It looks as though the peace deal, or at least the first stage of it, is proceeding in the midst of some cautious optimism. Both sides have a vested interest in letting the deal go ahead – the Palestinians evidently want a ceasefire and for the aid trucks to increase rapidly in quantity whilst the Israelis are desperate to get their hostages back, now that Gaza has been bombed to the ground and Hamas practically obliterated as a fighting force. Donald Trump is reported is preparing to fly to the Middle East as the hostages may well be returned to Israel on Monday in three days’ time and Trump is desperate that the worlds press has him centre stage taking the credit for the release of the hostages. Once the hostages have been returned, the Palestinian prisoners released and the Israeli army withdrawn somewhat in Gaza, the really hard part of the peace process will start. The most important tasks will be the reconstruction of Gaza society, both in terms of a government and also the infrastructure. But it looks as though the plans to create a government of sorts will include a committee with Donald Trump at its head and including Tony Blair (who is reviled in the region for his support of the invasion of Iraq) It seems inconceivable that we have a government that does not include any Palestinians but that is the situation as of today. In ongoing ceasefire negotiations, Hamas has demanded the release of key Palestinian leaders held in Israeli prisons. Among them is Marwan Barghouti, a prominent figure seen by many Palestinians as a symbol of unity and resistance. Hamas says freeing these leaders is essential for any lasting peace deal, while Israel remains cautious over releasing high-profile detainees. So we have an evident ‘leader in waiting’ who is kept in gaol. The British, though, have quite a good history or keeping in gaol individuals who went on to become outstanding international leaders. Both Gandhi and Kenyatta were imprisoned multiple times during their leadership roles against colonial powers. Gandhi was repeatedly imprisoned in both South Africa and India for his activism in leading the independence movements, while Kenyatta was imprisoned by the British from 1954 to 1961 for his involvement in Kenyan independence efforts. And the outstanding example is, of course, Nelson Mandela, who was kept in gaol for some 27 years by the South Africans.

Returning our attention to the UK., figures have just been released showing the average costs of residential care for the infirm and elderly. In the West Midlands, the costs have risen to £1200 a week whereas in the prosperous South East, the figure rises to £1450 and approximately half of the residents are paying for themselves by using the capital ‘locked up’ in their homes which are having to be sold to pay for their care. This has happened four times in the case of my own family and families connected by marriage and in practically every case, the old person in question has lived just long enough for the entire worth of the house to be spent before their own demise. The West Germans have an incredibly sensible system to cope with the increasing costs of old age. Using a German-style 2.5% levy on income for over-40s, split between employer and employee contributions ring-fenced for social care, would raise £15bn annually but we seem reluctant, as a society, to adopt this or a similar solution. I always find it both amazing, and also depressing, that the UK does not utilise research teams to study other European societies to see ‘what works’.  Insofar as we import social models, these sometimes seems to take America as their model (and the British Tory party seems as though it wishes to emulate the much derided American model of ‘ICE’, ICE refers to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a government agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws within the United States by locating, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants and targeting criminal activities that support these organisations. The agency was created in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and is the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). But in practice, this is often subcontracted out to the private sector in which masked men with no ID visible (as would be the case for a police officer in the UK) are seizing people almost at random off the streets of large cities in the USA. 

Mid-morning, I made a journey to Worcester by train to meet up with an old near-neighbour from my Winchester days.  We discovered by accident that we were both living in different parts of Worcestershire so we chose a coffee bar near to the station which was equidistant for us both and where we could catch up on old times. Then we popped around the corner to a little square that served light mid-day meals and carried on our long conversation there. So, this made for an interesting day out for both of us and made for a very different Friday. After I had returned home, I received a text from one my Saturday morning friends that we meet in a  slightly different coffee bar for our coffee tomorrow to make the journey a little easier for one of our number – there are now so many coffee bars along the High Street from which we can choose so we thought we try out a different one.

We all know that Donald Trump has been openly lobbying to be awarded the Nobel peace prize for his ‘role’ in the resolution of the Gaza crisis. But Venezuelan opposition leader and pro-democracy campaigner Maria Corina Machado has won the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee praised her for her ‘tireless work promoting democratic rights… and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy’. It said she had resisted death threats and been forced into hiding in her fight against President Nicolas Maduro – widely considered a dictator.’ When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,’ Nobel added. The committee said Ms Machado had stayed in Venezuela despite personal risk, calling it a ‘choice that has inspired millions of people Democracy depends on people who refuse to stay silent, who dare to step forward despite grave risk,’ it said. Apart from the sheer logistics of awarding a prize to Donald Trump when we are only a day or so into the process and all could still unravel, one wonders whether the Nobel prize Committee were indirectly making a point to Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA movement about the sort of people who are deserving of the Peace prize?

