I thought that I had brought everything away with me that I could possibly need and whilst this was true of what you might call kitchenware equipment, I found that I had forgotten to bring away my computer mouse with me. This is not as calamitous as it sounds because the laptop (a MacBook in my case) has a very good inbuilt trackpad which some experienced users prefer to a mouse. But in my case, I had hardly used the trackpad so there are various things that I literally did not know. So I needed to consult the web to discover how to perform the  equivalent of a right click on a computer mouse and the answer is surprisingly simple if you know how, being a two fingered tap on the trackpad which is fine once you act actually know about it. Similarly the ‘Delete’ function had to be learnt as there is no button actually labelled ‘Delete’ on my MacBook so I had to learn that this is done by a combination of Control+Back Space which, again, works fine once you know about it. So last night took me quite a long time and some experimentation how to put my blog to bed but the time spent alone in my hotel bedroom was not really wasted because I have learnt how to do things without a mouse that I did not know beforehand. I did not sleep particularly well in a strange bed although the room is well designed and perfect for my needs with a good desk upon which I can put the laptop and a suitable plug point nearby, which is not always the case.   In the event, I got up some time before 4.00am and spent some time installing and deleting apps on my laptop  and generally maintaining things before I started to get into a more routine from 6.00am onwards. The news media is full of details of the newly released Epstein files which should have been published in full by last Friday. In practice, the Trump administration has only released the first tranche in which, surprise! surprise! Bill Clinton appears very well represented but Trump is shown only in one photograph although we know from the White House Chief of staff that Trump has been warned that there is some material relating to him which will have to be released eventually. It seems that the White House has a strategy to release anything that shows the Democrats in a bad light and then hope that the public as a whole gets bored so that in a couple of weeks time (just after Christmas?) people will be bored by it all and the damage that might accrue to Trump is correspondingly limited. Having made an early start to the day, though, I will have to ensure that I am all washed, scrubbed and fed and leave the hotel by about 8.30am as I need to walk into town, do some present shopping for my sister and some wine for Sunday and then catch the train to Knaresborough and back again to see my other niece later on in the afternoon. So I need to keep a careful watch on my train times and how long it will take me to access the stations.

I made my way into town but there was a very cold freezing fog as I walked into town. I made my way into Marks and Spencers and bought a bottle of wine for consumption at the meal tomorrow. At my niece’s instigation, I bought a variety of fruit and some Belgian chocolates to provide a composite Christmas present but in the absence of wrapping paper, I had them packed into a seasonal Marks and Spencer bag and gave strict instructions that they were not to be opened until Christmas Day itself. My sister and I talked over some of the grief stricken moments that we had both experienced during the deaths of our respective spouses but we mainly talked over family matters until the time came for lunch. I accompanied my sister to the beautiful dining room where the care home provided me with a lunch of beef stroganoff on rice with side vegetables followed by a jam sponge and custard. I thought that the quality of the food was pretty good for institutional cooking and the whole ambience of the dining room approached restaurant standards.  I am going to see my sister again the following day at one of her nieces so I took the opportunity to depart an hour earlier and  managed to get to the station on time with it only taking about 15 minutes brisk walk to reach the station. I was pleased to get my hotel bedroom but the TV proved to be problematic and I could not get it to find any TV signal. Then I had a marvellous couple of hours with my niece and her husband and very intelligent son after which I returned to my room, informing the young man on reception about the problems I was having with the TV in my room. Fortunately for me, he made the offer to leave the reception desk and to sort out the TV for me but I could not really follow the exact sequences of commands that he performed to get things going again. I have the TV tuned to Sky News where it will be tuned for the rest of my stay here in any case. 

There is still a lot of controversy concerning the release of the latest Epstein files. Firstly, the release so far has only been a partial release despite the fact that legally the whole of the material should have been released. Secondly, the material released so far seems to have been carefully selected so that no criticism of Donald Trump is at all evidenced whereas there is plenty of adverse publicity for the likes of Bill Clinton. But thirdly, it is evident that a huge amount of redaction has taken place some of which is no doubt legally justified but the suspicion remains that much of the redaction is designed to avoid any embarrassment for the current regime in the White House. Over 500 pages of the files have been entirely redacted leaving many independent commentators to suspect that a huge cover up is taking place. When further material is released, it may well be well into the Christmas festivities when it is felt that the attention of the population and the media lies elsewhere.

