I awoke fairly late yesterday after I had had one of those nights where you seem to be chasing your own tail all night – all can dimly remember is that I was attending some kind of mathematics convention where nobody could agree on anything and we drifted from one scenario to another  all night. In the evening, I had the latest edition of ‘Question Time’ the transmission of which I had just missed the evening before and also watched the Women’s football team secure an evental victory over Greece by 3:1 in a not very convincing performance. When Inhad been up for a sleepless spell in the middle of the night, I saw a video on the preparation of a vegetarian meal which looked so good. At its heart was some chickpeas from a tin, drained, rinsed and blended with a hand-held grinder to a pulp before being added to four eggs in a bowl, whisked and enhanced with the addition of some chopped fresh parsley After this had been put aside, some onions and peppers were gently stir fried and then enhanced with some herbs and seasoning until softened. The eggs and chickpeas mixture is used to make two sorts of pancakes after a gentle frying and then cut into squares and the onions and peppers mixture are then reheated and stirred and the whole is served with a Greek yogurt dressing. Although I did take the trouble to write down the stages in a little notebook, I had better re-watch the video to make sure I have got all of the steps in the right order. The commentator to the video introduced it saying that he had been taught how to make this in a specialist  restaurant and the results were more tasty than a conventional meal of meat plus two vegetables. I think that this culinary experiment had best be left to the start of next week when I have plenty of time, patience and of course all of the necessary ingredients to hand.  The international political news this morning is filled with the American determination to screen in real time the execution of an American sergeant  who was evidently mentally deranged and had run amok and shot dead several of his fellow soldiers years ago. Live streaming and therefore a ‘de facto’ public execution was last performed in the US some ninety years ago and America will join Afghanistan and Iran as the only other two countries in the world to offer public executions. It looks as though even the Trump regime itself is split by this decision by the President and Pete Hegseth, the American self-styled secretary of state for ‘War’ and the vice president has announced his intention not to view the execution. Responding to the announcement that the Trump administration has set the first military execution since 1961, and that the execution will be carried out by firing squad and livestreamed to the public, Justin Mazzola, Deputy Director of Research at Amnesty International USA, has pronounced that ‘The announcement by the Trump administration that it has set the first military execution in more than six decades is reprehensible and showcases the inherent arbitrariness of the death penalty and the authorities’ utter disregard for the right to life. The death penalty is a violation of human rights, no matter what. International human rights bodies have long found public executions as incompatible with the prohibition on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The claim that the death penalty serves as a greater deterrent is simply unfounded: there is no evidence that it has a unique deterrent effect. The death penalty does not make us safer. Livestreaming the taking of a life by firing squad would only compound the cruelty of the death penalty and perpetuate the cycle of violence that the authorities purportedly seek to end. This announcement adds to the display of cruelty that we have just witnessed in the senseless pursuit of the execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee. The US death penalty is irredeemably broken. It is high time that the US authorities, at all levels, use their power to show human rights leadership and end this ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment once and for all.’ All of that having been said, some two thirds of Americans approve of capital punishment and it would not be surprising if the Supreme Court, heavily weighted by Trump nominees, did not give the go ahead for the execution in early December.

My son and daughter-in-law came round to visit me after I had had a minimal breakfast and quickly got a copy of the Saturday edition of the newspaper which tends to sell out quickly. Then we tried to put our collective heads together to attempt to load the TED app on the new Samsung Smart TV. Whilst there are seem to be massive of almost trivial apps available TED is not amongst them and it seems cannot now be downloaded as an app. However it is possible to access it either through a browser or directly from YouTube itself so I think this will suffice for my purposes. With the visit of my family, I completely forget that I was scheduled to have some flu and COVID jabs in the late morning. In the event, my daughter-in-aw drove me down, I tendered abject apologies but was seen in about a minute and emerged two minutes later with a flu jab in one arm and a COVID jab in the other. I had recognised the doctor and she had recognised me but at this stime of year I think they try and get the vaccines inside the patients an get them it of the surgery in about two minutes flat. Tomorrow I shall attend church in the morning but may feel a little under the weather so I am going to return home and coddle myself. During the afternoon, I could not resist a viewing of the Jane Austen ‘Emma’ which is a book I studied for GCE ‘O’-level but I did not enjoy this particular production of ‘Emma’ very much. When this concluded, I set about making two batches of sweet potato soup but I had previously given it a ‘base’ of an onion, carrot, celery and parsnip mixture so we will have to see how it all turns out. MY TV viewing for the rest of the day is all rather variable so I might look at the iPlayer to see if there have been any good films on during the week that I have missed. I expect that when I awake in the morning, it might be with two sore arms as a result of the vaccinations but I am happy to have got these shots of vaccine inside me before the winter flu season starts in earnest.

I have been following the American mid-term elections with a great deal of interest and we are now in a situation where these critical elections are only three and a half weeks away – because of wide spread postal voting, many Americans will already have voted. What caught my attention this morning was some video clip of Donald Trump being repeatedly heckled at an election rally in Texas. Trump has visited this one time deep red (= Republican) state and it could be that the Democrats could even win the state. According to some polls, which may be quite unreliable, the Republicans seem to be trailing the Democrats by about 4 percentage points in the race to the Senate. Now Texas is such an iconic state that its loss would be almost inconceivable to the Republicans. We are also hearing similar reports about Kansas, a state that was last held by the Democrats some 94 years ago. The Kansas race for the Senate is very interesting because the Democrat candidate used to be an independent who has only recently joined the Democrats and is a pastor. These last two factors alone might help wavering Republican voters to vote Democrat and the latest opinion polls put the race on a knife-edge with the two candidates tied at about 45% each. The critical factor seems to be the massive unpopularity of Donald Trump, reinforced by higher prices and the price of ‘gas’ (= petrol) at the pumps which shows no sign of abating. The Democrats are convinced, and not without reason, that Trump will every conceivable trick to  attempt to nullify the election races that he will probably lose. All kinds of conspiracy theories  abound but the most prominent is that Trump will declare that every election that he loses to be the result of ‘fraud’ and will challenge the result either in the courts or by using presidential orders. So we may have a situation in which the USA as a whole becomes almost ungovernable if the Republicans lose heavily but then refuse to accept or  endorse the result. It is certainly the case that the whole of the US government has been energised to try every ploy possible to deny the Democrats victory and the groundwork has already been done in several Republican states who have redrawn their electoral districts in order to maximise the Republican vote and to deny the Democrats victory. The Democrats may have little option in the last analysis but to take to the streets in protest which will then be met with the forces of the state and chaos may well ensue. It is in the nature of the electoral cycle that mid-term elections generally go against the party that happens to be in power (as happens with by-elections in the UK) but we are now in a situation where Donald Trump completely ignores the rule of law and the courts may be powerless having been ignored so many times by the Trump regime over the past few months. As followers of the Epstein files scandal will know, courts have repeatedly asked the FBI to release documents including one that we know that exists that accuses Donald Trump of the rape of a 14-15 year old and the FBI have taken every step of obfuscation known to man to prevent the release of these documents, even though we know that they exist.

