Yesterday, after doing my ‘evening jobs’ I received a text from my sister who had not been able to get through to read this blog which is her custom. I think I know the reason for this which is to do with the ‘http://’ protocol which is actually a part of each web address and is added by the system if not stated. The domain name should work with either ‘http://’ or the secure ‘https://’ but sometimes the second one fails for reasons beyond me. Anyway, I managed to get my sister some links to the actual web address of this blog and to its text backup text version should the problem re-occur and this seems to have solved the problem for her. If you thought that it was not possible to be shocked by anything that Donald Trump says, his latest announcements on Gaza were jaw dropping. Speaking alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the first foreign leader to visit the White House, Donald Trump has vowed that the US would take over war ravaged Gaza and own it, effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in an announcement shocking even by the standards of his norm-shattering presidency. Trump, who has previously threatened Greenland and Panama and suggested that Canada should become the 51st state, added Gaza to his expansionist agenda, claiming that it could become the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ and declined to rule out sending US troops to make it happen. ‘The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,’ the president told a joint press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday evening. ‘It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down’ Trump suggests displaced Palestinians in Gaza be ‘permanently’ resettled somewhere else. Arguing that Palestinians could live out their lives in ‘peace and harmony’ elsewhere, Trump continued: ‘The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. If it is necessary, we’ll do that, we’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.’ What one makes of all of this is hard to say – but the legalities of taking over a territory, owning it and then ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants must break every tenet of international law it is possible to cite. This, of course, is Donald Trump the property developer speaking but one presumes with the tacit approval of Netanyahu – the neighbouring Arab countries will all reject this incredible solution, however. Whether the Israeli extreme nationalist right wing endorse the Trump plan remins to be seen but from Netanyahu’s world view (an ethnic cleansing and a rebuilding of Gaza at American expense) there might be quite a lot to be pleased about. The reaction from the rest of the world, after a certain stunned silence, is predictable. Every Arab state in the region believes in the ‘two state’ solution and not be regarded as a convenient depository for displaced Palestinians.There is a long and dark history of Palestinians being encouraged one way or another to leave their homes never to return. Many of those living in Gaza’s ‘refugee camps’ are descendants of the victims of the Nakba, as they call it, or the catastrophe when during Israel’s first war of independence they had to flee homes on land that is now in Israel. They believe they should be allowed to return to that land, which they say Israelis wrongly took from them. Any acquiescence with another mass displacement would be a betrayal of their forefathers’ rights of return, they believe. In the early days of the Gaza war, Israeli right-wing politicians quietly pushed the idea that maybe the world could take Gazans in, give them a better life etc. They don’t really want to live there anyway, we were told, they’d be much better off in Michigan, or the emptier bits of Europe, or maybe Jordan and Egypt might be persuaded to take in more in return for the huge amounts of American aid they receive. Already some extreme right wing Israeli groups are relishing the prospect of resettling Gaza once the Palestinians have been ‘ethnically cleansed’. One wonders what the reactions of the Americans might be is we tried to claim back Virginia and other colonies lost when America declared its independence.

Occupying some media attention is the strange case of Lucy Letby, the nurse who was convicted of killing seven babies and suspected of killing seven more. But her defence team have assembled an international panel of experts who have concluded that there is no medical evidence that any murders have actually taken place and that the deaths of the babies concerned could be attributed to poor clinical care or vital signs being missed or minimised. Fourteen senior clinicians from around the world have analysed the medical evidence against Letby, including British doctor Neena Modi, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. The panel was assembled by Dr Shoo Lee, a retired Canadian doctor based at the University of Toronto who specialises in the treatment of young children. He said the panel worked without payment and were not familiar with the case prior to reviewing the evidence. So we have the possibility that Letby was used as a convenient scapegoat for the failings in the County of Chester hospital which had standards of care that led one of the international panel members to remark that those patterns of care had been deployed in a Canadian hospital, it would have been closed down by now. But occupying a lot of media attention are the two cases (the Southport massacre of young children, the Nottingham stabbings) in which the perpetrators were known to the relevant authorities, but decisive action was not taken. In the case of the Southport murders the young man had been referred to the Government’s (anti-terrorism) ‘Prevent’ programme but was deemed to be out of scope because he was not an adherent to an overarching philosophy such as militant Islam. The Nottingham case seems to have poor professional practice by letting a patient with known violent tendencies be discharged without ensuring that he would take his medication to prevent random acts of violence. There is a pattern in these cases in that the aberrant behaviour seems quite extreme in the first place but the overstretched social and medical services cannot (perhaps because of budget cutbacks) take the necessary preventative action with tragic consequences in each case.

