be sufficient if she can find space in her luggage for them but better the books be used than mouldering in my bookcase. After the morning had progressed, I ventured forth and picked up the last copy of ‘The Times‘ from the petrol station before doing my weekly shopping. This weekend, we are going to have some fillets of fish so I purchased both some salmon and also some trout so that we try a bit of each. I read that teriyaki sauce is fantastic on salmon as the sweet, salty, and savoury glaze cuts through the rich, buttery fat of the fish. When cooked, the sugars in the sauce caramelise into a sticky coating that seals in moisture. On the trout we can try some simple seafood sauce, or even some 1000 Island sauce or some horseradish sauce. I read that horseradish is a fantastic pairing for trout. The sharp, pungent heat of horseradish cuts right through the rich, oily texture of the fish. It works especially well with smoked or cured trout, typically softened into a creamy sauce using yogurt, crème fraîche, or sour cream. So after I cooked the two lots of fish next Sunday, I will have the various top dressings available in little finger bowls so that we can experiment and try out what works best for us. After I returned from shopping, it was so very hot that I merely helped myself to some scoops of recently purchased chocolate ice cream. As I had eaten so well yesterday, I am giving myself a lighter day in terms of meals and will cook a cheese omelette for myself accompanied by some salad which will be more than enough. Thinking ahead to my our Yorkshire trip my family is quite large but how many of them we will eventually meet is uncertain. But, in theory there are my sister’s four children, their collective total of twelve grandchildren and two great grandchildren. So in discussion with my American friend, we are going to fill the pages of a little hardback book so that she can work out who is who when we meet.

Domestic political news seems to be dominating the news headlines as the new day dawns. One of the most important tasks facing the government is to find a way in which the offenders convicted of the manslaughter of a policeman can be removed from the ‘Early Release’ scheme. This was NOT murder (as intent was not proved) as the young policeman was dragged along the road by a car speeding to get away from the interventions of the police but the public campaign to release him is enormous. Andy Burnham has instructed the Justice Secretary to ‘find a way’ to prevent the early release and the legal difficulty is that there is no special offence in law for the killing of an emergency worker. This will no doubt to be remedied in further legislation but this cannot be enacted retrospectively. Last night when I returned from my nightly peregrination in the park with my American friend, I settled down to watch the European athletics competition which is being hosted in Birmingham (but with disappointing crowds so far) There is no doubt that the Norwegians are a dominant force in European athletics at the moment and one of their stars returned from injury to win the 5,000 metres with an astonishing sprint over the last 100 metres. The event to which I was looking forward was the mixed (i.e. men and women) 4 x 400 metres relay race and this was very exciting. The Norwegian quartet won the race but the Brits turned in a very creditable silver and were in contention until the very end. The evening concluded with a brilliant run by a young rising star, Amy Hunt, who won the 100 metres spring final at the very end of the evening. This young athlete has been tipped for great things by those in the know but it was a wonderful sight to see her triumphing on her home soil. One has to feel sorry for the young British shot putter who has come 4th for the fourth time in a major competition. This position, without a medal obviously, is said to be the hardest to bear in all athletics as it is just outside the medals. The weather continues to be hot without even the hint of rain. One of the latest fires to devastate the countryside is in the New Forest where the vegetation is crisp but satellite photos of the UK show that that the whole country has turned from England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ to an orange-brown crisp. I am amazed that we have not yet any disconnections of the water supply because supplies must be running critically low – ironically enough Chopin’s ‘Raindrop Prelude’ is being played on ClassicFM’s play list as I type. Andy Burnham, having returned from a brief holiday, is turning his attention to Britain’s High Streets and is said to be contemplating a crackdown on the vape and betting shops which seem to be the only parts of the urban scene showing a profit at the moment. Labour has crept ahead of Reform by a couple of percentage points with the ‘Burnham bounce’ and we have the interesting by-election on Thursday night in which the principal contenders are Nigel Farage on the one hand and ‘Count BinFace’ on the other. In this farcical election in which there are 34 candidates, BinFace may just garner 20% of the vote but a win seems out of the question.

