Yesterday, I woke up relatively early and it a source of some relief to me that Meg seems to have had a good night’s sleep. I am organising her medication so in addition to her normal pills, Meg is also taking some Piriton which is basically an anti-allergen medication but the type we have just successfully ordered from the community pharmacist attached to our GP practice says that it may induce drowsiness which is exactly what we want. I suspect, as well, that when Meg gets put to bed by the two young people who know her well, she gets into bed into a relaxed frame of mind which again is helpful. Sometimes Meg falls asleep just before the evening carers call but I am attempting to keep Meg awake at this time as its putting her to bed so much easier. In the morning, the care manager called around as he often puts himself on a shift, accompanied by one of his regular staff and they have the facility of being able to jolly Meg along if she is taking some time to arouse herself in the morning. Tuesday is the day when Meg has a ‘sit’ session and it is always helpful if it is someone that Meg knows well, as it was yesterday. This morning, we went down the hill eager to catch up with our usual Tuesday friends but were quite disappointed when no one else showed up. Nonetheless, we had an interesting time in Waitrose. After I picked up my copy of ‘The Times‘ I noticed in the T2 section that they had an article of good alcohol-free lagers. I turned to the feature and noticed that the brand of which I am particularly fond and which is sold in the store was listed as the favourite beer of the reviewer. So I brought this to the attention of two of the staff that I know well so that they could bring it to the attention of the manager – he might have been interested to know that a beer he stocks has been so favourably reviewed. On the way out, we were given a bunch of 19 white, pink and yellow roses wby some staff who often think of us. I bought a chocolate cake in the store and on my way home, I popped in to see our French friend to whose house we are going for a coffee morning next Friday. However, she was not in but I called at a (near) neighbour who is our Irish friend and let her have the cake so we can give it to our mutual friend before Friday. As it Meg’s birthday on Thursday, we can have a sort of delayed birthday celebration only a day later.

Knowing that the sitter was due to call, I had arranged to go down into town to the EE shop to get my new phone (iPhone 16) brought into commission. The sales staff were exceptionally good and managed all of the technology for me but it took about an hour and a half to get all of the downloads done and the set up procedures (face recognition) completed. Then, on the recommendations of the EE staff, I went across the road to a mobile phone shop and bought both a glass protector for the screen, a new red case and also the requisite charger which is just as well because my existing ones might not have worked. So I got home about a minute before the carer was due to leave. In anticipation of today, I had applied to Tesco mobile for a free SIM card and after a bit of fumbling about managed to get this inserted into my old iPhone with, as it happens, a new number which was very easy for me to memorise. Then of course, the SIM being free had no credit on it so I had to get this organised but this is relatively straightforward for me as I have a Tesco PAYG program/app on my computer so it was easy to stitch in a ‘Family and Friends’ entry and get the top up organised fairly painlessly. This evening, I have just about got the relevant app downloaded into the new phone, having to remember that it is the PAYG version and not the contract version of the app that I need. Then I have in effect a second iPhone that I can use as an emergency phone or more likely as an extended MP3 player and a lot of the functionality of the apps will still be there but I have to wait until Meg is well and truly asleep before I can have a little play. But so far, so good. I still have a billing issue to sort out with EE but I can do this in a day or so. I had been so long in town, there was not really any time to cook a normal lunch. So I made a sort of omelette with masses of tomato and onion and the meal was ready in 10 minutes. Then afternoon, I replayed the ‘Genius of Mozart’ program broadcast the day before but which Meg had not seen. Then we went in the late afternoon onto YouTube and discovered a sort of instant history program that did a quick resume of the plot of Amadeus, going into some depth whether Mozart was actually poisoned by an arch rival as the film suggests.

As we were watching the 6.00pm news, it had become apparent the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East is now unfolding. After Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Iran has responded by launching some 140 missiles, some of them ballistic, towards Israel. The Israeli ‘iron Dome’ system has intercepted the majority of these but by no means all. Meanwhile the USA who is supplying Israel with whatever arms it wants is standing by helpfully as Netanyahu is pursuing his war aims with no restraint whatsoever. Of course, the moment is opportune for the Israelis as America in just over a month away from the presidential elections and will not dare to restrain Israel for the sake of the electoral consequences. Consequently, the conflict in the Middle East is spreading as many predicted that it would and we may even be on the brink of a huge regional war as Israel battles with every state on its borders and has the firepower to inflict the most terrible damage as has already been witnessed in the Lebanon. We can only wait and see whether the international community can exert any pressure for a ceasefire but the prospects this evening look exceedingly grim.

