Today was a really gloomy day and it was one of those days when it never really seems to get light all day long and there was a constant drizzle to dampen the spirits. In view of all this, we decided to go down into town by car and in Waitrose, we met our good friend from the University of Birmingham who we have not seen for a week. We seemed to have quite a lot of news to catch up (as well as stories to tell) so we spent a good hour, I should imagine, chatting in Waitrose until it was time to get ourselves home and prepare for lunch. On our way home, we loitered in the car outside the house of our Irish friends who have just returned from their fortnight’s holiday in Ireland until our friend spotted us and came out for a chat. We have agreed to pop into their house mid-way through the morning tomorrow as we have quite a lot of catch up on. We had both received the news by email that the Rome trip was ‘off’ and, it was on that basis, that we went ahead and booked our little stay in the Brecon Beacons. However, we have received another email from our bespoke travel agent who was organising the Rome trip for us and it could be if were to agree this collectively that our Rome trip might be ‘rescuable’ if were to choose other available dates such as late December to January or February. Meg and I quite fancy a January holiday (to help to draw the sting of the winter) but we need to have a collective natter with our friends to see if we are all of like mind. Another thing that we need to discuss is our wedding anniversaries. On September 9th, Meg and I ought to be celebrating 54 years being married to the wrong partner and our friends’ wedding anniversary is very proximate to that date so we are trying to see I we can organise a collective meal for ourselves to help ourselves to celebrate (or is commiserate?) Roll on tomorrow and our plans might clarify somewhat.

This afternoon and this evening we have been watching the finals of ‘The Hundred‘ which is a cricket format designed to appeal to the young- each side has only 100 balls and the batting team attempts no cricket finesse apart from the fact that they try to hit every ball for 6 (or at least a 4). As a lifelong ticket fan, I feel somewhat ambiguous about this form of the game. One the one hand it is entertaining (and the teams are dressed in colours and with names to reflect the new form of the game such as ‘Birmingham Patriots‘) The young seem to love this form of game and it has certainly attracted an enthusiastic fan base from those who have never played or watched a game of cricket in their lives. It is true that cricket needed to do something to attract the younger age groups and this certainly fits the bill. On the other hand, to purists this form of the game is doing nothing to enhance the traditional cricket skills. In particular, the patience involved in constructing a long innings is entirely lacking in this form of the game – instead we are seeing incredibly beefy individuals who have the power to hit a ball for six have to display a degree of athleticism on the pitch where typically they have to run around a boundary (to save it) or to catch a ball out in the deep.  So cricket as we know it is not – but I am trying (hard) to appreciate it on its own terms.

The scenes from Kabul airport (or rather the approaches to it) that we are witnessing today are horrendous. The pressure of the crowds if proving so intense that fairly young British soldiers are forced into a front line where individuals are dying before their very eyes from a combination of heat-stroke, dehydration and crush injuries. The British soldiers and associated medics are rushing from casualty to casualty covering those who are too far gone (and have died) with white sheets whilst trying to save others from the crush injuries which almost inevitably occurred when a large crowd panics and attempts to rush an entrance. The Americans have decided to actually close the airport for a full 48 hours so that the some of the existing crowds, many without any documents, can be processed. One thing that seems to be happening is that even those with a fully documented right to leave Afghanistan cannot get past the ring of Taliban controls outside the airport – and those who are undocumented are actually blocking the safe exit from those who do have the documentation. This sounds (and is) an absolute nightmare. The BBC website puts it cogently:

‘Looking back, putting the processing centre in place at the end of a long narrow street, publishing a press release saying the UK would take 20,000 Afghans without explicitly explaining it would be over the next five years, and then deploying a small group of soldiers given the job of processing people in the first instance while also maintaining military security – is morphing into a planning catastrophe’

Friday has come around again and it is the day that our domestic help ‘does’ for us so we always have a chat which takes up little longer in the morning than I suppose is good for us. We did have one domestic help, sadly departed from us for at least two decades, whose name was ‘Pep’ Smith. The ‘Pep’ bit came from her initials and she was known as Pep to everyone, including even her husband. Anyway on this particular morning I was taking a shower in the downstairs shower room that we had recently had constructed and I pranced gaily up the stairs in my birthday suit, totally obvious to the face that Pep Smith was hoovering away downstairs. Anyway, so as to not seem impolite, I called out ‘Morning, Mrs Smith’ as I bounded up the stairs. I did not dare to look down the stairs to see if Mrs Smith was gazing after my departed form and I do not even know to this day whether Mrs Smith actually looked up from her hoovering but neither of us mentioned it to the other. It cannot be the first (or the last time) that a similar thing has happened. 

