So yesterday was/would have been our 58th wedding anniversary and was most definitively a day to which I was not looking forward whatsoever but just wanted to get through. I had tried to make plans to go out for the day but these have fallen through so I will rely upon the usual routines associated with a Tuesday which are to meet some of my friends for a coffee in Wetherspoons followed by my weekly Pilates session. I did indulge myself a little the night before by looking at some of the websites available on Prime on coping with the grieving process but leaving aside the American psychobabble, of which there is quite a lot, I hardly learnt anything at all. Practically off of their recommendations I am already doing but one UK British psychotherapist informed me that that wedding anniversaries, as they were devoted to you and your married partner focused solely on each other rather than on a birthday, were in his experience the hardest of all anniversaries to cope with. The psyschotherapist had experienced the death of his wife eight years previously and I suppose I should applaud his honesty but it was really not what I wanted to hear. He spoke about living in the ‘Now’ rather than I the past which I am rather struggling to understand – after all, it is not possible to wake up alongside one’s spouse for an estimated 21,000 plus times and not miss them is it? But instead of wallowing in self-indulgence (which I am sure my son would say to me) I did locate a source of some 22 well-chosen quotes to help you come to terms with the end of a relationship and these I have put in a link and forwarded to my own email so that I can print them off and will read them to myself over breakfast.

One good thing to lighten my mood before I went to bed last night was a revelation from some of the Epstein files handed over to a Congressional Committee in the USA. Files from a ‘birthday book’ compiled for the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein appear to include a glowing contribution from the current UK ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson. The pages are contained in files from the estate of the deceased billionaire paedophile, handed over to a Congressional committee. The collection of birthday tributes includes a hand-drawing of a woman’s body, signed ‘Donald’. This drawing is handed over and is now published for all of the world to see. What is fascinating is that this drawing Donald Trump has variously proclaimed ‘not to exist’ (but now that we know that it does) or to be a fake which is the Trump response to anything he does not like. Donald Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal for publishing the information about the letter but now it is all in the public domain and does not look good for Trump as his previous denials are exposed as a complete lie. So, Trump can either drop his law suit (unlikely) or can go ahead and have to defend himself in a court where the evidence against him is pretty damning. The comments overall from the liberal media are that none of this looks at all good for Trump and his usual tactic of a threatening a huge law suit to silence critics may well backfire.

In the morning, I spent quite a lot of time with our domestic help talking over family matters (both hers and my own) here I always welcome her advice. Then I walked down the hill and made my way to Wetherspoons where I made contact with one of my regular coffee mates. The kitchens in Wetherspoons are being renovated for the next fortnight so all of the regulars will have to do without their daily supply of food and this probably explains why the pub was so quiet today. After chatting with one friend, I spent a few minutes with the other and struck for home, knowing that I had my Pilates session later on in the day. I changed into shorts (as I had promised my fellow classmates) and then went down for the session by car not in the best of spirits or moods as I could not stop reflecting on the first wedding anniversary on my own since Meg’s passing. But I think that one hour of exercise probably helped to lift my mood a little, although I always knew that today was one to be endured rather than enjoyed. Out of interest, I did consult this blog for a year ago and noted that Meg was still quite ‘compus mentis’ on our last anniversary, We had been to  ‘The Lemon Tree Cafe‘ on the morning of the anniversary and then some friends called round in the afternoon and we shared a bottle of Prosecco. The following day, we had gone down the hill and shared a chocolate cake (donated by Waitrose) and I believe that Meg had enjoyed all of this but her decline was to accelerate, particularly after the chest infection just after Christmas and she had died with eight months of our last anniversary. As soon as I arrived home after my Pilates session, I treated myself to a mackerel risotto which I made according to my tried and trusted recipe but I tried not to make it too large. At the end of this, I received a telephone call from the Honda garage which used to supply us with a Motability vehicle and our contact was probably trying to arrange a servicing which is due about this time. When I informed him that Meg had died, he seemed shocked and absolutely lost for words although this cannot be such an extraordinary event for Motability customers. Even later, I got an automated text from our doctor’s surgery to arrange a COVID booster jab in about a months’ time. Fortunately, I could do all of this via the automated system and I replied immediately to the text to ensure that I was well and truly in the system for my booster. Last year, Meg and I received the booster directly from a District Nurse but evidently this year, I shall attend the surgery in about a month’s time.

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.

