Sunday, 29th May, 2022 [Day 804]

Today being Sunday I walked down early to collect our newspaper and then got back to have a bit of breakfast in front of the TV whilst watching the Sunday (politics) programme. The show today was hosted by Clive Myrie and also included was a fairly lengthy extract of an interview that he had conducted with the Russian ambassador. Clive Myrie, in my view, did an absolutely excellent job in presenting the Russian ambassador with evidence of war crimes (which the Russians say is all ‘faked’ evidence). He had a quiet, polite but very insistent style of interviewing. One suspeccts that he acually made more headway than a more aggressive style of interviewing. Wishing to confirm my impressions, I did a quick Google search and came up with the following: ‘Clive Myrie was brilliant, there is no other word for it. There were some close ups of The Ambassador’s face and looking at his eyes I felt that not only was he lying he was afraid, probably of saying the wrong thing and incurring Putin’s wrath.’ I am sure that in professional terms, Clive Myrie has done himself no harm at all and he must have shot up in the estimation of his bosses at the BBC. After breakfast, Meg and I walked to the park and decided to vary our route slightly – quite by accident, we bumped into Seasoned World Traveller and our University of Birmingham friend and whilst they made room for Meg on the benches, I sat on our portable, three-legged portable stool facing them so that we could have a face-to-face conversation. We had quite a long chat on politics and a certain amount of confessional times in which in our lifetime careers we were in danger of getting sacked, largely because we stood our ground in the face of managements who wished to go down rather a circuitous, not to say devious, route. After a fairly long chat, we made for home and ran across one of Irish friends who was busy gardening, until we interrupted him. Having got home, it was time to cook Sunday lunch and this is always a slightly a longer procedure as we have slow cookers to clean up, onion gravy to make and so on. However, it makes subsequent meals during the week so much quicker and easier to prepare and we also take the opportunity to divide whatever meat we have cooked in two as one half gets labelled up and then frozen for future weeks.

I enjoyed reading some of the detailed accounts of the ways in Downing Street, despite all protestations, tried and may have succeeded in influencing the final draft of the Sue Gray report. The Sunday Times lets us know that Carrie Johnson may well have had another party (illegally) besides the infamous ‘Abba’ party, the initial draft referred to loud music emanating from here but this was excised from the final report, the numbers of named people was reduced from 30 to 15 and the reports of a couple having sex whilst ‘at work’ or even partying did not make it to the final draft (because of absence of proof which is not surprising) I have a feeling that little revelations will keep dribbling out and whilst 10 Downing Street wants us to ‘move on’ I suspect that this is a pious hope. The Labour Party, for example, in one of the days when they can choose the subject for debate will undoubtedly spend the whole debate discussing the Sue Gray report and will challenge any Tory MPs present in the chamber to defend Boris Johnson in public.

After lunch, I did a little bit of gardening. Principally, this was a quick flash with my edging tool up and down the ‘long edge’ of our communal grassed area, pulling out some of the bracken fronds which can appear and make tremendous growth if not pulled out immediately and finally  a cleaning and tidy up of some of my hand tools which had been left in a state of some disarray when the patio and associated paths down the side of the house were cleared before the cleaning job we had performed upon it.

The Champions Leage Final between Liverpool and Real Madrid in Paris turned into a debacle last night with the start of the match delayed for more than half an hour and several thousand Liverpool fans not being able to get into the ground until half-time. Sky News have unearthed some video evidence that shows a broad access way was blocked by 3-4 police vans parked across one of the accessways causing a bottleneck which was the start of all the problems. UEFA themselves claim that many of the Liverpool fabs had forged tickets which may, or may not be true. Given the powerful vested interests at work, I suspect that a completely independent investigation of ‘what went wrong’ may never actually take place. I would not like to have paid a huge price for a ticket and then travel to Paris only to see one half of the match and one’s own team beaten.

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