The evening before yesterday, I had got most of my packing done for my Yorkshire trip but then decided I would make a lightning trip over to Droitwich for a quick half an hour in other’s company before my little trip up North. This I did and we had a quick meal together which my friend threw together and then  returned home ready for a viewing of the Jane Austen ‘Pride and Prejudice’ This version was showing for exactly two hours and I stayed awake for the first one hour and fifty minutes of it before falling asleep just before the classic denouement at the end of the novel, only to wake up later and find myself in the middle of the film which followed it which was a showing of ‘Whisky Galore’ So this was an element of frustration but it has happened before when I have watched films from the comfort of a warm bed. I made sure that I had a couple of alarms set for early the next day so that I should not oversleep as there is always some last minute flying around before a long trip. I am well used to what might be called ‘hotel catering’ culture and I am taking with me some extra things and some things that I know will be useful such as extra waste bin liners for the storage and eventual disposal of any packaging for any little foodstuffs that I might buy from the little shop across the road from the hotel as I tend not to avail myself of the huge breakfasts that the hotel will provide. By sending out a series of texts several days beforehand, I have managed to meet up with some family members over the next few days and, evidently, there will be a lot of family news upon which to catch up. With various friends and acquaintances, I have made the observation that I thought that the dark days of the autumn would prove to be a great travail but instead the weeks seem to have flown by and I can scarcely believe that we are more than half way through December already. At this time of year, I like to ensure that I have calendars of the type that I particularly like I place for the start of the New Year and I do actually have most of these already in place. Before I see my sister on Saturday morning, I shall be able to stroll along some of the pedestrianised streets of Harrogate and perhaps make last minute purchases of things I need before the festive season descends on us with a vengeance.  I generally look forward to train journeys but the Friday in the week before Christmas might prove to be particularly busy and I nearly always have to first locate my seat in the relevant carriage and then turf the inevitable occupant out of it. Having done a similar journey several times before means that at least I have a rough idea of the platforms from which my various connections generally depart and this is always useful.

Having got to Harrogate, I purchased my tickets for my trip to see my sister tomorrow in Knaresborough and then when to a Chinese restaurant that I know very well. There I had the most enormous lunch of fried rice with beef, washed down with some China tea – the son of the restaurant owner is a real ‘foodie’ so we were soon swapping photographs of food dishes that we had on our respective phones. Then I got to the hotel, unpacked and then got some vital supplies such as fresh milk by which time most of the afternoon had gone. I had arranged to meet with one of my nieces in the hotel reception and then we shared a coffee and a drink with each other spending the early evening together. On occasions like this, we always have a lot of family history and family relationships to discuss and, of course, we both have some relevant photos to show to each other best part of two hours in each other’s company. When my niece departed, I almost but not quite got engulfed in a local Christmas part that was being held for members of a local gym but then I needed to get up to my bedroom to finish off this blog and reply to some messages. My niece and I often share detailed discussions about both parents and particularly grandparents where sometimes family ‘secrets’ get revealed but often it is a case of filling parts of a picture most of which we know but there are always details that one of us to get imparted to the other. Before I came up to Yorkshire on this occasion, I brought with me some of the magazines that detail some of the TV programmes so helps to push the solitude of staying alone in a hotel bedroom away somewhat. But I realise that when I meet the younger generations of the family, I must make particular effects to find out about their issues and concerns and not just be seen as a really distant relative who just turns up once or twice a year. Wandering through the streets of Harrogate as I do, I sometimes wonder whether it is at all likely that I will bump into anybody by chance that I could possibly know, given that I spent most of my formative years and did not leave it until 1963. But that was 62 years ago, so the chances of my actually meeting or even recognising anybody that I knew in those days must be vanishingly small. Many members of my family did have periods of working and livings in, for example, the capital London) but in the end they all seemed to gravitate back into the orbit of Yorkshire. So in many ways, I feel like a planet that broke away from the pull of the solar system of the family by working first in London, then in Manchester followed by  of Leicester and finally Winchester  before going to live in Bromsgrove. But I am forcibly reminded that many of the population stay within a few miles of their birth as I am quite forcibly reminded when I visit the Methodist Centre in Bromsgrove as a source of contacts and so many have been brought up within a few miles of where they are currently living. Of course, as generations age, older and widowed members of the family often move to be closer to their families of origin which I suppose makes sense so that they can provide mutual sources of support to each other.  

Yesterday evening, I spent a couple of hours watching the latest film in the Sky Arts season on all things Mozart. The programme was devoted to an examination of the life of his sister, Maria Anna often known as Nannerl who in her early years was a very talented performer on the harpsichord. For this reason, their father Leopold took both the young Mozart and his sister on tour as musical prodigies and of her talent s a performer there is no doubt. Maria Anna Mozart (1751-1829), nicknamed Nannerl, was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s older sister, a musical prodigy on harpsichord and piano who toured Europe with him as a child, but whose performing and composing career was curtailed by societal expectations for women, with most of her own compositions lost to history despite evidence of their existence in letters. She was a celebrated performer in her own right, often dazzling audiences, and collaborated musically with Wolfgang, but after marrying, she was discouraged from music, becoming a tragic symbol of suppressed female talent. In all probability she composed some pieces in her own right and we know this from correspondence with her father and brother. But these pieces are either lost, never published or simply attributed to her brother. We know from a parallel case, that of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn that Fanny composed several pieces but they were published with her brother’s signature on them as though they were his. So the search is on amongst musical scholars whether we can discern any of the early works that can now be attributed to his sister but a complicating factor this that Mozart himself played about with variations of his own signature so a non-match between two signatures does not point inevitably to his sister. But having been a prodigy in her own right and often playing pieces that Mozart had composed either on her own or together, their father stopped taking his daughter on tour when she attained the age of 15 and from the age of 18 she seems to have musically ‘disappeared’ We now know that she married and lived in a large house where she practised on her piano for three hours a day but unheard by anyone. But after the death of her husband and at the age of about 50 she returned to Salzburg where she reestablished her credentials as a noted performer in her own right. And we now know quite a lot of Mozart’s early life from what his sister had written about him which forms the elements of the first biography. There are some modern day female musicians who are intensely interested in the life of Nannerl and who take inspiration from her as she was forced to hide and suppress her own talent in keeping with the conventions of the day.

