The day started off today at about 2.00am in the morning when I was awoken by loud screeches coming from the garden. I assumed it was a fox-emitted noise and after a quick search on the internet, I managed to ascertain that the sound I heard was indeed a fox. Apparently, these sounds are likely to be heard in the dead of night in the middle of winter because it is the fox’s mating season and the sounds travel much further when there is an absence of trees on the leaves. So having got out of bed I read a few emails and consulted a few websites before making off to bed again. Today was one of those intermittently showery types of days so after a little deliberation, Meg and I decided to make the best of a bad job and we went into our ‘bad weather’ routine. We went in the car to collect the newspaper and then proceeded to the park where we  parked up and made a little trip to the bandstand – our refuge when the weather is poor. We drank our coffee and ate our biscuits in complete isolation as the park was practically deserted. We knew that we were to have a fairly busy afternoon and no sooner had we sat down and were enjoying a cup of tea, then our hairdresser turned up. We knew from our ‘planning board’ that our hairdresser was due today but were a little unsure of the time. So we had a delayed lunch after Meg had had per perm and I was shorn of my usual locks. No sooner had we despatched our hairdresser then our chiropodist arrived – again by appointment but it is still unusual for us to have two appointments like this on the same day. After the chiropodist had departed we were paid a visit by the Treasurer of our residents association who had brought us some unwelcome news. The bank that looks after our accounts had decided to close our account, afer some thirteen years.Even though we have been in a relationship with our bank for thast thirteen years, the bank is saying that we cannot prove who we say we are and despite several telephone calls from both the Treasurer and myself to the head office (but nothing can be handled in branch these days) the bank had decided that we did not meet their safeguarding procedures (or what-have-you) and premptively closed our account without notice. So tomorrow morning, I will need to go and argue with our original bank (which may prove fruitless) and after that, we may need to go and hassle with another bank for a ‘community’ account which will no doubt take a tremendous amount of bureaucracy to set up. Our chiropodist sympthathised  with us and told us that the same bank (which I shall not name) had done something similar to her and was generally ‘bad news’ The trouble is that the number of staff in the branch can be numbered as one or two individuals and then they are not empowered to take any decisions on their own. Then one has to hang onto a telephone for about 3/4 hour to be able to talk to a ‘real person’ who then has to refer you to a colleagues with a similar wait of hours. I look forward to tomorrow with a certain amount of dread, having been through their validation procedures once before and thinking that everything had been sorted out.

Tonight is the night when we have to drag our bins out from our individual driveways and put them into an accessible position at the kerbside, ready for the refuse delivery vehicles will call very early on Thursday morning. This is somewhat more than a trivial task as have to drag the bin for about 200 yards – and then I do the same for my two neighbours (one deceased, but the family visits the house occasionally to dispose of rubbish) and the other for our next daoor neighbour who can sometimes forget if he has been out at work all day long. This task always seems to be so much more irksome when you do it in the hours of darkness and one is manipulating a torch alongside two bins (one in each hand).

The latest sleaze crisis rumbles on and on.  It has since emerged that former Attorney General, Sir Geoffrey Cox, earned more than £800,000 while working as a barrister for law firm Withers, which is representing the British Virgin Islands (BVI) government in a corruption case brought by the BVI government. The particular offence seems to be that he was doing this from his Westminster office (i.e. within the Houses of Parliament) which would be a clear breach of the rules. In the meanwhile, No. 10 Downing Street seems to be losing patience particularly as Geoffrey Cox may have earned £800,000 working as a barrister on behalf of the government of the British Veirgin islands (in what may be, paradoxically, a corruption case!) Boris Johnson has said MPs who break parliamentary rules on second jobs ‘must be investigated and should be punished’. We shall see… but we have been here before and do not hold your breath.

Every day has its own character and Tuesday is no exception. As it is the day in which I attend my Pilates class, we have decided as a matter of policy to forego a walk in the park but to replace it with a trip to Waitrose (by car). This means that as well as a little treat for ourselves, I have enough time to get home, change into my track-suit bottoms and then walk down for my Pilates class. In Waitrose, we had a delicious (and hot) cup of cappucino and I did some shopping for some things that were needed. Although I have some curry powder at home, I wanted to buy something that would add a little bit of ‘spice’ to our root vegetables soup which I intend to cook this afternoon. I finished up impulse buying a couple of Sharwoods cooking sauces, one of which was a Korma and I thought would give us just the kind of spices that I needed.  Having got home, we did our normal mid-day Tuesday turn around and as I walked down into the town, I bumped into some of our church friends who were just returning home by car. In my brief chat, I told our friends about our soupmaking activities and was given a recipe for pea and mint soup (which I confirmed a little later on when I got home by consulting one of my recipe books). Then I had my Pilates class  in which there are five regulars after which,  I was back from my class a few minutes before 3.00 pm which is the norm. Then we had our lunch of cod fishcakes and some special Waitrose vegetables that microwave in about 2 minutes.

