Today we enter our normal Sunday morning routine which means getting us both up, washed and dressed and sitting down in front of the Lorna Kuenssberg show at 9.00am. This morning was one of the first through which I have not actually dozed through and the big political interview this morning was with Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, who was explaining to us the threat that Russia is offering not only to the Ukraine but the rest of Europe as well. Once this had concluded, we were contemplating a visit down to Waitrose when our University of Birmingham friend phoned up inviting us down for a coffee later on in the morning. Our friend and I got into one of our usual conversations (how degrees were classified, the various problems we had faced in the examinations process) and perhaps we had been talking quite loudly and excitedly but our conversation was overheard. Eventually we were joined by a person who was a fellow academic, had worked in the Open University Business School and also, for several years, at the CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards). Before the polytechics had their own degree awarding powers and eventually became part of the generation of ‘new’ or ‘modern’ universities, the CNAA was the body that awarded degrees. The thoroughness of the documentation demanded and the rigorous inspection standards over the course of a 1-2 day visit helped to ensure the quality standards of the ex-polytechnics. In many cases, too, we were cognizant of the fact that the CNAA helped to keep standards high by insisting on a certain degree of staffing which had to be wrung out of the grasp of the Polytechnic authorities and in this way, the CNAA became the students’ best friend ensuring that their qualification had academic credibility and that the colleges which came under their aegis were resourced at least to a minimal level. When the new universities acquired their own degree awarding powers and after the demise of the CNAA, the various directors of the polytechnics were delighted not to have to comply with increased staffing demands enjoined by the CNAA. So we had a very interesting conversation with the lady who joined us who seemed to have quite a lot of strings to her bow (e.g. a postgraduate degree in Music) so we invited her to come along and join us next Sunday when we can carry on with our trips down memory lane and our oft-repeated refrain that standards were so much higher when we were working and in charge.

I always look forward to an in-depth read of the ‘Sunday Times‘ to get the background to the stories that have surfaced during the last week – in particular, because of the revelations in the Post Office scandal I was expecting some detailed reported of the various transgressions both in Fujitsu and the Post Office itself. But I was to be disappointed because whatever analysis there was proved to be thin in the extreme. Instead many more column images were devoted to the machinations that lay behind the Rwanda vote in the House of Commons this week. I suspect that all of this is due to essentially lazy journalism. To investigate the wrong doings of large corporations requires good and persistent investigative skills as well as an examination of a mound of documents. But how much easier just to sit in a bar and talk over ‘who said what’ to an MP who is providing the information on a non-attributable basis. It rather reminds me of the war correspondent(s) who used to file stories such as ‘we had to negotiate our way through the alley ways of the city whilst sniper bullets whizzed past our ears’ whereas the truth of the story was that they had never left the confines of the bar in a safe hotel and got all of their information second-hand.

There is an interesting story emerging from the other side of the Atlantic. One of Donald Trump’s Republican challengers is Nikki Haley who is an ex US ambassador to the United Nations. She was well behind Trump in Iowa but is reported to be ‘within touching distance’ in the forthcoming primary poll in New Hampshire. She has indicated that she might only appear if Trump does likewise whereas Trump himself seems to have confused Haley with Nancy Pelosi the ex Democrat Speaker of the House of Commons. So Nikki Haley is publicly questioning the mental competence of Donald Trump and who knows how this might play out in the more liberal political environment of New Hampshire. The point here is that Trump appears massively ahead but in the primaries, things can change very rapidly as candidates gain (and lose) momentum. However, at this point it does look as the centre of American politics is evaporating. There was an ITV programme on Trump recently that revealed that many illegal immigrants were being ‘dumped’ upon the Democratic stronghold of Chicago. As these migrants are housed in makeshift shelters of plastic sheeting and random materials acquired from anywhere, so the predominantly poor (and black) citizens of Detroit are turning against Baden. The president is blamed for having to cope with these migrant ‘camps’ which is eroding the core support for the Democrats. We have seen hints of this policy played also in the UK where asylum seekers have been known to be visited upon poor communities (eg the Potteries) where there is little power to resist. This is one of the reasons why UKIP and the associated Brexit vote was so strong in poor communities such as Stoke on Trent.

