Today we slept in a little late for reasons that I cannot fully explain but it is a Saturday and we were not due to meet anybody in particular. Nonetheless, we picked up our copy of the newspaper (even though ‘The Guardian’ was handed to us by mistake but we did not realise that until we got home) We decided to visit the park today as the weather was quite mild and we do not seem to have visited the park for a few days. As we were leaving the park, one of the ‘park regulars’ who knows us by sight enquired after a fellow park regular that neither of us had seen for a week or so now. This is Intrepid Octogenerian Hiker who, in his late 80’s, always managed a walk of about 8-9 kilometers per day, aided by his walking stick. We have not been in the park quite as much recently whilst the weather has been rather icy but we trust that our acquaintance has not been ill in the meantime. When we got home, it was a case of a simple lunch of some ham, cabbage, baked potato and cooked tomato but although this seems a simple meal, nonetheless we enjoyed it greatly. We had a bit of a rush round to get everything washed up and our post-prandial cup of tea made before the Ireland-France rugby match which may well be ‘the’ match of the series as these two teams are regarded as No 1 and No 2 in the world at the moment. The match proved to be what in the headline writer’s vocabulary might be described as ‘scintilating’ or ‘pulsating’. The Irish ran out as the winners in the end but the levels of skill and commitment showed by each side were exemplary and for the Irish in particular, the win must have been especially sweet because as well as the tries that they did score, they got the ball over the line on two further occasions only for the try not to count as a French thigh (the same in each case) prevented the ball being ‘grounded’ and hence a no-try is the inevitable result. The refereee was Wayne Barnes of England and I think that he played a ‘blinder’ in getting all of the major refereeing decisions completely correct (in my view) We shall watch the first half of the Scotland-Wales match before we go to church later on this afternoon and hope that the technology recording ‘series record’ is going to do its bit so that we can watch the second half of the match this afternoon.

Once we had returned from church and had our traditional bowl of soup upon our return, we turned our attention to our PVR to see the second half of the Wales v Scotland match. For some reason which I cannot explain, every other match in the series seems to have been recorded or are scheduled to record apart from this one. So I changed tack and managed to get the whole of the second half via BBC-iplayer. Needless to say, once I got this located and then running, we ran into our buffering problem with the Firestick but I know how to cure this so it was the typical 3 minutes or so of delay until we got going again. Tomorrow will be England v Italy and this should prove to be no pushover for England as somewhat more intelligent play from Italy could well have created a victory over France last weekend.

There is a certain mount of informed speculation that we are seeing some interesting trends in the recent by-elections that have been held recently. In the last of these held in West Lancashire this week, the Labour Party pushed up its share of the vote to 62% whilst the Conservative share slumped to 25%. These results can tell us what we might expect in the local elections this May. To become the largest party of local government in England for the first time in 20 years, Labour must pick up 500 council seats. To dodge a crushing defeat, the Conservatives must lose hundreds not thousands. The local elections are to be held in May and the latest by-elections are the best predictor for what the local results are likely to be. The point is often made that by- elections are no predictor to any forthcoming general election and indeed, people may vote differently at the local level to their vote in a general election. But there is an interesting ‘twist’ to local election results. This is that the local party is likely to be energised by a good local result and hence a victorious local party is likely to have a goodly band of motivated and enthused supporters ready for the forthcoming general election contest. On the other hand, local parties who have just lost many of their local counsellors are likely to be demotivated and lacking the raw number to put supporters on the ground. So it could be that the connection between local results and national results is somewhat more complicated than the conventional political wisdom would indicate. Moreover, since Rishi Sunak became PM, the average Labour poll lead over the Conservative Party has been 21.5 points.

Today we got going eventually after rather a slow start to proceedings. Once we had picked up our newspaper, we made for Waitrose anticipating that we would bump into one or two people that we knew but we were to be disappointed because none of the regulars showed up this morning. So we enjoyed our coffee and cake and then bought a few things that we needed before we made for home. I cooked a lunch of a (bought) cod pie which we enhanced with some of our own vegetables and enjoyed a tasty lunch. Then we settled down for a lazy afternoon but I copied a few Mozart tracks onto a USB stick so that we can stick that into our devices and play them as and when desired. I was half way through this task when the doorbell rang and it was the firm that regularly services our burglar alarm who was scheduled to call this afternoon but I had comletely forgotten about it (despite it being entered onto our planning board) This was all quite satisfactory but I do not neglect to have the intruder alarm serviced on an annual basis because were this to be neglected, it would probably invalidate our home insurance where the relevant box is ticked to indicate that that the intruder alarm hs been serviced within the last twelve months.

