Yesterday, the day dawned a little cooler than usual and I got up just after 6.00am wondering what the day was going to bring. It is quite difficult to know what outerwear to don for my morning walk. Conscious of the fact that a sudden shower might be imminent, I put on some kind of waterproof but the air is so humid at the moment that I find that after my walk up and down the hill I am quite clammy with sweat and even have to change my short and underclothes on occasion. I am sure that the secret is one of those really light but ultimately ‘breathable’ fabrics you can buy so I might need a trip to a camping shop or the men’s outfitters in Bromsgrove to get something like this. The problem does not arise when the weather is colder and sharper but we are living through quite humid days at the moment.

The Trump and Epstein story rumbles on and, from the point of view of Donald Trump, will not just go away, Donald Trump has claimed billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein ‘stole’ prominent accuser Virginia Giuffre and other young women from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Ms Giuffre (who has now dead)  became a household name after she sued Prince Andrew for sexual abuse in August 2021 – saying he had sex with her when she was 17 and had been trafficked by his friend Epstein. Prince Andrew reached an out-of-court settlement with Ms Giuffre but has repeatedly denied the claims and has not been charged with any criminal offences. Donald Trump made his remarks about Ms Giuffre as his administration has faced growing pressure in recent weeks, including from within his ‘MAGA’ base, to release files related to Epstein after he promised to do so during his 2024 presidential campaign. This story seems to get worse and worse for Trump and his MAGA base which had been promised full disclosure of the papers related to the Epstein case once Trump assumed office are now being denied the same and the movement is fracturing over the issue. I follow the latest twists and turns via some news channels available on YouTube and whilst the issue is not discussed very much on this side of the Atlantic, on the other side of ‘the pond’ there is a continuing interest in the story. The polling organisation have performed an ‘end of term’ report on the Labour government after a year in office and the figures very broadly say that about only 30% approve of the Government’s performance but 50% disapprove. The cost of living remains the biggest grumble but immigration is one issue that may drive some ex-Labour voters towards Nigel Farage’s Reform party. In all of this, the Conservative party remains in the doldrums so here we have a situation in which the electorate are not enthusiastic about either of the two major parties and we are entering a period of very fractured politics which may persist for some time.

Later in the morning I met up with old Pilates friend from years ago. The thing is that we go back a long way (probably 9-10 years) and use to lie on adjacent mats in our Pilates classes. As we had had both taught maths or statistics then we both had something in our occupational lives in common and we often joked with each other using our shared knowledge. Seven years ago, we both had to undergo surgery at about the same time and we used to speculate with each other whether our we pass each other on a hospital trolley at some time. We did give each other a lot of mutual support at the time. mainly by text message and we both recovered from our problems. When my friend needed to move to a class on a different day so when we did meet up with each it was like ‘ships passing in the night’ At he height of COVID, though, she discovered a public footpath which ran near the bottom of our garden so  she came along to help me celebrate with a glass of champagne – I needed to serve it to her across a barbed wire fence in a seed tray attached to a long pole which is the nearest we could get to each other. But since then, we have both lost our spouses, my friend about five years go and me some eleven+ weeks ago. So, we had a lot of practical, social and emotional things to talk to each other about and we stayed chatting over our cup of coffee for over two hours. My friend is going to off to the Sidcup folk festival next week and is engaged in a lot of things when she returns but we will try and squeeze in another coffee. On my home I stopped off at a charity shop and bought a covered coffee container which I may use to give me a supply of cold drinks during the night. Then I bumped into my Italian friend and we spent a good 20 minutes chatting in the sunshine on her garden seat. She is trying to sell her house and then intends to move away to live near to her daughter which is a source of some sadness for me. I was so late when I got back as it was about 2.30 so I made myself an omelette filled with onions and tomatoes and served on some salad. Then I very virtuously cut the grass on the front greened area although to be honest it had hardly grown an inch. To my very pleasant surprise, I have a plum tree in the front which had one long prominent branch sticking out and practically touching the ground. It was laden with plums and I picked fifteen really big, ripe and juicy specimens and I estimate it is about 2lb of fruit. And not a single had been attacked by wasps which very often happens with particularly ripe and juicy fruit. Amazingly enough, there dd not seem to any more fruit on any other part of the tree but I am glad about this year’s crop – I seem to remember I did not get anything last year but fruit trees are like that sometimes. I also have a few apples coming along but bot as many as a few years ago.