Meg and I decided as it was late in the day to go down to Waitrose by car to save a bit of time. When we got home, we just had a very light lunch of soup because we knew that later on in he evening we were going to have a family meal of fish and chips where we were going to discuss some joint financial thongs that we needed to discuss (quite amicably) round the dinner table. Halfway through the afternoon, we got the email that we had been half expecting. The travel agent who had been organising our little trip to Rome had written to say that the budget airline we  were using had decided to cancel the flights both from Bristol and also from Birmingham and therefore the whole  of the planned holiday vacation was ‘off’.  We always knew that there was a 50:50 chance of this happening anyway so the news did not come as a great surprise. Anyway, at this point ‘Plan B’ swung into action. I immediately got onto the web to see what accommodation was available in the Brecon Beacons  which has scenery similar to the Lake District but we have never actually visited before. After a few minutes of research, I was lucky to secure accommodation in a farmhouse only three miles out of the centre of Brecon which offered us five nights for what seemed to be a very good price. On the basis of good reviews from ‘Booking.com’ (an average score of 9.2) and some very good reviews, it now looks as though we have secured ourselves a holiday even if not of the type we had at first thought. To be honest, even if it rains all the time (which it probably will) we can do our bit toddling around the sights and sounds of the Brecon Beacons before hunting out somewhere for a good lunch after which we will have our normal ‘siesta’ and crash out in the B&B which is equipped with a good TV and a kettle for late afternoon snacks. So at least we now having a holiday to which to look forward. In the last day or so, I have also made a more than tentative arrangement to shoot up the M6 to make a long delayed visit to Meg’s recently widowed cousin who is living in Bolton, Lancs. We are in contact with her daughter and will meet in her garden (if fine) or house (if not) and the date we have chosen is Sunday, October 3rd which just happens to be Meg’s 75th birthday. So if all goes well on this occasion, we can have a family reunion and a birthday celebration at the same time – hopefully the traffic will not be too bad at that time on a Sunday.

The COVID news does not look too good this weekend as the infection rate (and deaths) are up at about a rate of 11-12% over last weekend. I think the powers-that-be are worried that if the infection rate accelerates up during the autumn, then we will not be in a good position when COVID meets the ‘flu infection rates and we start another period of time when yet another lockdown may well be on the cards. So far, I think we are living in a more or less fool’s paradise where I suspect that things might start to get a lot worse than might be imagined. Of course, a crucial vector might be the rate of infection in the school based population who might go and infect the older generations. What I learnt during the week was that even the doubly vaccinated might still harbour enough of the virus particles to act as an infecting (and transmissibility) agent without their knowledge.

This week we thought we would try a new pattern of shopping. We have got used over the last year and a bit to getting our provisions delivered for us by Waitrose – this evidently means that we had to get our online shopping organised and we needed to get used to the system of online shopping. This has, though, worked very well over the past few months. We have to make sure that we have a slot booked and this generally has to be done 2-3 weeks in advance to get the day and the time slot that you want. The Waitrose system works (and I suppose all of the others are the same) by ‘reserving’ a slot and then you have to have a basket full of goods which you go through the process of paying for and which would be delivered at the appointed time. But then, not later than the day before, you have to go though the order and order what you actually want and so this has become part of my weekly routine – revising the list on a Wednesday and having it delivered the following day, on a Thursday. Occasionally, you forget to take things off the list and you add to your supply of  biscuits or what-have-you. Conversely, occasionally things get left off the list which is no great disaster – and it is always possible that you didn’t read the number of grams correctly and you tend to get a much smaller item than you were expecting. However, Waitrose has given me excellent quality and  good service over the past year and a bit and I am grateful to them for it. Now though I thought I would experiment, now that the worst of the pandemic is over. So as soon as I got up I threw some clothes on so that I could go shopping in person at the Waitrose store in Droitwich the minute it opened at 8.00 am in the morning. Shopping was almost like heaven – there can only have been 2-3 people in the store and the only people you encountered were the shop staff as they were restocking the shelves. A few days ago I made a very comprehensive ‘master list’ of everything that we might normally buy – then, last night I made a sub-list of only those items that I definitely knew that we needed. As I shopped, I stuck to this rigidly, not allowing myself to be tempted by other items that caught my fancy. What was so amazing was when I cane to the checkout where the bill was about £30.00 less than I was spending online. There must be a logical explanation for this – perhaps some of it is that I am better able to judge quantities e.g. of fruit. But I must say I am delighted by the result. As a result, I may adapt my habits again slightly and shop once a fortnight in the large store at Droitwich and in the intervening weeks ‘make do’ with the quite adequate little Waitrose at the end of Kidderminster Road. 

