Today my son and I (well, my son actually) installed the updated ‘gismos’ that we have just bought that route the WiFi signals through our house’s mains wiring system. The old units were about 8 years old and may have been a little outdated as the world of comms technology is coming on in leaps and bounds. The new units increased the WiFi signal strength sufficiently to give my son a workable signal strength and download speed in the corner of the house where he prefers to work (but where the route to the router is somewhat indirect) So this is another protential problem averted and we are now back more or less to the state we were in about two weeks ago, except that we now have a much improved download speed in the ground floor of our property, given that the fibre cable comes through a hole in the wall and is located in a room in the front of the house. Today is the day when I go shopping first thing in the morning so there I was at one minute to 8.00am queuing outside th supermarket door. Having got the shopping home, I then unpacked it whilst chatting with our domestic help and cooking a breakfast for Meg and myself. When all of this was done, we decided we needed to go to Waitrose in Droitwich to buy some items of clothing for Meg which I know the store stocks. But in the event, getting to Droitwich was less than straighforward. For a start, we soon discovered that the main road to Droitwich from Bromsgrove was blocked at some point, so we had to turn round and find another route. Even this second route seemed a bit problematic so we worked our way around that and eventually got to Droitwich. As soon as we got there, we made straight for our favourite coffee bar and treated ourselves to some good coffee and a huge toasted teacake which was split between us. After this, we piled into the Cancer Relief charity shop which is immediately next door. Whilst there, we discovered a stunning blue top which suited Meg down to the ground. Whilst she was trying it on, I discovered a stainless steel cafetiere but I was not quite sure how it worked. When I asked for some assistance from the shop assistant who could not provide me with any, another very friendly customer who was nearby told me he had one almost exactly the same and showed me how it worked. On the strength of this, I went ahead and bought it and then we made our way to our favourite Wilko hardware store. Whilst there, we bought the normal smattering of goods (some cosmetics, some stationery and so on) and finally we made our way down to Waitrose which was meant to be the object of our visit in the first place. I popped into the store and bought Meg the ‘knee-highs’ that are stocked within the store. Finally, it was a circuitous drive home as the traffic obstructions that we had encountered earlier were still there. The minute I got in, I started cooking a fish dinner with some smoked hake fillets I had bought earlier on in the day and our domestic help was more than happy to have a little of this as I also cooked some very low calorie rice substitute which I bought earlier.

After lunch and a doze, I realised that there were one or items I had forgotten from the morning shopping so I shot into town by car to get a top up. I also bought one or two things from a neighbouring store including some rather fine quality ceramic mugs wich we are going to take up to Yorkshire with us to help us enjoy our drinks of tea and coffee. Although we do not go until next Wednesday, I am collecting one or two little things that I know we can take with us to make our stay in the hotel so much more restful. Today has been a much cooler day, weatherwise, with a hint of rain in the air when we were out in Droitwich. According to the app on my iPhone, we should be getting quite a continuous band of rain during the night and this may well persist throughout tomorrow morning. I think we are all longing for one of those prolonged downpours but it may well be that we just end with a slight smattering of rainfall which hardly penetrates the earth at all.

Now that the two Conservative candidates are putting themselves forward to the Conservative party membership across the country, there is quite a lot of detailed scrutiny of the the two candidates. Liz Truss’s brand of economics is receiving particular attention as most economists are of the view that in present conditions, reducing taxes will be inflationary and the impact on growth will be minimal. Rishi Sunak’s past financial dealings whilst a young man is also receiving a lot of scrutiny and we will have weeks more of this yet. As things stand, Truss is way ahead of Sunak in the minds of the Conservative members and were they to vote early, then Sunak’s bid to become Prime Minister seems doomed from the start.

Today was very much ‘the day after the day before’ as we seem to have survived the unprecedented heat of yesterday. The sky was a little clouded over and whilst still a bit close and muggy, there was a gentle and cooling breeze which was so welcome after yesterday. Meg and I got slowly underway this morning and eventually I went out by car to collect the newspaper and popped into Waitrose for one or two things. Then it was just a gentle day, taking care of my accounts and filing some paperwork. I imagined that I was going to have to get into an argument with my ex-broadband provider as my email inbox suggested that another bill was on its way. But when I studied my account details on the net it seemed that the ‘bill’ was actually a refund for services not used and the account was now closed, as indeed it should have been. As Meg and I had not had a walk anywhere this morning, we thought that we would have an early lunch but did not fancy anything too heavy. I had got a small quiche out of the freezer so we decided to have this warmed up complemented with some salad type things that I have left over from this week so this was a meal quickly thrown together and easy to clean up afterwards.