The evening before yesterday, I attended my local church and I had a particular reason for doing so. It was the first service conducted by our new, and very young, parish priest who had previously served as an assistant priest in Coventry and before that in Leamington Spa. By way of introduction, he gave us a few words about his own biography and as he indicated, he is well acquainted with this wider region even if not Bromsgrove itself. I am sure that he will be a tremendous asset to the parish and he certainly made all of the right noises, as it were. It must be quite a daunting prospect to introduce oneself to a well-established, even if ageing, congregation such as ours and I thought that the sermon that he gave hit just the right note. There is going to be a special inauguration in about seven weeks time in the pub with a large meeting room across the road for which one needs to sign up. I must admit that I forgot on my way out of church but as I suspect that the list will soon fill up, I am going to make a special journey to the church this morning for the sole purpose of adding my name to the list. In the congregation last night was an elderly Irish parishioner who is very committed to the church and has often delivered some of the readings in a delightfully soft Irish brogue. But over a year ago, he was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer and his doctors had given him three months to live. But he still with us after a whole year, but I must say only just and is now painfully thin and receiving morphine injections and had made the most tremendous effort to attend the church and to greet the new priest. We used to see him on a Tuesday morning when we were having coffee in Waitrose and I even have a photograph of him and I with Meg and our University of Birmingham friend that was taken last Christmas. I find this man a completely inspirational figure and was delighted to see him for what could be the last time and I will certainly mourn his passing and attend his funeral which cannot be too far off now. To a man of such deep faith, then perhaps death holds no fears but how remarkable it is that he still making a positive impact upon the world when he is absolutely defying all of the medical odds. When I returned home, I managed to watch almost the whole of the England vs Australia women’s rugby match which, in the end, England won quite convincingly. But the English team did not start well whereas the Australians did so it looked as though it was going to be a much tighter match than it turned out to be. Apart from handling errors, what often sets teams apart is the level of fitness of the individual players where the teams who have players who have had superior training regimes have the strength and endurance to enter and to succeed in the scrums, mauls and rucks which is at the heart of the game. There are going to be some tremendous matches this afternoon and if I have no social calls upon my time, then at least I can enjoy the rugby. Sundays are often quite unpredictable days because it all depends upon the social commitments of my friends and acquaintances and, of course, I am acutely aware that Sunday is very much a ‘family’ day for most of the population.

Early in the morning, after I had undertaken my Pilates exercises, I decided to go and visit my local church not for the purpose of attending a service but in order to ensure that my name was added to the list for the inauguration of our new parish priest in late October. When I attended the church for the service the previous evening, we were encouraged to add our names to the list but chatting with others I forgot and only remembered later and as this inauguration event was bound to be popular and numbers might be limited, I was anxious to be included in the list. I bumped into several fellow parishioners that I already knew and was glad that I had made the effort and then I returned home to have a delayed breakfast and a viewing of the Trevor Phillips Politics program on the Sky News channel. Quite nearby there is a sort of water sports centre – actually an area used for the extraction of salt and gravel up until the 1950’s and into which local streams and water courses have now drained0 which is now used for canoing, swimming, sailing and similar water sports. It has a simple cafe so I decided to go there, along, if only to have a coffee and look out over the water. But my University of Birmingham friend phoned after I had texted him earlier in the day  and I was more than happy to accept his offer of a lift to the centre.  It was raining cats and dogs so we sat indoors and drank our coffees whilst catching up on the various things happening to us over the last fortnight. But as he is on holiday in Majorca next weekend, I shall not see him for another fortnight.

I knew that women’s rugby would dominate this afternoon’s TV viewing, so I settled down to watch the New Zealand team (the ‘Black Ferns’) take on the Irish team. But the Irish team were completely outplayed and won the match by 40:0. The nearest that the Irish came was a long punt up the field onto which the Irish player just had to drop to score a try but, given the shape of a rugby ball, there was a cruel bounce and the ball bounced out of play. Given the speed, precision and strength of the Black Ferns, I cannot see how they can be beaten in this competition, even by England playing at their best. This might be the eventual final, of course but we shall have to see once the quarter finals and semi-finals have been played. As I write this, France is playing South Africa but at half time, France have established a dominant lead by having scored four tries and will probably go ahead and complete their victory in the second half.

