There is quite a lot to comment upon today what with one thing or another but I will start with the results of some of the internet searches I made last night. Trying to ascertain some of the provenance of the tapestry I purchased yesterday at a knock-down price and am having currently re-framed, I have discovered the following. The story is considerably condensed but the starting point is that the outstanding weavers in the middle and late middle ages were undoubtedly the Flemish. The best of these were charged with the opening of the Gobelin factory, actually started by Louis XIV but coming into its heyday during the reign of Louis XV (‘Louis Quinze’) Under this monarch, there was a massive flowering of the decorative arts and the legacy to this day is Louis Quinze furniture. The Gobelin factor produced tapestries on mediaeval and classical themes and its output was used extensively at Versailles and at manorial homes throughout France. The established court painter was Boucher and a tapestry was made, in the style of Boucher, of ‘Jardin de Louis XV’ which depicted 18th Century aristocrats, some dancing, others painting, to the sound of music being played in the garden. (As you might have guessed by now, the tapestry I purchased yesterday was one of this genre.) Tapestry making was extremely expensive and took a lot of skill and gradually the use of tapestries fell away with the rise of paint and wallpaper – but the tapestry-making skills were still deployed in restoration work. The Flemish weaving tradition was still strong and one of the famous of these enterprises acquired the rights to all of the Gobelin as well as Jacquard designs. Then in the 1960’s, the skills of the weavers was deployed to make modern facsimiles of some of these classic designs. This was not like a photocopy or even a print but was a skilful adaptation of century old skills. The resulting output, although made on a machine and not hand made as in the original, were then put on the market at prices ranging from £160-£200 upwards. So the binding on the back of the tapestry I purchased although it says ‘Made in Belgium’ should really have read ‘Made by Flemish weavers using traditional skills’ So this the condensed back story of the tapestry I have purchased which is still best described as ‘Jardin de Louis XV’ but, if it were an absolute original, would sell in the hundreds of thousands and be in a museum (or stately home) somewhere.

This morning, after breakfast Meg and I went out to the AgeUK Club which we attend on the second Wednesday of each month and the morning turned out to be far more entertaining than we would have imagined. A troupe of female ‘Morris Men’ had been engaged and they engaged in some traditional dances made resonant by the clogs that they were wearing. They were accompanied by a little band comprised of a guitarist, an accordionist and a concertina or squeezebox. Some of the tunes originated from the locality and some from the North where the wearing of clogs in the mills was quite widespread. This really does not sound like everyone’s cup of tea but was actually immensely enjoyable and the morning just flew by. To make life a little more interesting, one person attended the club for the first time with her father and this lady was a teacher in Leeds, so we actually had quite a lot to talk about. This particular lady was being faced with the prospect of moving her father from a community in which he had lived for decades to a brand new environment so that she could continue to provide care and support for him. This must be a very difficult to make and I do not envy her lot – but I gave her details of a webpage I had put up some time ago that might offer a few practical tips and hints. I had hoped that more people might contribute to these pages so that we could information share but I guess that we are all too busy actually caring than to have time reading websites.

In the middle of the afternoon, I received a phone call from the daughter of Meg’s cousin. Yesterday, although very frail this cousin had celebrated her 88th birthday yesterday and had a really wonderful day with members of the care staff baking a birthday cake and with all round celebrations with the two daughters. This turned out to be a sort of swansong because early this morning, Meg’s cousin had slipped peacefully away having had the most enjoyable day yesterday. The family have been under immense pressure coping with the illness of her mother and so today their inevitable sadness is tinged with relief and almost a certain amount of happiness that their mother had experienced what in my youth used to be described by my religious studies teachers as a ‘good end’ The significance of this phrase was lost on me at the age of 14 but I appreciate the sentiment more fully today. Whilst one inevitably mourns the passage of a loved one, the age of 88 is not a bad age at which to pass on – in the meanwhile, we are still thinking about the practical arrangements when we can meet again, funerals notwithstanding, so that life can go on.

Just before we got the phone call from Meg’s cousin, we had received another one from the member of the NHS ReAblement team who had made an assessment of Meg some two or three weeks ago and was now checking that all would be in place for a hand over (or rather a hand back) to the care agency which we were using before Meg’s recent stay in hospital. This will be a case of picking up the pieces again and there is a certain amount of sadness involved as we move from one band of carers to another. Almost inevitably, one enters into a sort of emotional relationship with the personnel involved in providing care for a loved one and we may be in a situation where we will be sorry not to be seeing some of them again. This afternoon, though, has been one of those really wet and gloomy days and one wonders when we are going to get a glimpse of more springlike weather.