After lunch and a rest, I got out the other half of the root vegetables which I had prepared (diced) a couple of days before and got them simmering so that could be parboiled. Then I FaceTimed my sister in Yorkshire to get news from their particular home front – but nothing all that much had altered in the last week or so. Then it was time for us to FaceTime our old Waitrose friends which we do every Tuesday in the late afternoon. In the middle of our chat, I popped oout and got the soupmaker running so that we could have our evening repast as soon as we had finished our weekly chat. Now for the soup which I think was probably one of my best yet. The root vegetable mixture comprised a couple of sticks of celery, a large carrot, some swede, one parsnip and some fried-off onions. My stock was a vegetable stock made by dissolving a zero-salt vegetable stock cube (just recently on the market) and some Bouillon stock mixture. This went into the soupmaker together with about a third of a tin of coconut milk and half of jar of Sharwood’s Korma sauce mix. The end result was – stupendous (even, though I say it myself) I served it with some croutons and a large dollop of yogurt (which aids the creaminess and helps to cool it down from its boiling point).  I am going to make the whole mixture again in a couple of day’s time and leave some over to leave a little ‘taster’ for my daughter-in-law (the soup making expert in our house) and our domestic help who will come round on Friday and whose judgement I trust on these kinds of preparations.

Although I have been sort of following the COP26 proceedings, I must say I do not have much of a handle as to what kind of progress is being made. I had not realised that Amber Rudd, the Conservative politician, had been one of our lead negotiators at the last conference in Paris. She was arguing that in Paris all came good at the very last moment after days and days of wrangling. This time around, a more sober assessment must be that there is no way that we are even going to get near the limit 1.5% which is the overall goal of many. An influential report has suggested tonight that the pledges to cut methane, coal and protect forests made at COP26 will reduce global warming by just a few tenths of a degree – with temperatures on course to be at least 2.4C higher by 2100, according to the first major assessment of commitments at the summit. When you see the massive contribution that China makes to global warming, one thought might be  to try and persuade the Chinese to cut their emissions by just 1%-2% a year – whilst small in the context of the Chinese economy it might in quantitative terms be almost as much as many of the poorest African societies combined. Of course, it is possible that the Chinese are playing their cards close to their chest and might pull something out of the bag at the very last moment but I am not particularly hopeful about this.

Today was one of those nondescript days which, I suppose, is typical of November. The sky was overcast but it was not actually raining so we ventured forth and picked up our newspaper before our sojourn in the local park. We were half way through our coffee and comestibles when our good Italian friend hove into view and we exchanged pleasanteries and observations about the weather. Just then, our intrepid octogenerian walker came by on the first of his two laps of the park. He had been out with his family for Sunday lunch the day before and I made a mental note of the carvery which he had frequented so we might go there one weekend if we are entertaining. After a while our friend departed and it was time for us to make our way home and prepare lunch.

This afternoon was the day scheduled to a three hour debate called by the Liberal Democrats on the Owen Paterson ‘sleaze’ debate: Meg and I decided to sit through all of the three hour debate and ir proved riveting (to us, at least) Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Leader of the House, sat on the government front bench  and was the epitome of misery throughout. After all, it is a rare event for a Tory to have to sit and have abuse hurled at you from all sides but as Rees Mogg was not going to speak in the debate, he just had to sit there and endure it.   MPs as a whole launched a blistering attack on an absent Boris Johnson during the emergency debate. Labour leader Keir Starmer accused the prime minister  of ‘giving the green light to corruption’ after his government tried to overturn the suspension of shamed former cabinet minister Paterson, before trying to shut down parliament’s standards committee entirely. The Tory benches were almost entirely empty (no doubt the Paterson ‘friends’ stayed away) and in the course of three hours, Paterson only had about two defenders in the whole of the three hour debate. The main Tory line of defence was that the verdict on Paterson by the Committee of Priveliges was flawed in the extreme because there was no appeal process with independent questionning of witnesses. The counter to this was that there was a quasi-appeal process built into the process because after the committee had concluded the outline of  its report, the MP before the committee had the right to appear in person and to submit more evidence in writing. However, as Chris Bryant the (Labour) chair of the committee pointed out, there was hardly a need for an appeal process because Owen Paterson had denied any of the facts of the case and, indeed, said he would do the same again. The overwhelming view of the House of Commons in the debate was that Peterson was ‘guilty as charged‘, that natural justice had been done, and the government’s attempt to subvert the whole process by issuing a three-line whip to Tory MPs to reject the guilty verdict as evidence of corruption. To get the overall verdict on this, it will be interesting to see what ‘NewsNight‘ on BBC2  makes of all of this at 10.30 and ‘What the papers say‘ on Sky News at 11.30

