Today the weather looked set fair so after our customary chat with our domestic help whose day it is on Fridays, Meg and I set off for the park. For the past few days what with one thing or another, we have tended to utilise the car but today it was almost a spring-like day – although the sky was blue, the sun was shining and a gentle wind did not make us feel particularly cold.  We occupied our normal bench for about twenty minutes and then chatted with an older couple who recognised us as being members of the same church congregation. Then we walked down to the lake and espied our University of Birmingham friend and Seasoned World Traveller having a coffee in the open air at one of the few tables provided by the owners of the park’s cafe. I bought a round of coffees and left Meg whilst I popped into town to collect our Friday newspaper. In the newsagent, I espied a bowl of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs on the front of the counter. This prompted me to remark that when Meg was pregnant many decades ago now, she had a particular craving for Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. When I mentioned this to the newsagent he remarked that if he spotted Meg coming into the shop to buy a supply of the same, he would then draw the appropriate conclusions. I then popped back into the park to sit at a table with Meg and our two park friends and, of course, we spent most of our time discussing whether Putin was ‘mad’ or just ‘bad’. This is quite an interesting debate as it happens because there is a blog which comes my way via my email account where there is quite a long and intelligent discussion whether Putin is displaying rational behaviour or whether what is seen in the Ukraine is an example of the deranged delusions of the Russian leader. I think that it is possible to draw these two threads together, though. It is possible that Putin, acting as a chess player, has a carefully calculated plan which is now being put into effect. On the other hand, even some multiple murderers (for example ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’, the Moors murderers) might exhibit a complete lack of any emotional empathy whilst carefully planning their crimes. So we might label this complete absence of any emotional feeling state as behaviour which is ‘mad’ but this is not to deny that they are rational within their own terms.

The Ukraine invasion is now being reported upon and analysed by all of the world’s media. Channel 4 news, for example, is showing some incredibly compelling footage from inside the Ukraine and some of their focus has been upon the refugee crisis that we are witnessing in the heart of Europe. I suppose there could just about be some 95 year olds in Poland and France who can recall what it was like when Warsaw and Paris fell in WWII. I hasten to add that I think it is common knowledge that the French did not really much to defend Paris putting a lot of their resources into the Maginot line which the Nazis just walked around. However, I know that military history is a lot more complicated than this but the ‘decapitation’ of the Ukraine now looks a distinct possibility. Although the fall of the Ukraine is now almost certain, I do not think this is by any means the end to the story. I think it is true that whilst an army of ‘x’ thousands might conquer a territory, one has to multiply that by several times (3-5 times) to install an army of occupation. In the Ukraine, the authorities have been handing out Kalashnikovs to a goodly proportion of the population as well as encouraging the population to prepare Molotov cocktails. Whilst many if not most of the women and children are sheltering or fleeing, there is conscription in place for all adult males aged 18-65. So we may see the prospect of hand-to-hand fighting through the streets of the Ukrainian capital. The Russians, of course, might just try to utilise missiles against what they can but already some blocks of flats in the capital have been destroyed by missiles. Were these random attacks or a mal-functioning missile? As the veteran Labour politician (and doughty fighter as a tank commander in WWII) Denis Healy pronounced: ‘ In war, the first casualty is truth‘ No doubt, within the next day or so, we shall start to see some terrible events unfold before our eyes and the journalists can rely upon quite a lot of video-footage captured on mobile phones. 

Tomorrow, we have some more ‘6 Nations’ rugby matches to keep us entertained but the match I really want to watch (Wales v. England) clashes with our  our regular church attendance so I will have to try and time-shift it, if the BBC allows this (I was unsuccessful the last time I tried this as there may be ‘copyright’ issues)

Today did not start well – which is rather an understatement. I had set my alarm to 6.15 in order to go shopping early and when the 6.30 news came on, I found that Russia had launched a full scale invasion on the Ukraine. I say full scale but in the first few hours it seemed that a two pronged attack was in place from Crimea in the south (what a surprise) and from the Russia-friendly Belarus in the North, supplemented by some missile strikes on military facilities in the vicinity of Kiev. As the day progressed, it started to become evident that Russia intended to take over not only the two self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk but probably were intent on a decapitation of the Ukraine and were prepared to install a puppet government in Kiev. But more of this later.