Today, Saturday, the weather forecasters are telling us that it is the end of the cold snap so the weather should be considerably improved – but I must say that there was quite an icy wind to add to the windchill factor so the weather still seemed quite cold for us. We made for Waitrose knowing that some of our friends would not be there but we still made contact with the third so we had a pleasant coffee and chat together. Then it was a case of a quick whizz around the shop followed by a cooking of the Saturday lunch (some left over chicken heated up and enhanced by a thick onion gravy which seems the story of my culinary life these days) After lunch, Meg and I had set ourselves a little treat which I did not know how it is going to turn out. On BBC2 earlier in the day they were showing ‘The Pure Hell of St. Trinians‘ and I hoped that we get this on catch-up which we did. We did not know whether this was a sequel to the original ‘Belles’ of St. Trinians made decades ago or the much more recent remake where the schoolgirls were a lot more knowing, not to mention saucy, in keeping with the spirit of the 1970’s or 1980’s. This film was actually a black-and-white film made in the 1950’s I would imagine and was faintly both amusing/ridiculous in equal measure. We watched most of it before deciding that we had had enough of this and thinking that we would turn our attention to other things. One of the little rituals of life is that we wait until 4.00pm and then enjoy our afternoon cup of tea (but Meg is indulged with a chocolate biscuit). We have some things lined up for later on this afternoon and are enjoying a few minutes of relaxation with ClassicFM. They have Alan Titchmarch as a presenter of Saturday afternoons and it is always quite a pleasant selection of classical tracks (not the ‘tumpty-tum’ type music or the Straus walzes which fills the airwaves at less popular times) Then we watched a little more of the Thoams Hardy film of ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘ until it was newstime and we left the final quite dramatic scenes for another day. Incidentally, one of the closing scenes in the film shows Tess and her husband cavorting themselves on the stones of the monument of Stnehenge. I, too, when I was on a cycling holiday organised by my school in about 1958, did the same but of course no member of the pubic can get anywhere near the stones of Stonehenge these days (and for good reason)

The news from the Israel:Gaza conflict seems as dire as ever. There is now a direct conflict between the US on the one hand, which is still advocating a 2-states solution, and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu who is publically rejecting the notion of a 2-state solution. Israel has a very ‘pure’ form of proportional representation and I think I am right in sayng that the extreme right wing National Religious Party (or whatever its successor is nowadays) has had a place in every Israel government since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. So here we have a form of PR in which a very small tail is wagging a very large dog. I used not to believe in PR but I do so these days but I think it has to be thought about carefully. One solution to the ‘Israel’ type problem is to have a constitutional arrangement to make sure that extreme parties of either the right or the left cannot be invited into the government unless they reach a certain trigger amount (which I believe that Germany does, of about 5%) Another quite innovative solution is to ensure that he party with the most votes/seats is allocated an extra block of seats so that the resultant government has a reasonable working majority. This is to try to ensure that you do not have a situation in which, in a tight electiopn won with only a handful of seats, that certain maverick MPs do not use this ‘fractional’ bargaining power to exert a hold over the direction of policy.

I think the political class is starting to absorb some of the lessons of the Fujitsu/Post Office scandal. Now that it has emerged that Fujitsu witness statements, used by the Post Office as evidence with which to convict some of their own sub postmasters, were ‘doctored’ (i.e. incriminatory evidence removed), I think that it was Fujitsu staff themselves who doctored their own evidence but it may have been the Post Office staff themselves and I shall have to wait for a good detailed piece of investigative reporting (perhaps in the ‘Sunday Times‘ tomorrow) to ascertain where the blame arises. Evidently, the removal of evidence from a witness statement is perjury but can the state ascertain who are the people who thus perjured themselves – after all, they could have retired a decade ago. And if individuals cannot be identified, can ‘perjury’ be laid at the door of a company like Fujitsu itself? None of the precedents (e.g. the perjury committed by some of the Maxwell newsapers in the phone hacking scandal) bodes well for the future.

Today was meant to be a degree colder than yesterday but the weather station in Pershore, Worcestershire registered a low of -9.7 degrees yesterday which was one of the coldest (if not the coldest) in the country. The temperature here when I went shopping yesterday was -6 degrees and today it was -5 degrees but it actually felt colder. Fortunately, my windscreen protector had done its job and the car was relatively easy to put to rights before we set off this morning. The carers arrived on cue but one of my regulars had had an accident, probably weather-related, and so another carer was sent in her stead. Three of Meg’s carers have suffered five accidents in the last fortnight which must have put a lot of pressure on them as they have to dash from appointment to appointment and are given hardly any travelling time, the situation being exacerbated of course by road works on the one hand and rush hour on the other. Our domestic help calls around on a Friday and she is always a joy with whom to chat but we were quite keen to try and get into the Waitrose cafeteria by about 10.30. We were particularly pleased to have done so because we thought that there was a 50:50 chance that one of our regular friends (the chorister one) was celebrating her 90th birthday today. We were particularly pleased to give her a birthday card where I had managed to find one not liberally adorned with glasses and bottles of alcohol which, I suppose, reflects the fact that the card designers imagine that you spend your birthday boozing all day long. But we had also bought a little gift for our friend which we saw in Droitwich yesterday and she was very pleased to receive it, after ripping off the layers of protective bubble wrap and wrapping paper in which I had sellotaped it. They say, in popular parlance, that it is ‘better to give to receive’ and it certainly gave me a great deal of pleasure to able to able to hand over a gift to our friend who had achieved the ripe old age of 90. In fact, whilst she was bobbling around the shop, I had a word with the counter staff and left a tenner with them to provide our friend with a donated coffee when she came to order but the counter staff insisted on giving me back my money and giving my friend whatever she wanted ‘on the house’ (that is Waitrose for you)