The day did not start well when Meg’s hospital bed refused to respond at all to the control unit which raises and lowers it. I searched for various bits of documentation including perusing all of the various ID labels stuck on the bed itself but it was not at all evident how I was to summon help. I did remember, though, that the person who installed it did show me a little key fob type thing that you used to reset the controls when necessary. This did the trick to my evident relief. Then after it had rained so much during the night and the weather was still so gloomy, I thought I would consult the weather app on my iPhone. But it had somehow disappeared from my screen although I could find it in the List of Apps buried within the menu structure. But one of the carers who seemed quite IT savvy with iPhones managed to resurrect the app for me and restore it to its rightful place on my Home screen. I know that the latest version of the Apple operating system is grouping similar apps into an appropriate group and this may have happened but at least that is another thing put to rights. After we had breakfast, Meg and I listened to Brahms ‘German Requiem’ which we always find tranquil and soothing and is readily available to us on YouTube. We then needed to look at the weather to sort out exactly what little trip we were going to make today. Up to a point, our minds were made up for as our carers who give us details of the next visit ‘along the line’ indicated that indicated that would be back at 11.30 later in the morning. We started off down to Waitrose with the finest of rain in what I believe the Irish call a ‘soft’ day and although we got a little damp, it was nothing like a soaking. On our way down the hill, we bumped into our Italian friend who was just on her way out of the house to attend the funeral of a near neighbour. In view of the rain, we only had the briefest of chats, grabbed our newspaper and made up the hill hoping that we would get back in time. But I had been sent a text saying that we had only one carer for Meg’s lunchtime call and could I assist but in the event, she was 40 minutes after the scheduled time. This is all par for the course but it does make’s one day difficult to schedule.As soon as the carer had left, I pressed on lunch for us which turned out to be quite a tasty affair. But Meg was fast asleep (rather unusually) and did not fancy any of her lunch today which I did not press on her. As she is only two thirds of my body weight and she expends practically no energy during the day, I have a feeling I probably give her slightly too much food in any case so I did not think the absence of a meal would do any great harm. In between other jobs this morning, I filled in a form on the web (which is the way to contact the doctor in our surgery these days) and requested a prescription of which we had run out (through no fault of our own but rather the suppliers) and an additional anti-histamine which I have a notion may just help to get Meg off to sleep at nights.

The Israelis have been celebrating their success in killing the leader of Hezbollah as if there was no tomorrow, I have seen pictures of Israelis in a beach resort raising their glasses in celebration and, by all accounts, a similar mood has been exhibited in the various TV studios – I must say that find this all rather distasteful. The Israeli army are poised to enter Lebanon and their special forces are already operating inside the country. I ask myself whether it is a point of international that firing rockets into each others’s territory whilst undoubtedly an act of aggression is not regarded as an act of war but rolling one’s tanks in an invasion must surely be so. The Israelis are now fighting on multiple fronts (Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen) but one has the terrible foreboding that all of these military gains in the short run are not designed to elicit a peace in the longer term.

Now that Maggie Smith is no longer with us, I noticed when we popped onto YouTube this afternoon that one of Maggie Smith’s definitive films – the ‘Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’- was being given an airing. I expect that in the next few days, we may have even more of Maggie Smith’s masterpieces rolled out including, perhaps, her portrayal of the vagrant old lady in ‘The Lady in the Van’ which is essentially a true story. We seem to have a tradition in this country of cerebrating the young talent whilst actresses are in their 20’s and 30’s and then follows a fallow period in their middle age. But once they reach sixty plus, a whole new vista beckons to them and this probably the case that Maggie Smith made more memorable performances when she over sixty than she did in the 20 years beforehand. The afternoon ended with an unexpected bonus for us. On looking at what YouTube was showing, one choice was an ‘An Evening with Kenneth Williams’ Ken Williams was a regular on the ‘Round the Horne’ comedy shows broadcast on Radio 4 in the 1960’s. Rambling Syd Rumpo was a folk singer character created for Kenneth Williams for the BBC Radio comedy series ‘Round the Horne’. He sang suggestive and humorous songs with invented or double-entendre words, such as ‘moolies’ and ‘nadgers’. So we had a rendition of one of these songs which evidently we have not heard for some decades now but I imagine they are readily accessible on YouTube. Some of the characters performed by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick deployed some outrageous homosexual slang words then in vogue within the gay community but the BBC executives had no idea of the import of what was being said and thought it was just two comic male actors making up funny words that no one would understand. We listened to these shows avidly when they were first broadcast in the 1960’s and to the subsequent repeats when the BBC dared to repeat them.

Meg and I had a good night’s sleep last night and managed, unlike yesterday, to be well prepared for when Meg’s two carers call around five minutes earlier this Sunday morning. The two care workers evidently got on well with each other (sometimes this is not always the case) and were assiduous in making sure Meg was comfortably seated in her chair before being wheeled down to our Music Lounge. We shall be seeing the same pair again for the midday call, as it happens. We chatted away on the perennial topics of children, holidays and all points in between. The politics programs are particularly interesting this morning. One big headline is, of course, the fact that the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been ‘taken out’ by Israel i.e. killed in a targeted strike. Whether this makes for sensible politics is debatable. Now that Nasrallah has been killed, commentators are speaking of his intelligence, political skills and length of service and it could well be that he will be replaced by a leader who is infinitely less experienced and more hard line and is this what Israel actually wants? It looks as though a ground invasion of Lebanon is almost certain and now that the Hezbollah leadership has been largely eliminated, it looks as though Israel is now intent on invading Lebanon for a second time and one suspects of creating another ‘Gaza’ in that unhappy land. We also have the final four candidates for the Tory party leadership putting out their pitches mainly in the forms of interviews and the two front runners may well be Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick at this stage but after the vote at the Tory party conference, two names will go forward to the wider party membership. Personally, I am of the view that in both of major political parties, given that we live in a parliamentary democracy, the selection procedures in both parties should, as a minimum, have the support of a majority of MPs in their respective parties. Otherwise we may get a repeat of the Jeremy Corbin and Liz Truss situation when whatever parliamentary support there may have been melts away. There has been one standout story, though, from the interviews with the candidates for the Tory party leadership. When candidates for the Tory party leadership were questioned about affairs in Lebanon, most skirted around the issues of the terrible events unfolding in the Lebanon but not Kemi Badenoch. She was forthright in saying if she was PM ‘I would be congratulating Prime Minister Netanyahu. I think what they did was extraordinary. Israel is showing that it has moral clarity in dealing with its enemies and the enemies of the West as well’ she said. ‘Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, and I think that being able to remove the leader of Hezbollah, as they did, will create more peace in the Middle East.’ No doubt, there was a certain amount of grandstanding in this response but suffice it to say that I have heard of no other political leader or commentator who has ventured to suggest that decapitating the leader of Hezbollah which actually make the world a safer place. But there are two other big stories this Sunday. The other big political story this morning is the fact that a recently elected MP. Rosie Duffield, has resigned from the Labour Party and is to remain as an independent MP. Her resignation letter is said to be absolutely scathing and to nobody’s surprise, it is the combination of the ‘cruelty’ of the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance and the showering of gifts (and their ready acceptance) by the Keir Starmer which has really proved to be the last straw. I will just take the liberty of quoting some of the most scathing sections of the resignation letter but it has to be read to be believed:

