Here we are at the start of a new week and I wonder what is in prospect for Meg and myself. The first thing to which we look forward is the visit of our chiropodist who visits us once a month and keeps us both mobile. I told her of the things that I was giving up for Lent (an annual tradition) and the list extends to four things this year – gambling, fast cars, loose women and chocolate. The first three of these evidently derives from Georgie Best, the ill-fated footballer, who famously said that he spent a lot of his money on the first three items in the list above and then admitted to wasting all of the rest. I always like to tell my chiropodist a joke or two and reminded her of the married couple leaning over their garden gate and observing the milkman (in the days when we used to have milkmen) making his progress down the street. When the husband observed to his wife that the milkman had a reputation for being a jack-the-lad and had claimed to have slept with every woman in the street except one, the wife declared ‘So that must that snooty bitch at No. 47!’) I then wondered aloud whether this just a modern urban myth that milkman were notorious for early morning liaisons when our chiropodist confided in us that her own uncle had been a milkman and did indeed live up to the stereotype, including one pair of women who shared the same name of Jean. Apparently he was undone when one of his customers bore him a pair of twins and tried to pass them off as completely the progeny of herself and her husband who did not believe her. So after the departure of our chiropodist, we ventured as far as Droitwich noting that one of the access roads we use regularly to get to the other side of town was closed yet again, having been closed for about two months and open for one week. We arrived at our favourite cafe and had our usual bacon butty and cup of tea, having a conversation with a lady who works occasionally in the cafe but seems to spent quite a lot of time talking to customers. After our repast, we made a venture as far as the Worcestershire Association of Carers charity shop where we made three purchases, all of which will prove to be very useful to us. One of these is a decorated teacup with matching saucer and I was hoping to find something like this so that Meg’s cup of tea will always be complete with saucer. I also bought a rather nicely designed little mug which I am going to use exclusively for Meg as we have some glass mugs for cordial on our dining table that seem to get regularly knocked over. I also bought a couple of simplified books that are nicely illustrated and which I hope will give Meg some diversion.

After lunch, I started out to resolve one of the major frustrations of the day. I have bought domain names and webspace from a particular company for at least the last 15 years which suddenly refused to accept my email address as a user name even though I am sure that nothing has changed at my end, as it were and I quite regularly pay bills to keep my domain names/web space up to date. I suspect that the company in question has had a quiet change in policy but it is frustrating in the extreme. So I got onto their support line who asked me to fill a form for ‘account recovery’ and this required both colour photo and up-to-date proof of address ID which I have had to submit and then will have to wait the three days they say it will take to recover things. I have a sinking feeling that they might only recover the three or so websites/domain names that I listed on their form although I suspect my involvement with them is at least 20 and I wonder whether this one is going to run and run. All I can do is to sit tight for three days and then hope for the best. Whilst on the subject of computing issues, the file sync program which I downloaded the other day and which has been taken over by another company and renamed has just written to inform me that my previous ‘indefinite’ licence only now entitles me to a one year subscription and access to 10GB of cloud based storage space. I recall some 25 years or so ago trying to get a ‘FENSA’ certificate for some windows that had been renewed in the house and for which the FENSA certificates were required as part of the conveyancing. The firm that had installed the windows had gone into liquidation, as it were thus relieving themselves of all of the legal obligations involved in their warranties/certificates. But having ceased trading on a Friday, they had re-opened under a slightly different name on Monday morning but all of their previously issued warranties were now null and void. I am sure that I am not alone in having the subject of a practice like this but I suspect that it is not that uncommon.

The Navalny case (Russian opposition leader that the Putin regime tried to poison and since banished to the harshest prison regime imaginable in the polar regions) is rumbling on. The Russians are refusing to release the body to family which is fuelling the suspicion that he has been murdered, perhaps by an agent such as Novichok. His mother has been told that the Russian authorities are going to hold his body for two more weeks to undertake a ‘chemical examination’ but the suspicions in the West are that the Russians are holding onto the body so that any agent used in the probable murder of Navalny might disperse and not be detectable in any pathological examination that his family might decide to have.

Our Sunday morning routines took over this morning but with a slight hitch. We had been informed that the two carers would arrive an hour earlier today so we set our alarm accordingly. Although the alarm worked perfectly, we immediately fell asleep again so had a bit of a rush before the carer arrived. She was on her own this morning, her companion not having turned up but the two of us got stuck in together and this made the job easier for two of us. I was delighted to learn that having expressed our satisfaction with this particular carer to her manager who called around the other day, this good news had been conveyed back to her and this always makes for a cemented relationship for the future. After we had breakfasted, it was time for the Eucharistic minister to arrive and as she is such a good musician that any questions that I have of a musical nature, I save up until she comes so that I can ask her. After she had departed, we received a phone call from our University of Birmingham friend and we agreed to meet in Waitrose at 11.00am this morning. We got ourselves down to the store, picking up our copy of the ‘Sunday Times‘ when we got inside the store. Shortly afterwards, our friend turned up together with his newly acquired lady-friend so we had an interesting coffee together. We got onto the subject of ‘North v. South’ differences and there was quite a meeting of minds between the four of us how the present government was so disconnected form the lives of ‘ordinary’ people. We concurred that the Prime Minister and individual members of the Cabinet were so individually wealthy, that they had no real appreciation of the struggles of much of the population enduring the ‘cost of living’ crisis. Just before we left Waitrose, one of the staff presented Meg with a bunch of red roses left over from Valentines Day and which they would otherwise have thrown away. For dinner, we had the other half of some beef we cooked some time ago but with one half frozen up for future use, such as today. We had this with a baked potato and some broccoli, the only real preparation that I needed to do being to make a rich onion gravy in which the slices of meat were immersed to heat them up.

