The sentiment that we are entering  ‘World War 3’ is probably  over-used by journalists but it is quite true that the conflict is in danger of becoming just that. Donald Trump’s war with Iran is rapidly becoming global, with more than a dozen other countries in the firing line, or mobilising their armed forces, as Tehran fights back. The UK, France and Spain are among the nations sending warships, jets and troops to the region to bolster their defences and protect their allies, while states across the Middle East, as well as Cyprus, Turkey and Azerbaijan, have been affected by Iranian drones and missiles. The US is also not restricting its strikes against the Islamic regime to any geographical boundary, with an American submarine sinking an Iranian warship off the coast of Sri Lanka. The Russians and the Chinese are starting to get involved, at least to the extent that it looks as though clandestine supply chains of munitions are being formed, even if there is no overt involvement. What is making this war so unique is that there is no evident end-point – the Americans in particular  seem to be particularly prone to entering a conflict without a clear exit strategy or even clear ideas of what constitutes ‘success’ The American liberal political media are falling over themselves with exasperated video clips of the various reasons that Trump has proffered in his public statements for entering the war. One of the most ridiculous is the claim that Ira was only two weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon whereas more sober and intelligent analysis contradicts this. While Iran was close to having the enriched uranium to the level needed for bomb-making, experts said it would take months to two years to build a nuclear bomb. How quickly Iran could possess a nuclear weapon was used as the basis for Israel and the U.S. to strike. Iran did not yet have a bomb ready to launch, said Michael Singh, managing director at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an organisation that promotes understanding of American interests in the Middle East. What is being confused here is possessing the raw material for a weapon (enriched uranium) is one thing but getting these manufactured into a nuclear weapon and having a delivery system are completely different entities and these acts are being deliberately conflated to serve as justifications for the American invasion. What we do know is that invasion with bombs is easy but withdrawal from these conflicts is long and drawn out, complicated and messy. In the meanwhile, we are still dealing with Ukrainian conflict on our doorstep and that is quite enough to be getting on with. Meanwhile, I am entering  my Sunday morning routine which now involves an early start to the day, getting to church just after 8.00am for the 8.30 service followed by tea and biscuits in the adjoining parish hall. What I think I enjoy about such activities is there a good cross section of the population in terms of men and women quite equally distributed across the age groups as well as a smattering of young children who have  been brought along with the parents and grandparents. When I go along to meetings at the Methodist Centre as I did the day before for a group social session, I am confronted with an absolute sea of grey haired older women and hardly any men at  all – so having associated with young colleagues and students all of my working life, I find this to be a shock to the system and nearly always gravitate towards conversations with much younger  age groups with whom I feel, rightly or wrongly, that  have much more in common.  And so yesterday,  I engaged in my normal routine chatting with one or two people around the coffee table and then left to engage in my other round of routines which is to top up the car with petrol, collect my Sunday newspaper and call in at an ATM to get my supplies of cash for the forthcoming week. I find that Sunday mornings are quite useful in tis respect as the roads are fairly quiet and I am not stuck in the middle of traffic jams as happens during the week.

After I returned home, I made myself a treat of a breakfast which is a couple of fried eggs on some toasted sourdough bread. After a read of Sunday newspapers and a view of some of the latest political news, I prepared the sort of lunch which I normally have to accompany my half of a beef joint, cooked and frozen some months beforehand. I diced some carrots and ‘wonky’ parsnips to make for a carrot-and-parsnip mash which I eventually consumed with the beef heated up in an onion gravy and the remains of the sprouts.  Although the veg preparation is quite time consuming for this type of meal, I find that I can save half of the prepared veg which I pop in a plastic bag in the freezer and have halfway through next week. I did have in mind to give the car a wash later on today as, like many other cars in the area, it has been covered by a fine Saharan dust which as risen far into the atmosphere, been transported high across the high world and finally dumped on us here in the UK, a phenomenon which  happens from time to time. As there was no rugby match to entertain this  afternoon, this might be a good opportunity to catch up some of the Hannah Fry programs on Artificial Intelligence  which have been highly praised but which I have not yet got round to viewing, But yesterday was a landmark of sorts because, according to my specialist little calendar, the official ‘sun down’ time has just passed the 6.00pm threshold only the weather at the moment is pretty cold with a high of 11° and a cold, biting wind. In the days when I was a teacher in higher education, I recall the conversations I used to have over a Friday lunch-time beer with an accountancy colleague. He and I were, at the time, great Radio 4 listeners and my colleague used to listen to a programme broadcast after the weekend news at about 2.00pm called ‘Gardener’s Question Time’ When this program concluded, my colleague confided in me that his heart and spirits sank as he now realised that his weekend was effectively over as material had to be prepared for his class starting at 9.00am the next day. So it is as a common pattern for colleagues, myself included, to devote most evenings and some of the weekend as well to preparation and  the inevitable marking of students’ work.

