Tuesdays are a day to which we look forward because it is the day when we tend to coincide with our friends in Waitrose. But when we got up, there was a fine and gentle rain which I am sure will do the gardens an immense amount of good. According to the weather forecast, there is a band of rain sweeping up the country so we expect that by this afternoon, the weather might be quite fine but, we suspect, humid. Meg and I got to Waitrose but were somewhat disappointed because none of our usual coterie of three friends were there and we speculate that the poor weather was deterring some of them from venturing out. Nonetheless, Meg and I returned home and enjoyed a little of the midday Politics program with the aftermath of the Committee of Privileges vote. We suspect that the Tories were trying to avoid a vote but it looks as though the Labour Chief Whip shouted ‘No’ when the proposition was put to the vote which was sufficient to trigger a division. In the event, despite much huffing and puffing, only seven Tory MPs voted to reject the report. It looks as thougb 250+ Tory MPs took the easy way out by abstaining but Theresa May (ex Prime Minister) and I think about eight members of the present Cabinet voted that the report be accepted i.e. Boris Johnson is officially branded as a liar. Incidentally, the word ‘lie’ and ‘liar’ are judged to be unparliamentary language and may not normally be used but Mr Speaker had ruled that in the context of this particular debate and the conclusions of the Committee, a dispensation was awarded so that these words could be used – which they were, liberally, on the Labour side. Rishi Sunak has come in for a great deal of criticism by abstaining whereas, as the current prime Minister, he should really be reaffirming our democratic standards of accountability by endorsing or at least voting in favour of the report. So I set off for my Pilates class but just before I went, I took a quick snapshot of my new keyboard and its two ‘side-by-side’ seats so that I could show it to one of my fellow Pilates class members who had kindly dropped the recently acquired bench at my house last week, saving me the problem of lugging it home a mile in last week’s heat. After Pilates, I popped into our local Asda because there are a couple of items I wished to purchase. The first of these was some beet juice which few supermarkets seem to stock but Asda have traditionally had a good supply until today. I looked in vain through umpteen varieties of not particularly ‘good for you’ fruit juices and it looks as though my local store have now decided not to stock beet juice (which, of course, has various health giving properties as opposed to the rest of the more junky stuff). Nor could I find some grapefruit juice which I recently saw in Waitrose but they, too, had none in stock. So I scored a blank on both items and trudged home to cook our Tuesday dinner of fishcakes.

This afternoon, if the weather was fine, I thought I would go out and pick our crop of gooseberries. I bought a stock of (if I remember) Japanese gooseberries which always mature in mid-June. The goosberries looked nice and plump, particularly after the recent rain but I was anxious to get them picked before we had a spell of stormy and windy weather which causes all of the crop to fall off the bushes. Whenever, I collect fruit like this I inveditably count the number successfully picked and once I had negotiated the long spines on the goosberry branches, altogether I picked 577 goosberries. This, when I got them inside the house, weighed in 2.5 kg (about 5.5.lbs) so I reckon we had a good crop this year. Of course they all need ‘topping and tailing’ before they can be cooked but I prepared about 10% of cour crop which I then stewed in a modicum of boiling water and just a little brown sugar. This only took about fine minutes or so to stew and was served with some vanilla icecream for our evening meal. The flavour was just as I had anticipated which was very delicate but with just a hint of sharpness (acidity?) on the palette.

The first Test match between England and Australia is taking place just down the road in Edgebaston and Australia wre set quite a challenging target for a 4th innings score. But when I heard that the Australians had got to within 37 of the required total and with two wickets to spare, I suspected that they would actually win the match, which of course they did. Their captain who is noted for his fast bowling batted fairly low down the order but once he was in, it would have taken some incredibly sharp play to remove him. At one stage, the English captain (Ben Stokes) caught a difficult ball but then the ball popped out of his hands when he hit the ground. But we always knew that this match was going to be decided by the finest of margins between these two teams and so it proved.

