Yesterday, I woke up having just experienced a nightmare from which waking up was actually a blessed relief. Meg and I were trying to make a rail journey as a day return from I do not know where but although the railway station was full of places where people were eating, there seemed to be nowhere to buy tickets. Eventually we were rescued by a kindly station employee who started to walk us several hundred metres down a strange road where he thought the booking office might be. In any case, he informed us we would to buy a ticket to get to a small intermediate station which might, although he did not know, be able to sell us the required tickets. In the course of this foot journey, I lost a shoe but had to press on regardless. Needless to say, we did not complete even the foot journey and I woke up promptly at 6.00am just relieved, in the few seconds that I had been awake, that what I had just experienced was just a bad dream. I think that occasionally I had a bad dream like this when I was at work but I cannot recall the last time I had a dream like this. They always seemed to involve travelling but not actually arriving and the maximum amount of frustration ‘en route’. Later on in the morning, I am hopeful that our domestic help might arrive and we can exchange all of our news, such as it is and then the only ‘real’ appointment that I have later on in the day is with a physiotherapist who is doing some massages on my back to help to restore it to a better condition. So far it is early days yet but he seems to think I am doing all right so far. I am doing about 20 minutes of Pilates exercises every morning but none of these are particularly energetic as they mainly involve stretches and the like. But I discovered something the other day which I found quite interesting. I was lying flat on my back doing leg circles which is a common Pilates exercise. I had to put my hands somewhere so I placed them on my lower abdomen and when I performed the leg exercises, I could feel various deep abdominal muscles evidently at work, I had not thought about this as I had vaguely imagined that leg muscles work the legs but when you think about the bio-mechanics of moving your own leg in a circle there has got to be other muscles involved if your hip is actually the point around which your leg pivots. To a trainer, perhaps all of this is self-evident but I was intrigued that I was finding a way of building up the core strength in my abdomen without realising it.
In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the rest of Europe are slowly waking up to what might actually unfold. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine agreed to give up not land but its nuclear arsenal, inherited from the Soviet Union, in return for security assurances from Russia and other powers. They know how that ended up to their enormous cost. Putin reneged on Russia’s side of the bargain, with his invasion of Crimea in 2014 and once again with his full-scale attack three and a half years ago. The Ukrainian diplomat Yuri Kostenko helped to lead the Budapest Memorandum negotiations, He says there is a danger the world makes the same mistake and trusts Vladimir Putin when he says he wants to stop the killing, something Mr Trump said he now believes. So fundamentally, we have a situation in which there has got to be a basic trust that each side will stick to its side of the bargain. But without a real ‘boots on the ground’ operation, it seems there is nothing that will stop Putin leading a new invasion in a few years time given that he has believed for years that his role is to recreate a ‘Greater Russia’ as he is of the view that the dissolution of the former USSR was one of the gravest mistakes of the 20th century. The same lack of trust is found, of course, in the Gaza conflict. I saw an Israeli general who refused to believe that there was any starvation in Gaza and when confronted with the image of a starving child on a mobile phone accused the interviewer of playing ‘psychological games’ and refused to look at the image of the dying child.
In the morning after a good long chat with our domestic help and with my son who paid us a visit, I enlisted the aid of our domestic help to witness some signatures on our two Enduring Power of Attorney documents. Then I made my way into town and ensured that I got these posted off, clutching tight onto my ‘Certificate of Posting’ receipt as evidence that or documents were into the system. Then I re-parked the car and paid a visit to the Donkey Sanctuary cafe which has just reopened. There I was treated to a coffee and some chocolate cake and got into conversation with one of the helpers who had actually just spent some time recently in Madrid with friends, Then I followed a tip from our domestic help and went to one of the charity shops where I was fortunate enough to buy a new 15½ size shirt of a recognised brand (Taylor and Wright) and as this was the only one in the store and I have been looking for this size collar for some time, I was pleased to acquire it. Then it was practically time for my physiotherapy session, postponed from last week so I went and had another session of back massage and some tips how to keep my neck and shoulders in a reasonable condition. When I actually returned home it was past 2.00pm so made myself a ‘quickie’ lunch of some mackerel fillets on a slice of toasted sourdough bread, made tastier with some ‘Thousand Island’ dressing. The weekend is front of me is not a particularly exciting prospect as my son will be away ‘dog sitting’ for his mother-in-law whilst other family members are taking her on holiday and most of my local friends seem to be away on holiday as well. A slight consolation with the Women’s Rugby World `cup matches of which the first is to be broadcast this evening on BBC1 as well.