This afternoon, Meg and I watched in real time as the Japanese attempted to land their ‘sniper’ module on the surface of the moon. We watched the descent, monitored through instruments in real time, and it did appear that the craft had indeed made a soft (i.e. not a crash) landing on the moon’s surface. But the Japanese are still trying to establish contact with their craft to establish its exact orientation – it could, for example, have toppled over or slid down a slope. For reasons that are not entirely clear the Japanese were attempting to land on a slope (was it a crater lip or something?) but it looks as though we may have to wait a couple of hours before the Japanese and the rest of the watching world may be able to ascertain exactly what has happened. Immediately after touchdown one would have imagined whoops of delight from the scientists monitoring their craft from Japan but there was instead an ominous silence, so we shall just have to exercise some patience for a little.

Some further news has dribbled out of the Post Office scandal enquiry and from the revelations today, it looked as though Fujitsu itself was editing out some of the negativities about the software (bugs and the like) before the Post Office were informed. But Fujitsu are admitting that the Post Office knew of the presence of bugs and even the ability of Fujitsu to enter the individual accounts of sub postmasters and informed the Post Office of this. So the Post Office may well have been prosecuting in the knowledge that the software was problematic. From this distance, it appears to be hard to ascertain where the major degree of culpability might lie but we have unfolding before us two large corporations engaging in behaviour which protects their own interests and seeks to pass the blame onto the ‘little’ men i.e. the sub postmasters. One wonders how one starts to calculate whatever compensation might be due – what is the price to be put upon the fact that the aged parents of sub postmasters will probably have died thinking that their sons and daughters were guilty of a fraud? Similarly, the children of the sub postmasters would have had their lives blighted by the reaction of school friends not to mention the fact that their parents had lost their livelihoods. Just to add fuel to the flames of this story, Rishi Sunak to appease his (rabid) right wingers over the Rwanda bill is intimating that he may appoint 150 additional judges to fast-process claims of asylum seekers – but no such offer of additional judges seems to be available to offer an acquittals or compensation to the sub postmasters. The two little bits of news may not have connected in the public’s mind but a half-decent opposition should have been shouting it from the roof tops.

Thursday is my shopping day and things were slightly fraught this morning as I needed to cope with the sequelae of an overnight temperature of -6 degrees, plus the fact that a crucial access road that we use to get around Bromsgrove is blocked off which means that I have join a traffic queue of two thirds of a mile long to get anywhere. But these annoyances having been negotiated, I got the shopping done expeditiously and then joined queues to get back home again. When the weather is as cold as this, I have started to put on a windscreen protector on the car, held in place by rubber mats and these always help to allay the worst of the frost. Then it is a case of hot water in a specially designated long-spout watering can to clear the windscreens before I set off. Today, dawn was just about breaking as I left for the supermarket but by the time I got there it was half light. I tell myself that with a bit of luck, if the sunrise starts about two minutes earlier per day, then I might manage the trip to the supermarket in the light next week when I do the weekly shop. I had just about got back when the carer allocated to us on a Thursday turned up one hour earlier than we really wanted or needed – the carer herself realised that the start time they had allocated here was probably wrong and had texted them to this effect but the information had not really got through to those responsible for the staff allcation each day. The carer on a Thursday is a Pyschology graduate so we often have extended chats about matters which of interest to us both. Once she had departed, the sky was blue and the air was clear so we decided to make a trip to Droitwich to our favourite cafe where we indulged in our usual pot of tea and a bacon butty on large, chunky brown bread. We normally finish our little trip to the shop run by Worcestershire Association of Carers and today was no exception. We did purchase one item which was quite a pretty silvered dish which I bought as a present for our friend who is going to be 90 years old tomorrow. If she does not happen to like it, I am sure she will have a relative to whom she can pass it on. We may or may not see her tomorrow but if not there is always Saturday and failing that, next Tuesday.

This afternoon, I wondered what film I might try to access in order to keep Meg entertained. After a false start, I thought I would try and see if YouTube had a suitable Thomas Hardy film and found ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘ which is a story that I know reasonably well. We watched about one half of the film but, as it is quite a long one, decided to cut it short about half way through so that we can watch the second half another day. When Meg and I used to go on extended holidays in January in Salobreña, Southern Spain I located a copy of this Thoms Hardy novel in the hotel’s book collection and read it avidly. I was particularly interested in the final few pages because the sister of Tess and Tess’s one time ‘amante’ walk up the slope of a hill in Winchester called West Hill, half way up which is Winchester gaol. In this gaol Tess is to be executed and the pair observe the black flag flown when there is an execution. Now it happens that King Alfred’s College which was to become the University of Winchester (where I worked for ten years) is built on the slopes of West Hill and I used to walk through the grounds of the West Hill cemetery (more of a park than a cemetery these days) on my way to college. So I feel that there is quite a connection between the final pages of the novel and the scenes over West Hill that I used to walk and knew quite well.

