Today was always going to be rather an ‘action-packed’ day because there were quite a lot of domestic chores to be undertaken before we start our preparations for spending a few days away in Yorkshire. First thing this morning, I received a voicemail from my BT contact from Lincoln – unfortunately, I had missed her call on my mobile and she did not phone me on my newly restored landline but, in truth, we had hardly anything to discuss because with my ex-landline restored (or more technically, ported over to the Fibre Plus plan I now have with BT) then everything we needed BT to sort out was now actually working to our satisfaction. As today is a Tuesday, Meg and I indulge ourselves with going down to Waitrose where we did bump into one one or two of our regulars. I took the opportunity of doing a little bit of shopping, the most important of which was to have longer-life milk that will survive the rigours of a hotel bedroom whilst we make ourselves drinks as we require them. Then it was case of going home and getting through a pile of papers that needed to be processed i.e. either junked once the addresses had been shredded or else filed. When all of this, I was ready to change in my Pilates track-suit bottoms and then walk down into town. Our class is currently quite small and there were only two of us today – one of our regulars is fitting in to a Thursday class and another regular to another class this morning. We had the usual jokey session as our tutor and my fellow-class mate and I have been attending for some 8-10 years, I would estimate. Then it was a case of getting home and cooking a quick dinner for the two us. This afternoon, Meg and I thought that we would make a trip to our local vaccination centre to work out whether we needed a COVID booster jab or not. We have both had the two initial vaccinations and two boosters but nonetheless our local surgery had written to us to request that we present ourselves for a ‘spring’ booster. But this, too, proved to be as fruitless a journey as was yesterdays. The very friendly nurse on the entrance door explained that the vaccination centres all over the country were being closed down and further vaccinations would now be under the aegis of one’s own GP/medical practice. She explained to us that most of the time she was busy turning people (like us) away as part of the NHS machine was urging you to attend whilst another part was turning you away. So we now have it from the ‘horses mouth’ as it were that we would wait for the official autumn boost to the vaccine to be rolled out for us in September. On the way home, though, we took the opportunity to get the car topped up with petrol and we also dived into a nearby supermarket to buy one or two cosmetic items.

Last night was a televised debate beteen Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss in pursuit of the Conservative party leadership. Rishi Sunak made a pitch which seemed overly aggressive to many with a host of interruptions. For her part, Liz Truss seemed somewhat robotic as she evidently had prepared ‘mantras’ in which the word ‘deliver’ was certainly overused. In an opinion poll after the debate,the two candidates appeared to be level pegging. But amongst Conservative party members, Liz Truss held the lead whilst Rishi Sunak held a similar lead amongst Labour supporters. A debate held on TalkTV tonight was halted though when the presenter, Kate McCannn, fainted half way through the broadcst. Liz Truss appeared shocked and rushed to the aid of the presenter but the broadcast was immediately abandoned. Both candidates subsequently tweeted their good wishes to Kate McCann who seemed to recover from her faint but the programme makers had to issue an apology citing a medical incident. The debate so far this evening appeared to be much more even tempered but I think the spin doctors and associated journalists probably had to consider the whole of tonight’s confrontation as a ‘non-event’

We took the opportunity to FaceTime some of our pre-pandemic Waitrose friends this evening and we had quite a lot of news to catch up on. Earlier in the day, I had texted my two nieces in Yorkshire and it looks as though we can see both of them on Thursday as well as my sister. So far this leaves Friday for Meg and I to enjoy ourselves in Harrogate but we will see what emerges from our opportunities to catch up with our relatives who seem to be leading hectic lives (moving house, changing jobs) and so on. The weather seems set fair in the days ahead so this will no doubt enhance our little stay away.

