So now we are waking up to a succession of rainy days which comes as a bit of a shock to the system as we became habituated to such a long hot summer. Autumn seems to be well and truly upon us by now which means that I am now in the habit of wearing stouter footwear to it comes to striding out during the course of the day. I do have one of those really light weight shower coats but the time has approached when I need to get used to winter wear clothing again. The next weekend marks the end of British Summer Time as the clocks go back an hour which always makes the evenings appear so much darker. I think the time might be rapidly approaching where we abandon the ritual of putting clocks and back twice a year but this move is not on the political agenda at the moment. As I contemplate the international political agenda this morning, after some military successes things are looking a little bleak for the Ukraine. It seems that Trump may try and form an alliance with Putin and with the tacit acceptance of the Chinese President Xi impose a solution. Commentators are saying that if and when Trump receives a severe setback in the mid-term elections, Trump’s internal domestic agenda might be severely disrupted, in which case he will turn his attention almost exclusively to international affairs whilst he still has two yeas of is presidency left to run. In the meanwhile, President Trump’s physical health and mental state is showing some evidence of decline, probably as a result of frontal lobe dementia. We have been exposed in recent days to the strange sight of a US President publicly trying to humiliate journalists who ask him questions that are not to his liking. For example, when asking a question about the seemingly never-ending war against Iran, a journalist was roundly abused in public. The journalist who Donald Trump ordered to be quiet and asked if he was a ‘sick person’ and told ‘I actually think there’s something wrong with you’ during an Oval Office event has hit back at the president. Feinberg chronicled the events leading up to Trump’s verbal attack, which began after the reporter questioned a new program offering financial rewards for reporting fraud against the federal government, flagging how the False Claims Act already gives whistleblowers a share of money recovered in fraud cases for potentially far larger rewards. This new programme against fraud seems to be particularly ironic in view of the well documented fact that Trump has used his presidency to enrich himself and members of his family by billions of dollars with the use of government largesse in the award of contracts but the full extent of the corruption may never be revealed. Trump appears to be on the edge of losing his battle with the BBC where he is being sued for billions of dollars but the BBC has stood its ground and asked that Trump disclose his financial dealings to the Court to determine whether Trump has suffered the claimed financial damage. It has to be said that much of the American media has crumpled before a Trump onslaught but the BBC may just be on the edge of a historic Trump climb down.
In the afternoon, there was a meeting of the 3A Classical Music Appreciation group and we meet in one of the member’s houses. The afternoon’s activities started off with a talk about the associations of Sir Edward Elgar with Bromsgrove. He often used to visit a cousin in a village about three miles south of Bromsgrove. Later on, this cousin and/or her descendants moved to a house about a mile distant from where we now live and Elgar used to be a regular visitor on Sunday afternoons. Another local connection is that Elgar acquired an Austin 7 car which he then crashed whilst motoring down Bromsgrove High Street in about 1920. There are reports that Elgar might have performed a piece which was performed in St Peter’s Church (which is my local Catholic church) but the manuscript has been lost to everybody’s dismay but it is thought that Elgar himself did attend and worship in St Peters. After this talk and some coffee and biscuits we all listened to a Radio 3 talk on the life of Felix Mendelssohn who is in his youth was a prodigy almost of the stature of Mozart. We know that Felix Mendelssohn arranged and famously revived J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (Matthäus-Passion). In 1829, at age 20, he conducted the historic Berlin Sing-Akademie revival, shortening the work and re-orchestrating parts in a Romantic style. He later created an expanded edition in Leipzig in 1841. He conducted the work again at the Thomaskirche, restoring several of the previously cut movements and adapting the orchestral balance. This edition and performance sparked the 19th-century Bach Revival, bringing Bach’s music out of decades of obscurity. The talk indicated that wherever he travelled in Europe, Mendelssohn used to draw and paint and, as a group, we wondered if these had survived. The answer is that approximately 300 of Felix Mendelssohn’s paintings, watercolors, and drawings have survived. Many are preserved in major archives, including the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, the Library of Congress, and the Courtauld Gallery. I am amazed that some art historian has not had access to these and published them in a book. The evening promises to be filled with space science programmes on the TV in the evening because after an examination of the role of asteroids as they have impacted upon Earth, there will be the next in the excellent Brian Cox series on the planets which I started watching last week. The point about asteroids is that the dust from asteroids is constantly entering the atmosphere where they burn up and vaporise in the Earth’s atmosphere. Some larger ones land on the planet’s surface with concomitant damage whilst enormous asteroids hit the Earth about one every 500,000 years with dramatic consequences (such as the huge asteroid that hit the earth in what is now the Gulf of Mexico and led to the ultimate demise of the dinosaurs as the huge dust clouds blocked out the sun and vegetation across the globe took the impact) A programme that is on my ‘must watch’ list is the results of a year long investigation that ITV has undertaken of the racism and xenophobia displayed by Reform councillors up and down the country. This is no doubt still available on ITVX (the ITV catch up service) but the very rapid growth of the Reform party indicates that to put it at its most benign, the vetting procedures have not managed to screen out the racists and the xenophobes from seeking a natural home in the Reform party.