Yesterday after Meg was soundly asleep, I set myself the task of a tidy up in our Music Lounge with the primary aim of finding my mislaid TV remote. In this respect, I was successful after about ten minutes of my tidying up operations which pleased me no end and I lost no doubt on making a note of its mode number so that I can quickly replace it were it to go missing again. In my tidying up which still needs a degree of refinement, I not only threw away a lot of out-of-fate junk but carefully preserved four piles of material which is anything related to Meg’s condition, general articles on fitness and health which are quite commonly produced by the quality newspapers at this time of year, articles run off from the internet which helps to make my computing efforts more efficient and finally articles and magazines that I traditionally keep such as the Peter Brookes cartoons of the year produced for ‘The Times’, Now that I got to this stage, I can further refine each collection of material in the days ahead, probably at the rate of one per day.

Also yesterday, I heard a new theory announced about the imposition of trade sanctions on both Canada and Mexico. An American spokesman explained that the position of sanctions was deliberately designed to get the countries to which they were applied to shift their position, a strategy that also worked well with Colombia. But Mexico has now agreed to utilise an extra 10,000 guards alongside its border first and foremost to crack down the supply of fentanyl (artificial opiate, some 50-100 times stronger than heroin) and secondly to stem if not stop the flow of international migrants. Donald Trump give the 25% tariff increase some days to come into effect and this helped to clarify the mind of the Mexicans who have buckled. Almost the same deal was offered to the Canadians who, likewise, have agreed to increase border security by about 10,000 guards. Now all of this is quite interesting because it looks as though America has used its brute force to enjoin its will.But a slightly more nuanced picture s that all of the parties can gain some credit from these instruments of foreign policy. The Canadians and Mexicans can claim that by taking the requested actions on the flow of drugs, disastrous tariffs have been averted. Trump, of course, can claim that his strategies have indeed worked and he is in a position to apply other sanctions as and when he feels the need. The fact that fentanyl is so easy to manufacture and so potent that over 80,000 USA citizens die of it each year is a powerful argument in its own right, though. But the traditional use of sanctions against China might be a harder nut to crack because the Chinese have naturally engaged in a tit-got-tat sanctions regime designed to hurt American exports in certain areas. Again, these sanctions have even delayed for several days which gives some time for some hard fast and furious negotiating. However, the outcome of the tussle between the two world economic super powers is hard to predict at this stage and the world’s trading exchanges are experiencing real jitters as we may be on the brink of a huge trade war.

Although it was a little late in the day, Meg and I breakfasted on porridge and then made our way down the hill to make our usual assignation with our wheel-chair bound friend Wetherspoons. On the way down, we bumped into our Italian friend but did not tarry as we were running a little on the late side. In Wetherspoons, I had more normal egg and bacon crumpet which was freshly cooked and tasted especially nice to me this morning. But Meg was sound asleep nearly all of the time so I did not rouse her to take on food and drink she did not want. Then it was back up the hill because we needed to het back before the next scheduled visit of a carer at 12.00pm which we did with five minutes to spare. Although the weather was said to be fairly temperate this morning, it did not feel that way as there was a fairly strong biting wind to add in a wind chill factor so I was very pleased to get hone (as well as being extra tired out by my exertions this morning). Then we seemed to have a plethora of carers – one arrived to do the Tuesday morning sit and we talked over family matters and funerals. Then two more carers arrived for Meg’s lunch time call, one of them lives locally and I have seen quite often recently and the other I have not seen since before Christmas. To this band was added a ‘shadowing’ worker who is in the first stages of training and learns, hopefully, by a close observation of whatever does with each client and why. After they had departed and our ‘sit’ carer had come to the end of her stint, it was time for me to prepare some lunch which I did fairly rapidly. I had some cheese and onion bakes which I heated up together with those micro-waveable vegetables in a pack so that I could prepare lunch to save some time. Meg was so soundly asleep that I did not attempt to wake her up but left her dinner on one side so that I can try to get some food into her later.

Straight after lunch, the engineer called by appointment to check over that the bed was functioning correctly, as it has to be every twelve months. After the little mishap of yesterday, the engineer showed me how to fix this simple problem should it reoccur and, more importantly, instructed me in the use of the Reset function. He also put a very helpful sticker on the bedpost so that is malfunctions were to reoccur, I would know immediately who to phone. All of this was very useful and relevant information and good to know. We regaled ourselves with some black humour about the fact that it was quite possible (and had happened) that animals could be crushed to their deaths if a sleeping pet were to be present underneath the ‘floor’ type of bed when it was being lowered to the floor.