I suppose all days are likely to have minor triumphs and some disappointments and such a day it was today. However, our day started off exceptionally well because our ‘old’ landline number, disconnected when we upgraded to Full Fibre acquiring a new number in the process, was successfully ported over to our fibre connection. To be fair to BT, one of their technical staff last Monday promised me that they could ‘probably’ restore my old number starting today and they confirmed by text in what they called a new order. If you were to go on the web and look at some of the kinds of discussions that people have had in similar situations, it has often proved to be quite problematic as BT had often said that they would attempt but not guarantee to get the old number back again. So the strategy that I deployed to move my whole fibre package over to BT so it was a case of transferring from ‘old’ BT landline to ‘new’ BT fibre broadband, seems to have paid dividends. Tomorrow morning one of the very helpful BT technical staff with whom I dealt last week is going to contact me (ring me on my new number?) to check that everything has worked all right. I am not committed to my old number for sentimental reasons but it is is printed on lots of business cards and address labels that I put inside Christmas cards and the like so the ‘old’ number is probably written into diaries all over the country. Now that we our comms restored to something like a decent state, I texted some of our friends with whom we have not been in contact for a week or so to arrange a FaceTime ‘chat’ with them tomorrow. Then I downloaded the instruction manual for the new phones so that I know how to utilise all of the features (including the volume control). After all of this, Meg and I decided to return to our re-purposed Arts centre where we have already received two vaccinations plus two ‘top-ups’. It is unclear to us whether we are now due to receive a third top-up as our last one was on 21st March which is now four months ago and our enhanced immunity status might have diminished a fair bit. But when we got to the centre, the whole building was closed and will only re-open at 2.00pm tomorrow afternoon. So this means that Meg and I will need to return tomorrow after my Pilates class and a somewhat delayed lunch so we could have done without this on the day before we are due to go away.

Although we have had several days of intense sunshine, like the rest of the country, the lawns were looking a little sorry for themselves with some tall-stemmed wispy looking weeds spoiling the overall appearance. So as the sun was shining I took the opportunity to get our grassed areas cut which I like to have done before we go away for a few days. When I was in the middle of this, two cars appeared outside the empty bungalow which faces us across our communal green area and this was no great surprise to us as the house which was ‘Sold’ then reverted to ‘Unsold’ and then again to ‘Sold’ all within the last week or so. I imagine that the cars belonged to new owners, either actual or potential, and they might have a word with me about how the BioDisk works and related issues but in the event they just drove away.

Tonight, there is going to a ‘Question Time’ type of program in which Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are going to defend their political stance in front of an audience of Conservative party members. This may prove to be another ‘bearpit’ after some of the hustings last week but as Liz Truss is apparently so far ahead in the opinion polls of Conservative party members, tonight’s program is seen as crucial for the Rishi Sunak campaign. The debate is going to be held in Stoke-on-Trent as it was one of those Labour ‘red wall’ seats that swung massively behind Boris Johnson. From this, we might be able to infer that many of the audience will favour Liz Truss as she is seen as the Boris Johnson ‘heir apparent’in a community like this. How the BBC is going to get a ‘balanced’ audience tonight is an interesting point because in the run up to the EC referendum, most editions of ‘Question Time’ seemed to dominated by very vociferous Brexit audience members whereas Remain members appeared much more subdued. Some fairly late news this evening is that Rishi Sunak has agreed to be interviewed by Andrew Neil – in my view, one of the most penetrating interviewers in the whole of the media scene. For her part, Liz Truss has not agreed to be interviewed. So I suppose the very evident front runner feels she has everything to lose and the candidate who appears to be a long way behind has everything to gain.

Normally when we go to church each Saturday evening, it is a fairly ‘low key’ affair but yesterday proved to be the exception. About 10-15 minutes into the service, it was evident that something was happening at the back of the church because we could hear some groaning, a bit of a kerfuffle and lots of loud, worried whispers. As all of this was happening in the back of the church, none of us could see what has happening without turning round to gawp. Our parish priest, though, who was facing the congregation could discern what was going on which was the collapse of an elderly gentleman. One of the assistants to the priest went into the Sacristry and gave the priest some sacred oils which means that he could perfom the sacrament of what used to be called ‘Extreme Unction‘ but which nowadays is more accurately described as the ‘Annointing of the Sick‘. The theology behind all of this is that this sacrament is meant to be administered to a person who is on the point of death and gives remissions of sins and such like to ease one’s passage into the next world. The priest went to the back of the church and annointed the sick gentleman – whether he was conscious or not at this stage, we did not know. After a brief pause and after some prompting from the congegation, the priest continued with the rest of the Mass but when it came to the administration of Holy Communion, the priest went immediately to the back of the church to minister to the stricken gentleman. The whole congegation exited the church through the Sacristy at the front of the church (as we used to do in pandemic days as a form of simple crowd control) only to be greeted by not one but three ambulances in the church car park and the street nearby. One of them was even bore the message that it was part of the ‘Air ambulance’ service. I suppose people can be taken seriously ill almost anywhere including cinemas and theatres and so perhaps a church is probably as good a place as any for such a trauma to occur. Then we had to navigate home through a new route as our normal route back home was impeded by two sets of temporary traffic lights (one a consequence of the demolition of a local pub, the other being due to the flattening of the normal traffic light by a drunken driver) So it was good to get home, have a spot of tea and then settle down to what might be called a more normal, peaceful evening.