The day before yesterday, I gave myself a sort of early night by getting to bed at 9.00pm and then starting to watch the program on the origins of humanity called ‘Human’ which, in this episode, was concerned to restore the reputation of the Neanderthals which was another branch off the evolutionary tree and from whom we still possess a few of the genes in our DNA. Having fallen asleep, I then awoke and thought that I would watch ‘NewsNight’ which turned out to be an extraordinary programme. Donald Trump was in Scotland and perhaps, therefore, not surrounded by his usual Washington côterie. But what was so amazing was that he chose to criticise and even to contradict the Israeli leader, Netanyahu, about the starvation happening in Gaza. Normally as has been pointed out by commentators, you could not put a cigarette paper of difference between the American and the Israeli positions but it does appear that the images of starvation of children is starting to ‘get’ to Trump and he feels as though he must act.  One factor is that two Israeli human rights organisations have said the country is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In reports published on Monday, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) said Israel was carrying out ‘coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip’. The two groups are the first major voices within Israeli society to make such accusations against the state during nearly 22 months of war against Hamas. Keir Starmer is calling a Cabinet meeting (unusual for this time of year) and is working on a peace plan within Gaza and it looks as though Starmer might be working with the tacit approval of Trump which is fascinating. At the same time, Trump has announced that he is losing patience with Russia and has reduced the amount of time he has ‘given’ Russia to end the war in the Ukraine from 50 days to 10. So it looks as though some of the tectonic plates in world geopolitics may be moving. There was another extraordinary story in last night’s NewsNight. Under the impact of AI (Artificial Intelligence) it appears that a sizeable chunk of the student body is using ChatGPT to write their assignments and even their online exams. Since COVID online examinations have become the norm, then it is child’s play to use tools such as these and it means that any originality in the thought process is being lost. But the universities are having to cope with this situation as they cannot discipline the majority of their students. And even a most casual search in Google reveals the existence of software which is itself designed to detect AI generated content. So one example is and advert for ZeroGPT which claims to be  a free and highly accurate GPTZero detector tool designed for AI-generated content to detect any text generated by ChatGPT. I must say that I am glad not to be a university in today’s climate caught up in these AI wars where one large language model (to use the terminology) is used to detect the output of another. Even in my teaching days we always knew that badly written and grammatically incorrect assignments were more likely to be original than a more polished product written by a fellow student.

Later I the morning, I walked down the hill in order to meet up with my two sets of (quite unrelated) friends in Wetherspoons. This all worked out as planned but after my coffee dates, I went to a local ‘health and beauty’ type store where I bought a special inhaler type mask and some Olbas oil as I had been advised to do by the physician associate I saw yesterday, But I did not have a  great deal of time after I had walked home and then had to prepare for my Pilates class. This was as jolly as usual and I always go to my Pilates class by car to save some time. When I arrived back home, I was delighted to see that my son and daughter-in-law had paid me a visit and had let themselves in and were busying doing some hoovering. As our domestic help will be so preoccupied not to mention being busy looking after her son who is in hospital, we thought it would be a case of ‘all hands on deck’ to try to keep the house looking clean and tidy in the absence of our domestic help for a week or so. My daughter-in-law has only a few days ago finally retired from her teaching post and we had a lot of things to catch up on. We discussed Mandy’s retirement events in some detail and then some of the dilemmas that are facing our domestic help in her new position at the residential home where she works for most of the week. One thing that we needed to sort out in our diaries was a day when my cousins (actually Meg’s) could visit from Cheltenham and we have found a mutually agreeable date in mid August which being a Wednesday will suit us all and we will probably go out to a local gastropub/restaurant which has a good reputation. I was also the recipient of some good news earlier in the day. One of my nieces from Yorkshire had  texted me earlier in the day as she was off to a week-long Christian convention in the West country and wondered whether she could pop into see me in a week’s time when she was on her way back. Evidently,  I am always delighted to see my niece whenever the opportunity arises so we have a ‘date’ for next Tuesday where I can prepare some risotto for us both. She called in last year to see us and evidently, Meg was still with us at that stage but I can take the opportunity to make some advance arrangements for my next trip up to Yorkshire. It is my sister’s birthday at the end of August so I and the rest of the family are making some plans for a birthday celebration for my sister which conveniently happens to fall on a Sunday. It will be great to see the rest of the family again and then I may be able to start to make some plans for a tentative holiday in September, probably in Spain, although I realise that as August is nearly upon us, I had better put my skates on.

Yesterday was, of course, the finals of the Women’s European Cup in which England were playing Spain. Spain scored the first goal mid-way through the first half and England equalised in the second half. Then, even after extra time, the scores remained 1:1 and so we came to penalties. England missed their first but the Spanish sent one wide and two were brilliantly saved by Hannah Hampton who is almost a local girl as she was brought up in Studley, neat Redditch. Studley is best known for a local stately home. Coughton Court around whose grounds Meg and I could stroll even in the times of the pandemic and we passed through it on the way to Alcester which we visit for its charity shops and general ‘villagey’ feel. So returning to the football, England won the match and the Cup on penalties but in truth, the Spanish were the better team and the most dominant throughout the match. It was one of those occasions when the best team actually lost but not many UK commentators would dare to say that. As the Spanish team members came up to receive their losers’ medals, not even one of them could manage a half smile and they had their (quite natural) disappointment etched on their faces. So at least, life returns to normal now the football competition is over. As opposed to last week, this week seems pretty empty on the planning calendar although I am looking forward to the end of the month and the new month when financial things ought to happen. If the weather is fine, there will be no excuse for not mowing the grass and doing some other gardening jobs that are crying out to be done.

On the diplomatic front, it is said that Keir Starmer is to try to persuade Trump when he is over here for a golfing trip that something dramatic needs to be done over the dire starvation situation in Gaza (which the Israelis either deny or claim is the fault of Hamas, unlikely though that is) The clue to unravelling some of the conflict may be related to the time that the Israeli parliament goes into excess. If Netanyahu were to concede an inch at the moment, then the extreme nationalists in his coalition government would withdraw their support and bring down the government and Netanyahu with it. But once the Israeli parliament is in recess for the summer, then the Israeli premier has somewhat more room for manoeuvre so the next few days may prove to be critical. Some of the same considerations might apply to the UK parliament as well because the long holidays are starting and the government is left in the hands of fairly junior ministers whilst their senior bosses go off to enjoy several weeks of vacation. August is sometimes known as the ‘silly season’ because fairly trivial events can dominate the headlines whilst other events (protests outside the hotels that accommodate illegal immigrants) could come to the fore again as they did last summer.