The evening before last was devoted to rugby and I watched the Ireland vs. Wales match without a great deal of expectation as the Welsh team have been having a run of really bad form. Having said that, the match turned out to be entertaining and at half time the Welsh team were within a couple of points of the Irish with plenty to play for in the second half. Eventually, the Irish team ran out as winners but the Welsh had acquitted themselves very well despite them occupying the place of being bottom of the table. The really intriguing question which will be answered this evening is how the newly refreshed and quite young England team will perform against Italy when they meet in the final fixture of the weekend. Meanwhile the news from the Iran war seems more disturbing by the day. It is very hard to ascertain what the American objectives happen to be in this war as their stated war aims seem to alter day by day and one suspects that they aim to destroy as much of the Iranian infrastructure as they can now that they have complete control of the airspace over Iran and can bomb at will. Meanwhile, the Israelis seem to be taking every opportunity to destroy as many of their traditional enemies as they can and are already undertaking a ground invasion of Lebanon in order to eliminate the remains of the Hezbollah. Based on reports from early March 2026, Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated that the current, coordinated US-Israeli military actions against Iran represent the culmination of a 40-year goal to confront and ‘crush’ the Iranian regime. The economic consequences of the conflict are starting to unfold and extending beyond the cessation of gas supplies from Qatar. Oil prices have risen to their highest level in more than two years, after Qatar’s energy minister warned he expects all oil and gas exporters in the Gulf to stop production within days. Saad al-Kaabi told the Financial Times the conflict in the Middle East – a region which plays a key role in global energy supplies and shipping routes – could ‘bring down the economies of the world’. Brent crude oil rose more than 9% on Friday, topping $93 a barrel – the highest level since autumn 2023. Rising oil prices can have wide-reaching effects, not only on how much it costs to fill up your vehicle but also on the cost of some heating, food and imported goods. The Gulf also supplies the world with products such as sulphuric acid (used in the manufacture of explosives) and helium (used in scanners and in quantum computers) so the delicate eco-system of world trade is already being affected. The only smidgeon of comfort is the fact that we are coming towards the end of the winter when our national consumption of gas to heat our houses will naturally lessen during the summer months. The UK economy had just seemed to be turning a corner but now inflation will be given a further twist upwards and our economic recovery delayed even further. It is at times tat this when one would wish that the UK had invested in gas/oil storage facilities to build up a strategic buffer (as has Germany) but we are woefully deficient in this respect.

Yesterday morning, I made sure that I was in plenty of time for the twice monthly meeting of the ‘Carousel’ club which is a meeting of the elderly who meet in the Methodist Centre. Today we had a video made by a former member of the group of life about Herefordshire villages which was moderately interesting. But the main focus of the day is evidently social interaction and I made contact again with one of the parishioners from my own church who occasionally  volunteers for work in the kitchen. I also met again my acquaintance of a few days ago who has just moved into the Bromsgrove area and is finding her feet in the local community. Quite by chance, I also met another member of the group, about 50 of us, who is signed up for the same coach trip of Scotland for which I am committed in early April. Then I got home and cooked a fish meal liberated from the freezer before settling down to watch a pulsating France vs. Scotland Six Nations rugby. The Scots completely outplayed the French being fast and incisive and causing France to commit several errors in their frustration. The Scots were at one point leading the French by 7 tries to 4 but when the game was well and truly won France scored a couple of late tries. The Scots ran out as winners 50:40 and are jointly leading France at the top of the min-league table. The England vs. Italy match is being played in Rome and we will watch with bated breath to see if the young and refreshed England team prove their worth. As it turned out, England had a narrow lead over Italy of 2 points and there was an expectation that the Italian team would fade in the second half. But this did not happen and, for a brief period, England had two men n the ‘sin-bin’ (sent off for 10 minutes) with what seemed to me to be rather technical offences. The Italians were lifted by their home crowd and secured their first ever victory over England although the actual outcome of the game was undecided until the last minute or so when England came near to scoring a try which would have drawn the game whilst a successful conversion would have won the match. But rugby matches, particularly in the  Six Nations  competition, are often won or lost by the finest of margins and the very last kick of the game which was practically the case today.

A further twelve documents have been released by the FBI and in at least one of these documents a 13 year old girl has claimed abuse by Epstein, Trump and other Epstein associates in about 1984. The FBI maintains that some documents will contain fake or unverified stories and it appears that the claims of the 13 year old girl (name redacted) were never investigated. We have known of the existence of these files for some time now but the war in Iran has had the effect of successfully burying such stories. Of course we are now 40 years after the alleged events and even if a private prosecution were to take place after Trump leaves the presidency (if he ever does) then a court would have no evidence to support the allegation and would almost certainly dismiss the legal action.

I was just on my way to bed the evening before last when the news broke on the liberal American media podcasts that Trump had finally lost patience and sacked his outspoken chief of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. You would have thought that she might have been sacked for labelling the woman shot dead by ICE agents in Minneapolis a ‘domestic terrorist’ a few minutes  after the shooting and before any proper investigations had taken place. But it was disastrous appearance before a Congressional Committee which finally proved too much for Trump. Noem has spent $220 million (nearly a quarter of a billion dollars!) on a video supposedly encouraging illegal migrants to leave the US but actually largely devoted to her own self-glorification. Pressed by Republican senators whether Trump had approved of this level of expenditure, Noem at first said that the President was ‘aware’ of the funding but finally lied to the effect that Trump had approved the campaign whereas Trump himself denied all knowledge  of it. But even worse revelations were to come as the contract for the claim was awarded with no competition by an entity run by her lover (the husband of one of her associates) created only 11 days beforehand and with no track record of any dealings with the US government, which is about as evidently corrupt as it is possible to be. Other stories about her incompetence abounded, one of which was she sacked the pilot of a private jet who had forgotten to bring along her favourite blanket but then had to re-hire him again as there was no one else to fly the plane for the next leg of the journey. She did not deny having a sexual relationship with her associate (even though her own husband was sitting behind her to give her support during the Congressional hearings).She allowed her lover to sit at her desk and approve various contracts and fulfil many of the duties that were part of her job description. All of this proved to much for usually loyal Republican senators who tore her apart during  the Congressional hearings after which Donald Trump moved her to a sinecure elsewhere within government which was, in effect, a sacking as Trump himself must have known that the ICE excesses, which Noem supervised, was actually badly damaging to his own standing in the opinion polls. But there are other spokespeople for the administration such as Pam Bondi and the White House press secretary who lie just as much in public but they do this with complete impunity knowing that a cowed press will not call them out and Trump, a liar himself, is not unhappy when others lie on his behalf. British observers such as myself watch this open-mouthed as this level of venality would not be tolerated within our own committee hearings in the UK parliament where, in theory, evident mistruths can be rewarded by a spell in the Tower of London prison (but this has never actually happened) Many might think that this level of lying would eventually be exposed and sanctioned if the Democrats were to return to power but the members of the Trump administration  are well aware that Trump can, and will, grant pardons to all of them even as an outgoing president when the time comes.