Today, although the weather was cloudy, I had already collected my Sunday newspaper first thing in the morning so Meg and I decided to take a walk down into the park. We took our coffee on our ‘normal’ bench and waited for a few of our friends to turn up but none did. But as we turned for home, our University of Birmingham friend turned up, apologising for being a bit later than usual. Nonetheless, it was very useful to have a little chat with him as we could inform him that as we are going to be away next week and only returning on Saturday, we would not coincide with him again until next Sunday morning.

I have not had the chance yet of a detailed read of the Sunday newspapers, although they are giving a lot of the ‘insider’ information into both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. I do not suppose there is a lot of point being well informed about the strength and weaknesses of the two candidates as the whole result will be determined by about 160,000 Conservative party members in the country as a whole. The rest of the 60 million of us are reduced to the role of passive bystanders whilst the next Prime Minister is chosen by about 0.4% of the voting population. One particular feature of political parties in the UK is that the constituency political parties being populated by the activists and the committed are always more extreme than the parliamentary parties (for MP’s have had to appeal somewhat to the middle ground in order to be elected) So the constituency labour parties are to the left of the parliamentary party and as in a mirror image the constituency Conservative parties are to the right of the parliamentary party. Therefore the two candidates for the post of Prime Minister are having to pitch their appeals to the right wing members of the constituency parties which are themselves to the right of an already right wing parliamentary party. Today, both candidates have chosen to use the subjct of immigration to gain some electoral support. Liz Truss is arguing that we can search for other countries as as well Rwanda to accept would-be asylum seekers whilst Rishi Sunak is proposing a cap on the numbers to whom the Home Office eventually grants settled status. When all other arguments are exhausted, the Tory party can always rely upon ‘immigration’ and its modern day variants in order to garner support.

You are never quite sure what a day is going to bring and so it proved to be today. The day dawned bright enough but it was somewhat cloudy, not to mention muggy, and looked as though we might get a smattering of rain although it didn’t arise. Getting into town to pick up our newspaper proved to be a little problematic. There were enormous traffic jams throughout the town and particularly upon the street on which our newsgagent has his shop. When I eventually, and patiently, found my way to the shop I was infomed that a drunken driver had crashed into one of the local traffic signal staunctions and as a repair crew were busy working upon this, there was a complex sytem of temporary traffic lights. On our way down into town, we espied our University of Birmingham friend and wound down the car window to tell him we would meet him in the park. When we did get there, rather later than we had anticipated, we met two of our regulars (our friend just hailed and Seasoned World Traveller) who were sitting on a park bench together. These two are being a smidgeon careful in each other’s company as they both have had sniffles in the last week and were anxious that if they were harbouring anything a bit more serious than a slight cold, then they had no wish to inflict it upon each other. Nonetheless, we all did meet up on a regular ‘high level’ bench which overlooks a lot of the park and which is our favourite watering hole. We have a bit of a suspicion that when we start to talk politics, which is nearly every day, other members of the public who are nearby do not want to overhear any part of our conversation, even by accident, and tend to get up and walk away. This may well reflect a deeper division which sociologists in the past have labelled the difference between a ‘local’ and a ‘cosmopolitan’ world view. I suppose that with a mutual interest in national politics and more broadly in international affairs, we are firmly in the ‘cosmopolitan’ camp and are frankly just a bit bored, not to say uninterested, in what is happening within the very local vicinity (say within a couple of miles). This is perhaps too crude a distinction because one can be both local and cosmopolitan as the mood might take you although ‘pure’ locals are more likely to stay that way. As we were sitting on the bench we were passed by a couple of elderly Irish friends (friends of friends) that we know quite well and who attend the same church as we do but on a Sunday rather than a Saturday. We all congratulated each other how we had managed to survive the horrendous temperatures of the past week when the temperature reached over 40 degrees in Lincolnshire. Finally, Meg and I set off for the car on a way home and were enthusisatically greeted by a labradoodle type dog – this is quite a common occurrence. We got into conversation with the middle aged lady owner and one topic of conversation flowed on to another. Eventually, it transpired that she was a headteacher of a Catholic school in a neighbouring town but also attended our church but on a Sunday rather than a Saturday. We found we had quite a lot of interesting points of mutual interest, so I gave her one of my business cards which I keep with my phone in the event that we have a chance meeting like this. As my daughter-in-law is a headteacher, we understood to some extent the occupational pressures that she was under and we parted wondering if we might bump into each again somewhere. Finally, before we actually reached the car, we encountered our Intrepid Octogenerian Hiker and we exchanged some reminisciences about the characters that we could remember from ‘The Beano’ of our youth (principally Dan Dare, Dennis the Menace, Pansy Potter, Beryl the Peril and Desperate Dan) I will not start to explain who these characters well but readers of a certain (more advanced) age may well remember them quite well. In addition, as I ran around with the ‘vicarage’ children in the small village in which I lived in Yorkshire, I was introduced to the very middle class comic (‘Eagle‘) because the CofE vicar himself was very friendly with Marcus Morris who founded the ‘Eagle‘ and ‘Girl‘ comics in about 1950 and it survived until about 1969. These two vicars had served together with each in WWII and hence their friendship.

