Yesterday, I awoke to a dark, gloomy and rainy day with the temperature only at 2° and not predicted to rise much to about 9° later in the day when we may have a little sunshine after lunch. The weather reminds one of the old country description of February as ‘February fill dyke’ as it was the month in which there was a lot of precipitation of either rain or snow. In either case, the ditches were filled with plenty of water which country people realised was helpful to get the ground in good condition for the sowing season. In my gardening days, I think that parsnips could actually be sown in February but they have a long germination period and I think I used to soak them for 24 hours before sowing the seeds in clumps of about 4. I have particular memories in the days when we used to have a very long garden devoted to a lot of vegetables that I used to keep parsnips in the ground until Christmas day. If there had been a frost, then the cold had converted the natural starches into sugar and gave parsnips a wonderful sweet taste and before today, I have actually prised them out of the ground so that they were ready to cook for the forthcoming Christmas day. They could often grow to a foot in length as I remember but the parsnips that you buy in the shops today tend to be short and stubby. Meanwhile, the long shadow of Epstein dominates the political landscape and the news this morning is that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has moved out of Royal Lodge under the cover of darkness to avoid unwelcome publicity whilst the police are seriously considering and assessing the case against Peter Mandelson for criminal prosecution for having alerted his ‘friend’ Epstein of forthcoming cabinet moves to combat the then growing financial crisis, behaviour which some might almost describe as treasonous. The day did not hold much in store but may well turn out to be a very ‘domestic’ day as my son and I continue with our cleaning out of the ‘hobbit holes’ and shopping beckons later on in the afternoon. There is some speculation in the trans-Atlantic press that Donald Trump realises that he may well lose both mid-term and end-of-term elections so is positioning the Republican party to de facto ‘steal’ of the next election. Already some Republican states have acceded to White House demands to hand over voter registration lists and the strategy seems to be that if they find a single case of fraud in the Democratic vote then the whole election might be deemed invalid and handed to the Republicans. All of this violates the US Constitution, of course, but the Republicans will stop at nothing to seize and then to retain political power wherever they can exert the slightest degree of leverage and one fears for the worst. Court rulings against the Republicans can be appealed against over and over again until a case reaches the Supreme Court which is stuffed full of Trump nominees and typically (but not absolutely always) complies with the Trump agenda.
When my son and I cleared out the third of our ‘hobbit holes’ (giving access to storage space in the eaves of the house), it became a voyage of discovery. When I was busy in the ‘conference attending’ part of my academic career which was generally to read (and have published ) papers which formed the basis pf my PhD, the conference organisers would give you a little brief-case size canvas bag with various useful things inside such as the schedule of events if there were a variety of presentations offered at the same time. I always accepted such bags (as did everybody else) but when I retuned home, I junked most of the contents, filed away the useful bits I wanted to retain and kept bag itself which had only had a few days use. Well my son and I stopped counting when we go to fourteen and even this excludes some of the leatherette briefcases. Another real ‘find’ was a case which contained various items relating both to my employment and leisure activities before I attended university having left school at the age of 16 and therefore not attending a sixth form) For example, I found the letter of appointment when I joined the scientific civil service at a salary of about £368.00 pa and there are probably other documents which I am loathe to discard. A third general category of items could well be donated to a museum of computing because I had a whole volume of 3.5″ floppy disks (and there ma even have been some 5.25″ floppies as well) Some of these are the final versions of the software that I wrote and which got sold off as an adjunct to some statistical books and it could well be that the floppies contain my original source code (written in Turbo Pascal) There were also several boxes of slides which I used to take along to various conferences as the conferences in those days always had a slide protector but not necessarily a computer as we are talking about pre-Power Point days. So these materials have left in a pile on my landing and will await a time when I can go through them item by item and decide whether to ultimately retain or discard.
After I had made myself a quick ‘fish-on-bread’ style of lunch, I did my weekly shopping which was augmented by the ingredients for a meal I am going to prepare over the weekend. A combination of clearing out activities in the morning, shopping in the afternoon and then a trawl through some of the remaining newspapers before our green bins (= paper based items for disposal) get collected first thing in the morning has left me feeling quite tired at the end of the day. I may have an early night tonight as I have the excitement of a dental appointment tomorrow but at least there is the Rugby to which to look forward in the early evening. The first encounter of a new series is always very interesting because teams typically have the opportunity to promote some players and to retire others who have come to the end of their careers. On addition, coaches have always been working on revisions of both strategy and tactics during the ‘close’ season and this first game is the first opportunity to see to see how this planning works out in practice.