On a completely different subject, an interesting finding has emerged on the development of Alzheimer’s disease from which Meg died. Alzheimer’s disease is more widespread in people above the age of 85 than previously thought, a pioneering study has suggested. Researchers used a simple blood test to search for biomarkers associated with the development of dementia. The study also found more than one in 10 people over the age of 70 would meet the criteria for drugs that can slow down the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Researchers at King’s College London, University of Gothenburg and Stavanger University Hospital analysed 11,486 blood samples provided by people over the age of 57 taking part in the Trondelag Health Study (HUNT) in Norway. They looked for how regularly proteins in the blood that have been linked to cognitive impairment came up, or the gradual deterioration in thinking, memory and reasoning. The frequency of Alzheimer’s disease neuropathological changes (ADNC) – deposits of proteins in the brain that lead to the death of nerve cells – grew with age, according to the analysis. The study found it was higher in older people, but lower than previously estimated in the younger groups. ADNC was present in fewer than 8% of those aged 65-69, jumping to 65.2% in patients over the age of 90.

First thing in the morning, I attended an appointment at my local hospital for investigation of a tinnitus I have experienced since the death of Meg. The results are more or less what I suspected and I was given an explanatory leaflet which confirmed something I had read about i.e. that tinntus can be triggered by an extreme emotional event such as a bereavement. Having said that, I gain the impression that it has abated sonewhat in the last month or perhaps my brain had learned to lve with it. I am being offered a futher referral to the ENT department where they will pronbably do a scan – this s often done and the results, so I am told, often come back negative but I will probably wait to wait a couple of months for an appointment. One the way home, I did a minimal shop up leaving the perishable items until after the Yorkshire trip but the car started to give me an unwelcome message that there was an engine malfunction and the car needed to be checked over. Now this could be either serious or trivial but I have the car booked in for an investigation of this and a sticking wing mirror but not until New Year’s Eve which was the eraliest appointment on offer. So I shall probably confine myself to little ‘toddle around’ trips and not undertake journeys of any length. In the late afternoon, I did the majority of my packing ensuring that I am taking my medicaments with me on this occasion as I forgot them all on my last trip up North. Later on in the evening there is a ‘Pride and Prejudice’ film broadcast from 9.00pm-11.00pm so I will probably go to bed early and watch it in bed, with the benefit of an electric blanket. In the morning, my University of Birmingham friend is going me a lift to the station. for which I am profoundly grateful and perhaps  might get up early in the morning and prepare some sandwiches and a flask of coffee to take with me. If all works as intended,  shall probably touch base with one of my nieces for a cup of tea together in the late afternoon, to which I shall look forward.

Perhaps because I was out on the carol concert the evening before yesterday, I overslept a little yesterday but I put this down to the dark mornings. But the winter solstice occurs at 3.03 on Sunday, 21st December in Birmingham (although I should be in Yorkshire at that time having lunch with my niece and her family) to which I always sort of look forward. Today is hopefully going to be a quieter day after much running around yesterday but it never puts me in a good mood if I get up a little bit later than I intended and feel that I am chasing my own tail this morning. The financial news this morning is that the inflation rate dropped by a smidgeon more than was expected when the ONS announced the figures recently but at 3.2% the rate is still higher than the Eurozone at 2.2%. The reason seemed to be lower food price rises but often food prices maintain an upward trend just before Christmas as I suspect that supermarkets know that most customers are prepared to spend a little bit extra at this time of year. Speculation is also now rife than another interest rate cut is in prospect which although minute (of the order of 0.1%) will shave a little bit off the costs of the normal household budget. For once, I have some good political news this morning. The UK is to rejoin the European Union’s Erasmus student exchange scheme, according to reports. The popular programme allowed Britons to spend a year studying at European universities as part of their degree, without paying extra fees, and vice versa for their European counterparts. It ended for British students after Brexit on 1 January 2021 and was replaced by the Turing scheme, but ministers could announce the UK will rejoin Erasmus from January 2027. It so happened that the Erasmus programme played a significant part in both my own and also Meg’s life as through it we acquired some significant students who went on to become life-long friends. Also, because of the exchange relationship that De Montfort University had with the Complutense University in Madrid, this enabled me to go and spend a term teaching Information Technology to public administration students in that university. The amounts of money spent on the Erasmus programme were pitifully small compared with agricultural subsidies in place at the time. I seem to remember that the amounts of money to be claimed by students to help with travel  and accommodation costs was only of the order of £2,000 and of course there was a lot of bureaucracy and form-filling involved. But I always felt that withdrawing from the Erasmus programme (and replacing it with the ‘Turing’ programme) was rather a vindictive and unnecessary part of the anti-European sentiment which swept over the country in those Brexit days. I have to admit that the scheme was a little unbalanced as far more students who had studied English as their second language in their European universities wanted to come to the UK (to further improve their English) whilst there never an equal number of UK students proficient in a European language who went to a European university. 

