Saturday, 18th February,2023 [Day 1069]

Today dawned a little gloomy and overcast but nonetheless we were determined to make the best of it. Next week is going to be rather a strange week as it is a half-term week over most of the country. Consequently, many of our friends are drawn into grandparenting duties or similar and domestic arrangements are probably adjusted in many households. Last night, we texted our Italian friend who happens to live down the road and were delighted to get a reply back quite rapidly accepting our invitation to coffee next Wednesday morning. Apart from bumping each other as we walk down the road (my mother used to call these quick encounters ‘like ships passing in the night’ but I am not sure why), we have not had the chance of a good chat for quite some time now. We have quite a lot to catch up on as I am sure things have happened in our respective families that we would like to share with each other. At the same time, we also texted one of Meg’s cousins from whom we have not heard from some time and we know, via a Christmas card, that she had a serious operation last year. So we are anxiously awaiting some communication that all is well and that perhaps we can meet up for a lunch in the near future. It is always slightly ominous when one doesn’t get a reply within a day or so, but I am sure there is quite an innocent explanation.

This morning, we decided to give Waitrose a miss so that we do not get over-habituated to it and made for the park instead. The weather was quite mild and a little blowy but as soon as we started to drink our coffee, a very fine drizzle started to descend upon us. In the distance, I saw a figure that I could have sworn was one of our friends from down the road but as he had a little dog on a lead, I dismissed him from my thoughts. But spotting people in the park is a little like aircraft recognition in WWII where the population was taught to quickly recognise aircraft shapes to work out if it was ‘one of ours’ and therefore wished the equivalent of ‘Godspeed’ or an enemy aircraft in which case it was prudent to dive for cover. But as the figure with a dog approached, it turned out that it was our friend from down the road and hence my recognition of his shape and gait had been quite accurate. The dog belonged to his son and whilst the younger members of the fanily were off skiing somewhere, our friends were left dog sitting. The weather very gradually cleared up but we had a good long chat over a whole variety of topics which proved to be very pleasant. Eventually, we felt impelled to go as we were a little cold and wet and had acquired ‘square bottoms’ from sitting too long on the park bench. Once we got home, we partook of the obligatory cup of tea and then proceeded to cook a fairly typical Saturday lunch of mince and onions, a baked potato and some broccoli. Then we had a quiet afernoon reading before we start to prepare ourselves for the outing to church in the late afternoon and a little ‘do’ in the Parish Hall immediately afterwards when we will be meeting with an diocesan bishop.

Although I do not follow football affairs at all closely, two footballing items have attracted my attention today. The first is the fact that the Quataris have emerged as potential bidders for the club of Manchester United at a price which may be in the region of £5 billion. I must confess, I am uneasy about one of our iconic football clubs becoming the plaything of extremely rich men and not even English investors either, if that does not sound too xenophobic. I am sure that in some sports, the governing bodies demand a degree of local fan involvement so that the ‘fan base’ is sold as as a commodity like the football club itself. Another footballing story is that Brexit may mean that the UK clubs cannot bid for promising yoongsters until they reach the age of 18 but European countries have no such restriction upon their activities and can therefore snap up young talent at will. Whilst on the subject of Brexit, it was interesting that on the ‘Any Answers‘ program broadcast as a follow-on to ‘Any Questions‘ on Radio 4, some prominence is now being given to voices of callers who admit to voting Brext in the referendum but are now starting to realise that this was a terrible mistake. Normally, the BBC tries to keep clear of voices like this but the issue was raised in connection with the Northern Ireland protocol which Rishi Sunak may be inching towards a resolution. It is also interesting that pressure groups on the extreme right want the Sunak initiative to ‘fail’ as if it were to succeed, then Rishi Sunak will gain immense credit for it and those on the extreme right really want him to fail so that Boris Johnson (or someone similar) can be recalled as Leader of the Conservative Party.

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Friday, 17th February, 2023 [Day 1068]