In the early afternoon, Meg had a quiet period on our little two-seater settee recently acquired for our Music Lounge and whilst Meg had a doze, I had a chance to read some of the Sunday newspapers. Then we treated ourselves to the second episode of the ‘Pilgrim’ series (in which a group of modern day pilgrims journey from the Swiss Alps to Rome via an ancient, mediaeval pilgrim route) The second half of this episode we had stumbled into before by accident but we are now enjoying watching the whole of the series of three in its entirety. This we really enjoyed and we are looking forward to seeing the last in the series next Sunday (documenting what happens when the pilgrims finally reach Rome) En route, the pilgrims stay in a variety of hostels specifically catering for pilgrims and I find it interesting that when the pilgrims are addressed in a slow but clear Italian, I can manage to understand nearly all of it. Given the congruence of the Spanish and Italian languages, this is perhaps to be expected. Meg and I have discovered in the past that if we were to run into Italians with no grasp of English, we agree to each other that if we speak slowly to them in Spanish and they reply to us, slowly and simply in Italian, we can manage to understand each other.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that rather than backing up these blog entries manually, there ought to be a way of making simple i.e. incremental backups in which only the changed files get copied to their backup destination. In my pre-Apple days, I knew that I used to use a program which was incredibly simple to use with your existing folders in a left hand pane, the backup destination in the right hand pane and then a simple click to perform an incremental backup. The trouble is that I had forgotten what it was called and suspected that it might be called ‘FileSync’ or similar. So I did some internet searches and then discovered that the program which I had enjoyed using as called ‘Allway Sync’ Moreover, I managed to locate my original order for it and and the credentials for an indefinite licence that I had bought at least a decade or so ago. To cut a long story short, although the program had been re-titled and taken over by another company, I managed to download and install a brand new and up-to-date copy and it is said that they will honour past licences. From my playing about it, it seem to work well and incredibly quickly. As a bonus, they throw in 10GB of cloud based storage so I have actually got this for nothing. So I have two little ‘jobs’ already set up in the system, one of which makes a backup from my SD card to a Western Digital USB drive (more reliable in the long run?) and the second of which zings my stuff straight into the cloud based backup space. By my calculations, I have enough space given to me which will accommodate my blogs for the next 800 years so I suspect this will be sufficient.

Our two carers arrived right on cue this morning and so between the three of us we got Meg up, showered and dressed. One of the carers had started off life as a hairdresser so when we have Meg sitting in her bedroom chair, the carer supplies some of her hairdressing skills which is always much appreciated. As it a Saturday morning, we know that we have our Waitrose friends to which to look forward, so after breakfast we made sure that we got down there at the appointed time. In the car park and before we had had a chance to set foot inside the store, I ran across one of our fellow parishioners who like Meg and I used to attend the 6.00pm service in our local church on Saturday evenings. This chappie is a very chipper Irishman who is always seems full of good humour and I had a chat with him. When I enquired after his health in a casual sort of way, he informed me that he had oesophagal cancer and had only been given about three months to live. But was so remarkable was that he seemed to be cheerful and unfazed by this prospect. It is fair to say that he a very fervent and devout parishioner who often used to read out some of the epistle and lessons. I can only conclude that he really is quite pleased that he is shortly to meet with his Maker and is delighted by the prospect. I wonder whether when I approach the end of life I can meet it with such a joyous prospect but the chance meeting meeting between us was fortunate and I trust that I can bump into him many more times in the weeks and months ahead. Once we actually got inside the store, we learn that one of our friends is still poorly with a chest infection but we were delighted to meet up with another of our Tuesday/Saturday regulars. This lady is recently widowed and the crematorium service was last Wednesday so we had a rather mordant conversation about how she intended to dispose of her late husband’s ashes. Our friend was an incredibly good hill walker in her youth and probably climbed even more Lake District mountains when I did when I was younger. Knowing that she knew the Lake District well. I asked her what precautions she took whilst disposing of the dead body of (any past) husbands in the depths of England’s deepest lake which is Wastwater and is 260 feet deep. As she was a bit lost for words, I told her of the story of the dentist who had disposed of his wife in this fashion some time, I believe, in the 1930’s or 1940’s. Rowing out to what he hope to be the deepest point of the lake, he heaved his wife’s body overboard and then lived a tranquil life for the next 30 years. But it was unfortunate for him that his wife’s body ledged upon a sharp prominence of rock that extended from the lake’s bottom to a few metres below the surface of the lake. In the severe droughts of the 1970’s, the woman’s skeleton was discovered draped over the afore mentioned rock but the husband had forgotten to undertake the most elementary pf precautions which was to remove his dead wife’s wedding ring from her skeleton before disposing of it. This wedding ring was still in place on the appropriate finger and from the hallmark on this, the police were able to discover its hallmark and probable date of manufacture and from this information, it was not too difficult to connect the errant dentist with his crime with which he got away for decades. So the moral of all of this clear, namely that one should dispose of all jewellery and identifying marks before disposing of a dead spouse’s body – does this extend to gold teeth, I wonder?