Having been to Pilates in the middle of the day, I returned and had the lightest of salad lunches because I must leave space for U3A Curry Club  dinner this evening which is being held in a village not too distant from here. One my long standing Pilates friends seemed somewhat morose in the class today and I suspected that I knew the reason why because her dog and life companion had been very ill. She had previously sent me wonderful messages of support whilst Meg had been ill so the least I could do was to offer her some similar comfort in her hour of need. Her dog had been in a veterinary hospital for a couple of weeks and will have a blood test in about a week to determine what if any further courses of treatment there are to be. Fearing the worst and knowing that we have no Pilates class next week, I have given my Pilates class mate an open invitation to come and spent an afternoon having tea and/or ice cream with me and my American friend in the garden. Whether she will accept or not I cannot tell but I wanted her to know that she has friends around her and she will not be forgotten. I viewed some of the video footage of the terrible earthquake in Colombia. Sometimes these quakes occur in the middle of the night and can, of curse, strike at any hour of the day or not but normally any video images are of the extensive damage after an earthquake. But many images are circulating of buildings seconds before their collapse and then their subsequent collapse into streets full of terrified and screaming people. The number killed in yesterday’s 7.4-magnitude earthquake in Colombia, the strongest quake in the South American country in the 21st century, has risen to more than 220 but I fear that it will number in the thousands once the full scale of the destruction becomes known. My energy supplier which is the  UK’s biggest energy supplier urges people to use less electricity between 6-8pm tomorrow. Octopus Energy, the country’s biggest household energy supplier, is urging customers to use less electricity during the solar eclipse tomorrow. The window from 6-8pm is expected to have an impact on the electricity grid. Solar generation will be hit as 95% of the sun could be obscured across parts of Britain. Air conditioning, fans and refrigeration are all likely to push electricity use higher. Octopus Energy is incentivising customers to delay using appliances such as washing machines and dishwashers. Those who avoid unnecessary electricity use during the eclipse can earn a free hour of power to use the following weekend. The scheme is known as ‘saving sessions’. Octopus says even a small shift in household demand could help the grid cope with the loss of solar power and reduce the need to bring additional gas-fired power stations online. I am probably going to observe the eclipse on the TV as I do not feel in the least attempted to stare at the sum which, we are being  warned, is so very dangerous and can permanently damage one’s sight but there are warnings a-plenty to the population at large.

Yesterday evolved into a wonderful day. After my normal weekend routines, my American friend called around  and then we cooked a special dish of pork ribs with a red-eye sauce that we had purchased together in the Alcester branch of Waitrose that we visited last Friday. Red-eye gravy gets its name from its visual appearance. When black coffee is added to hot ham pan drippings, a layer of golden-red grease floats on top of the darker liquid. In a round bowl or plate, this pool of fat resembles a bloodshot human eye and hence the name. We served this with some purple sprouting broccoli, sprouts and a stir fry mixture I had prepared earlier and it was absolutely delicious with the meat just dropping off the ribs after half an hour in the oven. After this wonderful meal and a bottle of shared Asti Spumante that we have both come to enjoy with our shared Sunday meal we indulged in a little post-prandial snooze (although I took the opportunity to read most of ‘The Sunday Times’) We rounded off the afternoon with a delayed sweet of custard pies accompanied by some strawberry ice cream I had purchased earlier on in the day. But the highlight of our evening was yet to some. We viewed the J B Priestly film of ‘An Inspector Calls’ which lays bare the pretensions and class privileges of a middle class family at the turn of the century, each member of the family in turn having been exposed (by the Inspector) to a role in the death of a young women in a  horrible suicide. This play is gripping in its psychological intensity and always worth a further viewing. After that the iPlayer ran onto the next item which was a dramatisation of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’. This is not everyone’s cup of tea as it is really one long extended ‘sound-fest’ in the day of a small Welsh fishing village. In Dylan Thomas’s famous 1954 radio play ‘Under Milk Wood‘, the fictional Welsh seaside village is named Llareggub—which is famously ‘bugger all’ spelled backwards. This cheeky hidden joke reflects the quirky, earthy, and humorous tone of the town’s eccentric residents. For this production, the BBC had assembled the cream of Welsh literati who contributed little sound clips including Michal Sheen, Charlotte Church, Tom Jones, Sîean Philips and many more besides. In fact my friend has asked me to look out the complete cast list so that we can identify more of the characters. There is some vicious black humour contained within the work of which that ticked my fancy was the case of the downtrodden Mr. Pugh who frequently imagines poisoning his nagging wife while reading Lives of the Great Poisoners, a book he hides under a brown-paper cover and pretends to be reading a Theological text. These murderous, often comedic, plots remain purely in his imagination rather than being carried out. So after our wonderful evening’s entertainment, we planned out our week together  as  I have a Curry Club U3A meal out on Tuesday and on Wednesday we have plans to observe the 90% partial eclipse of the sun together (probably on the TV, given the danger of looking directly at the eclipsed sun). Having my February holiday in mind and asking my son if he would schedule