Yesterday when I awoke it was still quite dark as the nights are drawing on as we march inevitably towards the shortest day in December. As I have no particular commitments today, I decided to give myself the luxury of an extra half an hour in bed. I have got used over the months of getting up at 6.00am which is largely a hangover from the days n which I had to get myself up and things turned around before the carers came to care for Meg at about 8.00 each morning. There were days at the weekends when the schedule of the carers was to start at 7.00am and this necessitated me getting up at 5.00am but those days are over. Last night, although it is not really my ‘cup of tea’ there was a live football match in which Northern Ireland were playing Germany and the Germans have had a terrible run of failures recently so they felt they had a real point to prove. By half time, the Germans had scored but Northern Ireland had equalised so the second half could have been quite an interesting and tense affair. In the event, the Northern Irish gave away a soft goal and I lost interest at this point and amused myself by watching one of the re-broadcast episodes of ‘Rising Damp’ which tends to be shown on an obscure channel at 7.50 each evening.
The domestic political agenda has two stories running which one has the feeling will ‘run and run’. One of these is the fact that after the resignation of Angela Raynor, the Labour party needs to elect a new deputy leader, Angela Raynor having been elected to this position months ago. We are in the period just before the Labour Party conference and so we shall be treated to the spectacle of the Labour party tearing itself apart, which is hardly news these days. Given the rightwards drift of the party, MPs and the wider electorate will want to elect a person reflecting the views of someone on the left of the party but there is no self-evident candidate so we shall see the Labour party tearing itself apart over this. The wider public, one feels, will have no interest in all of this whilst the right-wing press will absolutely relish it all, not wanting an opportunity to pass by in which the present government can receive a drubbing. The second and somewhat more horrifying political story is the flip-flopping which the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, is conducting on the subject of Afghan refugees. Farage cannot resist an opportunity to pander to the populist and prejudiced parts of public opinion and is now suggesting that Afghan female refugees will be returned to Afghanistan where one can only imagine the terrible punishments that will be inflicted upon them by the Taliban. Only in the last few days has it been reported that a woman was publicly flogged for the ‘crime’ of walking in the open unaccompanied by a male relative or escort. So, it is almost certain that an Afghan asylum seeker would be subject to almost unimaginable forms of torture in which Farage would be complicit by organising their return. The distressing feature about all of this is that one gets the feeling that Farage and other Reform supporters do not care about any of this and are in step with those parts of British public opinion who just want the asylum seekers and small boat problem to go away at whatever social and political cost. Of course, in all of this we are only following the examples of the Americans who are lifting people off the streets to imprison and then to deport them, even if they have lived in the States for decades and contributed to the USA economy.
In the morning, I walked down into town stopping briefly to chat with my good Irish friends who has just returned home from an extended holiday and naturally I was pleased to see them. They informed that since our French friend has moved out, the house is now occupied by a lady and her daughter who I no doubt get to meet in the fullness of time. When walking back up the hill, I was recognised by a lady who I knew vaguely by sight but she had often spotted me pushing Meg up and down the hill and then entering Waitrose for my daily newspaper. She was very kindly ad sympathetic to my new status and explained how she had been a widow for 19 years her husband having died in his late 50’s but she herself indicated that she tried to get out as much as she could and bump into people. There is a fair chance that I might see her again in Waitrose but I now peregrinate between Wetherspoons, the Methodist Centre and the Donkey Sanctuary cafe according to the day of the week. Naturally, I am very keen to develop and cultivate whatever the social relationships come my way as some of my long established friends in the area are selling up and moving away. Near the top of the hill, I also had a chat with another near neighbour who I happen to know was ill at about the same time as I was several years ago but much more severely with a cancer, some of which has now returned. I made myself some lunch which was the simple expedient of some beef slices heated up in an onion gravy and then served on top of some salad which as actually pretty tasty. Although the weather was a little threatening, I managed to get the back lawn cut. However, I was more than a little dismayed that because of the building work that is taking place in the large field at the bottom pf my garden two temporary office block type of temporary buildings had been erected as near to the bottom of my garden (say about 2 ft away) as it was possible to get and much nearer to my property than any one of my neighbours. These buildings are to be used as temporary office accommodation whilst the rest of the building work is undertaken. Of course, there is absolutely nothing I could have done about this but what used to be a view over open countryside is now obscured by these temporary buildings. I suppose I shall just have to shut my eyes and pretend that they do not exit although I suspect they will be there for at least a couple of years. If they were permanent buildings, I suspect that they would not have been permitted under planning regulations but in the meantime, I will just have to grin and bear it.