Tuesdays roll around with a pleasant predictability and today we looked forward to our weekly (or sometimes bi-weekly) chat with the regulars in the Waitrose café. One of our number was missing today, possibly deterred by the really bad weather where one was threatened with quite torrential downpours every half hour or so. Nonetheless, four of us met to exchange the gossip of the last few days and after that it was returning home for a quick turnaround and then a walk down to my weekly Pilates class. Just before I set off, I got a friendly telephone call from a community pharmacist attached to our local medical practice. This has happened before so I was not unduly alarmed as one might be if the medical practice calls you instead of the other way round. He was calling to discuss a series of blood pressure readings which I had supplied to the practice last Friday and he was putting then onto the system but at the same time, he was taking the opportunity to review the blood pressure medication I was on. I asked him to give a sneak preview of the recent results from a blood sample I gave last Friday and he was a bit surprised that the one particular reading in which they were interested they had forgotten or neglected to test for. So he booked me another test and was generally quite full of generic advice. As it happens, I always used to enjoy chatting with the pharmacists when I was in hospital five years go as they have some interesting perspectives, in that they are involved in the ‘medical’ world whilst not actually being medics and sometimes you can have a discussion better than with a doctor. I consulted the pharmacist about the relationshop between weight loss and blood pressure and whilst some American websites will claim that you lose 1 point of blood pressure reading for every 1lb lost, a more conservative and probably more accurate view is that one loses about 1 point for every 2lb (or 1kg lost) I am keeping a little booklet with my regular readings and things are moving in the right direction.

Last night, or perhaps it was in the wee small hours of the morning, I taught myself a new piece to play on our newly acquired organ. After buying the organ I invested in a series of booklets purchased through eBay which were collections of classical works simplified for beginners and often adapted so that you do not have to master the complete work but just sufficient elements of it to recognise the theme. I have always been fond of Offenbach’s ‘Barcarolle‘ which easily evokes the image of a barge gliding slowly through the water of a canal with a beautiful slow rhythm. When you hear this piece of music you realise how few notes are deployed to produce an incredible effect so I turned to a book, recently purchased, in which 100 classical pieces were sold in a booklet for which I paid only £3.39. Luckily, I found the ‘Barcarolle‘ in this and quickly taught myself the basics of at least the first half of the piece. I have to say that this work is really very simple and many of the notes are literally next to each other which makes the whole piece pretty easy to memorise. So I gave Meg a rendition of what I had just learnt after we had breakfasted first thing in the morning. Of couse, there is still a task that lies ahead as I must practice the second half of the piece and then, even more challenging, add in the left hand but at the very least I have another melody available to me if I want to give mysef a quick burst of relaxation.

I read a tweet last night which really increased my revulsion at some of the antics of the modern generation of politicians. Our immigration minister is Robert Jenrick and he has oversight of the various detention centers in which migrants arriving by boat are typically accommodated. The ‘Daily Mail’ has reported that Immigration minister defended ordering the removal of Mickey Mouse artwork at an asylum centre for unaccompanied children. Murals depicting cartoon characters were last week painted over at a Kent facility used to hold those who arrive in Britain after crossing the Channel in small boats. Mr Jenrick was reported to have felt the murals gave the impression the UK was too ‘welcoming’ to migrants arriving from France after undertaking sea journeys. The mean spiritness of this approach when the centre was designed for unaccompanied childrn really takes one’s breath away. Meanwhile, the ‘Illegal Migration’ Bill was savaged in the House of Lords once it had passed through the Commons and 20 amendments were made. The Government having received this bill back from the Lords have made or or two small concessions but are busy voting to remove each of the Lords’ amendments. After that, the bill will be returned back to the Lords who will then have to decide whether to enforce the will of the (unelected) House of Lords as against the (elected) House of Commons. One of the most vociferous critics of the bill in the Commons is no less than the ex-Prime Minister, Theresa May, who feels that the current bill will facilitate much modern slavery – and as she had oversight of the legislaion outlawing modern slavery as Home Secretary and as Prime Minister, then she feels that some key parts of her legacy are being jettisoned before her very eyes.

Today was one of those rather gloomy days in which it looked as though as it was going to rain in little bursts right throughout the day. So after we had breakfasted we had to decide how to make the best of a rainy day. What we decided to do was firstly to collect our newspapers and then to go off and visit a little Age Concern shop, not on the High Street but about a mile or from the centre of town which is quite easy to access and often has some quite good little bargains. Whilst there, we did not find anything for Meg but I did pick up a little Bush DAB radio for less than £10.00. Once I got it home and gave it a good clean it was incredibly easy to scan and to set the particular presets that I wanted (which should be an easy task but is made a little difficult on some DAB radios) I managed to get the stations I wanted, had to replace one missing foot with some little round felt pads of which I had plenty in stock and then located a manual which is near enough for my purposes even though not the exact model number. I can see why someone has got rid of it as some of the Menu items cannot be accessed but this not concern me too greatly as I have got the DAB audio signal and quality of sound in the stations to which I listen to the most and therefore this is quite functional for me. I have found some batteries that fit inside it so it will be OK for the occasional use when I am sitting out on a garden bench.