Every week, we see if we can have a little venture out somewhere to help break the normal routine. Our favourite little venture out is to the neighbouring town of Droitwich and although I had been there already this morning, we decided to undertake our Droitwich day out routine. First we frequent a rather little cafe which is a little Wetherspoon-ish in appliance but does the magnificent toasted teacakes. From here we progressed on to our favourite hardware store – Wilko. Meg was despatched to buy cosmetic type things whilst I indulged myself getting round the gardening and hardware sections where I bought a few useful things like wire brushes. Then we made way to our favourite cafe-bar restaurant where we had already reserved a table. I had a salad type meal (trying to avoid too much carbohydrate) whilst Meg had a wonderful dish of chicken, leek and penne pasta in a creamy sauce. We exchanged halves of each other’s dishes so that we could both enjoy what the other had ordered. 

The news story is still dominated by the plight of the Americans, British and particularly Afghanis who are desperate to escape the clutches of the Taliban – at one point even handing over a toddler to am American marine so that the child would be saved and have a better life even if the parents cannot escape. With a bit of careful planning and imaginative thinking on the part of the British amabassador,I am sure this could have been handled much better. First get one’s own military to put a ring of steel around the embassy. Then encourage those who can to get to the embassy by what ever transport you can. Then ‘process’ the applicants within the embassy grounds. Finally organise helicopter journeys to straight inside the perimeter fence of the airport. Simple, innit?

Today was one of those days when even the weather forecasters were given to explain ‘The only word we can use for the whole of the country today is ‘cloudy‘) and so it proved to be. Meg and I walked straight on down to the newspaper shop and then retraced our steps as far as the park. On our way down, we encountered the French lady who we had round for tea in the garden about a couple of weeks ago. We were commiserating with other that the one Arts Centre that we had in Bromsgrove called ‘The Artrix’ was initially ‘dark’ at the start of the pandemic when all public places of entertainment were closed. It was then ‘repurposed’ as a vaccination centre which I think was quite an inspired choice of building. Given that it couldn’t be used as an Arts Centre until the end of the lockdown, I think a vaccination centre was a brilliant idea. It could process up to 2,000 vaccinations a day, there ws plenty of car-parking and ‘The Artrix‘ was on signposts all over the district and just off the arterial A38 road. Although we are getting to the end of  vaccinating most of the adult population, it now looks as thought the vaccination regime will extend into the secondary schools  and the the more elderly sections of the population, there is talk of combining the normal autumn ‘flu vaccine with an updated COVID-19 booster in the autumn. Perhaps, eventually, we might get our Arts Centre back but in the meantime, I think there will be plenty of work for the repurposed building for the foreseeable future.

Halfway through the afternoon, the daughter of our recently deceased neighbour called by.  She gave us the date when the funeral was going to be, now that then post-mortem had been conducted. The daughter was explaining that whilst her mother had had a stroke followed by a second one that we to prove fatal,mshe had no predispositions that one can think of such as high blood pressure. She also led an abstemious lifestyle with no alcohol and an avoidance of ‘junk food’ so we commiserated with each other that there was no justice in the world. As our neighbour’s daughter is in the final stages of completing her PhD, I tried to proffer what I hoped might be some useful advice , namely to choose one’s external examiner with care. I say this because in the course of my academic life I have seen 2-3 rampant injustices where deserving candidates  were denied their just desserts because an external examiner had a hidden agenda or a point to prove by turning down the applicant. 

In the late afternoon, I finally got round to planting out the nice rose that our French friend brought round with her the other day. I rescued some topsoil from a bag I scarcely knew I had, laced it liberally with chicken pellet manure and then planted out a rose and also a companion stone container which is awaiting a nice plant to go in it. I am also minded to take the small collection of hazels I have put in a temporary location in the front garden to start to form a little hazel hedge along the front of the raised wooden beds I painfully constructed down the side of the house some years ago now. If this comes off, we shall have effected our ambition to have a good ‘green screen’ between ourselves and the newly developed housing estate (now some three years old built on the site of an orchard down by the side of our house)

