Two nice events occurred the evening before yesterday to put me in some good spirits. Firstly, my good Irish friends from down the road have asked me round for a coffee this morning and this is always a welcome event. There are a few things I wish to share with them so this is something to brighten up the start of the week. Secondly, my good friend from the University of Winchester phoned up in the late evening and we spent a long time on the phone to each other as we are wont to do. He visits his wife every day who is in long term residential care in a nursing home and we have often swapped notes and try to be mutually supportive of each other including links to parts of the NHS which might be helpful to us but are hard to locate.
A rather terrible event is unfolding before our eyes which is the famine in Gaza. Video footage has been released of an Israeli hostage who appears skeletal as he has evidently been short of food for a long time. The Israelis are appalled and are pointing to the evident lack of humanity of the Hamas captors but in the meanwhile Gaza’s health ministry has said that six more people have died of starvation or malnutrition in the enclave in the past 24 hours – increasing the total to 175 since the war began, including 93 children. And the health ministry reports that another 80 people died yesterday after Israeli air attack strikes. The whole world appears to be standing by watching this tragedy unfold before our eyes but Israel as the occupying power are telling the world that starvation does not occur routinely but if any instances occur it must be because Hamas are keeping all of the food resources to feed themselves and are starving the rest of the population.
The day started off as gloomy and somewhat overcast and a storm is expected to sweep across the country later on in the day and will perhaps hit the Midlands in the afternoon. By then, I will have got my morning walks out of the way but I have a lightweight waterproof now permanently in my rucksack so that I do not get caught in a sudden shower or downburst. I am spending a certain amount of time each morning keeping track of my finances which are now, thankfully, settling down. The last few months have been a bit of a turmoil until the Teachers Pensions Agency got their act sorted out. When you at work, you have one day/date on which salaries get paid in but in retirement things are a little more complicated. I am juggling with the payment dates of my own pension, the remnants of Meg’s pension and my own retirement pension so my spreadsheet has to detail these anticipated in-payments and out-payments quite carefully. I think that things are settling down now but it has been a little complicated with some payments ‘on account’ and then subsequently subtracted, tax taken off here and there and so on. But everything does look quite stable from this point on from which I am grateful. At this time in the morning, I often ‘message ping’ my Droitwich friend as we both seem to be our computers at the same hour in the morning and we sort of check up on each other (which is rather nice, I must say).
In the late morning, I called in to collect a copy of ‘The Times‘ which was in rather a tatty condition as it was the last remaining copy but beggars cannot be choosers. Then I called in at my Irish friends who had invited me in for coffee and we were joined by their next-door neighbour who is the French lady who is shortly to move away from us after her house has been sold. We told each other stories about neighbours that we had known and I regaled our friends about the ‘neighbour’ from hell who we knew from a previous house in another part of the world. I explained how years after we had moved away, we met the husband by accident whilst we were on holiday and he said to us, with the broadest possible smile, that his wife had now died. She made his life hell on earth making him clean every window in the house every day apart from other things and I told several other stories to which our friends listened with a sort of fascinated horror. Then after I returned home, I made myself a ‘meat and two veg’ meal for the first time in days, after which I promptly fell asleep. I was awakened by the ringing of the doorbell from our domestic help who brought me up-to-date with all of the news about her son who had been injured in an industrial accident at work. I had assembled some books and materials that I hoped would help to occupy him during his period of recovery. Then I texted a friend and started to think about my priorities for the next day or so ahead. Whilst I was having coffee with our friends, the news came through about the narrow England defeat/India victory in the final Test Match which has resulted in the series being drawn. Whilst I would have liked to see England hang on (and I think they lost by only about 8 runs) in truth the two sides were very equally balanced and a think a draw between the two sides for the series is probably a very fair result.
The storm that had swept over the country has fortunately, for us, passed us by and we only experienced the fringes of it. But I think Scotland and the North of England were badly it and a lot of rail services in Scotland were actually cancelled until the storm had passed us by. The storm was of the type that was quite common in the winter months but quite rare in the summer months but with climate change very much in evidence, we can expect spells of good or bad weather at almost any time these days. Tomorrow might prove to be quite a busy day so I may have an early night to ensure that I awake up refreshed in the morning.