I gave myself a quiet morning this morning and just engaged in a bit of computer work before I had a quick lunch and then ventured out to a hardware store in the afternoon. I managed to buy one of the five things on my list but that is about par for the course as the shops seem to be full of Christmas flotsam-and-jetsam but the essential things for which you are constantly looking can never be found. Eventually, I found what I was looking for but was confused because the store stocked the same items in two different places (normal place plus Christmas stuff I suppose). Earlier in the afternoon, I received a text from one of my nieces and we have set up a rendezvous in a bar opposite the hotel in which I am lodged for Saturday afternoon so this is something to which to look forward. I need to have an early night tonight because I have to be up really early tomorrow morning to get to a local hospital for a routine test but, even at the that time in the morning the traffic will be horrendous and parking at the hospital is always problematic as well. I decided to leave my Christmas food shopping until late on Thursday afternoon as I do not fancy leaving it until literally a day or so before Christmas. Last night after a telephone call to a friend, I watched the second half of the first of a series of films on ‘Mozartiana’ broadcast by Sky Arts at 9.00pm each evening this week. From this I learned the following – as a result of her pregnancy, Mozart’s wife Constanza had considerably swollen ankles and Mozart engaged the service of a friend to find her a ground floor flat in Vienna. In return for his good offices, the friend who was a local choirmaster, asked Mozart to compose a little something for his assistance and the result was one of the most magnificent and tender works ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ (‘Behold the Body of Christ’ when taken down from the cross, a frequent subject in religious art)! Tonight, the programme is going to focus on Mozart’s sister who in her early yeas was almost as good a musician as her brother but who, almost inevitably, has been overshadowed. At this time of year, I always have similar feelings as our ancient ancestors found a way to bring light, heat and feasting into the very darkest days of the winter just around the winter solstice and early Christianity latched onto this festival and built the Christmas story around it. But in the Koran, for example, there is still the Christmas story but Mary goes out and gives birth under a palm tree (without the attendance of shepherd, kings, angels and so on) In fact, Meg and I bought a very beautiful and stylised sort of vertical crib when we visited the cathedral shop in Chester cathedral. This I bring out and display in one corner of our lounge and when suitably lit, it does indeed look as though the figures are sheltering under a palm tree. I enjoy showing this to visitors to the house, e.g. the carers who attended the little Christmas party which was about ten days ago now

I overslept a little yesterday so spent a lot of the early morning desperately trying to catch up with myself. This December seems to be absolutely racing away and although I am reasonably well prepared for Christmas with decorations done, trees in place and Christmas cards all posted, I still feel that there are precious few days left before the Christmas festivities begin in earnest. I have started taking my iphone to bed with me and the evening before I received a most welcome text. In the days when Meg and I used to walk down regularly to the park we often bumped into a couple who lived about five miles away but nonetheless used to come to the park to exercise their dog and so we got into deep conversations with them. This husband of the pair was an avid repairer of all things electrical and electronic and used to lend his skills to an organisation called ‘Men in Sheds’ where retired men occupy themselves with al kinds of repair activities. Now this couple were very kindly towards Meg and myself and we went out with them on at least a couple of occasions sharing meals in some of our favourite locations in the county. Now the husband seems to be a regular reader of this blog send me a most wonderful text saying that as this was the first Christmas without Meg, would I like to pop over to see them for a festive drink? I replied enthusiastically in the affirmative and also enquired whether I might take my Droitwich friend along with me which would be fine. In the days between Christmas and New Year, I suspect that the whole of the country will be on vacation as it were so the opportunity will be grasped to see families and friends wherever they might happen to be. I am hopeful that I might be able to make a visit down to Oxfordshire to see my very good friends who live down there but this is yet to be arranged. The day is shaping up to be a very busy one with some commitments bumping into each other. 

There is a recently published report which indicates that some £11bn was spent by the government during the COVID-19 crisis in what turned out to be fraudulent transactions. To some extent, the Conservative party was to blame for this because they fast-tracked any applications with known links to the Conservative party and ‘due diligence’ there most certainly was not, particularly in the case of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). Much of this turned out to be sub-standard and needed to be destroyed and practically none of the money fraudulently obtained was recovered. The government said the sum is enough to fund daily free school meals for the UK’s 2.7 million eligible children for eight years to put this sum into context. Meanwhile the main COVID-19 enquiry is still taking evidence and one would hope that lessons had been learnt ‘for the next time’ but it would not be a surprise to discover that the country is still woefully unprepared.