Today the House of Commons was recalled for an eight hour emergency debate on the situation in Afghanistan. The Commons was in a sombre mood and the government were peppered with questions, many from their own side, about Britain’s lack of preparedness for the scenario unfolding before us. The mood in the House of Commons was almost non-partisan – in some of the   contributions it was not easy to discern whether the MP who was speaking was a Tory or not. In fact, Teresa May, the previous Prime Minister, was particularly scathing. The fact our Foreign Secretary was on a beach when Kabul was falling speaks volumes. Boris Johnson himself reinforced his reputation for being unprepared, if not asleep on the job. I think the House of Commons is at its best on occasions like this – the previous debate of a similar nature I remember was when the Commons was recalled for a Saturday debate  after the invasion of the Falklands (the Malvinas to the rest of the world). I have been considering whether to not to pen a one line letter to the Times posing the following question -‘In view of the long historical association of the UK with Afghanistan and in view of the commitment to promote the education of women, why does the government not suggest that it should build and fund a university in Afghanistion solely for the education of Afghani women?‘ Were the Taliban to refuse such an offer, this itself would speak volumes about their real intentions.

Today being my Pilates day, Meg and I knew that we had to keep a careful watch upon our timings. We walked down into the park and I left Meg with one of regular park acquaintances discussing geopolitics whilst I went off to collect our newspapers. I also took the opportunity to race into Poundland and grab another couple of storage boxes (for topsoil) before they disappeared from view. Poundland can be great if you shop very selectively and these particular lidded boxes at £2 each will be excellent for storing some of my supplies of topsoil. As they contain 14 litres each, the three stacked on top of each other will occupy less space than even my mini-dustbin but each box will be excellent for one load of topsoil per plant. Tomorrow, I need to plant out the nice little rose that our French friend bought for us and where I already have a nice space (and container) waiting for it as soon as I have a little bit of time and a smidgeon of fine weather. After we got home, I started off some ‘boil in the bag‘ fish wedges which will mainly cook before I go but can be quickly completed when I return from my Pilates class and we have a ‘quick turn around’ style of lunch.

When I went to my Pilates class, it fell to me to announce the sad news of the death of my neighbour and long term member of our Pilates class. The news was evidently a shock for the teacher and the other class members because although we are used to the occasional member coming and going, the death of a member of the group had a kind of finality about it. Needless to say, a certain black humour soon took over and we pleaded with our Pilates teacher not to push us too hard as it could have dire consequences. But my neighbour’s loss will be quite keenly felt as she introduced me to the Pilates class some 9-10 years ago and we have regularly walked up and down the Kidderminster Road  to attend the class each Tuesday (sometimes in pouring rain, sleet and snow as well as blazing sunshine)

When I did get home, the plumber was already here installing some new kitchen taps in our utility room and I must say that he produced a beautiful job for us with new taps which absolutely fitted the design of the existing sink. We now employ a central heating firm who are only about half a kilometre away from us. This has got all kinds of advantages for both of us as they can pop into our abode at the end of another job  for an investigation and also fit us in if we have a small job that needs doing. Having ensured a week or so of misery with a dripping tap, we are mightily relieved to get it sorted once and for all.

We had the bizarre sight this afternoon of the very first Taliban press conference when they had only taken over the reigns of power last Sunday and not had even formed a government yet. There seemed to be extremely long winded answers and discourse followed by what seems to be only a sentence or so the English translation. The Taliban were asked more than once about their attitudes to women and they replied with emollient type phrases as follows: ‘Of course… we are committed to women’s rights, to education, to work and to freedom of speech, in the light of our Islamic rules.’ Of course the sting in the tail here is the expression ‘in the light of Islamic rules’ and this can be used to justify almost anything they choose. Many with long memories remember when girls were denied  any school type education, were sent home from their places of work to have their work taken over by men and in the more extreme cases were subject to forced abduction which could rule in a forced marriage or even rape. Naturally, there was a great deal of cynicism amongst the assembled reporters  whether we were actually seeing a Taliban Mark II or not. As evidence that there may be some change in the air, we saw some clips of film in which male Taliban members were being interviewed by female interviewers which would have been unheard of in the 1990’s. 

Whilst waiting for another program to commence, I tuned into the rolling news channel ‘Russia Today‘ where I heard the following news item. Russia’s embassy in Kabul said on Monday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in. It is interesting that this news item does not seem to have been reported on the BBC News nor is the word ‘corruption’ mentioned. After all, it wouldn’t do, would it, if members of the population with sons and daughters who had been killed or severely wounded  in Afghanistan had offered the supreme sacrifice in favour of a leader who only seemed to be hell-bent on enriching himself?