This morning, I amused myself by creating a little ‘Group’ of my BT email addresses in one of my companion email clients. This is so that I can send a ‘keep alive’ message at least once every 150 days which is a condition of use for the BT accounts in order to keep them active. So I have put a note on my calendar to activate my ‘Keep Live’ routine in about four and a half months time.

The day dawned today as one of those murkey looking days with a yellowish type of tinge to everything. We suspected that it was going to be one of those overcast drizzly type of days and so it turned out. We eventually decided that it would be a good policy to collect our newspaper by car, which we did, and then we made our way to the park carpark. At this stage, although the main rain showers had passed by, it was still spitting somewhat so we decided that today was one of the bandstand days to which we typically repair in weather conditions like todays. Two other groups of people had also intended to have a little picnic in the park so that they, too, also headed for the bandstand. This does have the slight disdvantage that there is nowhere to sit so I have thought of a little reminder to myself to hunt in the garage to see if we have a really lightweight little camping chair which we can take with us on days like these so that Meg has something upon which to sit. Needless to day, the sun was practically shining by the time it came to leave and we decided to pay a quick visit to Waitrose to see if any of our park acquaintances had finished up there. I popped my head round into the coffee bar area, saw no-one we recognised and so we made for home and thought we would treat ourselves to a quick viewing of the 1.00pm news before we started on lunch preparation. We had a simple lunch incorporating the one kipper fillet I had dug out of the freezer into a Friday risotto which used to be a staple for us every Friday lunchtime.

In my long, leisurely read of The Times over the last day or so, I have taken great pleasure in reading a commentary upon the important speech that Liz Truss made to the Food and Drink Federation when she was an advocate of remaining within the European Community. In this speech, she gave several detailed examples of the ills that would befall us were we to leave the European Community and the really interesting thing is that she was remarkble prescient, and accurate, in the things that she said before she ‘changed her mind’. Evidently, this is causing some glee amongst erstwhile Remainers amongst the staff writers and commentators. Of course, when it comes to a General Election, all of these just have to be constantly repeated back to Liz Truss and no doubt she will constantly asked exactly why she changed her mind (if not for naked political opportunism) and why she things she was wrong then (although she was right) and right now (although she is wrong) A rather shocking statistic is that only 31% of Tory MP’s actually voted for Liz Truss and, assuming she does become leader of the party, then some 69% of the parliamentary party of which she shall be the leader did not vote for her. To put it mildly, even some Conservative thinkers are worried that this will be a recipe for long run political stability even though loyalty used to the ‘secret weapon’ of the Tory party. In fact there is quite a massive tension between the ideological, Brexit-driven wing of the Tory party and a more centrist managerialist wing, typified by Rishi Sunak. To a large extent, this is a mirror image of the problems that the Labour party used to have where Jeremy Corbin led a parliamentary party here the majority of members had not voted for him.

I spent some of the afternoon exploring the email client provided by BT, now that I have eleven spare addresses ‘free’ provided to me as part of my new fibre broadband deal. If you look at the reactions of many users, there seems to be a consensus that the BT offering is terrible but as I am only going to use it fo the most occasional of uses (including quoting an address might eventually be ‘spammed’), this is not really source of concern to me. I have worked out a way I can navigate straight into my preferred email without having to go through the more general BT portal in the first place. I have also set up one auto-forward which means that anything that lands in my BT mailbox will be forwarded to my normal email client so that I can see what it is. Tonight, as we have our TV stitched into our new wifi-through-the-mains service, we are going to treat ourselves to an opera and see if we can get this viewed without any buffering problems which have plagued us in the past. I have one of those Amazon ‘USB’ gizmos stuck in the back of the TV and through this, I can access YouTube and hence to whatever operas they happen to have available. These tend to be very dated but nonetheless excellent productions, probably made 20-30 years ago.