Meg and I lunched on some barbecued chicken thighs which were pretty tasty and which we served up with a baked potato and some broccoli. The weather seemed to be brightening somewhat this afternoon but we still have some washing waiting to dry so I am keeping an eye upon the weather. We bumped into our next door neighbour when we returned from our little venture out this morning and he was busy sowing a bit of extra lawn seen and fertiliser upon his lawn what he hoped to be a few hours before it started raining again. As the gardening books say ‘Choose a fine day’ or ‘Choose a suitable day’ but this advice is more easily given than followed.

This afternoon, after we had our post-prandial cup of tea and a bit of a rest, I invited Meg to join me in our newly commissioned ‘Music Room’ as I had a little domestic job which I thought it would be nice for us to do together. When I was in the charity shop this morning, I was on the look out for some loose fabrics that could act as a sort of loose covers for the stools we have in our music room. I alighted upon what turned out to be a duvet cover, perhaps, for a child’s bedroom but in some rather classical looking blue stripes. Meg and I arranged these on a couple of adjacent stools to form a sort of impromptu bench and, in the fullness of time, I intend to have a variety of musical manuscripts arranged upon this arrangement such that I can quickly locate what I am seeking as the spirit takes me. When this little task was completed, and we were taking pleasure in our work, we decided to have a quiet sit down and listen to a CD of Sacred Choral Favourites that I had got loaded into one of our music centres. We then gave ourself an almost impromptu choral evensong with some of our particular favourites. These included the Fauré ‘Cantique do Jean Racine‘, Brahmn’s ‘How Lovely are Thy Dwellings‘ from his German Requiem and Mozart’s ‘Ave verus corpus‘ We followed this up with two other versions of ‘Ave verum corpus‘, one by Elgar and the other by William Byrd. So we had the most incredibly restful, not to say uplifting, little concert of our own choosing. This then led me to wonder how often choral evensong is broadcast and it only took a few seconds to discover that it is always traditionally broadcast at 4.00pm on Wednesday afternoons on BBC Radio 3 from a variety of churches and cathedrals. Also available, as it happens on Radio 3 today, was a choral evening song from Lincoln cathedral which I am playing now, as I blog, broadcast from Lincoln Cathedral and commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of William Byrd. So one way or another, I feel that we have hit a rich seam of broadcast pleasure to which we can look forward week by week. I am reminded that one of my music and art teachers, a very close personal friend who died a few years ago now, used to listen almost ‘religiously’ to Choral Evening Song when he was working on a design in his work as an architect. I now realise that he had a point so that is one more thing for which I need to offer him thanks. He also introduced me to Mozart’s ‘Piano Concerto No. 23‘ and the Mozart ‘Clarinet Concerto‘, both of which remain my particular favourites even some 65 years after I was first introduced to them.

Today we had in prospect a day out with our University of Birmingham friend, as we planned to visit Clevedon, a North Somerset seaside resort just south of Bristol accessed quite easily via the M5 motorway. Our friend texted us early in the day wondering whether or not we should make our planned trip together as the weather forecast on the app seemed to suggest a 50% chance of showers and heavy ones at that. I suggested that we should still go and after I had picked up our newspapers from town, we were picked up by our friend and then proceeded to Clevedon. We set off at about 10.15 and the sun smiled generally on us on the way down, so we felt vindicated in our decision to go. When we arrived in the town, we went straight for our friend’s favourite cafe and eating place which has a good view over the sea and where there is seating both inside and out. Our friend has been a frequent patron of this establishment over the years and is on first names terms with the staff. We treated ourselves to a really nice meal and enjoyed the relaxing atmoshphere and mood that the cafe engenders. After this relaxed lunch where we talked over the recovery that our friend was making after his bout of illness, we decided to have a venture along one of the best preserved Victorian piers. The pier won the ‘Pier of the Year’ prize in 2021 was dubbed by John Betjeman, the one-time poet laureate and Victoriana expert as ‘the most beautiful pier in England’ and was designated a Grade I listed building in 2001. The pier is interesting in that along the wooden restored benches that form the pier sides one can buy little brass plaques that mark the passing of a loved one. One can purchase a variety of size of brass plaques with commensurately more space available for messages and evidently this had provd very popular over the years and was no doubt a good source of fund raising. The pier was immensely breezy when we stepped out on it and the weather had changed for the worse with both thunder and lightning – at this stage, Meg turned a little wobbly and we turned back before completing our journey to the end of the pier and back again. I think that our friend has a plaque enscribed with a message for his wife located at the pier head and we were not able to see it on this occasion, but I am sure that occasions will arise in the future when we will have the opportunity to view the same. After this little pier walk, one could not fail to be impressed by the variety of shades represented in the waters of the estuary and this was echoed by the layers of clouds that were shunting cross the sky before our eyes. We retired to the cafe, this time for a pot of tea and, again, enjoyed the relaxation of nothing else much to do apart from to soak up the atmosphere of the place. The weather was definitely worsening by this time in the afternoon so our friend went off to locate the car which had to be parked some distance away whilst Meg and I braved the light rain to walk along the sea front. Then we left for home and, in contrast with this morning, we ran into some really heavy rain showers in the late afternoon. Of course by this time, we had had a happy day in each other’s company so we were not too concerned about the vagaries of the weather.