When I got to the larger Aldi supermarket in Bromsgrove, I realised that to my dismay I did not have a £1 coin or a trolley token to release the shopping trolley. A queue of about 10 had already formed and although I went down the queue, nobody was prepared to exchange my two 50p pieces for a £1 coin (which, I must say, I found rather incredible) So I had no alternative but to go back home, avail myself of a couple of £1 coins (one to use, one to keep permnently in the car) and then went off to the smaller Aldi that I used to frequent some three years ago now. I spent quite some time looking for items which were not where I expected them to be but one of the delights of Aldi’s is the ‘middle aisle’  where hardware and household goods (often high quality but remaindered) are sold off. I actually bought Meg a pair of pyjamas which she needed and also an extending bamboo cutlery drawer which is a bit more useful than the one we have in use at the moment.

After we had got unpacked and breakfasted, Meg and I went by car to pick up our newspaper and then we decided to go to Aldi’s to pick up a second pair of pyjamas as useful things tend to go extremely quickly – as Aldi say ‘Once it’s gone, it’s gone‘. We managed to locate the pile buried amongst other items and bought a second pair, albeit a size smaller but we trust that this will do. I also bought some leather gloves which happened to be in the vicinity, and not to be outdone Meg bought herself a pair of knee-length socks as well.  Afterwards,  we went to the park but it was bitterly cold and we did not want to linger. Nonetheless, our park friend Seasoned World Travller spotted us from afar so we had a brief chat about our reactions to the Ukraine invasion. But neither of us wanted to hang about chatting for too long as we were assailed by an icy wind, with lots of sleet and/or snow inside it. Then we came home and had ourselves a quick curry, necessary in view of the weather.

Needless to say the airways were dominated by the Ukraine invasion and we followed this quite intently, as well as viewing the feeds of the reaction of the PM and the Leader of the Opposition from Parliament, which was interesting to see. One the one hand, the channels are eager to report what is actually happening as it is the first time that a European country has invaded another neighbour since 1939 – 83 years go. And secondly, when I consulted the web, I found the following Question and Answer. Question – Why did Germany invade Poland? Answer – Germany invaded Poland to regain lost territory and ultimately rule their neighbor to the east. The interesting thing about this pithy piece of history is that you could just substitute the countries ‘Russia‘ and ‘Ukraine‘ and the sentence would still hold good. I am sure that when we get as far as Newsnight tonight, some of the military analysts will be available to air their opinion. Thinking through some of the longer term possibilities, then if the Ukraine does manage to hold off Russia, then they will surely want to join Nato as soon as they can. On the other hand (and more likely), if Putin gets away with Ukraine, he may well go after some of the much smaller Baltic states such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These three are members of NATO and the EU since 2004 and wish to be even more integrated into the NATO alliance. There are reports that the populations in these three countries are almost literally ‘trembling in their boots’ because they used to be under Soviet rule for decades and if Putin manages to regain Ukraine for Russia, then he will almost certainly go after them. So whichever way one plays out the scenario, it looks as though Russia and NATO are going to square up to each other for another version of the ‘Cold War’ The first one lasted from 1947 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 which is some 44 years.

As I was getting up this morning, I listened to some fragments of the excellent Radio 4 statistics programme ‘More or Less‘ I must say at the outset that I only caught some of this debate and may be mis-representing it entirely. But the debate went something like this – in assessing the impact and incidence of the COVID pandemic across most countries do we place more faith in (a) statistical modelling or (b) detailed inter-country comparisons, insofar as they are valid, to try to evaluate the effect of any one policy (e,g, wearing vs. non-wearing of face masks). I think I am right in saying that approach (b) was adjudged to be more fruitful but even here there are pronounced political and social differences between societies. Authoritarian compared with more ‘laissez-faire’ societies (who are inclined to punish infractions immediately) may well generate ‘better’ results even though both types of society have the same policy on mask-wearing. I am sure these statistical arguments and approaches will go on for years but if there is any consensus, it is that early and decisive action at the intimation of a pandemic generates better societal results in the long run.

Last night, as the newsreader was going through various items in the bulletin, there seemed (at first sight) to be an odd pause nwhen it was announced ‘Let us just have a quick time check‘ The time check was scheuled (to the second) to be on 22:22:22:22:22 i.e. the 22nd second of the 22nd minute of the 22nd hour (i.e. 10pm ) of the 22nd day of the 22nd year. To students of numerology, no doubt this was a second to savour but I suspect that it passed most of us by without a second glance.