Today my son and I (well, my son actually) installed the updated ‘gismos’ that we have just bought that route the WiFi signals through our house’s mains wiring system. The old units were about 8 years old and may have been a little outdated as the world of comms technology is coming on in leaps and bounds. The new units increased the WiFi signal strength sufficiently to give my son a workable signal strength and download speed in the corner of the house where he prefers to work (but where the route to the router is somewhat indirect) So this is another protential problem averted and we are now back more or less to the state we were in about two weeks ago, except that we now have a much improved download speed in the ground floor of our property, given that the fibre cable comes through a hole in the wall and is located in a room in the front of the house. Today is the day when I go shopping first thing in the morning so there I was at one minute to 8.00am queuing outside th supermarket door. Having got the shopping home, I then unpacked it whilst chatting with our domestic help and cooking a breakfast for Meg and myself. When all of this was done, we decided we needed to go to Waitrose in Droitwich to buy some items of clothing for Meg which I know the store stocks. But in the event, getting to Droitwich was less than straighforward. For a start, we soon discovered that the main road to Droitwich from Bromsgrove was blocked at some point, so we had to turn round and find another route. Even this second route seemed a bit problematic so we worked our way around that and eventually got to Droitwich. As soon as we got there, we made straight for our favourite coffee bar and treated ourselves to some good coffee and a huge toasted teacake which was split between us. After this, we piled into the Cancer Relief charity shop which is immediately next door. Whilst there, we discovered a stunning blue top which suited Meg down to the ground. Whilst she was trying it on, I discovered a stainless steel cafetiere but I was not quite sure how it worked. When I asked for some assistance from the shop assistant who could not provide me with any, another very friendly customer who was nearby told me he had one almost exactly the same and showed me how it worked. On the strength of this, I went ahead and bought it and then we made our way to our favourite Wilko hardware store. Whilst there, we bought the normal smattering of goods (some cosmetics, some stationery and so on) and finally we made our way down to Waitrose which was meant to be the object of our visit in the first place. I popped into the store and bought Meg the ‘knee-highs’ that are stocked within the store. Finally, it was a circuitous drive home as the traffic obstructions that we had encountered earlier were still there. The minute I got in, I started cooking a fish dinner with some smoked hake fillets I had bought earlier on in the day and our domestic help was more than happy to have a little of this as I also cooked some very low calorie rice substitute which I bought earlier.

After lunch and a doze, I realised that there were one or items I had forgotten from the morning shopping so I shot into town by car to get a top up. I also bought one or two things from a neighbouring store including some rather fine quality ceramic mugs wich we are going to take up to Yorkshire with us to help us enjoy our drinks of tea and coffee. Although we do not go until next Wednesday, I am collecting one or two little things that I know we can take with us to make our stay in the hotel so much more restful. Today has been a much cooler day, weatherwise, with a hint of rain in the air when we were out in Droitwich. According to the app on my iPhone, we should be getting quite a continuous band of rain during the night and this may well persist throughout tomorrow morning. I think we are all longing for one of those prolonged downpours but it may well be that we just end with a slight smattering of rainfall which hardly penetrates the earth at all.

Now that the two Conservative candidates are putting themselves forward to the Conservative party membership across the country, there is quite a lot of detailed scrutiny of the the two candidates. Liz Truss’s brand of economics is receiving particular attention as most economists are of the view that in present conditions, reducing taxes will be inflationary and the impact on growth will be minimal. Rishi Sunak’s past financial dealings whilst a young man is also receiving a lot of scrutiny and we will have weeks more of this yet. As things stand, Truss is way ahead of Sunak in the minds of the Conservative members and were they to vote early, then Sunak’s bid to become Prime Minister seems doomed from the start.

Today was very much ‘the day after the day before’ as we seem to have survived the unprecedented heat of yesterday. The sky was a little clouded over and whilst still a bit close and muggy, there was a gentle and cooling breeze which was so welcome after yesterday. Meg and I got slowly underway this morning and eventually I went out by car to collect the newspaper and popped into Waitrose for one or two things. Then it was just a gentle day, taking care of my accounts and filing some paperwork. I imagined that I was going to have to get into an argument with my ex-broadband provider as my email inbox suggested that another bill was on its way. But when I studied my account details on the net it seemed that the ‘bill’ was actually a refund for services not used and the account was now closed, as indeed it should have been. As Meg and I had not had a walk anywhere this morning, we thought that we would have an early lunch but did not fancy anything too heavy. I had got a small quiche out of the freezer so we decided to have this warmed up complemented with some salad type things that I have left over from this week so this was a meal quickly thrown together and easy to clean up afterwards.