During the week, I saw one of those Panorama programms which really made one stop and think. This program was upon the enormous environmental effects of what is popularly known as ‘the cloud’ but is, in practice, massive banks of computers forming a data farm probably but not exclusively, in the Unites States. Theae data farms consume massive amounts of power and the excess heat generated necessitates a lot of cooling water. Data storage is climbing the ladder of sectors responsible for the largest carbon footprints. In fact, data storage now accounts for more carbon emissions than the commercial airline industry – and a single data centre uses the same amount of electricity that can power up to 50,000 homes. All of this was news to me but then you consider the vast amounts of data that each one of us generates and then crucially no one disposes of, then it all gets stored somewhere. Trying to find out how much extra data is being stored year by year would appear to be a simple question to ask a search engine such as Google but the answers that are given are reflected in the following response to a query how much cloud storage is increasing: ‘starting at around $12 billion in 2010, revenues are predicted to exceed $623 billion by 2025.’ This answer is illuminating because storing increasing mounts of data is just seen as an economic opportunity. Of course in the early days of computing, memory was both limited and expensive so there was much pressure to reduce and eliminate data (old emails and files) that were no longer needed. These days have now absolutely gone and there is every encouragemnt not to prune and to delete but to store ‘in the cloud’ but at a cost, needless to say. Some kinds of data one can understand people wanting to store ‘for ever’ such as photos but there is no real encouragement to dispose of the computer rubbish as it were and, of course, it is quite time intensive to work one’s way through, for example emails, to determine what is to be saved and what is to be junked. The panorama program gave out a statistic that I have no way of checking that 5 minutes of internet searching may consume as much power as, say, boiling the kettle to make a cup of tea.

Tonight there is going to be a program especially devoted to the disappearance of the Lancashire dog walker, Nicola Bulley, who has now been missing for two weeks. It is informative that the authorities are now searching the coastal areas around the Wye estuary, assuming that that Nicola Bulley slipped into the river and was swept away. But if the program is well constructed this evening, it may be that alternative possible explanations for the disappearance may be aired.

The UK economy was officially ‘not in recession’ as the latest batch of economic statistics reveal that the country was basically flatlining. But the case remains that we are the only G7 economy that whose economy is lower than at the start of the pandemic. Of course the ‘elephant in the room’ here is the impact of Brexit because the effects of the pandemic as well as the war in Ukraine and the consequent steep rise in energy prices have to be statistically disentangled from each other. It does seem remarkable that both of our major political parties are still in favour of Brexit whilst an often quoted research finding is that every constituency in the UK except one (Boston in Lincolnshire?) now has a majority of voters who are not in favor of Brexit. We shall have to see what happens after the next general election when it comes but some form of closer association with the EU customs union would seem to be the most sensible economic policy even though no-one in our present political leadership dare mouth it.

Today dawned bright and clear and I got up early in order to get my weekly shopping done whilst Meg stays in bed until I return. Typically, I pick up my newspaper afterwards but today my newsagent had not received their copies of ‘The Times‘ so this necessitated a further trip to Waitrose in order to avail myself of it. Then it was a case of getting home and getting the breakfast cooked, the washing up done and the shopping unpacked. After all of this, we readied ourselves to pay a visit to one of our favoutite little market towns which is Alcester. We made a booking in our favourite restaurant in one of the hotels which is centrally located and where they put on a special pensioner’s lunch during the week. As it was such a beautiful day, every man and his dog had evidently decided to visit the town and parking was at an absolute premium. Nonetheless, we managed to park fairly centrally for an hour which was time enough for us to have a coffee nd cake in our favourite coffee establishment before we sampled some of the excellent charity shops along the High Street. But first, we visited one of those hardware shops that seems to sell ‘everything’ including things you never know that you needed. We departed the shop once we had a thorough look round and availed ourselves some black duct tape which I always seem to need for a variety of purposes. For example, if there is a manual that I wish to keep I will run it off on the printer, staple it, flatten the staples with some heavy duty pliers, pop the booklet in between some transparencies to form a cover and finally finish off the whole thing with some black tape that covers the staples and makes the whole thing look more professional. I am endebted to the Reprographic manager at De Montfort University who had to deploy this procedure when multiple copies of degree submissions were required for an imminent reapproval. I have used these techniques to professionally produce copies of any paper that I have published and I am eternally grateful to Anne for instructing me how to do it. In the charity shops we were not tempted by any items of clothing but we did avail ourselves of a couple of useful looking Denby ware dishes that looked as though they were really intended for the making of a steak and kidney pudding but which we shall deploy to give a final oven roasting to vegetables when required. And so it was on to lunch a few minutes before our allotted time but we enjoyed a beef lasgne and a roated vegetable lasagne, both with salad which we shared with each other when we were two thirds of the way through our respective dishes. After that, it was a pleasant drive home through some glorious sunshine and we prepared to have a quiet and restful afternoon.