Today was quite a dull, cloudy and not particularly warm Monday morning so it was not a day for too much lingering in the park or anywhere for that matter. Meg and I decided to go down into town by car because we needed to make an optician’s appointment with the optician who has been testing Meg and I for years now. We got the appointment made without fuss and then I made a favourite foray into Poundland where I bought some cleaning products and one or two items for Mog’s Den. We had rather a hurried lunch because we knew that our chiropodist was due to call at 2.00 pm in the afternoon. I had bought a huge cauliflower over the weekend and didn’t want to cook it over the weekend lest it smelled the house out (a potential problem with cauliflower) I overcame this to some extent by adding a layer of brown sugar on top of the cauliflower before I steamed it and had the kitchen window wide open. I made a cheese roux to go over the cauliflower and I am not sure that I made it correctly as I haven’t made a roux for a year or so. I started off with some melted butter and then added the grated cheese and some full-cream milk but I substituted some white gravy thickening granules instead of flour which I think now was a culinary mistake. However, it tasted OK and used it together with some carrot-and-peas mixture accompany the chicken breasts of which I cooked half yesterday. All of this was quite tasty and everything would have been OK but our chiropodist, uncharacteristically, arrived at our house about ten minutes earlier than anticipated and this really messed up our luncheon timetable. Meg had her dinner after she had received her treatment and I ate mine far too quickly than is good for me, trying to get it eaten on time.

This morning, I put into effect something I have been meaning to do and today was the day. After about 56 years of reading The Guardian, I have finally decided to cancel my subscription. I get the  Times and the Guardian every day and I tend to read the Times quite carefully but the Guardian only in a more cursory fashion. I am rationalising some of my expenditures to fit in better with my anticipated saving and spending plans and I reckon the £54.00 I spend each month can go to a much more worthy cause. I often read the Guardian’s News headlines and Comment section but I am pretty sure these can be accessed via the internet so I am not really losing out. What was interesting was the fact that the sales team at the Guardian subscription department  tried to keep me within their scheme by offering me a half price deal for three months but I was not to be tempted. I have a term (time limited) assurance that is due to run its course by the start of December so that is a bit more money that can find a better home. I did feel a slight pang of regret after ending an association that had lasted so many decades but now is not the time for undue sentimentality.

This afternoon was not devoted to anything very much apart from a doze and a read. Naturally, the news media is still full of the news of the fall of Kabul which is so redolent of the images that we remember of the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. On the occasion, though, there were scenes of hundreds of desperate citizens trying to escape the clutches of the Taliban and trying to get into the plane by whatever means they could. There were some rumours that some desperate people hung onto whatever they could from the plane’s fuselage and fell to their deaths once the plane had taken off. The scenes from Saigon were of people trying desperately to climb into helicopters whereas this time it was transport planes but the motivation was the same. Everybody is speaking of the speed of the collapse of the existing Afghanistan regime and, according to reports, even then Taliban themselves were somewhat amazed  at the pace of events. Of course, the interesting question is whether ‘the leopard has actually changed its spots‘ and whether there will be reprisals galore for having collaborated with the Americans or whether the Taliban are going to offer a different public face to their reputation since the 1990’s.

In the late afternoon, I popped into Mog’s Den to do a frenetic 15 minutes of weeding. I reasoned that if I removed the largest and more persistent of them, I would solve the problem getting worse. For the more minute weeds, I am going to use a combination of vinegar (acetic acid) and washing up liquid (just a splash) This is an incredibly effective low-cost and ecologically friendly weedkiller. The acetic acid in the vinegar dries up and desiccates the plant whilst the bit of washing up liquid helps to reduce the surface tension and therefore makes the whole solution that bit ‘wetter’  A bit of hot sun an hour or so after spraying is ideal for this system to work completely effectively.

Another Sunday has come round again and, as always, I went off to collect our newspapers early. Normally, I get back before 9.00 in order to watch the Andrew Marr show but today it was watching the events unfold, hour by hour, in Afghanistan – more of this later. After we had breakfasted and got ourselves turned around, we were off to the park where there was an open session of the Bromsgrove Literary and Philosophical Society– Meg and I brought the numbers uo to four where we were regularly inspected by the local dogs and their owners who stop by for a chat. I think this morning the subject that engaged us was interesting films we had see recently as well as the news story which lead the Sunday Times in which it is argued that the Chinese had effectively nobbled the World Health Organisation and ensured that a full investigation of the origins and history of COVID-19 will now never be known. After we got home for lunch, we cooked ourselves a chicken dinner (made easy by Waitrose where you merely pop the tinfoil container into the oven) After lunch, I needed to gird my loins and get the lawns cut – postponed from yesterday. When I started off, the weather was a little cloudy but as I was finishing off about an hour later, it started smattering with rain. Fortunately, it was nothing much to worry about and did not hold up the proceedings at all.