Today was a beautiful fine day and the kind of day that made you want to get up and get outside to enjoy the almost spring-like sunshine. Meg and I were just having breakfast when we received a telephone call from our University of Birmingham friend, enquiring whether we might meet for cofffee in Waitrose, which invitation we readily accepted. Once there, I had brought along with me my trusty battery charge indicator which I find a most useful bit of kit. There we tested out a range of batteries that our friend had brought with him and then divided the batteries into left and right coat pockets to distinguish the good from the dud. I then attempted to show our friend the bouncing battery test (it seems fanciful but dead batteries bounce quite a lot, charged batteries only a little – it is all a matter of the chemical composition of the ingredients and how they change during the act of being discharged.) Our friend was completely sceptical but a chap on the next door table was quite intrigued so I resolved that when got home I would ‘Google’ this strange effect to email onto our friend. This I did and indeed, it is all a matter of chemistry and the bounceability of zinc oxide as well as the distribution of fluid throughout the battery. When we next see our friend on Sunday, I will claim a free cup of coffee as recompense for his sceptism. Mind you, as a born empiricist and experimentalist, I did tell him about various experiments I had conducted as a teenager – this involved electrolyis (a total failure), the action of concentrated nitric acid on an old ‘penny’ (a total success) and an attempt to dissect a one-legged frog which had been chloroformed by a science teacher at school and which I had assumed was dead. It was only when I saw a beating heart I nearly dropped my rusty old scalpel whilst the rest of my classmates looked on, munching their sandwiches. There is an explanation attached to all of this. Immediately after our GCE ‘O’-levels, there was no point teaching us anything until the term ended so we were allowed to do almost anything that took our fancy. One master encouraged us to give a lecture on any of our pet interests and as I intended to follow a career in surgery (thwarted by an initial failure in ‘O’-level physics) I gave a ‘state-of-the-art’ lecture in the plastic surgery of the human female breast. How I researched this at the age of sixteen and without the benefit of modern technology or any books published within the previous twenty years I do not know. I think the lecture went down fairly well with my contemporaries (it was an all-boys direct grant grammar school) but certainly more succesfull than my rejected offer to perform an ovarectomy (spaying) on my next door neighbour’s cat. As it was such a beautiful day, I persuaded Meg to walk with me down the Bromsgrove High Street where we popped into Poundland to buy a piece of electrical equipment and some little plastic storage containers of which I have a need.

I had a bit of a lunchtime dilemmma because on the spur of the moment, the last time I went shopping I had bought some smoked haddock for our Friday meal. Althoough I enjoy the taste of smoked fish, it is always a bit of a dilemma how to cook it without smelling the whole of the house out. Today, I decided on a strategy of poaching it gently in some hot milk, supplemented with some dried potato and a leek and potato packed soup to act as thickening agents. I made sure I had the over the hob fan working as well as the window wide open and this combination of strategies had the desired effect. We really enjoyed our meal which we ate with a baked potato and some green beans and marked this down mentally as a ‘success’ story for the next time.

Sky News has an interesting little story about Vladimir Putin – but it may just be Western propaganda. It is reported that Putin will ony travel around the country in an armoured train, fearing an assassination attempt as Nato may try to bring down any jet plane in which is is travelling. It is said the Russian president believes the armoured train is a more secure way to travel and that nobody will know where he’s going. The train is so heavy that it needs three locomotives to pull it, and it has special equipment for secure communications. In the same post, it is said that of the convicts released from Russian gaols to man up the Russian front line in the war in Ukraine, approximately one half have already died or been injured – in other words, put out of action. We know already that convicts have been seen as expendable in this conflict but it does reveal a cynicism and lack of respect for human life that does leave one practically speechless. Nonetheless, what we know about the biography of Putin would indicate that this lack of concern for fellow humans is a consistent trait of his personality.

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Thursday, 16th February, 2023 [Day 1067]

Thursday is my shopping day so I was up bright and early to join the little queue of 2-3 people who wait outside the store, waiting for it to open. One or two of the things that I buy regularly were missing from the shelves this morning so I have to make a mental note of the extra things I need to top up with the next time I go to Waitrose in a day or so. The morning was a little foreshortened by the time I had got the shopping unpacked and the breakfast cooked, eaten and everything washed up. Meg and I did not bother to venture out today as the weather was a little overcast and both of us felt a bit knocked out so we just had a quiet morning in.

If an announcement is imminent from No. 10 and nobody is sure of the exact timing, then it is quite common for there to be a gaggle of reporters and photographers who have to while away the time somehow waiting for the forthcoming announcement. The comings and goings of Larry, the Downing Street cat, is then often the subject of much press attention. Incidentally, Larry in appearance looks as though he could the parent of Miggles, the cat who visits us every day, today being no exception – I think he spots the car arriving back from shopping and then makes his presence felt. It is rumoured that Larry is a bit of a bruiser and certainly has spats with Palmerston, the Foreign Office cat, with whom he is a fierce rival. But you can always tell when a journalist is sitting in front of his word-processor and wondering ‘What shall I write about today?’ and, in the absence of any breaking political news, it is always possible to put words in the mouth of Larry who comments upon the comings and goings in Downing Sreet. We had one such piece yesterday when Robert Crampton was writing in ‘The Times‘ giving us such offerings as ‘that dog Dilyn (the stray adopted by Boris and Carrie Johnson) could not control his bodily functions’ After commenting on a range of recent Prime Ministers came the observation that ‘there was that other peculiar woman (Liz Truss). I had forgotten about her. Barely moved in and then moved out again’ and so on and so forth. Putting words in the mouths of animals owned by politicians is not a new venture as Roy Hattersley, the veteran Labour politician and one time Home Secretary wrote a book called ‘Buster’ which was the political world as seen through the eyes of Roy Hattersley’s dog. ‘Buster’rather disgraced himself as he caught and killed a duck in St.James Park for which offence Roy hattersley, even though he was Home Secretary at the time, had to lead guilty by letter and then pay the ensuing fine.