The day today seems to have flown by. I walked slowly down into town but stopped to have a lengthy chat with my Irish friend who, very virtuously, was tending his front garden. I had a fairly lengthy chat if only because I had just received the very unwelcome news that one of the sons of our domestic help had experienced a bad industrial accident wand was recovering in hospital. I texted her to the effect that she take as much off from her duties towards us as was needed so that she could concentrate upon her son. But I am anxiously awaiting more up-to-date news as you might imagine. I had a coffee in Waitrose but they had no copies of ‘The Times’ left in store so I ventured out onto the High Street to get a newspaper, get some money out of an ATM and make a flying visit around the local Salvation Army charity shop. On my way home, my Irish friend was still tending his garden so we had another chat on the way home. Whilst I was with my friend, I received a telephone call from a Physician Associate because when she heard of my fairly mild but grumbling symptoms she thought I needed a physical examination. To this I agreed but I undertook the journey by car and I think I may have a blocked eustachian tube complaint which is probably treated with some Olbas oil which is basically eucalyptus oil with a few additives and, I was told, readily available. When I get down into town tomorrow, I will purchase some and there is Amazon as a fall back but I am sure it will be cheaper on the High Street. Then I made myself a light lunch which was basically some lentil rice cakes which I am now purchasing as they are so low in carbohydrate and, in particular salt. I followed this up with a quickly improvised fruit salad and ice-cream and then tidied up some photos. I have an ‘old’ Pilates friend who used to share the mat adjacent to mine but she has moved her class to a different day so I do not see her as much as I used to do. But we have arranged a meeting over coffee for next Wednesday. She lost her husband in the last year so we not only have a lot in common but there are all kinds of practical information that we might share with each other (and there are some questions I want to ask her as well) We need to have our coffee date quickly because she is off to a folk-singing singing festival where she performs regularly each year as part of a ukulele band.

There is a quite a rich programme of TV watching on this evening starting at about 6.30 and carrying on until 10.00 so I need to ensure that various domestic jobs are fitted in beforehand. Monday night is often quite a good night on the TV and I suspect that the TV schedulers realise that the watching audience are not going out on a Monday evening and therefore give us somewhat better offerings than is available on other nights. I also have a theory that the 8.00-9.00 slot is not filled generally with quality offerings (because middle class BBC and ITV executives realise that many parents of a similar ilk are busy putting their children at this time?)

Yesterday as my friend had called around from Droitwich and we seemed to have so much to talk about, I completely forgot about the play in the Test match against India. England posted a tremendously high total of 669 but the Indians replied with 174 for 2 in their reply. On a flat pitch almost perfect for batting and with the best English bowler and captain, Stokes, probably unable to bowl because of injury then the Indians may be able to play out the final fay for a draw although the odds must be on for an England win. In any case, the cricket is always interesting and absorbing and generally well worth the watch between 7.00-8.00 each evening. But the football final between England and Spain will no doubt absorb all of our attention and emotional energies this evening.

I have started to think about holidays in a general sort of way but with September in mind. I have asked my best Spanish friend if she would indicate the times when it would not be convenient for me not to distract her attention from the start of a new academic term which is always a very busy time. I am starting to think again about visiting La Coruña but I know that as well as flights, I will need to get a visa sorted for myself. To be honest, I am just waiting life to be on a nice even keel, not least financially, but we are slowly getting there now that the Teachers’ Pension Agency have seen fit to respond after some eleven weeks of waiting. I realise, too, that I need to renew my Senior’s rail card and as it had run out in the last few days, I rather thought that they could get in touch with me asking me to renew but that has not been the case. The day has turned out to be exceptionally overcast and rainy so that might mean that my weekend coffee plans get altered somewhat. I am about half way through reading the book by the well-known GMTV breakfast show presenter, Fiona Phillips, called ‘Remember when – my life with Alzheimers’ Apart from the early biographical material, she has detailed how first her mother died from Alzheimers and the middle section I am reading now is describing how the same affliction affected her father. The second half of the book is going to be an even harder read because Fiona Phillips went on herself to develop early onset dementia so the whole book is quite a hard emotional read. So, I am tackling it in little bits when the mood strikes and not am not anxious to see what is coming, although I can probably guess. The thing about Alzheimers is that afflicts people in very different ways with some people becoming abusive or aggressive. Fortunately, for both myself and for Meg, she just drifted away and although she did have periods of anxiety, we managed to find ways in which this could be assuaged by a combination of medication, music and hand holding. In the late afternoon, whilst I was awaiting my friend calling around, I started looking at a documentary on Franco broadcast by PBS (the United States version of a public broadcasting services) This revealed the quite shocking fact of the abduction of very young children, often taken at birth from their mothers and then brought up to be ‘good Franco-ists’ some even being sold with the connivance of the Catholic church. I knew of one or two instances of this scandal that had come to light recently but the program mentioned first 3,000 abductions and then 30,000 of children abducted during the 1950’s. In fact, this practice may have continued after the death of Franco into the 1990s. While the Franco regime ended in 1975, the practice continued for some time, with the amnesty law passed in 1977 hindering investigations into these practices.  This was quite shocking and I will discuss it in depth with my intimate Spanish friends when next I see them.