Today we had an appointment at the eye clinic for Meg timed at a rather unfortunate time at 1.30 in the afternoon, so this rather dictated how the rest of the day panned out. This morning after we had breakfasted, we merely went out in the car to collect our newspaper and then made back home to have our elevenses in front of the TV. Later on today, we knew that there was going to be a debate in the House of Commons on the Privileges Committee report into the behaviour of Boris Johnson but we were not sure at what point in the day this was going to take place. What we did see, however, was David Cameron, the ex-Conservative Prime Minister giving his live evidence to the COVID committee of enquiry. This seems as though it is going to be quite a thorough affair as each significant person called upon to give evidence has already submitted a dossier of their own testimony and relative portions of this are then played back to the enquiry for further examination and commentary. All of this seems well and good except the Committee are going to take evidence for about three years and goodness knows when an official report will be written and then published. If lessons are to be learned, then one hopes that another pandemic or great national emergency does not strike us in the next few years. The Swedes can certainly teach us a thing or so because they have not only started but also concluded their own investigation into their government’s reponse to COVID before we have even started our own national investigations. So to manage today’s business, we had an early biscuits and cheese to act as a lunch for us and then set off in plenty of time to get to the hospital well in time. We managed to get parked quite easily which is no mean feat given the pressure that the hospital carparks are generally under and arrived in time for our appointment. Meg then needed to have two sets of opthalmic tests before these were fed through to the doctor who is monitoring Meg’s eye condition. The conclusion was that we need to persist with eye drops for the next three weeks and then we will have another appointment so that the monitoring can continue. All in all, our appointment slot in the hospital lasted for the best part of two hours which is better than the three and a half of last time. It was a beautiful afternoon and so we quickly drove home and teated ourselves to a strawberry trifle which we had left over from yesterday’s meal. This was a wonderful little treat to have on a hot summer’s day and I appreciated for once having some supplies left over from yesterday.

The debate on the Privileges Committee is starting late this afternoon and it looks as though the debate may be quite short but also a little bad tempered. Rishi Sunak had conveniently discovered another pressing commitment in his diary so that he can avoid either attending the debate or casting a vote which would commit him either to condemning Boris Johnson by voting to adopt the report or perhaps even condoning Johnson’s behaviour by deciding to abstain. The Tories are in a terrible bind about all of this because to the public at large, they must surely vote to endorse the report. But were they to do so, there are rumours that their constituency associations will try to deselect them as MPs if they vote to adopt the report. The debate is proceeding in rather a rancorous fashion and it is by no means certain that a vote will actually take place. The diehard Johnson supporters may seek to force a vote but to many centrist Tory MPs they just hope that Boris Johnson would just slink away and the easiest way to avoid adverse consequences from their constitutuents is just to abstain, as Michael Gove indicated that he was going to do when interviewed on the TV channels over the weekend.

Sky News this afternoon is showing a photograph of thousands of pieces of PPE that have been abandoned in a field in Hampshire. A report from the council meeting said the packs were discovered following an investigation by New Forest District Council into use of land at Little Testwood Farm Caravan Park. The interesting thing is that nobody knows how this equipment got there and whether it has been legally dumped (in which the local authorities ought to have known about it) or totally illegally dumped, in which case some waste disposal company has been taking the worst of short cuts. If the latter, one hopes that the firm are identified, made to clear up their own mess and finally given the most appropriate fines afforded by the legislation. At the end of the day, though we know that billions of pounds of public money were spent to providing PPE, often of substandard quality and massively inflated prices. The officially stated estimates from the Department for Health & Social Care (DHSC) are that it lost 75% of the £12 billion it spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) in the first year of the pandemic to inflated prices and kit that did not meet requirements – including fully £4 billion of PPE that will not be used in the NHS and needs to be disposed of.

Well, what a day turned out to be. As is normal for us on a Sunday, Meg and I got ourselves up and parked in front of the TV for the Politics shows starting at 8.30. The great talking point today was the video clip which appeared on the Daily Mirror website of a party going on in the Tory Party HQ at the height of the lockdown with drinking, dancing and doing any other than observing social distancing rules. Michael Gove was the govvernment minister sent out to defend the indefensible this morning and naturally he condemned what he saw (and repeated his condemnation on two channels) The Tories say that some of the people concerned had been ‘disciplined’ (whatever that means) but even more sigbificant is that of the people in the party were awarded honours by Boris Johnson. You would have thought that that there was a good case for rescinding the awards once given but apparently this is hardly ever done. Meanwhile the police are ‘investigating’ and I wonder if they will issue the sort of standard fine that applied to the partygoers in Downing Street. The whole of this sort of episode is the attitude in the governing party that rules are ‘not for us, just for the little people’ and that they themselves are not subject to the same rules as the rest of us. After we had our fill of politics, Meg and I jumped into the car in order to collect the Sunday newspaper and then got on with the serious business of cooking for our cousins due to arrive later on this morning. I had already had the base boef bourbignon cooking in the slow cooker overnight but what I needed to do was to fry off some shallots and mushrooms and then add this mixture to the pot, thickening things with a little cornflower. All of this worked out OK and I busied myself making sure that the mashed potato, small new potatoes, carrots and broccoli were prepared and in most cases parboiled and ready to be finished off in the oven. Our starter today was going to be a really innovative one that our domestic help had told us about but I had never done it before. It involved lining some ranekins with smoked salmon, putting some chunks of smoked salmon in the bottom and then adding a mixture of eggs yolks and cream to each ranekin before all four of them were out into an improvised ‘bain marie’ (actually in my case, a deep square frying pan which held a good inch of water) and then baking in the oven for 30 minutes. I put this lot in the oven 15 minutes before our guests were due to arrive and they turned up just on time. This was ideal because by the time they had got themselves into the house and we had demonstrated the facilities of our new ‘music room’ to them, it was time for the salmon to be taken out of the oven. I have to admit that as a starter, this turned out to be brilliantly successful and I will certainly try it another time. Meg’s cousin helped me to dish up the meal which actually was extraordinarily helpful as the beef plus four veg and the starters took some doing. We finished off with a strawberry trifle complemented by some actual strawberries courtesy of Waitrose and cream and, although thrown together, this too was very successful. We would have liked a longer time together as the husband of Meg’s cousin had to fly from Birmingham to the Paris Airshow and so had to leave us on the dot of 3.00pm. Nonetheless, we had a lot of family news to exchange with each other, including the condition of our cousin’s mother (Meg’s actual cousin) whose health problems seem to be deepening although the rest of the family are wonderful in the support they are giving.