In the disappearance of Nicola Bulley, the missing Lancashire dog walker, the local police seemed to have made a massive blunder. After revealing to the press that Nicola Bulley was a ‘vulnerable person’ and refusing initially to divulge further details for the sake of the family, the police seemed to be working quite professionally. But then they had a complete ‘volte-face’ and put out a statement stating that Nicola had in the past suffered with some significant issues with alcohol which were brought on by her ongoing struggles with the menopause and that these struggles had resurfaced over recent months. These medical details seemed to go way beyond that which was necessary to inform the public of the progress of the police investigation and Lancashire police are now themselves subject to quite a degree of criticism. The independent Office for Police Conduct have now got involved and, no doubt, the story will further develop from this point on – I wonder if eventually heads might roll?

There has been a ruling in the High Court today that the UK scheme to settle millions of EU citizens risks creating illegal migrants overnight is unlawful. There was the possibility that millions of EU citizens did not apply in time and they could be declared as illegal immigrants and then deported (forcibly, I wonder?) In a highly critical judgment, the court said the scheme breached the UK’s Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. The watchdog for EU citizens’ rights argued the scheme could strip people of rights if they did not register in time. Quite unusually, the Government have admitted that they will not appeal against the ruling and so this is yet another example of a Home Office which is completely dysfunctional and seems to run from one disaster to another. The scandal of Windrush is still fresh in the minds of many people. Descendants of the Windrush which arrived from the West Indies in 1949 bringing many West Indians to the UK to solve severe labour shortages were declared to be illegal immigrants even though they had lived and worked in the UK for decades. As children, some people might have been entered on a parent’s passport but if this had not been retained after the death of the parent, the children were assumed to be ‘illegal’ After the scandal was exposed, the Home Office was meant to be offering a compensation scheme but even this initiative has run into the rocks.

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Wednesday, 15th February, 2023 [Day 1066]

The weather looks somewhat on the change this morning and the high pressure that we have enjoyed over the last few days is gradually being nudged aside by, I presume, some wetter weather. Meg and I overslept a little this morning which is not a particularly bad thing but it meant it was a little bit later than normal by the time we had picked up our newspaper and replenished some supplies in Waitrose – which, in all truth, we treat rather as though it were a little corner shop. In the park today, we ran across the regular gaggle of dog walkers nearly all of whom know each other quite well and stop and have a chat whilst the dogs have a chase around, rather like young children. Once we got home, we cooked the remains of our beef from the weekend with a baked potato and some broccoli and then settled down for a leisurely afternoon.

The political news today has been dominated by the shock resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s First Minister. Although the resignation came as the proverbial ‘bombshell’ there had been some indications that Nicola Sturgeon was finding life at the top increasingly burdensome and the big row in Scottish politic over the ‘trans-gender’ issues (which I shall not even start to unpick at this point) may well have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. She herself in her resignation statement reminded us that she had been eight years as the SNP deputy leader and eight years as leader and sixteen years is a long time in such demanding roles. Certainly, there is no really evident successor at this point of time and it may well she is a hard act to follow. I do wonder whether the female leader of the New Zealand Labour Party who resigned quite recently might have preyed at the back of her mind. At the height of the COVID pandemic when she was giving daily press conferences, she seemed to stand head-and-sholders above Boris Johnson when one compared them having to give similar annuncements and progress reports. It seemed to me at the time that the Scottish leadership was always a day or so in advance of that provided at Westminster but in the world of Machiavellian politics, I wonder whether amidst the sentiments of genuine regret about Nicola Sturgeon’s departure, there might be a certain amount of glee in the Scottish Labour party who might espy the opportunity for a bit of a comeback in the face of the SNP dominance over the past few years. One shadow minister is even saying that ‘It is all over for independence’ and that ‘After 15 years they have run out of road.’ Another suggested the SNP would now be split between its traditional base and its more moderate voters.

The search for the missing Lancashire dog-walker, Nicola Bulley, has had a slightly different gloss put on it this afternoon. The police are now saying that Nicola Bulley was listed as a ‘high risk’ missing person due to a ‘number of specific vulnerabilities’. The police, out of respect for the family, are not giving out more details at this stage but the admission that the missing person was ‘high risk’ adds a whole new complexion to this intriguing case. Now that the police have revealed this new information, it is quite possible that further bits will drip feed into the story. The Lancashire community has been subjected to all kinds of amateur detectives and sleuths working on any number of theories and I would imagine that this is making the work of the police more difficult. I just wondered for how many years a person must be missing before they are presumed ‘dead’ and the most common application of a rule is seven years. One can see why this period of time has to elapse – after all, it is quite possible for individuals to have an attack of amnesia and turn up years later and events like this turn up from time to time. But seven years is a long time to wait until a person’s affairs can be wound up and I can only imagine for partners, relatives and friends this can only serve to prolong their agony.