After my Tai Chi class this morning, I walked into town with three fellow class members to whom I have introduced the delights of the horse sanctuary coffee shop which I frequent once per week – we enjoy this experience because it is not like a normal coffee house and we are always  greeted like long-lost friends. After I pleasant chat, we all went  our separate ways and I popped into the large Asda superstore because  I wanted to buy some dried milk to put into my coffee and there are certain items that Aldi just does not sell. I got home and had a brief chat with my neighbour whilst we were busy retrieving our wheelie bins from the kerbside after the weekly emptying and then I made myself quite a delayed lunch of quiche and cabbage. To make the cabbage a little more interesting, I mashed it with some butter, a dash of hot chilli sauce and some of the excess oil from some dried peppers and tomatoes which I was serving up for myself as a little side dish. This little experiment worked quite well and I might  make an even more experimental mixture the next time I try this combination. Probably because of my new found interest in things culinary, YouTube has refined its algorithms and every so often makes some food preparation part of the offerings it made for me. Today’s video was quite an eye opener as it explained in some detail why people nearly cook mushrooms in entirely the wrong way. After the video presentation, I am going to try and put the lessons learnt into  effect which is to cook the mushrooms dry and whole in a chopped pan and add a modicum of soy sauce and a little oil only at the very end of the cooking process. As the nights are drawing in and there is a bit of a cold snap at the moment, then mushrooms on toast are quite a tempting evening supper so I might indulge myself in a few days time. I cannot fail but to notice that I all of these cookery programs, the chefs inevitably use a very broad bladed kitchen knife which also comes in useful, because of its width, as a way of transferring the prepared vegetables into the cooking pan.  So I thought I would treat myself to a broad-bladed chef’s knife as I am preparing vegetables nearly every day and all the supermarkets have removed knives from their displays lest they fall into the hands of errant teenagers. Selecting the knife which comes in its own self-sharpening case seemed the easy part but now we fall foul of the regulations regarding the sale of knives which evidently applies to online outlets as well. The age verification system needed to take a selfie pf my face and then both the front and back of my driving licence which was fiddly in the extreme as it was not immediately evident how this was to be done and it took more than one attempt. But eventually, I was successful and the knife should  arrive tomorrow, to be financed largely by the refund of a payment for some glass storage jars that failed to arrive even though the tracking system reported that they had been delivered. The joys of online shopping but these little hiccups occur on occasion.

The evening before last, I went out for one of my monthly ‘curry club’ nights with other members of the U3A group. The restaurant was a recently reopened/refurbished one in the High Street of Bromsgrove and the food was of a high quality and service quite attentive. We were  a party of about 16 split over two tables and the company was pleasant but it was slightly unfortunate that a large part of about 16-18 came to occupy a long adjacent table and they were naturally chatting excitedly with each other. Consequently the noise levels were tremendous and we could hardly hear the conversations going on in our own table. The lady sitting immediately on my right was evidently a keen gardener and she had been busy undertaking pruning activities in her garden. So she had brought along a bag full of both bay leaves and rosemary which she distributed to those of us who could make use of these herbs in our cooking. I think I will hang them up for several days to dry and then either put them in a glass jar or freeze them. I returned home to witness the second half of the England-Czech Republic match in which England were 2:0 ahead at half time and finished the match as easy winners, scoring an additional goal in the second half. I slept in a little this morning as I thought that I might as I was somewhat tired after the day before filled first with Pilates, then then with lawn-cutting and finished off with a restaurant visit. As I awoke, it was to lots of news that had been happening overnight. The most dramatic news was that Christa Pike who had survived a bodged execution attempt by the state of Tennessee had recovered consciousness and had managed some words of communication with her lawyers. The available medical details are exceedingly sparse and the eventual long term outcome very uncertain as there may be a long and tortuous road to recovery which may take several months. We do know, however, that both arms have been severely damaged as the result of the bleach-like agent drug not entering her veins to kill her but into the surrounding tissues. Quite apart from the drug, I think it was 1¾ hours that her brain was oxygen starved from the time when the execution was first attempted to her transportation into the ambulance to convey her to hospital so a degree of brain damage must have been done – which, in a paradoxical sense, preserves her according to the US constitution from further attempts at judicial execution. English newspapers are still bereft of any news at all of these events whilst the American liberal press is awash with it. But another development overnight were the rantings of Donald Trump who invited the Iranians to ‘take out’ the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego which, as Trump went on to argue ‘is a small price to pay’. The White House is saying that these remarks were meant in a jocular fashion and were delivered in the course of a campaign rally. If the words are taken at face value, then Trump has not only violated the Presidential oath of succession but this must be an act of pure treason. As the liberal commentators are pointing out, if a Democratic president had uttered these words, then impeachment would have followed within hours but somehow different rules seem to apply when Donald Trump is involved so great is his hold over the minds of the Republican party, none of whom dare to contradict him.