Once we got home, I set about cooking some odds and ends for a pasta type meal. This turned up to be much too large for Meg although she did manfully manage most of it. Not liking to throw food away, I had cooked one onion, some mini sweet peppers, mushrooms, a cupful of petit pois and some strip of pre-cooked chicken. Then I added a dash of brown sauce, a smidgeon of onion gravy and finished off with an apple diced small, some sultanas and a modicum of brown sugar. Meg’s dinner gets served on a bed of pasta but to keep the carbohydrate count low, I serve my own on 2-3 cream crackers, broken up inso small pieces. A lot of the food could have to be thrown away if I had not cooked it today so I am always quite pleased to turn odds-and-ends like this into a nourishing meal.

The airwaves have been filled yesterday evening and today with the demise of Alexei Navalny who is undoubtedly dead and probably murdered at that, as ee have evidence that he was alive and well yesterday and captured on video whilst on a court appearance the day before. The Russians have responded to the death of this arch critic of Putin by hardly mentioning the facts in the media, arresting anyone who wants to lay flowers as a tribute and refusing, as I write, to hand over the dead body to his own mother. Of course, we in the West are well used to the murderous ways of Putin (who after all, is ex KGB and for whom life may be regarded as cheap) but for may in Russia, the sentiment is that they have lost their ‘Mandela’ as the country slides deeper and deeper into an authoritarian nationalism.

We always look forward to Fridays because it is the day when our domestic help calls around and we always seem to have a lot of news to exchange with her about the comings and goings of the past week. So we got ourselves up and breakfasted but our domestic help arrived a little late as she has an ailing little dog which is keeping her up at nights. It was a beautiful and mild, almost spring-like day this morning so we had no hesitation in deciding that we make a little trip to Droitwich, which we often do on Friday mornings. Our University of Birmingham friend had a domestic commitment and so could not be with us this morning but we are always happy to get to Droitwich and enjoy our bacon butty and a pot of tea. After we had our fill, we made a slight detour to one of our favourite charity shops in the town but there was nothing to particularly take our fancy so we were quite happy to get home. We had a few things we wanted to discuss with our domestic help and I then busied myself with making a rather different kind of lunch. The fish pie I normally purchase in our local Aldi was not in stock so I was tempted to buy some mackerel fillets which came, pre-cooked, in their own plastic film. We heated these fillets up by the simple expedient of soaking them well in some boiling water – the alternative of popping them in the oven can occasionally make the kitchen smell decidedly fishy which we wanted to avoid. We ate the fish with a horseradish dressing and some baked potato and fine beans and a delicious lunch it turned out to be. After lunch, we thought we would treat ourselves to a Prime Video offering of ‘Peterloo‘ which we are going to watch in two halves, with the second half tomorrow. Today’s part of the film was full of the rhetoric of the Lancashire people crying out for electoral reform with the cry of ‘One man, one vote’ Tomorrow’s half is no doubt going to be filled with scenes of the bloody massacre of Peterloo but as both Meg and I are graduates of the University of Manchester, the events of Peterloo are still commemorated by the fact that one of the large squares in Manchester behind the town hall is called St. Peter’s Square.

Last night when Meg was in Meg I had set myself the task of solving a computer problem that had been bugging me for several days. When I purchased my new laptop, I paid as part of my purchase a subscription to the McAfee anti-virus program. This was not included so I requested the installation code which the supplier sent back to me by email. I had downloaded a trial copy of McAfee and there was no way I could find of getting it to accept the authorisation code as the system was just designed to make you pay for it first. So I got on to the McAfee support website which took you all around the houses but did not actually solve the problem. I got as far as installing the program for some seconds at which it then ‘stuck’ or hung. The automated technical help desk which I requested on two or three occasions promised a chatline response within a minute but all that happened was that the McAfee chatline cut me off after some moments of nothing happening. I then had a bit of a brainwave because I have used McAfee products before and I vaguely remembered that there was something called a McAfee Customer Removal Tool which was a piece of software that removed all traces of previous installation from the system. I managed to locate a copy of this, downloaded it and then ran it and it took several minutes for it to do its job. But this proved to be the right thing to do because, after that, the installation routine link which the supplier had given to me worked and the whole program installed itself rapidly and in only a few minutes. So the unsuccessful ‘messings about’ took over an hour and a quarter but once I had a ‘clean’ machine, life became very straightforward. Heartily relieved that I now had a system that was fully protected, I wondered to myself how many other consumers had run foul of this system and did not know how to put it right. I only use the laptop in the Music lounge for emails and for writing this blog and precious little else but I did not want to venture far into the internet unless I had a fully protected system. Having got McAfee installed, it now informs me that it will scan each and every file ever downloaded onto the system and will update itself automatically at regular intervals which is, of course, just what I want.