Later on in the morning, I went along to my local dentist and, given that I had been sort of fitted in as emergency appointment, I was delighted to be seen my normal (Irish) dentist who was visibly upset when I informed her about Meg’s death, made even poignant by the fact that she used to treat both of us and was very kindly to Meg the last time we had a dental appointment together. My dentist replaced the lost filling with a temporary filling which will serve the purpose until late in January when I have a scheduled dental appointment and she will then replace the temporary filling with a permanent one. I was also pleasantly surprised not to be charged for this either. I gleaned the following information from the web: ‘If a temporary filling is provided as part of a more comprehensive course of treatment that includes permanent fillings or other procedures, the entire treatment plan will be charged under Band 2, which covers all necessary fillings. You only pay one charge for a complete course of treatment, even if you need multiple visits to complete it’ I cannot remember the last time I visited a dentist without paying at the end of it. I returned home via Waitrose where I had my customary cup of coffee. Whilst in the store, I popped along to the ‘drinks’ section and there saw a bottle of Negroni which I promptly bought. A classic Negroni uses three equal parts: gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, stirred with ice and garnished with an orange peel or slice for a bitter, herbal, and slightly sweet Italian cocktail. So I was thinking of buying the ingredients and making it up from its constituent parts but  at least by buying it already mixed in a bottle, I can work out if family and friends quite like this cocktail. After I returned home, I noticed that the returns parcel had been correctly collected by DPD and then I prepared to go to Pilates. Once located in the car park, I realised with some dismay that I had forgotten to bring some £1 coins with me for the parking fee so  raced home, got the money and then back again only to be about 1-2 minutes for my class where we had all barely started. Next week, of course, will be my Santa Claus event (quite traditional by now and complete with the distribution of bottles of damson gin) My class members and I exchanged Christmas cards and then I returned home to heat up some of the dinner I had prepared yesterday and then had a welcome chat with my Droitwich friend before she went off to her works Christmas meal event in the centre of Birmingham. Later on in the afternoon, my chiropodist will call around for a postponed visit and then I need to prepare myself for getting to my local church (early, to secure a parking place) ready for the annual Christmas Carol concert to be followed by cups of tea and mince pies in the adjacent parish hall. Then I have arranged to phone a friend late in the evening so it has been one of these days when it has been all go but tomorrow promises to be a lighter schedule – I may well spend some of the time packing up things for my Yorkshire trip which will start on Friday.

It is very dark when I wake up in the morning in these days of the winter as we count down towards 21st/22nd December after which time the mornings should start to get a smidgeon lighter each day as the days start to lengthen again. The news media is full of the terrible slaughter that has taken place at Bondi beach in Australia where a father and son gunman have opened fire on a Jewish crowd celebrating Hanukkah killing 15 people which is the latest in a series of world-wide incidents. This rise in antisemitism must surely be linked with the conflict in Gaza which certainly does not justify what might be seen as reprise killings but the media are silent on this point. But the relationship is not an easy one to analyse. Experts point out that antisemitism was already widely prevalent before the bloody conflict in Gaza, provoked by the Hamas attack into Israel of October 2023, polarised opinions across the world. The most lethal attack against the Jewish community in the US, for example, came in 2018, while in 2023, Michael O’Flaherty, the director of the EU’s agency for fundamental rights, described such hate as a ‘deeply ingrained racism in European society’ that posed an existential threat to the continent’s Jewish community. But there is no doubt that such trends were intensified dramatically by the conflict in the Middle East. In the US, the Anti-Defamation League reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest since its records began in 1979. For the first time, a majority ‘contained elements related to Israel or Zionism’. The Community Safety Trust recorded 4,296 instances of anti-Jewish hate across the UK in 2023 – double the previous year – and the most ever documented. There were 3,528 in 2024, the second-highest annual total. Perhaps because of this complexity and its evident sensitivity, such relationships are under-reported and not analysed in depth. But there is always a problem in the way in which news gets reported in the media where there is a concentration upon the televisual focusing on real events in the world rather than the underlying reasons for such disturbances. In past decades, we used to have a concentration upon ‘strikes’ where the media loved to concentrate upon heaps of uncollected rubbish (in the case of the classic local authority dustbin men’s strike both historically and also today in Birmingham) whereas the underling cause of the dispute, usually relating to the falling real value of wages, does not lend itself to such a televisual appeal. To be fair to the BBC, there are often discussion programmes on Radio4 and some late night discussion programmes that attempt a more intelligent discussion of ’causes’ or stories behind the news but I suspect that these are watched by a very small minority of people.