Late in the afternoon before yesterday, I took the bull by the horns and cut the lawns at the back of the house even though the weather was pretty dull and overcast. The grass had grown quite long and luscious but fortunately succumbed to the mower pretty easily and I was glad to get this task done. By my reckoning, I have another cut to do in a fortnight’s time and then the last cut of the year on or about 5th November which is the way I remember the last cut. And on this last cut, the mower has to be drained of petrol and oil to keep it in reasonable condition during the winter months. The news in the evening before yesterday was dominated by a growing anticipation that a deal to end the Gaza conflict was now very nigh and the actual announcement was made but Trump just before midnight. Whilst there are still a lot of unanswered questions, it looks as though in the first phase we shall see the release of all of the Israeli hostages (or their bodies) and there will be an immediate cessation of strikes against Gaza. The feeling in the air is that once these two important events have taken place, it will be much easier to negotiate other things such as the exact shape and composition of the body that will govern Gaza post-conflict and what will happen to the existing members of Hamas who may still be armed? There is a technical and somewhat macabre problem with handing over the dead bodies of the hostages and that is that Hamas is not sure exactly where some of them are. Some may have been in tunnels which have been destroyed by Israeli tunnel-busting munitions, some may have been in hospital morgues ut these have been bombed practically flat in the conflict and finally, some of the Hamas officials who had the known the pf the location of the bodies have been killed and thus the knowledge of the location of the bodies has died with them. So although the Israelis have a number in their records of hostages still alive or of corpses held by Hamas, it is possible that we shall see some heart-rending scenes in Israel when some of the relatives expecting the release of the bodies of their loved ones in order to gain a sense of closure may have this denied to them as literally, Hamas do not know where the bodies are located and at least some of them will be in the rubble of what remains in Gaza. In the next few days, all of this will be played out before our eyes and the news media will be dominated by it. It increasingly looks as though the bombing of Qatar and the attempted assassination of the Hamas negotiators was the final straw that led Trump to lose patience with Netanyahu and force him into a deal. It looks as though the ceasefire will come into effect from mid-day and I wonder what else there is for the Israels to bomb. Nearly all homes have been destroyed or damaged. Entire neighbourhoods have been wiped out, leaving millions of Palestinians displaced and without shelter. Satellite analysis by the UN’s UNOSAT programme found that as of July 2025, nearly 78 percent of all structures across the enclave have been destroyed and the situation will have deteriorated since then as the Israeli army have swept through the whole of Gaza city in recent months. In the final reckoning, it looks as though the 1200 Israeli deaths two years ago is now matched by about 67,000 deaths of Gaza inhabitants which is a kill ratio of about 50:1.

This morning was rather out of the ordinary. Today was the feast day of John Henry Newman, a noted theologian who transferred his allegiance from the Anglican to the Catholic Church. The Pope has recently decreed that he was to be declared a ‘Doctor’ of the church and Newman is the first Englishman in 1,000 years to be so honoured. As he is practically a local saint and could well have visited my local church whilst he was active in the Birmingham area, I thought that he should be commemorated and suggest as such to the Church committee of which I was once a member. To cut a long story short, as I had made the original suggestion for some type commemoration, I was asked if I would undertake some of the readings or the special service to be held on his Feast Day. So, I turned up to the church and the congregation was quite small by Sunday standards. I approached undertaking the readings with some trepidation but all went and I was relieved not to make any fluffs. I also learned that the funeral of the dedicated parishioner who died last week is to be in a week’s time and his widow invited me along to the funeral tea afterwards (and he had come to Meg’s in any case) Afterwards, I came home for some quick elevenses and then shopping to Lidl, calling in at an ATM on the way. As with many other supermarkets these days, Lidl offers personalised offers direct to your smartphone and today the offers amounted to £6.00 which was more than 10% of the entire bill so this particular way of inspiring loyalty has worked in my case. I made myself a meal of curried vegetables with a few bits of ham thrown in an, as usual, I have made far too much so I have saved one half of it but labelled it with today’s date to ensure that it gets eaten up quite rapidly. Tonight, I shall probably watch ‘Question Time‘ but make sure that I am tucked up in bed so that I can fall asleep as soon as the the programme has finished. Beforehand, there is a friendly football of England v. Wales and I might watch that for a little, although these days I much prefer to watch rugby. I find the shirt-pulling and practical arm-wrestling to get or retain possession of the ball in football to be very off-putting and a long way for the traditional shoulder charge which we were taught when I started playing football in the 1950’s. But I acknowledge that the game and society have moved on a lot since then.

In recent days, I have been asked to reapply for my postal vote as the legislation has now changed and I needed to register for the next three years ahead.  I made my application and was subsequently informed that it had been accepted about which I was naturally grateful. But the procedure involved me writing my signature on a piece of paper, then getting a photo of this on my phone and then using this image to accompany one’s application. For me, the process was fairly straight forward but I used the facility in my iPhone to email a photo to my own own account and then in my main computer I was able to transfer the signature image file into a folder from whence it could be retrieved to complete the application. But I did wonder how many seniors and particularly those without the so-called smart phones would be able to complete this exercise unaided? Then a further question occurred to me which is whether council officials would be manually verifying the signature on my voting form when this occurs against the signature held on file but I found the answer online. As you might expect, this process is now completed automatically and the Electoral Commission has produced extraordinarily detailed guidance for the benefit of returning officers. But I ask myself the question whether if there was a mismatch, the voter would be informed? The guidance I have managed to seek on this point is silent on this point but apart from the vote being rejected and/or the police being informed, the answer appears to be a ‘No’ So I wonder how many of the votes of the elderly are actually discounted in elections in the future with the postal vote unaware that their vote had not been counted? I remember quite vividly the case of my own mother when she was in a residential home requesting that she be included on the electoral register only to be informed that they ‘did not do that’ for residents. My mother was passionately concerned that women having had to fight so hard for the vote should always use it and, to her credit, due to her doggedness and her insistence was eventually registered to vote but it was not an easy matter. I doubt any research has been done on the process but given the much greater numbers of the population now in residential homes, I wonder how many of them actually have their votes registered and counted? The rapid advance in technology has meant that the checking of legitimate votes is now much easier but the extent of electoral fraud is officially reported as being extraordinarily low with about 50 convictions in any one year. But there is much more evidence that the numbers of people deterred from voting because of the complexity of the procedures vastly exceeds the amount of recorded fraud and in the United States, this is known as ‘voter suppression’ and is a weapon utilised extensively by the Republicans to gain an electoral advantage. So, we are left in the UK with the distinct impression that the tightening of rules concerning the conduct of elections was less to do with the elimination of fraud than it was to convey an electoral advantage.