We watched Boris Johnson at Prime Minster’s Questions which was Johnson’s last stand at the despatch box as Prime Minister. The performance was much as you would expect with a massive amount of bluster. For his part, Keir Starmer just read a list of the ‘blue on blue’ attacks that have taken place as candidates in the Conservative party leadership race have just been taking great chunks out of each other. But the major event of the day was always going to be the announcement at 4.00pm to see which of the remaining three contenders for the Conservative party leadership would be eliminated leaving the top two to put themselves forward to less than 200,000 Conservative party members. When the result came, it was a bit of an anticlimax as Rishi Sunak secured the first place and the second place was easily taken by Liz Truss as was predicted in this blog yesterday. This was because about one half of the Kemi Badenock (right wing, Brexit type vote) went immediately to Truss with the remaining half split almost equally between Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt. All of the commentators had said that it was going to be an incredibly tight race and all kinds of ‘games’ were being played with some candidates rumoured to be lending votes to others in order to block a third. But it was very simple really as the right wing, Brexit vote just flowed from one candidate to the next and it was pretty obvious (well, to me) that Truss would come through. According to various surveys that have taken place, it seems that Liz Truss is way ahead of Rishi Sunak amongst the Conservative party membership so it is a foregone conclusion that she is going to be the next Conservative party leader and Prime Minister although the result will not be announced until the first week of September. In the meanwhile, Liz Truss has tweeted that she is ‘going to hit the ground running’ but forgot to include the word running which has caused a lot oF amusement in Labour Party circles. I think the Labour Party think that Liz Truss is quite beatable when it comes to a general election in about two years time.

If I have to reflect upon the terrible events of yesterday when several houses in the village of Wemmington in the East of London were consumed by fire, it is that finally the reality of climate change may be brought home to many people. I am not sure how the climate change deniers account for what happened yesterday but I suspect there is a realisation that the scientists were right. Without making an overtly political point here, it does appear that what the Greens have been saying for decades is probably correct and we need to rethink our social and economic structures. One comment heard today is that the London Fire Service has had its busiest day since the Second World War which, of course, ended some 77 years go.

This afternoon, whilst waiting for the Conservative party leadership elections to unfold, I started filing all of my BT broadband paperwork and exploring what the website had to offer. As part of the package, I am given an allocation of eleven email addresses with btinternet.com – normally one would have one’s own name but the evident one has been taken so I am thinking of some variations tht I can use. One of them I have utilised to ‘file away’ most of the email correspondence I have received from BT so that this is all in one place and another I am going to use for email that could be ‘spammy’ but no doubt I will think of uses for the remaining addresses. It seems as though I have unlimited storage, though, and the email system is bare-bones but adequate for the occasional use.

Today was a day when it was widely predicted that temperatures would exceed 40 degrees celsius perhaps in several places across the UK and this inevitably came to pass later on in the day. Meg and I knew that we would have to be especially careful throughout the day and that we had to take pains not to expose ourselves to any unnecessary degree of risk posed by the extremely hot temperatures predicted for the day. The huge plume of hot air may well move northwards to be followed by thunderstorms perhaps as early as tomorrow so we are aware that today is the type of day to be ‘tunnelled’ through as it were. After we had some cooling showers in the bathroom, we went by car to collect our newspaper and to see if any of the jolly Waitrose crowd were in evidence in the coffee bar. There we met with one of pre-pandemic friends as well as Seasoned World Traveller who made an appearance so we chatted about the events of the day (politics, weather and so on) Having taken advice from several people around me, I made the decision not to attend my Pilates class in the middle of the day. Although the exercise studio is air conditioned, it still meant going by car in the hottest part of the day so I texted my Pilates teacher to say that I was going to give today’s session a miss. She was a little disappointed, I think, but at the end of the day I thought I was probably making a sensible decision. When we got home, we treated ourselves to an ice-cream on a stick which I bought in the supermarket the other day and it was just the job for a day like today. I have a policy of getting us through the day of having a series of pint glasses each filled with cold water and cordial lodged in the fridge and each time we pass them by, we have a gulp of cold water. We had a simple lunch of fishcakes with a few steamed vegetables and some coleslaw and it took the minimum of cooking.