‘Since the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering and increasingly outrageous. I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear….How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicated and hardworking Labour MPs?! The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale. I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party….Someone with far-above-average wealth choosing to keep the Conservatives’ two-child limit to benefit payments which entrenches children in poverty, while inexplicably accepting expensive personal gifts of designer suits and glasses costing more than most of those people can grasp – this is entirely undeserving of holding the title of Labour Prime Minister. Forcing a vote to make many older people iller and colder while you and your favourite colleagues enjoy free family trips to events most people would have to save hard for – why are you not showing even the slightest bit of embarrassment or remorse?’

Our routines on a Sunday have a different rhythm to the rest of the week, largely as a result of watching the twin Politics programs on Sky News and BBC1. By the time these are finished and we have a leisurely washing up, we then prepare ourselves for a walk down into town. As the weather is getting a little colder, I equipped Meg with a (Manchester University) scarf and a warmer blanket and then we hastened down the hill to pick up our copy of the ‘Sunday Times’ Then we go straight home, without dropping off for a sojourn in the park. Rather, when we got home I treated ourself to some chicken soup in a mug which I prepare by dissolving a packet soup in some boiling water, topping up with full cream milk and micro waving to the appropriate temperature. Then the late morning carers arrived and after Meg had been made comfortable, I prepared our lunch of ham, baked potato and broccoli. After lunch, we dipped into the Walt Disney version of ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ which was not entirely to our taste and so we quickly moved onto other offerings. We actually did view last Thursday night’s broadcast of ‘Question Time’ which I had viewed once before but managed to sleep through practically from the first moment to the last. I find these days that when I am seated in my favourite armchair with a cup of coffee in my hand, I quickly fall asleep within minutes even if the programme in front of me is reasonably engaging.

It is hard to express my relief that on waking up at about 1.00am in the morning, I tried the various TVs that we have only to find that all is now restored to normality. What actually caused the outage in the first place, I shall never really know or even care but fact that normal life as we have come to know it has been restored is so reassuring given the other tribulations that we have to endure. Of course there was a certain amount of reconfiguration of the TV equipment that had to take place in the wee small hours of the morning but this was a price I was more than willing to pay under the circumstances.

This section of the blog is a complete experiment. In the past few days, I have discovered that an old Bluetooth keyboard that I have used to interface with an iPad and which did not seem to work, could now be coerced into life. First of all, I discovered how to use a keyboard with my iPhone, as well as with my iPad, and basically using a technology app called Notes. This particular app is very well known in the Apple eco-structure and is very easy to use and has the great virtue that with a few very simple keystrokes, it is possible to send anybody a text wherever one wants and in particular to my email, which means that once the text is in an email sent to myself, I can access it from either of the two laptops that I have in the two main lounges of the house. Very much encouraged by this development, I wanted to see how much I paid for this technology in the first place. I do not think it was a great deal of money, but I was absolutely amazed to discover that I could actually buy a brand-new Bluetooth enabled little keyboard for the princely sum of less than £7.00 So to cut a long story short, I actually bought this little piece of kit (and, of course, it is made in China) and it is a sweet little thing in effect converting my iPad, and new keyboard, into the equivalent of a little laptop that I can actually utilise while sitting in my favourite armchair, whilst watching the TV on the one hand and talking to Meg on the other. This is quite liberating in many ways. However, what is even more extraordinary is the little button ‘microphone’ symbol and it allows one to dictate ones text. So far, in this particular section of the log, I had avoided using the keyboard all together and I am dictating the whole using the new technology. I need to look at the text and see what terrible errors may or may not have been committed, but the fact that I can sit down and actually say what I want to say and it gets converted into text almost immediately is considerably liberating. I am actually quite excited as, in the past, you could pay an absolute fortune for this kind of technology. I seem to remember that there was an application in the IBM PC days called Dragon software and you paid hundreds of pounds for it, but this now seems available to almost anybody who wants it as an incredibly cheap price and we will have to see how it works. All that I can say is so far so good at this will conclude this particular section.

This morning starts off in a somewhat unusual way. Meg seems to have slept relatively well given the shenanigans of last night’s drama with our TV reception. But as I was getting dressed after my shower, the doorbell rang and one of the carers had turned up 20 minutes early. So she made a start getting Meg washed and dressed and I was going to act as the second carer (necessary when it comes to turning a prostate body – one to hold whilst the other washes) But then the second carer turned up on time and not late as predicted. The carers normally wear a thin disposable apron before commencing their washing duties but I was not wearing one. But in the washing process, I got wet through and just having put on a clean set of clothes had to discard them all and start to get dressed all over again. We breakfasted on porridge and toast and then made our way down the hill to meet up with our friends as we generally do each Saturday. It really was the most delightful day starting at about 10.30 but then the weather clouded over and we have had an increasingly gloomy afternoon. We had a jolly time with the five of us and although sometimes Meg is a bit sleepy, she was wide awake whilst she had her tea and Danish pastry. Then it was a case of ensuring we got back up the hill before the carers’ late morning call, after which I threw together some bits and pieces to make quite a tasty Saturday meal. After lunch, I navigate up through the channels and stopped at one showing past episodes of ‘Rising Damp’ which still remains reasonably amusing despite the act that it was shown in the 1970’s and needs to broadcast a disclaimer to disavow the racist and inappropriate humour which was not then inconsistent with the standards of the time. Normally, Meg can sit in her wheelchair securely enough to await the arrivals of the carers in the late afternoon. But this afternoon, perhaps as a consequence of losing all upper body strength, Meg was practically sliding out of her chair (a tendency to which she is wont). So I had to take some emergency remedial action and just about got Meg up in her hoist which is normally a two-handed job and then got her located reasonably safely in the armchair which we have in our main lounge which has ensured has quite a pronounced backward sloping tilt to it so that Meg can be relatively secure within it. I have put together some materials which I happened to have to hand to make a kind of bolster arrangements which I am going to try out on the armchair in the Music Lounge tomorrow. If I am fairly successful, then hopefully the slipping incident to which Meg may be subject may be averted but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say.

