This morning after I awoke and gazed out of my bedroom window, I noticed it had rained during the night and the tiles on my garden patio were still glistening from the rain. How prolonged was the rainfall I cannot say but it was probably just of the order of a passing shower. I imagine that the ground is so hard baked that any lying surface water would soon evaporate and not reach down into the soil where the vegetation is crying out for water. I consulted the longer range forecast and it dies appear that apart from a few isolated showers, we can expect the low pressure across the north of the country and Scotland to move away and another high pressure area (warm and sunny) will approach is from the South East. for the record, England has recorded its driest July on record, in a series since 1836, with just 6.5mm of rainfall recorded – just 10% of its long-term meteorological average for the month, and less than half of the previous record of 13.4mm set in 1911. One particular story is dominating the political agenda, and it is the early release of some prisoners to ease the overcrowding in our gaols. This may well spell the end of Andy Birnham’s honeymoon period in government and although the Prime Minister is himself taking some holiday, the issue will rumble on. On particular case is being kept in front of the public and this is where a police officer dies as he was dragged along the road by a car he was trying to apprehend, Although the lack of intent meant that that the conviction was for manslaughter rather than for murder, this nicety is rather lost on the public and we now have the bizare spectacle of even a chief police officer threatening to take the government to court in an effort to get the decision in this particular case reversed. There is one way out of this dilemma and this is to perform a ‘U’ turn in government policy and to add the murderers serving police officers to the list (along with rapists and child sex offenders) to the category of prisoners where the early release provisions o not apply. But this is the point at which pure politics start to apply because a ‘U’ turn in policy would make the government appear weak and indecisive and the frequency of ‘U; turns in government policy was one of the reasons why the Burnham government succeeded the Keir Starmer government in the first place. Last night, I viewed a very convincing video which argued that Argentina was shortly to be banned from the 2030 World Cup competition but of course this would take the immediate Number 1 spot in the news bulletins so I concluded that it must be a sophisticated AI fate. But it remains the case that the FIFA disciplinary will undoubtedly sanction Argentina for two major transgressions (displaying of political slogans and the brawl after the match) but whether they will receive only a cursory slap on the wrist after a gap of some weeks remains to be seen. Incidentally, the facts in this are clear and well caught on video constantly re-run throughout the world so who a disciplinary decision is so long delayed perhaps tells you everything that you need to know about FIFA.
This was my normal shopping day and this was conducted easily enough but I had to hunt around to find a copy of ‘The Times’ which I did on the third outlet I visited. Once I returned home, I lunched on some quiche accompanied by some salad and felt a bit better after the eating of it so perhaps my blood sugar level had dropped a litle low. I spent the afternoon a way most unusual for me. Tilm4 were showing a western entitled ‘Siege at Red River’ and I remembered that the name ‘Red River’ had features n a movie clip had seen as casual Although the American viewers of the time witnessed the deaths and unthinking American racism. So I viewed all of the film and the movie clip I remembered did not feature in it. But towards the end, hundreds of native Americans were slaughtered when the recently invented Gatling Gun that they had acquired was captured and turned against them. It says something of the sensibilities of conservative American society in 1954 that although audiences were exposed to the killing of hundreds of North American peoples, the final kiss between the female and male characters which formed the romantic interest in the film was shielded from viewers eyes by the neck of a horse! Wondering whether I was suffering from false memory syndrome, I did do some Google searching and found the clip of film depicting casual American racism In the 1948 western Red River, the ‘Don Diego’ scene depicts Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) forcefully claiming land north of the river that belongs to a Spanish landowner named Don Diego. When Don Diego’s Mexican wranglers object, Dunson shoots one of them dead and sends the survivor back as a hostile messenger. While the scene portrays ruthless land-grabbing and casual violence typical of frontier expansion, critical discussion of the movie more often points to its depiction of Native Americans later in the film as a product of mid-century Hollywood stereotyping rather than this specific encounter with Don Diego’s men. What is interesting to our eyes, though, is that the shooting of a Mexican emissary in cold blood as they were concluding a conversation would have been regarded as not worthy of comment and even the Wikipedia entry pulls its punches and does not mention the inherent racism. After the film had concluded, I knew it was the day before our green garden waste wheelie bin gets emptied and so I chopped down the remainder of the lava tera bush (which had grown to tree-like proportions) and used a saw to cut it into disposable pieces. For good measure I threw in some of another bush that had died as a product of the heat in the front of the house but only managed some of this. At the same time, I managed to sweep a goodly portion of the dead holly leaves that had been shed on the back path into the garde and these, too, went into the wheelie bin. I am aware that there are a lot of other things that needed to be cut back and disposed off but I did not want to overdo it. I managed after several attempts to get through to our favourite eating place in Alcester (pretty little Georgian town with some excellent charity shops) to secure a lunch time booking as my American friend and I are going off to treat ourselves to a little ‘jolly’ at the end of the week.