Throughout the day, we have following the fall of Afghanistan (or more accurately the fall of Kabul) to the Taliban which seems to have happened with the most extraordinary rapidity. It is not as though the Taliban have forced a victory – rather whatever opposition there might have been has just melted away so they seemed to have into walked into provincial capital after provincial capital (and eventually Kabul itself) with hardly a shot being fired. First thing this morning (UK time) we learned that the Taliban had entered the suburbs of Kabul, then that they had actually entered the presidential palace and eventually that the President himself had fled leaving only his generals behind who were no doubt wondering what to do. The whole speed of the take-over rather reminds you of the fall of Saigon all of those years ago – The British and Americans are sending troops not to fight  but to oversee the evacuation of their nationals as fast as they can. The reaction of the British government is interesting and quasi-comical – Parliament is being recalled next Wednesday but by that date everything will be a ‘fait accompli‘ so what is the point, I ask myself? The Foreign secretary is actually on holiday at the moment but is making his way home (as I suppose he feels he ought to be at his post given the circumstances). I seem to remember standing in the basement of a stately home somewhere and reading some archived documents which detailed how badly British army had fared in Afghanistan in the 19th C. If we go back to 1842, of course, we can read about the ‘1842 retreat from Kabul‘ which ranks as one of the worst military disasters in British military history. In total the British army lost 4,500 troops, along with about 12,000 civilians: the latter comprising both the families of Indian and British soldiers, plus workmen, servants and other Indian camp-followers. It does make you wonder if our policy makers have read any of this history and one suspects that the Americans have certainly not done so. I am also noting that the Americans do not like losing – hence all kind of blame is being thrown about at the moment and Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from one of the USA’s longest wars in history, being some twenty years, may lose him a lot of popularity in the American opinion polls. Of course, once the Americans withdrew, then the British had no option but to follow suit, appearing as always as nothing more than the lapdog of the Americans. How one must feel if one had a son or a daughter who had lost their life during the Afghanistan conflict, one must inevitably ask the question whether it was remotely worthwhile – and whether such a young life had been lost in vain. Being of a particular age, I can remember how Harold Wilson when he was the Labour Prime Minister skilfully kept the UK out of the Vietnam conflict, although the Australians and the Canadians contributed forces. And in case you happen to be wondering, Donald Trump successfully evaded the draft on at least five occasions, four of them whilst he was at college and on the fifth occasion arguing successfully that he had ‘bad feet’ caused by the growth of bone spurs. There is some talk that this last medical condition was not verified and could have been entirely fictitious.

Today was a fairly conventional Saturday with no particular things in prospect for us, apart from going to church in the late afternoon. Having completed a few household chores, Meg and I wandered fairly slowly down into the town and thence to the park. Here we were delighted to  meet up with our University of Birmingham friend and another of the park regulars – I quipped that we are now the Bromsgrove Literary and Philosophical Society having their weekly meeting. Having had our coffee, I started off to collect our weekly supply of newspapers and it started to smatter with rain. So I organised an emergency umbrella and having ensured that the rest of the group could more or less keep themselves dry, I set off to collect our weekly ration of newspapers. Upon my return, the little group had relocated themselves to a spot where the trees afford a little more cover and the bandstand was in close proximity in case we need to make a sudden dash for it. Realising that the weather may be worsening, Meg and I struck off for home and our two friends were going off to the little cafe in the park to treat themselves to something warm. As we set off, though, the rain stuttered to a halt so we did not get really wet on the way home but just a little damp.

Lunch was a little special today because I had ordered some lambs’ liver for lunch. Having cubed this and dried it off, I then panfried it but added a goodly layer of onions and some onion gravy I had made to complete the meal. As vegetables, we had a baked potato and some Cavolo Nero (kale) which is particularly delicious. In the past, I am pretty sure that I have added a little red wine to my lambs liver but I forgot to do it today and the results were still pretty good. After lunch, I had intended to give the lawns their weekly cut but, in truth, whilst the sun was shining the grass was still pretty wet from this morning’s showers so I decided to postpone this particular treat until tomorrow. 

