We awoke yesterday morning to the news that had actually broken the day before that the United States has seized a large Venezuelan oil tanker, claiming it to be part of their campaign (or is it a war) against the narco-terrorists. It had been evident for some time that the Trump regime will do whatever it can to destabilise and bring down the Maduro government which it claims stole the last election in that country. What I find so disturbing about the whole of this story is the absence of any international outcry against the United States but just a shrug of the shoulders and a sort of tacit recognition that ‘might is right’ and that the US can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants without the rest of the world community hardly expressing an opinion. Of course, Trump and Putin share the same world view, redolent of the 1950’s, that the two ‘great powers’ had complete dominion over developments in their own back years and sought to have a belt of client or non-hostile states surrounding them (Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall in the case of the USSR and the Caribbean and Central America in the case of the USA). Returning to domestic matters, we now seem to be at the start of a ‘super flu’ epidemic in the country and it is interesting to see what advice is being given to counteract it. One thing that the experts are saying is that remedies such as the consumption of garlic tablets and Vitamin C do not seem to be particularly effective. But what is being said by the experts may seem common sense but is probably not widely known. The most important is to have a good night’s sleep to help the body’s natural defences, followed by a good diet and plenty of hand washing throughout the day. I discovered a very useful link which I sent off to my Droitwich friend (we do our little bit to keep ourselves healthy and keep ourselves going) but accidentally sent the same link off to one of my nieces who is a teacher in Yorkshire She replied to the effect that her school has had unprecedented numbers of people off with flu and seasonable ailments with 140 being off quite recently). Later on in the morning, our domestic help called around as did our son and we all excitedly spoke about our Christmas plans. Our domestic help brought with her a bag of little Christmassy type decorations, some of which were added to our already decorated house instead of going to the charity shop. We spent so much time chattering away that a lot of the morning was spent and we realised that we had better get on and get our normal jobs done. Today our routines are slightly different because my Tai Chi class has finished for the Christmas season so we did not mind spending the extra time with each other and helping each other with Christmas decorations. In the course of all of this, I have now made sure that I have two candles ready to be lit in the event of other power outages because as we rely upon some overhead power lines that are susceptible to bad weather. Part of me wonders why in an advanced industrial society like Britain we are relying at all upon overhead power lines in a built up urban environment and I imagine that it was cost-cutting on somebody’s part years ago for which we are all paying the price today – but that seems to contemporary UK these days.
Now that the house is well decorated up, I am starting to think about my Christmas card lost. Several years I tried to ‘automate’ this process somewhat by making a Word document that uses a template that, in theory, positions each address onto a peel-off label. Last year, I made sure that I had purchased a good supply of these labels and that I now exactly where to find them as I released a portion of space in my filing cabinet so that I have all of the Christmas card writing materials in one place. I see that I purchased labels last year at almost exactly the same date last year and I also need to ensure that I have an adequate supply of my own address labels as I traditionally put one of these inside each card and also on the back of the envelope so that the card can get returned if it does not reach the intended recipient. The list itself also has a more macabre function because it could be used to inform everybody who needs to know in the event of a death. In the past, we have sometimes only learnt of the death of quite a treasured neighbour after a gap of weeks and even months if relative are having to rely upon entries in diaries and address books of the deceased person.
The news media is full of warnings about the flu crisis that seems to be have struck early this year and to be particularly severe. I heard one analysis that suggested that a particular severe variant of ‘normal’ flue was circulating with remnants of the COVID-29 virus and other seasonal viruses. The advice that was being promulgated, apart from the obvious requirement to et vaccinated seemed surprising in some ways.The importance of a good night’s sleep so that the immune system could regenerate and repair itself would not be a thought at the front of many people’s minds and to this, we need to add the importance of a good diet and, of course, plenty of hand washing and the minimisation of unnecessary social contact. The residents doctors (previously called junior doctors) are staging a series of strikes for better pay and working conditions but public sympathy for them is remarkably down which is not surprising as the new Labour government gave them a pay increase in excess of 20%. A strike actually could not have come at a worst time and it could be that many resident doctors will not join the strike on this occasion.The doctors are arguing that in real terms, their pay has declined over the years which is undoubtedly true. `But the same is true for many groups of workers in the economy and real living standards have not risen for decades. Real wage stagnation means wages are not keeping pace with inflation, leaving workers’ purchasing power flat or declining, a significant problem in the UK since the 2008 financial crisis, driven by low productivity growth, shifts in labour market power towards employers, and events like austerity and the cost-of-living crisis, leaving workers much worse off than historic trends. This stagnation is worse in the UK than in many other nations, with some workers earning thousands less annually than they would have if pre-crisis growth rates continued.