As regards the Turkey-Sria earthquake, I am wondering whether it is all sensible to try to rebuild these communities over an admitted geological fault line. If one has to start building from scratch, I wonder whether it would be sensible to take the whole swathe of land affected by the earthquake and turn it into a massive park and nature reserve. After all, thousands of people are probably still buried beneath the rubble and I wonder whether it would be a fitting memorial to those who have died and to their surviving relatives not to rebuild as an urban community but to landscape and to think of alternative land use? Of course, this is for the Turks and Syrians to decide but I am not sure that rebuilding on top of what is actually a massive cemetery needs some careful thought. It would take some skilful political leadership to put such a radical plan into effect, though, but surely the time to think such thoughts is the present and not several years hence.

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Tuesday, 14th February, 2023 [Day 1065]

Today being a Tuesday, it is the day when we pop into Waitrose to see if any of our regular acquaintances turn up. We were not disappointed because one of our pre-pandemic regulars turned up and we were pleased to see her. We got talking about things musical and in particular, Brahm’s German Requiem, myself as a mere listener but our friend as a performer in it until quite recently. On the way out, we had a word with one of the dog walkers that we used to see quite regularly in the park when the weather was a little more fair. In the past, when we had time for more conversation it emerged that she was a native of the former Yugoslavia and she certainly knew of the towns that we had visited in the halcyon days before Yugoslavian society seemed to implode. One acquaintance that we met whilst we were staying in a beautiful hotel in Dubrovnik used to write in the morning and then go out on trips in the afternoon. Only towards the end of our stay did it emerge that he was a Professor of Areonautical Engineering and together with a colleage was part of a two-man team that designed the whole of the Fokker Friendship aircraft between them. This was a turbo prop that seated about 25-30 people and regularly did short hop trips e.g. across the North Sea to Amsterdam and Meg and I actually flew in one when we went on our honeymoon to Amsterdam in September, 1967. When we got home, we had plenty of chats with our domestic help whose day is normally a Wednesday but came to us this Tuesday as a ‘one-off’. Our domestic help had kindly loaned me a pair of bright red, extremely high heeled ladies shoes which I needed for a little practical joke about which more later. Then it was time for me to change into my Pilates gear and walk down to our session which was going to be a bit special this week. I need to explain that last week as we were lying on our backs and doing some floor stretches, we could hear some heavy footsteps that may have been from the floor above. We joked with each other that it was probably the ghost of Joe Pilates (the guru and founder of Pilates in the 1930’s) One of our number (and not me!) suggested that he may have been walking in red high heel shoes and so for a dare, I indicated that I would emulate the ghost of Joe Pilates when our session had ended the following week. So when our instructor had her back turned to us, I tottered onto (rather than into) a pair of exceptionally high-heeled bright red stilettos and made my way across the studio floor before handing out some little high quality, Belgian chocolate bunnies to my fellow class members. Our instructor was worried to death I would fall over and injure myself and wondered what on earth she was going to have to write in the accident book if I were to be injured (but it was not going to happen) and we had a few moments of collective mirth to help us celebrate St Valentine’s day.

After Pilates, we get home to a delayed lunch. This week I had forgotten to purchase our customary fish cakes but instead I had bought for ourselves some rope-grown Scottish mussels in a white wine and cream sauce. We had this on a variety of carbohydrates (toast for Meg, rice cakes for me) with a sprinkling from those packets of microwavable vegetables that cook in about three minutes so the whole dinner only took five minutes to prepare. I found this to be quite a delicious change and although mussels are often used just as a starter, it seemed enough for lunch for us today. After lunch, I pottered about getting various bits of audio cabled up and eventually succeeded in what I was trying to achieve.

The Work and Pensions Secretary has admitted that ‘it was taking a bit of time’ for businesses to benefit from Brexit and it is now said that the ensuing political turmoil has hindered investment in the UK. Moreover, the former head of the Confederation of British Industry also blamed former prime minister Boris Johnson’s threats to breach international law over Brexit and his unlawful prorogation of parliament as issues which have scared businesses away from the UK. There was also an interesting high level meeting the other day which Michael Gove attended speculating about the ways in which Brexit might be made to work. An influential study by the LSE argues that evidence of the UK’s economic performance since the EU Referendum is clear: GDP growth has slowed down, productivity has suffered, the pound has depreciated, purchasing power has gone down and investments have declined. This kind of analysis is now broadly accepted by practically all of the non-ideological commentators. But whilst most of the analysis shows that Brexit has ‘not worked’ at least not as intended, the way forward is considerably less clear. The America economy is progressing in leaps and bounds by massive investment in ‘green’ technologies under the impetus provided by the Joe Biden presidency so this may represent one possible way ahead.