Later in the morning, I popped down into town by car and was amazed how much colder the weather had become since only yesterday. Having picked up my newspaper, I made my way to my favourite Friday morning watering hole where I chat with the one regular member of staff and one other regular customer. I needed to get home in time to have a quick chat with my son who was calling in to see me just before departing for a trip down to the in-laws which he happened to be combining with a rail tour with one of his oldest friends. I lunched on mackerel, mashed potato and sugar snap peas and then settled down for some leisurely afternoon activities. Quite by chance when I tuned into YouTube, I was offered the opportunity to view a video by a British doctor who was explaining  the 15 steps to be taken to avoid a high HbA1c (high blood sugar levels) which  is an indicator of the presence or likelihood  of developing diabetes. This was very interesting and confirmed quite a lot of what I already knew but I learnt some interesting facts such as the importance of keeping protein levels high. So  decided to take notes of the video which I did and I will type these up to have an electronic record handy. At the same time, I decided to do a quick trawl of the high glycaemic index foods to avoid or to eat in moderation and will adjust my diet a little in the future. I think I am hovering just below the borderline level of 48 but will make an appointment to have this checked out to make sure I have not crept over the limit in the last few months. Whilst I was having a ‘domestic’ afternoon, I decided to commission a spare strip calendar that I have with U3A (University of the 3rd Age) activities. I have recently joined a Classical Music Appreciation group (meeting in a member’s house) as well as a Conversational Spanish course. I did ask to join a Curry Club and a ‘Historic Local Churches’ group but have not heard back from these latter so perhaps the groups are full. In the past, and decades ago, Meg and I enjoyed several continental coach tour holidays run by a Leeds-based firm called ‘Wallace Arnold’ but I gather this firm merged some time ago with another company called Shearings. The Wallace Arnold holidays were real value and of high quality so I thought I would investigate what was currently on offer. I am a little tempted by a visit to Versaille/Monet’s Garden/Rouen in late September so  have some feelers out with the firm to work out whether this would be a short but stress-free late summer holiday. I am irritated by a heavy single person supplement but am not in a position to avoid this and the rest of the holiday seems good value. I imagine that if I were to avail myself of this holiday, the rest of the coach party would prove to be quite an interesting crowd given the whole title and description of the holiday.

To underline the depth of the crisis in the Middle East, one estimate of the numbers of UK citizens currently abroad in that region of the world is 300,000 which would take about 900 flights to bring them all home the next day. I imagine that many will just ‘sit tight’ for the next few days although the Trump regime himself is mentioning 100 days as the likely length of the conflict. The US Senate have just voted to reject a resolution that would have limited Trump’s war venture by a margin of 53:47 with one senator each side voting not along party lines, thus neutralising each other. Since the war is plainly illegal in international law (not to mention US domestic law) this all rather underlines the extremely partisan nature of the divide in US politics at this time. Here at home, we are having a burst of spring-like weather and I notice with a great deal of pleasure that some of the earliest of the Japanese flowering cherry trees which can be found in gardens along the Kidderminster Road are starting to burst into bloom and this is always a sight for sore eyes. The day before yesterday,I made a trip to the Methodist Centre and had one or two chats before going off to do my weekly shopping – later in the day, my son and daughter-in-law called around and we started to go through some of the boxes of photographs recently rescued from under the eaves of the house. Most of these were ‘holiday snaps’ and were jettisoned but we retained a few which showed family members and even one or two of my mother’s garden in Leeds which I shall pass on to other members of my family when I next pay them a visit. Next weekend, my son and daughter-in-law are going off to see my daughter-in-law’s side of the family but I have some Six Nations rugby to keep me diverted.  England are due to play Italy the result of which would normally be a foregone conclusion but after two recent defeats, no one can be quite so sure any more. The England coach is making twelve changes to the England team, nine personnel and 3 positional and the whole half-back lime has been replaced so this seems like an unprecedented change. The commentators are saying this either a master stroke or a sign of desperation and we shall just have to see whether the gamble has paid off or not. The forward line is largely preserved intact but the rest of the team has been chosen largely to import a degree of urgency into the England team who are facing a much-improved Italian team. We are now at the stage in the year when traditionally my thoughts turn to gardening matters but the first mowing of the season is still some three weeks away and we may yet have the last flourish of winter with which to contend. However for the last year or so, the back garden has been largely neglected whilst caring for Meg in her final months of life but I need to get a regime in place where I deploy some help in the garden and also try to do a regular bit each day to gradually get things trimmed back and being to look more presentable.

Later in the day, I attended my Tai Chi class and for inexplicable reasons (perhaps the fine weather) attendance was markedly down and there were only seven of us which is about one half of the usual number. This meant that the numbers for coffee were remarkably down as well but I chatted with one of the older regulars who is always there on the day of my Tai Chi class because it is his job to open up the Centre on that day. But, quite unexpectedly, we were joined by an elderly lady who was fairly new to Bromsgrove and to the centre. I told her all about the ‘Carousel’ gathering that meets twice each month and our paths will probably cross again in a couple of day’s time. It turns there were quite a few points of coincidence in our lives – for example we had both worked in establishments that were quite close to each other in Oxford Road, Manchester (and she came from Eccles which is adjacent to Trafford Park in Manchester) She had lived in Spain until quite recently and, in her youth, had  been quite a keen walker of the Lake District mountains and fells.  She had worked as a teacher of Pitman’s shorthand in a technical college in Coventry so this was a good cue to reminisce about my mother’s skills in Pitman’s shorthand and typing. So in the course of not a very long conversation, we had established several points of contacts between us – she had out-survived two husbands (and had a gammy leg from multiple fractures, sustained I suspect whilst fell walking). Anther sort of ‘window’ has just opened up for me because the U3A (University of the 3rd Age) group are recruiting members for a conversational Spanish course for which I have signed up immediately.  I am just hoping that there will be enough members because how these things work is that there have to be enough members so that the small fee payable on each visit will pay for the hire of the meeting room (I suppose it is a sad fact of life that precious little is cost-free these days).