Last night, the vote took place on the government’s Rwanda bill and, as I had anticipated, many of the Tory rebels drifted away from voting against their own government when it came to it. In popular parlance they had ‘bottled it’ and the government won by a fairly comfortable majority. The bill having got through the Commons now passes to the House of Lords which is where the fun is going to start. One of the (very few) virtues of un unelected second chamber in our parliament is that members are not always looking over their shoulder having to appease an electorate who might might turf them out if they did note vote the ‘right’ way. Consequently, the House of Lords has many independently minded members, irrespective of party, and the whipping system is very much more light touch than the Commons. So the Lords may not feel they could refuse to pass the bill but they might pass so many amendments that it emerges an entirely different creature from the one that was passed to them by the Commons. The Commons then has to decide which, of the probably many, amendments to accept or reject and then the consitutional game of ‘ping-pong’ starts in which the bill is batted backwards and forwards between the Lords and the Commons. My own feeling is that the Bill is probably doomed and the Lords will have no truck with any legislation that will make the UK a laughing stock and the only European country apart from Russia and Belarus that does not accept the jurisdiction and the rulings of the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights – nothing to do with the European Community but largely drafted by British lawyers at the end of the second World War)

Today we got ourselves up and breakfasted, with the assistance of the pair of regular carers who are proving to be a great boon at the moment. This morning, we had in mind to attend the Methodist centre which we have not requested since before Christmas. After New Year, the centre was closed for a week and then last Wednesday, we were otherwise engaged in the club organised by AgeUK on the second Wednesday of each month so this was our first visit for some time. We sat at a table with a patron of the centre with whom we have sat before and had some interesting conversations before he left us. We were then joined by one of our Tuesday crowd of Waitrose friends and we learnt that a special birthday was in the offing, specifically a 90th birthday next Friday. I must say that our friend is being quite sprightly for a 90-year old and I am amazed how she manages to keep so active. For example, I asked her if she had any domestic or cleaning help but she informed me that she is still all doing all of her own housework. I may be wrong in this but I think she is still an active member of a local choir as well.

All of today, there have been a lot of political machinations as the Rwanda bill is due to have a critical vote this evening and there is always the possibility that the bill as a whole might be lost. Last night, the right wing rebels of the Conservative party forced two votes on amendments the import of which was for the government to not comply with any judgements of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The rebels secured a vote of about 70 on the first and 60 on the second but it was relatively easy to rebel because with the Labour Party supporting the government in rejecting the amendments they were bound to fail – which they did as those voting to reject the amendments was the vast majority of the House of Commons of over 500. Knowing that the amendments could never succeed, the right wing rebels felt that they could vote against their own government with impunity but two deputy chairmen of the Conservative party resigned just before they voted in favour of the rebel amendments. The political commentators have got very excited about these results thinking that Downing Street may well feel that the Bill is effectively lost but this is rather to misread what is going on. The right wing rebels are trying to exact as many concessions from the government as they can and so on an elaborate game of ‘chicken’ is going on. The rebels are demanding that they be invited into Downing Street to argue with the Prime Ministers and his advisers holding the threat of defeating the Prime Minister on a core piece of legislation. As this is essentially a game of chicken, many of the rebels will not actually do so if it means that the bill as a whole is lost but this is all part of the bluff and counter-bluff of politics. The rebels are using rather weasel words not saying that they are going to vote against the government but saying that they are ‘prepared to consider voting against the government’ which, of course, gives the wriggle room to not actually lose the Bill as a whole. The result should be known at about 7.00pm this evening but may be later in the evening.

This afternoon, we engaged in our normal diet of a bit of comedy with ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘ taking the pride of place. Today’s episode was concerned with the machinations of a possible tobacco rise in tobacco tax where the relevant figures quoted were that 100,000 people a year would die of smoking related diseases in return for a return to the Treasury of about £4 billion in revenue. This episode may well have reflected some of the political machinations that were alleged to have taken place when some of the East European economies liberalised after the demise of the ‘Iron Curtain’ The story that I have heard is this. Senior executives of the tobacco industry met with senior civil servants of the country which may well have been Hungary. The tobacco industry chiefs let it be known that they privately knew that tobacco smoking killed a lot of people, even though this was denied in public. They then argued to the Hungarian civil servants that it not be a good idea to tax tobacco too heavily. It was much more sensible to let people smoke, stay alive and pay their due quota of taxes and then die, shortly after retirement, so that the State would not then be responsible for the heavy costs of pensions and healthcare for the elderly. So the tobacco chiefs argued that in purely financial times, it was more advantageous for the newly developing economies to collect the taxes whilst they could and then not be too unhappy about lots of people dying of smoking related diseases before the state incurred the heavy burdens to the tax payer of paying for people to survive too long. In any event, this argument seemed to succeed because the taxes were never actually levied on the tobacco companies (whose arguments must have proved to have been very influential)