In the wee small hours of the morning the results of the two by-elections held yesterday came through and the Labour Party made two stunning victories in both Wellingborough and in Kingswood with much higher than predicted swings. The Tories are attempting hard to console themselves by saying that their ‘core supporters’ had just stayed at home but would come out to vote for them in a General Election, now only months away. But it is fairly evident, displayed in the audience members in ‘Any Questions‘ last night, that the population as a whole are just fed up to the back teeth with the present government and just want it to be got rid of. The full political consequences of these two defeats are widely interpreted as nails in Rishi Sunak’s coffin and will no doubt receive a lot of detailed attention in the days ahead. In particular the Reform (ex UKIP/Brexit) party is making a sturdy showing and is helping to splinter the rightmost extremes of the right wing vote. The Tory party itself is said to be split (again!) between those who want to fight Reform at every opportunity and those who want some kind of accommodation between Reform and the Conservative party. The Reform party itself has an interesting agenda as it seeks to stand against the Conservatives in every constituency, force the defeat of the present government and then argue hard for a form of PR in whatever configuration of parties shows after an election.

Today turned out to be quite a full day in ways that we both did not anticipate. We knew that we had our meeting with our social worker scheduled for 11.00am but we decided to go to town earlier than is normal for us. We managed to call in at a distant ATM where the parking is convenient and then called by our erstwhile newspaper shop which was again bereft of newspapers. But I was pleased to see the new owner of the shop in place and left her one of my business cards with a request that she pass it on to the wife of the previous owner of the store. We last saw her at the funeral of her husband and I hope that once she has got over the immediate grieving process she might give me a call. We would like her to call around for a meal if she feels up to it and we are anxious, that although she no doubt feels the death of her husband and business partner so keenly, that we can still maintain some social contact in the months and years ahead. We then popped into Waitrose but this is not our usual ‘port of call’ for a Thursday so we did not anticipate bumping anyone that we knew. But we were delighted to meet up with one of our Tuesday regulars and we soon fell into a conversation on matters political, today being the day of the Rochdale by-election. In particular, we quite enjoyed telling each the stories of how, in the past, we had tied up the canvassers of a political party that we did not support, into extended conversations (in our case over several hours) thus giving their fellow canvassers the headache of not knowing where their fellow politician had actually got to. Then we looked at our watch and suddenly realised that we had better make a dash for it, so that we were at home in time for our appointment. We arrived back at our house about three minutes before the appointed hour and the social worker had already arrived and was knocking at the door (as we feared she might) but all’s well that ends all. After we were all safely inside the house, the owner-manager of the care agency looking after Meg and his principal assistant-cum-scheduler turned up so that we could all have a productive review meeting. This is one of the few occasions when I was pleased to have a lot of spare chairs in our Music Lounge. I started off by showing them the facility of Widows 11 to ‘speak’ the contents of a website to them, including the page I had posted recently for the benefit of fellow carers. Then the manager of the care agency asked a fair number of questions to which he wanted (and got) frank replies about the quality of service we had been receiving from his staff. To be fair, it was quite easy to say something positive about each of them although some are evidently so much more experienced than others. But evidently, the manager wanted a comprehensive and fair picture so that he knew how his staff were doing and so he could correct any deficiencies in their training or preparation. In the meantime, the social worker was furiously scribbling notes, trying to get a comprehensive record of the meeting. But at the end of the day, apart from meeting people such that we could, on both sides, put a face to a name the meeting also achieved some positive outcomes. It was confirmed that the daily care package for Meg should continue. Also, we had out into place two additional ‘sitting’ sessions for a care worker to be with Meg whilst I went out to do my Pilates class )in Tuesdays) and go out and do our weekly shopping (on a Thursday). So all in all, we felt that the meeting had a favourable and productive outcome and the manager was going to try and schedule the care worker in whom we have most confidence, and with whom Meg has a very good relationship, to be the ‘continuity’ care worker as it were although she herself has to have regular day off and only works on alternate weekends. But the manager of the agency seeking that I could access the web easily enough, promised to send me a link such that I could read the daily logs on Meg that the care workers supplied and perhaps also give some access to schedules to that we knew who to expect and on what day. So the various professionals had to make a departure for other meetings but Meg and I were satisfied with the outcomes. As it was a beautiful day and we both had a positive feeling, we decided to go out together and make a joint shopping expedition. We decided to go to the usual (smaller) Aldi store that I normally frequent but this proved to be a bit of a challenge. I put Meg in her wheelchair and then slotted this into one of the more specialist shopping trolleys designed to be used with a wheelchair. Whether I was operating this correctly I know not but we made good progress to something approximating to a normal week’s shopping with Meg in her wheelchair pushing and steering the trolley and with our goods piled up on a fairly narrow tray on the top. We managed to do all of this and getting everything into the car was a bit of a challenge but one which Meg and I met successfully. When we returned home at about 2.00pm., I made a lightning lunch of a thick lamp soup on a slice of toast and this was an almost an instant, but more than adequate, lunch for us under the circumstances.