Today started off wet and blustery and these conditions persisted for most of the morning. Although we generally look forward to our Tuesday morning ‘get togethers’ in Waitrose, we suspected that today was going to be a little different because we knew that one of our number had a meeting scheduled with a social worker and was going to miss this morning. We thought that the weather might act as a deterrent to another of our regulars and so it proved, so Meg and I had our coffee alone. On leaving the store, I realised I had left my hat behind so I went back to retrieve it. Upon reaching the car, I realised that Meg was no longer holding the loaf we had purchased inside the store so we traipsed back again and one of the really friendly shop assistants retrieved the loaf for us which had been dropped outside the store. Then, as it was not too late, we decided to go back to Droitwich in order to visit the Worcestershire Association of Carers shop which we were in yesterday. When leaving yesterday, I had noticed a rather fine tapestry of a lute player in a rural scene and at a very quick glance I suspect it is an 18th century theme even though it may have been made a century later. I thought that I would make an offer below the asking price if it was still available today and then it was pointed out that the frame was damaged (which I had not noticed yesterday) and it was offered to me at a discount. The volunteer within the store thought that the tapestry might have been an original which, if so, would make it pretty valuable but she thought that the frame was reparable. I left it for the moment but then called in at our local picture framing store here in Bromsgrove to ask their advice. The store actually had in stock some ornate frames more or less in the spirit of the original but not as ornate as the original frame and I asked for a quick quote as to what a re-framing might be. I explained my dilemma to the very knowledgable assistant who encouraged me to ‘Go for it!’ (Well, she would under the circumstances) So I am still rather conflicted. not to say torn, but the factor which is weighing quite heavily is the fact that the theme (a lute player) would actually be quite an enhancement to our Music Lounge as presently constituted. The dilemma is whether to spend money that I had not anticipated but to acquire something which is not only beautiful but probably with a value way in excess of the offer price, even after I have it re-framed. So I am still in the contemplation mode about this one. I have consulted the web and picked up some clues as to how to discern a genuine and handmade tapestry rather than a machine produced version. Eventually, by the late afternoon, I had made up my mind and so Meg and I raced back into Droitwich where we picked up the tapestry at the negotiated reduced price. I then dropped it off at our local picture framers in Bromsgrove who confirmed they could not repair the damaged, ornate gilt frame but they could do a tasteful and suitable replacement. But this will take them a couple of weeks as they indicated how busy they were at the moment. In a fortnight’s time, or a little over, I can contemplate my purchase as a sort of birthday present and I trust that it will maintain its function as adding a touch of class to our Music Lounge. At the picture framers, we did discern that it was produced in Belgian and some internet searches reveals that the theme (lute players, aristocratic ladies dancing and the mandatory Greek temple in the background) was a popular depiction of the Georgian period and used in many Belgian designs. The tapestry, though, looked as though it was machine produced and not an original tapestry (which was unlikely but would have made the potential value of it shoot upwards considerably)

Last night, we received an email from one of Meg’s second cousins (well, the daughter of a cousin) suggesting some dates when the sisters who are second cousins and ourselves might meet for a family meal. This Friday was one possibility but the next alternative was a date in May which happened to be the day before my birthday next month. So I suggested that the date in May might be a good occasion for us to meet up. not least because it would enable me to have a bit of a birthday bash at the same time. We also received the very sad news that after a lot of heartache, our domestic help had decided that it really was time that her beloved Jack Russell, who seemed to be falling apart in ways a bit too graphic to mention, really needed to start a journey to his doggie heaven and our domestic help wanted to share one or two days with her pet before the fateful day. So we now expect to see her on Friday rather than on Wednesday for the most understandable of reasons. Last night, in a slightly restless period before Meg settled down for good, I got onto the internet to buy some items of night attire that I thought were needed as well as some additional aids to help Meg and I to have a better nights sleep.

The enquiry into the Post office is continuing today and the evidence of Mr. Bates, although we know a lot of it already, is going to be revelatory. I could actually watch this all day but one bit of the evidence that I say just before I prepared lunch was the long and revealing letter sent to Ed Davy who was then part of the Conservative–Liberal coalition government and whose short, not to day curt, reply to Mr. Bates was to the effect that he thought that ‘No useful purpose would be served by such a meeting’ In the light of the ensuing scandal, this must surely rank as one of the greatest dereliction of duty by a serving minister although it may be that he was advised in this course of action by his civil servants who want to keep the ‘lid’ on things.

So the start of another week and two cheerful carers turned up, absolutely ‘on cue’ as it were. One of these carers, is a male I call Mr. Teazy-Weazy as he was a hairdresser for at least a decade in a previous life and I allow him to do his best on Meg’s hair once she is all washed and dressed. I think he achieved a kind of ‘urchin style’ look this morning but the results are always very pleasing. Under the arrangement that we have with the ReAblement team, we might have one more week of their regime and then we revert to our previous (private sector) care providers organised by Worcestershire Council with contributions from ourselves. After we had breakfasted, we thought we would go to Droitwich as, with Meg’s recent hospital stay, we have not been there for the best part of a month. Have visited the ATM and W H Smith’s (next door to each other!) to pick up our newspaper, we made for the ‘old’ Wilkinson’s store which has been taken over by Poundland. Here I bought some socks as I seem to developing holes in the heels of my current stock, some underwear for Meg and some of those little bits and pieces that you see in hardware stores that you know are going to be incredibly useful, even if you started off with no intention on buying them. We popped into the coffee shop that we used to frequent but every single table was taken (quite a frequent occurrence in this particular shop) and thence to an Oxfam charity shop where nothing took our interest. We made our way to our regular coffee house where we indulge in a pot of tea and a bacon butty and finally called in at the Worcestershire Association of Carer’s shop which is always stocked with interesting goodies. Here I did buy quite a few things, amongst the items purchased were some children’s books that were on sale for 50p each. Rather disappointingly, two that I would have readily purchased are already in our possession but I picked up six more, carefully chosen so that the illustrations are superb and that I can read aloud to Meg and she can follow the text as well as admiring the illustrations. Then I espied on a top shelf in the store the rather fine litre sized goblet that I suspect is actually Murano glass for the famous factory in Venice. I had seen this piece once before and rejected it because the designers have seen fit to encrust a band containing what I think are coloured pieces of red glass. To my eyes (and the store assistant agreed with me) this cheapens the look and appearance of the whole thing and almost makes it look like the kind of thing you would win at a fairground. But today, I had another long hard look at it and decided to purchase it (even though the price had risen since I first saw it) because the idea occurred to me that I might be able to ameliorate the effects of the red glass by the judicious application of some modeller’s gold paint. After lunch, I gave it a good wash in some warm soapy water and then decided to display it in a shaded corner of our Music Lounge. To my utter delight, in that particular position, the red glass ornamentation seems to practically disappear leaving only the traditional intricate gold design etched or applied to the amethyst of the original. So I may leave the way it is without running the risk of spoiling it but in any case, I shall certainly take the advice of my style consultant aka our domestic help who will call around on Wednesday and whose judgement on these matters I trust implicitly. Tonight, when Meg is safely asleep, I will photograph it and pop the photo into the Google app which identifies images to see if I can ascertain anything of the provenance of this piece.

