As I awoke yesterday morning, I turned on Classic FM in my downstairs lounge which is of my daily routine little habits. A rendition was played of ‘In the deep midwinter’ which is quite a well known with words I think by Christina Rosetti. However, ClassicFM chose to play a very slow and moving rendition picked out slowly on a classical guitar and I found it utterly transfixing. I have a suspicion that ClassicFM which boasts that it is ‘the home of Christmas music’ is trying to be a tad more sophisticated this year because it seems to be hunting out and playing versions of carols that are played on a solo piano or guitar and as well as adding variation, this makes listening to carols even more enjoyable when it is not the same old version being belted out over and over again. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) have just released figures to show that we are all worse off than we were six years ago. The average person now has £38 less to spend each month after tax than they did at the end of 2024, following three consecutive quarters of falling UK living standards. The government made ‘improving living standards across all every part of the UK’ one of their most high profile targets to achieve before the next election. The previous parliament, between December 2019 and July 2024, was the first in recorded British history to oversee a fall in disposable income in real terms. But disposable income is now £1 lower per month than it was in summer 2019 after adjusting for inflation, according to Monday’s updated figures from the Office for National Statistics, and more than £20 lower than in December 2019. It is no surprise, therefore, that the two major political parties of Labour and the Tories who have been in power during this dismal period and now being spurned by the electorate and this is a marked political shift to the political Right (in the form of the Reform party) and to the left (with the resurgence of the Greens, but no way as pronounced as the shift to the right) So our politics may appear increasingly fractured in the course of the forthcoming year and who knows hat might happen on the other side of the Atlantic. My own little prediction is that Trump will suffer a health episode and some of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) Republicans are already throwing their weight behind the Vice President, J D Vance, as the best way of carrying the Trump legacy forward for eight more years after this Presidency comes to an end.
I feel that I will be glad when this particular day is over and particularly the morning when I have to negotiate both Pilates and the Santa Claus visit. But beforehand, I need to decant and prepare some of the damson gin which is Santa’s normal Christmas gift to fellow class members at this time of year so it is going to be quite a busy morning as I still have to do some unpacking and restoration to their rightful place things taken with me for my Yorkshire visit. The morning then turned out to be a very busy one as I realised that I needed to get some bottles of damson gin prepared for my Pilates class. I was very short of bottles but managed to fill five of them , label them up and then wrap them in Christmas paper. Then I went down and had my Pilates class during the last five minutes of which I crept out into the toilet to change into my full Santa Claus outfit and then back into the classroom to distribute my bottles of gin to everyone. In return, two of my classmates had also prepared some strawberry vodka so I actually took two bottles home with me. My Droitwich friend had just completed her yoga class and then she called around and we spent a happy afternoon and evening with each other, collaborating with each other and cooking a prawn meal together. We are both of us relieved that we have got our various bits of work and other commitments out of the way before Christmas Eve which cannot come soon enough for the both of us. We have slightly different plans this Christmas time as my son and daughter-in-law are coming over on Christmas Eve and we will have some time and a meal together, The next day which is Christmas Day is going to be a great collaborative effort because my son and daughter-in-law will be responsible for cooking the main course (Lamb shanks) whilst I am responsible for both the starters and the sweets which should be relatively straight forward. Last year, I cooked Christmas dinner on my own and it was all a bit of a disaster although the identical meal prepared at New Year went off without a hitch.
There are some interesting details emerging from the latest tranche of Epstein files. It appears that a crucial person identified as ‘A’ is implicated procuring girls in the whole Epstein enterprise and this ‘A’ may well be the Andrew (ex-Prince Andrew) so the ramifications of all of this seem very serious for the British royal family. Details of this are yet to emerge fully and it may be that it will be several days before we get a fuller picture. Meanwhile there is a bigger domestic political story. In a massive Christmas U-turn by Sir Keir Starmer, the government has announced a huge climbdown on inheritance tax on farmers. The tax relief on family farms handed down between families is to increase from £1m to £2.5m, meaning only farms worth more than £5m will pay. The climbdown, overturning bitterly unpopular proposals in Rachel Reeves’s budget last year, follows a personal intervention by the prime minister. The National Farmers Union (NFU) president Tom Bradshaw revealed the government backed down after he had two ‘very constructive meetings’ with the PM. So after a great deal of political damage, it appears that the government have realised that their initial proposals on the inheritance tax payable on working firms needed more thought and we now have the interesting scenario that after the last election, many of the newly elected Labour MPs in rural constituencies are coming to terms with the realities of the rural economy for the first time.