Yesterday as it is Friday we go on our normal trip down into town to visit ‘The Lemon Tree‘ cafe which is now our favourite venue for a Friday morning. After the pouring rain of the last few days, it looks as though the bands of rain are sweeping their way northwards and, upon our return, the weather was rapidly brightening and yielded quite a pleasant day during the afternoon. We were delighted to meet up with our University of Birmingham friend who we often see at the weekend, either on a Friday or a Sunday. Then we rather had to dash up the hill to ensure that we get home in plenty of time for Meg’s late morning visit from the carers. I recently had to repair (i.e.wood glue together) some of the legs from a little occasional table we have in our lounge – I suspect the legs had become loosened from when Meg in her falling about days had sent the table crashing. The wood glue seems to have worked its magic although I a treating it very gingerly these days.

I have managed to get the Bluetooth keyboard upon which I am currently typing communicating directly with my iPad whilst sitting in my favourite leather armchair. This means that I can now chat with Meg, watch the TV and also type notes to myself all at the same time which is true multi-tasking. We also treat ourselves to a bought haddock fish pie which we are going to have for our Friday lunch and today is no exception. We finish off our lunches these days with a small bowl of plain Greek yogurt but enhanced a little with some spoonfuls of coconut yogurt (sold in Aldi) which is delicious. Last night was a disturbed night for both of us. Although Meg had been put into the bed by the carers so that she was all tucked up by 7.30pm, in practice she did not fall fully sleep until about 11.00pm.This happens occasionally such as every third night and, on occasions like this, I try to keep Meg calm and unagitated but this is easier said than done Eventually, I got up and started to do the jobs that I reserve for the evenings when Meg is (hopefully) asleep. Consequently, last night I got very little sleep last night and consequently have felt like ‘death warmed up’ the whole of the following day. After Meg has had her ‘tea time’ call from the carers in the late afternoon, we always go to the main lounge and see what YouTube has to offer. Sometimes we are presented with some classic comedy and so, sometimes with some classical musical offerings, depending on what the YouTube algorithm has sorted out for us. Today, there was an examination of the lives of the three great tenors,Caruso, Gigli and Bjorling (the Swedish tenor), As a follow up, there was a biopic of the life of Mario Lanza who had a magnificent voice but, coupled with his good looks, lent itself to the TV and cinema era rather than the opera house. But Mario Lanza died at the age of 38 and although he had recorded the sound tracks to The Student Prince, the powers that be that in MGM substituted another actor who played (and lip-synced) the role pretty well by all accounts. We were happily watching our TV when suddenly we lost all TV signal in both of our lounges. Suspecting a transmitter fault, I got onto the appropriate website which informed me that there were no problems with the transmitters (but I am not convinced about this) After an urgent phone call to my son, he came over and we experimented with a little portable TV and various lengths of TV cable to try to work out if the problem was with our aerial.To cut a long story short, we got first the portable and then the big Toshiba TV working but only in the other end of the lounge and only receiving the terrestrial channels and not the internet channels. But from the important standpoint of keeping Meg engaged, we now have a TV that offers something, if not everything, and she can view this by locating the wheelchair into a different part of the lounge. After various experiments and trials with different combinations, my son and I think that we may have an explanation for what is going wrong. It could well be that the transmitter has some kind of fault and is transmitting at a lower power than is normal. This might be effecting the big TVs but not the portable. In addition, to put the TVs where they need to be proximate to our armchairs, I have deployed long lengths of cabling along the skirting boards of the Music Lounge and this will degrade the signal further. So we think that a reduced transmitter power coupled with our cable-induced signal degradation may account for the problem. We are going to wait until the morning to see if anything has been sorted out overnight and whether the TV in our Main Lounge is functioning as it should in the morning. But as things stand, they are now looking somewhat less bleak than they were an hour or so back when it looked as though we might have to call a TV or aerial specialist and be without TV for days on end. I am relieved that we have a solution that will just about work for now and we will have to see what the morning brings.

The foreign affairs news on the evening bulletins was disturbing in the extreme. Israel had attacked the Hezbollah HQ in Lebanon and the scale of the destruction left a huge red glow over the horizon that rather reminded me of the initial American attack on Iraq when they were promising ‘shock and awe’. It looks as though some of the major Hezbollah leaders may have been successfully targeted but not their actual leader. Of course, there will be others who will step up into the role and I have always thought that the military doctrine of (almost literally) decapitating the enemy was a futile strategy. For example, if Churchill had been killed at the height of WW2, would the reaction of the rest of the population that now is the time to sue for peace? So a ceasefire seems to be a long way off and the Israelis are preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon in the near future in any case. One has to despair what a solution might be in the face of these calamitous scenes.