When Meg and I gazed out of our window this morning, the sky was blue and the sun was shining so we thought this would be a good day to make an impromptu visit to Droitwich just down the road. This seemed to be a good idea at the time but after we had collected our newspaper and then motored to Droitwich the skies had clouded over and the whole environment semed a lot less pleasant. Nonetheless, we trundled off to our favourite coffee bar but a couple of things conspired againt us. Not only was it half term (lots of screaming kids looked after by fraught grandmothers) but we got there at just about the minute late morning when the whole world suddenly determined they were in desperate need of a coffee and more. Nonetheless, we felt disinclined to go roaming much further afield so eventually we acquired a table and after a period of queuing ordered our favourite cappuchuno and teacakes. After this we had a long way to travel  (next door) to the Oxfam charity shop which is always stuffed full of high quality goodies, Most of the china goods were things that we would not want or need but the quality was universally high. We did, though, purchase a good handbag and bought some Easter cards which are occasionally hard to find. We had spent so much on this that we went straight to our cafe-cum-bistro where we knew we could get some high quality comestibles and we had not booked thinking, quite rightly, that the venue would be pretty quiet. The café had an interesting menu in that for its ‘specials’ board it was displaying some soup (lightest of meals), pasta with meatballs (a light meal) and finally salmon with new potatoes (a full meal) We opted for the pasta which was delicious and eventually I got into conversation with the chef to see if we could reproduce the same result at home. To drink with our meal, we also ordered some elderflower pressé and this was delivered in two stout bottles. When the waitress told me they would only throw the bottles away, I ‘begged’ them so that I could utilise them for my damson gin, cheekily asking her if she could possibly retrieve the screw-on caps for me (which she did).

About the Ukraine crisis, I have only thing to say at this point in time. Our government have been extremely forthright in indicating that sanctions would be applied against Russia to counter their incurson into the Ulkraine. However, the actual sanctions imposed amount only to the slightest slap on the wrist as it is said that the government is now going to pursue three Russian oligarchs and two minor Russian banks (which the americans had sanctioned months ago on any case) Even some Conservatives in the House of Commons think that the UK response is weak in the extreme. The Germans, for their part, with practically no fanfare, have suddenly halted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project which is designed to double the flow of Russian gas directly to Germany. This must have quite an impact on the German economy but it looks as though they are prepared to put principles before money (whereas the UK approach is the reverse i.e.  to put money before principles)

Well, this has been a bit of a strange day – or should I say a day that follows a long night. In the wee small hours of the morning, I got up and spent a bit of time on my desktop computer and wondered if it was eligible for an upgrade of the operating system. The latest version of the Mac operating sysytem is now Monterey and it was released at the end of October last year. Knowing that installing a new version of the operating system is a good way of getting rid of the ‘junk’ files which tends to accumulate over the life cycle of an operating system, I thought I would go ahead. The new operating system took over an hour to download but I thought this was probably just about acceptable as I pop into bed at about 3.00am in the morning. The download seemed to proceed to plan but what I had not realised that it took another hour to install the operating system. This is because the system has to reconfigure and update parts of itself, rebuild fle indexes and goodness knows what else – the system had to restart itself about five times altogether as various components got installed. Eventually everything seemed to be installed and I had to have a minimal ‘play’ with things to ensure that the new system was actually working as it should do – it is not unknown for a new operating system to completely fall over and, in that instance, one has to somehow revert to the old system if that is possible.  After a minimal ‘play’ the critical things (email!) seem to be working OK but I haven’t had chance for an extended investigation until later on. At first glance, the system seems just about as slow as the old system was so that the theory that an upgrade of the system should have cleared out an aberrant file that was slowing down my old system seems to have misplaced. Having said that, systems speed up over time as commonly used software gets prioritised – at least it does on the modern Windows system so I sure the Mac software engineers would have done the same. I crept into bed at about 4.40 not intending to spend half the night supervising the installation of an operating system but I have been there before and therefore should not express any degree of surprise. So after all of this, I slept in a bit this morning and generally felt like ‘death warmed up’ until I had got some breakfast inside me.

In view of all of this, Meg and I did not have time for a walk this morning but time is always a bit limited on a Tuesday morning when I have to prepare for my Pilates session later on. So I shot down to town by car to pick up our Tuesday newspaper and then got changed into my tracksuit bottoms which is my ‘de rigeur’ outfit for my Pilates session. Then it was a brisk walk down and I passed our Italian friend but had to rush past her saying there was no stop to stop for a chat. After my class, I bumped into my park friend, Seasoned World Traveller, and we had a few words about the situation in the Ukraine  and then a little later on my Irish friend who was busy transporting a bag of things for the charity shop so I assume she had been doing some ‘spring’ cleaning – or at least cupboard clearing out time. After I got home, I prepared our traditional ‘fish cakes’ meal that I have upon my return from Pilates and then it was into a spot of dozing and newspaper reading before we get to FaceTime our old Waitrose friends which we do regularly each Tuesday evening. As Tuesday night has a couple of old fashioned comedy programs (one of them Yes Minister!) we tend to always watch these and it means that we have to get ourselves organised in time for these.