Often on a Sunday morning, my University of Birmingham calls around and we go for a coffee to the local water sports facility down the road but I got a text this morning indicating he had other commitments. So, I started out on a leisurely walk down to Waitrose to collect my Sunday newspaper but as I did, I stopped for a few minutes char with a new set of neighbours who fairly recently have moved into a house quite near to us.  They were busy putting their young child into the back of the car but, nonetheless, I engaged in a few minutes of casual chit-chat with them. It transpired that the husband was a Manchester United fan and I told him about the deep impact that the 1958 Munich air disaster when most of the team were wiped out as they were on a ice-laden aircraft where the weight of the ice made the plane too heavy to achieve a lift off and hence the crash at the end of the runway. I explained to my neighbour as I had a slight personal connection with this disaster as the brother of the pilot, who was blamed for the crash, was the head barman at the Old Swan hotel in Harrogate where I worked in the early 1960’s. My neighbour told me that there was a huge memorial to the crash in the Manchester United ground and his wife told me that when she read all about it on being taken there by her husband, she burst into tears. Incidentally, it took the captain of the aircraft about ten years to clear his name when it emerged years later that he was ordered to take off by some of the Manchester United directors who were anxious that the team would be bag in the UK for another big match. So the cause of the rash was all about money, it transpired but the easiest thing in the world to do is to blame the pilot which is what initially happened. When I got home, I pottered about a little getting some photographs organised and then made myself a light lunch of quiche accompanied by some salad and coleslaw which I found absolutely satisfying enough. Of course, most of the day today the nation is waiting with eager anticipation of the football final of the England ‘Young Lionesses’ scheduled to start at 5.00pm.

The evening before yesterday, although I was inclined to just have a really lazy afternoon, I thought I had bestir myself and get the car washed. The previous Honda that we had was a wonderful sandy colour which had the wonderful attribute of not being washed for weeks and one would not really notice. But now we living in different times and a huge development is being built on the other side of the road that service our little development. As they are at the earth moving stage, a tremendous amount of fine dust is filling the air and gets deposited on cars as well as the rest of the environment. So it is possible to wash the car one day and have it looking pretty dirty the following morning. The contractors try to alleviate this somewhat by having a huge water spray to help to settle the dust but this seems pretty ineffective and I am having to live with all the inconveniences associated with masses of building work going on all around me both at the back of our property and now also to the front. Although the garden has been a bit neglected not to say overgrown since my energies were devoted to caring for Meg, under the circumstances I am quite glad to have a lot of vegetation to screen me from the various vexations going on around me. My Asian neighbour from across the green area in front of the house brought me over some rhubarb crumble which I enjoyed last night with some ice-cream and I am always pleased to accept these little gifts of kindness. In the evening, I also spent a certain amount of time comparing the blood test results that I obtained the day before with readings taken some two years before and they were very similar to each other with the critical ones all on the right side of the safety margin to my relief. So I need to continue with my current regime of diet and exercise and not be tempted to let things slip.

New age verification rules are now in place to attempt to ensure that those under 16 do not by accident view inappropriate on the web such as pornography. But already it appears that the rules can be circumvented and some researchers have claimed that by using easily available software they have managed to gain access to such sites within about 30 seconds. Of course, teenagers will spread such knowledge between themselves so one despairs whether any new such rules will be effective. One age verification technique is to ask for credit card details but an enterprising teenager could set their alarm for the middle of the night and creep downstairs to acquire such details from their parents’ wallets without their parents being any the wiser. So, together with many others, I suspect that these new internet controls whilst being praiseworthy in themselves may well be ineffective from Day One as some journalists have already demonstrated. Personally, I think all children under the age of 16 should be banned from having a mobile phone but I doubt whether this is enforceable in any meaningful way.

The rest of the day turned out to be one of the most interesting of days. Firstly, I called in at Wetherspoons and had my usual Saturday morning sojourns with my two sets of friends that I have coffee with sequentially. As I was concluding my drink of coffee within the store I got into conversation quite by accident with an old lady and somehow we got onto the topic of talking not just to ourselves (with whom we can often hold an intelligent conversations) but also conversations with departed loved ones. She intimated that although she was 88 years old, she still spoke with her departed husband every day. She was very kindly and sympathetic about my recent loss of Meg but we agreed with each other that we had to make positive steps to life beyond that which we had experienced with out past partners and had to keep interacting with the world and talking to people (as indeed, so were we with each other)

Then I came home and bought some special low-salt lentel cakes from Waitrose  before calling in on my Irish friend who I did not meet in person but eventually he identified me from his doorbell system and we spoke by phone. Then I got home and made myself a light lunch of ham and cheese on some crackers. Later on in the day, I knew that my Droitwich friend was due to call around but I had  already saved some risotto from the day before so I ensured that this was kept warm for the moment that she arrived. Then we spent the most marvellous late afternoon and early evening in each other’s company.  After recounting to each other the various traumas that had afflicted us  during the week we polished off the risotto complemented by a bottle of rosado Cava which I happened to have in stock Then after lots of conversations about how to maintain healthy a lifestyles I eventually persuaded myself to show my friend some of my favourite tracks on YouTube. We started off with Joan Baez (of course) and then progressed on to some Ravi Shankar sitar instrumental music before finishing off with some of our favourite Fauré. This weekend is promising to be a weekend of exhausting and last minute finishing. The British Lions rugby team (combined England, Wales, Scottish and Irish team) pulled off a second win against Australia although I believe that the winning English try was only scored in the last minute of the game. Meanwhile, the whole nation is holding itself in readiness for the final ion Sunday evening between England and Spain.