Yesterday was my shopping day and we almost overslept this morning – I suspect that the dark mornings makes it slightly more difficult to awake at our normal time. But the two carers came on time to get Meg up and ready but she did appear to be a little sleepy this morning. Perhaps the RSV virus jab that we had the other day is making us both a little more tired but at least we are happy to be within the narrow window of the system (75-79 year olds) and to have been given a level of protection that may last for at least a couple of years. One of the carers was detailed to stay on with Meg as a ‘sit’ carer whilst I went off to do our weekly shopping. This particular carer has a very happy and friendly disposition and I was actually quite relieved to leave Meg with her whilst the shopping was done. At Aldi, I saw a pair of admittedly thin cotton men’s pyjamas marked down to £5.00 so I bought this to complement a similar pair I bought last week thinking to myself that in the very cold weather, two pairs of thin pyjamas might actually prove warmer than the traditional Winceyette, particularly if they trap a layer of air between the two pairs. Upon my return, the carer helps me to put things away and this seems to take most of the morning. At midday, the manager of the care agency who details himself as one of the duty rota was due to call around accompanied by his manager. The idea of this is that the management team as a whole have sight of each of their clients periodically so that they can get a more rounded picture of their domestic situation and attendant care needs. This sounds like excellent practice and I took the opportunity to enquire how our application to Social Services for an extra visit was being processed. I was told the most incredible tale of woe about how things were with Social Services these days. Every request for an extra resource has to go through several layers of bureaucracy and then sent out to an assessment panel to see if the extra resource can be approved or not. So a decision can take months to emerge and the whole scenario is a response to the absence of resource within social service departments. The levels of bureaucracy are an attempt to save money be delaying and delaying the decision making process. As though all of this was not bad enough, I was told blood curdling tales of what was happening in Birmingham Social Services now that the city council is effectively bankrupt. Birmingham’s problems were brought to a head when it was ruled that they had underpaid their female employees for decades and were then faced with a huge bill in back payments. At the same time, there was a huge squeeze in local authority budgets which in the big cities were generally under the control of a Labour administration. This suited the purposes of the then Tory government who starved the big cities of resources and then found it quite easy to deflect any criticism by pointing out that Labour administrations were always profligate whereas their Tory counterparts in the more affluent shires did not have the same scale of problems exhibited in the large conurbations. We received through the post a written confirmation of the fact that the wheelchair service are due to pay us a visit in about 10 days time to see if the ankle straps arrangements that I utilise to keep Meg’s legs from slipping off the footrests can be replaced by a more professional arrangement. The occupational therapists were generally happy with my pragmatic solution but they have made an onward reference to the wheelchair service itself that may have some more professional kit to help to keep Meg more secure (and less liable to slippage) in her wheelchair.

Last night, I had a sudden burst of enthusiasm and wondered whether a keyboard that I had purchased some time ago to make a Bluetooth connection with my iPad would actually work with my existing iPhone. After a certain amount of experimentation, I found that this would work pretty all so in the afternoon, I wondered if it possible to view the TV whilst also using the keyboard to write some text for this blog. As we been watching a Lucy Worsley program on Mozart in London yesterday, I had unfortunately had a doze in the middle of it and the carers had also come along before we had got to the end of it. So today, we are resuming our viewing of this and I am also trying out this innovative bit of kit and am using the ‘Pages’ app on the iPhone. From here, it is a fairly simple task to use a few keystrokes to upload the text into an email and then I can send it to myself so that I can read it on either of my laptops. This afternoon, it has been rather a gloomy afternoon so we are not unhappy to have another little burst of Mozart for this afternoon. We had been watching some ‘BlackAdder’ on BBC catchup but the selections were not some of the rib tickling ones so we were happy to resume our viewings of yesterday.

In the late afternoons, Meg and I have a little routine that seems to work pretty well for us. After the carers have made Meg comfortable, we stay in our main lounge where we have a chair in which the seat cushion has been tilted back somewhat to help keep Meg from sliding off and whilst Meg is sitting happily in her chair, I go off and make ourselves some tea and also treat ourselves to a little bit of chocolate. Then we either watch some comedy or view a YouTube concert until it is time for the 6.00pm news. I have also got into the habit of giving Meg her ‘evening’ pills at 6.00pm before Meg is put to bed at about 7.00pm. For the last day or so, this timing has worked out very well for us and it seems to help Meg settle down for the evening a bit more readily. This then releases me to get some more of my evening routine jobs done which is always a bonus.

Last night, Meg seemed to get off to sleep relatively quickly and I felt as though I could benefit from an early night. However, that is not how the night transpired because as I had ordered new iPhone, an iPhone 16, I thought this would be a good opportunity to clean up some of the clutter on my existing phone. So I went through the entire collection of Apps, deleting about half of them and evidently only keeping those that I thought would still be useful to retain even though I had not used them a great deal. At the same time, I made sure that I could access my NHS app and, in general terms, tried to make things neat and tidy before the changeover next Tuesday. I feel that I would like to start off with a fairly limited set of useful apps and I believe that in the updated model, Apple will actually group together apps that are similar to each other and this sounds a useful feature. I managed to locate some ‘Getting Started’ guides which I have run off on the printer and put in a file. Whilst up and about, I thought I would see what range of Amazon books might be available for me to make maximum use of my new phone but the available offerings were both extensive and, to some extent, confusing. Sometimes, these books can be excellent and sometimes they are a complete waste of money so I decided to stay my hand and see if I could find a book that was a clear market leader or, at least, not a complete waste of money. Perhaps I do not have the search terms correct but when I try to search for some recommendations or evaluations of the various books to make sure that I do not buy ‘a pig in a poke’ but decided to stay my hand for the time being. So I was pretty tired this morning as I had been up half of the night but it is only once in a while. After we had breakfasted this morning, our domestic help turned up as is usual on a Wednesday and then Meg and I decided to make a Waitrose trip. This all worked out as we had intended although we did not bump into any of our regulars but had a brief snatch of conversation with our Irish friend who we passed on the way down. After we returned, we awaited the arrival of the carers to give Meg her late morning call which was an hour later today for some reason. The two girls who turned up were of a very chatty and friendly disposition and this certainly helps to both keep Meg in a good mood and also make the whole carer session progress so much more smoothly. I thanked the care workers and then let them know that I thought that if the visit was filled with a lot of jolly conversation, this was very good therapeutically for Meg. We lunched on the fishcakes and microwaved vegetables which is normally our Tuesday rather than our Wednesday fare and settled down to see a biography of D H Lawrence on Sky Arts which was reasonably informative.