In the mid-morning, I went for a coffee and a chat in the Methodist Centre and listened to a long account of the pleasant experiences that one of my fellow U3A members  when she had been on a recent cruise which had called in at Madeira as well as other places. After we had broken up, I did my normal shopping for the week making sure that I had bought some extra spices, including ginger, to aid my culinary activities. In view of the meal I had yesterday evening, I was not particularly hungry today so just had a bowl of soup enhanced with some spices and with a few little cubes of ham thrown into provide a slightly more satisfying repast. Then, after lunch, I entered  into a ‘one thing  leads to another’ scenario occasioned by what happened on my TV set yesterday. In the course of my viewing yesterday evening I got a ‘Software Update’ invitation on my fairly aged Toshiba and with a degree of trepidation I accepted the update invitation. But on this occasion, the update took place just once instead of the about ten times that I had to repeat he procedure the last time I updated. Rather subjectively, I feel that accessing YouTube via the internet is a little crisper than it was but I also noticed that most of the apps that I view regularly had not been re-activated. But I now know that you have to go into ‘Settings’ and choose the apps that you require (principally, the BBC iPlayer and ITVX) and this seemed to work as it should. But amongst the apps now available to me was ‘TED’ which my son and daughter-in-law have told me about as a series of informative lectures and presentations. So I now have TED in my list of apps and decided to give it a go. I did stumble across and the enjoyed a presentation called Kasley Killam who was presenting the thesis of a book she had written and was evidently promoting called ‘The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier and  Happier’ and after I had absorbed the message of the presentation I have ordered a second-hand copy of her book which cost me £5 and should arrive by next Tuesday. Killam’s thesis is essentially very simple : we concentrate on our physical health and then our mental health but our social health is often sadly neglected. According to some of the ‘blurb’ advertising the book, research shows that people with a strong sense of belonging are 2.6 times more likely to report good or excellent health. But people who lack social support  are up to 53% more likely to die from any cause. Now this has struck a particular chord with me because one of the ways to prevent the onset and progression of dementia is to build strong social relationships and since Meg’s death from dementia, I have tried via U3A and other means to develop and strengthen my own social relationships.

The American decision to remove their fleet of bombers from Fairford, Gloucestershire, is starting to come into focus. The most expensive bomber is the B2 at a reported cost to build and develop of $2 billion although cheaper versions are in development. The runway at Fairford is said to be one of the longest in Europe but then, of course, it is surrounded by roads and villages unlike the American air force bases themselves that are often located in desert areas which are therefore so much easier to defend. After the recent suspicious activity that took place in the middle of the night, the Americans appear to have realised that these American assets are under some threat and a £1,000 drone, launched from just outside  the perimeter fence, could take out or incapacitate a $2 billion aircraft. As Donald Trump is intending to wind down his war against Iran and therefore not utilise Fairford as a forward base, the calculation of the potential benefits has altered particularly as Iran may be using ‘sleeper’ agents in the UK to attack American bases. We know that several American bases in the proximity to Iran ave been successfully attacked and damaged but the Americans are not communicating this fact to their general public. Images showing widespread damage to multiple US sites in the Middle East from Iranian strikes have been obtained by the BBC’s US partner CBS. The photos, provided by active military personnel, show a severed radar jet, flattened trailers and severely damaged buildings. The undated photos were taken at US bases and sites in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. One member of the military, who was not named by CBS, said: ‘This is major damage to our bases that has not been communicated to the American public. We are standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.’ The White House referred the BBC to US Central Command. Centcom did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The photos, which have not been independently verified by the BBC, were published the day after a report from the Pentagon’s watchdog confirmed hundreds of buildings and structures at US bases in the Middle East have been damaged and destroyed by Iran. One of the photos showed a destroyed Boeing E-3 Sentry at Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia that has been ripped in half, its tail section crumpled into a tangled mess of metal. I am always reminded in these circumstances of the wise words of the veteran Labour politician, Denis Healey (although this may be a mis-attribution) that ‘In war, the first casualty is truth’ The evening before when browsing through YouTube on the latest news of the bodged execution in Tennessee, I came across a UK made video on the history and failure of multiple methods in the United States. The conclusion of the film was that there are flaws in each major method of execution which hit public sensibilities ranging from the electric chair (which fried people so that flames sometimes shot out of their heads) to the gas chamber (in which people died in agony often taking 20 minutes to die and ‘out of favour’ since the revelations of the Holocaust). Hanging, if properly executed and the guillotine, seem to be the most effective methods but every method, including lethal injections which appear to be more clinical and can one hardly use the word ‘humane’ seem to have flaws. In the sad case of Christa Pike, she may be so brain-damaged that execution cannot be allowed under the US constitution so she may be condemned to live out whatever days remain to her in a vegetative state. For some reason, both the Times and the Sunday Times have taken the editorial decision not to carry any reports on this bodged execution and one wonders why as it may sway public opinion in the UK definitively in the direction of abolition as public pinion is still said to be in the region of 50%-55% despite  the fact that the death penalty has been abolished since 1969.

In the late morning, I went down into town to attend my Pilates class together with three other regulars. This is just a small class but we have been attending for years now and the time of the day is rather arkward for many being in the middle of the day. We have our little traditions one of which is to have five minutes of relaxation at the end of the session if it happens to be anybody’s birthday during the preceding week. This was the case this week but I generally manage to fall asleep within the allotted time span but eventually our instructor’s voice permeates my doze and I waken up but generally when everyone is getting up.  After I returned home, I cooked myself a quick lunch which was a prawn omelette which I wanted to keep quite small as in the early evening I am due to go out and participate in the latest of our U3A Curry Club meals. The afternoon was a fine one and although  was feeling tired after the Pilates, I made myself get out and give the back lawn a cut which, as it happened, was quite desperately needed. There is an England football match on this evening which would have normally taken my attention but I think it is important for me to sustain my social contacts whilst I can. Some quite extraordinary local news has emerged recently. The town of Bromsgrove has been ‘plagued’ (and I use the word advisedly) by a massive road improvement scheme whereby the A38 road which rune down one side of the town is being ‘improved’ so that two carriage ways are being extended into three. Given  the other roads that the A38 has to cross, this improvement has been subject to masses of delays and the inconvenience to which the town’s inhabitants have been subject is hard to exaggerate. When the improvements are completed by next spring, some two and a half years behind schedule, the highways authorities are arguing that the residents of Bromsgrove will benefit because a journey from the north of Bromsgrove to the south on the improved road will now save an estimated two and a quarter minutes (during rush hour) This road scheme will only transfer a bottle-neck from one place to anther about 300-400 yards distant. Our local Tory MP is incandescent about these delays (and rightly so) and recently the leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, was visiting  the area and was briefed on the entire debacle. There is now going to be a Parliamentary debate in about two weeks time which I think is going to be broadcast on the Parliamentary channel so this may well be an occasion when it is worth having one’s eyes glued to the TV because I have never heard of another local mishap being discussed in a full Parliamentary debate before.  No doubt there will be a lot of opportunity to score political points particularly at the expense of the bankrupt (and Reform led) Worcestershire County Council but the blight upon the lives of the people of Bromsgrove as a result of this scheme has been extreme.

