There is an expression that one has to be ‘thankful for small mercies’ and I felt that when I got up this morning and discovered that the weather was actually above freezing at 2° which is some 6° higher than yesterday and predicted to rise by a few degrees during the day. Upon drawing back my bedroom curtain, I could discern a fairly thick blanket of cloud rather than the clear skies that have greeted us in the past few days and so even storm clouds have a gently warming effect. Having said that, we are very much in the ‘calm before the storm’ period as the first major storm of the winter, codenamed ‘Goretti’, is due to strike Northern France on Thursday and Friday. Storm Goretti is expected to move across the south of the country on Thursday and into Friday, bringing with it rain, snow and strong winds. Heavy snow is likely to develop over higher ground in South Wales later on Thursday, before rain turns to snow more widely across parts of England and Wales overnight. Forecasters say 5 to 10 cm of snow could settle in some areas, with up to 20 cm possible on higher ground. A yellow weather warning for snow, covering large parts of Sheffield, Peterborough, Bath and Worcester, and in much of Wales, will be in place from 6pm on Thursday until midday Friday. So I was somewhat dismayed to see that Worcester is named as a town liable to receive significant snow, particularly as it is only 15 miles away from our house and one can only hope that the protective distance may save us from the worst. The whole of Wales is liable to be impacted by the storm and, as is always the case, it is not so much the actual snow but the accompanying strong winds that can cause snow to drift and certainly makes on feel colder. So this is the first morning for the best part of three weeks that I have not come down the stairs and put the Christmas tree lights on but, in a completely nerdish way, I have consulted the special calendar I have printed off that tells me that we have the whole of an extra 2 minutes of daylight today compared with yesterday. The global situation is still dominated by the news which seems almost incredible that Donald Trump seems to be intent on acquiring the mineral wealth of Greenland by hook or by crook. Sky News reports that President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States and it is vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region. The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilising the US military is always an option at the commander-in-chiefs disposal What I had not fully appreciated until the news broke recently is that the US military already have a strong presence across Greenland. The U.S. has one main military base in Greenland: Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, focused on missile warning and space surveillance under a long-standing defence agreement with Denmark. While there were numerous U.S. installations during the Cold War, most have closed, with Pituffik remaining as the primary permanent installation, supporting about 150 personnel year-round, plus seasonal visitors like the New York Air National Guard. Some analysts are saying that given the huge land mass of Greenland (mainly frozen rock making mineral extraction expensive) Trump’s real motivation is just to add Greenland to the existing maps of the United States as coloured in the ‘Stars and Stripes’ it makes the USA appear much larger than it is always is and this feeds into Trump’s paranoia. If one NATO ally invades another, then some analysts have predicted the end of NATO but a more likely scenario is for NATO to exist but much weakened and with the USA suspended from it (until such time as there might be dramatic political change within the USA itself).
My son and daughter-in-law called around mid morning because we had decided that as threesome we would start to clear out what we affectionately call the ‘hobbit holes’ As the house is constructed as a dormer bungalow, the so-called ‘hobbit holes’ are small doors which give access to the eaves of the house which we use for storage purposes. We set to work on what we imagined might be the smallest of these but found a multiplicity of things. These ranged from bedding such as duvets and bed linen but all needed for single beds so we had evidently brought them with us from our previous house. We also discovered a lot of packaging we had been saving, Christmas wrapping paper, wet weather gear that we used when climbing in the Lake District such as cagoules, over-trousers and boot socks and miscellaneous bits and pieces such a fan heater (with a broken plastic foot), a set of steamer pans and all kinds of other things. We quickly junked at anything that looked beyond use and a few items that looked as though they had been mouse-nibbled in the past. Bur anything still in it’s original packaging or capable of current us we made into a separate pile destined for a charity store. We deliberated over how to dispose of two single bed duvets in their boxes but decided to take these to the local tip where they might be added to specialist recovery skip, as we had been led to believe. But the site operative insisted that duvets had to be thrown into ‘irrecoverables destined for landfill’ skip and so with a heavy heart, this was the skip into which they were thrown. I console myself a little that the energy that I might use to wash and then dry these duvets might be of a drain on the earth’s resources than would be gained by their recovery. After disposing of a car load of junk, I motored into town and got some money out of an ATM before I went shopping in my local Aldi. Then I needed to call in at Waitrose to collect a copy of ‘The Times’ and finally returned home in the dark where one more major task awaited me. As the local authority is using newly designed ‘wheelie bins’ for the disposal pf general, paper and garden waste , the older versions of the bins have to be hauled to the kerbside for collection first thing in the morning This took three trips to the end of our access road and the of course I needed to unpack the shopping. So all in all it has ben a pretty full day and I feel pretty tired at the end of it all.