On the recommendation of my domestic help (and a life-long friend), I am always on the lookout for tasty snacks. Not only did she recommend a new Italian cracker which is very low in sugar and salt but a snack which I have enjoyed for the first time this afternoon. It was slices of apple dipped into crunchy peanut butter and I suspect it is going to be a firm favourite in the afternoons. There is some TV viewing that I wish to catch up on and this is the Hannah Fry series of programmes on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and I noticed that one was being broadcast yesterday evening. But I think will watch the whole series on the BBC iPlayer and I will probably watch that in the early evening where there is a documentary as well as  the weekly edition of ‘Question Time’ This last programme can be an interesting ‘pulse of the nation’ so long as the audience has not been hijacked by a local campaign group or faction of a political party which used to happen in the ‘Brexit’ days.

I spent some of the time first thing yesterday morning completing the documentation for the various HTML scripts for the display of Meg’s photos. This task is now completed and means that if I have in future a little project in view (e.g. a holiday) then I have everything in place to make a complete slide record of it. I used to do this before Meg became very ill but evidently had to stop doing this in the last few years of her life, not least because  we had no holidays to document. But now I have put the 4-5 scripts and the documentation into their own little table so that a viewer could select which they preferred to watch and even use themselves. I calculate that each script and its associated photos takes about 50Mb but I have some 25Gb free in my webspace so plenty of room for expansion (for example, 500 more scripts and associated photos, although this is only a theoretical calculation). I consulted ‘Sky News’ quickly for the latest news of the war and came across an interesting calculation. Whilst missiles are being thrown about all over the Middle East, it has been calculated that the UAE, for example has successfully shot down over 90% of incoming missiles but at a cost some 25 times more than it costs to launch. So one calculation is that the Middle East countries will beg Trump to curtail his war, not least because they will run out of missiles/money to defend themselves if the war continues unabated. By this calculation, the long-term mathematical odds are on the side of Iran. In America itself, the focus of the debate is whether Congress will approve or fail to approve authorisation for Trump’s adventures. But even if a resolution were passed denying Trump the funding, Trump could override this with a presidential veto which is a chilling thought. What is troubling the Americans is the absence of any clear plan what to do about a post-war Iran and the fact that America might be embroiled for years and the turbulence created in the Middle East may take years to subside. But what is crystal clear at the moment is that the campaign so far is both illegal and unconstitutional but when allies such as the UK point this out to the American administration, they are lambasted. However, at the point of time when it just appeared that the UK economy had at least turned a corner, we now have the destabilising effect of rising energy prices, a rise in inflation and military action into which we are sucked and cannot avoid, all of which was not predicted. Trump is saying that the war will last for months but although Trump has used the word ‘war’ there are some on the American right who are arguing that this is not, actually a war and as such, the opinion of the Congress is irrelevant. I wonder though whether the Americans might actually take to the streets in millions to try to force an end to the conflict and this fact alone may change the mindset of some Republicans who hold the key (and the votes) to alter the progress of the conflict.

After a chat with some fellow coffee drinkers in the Methodist Centre, I went off to do my weekly shopping which I have now started to do a day earlier in the week. My son and daughter-in-law were due to come round in the afternoon to assist in the clearance of several items we had rescued from the eaves of the house. Our principal task today was to go through a box which contained packets of old photographs dating mainly from the 1970’s and 1980’s. In those days, you took your film to an agent such as Boots who developed the film for you and actually gave you back the reel of film should you wish to have more copies. Most of the photographs were in the nature of ‘holiday snaps’ so we jettisoned these quickly retaining only those containing images of family members which we duly duly labelled up, dated and retained. We did discover some photos of my mother’s garden in Leeds which I will pass on to other family members in Yorkshire when next I see them. In my little trip down into the town, it is rather a sight for sore eyes to observe the flowering of the Japanese cherry trees which adorn some of the front gardens in the houses along the Kidderminster Road. This is a reminder to me as well that spring is in the air and that grass mowing activities will start in about three weeks time. Our garden has got somewhat overgrown since I devoted all of my attention to looking after Meg in her final months and did little gardening apart from a regular mowing of the grass. One of the carers that used to look after Meg has a partner who does not mind turning his hand to what I call (not perjoratively) ‘rough gardening’ which is basically taking an over-grown garden and getting it back into reasonable shape. As the weather improves, I need to get into the habit of about 30 minutes a day of regular gardening and I probably need to engage a proper gardener as well. At the same time, I need to get into a good de-cluttering mode – when one moves house, then a lot of stuff gets junked into a skip and in Hampshire I think that we filled at least three before we left. But I have now lived in this house for more than 18 years and retired as well so the house has gradually accumulated more and more ‘things’ that need a degree of rationalisation. At the time of COVD, when we were confined to houses, we thought this would be a good time to go through the house room by room decluttering but it never actually happened, despite our good intentions. However, with the help of my son and daughter-in-law, we have made a start in throwing away or recycling some of the materials we had stored. We did find a suitcase with some rather fine curtains inside and my domestic help and I are going to decide whether some of them would be useful to her or it could be that we can bring them into use in this house. But we have to examine them for the ‘drop’ sizes before we can come to a decision on that.