In the morning, I decided to go down and visit the Methodist Centre in the middle pf the town to which I used to convey Meg in her wheelchair in the days when I could still get her into and out of the car. The centre contains what is called a ‘chatty’ table where one can usually converse in some pleasant conversation. But today did not turn out as planned and, in fact,  was disappointing to me. After the comings and goings associated with the ‘Strength and Balance’ classes which are a regular staple of Wednesday mornings and eventually  when I surveyed the room I was the only male in a room of about fifteen elderly females. As they were all locals, the topic of conversation revolved around the local schools they had attended in their youth, and the local schools that both their children and then their grandchildren attended. Evidently, I had not heard of any of them and some had even not survived after which the conversation turned to the cancer diagnoses of either themselves or their friends. So I found myself sitting alone,  with the fifteen ladies sitting around the chatty table discussing schools and ailments so having consumed my coffee and cake there was nothing else much to do but to get up and leave. I recognised some of the people by sight but of course they had known each other for decades whilst I was the newcomer. So I returned home not in the best of moods and consoled myself by burying myself deep in a ‘Super Fiendish Sudoku’ which I did manage to solve. Although I had scheduled myself to cut the back lawn, it is very cloudy and overcast at the moment but according to the app on my phone, the weather should improve with some sunshine in the late afternoon so I may delay my gardening activities until then.

Domestic politics continues apace with the Conservatives promising to abolish stamp duty and with the cost of several billions coming from denying sickness benefits to those mental illness adjudged not to be particularly severe. Of course, this hits two Tory targets at once (tax cuts plus benefits reduction). Sky News is reporting as the Tory party conference ends that the brutal findings of the YouGov poll suggesting Conservative members want leader Kemi Badenoch out and a pact with Nigel Farage confirm what the party’s gloomy MPs are telling Sky News here in Manchester. One MP, whose majority slumped from nearly 18,000 to less than 1,500 last year, said a deal with Reform UK was essential to prevent Labour clinging to power at the next general election with support of the Liberal Democrats, nationalists and Greens. Another veteran MP predicted that in the former Conservative stronghold of Essex, where Reform UK won two seats last year, the Tories could lose every seat in the county – including Ms Badenoch’s North West Essex – because of a surge in support for Mr Farage’s party. Of course, the next general election is some years off but there are local elections in May which will be a massive test of the popularity (or lack of it) of the Tories under the leadership of Kemi Badenock.

The date of October 7th has passed into political history as the date of the original massacre that initiated the start of the conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel. We are still in the negotiation phase in the resolution of this conflict as talks progress in Egypt but Hamas is facing the united opposition of many of the Arab states as well as Europe and it seems has ‘nowhere to go’ There are some who say that Hamas may might on to the bitter end until it is completely destroyed but Trump is desperate to try to claim a Nobel peace prize for resolving the conflict. It now appears that the attack by the Israelis on Qatar was the last straw for Trump as the Israelis attempted to assassinate those who were trying to negotiate a peace plan and this made Trump force Netanyahu’s hand. But by stage, Gaza was generally reduced to a heap of rubble and the costs of reconstruction must be huge. The reconstruction of Gaza and the occupied West Bank will require an estimated $53.2 billion over the next ten years, according to the latest Damage and Needs Assessment from the UN and partners and one wonders where the funds will ever become available for this.

The day started off very dark this morning and, almost inevitably, I overslept a little. In prospect for the day was my normal Wetherspoon’s coffee meeting with friends followed by Pilates later on in the day. If the weather holds out for a bright afternoon, then we can expect a high of 16° so that ought to be warm enough to get the job done. I always time the very last cut of the season for November 5th so by this reckoning, then after today there should be two more cuts left in the season before we resume again on March 25th, a day which is always remembered because it is my son’s birthday. When we do our Pilates, there is a general reluctance to utter what our tutor calls the ‘C’ word which is actually Christmas. A tradition has developed over the years, not honoured in the last year or so, is one in which I play Father Christmas to the rest of my Pilates group and give them presents of damson gin. I may just have a little left over from previous years waiting to be bottled so that the tradition may be continued for one more year but the damson trees have been severely affected by the building work at the rear of our property so it may be that the damson gin production may have come to an untimely end. This year, though, my son and daughter-in-law have broad plans that we shall spend Christmas day in this house and of course cooking a Christmas dinner is almost second nature to me having done it for decades. But there is a lot of water to flow under the bridge until we can actually start to contemplate Christmas and we still have the American import of Halloween to contemplate yet and pumpkins are starting to appear in the supermarkets.

I spent some time with our domestic help this morning talking over some housekeeping issues and then walked down to meet up with my ‘coffee’ friends in Wetherspoons before I walked back up the hill and started to get things ready for my Pilates class later in the day. I always go to this class by car to save a bit of time as well as my legs and today, as it was the birthday week of one of my class mates we were all treated to a fancy cake which was very welcome. Then I returned home and prepared a meal of mackerel fillets on a bed of salad which requires no cooking and the minimum of preparation which is just as well as it is practically 3.00pm by the time I have returned home. Then in the later part of the afternoon, I spent some time reviewing and helping to refine the personal statement of the son of a friend of mine who is applying to university and the ‘Personal Statement’ can be an important part of the whole document. This was a pretty good statement which required only a very little minor tweaking bit I had to do a certain amount of file manipulation and conversion so that I could work on the document using the software that I had. 