We got home just in time to see the conclusion of the Test Match betweem England and Australia. Engand required 251 runs in a low scoring test match where the previous three innings all had had scores in the 230-250 range so it was very ‘nip and tuck’ whether England would manage to reach tis 251 total and not have a spectacular collapse. In the event, although England lost some vital wickets during the afternoon, they managed to achieve the required total with three wickets in hand. This makes the series 2:1 to the Australians in the current series which means that to retain the Ashes, England have to win both the next match at Old Trafford and also the final one at the Oval. It was always known that this series of test matches was going to be incredibly tight with little to choose between the two teams and with the fortunes of the game swinging both this way and that within the course of an innings. Two quite important considerations when the difference between the two contestants is so small is who wins the toss and elects either to bat or to field. Also the state of the weather can be critical as well because damp and humid conditions might just work to the advantage of England and vice versa for Australia.

Tomorrow, as we have no real pressing commitments so we may devote our time to domestic activities such as clothes washing and household tidying. One would really like to put the completed washing on the washing line outsides to dry but we have been caught in the last few days with leaving some things on the line only to have them wetter after an intense shower than when they were first pegged out.

Today dawned with one of those little domestic accidents in which things have been spilled which needed some clearing up but once all of this was done, the washing was put in the machine and then pegged out and Meg was breakfasted with her usual fare. We knew that this morning should be quite an interesting morning because not only was there a gaggle of four old ladies (including Meg) in the Waitrose café but our University of Birmingham friend turned up by prior arrangement. I greeted him with the plea to come and help me out because I felt that I could handle two or three old ladies at once but four was a bit of a stretch, even for me. Naturally, he obliged and in no time the conversation was flowing and the jokes were flying. I told them the story of the hospital in South Africa where all of the patients seem to to die on a Friday morning and that just a few minutes after 10.00am. To understand what was going on, a nurse was put on observational duty and for several hours, there was nothing to observe. But shortly after 10.00am, a cleaner came into the room and unplugged the life support system in order to plug her vacuum cleaner into the socket – thus the mysterious death rate riddle was solved. Later on, the conversation turned to buses and I asked the question what was the earliest ticket issuing machines utilised when we were all very young. The machine that I was used to in Yorkshire was an affair with several buttons or levers on it, laden with pre-printed tickets such as 2d and so on. By pressing a little button on the bottom, the machine would issue 2 tickets so this took care of a fare that cost 4d. When I first made a journey into Lancashire at the age of 11, I was absolutely intrigued by the very different technology deployed on the other side of the Pennines. The machine there was a series of circular dials which could then be set to the correct fare. Then a handle was wound once or twice after which a ticket, printed for the paid fare, emerged from the machine. To my eyes, this was totally different to anything experienced before but reflecting upon it after all of these years, the Lancashire system must have been much more versatile and, of course, did not rely upon supplies of pre-printed tickets. For the very saddest people in our midst, you can even go on eBay and buy of these (Lancashire) style machines from prices that vary from £50-£100 and I suppose to some people they are really prized possessions. Whilst on the subject of antique machines, I well remember the amusement that I felt when I first supervised an accountancy examination in my Leicester Polytechnic days. In 1971, the electronic revolution had yet to get really underway so in the accountancy exams, the students would leave their examination desks and form a queue in front ot a primtive hand-driven calculating machine. They would punch several numbers in, turn the handle for a few ‘whirrs’, and then emerge with a little slip of paper with their results upon it which they included in their answer books. Of course, all of this was swept away when cheap electronic calculators became available in the 1970’s but a prescient colleague of mine made a collection of these ancient machines once they were literally thrown away and then used them as teaching aids (to illustrate the march of technology, the diminution in the number of working parts and so on). Later on in my own teaching career, similar things happened when students asked ‘What is a 5¼” floppy’ (when they were only used to the more modern 3½” floppy disk) A colleague of mine even flashed an antiquated 8″ IBM floppy disk in front of me on one occasion so I have only seen one for seconds. Of course, before there were floppy disks there were punched cards which had the virtue of being readable not only by a card reader but also by a human (even without characters printed along the top if you were quite knowledgable)