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Monday, 13th February, 2023 [Day 1064]

Today dawned as quite a bright,but cold, day and it is pleasant for us to enjoy this spell of high pressure whilst it persists- which may not be for very much longer. Meg and I went off to collect our newspaper and we took back with us a copy of ‘The Guardian‘ which was given to us in error the other day but the newsagent is going to restore it to its rightful owner. As we often do on a Monday, we popped into Waitrose to buy one or two things and the staff delighted us by giving us a small bunch of daffodils which look as they might bloom within a few days. They were evidently getting prepared for a big rush later on today ready for St. Valentine’s Day which is tomorrow. I did read somewhere on the web that if we look back to the pagan origins of St Valentine’s Day, then it was characterised by naked men, running throgh the streets with a leather whip and swishing at the posterior of any maidens that they espied as a way of guaranteeing their future fertility. I somehow think that I had better not emulate this example for fear of being arrested and I do not think that following an ancient tradition will be much of a defence in court.

The situation in Turkey/Syria is becoming more dire by the day. Live people are still being pulled from the ruins over a week since the earthquake struck at 4.17 in the morning. However, the task of searching is becoming inceasingly unpleasant as the stench of decomposing, but unreachable, bodies fills the air. In the streets where the houses have not completely collapsed, the remainder are in such an unstable condition that nobody dares to go back inside them. Meanwhile for the rescue and medical authorities, the most difficult of balances has to be struck. Does one carry on searching for hours to rescue any more survivors or does it make more sense to preserve more lives by devoting resources to those who are rescued and injured but may not survive without some extra care and attention. At some point, and this point may only be a day or so further off, then might one preserve more lives by caring for the survivors than by an inceasingly futile search for those trapped in the ruins of the collapsed buildings? The total death toll is now put at nearly 36,000 and fears are rising that infections of all kinds may ravish a very weakened population. It is also being reported that the Turkish authorities have ordered the arrest of 131 builders or developers who may have been responsible for the erection of buildings that have evidently not survived the earthquake. Although it is well known that Turkey lies abreast a massive earthquake fault and therefore that quite severe earthquakes are not unknown, nonetheless building materials, design, construction and maintenance have been routinely ignored over the years. But before we start to point the finger, we still have the scandal of Grenfell Towers hanging over us after which no building firm has yet been sanctioned yeas after the event. One has to ask the question, which is not easily answered, which is why the construction industry should so ofen prove to be found wanting in the case of national disasters? One reason may lie in the fact that one relies upon first a strong moral and professional ethic on the one hand coupled with a strong and effective state which is properly resourced to police the design and the construction of building projects. But we live in an age where regulation is decried by the right wing media as the ‘nanny state’ which is said to be a brake on the operation of ‘free enterprise’. A related example is to be found on the front page of todays ‘Times‘ where it is reported that the water industry that has been routinely polluting our rivers and waterways should be subject to absolutely massive fines. But the story today is that these fines are being lessened by the present Government on the grounds that they are disproportionate. Once we go down this road, then a fine for non-compliance with legislation is merely seen as an additional and occasional business cost which will be passed on in any case to the customers.

Very strange things seem to be happening over the skies of North America. Shooting down a Chinese do-called weather balloon (which was quite likely to be a spying venture that went wrong) is the comparatively easy part. But now, the American military have attacked and destoyed three other ‘objects’ flying over North American and Canadian skys. In all probability, it is likely that these ‘objects’ which are the size of a small car may well be spying-related entities but, as of now, and until some pieces have been recovered, we could classify these entities literally as ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’. It seems likely that in a day or so, sufficient fragments of these objects will have been found for more definitive information to emerge. There is a very heightened state of tension between the USA and China at the moment and the existence of these flying objects can only add to the growing sense of unease.

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Sunday, 12th February, 2023 [Day 1063]

Today being a Sunday is the day upon which I used to get up early and walk down to collect my Sunday newsaper. But we have changed our routine slightly on Sunday mornings so Meg and I have a more leisurely start to the morning but we make sure that we are sitting down in front of the TV for the Lorna Kuenssberg ‘Sunday’ program. Today there was quite a significant part of an interview because the DCMS select committee (Digital,Culture, Media and Sport) Select Committee have recently called as a witness before them Richard Sharp who is the BBC Chairman. The committee were questionning whether there had been complete transparency in the evidence given to the committee as he had had some influence in the arrangements by which a distant cousin to Boris Johnson had acted as a guarantor for a loan of £800,000 to be arranged whilst the latter was Prime Minister. Richard Sharp himself argues that he was only acting as an intermediary, had nothing to do with the financial arrangement as such and reported the same to the Cabinet Secretary. But the cross-party Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has said in a report that Mr Sharp should ‘consider the impact his omissions will have’ on public trust in the broadcaster and has also said his actions ‘constitute a breach of the standards expected of individuals’ applying for prominent public appointments. A very significant part of their findings is that Richarp Sharp had made a ‘serious error of judgement’ On the face of it, whatever the dancing on the point of a pin is made by Richard Sharp and even members of the government, the ‘optics’ of the affair look incredibly sleazy. To cut the story down to its bare essentials, someone who has donated £400,000 to the Conservative Party is then named by the government as a ‘preferred candidate’ and then helps to arrange a loan to the serving PM of £800,000 whilst he is in the later stages of his application to chair the BBC. The Labour spokesman, Lisa Nandy, the opposition DCMS spokesperson was on record as saying that the position of Richard Sharp is ‘increasing untenable’ which is about the nearest to a public call for his resignation as it is possible to get.