The Tory party conference is trundling on with one of the latest revelations being that 20 Conservative councillors are to defect to Reform. Meanwhile, the leader-in-waiting of the Conservative party Robert Jenrick, is having to defend remarks that he made calling Handsworth in Birmingham ‘a slum’ and also declaiming that he did not see a single white face whilst he was in that suburb. That probably says more about Robert Jenrick than about Handsworth but it shows that ‘the race card’ is never far the thought processes and the mindset of Tory politicians.  Decades ago, Margaret Thatcher spoke in terms of the country being ‘swamped’ by immigrants and despite having made a lot of progress in promoting and electing black and minority ethnic members (e.g. Rishi Sunak), the modern Conservative party still finds race and immigration an issue to which it will always return when it is desperate for votes.

I have always thought of the Danes s being a very sensible and level-headed people and this was confirmed in the latest news from that country. The Danish government is proposing a ban on several social media apps for under-15s, according to the country’s prime minister. Mette Frederiksen told Denmark’s parliament on Tuesday that ‘Mobile phones and social media are stealing our children’s childhood.’ Research published by Denmark’s wellbeing commission earlier this year found 94% of the country’s young people had a social media profile before they turned 13 – despite that being the minimum age for many social media platforms. It also found nine to 14-year-olds were spending an average of three hours a day on TikTok and YouTube. Australia is also grappling with the problem but I doubt any British politician would dare to grasp this particular nettle. There are some voices advocating a similar policy in the UK but it has failed to make any traction in the political agenda. It is not just the fact of being online but the insidious effects of social media from whence many get their news about the world which does not bode well for the democratic process as mis-information is so widespread on a range of topics.

So, the new week starts with no particular engagements in the early part of the week. For several years, we have one of those ‘planning boards’ in the kitchen which means that one can see at a glance the commitments that lie ahead for the forthcoming week and indeed month. The night before last upon glancing at the TV schedule, I noticed that probably as a tribute to Robert Redford who played ‘Sundance’ in the famous film ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance kid’ the film was broadcast on BBC2. I had already seen the ending of it only a week or so before but nonetheless watched it sporadically during the course of the afternoon. The film is full of brilliant laconic dialogue between the two outlaws but one scene is hilarious. The pair are attempting to rob a Bolivian bank but, having no Spanish, the heroine in the film who is accompanying them has given them some phrases in Spanish such ‘Hands Up’ ‘Backs against the wall’ and she had written down a few phrases which they have to consult on some cue cards as they are attempting the robbery. This puts me in mind of a true incident which occurred when Meg and myself were returning from a visit to Mexico where we we had been to visit our son who was undertaking a scholarship year before he went to university in England. At that time, most flights to Mexico were routed through either Houston or Dallas an we were returning via Dallas as I remember. Going through security, Meg’s passport was scrutinised very closely as the security guard stared intently at his screen. Eventually we were told that ‘A Margaret Hart, born in Sheffield in England, was wanted for armed robbery  across the three States of Arkansas, Wyoming and Nebraska – but the dates do not quite match up’ To this I replied ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ and I remember the security official, probably not used to black English humour looking rather quizzically at me. Another funny incident that I recall was when returning through an American airport from Mexico one of the all-American ground crew staff smiled broadly at everyone exclaiming ‘Welcome (back) to America!’ Now Meg was not feeling particular well that day and retorted to the female ground crew ‘Welcome back – I cannot wait until I get out of this bloody country as soon as I can and shake its dust off my feet!’ Now the American had never heard anybody speak of America in anything less than the most glowing of terms and her jaw dropped and she gazed at astonishment and some horror at Meg’s outburst which was one of those little images which will stay in my mind for ever. A quote which runs through my head as well given the general lack of ignorance of things geographical outside America runs ‘War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography’ a remark first coined a long ago as 1842 but still as true today.

The day was quite a beautiful early Autumn day and my walk down into town proved to be quite interesting. I passed an old lady who was in her front garden and we know each other quite well by sight.  We engaged in conversation and she informed me that when I was pushing Meg up and down the hill in her wheelchair when walking was way beyond her, this had been observed by many of the residents of Kidderminster Road. When I was observed on my own, people had inferred that something had happened so it was not a great surprise when I informed them of the fact of Meg’s death nearly five months ago.  I carry in my rucksack some spare copies of the eulogy that I gave for Meg on the occasion of the funeral which is also a résumé of Meg’s life. These I hand out (sparingly)  to people that we have come to know for years, if only by sight and I hope her life was of some interest to them. On the same journey down the hill, I had another conversation with one of my Catholic friends and thence to Waitrose for my coffee. Perhaps because it was such a fine day, people were out in their gardens and I had a couple more conversations on my way home. I then prepared some lunch consisting of ham cooked over the weekend and complemented with some potatoes and leeks, first parboiled and then finished off with a roast in the oven setting of the microwave. I had set myself the task of cutting the front grassed area in front of the house which is rather a sorry state as a result of a rampant mole during the summer months and a prolonged drought as well.

The Tories are having their annual conference in Manchester this week and, by all accounts, numbers attending are down which is not surprising given that they are now in opposition. Perhaps they are in a similar position to Labour as they fear that a lot of their traditional right-wing support, not to mention some MPs, will drift off to the Reform party which is way ahead of them in the opinion polls. Half of all Conservative members think Kemi Badenoch should not lead the party into the next election, according to an exclusive Sky News Tory members poll. The YouGov poll found 46% think the current Tory leader should stay in place when the country next goes to the polls, while 50% say she should not. Tory members are split as to whether she will make it that far. A total of 49% think she will be out before the election, compared with 47% who think she’ll still be in place. In the meanwhile, Robert Jenwick is poised to be a new leader waiting for the moment, perhaps after the next local elections, when Kemi Badenoch gets ditched. It is often said that the Labour party dithers excessively when deciding whether or not to elect a new leader but the Tories have the reputation of being much swifter in despatching a former leader and installing a new one. But the Tories system for electing a new leader gives the final say to the constituency parties who are always to the right of the parliamentary party which generates nonsenses like the election of Liz Truss who found it difficult to have the support of the parliamentary party. The present system ensures that only a person from the right will ever lead the party. A superior system would be that MPs elect the party who is then ‘endorsed’ by the wider constituency party. The same is also true of the Labour Party where the system threw up Jeremy Corbin as the party leader – Truss and Corbin between them ought to be a telling message as to why leaving the final result to the constituency parties is almost always a bad idea.