An extraordinary polical story has just broken this aftrnoon but I wonder whether it will see much light of day in MSM (Main Street Media) The story is that the UK has paid £2.3 billion having lost a trade dispute with the EU. It was claimed the UK had failed to prevent the undervaluing of these goods imported from China, letting criminals evade customs duties by making false claims about the clothes and shoes. In March last year, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) found against the UK ‘on most liability points’, according to John Glen, the chief secretary to the Treasury. On the face of it, it looks as though he UK government is not unhappy about criminal trade activity so long as it keeps the cost of living down. There is another story in a similar vein which I read about recently and which my blood run cold. After the BSE crisis a few years ago, you would have thought that we had learnt the lesson of not maintaining the highest of standards in the way in which our meat is processed and then traded. But in the bonfire of (EU) regulations that we are promised, it will become an adulterer’s charter for all kinds of contaminants to be added to meat products with practically no checks or regulation. This means that as a society, we may be laying ourselves open to the most horrendous of food scandals several years down the line and all in exchange for a lighter regulatory regime. The inspectors of the meat products entering the UK are privately very worried but it looks as though a governent hell bent on de-regulation will stop at nothing.

The story of the missing Lanashire dog walker is still not producing any definitive results. But the focus of the investigtions now seem to be shifting towards seeing if a body might have drifted out to sea so coastal patrols are intensifying in the search. It may well be that a body will never be found or the mystery of her disappearance solved so one can only imagine how difficult it is to have any normal sort of grieving process under these circumstances. At some point as well, the police will have to scale down their search activities which must be a profound moral dilemma for them as well.

Today we chatted for a while with our domestic help whose day it is each Wednesday. We were swapping stories about the emerging news from the earthquake zone in Turkey and Syria and how devastating it is for those lucky enough to have escaped the falling buildings only to helplessly stand by whilst they can still hear family members trapped inside the ruined buildings, calling for help of which there is never enough. Then, after breakfast and more or less on the spur of the moment, we decided to visit Marks and Spencer in Longbridge (the site of the old Austin-Rover factory which is now a large retail park) We had not visited Marks and Spencer for several months now and as usual the departments that we visited were generally very quiet whereas the cafeteria was heaving. Meg and I treated ourelves to a coffee and a sandwich as soon as we arrived as by now, it was quite late on in the morning. Then we paid a visit to the women’s lingerie deprtment where after a degree of searching, we managed to locate and to buy the underwear for which we were seaching. Finally, we paid a visit to the Food Hall to pick up an item that our domestic help particularly wanted and finally we returned home. Once at home, we immediately started to prepare our lunch which was a curry/pasta type meal and our domestic help took a little lunch with us. I asked her if I could borrow a particular item of clothing which I need for my Pilates class next Tuesday – all of this will be explained in the fullness of time.

A private underwater search company has been using sonar equipment on the River Wyre in the search for the woman missing from a Lancashire village. The news this afternoon is that the underwater search expert looking for missing mother Nicolla Bulley has said his team is pulling out of the hunt as she is ‘categorically not’ in the area of the river where detectives believe she fell in. All of the experts involved in this search describe themseves as ‘baffled’ by the disappearance of the woman and one wonders what form the search will take from this point onwards. The police has been assiduously checking all of the videocam evidence that they can lay their hands upon and are wondering if she could have left the area without being caught on any video cameras at all. After the passage of some days, the trail, if any, gets colder and colder and at some point, I imagine that the police will have to scale down their operations and declare the whole incident as an unexplained missing person.

The Turkey-Syria deathtoll is now of the order of 12,000 and research fforts are bcoming increasingly frantic. A team from Britain got to work within minutes of their arrival upon Turkish soil but even with a vast army of volunteers, the scale of the problem is so vast that the chances of being rescued is diminishing by the minute. The more one learns about the complexities of this particular earthquake, the more horrendous it becomes. For a start, the earthquake footprint falls across both Southern Turkey and Northern Syria so two governmnts are involvd. But Northern Syria has been an area in conflict for some time now and the remit of the Syrian government does not run as far as the earthquake footprint – the Turkish army control some of the area, as do Kurds and some rebel militias. So trying to negotiate the politics of all of this sounds like a nightmare. In addition, many of the roads serving the area have themselves been destroyed in the earthquake. Whatever roads are open, there is an army of refugees trying to flee the area presumably trying to get to the safety of other family members who live outside the earthquake zone. So trying to get heavy earthmoving equipment along these damaged and refugee packed roads is problematic to say the least. And finally the weather is particularly bad at the moment with temperatures several degrees below zero and with heavy snow much in evidence. Those who survived the earthquake only wearing the clothes they were wearing when they ran out of their collapsing buildings are pullings bits of wood out from the rubble with which to light or sustain a fire so that they can keep themselves warm.

The Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has making a surprise visit to the UK today and is addressing members of both the Commons and the Lords in Westminster Hall. Naturally he has been asking for jets from this country and the response from the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunk is to say that ‘nothing is off the table’ which is a meaningless form of words that means nothing and commits you to even less. Supplying jets is not a simple question either as jets have to have support and maintenance and refuelling even before we get onto the vexed question of training Ukrainian pilots. Following the speech, Mr Sunak asked Defence Secretary Ben Wallace to investigate what jets the UK could give to Ukraine – I do not expect the reply will be a straighforwrd one and may be an interesting way of saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time.

Today seemed to be a day a little like yesterday except that the temperature might have drifted a degree or so lower. But Tuesday is the day when we looking forward to having some chats with acquaintances and friends in the Waitrose cafe. As soon as we got in, we noticed a couple with whom we used to be in regular contact both before the pandemic and also during it via FaceTime. We had heard via a mutual friend that they had moved from one flat to another and their most recent abode seems to meet their needs somewhat better as the husband is a wheelchair user and therefore things like ease of access is very important if not crucial for them. The move seems to have gone fairly smoothly but they did have to spend a week or so in a hotel in the transition from their former flat to their present one and the conveyancing firm that they used seems to have been problematic for them as well. We quickly brought each other up-to-date with our various bits of news but they could not stop for a longer chat as they had other things to do. We saw another of our friends that we regularly see on a Tuesday morning, but this too proved to be a ‘hello and goodbye’ affair. On the way home, we called in to see one of our Kidderminster Road friends as there was a church related issue that we needed to discuss. Again, we conducted our business on the doorstep because on a Tuesday, I always need a fairly quick turn around as it is my Pilates day. I had a pleasant walk down into town followed by a period of slight frustration when an item of clothing that I wanted to purchase for Meg did not seem to be in stock where we had bought it previously – thus was it ever so but it is surprising how often the shelves are filled with lots of things that you do not want but empty of the things you are actually looking for. My Pilates class which is small (there are four of us regulars in this particular class) ran true to form and then I return home for a somewhat delayed lunch of fishcakes and microwaved vegetables.

The Turkey-Syria earthquake continues to appall as the images fill our TV screens today. There are always some heart-warming stories of children being pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building but these will evidently lessen as the days roll on. One aspect of this particular earthquake is particularly distressing both for the participants and also for us viewers. It seems to be the case that relatives, standing besides the remains of a collapsed building, can often hear the cries of people from inside the ruins crying out for help but the scale of the destruction is so enormous that there are no resources to help to locate them and to dig them out of the rubble. Evidently, people do what they can with their bare hands but I imagine that knowing a family member is calling out for you but is unrescuable must surely only intensify their grief. The latest estimate of the deathtoll is about 7,000 but some estimates are that the eventual toll may be 20,000. One particular dramatic story was the rescue of a baby born in the collapsed ruins and still attached by the umbilical cord to its dead mother. Hopefully there will be other ‘miracle’ chidrn extracted from the rubble and chunks of concrete. Here at home the media is still reporting the desperate search for the woman who disappeared when walking her dog besides a river in Lancashire. The most sophisticated underwater sonar is now being deployed and it is being said that such technology can identify even sticks and stones on the river bed. The specialised firm who are deploying this technology think that if there is a body of the woman within the river, they should be able to locate it after about three days of searching. So far, no clues of any kind have emerged and the police say that they are acting on 500 separate pieces of information but there is nothing that as yet is worthy of note. Properties bordering the river have apparently been searched and the police are tring to keep an open mind but so far, they seem to have precious lttle to go on.

It seems that most of the nation, including ourselves, were gripped and engrossed in the concluding, and final, instalment of ‘Happy Valley’ based upon the life and work of a police sergeant in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. The concluding episode did resolve several of the outstanding, intertwined story lines in an interesting and unpredictable fashion but I will say no more at this point. But the point has been made that perhaps the police themelves could do well to study the series and the way that policing was deployed to see if there are any elements of good practice from which they could learn. This may be a tall order but the writer of the series, Sally Wainwright, did a magnificent job in making her story lines both credible and absorbing.