After our early morning shot of Sunday politics, it was time to wander down to Waitrose, which we did after we had picked up our Sunday newspaper. No sooner were we there but we were soon joined by our University of Birmingham friend who we were especially pleased to see because we had missed each for a few days. The flower section of Waitrose was absolutely bursting with banks of flowers and particularly with roses not to mention accompanying boxes of chocolates, all in preparation for Tuesday which is St. Valentine’s Day. I had always assumed that this was an over-sentimentalised 19th century innovation but the earliest mention of it in Englnd was by Chaucer. Writing in 1382, Chaucer celebrated the engagement of the 15 year-old King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia via a poem, in which he wrote: ‘For this was on St. Valentines Day, when every bird (fowl) cometh to choose his mate.’ Of course origins of this can be traced back to some ancient pagan ituuals which were then taken over by the Christian church, sanitised from rather bawdy traditions and sanctified by the celebration of the Feast of St Valentine, declared by then Pope to be an offical feast day in 495. We joked with the staff about the various activities associated with St Valentine’s day and I wonder how many of them send cards and presents to each other. Meg and I and our friend discussed some of the programmes that we particulatly enjoy on Radio 4, or current favourite probably being ‘More or Less’ which is a program about statistics in our lives and how they can be interpreted, properly utilised or more often mis-used these days. The program manages the difficult task of taking what might be a dry-as-dust subject for many (except for a few of us geeks) and making it both informative and entertaining. After about 45 minutes of chat we parted to go on our various ways, our friend for another coffee date and ourselves to cook the Sunday lunch.

This lunchtime, we treated ourselves to a traditional Sunday lunch of roast beef (done in a slow cooker) but complemented by some parsnips finished off in the oven, broccoli, Yorkshire pudding and a glass of red wine. We knew that we had to get everything over before we settled down to watch the England-Italy 6-Nations Cup match. England secured an anicipated victory with an improved performance over that of last week when they were defeated by Scotland. But having secured a good lead in the fist half, the Italians came back strongly in the second half and I got the feeling that the England team stepped off the gas a little. We shall now have a break of two weeks bfore the competition resumes. I have often wondered whether a two gap is put into place at this stage so that players on both sides can ‘lick their wounds’ after the intensity of the collisions which they have dealt out, and had to endure, since the competition started just over a week ago. This break is actually coming at quite an opportune time because next week after Church, we are going into the Parish Hall for a little bash as an auxiliary bishop is due to make a visit and the message has gone out that our attendance is expected.

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Saturday, 11th February, 2023 [Day 1062]

Today we slept in a little late for reasons that I cannot fully explain but it is a Saturday and we were not due to meet anybody in particular. Nonetheless, we picked up our copy of the newspaper (even though ‘The Guardian’ was handed to us by mistake but we did not realise that until we got home) We decided to visit the park today as the weather was quite mild and we do not seem to have visited the park for a few days. As we were leaving the park, one of the ‘park regulars’ who knows us by sight enquired after a fellow park regular that neither of us had seen for a week or so now. This is Intrepid Octogenerian Hiker who, in his late 80’s, always managed a walk of about 8-9 kilometers per day, aided by his walking stick. We have not been in the park quite as much recently whilst the weather has been rather icy but we trust that our acquaintance has not been ill in the meantime. When we got home, it was a case of a simple lunch of some ham, cabbage, baked potato and cooked tomato but although this seems a simple meal, nonetheless we enjoyed it greatly. We had a bit of a rush round to get everything washed up and our post-prandial cup of tea made before the Ireland-France rugby match which may well be ‘the’ match of the series as these two teams are regarded as No 1 and No 2 in the world at the moment. The match proved to be what in the headline writer’s vocabulary might be described as ‘scintilating’ or ‘pulsating’. The Irish ran out as the winners in the end but the levels of skill and commitment showed by each side were exemplary and for the Irish in particular, the win must have been especially sweet because as well as the tries that they did score, they got the ball over the line on two further occasions only for the try not to count as a French thigh (the same in each case) prevented the ball being ‘grounded’ and hence a no-try is the inevitable result. The refereee was Wayne Barnes of England and I think that he played a ‘blinder’ in getting all of the major refereeing decisions completely correct (in my view) We shall watch the first half of the Scotland-Wales match before we go to church later on this afternoon and hope that the technology recording ‘series record’ is going to do its bit so that we can watch the second half of the match this afternoon.