We watched Boris Johnson at Prime Minster’s Questions which was Johnson’s last stand at the despatch box as Prime Minister. The performance was much as you would expect with a massive amount of bluster. For his part, Keir Starmer just read a list of the ‘blue on blue’ attacks that have taken place as candidates in the Conservative party leadership race have just been taking great chunks out of each other. But the major event of the day was always going to be the announcement at 4.00pm to see which of the remaining three contenders for the Conservative party leadership would be eliminated leaving the top two to put themselves forward to less than 200,000 Conservative party members. When the result came, it was a bit of an anticlimax as Rishi Sunak secured the first place and the second place was easily taken by Liz Truss as was predicted in this blog yesterday. This was because about one half of the Kemi Badenock (right wing, Brexit type vote) went immediately to Truss with the remaining half split almost equally between Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt. All of the commentators had said that it was going to be an incredibly tight race and all kinds of ‘games’ were being played with some candidates rumoured to be lending votes to others in order to block a third. But it was very simple really as the right wing, Brexit vote just flowed from one candidate to the next and it was pretty obvious (well, to me) that Truss would come through. According to various surveys that have taken place, it seems that Liz Truss is way ahead of Rishi Sunak amongst the Conservative party membership so it is a foregone conclusion that she is going to be the next Conservative party leader and Prime Minister although the result will not be announced until the first week of September. In the meanwhile, Liz Truss has tweeted that she is ‘going to hit the ground running’ but forgot to include the word running which has caused a lot oF amusement in Labour Party circles. I think the Labour Party think that Liz Truss is quite beatable when it comes to a general election in about two years time.

If I have to reflect upon the terrible events of yesterday when several houses in the village of Wemmington in the East of London were consumed by fire, it is that finally the reality of climate change may be brought home to many people. I am not sure how the climate change deniers account for what happened yesterday but I suspect there is a realisation that the scientists were right. Without making an overtly political point here, it does appear that what the Greens have been saying for decades is probably correct and we need to rethink our social and economic structures. One comment heard today is that the London Fire Service has had its busiest day since the Second World War which, of course, ended some 77 years go.

This afternoon, whilst waiting for the Conservative party leadership elections to unfold, I started filing all of my BT broadband paperwork and exploring what the website had to offer. As part of the package, I am given an allocation of eleven email addresses with btinternet.com – normally one would have one’s own name but the evident one has been taken so I am thinking of some variations tht I can use. One of them I have utilised to ‘file away’ most of the email correspondence I have received from BT so that this is all in one place and another I am going to use for email that could be ‘spammy’ but no doubt I will think of uses for the remaining addresses. It seems as though I have unlimited storage, though, and the email system is bare-bones but adequate for the occasional use.

Today was a day when it was widely predicted that temperatures would exceed 40 degrees celsius perhaps in several places across the UK and this inevitably came to pass later on in the day. Meg and I knew that we would have to be especially careful throughout the day and that we had to take pains not to expose ourselves to any unnecessary degree of risk posed by the extremely hot temperatures predicted for the day. The huge plume of hot air may well move northwards to be followed by thunderstorms perhaps as early as tomorrow so we are aware that today is the type of day to be ‘tunnelled’ through as it were. After we had some cooling showers in the bathroom, we went by car to collect our newspaper and to see if any of the jolly Waitrose crowd were in evidence in the coffee bar. There we met with one of pre-pandemic friends as well as Seasoned World Traveller who made an appearance so we chatted about the events of the day (politics, weather and so on) Having taken advice from several people around me, I made the decision not to attend my Pilates class in the middle of the day. Although the exercise studio is air conditioned, it still meant going by car in the hottest part of the day so I texted my Pilates teacher to say that I was going to give today’s session a miss. She was a little disappointed, I think, but at the end of the day I thought I was probably making a sensible decision. When we got home, we treated ourselves to an ice-cream on a stick which I bought in the supermarket the other day and it was just the job for a day like today. I have a policy of getting us through the day of having a series of pint glasses each filled with cold water and cordial lodged in the fridge and each time we pass them by, we have a gulp of cold water. We had a simple lunch of fishcakes with a few steamed vegetables and some coleslaw and it took the minimum of cooking.