The weather forecast warned us that today was going to be one of those clear and bright days as we are subject to a high pressure system at the moment. Actually, the Spanish have an expression for this which is ‘febrero loco’ or ‘Mad February’. I have some first hand knowledge of this because in my working life, I spent a term teaching at the Complutense University in Madrid. Here I would typically set off to catch the metro and then a bus to get to the relevant University campus and the days always started off being crisp and cold and pretty dark at that hour in the morning. I taught from about 9.00am to 11.30 and then after some coffee returned back to the Hall of Residence in which I was lodged. As I returned home, the sun had arisen and there was quite pleasant, almost warm sun by midday which made the journey home very pleasant. I seem to remember that in the metro journeys that I had, first thing in the morning the carriages were silent as people were contemplating the day’s work ahead of them. But by midday they had relaxed and the carriage was full of chatter as some people returned home for lunch (but they would return back home for an afternoon shift from about 4.00 until maybe 7.00pm). The other thing that I particularly remember about those metro jouneys was that the trains were full of Madrileños i.e. people who were born in or near the capital and were predominantly white with just a smattering of Latin American hispanics. But there is a massive contrast with the London Tube which is about as cosmopolitan as it is possible to get, with a massive diversity of ethnicities, skin colours and languages. Returning to this country, though, Meg and I were happy to get to the park once we had picked up our newspaper. The air was pretty cool but completely still which meant you could simultaneously feel the cool of the air but also get a hint of pale spring sunshine on one’s forehead. As we have by now come to expect, the park was full of dog walkers and one of the regulars is a ‘labradoodle’ or a mixture of labrador and poodle. But the fine looking dog looks more poodle than labrador and when let off the lead, he has a series of similar doggy friends and they love chasing each other in huge circles around the park. Evidently, the dog owners know each other well and ensure that their dogs do not get out of control but there was a great deal of yapping and barking which was just the doggy equivalent of ‘joie de vivre’ on a morning like this. We had some pleasant elevenses and chatted with seveal of our acquaintances, all of us appreciating the weather for what it was.

When we returned home we cooked ourselves some lunch and then watched, with a degree of fascinated horror, some of the unfolding stories of the huge earthquakes that have hit Turkey and Syria. Sky News are reporting that nearly 3,000 people have been killed and thousands more injured after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and several aftershocks caused widespread destruction in Turkey and Syria. The earthquake struck at 4.17 in the morning when most people would have been in bed and this has contributed to the enormous death toll. Very often when earthquakes strike, deaths are reported in their hundreds but on this occasion the deathrate was immediately reported as in the thousands so it was known within minutes that this earthquake was huge and extensive. The fact that it was quite shallow within the earth crust adds greatly to the destructive power and I heard the gographical impact of the earthquake being likened to a tear in a piece of paper and the resultant destruction extending over hundreds of kilometres. There were, in fact, two earthquakes, one of 7.8 magnitude followed by one of 7.7 magnitude impacting not just Syria and Turkey and the impact has been felt further afield, including in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The reaction of most countries to this apocalyptic earthquake has been an immediate offer of assistance from a host of European countries but it is now nighfall in Turkey which will hamper rescue efforts. Another factor in the destruction is that the first earthquake may well have weakened some already shoddily constructed buildings which the second eathquake soon caused to collapse. One particularly dramatic of mobile phone footage shows the whole of a block of flats collapsing in about 10 seconds flat.

Meanwhile, back at home the largest number of NHS personnel on strike has had a big effect upon the hospital sector. Some 80,000 appointments and 11,000 operations have been cancelled on the biggest NHS strike day and the nurses are to to strike for a further day tomorrow. This is a massive trial of strength and it is hard to predict the outcome as of now. I have a feeling that the bad feelings generated by these disputes may last for quite a long time. The strikes are not just about pay – the failure to recruit sufficient staff in the past few years for whatever reason (Brexit? low pay?) has entailed massively increased workloads and workspace stress.