Meg rather crashed out this afternoon and spent the afternoon in bed. Perhaps it was a bit of a strain for her interacting with her cousins over several hours but nonetheless she has just about recovered in time to come down and join me for the finals of Cardiff Singer of the World which is on BBC4 this evening. I must say, I have worked pretty hard this afternoon and the washing up ws not completed until 6.30 this afternoon. As is always the case, I seem to have a mountain of food left over but a lot of it will be eaten up during the week and I have promised our domestic help some of it to sample as she has following my culinary efforts, giving me encouragement and support along the way. Although today has been a busy one, I have rather enjoyed myself. Our son delivered a highly appropriate Father’s Day card yesterday and I was pleased to get the bit of tidying up done in the garden (which in the event was not really needed because there was a sudden rainstorm so we could not get into the garden anyway) But I used a blower to whisk away some pesky holly leaves from the holly trees that we have, so this was another another bit of tidying up which had needed doing for some time.

So Saturday dawned on what we suspected might be quite a busy day. When we first woke up, the weather was a bit gloomy and drizzly so after breakfast, we decided to give the park a miss this morning. Instead, we decided to make a little trip out to Droitwich which we have not visited for a week or so. We had our normal coffee and teacake and then came home to think about lunch. Just before we went out, we had a telephone call from our Italian friend who lives down the road. I thought we had an arrangement for her to call around yesterday in the afternoon but she thought the arrangement was for the morning, when we happened to be out. So we failed to coincide on this occasion so had a quick conversation to make our number with each other. This afternoon, there were two jobs that I knew I needed to get done. The first, and major, job was to start the preparation of the boeuf bourguignon for tomorrow’s meal. This involve some frying of the meat, followed by the lardons and then laced with some chopped onions, garlic, tomato puree, a bottle full of wine and the bay leaves and thyme. This then went into the slow cooker where I am cooking it for about eight hours. There will be some further finishing off tomorrow with the shallots and a further bit of cooking but at least we are half way there. I had just about finished putting all of the ingredients to bed and into the slow cooker when our domestic help called around. She presented me with a freshly ironed shirt (a present for Father’s Day?) and some more ranekins in which to cook and serve the special starter I am to prepare tomorrow. This involves smoked salmon topped with a cream and egg yoke mixture which cooks in a bain-marie in the oven for about half an hour. This sounds quite ambitious for me but our domestic help assures me that it will cook easily and taste wonderful. After the cooking was done, I needed to get a border sorted out which was an eyesore. I have demarcated the dividing line between the border itself and a lawn with a number of large, rounded pebbles to form an attractive ‘dividing line’ These had become overgrown through the years so I had to dig them out, get the border straightened and a gully formed and then replace the decorative stones. This worked out practically as I intended but I was rather working at pace trying to get it done and for this corner of the garden to look a little more tended so that if were to have coffee outside tomorrow, the garden looks a little more presentable. Of course, we go to church in the late afternoon on Saturdays which, given the business of the rest of the day might be a period of some quiet contemplation and relief. After the televised cricket this evening, which Meg and I enjoy watching, there may be time for us to a least start to watch the first act of an opera but we shall have to see how we feel.

This morning as we were in the car, I heard a consumer report on Radio 4 which I think concerned access to the HMRC service. Apparently, they have (if I heard the report correctly) about a million visitors to their phone lines in the three months of the summer months and under these circumstances, you would have thought that HMRC might have thought about the extra resources needed to meet the demand. But they indicated that they intended to close the phone lines and were going to direct everybody to use web-based resources. Their argument was that they needed to conserve their precious ‘phone call access’ to those people who could not use the web. HMRC seemed oblivious to the fact that half of the people who were phoning them had tried to get the answers to their questions using the website and having failed at this were then driven by desperation to attempt a phone call for which they had to wait a very long time to get answered, if it was answered at all. All of this I found quite shocking and I suppose it was self evident to them that they did not have the staff resources to answer queries and therefore directed callers to a website.