One does get the impression that the government is starting to panic with the COVID situation as it is. For a start, there are still 4.5 million people who have not received even their first doses of the vaccine and only 10 million (out of 50 million?) have received the booster vaccine. A fact not much appreciated is that as the immunity offered by the vaccine wanes over time, then those who received their first jabs in September may have precious little immunity left six months later. People are being urged to book their second jabs as quickly as possible and already there are accounts that some hospitals are under extreme pressure, not least because they are understaffed and there is quite an absenteeism rate with COVID anyway. Laying bare the toll of the past 19 months on the profession, an investigation has showed nursing staff are needing more time off for mental health problems, respiratory illness and migraines than they did prior to Covid-19 and absenteeism rates are up a fifth on pre-pandemic times. Those absent with mental health or stress-related conditions has increased by about 40% over the last year. So the government is actually pretty worried that they are caught in the vicious pincer movement between an understafed NHS on the hand hand and a mixture of winter-related seasonal illnesses with COVID on top on the other hand. 

I am hopeful that tomorrow might continue to quite a fine day. Before the fine weather disappears almost completely, I want to get little bits of ‘routine’ gardening done at the rate of about 20 minutes or so a day. I know from bitter experience that if you start off the spring with a generally weed-free garden, you get off to a flying start – and vice versa.

Today being Sunday, I collected our Sunday newspaper from the newsagent and then Meg and I watch the Andrew Marr show on the TV, all routine stuff for a Sunday morning. On consulting my phone, my daughter-in-law (following last night’s blog) had sent me a text informing me that the current series of rugby matches can be seen on Amazon, not the normal channels. However, we met our University of Birmingham friend in the park  and I said I would bring along a copy of the Ladybird reading scheme books which we have retained since the days when we were teaching our son to read (approximately 49 years ago) This book was written in the mid-1960’s when Ladybird had been criticised for outdated and probably middle class images of young children and their interactions with other. So the principal characters, Peter and Jane, had been modernised somewhat, Peter having longish hair and Jane now wearing jeans rather than a skirt. Ladybird tried to bring their work up-to-date but there are still massive ‘tell-tales’ in the book. For a start Peter plays with his football (which he subsequently retrieves from the highest branches of a tree) and chooses a toy tractor in the toy shop whereas Jane still chooses to have a doll (but is pointing, with a degree of political correctness, to a ‘black’ rather than a white doll, trains the dog  which she is taking for a walk and encourages Peter to retrieve the lost football but does not climb into the tree herself.  In another Ladybird book of the era, Jane helps her mother to bake a cake whilst Peter helps his father to paint the fence. Just to make everything worse, the book shows an illustration of Peter and Jane on the beach and is entitled ‘Play with us’ (a title that must rank alongside Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, whose book was entitled ‘Scouting for Boys’) One has to say that in these sad times of 2021, neither of these books could have been entitled thus.

I also amused our University of Birmingham friend with a letter than had been written by Boris Johnson’s house master and classics teacher to Boris Johnson’s father. The letter indicates with a startling clarity with what we know now that ‘Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies…Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failureof responsibility (and surprised at the same time he was not appointed Captain of the School for next half) I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligations which binds everyone else…‘  I must point out that this letter was written in April 1982 and here we  are nearly 40 years later and it must be said ‘plus ça change’ ( or ‘what has changed?’)

This afternoon, Meg and I watched a most enjoyable game of women’s rugby in which the  English team (the ‘Red Roses‘) surpasssed their win of last week over the New Zealand (the ‘Black Ferns‘) by winning 56-15 (a larget margin of victory than last week’s 46-12) At half time,the New Zealand team had no points on the board at all and the commentators were speculating whether they might end the match without scoring at all. Next week, though, they play France so that might be an interesting game as well.

Soupmaking experiments are continuing later on this evening. I am going to try a combination of celery, swede, carrot, potato and perhaps a little parsnip to see how all of that pans out – it is, after all, a classic root vegetables type of soup but how the flavours will combine or not we will have to wait and see. It actually turned out to be a lot better than I predicted that it might – so I am pleased that I saved half of the raw ingredients so I can quickly make another batch if the weather turns particularly cold in the next week.