Tomorrow our University of Birmingham friend and we two have decided to go on a little trip out together. Our friend knows Cliveden pretty well including some interesting eating places so we are being picked up by car in the morning and look forward to a nice day out. I must say it is a very long time since I have actually seen any seaside so if the weather is not inclement, that should be an interesting little venture for us. After one or two text messages, I have also put the wheels in motion for a little meeting of like minded individuals to meet in the park next Friday so perhaps we can all have a pleasant time in each other’s company. We have noticed, by the way, that there are often groups of a good half dozen or so mothers with pretty young children so I suspect that these young women have got themselves organised in a WhatsApp group which must make it easier to organise. They seem to turn up with blankets to sit on, some treats for the children but evidently this will only work when it is not bucketing down with rain.

Today we were particularly intererested in the arrival of our domestic help becase I was anxious to get her opinion on my newly acquired piano stool. Her opinion was that it was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship and I had probably acquired quite a bargain – so to celebrate this I played her the part of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, the Cardinal Newman hymn which is actually incredibly easy to play once realises that the key of F has a ‘B flat’ in it so you have to remember to press this black key when needed. I had to have quite a quick conversation with our domestic help because I had an appointment with a nurse in the doctor’s surgery. This turned out just to be just the routine taking of a blood sample but I also handed in a series of blood pressere readings that I have been keeping on the instruction of the surgery and which will be scanned and appended to my record. I have a little book in which I (sporadically) make a record of things like blood pressure readings and when I glanced back over some of my historical records, I discovered that my blood pressure is lower than it was about eight years ago so this is quite good news. As the appointment at the surgery hardly took any time at all, Meg and I made up a flask of coffee and made our way to the park where it was certainly pretty warm compared with the last few days. We drank our coffee but did not linger as we might have got uncomfortably hot in the midday sun but instead came home to coook dinner. Our domestic help had very kindly made a special tuna paella for us so we were more than happy to add a variety of salad ingredients to this and to enjoy a communal meal, once I had heated up the paella in the oven.

This afternoon, we had a pleasant surprise half way through the afternoon. Our domestic help had left us and then called in at her favourite little charity shop, not on the High Street and not too far away from us. There she had found an incredibly useful tool for the bathroom which is actually called a ‘safety step stool with handrail’ These devices are evidently to be used to assist people getting into/out of a bath or shower but I also gather they have another use which is to help people negotiate quite
a steep step in a caravan. Our domestic help thought it would be tremendously useful to assist Meg and I getting into the shower and she grabbed it for us whilst she could. Naturally, we have accepted this with a profusion of thanks and got it installed in our bathroom where we can give it a good roadtest tomorrow morning. It was a brilliantly sunny afternoon so we had a line-full of washing left out until it was well and truly dry and then it was a case of folding it all up and putting it all away. I know that some people put their washing outside almost whatever the weather and we are not quite as assiduous as this but evidently we must make use of the sunshine whilst we can.

Surveying some of our social committments in the next few days, tomorrow is going to be a definite Waitrose day. This is because we will in all probability see our University of Birmingham friend tomorrow morning. We also think that several of the gang that meets on Tuesday mornings may well be there tomorrow so we are looking forward to all of that. Of course, in the late afternoon, we go off to church and then it will be a case of racing home and installing ourselves in front of the TV in order to see ‘Today at the Test’ as the England v. Australia is very finely poised and could go either way although the pessimistic side of my nature tells me that the ability of the English cricket team to throw away a potentially winning situation by rash shots or failing to hold catches is unparalleled. Next Friday, we are going to have the daughter of some of the friends we recently made at the Age Concern club (which we attend on a monthly basis) to call around so that we can give each other a bit of mutual support in the care that we can offer to our family members (parents in her case who are getting a little frail)

There is a now infamous incident in which a Berkshire headteacher with an unblemished record when her school was suddeny regraded from ‘outstanding’ to ‘unsatisfactory’ committed suicide. Her family believes stress associated with the inspection was a major factor in her death. The tragedy prompted many teachers to call for changes to the inspection system and the end of the one-word grading system. The school was reinspected on 21 and 22 June and assessed as good in all categories, the second-best rating. But the whole point of the controversy is whether Ofsted is justified in giving a ‘one word’ overall categorisation to a school such as ‘good’ or ‘unsatisfactory’ I am sure it is possible to do what was done in Higher Education quality assessments a few years ago in which the course was given a quality score (from 1 to 4) across each of six dimensions, 24 being a ‘perfect score’ (and anything in the range 22-24 being regarded as excellent)