Some really shocking video clips have emerged today Conservative staff were filmed partying at their London headquarters during the height of the COVID lockdown. The new footage, obtained by ‘The Mirror‘, shows Tory Party staff at a Christmas party dancing, drinking and joking about Covid restrictions while lockdown rules were in place in December 2020. Two of those at the party were among people awarded peerages in Boris Johnson’s honours list. These revelations are only go to add to the anger of those families who were not allowed to see their relatives when then they had to die alone of COVID in hospital. The official COVID enquiry has already been accused of giving insufficient weight to the concerns of bereaved relatives and the emergence of this further evidence is only going to infuriate them even more. What is particularly galling is that not only were these Tories not observing social distancing but were filmed drinking, dancing and generally cavorting during the lockdown.

Today is the day when our domestic help calls around and I had a special surprise in waiting for her. This was that as soon as she arrived, I called her into what we call our ‘Music Room’ and then, on my newly acquired Casio keyboard, started playing Mpzart’s ‘Turkish March’. Evidently, it was not me actually playing but one of the inbuilt 100 tunes – I hope that by moving my fingers over the keyboard, I could actually convince her that it was me playing. This pretence did not last for a great length of time but enough to give her a pleasant surprise. She also admired the couple of piano stools I had acquired in the last few days, one last Sunday and the other on Tuesday but although of different manufacture, they sit quite well side-by-side and the design is consistent with the Casio stand. I then did play the ‘Largo’ from the Dvorak ‘New World Symphony‘ which is a simple tune for the right hand and which I have almost (but not quite ) memorised so that I can play it straight off. So after this little diversion and much merriment, we made for Waitrose to see if we could coincide with our usual buddies. Although it was a busy morning, we met no-one in particular but we had some last minute shopping to do to for the starter and sweet of Sunday’s lunch. All of this having been bought, we then headed out down the Bromsgrove High Street so that we could make an eye apointment for myself and also pick up some supplies for our domestic help. It is her birthday next week but fortunately Meg and I had made a trip to get an M&S voucher as a birthday prezzy so I was pleased to have got all of this sorted out in plenty of time. Our domestic help has given me instructions how to produce a stunning starter for Sunday, involving smoked salmon and cream cooked in a ‘bain marie’ style in the oven. Obviously, I will be delighted if this works out OK but she gave me a tip, derived from Mary Berry, which is to prepare the boeuf bourbignon the day before to allow the flavours to truly percolate and then heat up again the following day.This I will probably do and it had the advantage of taking some of the pressure off Sunday.

This afternoon, after our lunch and a little rest, I decided to embark on two tranches of gardening. Firstly, I attacked the by now dried off weeds in the cobble stones at the front of the house. These had previously been treated with my own patent strong-vinegar-and- washing-up-liquid recipe which had done its trick of killing off the green tops of the weeds but the whole now needed a more radical tidying up. After that, I turned ny attention to the back garden and, in particular, one border which looks a bit of an eye-sore if we decide to take our coffee in the garden. This afternoon, I managed to get the grossly overgrown bits cut back from this border this afternoon and tomorrow I may well be able to give it all a neater finish with a combination of edging shears and half-mooner implement. Everything does seem to be a bit of a race against time at the moment with fitting in much needed jobs when I can but I am hopeful that a little every day will help.

No sooner has Boris Johnson left one job as an MP but he has landed another as a columnist for the Daily Mail. Apparently, this rapid switch from a political job to another needs to vetted first by ACOBA, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. ACOBA advises ministers and senior officials on whether jobs they take on after leaving government comply with the ‘business appointment rules’. This is meant to ensure that a minister should not be in a position where ministers move immediately to a private sector position when they may be in a position to use some ‘insider knowledge’ ACOBA generally advocates a gap of several months before leaving one position and taking up another to avoid these conflicts of interest. But it is being said that ACOBA was appraised of the the Johnson job some 30 minutes before it was announced. By all accounts, they are absolutely furious about this absence of notice but they have no power to stop or prevent Johnson taking up his new role. An Acoba spokesperson said: ‘The Ministerial Code states that ministers must ensure that no new appointments are announced, or taken up, before the committee has been able to provide its advice. An application received 30 mins before an appointment is announced is a clear breach’ So what a surprise – Boris Johnson is found to be in a clear breach of the rules (where incidentally, Downing Street were trying to prevent Sue Grey, the prominent civil servant who provided a report on ‘partygate’ not to take up an appointment as Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff for two years) It is also being put about that Johnson may be willing for ‘the dogs to be called off’, presumably before the debate of the Committee of Privileges report debate on Monday next. I would surmise that most Tory MPs will absent themselves and thus effectively abstain – only a small number will be seen to vote in favour of the report which will be easily carried because of the votes of the opposition parties.