Today being a Tuesday, we enter into our normal routines but today was going to be a little different. Although we generally meet with our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria twice each week, we knew that one of our number who has recently lost her husband was probably going to be heavily involved in the sequelae following a death in the family and when we met with her yesterday, she let us know that she might not make it today. Neither did any of our usual companions so Meg and I had our coffee alone, which is quite an unusual experience for us these days. We knew that today the airways were going to be full of the investigations of the Post Office scandal as well as the ongoing debates about the Government bill to expedite the transportation of refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda. Although the transmission of some of these investigations started off early, we knew that we would have to wait until later to get to the juicy bits. When we returned from our morning excursion, the care worker turned up but about 50 minutes too early but I did manage to go and attend my Pilates session, albeit for only 45 minutes instead of the allotted 60 minutes. I left Meg in the care of the Peruvian-born care worker, listening to Joan Baez (the Mexican-American folk singer who made her reputation in the 1960’s) One of her signature songs, which I must admit I do not really know that well, is ‘Diamonds and Rust‘ which is said to be a commentary on her relationship with Bob Dylan when it was breaking up. The symbolism lies in the fact that diamonds are meant to ever-lasting and indestructible whereas rust is the absolute opposite. Meg and I did go to see Joan Baez in Birmingham when she was staging one of a host of farewell concerts and we bought one of her earliest CDs which her ‘roady’ was selling in the foyer. One of the outstanding tracks upon this is her version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun‘ which many will know from the raucous ‘Animals’ version. But this version is sung by a 17-18 year old Joan Baez, accompanying herself on a guitar and singing (in Spanish) with the utmost precision and clarity. How many realise that the full story of the ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is the lament for a sister who falls into prostitution, the ‘House’ in question actually being a brothel. When I got back fom Pilates, the YouTube had given rise to other folk singers of a similar ilk, including I think Mercedes Sosa- I think that Meg and the care worker had had quite a good time together but of couse I was not present to witness it. Then it was a case of getting our lunch prepared of fishcakes and microwaved vegetables before settling down for the afternoon. But we had an phone call from our social worker and this necessitated emails that needed to be forwarded as well as a host of domestic jobs that could not wait any longer.

Meg and I caught some snatches of the proceedings of the House of Commons committeee that was cross questioning some of the Fujitsu executives. An apology of sorts was issued but in response to detailed questions, the Chief Executive of Fujitsu and of the Post Ofice were both tending to say the some thing along the lines of ‘It was before my time.. I have no direct knowledge…There are a mass of complex documents through which we are trying to wade to make sense of the past…’ and so on and so forth) Although not directly questioned on this, it does appear that the Post Office knew of the errors and bugs in the software for quite some time but were of such a mindset that it looked as though they could not believe that the software that they had commissioned was at fault. But two little nuggets did emerge from the questionning. One was surely that the senior executives at the Post Office must have noticed that there was suddently a dramatic rise in the number of ‘deficits’ in the sub postmasters’ accounts but the (now) chief executive argued that the number of prosecutions and investigations had stayed fairly constant over the years, which surely be the most blatant lie. Another fact to emerge is that crucial documents are either said to be ‘missing’ or even ‘shredded’ which either suggests the utmost venality or else incompetence in equal measure) No doubt, this will run and run.

Yesterday, I stumbled across a website that I found intriguing. A tester of laptops was making a comparison between the old, but incredibly sturdily built IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad laptops on the one hand and a modern, but cut-down-to-a-price Dell laptop on the other. The commentator could not hide his disdain for the more modern Dell laptop which was constructed using not very high quality plastics that flexed and creaked when leant upon whereas the Thinkpad was built like a tank. The thrust of his argument was that an ‘old’ machine built to high standards and with high quality components would prove to be a ‘better’ machine than its more modern counterparts that, despite more recent processors, chips and other components may well fail before the much older machine. Certainly, to a journalist who was bent on bashing out his/her 1000-2000 words a day the legendary quality of the keyboard on the older Thinkpads would make the journalist reluctant to abandon their ‘older’ and ‘inferior’ machine in favour the ‘newer’ and ‘superior’ one.

We knew from the weather forecast that today was going to start off as a cold day but as we were getting ourselves up,washed and dressed then we had the sudden flurry of a snow shower which was not really anticipated for this part of the country. It did not last for very long but was just enough to give our driveways a good covering but one, once the sun started to shine, we felt would soon melt. After we had breakfasted, we thought that we would make a trip into Droitwich which is our normal pattern for a Monday. We knew that we did not have a totally uninterrupted morning because we were expecting visits from the nurses who care for Meg’s condition in the late morning so we decided just to make a visit to Waitrose and to treat ourselves to a bacon butty as it was the start of a really cold snap. This turned out to be quite a good move because we made contact with one of our normal Tuesday crow who was there in Waitrose with a friend. This friend, once we had got into conversation with her, had been an embroiderer for several years so although it is a subject about which I know practically nothing, we could still find some points of contact. For example, I mentioned that Meg’s cousin was a superb quilter and in her time had taken part in exhibitions of the quilter’s art at, I belive, Westminster Abbey or a similar venue of note. Then we got home and waited for the visit of the two specialist nurses and who then spent some time with us, one with Meg and one with myself, whilst we discussed a whole range of issues concerned with the management of Meg’s care.