Today we knew that we were going to see our University of Birmingham friend later on in the morning so I did not feel the complusion to leap out of bed and walk down to get the newspaper early on in the day. So we had a fairly leisurely breakfast before we hit the road this morning. After we picked up the newspaper, we had a little bit of time before we were due to meet with our friend so we paid a quick visit to the hardware store that I visited yesterday as I could do with one more of the little containers that they had in stock. I thought that this was going to be a quick ‘in and out’ job as I knew exactly where the little baskets I wanted were shelved. Hoever, that was yesterday and today I could not immediately find them as the store had already re-shelved some of their stock and therefore they needed a bit of hunting around for them. However, they were located at last and I purchased what I wanted. We then spent the best part of an hour with our friend in the Waitrose coffee bar and the store was particularly full of flowers and related ‘romantic’ items as Valentines day is early in the week just after next. Then it was a case of getting home and having some quiet time with the Sunday newspapers before we started to cook the Sunday lunch. This was simple but tasty affair of ham, primo cabbage and a baked potato but although it was simple lunch, we nonetheless enjoyed it. In the afternoon, we tuned into the France vs. Italy match which everybody, including ourselves, assumed would be a walkover for the French. But the Italians were enterprising in the extreme and about ten minutes before the end, the Italians were leading by a single point. Then the French scored a try which was not surprising and the Italians needed to score a try to overhaul them. They were awarded a penalty at the very end of the match and ‘all’ they had to do was to kick for touch right next to the corner flag and then in the resulting throw-in organise a maul to get the ball over the line (a frequent tactic) But the Italians made rather a mess of their kick for the corner, made a bigger mess of their own lineout and so the French ran out as winners. But for Italy to push the French as hard as this was amazing and made for a really exciting afternoon of rugby. As the Italians are to play Englnd next weekend, then this match too might be too close to call.

In the political sphere, Liz Truss the ex-Prime Minister who trashed the British economy (for which many of us are now paying in the form of higher mortgages) has written a long, 4000 long article to which the Sunday Telegraph has given prominent position. Liz Truss is arguing that ‘a left wing economics establishment’ foiled and frustrated all of her plans to borrow a lot of money to give handouts to the rich, hoping that this would kickstart the economy. All kinds of media outlights are giving Liz Truss as much time and spce as she wants to defend her premiersip, reckoned to be on of the most incompetent in British political history. It is an interesting reflection upon the media in this country that if Jeremy Corbin had tried a similar defence of his economic philosophy and politics, nobody would have given him the airtime or the print space. The Liz Truss polemic was discussed on the Andrew Neil Show (which has as part of its regular contributors George Osborne and Ed Balls) where it received a predictable mauling. As was mentioned on the programme, the Tory party believes in the operation of free markets and it was the bond market that ‘did for’ Liz Truss when the economy tanked. Professor Danny Blanchflower, who was previously on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, was more damning in his criticism as he said the article was the ‘most appalling nonsense I have ever read’ and rubbished her claim nobody warned her the economy would suffer under her plans. After all, she did sack the senior civil servant in the Treasury who had decades of experience, refused to put her plans before the Office of Budget Responsibility and implied that the Head of the Bank of England had no crediblity. So although Liz Truss claims that ‘nobody warned me’ that is because she had sacked, ignored or sidelined them all.

Tomorrow will see tens of thousands of NHS workers including nurses, in England, and GMB union ambulance workers, in England and Wales, taking industrial action in a dispute over pay and conditions. It is being billed as the biggest strike of NHS personnel in history and there is not the slightest sign that the government will follow the lead of the devolved government in Wales in an attempt to resolve the crisis. It may be that we all have to wait for Budget Day, which will be on Wednesday, 15th March when the rate of inflation may have reduced somewhat and the government feels it can make a pay offer.

Today was the start of a weekend to which we had been looking forward for some time as it was the start of the 6 Nations rugby competition. Rather than a walk in the park this morning, we decided that we would pay a visit to a large multi-product store on the edge of town in order to buy some medicaments and also a couple of little storage baskets. This having been done (and a certain amount of work to remove the extra sticky labels from the same) we returned home to have our elevenses in the comfort of our own home and to have a bit of a read of the newspapers. Then it was a case of having a simple lunch of quiche and vegetables before we settled down for an afternoon of rugby. We are able to watch the whole of the Ireland-Wales match at our leisure but the Englnd-Scotlnd game is another matter. We should be able to watch most of the first half of this match but then our normal church attendance intervenes. We have programmed our PVR on a ‘series record’ and, in theory, we should be able to catch the second half of the match but I am not holding my breath over this.

The news media is dominated today by the massive police search for the woman walking her dog in Lanacashire who has disappeared without trace when walking quite near a river bank. After extensive searches, the police ae working on the theory, but it is only a theory, that the woman had slipped into the river and been swept away. It is possible that as the river had quite steeply banked sides that the dog’s ball rolled into the river and that the missing woman may have been trying to retrieve this which accounts for her slip into the water. But all of this is conjecture and it is that is causing some discomforture to her family and friends. A enormous amount of technology seems to be being deployed in the search for the missing woman. We have seen police helicopters, drones, underwater sonar, police frog divers and probably much more that I have not mentioned. So far, not a single clue (such as the dog’s ball?) has been revealed but, in theory, the sonar unit dragged behind the police launch should be able to detect underwater shapes including a body. The police efforts and resources are all concentrated upon this but it may take some days to discern whether this is good police work or whether there may be other explanations. The disappearance of the woman is quite baffling to everybody but in the fullness of time, we may discover what has happened. Just out of interest, I Googled to see how common drownings are in the UK and came across the latest annual figures that suggested that each year there are some 80 drownings by ‘falling in’, a further 73 which are alcohol related and 34 due to swimming in all waters. The point here is that there are nearly 200 drownings a year but hardly any attract the attention afforded to this particular case.