As you might imagine, the Ukraine crisis has dominated the airwaves today. The situation is not quite as clearcut as a starightforward invasion of one (small) country but another,much bigger neighbour would suggest. I refreshed my memory about the Russian ‘takeover’ of the Crimea and discovered that Russia formally annexed Crimea on 18 March 2014, incorporating the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol as the 84th and 85th federal subjects of Russia. Despite its annexation, Crimea was considered by most countries of the world in a UN resolution of March 2014 to remain part of Ukraine. I did not know, though, that the USSR formally transferred the Crimea from Russia to the Ukraine as late as 1954 for reasons which are too tortuous to begin to explain. I suppose that it was about the time of the repossession of the Crimea that the two Ukrainian provinces of  Luhansk and Donetsk, the two provinces of the eastern Donbas region, are only about one-third controlled by the separatists now recognised by Russia. But separatist officials in Luhansk demanded on Tuesday that Ukraine removed its troops from the Kyiv-controlled parts of the province and threatened they would ‘take measures to restore the territorial integrity of the republic‘ if ignored.

Today opened as a very windy day as the succession of storms proceed across the country. If anything, I think the intensity of the wind might have been worse than we experienced with the Storm Eunice a day or so ago and last night we certainly seemed to have a lot of intense rainfall. These weather conditions put our walk this morning in some jeopardy so we did not rush to get ready this morning, hoping that the storms would rapidly traverse the country. When we did venture out as far as the park, we had decided to go by car and went on a small perambulation intending to stop on a bench to drink our usual coffee. However, the conditions were so unpleasant that we decided to cut our losses, come back home in the car once we had had a walk of several hundred metres and have the coffee from our flask in the comfort of our own home. Lunch was easy to prepare as we still had a good portion of our turkey-and-root-vegetables stew left from yesterday so we heated this in the oven and served it with a baked potato and some green beans.

During some spare time I had this morning, I continued with my decluttering of my Apple Mac and am pleased with the progress that I have made. Basically, I have taken all of the items off the desktop apart from an icon showing the system’s hard disk and put them away in a folder I called XS-Files which is itself subdivided into video, images, apps and so on. The huge download file has now been copied in its entirety to a secondary storage (a 1TB external pocket drive) where it can be pruned at my leisure at the same time releasing space on the main hard disk.

Late on this afternoon and by prior arrangement, I was delighted to be able to Skype on my ex-University of Winchester friend. We seem to have kept missing each other for the last few days what with one thing or another but we certainly made up for it today with a good old hour and half long natter about things. We are both getting a little frustrated about the weather which is curtailing our normal walking activities but as restrictions are easing, we are cautiously looking forward to being able to resume some more of our social contacts. Boris Johnson made an announcement in the House of Commons this afternoon announcing the legal end to all pandemic restrictions from next Thursday onwards. This was followed up by a news conference from 10 Downing Street announcing the same end  of restrictions, including the necessity for self-isolation, to members of the public at large. There was some speculation that the two scientific advisors would not appear along Boris Johnson but nonetheless they did do so and dutily went through their graphs but one certainly did not sense any degree of enthusiam for their task. As well as an ending of legal requirements, there was also an announcement that free testing was due to end and people would have to pay for this in future. After the news conference was over, I heard an excellent contribution on the BBC rolling news programme from a professor at the University of St. Andrews. He was making the point with a great deal of force and cogency that those who had the resources to afford lateral flow tests for themselves would indeed have more ‘freedom’ how to conduct their affairs. However, a low paid worker who had not seen, for example, an aged relative and who also needed to go back to work to put food on the table has his ‘freedoms’ restricted if they have to make a choice whether to visit their relative or not and cannot afford the cost of a test. The Professor also made the excellent point that the during the pandemic the motivation of the public to comply with restrictions on their liberty was pretty uniformly high – but the ability to comply with legislation was very much governed by the economic ability of the individual. A previous social theorist, R H Tawney, expressed this dilemma extremely pithly when he pronounced that ‘freedom for the pike was death for the minnow‘. The wider point here is that one person’s freedom is often at the expense of another. All ‘freedoms’ (how I dislike this term) have to be exercised in the context of obligations to others and therefore one is not ‘free’ to show ‘Fire‘ in a crowded theatre or cinema.