Yesterday, we are having our roof checked over by one of the carer’s partners and his ‘roofer’ mate who we have employed before when the garden needed a blitz in the autumn. To complete the ‘outdoor’ picture some heavy earth moving vehicles have moved into the field at the back of our house and have started making progress on yet more building work which seems to be taking place around us. Gone are the days some seventeen years ago now when we used to wake up to the sights of rabbits and their young grazing on the grass on our back garden lawn (where I imagine the young shoots of grass were more tender than the field beyond, devoted to sheep) In the past, we also had visits from a golden pheasant, several foxes and a green woodpecker but of course had an ancient old apple orchard to one side (lost after three planning appeal to housing) and now building is starting at the rear. Although I used to fight these developments, these days I have given up the unequal fight and let what will be, will be. On the political front, we are waiting to see how developed the trade war will be between the USA and its immediate neighbours to the North (Canada) and the South (Mexico), What has fuelled the Trump anger against trade deficits (which in his mind is a kind of subsidy to countries exporting to the USA) is the following. Where once goods would flow directly from China to the US, there is evidence to suggest many of them are instead flowing, mostly in the form of components, to ‘third countries’, including Mexico, and then being assembled into finished products and sent into the US, and this process might accelerate in the coming years. But negotiating with Trump has its dangers as the Colombians found to their cost where they tried to refuse a planeload of migrants and immediately were subject to such punitive sanctions that they backtracked almost immediately. One of the basic tenets of politics (or deal making) is not to utter a threat that you do not intend to carry out. But in the case of Donald Trump, it is not just bluster but he does intend to carry out what he threatens, and if this is a case of destabilising the whole of the world’s financial and economic foundations, then so be it. In the Trump world view, all international bodies are stacked against the USA preventing his ‘Make America Great Again’ by which is meant total American dominance in every sphere of activity. Hence the phone calls with Canada where 20% tariff is due to applied in a day or so if not immediately and where in the Trump world view, Canada should be annexed as the 51st American state. When you have a neighbour as rich and powerful as the United States and the neighbour turns on their supposed allies, then where do they turn? The latest draconian Trump move is to close down the whole of $40 billion United States Aid agency with some unimaginable consequences for the poorest in the world. Tromp has tweeted that the agency is ‘broken beyond repair’ and is staffed by ‘radical left lunatics’. Earlier in the day, Elon Musk who is Trumps efficiency tsar asked to access secure files held by senior staff of the Aid agency, When they refused, they were promptly sacked and Musk, an unelected political force, called in US Marshalls to evict the executives denying access to secure files. These tactics are reminiscent of the Nazi bully boys in the 1930’s, but who in the world is going to gainsay them. We might ask what has happened to a ‘government of laws, not of men’ but there is an interesting debate to be had whether and in what context the word ‘laws’ implies ‘legislation’

The two carers came at the scheduled time this morning, including one I had not seen for some time. But as he was attempting to tidy up the hospital bed before leaving, he lifted up one corner of the mattress and the new bed got ‘stuck’ with the foot of the bed in a raised position. Everything we tried on the control failed to work and so we were resigned to telephone the only number that we had which was the manufacturer’s number to explain our predicament. So, I was not a happy bunny this morning, but my son happened to be at work in his office and he crawled under the bed and found a ratchet which had been displaced and managed to correct it manually. As it happens, the engineer is due around for a maintenance visit some time tomorrow so I can take the opportunity to ask him questions about the correct operation of the bed, a reset procedure and, most importantly, a telephone number to ring in case there are emergencies some time in the future.

In view of various comings and goings this morning, I decided not to take Meg for a walk. We lunched on chicken legs which I bought (more cheaply) with skin on and bones in and then discarded these after cooking as I believe you get the flavour but without the fat. Having seared the chicken well, I cooked it in a tin of chicken soup enhanced by a cheese white sauce and then also cooked alongside it some oven chips which I have had in the freezer for ages but not actually consumed for as long as I can remember but the result was suitably tasty. I got about one half of the intended quantity inside Meg but she can pretty difficult to feed if she slumps in the chair and turns her head to one side (away from me) occasionally not even opening her mouth when prompted. All of these latter are sequelae of the dementia which, of course I have read about and know about but it still makes life to deal with. Another irritation of life as that have mislaid the TV remote but fortunately I had spare standing by just in case of emergency because with a remote the TV seems inoperable. I know misplacing the remote is symptom of tiredness but I will have to wait until Meg is asleep before I turn the room upside down later on (although I hunted for it for over an hour last night.)