After we had lunched we were eager to see the latest round of voting in the Conservative elections for the party leader and, as expected, Kemi Badenoch was eliminated having has a good run so far and enhanced her chances of a good cabinet post substantially. There is going to be a terrific fight for the second place behind Rishi Sunak but I am pretty sure I know what is going to happen. I reckon that at least 50% of the Badenoch votes will now go to Liz Truss (as right wingers allways support each other massively) and from this stage on Sunak and Truss will go the country. Here, according to all of the opinion polls, Truss supporters will easily outvote Sunak and hence I predict that she will be the next Tory leader, not least as she can sort of claim that she is carrying the ‘Johnson heritage’ forward. Having said this, a videoclip is circulating of her saying what a disaster leaving the EU would be when she addressed the Food and Drink Federation just before the referendum. Also, she regularly cmne bottom in all of the TV debates where viewers were asked to rate the perfomance of the candidates. On the other hand, the Labour Party may feel that she is quite a beatable candidate rather than Sunak. You read it here first!

I had a rather extraordinary telphone call with a representative of BT today. I had got a text on my phone to see if I could discuss my latest upgrade to Super Fibre 500 which as it turns out gives me 10x the speed for only an extra tenner a month. It looked as though some kind of duplicate order had crept onto the system so my contact in BT, who I shall call Susan, quickly cancelled the misplaced contract. Then she asked if there was anything she could do for me and I mentioned the landline I wanted to get back. She put this through the system and thought that all being well it could probably be restored by next Monday. Asked if she could do anything else for me, I mentioned the poor reception that we get one of the bedrooms in which my son works when he calls around. She performed a series of tests upon the line for me and we looked at some settings in the router. Finally, if at all fails, she thinks she could probably solve our problems by some repeater units (up to three) which we can have around the house – if they don’t work, then we have a fourteen day cooling off period so we cancel the order and return the units. She is going to phone me back within a 2-hour time slot next Tuesday when my landline number should have been restored and we can discuss options to increase WiFi reception in the relevant bedroom. But I have experimented with my iPad and we may get the reception we need by altering the location of the desk and the WiFi within the room but we may need to experiment further.

Well, today has arrived which is the first of the two really hot days through which we had to ‘tunnel’ as it were. Very first thing this morning, our son called round and we got round to installing our new BT router. This really was incredibly simple and all we had to do was to plug it in and then enter the passwords for the new network into our computers and phones. So far, so good but we haven’t yet tackled the TV which we will do in the fullness of time. Then we have four new phones which we had to register with the router, which again could not be more simple (it involved pressing a button for two seconds and that was it) Then all we had to do was to ‘name’ each handset (kitchen, study, lounge, bedroom) and this too proved simple. Having got all of this done, we tested the broadband speeds and got 50 MBps which seems adequate but it is actually slower than the copper cable which it replaced. But more on this later.

After breakfast, the priority was for me to get out onto the road before it became too hot both to pick up our daily newspaper and also to visit our preferred supermarket to get a supply of ice cream. Normally, we would have been quite well stocked up on this but when I last did a regular food shopping, nearly all of the ice cream was gone. no doubt with people stocking up in anticipation of the warmer days ahead. I managed to get three tubs of ice cream and some ice cream lollipops on a stick and this was a fast and easy transaction. When I got home, the next thing to do was to get onto BT to ask them if they could resurrect my old landline number. There is a rather obscure department of BT called ‘Keep Live’ or something similar so it is all in their hands at the moment and I await a text or similar communication in the days ahead to see what success they are having.

As you might expect, the rolling news programmes are full of the up-to-minute accounts of what is happening around the countryside as people try to cope with temperatures heading to be in excess of 40 degrees celsius. Long distance trains are having to keep their speeds well down as a buckled rail could give a rapid derailment so a journey from Leeds to London will take five hours rather than 2.5 hours. Several airports are having massive problems as the tarmac on the runways melts literally making the aircraft stick to the ground. There is masses of advice how to protect one’s health and drinking plenty of cold fluids is stressed, not least because excess heat and dehydration mkes the blood less viscose and therefore more liable to clot which translates into heart attacks and strokes. In the light of this information, I have filled several half pint glasses with cold water and some cordial and placed them in our fridge. Every time to go past them, we have several gulps of fluid which strategy seems to have worked fine so far. In the early afternoon, I consulted the thermometer which we have outside the house and the maximum displayed was 34 degrees at about 2.30pm. By 3.00 pm it had come off the peak very slightly and is now about 33.5 degrees at 4.30 in the afternoon.