The evening before last, my daughter-in-law treated me, at our local Arts Centre,to a special showing, direct from the National Theatre of ‘The Audience’ originally shown as a play in 2013. The Audience is centred on the weekly audiences given by Queen Elizabeth II to prime ministers from her accession in 1952 until her death. Three Prime Ministers are omitted from the play as Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home and Edward Heath are not featured. Tony Blair originally did not feature in the play, but was added when the play transferred to Broadway, replacing James Callaghan, who was excluded from subsequent productions. Advice regarding the political and historical content of the weekly audiences was provided by Professor Vernon Bogdanor (Emeritus Professor of Government at Oxford University), the former tutor of David Cameron, Prime Minister from 2010 until 2016.The play takes place in the Queen’s audience room at Buckingham Palace. This whole production was hugely enjoyable but the audience was quite small, being of the order of about 50 or so. There was a moment in the play which made members of the audience catch its breath because it featured a British Prime Minister, in close liaison with Israel, who intended to launch a clandestine and illegal attack on a neighbouring country without  any thought of reference to the United Nations or thought for the long term political consequences. This was reflecting the Suez canal debacle in which Antony Eden, the British Prime Minister abetted by the French, tried to wrest back the Suez canal from the Egyptians with disastrous consequences both in military and in diplomatic terms. Most of the script could have been written in the last day reflecting the American invasion of Iran (rather than the British invasion of Egypt) but the events closely paralleled each other with a common factor being the role of Israel intending to carry out a regional war against neighbouring hostile states. So my daughter-in-law enjoyed the performance of Helen Mirren who played the part of Queen Elizabeth in ‘The Queen’ and the dialogue between the Queen and her Prime Ministers reflected little tit-bits which has become part of the public domain of politics enhanced with some amusing written dialogue. To return to contemporary political affairs, there has been a recent opinion poll in the United states in which only 28% of these sampled supported Trump’s invasion of Iran, the remainder of the sample presumably being either opposed or with no strong opinion. There are some within the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement who feel utterly betrayed by a President who vowed to remove America from ‘forever’ wars and who promised to release the whole of the files relating to the Epstein paedophile regime. We have been informed  that Trump is mentioned 2,800 times in the Epstein files but in the half so far released, Trump’s name has been systematically removed or redacted. Only the American Congress can authorise a war through a piece of legislation known as a ‘War Powers’ Act but the Congress have yet to debate the issue. How this will play out is yet to be seen but it will be interesting to see if some of the MAGA Republicans might not support Trump in any Congressional vote meaning that Trump cannot get the authorising ‘War Powers’ legislation through the Congress. Those votes which require congressional approval for military action against Iran, which were already set for midweek, will amount to a major test of loyalty for some of the GOP’s far-right flank, who have for years championed Trump’s promise of keeping America out of foreign wars. Those Republicans will be forced to take a public stance after months of simmering consternation over Trump’s legal authority as he has dramatically expanded powers abroad with Congress on the sidelines. Multiple GOP sources told CNN they believe those three Republicans — Massie, Paul and Rep. Warren Davidson, who has also publicly condemned the attack without authorisation — are likely to be an island in their own party. Even so, Democrats believe it might be enough to deliver the rebukes. ‘I do think this has a real chance of passing. And it is going to be seen like the Iraq war vote,’ Khanna added, referring to the historic 2002 vote in Congress that authorised the US invasion of Iraq. Even if the measure passes, it is subject to a presidential veto, and a two-thirds vote to override could be a challenge to reach. So while it would be unlikely to change the president’s actions, it would be seen as a stunning rebuke of the administration. The Americans are being particularly critical of the UK in refusing to give the Americans the unlimited right to launch attacks from bases not only in this country but also in Diego Garcia. Keir Starmer has made clear to the evident wrath of the American administration that support for an American war must be both legal and must be supported by a clear plan of follow-on action. To this  extent, we have learned the lessons of the Iraq conflict despite the calls from the political  right on the UK to give unequivocal support to Trump. It does look as though the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA is now dead in political terms but some commentators observe that behind the scenes, the professionals involved  in intelligence gathering, are collaborating as they always have done leaving the politicians to squabble over their heads. Janes O’Brien on LBC was incandescent with rage that anything in the British political system should give any thought to giving any kind of support to an evidently deranged Donald Trump and he based his podcast around two pieces of paper on one of which was written ‘Iraq’ and on the other ‘Trump’.

The first thing I did yesterday morning and before I attended my Pilates class was to give a final ‘tweak’ to the HTML code which is the final and most comprehensive of my photo slide display scripts. I felt the need to have a general title running across the top and I have a found a way of doing this using the top line which is used to display the photo slide number. The default colour for this is white but this is sometimes made invisible in some photographs where there is a very light background (such as wall or sky) and, in these cases, I have worked out a way of utilising a black font colour thus making the slide number  and the general title visible rather than invisible. So I am very pleased with my final tweak which just involved copying one line of code into each file ‘division’ and all I have to do now is to fully document the techniques I have just utilised into the document I have written documenting the procedures I have used. This can be useful for reference as to how I managed to achieve my results and which I can consult the next time I am engaged in a similar venture.