This afternoon was going to be a quiet afternoon but we had a delayed lunch of ham, beans and baked potato after which we wondered what current news was on offer today. This was the first opportunity that Rishi Sunak could take to inform the House of Commons of the necessity, as he saw it, to take military action against the Houthi rebels of Yemen. After what many regard as the disastrous intervention of Tony Blair in the Iraq war, a convention arose in the House of Commons that before, or as soon as practicable, before military interventions took place the House of Commons needed to be informed and take a vote, if necessary. When David Cameron had it is mind to commit UK forces to the conflict in Libya, this was vetoed by the House of Commons which many hoped would be a precedent for the future. But here we have another Conservative Prime Minister informing Parliament about a military action that had already taken place. On tis occasion, as the Leader of the Opposition, Keir Armer, was supporting the stance taken by the Prime Minister, then Parliament would not have withheld its approval but there is some concern, not least amongst Liberal Democrat and Scottish Nationalist MPs that we have been here before and whatever the military justifications appear to be, it could well be the case that the UK action in joining the Americans may well to help to spread the Israel/Gaza conflict further around the already volatile Middle East.

I had a very pleasant surprise this morning as our son called round to make me an impromptu present. This was a scarcely used Pure DAB+ radio that he just happened to have as a spare and he thought that I could probably make use of it (on the condition that I threw one of my older and now defunct radios away) The ‘Pure’ was amazingly simple to tune into the stations that I wanted (Radio 4, Classic FM, Radio 3 and Radio 4 Extra) and I had it installed in the kitchen and playing away in no time. As this is a relatively modern DAB radio receiver, this has the advantage of the rolling display so that when a track is playing on ClassicFM that you vaguely recognise but cannot quite a name to, then the additional program information supplies this for you. After what I thought was going to be the trauma of the move of ClassicFM to DAB+, our household has survived this transition pretty well but I think that some of this is due to the happy accident that on the receivers that could no longer receive ClassicFM I could retune to the station on FM and the location of the radios just happened, fortuitously, to be in areas of good reception without the dreaded FM hiss and whispering that can bedevil FM transactions on occasions. This afternoon, as is quite normal for us these days, Meg and I enjoyed some rather fine baroque classical music tracks by courtesy of YouTube. The algorithms that they deploy generally choose some linked tracks so that you are never quite sure what track is going to follow its predecessor but it is nearly always something that we enjoy. Over the months, both Meg and I have started to appreciate the music of Fauré more and more which we find relaxing and to which we can listen over and over again without ever getting bored by it.

Today we drop into our normal Sunday morning routine. As the weather is threatening to be quite cold for most of this week, I thought I would start us off with a big bowl of porridge – I have quite a good supply of oats available in my store cupboard for when the cold weather strikes. We got ourselves plonked in front of the Lorna Kuennsberg show and, apart from an interview with David Cameron the Foreign Secretary, I immediately fell into a doze. This is not an unfamiliar pattern for me each Sunday morning but when the show was over, we got ourselves ready for our weekly visit to Waitrose where we were due to meet with our University of Birmingham friend. We both arrived promptly on cue and we had our customary chat which is going to have serve us well for the best part of a fortnight as next weekend he plans to be away in Yorkshire. Our friend is growing a beard and it is at the stubbly stage so far but perhaps when we see him again he will be sporting something somewhat bushier. We did a little bit of shopping whilst in the store and then came home to cook the Sunday dinner. We had a piece of unsmoked gammon chugging away in our slow cooker but once cooked, we tend to cut it into two equal portions and one portion, once cooled, goes into the freezer for consumption in the weeks ahead. I made a good onion gravy and we had the gammon with baked potato, primo cabbage and tomato. Although I had probably cooked too much for Meg she ate it all up and commented how delicious it all was (with which opinion I concur). Whilst on food related items, I realised that I had about three bags of 4 baking potatoes in stock, all bought from Aldi, and I needed to use them up in the correct order. Aldi are deploying a policy, in common with other supermarkets, of removing ‘Best Before’ or ‘Use By’ dates from their fresh fruit and veg. The argument of the supermarkets are that this reduces waste and shoppers should be discouraged from buying (and wasting) too much. The general advice given out there is that the consumer should trust their own judgement whether or not food is ‘fresh’ or not and, besides, some type of fruit mature at different times and have differing keeping qualities. So I went onto the web and discovered that the codes that Aldi is for their stock rotation and takes the form ‘xxyy’ where ‘xx’ is the week number and ‘yy’ is the day number of that week. I am sure that many Aldi customers will know this already but I am sure that there is a goodly number who do not, so at least I have discovered something for myself that will prove useful.