The night before last, I did not sleep particularly well as I suspect that the jabs I had received in both arms were keeping me awake. I failed to ask the doctor in which order the jabs were administered but if the COVID jab was given in my left and the flu jab in the right then it is the flue jab which is giving me a little bit of soreness. I know this will pass in a day or so and it is not really troublesome and I am glad that I am fully protected before the winter colds and flu season gets under way. My way to church was eventful if only because there had just been a most horrendous crash and the police had closed off the road that I use to cross the Kidderminster Road. The fact that a crash had occurred here is of no surprise as it involves a five-way junction with a camber on the two principal roads and the County Council refuse to erect traffic lights. I have heard it said that this junction is the most dangerous in Worcestershire and there are constant near misses when motorists misinterpret the hand signals given by others. Just to make matters worse, when a new gated estate was built about one hundred metres away, the developers offered to pay 50% of the cost of some traffic lights under the ‘Section 106’ legislation of the planning acts. But the County Council gave the developers their money back and argued that they could not afford even 50% of the costs of some traffic lights (but some have been installed near a new development down the road which is infinitely less problematic) Some traffic lights have been promised when the local roads are reconfigured after the local building work is complete but this may be years off yet. I wonder whether the latest crash (and there are multiple near misses as well) will force the hand of the county council who may not move, even now, unless there has been a death at the scene of the crash.  I got to church after a massive detour but an hour and a half later all of the crashed cars had been cleared away and I managed to return home expeditiously. The weather has calmed down today and I have no social visits of any kind in prospect so will probably walk down to collect my Sunday newspaper later in the morning. 

The Tories are meeting in conference this week and are desperate to stop the leakage of their vote to even more right-wing parties such as Reform. The Conservatives are pledging to create a new ‘removals force’ to detain and remove 150,000 a year as part of a broad plan to tackle illegal immigration to the UK. Modelled on the ‘successful approach’ of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, this new force would be given ‘sweeping new powers’, and over £1.6bn in new funding. The pledge is part of the Conservative Party’s broad new plans to stop illegal migration to the UK, set to be unveiled by Kemi Badenoch on the first day of their annual conference on Sunday, where reducing immigration and creating ‘Strong Borders’ will be one of the key themes. The new ‘removals force’ that she will unveil will replace the existing Home Office Immigration Enforcement (IE) and will be given broad new powers, including being able to use facial recognition without warning in order to spot illegal immigrants. Given the strong adverse community reaction in the US to this policy, one can only predict the most turbulent of times ahead as the immigration issue drives policies more and more rightwards.

In the morning, after I had done my Pilates exercises, showered and breakfasted, I made my way down into town on quite a nice day. On my way down, I bumped into a Welsh acquaintance who lives just around the corner on the main road but we have not coincided for quite some time now. She had put her house on the market but has now decided that she is quite content with her lot and is going to stay put. I must say that I was delighted by this news if only because 2-3 of my acquaintances from down the road have moved away from the area. We exchanged news about families as her own mother is gradually fading away and so we discussed with each other the plans that we both had for the ultimate resting places of our deceased relatives.  The rest of the trip was unremarkable and although I collected my newspaper and had a coffee in Waitrose,  the sum of my social contacts was dealing with two scammed messages on my phone. Not being particularly hungry today, perhaps as a consequence of yesterday’s jabs, I made myself a light lunch of fish on bread which was all I felt I needed. Then I watched quite an interesting programme on paleo-anthropology in the BBC series ‘Human’ and this documented the very first human incursions across a land bridge from Asia as far as the northern coast of Canada and then, following the seashore eventually getting as far as Patagonia.  We know some of this from fossilised footprints that have been found in North Western Canada and which can be carbon dated to at least 4,500 years ago. Tonight BBC4 will be broadcasting a whole concert on the music of South East Asia from its archives and, somewhere in all of this, there will be a performance by Ravi Shankar who brought the music of the sitar to western audiences. 

In the domestic political agenda, the Green party who have just elected a charismatic young leader, Zack Polanski who made a pretty dynamic conference speech recently. The Green Party now has more members than the Liberal Democrats, despite having 68 fewer MPs in parliament. Rachel Millward, the party’s deputy leader, announced the achievement to members on the second day of the party’s annual conference in Bournemouth recently. It is believed to be only the second time this has happened, with the last time being more than a decade ago – in January 2015. The Greens have revealed they now have more than 83,500 members, to the Lib Dems 83,174. So, we are now in a multi-party democracy as there are five parties on the political scene and before we count in the three nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

It looks as though the Gaza conflict is now edging towards some sort of resolution. Donald Trump has said Hamas is ready for a ‘lasting peace’ after the Palestinian militants agreed to release all remaining hostages, as he called on Israel to stop bombing Gaza. The US leader was responding to a statement by Hamas on Friday in which the group committed to returning all remaining hostages in Gaza, dead and alive. Hamas also said it wants to engage in negotiations to discuss further details of the president’s peace plan, including handing over ‘administration of the enclave to a Palestinian body of independent technocrats’. Now I am sure there is some way to go yet and there are bound to be some last-minute hitches but the signs are promising so far. Donald Trump has posted that ‘Based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE. Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly! Right now, it is far too dangerous to do that. We are already in discussions on details to be worked out. This is not about Gaza alone, this is about long sought PEACE in the Middle East.’ This was a remarkable statement and represents a huge moment. Neither Mr Trump, nor Joe Biden before him, has ever asked this of Israel before. The American president was telling Israel to stop by standing its military down and to bring this war to an end. Trump is assuming that Hamas have accepted most of the peace plan which it has not but there is no doubt that we are entering an endgame in which there need to be tit-for-tat moves on both sides.