taking us to the airport, I noted the following disturbing news item which is the airport parking change that is catching Britons out – and landing them £100 fines. Anyone picking up or dropping off at some UK airports this summer is being urged to avoid a costly mistake. Birmingham, Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton, Manchester and Stansted are among the airports now using automatic number plate recognition to track how long you park for and how much you owe. That means there are no barriers prompting you to pay, so you’ll have to remember to pay online or by phone, with the deadline being midnight the following day in most airports. If you do not pay on time, you’ll get a parking charge that could range from £80 to £100 – though is reduced if paid in 14 days. In the late morning, I walked down into  town to pick up a newspaper and to have a coffee in Waitrose. I ensured that I sought out the shade whenever I could which covered at least half of the journey back 

This afternoon I stumbled across a program on the Sky Mix channel detailing the ways in which customs officials in Australia deal with contraband  entering the country which includes not only drugs but seeds, meat products as well as people attempting to enter Australia on a tourist visa and then seeking work. After due process, may of these infractions resulted in the visas being withdrawn and the miscreant put onto the next flight back to whence they came but apart from drugs, importation of banned substances was typically met with confiscation and a huge fine. In the late afternoon, the sight of some huge brambles in our back garden got too much to bear so I went and cropped the worst offenders but this entailed a lot of chopping of extremely long tendrils into shorter lengths so that they would fit in the wheelie bin (which is now full) There is a bonus to all of this which is a big crop of blackberries amidst all of the prickles  but I will leave this for another day before I attempt to pick a supply. After my walk in the park, I have the European Athletics championships to enjoy and they are actually held in Birmingham this year. There promises to be a host of interesting events between 8.00pm and 10.00pm and the women’s 4 x 400 relay should be exciting and interesting to watch and probably a more exciting watch than the football. An unfortunate record has been set in the wee small hours of the morning as a boat carrying 230 migrants made it across the channel and this easily exceeded the last ‘record’ of 165. It looks as though the people smugglers are changing their tactics and relying upon a smaller number  of crossings but in bigger boats. That having been said, the battle against the small boats is gradually being won as a total of 15,049 people are known to have crossed the Channel illegally on 224 small boats so far this year but as of 9 August, the number of small boat arrivals is down by 42% compared to the same period in 2025. The fine weather we have been experiencing must be working in favour of the small boat crossings because they diminish in the winter months and when the weather is stormy.

Yesterday would have been the 115th birthday of my mother but she did live to the ripe old age of 95. It is interesting that we never forget the date of our mother’s birthday as I suppose we learnt this as a young chid and then never ever forget it. For this reason, software developers might ask you to specify the date of your mother’s birthday as one of a set of questions as a clue to unlocking your password should you forget it. Last night, I went out as usual just before 7.00pm to meet up with my American friend and whilst we were strolling around, my friend swore that she saw a parrot. As it turned out in further conversations with dog walkers, my friend had indeed seen a parrot which we discovered to be a macaw. These birds  can live up the age of 50 or even longer if kept as pets and are very intelligent, even managing a few words of mimicking English speech. As we advanced on our walk we stopped to stare in some wonderment as the macaw was evidently being exercised by its owner and would make a number of soaring circles before coming to alight on the owner’s shoulder. We only know it to be a macaw because some of the other dog walkers had witnessed the same bird exercising and had evidently got some of the inside story. My friend and I always find that at this time of night, apart from the runners and trainers, many people are prepared to stop for a chat (usually on the origins of their dogs which is always a conversation opener) and I remarked to my friend that this would be a good training for the early evening ‘paseo’ which no doubt she and I will undertake when we are holidaying in La Coruña next February. I have informed one Spanish friend but not the other as yet as I only received the final confirmation of our flight details the day before. We have a particular event to which to look forward on Wednesday  and this  an almost total eclipse of the sun, starting at about 6.00pm and as its maximum at about 7.00pm. In Cornwall, some viewers may experience about 96%  of the totality of the eclipse but it will be about 90% elsewhere.  My friend in Northern Spain should experience 100% of the eclipse and we ourselves will not experience another total eclipse of the sun until about 1990 so we had better make the most of it. The media is full of advice concerning not viewing the eclipse except with special eclipse glasses (which Amazon are selling for about £7 for a pack of 2) For most of the population, though, it is either a case of constructing one’s own ‘pin-hole’ camera of of viewing the whole event on the TV which might actually be the safest thing to do. If Wednesday is to be a cloudy day, then this will spoil the effect for millions of us. Apart from the eclipse, I have a ‘Curry Club’ to which to look forward on Tuesday evening and I have SatNaved all of the details as it is to be in a restaurant in a nearby village about a 20 minute drive from Bromsgrove. The enjoyment of these events though is highly dependent upon the table talk of one’s nearest dinner companions so I generally approach these events with some mixed feelings.