The evening before last, I watched on the U&Drama channel the first two episodes of Thomas Hardy’s’Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ As it happened, this was one of the classic versions that I have seen on at least two previous occasions but I love any dramatisations of Hardy and cannot resist another viewing. The last two episodes will be shown back to back next weekend so this is something to which to look forward. The latest of my soup making ventures – leek and potato – seemed to go well enough but the overall result was so bland that this is a soup I do not think I will repeat making in the future, Next week’s foray will be to make some pumpkin soup and evidently, I will parboil and roast the pumpkin slices first to extract the maximum flavour. I scoured the American  media to see if there is any news of the fate of Christa Pike after she survived the administration of two lethal injections in Tennessee but no medical reports are being released. Her lawyers have informed us that she has not regained consciousness since the botched execution attempt and may not do so for several days yet and no-one knows what the eventual prognosis will be. As things stand at the moment, the probability of her being irreparably brain damaged is quite high as her brain was deprived of oxygen for a long time until she was admitted to the ambulance/hospital. To be brain damaged is a sort of reprieve, though, as under the US constitution and subsequent Supreme Court decisions, the death penalty  is not permitted on a person who cannot give full consent and is not aware of their surroundings or is cognitively incompetent. So now we have the absolutely bizarre paradox that the state of Tennessee with an array of equipment cannot perform an execution competently despite all of their protocols. But – and this is only a thought experiment- the medical authorities could achieve the same result (the death of Christa Pike) by the simple flick of a switch that would turn off her life support system. The only 100% certain method of execution would be death by a firing squad but this is rejected for diverse reasons in several state legislatures. Ironically enough, traditional methods such as hanging or the guillotine will cause death within a second or so. Meanwhile, there are strange goings-on here in the UK. There is a huge American airforce base at Fairford in Gloucestershire which housed a range of American bombers such as the B1, B2 and B52. But there is some evidence that an Iran-linked plot attacking the base may just have been foiled by the UK  and, probably  as a consequence, the Pentagon has ordered the withdrawal of all the American bombers back to their bases in the USA. On the face of it, this seems a bizarre decision as some on the left of politics have argued for years that Fairford is the American equivalent of an aircraft carrier from which America could launch attacks on the other side of the world from America. There is some speculation that Trump as commander-in-chief may have ordered this removal of American aircraft as a precursor to bringing the war to and end in Iran.  I any case, we are now only 29 days until the mid-term American elections on 3rd November and postal voting as already started in several parts of the USA.

I waited in for my chiropodist to arrive early in the morning but she was delayed so I had time to pop into town and pick um a copy of my daily newspaper. I had done some research  earlier on in the day what can be done to enliven a rather insipid leek and onion soup – from the accounts I read on the web, this is not an infrequent complaint. The answer seems to lie  in the administration of some salt which I had avoided completely in my preparations yesterday. I had a small portion of the soup left over and enlivened it with some garlic salt, onion granules, Worcester sauce and a dash of apple cider vinegar. This was to enough to turn the remnants of my soup into a rich and tasty sauce into which I dropped some slices of ham and then I had a meal of this with a parboiled and oven roasted mixture of carrot and parsnip as well as a small portion of cabbage. After I had rested a little after lunch, I girded up my loins and set to with the mowing of the green area in front of the house which receives two cuts and I have a little break for ice-cream in the middle. After I had completed this task, I turned on Classic FM and two of may favourite pieces of music were played one after the other. The first was Offenbach’s ‘Barcarolle’ but with the addition of two female singers (a soprano and a mezzo I think) followed by Pelagia’s Song from the film ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ which is both a love story and a war movie in the one film but one which I find emotionally very compelling. Later on in the evening, there is going to be a Sky Arts presentation of the work of Andrea Bocelli lasting an hour and a half so this is going to keep me enthralled for the evening. The Tory party conference is taking place at the moment and it appears that Kemi Badenoch wants to established a marked right-wing agenda, wishing no doubt to emulate Margaret Thatcher. The snatches of policy changes that I have  gleaned today (but I may be mistaken)is a commitment to abolish the Environment Agency, to restore child allowances to a of those with incomes in excess of £100,000 a year and to release building developers from the obligation to provide any social housing. I cannot see these policies will appeal to the demographic of middle income, undecided  female voters who may well be crucial in the next election. The party is advocating the ‘most ambitious deregulation project in a generation,’ arguing that accumulating rules have stifled British living standards. Plans include dismantling environmental regulators like Natural England and the Environment Agency, moving their necessary functions directly into government departments to cut red tape for businesses and farmers. There is no doubt that the Conservative party has been pulled almost ineluctably to the right by parties such as Reform but the acid test is how to appeal to the floating voters. When you see what had happened to Britains rivers and water supplies since privatisation, one would have thought that deregulating the almost farcical light self-regulation is not the political path to choose.