After we had lunched we were eager to see the latest round of voting in the Conservative elections for the party leader and, as expected, Kemi Badenoch was eliminated having has a good run so far and enhanced her chances of a good cabinet post substantially. There is going to be a terrific fight for the second place behind Rishi Sunak but I am pretty sure I know what is going to happen. I reckon that at least 50% of the Badenoch votes will now go to Liz Truss (as right wingers allways support each other massively) and from this stage on Sunak and Truss will go the country. Here, according to all of the opinion polls, Truss supporters will easily outvote Sunak and hence I predict that she will be the next Tory leader, not least as she can sort of claim that she is carrying the ‘Johnson heritage’ forward. Having said this, a videoclip is circulating of her saying what a disaster leaving the EU would be when she addressed the Food and Drink Federation just before the referendum. Also, she regularly cmne bottom in all of the TV debates where viewers were asked to rate the perfomance of the candidates. On the other hand, the Labour Party may feel that she is quite a beatable candidate rather than Sunak. You read it here first!

I had a rather extraordinary telphone call with a representative of BT today. I had got a text on my phone to see if I could discuss my latest upgrade to Super Fibre 500 which as it turns out gives me 10x the speed for only an extra tenner a month. It looked as though some kind of duplicate order had crept onto the system so my contact in BT, who I shall call Susan, quickly cancelled the misplaced contract. Then she asked if there was anything she could do for me and I mentioned the landline I wanted to get back. She put this through the system and thought that all being well it could probably be restored by next Monday. Asked if she could do anything else for me, I mentioned the poor reception that we get one of the bedrooms in which my son works when he calls around. She performed a series of tests upon the line for me and we looked at some settings in the router. Finally, if at all fails, she thinks she could probably solve our problems by some repeater units (up to three) which we can have around the house – if they don’t work, then we have a fourteen day cooling off period so we cancel the order and return the units. She is going to phone me back within a 2-hour time slot next Tuesday when my landline number should have been restored and we can discuss options to increase WiFi reception in the relevant bedroom. But I have experimented with my iPad and we may get the reception we need by altering the location of the desk and the WiFi within the room but we may need to experiment further.

Well, today has arrived which is the first of the two really hot days through which we had to ‘tunnel’ as it were. Very first thing this morning, our son called round and we got round to installing our new BT router. This really was incredibly simple and all we had to do was to plug it in and then enter the passwords for the new network into our computers and phones. So far, so good but we haven’t yet tackled the TV which we will do in the fullness of time. Then we have four new phones which we had to register with the router, which again could not be more simple (it involved pressing a button for two seconds and that was it) Then all we had to do was to ‘name’ each handset (kitchen, study, lounge, bedroom) and this too proved simple. Having got all of this done, we tested the broadband speeds and got 50 MBps which seems adequate but it is actually slower than the copper cable which it replaced. But more on this later.

After breakfast, the priority was for me to get out onto the road before it became too hot both to pick up our daily newspaper and also to visit our preferred supermarket to get a supply of ice cream. Normally, we would have been quite well stocked up on this but when I last did a regular food shopping, nearly all of the ice cream was gone. no doubt with people stocking up in anticipation of the warmer days ahead. I managed to get three tubs of ice cream and some ice cream lollipops on a stick and this was a fast and easy transaction. When I got home, the next thing to do was to get onto BT to ask them if they could resurrect my old landline number. There is a rather obscure department of BT called ‘Keep Live’ or something similar so it is all in their hands at the moment and I await a text or similar communication in the days ahead to see what success they are having.

As you might expect, the rolling news programmes are full of the up-to-minute accounts of what is happening around the countryside as people try to cope with temperatures heading to be in excess of 40 degrees celsius. Long distance trains are having to keep their speeds well down as a buckled rail could give a rapid derailment so a journey from Leeds to London will take five hours rather than 2.5 hours. Several airports are having massive problems as the tarmac on the runways melts literally making the aircraft stick to the ground. There is masses of advice how to protect one’s health and drinking plenty of cold fluids is stressed, not least because excess heat and dehydration mkes the blood less viscose and therefore more liable to clot which translates into heart attacks and strokes. In the light of this information, I have filled several half pint glasses with cold water and some cordial and placed them in our fridge. Every time to go past them, we have several gulps of fluid which strategy seems to have worked fine so far. In the early afternoon, I consulted the thermometer which we have outside the house and the maximum displayed was 34 degrees at about 2.30pm. By 3.00 pm it had come off the peak very slightly and is now about 33.5 degrees at 4.30 in the afternoon.