On Saturday in the late afternoon, we watched the England-Ireland rugby match which was one of the first in the series when the outcome could not be predicted with any certainty. The England team made a roaring start, almost playing the Irish at their own game with lightning-fast tackles and a ferocious efforts in the breakdowns. By half time, England had a lead of 10-5 which they sustained in the early part of the second half. But the Irish gradually got their act together and eventually overhauled England with a fairly convincing victory. So, on present form, the two teams that will slug it out for the head of the table will be Ireland and France and England, despite a promising start, will probably end up in the middle of the table. I think there are more games next weekend and then a fortnight’s break, probably to lick wounds and to recover from injuries. Naturally the press is seizing upon every word of analysis of the horrendous air crash in Washington and the other night there was a press conference held b the National Transportation and Safety Board who have the responsibility to investigate the cash for probably causes. An anomaly has come to light which is, as yet, unexplained and that is the altitudes at which the two aircraft collided. the ‘black box’ recovered from the airliner shows that the airliner was travelling at a height of 325 feet, plus or minus 25feet. But preliminary data in the air traffic control tower showed the Black Hawk helicopter at 200ft at the time and the discrepancy has yet to be explained. Any explanation must be speculative at this time, but a possibility is that either one or even both of the recording instruments was incorrectly calibrated and perhaps giving false pictures for years. Having said that, one assumes that the airliner’s data has to be the most accurate but if I had to make a guess at this stage it is that the airport’s own radar navigational aid giving a reading of 200 feet is erroneous. This story will run and run and no doubt will dominate the media all day long.

After I had breakfasted Meg this morning on her customary porridge, I was pleased to have found a slightly different way of getting fluid into Meg which is so problematic these days. Some time ago when Meg and I used to roam the charity shops I picked up a dinky little coffee cup which was only 6cm tall and 6 cm wide at the top. This was adorned as a ‘Present from San Francisco’ but I picked i t up form 50p and have tended to use it, for example, to convey pills from to place or to give her a little yogurt, I have found that if I fill up Meg’s feeder cup, I then use it as a ‘source’ cop for the tiny little one which, as it so small and fine, Meg finds easier. Using this, I managed to get some soup into Meg this morning and later on some fruit juice. Shortly after 10.00am, I popped down in the car to pick up a copy of the Sunday newspaper and in the course of my journey get a phone call from our University of Birmingham friend. He popped around in half an hour and we spent a very happy hour and a half talking over our favourite subjects which includes statistics, cosmology and various scientific subjects in between that happen to take our fancy. Then it was time for the carer to call so our friend took his leave, and I assisted the carer (her ‘double up’ having gone home sick) Then it was a case of cooking dinner, and I had some chicken legs to prepare but I was a bit short of time. So, I resurrected some pork mince from the freezer, fried this with some onions and added an onion gravy enhanced by brown fruity sauce and I was delighted that I managed to get the whole of Meg’s portion into her. Immediately after lunch, Meg and I watched a sort of travelogue about a couple traversing the Yorkshire Dales and looking at the traditional industries in some of the Dales villages (such as rope ,manufacturer and curd making) Then Meg and I started to watch again the Austen production os ‘Sense and Sensibility’ which was punctuated by the rugby yesterday and during which I managed to sleep a good portion. When Meg was in bed last night, I notices a little advertised film version of ‘Emma’ which I have seen before but for which I have a particular feeling (not always favourable) as it is the play I studied for my GCE in English Literature from 1960-1961.

Since Donald Trump has instituted trade sanctions against both Canada and Mexico, both have responded with trade sanctions of their own. The conventional wisdom amongst economists is that one sanctions have been exchanged on a tit-for-tat basis, then all parties to the sanctions end up being the poorer. Whether this will be so in this case will take some months to resolve but for the moment, the UK seems to have escaped the wrath of Donald Trump. Also on the economic sphere, we are now at the fifth anniversary of Brexit and what opinion polls have been collected seem to indicate that the majority of Britons now regret the decision to leave but are unsure what any new and more sophisticated with Europe is likely to be. Keir Starmer is very nervous about the public reaction if the UK were to enter into any closer association with Europe, but closer ties are now being explored such as the possibility of some student exchanges. But the current Labour government will not endorse any move that could be interpreted (by the right-wing press, naturally) as a betrayal of Brexit and the reintroduction of the mobility of labour provisions. It is a particular irony, though, that since the implementation of Brexit, many of the migrant workers who have returned to Europe are white (Poland, Latvia etc,) whereas the majority of the newly arrived and quite legal immigrants who are staffing our care services are from countries such as Nigeria. Is this what the xenophobes who fuelled the Brexit debate actually had in mind?