This afternoon we both watched, and really enjoyed ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ which is provided as part of our Prime subscriptions and there were some achingly funny moments, as well as memorable lines, that made this film a really good watch for us.

This morning we knew we had a sort of social engagement later on in the day, so after we were up, washed and breakfasted we set out to visit the rugby club in Finstall. a small village which to all extent and purposes a suburb of Bromsgrove. Here AgeUK runs a special cafe on the second Wednesday of each month so we made sure that we got there promptly for proceedings to begin at 10.30. Today being Valentines Day, we had some activities based around this (recognising songs on the ‘Love’ theme principally) I also took the opportunity to speak for 2-3 minutes at the end of the meeting informing all of those present about the little one page website I created recently for the benefit of carers but which may grow if other carers want to email me with additional comments that I can incorporate into further pages. Our activities, complete with coffee and biscuits, were completed by about 12.15 so we picked up a newspaper from a local suburban post office and then made for home. We lunched today on a fairly conventional lunch which did not too long to prepare and then we settled down, afterwards, to watch the second half of the biopic ‘La Vie en Rose‘ which was the life story of the French ‘chanteuse’ Edith Piaf. This was a fascinating, but not an easy, film to watch in many ways. True, it did start with her early life and it did end with her death but most of the film consisted of episodes that reflected the turbulence of Piaf’s life. There was a gritty realism to the film and it pulled no punches in its telling of the Piaf story. Meg and I watched it with a kind of fascinated horror, not knowing exactly what episode was going to be displayed next which is an approach to film making with many may well find disconcerting. After we had concluded our viewing, I did a search to see if I could find reviews of the film and did find an American review, full of praise for the biopic which was one of the finest that the reviewer had actually seen, but the sentiments expressed almost echoed my own feelings. Incidentally, this reviewer also translated ‘La Vie en Rose‘ in the manner that I suggested when I blogged yesterday as ‘life viewed through rose-tinted glasses’ At the conclusion of the film we had Piaf singing ‘Je ne regret rien’ which sounds morbid and mournful but is actually a song with quite positive sentiments as it encourages one to look forward to what the future may hold in the store despite whatever vicissitudes have been endured in the past.

Further aid for the Ukraine might well be in doubt after votes in the US Congress. Although a bill for billions of dollars has passed through the Senate (Upper House), the House of Representatives (Lower House) may well vote down the bill requesting additional funds. There is a large amount of political opportunism in all this as Republicans are generally supportive of extra spending on the military. But the Republicans sold it as ‘why should we be helping Ukraine secure its own borders when our own are wide open’ and is proving an argument which is appealing to even uncommitted voters in the USA at the moment. Speaking of Ukraine, it is reported today that their forces have destroyed the Russian Navy’s Tsezar Kunikov large landing ship off the occupied peninsula of Crimea in the Black Sea. This has been done with the aid of ‘sea drones’ and it may well have been that the Ukrainians struck lucky by getting the ship’s ammunition store to explode, this destroying the whole ship. The Ukrainians have now developed a pattern of being able to destroy some of the Russian landing craft in the seas around the Crimea which cannot be replaced in that part of the Black Sea. To some extent, this may be a consolation prize for the fact that the Russians may be getting the better of the land war as they are pushing back at the Ukrainians defences.

As I was reflecting upon some of the archaic customs associated with St Valentine’s Day in the past, I also remembered a rather strange custom which I had observed when we lived in Leicester. Being a city the economy of which was based on the textile industry, there was a large factory much of which output went to Marks and Spencer. There was a tradition that when young women were to be married, her mates would dress her up in the gaudiest clothing imaginable and with garish make up on her face as well. The ‘victim’ would then be taped to a lamp post with yards and yards of sellotape, string and other tape such that it was impossible to escape. Thus tied to the lamp post, the girl did not attempt to make an escape but had to endure the laughter and comments of passing pedestrians and motorists for several hours (normally from about 2.00pm in the afternoon until about 6.00pm) Her friends would then come and release her and get her thoroughly drunk for the rest of the evening (although she may have drunk something at lunchtime as well) In the sixteen years that I lived in Leicester, I think I observed this about twice and certainly more associated with the 1970’s rather than later. I suspect that this habit may well have died out a long time ago and one wonders what the attitude of a modern day police force might be if faced with a girl-tied-to-a-lamp post scenarios in today’s world. I would suspect that this practice has been replaced by a more modern version which might be a hen party organised in Amsterdam or in Prague. Meg and I actually bumped into a more mature hen party when we were staying in a hotel in Madrid – the members of this group all wore identical tee-shirts but I cannot remember what their slogan was at the time.