Halfway through he afternoon my small-scale dustbin arrived, courtesy of Amazon and well before the anticipated delivery date of next Tuesday and Wednesday.  I have bought one of these mini dustbins before and it is now residing in Mog’s Den, filled with a large bag of gravel. I now intend to use this new one as a storage container for garden peat and/or topsoil. They are about 18″-19″ in height and have a lockable lid with some clips to hold on the lid. Whilst these are a little ugly to the purist, it is well worth having something with a completely secure and lockable lid as I know to my cost that light plastic dustin lids can easily blow away in the winter gales. Also they are superb height and have a capacity of 50 litres. My original intention was to mix peat and topsoil in approximately equal proportions so that I would always have a handy supply when it came to planting out. But then I had some second thoughts and thought it would probably be a better idea to have peat in one container and topsoil in another so that I could mix them in absolutely the proportions that I needed for any particular planting. Although they are cheap enough at less than £12 (delivered), I toyed with the idea of buying yet another but decided to improvise. Going to my compost area (nicely hidden behind some tall fir trees), I resurrected an old builders bucket and found one of these plastic trug affairs that would serve as a huge but highly effective cover and so I utilised this for my topsoil whilst keeping my shiny new dustbin for garden peat. I wanted something a bit more professional than half-filled plastic bags which however well you try to close them always seem to attract slugs and snails from somewhere.

This evening we went to church as we always do on a Saturday evening and attendance was a little down as you would expect in the middle of August when so many are on holiday. I had brought with me a little bottle of damson gin which I intended to bestow upon on of our chatty Liverpudlian parishioners to whom I promised it last week – as she wasn’t there this week, I shall have to used to taking it along each Sunday until she reappears. Tomorrow, I hope that the weather is a bit better because I want to get a little bit of planting done and the lawns cut. Our lawns generally look OK and then suddenly look straggly and overgrown and I have to, as the gardening books say, ‘Choose a fine day‘ to get the mowing done.

We woke up to a nice bright day this morning and although it was a little cloudy this morning, the day seemed to be set fair. In a wakeful period during the night, I attempted to use the cPanel system to investigate a couple of websites that I have. To my display, I kept on getting a ‘login not valid‘ message so I had to have a think about how to put it right. Eventually, I hit upon a solution which was to use my conventional FTP transfer program on my IBM portable where I was relieved to discover that an updated password seemed to be working OK. I am pretty sure that cPanel uses the credentials from an FTP program and this did the trick for me. Once I gained access to the site, you can have a fish around and use Disk Statistics to discern (up to a point) which applications and programs are taking up most space. There is also a utility called File Manager which enables you to explore features of the website not accessible to a browser. However, some of these are system statistics, log files and web statistics so some of these ‘housekeeping’ files can be deleted but some evidently need to be preserved. I managed to do a certain amount of tidying up and eventually recovered a little of disk space so now the I am using 1.5Gb of my 2.5GB allocation – so I think 1Gb should be enough for the immediate future so long as I keep an eye on things.

Meg and I had a pleasant walk down to the park this morning. Fortunately, the fairground activities of yesterday have all been packed away so we were relieved to enjoy the pleasant and more tranquil ambience off the park again. I collected our newspapers whilst Meg read the edition of yesterday’s Guardian and then we made tracks for home,knowing that our hairdresser was due to call at 1.30 so lunch would have to be delayed. By the time Meg’s hair and been done and my own fixed in-between sessions, we had to work out how to have a really fast but delayed lunch. This dilemma was solved by toasting some of the sandwiches we bought for yesterday’s afternoon the but did not use and this proved to be tasty warm snack finished off by a chocolate ice cream in which Waitrose happens to excel.

One little thing I did in between the hairdressing sessions was to get onto an insurance company who sold us some term assurance (i.e. they only pay out if you die before the end of the time) This  ‘expires’ at the start of December and I needed to know exactly at what point the direct debit should cease – after all this was set up 20 years ago. The personnel in the insurance company confirmed that the direct debit should cease after the last payment had been made in the month before expiry which sounded reassuring – nonetheless, a bit nearer the date, I will probably do a check to ensure the direct debit is well and truly cancelled and the money saved diverted to a more worthwhile savings ‘pot’.

This morning as we went down on our walk we noticed that some of the relatives of our recently deceased neighbour are clearing out the contents of the garage. As is often the case of people who pride themselves on their handyman skills, the garage was stuffed full of tools some conventional and some esoteric collected lovingly and used over the years. As I saw tin after tin of god-knows-what  get disposed of I did feel a quick pang – I am sure that some of the chemicals were out-of-date and needed a rapid disposal but I wonder what was going to happen to the clamps, lathes and sometimes faintly exotic (not to say quixotic) tools that were lurking within.