Once we had returned from church and had our traditional bowl of soup upon our return, we turned our attention to our PVR to see the second half of the Wales v Scotland match. For some reason which I cannot explain, every other match in the series seems to have been recorded or are scheduled to record apart from this one. So I changed tack and managed to get the whole of the second half via BBC-iplayer. Needless to say, once I got this located and then running, we ran into our buffering problem with the Firestick but I know how to cure this so it was the typical 3 minutes or so of delay until we got going again. Tomorrow will be England v Italy and this should prove to be no pushover for England as somewhat more intelligent play from Italy could well have created a victory over France last weekend.

There is a certain mount of informed speculation that we are seeing some interesting trends in the recent by-elections that have been held recently. In the last of these held in West Lancashire this week, the Labour Party pushed up its share of the vote to 62% whilst the Conservative share slumped to 25%. These results can tell us what we might expect in the local elections this May. To become the largest party of local government in England for the first time in 20 years, Labour must pick up 500 council seats. To dodge a crushing defeat, the Conservatives must lose hundreds not thousands. The local elections are to be held in May and the latest by-elections are the best predictor for what the local results are likely to be. The point is often made that by- elections are no predictor to any forthcoming general election and indeed, people may vote differently at the local level to their vote in a general election. But there is an interesting ‘twist’ to local election results. This is that the local party is likely to be energised by a good local result and hence a victorious local party is likely to have a goodly band of motivated and enthused supporters ready for the forthcoming general election contest. On the other hand, local parties who have just lost many of their local counsellors are likely to be demotivated and lacking the raw number to put supporters on the ground. So it could be that the connection between local results and national results is somewhat more complicated than the conventional political wisdom would indicate. Moreover, since Rishi Sunak became PM, the average Labour poll lead over the Conservative Party has been 21.5 points.

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Friday, 10th February, 2023 [Day 1061]

Today we got going eventually after rather a slow start to proceedings. Once we had picked up our newspaper, we made for Waitrose anticipating that we would bump into one or two people that we knew but we were to be disappointed because none of the regulars showed up this morning. So we enjoyed our coffee and cake and then bought a few things that we needed before we made for home. I cooked a lunch of a (bought) cod pie which we enhanced with some of our own vegetables and enjoyed a tasty lunch. Then we settled down for a lazy afternoon but I copied a few Mozart tracks onto a USB stick so that we can stick that into our devices and play them as and when desired. I was half way through this task when the doorbell rang and it was the firm that regularly services our burglar alarm who was scheduled to call this afternoon but I had comletely forgotten about it (despite it being entered onto our planning board) This was all quite satisfactory but I do not neglect to have the intruder alarm serviced on an annual basis because were this to be neglected, it would probably invalidate our home insurance where the relevant box is ticked to indicate that that the intruder alarm hs been serviced within the last twelve months.

During the week, I saw one of those Panorama programms which really made one stop and think. This program was upon the enormous environmental effects of what is popularly known as ‘the cloud’ but is, in practice, massive banks of computers forming a data farm probably but not exclusively, in the Unites States. Theae data farms consume massive amounts of power and the excess heat generated necessitates a lot of cooling water. Data storage is climbing the ladder of sectors responsible for the largest carbon footprints. In fact, data storage now accounts for more carbon emissions than the commercial airline industry – and a single data centre uses the same amount of electricity that can power up to 50,000 homes. All of this was news to me but then you consider the vast amounts of data that each one of us generates and then crucially no one disposes of, then it all gets stored somewhere. Trying to find out how much extra data is being stored year by year would appear to be a simple question to ask a search engine such as Google but the answers that are given are reflected in the following response to a query how much cloud storage is increasing: ‘starting at around $12 billion in 2010, revenues are predicted to exceed $623 billion by 2025.’ This answer is illuminating because storing increasing mounts of data is just seen as an economic opportunity. Of course in the early days of computing, memory was both limited and expensive so there was much pressure to reduce and eliminate data (old emails and files) that were no longer needed. These days have now absolutely gone and there is every encouragemnt not to prune and to delete but to store ‘in the cloud’ but at a cost, needless to say. Some kinds of data one can understand people wanting to store ‘for ever’ such as photos but there is no real encouragement to dispose of the computer rubbish as it were and, of course, it is quite time intensive to work one’s way through, for example emails, to determine what is to be saved and what is to be junked. The panorama program gave out a statistic that I have no way of checking that 5 minutes of internet searching may consume as much power as, say, boiling the kettle to make a cup of tea.

