As it was so very cold yesterday morning, I allowed myself the luxury of staying warm in bed for an extra hour. I knew that my University of Birmingham friend was away and had no social engagements for the day so I indulged myself somewhat. When I did get up, my smart speaker informed me that the temperature was -2° but the highest we could expect throughout the day was a high of 3° but a low of -5° during the course of the day. Conditions will become less cold through the upcoming week but temperatures will most likely stay below the January average, and further snow showers are expected in places. The second half of January should be a bit milder with temperatures near or a little above average overall. This would mean more rain than snow but occasional wintriness will still be possible. At the moment, it appears to be a little too cold to snow but we might expect some later in the week. The weather charts show that that the cold snap is affecting Scotland and the east of the country but here in the Midlands, it appears that we might be spared some of the worst excesses of the cold. Even going to church the evening before entailed a de-icing of the car which I have not experienced before at this time of year. After I returned from church, there was one of those really good end-of-year programmes which was the Earth viewed from space throughout 2025 and, as you would expect, some of the shots were astounding. I spent some time in the evening before yesterday fiddling about trying (and failing) to get the Tesco Mobile PAYG app working on the phone which used to be Meg’s but upon which the credit from my ancient Nokia has successfully been transferred so I did not lose this when TescoMobile switched off their 2G/3G last Wednesday.
I am absolutely appalled by the new world order which is developing once the Americans have resurrected the ‘Monroe’ Doctrine which dates from the C19th and which can be summarised as letting America do what it likes in its own ‘back yard’ i.e. Latin America and the Caribbean and the USA will not interfere with other people’s affairs. So now emboldened by all of this, Trump may now invade or interfere with other adjacent countries and I would think that the Chinese must now thinking that there is nothing to stop them (following the American example) invading and annexing Taiwan which they regard as ‘theirs’.The seizure of Nicolas Maduro takes the world into new territory. Geopolitics is about to become weirder and potentially a lot more dangerous. America’s president has justified seizing the leader of a sovereign nation by drawing on the US foreign policy of the 1830s – and he says the US will now be running Venezuela for the foreseeable future. The liberal American media which I view on YouTube are convinced that Trump is now seriously demented, falling asleep and slurring his words and all of this, probably true, is making the world an incredibly dangerous place as there appears to be no opposition, even within the military to more madcap adventures.
With getting up a little later than normal, I was further delayed when in the middle of my Pilates exercises by my Italian friend from down the road. I had pushed a little card through her door to enquire if she needed any medications whilst feeling under the weather with cold-like symptoms. We had quite a long chat about this and that and if she is feeling better by next Sunday, then I may well take her in the car to the later Sunday morning service at our local church. We are both hoping that the parish hall might be open for tea and biscuits where we can meet up with fellow parishioners with whom we may have lost contact. Instead of walking down the hill, I decide to go by car as otherwise I might not have been eating lunch until, about 2.30 or 3.00 and there were some cleaning jobs that wished to do whilst the last of the natural daylight. It was a gloomy afternoon but the clouds parted for a few minutes which was helpful to me in my cleaning activities but they soon rolled back again. Down at Waitrose, I availed myself of a cup of coffee and chatted to one of the staff that I knew quite well as, with two other members of staff, she had actually attended Meg’s funeral last May. In our brief snatches of conversation, it emerged that she had joint UK-Australian citizenship and had spent some of her early life there. She had also had employment in the diplomatic service for some years before she was married and I told her that I had desperately wanted to get employment in the diplomatic service but was offered a position in the Central Office of Information instead. I have noticed before that the ‘partners’ (as John Lewis, owners of Waitrose, staff are called) have often had quite interesting jobs before they joined the Waitrose staff.
The massive implications of the US invasion of Venezuela and the capture of its president, Maduro (no shining angel himself, but that is not the point) I think it is now fully appreciated that since WWII we have a ‘rules-based’ international order in which it is regarded as completely illegitimate for strong nations to invade and take over weaker ones – as the Nazis did in Poland, for example. But now that Trump has revoked the post WWII consensus, it opens the door for Putin to be expansionary in Europe and the small Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania must be quaking in their boots) and, even now, the Chinese might be licking their lips at the opportunity to ‘take back’ Taiwan. Although many people are blaming Trump, some more informed analysts are arguing that we always have mad men in our midst like Trump but the real failure in the American constitution is the failure of the Congress or the Supreme Court to halt such plainly unconstitutional actions. I think an estimated 40 Venezuelan troops might have been killed (or is it murdered as war has not yet been declared by Congress) although I think that the President can take action under the ‘War Powers Act’ but any military intervention such as this need Congressional approval within 60 days.