My son and daughter-in-law having returned from holiday are busy throwing things away, recycling them to charity shops and generally de-cluttering themselves of years of impedimenta. I suppose I ought to feel really inspired by their example and start to do the same. Up to a point the ‘mañana’ syndrome strikes and tomorrow always seems the better day to start. I had intended to get our lawns cut day and to do a little bit of pottering which means taking a few of the cuttings I have been nurturing and putting them into more conducive surroundings. But our French friend who we entertained in the garden yesterday brought along a beautiful little patio rose so I know exactly the spot in which I want that to grow. I have a series of herbs (coriander, basil and the like) that in theory you can start off on a kitchen window sill and then transplant out later but it is really getting a little late in the year, even for fast growing herbs like that.

We had made plans for today several days ago along the following lines. Down at the bottom of the Kidderminster Road and neighbour to some of our closest friends is a French lady who has been widowed quite recently. With walking up and down, we have had snatches of conversation with her but felt it would be nice if we had the opportunity for a more extended and leisurely chat. So about a week ago, we agreed that we should meet for tea in our garden and, of course, today is the agreed date.We decided to go down in the car because we thought we would pop into Waitrose and get a few things necessary for this afternoon and then we would make our way to the park. When we got to the park it was absolutely teeming with a huge fun fair that had been organised primarily for the benefit children of  the younger school children. So there were masses of organised activities for the children as well as the more usual collection of slides, bouncy castles and the like. The park was so busy that some of the local authority staff had had to tape off various areas of the grass to act as an overflow carpark and, as you can imagine, the whole park was teeming. With a heavy heart, we suspected that every bench would be occupied but we were fortunate enough to find an unoccupied bench so we sat down to have our elevenses in the midst of the hustle and bustle. We were quite pleased to start off on our way home and have an early light lunch, knowing that we were going to eat again during the afternoon.

Our guest arrived at 3.00pm, absolutely on cue. We have a well-worked routine by now where we throw some cushions on the metal garden chairs, a table cloth on the table and then prepare the food for the afternoon. We had a very entertaining chat with our guest who had come over to England as a French ‘assistante‘ and then met her future husband in the school in which she was employed teaching Modern Languages and where she carried on working for much of her professional life. We exchanged a lot of stories about the places in Europe that we had both visited in our earlier lives and then wistfully tried to imagine what trips we might make in the future. However, her son had visited Italy recently so perhaps there is hope for us yet. The Foreign Office website mentions the necessity to quarantine until August 30th so perhaps this restrictions are time limited and might be lifted after that date.We shall have to wait and see.

In the late afternoon, we received some very sad but not completely unexpected news. Our near neighbour who lives across the way from the communal green area in front of our house had had quite a severe stroke but was currently in an assessment unit in one of the local hospitals. This afternoon, her son called around to say that his mother had had another massive stroke from she had died at about 5.30 this morning. Apparently, the doctors had told the family that they were surprised given the severity of the first stroke that she had actually survived it – she appeared to be making some progress as recently as yesterday as she was walking about and her power of speech was gradually returning. However, I sensed that the emotions of the family as well as a natural grief were a sense of relief that their mother had not lingered on for months in a kind of twilight world. 

Our neighbour had introduced me to Pilates several years ago so we used to walk down the hill to the class together every single Tuesday, without fail (but of course the pandemic put to a halt to all of that) She came from Huddersfield so we shared some Yorkshire roots in common and indeed found that we shared many similarities inner outlook on life. As well as our Pilates classes, we joined with each other to attempt to stop the housing development which took place immediately adjacent to us when an apple orchard was mercilessly chopped down (but paradoxically would have an automatically protected status if it had come under the jurisdiction of  Worcestershire County Council rather than Bromsgrove District Council.) We were actually very successful in opposing the planning application and were successful on the first three occasions but ultimately lost on the fourth one. A developer is allowed to appeal  a decision for ever more until successful whereas residents are not allowed that right. We also, with another neighbour, bought the communal green area in the middle of our houses and this effectively stopped any would-be developers from driving a roadway straight past our houses which would have made our lives hell. I also wonder whether the additional stress of having to cope with the vibration cracks that appeared all over her bungalow as a result of heavy earth moving vehicles moving in the vicinity whilst the new estate was being built actually contributed to her ill health. She will be sadly missed.