In the last hour, Putin has just announced that he will recognise the ‘independence’ of the two provinces of eastern Ukraine that have large Russian-speaking populations. Is this going to be the green light for him to roll in his tanks in support of their ‘independence’? I actually think not but it enormously ratcheted up the pressures that Nato now faces as well as being contrary to the Minsk agreements as as well as international law.

Today was almost a typical Sunday but not quite. I got up relatively early, as is my wont on a Sunday morning, and strolled down to get the Sunday newspapers whilst listening to a diet of Mozart which is my weekly treat. Then it was time to have a bit of breakfast on our knees whilst watching the Sunday morning politics show. As most of us are suspecting these days, Boris Johnson is absolutely loving the Ukrainian crisis because it is making him look like an important statesman rather than a rather grubby politician. The more the Ukrainian crisis drags on, the more Boris feels that he is putting ‘partygate’ behind him and that the public attention is being devoted onto other matters. As ‘partygate’ fades for the time being,  so the postbags of MPs are not being filled wih indignant letters from the electorate and therefore, of course, the pressure to remove him lessens – at least for the time being. I think it was at university that I read (and was very impressed) by a book by Lewis Coser called ‘The Functions of Soial Conflict‘ and it was from this source that I first learnt that all right wing politicians typically engage in aggressive relations with ‘foreigners’. This is because, by so doing, attention is diverted from what might be massive sources of conflict at home whilst the political benefits will accrue from what might be termed the ‘rally round the flag’ sentiment in the population as a whole.  So the whole sabre-rattling continues on both sides – but I find it intriguing that the Ukrainians themselves are getting irritated by the increasing bellicose noises coming out of Washington and the NATO alliance. At the end of the day, I suspect that a ‘diplomatic’ solution will emerge in which, in the short term, Putin emerges as a stronger figure than before. Incidentally, the Lewis Coser observation on right wing leaders applies equally to figures such as Putin who has every interest in diverting attention from domestic difficulties within Russia. Meg decided not to walk down to the park this morning as the weather did not bode too well and she was feeling a little on the chilly and fragile side. So I made myself some coffee and made for the park but I did not tarry on our usual benches but instead carried on walking around the lake to look in on the small cafe which is normally open at the weekends. As it happens, as I suspected, both my University of Birmingham friend and Seasoned World Traveller were there so I joined them for about half an hour. We swapped some funny (medical) stories wih each other as well as discussing the fact that in many societies, one goes directly to a specialist to get one’s problems attended to whereas in our NHS one is used to the GP acting as a ‘gatekeeper’ to the specialist who is not approachable directly in the UK system. Obviously, on can approach the specialist directly in societies where there is a cash nexus up front ie one pays directly (even if some costs may be reimbursed later by the state). Before I had walked down to the park, I had prepared some ‘chunky’ root vegetables which were parboiled and then thrown together with some turkey thigh meat to make a huge casserole dish that could cook slowly in the oven whilst I was on my walk. All of this worked out very well and, when I returned, I just need to steam some green vegetables to have a complete meal.

This afternoon, I devoted myself to a leisurely reading of the ‘Sunday Times‘ before I started to tackle getting my computer gradually de-cluttered. I have come to the decision to replace my aging machine but if I do not get the existing machine de-cluttered, I will end up transferring clutter from one machine to another which is not exactly what I want. I suppose it is like having one cluttered desk and a brand new clean disk beside it. If you were to merely transfer all of the clutter from one desk to the other, then you would be no better off. This analogy is not completely sound, though, because as computer systems age there is a lot of junk left around from incomplete installations which can be difficult to locate and delete.

The weather today has seen the aftermath of the Storm Eunice as it has moved on from our shores. The weaher this morning was a bit of a lull but it was then followed by a very windy period and then torrential rain later on in the afternoon. We now learn that another storm, codenamed Franklin, is on its way and I think that succession of these storms are on their way. And to finish off today, we learn that the Queen has been declared positive for COVID and although the symptoms are declared to be ‘mild’ and the Queen will be undertaking ‘light duties’, nontheless there is a degree of concern as the monarch will shortly by 96 years old. 

Today is the day after the ‘big storm’ that was Eunice and I must say that here in the Midlands, we have got off fairly lightly.  On the other hand, when I was FaceTiming one of my colleagues from the University of Winchester who lives in rural Hampshire, he seemed to have a bit of a torrid time with sheds being moved off their bases and trees shedding some of their branches. The possibility of severe tidal flooding along the Bristol Channel and Severn Estuary did not materialise, but the severity of the winds caused significant damage and loss of life across the South of England and London where red warnings were issued by the Met Office.