In the political sphere, the starvation in Gaza has now reached such an intensity that air drops of food are now being considered. The Israelis are saying that plenty of food is available within the territory but that Hamas is commandeering supplies for itself but this view is not backed up by any of the evidence from seasoned international observers. The pressure is growing on the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer who seems fearful of taking a stronger line in case he falls foul of the Americans with whom he wishes to conclude a comprehensive trade deal in any case.

Thursday is the day when I do my shopping and I think this week is going to be a fairly ‘light’ week as I do not seem to have consumed that much. I do make sure that I have a fair quantity of fruit and I would always buy some bananas (good for their potassium level), some of those flat peaches which are so easy to de-stone because you can cut them around and then separate the peaches into two halves with a twisting motion and some big ripe plums. As I go through my morning routines, I keep getting filled with relief that the three massive technological problems I had yesterday (lack of internet access to my bank account, the landline number having to be replaced and sound restored to the car’s SatNav) were all actually resolved in the day instead of grinding on and on. But, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions’ which is an experience well known to all of us when problems seem to appear together in clumps. This week is turning out to be quite a busy one filled with quite a lot of what one might call ‘routine’ medical appointments and I expect our chiropodist later on today, postponed from last Monday. However, the appointment did not take place due to a misunderstanding but is scheduled for later on today. I just thought that my tech problems had done away but one has returned to plague me. Despite being told that a direct debit charge for the cancellation of a contract with BT should not have been charged and should not have been collected, nonetheless the money has left bank account., When I tried to phone up EE to complain their customer support line is ‘unavailable’ and I was told to try again later. I am tempted to believe that companies like this are very efficient in collecting money but less so when it comes to providing a service so this might take some days and hassle to resolve.

Sky News is reporting the latest revelation in the Donald Trump/Epstein story. Donald Trump was told in May that his name appears multiple times in justice department files related to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein according to the Wall Street Journal. The American president has come under fire for not releasing the documents – breaking a campaign promise – with some questioning his ties to Epstein. Now the newspaper reports Mr Trump is aware his name is included in the files, along with many other high-profile figures. Being mentioned in the records is not a sign of wrongdoing, and Mr Trump has not been accused of anything. The White House initially described the report as ‘fake news’, but Reuters news agency said an official told them the administration is not denying Mr Trump’s name is there. This story will run and run if only because in his election campaign, Trump insisted that these files showed up prominent Democrats in an exceptionally bad light but it look as though the truth is that this itself was wishful thinking and was the ultimate in ‘fake news’ Having been repeatedly promised full disclosure. the MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) movement is deeply suspicious about non-disclosure and seems to be deeply split on the issue.

Sky News is also reporting on a big domestic issue is confronting our politicians to which there is no immediate answer- welfare versus warfare. For decades, it is a question to which successive prime ministers have responded with one answer. After the end of the Cold War, leaders across the West banked the so-called ‘peace dividend’ that came with the end of this conflict between Washington and Moscow. Instead of funding their armies, they invested in the welfare state and public services instead. But now the tussle over this question is something that the current prime minister is grappling with, and it is shaping up to be one of the biggest challenges for Sir Keir Starmer since he got the job last year. As Clement Attlee became the Labour prime minister credited with creating the welfare state after the end of the Second World War, so it now falls on the shoulders of the current Labour leader to create the warfare state as Europe rearms. But since the fall of the Berlin Wall our domestic needs have arisen, not least because some parts of the population are still bearing the after effects of COVID and the period of austerity immediately after it. The great moral and political dilemma is whether those who are sick or disabled should bear the brunt of the costs of increasing our national expenditure on defence?

The evening before last was the semi-final of the Women’s Euro competition and the whole match turned out to be extraordinary. England were playing Italy and the English team team started well with a lot of possession and a slow but patient buildup but did not manage any really penetrating crosses. Then, as has happened so often with this England team, there was a quick breakaway by the opposing team and the Italians scored a goal very much against the run of play. From then on it was a tense first half and an even more tense second half in which, although the England team played with much more aggression and focus, it looked and more likely as the minutes ticked away that they were destined for defeat. Seven minutes of extra time had been added and in the fifth minute of the seven, a young English substitute scored an equalising goal. This was really ‘by the skin of your teeth’ stuff and so we were destined for extra time. It looked more and more as though we were destined for a penalty shootout but with only two minutes of the second half of extra time left, England were pressing hard but an Italian player bundled over an English player off the ball in the penalty area and the referee immediately awarded a penalty. Some questioned whether a penalty was too severe a punishment for the offence but if you flatten an opposing player in the penalty area, I suppose you have to expect this. The penalty was taken by Chloe Kelly, one of the substitutes but was saved. But acting with a lighting reflex, Kelly leapt upon the ball pushed out by the goalkeeper and scored what turned out to be the winner. So, it has been reflected that if this has had been a fantasy movie, one could not have made more a more amazing ending. The England women now have quite a tradition of scoring in the last minute of a game or even of extra time and I am sure that their opponents can scarcely believe what had happened when victory appeared to be literally seconds away from their grasp, only to see it snatched away from them. The rest of the day may be quite busy, not least trying to sort out why I am unable to access my online bank account is troublesome but I suspect there is a software fault somewhere. At half time in the football match yesterday, I went down in the car to access an ATM so I know my account is ‘there’ and properly functioning but I felt I needed to check it out for my own peace of mind. So well as sorting some tech issues this morning, I am due to go and have another session of physiotherapy this afternoon to help to keep my back in a better state of repair after years of lifting Meg off the floor and pushing her wheelchair up and down the Kidderminster Road. My domestic help told me that one of her friends who I do not know saw me yesterday walking down to collect my newspaper so I must surmise that with my Australian bush-style hat and in the past pushing Meg in her wheelchair I must have become quite a familiar sight in the town.