Awaking yesterday morning, it was to the grim news that Iran, after the death of its leader Ayatollah Khamenei, has responded by attacking many of its neighbours in the Gulf with the list including Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran has had tense relationships with the Arab states which are mainly Sunni Muslim whilst Iran itself is Shia but it is not immediately evident what Iran’s strategy might be in causing so much disruption. There may be a feeling that causing so much turbulence shifts the blame back onto Israel and the United States but for once the journalistic expression that the Middle East is a ‘tinderbox’ seems a fairly accurate expression. The UK is being drawn into this conflict as a base in Cyprus has been subject to a drone attack and Keir Starmer has now lent his support to America by allowing British bases in the area to be used from which the Americans might launch ‘counter-strikes’ for purely defensive purposes. Having  tried to keep out of the conflict, we as a country are now being dragged into it and thereby made ourselves into a potential target. Those who launch missiles against America will feel no compunction now in launching missiles against a staunch ally such as the UK and I have a feeling that the UK is making a bad strategic mistake in getting embroiled in Trump’s war, which after all is just a diversionary tactic to take attention away from the revelations of the Epstein affair (which some, including Epstein himself, predicted even many years ago that this is what Trump would do if he ever felt cornered) The reaction inside America itself is yet to fully unfold but the mood may well change when the body bags of American military personnel are returned home. The political middle – often quiet but decisive – asked the critical question: What are we dying for? Escalation risks turning him into the kind of Middle East war president his own base rejected. His U-turn, however justified on strategic grounds, will be tested in this year’s mid-term elections. History suggests that presidents do not lose support simply because Americans die on the battlefield. They lose it when deaths feel pointless, endless or poorly explained by the commander-in-chief. Trump himself is communicating via his ‘Truth Social’ social media that more American personnel may be killed. Kuwait’s defence ministry says ‘several’ US military aircraft crashed this morning inside the country. It says the crews of the jets ‘survived unscathed’ and are in ‘stable condition’ after being evacuated and transferred to hospitals The ministry says it is continuing investigations into the causes of the incident. This has all of the hallmarks of a ‘friendly fire’ incident in which the Kuwaiti Air Defence system seem to have shot down about 3 F15’s from which the pilots managed to parachute to safety. Details of the incident are sketchy and I suppose neither the Kuwaitis or the Americans wish to dwell on the subject. As a particular thought upon the whole of the conflict, I wonder what would be the consequences  for the USA is in the midst of multiple drone attacks, a large American warship to be successfully attacked and even badly damaged? This is highly unlikely but war is an unpredictable exercise and, every so often, one’s enemies might get lucky.

After I had breakfasted and absorbed some of the terrible news from the conflict in the Middle East, I popped down into town by car and picked up my newspaper (the last one, as it happens!) and a loaf of sourdough bread. Then I came home and prepared a lunch for myself of duck, potatoes and sprouts. Last night, just before I came to bed and quite by accident, I discovered another photo display script which gives me almost everything that I want in one package. I had used this script once before but there was a bit of an obscure bug in which the cursor pointer function does not work as it should which is a well known problem in the HTML community but led me to reject this script in the first place. But I managed to find a work around to this system and it has the great advantage for me in having a clickable progress indicator of dots which enables you to go to any part of your collection and this saves a lot of time in the construction and adaptation process. Having cured the cursor bug, at least to my satisfaction, the script has the ability to display a caption across the bottom of the photograph which is nearly always excellent. But if the bottom of the photograph contains a lot of ‘white’ e.g, a table cloth then the white caption becomes almost invisible. I managed to tweak this problem by formatting the caption script to a black rather than a white font which may be used as the occasion demands. Also, each photograph is set to a width of 100% but this can be scaled back to enable portrait mode photos to display properly. All that needed to be done was to write the 67 captions into the photograph series (but some of them I had already adapted years ago to have a captain  incorporated into the photo using white text on a black banner) So most of the day was spent getting this to work to my satisfaction and I was pleased to say I finished this late in the afternoon. I now have to add a section to my documentation files so that  do not forget how I did all of this and I also discovered a couple of useful HTML functions of which I was ignorant but can now use in the future. This evening, my son and daughter-in-law are treating me to a cinema transmission of ‘The Audience’ live from the National Theatre.Helen Mirren is playing Queen Elisabeth II which she does superbly well and the whole dramatisation (‘The Audience’)is in effect a stage version of the film made about the tense interactions between the old Queen and the newly elected Tony Blair on the occasion of Princess Diana’s death. It will be interesting to see how full the theatre will be tis evening – I suspect that it may be only half full as it was on the occasion of the screening f the opera of ‘La Traviata’ which saw there recently.

As we awoke yesterday morning, it was to the news of the assassination of the Iranian leader, the Ayotollah Khamenei. But it was President Ronald Reagan, much revered by some on the American right, who had this made into an illegal act. The assassination of a foreign leader by the United States is expressly prohibited by U.S. law and executive orders, most notably Executive Order 12333, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, which states that ‘no person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination’ Of course, this does not trouble the current Trump administration which does not care an iota for law, either national or international and the justification is one of ‘self defence’. Video has been released which shows the headquarters of the deceased Khamenei hit by eight missiles and literally reduced to a pile of rubble and it was no wonder that noone could have survived such an attack. The Americans now have a dual dilemma in the face of this ‘victory’ which is whether to try to decapitate the rest of the Iranian leadership, and more importantly what to put in its place. However, analysts warned that jubilation does not equal transformation. ‘Taking out Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is not the same as regime change. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the regime,’ the Council on Foreign Relations noted following his passing, limiting the prospects for immediate political or economic transformation.  The death of Khamenei ushers in only the second leadership transition since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a moment that the CFR described as historically significant but deeply uncertain in its outcome.  While some Iranians have expressed hope that a leadership change could ease repression and economic isolation, the Council on Foreign Relations said the most likely succession outcomes do not suggest meaningful political or economic liberalisation in the immediate aftermath. ‘A transitional leadership change in Iran could take three primary trajectories—regime continuity, military takeover, or regime collapse,’ the CFR reported. However, the think tank warned that ‘none’ of these near-term scenarios envisage a positive transformation in the year or so after transition. We know from bitter experience, not least the death of Sadam Hussein, that engineering the death of a powerful leader is only likely  to lead to a power vacuum in which a country may become ungovernable. If the Americans are hoping for regime change, what we are likely to see is a reconstructed regime which is like ‘Khamenei without Khamenei’ and so the Americans are left with the same dilemma as has faced them many times before. Whilst the death of the Ayatollah has been greeted by some young Iranians on the street, the most powerful recent repression in which it is said that 6,000 died is sufficient to deter and probably prevent a popular revolution. The mindset of bombing a people into submission is also laughable. Can you imagine the British after the London bombing saying to themselves that they had better surrender to Hitler or the Americans after 9/11 surrendering to Osama bin Laden? Although this is an emotional type of argument, one has got to ask oneself whether the world feels a safer place after the current Iranian conflict and the answer must be no. We has also got to ask whether Trump still thinks of himself as a ‘peacemaker’ and whether he is gong to add the current conflict to the list of conflicts around the world that he claims to have solved?  Evidently, the media of every shade of opinion is going to be filled with both news and analysis but I have the feeling that, for a variety of reasons which do not necessarily coincide, that for Trump all of this might prove to be a step too far. After all, only Congress is allowed to authorise a war according to the US Constitution (for which Trump has no respect in any case) and could even some Republicans in Congress bring themselves to abstain or even vote with the Democrats on this issue?