Now that I have the internet freely available to me, I decided to do a ‘browse’ and see what BT packages were available to me and whether I was on the correct package or not. I suspect that I was on the lowest tranche of fibre broadband and then get onto BT to see if I could speak with anyone sensible. After my past experiences, I avoided all of the sales teams altogether and got through to a technical department where I explained that I had fibre broadband installed that morning and wondered if I was on the correct package. They started talking about the most expensive options with ‘silly’ broadband speeds and even sillier prices but as they talked me down the various options, I eventually chose an option which increases my broadband speed 10-fold for another £20.00 a month. This seemed quite acceptable to me and after going through all of the terms and conditions, to which I assented, I should be upgraded to this fast broadband speed sometime tomorrow morning. This may be as late as 23.59 hours but could be as early as tomorrow morning (after all, all they have to do is to ‘click a box’ on the software that will control such things).

In the elections for the Conservative party leadership, several candidates have pulled out of the ITV hustings programmes tonight as the Conservative party were getting dismayed at the ‘blue on blue’ attacks. The latest round of voting takes place this afternoon and the latest result will be available at 8.00pm this evening.

Today started off quite well. First of all, Meg and I made sure that our bedroom was sufficiently cool for a good night’s sleep and this we both obtained, so at least we got off to a flying start. Then quite early on, I sent off a quick email and WhatsApp message to my friend in Scarborough to check his availabiliy for late August. Once I had received a positive reply, I went ahead and made a booking with the same hotel in Harrogate for which we already have a booking in ten days time. We were offered an incredibly good price – better than some B&Bs – so I was tempted by and quite readily accepted a room upgrade which means that we have an even better room when we go at the end of August for about the same price. Actually things could hardly have worked out better because when we have a stay in the hotel at the end of this month, we can make some arrangements for a good afternoon tea for my sister and we will be able to enquire what arrangements we are able to make for a suitable birthday cake. All of this having been done, we then decided to make our cautiously down to the park for our daily perambulation. I had already picked up the Sunday newspaper early on this morning as part of my usual Sunday morning routine. As I walked down for the newspaper, I noticed that the park gates were shut so we parked on a service road opposite the park. Then we made our way onto our normal bench and were soon joined by our University of Birmingham friend who we were especially pleased to see as we had not seen him for several days. We were just on the point of leaving when we joined by our Irish friends who were off on an extended walk as they often do on a Sunday morning so we had our normal jolly little chats before we made our way home by car as we specially wished to avoid walking in the full mid-day sun today. Looking at the TV schedules for this afternoon, we noticed that they were putting on a re-run of The Railway Children which, of course, we all saw decades ago. I think the reason for the re-showing at this point of time is because a sequel to The Railway Children has just been written and is due to be released into cinemas quite soon now. Many of the TV pages are saying that it would be a good idea to see the original before you go off and see the updating, so this repeat makes a lot of sense. Jenny Agutter played the part as a 17-year old and will star all of these decades later as the grandmother in the update of the story. We had some ham cooking in the slow cooker so to make sure we did not waste any time cooking on an already hot day, I put thick slices of ham between two slices of toast (for Meg) and rice cakes (for myself) so we finished off having a hot, but smallish meal, within minutes of getting in so that we sit down and watch the film in some peace.

This afternoon, and thinking ahead to our second little stay in Harrogate towards the end of August, I decided to renew my Senior RailCard. As it hapened, Meg’s card had a couple of years left on it but mine runs out some three weeks before I intended to use it again. You would think that the system would be simple enough to set up and run but it kept falling over and apologising for enexplained and unanticipated errors. I was just on the point of clicking ‘Accept’ when I noticed that they had my details and Meg’s intertwined even though we obviously had seperate numbers. Eventually, I got my card renewed by following different routes on the website but this one needed one to type in a 30+ ID number fom one’s passport as proof of identity. Although it was time consuming and error prone, I eventually got my renewal conducted on time and opted for a plastic card rather than a digital one on my phone as if my phone goes AWOL or the App falls over then I would have no backup. So at the end of today, I have two little mini-breaks in Harrogate ordered as well as a luncheon date with our friends in Oxfordshire. In addition our Irish friends are going to make a booking for the four of us on the occasions of our wedding anniversaries in early September that are within days of each other (and hence a joint meal). Meg is looking forward to seeing the adapation of ‘Little Women‘ which is the kind of book which was put in the path of adolescent girls whilst we males were fed a diet of G H Henty and similarly (vaguely imperialistic) stuff by G Rider Haggard if I remember the author’s name correctly.