Thursday is my shopping day so I was up bright and early to do my weekly shopping. In common with a lot of the population, I think I tend to rotate across the normal range of joints to have for our principal Sunday meal and thereafter in the week. So the choice revolves between beef, pork, ham and bacon joints, chicken and lastly lamb. I mention this last because it maybe a result of the supermarket in which I shop but lamb seems to be becoming a luxury item having been a staple meat for UK households over the decades. Today, just out of interest in the freezer sections of the supermarket I decided to make a quick mental note of the range of meats available. I did find some lamb shanks at quite an expensive price but adjacent to it, I found 17 manifestions of chicken in a variety of guises and, no doubt, with all kinds of gunk added to them to make them relatively more palatable. I suppose all of this is quite evident when you explore how long it takes for the various types of animal to mature before slaughter. In the case of chickens the modern factory farming gets from a chick to slaughter in 40 days whereas lamb takes five or six times as much with a minimum of 210 days. Also you cannot ‘intensively farm’ lamb: sheep eat grass and need a lot of space and sheep require lots of looking after compared with chickens. I had not really given this topic too much thought but I am pretty sure that most supermarkets used to have freezers full of lean New Zealand lamb and this seems in equally short supply, these days. Once I got the shopping unpacked and Meg up and breakfasted, the day was rather gloomy so we decided not to go out this morning. Instead, I cooked a fairly early lunch, not having cut the lawns yesterday, and I wanted to have a go today before things get out of hand. I consulted my weather app and no rain was forecast and so after we had lunched, I set to work with a vengeance and got everything cut in accordance with my schedule.

There are interesting stories today that Russia may be on the brink of a civil war. Speculation started once the Wagner leader, Prigozhin, is now rumoured to be in St. Petersburg rather than in Belarus where he was supposed to be in some kind of exile. These kinds of stories are always speculative in the extreme and it can be difficult for us in the West to read the runes of what is actually happening in Russia but I think it can be said that cracks are appearing in what used to be thought of as a state in which Putin was in absolute control. Naturally, the Ukranians are immensely interested in any evident weaknesses in the invading power but there is still a lot of hard fighting to be done in the Ukranian war and the promised advance seems to have been a very slow and difficult affair. But I have a suspicion that if the Ukranian military keeps its nerve, there may well be a tipping point in which the morale of the Russian soldiers suddenly collapses. There was a story told in the early days of the war that the Ukrainians, when they had captured young and very frightened Russian soldiers, used to sit them down with a cup of tea and then toss them a mobile phone with the ‘order’ that they telephone their mothers and tell them exactly what had happened to them. This story must have ‘had legs’ as the journalists used to say, because Russian families seemed to be fully aware of what had happened even though to organise anything like a protest movement would have been incredibly dangerous.

Tomorrow our domestic help is due to call round, having postponed her day from last Wednesday until tomorrow. As it happens, we both have little surprises for each other and I have been given a hint that tomorrow may be a bit of a culinary treat for us, but I have no real idea what it is apart from the fact that our domestic help is the most excellent of cooks. In turn, I want her honest opinions on our recent furniture acquisitions and I value her opinion highly. Our domestic help and I tend to share a common weakness that if we something that we like in a charity shop, naturally at a reasonable price, then we cannot resist making a purchase. In particular, we both rather like buying things that, with a bit of restoration, can be really turned around and we both take pleasure in seeing the results of our labours.

Since I acquired my electronic organ, I have tended to scour eBay for the kinds of books that have been put together for the benefit of learners and are usually simplified classics. I got my latest, and very last, book through the post today and it looks incredibly well used over the years – and well worth the £3.39 I paid for it. Today’s booklet details 100 ‘classics’ which have been simplified somewhat and abridged such that one gets the principal theme of the piece on one double page. I think I can recognise the vast majority of the pieces in the latest book so as my skills develop (and if they do), I will have a lot of material to give me pleasure over the months and years ahead.

Today the weather was set somewhat more fair but the humidity seemed to build up as the day wore on. This morning, Meg and I needed to have a passport photo of Meg taken in connection with some legal work so we actually chose another car park which minimised the amount of walking that Meg needed to walk along the High Street. As we were about to leave the photo shop, we received a very welcome phone call inviting us for coffee in Waitrose at the other end of the High Street. We made our way via one or two charity shops and were very pleased to see our friend being gradually restored to health after his recent bout of illness. One of the slight frustrations of life is that when our present car experiences a low type pressure in any of its four tyres, a symbol appears in the car’s information system as a constant reminder to get something done about it. What I have learned, through some experiences in the past, is that once the tyres are correctly inflated, the ‘flat tyre’ symbol does not disappear but one has to locate the appropriate setting in the controls (buried some way down) and then re-initilise it. This happened today and after I had checked out my tyres, I then had to come home and consult the web to find out how to reset, and thus eliminate, the warning symbol. After all of this, we decided to forget about the grass-cutting which we normally do on Wednesdays because we were expecting a long and important telephone call this afternoon.