At the start of the week, there are a variety of phone calls that I must make and one is very conscious of the fact that Christmas and the New Year (quite rightly) wipes out a lot of time at this time of year. I am thanking my lucky stars that I managed to order a good supply of my routine medications because running out over the Christmas period does present a happy prospect. When I return from Yorkshire next weekend, I only have two clear days and this reduces to one if you were to discount Christmas Eve itself so I am contemplating a really early start to my Christmas day meal shopping although it is only a case of picking up bits and pieces. As the day has gone on, it has developed into one of those days when I have seen either telephoning or texting all day long.  I made a couple of telephone calls in the morning, both of which I assumed were going to be ‘tricky’ but in the event turned out OK. One call was to my dentist as a filling dropped out of a molar recently and my next dental appointment is late in January. I telephoned for advice and was originally informed that  could go and get a temporary DIY tooth filling kit from the High Street – fortunately, the receptionist found a spare slot for me the following day so I did not have to act on her advice (which is incredibly dangerous because you can seal infection in and make a problem much worse) The rest of the day has been in texting left, right and centre – some texts have been to friends but most have been to members of my family to inform them of my arrival and departure times when travel to Harrogate next Friday. I felt that I needed to give family members a few days notice so that I can try and fit in some meeting time with them – as it is, they all seem frantically busy at this time of year. One of my nieces gave me some good advice as to what sort of Christmas present to buy for my sister when I hope to see het on Saturday. It has been one of those days today when with a layer of heavy black rain clouds, it seems to have been dark all day, even before 3.00pm in the afternoon. Nonetheless, my texts have borne some fruit and I have got on with some domestic jobs like the washing. Tomorrow is going to be a kind of day heavily weighted towards the end of the day as my chiropodist is due to call around late in the afternoon after a postponed visit today and then I have the carol service in my local church followed by tea and mince pies following which I need to dash home for a scheduled telephone conversation with a friend later on in the evening.

Amazingly enough, we seem to be getting some positive news about the Ukraine talks being held in Berlin. Sky News reports that after the Ukrainian team held talks with US officials Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Ukraine’s top negotiator described talks with the US team in Berlin as being constructive and productive. Rustem Umerov added that real progress has been achieved, and he hopes to reach an agreement that will bring us closer to peace by the end of the day. The American team led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were said to be  working extremely constructively to help Ukraine find a way to a peace agreement that lasts. The Ukrainian team is reported to be enormously grateful to President Trump and his team for all efforts they are putting in. It comes after Kyiv handed an updated peace proposal to Washington last week, consisting of 20 points instead of the initial 28-point plan Donald Trump’s team had proposed.

First of all, I would like to issue an apology to regular readers of this blog as it appeared to be’down’ for the best part of the day on Saturday, 13th December, 2025. The problem related to a domain name issue which is now fortunately resolved and I am relieved that all is working correctly. But I am very aware that things can, and do, occasionally go wrong and having put so much investment into these blogs (for more than five and a half years now) I would be loathe to lose the lot. So readers may not know that I have always maintained a parallel ‘back up’ copy of the blog which is written completely in .html (Hyper Text Mark up Language) and maintained on a completely different server and this is always accessible should the first site go down, as it did recently. But readers will need to take a note of the address of this back-up, text based version where you just pick the day that you wished to read from one of a series of tables and the results are practically the same. This address needs to be written down and kept in a safe place so that you can always see this if the ‘main’ site goes down. The address is quite a simple one and it is
http://mch-net.uk
and you can always copy and paste this link into the browser of whatever technology you happen to be using which is typically ‘Safari’ in the case of iPads and iPhones. So that has got the ‘housekeeping’ out of the way and my apologies once again to regular readers. The night before yesterday I went to church as normal for a Saturday morning and gave (and received) a Christmas card from one of the regular parishioners who regularly sits near me in the church. In the morning, I did not have my usual visit from my University of Birmingham friend so I intend to walk down into town and post the remaining cards that I hand deliver and then my Christmas card duties are done for this year with a supply to hand for regular callers to the house and for anybody who sends one to me  who had been left off the list. Although I sent a Christmas containing some photos to the mother of my Droitwich friend, what I have read on the web is chilling. From what I read, it reckoned that the card might take 2-4 months to arrive and there was a 50% chance that it would never arrive at all and that I really should have sent it via a Courier service such as DHL and not relied upon the South African postal service at all, which is notoriously unreliable (and bankrupt, by some accounts). So I have a backup plan which is to put the two photos in some of my own webspace where they are accessible once you know the web address which I will give to my friend to forward to her Mum. Actually, I spent a large part of the morning constructing the files to make the website to protect the website. Although there are simple website protection tools, they are easily hacked and therefore the industry standard is to use two files one of which contains the encrypted password and is stored in a different (and not accessible folder) so the user has to know the correct path from the server to this location and you generally need to use another piece of software to help you do this. At the end of the morning, though, I got the website protected in the way that I wanted and am generally quite pleased but it did take me some time to do this.