This afternoon, Meg and I set ourselves down to watch a film hosted by Lucy Worsley being run as a supplement to the Mozart series on BBC2. Entitled ‘Mozart’s London Odyssey’ it details the stay in London of Leopold Mozart, Mozart’s father who was attempting to cash in on his son’s prodigy status. The family stayed at various addresses and performed at a series of locations but occasionally times were hard and Leopold Mozart had to accept whatever opportunities came his way. On at least one occasion, both children were to be heard performing for just half a crown (12p) at a tavern named the Swan and Hoop near the western end of Cornhill, in the heart of the City. Leopold Mozart advertised his son’s age at seven even though he was in fact eight at the time but even more remarkable is the fact that Mozart composed his first symphony at this age and whilst staying in London.

The Labour party conference closed today having been dominated by the row of the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowances and the rank hypocrisy exercised by some of the leading figures of the party, including the Prime Minister, as they accepted gifts from wealthy donors. Whether or not all of this is transparent and within the rules is completely besides the point as the ‘optics’ of members of the party accepting handouts whilst benefits are denied to old age pensioners just seems to scream of a lack of political common sense. But the Tory party conference will start shortly and I have always found this to be a lot more interesting. I think this is because one expects the Labour party to be rowing with each other and to be fractious but the Tories would always like to generate the impression of complete party unity. In fact, party unit is said to be the Tories secret weapon but post-Brexit all of this has broken down since the premierships of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. At this party conference, there will be four candidates for a new Leader of the Opposition strutting their stuff but there is to be a vote amongst the representatives (not delegates to a Tory party conference!) to whittle the four down to two and then these two names will be put to the constituency parties. The possibility remains, of course, that the successful candidate may appeal to the right wingers in the constituency parties but not command a majority of their own reduced number of MPs and this does not bode well for the future. Of course, the number of corporate sponsors and big business interests will shrink dramatically at this party conference as the Tories may well be out of power for 10 years and therefore not be in a position to hand out contracts and other largesse as they have done over the years. The big political question for the Tories is what kind of party they want to be and will they swing further to the right (which probably spells out further electoral oblivion) or will they tack to the centre ground which the Tory party has not done for some decades now? And of course most parties in opposition, and after heavy defeat, take the opportunity to have a rethink of their policies but I cannot really see this happening in the modern Conservative party which probably appeals at a more visceral rather than an intellectual level these days.

Yesterday, we woke up to a somewhat finer day and we were relieved that the huge band of rain that had swept over all of the country seems to have passed over. I was just getting washed half an hour before the carers were due to call when the doorbell rang and there was the manager of the care agency (who often puts himself on a shift) saying that they had changed the timing of the morning visit to half an hour earlier but had forgotten to inform us, and by the way could I act as No. 2 to the manager as a second care worker was not available. This kind of thing is par for the course these days and although initially somewhat exasperated, I get on well with the manager who is literally ‘hands on’ so I did not mind the opportunity to have a chat. Also he knows how to jolly Meg along first thing in the morning and a chat over care related issues is always worth while. We made our usual trip down to Waitrose in order to meet up with the grandiloquent granny gang.I took along with the lyrics of ‘Airn’t it grand to be blooming well dead’, a comic song first written in 1932, and we all had a good giggle with this. Our table was delighted to be the recipient of four bunches of roses (one per couple) as one of Waitrose partners who has responsibilities for looking after the ‘flowers’ section of the store donates bunches of blooms to us regulars rather than throwing them away which is always a much appreciated gesture. Having got back in plenty of time for our ‘sit’ carer, she failed to make an appearance. After a time, the normal lunchtime carer call was made and she had just about checked Meg over when the District Nurse turned up. She was visiting to administer our RSV vaccine to us, a new vaccine which is only being made available to people in their 70’s this year. This service is not available once you have passed the milestone of 80, the ostensible reason being that the original trials had so few people of 80+ acting as volunteers that they did have the data to vouch for its effectiveness. I have considerable doubts about this explanation but at least Meg and I came within the appropriate vaccination window and the effectiveness is claimed to be for at least two years or more. Then one of the carers left and a second carer turned up to perform the ‘sit’ service almost 30 minutes after the scheduled time. Evidently, the care firm is having its usual logistical problems with staff but some of these are probably due to the prevalence of zero hours contracts. I needed Meg to be ‘sat with’ for at least 30 minutes so that I could go into town and start the process of renewing my mobile phone contract. Needless to say, when I was short of time, all of the staff in the EE office were busy with other customers and I had to wait about 10 minutes before anyone was free to attend to me. I indicated that I was incredibly short of time but to cut a long story short, I was dealt with quite expeditiously and have ordered a new iPhone 16 (the last one having been sold this morning, which is surely Sod’s Law.) Although I cannot quite believe it, the new phone contract will work out cheaper than I am paying at the moment but I do not have the time to sort out what the snags might be. As it was, I spent a lot of time flipping through 11 pages of contract saying that I had read it, understood it and agreed with it but I imagine that I am only doing what most customers tend to do. The new phone will be delivered to the store and I will go down in a week’s time when I have another ‘sit’ session on a Tuesday to get the final handover from the old phone to the new. I was given the option of having the phone delivered to my home address but I feel happier with the store organising the changeover in case any problems should arise. The whole trip to town took 50 minutes rather than 30 I had anticipated so I abandoned the lunch that I had originally planned and made a quickie lunch based upon an Aldi thick soup so that we could eat fairly soon after my return. Then we watched the Keir Starmer first address to the Labour Party conference as party leader and this was workmanlike as you might have anticipated.

