Now that autumn is well and truly upon us my thoughts are turning to things that need to be done and plans that need to be made. The prospect for this weekend is for the lawns to receive their penultimate cut (the last one I schedule for 5th November which is a date easy to remember) Many people might think that the grass has now effectively stopped growing so what is the point of waiting for another two weeks before the final cut. But I take on board a magnificent tip which heard from the well-known gardener and broadcaster, Alan Titchmarsh. After the leaves have fallen and, hopefully, a frost has dried them up somewhat, then a final cut of the lawnmower is particularly useful for the grass. This is because the action of the lawnmower (and particularly a mulching mower of the sort that I have) has the effect of chopping the leaves into much smaller pieces. Then, unseen to all of us, the worms get to work and gradually drag the leaf fragments under the surface off the soil making for an excellent lawn fertiliser so that the lawn can get off to a flying start in the spring. And I always take care to ‘winterise’ my lawnmower to ensure that all of the petrol in the tank is used up or emptied and, of course, the season’s oil removed. But the other seasonal task is to think ahead to what my Pilates teacher calls the dreaded ‘C’ word by which she means Christmas. At this time of year, many families are thinking about or actively planning a break to coincide with the Halloween/Bonfire Night celebrations which is the last break just before Christmas. But I have started to think early about Christmas because whilst the nation’s attention is diverted onto other things, there are things like hotel bedrooms and train tickets that need to be booked. Now these always rise very sharply once Halloween is out of the way but I have started to think about planning the winter trip to my family in Yorkshire whilst the hotel rooms are still available and the cheaper train tickets not all snapped up. I have made some provisional enquiries and the prices are still reasonable but I need to stay my hand for a few days until I have had a chance to consult with relevant others a good time to make my trip and for some funds to flow into my bank account. The hotel and the booking agency that I usually use for booking my Yorkshire trip have a variety of prices but one mid-range price has the option of allowing a cancellation until a few days beforehand and only taking payment in mid-December so this is the most sensible option to cater for unseen contingencies. I have read the following on Sky News with a certain amount of ‘schadenfreude’. More than 2,000 counterfeit weight loss jabs have been confiscated from a factory in Northampton, in what is believed to be the world’s largest seizure. The UK’s medicines regulator and police joined forces to smash the illicit facility, which was manufacturing and distributing unlicensed products. Labels suggested the knock-off pens contained tirzepatide, an ingredient found in Mounjaro. But Eli Lilly, the company behind the real medication, said anyone who bought these jabs on the black market would have no way of knowing what they actually contain. I am always amazed about the gullibility of people who buy drugs off the internet knowing what an ‘unregulated Wild West’ we know the internet to be. But the demand in the UK is enormous as an estimated 1.5 million people in the UK are currently on weight loss drugs, with the majority (over 90%) obtaining them privately. While a growing number are eligible for NHS prescriptions, the current rollout is limited, with plans to cover a smaller number of patients over the next few years.
Later in the morning, I went down into town parking the car in one of the top of the town carparks and then walked down the High Street to meet a couple of my Saturday morning friends for coffee. We are normally joined by a third friend but she is now in hospital following a chest infection and this may have worsened whilst she has been in hospital, allied to which she may have a foot problem as well. So we are worried about our friend who normally has to get to us in her motorised wheelchair and we are fearful as to what the immediate future holds for her. After I left my friends, I went into the charity shop which normally has a good range of men’s shirts and bought a couple of Marks and Spencer ‘EasyCare’ shorts which I believe are non-iron and retail for £40 each but I only paid £5 for each of them. They have been popped straight into the wash and when they emerge from the dryer, I will better be able to assess how ‘non-iron’ they will actually prove to be. After I had got the washing going, I made myself some lunch which consisted of throwing some fragments of cubed meat into the remains of a curry and supplementing this with some carrots and beans.
Experts are warning that without fast changes the UK could run out of drinking water in the future. The first seven months of 2025 were the driest since 1976, with reservoirs across England only 56.1% full on average, according to the Environment Agency. Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology from Reading University, told Sky News that she thought that all need to worry about the fact that there is this possibility we could run out. She expressed the view that ‘It is only if we start thinking like that, that we are going to start conserving our water, otherwise we just take it completely for granted. It is all of our fault, we have not been paying attention to what is going on… we need some very fast changes to the way that we are using water and the way that we are storing water in order to stop this being a problem in the future, because our summers are only going to get hotter.’ By 2050, the government says that England could face a shortfall of five billion litres of water every day.