Just to show what a dangerous world we are now living in, there is a report today that one of the nuclear reactors in the Ukraine have been subject to a drone attack. Russia has control of these reactors but the Ukraine has denied any involvement in the attack. It may take some days to investigate from which territory the drone was launched but when nuclear power stations were designed and then operated, I do not suppose that the civil designers ever had a thought that they should be made bombproof. The motivation behind the attack seems bizarre – would the Russians attack a nuclear power plant under their control and then try to blame it on the Ukrainians? And surely the Ukrainians themselves would not attack a plant they regard as ‘theirs’ and are trying to liberate? The full truth behind all of this may never be known but seeing the trail of destruction wrought by Chernobyl, one would have thought that all sides to a conflict would keep nuclear plants out of their sights. There is quite a lot of excitement growing in the US at the moment concerning the total solar eclipse which will be seen across some of the eastern states of the US as well as parts of Mexico and Canada. The very earliest partial solar eclipse that I witnessed was in about 1961 then a partial eclipse was visible in the UK. One of the masters at the school I attended had rigged up a telescope which was then focused on a piece of card so that we could an observation of the eclipse without the risk of damaging our eyesights. The authorities are rightly full of warnings about the damage that can be done by observing an eclipse with the naked eye or without suitable optical equipment but I wonder how many of these warnings are actually heeded?

One hope it is not a false dawn but there is a glimmer of light in a resolution of the Israel/Gaza conflict. It looks as though the killing of the seven aid workers was an ‘inflection point’ in the war but it is perhaps a sad refection that 33,000 Palestinians have died. many of them women and children but the West only tries to exert some influence upon the conflict when seven of their number have lost their lives. But by my calculation, the kill ratio of 33,000 Palestinians compared with 1200 Israelis is of the order of 27.5 to 1.

After I had made Meg comfortable in the middle of the night, we eventually settled down and had a good night’s sleep. Meg’s carers turned up on the dot of 8.30 and we had got this organised so that they could take over the minute I had got Meg up and prepared for them. They see her downstairs on the stairlift and ensure that he is comfortably installed in her favourite chair before I go off to prepare our breakfast. After we had breakfasted, we received a visit from the Eucharistic minister from our local church and commiserated with her as she had being having a torrid time recently, firstly with a brother-in-law and now, in the last week, with a sister-in-law. The story is an all too familiar one these days which is a fall at home, followed by a long wait for the ambulance followed by an even longer wait in A&E whilst their relative was being attended to. The lady in question had initially refused to go to our local hospital and, in view of our recent experiences, perhaps she was wise not to go and knew a thing or two that we evidently did not. We will not see our Eucharistic minister again for a week or so whilst a family holiday intervenes but we keep a little calendar specifically reserved for the purpose of recording the next visit. After our visitor we left, we departed and made our way to an almost deserted Waitrose which seemed exceptionally quiet even for a Sunday. But we picked up our copy of the ‘Sunday Times‘, the reading of which is a treat that I reserve for myself over a cup of coffee whilst Meg is having her post-prandial sleep. Once we returned home, we flicked the various channels on the TV and stumbled into the last third of the film ‘Call of the Wild’ which I seem to remember was actually written as a book by Jack London. When I picked up the story, there was a deep bond between a Yukon gold trekker, Thornton and a dog which is a mixture of St. Bernard and Scotch Shepherd called Buck but in the course of their lives together, they run across a pack of wolves. Evidently, the plot revolves around the bond between the gold panner and the dog and the eventual pull of meeting with the wolf pack and hence the title of the film (which rather gives away the ending) I was a bit intrigued by how the film would work out and had to break off the watching of it whilst I went off to get lunch but eventually I learn from a synopsis on the web that Buck does get attracted to a white wolf with whom he eventually mates and then becomes leader of the wolf pack. I have to say that I found the CGI stunning for the facial expressions (anthropomorphism?) on the face of the dog but the film as a whole got rather mixed reviews and eventually only got box office receipts that recovered only about half of the production costs. But I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the 20 minutes or so of the film that I actually viewed. Lunch today was a fairly conventional affair of ham (originally cooked a month ago but half saved in the freezer) augmented by some onion gravy, baked potato and broccoli. Meg ate up every scrap of hers which is always a source of satisfaction and seems to be enjoying a deep doze as I write.