I am not normally a fan of football, particularly when England are playing, but the night before last was a little special. England were playing Croatia and I tuned in one minute before the end of the first half just in time to see England score their fourth goal in the half. During the second half, England scored three more times, making the final score 7:0 which is the biggest margin of victory recorded against a top 50 Uefa team. The English forwards were on fire, each of the four scoring and the Croatian defence was dire contributing to the final result. Late on in the day, I intend to scour the airways on ITV wondering if there are any free-to-air matches but I am not very hopeful. The first thing that I did when  got up in the morning was to select one large Maris Piper potato and get it sliced, peeled and immersed in cold water to reduce the starch content before I deploy it in my soup-making in the afternoon. Last night, I enjoyed the last of the curried parsnip soup that I had in stock and next week I am going to be more adventurous and try some pumpkin soup. I have looked at a quick YouTube video on this and it looks straightforward enough so all I need to ensure is that I have a large pumpkin or another squash in time for next weekend. There may be a cookery programme to absorb my attention later on in the day and sometimes these prove to be interesting. In the political sphere, one item that attracted my attention was the fact that Andy Burnham is to scrap the plans formulated by the Keir Starmer government to restrict the use of jury trials. I would have thought this was pushing at an open door because on many sides of the political divide there was a degree of uneasiness about plans to limit jury trials. The Conservative party conference is beginning this weekend and commentators are speculating whether Kemi Badenoch can do enough to restore Tory fortunes. Whenever the Tories come up with a new policy with which to attack the Labour government the charge is always that they had enough time in power to solve the problem (e.g. building more prison places) so why had they not done it? The morning’s attendance at church did not go according to plan. Our regular priest is going to be away for a fortnight as he is attending to the funeral of one of his brothers and is then due to a little of a delayed summer holiday. So we were due to have a ‘relief’ priest today but his car had broken down on his way to the church. So the ‘elders’ of the parish scrambled together the elements of a communion service so that the congregation  had not made a visit to the church in vain. All of this worked quite well and we sang our usual hymns including the Victorian classic ‘All things bright and beautiful’ but without the offensive third verse which implies that the class of structure of Victorian society was in accordance with God’s plan for humanity. At the end of the service, I went and had my usual coffee dangling an 18-month old on my knee for a few minutes to give their parents some respite. In late November, we are due to have a parish meal in a local hotel but precious few people have signed up for it and I suspect that the price for it is too high for most parishioners so perhaps on future occasions a simpler alternative to the full Christmas fare needs to be considered. I was a little dismayed that I got a low tyre pressure on my car’s dashboard this morning so having collected my newspaper, I spent the money I would have spent on a car wash feeding money into the machine which supplies air in our local BP garage. I have often wondered whether to get one of those domestic tyre inflating machines  but my experience of them in the past as not been a very happy one. Having got home, I perused the TV programmes and found something very much to my liking on U&Drama which is a British free-to-air television channel owned by UKTV (a subsidiary of BBC Studios) that broadcasts classic and modern drama series. Late in the afternoon, they are going to broadcast the first two parts of Thomas Hardy’s’ Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. This starts in the late afternoon and goes on until 8.00pm when we shall have more football to entertain us (Wales vs Denmark) I have just checked that Parts 3&4 are to be broadcast next week at the same time.

In the afternoon, I managed to catch a résumé of the England vs Argentina match from the first round of the ‘Nations’ competition, the second round starting in November. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon making my leek and potato soup which I am sure will turn out to be pretty bland but at the time of dishing it up, I will probably enhance it a little with some black pepper and creme fraiche. I always add a bit of coconut milk to these creamed soup recipes in any case. I always prepare the soup in two batches with an initial parboiling and the a quick blast in the microwave oven before I hand over the rest of the job to the soup maker. I have watching my timings quite carefully and hope that I can get the two batches completed just before my viewing of the Thomas Hardy. My Italian friend from down the road gave me a swift telephone call and I invited her out to the Methodist centre next Wednesday, but she has started to take some piano lessons which may coincide on a Wednesday morning. The week in prospect is a fairly humdrum week although I have a ‘Curry Club ‘engagement to which to look forward this Tuesday evening. This week we are gong to sample an Indian restaurant which has fairly recently appeared on the Bromsgrove High Street (although it might just a change of name and ownership which is not uncommon these days) In the meanwhile, if the spell of good weather continues, then I think the grass will need cutting front and rear and, at this time of year, there is always some pruning and cutting back to be done if I have both the time and the energy to do it and then at some stage I will need to employ a gardener to undertake some more radical cutting back as th ack garden is pretty overgrown.

So yesterday was the day of the big ‘vegetable stock preparation’ and I think that all has gone well but I won’t know until the final taste comes when I prepare some soup in the next day or so. I started off with a good array of freshly scrubbed, but not peeled, vegetables (onions, peppers, carrots, celery, leek, garlic and sweet potato) to which I added some thyme (from a herb jar) and some freshly cut basil. but no salt. After a good drizzle of olive and just a splash of boiling water, this collection was cooked for about 20 minutes with a constant stirring so that it did not stick. Then this was blitzed with a hand held mixture until I ended up with a kind of gooey paste (which did accord with the video I had watched previously)  I had purchased from the internet some extra large plastic ice cube containers and these I filled with a spoon (and put the plastic lid over them) before they were popped into the freezer. A little job for the next day or so is to pop out these cubes and perhaps wrap them in little foils of silver paper so that they resemble the bought product. So far, so good except I do not know what the eventual taste will be but stuffed full of good ingredients I would surprised if they do not taste good. So now instead of reaching for the onion gravy jar, I shall deploy my own product and I have 16 of them so I imagine I will use them up at the rate of about 4 per week. The night before, I watched again the film that BBC had made of the life of Florence Foster Jenkins with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, both of whom were incomparablly good in their respective roles. I must say that the scenes at the very end when Florence was on her death bed and her husband expressed his deep love for his (admittedly eccentric) wife, I was actually moved to tears (as it reminded me of Meg’s death)  I wondered how true to life the film managed to be and discovered that apart from a little dramatic licence, it was a pretty accurate portrayal. The 2016 biographical film Florence Foster Jenkins is remarkably faithful to the outline of the real-life New York socialite, though it took some dramatic license with audience reactions and her final moments. The film accurately portrayed the singing and costumes: Florence (played by Meryl Streep) genuinely had no sense of pitch or rhythm, wore eccentric self-made costumes, and threw roses into the crowd during her shows, just as depicted. St. Clair Bayfield, Hugh Grant’s character, was her real-life partner and manager of over 30 years. He truly did shield her from harsh criticism by managing her invitation-only club and keeping negative reviews away from her. In the Carnegie Hall debut, she really did sell out Carnegie Hall in 1944 at age 76, and gave away hundreds of tickets to war veterans. The record that she made even became a best-seller for the recording label. The part of her pianist accompanist (Cosmé Macmoon) was also excellently portrayed and after the death of Foster Jenkins in 1944, his own career took some strange career twists as after Florence Foster Jenkins died in 1944, he did not pursue a lasting career in music, instead turning his focus toward bodybuilding, master-level chess, and mathematics.