The next week is going to be a crucial one for Boris Johnson. Not only is COP26 Climate Change coming to an end (with what result?) but the sequelae of the Owen Paterson debacle are rumbling on. Even John Major the ex-Tory PM was driven to declare that the present government was corrupt – a very powerful word in politics. Basically, the Tory party collectively put its foot down and the newer intake basically said to the Brexiteers and the ‘old guard’ that they could not be rolled over. Does this make the present Tory party almost unwhippable?  Also the position of the Leader of the House (Rees-Mogg) and the Chief Whip must now by in doubt – in any event, they have lost all credibility and will they ever be believed again after last week? Watch this space!

I suppose we ought to celebrate the 600th edition of this blog but I am not sure how – so we shall just progress as normal. Today, we woke up to the fact that the high pressure weather system we have known for the last few days is gradually giving way to a low pressure system, characterised by some scudding clouds (but no actual rain) and quite a sharp wind that brought a degree of wind chill with it. On our way down the hill, we bumped into our Irish friends and exchanged some gossip about what is happening in our local church as well as our normal chit-chat. Naturally, we had a chat about the ‘goings on’ in Parliament and how long ‘King Boris’ could survive all of the scandals which appear to engulf him. Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi seemed to thrive on lurid sex lives which didn’t appear to do them any harm so we concluded that in our working lives, we must have been in the wrong job. In the park, we met up with our intrepid octogenarian hiker which is nearly a daily occurrence by now. We wished him well, ate up our comestibles  and set off for home in a little pale sunshine but no wind.

After lunch, I needed to make a lightning visit into town to get some money out of an ATM and to do my rounds of shops selling toiletries and cleaning materials not to mention Poundland for other bits and bobs. The whole of this took an hour of the afternoon and then it was a case of a quiet cup of tea before we started to get venture for our weekly visit to church. In place of a sermon, we had information from our stand-in priest that although he had been scheduled to leave us shortly, he had been ‘persuaded’ to  stay with us until immediately after Christmas after which time he would return to his parish of origin. Whether a replacement priest can be found to take over our parish from 2nd January onwards is an open question (and I am not particularly hopeful as the number of priests in the UK as a whole has been dropping like a stone)

Tonight, our University of Birmingham friend who was off spectating at a rugby match today had texted me the channel numbers upon which, in theory, I might be able to see highlights of the England vs. Tonga rugby match, played earlier on today. I somehow feel that I am not going to be successful finding this channel as I am sure I will have run across it by now but we can but see.

Sir John Major, the ex Conservative Prime Minister, has made a most vituperative attack upon Boris Johnson and his government. Sir John had his own problems of Tory sleaze with ‘cash for questions’ during the period of his premiership but he reminded us that he set up the Committee on Standards of Public Life – the Nolan Committee – to cope with the aftermath of Tory sleaze. Sir John Major said parliament’s reputation had also been damaged by the affair, adding: ‘Many Conservative MPs – who are clearly in their own minds unhappy about what they’ve been asked to do – were forced and in some cases put under real bullying pressure to vote for the amendment and to vote not to proceed with the suspension of Owen Paterson. So people are bound to wonder: can we trust them or can they be put under pressure to do things that they know are wrong?‘ Of course, what. is always interesting about these type of scandals is the reaction of the (generally Conservative supporting) Sunday newspapers. It looks as though the reaction of the daily newspapers in the last week, including the normally loyal Daily Mail might have had quite an impact. One former minister told the Daily Mail that Mr Spencer had not done his job properly.  ‘If the PM was told about the extent of dissatisfaction then he wouldn’t have pushed it,’ they said. ‘You could tell there was a problem because the whips were literally running around the Commons.‘ Another Conservative MP said Mr Spencer is a ‘very nice guy’ but ‘out of his depth …The Cabinet is full of nodding yes men. I had two marginal male MPs from Red Wall seats in tears looking at their social media feed, looking at their emails coming in after the vote, going ‘what the hell have we done?‘

There have been massive street protests today (Saturday) in Glasgow as the demonstrators are tring to impress upon the conference organisers the strength of feeling felt by many young people. The organisers claim that 100,000 demonstrators were out on the streets today – but the police (untypical) did not put their own estimate on the size of the crowd.  Typically, organisers ‘talk up’ the number of demonstrators whereas the police have their own motives in underestimating the actual crowd size. It is somewhat difficult to ascetain where the truth lies in these circcumstances.