I set off to walk down the hill and took the opportunity to hand deliver my last four cards on my journey down. I had a coffee in the store and then on my back met a very old lady that Meg and I used to see regularly in our walks in the park – actually, I believe that her husband had worked in the Parks and Highways department and they had a bench with his name on it in the park. This old lady was 90 and very, very frail so I took her arm so that she could walk round to her next doot neighbours and hand deliver her Christmas card to them. Then I walked her back home as I was fearful that although the distance  was not great, she could have fallen if not given a friendly arm to assist her. Then when I got home, I rested for a while and then served myself some of the huge chicken stew meal that my Droitwich friend and I had prepared the day before. I started to watch the latest version of ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ starring Martin Clunes who was excellent in this role. but I only watched about half an hour of the film because my son and daughter-in-law called around and chatting with them took priority over film-watching and dinner-eating. We discussed some aspects of Meg’s final illness and then made sure that we had all of the arrangements for our Christmas meal as we are sharing the preparation between us and I am to be responsible for the starter and some of the sweets. The week ahead is to rather a truncated one. On Tuesday, I shall certainly attend the carol concert to be held in my local church if only because we have the promise of mince pies and a cup of tea immediately after the event in the parish hall and I will seize the opportunity to socialise a bit. Although Wednesday is now my regular shopping day, I shall be leaving to go on my Yorkshire trip on Friday and will be away until the following Monday so I probably need to run down the supplies of food that I do have in stock. Thinking ahead to the week immediately before Christmas, we have a Pilates class on the Tuesday before the ‘big day’ so I need to ensure that I have supplies of damson gin bottled up so that I can do my traditional Santa Claus appearance in the class. I normally wear some of the outfit underneath my normal trousers so that I can undergo a quick change whilst we are having our traditional ‘relaxation’ at the end of the class. Fortunately, the numbers are quite small so I am hopeful that I still have enough damson gin in stock from a couple of years ago. Taking a Christmas present up to my sister can probably wait until I actually get up there as it will so much easier to buy something on the spot in Harrogate. Although I do enjoy seeing part of my Yorkshire family, I shall still be alone in a hotel bedroom for the three nights of my stay and I do appreciate that at Christmas time my wider family are exceptionally busy themselves with a host of other activities which all seem to cluster at about this time.

The evening before yesterday, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself that I had got my Christmas cards into the system but had got up at 5.00am to make sure I had got the job done. Consequently, I decided to have an earlier night to catch up on lost sleep so got into bed and started watching ‘NewsNight’ on BBC2. There was a very rational and sober discussion from a variety of experts that the UK and Europe were standing on the verge of war with Russia and in many ways we had to prepare ourselves for the type of conflict that our grandparents had experienced during WW2. The fact that the current American administration was turning its back upon Europe and that Putin was prepared to invest huge amounts of money and military strength to gain comparatively little were indications that we could not afford to ignore. We know that Russia is constantly probing the defences of other European societies which have been somewhat slow to respond. The reasons are not hard to find: after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the cold war, European societies have, in generally, taken the ‘peace dividend’ and invested the money largely to support domestic political agendas such as the health needs of an ageing population. But we are now in a situation in which all European societies need to radically increase their defence expenditures as the Russian desire to regain control of its ‘lost’ empire and to weaken the EU is not in doubt. China is standing in the background and quietly helping Russia to achieve its aims so we have to understand the impact of contemporary global politics. But the Ukrainian war has taught us that the nature of conflict is rapidly changing and various military concepts such as using the air force to prepare for a subsequent ground invasion have to be rethought. We now live in the age of attack by drone  and Ukraine has to deal with over 180 attacks each day of which about 20% actually hit their target. Allied to this, we now have cyber warfare and we must be aware of the fact that the UK’s data connections by cable under the North Sea are fairly easily capable of being damaged by Russian craft. So the argument currently runs that it is only be military strength that Russia can ever be deterred and the threat to Europe is real and growing daily.

One of the interesting by-products of this blog is that I can look back a year and see what I was doing this time last year. I found that almost to the exact day, I got up early at 5.00am to write the same number of Christmas cards, the arguments about a flu epidemic were just as prominent and I was even cracking the same observations about the truncated first lines of Christmas carols.  In fact, history was repeating itself so exactly that I needed to do a double check to make sure I had not go the year wrong in the examination of my blog although I probably have got the Christmas tree erected and the decorations done a few days earlier this year. The month of December seems to be racing away and it seems remarkable that Christmas Day itself is less than a fortnight away. I have a carol service to which to look forward in the coming week and afterwards there will be coffee and mince pies in the church hall which is an opportunity that I shall seize to try to maintain my social contacts, which otherwise might start to slowly diminish.

I had a lovely surprise in the middle of the day, which I was not expecting and hence it was so much more enjoyable. My Droitwich friend found she had a couple of hours free in her domestic schedule after dropping her boys to various engagements so she came around and we cooked a South African chicken stew meal together. This was wonderful but we have a lot left over for other meals in the next day or so, After she had left, I raced into town and took advantage of the free parking to visit a photoshop where I asked them to produce a couple of prints of my Droitwich friend and I – the first with Meg and her own aunt when we first met over four and a half years ago and the latest one being the two of us cooking a meal together more recently. These two prints I have despatched with a letter to my friend’s mother in South Africa where I am sure she will appreciate it. I  took the opportunity to post some neighbour’s cards on the way but was disappointed that what I hope to be the last post at 4.00 in the afternoon was actually collected at 11.40 this morning. The postal service has lost a lot of business now that people use email and social media but we are now getting a pretty shocking service at sky-high prices.  In the evening when I anticipate going to church when I return I shall catch up on some lost TV viewing such as ‘Question Time’ which I missed this week. I know that I shall not see some of my regular friends in the next day or so as they have commitments elsewhere so I need to find some jobs with which to busy myself. When I was down in town earlier on this morning, I bought myself a double issue of the ‘Radio Times’ which I generally do at this time of year because you get a good guide to all of the films and special programmes broadcast over the Christmas period. I thought my bill at the supermarket checkout seemed a bit high and then I looked at the price of the ‘Radio Times’ I could understand why as the cover price was £6.50  It is said in the publishing industry that the advertising rates in the Radio Times are sky high for this particular issue because unlike other periodicals it is consulted often and regularly over the two week period by several family members. But I was also tempted into buying an issue of ‘The Sun’ because they were advertising a free guide to all of the TV programmes over the Christmas period as well (and the ‘Sunday Times’ might also put out some special guides when I use my token to pick up my copy of it.