In the late morning, my daughter-in-law and I set off for Sutton Cheney which is a village halfway through Bromsgrove and Leicestershire where we had arranged to have a lunch date with a very old Leicestershire friend and her daughter. We settled upon a gastropub with a very good reputation and each enjoyed a delicious meal of a very high standard. We had arranged to meet at 1.00pm and my daughter-in-law and I arrived 15 minutes before the appointed time with no traffic holdups en-route and our friends were not subject to any delays either. We had a lot to catch up on because my friend has moved house a few months ago and I took along with me the card signed by all of the members of the international linguist conference that Meg used to attend as part of the Erasmus programme. I also  had located an iconic photograph that showed Meg’s swan-song i.e. dancing on the table of a Greek taverna in the city of Thessaloniki the previous year. After a delightful lunch, we had an uneventful journey home but we could not fail to notice the dramatic developments and infrastructure that has just been put into position as part of the HS2 approach to Birmingham. Upon my return home, my daughter-in-law stayed for an obligatory cup of tea and a chat. Before she left me, I released two of the cubes of vegetable stock prepared yesterday and frozen into an ice cube container so that she could try them out at home. The acid test for me will come shortly when  prepare the look and potato soup which is the latest on my schedule. I noticed that it was the England-Croatia football match and the first half was 44 minutes old (i.e. with one minute of the half to go) and I witnessed the scoring of a fourth goal as England, playing superbly well, had put four goals past Croatia in the course of the half. I still need to sort out some TV viewing for myself this evening but I can always entertain myself with a thorough reading of ‘The Times’ and a Sudoku  puzzle. There is more football televised this evening (Scotland vs. North Macedonia) but this does not sound the most riveting of contests. We know that ‘gas’ i.e. petrol and diesel prices are at an all time high in the United States and this is causing all kinds of reasons for voters to turn on Trump at the time of the mid-term elections. The G7 group of rich nations have agreed to release 10 million barrels of oil from strategic stockpiles to help to alleviate the current shortages. The immediate causes for the shortage are two global conflicts raging at the moment, namely the US conflict in Iran and the blocking of the Straits of Hornuz and the Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil supplies. In part, the G7 must be gambling that with only about a month to go before the mid-term elections, that the Iranian conflict might be mitigated before too long and this will help to put downward pressure of prices. Here in the UK, we have seen diesel prices teach £2.00 a litre and filling an average 55-litre family car with diesel now costs roughly £110.

I got up late yesterday morning because the night before I had become absorbed in some of the video footage surrounding the botched execution of Christa Pike, the first woman to be subject to judicial execution in the state of Tennessee for 200 years. After two unsuccessful attempts to administer the lethal injections, she was transported to a local hospital where she is reportedly ‘fighting for her life’  and with a fair probability that if she survives then she may well be brain damaged as a result of the failed injections. The question is inevitably raised as to how such a procedure can go horribly wrong and the answer lies in two directions. Firstly, no medically qualified personnel would ever agree to administering the injections via an intravenous line and hence the injections would have been attempted by completely unqualified prison staff with the consequences that ensued. This followed another botched execution attempt earlier in the year so the prison authorities had due warning. Secondly there are some people who by reasons of their anatomy are very difficult in whom to insert IV lines and Christa Pike was one such individual (as her own lawyer had argued but was overruled) So, in legal theory, the sate of Tennessee might try to try to execute her again but not immediately as the governor  has ordered a halt to all executions in the state until the end of the year. In the meantime, there will be the most intense media debate not helped by the fact that the full facts will never be known as the lawyers view of the whole botched attempt was often screened out by a curtain. One liberal American commentator even informed viewers that there had been a commission in the US in the 1890’s that had ruled out execution by lethal injection for exactly the two reasons described above. According to the US constitution, judicial execution is not allowed if punishments are ‘cruel or unusual’ and I would have thought that her lawyers would have been able to argue that death by lethal injection is cruel as some 7% of these fail. The Guardian  newspaper take on all of this is interesting and supplies more contextual information. Lethal injection was supposed to be the humane alternative to firing squads and electric chairs. They in turn were seen as an improvement on hanging, which looked much like lynching in a system disproportionately handing the death penalty to black men. The age and ill health of those executed, and the ethical refusal of most medical staff to be involved, may contribute to botched injections. But analysis of autopsy results has provided compelling evidence that suffering is inherent; injections – especially those involving paralytic drugs – have merely disguised it. What is described as safeguarding the dignity of prisoners is really about reducing the discomfort of witnesses who would otherwise see their suffering. So having made a late start in the day, I am now looking forward to my saunter down the Hight Street in Bromsgrove where I go to my favourite cafe and see what the charity shops have to offer.