The news yesterday was completely dominated, as you would expect, with the enforced resignation of Angela Raynor, the Deputy Prime Minister, for her tardiness in declaring the correct amount of stamp duty on a property that she was purchasing. The story is a complicated one but basically, she thought she could get away with not declaring the full worth of the property and claiming that it was her prime residence although she was still a trustee of the property she had in trust for her disabled son. My take on all of this was she that she should have realised that as Deputy Prime Minister and in charge of housing to boot, she should have realised (as the HMRC website makes crystal clear) that she was still regarded fo tax purposes as having an interest in her former property. She had tried to cut corners by going to a cut-price form of conveyancers to facilitate the purchase of her new property but should have employed the (much more) expensive law firm that had set up her trust and would have advised her accordingly. Raynor claimed that she had received legal advice on the correct level of stamp duty but the conveyancing firm have riposted that they do not give advice so someone is lying somewhere. So, her offence was breaking the Ministerial Code by not taking sufficient care over her tax affairs and, I think in the court of public opinion, it is felt that the report of the ethics adviser was a fair one and so Raynor had no alternative but to resign. Keir Starmer has engaged in a large-scale reshuffle of his cabinet a lot of which was in the offing in any case and there has been some ‘rearrangement of the deckchairs on the Titanic’ but the movement of politicians to new responsibilities seems quite sensible to me and may mean that the government looks as though as it had a bit more purpose than tackling the evident problems. There is no doubt that Nigel Farage and the Reform Party have been setting the political agenda for weeks now and immigration has remained as he most contentious issue as it has done since the five years since Brexit and nine years after the referendum. Incidentally, Research by the Centre for European Reform suggests the UK economy is 2.5% smaller than it would have been if Remain had won the referendum. Public finances fell by £26 billion a year. This amounts to £500 million a week and is growing. The ultimate irony is that had we remained within the EU, we would have found it so much easier to send the ‘small boats’ migrants back to France. In July 2017, the European Court of Justice upheld the Dublin Regulation, declaring that it still stands despite the high influx of 2015, giving EU member states the right to transfer migrants to the first country of entry to the EU. The United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union took effect at the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, at which point the Regulation ceased to apply to it. So the profound adverse consequences of Brexit are still plaguing the country.

The evening before last, there was not much on the TV to interest me so I watched the Scotland vs Denmark football match which was not a great match but was interesting in its way. Scotland were playing in Copenhagen and were very much the underdogs but managed to secure a 0:0 draw and hence one point in the competition which was a pretty good result for them. There is a fair bit of Women’s rugby on the TV today which will probably engage me a little but in the meanwhile, I will settle into a Saturday routine which will include some lawn cutting this afternoon. I still feel waves of relief at having discovered my misplaced garage front door keys without which I might not have been able to access the mower. I was just about to depart on my morning walk down into town when, quite unexpectedly, my son and daughter-in-law dropped in to see me. Evidently, I was very pleased to see them and we exchanged bits of news with each other, one of which is that my daughter-in-law informed that that following her retirement, she too has started some Tai Chi classes. Then they continued on their journey to their South Coast holiday but gave me a lift into town where I met up with one of my Saturday morning friends but not the other. I walked back up the hill and was a little saddened to see that my friend, the French lady who lived down the road, has now definitely sold her house and departed to live in Cheshire with their daughter so this makes two of my friends that I have established over the past 18 years now selling up and moving away. The one consoling feature of this weekend was that I knew there were going to be several of the Women’s World Cup rugby matches and in the first of these, I saw Scotland well defeated by Canada. But the Scots made a pretty good fist of things as the Canada team is a very strong one and could well emerge as overall winners of the competition. The second match I started viewing is very much harder to predict as it was Wales vs. Fiji match and at half time, the Fijians were ahead taking several opportunistic tries. Eventually, Fiji won the entire game by the very small margin of three points. Wales came within inches of scoring a try to win the match but to be honest there were multiple handling errors on both sides which made the final result very unpredictable. Probably, on balance, the Fiji team deserved to win the game and it is only their second win in their world cup history but if Wales had converted some of their tries and made fewer handling errors, the game was well within their grasp but they just failed.  I will be attending church this evening with a particular degree of interest because it should be the first occasion in which we can meet the new and fairly young priest who has been allocated to the parish. I am quite eager to get to know him because some of his theological training was in a seminary in Spain in Valladolid and therefore there is a chance he is a Spanish speaker and we have something in common.

Readers will notice that this blog is on ‘Day 2000’ which seems as though it ought to be marked by something special. I will just confine myself to a few observations about the timings when the blog is written. Whatever the date of the blog, its contents generally refer to what has happened on the preceding day and also to the evening before that. About one half it if is written in the morning (when nothing much has happened save for breaking political news) and then it gets concluded in the late afternoon. At that stage, the draft version is ‘saved’ on the WordPress website but not yet published. But the saved draft of the actual preceding day (but today’s entry) is published (by the simple expedient of a mouse click) I have followed the tradition of composing it in ‘Outlook’ where the draft is saved and I can, in theory, access it from either of my laptops in the Main Lounge or the Music Room which system I devised when I was looking after Meg and has the advantage of a grammar and spelling checker. Then I transfer the contents to a text editor (not a word processor) which is specially written for the MacBook and other Apple hardware and then the contents of the file gets some final checking and some simple HTML added. This and other updated files get transferred into a parallel website that I maintain so if the main site is ever lost or hijacked (these things happen!) I automatically have a backup system on a different server and on my own webspace. 

