Last night, after the visit of my family, I was quietly reading my copy of ‘The Sunday Times’ whilst also listening to the fulminations of James O’Brien, the LBC host who regularly broadcasts against the crassness and illegalities of the Iran war. Last night, he was listing the various reasons that had been advanced for the hostilities to commence and had reached about eight or nine on his list before he invited viewers to supply any more that hadn’t occurred to him. O’Brien also pointed out the pusillanimous nature of some of the British press who had vociferously called for the UK to enter the war but now that hostilities were going so badly wrong had relegated the item to deep inside their pages such as Page 10 preferring tittle-tattle rather than accounts of how badly the war was going. A rather disturbing analysis doing the rounds in the minds of some experts is that Trump will be quite content to let the war drag on until about September at which point he can declare the mid-term elections to be held in November to be postponed. As Trump is heading for a massive defeat, this possibility cannot be lightly discarded. But the consequences for the UK economy are likely to be severe and one analysis published recently has put the job losses in the UK at about 250,000 as well as the twist to inflation.The major political focus this week though will be our own domestic politics in which Starmer will be strenuously denying that he was ever informed of the fact that Mandelson had failed his vetting. There is a very arcane and obscure argument going on at the moment that the civil, servants who knew Mandelson had failed his vetting were forbidden by some legal process to communicate this result to the Prime Minister until the result had assessed and framed in a particular way. I, for one, do not follow the intricacies of this argument whatsoever but no doubt we will be exposed to a lot more of this circuitous kind of reasoning as the story continues to unfold during the course of the forthcoming week. The weather has taken a turn for the better and although it is sunny first thing in the morning, it looks as though we are going to have one of those ‘whited over’ days with a preponderance of cloud for much of the day and temperatures only arising as far as 10° which seems to be a little low for me as we are approaching the end of the month. I have detailed some more grass cutting to be done if the weather holds and then the weeds have started to multiply down the roadway approaching the house so I must tackle these as soon as I have both the inclination and the energy. I thought that I had felt particularly tired after the administration of my COVID booster jab a few days ago and the result of my searched on the web revealed the following. A COVID-19 booster shot can cause you to feel tired or fatigued and fatigue is one of the most commonly reported side effects of COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, indicating that your immune system is responding to the vaccine. So perhaps my feelings of lassitude are not imagination but a response to the vaccine but I have felt better as the days have passed since the booster jab.
In the late morning, I went down the hill by car to pick up my copy of the newspaper. I then continued my journey onto Asda where needed to buy some extra supplies of fruit and one or two items that I cannot get in my normal shopping. Then when I arrived home, I made myself a ‘fish-on-bread’ type of lunch and started to contemplate a lawn cutting job for the afternoon. The sun was shining brightly but it was pretty cold together and the grass at the back of the house was pretty thick so I had to take some care that I dd not overload the mower to make it ‘baulk’ at too heavy a cut but fortunately, I got all of this done and then the mower cleaned up in time for me to watch the Prime Ministerial statement on the Mandelson affair. My mind has been exercised by a seemingly trivial question to which I wanted to know the answer. Some time ago I thought I had lost my Victoria University of Manchester scarf which I have had for the last sixty years but fortunately turned up in a rucksack, At the time, I hunted on the web for a replacement but could not find an exact replacement. But I did manage to locate and purchase a UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) scarf which was identical to the main university scarf but had an original orange stripe. When this arrived, I it has been my constant companion for the last week or so. So the quasi-legal question I have asked myself if whether I am strictly entitled to besport a UMIST scarf. The answer, according to ChatGBT is quite a nuanced one. The strictest interpretation of the legalities involved are that only undergraduates of UMIST should wear the scarf. But UMIST was technically just the technology faculty of the main University of Manchester (called ‘Owens’) until it achieved the status of an independent university in 1994. Then ten years later, it merged back into its ‘mother’ university in 2004. I had graduated in 1968 and whilst I was a student there, Owns and UMIS were joined at the hip, as it were, as one was equally a member of both Student Unions. In practice, Meg and I used to attend folk nights at ‘The Tech’ each Sunday evening. Students from the two universities shared places in the Halls of Residence and there were many cultural and shared facilities across the two institutions. So, my wearing of a UMIST scarf has some degree of legitimacy – and now that the University has completely changed its official colours, the UMIST scarf I now have can be regarded as a legacy product. Incidentally, there is no legal reason who one should not wear the scarf of whatever university one chooses but the whole habit of buying and wearing university scarves now seems an incredibly outdated cultural fashion but I quite enjoy be-sporting my latest purchase to the full (whilst the original scarf s being securely kept in the chest we keep in our hall for the storage of hats, gloves and scarves).