My normal Sunday morning was attenuated this week for a couple of reasons. The parochial church hall in which we normally enjoy a cup of tea and a chat was closed for its annual refurbishment so after the service, I shot off to collect my newspaper. But the car washing facility that I normally use each Sunday was closed, no doubt as a sensible precaution in these drought-stricken conditions but the Sunday supermarkets were yet to open by 10.00am. So I came home, made myself a cooked breakfast of poached eggs on rice cakes and then scurried out in the car to pick up some ice cream as I had practically ran out at home. When I retuned, I tuned into the last 40 minutes of the ‘Pilgrimage’ programme which I generally enjoy on a Sunday morning even though I have seen all of them at lest twice before. The formula is nearly always the same as they collect together some minor celebrities and generally manage to put together a Catholic, an Anglican, a non-Conformist, perhaps a Jew and a Muslim and a follower of an Asian religion such as Jain and an agnostic or two. Then the ‘pilgrimage’ is both a physical journey along well known pilgrimage routes (this one being North Wales ending up on Bardsey Island) but also a spiritual/emotional one. The pilgrims chat along the way and nobody tries to convey anyone else but they do mutually  discover what they believe and how it has influenced their lives. Towards the end of this pilgrimage, the pilgrims call in an ancient chapel dedicated to an Anglo Saxon saint dating from the fifth century. There they participate in a local tradition for pilgrims which is to find a smooth stone of which there is a plentiful supply on the nearby beach. Then they dedicate the stone to a loved one or write a message upon it. Then holding their stones, the group is blessed by the minister and then the stones are solemnly added to the pile at the entrance at the ent rance to the church. Each year, the stones are gathered up and returned to the sea where they will be gradually washed away. The symbolism here is immense and it moved many of the pilgrims to tears (including the male Muslim, remembering his mother). Afterwards, a sense of release and fulfilment sweeps over the group and although the weather conditions were such that the crossing to Bardsey island would have been too dangerous, nonetheless the pilgrims all felt that the ‘ceremony of the stones’ was a fitting end to their long journey. After this TV viewing, I have two more treats in store. My American friend and I cook a Sunday lunch together and this is always a good idea because cooking for two means that you can try something a little more adventurous than merely cooking for one. Later, we are going to indulge ourselves in a viewing of J B Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls‘ (incidentally, a favourite amongst amateur dramatic societies) which I know is readily accessible on the BBC iPlayer and will be a highlight of our Sunday evening viewing.

We can tell how dry the UK summer has become when one of the most iconic rivers in the country – the River Wye- has started to run dry. We may become accustomed to this in the future and, in the past, Meg and I have parked our hired car in the dried up bed of a river which runs ‘wet’ during the winter but is used as overflow car parking space in the summer. Meanwhile, we have got some news from the US that being forced to display all of his financial dealings to demonstrate his financial ‘loss’ after his dispute with the BBC, Donald Trump had decided to abandon this part of his claim and to claim just an amount to reflect his ruined reputation. Hence the $10 billion claim against the BBC is already faltering and may in the coming weeks be withdrawn completely. The Americans do not take as many holidays as the Europeans but I imagine that soon there will be a holiday season of sorts  during the remainder of August when Congress will not be in session and then, in the Autumn, the battle for the mid-term elections to be held in the first week of November will intensify. These elections will be doubt interesting because any gains that the Democrats make, which is increasingly likely, will be fought with every kind of legal challenge possible by the Republicans and there is every prospect that Donald Trump will become the traditional ‘lame duck’ president for the last two years of his tenure of the White House. I got up a little late this morning, after allowing myself the luxury of a little lie-in but my son is due to call around later which will be a pleasure. The country as a whole is still crying out for rain of which there seems to be little prospect as the spells of warm weather keep following each other. At some stage, surely we will be asked to moderate our use of water across the whole country and I notice that in my the car wash that I use regularly, one of the two units that are available for use is being put out of use so I wonder whether this is a voluntary or a forced restriction. I keep expecting the sale of salad crops to be impacted in the local supermarkets but such is the strength of supply  chains, I have not noticed any impact just yet.