This afternoon, I had been saving as a treat the latest in the BBC2 series ‘Mozart: Rise of a Genius’ I had originally thought that there were only gong to be two episodes but consulting the BBC2 web pages, it indicates there is a third episode. Rather tantalisingly, it indicates that this is ‘Series 1’ which might imply that there are other series to follow. Although I am familiar with the main points of Mozart’s life, there are always new things that are learnt. In particular, I learned last night that ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was considered so revolutionary (servants getting the better of their aristocratic masters) that it made some of the upper class audience of Vienna so uncomfortable that it was pulled after 9 performances to make way for another opera which was less threatening. Mozart conducted the first night and although the first night was well received, it was spoiled somewhat by some of Mozart’s rivals who were paid to boo and hiss and to generally disrupt the performance. But it was performed subsequently in Prague where I think it was much better received. It is generally regarded as one of the finest operas ever written and contains some hilarious scenes not to mention a certain amount of cross-dressing. For example, Cherubino an adolescent page boy, is generally sung by a mezzo soprano but in one scene is dressed in girl’s clothes to play a practical joke upon the Count.

It was a very dull and gloomy day when we woke up yesterday and after our thorough soaking of the day before, a day when we had to make difficult decisions whether to venture out and risk another soaking or stay confined indoors. Now that the vernal equinox is over, there is still a month to go before the clocks go back and the gloomy mornings do make it a little difficult to get oneself up and going in the morning. Nonetheless, we had both had a fairly good night’s sleep and after we had breakfasted, it was evident that the rain was going to be falling steadily so I made a lightning visit down to the supermarket just to collect our copy of ‘The Times‘. Whilst listening to Radio 4 in the background this morning, reference was made to the fact that the ex Defence secretary, Ben Wallace, was going to give evidence to the Afghan enquiry. The Afghan Inquiry is a British public inquiry that is investigating extra judicial killings by British special forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. The inquiry is examining night raids carried out by UK special forces, specifically known as Deliberate Detention Operations (DDOs). Intrigued by an enquiry of which I had never heard, I thought I would investigate how many public enquiries are taking place in the UK at the moment. I knew, of course, about the ongoing COVID enquiry and the last phase of the Post Office Enquiry is due to resume this Monday but when I consulted the internet, I discovered that there were no fewer than 17 enquiries taking place at the moment. Some of these are admittedly very small scale such as excess deaths in a Scottish hospital but I was amazed at the number. I think that in the UK that after a very public scandal we say that we must have an enquiry but the pressure must first build up for the enquiry to take place, then the enquiry itself might take a year or more and then there is a period of time in which the report has to be written up. After publication of the report, the Government indicates that it will either accept or ‘consider’ the recommendations. But the net effect of all of this is that when redress is sought and one thinks of the Hillsborough football disaster, the enquiry is so long after the event that nobody actually carries the can or is effectively punished. Some miscreants ought to end up behind bars (and one thinks of the lies told by the Post Office) but this never happens. In the case of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ enquiry, the inquiry was set up to establish a definitive version of the events of Sunday 30 January 1972 and was set up in 1998, reporting some 12 years later in 2010 at a cost of £21.6 million and with a report running to 5,000 pages. So the report was published some 38 years after the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ had taken place and evidently some of the key army personnel were either dead or retired. This was admittedly a long and expensive enquiry but it fits a pattern where the greater the scandal, the longer it takes to report upon it. In theory, the idea of a public enquiry is that ‘lessons must be learnt’ but by this stage, so much water has flowed under the bridge that any lessons cease to retain their relevance.

As it was such a dire day weather-wise, we decided to stay at home and have a nice quiet day. This was perhaps just as well because after the thorough soaking we received yesterday and then entertaining our friends yesterday afternoon, I think that Meg needed a little recovery time. She did seem somewhat sleepy this morning but gradually recovered as the day wore on. For lunch, we took the carcass of the chicken left over from yesterday’s meal and made a fricassee of it, together with some chicken gravy which we served on a small bed of rice and some petit pois. This was absolutely delicious and we enjoyed it tremendously. For our post lunch entertainments, I now consult the TV schedules for the night before and see what I can get on catch-up TV. The Politics programme of ‘Question Time‘ resumed last Thursday evening so we saw the re-run of this and then after this treated ourselves to a retrospective of the life and humour of Victoria Wood which is both entertaining and informative at the same time. I remember seeing Victoria Wood together with a neighbour in the De Montfort Hall in Leicester where she brought the house down. Here she sang ‘Let’s Do It – The Ballad of Barry & Freda’ which must be one of the finest comic songs of all time with some hilarious one liners in it. It is interesting to reflect that she admired the monologues of Alan Bennett and there is something both about the northern edge and self deprecation that runs throughout both of their work. She could also be deprecating about her Northern roots with a brilliant one liner from a TV announcer apologising to the people in the North of England with the acid comment ‘It must be awful for them’. And of course the ‘Two Soups’ sketch is still remembered by many of us of a certain age, even though it is making fun of an elderly deaf waitress.

