So the evening before last, the long predicted eclipse arrived to much excitement. The eclipse reached 92% here in the Midlands but as much as 95% in Cornwall. I started to watch it on BBC 24 hour news and it certainly became like a rapid dusk. My American friend came around and at the exact moment of the eclipse here in Bromsgrove which was at 7.16pm we went outside to appreciate the rarity of the moment. Given that the next event will not take place in the UK until 1990, 64 years hence, then neither of us are going to be around to witness it. The TV channels are full of stunning images in case any of us want to replay the moment. But as the new day dawned, there is the extremely hot temperature to contend with a high predicted of about 35% here in Bromsgrove where we seem to be marginally just outside the extremely hot regime which the South East will experience. The BBC weather app has just been enhanced a little so that for your postcode you can click a timeline that will progress you though the temperatures to be expected that day and the next. So once we have tunnelled through the 35% expected later in the day, this may drop marginally to 29% for the following day and the prospect of some slight breezes (rather than a cloudless sky) over the weekend. This has put me into a little bit of a dilemma. as normally I would feel inclined to absent myself from my Tai Chi class. However I think I might attend it and immediately strike for home for the rest of the day as the following week my Tai Chi class will be displaced by a funeral that I going to attend and the following week we should be up in Yorkshire. So I want to explain to my Tai Chi teacher why she will not see me for three weeks but this does not indicate a lack of interest on my part. Turning to more domestic news, we have learned that economic growth grew by 0.4% during the last three months which would normally signal that the economy is not performing well. But, paradoxically, it also shows that the UK economy is quite resilient and is withstanding the effects of the ongoing conflict in Iran and the Straits of Hornuz so the fact that the economy has grown at all is quite remarkable. The undeclared war in Iran is creating a massive political problem in the United States as Trump has practically no options left to play. One option is to end the unpopular war abruptly but this would entail a massive loss of face for the American military and the presidency as a whole. A second option is to continue the conflict, even though America’s missile stocks are being depleted and there is no sign that repeated bombing of Iran is weakening the resolve of the Iranian people to continue the conflict. Meanwhile the mid-term presidential elections are approaching after the summer break and the more the war continues, the more it bodes ill for the President and the Republican party. So in every sense, Donald Trump is between ‘a rock and a hard place’ and he is learning, as most of knew, that it is easy to start a war but quite difficult to end it. The supreme irony is that one of Trump’s slogans to help him win the last presidential election was ‘No more wars’ and the predilection he is in is entirely one of his own choosing. I suppose he believed his own propaganda that the American military was the most powerful in the word and assumed that any conflict would be over within days. But as well as the Iranian conflict, we still have the situation in Gaza in which the Israeli leader Netanyahu is blatantly ignoring the supposed ceasefire because he, too, is facing elections and a premature withdrawal from the Gaza conflict would spell electoral suicide for him. And, of course, the war in Ukraine rumbles on as both Russia and the Ukraine carry on fighting by sending drones into each other’s territory to inflict what damage they can. As is evident by now, I am following American politics quite closely and have noted with a degree of grim satisfaction that after the birth of her second child, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post. Leavitt noted that since returning from maternity leave after the birth of her second child in May, she found it difficult to balance the intensive demands of the White House press office with raising two young children and all of this is quite plausible. But it means that one of Trump’s principal attack dogs is leaving the fray and perhaps she all too fully appreciates the bad news for the Trump presidency which is coming down the line. We also have the saga of the state of Trump’s health in which there are visible signs of him gradually failing and there are quite frequent video clips of him falling asleep during cabinet meetings and the like. Donald Trump has been publicly accused of falling asleep or dozing off at least 25 times during his second presidential term, in addition to multiple well-documented instances during his 2024 Manhattan criminal trial. Because these instances rely on observations by journalists, cameras, and critics rather than medical confirmation, the exact number is highly debated but the unofficial liberal media loves to record and to document these instances when they occur.
So I went along to my Tai Chi class and there were about ten of us altogether so the heat had not deterred many of my class mates. Afterwards, I went for a coffee with by bank manager friend in my normal coffee watering hole and then got home at about midday. My American friend joined me as we were going to avoid the tremendous heat today and my thermometer read 35° in the mid afternoon. We lunched on some quiche and salad and cooled off with some melon slices that had been kept cool in the fridge. We enjoyed a pleasant afternoon together and then settled down to watch some interesting finals in the European athletics competition broadcast n the late afternoon and evening. Once we have got today’s heat and well truly coped with, then the temperature is predicted to drop to 29° and to drift even lower in the days over the weekend. We have a massive fire raging on a golf course in Stourbridge just down the road and I think the fire has spread to at least a couple of houses and perhaps even more as the day unfolds.