The forthcoming week should be an interesting one for those interested in the political process. The government will be attempting to make progress with its bill to force asylum seekers onto planes with the destination of Rwanda. The published bill goes as far as the centre and left of the Conservative party will tolerate but the right wing of the party has published a lost of amendments, the effect of which if pushed into law, would force the government to disregard the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights. It is probably slightly less than a 50:50 chance that the amendments will be accepted but what I have discovered on the web is the following: Under international law, states cannot invoke domestic law to avoid their international obligations. Even if a power was given to disregard judgments or interim measures in national law, this would not prevent the international legal obligation from still standing. Of course, any Bill eventually passed by the Commons will never make past the current House of Lords and then a battle of ‘ping-pong’ would start with the Commons which may or may not be resolved before an election later on this year. A second item of interest next week is the fact that the Fujitsu executives may be forced to give evidence to the enquiry into the Post Office scandal and I believe that Tuesday is the day to look out for. This might well be a blood sport day for those of us who wish to see the guilty parties brought to account. On the other side of the Atlantic, the ‘caucuses’ are due to start in the Presidential elections and the first of these is in Ohio on Monday next (but because of time zone differences we would not hear anything significant until Tuesday). Democratic and Republican nominees are determined through primaries and caucuses that take place over the course of an election year. While Democratic and Republican primaries are on the same day in some states, others hold the events on separate dates. This is a novel part of the American democratic system which has no real parallel on this side of ‘the pond’ but the whole point is that candidates can very rapidly both gain (and lose) support depending on their appearances and performances in the primaries. On the Republican side, there is a small chance that an alternative to Donald Trump might appear whilst on the Democratic side, there must be hopes that almost any candidate must appear better than Jo Biden who seems to many to be too old for a second term.

Today turned out to be rather a quiet Saturday. We knew that we were going to receive a visit from a Eucharistic minister from our local church but she was not due to arrive until after 10.30 am so we played some good music from YouTube until she arrived. After our little service this morning, we realised that we really needed to call into Waitrose to collect our weekend copy of ‘The Times‘ During the week, we sometimes call in at a local garage to pick up our copy of the newspaper but bitter experience has taught me that at the weekends, some of the supplements tend to be missing from copies supplied to the garages and although we throw some supplements away on sight (such as the ‘Style‘ section) there are others such as the ‘Culture‘ section that details all the radio/TV programs for the week ahead together with some book reviews so this is quite important to us. So we popped into Waitrose and afterwards paid a visit to our erstwhile local newsagents to see what progress they were making with reinstalling the supply of newspapers. The employee looking after the shop did not seem to know much about anything and I was given the standard ‘wait for two weeks’ reply which I was given last week, so I shall give it another week to try to reestablish my regular order. The previous newsagent always kept of a copy of my newspaper in the back of the shop for me so that I never run short as I am hoping to establish a similar system with the new owners.

After we had a lunch of chicken and mushroom pie, bought as a new line from ‘Aldi‘, we settled down to an afternoon of TV watching, principally trying to access catch-up TV. But it proved to be one of those frustrating afternoons where nothing quite worked. We tried to watch some past episodes of ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘ on BBC iPlayer but it was subject to constant buffering pauses which eventually made the whole episode unwatchable. In frustration, we turned to ITVX to watch the ‘Mr Bates and the Post Office: The Real Truth‘ but this, too, was full of buffering problems so we had to abandon this after a while as well. I suppose it must be our internet connection that might be to blame but it might be massive demand on a cold winter afternoon causing the problems and who can say? So, in some desperation, we trawled up and down the available channels hoping to find a half decent film and settled on ‘Shirley Valentine‘ which I might have seen decades ago and am not convinced that I really want to watch again but beggars cannot be choosers. I suppose every once in a while, one gets a really chewy type of day and so it was today. Meg had a rather unsettled afternoon which did not really help things along but tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow morning, we are going to meet with our University of Birmingham friend in Waitrose and we need to brace ourselves for what is going to be quite a cold, hard week. There is snow threatened next week with some creeping from the North and more advancing from the South but here in the Midlands, we might just escape the worst of it.