The enquiry into Post Office ‘Horizon’ scandal resumes again today and just when we thought that all of the reported problems were just a part of history, we find in a report published today that some problems are continuing. The vast majority of sub-postmasters operating Post Offices (92%) reported ‘some form of issue’ with Horizon in the last year. More than half (57%) said they had experienced unexplained discrepancies, with 19% reporting unexplained transactions and 14% experiencing missing transactions. When resolving those discrepancies, more were dissatisfied (48%) than satisfied (19%). In the past, this has provided some quite compelling viewing and I wonder if the last phase of the enquiry will generate more eventual revelations. The thing that sticks in my mind when witnesses have to take the stand and to account for their past actions, how often even when confronted with the evidence (often in the form of an evidence trail facilitated by emails), witnesses have selective amnesia and suddenly find that they ‘cannot remember’ Some of this must be undoubtedly due to the passage of time but there must be multiple occasions when the inability to remember is just a convenient cover for their own shortcomings.

Yesterday being Sunday, we woke up just a tad early and were delighted that we both seem to have had a fairly restful night. I was pleased to say that I had enough time to have a shower and put the various preparations in place before the couple of carers called around at 8.00pm. Whilst Meg was watching the Politics programmes, I was preparing breakfast and so did not catch up with as much of the comment as I would have liked but then we got an extremely welcome phone call from our University of Birmingham friend to meet up for a coffee. We knew that the weather forecast was not very propitious but nonetheless took a chance on the weather and made our way in the spitting rain. I had taken with me, as I promised, some of the Civil Service Commission examination papers dating from about 1963 which I had taken and which eventually secured me a position in the Central of Information in London. Our friend was going to take these home and peruse them at his leisure and then try to infer whether standards had risen or fallen in the sixty years since they were first set before the intending applicants. On the way back home, though, the skies opened and Meg and I got absolutely drenched, practically to the skin. Fortunately the carers were there waiting for us upon our return and they themselves were a few minutes early so whilst they stripped Meg off and put her in dry clothing, I did the same for myself and we both hoped that exposure to a bit of a rain would not subject us to any deleterious consequences.

Yesterday afternoon, as we had our pre-planned, our Irish friends called around with a fully cooked meal for our enjoyment. We would normally entertain each other in our respective houses but now it is too difficult for Meg’s wheelchair to get over the threshhold of their front door so we decided that it would better if our friends came round to us and they very kindly suggested they would they us to a cooked meal. This worked out extremely well and we dined on a newly roasted chicken, mashed potato and broccoli. I had already bought some apple pies so we had this with ice-cream as our dessert. Our friends bought a bottle of Chilean Malbec with them so we enjoyed this as well as helping to finish off some of the Cava which I had left over from our wedding anniversary (but protected by a wine stopper) Then we repaired to our Music Lounge and I explained to our friends some of the various bits of furniture we had acquired since their last visit to our house. This included our latest captain’s chairs, the little two man sofa we acquired some months ago, the story behind the Flemish tapestry we acquired from the Worcestershire Association of Carers and culminating in the beautiful leather sofa which forms a beautifully intimate space where we could all sit and chat. I played them the Joan Baez track which had made such a profound impact on us only yesterday and then we caught up on all sorts of things including health matters relating to all of us, aspects of folk music and our mutual opinion of what we felt about the way in which the present Labour leadership is accepting gifts from wealth donors in which receiving the gifts, even if technically within the rules generates, the most terrible ‘optics’ for the Labour party and the kind of bad publicity which could easily have been avoided if only they had shown a little more temperance and self-restraint. But is this asking too much of the present generation of politicians? Our friend told us that Joan Baez had died soon after her last tour in which Meg and I had actually attended in Central Birmingham and I was dismayed by the news. Buy on consulting Wikipedia and its edit history, I discovered that as of two weeks ago, Joan Baez was still alive and aged 83. I am sure that when she does die, the event is bound to attract at least some attention from today’s media. We enjoyed each other other’s company so much this afternoon and hope to be able to repeat it more often. Our friends commented how the new hair style that our regular hairdresser had given Meg suits her down to the ground and makes her look years younger – if only!

I suppose that I ought to feel fairly happy that Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump by about 3% in the opinion polls. But there is a massive snag about this lead because it could be that Harris is piling up more votes in places that will not necessarily swing the election. In the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, a popular epithet was ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – in other words all other issues fall into insignificance compared with how well off people are, or rather feel themselves to be. Trump is trusted more than Harris on the economy, probably because he has sold the idea that he is a ‘successful businessman’ who therefore ought to understand how the economy works. Harris is closing the gap on the economy but there is a lot of convincing to do. Although some of the economic indicators such as inflation are heading in the Democrat’s direction, Americans in the mass do not feel better off. In other words, after years of sharply rising prices (a box of eggs costing two and a half times more than they did five years ago as what was $2 is now $5) So an interesting paradox occurs at this point which is that it is perception of one’s standards of living whatever economists say which becomes the crucial political fact. So the sad fact remains that unless Harris is able to convince voters of her economic credentials, the presidency seems to be heading Trump’s way. But there are some interesting things that sharp followers of the American elections might look out for. Pennsylvania is said to be a key battleground with the parties practically level and Harris might not gain it. But North Carolina which has consistent but small Republican majorities may be heading the Democrats way thanks to the resurgence of the black vote in the rapidly expanding suburbs of that state and so capturing this state could carry the election for Harris. Some analysts are of this view that the race to win North Carolina is the tightest of the whole contest and winning this state might prove to be critical.