Last night, when I had a bit of time to myself, I was intrigued to attempt to discover the value and provenance of the better of the piano stools which I purchased yesterday. Finding the value of piano stools via eBay is not necessarily an easy thing to do. There are several offered for sale but they are almost inevitably put into an auction where one can only surmise what the final selling price is likely to be. But more importantly, and given the nature of the items, they always seem to be offered on a ‘collection only’ basis and they always seem to be at least one hundred miles away from the Midlands. So my efforts in this direction initially scored a blank. I then consulted a veriety of websites to attempt to ascertain the kind of wood from which the stool was made and narrowed my options down to deal, cherrywood and mahogany. I think that mahogany was probably the best match but one can never be sure about such things. Finally, I hit on a vein of websites which were showing antique piano stools and this avenue of approach seemed a lot more fruitful. Looking at how the stool I had bought fitted into the general panorama of what I say displayed, I am now pretty certain that I have acquired a vintage Edwardian piano stool, manufactured about 1900 and which, in an antique dealer’s shop, would probably start off from £150 upwards. If attempting to buy one of these items through a straight eBay transaction, I think the price may lay in the range of £70-£120. But putting together a series of clues, I suspect that I am now the proud owner of a piece of vintage furniture worth considerably more than the price I paid for it. When I get somebody a bit more knowledgable than myself, it will be interesting to see if my guestimate and/or judgement is confirmed.

This afternoon, I had a long and important telephone call, by prior arrangement, with Worcestershire Association of Carers. This organisation acts both as a voluntary organisation with its own mission and agenda but also acts as an agent for Worcestershire County Council when it is in ‘assessment’ mode. The conversation was about an hour and a half long and generally fruitful as my contact made some suggestions some of which she is going to action and others of which I might be able to action myself. All of this may mean that there a range of sources of help and advice to assist with my wife’s health condition which may eventually prove helpful to us but I think that it may be several months before any real benefits manifest themselves.

Tonight there is going to be a program on the TV celebrating the life and achievements of Florence Nightingale. I remember well when I was attending a Total Quality Management conference in Sheffield when I was accumulating papers for my PhD that the floor was given to a Japanese TQM expert. His lecture started with words to the effect that speaking to a British audience, we did not need to be reminded about the life and career of Florence Nightgale, the great English….At this point, most of the audience was expecting to hear the words ‘nurse’ but instead the Japanese academic spoke the words ‘social statistician and nurse’ It is instructive for us now to appreciate that Florence Nightingale gave us the pie-chart and several other graphical representations that have become the bread-and-butter of modern statistics, perhaps well known to all school children. I am wondering, and will no doubt soon find out, whether this is reflected in the program this evening.

Tuesdays follow a regular and predictable pattern and today was no exception. By the time we were up and breakfasted and our daily newspaper collected, we made common party with three of our Waitrose regulars. I suspect that we all look forward to this chat and discussion of common problems and we generally have a good laugh, one way or another. Today, I was reminding them of a couple of stories from our Manchester days when I found myself in the office of the Professor of Surgery at Manchester University. To this day, I do not know and cannot remember how I bypassed the rest of the NHS systems and bureaucracy but the point of this story is that the estemmed professor operated on a lump in my neck and missed by over an inch. When confronted with the evidence, some weeks later, I was advised to go away and forget all about it which I did. But the next time I bumped into the Professor was when I was a census enumerator and he was ‘on my patch’ living in a large villa overlooking Platt Fields park in Manchester. The story that did the rounds was the fact that the Professor had large and alcohol fuelled dinner parties where a dozen people or more would be seated around a large dining table. During the course of a dinner, the Professor’s pet monkey was apt to swing from a chandelier over the table, urinating in long trails across the dinner table. If guests remonstrated with the Professor, they were informed that the monkey’s urine was biologically pure and would do them no harm so they should just carry on and enjoy the rest of the dinner. I am just recounting the story that I heard from more than one source but can honestly attest that I was not actually a witness to the events in question but why should people lie about such a thing? After we took our leave of each other, Meg and I did a little shopping in Waitrose and then returned home so that I could get changed into my Pilates gear. I walked down into town leaving some five minutes earlier than usual so that I could call in at an ATM for some living money. Then I popped into a stationers and bought a couple of erasable biros which the website I was consulting yesterday informed me was the best way to write out your own musical scores. I then popped into our local Age Concern used furniture shop and within seconds found exactly the thing that I had set my heart upon which was a specialised piano stool – the sort with the lid which lifts up so that you can store your music inside. When I enquired about the price, they were a little nonplussed within the store as this item had only been donated literally a few minutes before I walked in. Hence they did not have a chance to do the sort of consultations to put a price upon the stool and they then then informed me that they had a second one as well. The first stool was absolutely delightful and was a very traditional design with well turned carrying handles and a really expensive flock seat cover. The second was a bit more predestrian and was covered in a crimson brocade although I would preferred green. When it cane to pricing them up, I thought that the superior one was a little underpriced and the second one a little overpriced and although I tried to bargain for a better price if I bought the two, they did point out that they had only just been donated and seemed to be eminently saleable. I concurred with this and bought the two of them, knowing the better one would be a superb match for my recently acquired Technics organ and even the second was quite a nice piece of furniture. Then I went and did my one hour of Pilates and after walking home and cooking dinner, excitedly told Meg my good news.