The Post Office scandal story continues to evolve and one where it is actually going to end. Apparently, it is the case that any fines that have to be paid to regulatory agencies cannot be regarded in conventional accounting terms as a tax deductible expense but the Post Office have been doing this, thus enhancing the size of declared profits (and also the bonus of the chief executives which is based upon this level of profits) The Post Office argues that its dealings with HMRC, they were under the impression that any fines liable were a tax deductible expense. The point is being made is that if the Post Office were a private company, the chief executives’ heads would have to be served up on a platter to appease outraged shareholders but in the case of the Post Office, there is only one shareholder, namely the Government. As is nearly always the case for these type of scandals that emerge at the end of a working week, one looks to the Sundays for a more in-depth exposé so I will look forward with particular anticipation to tomorrow’s editions. I must say that the more I think about the Government solution to this problem, the less convinced I am that another solution could not be sought. If one were to recruit, say, ten retired High Court judges and give them each a case load of about a hundred, surely the thousand cases could be processed in just a few weeks. I may be wrong in this but I seem to think that if the Government wished to pursue a large number of miscreants (e.g. the poll tax, football hooligans ‘en masse’ and other demonstrations,the Northern Ireland Devlin courts and so on) then it has in the past instituted a large number of special procedures to cope with this. It seems possible that governments can create special courts if a large number of prosecutions are required but acquittals seem to be a different matter altogether.

Today being a Friday we pop into our Friday routines. As Friday is one of the days when the two, always cheerful carers, call around to attend to Meg, I was pleased to see them absolutely on cue. I was rather appalled when one of them told me that she was feeling a little tired as yesterday she had started work at about 6.00am in the morning and not finished until 10.40 at night. What makes things even worse for carers, especially first thing in th morning, is that they have to cope with rush hour pressures when there always seem to be huge queues of traffic through Bromsgrove first thing in the morning. What is going to make things worse is that a major trunk road that runs through Bromsgrove and is used by a lot of the resident population, is being subject to a £ multi-million upgrade and, in the opinion of many of the residents of the town and the local newspaper, this may mean months of disruption with no discernible benefits in the meanwhile. Then the carers left and our domestic help arrived so it proved to be quite a busy morning. But we did manage to sort out some old clothing to lighten the wardrobe a little which means that we will pay a visit to our local charity shop before e’er long to dispose of the same. After we had breakfasted and then chatted, our University of Birmingham friend phoned to arrange a coffee rendez-vous in Waitrose, which, of course, we accepted with complete alacrity. After we got home, we had a quiet half hour on our newish two-seater settee before I cooked a lunch of haddock pie which is a fairly typical Friday dish for us.

This afternoon’s news is dominated by the joint attack by British and American forces against the Houthis rebels in Yemen who had rather indulged themselves attacking shipping in the Red Sea. Whatever the justifications for the retaliatory attacks, it has certainly extended the Middle East conflict beyond the confines of Israel-Gaza which is the fear of many foreign affairs commentators. Of course, this may have the effect of reducing the strength and/or the resolve of the Houthis but I do get the horrible feeling that this may go badly wrong for the West. It is being said that the Houthis are acting as proxies for Iran as they both have Shia populations and have an undying hatred of Israel. Our University of Birmingham friend and ourselves were discussing all of the ramifications of this as we were having our coffee this morning. We often find that our independently derived opinions are often quite closely aligned on issues like this. We both agreed with each other that whilst Israel has the absolute right to defend itself, the ‘kill-ratio’ of Palestinian versus Israeli lives lost might now be running at a rate of about 10-1. The net effect of this may well be to stir up resentments and hatreds for decades in the future. If a Palestinian youth, aged 10, lives for 75 years beyond an age of 10 then by this calculation, this is as long as the state of Israel has been in existence which is also 75 years from 1948 to the present. The South African government has recently taken the step of accusing Israel in the International Court of Human Rights of the crime of genocide. There is a panel of distinguished judges drawn from a series of nations who may well take years to both hear the case and then to make a final and definitive ruling. But there is a possibility that they may come to an interim and provisional judgement (perhaps on the grounds of ‘Is there a case to answer’) within quite a short space of time measured in weeks and this may have the effect of requesting the state of Israel to call for an immediate ceasefire. Israel itself will probably ignore such a ruling but the position taken by the UK and the American governments is much less certain so this may prove to be quite an interesting development in the whole conflict. Actually, I would have preferred to be watching any further coverage of the Post Office scandal but I suppose the continuous media such as Sky will always have the tendency to follow something visually exciting (such as war planes being launched, bombs being dropped) rather than something as dry and undramatic such as the examination of a Post Office witness.

There is a current news item which gives one pause for thought. A survey by the British Retail Consortium this year found levels of shoplifting in 10 major cities had risen by an average of 27% compared with 2022, costing businesses £1.76 billion over a 12-month period. It is also reported that some supermarkets are equipping their staff with body cameras to capture images of shop lifting. This is surely a sad commentary on the state of affairs in contemporary Britain but even my local Aldi has resorted to putting special anti-theft devices, which used to be reserved for bottle of spirits, to be now utilised on joints of meat that used to be the weekend roast. The staff in my local Waitrose infom me that shoplifting has risen substantially but they tend to know who the main culprits are by now. But they have resorted to utilising special security staff at the weekends rather than during the week (when presumambly the staff are less busy and therefore shoplifters easier to spot and to challenge)