Gradually, throughout the morning, my various technological problems started to be solved. Firstly, getting onin to the phone to my bank helped to obtain the correct specialised ID number so that I can now access my account as I have been the habit of doing for the past few decades. It could be that removing Meg’s name from the joint account had unintended consequences but at least all is well that ends well so that is one worry less. Then I go onto BT to attempt to resolve the restoration of my previous phone number which was automatically replaced when we registered our handsets with the new router. After being passed through about three sets of hands I was informed that it could take up to 10 working days to resolve this issue. When I expressed dismay, the ten working days was shrunk to 5 and I was told it could be restored beforehand. Actually, it was restored within an hour and I got an email message informing me that the ‘upgrade’ to the service had been successfully completed.  I tested it out my mobile and a spare Nokia reserve mobile and was reassured that the previous number had, in fact been restored. Then my son turned our attention to the non-performance of the voice component in the SatNav in the Mazda I have inherited. We discovered in the ‘Settings’ section that the volume component of the voiceover in the SatNav had been set to zero but how, we do not know unless it was accidentally done when the car was serviced. My son and I travelled down to Waitrose to pick up my newspaper and at the same time test the SatNav on the way back home and this is fortunately now working. Now we come to the final trauma of the day. Following receipt of the letter detailing Meg’s continuation pension, the advice was given to contact HMRC to resolve any tax issues. So I spent 15 minutes waiting to be put through to a section dealing with ‘Death’ only to be told they only dealt with notifications of the death of a taxpayer, not affairs relating to the tax affairs of the dead person so would I ring in again. This I did and the actual wait turned out to be 30 minutes rather than the advertised average of 20. Then I was told they could not discuss any figures over the phone so I pointed out that I had definitive figures in a letter, ‘No’, I was told I could not supply the information by message or by email (‘to avoid fraud’)so I was told I had to photocopy the letter and send it in to them by post. Scanning a two-page document was not as easy as might be thought so I had to make two jpg files and then use utility software to stitch them together and these I popped into an envelope and sent it off but I suspect that it may be left unopened and unread for weeks. After all of this, I went down to get one of my fortnightly physiotherapy treatments on my back (just a massage really) and upon returning home, did half an hour’s weeding as tomorrow is the day when the garden waste bins get emptied and I felt I needed to get rid of the worst of the unsightly weeds at the front of the house.

When I awoke yesterday morning, I wondered what the day was going to bring and still felt pretty tired after the excitement of yesterday. So I thought I would have a quick fifteen minutes on the downstairs sofa before I made my morning cup of tea but this became three quarters of an hour. Our domestic help texted me last night to come a day early this week no doubt to fit in with her new work commitments as she has just changed her role in the residential home in which she works for most of the week. I learned from the Home secretary that she is going to institute an enquiry some forty years after the events at the Orgreave coking plant as part of the miners’ dispute. There was a massive pitched battle between the police and the miners in which it now looks as though the miners were lured into a trap so tat they could be charged by the police on horseback. There were a horrific number of injuries and I was shocked to learn in one of the many documentaries unpicking the events of the day that the BBC edited their own footage so that it appeared that the miners charged the police although the reverse was the case. Many of the police gave perjured evidence several having been instructed to use identical phrases supposedly written into their notebooks but none were convicted. I think that all of the charges against the miners eventually were dismissed but the events at Orgreave have been a running sore and a national scandal. The British seem quite good at holding enquiries decades after the event (‘Bloody Sunday’ in Northern Ireland comes to mind) with the enquiry itself taking an age and then no prosecutions are possible because of the passage of time. I think that this long called-for enquiry into Orgreave will fit into the pattern of all of the rest. Meanwhile, most of the nation will be holding its breath as the England womens football team (aka known as ‘The Lionesses’) play Italy in the semi-final this evening. If England play well, they may prevail but often nerves take over and mistakes are made.. A probable outcome is a draw after extra time followed by penalties where the outcome is always unpredictable. In some ways, I will be glad when the football competition is over and then we can all resume a more normal life.

Later in the morning, I popped down the hill, picked up my newspaper and then made for Wetherspoons where I see (separately) two groups of friends. I saw the Inveterate Hill Walker first and after we had concluded our chat had a few minutes only with Seasoned World Traveller in another part of the pub. Then I came home and prepared myself for going to my Pilates session but by car on this occasion. As I got to the studio, the reception staff reminded me that my Pilates teacher was on holiday this week and I had, indeed forgotten as had one of my class-mates. So I came home and after a rest, heated up some risotto which I had left from last week. Most of the rest of the afternoon was taking up with wrangling with various communication companies. Initially, I got onto BT trying to persuade them to revert the old telephone number that I have had for the past 18 years. I have to wait for a day for the order of equipment which I do not need and which arrived today to be ‘technically closed’ as an order and this has to wait until tomorrow. Then I got onto EE to dispute a £199 cancellation charge for which I do not think I should have been charged – eventually, I got someone to agree with me and the £199 debit charge was cancelled. My experiences with both of these tech companies were very similar. First after a long wait, you get onto someone who goes through ID routines with you and then you are passed onto another person/department which involves more waiting and the most jangly pop music it is possible to imagine. Eventually, about three or four people down the chain, you reach a situation in which the situation is almost, but not completely resolved. As I say, my dealings with these tech companies occupied a fair bit of the afternoon and you feel you are trying to make progress through a ‘cat’s cradle’ of bureaucracy.