First thing this morning, my package arrived from BT which contains a router and four new specialist phones. Our new service becomes ‘live’ some time on Monday and, in theory, all one has to do is to plug in various leads and off you go. I am sure it is not going to be as simple as this but our son is going to come over in the cool of the evening on Monday night to help us in this venture. Today, we are counting down towards the really horrendous heatwave which is heading our way, moving northwards from the rest of Europe. On Monday and Tuesday next, it appears almost certain that somewhere in the country, a spot will reach 40 degrees celsius. The previous record was 38.7 and this was set in Cambridgeshire. The Met Office have issued a red warning (danger of loss of life)for a great plume of heat hitting Central, Eastern and Southern England. All kinds of warnings are being given, not only to damage to individuals from excessive heat but also to the nation’s infrastucture. Tar seems to be bubbling up from roads, railway lines are in danger of buckling, utility pipes are in danger of cracking and so on. The warnings are so severe on this occasion that I think most of the country will almost ‘de facto’ shut down on Monday and Tuesday. So I think that many people are moderating their behaviour, for example by taking their exercise, including dogs, very early in the morning and then keeping to the coolest place in their houses or gardens during the heat of the day on Monday and Tuesday.

Today was Carnival day in Bromsgrove. We picked up our newspaper by car and could not then get near to our local park because it was let over to Carnival type activities. The normal car parks were out of bounds but, fortunately, we managed to knock on the front door of our Irish friends and to park our car on their drive. From here, we managed to get into the park via a side entrance, only to find the park full of fun-fair rides, fast food stalls, temporary toilets everywhere and all of the other things that accompany a carnival. We managed to get to our usual bench and were soon joined by Seasoned World Traveller who came and spent a few minutes with us. We exchanged messages of support to each other to keep ourselves safe for the next few days and we may not even venture out of the house. On our way out of the park, we witnessed the carnival ‘floats’ going past on a series of large low loaders and flat bed trucks and there seemed to be lots of young people dancing away and enjoying themselves as the floats moved at a snail’s pace up the road. We got back to our car through people thronging the main road to witness the carnival parade and then made a circuitous journey back to our house, as some of the more immediate ways home were closed or blocked off to allow for the carnival parade. When we got home, we made a quick lunch of quiche and some salad type things which were quick and easy to prepare. This was just as well because it was going to be the ‘Bite Sized Classics‘ concert in our local church. We set off at 2.30 in order to get to the concert in plenty of time for a 3.00pm start and sat in our usual pew. The concert was provided by a prodigiously talented local musician who was accompanied on a keyboard by her father. The repetoire contained some some stunning classical ways by Handel and by Mozart that we had not heard before as well as some film classics such as ‘Ladies in Lavander‘ and ‘Schindler’s List‘ which are probably familiar to everyone. The concert which was only an hour long but contained about 8-9 items was most enjoyable and, after that, many of us piled into the Parish Hall for some tea, biscuits and cake. At the end of the performance, people seemed to give freely and generously to the collecction plates soliciting donations that were destined eventually for the Ukraine.

When the ‘bun fest’ was over, some of us were in a dilemma because we had an hour to spare before our ‘normal’ Church service started on Saturday evening. We decided to stay behind and chat with one of my fellow Parochial Church Council committee members who know us anyway from chatting to us in the park. We did exchange a few ‘medical’ stories as we are both of the age when we have required surgery in the last few years but it was pleasant to get to know one of our fellow parishioners through a more extended chat than is possible when arriving or leaving church on a normal Saturday evening.

Last night, I received a very welcome voicemail from our Irish friends down the road. They had been trying to bump into us (and us into them) for some days now but we got an invitation to pop in for coffee at 11.00am this morning. This we did because we had got the accumulation of lots of bits of family and other news that we wished to relay to them. We glanced at the weather before we walked down this morning but I had already made a journey by car to pick up our copy of the Times and the sky seemed to have a few clouds to keep the temperature down a smidgeon so we pleased to walk down. On the way, we paused to have a chat with our Italian friend who was bobbling about in her front garden and we keep on promising ourselves that we must make time for a longer chat rather than just a chance meeting in the street. With our Irish friends, we had a wonderful selection of sandwiches and some cake and were persuaded, as we were not motoring back, to have some refreshing alcoholic beverages as well. One of the things we wanted to do was to see if we could set up something for our 55th wedding anniversary which is going to be in early September. Although we are now six weeks before the anticipated date, we are conscious of the fact that bookings are best made some time in advance. Our friends have their own favourite restaurant in which we can eat midday so without further ado, our friend made a note of our agreed date and is going to make a booking for the four of us whilst we still have plenty of time. There were some church related matters that we were pleased to chat over with other and then we caught up with bits and pieces about which we had wanted to chat for a long time. We spent a couple of very happy hours in the company of our friends and then walked slowly home. The sky was quite cloudy and it did not look as though rain was really threatening so it was a pleasant walk home. Having said that, the Met Office had today issues a red warning about the extreme heat which is going to hit us on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday where it is anticipated that the temperature may well exceed 40 degrees somewhere in the UK. So if Meg and I make any venture out in the days ahead, we will take every precaution because red warnings from the Met Office are very rare and are presumably meant to be taken very seriously. When Meg and I got home, we cookd ourselves a couple of fillets of seabass served on a bed of lettuce – this meal has the advantage of being nutritious,non-fattening but exceptionally quick to prepare.