I got into town fairly late but made my way to my favourite cafe but via some charity shops. I stopped off at Poundland where I bought a cup of noodle containers with plastic lids that would double as soup containers as they each held 900ml as well as being well as BPA free. But this is not as it seems as I read a post from a chemist who argues problem with BPA is the “BP” part, AKA bisphenol. It’s an endocrine disruptor that strongly resembles a functional part of oestrogen. Plastic manufacturers know this. However, since BPA has become a sort of marketing boogeyman, they can claim things are “BPA free” while containing BPS, BPF, BPZ, and so on. As long as BP is in the compound, it’s a problem. In short, plastics of almost any sort are best avoided. I did come across a set of six high quality soup bowls that were being sold very cheaply as a set. The brand name was MALACASA and I learned from the web that this Chinese make is well regarded, superior to many European alternatives and specialising in affordable, high-temperature fired white and coloured porcelain dinnerware sets that are entirely lead-free and non-toxic. So now I am all set up with storage containers for the foreseeable future and later on in the afternoon, am going to try my hand at vegetable stock making. We are being subject to the Greens party conference and they are being attacked from both the  left and the right of the political spectrum. The Labour party fears that the Greens will siphon off some of their support laving Labour seats a little vulnerable whilst the Tories are suspicious that an ‘unholy alliance’ between Labour, Lib Dem and Green councillors may deprive them of the leadership of many local councils. I was not particularly  hungry this lunchtime but I experimented with a new kind of lunch which was to use up half a can of butter beans to which  added some microwaved petit pois, and some ‘jack’ mackerel made a little more palatable by adding a big dollop of thousand Island dressing. TV tonight is not very inspiring but I am going to watch on catch-up ‘Florence Foster Jenkins’ which is the film biography of the New York socialite who thought of herself as being a brilliant singer whilst being one of the worst of all time and filling Carnegie Hall with an audience who were desperate to hear just how terrible she was. Meryl Street plays the major role brilliantly and the film is simultaneously incredibly humorous but filled with pathos at the same time. I have seen this film twice before but it is always worth watching again for some of the agonisingly funny sequences within it. Her wealthy friends, husband St Clair Bayfield, and accompanist Cosmé McMoon praised her endlessly and shielded her from criticism. At her private club recitals, audiences smiled, cheered, and hid their laughter behind handkerchiefs rather than tell her the truth. When people did laugh or critics wrote harsh reviews, she believed they were just jealous or malicious. The countdown to the American mid-term elections is proceeding apace now that  these crucial elections are only just over four weeks away. It is almost certain that Trump knows he is doing incredibly badly in the polls and will almost certainly try to engage in activity to nullify them. Liberal opinion is split on whether Trump will attempt o make a preemptive strike and cancel the elections altogether (on the totally spurious argument that the country is under attack from hordes of illegal and undocumented migrants) or clog up the courts with challenging every single result once the elections have been held. I think the latter course is a little more likely as he will be able to claim that the election was ‘stolen’ from him (which quote applies to every election except the ones where he himself actually was the winner)

It seems incredible to believe that in a country as dedicated to sophisticated ways of killing people that the United States is not capable to administering a lethal injection to enact a judicial execution. A Tennessee death row inmate set to be the first woman to be executed by the state in more than 200 years is still alive after being administered two lethal injections, her lawyers have said. Christa Pike, 50, convicted of murdering a schoolmate three decades ago, was due to be executed after the US Supreme Court overturned an earlier reprieve that had been ordered just an hour before her sentence was initially scheduled to be carried out in Nashville on Wednesday. The state proceeded with the attempted execution. However, Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion to halt and stay the execution, claiming she was still alive after both syringes of lethal injection chemicals had been administered. She has now been taken to hospital where I wonder whether doctors will attempt to save her life. The damage done to her internal organs such as liver, kidneys, heart and brain by administering lethal injections can only be imagined and I wonder if she will die anyway. I did consult the internet to ascertain what medical protocols are in place in cases such as this. There are some ad-hoc interventions during botched attempts. If an execution is halted or an inmate survives the initial administration while still showing vital signs (such as a continuing heartbeat or consciousness), emergency legal stays or executive orders prompt transfer to an outside medical facility. Once transferred to a hospital, standard emergency medicine and critical care protocols apply—treating symptoms like respiratory depression, hypoxia, or drug toxicity just as they would for any severe overdose or poisoning. Medics are themselves forbidden by their Hippocratic Oath as well as by statute not to assist in judicial executions which may explain why some of these attempts are botched. In the meanwhile, does this survivor have any right to life? Returning to more sanguine matters, we are now in the month of October which a month often typified by a burst of good weather even though the days are lengthening. In two days time, it would have been Meg’s 80th birthday which would normally be an occasion of some sadness. However, my daughter-in-law and I are due to travel to a village in Leicestershire which is approximately half way between Bromsgrove and Leicester so that we can have a meal with some Leicestershire friends, a friendship which goes back some thirty years and no doubt we will all raise a glass to Meg’s memory – we have just passed the point where it is 500 days since her death. When I went shopping yesterday, I ensured that I have all of the vegetables that I need for my next bout of soup preparation. Our domestic help brought along with her a bread slicing machine she had just bought second-hand and with this we managed to cut a sourdough loaf into extraordinarily thin slices which were then frozen. The point of this is both to cut down the carbohydrate count, even in a loaf of sourdough bread but also the very thin slices of frozen bread, once toasted in the microwave, are an excellent quick way to make some croutons to accompany the soup. At the weekend, I intend to make some really good vegetable stock which will be packed full of flavour but can be guaranteed to be salt free. Some of these will be destined towards the kitchen of our domestic help as will some of the soup itself. I may be tempted to buy one of these slicing machines myself but apart from bread it would mean that I can slice vegetables incredibly thinly which might be useful in my soup preparation. I have noticed that most chefs in the internet videos use very large knives to chop vegetables but most supermarkets have a policy where these are not stocked anymore in an attempt to cut down on adolescent knife crime.

After my Tai Chi class this morning, I had my customary coffee sitting at the ‘chatty table’ in the Methodist centre. Here I was engaged in conversation both with my banker friend but also with another couple who are frequent patrons of the centre. This couple have just celebrated 64 years of married life together which I find both remarkable and inspiring. We often hold conversations about current affairs. After we had spent a good half hour in each other’s company which was really enjoyable, I decided to visit my local Lidl’s store to enhance the supply  of vegetables for my soup making and stock preparation over the weekend. I needed some more leeks which I purchased for about three quarters of the price that I would  have paid in my local Waitrose. But I was particularly anxious to get my hands on some raw turmeric root which I located and bought in a packet for less than £1.00. But having got it home, I had absolutely no idea how to prepare to or what quantities to use. Fortunately I found an extremely informative video put on the web by an Asian lady who was the holder of a PhD in nutritional science. From this I leaned that dissolving turmeric in water or even taking pills of it is almost useless as most as most of the useful ingredients of turmeric are not absorbed by the body and hence are wasted. The trick is to add grated turmeric to stews and curries such that it can be absorbed by whatever fats are used in the cooking process. Another method which I think I shall employ is to dissolve turmeric in a glass of warmed full fat milk where the natural fats in the milk will aid absorption. The same video also warned against too much use of this herb as it can cause oxalate damage to the liver. It is advised to pair oxalate-high foods such as turmeric with calcium by eating calcium-rich foods (like milk, yogurt, cheese, or calcium-fortified plant milk) at the exact same meal as high-oxalate foods. The calcium and oxalates bind in your gut and pass safely out of your body as waste instead of forming kidney stones.  I wonder how many people who buy and use oxalates are aware of how to use it safely and for maximum effect. Tomorrow, I shall indulge in some vegetable stock preparation and in the afternoon but in the morning I shall visit my friendly ‘Gifts of Love’ charity shop for my end of week coffee and see what other glass containers (for soup) are available in the local charity shops.