I woke late this morning as the rain storm is continuing to sweep across the country and I suspect that it might change my plans for the day. I am pretty sure that the weather is too inclement for one of our coffee mornings this morning. I think I will probably take the car to get my newspaper and I might pop into the charity shop to purchase the neck-shaped hot water bottle for my Droitwich friend before it is snaffled up by someone else. The evening before last, I had a surprise video call from one of my University of Winchester friends which was very welcome. He had remembered that it was the date of Meg’s birthday and had made a video-call in case I was in need of being cheered up. As I happened, the day passed without a great emotional impact but it was delightful to get the call. We discussed medical matters which unfortunately is all too common at our ages. My friend and I are both living in houses that are somewhat too large for us and so we spent some time discussing what our respective down-sizing plans might be. At the moment,  I am just battening down the hatches and preparing to see out the winter before making any other plans. I am hopeful, though, that I might take a short trip to Spain at the start of February to help to pull some of the teeth of the winter.

The morning turned out to be quite a busy one, what with one thing or another. By the morning’s post, I received an invitation from my local council to re-register for my postal vote as I was informed that the legislation had changed and I needed to re-register for another three-year period. In order to comply with this, I needed to put my signature on a sheet of paper and then photograph it. I emailed the photo to myself so that on my computer system I could put the image file sent from my phone by email into a file location that I knew about in my main computer system. Then I went online to complete the form and had to supply address and contact details together with a national insurance number and the uploaded signature file. This all seemed to go well and I received an email informing me that I would know the result once my application had been processed. I just wondered, en passant, how many other seniors would be able to complete this process trouble-free. As I was now late, I went down to Wetherspoons by car, spending a bare 15-20 minutes with my two lots of friends before re-parking the car in a car park at the top end of town. I made a lightning visit to purchase the specialist hot water bottle for my friend and then made my way to the surgery where everyone was being processed in an operation that seemed to be run like a military operation. I was seen by one of the doctors who I know quite well and it might have been her who gave Meg and I our jabs at home, a year ago on her birthday as it happened. I received a flu jab in one arm and a COVD jab in the other and was in and out of the surgery in a few minutes. The doctor made sympathetic enquiries into how I was coping in my newly widowed status and I was able to say to her that it was a case of ‘So far, so good’.  Then I called in at Waitrose to pick up my newspaper and one other item and then returned home to have a little rest and then to prepare my lunch of quiche, broccoli and some microwaved tomatoes. Then I settled down to watch ‘Question Time’ broadcast last Thursday evening which I had missed but was coming from Belfast and therefore there were some issues particular to the province and this made the whole programme a little less appealing. I intend to have a fairly quiet afternoon just in case I feel a little under the weather from having received two vaccination jabs, one in each arm and it may be that I experience a little soreness in the morning. The weather has brightened up considerably since the rain storms of the morning and although it is bright, it is still pretty windy. In the late afternoon I shall attend the Saturday evening service in my local church which is part of my new routine by now. Then I expect that after quite a busy day, I may treat myself to an early night unless a good film grabs my attention.

Yesterday, the news was dominated by the attack on a Manchester synagogue in which two members of the Jewish community lost their lives in an attack in which the assailant used both a car and a knife. It is an unfortunate fact of life that all synagogues have to have armed protection and the attacker was shot dead within a few minutes, thus preventing a much larger tragedy. The police probably acted with the utmost speed and diligence and were praised for their swift actions. But when an attacker is stopped in this way, the fact of shooting them dead rather them being disabled by a shot means that we have to infer the motives rather than questioning the attacker himself. This seems to have been the first time that a member of a Jewish congregation has actually been murdered and the general reaction is one of shock but not complete surprise. One member of the Jewish community attending the synagogue expressed his view that there had been a ‘tsunami’ of hatred manifest towards the Jewish community since the outbreak of the war in Gaza two years ago. Now this appears to be ‘the elephant in the room’ because there must be a line of affiliation between the conflict in Gaza and the rise in anti-Semitism. Perhaps I have not followed all of the news bulletins very assiduously but I do not recall the conflict in Gaza being mentioned in the media.  But according to many people in the neighbourhood, even Israel’s war on Gaza has not caused any great division within the community. However, many expressed concerns that far-right groups – their confidence fuelled after an August campaign to hang English flags across the country and a mass rally in London a month later – would seek to take advantage of the attack to further unrest. Across Britain, the number of reported antisemitic acts last year was the second highest in modern times. The Jewish charity which advises communities on security said the Hamas attack and subsequent war had helped fuel thousands of incidents, including cases of violent attacks and threats. The area of Manchester is one where Jews, Muslims and other faith groups have lived harmoniously for a long time and the wave of revulsion at the attack is universally shared. Jews in Manchester and across the country say that they are shocked but not surprised and an attack like this had been expected for some time. One unfortunate revelation has come about after the horrendous attack upon the Manchester synagogue yesterday. Two people died and four were seriously injured but it has now come to light that one of the two people who died did so as a result of a bullet from a police marksman. Details of this are extremely sparse at the time of writing but I imagine that the police service, not to mention the individual marksman, are absolutely mortified. The victim shot by mistake was believed to have been behind the synagogue door, close to another victim, who is in hospital with a gunshot wound, but their condition is not life-threatening.