Once we had had our post-prandial rest, I texted my sister in Yorkshire and some friends who now live in Scarborough. I am trying to arange a window of time in which I can take my sister out for a celebratory meal of some sort as she will be 80 years old this year. In the same visit up to Yorkshire, we are hoping that we can coincide with our friends living in Scarborough and the plan, if it comes off, is to each take the train to York and then find a restaurant for a long midday meal and catchup. We are planning this for some time in late August and are hoping that the really good deal which we got on the hotel in central Harrogate we can manage to repeat on the dates that we want. This evening is going to be the opening night of The Proms and there is a going to be a performance of Verdi’s Requiem to open this season’s concerts. When I worked down in London in the mid-1960’s, I quite often went to concerts in the Royal Albert Hall. This is because they often sold tickets at some heavily discounted prices which even as an inpecunious civil servant could afford. I cannot quite remember how I got the tickets now but I think that an allocation went to the London Hostels Association which was a non profit making body which provided accommodation to young civil servants, as otherwise they could not afford to take up a position in London. We did lots of things that were cheap and cost no money such as organising a series of quizzes across the various hostels. Eventually, I became very friendly with the Sports and Social organiser for the LHA and helped him to put together the little booklet which we produced once per month and sold to the hostel residents. This is when I think I acquired a sort of taste for journalism which has stayed with me (for better or worse) throughout life.

Thursday is the day when I do my weekly shopping and today was a ‘heavy’ week as last week’s proved to be quite a light one and these things balance out. I was first in the queue to get into the supermarket and shopping is quite a stress-free experience this early in the morning. On my way home, I collected our newspaper and then it was off to home for a tiny breakfast (a poached egg on a rice cracker, following the slogan coined, I think, by Salmin Rushdie to ‘go to work on an egg’) Then it was a case of getting all of the washing hung out on the line as it was such an excellent drying day, fed Miggles the cat and finally prepared our elevenses for our trip to the park. We went into town by car this morning as time was marching on and we were delighted to have a conversation with Intrepid Octogenerian Hiker who we see practically every day that we go to the park and who is always busy completing his 9-10 kilometres for the day. We then made contact with our our recently established Lickey friends who follow this blog and told me things about myself I had long forgotten. We had some interesting discussions about the ways in which, when we teach ourselves languages, it is quite possible to make terrible mistakes. There are what linguists call ‘false friends’ where you are pretty sure you know the meaning of a word but it can land you in some trouble. The best example of this genre that I know of is the Spanish adjective ’embarasada’ which sounds to English ears to mean ’embarrassed’ but actually means ‘pregnant’ so you can see how this is likely to end up wih gales of laughter. So we had a pleasant chat and no doubt there will be many more in the days ahead. After we lunched (and dozed for a litle) I got onto BT to see if there was any news about the four phones and the router that we have on order with them and that we need if we are going to get our landline and fibre-based broadband up and running next Monday. Time is rapidly running out for these items of equipment to arrive so having got through to the relevant department within BT, I found out that the required kit had been despatched today by BT and was now in the hands of Royal Mail itself and I was informed that the gear should arrive with me on Saturday. This sounds like ‘just in time’ with a vengeance but I suppose there is always Monday morning but things might be a little frantic by then.