This Tuesday, we are going to depart somewhat from our usual pattern of events for a Tuesday. But first, having got Meg up and breakfasted, we needed to make our way down to Waitrose where we hoped that we would bump into some of our normal Tuesday crowd. In the event, we were to be disappointed because our recently widowed friend was not there, a second may have been at home with a chest infection and the thirds was off playing bowls. Nonetheless, Meg and I had a coffee quite alone for once but we noticed, en passant, that the store was full of red roses ready no doubt for people to purchase them in anticipation of Valentine’s Day which is tomorrow. I am afraid that we make the most ungallant of gestures, refusing to participate in Valentines Day after 56 years of marriage but it is not unheard for the Waitrose staff to dispose of some of their excess stock, immediately after Valentine’s day by throwing some in our direction. But we knew that a visit to us scheduled for later in the day so we did not tarry too long in the store. At 1.00pm, by arrangement, the two nurses who specialise in Meg’s condition, were coming along to make their scheduled monthly visit. These meetings follow a pattern as one nurse spends some time with Meg and the other with me and then we swap over. One of the nurses had spent some time encouraging Meg to read aloud from the ‘Mog’ book which I acquired yesterday and was pleasantly surprised at Meg’s fluency in this little venture. This being the case, I must keep looking in the charity shops for books of a similar genre and I am wondering whether we might build a new pattern of activities into our daily routine such that Meg reads to me some passages from whichever book is engaging her attention and I, for my part, get the computer to ‘speak aloud’ the words of my most recent blog. As the nurses’s own son is just starting school, I think I have planted a seed in some of the books that she might quite like to acquire and to read aloud to him (or for him to read to himself as he gets older). However, I amused the two nurses, or afflicted them both, with getting the new laptop to speak out loud the words of the little ‘Hints’ page that I put on the web last week and then the latest edition of this blog. We are always pleased to seeing these two nurses who work for different parts of the Health Service but in adjacent rooms so they evidently liaise well with each other. Amongst other things, we review Meg’s medication where we are going to reinstate one of the items that the doctor (not a specialist) had decided to discontinue. To be in the middle of competing sets of advice is somewhat frustrating but I must admit I tend to go with my own feelings as to what is appropriate in most cases. As I had been anxious not to postpone this visit from the two nurses, I had foregone my Pilates session this Tuesday, but I felt the visit was more important under the circumstances. After the nurses had departed, we had our normal ‘Tuesday’ lunch of fishcakes and micro-waveable vegetables and then settled down to some afternoon TV. Meg and I had scheduled for ourselves to watch, on Prime TV, the biopic of Edith Piaf called ‘La Vie en Rose‘ This was rather full of the gritty realism of the backstreets on Paris in the early years of the century in which Edith Piaf was raised, or should I say ‘dragged up’ We only watched one half of the film today, saving the final half for another day when Meg is not so tired and/or stressed.

The enquiry into the Post Office scandal seems to gone into abeyance for a little while but I gather is to resume again in April. Yet another sub postmistress has been cleared by the Court of Appeal today and I read on ‘Sky News’ that Paula Vennels, the ex-Post Office chief is to give evidence. This I hope will be a ‘must see’ event because it is quite rare to see the powerful brought to account and in this particular case, Paula Vennels, seems to be in denial that she bears any responsibility for the ill-judged prosecutions in which the Post Office engaged. I find it simultaneously amusing and frustrating that when such individuals are held to account that suddenly they have a great lapse of memory or to say that ‘that to best of their knowledge and belief’ which they hope is a get-out-of-jail card for them. In a similar vein, when one of the Maxwells was questioned in the phone-hacking investigation and was presented with an email showing they had been informed of some malfeasance or another, the flimsiest of excuses that I have ever heard is to not to deny that they had received such and such an email but that he ‘had not read it to the end’

The political event unfolding in the by-election to be held on Thursday may well prove to be interesting. The Labour candidate in the Rochdale by-election has had support from the Labour Party officially withdrawn from him but the Labour Party ‘label’ will still appear on the official voting forms. This is a consequence of past comments indicating that he thought that Israel had ‘allowed’ the Hamas attack to happen to give an excuse the invasion of Gaza. Will this candidate still be elected or not? Even if elected, the new MP will be shunned and will have to sit by himself as an ‘Independent’. In any General Election which is now only months ago, this MP will deselected and will be replaced, no doubt, by more suitable candidate who is not prone to making anti-Israeli jibes of this kind.

So Monday, the start of a new week has dawned and so we got Meg up and ready for the carers to take over at 8.00am. For one of the care assistants, it was her first day in a new job so she rather tended to stand around consulting the package on her mobile whilst the other girl got on with the job in hand. To be fair, I had got Meg half ready so there was not a great deal for them to actually do. But today is the start of the new régime where we are going to have a couple of carers in every morning so I am hopeful that we can get rapidly into a new routine. After the carers had left, I gave Meg her breakfast and then we proceeded to go to Droitwich, which is our normal run out on a Monday morning. I called in at the newsagents that we used to frequent on a daily basis and saw that they had a supply of newspapers. So I made a request to the young male assistant behind the counter that they keep a copy of ‘The Times‘ safe for me in the back office which was the arrangement I used to have with my previous newsagent. Whether this new arrangement will work out as I would like, we will have to wait and see but the youngish lad who is behind the counter these days does not seem to have much clue about things. We then proceeded to Droitwich where we parked fairly easily and just outside the Worcestershire Association of Carers shop which was to prove fortuitous. Then we repaired to our favourite coffee shop enjoying a pot of tea and a bacon butty and the cafe seemed to fill up quite readily. The proprietor did not have any assistance this morning so he was doing a lot of running around but after we had had our fill, we returned to the car. As we were quite near the charity shop, we popped inside and emerged with several goodies, all at bargain prices. One of these was a boxed set of children’s classic stories (of the likes of ‘Little Women‘ and ‘Black Beauty‘) I bought these for Meg hoping that her concentration span was such that she may well like to read them again, probably having read each one when she was of the age of 10-12 years old. Whether this little theory of mine will work or not is unclear but the whole boxed set of a dozen books cost less than the current price of a coffee so it is scarcely a waste of money. I also took the opportunity to buy a children’s version of ‘Scrabble’, another Judith Kerr on the adventures of Mog the cat and finally a slimline melamine tea tray with a poppy design upon it. When we got home, it was not quite the normal Politics program in the middle of the day that we have come to expect- perhaps they are on a half-term break as well but I needed to press on and make lunch rapidly as time was marching on. I scaled down the amount that we were going to eat and so we dined on ham, mange-touts and baked potato.

