The evening before yesterday, I received a very pleasant surprise in that one of my close ex-University of Winchester friends is going to call in on me in the afternoon to pay a surprise visit. My friend visits a Birmingham suburb where he still has appointments with a dentist he has been attending for years and so is taking the opportunity to call in which will be a wonderful surprise. We have quite a lot of practical issues to talk over so I am looking forward to his visit. Today is the day when I generally both see my friends in Wetherspoons and also attend a Pilates class later in the day. Yesterday, I received a medical report on the X-ray I had recently had taken of my pelvis which was extraordinary for its banality. The text message received indicated that ‘there was no significant difference observable since the last X-ray’ but as this had only been taken 3-4 weeks before, I would have been amazed if any differences had been observed. Meanwhile last night there was the last of the series broadcast by Michael Moseley on the secrets of the ‘super-agers’ and the first item was the benefit to the immune system of regular cycling. This has left me vaguely wondering if there is a local cycle club in which there is a spare bike going which I could rent for a month or so and then ‘try before you buy’ but I might have a think about all of this. In the meantime, I will put the word around amongst friends and acquaintances of they have a spare bike available they could lend me for about a month to work out whether this is a mad idea or not. But I did learn one thing from the Michael Moseley programme which I found really interesting but also somewhat counter-intuitive. One of the greatest enemies of late middle age, not to say old age, is the accumulation of fat around the midriff and some of your internal organs, known as visceral fat. This is the so-called ‘brown’ fat which is not good for you hormonally and is difficult to fix by conventional exercise. But it seems that the practice of Tai Chi is better at shifting belly fat even more so than gym exercise and so it seems the way to go. A bit of investigation reveals that there may a Tai Chi class in my local Methodist Centre. But everything is in a bit of obeyance at the moment as we are in the height of the August holiday season. But as soon as normal activities resume at the start of September, I will start to make active enquiries. In the meantime, I think that a quick search of Amazon to find an instruction book might help to get me going. The Michael Mosely series concluded with four activities – cycling, brisk walking, good Mediterranean diet with lashings of olive oil and finally Tai Chi so at least 2-3 of these are well within my grasp.
In the middle of the day, I went off to my Pilates session which I always do by car as I have already made one journey down into town and back again on foot. After our Pilates class, I made my way home and then enjoyed a lunch of mackerel on a bed of salad, complemented with some grated cheese and beetroot. This was highly appropriate for a hot day when I was disinclined to cook and then after lunch, I awaited the visit of my University of Winchester friend who was calling in on me. It was such a hot afternoon that we regaled ourselves with some zero alcohol lager and then had a long chat about all of the things that we wanted to catch up upon. Some of these were issues that we could talk to each frankly about both being in the situation of having lost spouses fairly recently. I then informed my friend that my son and myself had gone through all the stages of preparing the two Enduring Power of Attorney documents which just needed some signatures before they get despatched to the Office of the Public Guardian. My friend was very interested in this as he was contemplating doing the same with his daughter and son and I explained how straightforward the whole process appeared to be and how much cheaper it was to do it for yourself online rather than going o a solicitor who would in effect charge you an arm and a leg for something that most people will be able to do for themselves. We then polished off some rather nice ice-cream before my friend had to depart for the long journey back to Hampshire.
Thames Water seems to be on the brink of insolvency and the government have taken the step of appointing some special administrators should the company go complete ‘belly up’ Thames Water, its largest group of creditors and Ofwat, the industry regulator, have been locked in talks for months about a deal that would see its lenders injecting about £5bn of new capital and writing off roughly £12bn of value across its capital structure. The discussions are said to be progressing constructively, although they appear to rely in part on the prospect of the company being granted forbearance on hundreds of millions of pounds of regulatory fines. The root of the problem appears to be the amount of money taken out of the company in the form of dividends whereas the view of Margaret Thatcher, who instigated the policy of water privatisation, was that only the private sector and not the state could afford to invest the billions of pounds of much needed investment in the outdated infrastructure of water supply on the one hand and drains on the other. Normally, one would have thought of public ownership (nationalisation) as the only solution to a problem as complex as this but the debts are so enormous that the Treasury does not really want to know about it. In addition, would the public be in agreement that money should be taken away from sectors such as education or the NHS in order to bail out and compensate the owners of a failed public utility? Thames Water has been teetering on the brink for years and what rankles is that it is being contemplated that they be let off the large fines that they have incurred for their misdemeanours in the past.