Sundays can be a problematic day as so many people are naturally at home with their families and this Sunday, two of my good friends who I might expect to see on a Sunday morning are away on holiday. But I know that a young Asian carer who used to look after Meg will be calling around with his partner (with whom he is busy setting up house) are coming round this evening with a bottle of wine and that is something to which to look forward. Depending on my text messages reveal I may be seeing another friend in the course of the day. A day or so ago, I experienced a real treat in the Promenade concerts broadcast each year throughout the summer usually from the Royal Albert Hall. Now the world’s finest exponent of the Indian instrument, the sitar was Ravi Shankar who Meg and and I nearly had to chance to see in Manchester in 1966 but a think a bout of ‘flu’ intervened to prevent it. But the tradition has been carried on with his daughter, Anoushka Shankar, and she has made her life’s work bridging the musical traditions of East and West with incredibly skilful compositions. She had a non-stop performance for an hour and a half a couple of days ago at the Proms and received the most rapturous applause from a highly appreciative audience. For my part, I well enjoyed her music as well which is both interesting and innovative.
The details of the Trump-Putin summit are starting to unfold and the omens are not good for the Ukraine. It looks as though Putin ran rings around Trump which was widely predicted and that the two leaders may have an accord to make Ukraine exchange hard-fought lands for peace, thus rewarding the original Russian aggression. There is to be another visit of Zelenskyy to the White House and he cannot forget the ‘mugging’ that he received on his last visit there. The Russian media are absolutely jubilant as they see their leader brought in from the cold, treated as an equal to the USA the world’s greatest military power and with all of the trappings of a state visit with red carpets galore, a military flypast and a ride in the presidential armoured Cadillac, popularly known as ‘The Beast’ It is no surprise that Putin is seen smiling extensively and it looks as though he has had to make no concessions at all. The word ‘ceasefire’ is not mentioned at all and it now looks as though Trump will be ‘de facto’ endorsing the Russian leaders claim over several areas of Ukraine and that the two world leaders will be pushing this upon Zelenskyy. Meanwhile, European leaders are looking on powerless with a kind of fascinated horror and all eyes, for the moment, are focused upon the Zelenskyy White House visit on Monday. I saw a newspaper headline from Boris Johnson that this summit was the most vomit-inducing meeting in history and I suspect that this view is shared privately amongst some of the American military as well as European leaders.
After I had breakfasted, I sauntered down the hill on quite a pleasant summer morning to collect my Sunday newspaper from Waitrose and whilst there, I availed myself of their free cup of coffee. Whilst I was drinking this, I was approached by a member of the church committee to whom I had written earlier on the week concerning any celebrations on the occasion of John Henry Newman being bestowed the honour of a Doctor of the Catholic church. I suspect that nothing much that much is going to happen because our existing priest has about two weeks left to run of his tenure and the new and younger priest takes over on 1st September so we are rather in an ‘interregnum’ period at the moment. On the benches outside I had a chat with a couple who were ‘friends of friends’ – in her younger days, the wife had acted as a baby sitter for some of our former neighbours (both, sadly now deceased) and also used to be a colleague of some of our other friends down the road. I took delight in telling them the story that they did not know about the first time we met our new neighbour nearly eighteen years ago now. He had a lot of connections with the BBC in Birmingham and with a background in amateur dramatics was sometimes called upon to play ‘bit’ parts in a local BBC production. But when we first met him, his nose had been rather put out-of-joint because having just returned from holiday in Spain and with a nice ruddy complexion, he had auditioned the play the part of a corpse. But he had failed the audition because the producer informed him that he looked a bit too healthy to play the part of a corpse. I made my way into the park which is always somewhat of a bitter-sweet experience for me as I retrace the route which Meg and I used to walk and latterly I pushed her in her wheelchair. If I had a dog or a three year old child, I would have been completely at home in the park because they were both present in abundance, I chatted briefly with one acquaintance and then returned home where I prepared a conventional ‘beef and two veg’ meal, the beef having been cooked in the slow cooker since first thing this morning. After cooking, I always divide the joint into two and one half is immediately put in the freezer (after cooling) whilst the other will give me meals throughout the week. In the late afternoon, I received a text reminding me that one of Meg’s young Asian carers and his partner were due to call around with a bottle of wine so no doubt we can have a good chat talking, no doubt, about colleagues both old and new as there is such a rapid turnover in the care industry. The young man in question came to Meg’s funeral with some colleagues and I requested that the whole of the funeral party give them a special round of applause (which was thoroughly deserved) for the magnificent way that they had cared for Meg in her final months and days. It is still heartwarming to recall the magnificent send-off that Meg had on her funeral day and not unpleasant to remember.