Meg and I were not quite sure how the day was going to pan out, weatherwise, so we decided to play safe and we went down into town by car. Having collected our newspaper, we popped into the park and did a circular walk for about 15 minutes or so but we broke with tradition by not bothering to sit on a bench and consume any of of our own coffee. Having completed our walk, we were both feeling a little chilled so we were pleased to get home and enjoy our coffee and biscuits when we got home. Lunch was fairly easy to prepare as we had some venison meatballs in their own onion gravy which we complemented with some green veg and prepared fairly quickly.

After lunch, we were excited to discover that there was a film of ‘Pride and Prejudice‘ on BBC2. This was a 1940 production in black and white and starring Lawrence Olivier as Darcy. But somehow we felt that it did not capture our imaginations in any way and seemed to pale into comparison with modern productions that we have seen. There was quite a lot of flouncy 1940’s style versions of 18th century costumes and a declarative style of acting which seemed to us to miss the subtleties and the nuances of more more recent productions so we turned it off and devoted ourelves to an afternoon of reading before we leave for church in the late afternoon.

I am in now in the research phase of what model of MAC I shall use to replace my aging and slowing desktop machine.  The basic version will give you the astounding new MI chip in which Apple have integrated memory onto the chip but seems a little compromised in terms of the size of the solid state disk that they supply and particurlarly the number of ports. So I am leaning towards the next model upwards in the range and getting my finances arranged accordingly. Even here there are several options. I could go to the Apple Shop which never discounts and always charges the full ‘official’ price. On the other hand, I have in the past received an education discount but this has to be organised through a third-party firm and the procedures are a little tortuous, although I am in email communication with them. On the other hand, John Lewis seems to offer what I want with the equivalent of a 10% discount and an automatic two year warranty plus an interest free finance deal over three years all of which sounds sufficiently attractive for me to consider this as well.

Team GB has sceured its first medal in the Winter Olympics but Silver rather than Gold. The men’s team were playing Sweden and although they were behind for most of the match they drew level with the Swedes but were eventually were defeated by one of the last ‘stones’ launched by the Swedish team. Meanwhile the Women’s team are due to play the Japanese in the wee small hours of the morning tomorrow and, lik the men, they are guaranteed a silver but a gold may be within their grasp. No doubt, win or lose, the TV programmes will be full of the repeats of this match tomorrow.

The news headlines are also dominated by the stand-off in the Ukraine at the moment. I cannot but help feel that there is an awful lot of posturing going on here and if an actual conflict does occur, it is because either side has stumbled into it by accident rather than design. Yet one does get the impression that whatever happens, Putin will emerge as the happier party when all is said and done.   After all, he has a succession of world leaders calling on him to enhance his international standing and they are being subject to a sort of ritualised humiliation as they are forced to sit at end of  very long table with Putin at one end and themselves at the other. Despite all of the threatening noises being made about sanctions that NATO might try to impose, I am not sure how you disentangle the ‘clean’ from the ‘dirty’ Russian money that has flooded into London and then into property – if this were easy, would it not have been done by now?

This was a very strange type of day. We have been given lots of warning by the meteorological authorities that storm ‘Eunice‘ may well be the worst to hit the UK since the infamous great storm of 1987 which did all kinds of damage across Southern England. Because at that time the country did not receive sufficient warning as was thought that the storm would veer away and only clip the UK, I get the impression that nothing is being left to chance this time. So we have had lots of warnings including a ‘red’ warning from the Meteorological Office and people are being urged to stay away from the coasts as they could literally be swept away. So when I woke up this morning, I expected that there would be at least some premonition of the storm yet to come but there was only a strange calm. I had previously texted our domestic help to delay her journey to us in case the storm was at its height first thing in the morning but in the event there was no need and she arrived at the normal time. By mid morning, the weather conditions were evidently worsening so I texted our University of Birmingham friend to suggest that we meet in a coffee bar along the High Street. This we did, arriving within a couple of minutes of each other so we sat down for a nice long (and warm) chat with some cappuchinos and a round of teacakes inside us. The wind had got rather swirly and rain-filled as we made our way to the coffeeshop but when we emerged about an hour and a half later, the height of the storm seemed to have passed us over. We invited our friend to come and have some lunch with us and he readily accepted. I was cooking a simple rissotto with some smoked mackerel as the protein element so our friend stood at my shoulder as I cooked the meal (which I have done many times before) to learn some lessons. Then we had a very pleasant meal which we complemented with half a glass of white wine and a good time was had by all. This afternoon, we have a kept an eye on the news broadcasts to see if the storm damage was extensive or not. The most dramatic pictures were of parts of the (plastic) roof of the O2 Millenium Dome building being ripped away in London whilst the church spire of the principal church in Wells, Somerset was pictured in the act of being blown away. There were also some dramatic pictures of trees being uprooted and falling – I suppose with the ubiquity of mobile phones, it is easier to capture these images than would have been the case in 1987. I am going to email some of our Hampshire friends to see how they have coped and as they tend to live in rural environments, whether they had been troubled with falling trees or worse.