Donald Trump’s shenanigans on the other side of ‘the pond’ are always the kinds of things that one follows with a kind of fascinated horror. Nonetheless, I read something today which I found genuinely shocking. This is an account of the hold that Trump holds over the current Republican party in the US. The article I read reminds us that most current Republican members of the House, including Speaker Michael Johnson, refused to certify the outcome of the 2020 election. In fact, Johnson helped organise 138 Republican House members to dispute that outcome, despite state certifications and the nearly unanimous rulings from state and federal courts that it was an honest election. And so the argument runs – if Johnson and his cronies had so few scruples then, why should we assume they will have more scruples in the weeks following November’s elections?

The Labour party should perhaps be rejoicing in the fact that a landslide victory for them is still completely on the cards – and many Conservative MPs are secretly resigned to their fate. But the Labour leadership is being cautious in the extreme and is taking nothing for granted. Having made very few specific pledges and with a large majority in prospect, there is no reason why the pledges made by the Labour party should not be fulfilled quite speedily. It is not fully appreciated that Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister on the basis of quite a mild manifesto that was designed not to ‘frighten the horses’ as they say. Those well versed in the arts of ‘realpolitik’ argue that political parties should aim to get elected by making as few and uncontentious promises as possible but then to have up their sleeve a ‘real’ agenda that they would put into effect if elected by sufficiently large majority. But many political commentators are of the view that if the Labour Party were to be elected, then after the initial pledges were fulfilled, there would be no real vision as to what to do with the political power that they so crave. After all, we did see that in 1966 when a Labour government was elected with a very workable majority but any opportunities for more radical reform were frittered away in the absence of any real vision. I remain of the view that any non-Conservative government in the UK always has to face three real sources of opposition to its very existence. The first of these is the undoubted hostility of the Main Street Media which is predominantly in the hands of those advocating a right wing agenda. I have referred before to the secret Tories who always seem to be around when needed to bail out a Conservative government, however dire it might be. Finally, of course, the right will always mobilise and play the ‘race’ card (or the overtly ethnocentric card’) in order to garner support.

I really am not sure how carers keep themselves so cheerful when they have a multiplicity of clients and are probably on the minimum wage but the two we had this morning, one of whom we knew already, were true to form. I often ask carers about their own families because they always seem very happy to talk about them and such was the case today. Once we had got Meg ready and downstairs, I showed one of the carers our weighted blanket which she thought might be useful to help one of her grandchildren who was on the autistic spectrum. Actually, as I talk to carers, they all do have families and problems of their own which, of course, they are having to cope with as well as their jobs as carers. I remember once having a conversation with one of my (mature) students who I was teaching on a part-time degree at Leicester Polytechnic. These students were all having to juggle their full-time jobs, various domestic responsibilities as well as the demands of a degree course. When I made enquiries of one of my students, she explained that she could cope with her husband being ill, her children being ill as well as normal work and domestic pressures but when she herself felt under the weather, she felt as things were starting to get on top of her. During my professional years, I nearly always ending up teaching part-time, mature students often in the evenings and I never ceased to marvel how supportive they were to each other and how they coped with the multiple demands of home, work and an academic course. After we had breakfasted this morning, we made our way down to Waitrose where we made contact with one of our ‘old faithfuls’ and spent a happy half hour chatting. Then it was time for us to go home and I started to think about preparing the lunch. As we had already bought our copy of ‘The Times‘, I consulted the schedules and found quite an interesting programme being broadcast on Radio 3. This was Jooles Holland in conversation with a Radio 3 presenter and presenting his choice of classical music. One track that was played was the Elgar Cello Concerto and I suspected that the recording was the famous one by Jacqeline Du Pré who was regarded as one of the finest cellists of all time and who died tragically young of MS at the age of 42. I then pressed on with a simple lunch of quiche and some of our left-over vegetable mixture of a day or so back.

After lunch, I had it in mind to attempt to get the front green communal area cut, which normally takes me about 40 minutes, although I do cut it twice, once in one direction and once in a transverse direction., For this I dearly want Meg to be asleep after lunch and although she obliged me with a deep doze she did not actually fall asleep as I would have liked. So I cut the grass in ten minute segments, checking on Meg regularly so that she knew where I was. Whilst last week, I cut it on the highest cut I tried to start cutting on a medium cut (position 3 of the 5) so the mower tended to baulk at this so eventually I choose the better option of choosing a medium high position for the first cut but dropping it to the a medium cut for the transverse. The mower seemed very easy to clean up today with hardly any grass clogging the underside of the hood so perhaps the liberal spraying of the underside with WD40 had done its magic and helped to prevent the build up of grass. These days, it is probably a better idea for me to cut the grass in two tranches (the front lawns on one day and the back lawns on another day) So, as the gardening books always say, we will ‘choose a fine day’ for the second round of grass-cutting so we will probably attempt this in a few days time.

After I had come in and had a well-earned cup of tea, the sun came and out and it seemed to be shaping up for a beautifully warm and sunny afternoon. So I thought it would be a good idea for Meg and I to pop out in one of our transit chairs so that Meg could admire my handiwork of the cut lawn, the timely cutting of the privet hedge around the BioDisk which my son and daughter-in-law did yesterday and I could also take the opportunity of showing off our plum tree to her which is in full blossom at the moment. We did intend to sit down and enjoy the sunshine but it did prove to be a little too chilly for that. But our little trip outside did generate a bonus for us as our neighbour was just getting ready to go the park to have her constitutional walk and she took the opportunity to invite us round for a cup of tea next Tuesday afternoon, which invitation we were happy to accept.