Tonight there is going to be a program especially devoted to the disappearance of the Lancashire dog walker, Nicola Bulley, who has now been missing for two weeks. It is informative that the authorities are now searching the coastal areas around the Wye estuary, assuming that that Nicola Bulley slipped into the river and was swept away. But if the program is well constructed this evening, it may be that alternative possible explanations for the disappearance may be aired.

The UK economy was officially ‘not in recession’ as the latest batch of economic statistics reveal that the country was basically flatlining. But the case remains that we are the only G7 economy that whose economy is lower than at the start of the pandemic. Of course the ‘elephant in the room’ here is the impact of Brexit because the effects of the pandemic as well as the war in Ukraine and the consequent steep rise in energy prices have to be statistically disentangled from each other. It does seem remarkable that both of our major political parties are still in favour of Brexit whilst an often quoted research finding is that every constituency in the UK except one (Boston in Lincolnshire?) now has a majority of voters who are not in favor of Brexit. We shall have to see what happens after the next general election when it comes but some form of closer association with the EU customs union would seem to be the most sensible economic policy even though no-one in our present political leadership dare mouth it.

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Thursday, 9th February, 2023 [Day 1060]

Today dawned bright and clear and I got up early in order to get my weekly shopping done whilst Meg stays in bed until I return. Typically, I pick up my newspaper afterwards but today my newsagent had not received their copies of ‘The Times‘ so this necessitated a further trip to Waitrose in order to avail myself of it. Then it was a case of getting home and getting the breakfast cooked, the washing up done and the shopping unpacked. After all of this, we readied ourselves to pay a visit to one of our favoutite little market towns which is Alcester. We made a booking in our favourite restaurant in one of the hotels which is centrally located and where they put on a special pensioner’s lunch during the week. As it was such a beautiful day, every man and his dog had evidently decided to visit the town and parking was at an absolute premium. Nonetheless, we managed to park fairly centrally for an hour which was time enough for us to have a coffee nd cake in our favourite coffee establishment before we sampled some of the excellent charity shops along the High Street. But first, we visited one of those hardware shops that seems to sell ‘everything’ including things you never know that you needed. We departed the shop once we had a thorough look round and availed ourselves some black duct tape which I always seem to need for a variety of purposes. For example, if there is a manual that I wish to keep I will run it off on the printer, staple it, flatten the staples with some heavy duty pliers, pop the booklet in between some transparencies to form a cover and finally finish off the whole thing with some black tape that covers the staples and makes the whole thing look more professional. I am endebted to the Reprographic manager at De Montfort University who had to deploy this procedure when multiple copies of degree submissions were required for an imminent reapproval. I have used these techniques to professionally produce copies of any paper that I have published and I am eternally grateful to Anne for instructing me how to do it. In the charity shops we were not tempted by any items of clothing but we did avail ourselves of a couple of useful looking Denby ware dishes that looked as though they were really intended for the making of a steak and kidney pudding but which we shall deploy to give a final oven roasting to vegetables when required. And so it was on to lunch a few minutes before our allotted time but we enjoyed a beef lasgne and a roated vegetable lasagne, both with salad which we shared with each other when we were two thirds of the way through our respective dishes. After that, it was a pleasant drive home through some glorious sunshine and we prepared to have a quiet and restful afternoon.

An extraordinary polical story has just broken this aftrnoon but I wonder whether it will see much light of day in MSM (Main Street Media) The story is that the UK has paid £2.3 billion having lost a trade dispute with the EU. It was claimed the UK had failed to prevent the undervaluing of these goods imported from China, letting criminals evade customs duties by making false claims about the clothes and shoes. In March last year, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) found against the UK ‘on most liability points’, according to John Glen, the chief secretary to the Treasury. On the face of it, it looks as though he UK government is not unhappy about criminal trade activity so long as it keeps the cost of living down. There is another story in a similar vein which I read about recently and which my blood run cold. After the BSE crisis a few years ago, you would have thought that we had learnt the lesson of not maintaining the highest of standards in the way in which our meat is processed and then traded. But in the bonfire of (EU) regulations that we are promised, it will become an adulterer’s charter for all kinds of contaminants to be added to meat products with practically no checks or regulation. This means that as a society, we may be laying ourselves open to the most horrendous of food scandals several years down the line and all in exchange for a lighter regulatory regime. The inspectors of the meat products entering the UK are privately very worried but it looks as though a governent hell bent on de-regulation will stop at nothing.

The story of the missing Lanashire dog walker is still not producing any definitive results. But the focus of the investigtions now seem to be shifting towards seeing if a body might have drifted out to sea so coastal patrols are intensifying in the search. It may well be that a body will never be found or the mystery of her disappearance solved so one can only imagine how difficult it is to have any normal sort of grieving process under these circumstances. At some point as well, the police will have to scale down their search activities which must be a profound moral dilemma for them as well.

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