Today was the day when we knew that the report on the Committee of Privileges into Boris Johnson was due to report and, despite logistical difficulties in getting it printed, it hit the airways at about 9.00am this morning. Never can a report be as damning as this one. Johnson was subject to a 90 day suspension from the Commons were he still to have been an MP in the meanwhile. The suspension was going to be of the order of 10 days but two additional factors led the committee to increase the suspension period. Firstly, the evidence that he gave to the Committee itself, televised at the time, was taken as further evidence of having lied to the House of Commons as well as across the floor of the House of Commons. But a further factor was Johnson’s reaction to the initial draft of the report in which he tried to traduce the work of the Committee using language such as ‘kangaroo court’ and ‘witchhunt’ and this further compounded the offences he had originally committed. I think it is true to say that the penalty of 90 days was a complete surprise to the commentariat and the overall judgement of the report. Beth Rigby, a superb political commentator for Sky News gave a pithy summary ‘In the end, it was excoriating, damning and unanimous: Boris Johnson was found not only to have deliberately misled the House of Commons over events in Number 10 during COVID lockdowns, but had attacked the fabric of our democracy itself by seeking to undermine the committee and investigation’. I think that the fact that Johnson has misled the House not on one occasion but on several occasions revealed a cavalier attitude to the truth. As his housemaster in Eton wrote to his father ‘the conclusion was that thinking he should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone’. I think that if you wanted to be as scrupulously fair to Johnson as it is possible to be and one ignores the often inferential evidence against Johnson in the Committee’s report, it must be said that Johnson has exhibited a consistent pattern of lying to employers for which he was sacked both by Michael Howard and by Max Hastings. Therefore the Committee must have concluded that any smidgeon of doubt that could be exercised in Johnson’s favour could be set aside given a track record of decades and decades of mendacious behavior. I think that people have forgotten long before Johnson was even thought of as a Prime Mnister, there was a large campaign group in the Commons which called them selves the ‘ABB’ group – anybody but Boris as they argued (with considerable foresight) that Johnson would make the most disastrous of Prime Ministers and so it proved. If I were a cartoonist, I would display Johnson as a firework in the shape of a volcano set apart from the rest of the Bonfire Night party and being allowed to fizz off with nobody noticing or being of interest. I read that the Twittersphere is even more vituperative but I did read one tweet to the effect that they had run out of Kleenex tissues with with to mop up the tears of joy that flowed down their face after the report was published.

Today was my shopping day but I after collecting my money from an ATM, I popped into a Morrison’s store to get some herbs and other ingredients for the meal I am going to prepare for Meg’s cousins on Sunday. It was one of those days where I found everything I wanted extraordinarily quickly and a kind member of staff even located some cornflower for me whilst I was perusing the packeted herbs section. So now I have all of the ingredients that I need for Sunday but I am relying upon our domestic help who calls around tomorrow to give me some final instructions how to prepare some special starters. Once I had got the shopping home, we had to unpack quickly the items that needed the freezer because Meg and I had a double appointent at the dentists mid-morning. Normally, we are in a pattern where we see the hygienist every six months and the dentist every six months but we ‘interdigitate’ the two such that we see the hygienist and then the dentist three months later. But the post COVID rush and scarcity of appointments meant that we saw the hygienist and the dentist on the same day, being today, and were both pleased to have emerged with a full scale bill of health for both of us although our bank balance received the nomal bashing. After that, we were pleased to get home and glue outselves to the TV to see the reactions to the Johnson report which is evidently dominating the airwaves today.

It was another roasting day today and Meg and I needed to make sure we were keeping ourselves both cool and hydrated. In the shopping this morning, I indulged ourselves by buying some choc ices and Meg and I treated ourselves to sitting out on our front bench to enjoy them. But we quickly had to retreat to the back garden and I was delighted to show the Meg the completely self-sown foxgloves (three purple but one pure white) that have sprung up in our back garden.

We knew that today would be quite a busy day for us. As soon as Meg and I had breakfasted, I took to my word processor to pen a letter to a consultant opthamologist, whose clinic Meg is due to attend next Monday. We have a series of quite important questions to ask him so I carefully composed the letter indicating that I wished to see him personally to answer our queries rather than one of his assistants. Whether this letter will generate the desired results or not, I cannot say but at least the letter is composed and on its way. Having picked up our newspaper, we then made our way to Finstall which is a delightful little village which is now a ‘de facto’ suburb of Bromsgrove and in the village hall, Age Concern Worcester run a club once a month on each second Wednesday. We arrived early but we were joined by a couple we know who only live a bit over half a mile from us and who we met at our very first meeting. On today’s agenda, the meeting was themed to be ‘Holiday Snaps and Memories’. However well intentioned the organisers were, this did not really work as intended if only because so many of us now hold our snaps digitally on phones and ipads and so not so easily passed around. Nonetheless, we had some pleasant chats and the two personnel who run the club are very friendly and approachable. Actually, I did have quite a long chat with one of them who promised me some help in navigating my way through the labrynthine coils of the welfare system because I have a feeling that Adult Social Services in Worcestershire may be able to unlock some channels that might be useful to us. This helper took some copious notes which she was going to discuss with her manager and we were very grateful for the enquiries that she was going to make on our behalf.