We have news this afternoon that one of the Israeli hostages has been discovered dead and indeed already buried. This news is fuelling the considerable opposition to Netanyahu within Israel and the families of the hostages are calling on the Israeli Defence Force to make release of hostages their top priority. So it could be that public opinion within Israel is not convinced that trying to bomb Hamas out of existence is the best way to secure release of the hostages and so we have a situation in which both external and internal pressures on the present Israeli government are increasing almost by the day. Next Monday those living in the USA, Canada and Mexico will be able to witness a total eclipse of the sun and even a partial eclipse might be visible from some parts of the UK. Sky News has indicated that it will be showing the whole of the eclipse process ‘live’ and I think this will be from about 7pm-10pm next Monday evening. Depending upon what time Meg goes to bed on Monday, we may be able to witness some of this together on TV and these natural events are always rather exciting to behold.

Today started off as one of those days when the sky appears gloomy, the sun then breaks through the clouds with the promise of a much brighter day and then it becomes overcast again. So it has proved to be most of the morning, actually. Our couple of cheery care assistants turned up, absolutely on cue this morning and I was pleased to see them both but they are now both having a couple of days off over the weekend. After we had breakfasted on a mixture of toast and instant porridge oats, the phone rang and it was an OT arranging to come along to give Meg an assessment in about an hour’s time. Actually a pair of them turned up after only about half an hour and one of them had come to the house before and remembered all the details of Meg and our Music Lounge. Before they came, I let Meg have a little wander on her walker and this proved to be quite useful as the OTs could assess her mobility using the walker. They then observed how I managed to get Meg to a standing position and into/out of her chair. At the same time, they tested Meg’s upper body strength with a little range of tests. The upshot of all of this was that the OTs, who I think were sensibility personified, were quite satisfied with the practical arrangements that we have for Meg’s mobility, support and general living arrangements. This they were going to put on file and thought that any additional equipment was not actually indicated at this stage and might create more problems than it solved. They agreed completely with the strategy I have adopted of using the transit chair at the beginning and end of the day or other occasions when Meg might feel somewhat wobbly but the rest of the time applauded my efforts at keeping Meg relatively mobile with the use of walkers and frames. They were just on the point of leaving when our University of Birmingham friend phoned up and were intrigued and amused by our conversation which included our observations that we all wanted to go out to play (as if we were young children) and we knew that Waitrose had a good supply of play pens for us. We made contact with our University of Birmingham friend with whom we chatted until we were joined by another of our Tuesday gathering who we missed last Tuesday.

Just after we had pulled into our drive, our son and daughter-in-law turned up and we were evidently pleased to see them after an absence of a week. They had actually come along to do a badly needed gardening job which was to trim back the hedging around our BioDisk installation in the front of the house. When we first moved into the house some seventeen years ago now, this was a bit of an eyesore but within about a year I had prepared to put in some hedging plants. I know that at the time, I took a lot of trouble with the soil preparation but this has actually paid dividends as the resulting hedge is about 6 feet in height and not far short of that in width as well. So it does a magnificent job in shielding our BioDisk and almost turning it into a garden feature but the downside is that the privet hedging needs to be pruned once and twice a year. As the years have gone by and this hedge has got both taller and thicker, then its maintenance has got correspondingly more arduous. Needless to say, I am truly grateful to my son and daughter-in-law performing this task for us as it has become somewhat more difficult as the years have rolled by. The weather forecast is indicating that it may be warmer tomorrow but also wet and windy. I am hopeful that I can manage to get at least the front lawn properly mown tomorrow as we certainly on a weekly schedule from this point of time onwards.

And now a story that journalists and photo-journalists absolutely love and one that politicians of any note are keen to avoid. Rishi Sunak was visiting the Oval to meet participants of Surrey County Cricket Club’s Ace Schools Programme – it provides free training for state school pupils aged nine to 13. In the videoclip, Rishi Sunak is being seen being bowled out middle stump by a schoolboy – the still of this photo will surely go viral and is an absolute gift to the Labour Party. All that is needed is to blow up the still to a poster and then slap a simple message on it such as ‘Out!’ or ‘Bowled Out’ and it will surely capture the zeitgeist of the moment i.e. the popular mood. Certain video clips become iconic and the one in most recent memory was Theresa May at, I think, the Conservative Party conference where the ‘stick on’ letters on a display behind her kept dropping off by one. It just seemed to symbolise a governing party in the process of dissolution and the point was gleefully seized upon by journalists of all political persuasions.

It seems that we may be at an ‘inflection point’ in the Israel/Gaza conflict. After the killing of the seven aid workers, three of them UK nationals the Americans have indicated to the Israelis that they have had enough. They are saying to the Israelis that American support is continent upon new secure supply routes being opened up instantly and, almost immediately, it seems that the Israeli war cabinet have complied and new routes opened up at once. I think that I have read recently that President Reagan stopped the bombing of Hesbollah in Lebanon in a conflict at some time in the past by indicating to the Israelis that no more weapons would be supplied until they complied. Meanwhile, we are in a situation where it appears that the official legal advice given to the UK government that if we continue to supply arms in the face of a potential genocide then the UK is probably in breach of its international obligations. This advice has not been made public (I wonder why?) but it is pretty clear what the advice probably is, supported by a recent call by hundreds of legal professionals in recent days.