Yesterday would have been Meg’s 79th birthday but I think it is a day that we will manage to navigate without too much evident grief. I did consult via this blog how we had spent last year’s birthday and, on that day, she had received cards, flowers and chocolates and we had celebrated in a quiet way. We had even watched one half of the film of ‘Schindler’s List’ which because of its length we had put into two viewings. Evidently, the point had not then been reached at which Meg’s decline became progressively more rapid and I think she had been capable of following the plot of the film. But Meg’s condition worsened considerably immediately after Christmas when she suffered a chest infection but it was interesting that she had actually managed to enjoy what was to become her last birthday a year ago now.

Later in the morning, I made the journey down into town by car. A transatlantic storm is sweeping across the country bringing rain to practically all parts of the UK and it is quite windy as well, although not particularly cold. I did not wish to get thoroughly wet so I parked the car in the Waitrose carpark, collected my newspaper and then walked the length of the High street to have my usual coffee in that I call the Donkey Sanctuary shop although that is not its real name. Once inside, I was treated to my customary cup of coffee and then a real teat of some homemade scones with cream and jam (which I only spread on very sparingly) It is much nicer going into an establishment where you are known and can have a friendly chat with the staff. I wandered into one or two of the local charity shops to see if anything caught my eye and one item did which I will probably go and purchase tomorrow. This was a hot water bottle in faux fur but shaped rather like a question mark and is designed to ft around one’s neck. As my Droitwich friend has quite a few problems in her neck which can be exacerbated after a long journey, I thought I would go along and make a purchase of this before it gets sold out. Whether it will prove to be a boon or a white elephant I cannot say but the charity shop is selling these items off quite cheaply. After I returned home, I made myself a simple lunch of mackerel fillets which had already been defrosted on a bed of salad and his kind of lunch can be prepared within just a few minutes.

Some interesting news has been announced during the day. The Bishop of London, Dame Sarah Mullally, a former nurse, has been named as the next Archbishop of Canterbury – the first time a woman has been appointed to the role in the Church of England’s history. The announcement comes almost a year since Justin Welby resigned from the role as spiritual leader of the Church of England (CoE) due to a damning review into its handling of a sexual abuse scandal. It is the first time an archbishop has been chosen since women were allowed to become bishops in 2014. She was actually the UK’s chief nursing officer from 1999 to 2004 so is well used to a leadership role. One wonders what the reaction will be of some of the more traditional and evangelical wings of the Church of England but my feeling is that she will probably bring a breath of fresh air to the venerable institution of the Church of England.

As is usual on these darker mornings, I got up a shade before 7.00am having woken up at 6.30. I always stay up until after midnight at this stage of the month anyway to see if any of my Premium Bonds had struck lucky but I had a much better night’s sleep than the night before. Sky News came up this morning with some financial analysis which is actually quite revealing and indicates why the last Conservative government had become so unpopular. Monthly disposable income fell by £40 per person between Boris Johnson’s election victory in December 2019 and Rishi Sunak’s defeat in July 2024. It is the first time in recorded British history that disposable income has been lower at the end of a parliamentary term than it was at the start, Sky News Data x Forensics analysis reveals. Disposable income is the money people have left over after paying taxes and receiving benefits (including pensions). Essential expenses like rent or mortgage payments, council tax, food and energy bills all need to be paid from disposable income. Previously published figures showed a slight improvement between December 2019 and June 2024, but those were updated by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday. There has been an uplift in the last year, although we are poorer now than we were at the start of the year, and today we only have £1 more on average to spend or save each month than we did at the end of 2019. That represents ‘an unmitigated disaster for living standards’, according to Lalitha Try, economist at independent living standards think-tank the Resolution Foundation. Although I have not seen any data, I would not be surprised if something like the same analysis applies to France and helps to explain the current unrest in that country also. Meanwhile, the Labour party are being pulled rightwards as they strive not to lose voters to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party which is way ahead of them in the opinion polls. Refugees who have come to the UK and successfully gained asylum will no longer be able to bring their family members to the UK, under new plans. Sir Keir Starmer will announce that the rights of successful asylum seekers will be restricted, and will pledge to ensure there is ‘no golden ticket to settling in the UK’. The proposals would see the automatic right to family reunion permanently dropped, along with the automatic right to settlement, the latter becoming conditional. I checked the legality of this and have discovered the following.  Not allowing family reunion does not constitute a branch of human rights, but rather a violation of the right to family life, particularly under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) affirms family unity as an essential human right for refugees, and while it is not an absolute right and can be limited for reasons like immigration control, a refusal to grant family reunion may violate this right if family life cannot be enjoyed elsewhere. 

In the morning, I went down to the Tai Chi class which I have started attending but which session I unfortunately missed last week.  But this week a gentleman about my age with whom I had a great chat a fortnight ago turned up and we were mightily pleased to see each other as we had both missed sessions (and therefore seeing each other) So after the class was ended, we had a hearty chat with each other and supplemented our coffee with some homemade cake. I think why we get on so well with each other is because we are of the same generation and understand the illusions that each of one is likely to make such as the imprecation not to spoil a renovation by cutting corners with the expression ‘don’t spoil the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar’. I used this expression with my daughter-in-law some time ago and she had no idea what I was talking about but, there again, many of these very old expressions are dying out for lack of use. After the exercise (if Tai Chi can be called thus) and a coffee I went to Lidl for my weekly shop, this now being my third trip to the store. On this occasion, I managed to locate some of the things that I have been in the habit of buying quite regularly but could not find last week so now I know where to look for them on future trips. My overall impression of the Lidl store is that it is a slight notch up in quality compared with Aldi but there again, the store is quite a large one. I did not get home until about 1.00pm and unpacking always takes a certain amount of time. Lunch consisted of heating up some curry of which I had prepared an excess the other day complemented with some baby potatoes. Idly flicking through the TV channels, I found a programme in which the presenter was trying to track down the evidence for the remains of the cross upon which Christ was crucified. What I had not realised is that there is one school of historical thought that argues that Romans used an ‘X’ shaped cross that was easier to constrict and to erect with a man’s body affixed to it rather than the ‘T’ shaped cross which has become the most dominant of Christian symbols. Of course, as with all archaeology there is a lot of informed speculation but no definitive proof. What is well known is that many ‘splinters’ of the true cross, supposedly discovered by St Helena, the mother of Constantine, must be fakes as the total sum of the many splinters that have been claimed might have filled a ship-full of wood.