This afternoon, we had intended to watch ‘La Vie en Rose‘ which was the life story of Edith Piaf. Incidentally, I wonder whether the title of this song is best idiomatically translated as ‘Life seen with a rose-tinted view’ along the lines of the English expression ‘seeing life through rose-tinted spectacles’ The literal word for word does not justice to the subtlety of the phrase so when I next see our French friend from down the road who was also a language teacher, whether my conjecture is correct. I always think of the translation process as much more than actually knowing the meaning of the words themselves – after all, think of the meaning behind describing a man as an ‘old dog’ but the female equivalent would be a ‘bitch’. Meg was not feeling at all wonderful this afternoon, so instead of watching the film as we intended, we tuned into one of our favourite baroque concerts on ‘YouTube‘, which is a staple of ours these days.

Ex-President Trump has a known predilection for ‘strong’ (quasi-fascist?) leaders and has more recently expressed the view that the Europeans should be making a greater contribution to Nato that they actually do. With these thoughts in mind, it seems amazing that one should hear these words from ex-president Trump: ‘No, I would not protect you. In fact I would encourage them (Russia) to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay’ he has reported to have said to unnamed leader. Quite a backlash to these comments is now making itself heard and a former presidential candidate (Chris Christie) has retorted ‘This is why I have been saying for a long time that he is unfit to be president of the US’. It is certainly the case that many NATO members are increasingly concerned about the consequences that might flow from a Trump re-election and the Ukrainians, in particular, must feel that they are on the verge of being abandoned for good. It may well be the case that other Western governments have to bite the bullet and increase funding and support for Ukraine in the face of American intransigence but perhaps their economies cannot bear the strain.

We pop into our Sunday routine this morning which means getting ourselves ready for the Lorna Kuenssberg program on BBC1 which we manage in time. Once we were up and breakfasted, we wondered if our University of Birmingham friend might make contact with us. This, indeed, he did but only to inform us that he had another commitment this morning so could not meet with us today. Nonetheless, we still went down to Waitrose on the off chance that we might bump into some people that we knew. There were some Sunday morning regulars that we know by sight only so after we had our coffee and a Danish pastry for Meg, we came home to settle down for the treat that we had promised ourselves. Two Sundays ago, we dropped into the second half of a three part series in which a group of very dissimilar minor celebrities were joining forces to walk an ancient route from the Swiss Alps over the St. Bernard’s pass and thence to Rome. Last week, we saw the third and the final part of this series but today we had promised ourselves that we start to view the series on iPlayer from the very beginning and in this way find out who the eight minor celebrities actually were. This proved to be an hour of the most absorbing TV that it was possible to watch – as well as the stunning mountain scenery and ancient Italian towns, there were the various group dynamics to consider. There were a variety of faiths – and no faith – individuals on offer but they were all, in a way, trying to prove something to themselves by undertaking the pilgrimage. One fascinating fellow pilgrim that they met en route was a British doctor who quite liked to walk along alone although he acknowledged that many pilgrims found walking in a group was extremely enjoyable. He explained that when one was alone, you concentrated on food, drink, appropriate clothing and where you going to spend the night in a hostel along the route. All of the other problems that you might have faded away when you were concentrating upon these bare essentials of life he argued and one could understand that he had a good point. So Meg and were delighted to have tuned in successfully to this first episode and are going to get to view the other episodes at about the same time each Sunday morning as some viewing to which we can look forward each week. This morning, we had some unsmoked ham cooking in the slow cooker and made ourselves a fairly conventional Sunday lunch of baked potato, broccoli and the slices of meat bathed in a thick onion gravy. There is always a certain amount of preparation preparing a Sunday meal like this but, once done, it makes life easier for the rest of the week as the meat is cooked, the onion gravy is prepared and so meals are quite straightforward for the remainder of the week. We knew that we were going to watch the Ireland vs. Italy Six nations rugby match this afternoon and this turned out to be quite enjoyable. Although this was one of he strongest teams of the competition playing the weakest, the Italians put up as good a show as they could and the match was reasonably entertaining, even though the Italians finished the match without a single score on the board. Whilst we were waiting for the match, we tuned into BBC 24 hours news programme and saw a fascinating half hour of the Art of Islam which was pretty enjoyable in its own right as well.