So I treated myself to watching the first of the rugby matches in the ‘Six Nations’ competition but, as widely predicted, gallant little Wales were blown away by a much superior France team. It is not that the Welsh played particularly badly but the first two French tries were brilliantly executed with a full frontal engagement of the French forwards and then two brilliantly executed curling balls out to the wing that enables the two wingers to score. Dupont was,as usual, brilliant and most unselfish often making an ‘assist’ pass when he could probably have scored himself. The economic news this morning is the unwelcome news that AstraZeneca is pulling out of the investment that it was going to make in a modern pharmaceutical plant near Liverpool producing, probably vaccines which we shall surely need when a new pandemic strikes us. The previous government had issued what appears to be a subsidy of some £90m towards the building of the £450m but the new Labour government only offered £40bn and hence the AstraZeneca pullout. But this is part of a strategy on the part of the big multinational companies who often go round from government to government extracting bigger and bigger promises of support from competing governments until they extract the best deal that they can (and probably built the plan where they intended to in the first place but with an even greater subsidy than before. This raises the interesting theoretical point that a government can make any industry profitable or unprofitable according to the size of the subsidy they manage to extract from the government of the day. Is this ‘standing on your own two feet’ (an important refrain from the Right) or not? The weather started off at about 3° today, cloudy but with a light breeze and may well repeat the pattern of yesterday when the temperature was above freezing but it nonetheless felt quite cold all day long.

After breakfast this morning, I had in mind that we wrap Meg up warmly in her blankets and proceed down the hill, which we did. We met up with two of our friends in Wetherspoons, partaking of our normal breakfast fare and immediately afterwards, I knew that I wanted to visit our bank to take out some cash. When we got inside the branch, we utilised the ATM machine inside which functioned as far as as returning my card and was about to dispense my cash when the machine malfunctioned. I called over to one of the two members of staff to attend to the machine which she did once she had finished with another customer and then I needed to see the other member of staff working behind the counter to get my own cash out. So I was relieved when eventually I got my hands on the money and then we made for home. Getting inside our house is always quite a complicated procedure because I first have to use some brushes to get the external ‘road dirt’ of the wheels of the wheelchair and, generally speaking, Miggles the cat who has adopted us is lurking eager to gain admittance and to be fed. Then I have to get Meg inside, clean off the wheels with a sponge, de-blanket Meg and finally get some warm drink ready for her. I needed to see what to prepare for lunch and I found a goodly portion of risotto which needed to be resurrected from the freezer and to which I added some green beans. I had just about eaten my portion of dinner when the carers arrived for Meg – one of them is the young Asian boy who we see nearly every day whilst the other on this lunchtime was a college student who is studying ‘A’-levels and aiming to get into medical school. She gave me the good news that she had a very successful interview last week with the University of her first choice, which was Birmingham, and had shortly afterwards received an offer of a place upon achieving the grades of A,A and B which she thought was quite within her grasp. Perhaps it is because of the young carers but Meg seemed to be in a very good mood with them whilst they were attending to her and I have noticed this before with young carers who seem to have the facility to make Meg relax with them much better than with some of the older ones.

In the afternoon, I started to watch the Scotland versus Italy match which is turning out to be quite a pulsating one as the Italians draw level with the Scots in the second half, although the Scots then took the lead again Then with some of the exigencies of programme scheduling, there is going to be a film of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ which I think I shall watch by abandoning the second half of the (admittedly) quite exciting Scotland-Italy game. There seems to be a viewing of a Jane Austen film about once a fortnight which suits me down to the ground. This particular production is one with Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman and is bound to be one of the better productions in this genre. I appreciate Jane Austen more and more these days and suspect that I was first introduced to the novelist via ‘Emma’ at the age of 15 when I was rather in an ‘angry young man phase’ that I did not really appreciate Austen to the extent that I do now. We have the treat of England versus Ireland in the rugby later on the afternoon and, hopefully, and I shall have to abandon ‘Sense and Sensibility’ after an hour to watch the start of the match. Watching the Austen production, I am always forcefully reminded of the dire position of women at the time that Austen was writing when basically women were almost like property at the disposal of men and marriage, if one was asked, was one’s only route out of poverty. I suppose that most people know that Jane Austen herself did accept a proposal of marriage herself late one morning but in the morning, changed her mind and informed her intended husband of the fact.