In the late afternoon, I made myself go outside and do a weeding job on the patio that we have at the back of the house. It was a gloomy afternoon and I felt most disinclined to do any ‘outside’ jobs but I needed to collect the two bins from the side of the roadway, after they had been emptied first thing in the morning. I did the same for my neighbour as well because he will still be a little incapacitated after his knee operation about a week ago. I only stayed out for about 15-20 minutes but was pleasantly surprised by how much progress I managed to make in that limited period of time.

I did not sleep particularly well the evening before yesterday and so decided, in the middle pf the night, to have a look at some of the liberal media websites that are constantly examining the shenanigans in which Trump is engaged in the White House. One of the latest is being reported in the UK media but is not receiving the attention which it deserves. Many, if not most, of the 800 generals serving in military establishments in the USA and across the globe were summoned to a military academy. There we were informed that in the newly renamed Department of War (renamed from the Ministry of Defence) the military should focus their attention on ‘the enemy within’ who just happen to be the large cities in the USA which are under the controls of the Democrats. Trump told the assembled generals that they should now focus on large Democrat-controlled cities and these should now be used as ‘training grounds’ for the American military and is clearly aimed at intimidating and suppressing any Democrat votes on those cities. Ostensibly, the reason for the deployment of the military is to ‘fight crime’ but in the Trumpian view of the world, these cities have been invaded by people who wish to destroy America from within. At the same time, the American Secretary of State for War, as I suppose he is now called, vowed to eradicate what is perceived to be a ‘woke’ culture in the US military. The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said he is ending woke culture and political correctness and that diversity and inclusion policies would be rowed back, with changes including ‘gender-neutral’ or ‘male-level’ fitness standards for everyone. He also hit out at ‘fat troops’ and said height and weight requirements would be brought in – as well as twice-yearly fitness tests. These harangues were received in a stony silence as, after all, the intelligent military chiefs well know the difference between serving their country and being used as a partisan political weapon which is as unconstitutional as it is possible to be. Trump himself was a well-known draft dodger and the American Defence secretary has the most limited of military experience and neither are at all respected for any of their military credentials. The meeting concluded with a stunned and stony silence which is not something to which Trump is at all used. He then informed his incredulous audience that it was up to them whether they applauded or whether they left the room. But if they were to leave the room, they would be automatically stripped of their rank and then dismissed! I imagine that the assembled military would try their utmost to avoid implementing these new policies but in the discussions that I followed on the TV, there are already  reports that throughout the American military, individuals are being promoted (or even dismissed) on the basis of their political loyalty to Trump rather than their actual competence. Now you would have thought all of this would have been opposed in Congress but this is being actually closed down as I write as there is no agreement between Republicans or Democrats over the passage of two crucial bills. A Congress shut down is not a trivial thing as thousands of government employees are temporarily laid off and Government business and funds temporarily cease. Now to be too dramatic about this, individuals will die as they no longer receive the funds supplied through Medicare for life-saving drugs. All of this may receive an airing in the UK press in the fulness of time but like the troubles in France on which I commented yesterday,  we in the UK are being very insular about events elsewhere that may well impact upon us.

In the morning, I had promised to take my Droitwich friend to Birmingham airport which I did. My friend had two enormous suitcases but assured me that each was below the regulation 23 kg but I am not so sure. We got to the airport in plenty of time with no holdups on the motorways. A really long journey was in prospect because my friend was flying first to Dohar in Qatar for a three-hour stopover and then on to Johannesburg and then on to Durban for which she is going to spend a couple of weeks with her family. I warned against ‘burning the candle at both ends’ because it is quite possible that she goes from relative to relative and has a succession of really late nights. I may get a text later on in the morning tomorrow telling me she has arrived but I think a good long sleep was in prospect, particularly as she had got up at 3.00am this morning with last minute packing to do. This afternoon after lunch, I checked over the legal documents that my son and I had worked on in the morning and then parcelled them up to get them into the post.  I took the car down into town and then after dispatching my documents, I took the opportunity to buy a couple of reams of paper for the laser printer in my office. Although I try to keep my printing requirements down to the bare minimum, there are still occasions when I need a hard copy. Knowing that tomorrow is the day when our green bins (paper waste) get emptied, I spent some time in the afternoon going through a pile of ‘The Times’ to see if there are any things that I really feel the need to keep. Most typically, these articles are health related ones such as the double page spread of information giving tips and hints of how to maximise the response of your immune system to cope with the winter months ahead. It is fairly common knowledge by now that when children return to school in the autumn, they inadvertently help to activate respiratory and other viruses that had been dormant throughout the summer. These are then transmitted to older siblings, the rest of the family and so on into the wider population as a whole. Again, knowing it was bin day tomorrow, I made a quick excursion to remove some of the tallest and most unsightly weeds from the kerbs along our common roadway, so that these, too, could be removed in our brown (garden waste) bins. I think I will have an early night tonight and try and catch up on some of the sleep that I lost in a restless night last night.