As I picked up my newspaper this morning (an early morning chore at the weekends as the papers replete with supplements tend to sell out early) I bumped into an ex-park friend of mine with whom I used to chat when she was exercising her little dog. I discovered that she was actually the mother of a handyman who lives around the cornet from me and who we have employed in the past for little odd jobs around the house and the garden. I raced back home and found  my son who I was knew was calling around hard at work chopping back some of the buddleia which had grown enormously in a plot to the front the house. Strangely enough, you often see this plant growing vigorously in abandoned railway sidings and spare land attached to the railway estate and its popular name is the ‘butterfly bush’ for the pollinators that it attracts. After my son and I had exchanged a pleasant hour with each other, I studied the TV listings for intimation of any special programmes that were a ‘must watch’. I found that ‘The Times‘ media pages were giving a star billing to a re-run of the BBC production of J B Priestly’s ‘An Inspector Calls‘ and I quickly checked this would be available to me when we wanted to watch in on the BBC iPlayer. So this psychological drama in which J B Priestley ‘plays’ with time is always an intriguing watch and I never tire of watching. repeat of it. So, this will provide some marvellous evening entertainment for us some time later in the day. We intend to have consume a special dinner of red eye pork ribs. These are pork ribs prepared with a barbecue sauce or rub that incorporates brewed coffee, inspired by traditional Southern ‘red-eye gravy’ which mixes ham drippings and black coffee. The coffee adds a deep, smoky, and slightly bitter complexity that balances out sweet barbecue ingredients like brown sugar, honey, or molasses. Normally August TV viewing is pretty dire as the programme schedulers assume that everybody is away on holiday and there are plenty of daylight hours left to enjoy the day so TV takes on a low priority. But I have noticed that quite decent films are showing with repeats of some of the early Bridget Jones films but these are shown quite late so I am taking a note of it so that I can watch it on catchup in the next day or so. I finally received the confirmation from Expedia (for which I was waiting) that our bookings for the holiday in Spain, flying with Air France for next mid February were now firmly confirmed  on their systems. To get to Coruña, though we are having to change both in Charles De Gaulle, Paris and also in Madrid but there is a two hour gap between each flight leaving room for refreshments. Although this sounds a little ‘chewy’, at least the flights are at a reasonable time during the day both there and back and, of course, we do not have to travel to London and then cope with car parking at the other end so I think the double change of leg is a price worth paying. I idly wondered if we would be fed on each leg of the journey but believe that Air France led the way in abolishing ‘free’ in-flight meals for short haul flights so we had better take our own comestibles with us. Finally, I have come across a story which seems to be in the ‘incredible but true’ category. It looks as though the USA may have depleted some of its missile strike capacity quite badly in its conflict with Iran. It is said that the number of Patriot missiles (effective against incoming antiballistic missiles) may have been reduced from 2,600 to 800 and the Tomahawk attack missile may have been reduced from 3,000 to 2,000. It is reported that Trump reacted furiously at Camp David, laying the blame upon his Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth who, in turn, has blamed his deputy and so on down the line. It could well be that nobody has the courage to tell Donald Trump ‘the truth’ and news of weapon depletions just seems to have leaked out. The big political question is whether the US military are nervous about further depletion of their stocks and this may have the effect of actually bringing the conflict in Iran to an end. This is bad news for the Ukrainians as well as the US will not have any ‘spare’ for the defence of Ukraine even it is felt so inclined. Incidentally, the costs per missile are enormous- a single Patriot missile costs roughly $4 million to $7 million, depending on the specific interceptor variant and whether it is a domestic U.S. procurement or an international military export.