Today, it is rumoured that the fate of Angela Raynor, the deputy Prine Minister, will be known when the report from the ethics adviser is presented to the Prime Minister. My own gut feeling is that whilst she might be technically cleared, the whole affair does not pass the ‘sniff test’ and there are some words indicating a degree of carelessness which means that her position is untenable. Yesterday, I turned up for a Tai Chi class and although I was there five minutes before the class, I was the first to arrive. It turned out that of the 6-8 people in the class at least five of us were complete beginners – I suppose we were all waiting for the classes to recommence after the summer break before we started on a new venture. Tai Chi is full of soft, flowing movements and one has to concentrate well on correct breathing nd enter a spirit of mindfulness. In general, I found it OK except that by the end of the 45-minute session, my knees and hips were starting to complain somewhat. This is because in my Pilates exercises, much of the session is conducted on the floor instead of one’s feet and the same applies to the 20 minutes of Pilates exercises that I do every morning in the bedroom. When the session was concluded, I treated myself to a cup of coffee and a slice of home-made lemon drizzle cake and got into conversation with another gentleman of about my age for whom this was also a first session. It transpired that in his occupational life he had worked in a bank and so we got into the predictable old men’s talk about how in our day, things were so much better and now everything was going to the dogs. I hope he persists with the Tai Chi and I think he also attends a ‘Health and Balance’ class the preceding day. If this turns out to be the case, then I may have acquired a soulmate with whom to converse. Because of the inevitable facts of biology, most of the members of these coffee mornings and exercise classes are women who have out-survived their husbands so the topics of conversation are often confined to moaning about the state of the traffic and the inconveniences occasioned by the building work going on all across Bromsgrove at the moment. Whilst not being averse to talking about local things, I do lift my sights to larger national and international issues about which topics I would much prefer to converse, as you might imagine.

I walked down into town this morning and was dismayed to be greeted by 21 Union Flags hoisted at the rate of one per every 57 yards. I had previously consulted the web for some background to all of this (which started in a poor white area of Birmingham called Weoly Castle) and came across a discussion as to what parents should tell their children. To 5-6 year olds, the advice was just to say it was people showing pride in their country whereas to teenagers, it should be possible to explain how the racist and xenophobic far-right had expropriated the flag for their own nefarious purposes and for some people, the display of so many flags ‘in your face’ was both provocative and intimidating, (not to mention non-British as we are not an avid flag waving people like the Americans) I had a coffee with one of my usual Tuesday crowd who was taking advantage of the sun on the outdoor benches, Then proceeding along the High Street, I purchased  a gymnastic aid which would help with Pilates exercises and stretches upon which I had had my eye in the Salvation Army shop window and then got some cash out of the ATM in my bank. Then I went along to my usual Friday morning ‘Donkey Care Sanctuary’ cafe where I had a nice chat with the owners and was supplied with coffee and home made cake. By now, I am treated with hugs and kisses when I leave which is rather nice and then I made my way slowly home. I cooked myself a beef curry with onions, peppers, tomatoes, mange-touts, sultanas and apple in the mix – I must say that I found it delicious and have a little left over for another day for a taster dish. For the first time in about a month or even more, I cut the grass which did not look too long but was a bit on the straggly side. I had a few moments of blind panic because it had been so long since I used the mower that I could not find the garage keys to access the mower. Fortunately, in a flash of inspiration I looked at the jar adjacent to my key jar and found that the misplaced keys were nestling at the bottom of a ‘pen’ jar where I must have put them my mistake several weeks ago. 