To overcome my conputer problems (my computer getting slower and slower for none of the usual self-evident reasons) I have resolved to start a miniature savings programme and to replace my desktop computer in or about May time. This gives me the time to do as well as a certain amount of saving as well as ‘project managing’  the transition from the old computer to the new. This is the kind of thing that has to happen every 5 years or so or whatever is the interval that people choose these days to update their systems. Things are a little different this time around as ‘normally’ one gets as much RAM as you can afford and, more or less the same for storage capacity. But Apple has rather changed the nature of the calculations insofar as they have developed a new generation of chips (M1) with what what is called ‘unified memory’. Without getting at all technical,  this allows their minimum configuration of an 8GB memory to be tightly integrated into the CPU to give the same performance as a conventional 16GB configuration often regarded as the minimum necessary for today’s ‘normal’ home user. I have got the benefit of time on my side and I may be able to resurrect the arrangements that I have made in the past to get an Education discount on my hardware although this has proved possible but a little complicated when I was last in the market.

The winter Olympics in Beijing has largely failed to set the nation alight, no doubt due to the fact that many of our hyped up medal hopefuls have not managed to deliver and it seemed very likely that as the games end in a few days time that the GB team leaves Tokyo with the sum total of zero medals. But in the past few hours I gather that both the men’s and the women’s curling teams have pulled off thrilling last-minute victories over their rivals meaning that they have both qualified as finalists. That means a guaranteed silver even if both fail to achive their ultimate victory so there may be some interesting highlights to catch up on later.

Today is our grocery shopping day so it was up at 6.15am so that I get to the supermarket at 7.00am in the morning before there are a significant number of shoppers around. I must say that I have felt somewhat tired this morning as a result of my long journey of yesterday followed by not too much sleep during the night. I have taken with me a very long (computerised) shopping list from which the items I do not need this week have already been scored out. But as always in a (newish for me) supermarket you can spend trudging around and looking for eg soy milk. Should this be with the other milks? With cream and cheeses and so and and on on. Eventually I sought the help of one of the shelf stackers who took me to the other end of the store, explaining that all of the ‘vegan’ type stuff was now stored a long way away from more conventional lines. As always there is a logic in all of this but it will take some getting used to over time. Altogether, my shopping trip took well over an hour and a half so next week should be a lighter week and therefore easier to cope with. Once the shopping was unpacked and Meg and I had breakfasted, I went down into town by car and picked up our daily newspaper and then we had a fairly early lunch and decided that we would have a little walk some time after lunch when the weather was a little more accommodating.  After lunch and a nap, we journeyed to the park by car and did one complete circuit around the lake so as to give ourselves a little bit of exercise and some fresh air. On our way home, we needed to call in and see our Irish friends because we had some potential holiday arrangements to discuss. Our plans to go together to Rome as part of a larger group from church  have been subjct to constant change as the pandemic got in the way of our original plans and then flight information and availability kept changing. The travel agent who is trying to cope with all of this emailed us so that we could decide upon and then coordinate the various options that are now open to us. We had a good opportunity to discuss the various ins and outs of the options under discussion and we have now decided that we shall postpone the plans for this year, take the offered refund of the deposits that we had paid and then start again with new plans next year when the situation should have clarified considerably.

In the last few days, Meg and I have been evaluating some of our clothing options. Meg has a series of kilts of various tartans and they are incredibly versatile pieces of clothing because they never really date, are really practical and are very hard wearing as well as being good ‘winter clothes’ weather. We evaluated one of Meg’s favourite kilts which is now getting a little ‘tight’ around the waist so we took it to our local dry cleaners who also act as a agency for clothing repairs. When the kilt was examined in the shop, the assistant was of the view that there was not sufficient spare material to extend the waist in a properly tailored way. We explained this dilemma to some of our ex-Waitrose friends when we were FaceTiming them the other day and they told us about the concept of ‘waist extenders’ (which was, of course, news to me, a mere male) So I got onto the web and bought very cheaply a set of five ‘extenders’ which arrived today. The things that arrived were actually designed and marketed to extend jeans and they were interesting little gadgets, being like a loop of really tough elastic with a metal design button on one end. You loop the extender over the existing button and the new button will take over about ¾” displaced to either left or right. So tried this on Meg’s kilt and actually used two (an extender on an extender) to give an extra 1½” on the kilt. This was worked superbly well, so Meg can now bring a wonderful garment back into use at absolutely minimal expense -so you live and learn.