By tbis mornings post, the awaited letter arrived from the Teachers’ Pension Agency but even this had some complications. After the death of Meg, I am entitled first to a short-term pension and then to a longer term pension. But these are subject to tax and the letter intimates that I need to get onto the Inland revenue (which I shall tomorrow) or avoid emergency tax codes being applied to the payments. In theory, the Inland revenue should get data from the Teachers’ Pension Agency but the latter are very tardy, having taken some 10 and a half weeks to process Meg’s claim which should have been straightforward. Then, in view of the time scales involved, they have made an interim payment of some 73% of what should be the full amount which they will then claw back at a later date. All of this makes apparently simple things so much complex and the payment day has been altered to towards the end of the month to further complicate calculations. But at the end of the day, I think I am receiving the proportion of Meg’s previous pension to which I am entitled. By a late afternoon delivery, a book arrived that I had ordered from Amazon. This is ‘Remember When’ which is a 300-page hardback detailing how the TV presenter Fiona Phillips coped with the onset and progression of early onset dementia. Although I have read the first few pages to get the flavour of the book, I feel that at the moment I want some light reading on almost any subject except dementia so I may have to wait until I am in the right mood before I tackle the rest of the book. I dare say I will find many portions of the book with which I shall resonate but having lived with this afflicting one’s spouse, there might be better choices of reading matter.

So, the night before yesterday, I thought I would go out to the concert held in the Bromsgrove parish church of St. John’s just down the road. The first part of the programme was Strauss’s ‘Four Last Songs’ which have a mournful, elegiac feel to them and were powerfully sung by a soprano who happens to be married to the well-known local conductor. In the interval, I wandered over to the orchestra area and espied our friend, the Eucharistic minister who was one of the cellists in the orchestra, She was delighted to see me (and I her) not least because she is struggling with a bout of ill-health and I thought that if she had struggled through her rehearsals and the practice, not to mention the actual performance, the least I could do was to give her my support. I got the impression she was very pleased to see me and I bumped into hr husband a little later and I hope to have both of them over for a meal when the coast is clear. In the interval, I had a glass of red wine and started chatting to a couple who I did not know but was not engaged in another group. It turned out that the wife had been a teacher, knew my cellist friend well and was a fellow parishioner in my church but at the Sunday rather than the Saturday service. I mentioned the facts of Meg’s demise and she remembered the details being announced in our parish newsletter. The second half of the concert was one piece which was Bruckner’s ‘Symphony No 7’ which was a piece I had not heard before. This piece seemed to me like an artist applying layers of paint and reminded me more of a tapestry being made than anything else. The piece is long and complex taking 65 minutes to perform over four movements and deploys the use of what are called ‘Wagner tubas’ These are not tubas at all but a bit of a hybrid between a French horn and a trombone and are added to give a real depth and blast of sound in an orchestral piece. After the concert was over I returned home and cooked myself some cheese-laden scrambled eggs on one slice of toast before making some preparations for my trip to Cheltenham to visit cousins the next day. Overall, I was glad I had made the effort to go out last night but it is a slightly Kafkaesqe experience going out to a concert on one’s own on a Sunday evening. But as I explain to everyone that I meet, I must keeping on trying to engage with the world and not just withdraw into a little pit of self-pity. Needless to say, I have been thinking over some of the things I want to convey to Meg’s cousins when we meet later in the day for an extended lunch.

The morning turned out to be a bit nightmarish in more ways than one. I received a message from BT telling me that my new DECT telephone service was due to start. After my son hunted around for the base unit of the phones that we have, my son tumbled to the fact that we needed to register our existing phones on the new router. This we did but with the result that the telephone number we have enjoyed for the past 18 years had now been substituted with a new one. BT were going to issue us with a new piece of kit, free of charge, but we cannot start to resurrect our old number until the new piece of kit arrives on Wednesday and we then inform them that we do not want it a which point they can try and resurrect the old number but not before. This is frustrating but we just have to be patient. Now we come to my trip to Cheltenham to see Meg’s cousins. I filled up with petrol and collected a newspaper and my son and I had already set the coordinates for the Sat Nav. But no voice directions came through the system so by the time I got to Cheltenham, I had no idea how exactly to reach my cousins. Just to make things worse, the journey down the motorway was severely congested and for most of the journey, I had to chug along at 25-30 mph, an accident further down the road causing huge delays. I remembered the way to a suburb called Charlton Kings and then remembered my way to a pub with a large car park where Meg and I had dined with members of her extended family in the past. I then telephoned for help and was rescued by my cousin’s husband who came out in his car and I followed him their house. There I was very warmly greeted by my cousins and after a restorative cup of coffee we sat down to a magnificent lunch. I took the opportunity over lunch to inform them of a few facts about her childhood stay in France of which they were largely ignorant. Then, after lunch I had taken along an iPad with link to the speech that Meg (and I) gave to our Harrogate relatives on the occasion of our 50th wedding anniversary some eight years ago. My cousin’s husband who is supremely technologically competent managed to get my video ‘AirPlayed’ through his own smart TV set so we could watch the full 20 minutes presentation, the first 10 minutes of which was Meg at her fluent best speaking from memory and with no notes with no signs of the dementia that was to overtake her in the following years. The family were pleased that I had brought this along and now we came to the third objective of my visit. I had taken along a fair collection of the jewellery I had discovered in Meg’s drawer and I laid all of these pieces out on a table. The Meg’s cousins pored over the various pieces before taking possession of pieces that they particularly liked and would complement their own clothing and tastes. I was absolutely delighted that they had done this and so now they have good lasting momentos of Meg and have also taken some pieces which they think the younger members of the family will appreciate. Now it came to the journey home but it only a right hand followed by a left hand turn to get me onto the right road (which I remembered from years back) so all I hd to do was to follow my nose. Despite unclicking a box that said ‘Mute directions’ I still had no directions on the way home but I did not need any as the journey back, once Cheltenham itself is navigated, is simplicity itself.