Today I had just about got myself up and showered when the doorbell rang and it was two friendly carers who had turned up 15 minutes early – not that I minded. My nickname for the male carer is ‘Mr Teazy-Weazy’ after the famous hairdresser of, I think, the early 1960’s. After everything else is done, I am more than happy to let him work his magic on Meg’s hair and I think that we are going to have the same pair tomorrow which is a bonus. After we had breakfasted, we received a phone call from a nurse who was part of the ReAblement team and she was going to call around in about 15 minutes to do the kind of routine monitoring that is part of the hospital routine (blood pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature) and this all turned out to be normal. After the nurse had left, Meg and I knew that we had to get our act together to get our weekly shopping done. We went to our local smaller Aldi at which I usually shop and know where absolutely everything is. This week, having got Meg seated in her wheelchair, I then managed to clip the special trolley that is available for the use of wheelchair users and found out how it clips onto the vertical leg supports and we then started our trip around the supermarket. This all went pretty well except that the trolley for wheelchair users only has half the capacity of a normal shopping trolley and therefore for a weekly shop, it is necessary to pile things high and to take a great deal of care arranging one’s purchases. Both of the local Aldi stores have invested in ‘scan your own’ shopping terminals but these I do not like when I have enough on my plate manipulating wives in wheelchairs, shopping trolleys piled full of shopping and I am desperately trying to get things packed away once scanned. But I must say that things went pretty well and one elderly lady promised to take one of my bags which was piled high and precariously but I managed without her help. Then I popped around to the garage attached to the supermarket where they have newspapers in racks outside and managed to secure one of the last two remaining copies of ‘The Times‘ When we did arrive home, Miggles our adopted cat wanted to make an entrance but was evidently spooked by the wheelchair just inside the front door and was unsure whether to go round it or under it. Eventually, on the second attempt I got the cat into the outer kitchen where he/she knows to sit patiently for me whilst I got Meg into her chair and the shopping inside the house. Like most things these days, everything is logistics or so it seems.

Lunch today was going to be one of those thrown together meals which always turns out to be a little on the large side, But I started off with a couple of onions and two small sweet peppers which were fried together with a couple of tomatoes, some petit pois and a few mushrooms.I added some fragments of beef left over from the weekend and then made the whole into what I have been told is a sort of Arabic curry once I have put in some sultanas, a couple of small diced applies and a dessertspoonful of Demerara sugar. To this I add a small cup full of onion gravy and some brown fruity sauce and let it simmer for a few minutes. Then Meg’s get dished up on sone cauliflower rice substitute whilst I keep my carbohydrate count down with a couple of broken cream crackers. After lunch, I encourage Meg to have a sleep or a deep doze but for one reason or another, I just could not get Meg to settle. She had a rather agitated afternoon until later on I was able to give her some medication. We also started watching ‘La Traviata’ the opera by Verdi which considering the heroine spends much of the opera regretting parts of her past life was perhaps not the most suitable given the events of the afternoon. But there was some glorious singing as well as emotion filled moments which Meg and I really did enjoy. These days we tend to watch an opera over two days rather than in one concentrated session so after the second Act, we paused the transmission and will resume again tomorrow.

Last night, I had sent details of this blog so that Meg’s second cousins (daughters of a cousin?) could catch up on news and I enquired about their mother, Meg’s actual cousin on the maternal side, who I know has been rather poorly. But we received some unpleasant news in the middle of the night because Meg’s cousin is suffering from dementia, a broken pelvis and has to endure two really serious infections. In short, she is only conscious 5% of the time so we are contemplating if and when the families ought to meet for a joint meal. I conveyed the news in its entirety to Meg but I am not sure whether the full import of the news is fully appreciated by Meg. So I am in contact with the two sisters and we are trying to arrange a meal at one or other of their houses next Wednesday unless we get overtaken by events, of course. It is an inevitable consequence of our stage in the life cycle that most of our news about family and friends seems to be about their frailties or worse but we have to be philosophical and make the best of each day as it comes. Although today has not been a particularly good day, I am always conscious pf the fact that ‘tomorrow is another day’

Today was one of those days which I traditionally describe as ‘chewy’ where nothing seems to go quite right. But it started off brightly enough when two carers turned up promptly at 8.30, one of whom I knew from the day before and other was a male carer who knew the ins and outs of everything as he had to care for his invalid mother for years before her eventual demise. He was delightful and, as he had been a hairdresser in a previous life, I let him get on with doing his best on Meg’s hair after we had finished everything else. Last night we had a delightful carer with whom I got on like a house on fire and am relieved that she will be on duty again tonight. Today is the day when our domestic help calls around and it is always good to see her and she helps to jolly Meg along when Meg is feeling a bit low which she is sometimes in the morning. As soon as we had breakfasted, we made our way to the Methodist Centre which is our usual haunt on a Wednesday morning but the entire cafe was in darkness as it was a non-opening week this week, no doubt as a hangover from the Easter holiday. So we thought that we would then make a trip to a ‘Home and Gardens’store which we were assured would have in stock some items of which we had run short. Needless to say, I could not find what friends had assured me that they stocked so I bought something which was probably inappropriate and then decided to visit our local Aldi store which was not too far distant. When I got there, the items that I wanted were completely out of stock so this too was a bit of a miss. In frustration, Meg and I decided that we would go straight home and have our coffee at home. This having been done, we were not too far off lunchtime so we finished off the beef from our weekend roast and ate it with baked potato and primo cabbage.