The end of the week and the weekend is a period to which many people look forward in their working lives but, of course, it is a little different for Meg and I now that we have been retired for so long. Nonetheless, this is a weekend to which I am looking forward for a variety of reasons. One of these is that Saturday is the 1st February and is a 28-day (i.e. exactly 4-week month) and marks the start of an experimental period for us. Many people engage in a ‘dry’ January and sometimes February, after the alcohol consumption over the Christmas period. This is not so in our case, but I am embarking on an ‘Amazon’ and ‘eBay’ free month to see how I manage. When I have managed this casually to some of the care workers, none of them seem to think that I can possibly manage it as they themselves feel they could not – but I think hey have underestimated my resolve in this matter. Every so often it is a good idea to review one’s expenditure and particularly to review those pesky subscriptions that come around about once a year and, for which, can be quite difficult to budget. So this will be an interesting month ahead starting this Saturday. Also, by Friday the week’s shopping has already been done (typically on a Thursday) and our domestic help calls around, an event to which we always look forward. This weekend, starting on Friday night, is the start of the ‘Six Nations’ rugby competition and Meg and I have typically enjoyed this. On Friday night, we are going to witness Wales vs. France which happens to be one of the weakest teams in the competition against probably the strongest. The Welsh rugby team is undergoing the worst period in its long and illustrious history and has a run of about seventeen straight defeats and there are fears in Wales that if they do not turn their fortunes around, spectators will drift away and follow other sports. The opening games are always fascinating because whilst there may some international matches in the autumn, the winter is a time for team building, new personnel selection ad the formulation of new strategies and tactics. So the opening games are always fascinating to see how these plans come to fruition. f Wales do not lose very heavily to France, then this might be an important marker for the rest of the season. Meanwhile, the first England match against Ireland is on Saturday and Ireland aim to be the first team to win the series for three years in a row. To add a little more incentive to the competition, the Six Nations has developed a series of bonus points. These are a point for scoring four or more tries in a single match (a try bonus), a point for teams that lose by seven or fewer points (a losing bonus) and three points to a team that wins all five of their matches (a Grand Slam bonus). This weekend, we see all six teams in action (one match on Friday and two on Saturday) so this is a pleasure to unwind for us.

This morning after we had breakfasted and we had caught up with our weekly news with our domestic help, we awaited the arrival of the Eucharistic minister who comes from our local church to provide Meg with some spiritual comfort. She herself seemed to be surrounded by family and friends experiencing a spate of funerals as was indeed our domestic help who was going off to a funeral later on in the morning. Although the day started off at a reasonable temperature, it was one of those days when a low cloud seemed to trap the cold air and make the whole day rather chilly. When we have had fine weather and clear skies, the temperature had warmed up somewhat by the end of the morning but today the weather app on my phone tells me that it is 8° but felt like 3° In the later part of the morning, we looked on to the Channel 4 catch up channel and decided to watch ‘Brian and Maggie’ which was a series built around the television interviews that Brian Walden held with Margaret Thatcher which is now said to be very hard hitting and contributing to her downfall but that does not accord with my understanding at the time. Earlier in the morning, I had made a contribution to my family finances by telephoning the Subscriptions department of ‘The Times’ indicating that I was minded to end my subscription. Initially, I was offered a reduction of one quarter of the entire price but this was then increased to a reduction of one half which I accepted for the next three months ahead. What I will do after that, I will have to wait and see.

The air crash in Washington is continuing to surprise us, not least with the interventions of Donald Trump who is trying his hardest to make political capital out of the tragic event. One fact to emerge is that one air traffic controller was allowed to leave his duties early only leaving one to handle the business of the current shift. Another point that has emerged is that the helicopter may have been flying at 400′ rather than 200′. But it would be better all round if the competent safety authorities were left to go about their investigations rather than have the speculations of journalists on the one hand and the ramblings of Donald Trump on the other. The black boxes from the airliner and the helicopter have been recovered and they will require as rapid an analysis as possible to avoid future problems. The most important single bit of information is what the two Black Hawk helicopter pilots were saying to each other and whether they were performing a normal or an extra-ordinary manoeuvre at the time. The indications at the moment, though, although fingers of blame are pointed in various directions, it does appear that the military aircraft (the helicopter) must shoulder the major share of the blame.