After lunch, Meg and I decided that we would make our way down into town to collect our recently purchased furniture. Although the front of the Age Concern shop is on the High Street, it is not at all evident where the access to the store is via a rear entrance – but there evidently must be one so that the store can get its collections of furniture delivered. After a bit of fishing about, we did find the rear entrance and collected our acquisitions. Once we got them home, we kept them on the dark brown entrance mat that we have just inside our front door because this would be a qood site for them to be cleaned up. I started off with a bucket of warm soapy water and this is all they really required although later on, in the full light of day, there may be a call for some slight renovation with my bottle of ‘scratch cover’ fluid. I then ensured that each of the hinged seats were screwed up tightly, as I surmised that the hinges had not seen a screwdriver in decades. The older piece needed lining with some anaglypta wall paper of which I have a stock for cupbord lining purposes and now the two pieces have pride of place in our newly refurbished music room.

So Monday morning dawned as a fairly gloomy and rain bespattered day but we had no real projects that we had to undertake today. But by yesterday’s and today’s post, some very interesting mail arrived for me. They are principally a set of organ manuals for beginners (where I managed to get a job lot for six parts of a series via eBay). But most prized of all was a collection of carefully curated classical pieces for beginners such as myself acquiring or developing keyboard skills. There are quite a lot of these booklets in the world ‘out there’ evidently designed for children aged 8-14 (I would imagine) so that they can get the satisfaction of playing some of the themes from the well known classics but with a simplified format. Some of these are almost babyish in that they actually have the names of the notes written inside the circular shape of the notes themselves. But they serve their purpose to get you going – I suppose the best analogy is armbands that you put around the arms of young swimmers to give them a little bit of assistance (buoyancy) until the need for them is past. Some of these pieces I am really going to enjoy tackling once my skill levsls have improved a little and they are a ‘delight’ to be enjoyed down the line as it were. In the meanwhile, I have been learning ‘Morning’ from the Peer Gynt suite which I imagine is a well known tune, recognised by us all. I have tried a little experiment today, as follows. Looking on the web, I found a site here I could download a .pdf of some ’empty’ staves. Then I followed the advice I found elsewhere on the web to transcribe some of my tunes onto my own staves. The reason here is that I wondered if I could make my own musical scores a little less ‘baby-ish’ and I also considered that I might be able to add some of my connotations for fingering once I start to practice doing this properly i.e. using all of the fingers of my hand and not just picking out notes with an index finger which is what I have done so far.

After we had breakfasted, I collected our newspaper and then we swung by Waitrose for a few essentials. The car park was absolutely teeming, so much so that after circling around a few times we had to go on another errand and then try the car park a few minutes later. I suspect that it is a combination of the wet weather on one hand and a funeral in the local church on the other which leads to temporary overcrowdings like this. After lunch, I busied myself with making myself a piece of ‘storage’ furniture. One of the interesting things stocked at amazingly cheap prices in our local Poundland are adhesive floor tiles where you get about half a dozen for £1. There are two designs that I always like to have in stock, one being a type of wood laminate design and the other being a black and white tile design and both of their have their uses if deployed with care. This afternoon, I wanted to liberate a magazine rack for which I had other intentions. With the spare floor tiles enhanced with some black ‘gorilla’ tape, I made a pretty decent looking and quite strong storage box into which I could decant the former contents of the magazine rack. This I could then use to house some of the collection of piano song books I have accumulated in the last week or so so that I can ensure that everything is neatly put away but also quite accessible when I need to try my hand at something.