There is a huge storm (codenamed Eunice) destined to sweep over the country tomorrow with the South West taking the initial brunt of the storm.  This storm is predicted to be the worst that the UK has experienced for decades – so a rare red warning (imminent danger to life)  has been issued by the Met Office. All trains have been cancelled in Wales, the army is on standby and the country is waiting to see what damage winds of 90mph might cause. Exceptional  winds and heavy snow could hit many parts of the UK so we await tomorrow with a degree of trepidation.

Today is the day when we are going to see our friends in Oxfordshire so we got up reasonably early to get breakfasted and our washing done. After my son had a good old ‘go’ at my desktop computer to attempt to ascertain why it is running so slowly, I think I may have identified the source of the problem as virus checking program seemed to be hogging a lot of CPU resources. My son and I might have a go at uninstalling the virus checker which is not as simple as it sounds as this sort of program protects itself against attempts to disable it – for obvious reasons. We may have to search on the web for a specialised uninstaller specific to the make of virus checker, then see if its absence makes any difference and then possibly installing another program that may prove to be less problematic. I have  investigated the price of new systems and I may have to buy a new one in a few months time but not yet. I have started to log the amount of time that it takes to log on and whereas it was 7 minutes yesterday, it was 5 minutes today so it is possible that our attempts to clean up the system are meeting with a modicum of success.

We called in to collect our newspaper before we set off on our journey. I had previously given our newsagent the web address for my collection of ‘Vertically Challenged Anecdotes’ – this is so named because  my collection of stories are not ‘tall stories’ but are basically true and therefore the opposite of ‘tall stories’ – hence they ‘vertically challenged’ or short stories.

We set off  to see our friends in plenty of time and once we had located a particularly tricky junction south of Oxford we pulled into a favourite parking spot and allowed ourselves a quick cup of coffee and a banana to sustain us. Although the weather had been fine for most of the journey, once we got into Oxfordshire the rain clouds had started to gather. We did notice at fairly close range a couple of red kites- there is a colony of them towards the south of the M40. We then proceeded to our friends, ignoring the Sat Nav’s instruction to us to take a narrow ‘forest’ road – if you ignore this direction, the Sat Nav takes you by a more sensible route a mile or so down the road. Then we arrived at our friends about 20 minutes early but no matter. We had a wonderful meal all made with home-grown type ingredients and of course several hours of wonderful conversation. As well as the perennial politics, our friends were telling us about a car crash in which they had been involved a day or so ago but fortunately with no injuries of any kind. We then gravitated onto the topic of how we were all growing old (dis)gracefully and other family matters. We left for home whilst we still had a couple of hours of daylight left to us and made progress at a reasonable pace until we were half way up the M40. Then the skies darkened and we ran into a torrental rain storm – or rather it ran into us. Fortunately, the rain was of an intensity that the windscreen wipers could cope without difficulty but we passed a crash which must have occurred minutes beforehand in which one car had run into the back of another. 

Not being of a particularly royalist disposition, I did feel a smidgeon of sympathy for the Queen. Yesterday it looked as though the Prince Andrew affair had been finally put to bed as an out-of-court settlement had been made. There is no way Prince Andrew would have won this case with the damning evidence of his arm around Virginia Giuffre (nee Roberts) and the standard of proof set as ‘the balance of probabilities’. It is rumoured, by the way, that the Queen might be digging into own pocket to fund the (reported) settlement which may well be of the order of £10-12million. So the Queen might have slept easily for one night before police have launched an investigation into a bid to give honours and citizenship to a Saudi national linked to the Prince of Wales’s charity The Prince’s Foundation.  The Met said in a statement: ‘The decision follows an assessment of a September 2021 letter. This related to media reporting alleging offers of help were made to secure honours and citizenship for a Saudi national.’ So in two days we have two large scandals both involving sons of the Queen and, in Charles case, the Monarch in waiting. Needless to say, all kinds of questions are now being asked about the future of the monarchy – republicans must be rubbing their hands in glee for this conjunction of two scandals in two days!