Although I am not a great ‘aficionado’ of things military, something caught my attention the other day when the News Channels were reporting upon the huge military display recently mounted by the Chinese in their capital (no doubt to impress the Americans, as well as the Russians and the Indians) The Chinese have developed a very fast and sophisticated underwater drone which is capable of about 45 knots on the surface and up to 6 knots underwater. Although intended primarily for civilian use such as mapping and hydrology, the technology has evident military significance (and hence its place in the military parade) and one can only start to imagine the vulnerability of the British (and American) submarine fleets that are armed with our nuclear deterrent. The vessel is equipped with an advanced artificial intelligence decision-making system powered by deep learning algorithms capable of autonomous route planning, real-time mission adaptation, and hazard avoidance. The vessel’s AI-driven autonomy has tripled mission efficiency in complex operational environments compared to manual navigation protocols. Its core mission set includes typhoon tracking and atmospheric data collection through the launch of onboard meteorological rockets, which can be deployed while tracking cyclonic systems. The submersible’s endurance profile enables operations under Category 12 typhoon conditions, environments characterized by winds exceeding 130 km/h, and hazardous sea states.  Submerged, the platform utilizes an advanced propulsion system that alternates between high-speed waterjets and silent magnetic fluid drives. Proprietary acoustic-dampening coatings reduce operational noise to ambient sea levels, enhancing their utility for hydroacoustic monitoring and stealth operations. Its payload capacity exceeds 20 mission-specific modules, enabling operations including meteorological surveillance, ocean floor mapping, photogrammetry, water quality sampling, and subsea infrastructure inspections. During recent trials in the South China Sea, the vessel successfully mapped 3,000 square kilometres of seabed in just 15 days, a rate five times greater than conventional manned survey vessels. Other technology included robotic ‘attack’ dogs (called wolves) that could approach a tank, crouch under it and then blow it up. The interesting thing is that the Ukraine is proving to be a testbed for such technologies – why use a simulated attack in for example, a desert when you have a real war in which to test things? Despite the impressive military hardware, a defence analyst made the point that despite a few minor border skirmishes over the decades and impressive military parades, the Chinese have not actually fought a real hot war in decades and no one in the Chinese army has any experience of this. So how well could the Chinese miliary perform in an an actual ‘hot war’ situation? Although posed in this way, it looks as though the Ukraine conflict is changing the nature of modern conflict in which appears likely that initial contacts will be by drones or robotic fighting vehicles controlled from a safe military HQ somewhere. This morning, I am probably going to try a ‘Tai Chi’ session at the Methodist Centre in Bromsgrove. It will probably be a session where I put myself near the front so that I can closely observe the actions of the demonstrator but practically every participant will be my age or similar so I am pretty sure that I will be able to keep up even though it is all very new. In addition, there is always a cheap cup of coffee and the possibility of a chat at the conclusion and before I go off and shop.

At last, the Epstein scandal is started to be reported in depth on Sky News and the other Main Street Media (MSM) Epstein survivors take centre stage as files controversy continues to leave Trump vulnerable. MAGA ultra-loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene was among politicians who joined the women to call for complete disclosure of government files on the infamous paedophile. For so long, the Epstein story has cast them in a cameo role. Everyday coverage of the scandal churns through the politics and process of it all, reducing their suffering to a passing reference. Not anymore. Not on a morning when they gathered on Capitol Hill, survivors of Epstein’s abuse, strengthened by shared experience and a resolve to address it. In a news conference that lasted over an hour, they brought an authenticity that only they could. There was vivid recollection of the abuse they endured and a certainty in the justice they seek. They had the safety of each other – adults now, with the horrors of youth at a distance, though never far away. It was an emotional gathering on Capitol Hill, attended by survivors, politicians and several hundred members of the public who turned up in support. Banners read ‘Release the files’, ‘Listen to the victims’ and ‘Even your MAGA base demands Epstein files’. That last statement is not lost on Donald Trump. As if for emphasis, one of the speakers was the ultra-loyal House representative Marjorie Taylor Greene – they don’t make them more MAGA. In a spectacle, startling to politics-watchers in this town, she stood side by side with Democrat congressmen to demand the Epstein files be released. It reflects a discontent spread through Donald Trump’s support base. He is the man who once counted Jeffrey Epstein as a friend and who has said he would release the files, only to reverse course.

We have our own scandal brewing here in which the deputy PM as had to refer herself to the Parliamentary ethics watchdog for seeming to underpay a great wallop of stamp duty. He full story is that Ms Rayner says she was advised that the home she bought was liable for the standard rate of stamp duty. It now turns out that advice was wrong and she owes tens of thousands in underpaid tax, because Hove is classified as her second home rather than her main residence. She says it was a genuine mistake and has referred herself to Parliament’s independent standards commissioner and informed HMRC that she says she will pay any additional tax owed. Whether this ‘I was misinformed’ excuse will wash is an interesting question because all that she and/or her advisers had to do was to consult the HMRC website where it is made crystal clear that stamp duty needs to be paid even if the property in question is held in a trust. Either Angela Raynor is lying (and a hypocrite to boot) or she has the most incompetent of tax advisers. In any case, as Deputy PM and in charge of a huge department such as housing, surely, she can understand the clear advice given on the HMRC website. I suspect that she might be ‘cleared’ on a technicality but that that there may be a damning phrase in the report when it emerges that ‘she did not exercise the required degree of care and/or oversight of her tax affairs’ and this will be sufficient to sink her completely. Keir Starmer is rumoured to be planning a mini-reshuffle of ministers but is staying his hand until such time as Angela Raynor’s future becomes more clear.