When we returned from church this evening, we had the bowl of soup which is the repast that we always tend to have upon our return and then took our chances with the PVR to see the second half of the England-Scotlnd match. The PVR performed flawlessly and the series record seeme to have worked as it should. Scotlnd won the match in the dying minutes of the game and, I think, deservedly so but in truth there was very little between the two teams. We have some more rugby tomorrow but France vs. Italy is not going to be particularly exciting although next weekend will see France v. Ireland which may well prove the match of the series. Whilst on the subject of TV, the whole nation is on tenterhooks to watch the final episode of the third series of ‘Happy Valley’ at 9.00 tomorrow evening. We have only come lately to the joys of this series based upon a doughty policewoman based in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire. Tomorrow night is the last episode of three series and there will no more after tomorrow night. I did read one comment in a newspaper that all actors and producers of TV dramas ought to be made to watch a series of ‘Happy Valley’ to show how the job ought to be done. It is also rumoured that several alternative endings have been filmed so that if any on them is inadvertently leaked, another ending can be substituted.

Tonight it has reported that the Chinese ‘spy’ balloon which has been making its way across the landmass of the United States has been succesfully shot down once the balloon was safely over water. Informed commentators are arguing that this Chinese balloon was a spy mission that went wrong – as for the US shooting it down, it is hard to see any military in a northern European society to allow a transgression of their airspace as egregious as this to go unpunished. One does wonder, though, what parts of the downed balloon the United States will manage to get their hands on to learn exactly what games the Chinese military are playing.

Today being the end of the week, Meg and I had nothing really in prospect so it was a toss-up whether we went to the park or visited Waitrose in the off-chance that we might bump into any of our pre-pandemic friends. Eventually, we decided on the off-chance to visit Waitrose and we were really glad that we did because sitting there waiting for us was our University of Birmingham friend. We were both pleased to see each other and we had one of those chats where one thing leads to another. One amusing topic of conversation was the disjunction that is apparent between the normal speaking voice with which we are familiar and the sound of your voice as captured on a tape recorder, for example. As we hear the sound of our voice mediated somewhat by the bones of our skull, then what we imagine to be our normal speaking voice is not what what others hear. This then led onto one of the insights of social psychology which I have always found fascinating. This is the self concept that individuals have of themselves and an early social psychologist at the turn of the century dubbed this ‘the looking glass self’ The essential idea behind this psychological contruct is that we form the perceptions that we have of ourselves from the way in others perceive us – on other words, other people in their interactions with us constitute a type of mirror or ‘looking glass’. There is subtlety attached to all of this because it is actually our perceptions of other people’s perceptions of us that get built into our own self-identity. I remember that as boys playing football in the school yard during playtime, as a rather cruel joke we use to take the kid that happened to be the least skilful at football and then all pretend to him that he was absolutly brilliant, even allowing him to score occasionally to add to his self belief. The young ‘victim’ (as they were in reality) then started to think of themselves as really talented which I suppose is rather a cruel joke but that is what children sometimes do to each other in the playground. Allied to this story is the other one I blogged about the other day when the world famous footballer Pele had just died. The story is told of an amateur footballer who had been knocked unconscious and was being treated by the trainer at the edge of the pitch. But the manager was desperate to get him playing again in a very tight Cup match and when the trainer explained that, after the concussion, the footballer was confused and could not remember who he was, the manager retorted ‘Tell him he is Pele and get him back on the pitch!’ The conversation with our University of Birmingham friend then flowed on to the topic of the level of musical education we had both received and how we all have to find our natural level of ability before we realise that we were never going to become concert pianists or performers.

This lunchtime we raided the freeer and found one piece of frozen white fish that was going to constitute our lunch. The frozen fish is nutritious enough but not particularly flavoursome, so it needed a bit of ‘tarting up’ for our meal. I discovered that I had a half packet of Hollandaise sauce powder left which I then enhanced with some ‘mixed Italian herbs’ I discovered in our spice rack and all of this had the desired effect as our lunch turned out to be quite tasty and was complemented with a baked potato and some green beans. After lunch, we enjoyed a little concert of some Mozart piano sonatas and then tuned in to an old version of ‘Morse’ being shown on ITV3. The theme of this proved a little ‘dark’ for Meg (teenagers dying after taking ‘E’ and similar laboratory manufactured drugs) so we abandoned this and tuned into an animal type program that was more of Meg’s cup of tea. I read the newspaper from cover-to-cover and successfully completed a ‘difficult’ Soduka which I rarely do these days. Meg and I are looking forward to this weekend because it is the start of the 6 Nations rugby competition – some of it collides with our visit to church on late Saturday afternoon so we shall have to make a judicious use of our Personal Video Recorder to record the matches (or even the whole series) for later viewing.