Today started bright and cold and it was truly one of those days when one needed to reach inside the store cupboard and have a steaming bowl of porridge (complete with syrup, of course) Today we shared out breakfast with our son who was hard at work in his little ‘office’ upstairs and for whom the porridge was especially welcome. Our domestic help was a little delayed this morning but eventually we got off into town and picked up our newspaper before making for the park. There we were delighted to be joined by our University of Birmingham friend  who we had not seen for several days as, very conscientiously, he was nursing a heavy cold so had kept hmself out of our vicinity lest he inadvertently infect us. Fortunately, his cold is not of the extremely ‘heavy’ kind that seems to be sweeping the country and laying people low. As we sat together (or relatively near to each other) on adjacent park benches, we commented to each how beautiful the park looked in its autumn colours, how fine and almost warm the day had turned out to be and how few people there were in the park today to enjoy it all. I think, though, that the high pressure system giving us this fine weather is going to slide away so we have to enjoy the last days of summer (or autumn) whilst we can.

Lunchtime today had been desgnated as ‘risotto’ day, which we were going to share with our domestic help as a special treat (and she was supplying some white wine to perfectly complemnt the meal) I used to make risotto regularly each Friday but I have rather got out of the habit since I tried to cut down on carbs as part of a weight reduction programme (but I thought once in a while would not hurt) I had made sure that I had bought some ‘arborio’ rice for the risotto and, from Waitrose, I had purchased some smoked trout. Although thrown together, the meal turned out fine and I was pleased that I not lost the knack. I knew, however, that we could not tarry long over lunch because I had designated this afternoon as the final lawn-cut of the season. For this to be successful (i.e. possible) one needs a fine afternoon and hopefully  the absence of rain for a few days so that the grass-cutting is not incredibly soggy. The grass-cutting itself was uneventful but in the last cut of the season, I need to run the petrol down to absolutely zero so that no ‘gunk’ is left in the tank. So I engaged in the by now traditional rite at the end of the grass-cutting of keeping the mower running whilst I walk up and down with it muttering under my breath ‘Die! Die!’ until, as the daylight fades to  practically nothing, the petrol tank runs dry. Then the final task, difficult to perform to perform at the best of times but more difficult in the practical darkness, is to get the old oil drained out (whilst it is still hot) into a tin saved for the purpose. So I was particularly pleased to get this done on the traditional day I designate for the last cut of the season (November 5th) whilst the first is my son’s birthday on March 25th. Several years ago, I heard a tip from Alan Titchmarsh (the gardening guru’ but now with a new career on Classic FM and several other TV shows) His tip is always to mow the lawn at the end of the season even though there is no grass long enough to cut but assuming there has been a leaf fall. The mower will shred the leaves into smaller pieces making it easier for the worms to drag them down into the soil  and hence contributing to its overall fertility.

The fallout from the Government ‘U’-turn continues as Tory MP’s turn on each other (particularly the recently elected, recent generation of MPs compared with the old school veterans) Personally, I think Boris Johnson should have sacked the Chief Whip, Mark Spencer. The conversation could have gone like this, assuming that Boris Johnson might have been the ultimate author of the policy -‘Even though you were carrying out my instructions, you should have warned me of the possibility of masses of abstentions or even members of our own party voting against us. The fact you didn’t warn me of this means that you were not in touch with back bench opinion and mis-read the mood of the House. This has led to one of greatest debacles in modern parliamentary history for which I hold you responsible. I will give you two minutes to consider your position…‘ Of course, none of this is going to happen (is it?) but I suspect that there may be all kinds of fallout from the recent debacle. Not least, is that fact that the younger generation of Tory MP’s may be very unwilling to act as ‘lobby fodder’ and follow their Whip’s instructions without question for the rest of this Parliament.

Thursday is the day which we have decided to make our main shopping day. Accordingly, I set off in plenty of time  and arrived at the door of Waitrose in Droitwich two minutes before the doors were due to open – and third in the queue. As always, shopping is quite a pleasant experience at this time and, apart from one or two of the shelves being somewhat understocked, something to which I quite look forward. So all the shopping having been done, we treated ourselves to the first breakfast of porridge of the winter (suitable when the weather is pretty cold outside). As I wrote this, I pondered which spelling is correct: porridge or porage. What I discovered was this. The conventional spelling is porridge but Scotts, the firm behind the famous breakfast oats cereal devised a unique spelling as  a marketing trick to distinguish themselves from their rivals and they combined the spellings of porridge and potage – a French word for a thick soup – and ran with it from 1914 onwards. I think it is by now common knowledge that a bowl of porridge is very good for one first thing in the morning as it provides a source of slow-release carbohydates right throughout the morning. Furthermore, as regards the health benefits, scientists at Harvard University’s School of Public Health in 1984 have been following the dietary habits of around 100,000 people and have now come to the conclusion that those of us who regularly eat whole grains, such as porridge oats, can expect to live longer and healthier lives. Just one small bowl of porridge a day can increase life expectancy by 5 per cent, and reduce the risk of death by heart disease by 9 per cent.