My regime has altered each Sunday as I now attend the 8.30 service which means that a fairly early start is called for. Later in the day I finished off the captioning of one of the versions of the slide show that documents  Meg’s life and am mightily relieved that this has now been done and I can post all three versions into my webspace. Now the task is completed, I am busy writing myself documentation so that if I ever to need to repeat the whole exercise, I can do it all over again. Actually I do have a large book entitled ‘What I have learned (and re-learned) today’ in which once have documented a new procedure or mastered a new IT skill, I write it all down so that I can refer to it again. This book was started ten years ago and is very valuable insofar as it stops me from re-inventing the wheel or working out if I can remember how I did a certain thing years ago. Having attended the church service, partaken to tea, biscuits and a chat, I filled the car with petrol, got my newspaper and took my weekly cash allowance out of the ATM. I had just finished a cooked breakfast for myself when my son came round and he helped to confirm my intentions of a little holiday adventure. Years ago, one of my Pilates class members spoke to me glowingly of a specialist coach company which owns its own hotels and organises 5 day holidays of Scotland at a very reasonable price. My son and I looked over the details and he urged my to book it up on the spot as there was no way that I could have purchased the hotel accommodation, half-board meals and then the actual transport for the quoted price. I worked out that it was actually much cheaper than going up to Yorkshire to see my family so  made a booking there and then and am looking forward to this five day trip starting on 10th April (i.e. just after Easter) This will be my first real holiday for six years and I now have the funds to be able to afford it now that I am unencumbered by a monthly mortgage. Later on in the afternoon I noticed that Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ is to broadcast and, as I studied this book for my GCE ‘O’-levels in 1961, always welcome the opportunity to see the filmed version.

I woke up yesterday morning knowing that the result of the Gorton and Denton by-election in Manchester would not be declared until 4.00am in the morning. The result was predicted to be very close but in the event was a run away victory for the Greens who won with 41% of the vote, Reform securing 29% and the Labour Party pushed to a humiliating third place with 25% The winning candidate and now the first Green MP to be elected in a by-election was a (female) Manchester plumber and turned out to be an excellent choice. In her post victory speeches she sounded every inch what ‘traditional’ Labour wanted to hear, and it was no surprise that she was successful. This result once it is well and truly analysed and digested will no doubt add yet another nail to the coffin of Keir Starmer. I suspect that the answer to this will come after the May elections when the Labour party will receive yet another drubbing so the question about Keir Starmer’s leadership becomes a case of ‘not if, but when?’ The difficulty is that there is no evident and outstanding candidate who could unify the party. Probably one of the best candidates is Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester but he has yet to secure a parliamentary seat and the parliamentary Labour party, under the leadership pf Keir Starmer are not willing to see him as a potential rival return soon to Westminster. Yesterday was a day long pencilled into our diaries because it is a day when my son are going to travel to Worcester by train to undertake a financial transaction (repayment of my remaining stub of a mortgage) after which my son has promised that he would treat me to a meal. Actually there is a little  cafe just around the corner from the train station and not of our way which serves delicious but simple home-made type food so we will probably eat there. I spent some time the evening before last making sure that I had some of the software in place which takes a series of photos and then turns them into a rolling display  with whatever interval (in seconds) the user chooses to have. I am going to offer this to my University of Hampshire friend who will then have a choice whether to have a really excellent and professional service provided on the web and used by professional photographers (but at a price) or my own little system which is free and I can even host for him as well. I think another telephone call is needed to discuss the various alternatives. One of the advantages of using a professional website is that all of the resizing necessary is done for you whereas in the more home-made solutions it is often advantageous to have all of the photos calibrated to the same set of dimensions so that the software can deal with it more easily. I know that a lot of people will have their photographic collections stored on their phones but there are occasions when on family occasions one wants to have a selection of photos have a much wider availability and so do a more dedicated display on a website is indicated.

My son had called around as arranged and we made our way to the railway station, arriving in plenty of time and caught the train to Worcester where there was a gentle drizzle as we arrived. We had an appointment at the bank and were seen promptly and a redemption amount was put into effect to allow us to pay off the remainder of the mortgage. Then we trundled off round the corner to my own personal bank where we did not have an appointment but were seen by a very helpful assistant. We had to go through a series of checks including a call to their own control centre but this all worked very smoothly and by the time we got home, the funds had been taken out of my account and the mortgage redeemed. My son had promised to treat me to a celebratory meal so we patronised a cafe we know near to the station who do a good line in home cooking so we enjoyed a meal there. Then we caught the train back to Bromsgrove, everything having worked out smoothly. I spent the whole afternoon rearranging the series of photos that document Meg’s life and although we have these on a professional website, the originals were scattered all over the place. So I downloaded the files from the website and then to sort them in the right kind of order, made the simple expedient of just renaming them from 001 onwards. I only intended to make a start on this process but as I got half way through I thought I might as well get through to the bitter end. All I have to do now is to enter the files into my own software which provides a rolling display and then I can utilise some of my own webspace to post the files back again. The point of doing this is to demonstrate to my University of Winchester friend that he can either utilise a professional photo display package (at a cost) or I could utilise my own home-made solution and even post things into my own website for him which would cost him nothing at all.