So yesterday was one of those days where I quietly resume my ‘normal’ activities after the interesting interruption to my daily routines of my Yorkshire trip. I am quite glad that the month of August is behind me and that we can start to think of ‘back to normal’ as the schoolchildren are returning to school. For my daughter-in-law, these next few days must seem quite strange as her retirement will just have come into effect and instead of hours of frantic preparations for her school tasks, she can concentrate upon her own life-space as it were. Personally, I have always liked this time of the year and have always regarded it as almost the start of a new year. Apart from my very first job which started on 1st January, 1962, every job that I have had (other than temporary work in factories and the like) has started in September/October. So, my two jobs in the civil service before I went to university started at this time of year as evidently did my two university courses (first degree followed by a Master’s degree) so it is easy to associate this time of year with a fresh start to things. As well, we often have quite a burst of fine weather in September as the weather in August itself can be a very mixed bag. Whilst on the subject of new starts, I reflect upon the fact that I had worked for three and a half years before I went to university and was actually 20 years of age when I first went to university, not having attended a 6th form as did most of my generation. This, I think, did me no harm at all and I was reflecting upon the consequences of all of this with my niece who eventually went to university in her 20’s but with a marriage behind her and a child for whom to care. When Meg and I lived in Leicestershire, the teenage son of a lady who became our domestic help used to pop around to help me with a few gardening jobs and to restore an old bike of mine whilst I gave him some earned pocket money. This young man got a place at a university but worked for the whole of a sort of ‘gap’ year in a building society before taking up his university place. Having built up a little capital for himself, this young man only needed quite a small student loan compared with his contemporaries. As often happens (hints of Meg and myself) he met a nice Welsh girl on a cognate course and they decided to get married. Without a huge student loan hanging over him. he managed to secure a mortgage fairly easily and therefore although he spent a year earning before he went to University he actually pulled away ahead of his contemporaries in terms of housing and employment so going to university a year later was actually beneficial for him. In my own case, I was amazed to discover at the time that I was applying for university that I was classified as an independent student (i.e. independent of parents) and qualified for a full grant which was awarded to me by a body then called the ‘Inner London Education Authority’ or ILEA. Of course, they were different times but ILEA even presented a special ‘tea party’ for their award holders where we mingled with members of the education committee and even some members of the House of Lords. My year working in London before I went to university and during which I acquired my A-levels had a great impact on my life and taught me quite a lot about both work and life. Mind you, in those days, I was desperately short of money and used to lunch on ½lb of broken biscuits and sometimes, a warmed Cornish pasty and this cost me anything between 7½p and 1 shilling (12 pence) which was 3p-5p in today’s money. As a rule of thumb, one needs to multiply these figures by 26-30 times to translate into modern values.

In the morning, I made a trip to the Methodist Centre in Bromsgrove where normal activities are resuming after the summer break. I spoke with the young lady who was taking a ‘Music and Movement’ type class and asked her about the Tai Chi classes which I understood were held in the centre. It transpired that these classes are taken by her mother and there is a Thursday class at 9.45 in the morning so I will probably do my weekly shopping immediately afterwards. I suspect that the first class is probably free as a kind of taster course and thereafter I think the fee is about £5 for a 45 minute workout. On my way down into town, the ‘Support the Colours’ flag erecting brigade have been in action again and now I notice that some 18 Union Jacks were affixed to practically every lamp post down the Kidderminster Road. So now not only do we have St George’s flags all over the High Street but even the arterial roads such as Kidderminster Road are so adorned. The flags seem to have been affixed at a very high altitude and I suspect will only be removed with a cherry picker or something similar. I checked out the legal position and the powers of he police and discovered the following. The police’s ability and responsibility to stop the affixing of flags depend on the context and location, but generally, the Local Authority has primary responsibility for enforcing rules regarding flags affixed to public street furniture like lampposts, not the police. Police may only intervene if a flag poses a safety risk (e.g. an insecure load on a vehicle) or is associated with an offence, such as supporting a prescribed terrorist organization. So, in areas dominated by the Reform party (as we are in North Worcestershire), it is possible that these profusion of flags might fly for months and the Far Right in this country probably cannot believe in their good fortune that they managed to expropriate the national symbols for their own political purposes. In the afternoon, I watched ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ but it was rather a bitter-sweet experience because the last time I watched it, Meg and I watched it together and I think she was able to follow the story line and to enjoy it.