The big, bold part of the Andy Burnham speech yesterday – the triple lock – will now receive a lot of media scrutiny but the debate, as they say, is often generating more heat than light.  The triple lock is to give way to, in effect, a double lock in which pensioner’s incomes will always keep pace either with inflation or with 2.5%, whichever is the greater. The ‘third’ leg of the triple log – keeping pace with wages – has only occurred six times in the last sixteen which is evidently less than 40% of the time. The new policy also indicated that periodically the pension would be reevaluated in the light of wages growth to make sure that they did not get out of kilter with each other so the double lock will be, in effect, a 2½ lock. Also the fact that the ‘care’ component of the afflictions of old age will be met by the state rather than by the individual, should be a massive reassurance to many older people, although it must be conceded that the residential ‘living’ costs of care will not be met. I am sure that the new policy is easy to sell, not least because of the prospect of a National Care Service and the Labour party can now campaign on the basis that they brought the NHS into existence and only they have actually brought the National Care Service into being. It is true to say that using the double lock rather than the triple lock will not release funds on the scale that is needed to fund the new service. But perhaps we could take a leaf out of the German’s book where they levy a social care tax from people in their mid 40’s onwards. This is the point at which people are generally well established in their careers and the costs of rearing a family are largely already  passed. The Conservatives did introduce a formal ‘Health and Social Care Levy’ under Boris Johnson’s government in September 2021. The tax was designed specifically to tackle the funding crisis in the NHS and adult social care, aiming to cap the lifetime ‘costs of old age’ care at £86,000 per person and was a small percentage increase in National Insurance. But it did not survive the ill-fated Liz Truss regime, but the Labour party could introduce a similar scheme in future years and point gleefully to the fact that a previous Tory administration had introduced the concept of a social care levy. The fact remains that national government are best placed to introduce such universal schemes. With some imaginative thinking, individuals could be encouraged to pay into a ‘Social Care’ fund as a sort of insurance policy and this could itself receive government assistance in the form of tax relief but become a way in which, as a mature industrial society n which we are all living longer and getting commensurately more frail, then the inevitable costs can be met at a societal level. One of my favourite quotations is ‘Taxes are what we pay for civilised society’ and originates, perhaps surprisingly, from the American U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, in 1927.

I read this afternoon on Sky News that prosecutions may be forthcoming over the Grenfell fire which took place almost ten years ago. The breaking news is that prosecutors have been asked by the Metropolitan Police to consider manslaughter and a range of other charges against companies and individuals over the Grenfell Tower fire. The force said it has now submitted all its files to the Crown Prosecution Service to allow it to make charging decisions in relation to the June 2017 blaze. The files of evidence, which relate to 20 companies and organisations and 54 individuals, was a ‘milestone moment’ in a ‘truly enormous’ investigation, police said. Seventy-two people died and more than 70 were injured after a fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in North Kensington, West London. The Met said in a statement that the 20 files relate to 20 companies and organisations and 54 individuals. They ask the CPS to consider charges including corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, health and safety offences, fraud and fraud-related offences and misconduct in public office. The CPS has committed to making the charging decisions before the 10th anniversary of the fire in June 2027. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Kevin Southworth added: ‘This is a milestone moment in the police investigation into this devastating tragedy which took the lives of 72 people. Our dedicated team of 220 investigators has worked incredibly hard to honour our commitment to the bereaved, survivors, residents and all those affected by the fire to meet this timescale. We appreciate, of course, it has taken nine years to get to this point. As we have said before, this is one of the most complex investigations ever undertaken by any UK law enforcement agency – the scale is truly enormous. While we know this has had a significant impact on those waiting for answers, it has necessarily taken this long to ensure our investigation is meticulous and presents the very best possible evidence to the CPS for charging decisions.’  If a trial does take place, I have severe doubts whether this long after the event any prosecutions will succeed. Firstly, corporate manslaughter and similar prosecutions are very difficult to prove in law, particularly after a gap of ten years. Secondly, there were reliable reports that on the morning following the disaster, shredders were busy in planning and construction firm offices making sure that no evidence trail existed. And thirdly, we have a long track record of instituting enquiries, in some cases decades after the event (such as the ‘Bloody Sunday’ enquiry, the ‘Hillsborough’ football disaster) none of which generated any prosecutions or findings of guilt. The day proved to be a typical mid-weekday in which I picked up a newspaper and then went off for a coffee in the Methodist centre where there one or two acquaintances with whom I chatted. Then I did a normal weekly shopping in my usual supermarket and cooked myself a lunch of quiche and cabbage. The TV does not look particularly  good this evening but there may be another in the medical series on ‘The Body’ starting at 9.00pm which might be worth a watch. In the course of the day, I opened a letter addressed to Meg who has now been dead for over 16 months) explaining that the care for dementia sufferers offered by Age UK in Worcestershire could not now be afforded. The Alzheimer’s society had been awarded a new contract but with no social events, trips, outings or anything comparable with the service offered to Meg in the last year or so of her life by Age UK. I think Meg quite enjoyed the limited social contact provided by these even though each visit was accompanied by a fall somewhere and I wondered to myself whether dementia sufferers are having to bear the brunt of unaffordability in the provision of services.