In the late evening before yesterday, I attended church which is now part of my early Saturday evening routine and several parishioners who I had not previously known came up to me to offer their condolences even though it is now ten full weeks since Meg died. At the conclusion of the service, there was a cloudburst so we all needed to huddle in the porch of the church until the worst of the rain had passed over and we could all make a dash for our cars. Once home, I prepared myself some chicken soup and then settled down to watch the France v. Germany in the Euro football competition. An extraordinary incident occurred about a third of the way through the first half in which a German defender pulled the hair of an opposing French player which resulted in an immediate red card (and subsequent sending off) and a penalty from which the French scored to make the score 1:0. But it sometimes happens in football that a sending off inspired a team to even greater efforts and so it proved today. The Germans equalised with a stunning header and from this point on, it was a tussle throughout the rest of the game. The French, despite being the favourite to take the championship. seem to have lost their belief and did not make many crosses into the penalty area and when they did, there did not seem to be a forward there to make the finishing touch. So, it was no surprise that the game ended at 1:1 even after extra time and then the game went to a penalty shootout. I had felt in my bones that this whole game was going to end in one way. The German goalkeeper made several incredible saves and when it came to the penalty shootout, one always favoured the Germans. They did hold their nerve and always seemed so much more assured and less nervous than the French when it came to taking the penalties and eventually missed only one of their spot kicks before emerging as winners 6:5. The French twice had the ball in the net only for the VAR to spot an offside using the computerised VAR system and thus the goals were disallowed. The French have now been eliminated from this stage of the competition more than any other team in the game’s history whilst the Germans go on to take on Spain in the semi-finals (the other semi-final being the UK versus Italy next Tuesday) So it is interesting that two of the semi-finalists, England and Germany. have made it to this stage of the competition despite it looking at one stage in their respective matches as though they were on the point of elimination. But, as the commentators are wont to say, it is often a case of fine margins that determine the eventual outcome of matches. The undoubted hero of yesterday was the lanky German goalkeeper who produced some stunning saves – and in her personal life she has twice survived cancer which adds a human twist to the whole story.

After I had exercised doing some Pilates routines and then breakfasted, I received a welcome phone from my University of Birmingham friend and we made a joint decision to go, as we did last week, to the local water sports facility based on a huge ex-gravel pit where we sit under cover enjoying a cup of coffee but still enjoy a stretch of open water upon which to gaze. We spent a certain amount of time discussing the attitudes of generations younger than ourselves both towards debt but also whether younger generations felt they had a right to possessions and a life style which, for those of us who are an older generation, we had to work a lifetime to achieve. I have to admit that this is the type of conversation in which only men over a certain age will tend to indulge but my friend and I do think quite alike on many issues. As soon as I was being dropped at home by my friend, upon his departure I was led into a conversation with a very long-standing friend of my next-door neighbour who just happened to be arriving at the same time. My next-door neighbour had informed her friend of my recent loss and as she had been widowed some ten years before, we swapped some stories upon our various coping strategies and this was quite an entertaining, and useful, little chat. Then when I got inside the house I read a text from the cousins that I am to visit tomorrow and was delighted to learn that another set of cousins (the two female members being sisters) were also staying in Cheltenham so we should have a jolly little gathering of Meg’s relatives who were present at her funeral but there is so much more than I want to convey to them. Tomorrow, I am going to take a long a laptop which I trust will give me access to a long video clip of Meg and myself giving some recollections to the Yorkshire branch of the family on the occasion of our 50th wedding anniversary (and before Meg’s ultimate illness finally took its toll) I also have quite a lot of interesting information about Meg’s childhood to share with the family because I suspect that they do not know very much of it. Finally, I am taking the opportunity to take some of Meg’s collection of jewellery along so that family members can retain a keep sake of her.

Although I have been in two minds about it, I think that I will after all attend the concert in our local church and I have permission from our Irish friends to park on their drive-way so that most of the journey will be by car. Our fellow parishioner who acted as a Eucharistic minister to us is going to be playing her cello on the improvised orchestra so I do feel I would like to go along and give her some support. I intend to take along a cushion as the hard wooden benches can be uncomfortable if the concert is a long one and it starts at 7.00pm in the evening. There is typically a little wine or coffee break in the middle of it in any event, or at least I trust so.