Yesterday was the day upon I which travelled back to Bromsgrove but the day unfolded in not quite the way I which I would have predicted. Knowing that my scheduled train was after 1.00pm, after I had packed up everything in a suitcase, I vacated my room and left my bags with reception in their ‘strong room’ whilst I contemplated any breakfast arrangements. I followed the advice of my niece and walked along a path in the famous ‘Valley Gardens’ which was, like other parks, full of dog walkers. My niece had told me about a delightful little café which was a good pace for people watching and so I treated myself to a cup of tea and a toasted teacake. The elderly gentleman on the adjacent table was cutting very thin slices from his cooked sausages and feeding them to his little spaniel companion. I struck up a conversation with him and he had lost his wife to cancer only two months ago. We exchanged reminiscences about the events surrounding the death of our respective spouses and they turned out to be remarkable similar. In both our cases, we had to wait a long time for a death certificate and then both had the experience of a doctor consulting with us about the exact wording on the death certificate. It also turned out as well that his ancestors came from Wolverhampton as did a distant grandfather of mine. So, we found we had a lot of experiences in common and had I walked in the Valley Gardens every day I am sure that an enduring friendship would have ensued. Then I decided to get a taxi to go to the station rather than trundling a heavily loaded suitcase up the hill and this worked out fine and I contemplated getting an earlier train into Leeds which would have the advantage that I would not have to rush for the Cross Country service that would coney me to Birmingham New Street. It was at this point that my day started to go downhill. The automatic entry gate would not accept the scan of my ticket and the railway staff member informed me that I had to go only on the specified train and no other. This surprised me because I can understand that policy on the cross-country train where I had a reserved seat but I dd not think that the policy applied to what I called the little ‘chug chug’ suburban trains as well. So now I had the best part of 2-3 hours to kill in Harrogate, complete of course with luggage. To pass the time, I thought that I would make for the little cafe run by a Chinese family in which I had eaten before and I thought I would have a really light lunch to help to pass the time. But when I got there, it was closed for holidays and would not reopen until Friday so my plan was thwarted. As I trundled back to the station, I found a shop that sold hot Cornish pasties in variety so I bought one of these and ate this on the station forecourt whilst also doing a ‘fiendish’ Sudoku.  I did take the opportunity when the booking office was clear whether it was absolutely the case that I could not get an earlier rain but also the platform where the mainline Cross Country was due to depart where I did get the information. So eventually, when I caught my scheduled train, it was delayed because of delays to an earlier train where they had experienced some signalling difficulties. I was now getting worried that I had precious little time to alight the suburban train and claim my place on the mainline train because the scheduled 20 minutes was now down to about 11 minutes which was cutting it fine. In the event, I go to the right platform with a few minutes spare and the mainline train to Plymouth was delayed by a minute. The train when it arrived was full but not over-filled at that time of the day and that day of the week but the journey ran smoothly enough although hot drinks were not available on the train as their machinery had broken down. Birmingham New Street was quite a breeze with the Bromsgrove train departing from an adjacent platform so this transition worked well. But then I needed to phone for a taxi and this proved to be problematic. The form that I used did not respond to either a Message or a WhatsApp text so I had to rely upon a voice message. The 10 minutes delay in the taxi arriving becoming more like 25 and then we were stuck in the middle of both rush hour and the ever-present roadworks, So it took me the best part of an hour to actually get home so the actual journeying time had taken me five hours plus all of the hanging about beforehand time. So, I decided to learn the lessons from all of this the next time I plan a train journey to choose train times and ticket types with a little more care so that I have a degree of flexibility built in in case any of the adjacent links fall short. So, my experience of ‘modern’ rail travel at both Knaresborough and Harrogate railway stations was not a happy one and absolutely everything is now ‘app’ driven. I did not see a single ticket actually being utilised because every single traveller, old and young alike, seemed to rely upon their mobile phones for everything.

The morning was a little busy because our domestic help called around and we always have a lot of news to convey to each other. Then I shot down into town and had my usual ‘breakfast’ with one group of friends and coffee with another. Things were running a bit late at this stage so I returned home, made an important social telephone call and then went down for my Pilates class. Then it was a case of making myself a mackerel salad lunch and making some arrangements for a celebratory birthday meal with a close friend later in the month.  As always, there are some classic comedy programs on the TV to which to look forward this evening and I am looking forward to life returning to a more normal pattern after the disruption of school and Bank Holidays.

