So the day before yesterday panned out in a rather unexpected direction. My American friend, who was unwell, decided to come and spend some time with me in my house and this turned out to be quite a good policy instead of sitting for hours in A&E with the possibility of acquiring an infection. After a sleep and then a light meal that we prepared between us, we watched a very good podcast of the type that we both enjoy because it was the British pairing of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. After this was finished, we started to browse the TV channels and found that we were half way through a transmission of ‘Paddington’ which we both thoroughly enjoy. Disappointed that we had missed some of it, we turned to the BBC iPlayer and were delighted to find that we could enjoy the whole film from the very beginning which we promptly did. This film has many visual gags within it and also some quite apposite political themes (such as how the UK reacts to ‘strangers’ in its midst) and is always fascinating to watch over and over again. One of the jokes that I particularly enjoy is when Paddington (bear) sees a notice on an escalator in the Underground that ‘Dogs must be carried’ and thinks this must be taken quite literally as an instruction. So Paddington goes and finds a pet dog to carry on the underground. I also enjoy the ‘ride’ that Paddington undertakes in a bath down the family staircase after he has flooded out the bathroom. On consulting the internet, I find that Paddington in Peru (the third movie) is not the last film in the franchise. StudioCanal has officially confirmed that Paddington 4 is in active development, alongside a planned television so these are pleasures left to enjoy – I wonder whether Paddington in Peru will be shown this Christmas alongside other Christmas classics? A domestic story that has rather filled the nation with a degree of shock and horror is the news that two policeman lost their lives whilst pursuing a group of teenagers who drove their car the wrong way down the A66. Two police officers were among seven people killed when a car travelling the wrong way down a dual carriageway crashed into a force vehicle. A Volkswagen Passat with five occupants said to be in their late teens struck an oncoming marked Cleveland Police vehicle on the A66 near Middlesbrough. A pursuit of the car had ended before the crash, with the police vehicle just happening to be in the South Bank area. The occupants of both cars were pronounced dead at the scene. My American friend is quite emotional about all of this news as her own father was a policeman and she can imagine the devastating effect upon the families when the police leave for their shift and do not then return home. Meanwhile, Trump is still issuing dire warnings about what he will do in Iran but we have heard this story before so a well known joke is that we have a ‘TACO’ situation, the initials standing for the phrase ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’ The tariff talks between USA and Canada have broken down and so we are entering a period of ‘tit-for-tat’ sanctions in which we know that all Californian wines, as well as other imports, are being shunned like the plague.
Yesterday did not exactly turn as I intended. I went to church at the normal time and was delighted, on my way out, to see my Italian friend who I have not seen for a few weeks now. We had quite a few bits of news to impart to each other so I readily accepted her invitation to pop into her house for a delicious cup of freshly brewed coffee. Our friendship goes back well over fifteen years now, I should imagine, and I have promised her that when the Methodist Centre reopens in about mid-September then I shall take her down in the car each Wednesday where we can join the ‘chatty table’ and re-establish old acquaintances, attenuated whilst the centre has been closed for its summer renovation. After our coffee, I ran the two of us down to Waitrose and then returned my friend to her home before going off and giving the car its weekly wash. I had been contact with my American friend who had been sick during the night and I wonder if the meal I had prepared for her yesterday had proved to be a too heavy on the olive oil, I consulted the web and cooked what I hoped would be a bland dinner of some (tinned) salmon in a creamy mushroom sauce and this worked out pretty well except I think I may have over estimated the strength of the garlic that I deployed. So after my American friend phoned up, I told her about the portion of lunch I had prepared for her but concluded it was too rich for an upset stomach. So instead, I made a special journey down to Asda to pick up some bland foodstuffs and Evian water to deliver to my friend and then returned home for a bit of a doze. Following the international news, it now looks as though the UK is losing patience with the very right wing Israeli government and a war of words has commenced. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband and the Israeli government were in dispute over a controversial settlement project in the occupied West Bank. Mr Miliband summoned Israel’s charge d’affaires – the country’s top diplomat in the UK – on Wednesday to set out the UK’s profound objection to Israel publishing a tender for the construction of about 1,200 homes, as part of the E1 programme of expansion. He called it an unacceptable and destructive act and said the UK would not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution, as he demanded an immediate reversal. Israel for its part had indicated that it was no business of the UK to determine in which part of the Occupied West Bank Israeli settlers choose to live. Even the name of the territory itself alters according to who is speaking because the Spanish refer to the territory as cis-Jordania (literally ‘the other side of the Jordan river’) whilst Israelis refer to the northern part of the West Bank as Samaria and the southern part as Judea, combining them as Judea and Samaria. These biblical names date back over 3,000 years to the ancient Jewish kingdoms, whereas the term ‘West Bank’ was popularised later, during Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967. Whatever it it is called, international law is in no doubt that the occupation of what we term the West bank is illegal having been subject to Israeli occupation, whereas the term ‘West Bank’ was popularised later, during Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967. The West Bank was captured by Israel from Jordan during the Six-Day War in June, 1967. Before that, Transjordan (later Jordan) had occupied and annexed the territory following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.