This afternoon, we got home fairly late but nonetheless wanting to have a quickly prepared lunch as I was keen to get going on the weekly lawn mowing whilst I could. So what I did was to make a fairly large confection of some iceceam, a tin of peaches, some yogurt and finally some dried peaches, walnuts and a drizzle of honey. This was not only delicious but was quickly prepared and just the job when we were pretty hot anyway. So this went down a treat and I was able to start the mowing just after 2.00pm and get it all done within the hour. Then, after a rest, it was a case of unloading the washing line where things had been baking since about 10am this morning but I follow this up with another light tub load of washing comprised of the underwear I bought for Meg recently. This is out on the line as I blog but I am pretty sure it should be dry-ish by about 8.00pm.

This afternoon, there have been live scenes from Nottingham where staff and students were participating in a vigil for the two university students (and a third man, a school caretaker) who were stabbed to death by someone who appears to be mentally deranged in the small hours of Tuesday morning. The live TV clips were emotionally compelling although I only witness them in passing. When this sort of apparently random killing occurs, I always ask myself the question of what this a case of ‘Care in the Community‘ or what the more cynical amongst us might call ‘Neglect in the Community‘ which is a popular regime as the medical authorities are loathe to admit people into mental health wards given their scarcity. I often wonder whether such indivuals are properly taking their medication and whether they are being adequately supervised. When the full account of what actually happened in this incident will ever be released into the public domain is hard to say but I would not be surprised if the answer to both of the questions that I posed above tends out to be a ‘No’

One of my Wednesday afternopon jobs is to roll out the dustbins to locare them near the roadside ready for empting first thing in the morning. Very often, I take my neighbour’s bin(s) out as well as our own and he, in return, brings them back for both of us. But today, we coincided and so took a chat about things musical and musicological. I was telling him about our recent venture in buying and practising upon a Casio keyboard and my ambition for the future. Our neighbour is extremely knowledgeable about most pf the personnel and the groups in popular masic probably since the 60’s so we never pass by the opportuniy to discuss items of joint musical interest. Today we were thinking about the classic recordings of ‘Scarborough Fair‘ about which I was blogging recently. My neighbour collects the old juke boxes, some of which have the most amazingly mellifluous sound and naturally, he has a huge collection of 45 rpms which these machines play. He is a very dab hand in this technology and knows how to buy and restore these items when they come onto the market which I do not suppose is that often nowadays.

Tuesday has dawned on my Pilates day but first of all, we paid our customary visit to Waitrose where we met two of our regulars. Our third friend was away on holiday with her family in mid-Wales (somewhere beginning Llan…which must narrow it down a lot) After our customary chat we raided the shelves of the supermarket, buying some cordial, a decent bottle of Rioja and one or two other ingredients thinking about the things I need to have to hand before I start to prepare the meal on Sunday for Meg’s cousins. In Waitrose, we were greeted by our Irish friend who had just returned from a fortnight’s holiday in Ireland. I joked with her whether the Irish had needed to throw her out for drunken and debauched behaviour but she assured me that this was not actually the case. We promised to meet up with each other in the days ahead. After getting home and changing into my Pilates gear, I left for the class giving myself an extra five minutes so that I could make a detour into the ‘Age Concern‘ second hand furniture shop which has a presence on Bromsgrove High Street. In there, I knew what I was looking for which was a stool which would serve as a second ‘piano stool’ to accompany the one I purchased the other day and I happened to see almost exactly what I was looking for. This was an adjustable stool clad in a serviceable leatherette. As it was only £2.95 I was quite happy to purchase this and, as I was just around the corner from my Pilates class, I carried this into the studio, explaining why I was turning up to a Pilates class complete with stool. One of my fellow class members made me a quite unprompted offer to take it home for me and drop it inside our front porch. This was an incredibly kind offer and although I hesitated for a moment, I was happy to accept as otherwise I would have needed to carry it a mile home, uphill and in some blazing sunshine. Needless to say, I was delighted to see it in the porch when I arrived home several minutes later on foot but I made my priority getting on with the lightning speed lunch of fishcakes which is part of our Tuesday routine. After lunch, I gave the stool a ritual clean (not that it needed much) and an examination that all was well. Although it was adjustable it seemed somewhat on the stiff side but it was exactly the height, almost to the millimetre, of the bench I collected last Sunday so now I have the two stools sitting side by side. The idea here is than when, and if, I get Meg to sit by my side whilst I teach her some keyboard skills, it will be faciliated by us sitting side by side and on stools of the same height.

