So I contemplate that we are now in the second half of November and I swear that this month has absolutely flown by. What can make the winters seem particularly long and aggressive in the UK is if we have a spell of bad weather, and particularly snow in November and December. By all accounts, though, after the winds and associated rainfall of storm ‘Claudia’ which disrupted many of our travel plans last week, we should now anticipate quite a blast of colder, Arctic air which is going to sweep across the country starting on Monday. I watched the BBC longer term weather forecast for the week ahead and it looks as though although the colder air will bring snow to Scotland, the rest of England will escape this but we should expect blasts of much colder air, made to feel even colder by the wind-chill factor associated with the strong winds that will accompany it. And now to more domestic matters. My very good Droitwich friend called around in the morning and we spent some time making onion bhajis of an authentic variety, although I must confess that I found an onion bhaji pre-prepared mixture in a supermarket packet the other day which we used as a base. As might be inferred, my friend absolutely loves cooking and up to a point, so do I so we have fallen into a pattern where we prepare, cook and then eat some meals together at the weekends when it fits in with other domestic arrangements. I have discovered that my friend absolutely loves ‘bœuf à la Bourguignonne’ which was a signature dish that Meg and I used to prepare together and I remember making some years back for Meg’s cousins when we had invited them over for a meal. This is the kind of dish which you would not make for oneself alone but is more of a special occasion dish so it looks as though have let myself for preparing this in a fortnights time. No doubt, this will be followed in due course by one of the vegetable pies that I used to cook regularly but, again and sadly, I have got out of the habit of cooking this. My culinary habits when Meg was alive was always dashing into the kitchen and preparing anything that could be done quickly which doe not lend itself to any ‘haute cuisine’ It used to be said that for the majority of the population, the weekends were used as a way of recovering from the stresses of the week whereas those with a very full, and should I say alcohol-laden, weekend reversed this pattern by using the weeks to get over the weekends. I can remember well a former colleagues of mine at De Montfort University, who was quite a keen Radio 4 listener explaining to me how, after the edition of ‘Gardener’s Question Time’ which used to be broadcast at about 2.00pm early on a Sunday afternoon he always had a very heavy heart. This was because he realised that the weekend was effectively over because Sunday afternoon and evening were spent preparing lectures and teaching materials for the forthcoming week. After all, if you have a 9.00am lecture to give on a Monday morning, it has to have been prepared beforehand. And, upon reflection, the part of my teaching career that I really did not enjoy was the marking. So if one had a class of say, 70 students and each assignment, even working at speed took half and hour first to mark and then to write up written comments, we are talking about 35 hours of extra work that had to be fitted in somehow. The ‘somehow’ actually meant staying up late night and night, fuelled by tea and biscuits to get the extra work done as there was an expectation that work needed to be handed back within about a two week turn around time.
In the course of the morning, my University of Birmingham phoned up to see if was available for our normal Sunday morning get together over coffee and I took my Droitwich friend, who was with me, along to meet him and we shared a coffee overlooking a sort of outdoors water sports centre as there are precious few things open on Sunday morning. Then my Droitwich friend and I came home to prepare a huge cauldron of an Indian curry. My role in all of this was mainly to prepare vegetables and then to sit at the feet of the master whilst I learnt the authentic way in which an Asian curry should be prepared. Lunch was a bit delayed by a long phone call from a family member but nonetheless we eventually enjoyed our meal even thought we could easily have fed a family of seven with it. Then we crashed out in the afternoon and watched some TV together, I was delighted to see the highlights pf the New Zealand vs. England rugby match in which the English team were victorious for the first time on home soil since 2012. The All-Blacks opened the match by scoring two tries but then George Ford helped to redress the balance with two dropkick goals. After that, the England team were magnificent in the second half of the game, eventually winning comfortably 33:19. Interestingly enough, I had spent some time in the afternoon going through past editions of ‘The Times‘ to see if there were any articles worth saving and I did glance at an article by a sports writer written some days ago which suggested that a victory against New Zealand was well within the grasp of the English team who are enjoying a good run of form and some excellent tactics to boot.
It looks as though the Home Secretary is to announce a massive policy shift on migration tomorrow morning. Shabana Mahmood said illegal immigration was causing ‘huge divides in the UK. I do believe we need to act if we are to retain public consent for having an asylum system at all.’ Speaking on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, Ms Mahmood said the government would set out changes to the asylum system in a bid to reduce the pull factor for those arriving in the UK via small boat. The home secretary has been looking to Denmark for inspiration, where there are tighter rules on family reunions and restrictions on how long refugees can stay. Measures that are expected to be announced on Monday include changing the rules so that people who are granted asylum in the UK will only be allowed to stay temporarily, and will have their refugee status subject to regular review. The statutory legal duty to provide asylum seeker support, including housing and weekly allowances, is expected to be revoked. It is almost certain that this will go down very well with the electorate as a whole but extremely badly with the Labour Party so we can foresee plenty of ructions ahead.