Now that I have the internet freely available to me, I decided to do a ‘browse’ and see what BT packages were available to me and whether I was on the correct package or not. I suspect that I was on the lowest tranche of fibre broadband and then get onto BT to see if I could speak with anyone sensible. After my past experiences, I avoided all of the sales teams altogether and got through to a technical department where I explained that I had fibre broadband installed that morning and wondered if I was on the correct package. They started talking about the most expensive options with ‘silly’ broadband speeds and even sillier prices but as they talked me down the various options, I eventually chose an option which increases my broadband speed 10-fold for another £20.00 a month. This seemed quite acceptable to me and after going through all of the terms and conditions, to which I assented, I should be upgraded to this fast broadband speed sometime tomorrow morning. This may be as late as 23.59 hours but could be as early as tomorrow morning (after all, all they have to do is to ‘click a box’ on the software that will control such things).

In the elections for the Conservative party leadership, several candidates have pulled out of the ITV hustings programmes tonight as the Conservative party were getting dismayed at the ‘blue on blue’ attacks. The latest round of voting takes place this afternoon and the latest result will be available at 8.00pm this evening.

Today started off quite well. First of all, Meg and I made sure that our bedroom was sufficiently cool for a good night’s sleep and this we both obtained, so at least we got off to a flying start. Then quite early on, I sent off a quick email and WhatsApp message to my friend in Scarborough to check his availabiliy for late August. Once I had received a positive reply, I went ahead and made a booking with the same hotel in Harrogate for which we already have a booking in ten days time. We were offered an incredibly good price – better than some B&Bs – so I was tempted by and quite readily accepted a room upgrade which means that we have an even better room when we go at the end of August for about the same price. Actually things could hardly have worked out better because when we have a stay in the hotel at the end of this month, we can make some arrangements for a good afternoon tea for my sister and we will be able to enquire what arrangements we are able to make for a suitable birthday cake. All of this having been done, we then decided to make our cautiously down to the park for our daily perambulation. I had already picked up the Sunday newspaper early on this morning as part of my usual Sunday morning routine. As I walked down for the newspaper, I noticed that the park gates were shut so we parked on a service road opposite the park. Then we made our way onto our normal bench and were soon joined by our University of Birmingham friend who we were especially pleased to see as we had not seen him for several days. We were just on the point of leaving when we joined by our Irish friends who were off on an extended walk as they often do on a Sunday morning so we had our normal jolly little chats before we made our way home by car as we specially wished to avoid walking in the full mid-day sun today. Looking at the TV schedules for this afternoon, we noticed that they were putting on a re-run of The Railway Children which, of course, we all saw decades ago. I think the reason for the re-showing at this point of time is because a sequel to The Railway Children has just been written and is due to be released into cinemas quite soon now. Many of the TV pages are saying that it would be a good idea to see the original before you go off and see the updating, so this repeat makes a lot of sense. Jenny Agutter played the part as a 17-year old and will star all of these decades later as the grandmother in the update of the story. We had some ham cooking in the slow cooker so to make sure we did not waste any time cooking on an already hot day, I put thick slices of ham between two slices of toast (for Meg) and rice cakes (for myself) so we finished off having a hot, but smallish meal, within minutes of getting in so that we sit down and watch the film in some peace.

This afternoon, and thinking ahead to our second little stay in Harrogate towards the end of August, I decided to renew my Senior RailCard. As it hapened, Meg’s card had a couple of years left on it but mine runs out some three weeks before I intended to use it again. You would think that the system would be simple enough to set up and run but it kept falling over and apologising for enexplained and unanticipated errors. I was just on the point of clicking ‘Accept’ when I noticed that they had my details and Meg’s intertwined even though we obviously had seperate numbers. Eventually, I got my card renewed by following different routes on the website but this one needed one to type in a 30+ ID number fom one’s passport as proof of identity. Although it was time consuming and error prone, I eventually got my renewal conducted on time and opted for a plastic card rather than a digital one on my phone as if my phone goes AWOL or the App falls over then I would have no backup. So at the end of today, I have two little mini-breaks in Harrogate ordered as well as a luncheon date with our friends in Oxfordshire. In addition our Irish friends are going to make a booking for the four of us on the occasions of our wedding anniversaries in early September that are within days of each other (and hence a joint meal). Meg is looking forward to seeing the adapation of ‘Little Women‘ which is the kind of book which was put in the path of adolescent girls whilst we males were fed a diet of G H Henty and similarly (vaguely imperialistic) stuff by G Rider Haggard if I remember the author’s name correctly.