After we had our lunch and customary post-prandial drink, Meg expressed the desire to get out and experience some fresh air. We decided to visit the large Webb’s garden centre which is just down the road but which has a wonderful little meandering series of paths that eventually lead you onto the banks of the River Salwarpe which flows through the Webb’s gardens. Before the pandemic, we used to do this little walk on a fairly regular basis but we have got out of the habit once the gardens were closed during the pandemic and were then subject to some upgrading. So it must have four years since we last walked these gardens and, four years ago, Meg’s health was much better than it is today. So today, it was a bit of a struggle for Meg to traverse the paths and to make our way to the river. We just about managed to make this trip but it was proving to be quite a struggle for Meg to manage even this little journey. As I was walking back to the car, Meg was making some rather slow progress, having to stop for breath on occasions when we actually received the offer of assistance to get Meg back to the car. This offer of help (from a retired nurse) was gratefully received but in the event, declined as we were we were only about 150 yards from the car and I felt this was manageable on our own. Still, it does give me pause for thought as to the kind of trips that Meg can manage these days so I may need to keep plans under constant review.

For the last day or so, we have had the same weather pattern in that in the early evening, the rain clouds build up and then there is a sudden rumble of thunder, a flash of lighning and a downpour. But tonight, we have a brilliantly sunny evening so this pattern of daily rainstorms seems to be passing. When my son spent a pre-university year in Mexico, he used to tell us how it rained regularly between about 2-3 in the afternoon which was just the time when Mexicans traditionally took their main meal of the day. This was then typically followed by a walk when the day had cooled a little and the air was wonderful,crisp and clear after the rain.

We had not a great deal on today so decided to capitalise upon the fact that we have a ‘free’ day. After I collected the newspaper this morning, Meg and I had a quick refreshment of some elevenses at home before we set off for Marks and Spencer in Longbridge, some eight miles distant. There we wanted to buy a birthday M&S voucher for our domestic help as it is her birthday in just over a week’s time and I had discussed with her recently that this is what she would like as a birthday gift. At the same time, we took the opportunity to buy Meg some underwear and fortunately we managed to locate the ‘Lingerie’ section fairly quickly although I have to confess, as a mere male, the options and choices are bewildering in the extreme and, as usual, the actual garment you require is always hard to locate. Anyway, we got our business done, navigated the new self-service tills (with a little bit of assistance from staff who always seem to be a bit thin on the ground) and then struck for home. After that, it was quite instructive to watch the mid-day BBC2 Politics program which we tend to do quite often just often 12.00pm on a weekday. Here we witnessed Jake Berry, an ex-Tory party chairman, simultaneously trying to rubbish the work of the Privileges Committee by implying that it was similar to a judge announcing his sentence to a court and then allowing the case to proceed. But when challenged, Jake Berry would not go through with the import of his analysis by saying that he did not impugn the integrity of the committee. This is just as well because, in theory, that would make his own utterances liable to sanction by the Privileges Committee under the rubric of bringing the work of the House of Commons into disrepute.

Whilst I have not had much time to practice on my new Casio keyboard, I have consulted the web to see if there are easy classical pieces that can be played with one hand (for the present). I have located on the Amazon web site the offerings of a piano teacher who has published a series of booklets aimed at beginners. Most of these are offerings to which I can easily give a miss (such as the booklets on hymns, nursery rhymes, Christmas carols) but I have purchased the one on simple Classical pieces.This has now been delivered and it is possible to visit the author’s website and download some additional pieces at no additional cost. So I have now augmented the twenty classical pieces in the purchased booklet with another ten evidently making thirty in total. Each piece is only of the order of 15-20 bars long and has been simplified in that the author has transposed the original into a simpler key i.e. without a proliferation of sharps and flats and with any grace notes removed, thus preserving the essence of the piece but simplifying it for learners. I imagine most learners would be between the ages of 8-14 rather than in their late 70’s (in my own case). As well as classical pieces, I am not averse to the occasional well-known tune from the world of popular music but as one might expect, most of this is still subject to copyright and a purchase fee. But I have managed to locate a copy of ‘Scarborough Fair‘, the origin of which can be traced back as far as 1670 but is best known to us today via the recording made by Simon and Garfunkel. I am pretty sure that given the tune’s simplicity and universal appeal, this is part of the repertory of most folk singers as well.