Eventually after a slow unpacking of the shopping, Meg and I realised we were a little short of time. So we took the car down into town to hand deliver a form that we needed to hand in to Bromsgrove District Council. This having been done, we collected our newspaper and then popped into the park for a reduced walk and a quick burst of elevenses (although, strangely, I had made up the flask and then forgot to put it in the rucksack). We met up again with our octogenarian daily hiker as well as Seasoned World Traveller – but as the cold wind was starting to blow, despite the sun and a blue sky, we did not tarry too long but were keen to get home. I needed to strip the carcase of our chciken of little bits of chicken meat which I made into a kind of risotto with some quasi-rice I had manage to get hold off which claimed to be exceptionally low in carbohydrates. This having prepared, I gave Meg her portion but left my own to eat after the training session I was scheduled to have with medical students. 

Promptly at 2pm I receivd a FaceTime call from a young female Asian student who was going to be my contact for the day. The conversation flowed freely – and I must admit I probably was speaking too much. We started with what our GP had wanted us to act as a discussion point (how individuals via diet and exercise could reduce over-high blood sugar levels which is used as a marker for the onset of diabetes) but after that the conversation becaame quite wide ranging and wat should have been a chat for about 20 minutes became 40. I am not sure if I fulfilled the aims of the whole training exercise but I am sure that the young student at the other end of the FaceTime camera would go on to make a very good doctor).

It has been a day of great political drama today, not to say screeching government U-turns. After the government had seen the hositile reaction from all of the opposition parties and many on their own side  to their ‘rewriting of the rules’ to save Owen Paterson, the determing factor may have been the uniformly hostile press, with even the Daily Mail joining in to give them a good kicking. So William Rees-Mog, the Leader of the House of Commons was desptached to announce a government reversal of yesterday’s policy. It became evident within minutes that as the government majority on a whipped vote was only 18 last night, then an ‘unwhipped’ Conservative party would surely despatch Owen Paterson to oblivion. It was quite evident that he could not survive and, later on in the day, he resigned as an MP (he could well have been subjected to a Parliamentary recall and thrown out if he hadn’t resigned) He claimed that he was standing down as a result of his children persuading him to go – disingenuous in the extreme and to the end because having accepted emoluents of £110,000 a year and then lobbying ministers for ‘favours’ towards his paymasters, he was clearly in breach of the rules. I look forward to the completion of the evisceration which well happen in NewsNight tonight at 10.30pm (BBC2)

Today started off with one of those irritating little things that come along to try us. I was expecting a small package to be delivered to us from our doctor’s surgery as they had previously told me it was ‘in the post’ But instead of the package, I received a little note to indicate that insufficient postage had been paid and ‘inviting’ me to pay the missing postage and organise a new date of delivery. So I negotiated the Royal Mail system to pay them the £2.00 which they reckoned they needed and now I can expect delivery not today but on Friday. This I could do without. It was one of those when it was touch-and-go’ whether we went down to the park by car or on foot.We took a gamble and went on foot and were glad we did.  On the way down, we had a chat with our Irish friend which was welcome as we had not seen her a few days. Then we bumped into one of her near neighbours, a French lady, who we are getting to know quite well and we thought we would seize the opportunity to have a coffee together as soon as we can see our way forward. After we had collected our newspaper and made our way to the park, the weather, although cold, was starting to brighten quite a lot leaving the park trees looking tremendous in their autumnal colours.  Then we walked home slowly enjoying the sunshine and wondering how long we were going to have a few fine days lik this. 

One is very conscious, particularly in November, to do what one can before the natural light fades. Knowing that I was running short of petrol, I went off fill the car up before I go shopping in the morning. Then, as it was adjacent to the petrol station, I availed myself of one of the new  ‘Home and Garden’ type stores so that I could buy some bits and bobs. One little thing I bought that our chiropodist had told us about and actually used was a little hand-held device made entirely of copper and zinc which enables a person to key in values on a public screen or even to pull a door shut behind oneself without actually touching the offending surface. Although the immediate need is probably much less now than in the months gone by, there will no doubt be instances when it will prove its worth. I also bought a few tiny little glass bottles into which I can put coins of various denominations. Then when I am dashing forth and know that I need money for a carpark or whatever, I grab the coins that I think I will need and this obviates the need to carry around a purse or lots of spare coins. I also took the opportunity to buy some cheap toiletries and one or two household things of which we were running short.