The results of the second round of voting for the Conservative party leader were announced at 3.00pm. As widely predicted, the Attorney General Suella Braverman who had only just crept into the the current round actually lost votes and was then eliminated. Now the total list is down to five and this has to be whittled down to two. Of course, when candidates are eliminated, there is a frantic lobbying to try to secure their erstwhile supporters for the next round. Sometimes, this is easy to predict as the ‘wings’ of the party tend to be very loyal to each other – but not always. So the 28 or so Braverman voters will almost certainly go to the most convinced of the remaining right winger/Brexit inclined candidates which in the current context means Liz Truss (and this is what happened) But this is where the politics gets really Machiavellian because if it can be demonstrated that you spotted the eventual winner at an earlier stage and publically pledged your support, then there is always the prospect that you will be rewarded with a Cabinet position. This sometimes means that MPs such as Gavin Williamson, one of the least competent Ministers of Education in the modern era, owe their appointment to the fact that they led the campaigns for the winning candidate. So this is politics – promises are made and then not redeemed, a certain amount of black propaganda and ‘dirt’ is hurled backwards and forwards. There are some stories that some of the candidates have been leaking ‘unsavoury’ details of other candidates that might be damaging to them to the Labour Party so that the ammunition is fired by the official opposition rather than one’s own side. It brings to mind the oft repeated aphorism in politics, with particular reference to the House of Commons that one’s opponents are to the front of you (i.e. the opposition) but one’s enemies are behind you)i.e. members of your own party). Although Rishi Sunak is the candidate in the lead as of this evening and Penny Mordaunt is not too far behind, getting into the last two is not the end of the game. It seems that Penny Mordaunt is much more popular with the Tory rank and file in the constituency parties out in the country so that it could be that even if Sunak + Mordaunt come out as the two preferred candidates of the parliamentary party, the real election may well depend upon the wider votes of Tory members in the constituencies so Mordaunt may well romp ahead and win the entire contest.

Today was a day when Meg and I were going to treat ourselves to a day out and we had chosen to spend the day in Stratford. Our domestic help had helpfully given us the postcode for a central car park in Stratford and having collected our newspaper and then filled up with petrol, we made our way there with no difficulty. When we were navigating Stratford today, although we had visited it previously, it seemed both enormous and teeming with tourists. The car park was attached to a huge leisure centre and it was not immediately evident to us whether to navigate to the north, south, east or west out of the car park. Fortunately, we seemed to head off in the right direction and we walked in the vague direction of the river. We found ourselves in an Italian type coffee bar and here we had some elevenses and enjoyed an indifferent cup of coffee and an equally indifferent pastry. But then we got into conversation with the couple on the next table and enjoyed an exceptionally stimulating half hour of chat. We started out with politics (trying to discern who might be forced out of the Tory leadership campaign in today’s vote when the results will be announced at 5.00pm this evening). We then chatted over a whole range of issues as our chatty ‘coffee neigbour’ was a business studies graduate so we had quite a lot in common swopping some of our industrial experiences and a few stories and jokes from our collective memory. Eventually we parted having exchanged business cards and as it was 1.00pm by this time, Meg and I went in search of a suitable place to lunch and found a Cafe Rouge which is rather a conservative choice of place in which to lunch but we did not feel like trailing about too much. We had a middling type of meal after which we were quite happy just to retrace our steps and return home.

The really big political news this afternoon was the result of the first round of voting for Conservative MPs to choose their own leader. Of the eight remaining candidates it is perhaps interesting to note that that the candidates split equally male and female (4 apiece) and are equally split in terms of ethnicity (again, four ‘white’ and 4 BAME candidates) But this round is going to be particularly interesting because after all of the protestations of support, this is the first time that in a secret ballot it may become apparent who has real support from fellow MPs and who does not. In some ways, it reminds me of the ways in which the Pope is elected from amongst the cardinals in the Catholic Church as some candidates evidently gain ground through the rounds of voting and some fall back. At 5.00pm the results were announced and the eight candidates were now reduced to six as Jeremy Hunt failed to reach the required threshhold of 30 votes as did Nadhim Zahawi. Personally, I was surprised to see that Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, just crept over the line into the next round and even the Times was saying today that nobody thinks that she will come close to success. But the real ‘dark horse’ of this round of voting was Penny Mordant who was a former defence Secretary, sacked by Boris Johnson (perhaps on the grounds that she was a bit too competent to be in his cabinet and might have stood up to him). For reasons that are not entirely clear, she has become the darling of the members of the Tory party out in the constituencies, replacing Liz Truss who used to hold the No. 1 spot. In today’s round of voting, Rishi Sunak retains the pole position but Penny Mordant had established a real momentum, rapidly improving the numbers of committed supporters and endorsements and taking the number 2 slot quite convincingly. There will be hustings tomorrow morning and then a further round of voting tomorrow afternoon but I do not think it has yet been announced what the threshhold of successful votes will be – this is in the hands of the 1922 committee who decide it round by round.Penny Mordaunt has kept a fairly low profile hitherto. Her promotional vide may have seemed rather ‘naff’ to the media professionals and started off badly by showing Johnny Peacock, the paralympic champion, winning one of his contests but the video clip was not included with his pernission and he insisted that he be removed from it in case it might appear that there was a degree of endorsement. The rest of the video was full of Churchillian rhetoric and rousing patriotic music reflecting Penny Mordant’s close military associations and this probably appealed to the ‘blue rinse’ brigade back in the ranks of the Tory party faithful. But I suspect that her real appeal is that she was not part of the Johnson cabinet and could therefore distance herself from the current administration all of whom were complicit in the Johnson lies and often defended them in public. Tomorrow’s results will again prove interesting.