It has been the convention that ex-Prime Ministers do not enter into overt criticism of their successors. But today, Boris Johnson, no respector of any constitutional proprieties as we know full well, has laid into Rishi Sunak and vice versa. Rishi Sunak is arging that Boris Johnson asked him to overturn and to ignore the advice of HOLAC (the House of Lords Appointments Commission) over the Boris Johnsom nominations for honours and peerages. Rishi Sunak refused this request point blank and Johnson has replied indicating bad faith or broken promises. This public row is unprecedented and only serves to reinforce the impression in the electorate’s mind that the Tories are fighting like rats in a sack. There will now be three by-elections probably before the end of July and the Tories may well lose at last two of them and possibly all three. On the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump is turning up to a court house in Miami to be formally charged with some three dozen offences over his storage of official government documents in his own house. Both supporters (many of them actually armed) and opponents of Trump are due to turn up tomorrow and the local police may well struggle to keep the two opposing factions apart. The Trump faction is indicating that they are staunch members of the National Rifle Assocoation (subtext being – come armed to the teeth) so we may have the equivalent of a bloodbath outside the courtroom tomorrow, in full view of the wold’s media of course.

This Sunday started off in a fairly predictable way in that Meg and I ensured that we were all up and ready in time for the first of the politics programs on the TV starting at 8.30. As we have come to expect, the same Tory spokesperson is always on both channels and seems to repeat word-for-word on the Lorna Kuennsberg programme what they have just uttered on the Sophie Ridge program on Sky. Having said that, I am beginnning to think that Sophie Ridge has the slight edge on her BBC counterpart who is arguably better known. Grant Shapps is well known as a ‘smooth’ talker and I thought that he manifested these skills this morning where he managed to disavow some of the wilder Boris Johnson’s accusations (a witchhunt, a campaign by the Establishment to exact revenge on Johnson for the Brexit venture) whilst using quite emollient language. After these programmes, we prepared our elevenses and then picked up our weighty Sunday newspapers, filled the car up with petrol and then made for the park. I must say that it was pretty hot there this morning and whilst I was protected with my leather bush hat, Meg was not so I made a mental note that if the fine weather persists, I need to dig out a sunhat for Meg tomorrow. When we got home, I was keen to get the inside story of Johnson throwing in the towel. Actually, there are two intertwined stories here. The most evident one is the draft report from the Committee on Privileges but even the Johnson allies are very circumspect about this because, after all, it has not even been published yet and will probably take a few days to get through the system. But another intertwined story upon which the Johnson allies are seizing is the strange case of the Johnson ‘leaving Prime Ministers’ recommendations for Honours. There were two or three nomimations on the list one of whom was Johnson’s own father, Stanley Johnson (now a French citizen, incidentally) and another of whom was Nadine Dorries, an adorer of Johnson. The Sunak team argue that the list went to HOLAC (House of Lords Appointments Commission) and it was they who made the ruling, probably following precedent, that you could not be nominated for a peerge if still a member of the Commons. One needs to have resigned some months ago for a peerage nomination to be accepted. Anyway, the Johnson camp is claiming lots of dirty work behind the scene to remove various people from the list before it went to HOLAC – for its part, the Sunak team are saying that they presented a list to HOLAC and then followed the HOLAC recommnendations. The truth behind all of this may never come out but ardent Brexiteers such as Isabel Hardman who was on the Lorna Kuennsberg programme this morning are crying ‘Foul’ at the top of their voices and this is being added to the complex mixture of motives that led Johnson to resign. A fascinating piece was provided in the Sunday Times by Anthony Seldon who has written the most recent account of Johnson’s life, concentrating upon his tenure at 10 Downing Street who entitled his piece ‘He has caused damage beyond measure. But his vanity will not let him see it’ This is probably as accurate and succinct judgement of the case against Johnson that one is likely to get.

This afternoon, there is going to be a slight indulgence whilst I watched ‘Paddington 2’ as a sequel to the original. I think I prefer the first film to the second but it is a marginal call. Later on this afternoon, Meg and I had a trip out to Worcester in order to pick up a keyboard bench which is height adjustable and especially designed to be used with keyboards. I thought this was going to be a shorter trip than the other day but it turned out that the address was in deepest Worcestershire although the initial seller’s contact details indicated Worcester. Nonetheless, it was a 40 minute trip with the M5 motorway providing some ‘fast miles’ and I was slightly anxious that we might caught in a torrential downpour. The house from which we were due to collect was slightly hard to find – why do people buy nice looking houses in modern developments but then not bother to put a house number on the side of their houses, I ask myself. We got home quickly enough and treated ourselves to an icecream supper and as we were finishing this the skies seemed to darken so I would not be surprised if were to have a downpour later on tonight as we did last night. Tonight, we are going to treat ourselves to ‘Cardiff Singer of the World’ which is a competition that builds up over the next few days. Altogether there will be sixteen singers over four rounds with the main final next Sunday night. These competitions are always quite fascinating to watch as sometimes one can see a real star of the future performing as they are the way up. I think that Bryn Terfel came up through this route and certainly sang in many of the regional as well as the national Eisteddfod in Wales.