Well, yesterday turned out to be quite an interesting day. I caught a taxi direct from the hotel to my nieces address in Harrogate and remarked to the taxi driver that my sister used to use the services of his taxi firm when she needed to return to her work late each Sunday evening as far back as 1960 which is, of course, 65 years ago. The taxi driver informed me that the firm had been in existence for practically 90 years which must make it one of Harrogate’s longest surviving continuous businesses. My sister arrived soon after 2.00pm and soon we had a room full of excited chatter and many of the younger members of the family as well, the youngest being, I surmise, a great-great nephew aged two years old. Although Meg and I could not attend his christening in, I think, Gateshead in the North East of England, their local church is very switched on technologically and we were able to view the service ‘live’ via a video link directly into the church. But after we had cleaned away the food items from the table, I laid out along the table all of the items of Meg’s jewellery that I had brought with me and invited members of the family to take whatever piece(s) they fancied as a lasting souvenir and memento of Meg. Practically everybody found a piece that they would like to add to their collection and, I supposed we were blessed that there so many female members of the family in attendance. The younger children, and one great niece in particular (six years old), was delighted to acquire a rather pretty blue necklace and as a very well brought up young lady she thanked me profusely for me. Of course, the younger members of the family could not really remember Meg as they would have not have seen her for the last 4-5 years but I showed them the really nice photo of Meg that I have on my iPhone so that they could connect the jewellery with their Great Auntie Meg as I suppose she would have been known to them. Eventually, people had to drift away and my sister returned to her residential home and my niece kindly dropped me back at my hotel in Harrogate town. One little thing emerged in the course of the afternoon which surprised me. The rest of the family were interested to know how I was coping after Meg’s death and so I detailed how I has started to re-attend my Pilates class once per week and did Pilates exercises for about 20 minutes each morning.  Those who had attended the funeral over three months ago remarked how much straighter and more upright I was because three months ago, I stood and walked with quite a pronounced ‘lean’ to my gait. Several years of pulling Meg off the floor after she fallen (sometimes as much as 3-4 times a day) and the absence of a regular walk each morning had exacted their toll so at the time of Meg’s death, I was evidently not in the best physical shape but was now in the course of being corrected. Even my Pilates teacher mentioned that she thought my posture and gait had improved over the past three months so the interesting question is whether my physical health was in danger of being permanently damaged in my efforts to look after Meg in the last year or so of her life. As my niece gave me a lift back to my hotel, we took the opportunity to have a long chat about family matters, though, whilst we were in the car and subsequently as we parked near the hotel and I pondered with my niece what my future holiday plans might be.

Sky News is reporting tonight that the India leader, Narendra Modi, is seething with fury over the treatment he has received at the hands of Trump. One source of resentment is that fact that Trump has claimed to have brokered a ceasefire in the latest outbreak of fighting between India and Pakistan before a ceasefire was even on place. But by far the biggest source of conflict are the tariffs Trump has imposed upon India. We have the swift punishment of an extra 25% tariff levied on India for buying discounted Russian crude oil, taking the total duties to 50%, one of the highest in the world. The US government justified its actions as a national security concern that is fuelling the war in Ukraine and so applied aggressive economic leverage. Mr Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro described the Russia-Ukraine conflict as ‘Modi’s war’ and said ‘the road to peace runs, at least partly, right through New Delhi…The Big Oil lobby in India has turned the largest democracy in the world into a massive refining hub and oil money laundromat for the Kremlin. It is really easy. India can get 25% off tomorrow if it stops buying Russian oil,’ he added. Though China is the largest buyer of Russian oil, it has been left untouched. In 2021, Russian crude accounted for just 3% of India’s imports, but this has risen to about 40% in 2024 – making Moscow the country’s largest supplier. In the meanwhile, there has been an important economic summit between Xi (the Chinese leader), Putin and Modi who are evidently setting up an economic block. Of course, Trump with his ‘Bull in a China shop’ approach would deny that his tariff policies have any impact upon the world economic order but it is evident that the RIC part of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) bloc are exerting their combined economic muscle, with what effects, we shall all to wait and see.

A disturbing domestic story is being reported on Sky News. A child may have been affected by synthetic pepper spray as protests inside Canary Wharf shopping centre boiled over into an officer being reportedly punched in the face. Police said a group of masked protesters became aggressive towards police at the shopping complex after an anti-asylum demonstration. A group of people entered the shopping centre around 4.30pm and a small number of masked protesters then became aggressive towards members of the public and police, the Metropolitan Police said in a statement. Police issued an order to prevent people concealing their identity with masks and a dispersal order was also put in place. Video seen on social media showed young children among the protesters, with some of them wearing England flags. In these protests, the Union Jack and particularly the red and white flag of St George are present in abundance and these must be being manufactured and supplied by someone. The protestors probably do not have a proper appreciation that their protests are actually assisted by, and following the agenda of, extreme right-wing forces. It only took the most casual of Google researches to reveal, as I suspected, that the far-right group ‘Britain First’ claims to have provided many of the flags in the North West. Their leader has stated that ‘Britain First’ has, so far, donated 75% of its flag stock to local teams in Manchester and the West Midlands for ‘Operation Raise The Colours’. They add that most of the flags that have appeared in video clips are now on lampposts and bridges in Manchester and Birmingham which rather tends to lend credence to the influence and impact of this and other far right groups who are supplying the flags to all and sundry.