I have got so fed up with waking up to quite cold weather that I turned to the BBC weather app on my laptop to get some commentary on current conditions. Yesterday in particular, there was quite an icy blast and even today I read that that I can anticipate a day filled with heavy showers and quite a sharp wind. In fact, yesterday I noticed a pile of hailstones lodged in my rear garden gate and it looks as though this bad spell of weather may well persist for a few days more, The temperatures are definitely below the average for mid-May and I am finding this particularly frustrating because I am anxious to go out and get some weeding and general garden tidying-up done but I don’t intend to do this if I m subject to icy blasts the whole time. The last thing I could do with is a bad back induced by gardening in adverse conditions but I may have to wait for the best part of another week until the weather starts to rise to conditions which are average for mid-May. We will have to see what the afternoon brings for us but although the days seem to start bright enough, clouds and rain soon seem to sweep over us. The political scene is dominated by suggestions that the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is poised to resign and to attempt a challenge against the Prime Minister. Ny prognostication is that this would be a terrible move by Streeting although he may feel as though he is being swept along by a media surge and feels powerless to resist it. There are two reasons why a Streeting strike at this time may be ill-judged although he probably feels impelled to make his bid before Andy Burnham has the chance to re-enter Parliament. The first of these reasons is to ignore one of the first rules of contemporary politics which is to ensure that you can count! Although the best part of 100 MPs might have signed a letter indicating that they think that Starmer’s days are numbered, it would be folly in the extreme to assume that this will translate over into the 81 firm votes that Streeting needs to have to mount a leadership challenge. Signing a letter is one thing but an actual vote to de-fenestrate an existing leader is quite another. A second factor is a simple reading of political history. The candidate who proffers the first blow in a contest rarely emerges as the ultimate winner and Streeting, on the right of the party and a good media performer, is probably is not a good judge of the depth to which he is disliked on the left of the party, not least because he seems open to letting the private sector rip open the body of the NHS. I have a small but indicative reason why people may feel discontent with the NHS. I was asked to apply for a routine diabetes monitoring but the app (sourced to a third party) told me it could not process my application at this time. So I phoned my surgery which told me in the introductory blurb that there are very long waits for hospital appointments at this time and therefore do not pressure the GP service at this time because there is nothing they can do about it. I was offered a routine appointment, eventually, but this was in three weeks time for, admittedly, a non-urgent appointment. But if you multiply these instances up, there is no wonder that the population feel that ‘their’ NHS (reportedly, the nearest thing that we have to a national religion) is actually crumbling around us.
After my Tai Chi session this morning, I spoke with two of my fellow class members both of whom seemed to be having a torrid time with ill and failing relatives. My bank manager friend was experiencing a situation in which his mother-in-law was failing fast and whilst some members of his family were being cooperative others were not to add to his distress. And another class member seemed to be surrounded by failing relatives at the moment so naturally I was very sympathetic to their respective plights. With the UK’s ageing population we now have a situation in which the aged are looking after the extremely aged, raising, of course, the interesting question of ‘Who cares for the carers?’ After an extended chat, I left and called in at a couple of shops but, as so often happens these days, neither of them stocked the items for which I was searching. So I came home and cooked myself a meal of chicken pieces, heated up in some onion gravy and supplemented by a type of stir-fry of onions, tomatoes, garlic and a few mange-tout peas. As I turned on the TV news when I was sitting down to eat my dinner, I see that the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has resigned in order to challenge the Prime Minister followed by the customary exchange of letters. But Wes Streeting now has to demonstrate that he ‘has the numbers’ of others supporting him and I suspect this may well be not the case. So now the Labour Party is entering a period of complete turmoil as despite the unhappiness of many Labour MPs, any leadership campaign might be protracted, messy and possibly leading to a narrow victory which is inconclusive. In the meanwhile, Keir Starmer remains in office and, as yet, nobody has yet to challenge him directly. So I am reconciled to a fairly damp and gloomy afternoon, in which if I had hoped to get the lawns mown, then this hope is dashed as the grass will now so wet as to make mowing a rather messy business. My American friend phoned up to tell me how her cold is progressing and, very sensibly, she has decided that she had better stay out of direct contact with me so that does not pass her cold onto me, which of course I appreciate. On the first and the third Saturday of each month, there is a more general meeting in the Methodist Centre which goes by the acronym of ‘Cameo’ which initials stand for ‘Come And Meet Each Other’ in which the unattached (generally widows and widowers) meet for a coffee and then we have a talk or a communal activity of some kind. Next Saturday will be the third of the month so I shall turn up and see what is on offer. As might be expected, the numbers of widows far exceeds the numbers of widows by a ratio of about 10:1 from what I remember of the last meeting but the ratio in UK society as a whole is about 4:1. Perhaps women are better joiners than men in their widowed status and hence they are more likely to turn up to these communal events than are men.