We now know that the inflation rate, published yesterday, has come in at a figure of 3.8% and not hit 4.0% as some had predicted. This fact alone will save the government quite a lot pf money as a whole range of benefits are linked, by law, to the inflation rate for September (published in October) of the previous year. But what the government has gained on the roundabouts, it may have lost on the swings as it were as the retirement pension, subject to the triple lock, will now rise by 4.8% which mirrors the recent growth in incomes. Since the introduction of the triple lock in 2011, the value of the state pension has risen much faster than either average earnings or prices. At £241 per week, a full new state pension is expected to be £30 per week (14%) higher than it would have been under average earnings indexation since 2011. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the triple lock has pushed up spending on the state pension so that it now (2025–26) costs the government £12 billion more per year than the cost would have been if the state pension would have been uprated in line with average earnings since 2011. On the domestic front, our domestic help called around in the morning as she had attended a funeral on her usual day. We exchanged our usual round of domestic and family-related news with each other as we always do. I was feeling pretty tired in the morning having got up so early to go the airport the day before, so am enjoying a quieter day. I had spent some time the previous evening reminding myself how I could protect a file which had posted onto one of my websites. I know of this fantastic piece of software which encrypts the whole of one’s file with a password and encodes the password repeatedly into the encrypted file, working in an extremely clever way. So the password is not stored anywhere and if you ever forget it and do not have access to the original, then you are stuck for ever.
The conflict in the Ukraine seems to be going nowhere fast, A one stage, it looked as though Trump was losing patience with Putin but Trump blows hot and cold at the drop of a hat and now seems to be swinging firmly behind Russia. Donald Trump has said he did not want a wasted meeting after a plan to have face-to-face talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine were put on hold. The US president indicated that a key sticking point remained Moscow’s refusal to cease fighting along the current front line, in remarks at the White House on Tuesday. Earlier, a White House official had said there were no plan for a Trump-Putin meeting in the immediate future, after Trump said on Thursday that the two would hold talks in Budapest within two weeks. Key differences between US and Russian proposals for peace became increasingly clear this week, appearing to have dashed chances of a summit. To most observers, Putin now seems to be playing Trump and has apparently made no concessions of any kind. The latest madness in which Trump is engaged is to demolish part of the East Wing of the White house in order to make space for a huge ballroom, Mar-a-Lago style (i.e. gaudy and tasteless) In so doing, the Rose Garden established by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over in what appears to be an act of pure vandalism. It seems that Trump may be within his rights to do such a thing but nobody has been able to ascertain who will pay the thousands, if not millions, of dollars to carry out the work. Trump is saying that the work will be funded by ‘patriots’ but, like so much else, appears murky in the extreme. Presidents have remodelled parts of the White House in the past but the East wing, by tradition, is regarded as the province of the ‘First Lady’ but it is being said that Melania Trump has spent less than 14 days in the White House since last January and therefore, one supposes, could not care less about what is going on in the East Wing. It seems she spends. a fair amount of time in Trump Tower in New York but, apart from contacting Putin over the state of the kidnapped Ukrainian children seems to keep well out of her husband’s way unless it is absolutely necessary that they be seen together.
In the morning, I was still feeling pretty tired after the really early start of yesterday and so busied myself with a computer task which was to locate the files which tell me the location of each of my ‘domestic’ files within the study. Since I turned the study around last April, this system has worked extremely well for me but I still needed to know the location of my index files. For some reason, the ‘Finder’ app on my Apple Mac does not seem to play ball but with a combination of some inspired guesswork, I managed to find out where my files were. But it took me the best morning of the morning to accomplish this task after a degree of frustration. In the very late morning, I went down by car to pick up my newspaper and then returned home to have a ‘quickie’ but healthy lunch of a tin of tuna on some salad leaves. Today is the day when our domestic rubbish bins go out and fortunately, I remembered, just in time, that I needed to label my bin with my newly acquired wheelie bin number, acquired last week. In the late afternoon, I composed a long text to one of my friends and wanted to correct a word with a typo in it and succeeded in deleting the whole lot of it. On a computer, you can always press ‘Ctrl Z’ to effect an undo of the last action and I have just consulted Google to see what is done on a smart phone. The answer is the equivalent of ‘undo’ while texting is, according to Google, to use a two-finger swipe left on the keyboard to undo recent text or shake your iPhone to bring up the undo typing option. To redo, swipe right on the keyboard with two fingers or shake again. This I must experiment with to make sure the problem does not happen again.