As many motorists have suspected, fuel prices tend to rise like a rocket when external events such as the war in Ukraine drive up prices but only fall back to earth very slowly ‘like a feather’ when the whole sale price softens. The net effect of all of this is that Asda and Morrisons, in particular, have been accused of extracting a lot more profit via their petrol stations and consequently being fined (only a ‘rap across the knuckles’) by the Competition and Markets Authority. Retail prices are now providing a 6p of profit per litre to the supermarket giants and almost £1bn has been extracted from the public via higher prices. There is some speculation that the supermarkets themselves are tryng to service mountains of debt incurred when ownership of them changed hands and as we have come to expect, it is nearly always the supermarket’s customers who have to pay the bill.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the right wing Conservative and arch Brexiteer is being investigated by Ofcom for his role in the so-called news channel of ‘GB News‘ An OfCom spokesperson has indicated that they are investigating whether this programme broke OfCom rules, which prevent politicians from acting as newsreaders, unless exceptionally, it is editorially justified. Certainly, the claim to be solely a ‘news’ channel is somewhat tendentious when the only ‘news’ avalable to the public is one from an extreme right wing perspective. One can only surmise that these channels are actually following the examples of Fox News in the United States where the sole ‘raison d’etre’ is to promulgate a right wing agenda rather than keeping an audience objectively informed.

Today has been a very interesting day for a variety of reasons. After a cup of tea in bed on a Sunday morning, the bedside radio was tuned to Radio 4 and we started passively listening to the ‘Sunday’ program devoted to religious affairs although the program defines itself broadly. This morning, there was a discussion with funeral directors concerning the most popular pieces of music both requested, and played, at funerals. Some were judged to be somewht inappropriate such as ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ unless it was very specifically requested by family and friends. This got me wondering what hymns I would like at my own funeral and, as it happens, in church last night before the service started I was glancing through a section at the back of our hymn book which was ‘Hymns for Particular Occasions’ I turned to the section on funerals and found a favourite of mine which was ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ written by John Henry Newman. This is one of the nearest that we have to a local Catholic saint (although there are others associated with Harvington Hall, just down the road from us) The point about this hymn is that the lyrics could easily be transported from one religious ethos or denomination to another and are not particularly mawkish or over sentimalised which can be the problem with Victorian hymns. Searching on the web, I found both an interesting rendition of the hymn sung by the choristers of Arundel cathedral and after not much searching, the sheet music associated with the hymn. This is a fairly simple melody which I can easily practise in my right hand mode and so I may be in a position in a few days time to play on my newly acquired organ one of the hymns that I would to have played at my own funeral. This is all slightly less macabre than might appear at first sight as hymn tunes are fairly simple, not to mention sonorous pieces, and they really do sound better when played with the gravitas of an organ rather than a more tinkly sound of a piano.

We had arranged to meet with our University of Birmingham friend in the park at about 11.00am and, fortunately, the weather brightened a little so we engaged in our Sunday morning chat, visited on our usual bench by a variety of dogs who associated people sitting on benches with titbits. After about half and hour or so, we both went to our house where we had invited our friend round for a traditional lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Fortunately, I had done some vegetable preparation beforehand and had some onions cooked until they were translucent so that I could quickly prepare an onion gravy. All of this meal worked out just as I wanted – I even located four remaining Yorkshire puddings that were popped in the oven to complement the rest of the dinner. No sooner had the meal been consumed and we had started to think about our post prandial coffee when I received a telephone from one of my ‘oldest’ friends. I use ‘oldest’ in both senses of the word because this lady is now 96 years old and we used to attempt to see each other once a year until the pandemic put paid to all of that. Secondly, we were colleages in the Central Office of Information where we met in 1964 so our friendship goes back practically sixty years. She has now moved from where she used to live on the South Coast to Dorking where she can be so much nearer to her one son (who of course, is now retired, needless to say) Our friend is a most remarkable lady and has an amazingly interesting professional life – at one stage, she had even worked in an office adjacent to Alan Turing but I must remember to ask her if she ever actually met him. Anyway, I regard this as one of my actual links with history. Our friend was a very good pianist before the arthritis got to her a few years ago and I think she has an LRCM Licentiate as a professional qualification. Knowing her proficiency in piano, I told her of my ventures into keyboard instruments first via my Casio keyboard and latterly through my Technics organ, only acquired last Sunday. So I played our friend the only piece of music I have absolutely committed to memory and can play without a fluff which is the Largo from Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Our friend recognised it instantly and sang along with it, as I played which was quite an interesting experience. As soon as we get a telephone call from our friend’s son, I want to organise it so that we can have a meal as soon as we can organise it. In the past, my son and daughter-in-law have enjoyed the past lunches that we have had together in Central London so as soon as we make some practical arrangements and coordinated diaries we will journey along to see our friend as soon as we can. The whole point here is that a 96 year old can be carried away almost by a puff of wind so we are particularly anxious to keep on meeting with each other as long as our health and faculties survive.