The next week is going to seem quite strange to us in a variety of ways. Our son and daughter-in-law are going to be away in Spain enjoying a half term break and some nice warmth away from the winter weather in the UK (although to be fair, we have not had he snow which was forecast last week and the next few days are going to be quite mild) But we are moving onto a new pattern of carers for Meg in which the carers are going to come every day rather than three days a week. My Pilates session this week is being junked so that we can enjoy the visit of the Admiral nurse under whose care Meg is receiving at the moment and whose advice and support we find quite valuable. Then on Thursday, our allocated social worker is due to visit for another visit in which the care and support for Meg are to be reviewed.

There is a story told about Clement Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister of the landslide win for the Labour Party in the 1945 election. After a reshuffle, one of his ministers was very disappointed that he had not been offered another portfolio and sought an interview with the Prime Minister. When asked why had had not offered another appointment, Clement Attlee apparently took a suck on his pipe and looking up from his desk just said ‘Not good enough’ – which ended the interview. I am reminded of this story because a Tory Treasury Minister was caught out in a Radio 4 interview last week not knowing some of the most basic facts about the British economy and hence the ‘not good enough’ epithet which ought to be applied to her. Mind you, the same could be said of many members of the current Cabinet whose days are surely numbered.

Being a Saturday morning, we were looking forward to making contact with some of our coffee bar friends. As it turned out, we had coffee with the one of our friends who had attended her own husband’s funeral last Wednesday. Her husband was practically 90 and had sort of decided, for himself, that he no longer wished to eat or drink so it was fairly evident that he could not last a great deal longer. I think the overwhelming emotion of our friend was one of relief that everything was all over and now she had to continue with all of the post-death sequelae such as ensuring that her dead husband’s name was taken off joint bank accounts and the like. We are a little worried about a mutual friend (the chorister) who we normally see each Tuesday and each Saturday. But whilst we were in the Methodist Centre last Thursday we thought that we heard that our friend might have taken to her bed with a chest infection so we hope this is just a transient thing and that she quickly gets over this little setback. We also bumped into two other friends to whom we used to make a videocall once a week during the height of the pandemic but they have moved from their previous address and we have lost the kind of contact that we used to have them. They both have their share of health problems with which they are coping on a day-to-day basis but without the benefit of any carers at all. When we got home, we made a lunch of quiche with a ‘melange’ of vegetables to go with it. The vegetable mixture consisted of two small onions, some sweet peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms and some petit pois with a dash of a garlic and tomato sauce to add a little bit of piquancy. This turned out to be delicious and whilst being a completely vegetarian meal, was nonetheless incredibly tasty and enjoyable.

We knew that we were going to enjoy some Six Nations rugby this afternoon and the first of these was Scotland vs. France at Murrayfield. Scotland were in the lead at half time and ten minutes before the end of the match were leading by six points. But then followed a ping pong period in which the backs from each side booted the ball up and down the field with each side waiting for a mistake and neither team making a decisive move. But then the French made a bold move and scored an opportunistic try which one always thought that they would, and then after a conversion led by one point. They then added three penalty points and Scotland needed a try to win the match. Then followed one of the most tense ends to a match it was possible to witness. Scotland did get the ball over the try line but the online decision of the referee was that the ball was held up i.e. no try. The video referee has to find ‘clear and compulsive evidence’ to overturn the on-field decision and then what we all saw on the video replay was the ball held up on a French leg and then rolled off it. So the ball was probably grounded but was there ‘clear and conclusive’ video evidence that this was the case and the answer is that there was not. So the try was not awarded even though on one video frame one saw the top of the ball roll over the leg but was the ball grounded? This is rather like the burden of evidence in a legal case when in a civil case the issue is decided on the ‘balance of probabilities’ whereas in a criminal case it has to be proved ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ So to summarise here, I think on the balance of probabilities, the ball was grounded but was there ‘clear and conclusive evidence’ to overturn the on-field decision’ and one has to say there was not. So the rules of rugby were properly followed but the decision of ‘no try’ was decided on the tightest of margins and so the French were awarded the victory. Such fine decisions are not rare in rugby these days but in a case like today’s, the decision was agonisingly close and some members of the public reviewing the video evidence might conclude that the ball had actually been grounded and the try (and the match) should have been given to Scotland. This was one of the tightest and hardest decisions that a refereeing team have ever had to make but this is what makes the game so excruciatingly difficult to watch upon occasions. The match to which we had been looking forward was the England vs. Wales match and this, too, had echos of the previous game. The Welsh were leading at half time but like the French before them, one always had the suspicion that the England team would manage to overhaul the Welsh in the final stages of the game, The Welsh played with enterprise and flair and the English with a kind of gritty determination which proved to be decisive in the end. The margin here was only a couple of points and made for a tense and exciting finish (but it could not rival the knife-edge of the Scotland vs. France game). Tomorrow, we shall see Ireland vs. Italy which is probably the strongest team in the competition taking on the weakest, but we shall see.