The day before yesterday was an interesting one, as starting in the mid afternoon. I decided to make a start on my Christmas card list, which although I have address labels in a file ready to be printed off is still quite a venture. First I located my file and had to update it and reorder it somewhat as almost inevitably there have been some deletions to it. Then I printed off 40 address labels on 4-5 sheets and this helps to automate the process somewhat although sometimes there is not an absolute match between the address and the label and the address over runs a little onto the following label. Then it is a case of going through the labels systematically, taking care to choose religiously themes cards  for those who would particularly appreciate them, more internationalist type of cards (generally a Dove of Peace) for particular individuals and then all points in between. In the morning I had tramped up and down Bromsgrove High street seeking out the displays of Christmas cards in the charity outlets – at Christmas time, I always want to support a charity in the appropriate way. I wanted in particular some religious cards for those who would appreciate than most highly but found them to be almost non-existent. Altogether, I think I located about 3-4 of ‘sort of’ religiously themed cards out of a total of about 80 but none of classic paintings of the Madonna and Child which is often the subject of Christmas cards and I suppose that if I want these in future years, I am going to have to buy them from some more specialist suppliers. I put an address label in each card before sealing it up and then ensure that I have a sender’s label on the outside in case old contacts have died or moved and the card needs to get returned. I was about a third of the way through this task when my Droitwich friend got into contact and we decided to cook a meal together which we did, collaborating in our usual fashion. Because my friend has spoken of me to her mother in South Africa, I thought I would send her a special little letter to enclose with a Christmas card indicating what firm friends we have become, helping each other with life’s little vicissitudes and I also spent some time locating and making two particular photos one of which is Meg and I and our friend and her aunt taken some four years ago and the other one my friend and I after we had just cooked a big meal together. I got up particularly early (at about 5.00am yesterday) to get the remainder of the cars written and ready to be posted the Post Office later on today which I succeeded in doing in the late morning.. The cards for my Yorkshire family I will take with me when I travel north to Harrogate in a week’s time. It looks as though I have just caught the deadline for cards to be delivered to Spain in time for Christmas as the dates of 11-12 December are mentioned, whereas the date for guaranteed delivery of second class mail here in the UK is December 17th so I have beaten this deadline by some five days.  I spent a certain amount of time today making sure that my address file is up-to-date so this is all ready to roll for next year. I must say that I think that I got the cards processed extremely expeditiously this year although, of course, I concentrate upon those that have to catch the mail whilst nearby friends and neighbours can be left until a little later. I must confirm that there was a slight pang  for each card that  signed which was ‘Mike’ on each card  rather than ‘Mike and Meg’ as has been the case for the past 57 years. There were a couple of instances as well where ex-neighbours of ours in Hampshire would not have heard about Meg’s passing in May so this needed an added note of explanation. 

A few photographs have been released from the Epstein files in the USA but there is nothing to suggest any illegal or indeed impropriety. But it is being pointed out that these are but a drop in the ocean because there are believed to be over 95,000 images in total and the legislation passed by both Houses of Congress gives the relevant authorities until December 19th, i.e. one week more to release the vast bulk of the material. I would anticipate that when the files are released, some will be held back on the grounds of ‘national security’ and I would not be surprised if an enormous amount of redaction (i.e. blacking out of embarrassing material) will have taken place. Given the litigious nature of America society, there may well be a flurry of court battles lying ahead of us as well. There is a very balanced and well-argued analysis in ‘The Times‘  published the headline ‘Brexit made us poorer and it is getting worse.’ by the economist Emma Duncan. The latest analysis indicates that GDP per head (the best measure of prosperity) is in the range of 6%-8% lower than if Brexit had not happened and that figure is about £3,000 for each of us in the population. The authors of the paper are highly respected and analysts are drawn from Stanford University, the Bank of England, King’s College London, the German central bank and the University of Nottingham. What makes the analysis so powerful though is that the paper utilises a ‘bottom up’ as well as a ‘top down’ approach by looking at the performance of companies that were most exposed to the EU compared with those companies whose exposure to the EU was much less. This, too, mirrors the picture obtained by looking at the macroeconomic data. The article concludes that we shall never make up the ground that we have lost but there is a very strong conclusion that borderless trade with the EU would bring large economic benefits. Those who think that Brexit has been a failure outnumber those who feel it has been a success by 61% to 13% but the politicians seem loathe to grasp this particular nettle and re-establish better trading links with the EU. The Reform party are so far ahead in the polls that the Labour seems like the proverbial ‘rabbit dazzled in the headlights’ and will not dare to make anything except the most tentative (and inconsequential) moves back towards the EU.

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.