Awaking yesterday morning, it was to the grim news that Iran, after the death of its leader Ayatollah Khamenei, has responded by attacking many of its neighbours in the Gulf with the list including Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran has had tense relationships with the Arab states which are mainly Sunni Muslim whilst Iran itself is Shia but it is not immediately evident what Iran’s strategy might be in causing so much disruption. There may be a feeling that causing so much turbulence shifts the blame back onto Israel and the United States but for once the journalistic expression that the Middle East is a ‘tinderbox’ seems a fairly accurate expression. The UK is being drawn into this conflict as a base in Cyprus has been subject to a drone attack and Keir Starmer has now lent his support to America by allowing British bases in the area to be used from which the Americans might launch ‘counter-strikes’ for purely defensive purposes. Having tried to keep out of the conflict, we as a country are now being dragged into it and thereby made ourselves into a potential target. Those who launch missiles against America will feel no compunction now in launching missiles against a staunch ally such as the UK and I have a feeling that the UK is making a bad strategic mistake in getting embroiled in Trump’s war, which after all is just a diversionary tactic to take attention away from the revelations of the Epstein affair (which some, including Epstein himself, predicted even many years ago that this is what Trump would do if he ever felt cornered) The reaction inside America itself is yet to fully unfold but the mood may well change when the body bags of American military personnel are returned home. The political middle – often quiet but decisive – asked the critical question: What are we dying for? Escalation risks turning him into the kind of Middle East war president his own base rejected. His U-turn, however justified on strategic grounds, will be tested in this year’s mid-term elections. History suggests that presidents do not lose support simply because Americans die on the battlefield. They lose it when deaths feel pointless, endless or poorly explained by the commander-in-chief. Trump himself is communicating via his ‘Truth Social’ social media that more American personnel may be killed. Kuwait’s defence ministry says ‘several’ US military aircraft crashed this morning inside the country. It says the crews of the jets ‘survived unscathed’ and are in ‘stable condition’ after being evacuated and transferred to hospitals The ministry says it is continuing investigations into the causes of the incident. This has all of the hallmarks of a ‘friendly fire’ incident in which the Kuwaiti Air Defence system seem to have shot down about 3 F15’s from which the pilots managed to parachute to safety. Details of the incident are sketchy and I suppose neither the Kuwaitis or the Americans wish to dwell on the subject. As a particular thought upon the whole of the conflict, I wonder what would be the consequences for the USA is in the midst of multiple drone attacks, a large American warship to be successfully attacked and even badly damaged? This is highly unlikely but war is an unpredictable exercise and, every so often, one’s enemies might get lucky.
After I had breakfasted and absorbed some of the terrible news from the conflict in the Middle East, I popped down into town by car and picked up my newspaper (the last one, as it happens!) and a loaf of sourdough bread. Then I came home and prepared a lunch for myself of duck, potatoes and sprouts. Last night, just before I came to bed and quite by accident, I discovered another photo display script which gives me almost everything that I want in one package. I had used this script once before but there was a bit of an obscure bug in which the cursor pointer function does not work as it should which is a well known problem in the HTML community but led me to reject this script in the first place. But I managed to find a work around to this system and it has the great advantage for me in having a clickable progress indicator of dots which enables you to go to any part of your collection and this saves a lot of time in the construction and adaptation process. Having cured the cursor bug, at least to my satisfaction, the script has the ability to display a caption across the bottom of the photograph which is nearly always excellent. But if the bottom of the photograph contains a lot of ‘white’ e.g, a table cloth then the white caption becomes almost invisible. I managed to tweak this problem by formatting the caption script to a black rather than a white font which may be used as the occasion demands. Also, each photograph is set to a width of 100% but this can be scaled back to enable portrait mode photos to display properly. All that needed to be done was to write the 67 captions into the photograph series (but some of them I had already adapted years ago to have a captain incorporated into the photo using white text on a black banner) So most of the day was spent getting this to work to my satisfaction and I was pleased to say I finished this late in the afternoon. I now have to add a section to my documentation files so that do not forget how I did all of this and I also discovered a couple of useful HTML functions of which I was ignorant but can now use in the future. This evening, my son and daughter-in-law are treating me to a cinema transmission of ‘The Audience’ live from the National Theatre.Helen Mirren is playing Queen Elisabeth II which she does superbly well and the whole dramatisation (‘The Audience’)is in effect a stage version of the film made about the tense interactions between the old Queen and the newly elected Tony Blair on the occasion of Princess Diana’s death. It will be interesting to see how full the theatre will be tis evening – I suspect that it may be only half full as it was on the occasion of the screening f the opera of ‘La Traviata’ which saw there recently.