In today’s ‘Times‘ there was an article written by a lady who declares herself to be 77 years old and the article was entitled ‘Where are the knobs?’ The whole article was bemoaning the fact that the knobs and dials with which we used to control appliances had not been overtaken with smartphones complete with swipes, QR codes, apps and the like – none of which seem to work in the way that you thought. Even on my apple iPhone you are meant to swipe upwards to get a menu that gives you access to a volume control but this (for me) is an incredibly hit-and-miss affair which sometimes works but more often does not. I also have a problem hitting the right keys if only one of my fingers, probably made a bit wider with the onset of some osteoarthritis covers three characters at once when I am trying to type. How the younger generation manipulates quasi keyboards with both their thumbs is totally beyond me. Having said that, there is a bit of a fight back going on. I notice that in the latest generation of Honda car that I have, the adverse reaction of car drivers having to manipulate a slide or touch screen to control the volume of the audio in their car has led the Honda engineers to introduce some selective knurled knobs to control volumes and all of the reviews that I read of the motoring correspondents was that this was surely a move in the right direction and manufacturers were now listening to the likes and dislikes of their customers.

There is a big political story on Sky News today. A mega new YouGov poll has forecast Labour would win more than 400 seats if the general election were held tomorrow. The Conservative Party would crash to just 155 seats, meaning 210 sitting MPs would lose their jobs – among them multiple cabinet ministers. Now I do not expect that this will actually happen in a month of Sundays as the Tories can always rely upon a tranche of voters who will not give their opinions to pollsters, who are generally a-political but who always seem to come out and secretly support the Tories when it comes to the crunch. Having said that, we have the local elections in a month’s time and this is predicted to go very badly for the governing party. When lots of councillors lose their seats, the local party also loses the people who go round knocking on doors, stuffing envelopes and delivering leaflets as the defeated candidates are often disheartened and perhaps even disillusioned. There is some talk that the Tories are starting to think hard about they are going to do in opposition and are even toying with the idea of a ‘Liz Truss Mark 2’ style candidate. One development that may happen is that so many MPs will lose their seats that the wishes of the Parliamentary party may rest on the shoulders of a greatly diminished number. So, the argument runs, why not organise a putsch against Rishi Sunak now given we still have quite a large number of MPs. It is said that Penny Mordaunt as leader, if installed today, would cut the projected majority of any likely Labour government by one half. So we are in a very febrile state of politics at the moment and probably the majority of Tories are resigned to some kind of landslide given the depth of their unpopularity at the moment. It takes a landslide to get rid of a landslide so if we do get a Labour government within a few months time then they may well be in power for the best part of ten years. But I seem to recall an old fashioned examination questions that ran along the lines of ‘The Socialists are in office but the Conservatives are in power. Discuss’ I do remember when I studied the French political system in my second year at University a favourite question was ‘The French voter has his heart on the left but his pocket on the right’ which was a not dissimilar sentiment.

We had a fair night last night but the weather was bright and clear when we woke up this morning and of course it is Tuesday to which we always look forward. I got Meg up, washed, dressed and breakfasted completely on my own this morning and then two cheerful ReAblement care personnel turned up at 9.30 this morning. I explained to them in detail how and why if Meg woke up at 6.30 she needed to be toileted, washed and dressed immediately and she could not be left for a further three hours. The two care assistants were very understanding and put in a special request to their coordinator/scheduler that we really did a first call at about 7.30-8.00pm and they were hopeful that something could be done. After they had left, we started to think about our normal Tuesday morning Waitrose visit and we got there practically on the dot of 10.30 and made contact with one of our usual friends but not the other. We spent the hour discussing some contemporary politics, the vicissitudes of carers as well as some fell-walking stories from our past. As we were leaving, we treated ourselves to a tub of ice-cream now that the weather is getting slowly warmer and we fancy a bit for our evening repast. We dined on fishcakes and microwaved vegetables and then as I try and do straight away, I encourage Meg to have a post-prandial doze.

I got a welcome telephone call from our University of Birmingham friend because we had a loose arrangement that we might collaborate over lawn mowers this afternoon. Last Autumn my friend and I resurrected a basically sound Honda lawn mower which needed a but of TLC (Tender Loving care) and a bit of knowhow to get it working again. This we did in the autumn and we then decided to ‘winterise’ it by draining off the fuel and the old oil. As our collaborative efforts had been so successful we had an understanding that the mower should stay in our garage and then we would use our collaborative efforts to get it functioning again in the Spring. With freshly drawn and stabilised fuel and a new complement of the correct motor oil, my friend and I got it going again. I was attempting to cut our back lawn which was not done the other day so I was popping in at 10 minute intervals to oversee my friend trying his own mower at the front whilst I was making progress at the back. My own mower seemed to be cutting so well and effortlessly that I successfully lowered it a notch (to No 4 of the five positions, No 3 being our ‘normal’ cut) and succeeded in getting the lawns cut whilst Meg was either dozing or in a sleepy mode. So after all of this was completed and the mower put away for another week, Meg and I treated ourselves to a post-prandial cup of tea and some dark chocolate by way of celebrations for two tasks successfully accomplished.

Every so often a government proposes a course of action that seems so ‘barking mad’ that you wonder what minds are at work within government – perhaps is what Sir Humphrey in ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ would call a ‘brave’ decision. The latest proposal which came from the mind of Suella Braverman to take people who are living their lives on the street, sometimes in tents and to sanction them if they are making an excessive smell. The idea is to deter sleeping on the streets which Suella Braverman is terming a ‘lifestyle choice’ and proposing either to fine individuals or to imprison them. On the supposition that no one living on the streets had a credit card or the odd valuable painting to sell to generate funds, then non payment of the fine would resultant in imprisonment. The idea is so crass that even the Education minister who appeared on Sky News this morning refused to support the idea from her own ex-Home Secretary that people be fined for having an excessive smell and it looks as though up to 40 Tory MPs will refuse to vote for the idea – one suspects that the idea is so crass, it will be withdrawn before MPs are asked to vote upon it. But it seems a good way if you are 20 points behind in the opinion polls to drop another 5 percentage points. This of course combined with the recent comment by Jeremy Hunt that £100,000 a year is not a very high salary these days only serves to underline the disconnect between what might be termed the ordinary people and those presently charged with governing us.

