We awoke yesterday morning to something like ‘normal’ temperatures with a predicted temperature of about 22°. Some rain might be on its way in a day or so but of a very patchy nature and not the sustained downpour for which so many of us have been waiting. However, it appears that the UK’s groundwater supplies (water trapped in aquifers way underground) which forms most of the storage of water is actually holding up quite well and some 40% of supplies are actually at normal or even more than normal levels which is surprisingly good news. I suppose this explains why we have not seen water restrictions or even disconnections which one would have thought was on the cards. The evening before last, it was particularly enjoyable to watch the GB success in the 100 metres sprint relays. The male quartet won their race fairly convincingly whereas the UK female team won by a huge margin. Amy Hunt will now attempt to become the first athlete to win four gold medals at a single edition in the event’s 92-year history when the mixed 4x100m relay takes place on Sunday. Her team-mate Asher-Smith, meanwhile, achieved her seventh gold at the championships – 10 years after capturing her first. Given the success of both the women’s and the men’s team, one can only hope that the mixed relay team will enjoy similar fortunes, but even excellent teams can fail the baton changes unless they have practised very hard together so we shall have to wait and see. The Reform party have unveiled their plans for welfare reform which would entail the withdrawal of the benefits from very many and is predicted to save some £50bn. It now seems unlikely that Reform will ever come to power, however. Robert Jenrick claims a Reform UK government would cut £50bn from the welfare bill, in what it’s describing as the biggest shake-up in a generation. The party’s treasury spokesperson says the plans would result in almost three million people seeing disability and sickness payments withdrawn or modified. The Telegraph reports Reform would abolish personal independence payments (PIP) and the health element of Universal Credit for working-age adults under the plan, due to be unveiled in detail on Monday. Jenrick says 6.9 million people were receiving disability benefits, but adds ‘this is not an epidemic of broken backs and lost limbs’, as since 2002 the share of working-age people claiming for mental health and behavioural conditions had tripled. He adds that under the planned reforms, a new, regularly reviewed, health security allowance would provide support for the ‘gravely ill and severely challenged’. What I find interesting about these proposals is how these proposals are regarded in the wider electorate. No doubt, Reform thinks it will please its natural supporters with these proposals but I wonder how it play out with the wider electorate and whether it will turn out to be a vote winner or a vote loser. There is no doubt that the UK’s welfare bill needs some degree of moderation so as not to be constantly increasing but whether cruel and swinging cuts are the way to achieve this is problematic.
After I had attended church this morning, I made my way to my normal garage where I fuelled the car and the, after a wait, managed to give my car a much-needed wash as it has missed out for a couple of weeks now. I spent some time reading the Sunday newspaper and then started to make some preparations for Sunday lunch which I am going to share with my American friend. This weekend, we had decided on a fish meal so I oven-baked a couple of salmon fillets together with one of a trout. The salmon had a teriyaki sauce which was spread onto the salmon fillets and then finished off with five minutes in the oven. Ny friend had brought along some asparagus spears and some pak choi whilst I had prepared some broccoli. We parboiled these vegetables and then gave them a final tossing in some olive oil and this worked out very well and made for a delicious meal. After we had had our post-prandial rest, we ate a delayed sweet and then went down the garden to pick some blackberries and despite the fact that the birds must have helped themselves to a meal. we picked sufficient for us both to enjoy some of our own home grown fruit which we can eat with either yogurt or ice-cream. In the late afternoon, we viewed some of the highlights of the Franco Zeferelli production of ‘La Bohème’. We decide not to watch the whole of the opera but confined or viewing to the first two extended scenes where the two principal characters meet and fall in love before enjoying some Christmas Eve festivities in the Cafe Momus. Then we skipped to the final act in which Mimi is brought into the garret accommodation of the four bohemian friends before she dies of the all too prevalent consumption (tuberculosis). We both find this a very emotionally compelling opera to experience but then we had the conclusion of the European athletics competition to help to lift the mood. The highlight of this was the mixed male-female 100 metres relay race in which the GB was not only successful but in which Amy Hunt won her fourth gold medal in these games, a feat never before achieved (two individual and two part of relay teams) The Italians won the competition with the GB team being placed second. But if the female long jumper had jumped one centimetre further or the final runner in the 4 x 100 metres men’s relay race had run 0.06 of a second faster, then the GB team would have secured an extra gold meals which would have made them overall winners of the championships. Tomorrow night a viewing of the film ‘Brassed Off’ beckons and my friend and I will watch this together once we have had our early evening walk in the park. One quite interesting philosophical discussion in which my friend and I engaged following the Jason Arday suicide was the incidence of compulsive lying by some individuals in our society. We were speculating whether the loosening of family and community bonds as well as the increasing incidence of evident lack of candour in our political and commercial life had lowered the thresholds for lying behaviour. Certainly. if never challenged, then some people, may continue to lie their way through their social lives and perhaps, if not challenged, they ‘get away with it’ and incorporate the use of lysing as a useful tool to help get on in life