This weekend is a ‘rugby less’ weekend as a fortnight’s break has been built into the schedule and the Winter Olympics have now concluded. If the weather is fine, there are a host of outside jobs to occupy m ranging from car washing to gardening, whereas if rain confines me to the house, I have a mountain of recently unearthed photos to be examined to determine if they are to be saved or jettisoned. Meanwhile, I am contemplating now that I do not have a mortgage to service whether to spend the newly released fund on a brief holiday, perhaps going up to Yorkshire, or to replace my ageing MAC desktop computer. It is now 10 years old and slowing considerably and my web searches indicate that Macs generally last 6 to 10 years, with intensive users seeing peak performance for about 6 years before battery decline, while light users can get 10+ years, though performance slows and support ends eventually. Key factors are usage (heavy vs. light), care, and Apple’s software support, which usually stops around 7 years after release, leaving devices vulnerable to security risks.

The night before last, I indulged myself and really enjoyed watching the last pf the mini-series of 3 docudramas entitled ‘Dirty Water’ showing, in great and graphic detail how the privatised, and not particularly well regulated, water industry has made vast profits but regularly polluted our rivers and coastal areas. What was so shocking was the revelation that in a desire to cut ‘red tape’ successive governments had rolled back their regulatory functions and had had asked the water industry to regulate itself, which it had manifestly failed to do. Channel 4 are very good at producing these docudramas and I wonder what impact the programmes will actually have. Just before I was getting ready for bed, I read my texts and my good University of Winchester friend whose wife is in a similar situation to Meg had sent me a text where it felt as though he needed some support. So I phoned him and we had  a good long chat on the phone and I hoped that I could be of some help to him as all of the things he is currently experiencing as his wife drifts away I have experienced with Meg about a year ago. I got up pretty early in the morning  having had a sleepless patch during the night and made the suggestion to my friend that he assemble together a series of photographs that will document his wife’s life. I have done this for Meg and every so often I look at the website I created for Meg which contains my funeral eulogy but also links to a slideshow of most of the photographs that my son and I could find which we assembled in a roughly chronological order. Without  wishing to sound in any sense macabre,  I am hoping that my friend takes up my suggestion but it will help to alleviate the inevitable rushing around that inevitable occupies one between the death of a loved one and the consequent funeral service. I must say that when I visit Meg’s website, I enjoy some bitter-sweet moments when I survey the photographs from the earliest to the latest which chronicle her life and I am still pleased with the efforts that I made at the time- there is a collection of 59 photos in the collection and more will be added as they come to light, no doubt. We are holding ourselves in readiness for the results of the Manchester by election which will be announced in the small hours of tomorrow morning, and the Labour party seemed to be set up for a good kicking by the electorate. The really interesting question is whether the Labour party will be defeated from the right (the Reform party) or the left (the Greens) As things stand on polling day itself, the election is too close to call between Labour, Reform and Green but a major upset may well be on the cards. There are some slight straws in the wind that the Greens might actually be a whisker ahead. A recent poll suggests Nigel Farage’s Reform UK could be narrowly defeated by either of the other two parties. And the new poll suggests that, among those people most likely to turn out to vote, the Greens are ahead on 30 per cent with the other two parties each on 28 per cent. However, tactical voting is bound to play a part as well in this Denton and Gorton election.

Yesterday proved to be quite an interesting day. I attended my Tai Ch class as I normally do each Thursday  morning after which I had coffee with a couple of my class mates and then carried on chatting with others at the ‘chatty table’ in the Methodist centre. Then I got home and cooked myself a normal ‘meat and two veg’ meal and after I had completed  the washing up, my son and daughter-in-law turned up to help me clear out the last of the ‘hobbit holes’ This particular storage area was devoted to some rolls of Christmas paper, and a very large but old suitcase. which we had stored some quite high quality floral curtains. These we are going to offer to our domestic help in the first instance but otherwise they will be charity shop bound. But the most important stored items were several large boxes stuffed full of travel guides from past holidays all of which were junked  but more importantly family photographs going back over the decades. The very earliest of these we must have been given by Meg’s parents as there were several of these taken when Meg was very young and the most charming of these was taken when Meg was being taught how to play the piano. There are several photographs of the generation before Meg so I am going to hang onto some of these so that we next are in contact with Meg’s cousins. There are a huge number of the kinds of folders that the chemists used to give you when photographs were handed  for developing – some of these will be seaside shots whilst yet others will be photographs taken of us holidaying in the Lake District. At the moment, we just have a huge pile of these on our landing and evidently, a job each day for the next weeks and months ahead is to devote a certain amount of time each day to go through them all and working out what to retain (and label if I can) and others to throw away. But we are taking about six decades of photos here so there is a lot of material to assess and process. Whilst this particular hobbit hole was ended, we have discovered a point at which there may have been a leaking valve or junction in some of the central heating pipes which are located in the eaves so we may have to ask the very good person who services our central heating boiler to have a look at this for us and see if a repair needs to be effected. We not appear to have see evidence of a leak in the house but there are suspicious water stains on the block flooring but if we had not cleared out the hobbit hole, then this would never have been discovered at all. Later on in the evening, I will get myself into bed to watch ‘Question Time’ on BBC1 which can sometimes, via audience reaction, give us an indication of the public sentiment over particular issues and, in this respect, the whole ‘Andrew’ affair will probably draw the wrath of both panel members and audience alike.