Tonight, we have seen one of those things that really brings the whole of the House of Commons into disrepute. A Conservative ex-minnister (Owen Paterson) had been found guilty by a House of Commons Committee of flagrantly breaching parliamentary rules by being a paid lobbyist without declaring his interest. He had been paid more than £110,000 for these activities and a two year investigation into his conduct concluded that there had been a flagrant breach of the rules. The House of Commons, following precedence, would normally have voted for a 30-day suspension.But as Boris Johnon has a majority of 80, they decided to abolish the committee that had adjudged Owen Paterson to be guilty and were going to set up a new committee, with a Tory majority to judge his case again, the first ‘guilty’ verdict having been set aside. Opposition MPs are incensed and are refusing to serve on the new committee which means that we will have the ultimate in Tory sleaze in which Tories break the rules, but then members of his own party rescue him by changing the rules after the event in a committee composed only of members of his own party. Whether this plays badly in the country or not, who can say? But the net result is that all politicians, not just Tory MPs, are adjudged to be guilty of sleaze and the reputation of the House of Commons as a whole sinks further into the mire.

A very interesting telephone call came my way in the erarly evening. This was the senior partner in the medical practice that looks after Meg and myself and he was telephoning to ask a favour. He conducts some training sessions with trainee doctors from the University of Birmingham and he wondered if he could use me as a resource for the students to question of a patient on the brink of diabetes who ‘hauled themselves back’ by radically reducing their weight (which I did four yeas ago) So I am standing by my phone/ipad to participate in this training session tomorrow. Quite exciting really!

The day started, as far as I was concerned, at 5 minutes past midnight as this was the time when we could access the National Savings and Investments (NS&I) Premium Bond checker to see if we had any success in the November draw. I have been impatiently waiting for this day to arrive as I had consolidated some of my savings into Premium Bonds on the basis that ½% interest was so miniscule that I might as well as forego this in order to participate in the NS&I ‘lottery’ that takes place every month. If you are successful, these ‘winnings’ can be added to the rest of your bonds – they are, in effect, a type of interest payment but there is the remore chance that you might win quite a lot. On the other hand, once you have built up a certain number of bonds then statistically you should be able to generate some ‘interest’ by winning a prize every month. Having got my collection of bonds in place by the end of September and then waiting the mandatory month, then the November draw is the first in which your tranche of bands can participate. I was delighted, and a little relieved, to find out that I had actually ‘won’ £25.00 in the November draw, which is then added to my total.

I was awoken early in the morning by my wife who informed me that the toilet in our ensuite was blocked. When I got up, I discovered that it was not only blocked but I suspect that my wife had panicked and flushed the loo again with the net result that it had actully overflowed. A quick burst on the long handled plunger which I always keep to hand in the garage was immediately put to use and whatever blockage there was was transitory in the extreme as the loo cleared itself and stayed unblocked after several more flushes. In the meantime, I had to cope with the effects of the flood which was mainly a soaked carpet although the toilet pedestal mat had taken some of the brunt. Several applications of ‘jumbo’ sized kitchen paper, treaded carefully to ‘lift’ the water out of the carpet eliminated most of the overflowed water so I have now put ‘policies’ in place to make sure that this event does not reoccur.

Immediately after breakfast, I telephoned our doctor’s surgery to get an appointment for Meg as we had been urged by a recent circular letter to to phone for an appointment as part of a ‘normal’ annual monitoring to which Meg is now subject. We were were offered a telephone appointment in the late morning which, whilst wecome, rather threw a spanner in our normal daily routine. So I went by car to pick up our newspaper and milk from the local Waitrose  which we often treat like the old-fashioned corner shop on occasions such as these. Then we had our elevenses at home eliminating any walks to the park and sitting back to wait for the doctor’s call (‘in the late morning’) This duly came along at 12.10 so we just had time to get this consultation all done before it was time for me to start my weekly walk down to attend my Pilates session. Once this was over and done with, we go home and had a rapid lunch and washing up knowing that we had arranged a Skype call with one of our Hampshire friends at 4.00pm in the afternoon. Then we had the most wonderful chat but an hour shot by incredibly quickly so we had to make a fairly rapid farewell to our friends. This was because we have another regular Facetime call with some of our oldest Waitrose friends who we call to have a chat once a week. Once again,more than an hour shot by and then it was time for our tea.