Today, fortunately, was just a little bit cloudier than yesterday and consequently the heat was just a little bit easier to bear. But today being a Tuesday we go down to Waitrose and meet with our usual crowd of people – well, some of them anyway. As usual, we had a jolly good time and also took the opportunity to buying a few things of which we were short. Then we made our way home and I got prepared for my normal Pilates class later on in the morning. This was rather a strange class as there was only myself and one of the faithful regulars who has been attending the class for years now.

A few weeks go, I was ‘volunteered’ onto the Parochial Church council of the church I attend together with Meg on a weekly basis. We have had one meeting already but this was largely procedural concerned with getting some of our number into the leadership roles, followed by a lengthy discussion of how we were going to go about our task. Our church has had a Parochial Church Council at some time in the dim and distant past but COVID and changing philosophies about the role of the laiety makes for a new situation so we are almost starting ‘ab initio’. But tonight was our first real business meeting and the discussions ranged from the procedural (how do we make our own Council more representative of the congregation in terms of gender, ethnicity and age distribution), to the chatechismic (how do we best prepare our young church members for Confirmation) to the severely practical (does the availabillity of hand sanister in the porch of the church have deleterious effects upon door handles and the wooden furniture within the church). There was no animosities or ‘grandstanding’ involved but a genuine desire to see how we could individually and collectively fulfil our mission and play our part in the community of Bromsgrove. Once we settle down, we will meet about once every two months but one source of discussion was how we could ensure that the whole of our parish community could be better informed about the different voluntary activities that are already being undertaken. Incidentally, next Saturday we are going to have a concert of ‘bite sized’ classics performed in our Church as part of the Bromsgrove festival so it will be rather strange for Meg and myself to turn up, as we will, not for liturgical but for essentially entertainment purposes. The concert next Saturday is ‘free’ but nonetheless a collection plate will be passed around with contributions invited to help the people of Ukraine.

Today has been the day when the nominations for leadership of the Tory party had to be submitted. The number initially indicating that they intended to put themselves forward numbered 11 but this figure is already reduced to 8. One ‘no hoper’ failed to get any nominations whilst another two withdrew as they suspected that they would not meet the criteria of having their nomination papers supported by at least 20 MPs. One of the candidates who withdrew was our own MP, Sajiv Javid, who I suspect withdrew because he was in danger of falling short of the required number. What is particularly ironic in this case is that it was Sajiv Javid’s resignation which helped to start the gradual abandonment of Boris Johnson by the rest of his party. But Javid made the issue of integrity and honesty the main thrust of his complaint against Boris Johnson but in the event it appears that this does not cut much ice with his fellow Tory MPs. There is a saying, of course, probably drawn from Shakespeare that ‘he who wields the dagger never wears the crown‘ which explains why in any revolt against established leaders those who seek to depose them are very anxious not to be the ones discerned as striking the first blow. Now that the total number of candidates hs been reduced to eight, then voting will start tomorrow and the outcome is bound to be bloody in the extreme. One of the criteria that governs the voting tomorrow is that anyone failing to achieve 30% of the vote will be eliminated so it is possible that two more candidates may be gone by tomorrow night. Then there will be further votes on Thursday and more next Monday with the aim of cgetting the candidate list down to two as soon as possible. All kinds of machinations are now taking place – it has been said the the Tory party electorate is the most duplicitious in the world. Rishi Sunak appears to be the front runner but there is a determined ‘stop Risihi’ campaign from Johnson acolytes swinging votes behind Liz Truss. In the meanwhile, Penny Mordant an ex-defence minister who Boris has sacked in the past, seems to be very popular with members of the Tory party in the country so the results of the first round of voting, to be announced at about 5.00pm tomorrow afternoon, will be fascinating.