Last night, I awoke having had a dream about Meg in an incident in her life which was completely untrue – but could well have been true. They say that often the dreams you remember are ones a few seconds before you wake up and perhaps it was evoked because I had been recalling fondly some of my times with Meg to my American friend the day before. In my dream, Meg and I were on a day trip out somewhere with friends and had stopped off for refreshments. Just before we left, Meg popped into the adjacent loo so our friends said to Meg ‘Do not forget your hat!’ So, Meg made a quick visit to the loo and came back wearing a hat which we did not recognise. So, we told Meg she had got the wrong hat, and Meg was despatched back to the loo to find the correct one. When she re-emerged it was wearing a different hat which none of us recognised so my Friends exclaimed to me ‘Surely you can remember which hat she was wearing?’ to which I had to reply that I could not (to be fair, Meg did have a fair selection of hats and head coverings) So in the dream Meg was making visit after visit to the loo emerging with a different hat on each occasion and then I woke up before anything resembling the correct that had been identified. Now, I must repeat that this dream is not at all true but as Meg’s memory started to fade in her latter years, it could well have been a true story. But to return to a more brutal reality, we know that Donald Trump has a massive streak of vindictiveness against people who I think has wronged him and his ire is particularly directed against Britain who he feels failed to support him in the Iran conflict. Trump is saying that he is minded to punish Britain by withdrawing American support for our recapture of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas to our Spanish and Latin American friends) in 1982. The Argentinians are already starting to make belligerent noises about the return of the islands to Argentina and despite the fact that the Brits built an airstrip on the island immediately after their recapture, it is an interesting question whether Britain could mount a repeat capture if the islands were to be invaded again but this time with tacit American support for the Argentinians. To use a popular expression, it could be that Margaret Thatcher whose popularity shot up immediately after the recapture of the Falkland islands would be turning in her grave. Whether the Trump view that any island laying adjacent to a much more powerful neighbour automatically ‘belongs’ to the neighbour must be a chilling thought for the inhabitants of Taiwan. Taiwan (officially the Republic of China, ROC) is an island located roughly 100 miles (160 km) off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The two are separated by the Taiwan Strait. While geographically close, they have been governed separately since 1949, though Beijing (People’s Republic of China, PRC) claims sovereignty over the island. Later on today, I have a series of Women’s international rugby fixtures to which to look forward so may try and squeeze in some patio cleaning activities around the fixtures. In the morning, I undertook a walk down into town to pick up a copy of my daily newspaper and the Saturday edition also has a supplement containing all the details of the TV broadcasts during the forthcoming week, so I was relieved that they were not sold out. When got back, I made myself do 30 minutes patio clearing ad made a bit more progress but it was actually pretty warm outside.
The afternoon turned out to be rather a curious, not to say fraught, one. I lunched on some salad and ham and had this so that I could watch the whole of the England vs Wales Women’s rugby. As might be expected, England dominated Wales in this match but the Welsh played some entertaining rugby and even managed to score four tries against England which they have never done before. So the Welsh team took heart from the fact that they shown improvements over recent performances and provided an entertaining game. The Italy vs Scotland match was due to start a few minutes later and that is when my troubles started. I knew that my Toshiba in the Music Lounge had had an automatic software update recently but I scarcely believe my eyes when access to the BBC iPlayer seemed to have been removed completely whereas there were 150 other apps, all unwatchable and devices to extract money out of you to watch the channel. I think that over the years, I have come to dread the words ‘Software upgrade’ because problems always seem to occur immediately after un upgrade on whatever device. So I went onto the web and found that the removal of the iPlayer was quite a common problem after a software upgrade on a Toshiba. To try to rectify the situation, I eventually got onto a Chat website (which charged £1 for the privilege) and there you could describe problems to an online TV engineer. This evidently called for the Toshiba model number which meant locating the manual which I did after a search. The TV engineer did suggest that this happened after a manufacturer’s upgrade and perhaps I might consider a FireStick. I had ignored another website popping up asking me for £22 to solve my problem which I ignored. Eventually, I solved the problem for myself after a lot of messing about but it involved going into ‘Settings’, finding a list of ‘Apps’ and then activating/deactivating the apps with either a long or a short press on the remote. None of this was easy but at the end of the day, I did get access to the BBC iPlayer. In any event, Italy was massively defeating the Scottish women which I did not particularly want to watch. But later on tonight, on the iPlayer there should be France vs. Ireland which might be a better contest and worth watching. As I am finishing off today, it looks as though the final attempts to secure a meeting to resolve the Iran conflict have broken down and Donald Trump has not allowed his negotiating team to leave the USA to journey to Islamabad. Trump is saying that ‘he holds all of the cards’ which of course is not the case as Iran still controls the Straits of Hormuz and there is evidently zero trust between the two main protagonists and perhaps we shall shortly see the resumption of overt hostilities.