The first hint of a breakthrouh in some of the public sector strikes was seen this afternoon. Nurses in Wales with the Royal College of Nursing have called off planned strike action next week after a pay offer this afternoon. Pat Cullen, the union’s general secretary, observed that if the other governments can negotiate and find more money for this year, the prime minister can do the same. This puts the presssure upon health ministers who refuse to negotiate on the nursing dispute in England to come up with a similar offer but somehow, I think that they will still hold fast and not accept the precedent of the nurses in Wales.

Today has been an interesting day. As I normally do, I got up early and got myself to my local supermrket one minute before it opened which is my ideal. I decided to make this week a ‘light’ week so whereas I might be tempted to buy the occasional thing that was not on my mental list, I tried to restrict myself today to only those items that were strictly necessary. As a consequence, I finished my shopping ten minutes early, saved the best part of £10.00 and then, having collected our daily newspaper arrived home before normal and got the packing unshopped in almost record time. As I was on the road, there was a not particularly pleasant sort of stinging rain hanging in the air. Consequently, it was quite easy for Meg and I to decide on an activity rather than walking in our local park. As we did a couple of weeks ago, we set off for nearby Droitwich and immediately to the coffee house which is our usual haunt. By the time we got there, the place was absolutely heaving but we were fortunate in finding a little table to ourselves near the back of the shop. On a neighbouring table, there was a threesome with a couple of Jack Russell dogs and we had an entertaining conversation with them about ‘doggy ‘ matters, even though we are not dog owners ourselves. After coffee, we piled into the Cancer Research charity shop next door pursuing the shop for kitchen odds and ends without finding nothing that we wanted or needed. However, in contrast to a couple of weeks ago on our last visit, they had a good supply of shirts in the 15½” range and I quickly selected a couple to replace some of the shirts I have in our wardrobe that are by now getting a bit threadbare. Finally, we popped into our latest hardware store – Wilko– in search of a simple kitchen tray which I have in mind for a particular purpose and it took a lot of finding. Even the store staff did not know where in the store they might be found one or whether they had any in stock. Eventually, I found a supply of what I wanted and the dimensions were absolutely perfect. In the past, I had bought a lot of plastic/melamine type trays that this store used to stock but that was years ago and times have moved on. However, I found a wooden tray (actually, in bamboo, it was said) and was pleased to have located what I wanted. As I was taking it out of the car when we got home, though, I was delighted to discover that that what looked like a tray actually had folding legs on the back to convert it into a low table if you want. This fits my purposes even better so after I got it home, it had a quick treatment of some furniture polish to keep it looking in good condition and then I will store it until I bring it into use.

When we got home, it was fairly late by this stage but I threw together a meal (onions, tomatoes, peppers, some peas) which I served on a bed of pasta (for Meg) but cream crackers for myself. For protein we resorted to a standby of some tuna enhanced by 1000 Island sauce and the whole meal proved to be quite quick to prepare as well as being tasty. We had a quiet afternoon but treated ourselves to listening to the outstanding Canadian pianist Glen Gould playing some Mozart sonatas. We have a boxed set of this performer playing every piano sonata that Mozart composed and the whole set came along as part of the bid I successfully made for the 48 strong collection of CDs about three weeks ago now.

Two stories caught my eye this evening, one national and the other more local. The national story was highlighting the activities of British Gas who were employing some agents to force pre-payment gas meters on consumers who had run foul of their systems and who installed meters for these really poor payers. What was shocking, though, was the way that British Gas (or the agents they deployed) used a local locksmith to gain access to a property in which they were going to install a meter and the video clip showed the pleasure that they showed when gaining forcible access in this way, coupled with brutal attitudes towards the poor (in every sense) customers who had this treatment foisted upon them. The local story concerned a statue known as the ‘Knife Angel’ which after a tour of several towns is going to be installed outside Gloucester Cathedral. The statue is contructed from knives that have come into the possession of the police and rather than being destroyed, they have been used to construct this dramatic statue. Meg and I have actually seen this when it was located outside Chester Cathedral about a year or so ago and we can only hope that the prominent display of this statue has the desired deterrent effect. The local news item focussed on a local youth who had been prominent in the Gloucester area in trying to get knives off the streets of the city.