Another story worthy of comment is what happened in the Boat Race run last Saturday and won by the Cambridge crew. It transpired that I think three of the Oxford crew had been suffering from vomiting on the morning of the race, probably afflicted with e-coli which emanates from the contaminated Thames on which, of course, they would have practising on for weeks. The authorities even warned the crews that the traditional practice of throwing the winning cox into the Thames should be abandoned this year (although I think the Cambridge cox had collapsed in any case). The whole point of privatisation of the water industry several years ago was to provide the funds (by the efficient private sector) so that the requisite investment could be made. But we have seen an investors strike whereby the principal investors are refusing to fund Thames Water unless prices rises are charged to the customers i.e. the customers have to pay for improvement whilst preserving their dividends. What a mess!

Today when we awoke it was evidently the first of the month and I raced around making sure that all of our various appliances were being charged up before I update our planning board and then brought Meg her early morning cup of tea. Having got Meg up and myself showered, we were just at the point where the carers were due to turn up which they did promptly at 8.30am. They were two jolly ladies who we fairly quickly got Meg turned around and then brought downstairs on the lift and installed in her favourite armchair. Whilst chatting with them, they informed me that they could be deployed anywhere in the county (of Worcestershire) so the logistic of getting care coordinated at any semblance of the allocated time slot must be a nightmare. After we had breakfasted, although the day was a little gloomy, we knew that Waitrose was probably going to be open so we decided to give it a go. Seeing the motorised wheelchair outside the front door, we surmised that our regular friend might be there and indeed she was, soon to be joined by one of her other friends so the four of us spent more than a happy hour together in each other’s company. When out time was up, Meg and I scooted around the store to buy bits and bobs and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Waitrose’s own porridge oats in a simple plastic bag only cost half the price of its market leader equivalents so we snaffled this up readily. On our way home, I decided to impulse to drop in on our close Italian friend who lives down the road. Very fortunately, she was in but just recovering from a bad bout of sciatica. As Meg was in the car, and to keep us all warm and comfortable, I invited our friend into the back of the car and so we could all a little chat in public. We have not seen our Italian friend for a week or so now, so we were delighted to be in contact again and ensured that we had a good ‘WhatsApp‘ contact so that we could arrange to have tea together. Our friend promised to bake us some fresh scones which we can with jam and cream when she calls round so this may well be a treat in store for next weekend all being well. I was explaining to our friend how I transported Meg from place to place in what I am calling our transit chair so we are all quite happy under these circumstances to meet in our house rather than elsewhere. I was just on the point of getting Meg through the door when a physiotherapist from the ReAblement team rang wondering about the equipment that the carer who called the other night had thought was essential. We had quite an extended chat and the physio and I eventually agreed that it was better for the physio to call here and see Meg in her own home and then work out what additional equipment was indicated rather than bring the equipment and then do the assessment. I honestly believe that it best to fit the equipment to Meg’s needs rather than making Meg to conform to the equipment so I think it is more sensible for us to do things this way round rather than to comply with the wishes of one particular carer (who we will now see for a couple of days, thankfully!) who tends to think equipment first. For lunch, we finished off the quasi-Christmas meal that we had yesterday, complemented with some primo cabbage but once again, made into a very tasty meal for us.

On the front page of today’s ‘Times‘ there was a really arresting story which broke through into the attention of the daily news programmed. The headline was ‘Long waits in A&E kill 250 people every week’ Of course, some of this rather sensationalist short hand reporting which makes it sound as though people are turning up to A&E and then dying in vast numbers which is of course not the case. But what is happening is that people who might have died shortly are having their deaths accelerated (i.e. brought forward in time) to when they would have died otherwise. The true basis of the figures is as follows. In 2023, there were 1.534 million emergency patients who waited 12 hours or more and of these 1 million were waiting to be admitted.According to the ‘Emergency Medicine Journal’ there was one excess death for every 72 patients who spent 8-12 hours in A&E. The risk of death grew after a wait of 5 hours and grew worse with longer waiting times. The College of Emergency Medicine estimated that there were 268 excess deaths a week were likely to have occurred last year. Even the concept of ‘waiting time’ has to be decoded because both Meg and I have experienced long waiting times in our hospital experiences. What actually happens is that one joins a queue, generally in a hospital corridor, and one leaves the queue to have things like X-rays, MRI scans, blood tests and the like. Eventually one rejoins the queue and one slowly progresses through the system until eventually the blessed relief of a hospital bed beckons some time in the future. It is true that one can experience a ‘wait’ of 12 hours or more but the wait is actually a process when one waits, then enters a queue, progresses along the queue and then exits the queue i.e. is admitted to a ward. I am not sure that I know the exact definition of how a ‘waiting time’ is absolutely calculated but is certainly true that one’s condition can worsen quite rapidly (e.g, septicaemia take hold) whilst progressing in the queue which evidently has to be monitored carefully by those in charge of the system. I would not want their job for, as they say, ‘all of the tea in China’