We have been following the COP26 talks with more than a passing degree of interest. Two interesting things have actually emerged today which actually might just be a sign that all is not lost on the Climate Change front. The first of these is an ‘agreement’  from several countries, including Brazil, Russia and Indonesia that aims to halt and reverse global deforestation over the next decade as part of a multibillion-dollar package to tackle human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. This is particularly significant as forests are one of the major ways in which carbon (dioxide) is actually removed from the atmosphere. The second agreement was potentially just as important. Leading an alliance of more than 100 countries, US President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have launched the Global Methane Pledge – an agreement to cut methane emissions by 30% between 2020 and 2030. As methane is some 80 times more lethal for the environment than carbon dioxide, then this too is another step in the right direction. One is intrigued to know how this reduction is to be achieved – if we can put men on the moon, surely it is quite possible that we fix low-cost contraptions to the back ends of animals to mitigate the effects of excessive methane emission.

Today being a Monday and also the 1st of the month, it very much feels like the time of year to make (and keep) good resolutions. As a baseline measurement, I decided to weigh myself for the first time for a month or so and was quite reassured to finish off with a BMI of 27.3 The evidence is somewhat mixed on this measure – there are some studies that suggest that anything over a BMI of 25 contributes (somewhat) to a reduced mortality but there are some studies ‘out there’ that indicate that a BMI a little over 25 can actually reduce the overall mortality. The reason for this discrepancy can be found on the amount of muscle mass that an individual possesses. As muscle is denser than fat, then a BMI of 27 for a muscular person may well be heathier (i.e. people die less ) than a BMI of 25 of which a higher proportion is fat rather than muscle. Notwithstanding all of this, I intend to nudge my weight down (particularly in the weeks before Chrismas) and get my BMI to below 25. Meg and I tarried a little as there seemed to be rain showers still sweeping avcross the country. Nonetheless, we walked down to the park and made for the bandstand as showers could engulf us at any moment. There we were joined by Seasoned World Traveller and we chewed the fat a little (politics, mainly) until the time came to strike for home. Then we had another meal of chicken which seemed to taste even nicer than yesterday’s.

After lunch, we were having a bit of a tidy up after lunch when we received a telephone call from the wife of the person who gardens for us (the ‘heavier’ and ‘more arkward’ type of gardening such as pruning) He had been found collapsed and was quite seriously ill in hospital whilst the medics were using scans of all kinds to discover the sources of the ‘leak’ of blood. After transfusions, he was in a better state than yesterday but investigations are continuing. Needless to say, our Thursday ‘garden up’ has been cancelled and all we can do is to send our good wishes and hopes for his speedy recovery.

Today is the first full day of the COP26  and there have been a number of stirring speeches. Prince Charles, who made one of them, must feel as though his hour has come as he has been going about this and similar green issues for about the last fifty years! But of course, stirring speeches are one thing and then we have to determine whether enough countries will pledge  towards trying to achive the 1.5% target (in the rise of emissions). Finally, of course, a pledge is one thing but how many countries will actually achieve their goal is another as parts of the electorate may reject or not be able to afford critical policies (e.g. replacing domestic boilers with much more expensive heat pumps). A question to which I have been trying to find the answer is as follows. How are we going to judge whether the delegates as whole approve a move to a 1.5% target? Evidently, it will not be a simple majority of the delegates (even weighted by the size of their populations) – so will it judged to have been ‘adopted’ of a certain proportion of the earth’s population (measured via their delegates) reaches a certain trigger length, say 70%? No doubt, this question may well be answered once we get towsrds the end of the conference but in the meantime, I can only just wonder. 

For the COVID news tonight, I will just quote just one statistic. The last UK figure was 40,000 new infections today whilst in Disneyland Shanghai the entire number of visitors (nearly 34,000) were in lockdown because of one positive case of COVID.

One political story this evening is the amount of money that has been completely wasted by the present government. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has insisted it is ‘slightly unfair’ to focus on the amount of taxpayers’ cash lost to fraud during the emergency rollout of schemes during the coronavirus pandemic. Labour’s Dame Angela Eagle raised concerns about the £37 billion spent on the test and trace scheme and the possible £27 billion lost to fraud under COVID support schemes. It is certain true that the government threw all kinds of cash around in the early days of the pandemic and an enormous number of ‘white collar’criminals made off with an eye-watering amount of government cash with little or no accountability.

SoupMaker time again this evening and my fourth venture in this regard was to make some celery soup (the recipe also calls for some fried onion and a couple of potatoes as well) This worked out fine and I used some of the croutons I made the other day (and had deep frozen) which got reheated with a little hot oil and some marjaram herb (out of a pot)