Here we are in the second half of June and not too far off the longest day – it seems as though this year is really flying by (at least for us, if not for many others). Today was a rather muggy, humid kind of day in which as we walked to the park armed with an umbrella (in case of a sudden torrential downpour) but we had to divest ourselves of our outer clothing as it was so hot and sticky. On the way, we met with a couple of our friends so we felt cheered by this, as always. We were a little late back and subsequently had a rather delayed lunch but no matter. After lunch, I had set myself the task of using some leftover bits of timber from my fence/handrail construction to create some small barriers to help to mitigate the effects of the slope in the wilder parts of Mog’s Den. To do this, I have to utilise my well-established procedure of creating some long ‘pegs’ some 40cm (16″) in length – this generally entails some sawing in half of longer pieces of timber and then putting a pointed end on each. Then the barriers are put into position on the slope and held in place by four pegs (two on each side) hammered into the ground with the aid of my trusty sledgehammer – as you might gather, I have done this lots of time before. I then utilised some of the thicker and straighter portions of a branch and or trunk from the recently cut-down ceanothus tree to reinforce the barrier before putting the icing on the cake (pouring the contents of the sacks of forest bark into the desired location) This last bit is actually the easier bit of the lot and takes no time at all. I am pleased with the overall look as the sections of half-round poles look quite natural in this setting and I am pleased with the overall result (except that the presence of recently added forest bark shows I need to put a few more bags down into the upper reaches) This was all accomplished before we FaceTimed some of our oldest Waitrose friends that we have got into the routine of FaceTiming every Tuesday and Friday. We were aware that a storm and the long-awaited rains were coming and after an intensely black cloud passed overhead, we did actually get some 20 minutes or so of quite intense rain. The next day or so, we should anticipate even more and there is no more ‘smug’ feeling that you can have is to await the rains when you are truly ‘gardened up’.

More on the horseshoe shoe saga – I asked our Irish friend is she could lend me another three horseshoes and a horse to stand in them (she said she would see what she could do) I reproduce below a bit of my Google research which you can either believe or not as the spirit takes you.

The lucky horseshoe is a big part of Irish folklore and history (despite being typically associated with western cowboy culture). The story of Dunstan and the horseshoe varies greatly depending on where you look. But the gist of the story is that in the 10th century, St. Dunstan (a blacksmith at the time) was visited by the devil himself. The hoofed devil asked for a horseshoe for himself. So then, Dunstan nailed a red hot horseshoe tightly on one of his hooves, and the devil howled in pain. The devil begged for Dunstan to remove it. Dunstan agreed under one condition — the devil must respect the horseshoe and never enter any place where one was hung above the door.

By the way, I am delighted that a well-paid footballer has not forgotten his roots. Marcus Rashford has almost single-handedly forced the government to change its mind and let children who are entitled to have free school meals to carry on receiving them during August (rather than starving!) So much for a majority of more than 80 MP’s!

We had quite a busy morning this morning what with one thing or another. Our local GP practice had called Meg in for a routine blood test but this entailed getting there 10 minutes early, taking along a cardboard box for one’s clothes (which in the event was not needed) and then queuing as only one patient could be allowed into the building at a time. However, whilst all of this was going on, I took the opportunity to pop along to the garage to get one gallon of high-grade petrol which is to be used in the mower for the rest of the season (I always try to get high-quality fuel to try to ensure it is as ethanol free as possible, as ethanol attracts water and can cause great problems in petrol mowers). This having been done, Meg and I then went by car to our local park for our elevenses and bumped into one of our old friends who was busy making a tour of the park with another friend so we didn’t stop for a chat on this occasion. Then, almost on the spur of the moment, we decided as we were in the car to make a flying visit to Asda to see if they still had supplies of forest bark available, As it happened they had and one of the supervisers we know well was organising operations on the outside so I loaded up my trolley with six bags for £20.00 and then got it paid for quite easily using an assistant at one of the automatic check-out desks to handle the transaction for me. Then we loaded up the back seat of the car (forest bark is quite easy to handle) and got it home so we now have copious supplies. We had a salad lunch after which I spent some time getting the supplies of forest bark in various locations throughout the garden (assisted, as usual, by Miggles the cat). I then need to shift a small aucuba shrub some distance from its present location where it was getting in the way of the footpath down into Mog’s Den. Needless to say, in preparing the planting hole for the aucuba I encountered the by now traditional large victorian brick just where I was digging the planting hole. it is no wonder that the London sewers have lasted for about a centry and a half when you consider how dense and well made these victorian bricks were – I suspect they must weight at least 50% more than a modern brick.

I then turned my attention to my horseshoe to see how effective the white vinegar had been in removing the layers of rust. I have to say ‘very effective’ and then I finished off the restoration process with a good old fashioned brillo pad. The result was a gleaming, evidently low carbon mild steel which positively gleamed and took on quite a silvery appearance. I applied a liberal dose of WD40 once it was thoroughly cleaned up to try and keep it pristine. The next problem, so I have discovered, is whether to affix it, as some way, in such a way that the ends point up, so that the horseshoe catches the luck, and that the ends pointing down allow the good luck to be lost; others say they should point down so that the luck is poured upon those entering the home. I think I have decided to play safe and affix it with the ends pointing up to keep our luck!

One of the news stories this evening is the fact that some two million children have done little or no schoolwork at home during the lockdown, according to a report that lays bare the impact of school closures on education. The study by University College London (UCL) found that a fifth of the country’s ten million schoolchildren had done no work at home or less than an hour a day. A separate academic study found that about four million pupils had not been in regular contact with their teachers and that up to six million children had not returned the last assignment they had been set. This means that eventually in the same classroom will be children who have massively behind their contemporaries who do have access to computing facilities (i.e. without having to share with other siblings) and the pedagogic implications of this are truly disturbing.

A slightly different routine for today. Last week, I noticed that in our usual newsagents the Sunday Times had all sold out by the time we got there, after our trip in the park. So having ascertained that they opened at 7.30 even on a Sunday morning, I decided to make a quick trip to town on my own (which I did) suspecting that many people pop in quite early to get their papers whilst getting back in time to watch the Andrew Marr show at 9.00 (although I am not sure why I bothered) So I spent quite a nice leisurely morning reading the Sunday newspapers. The newspapers were quite full of the riots on Saturday night but I notice that Boris Johnson and Priti Patel said that the demonstrators last week were ‘thugs’ whilst those who were rioting this Saturday were also …‘thugs‘ as though there was some kind of moral equivalence between the two. The difficulty here is that using the word ‘thug’  in both contexts is almost like saying that there is no real difference between the BAME communities demonstrating last weekend and the extreme right-wing who were certainly rioting this weekend. But there is a massive difference between the two – the BAME demonstrations were large and generally very peaceful with the odd outbreak of violence from some who had hijacked the event. The riots this week were organised by a variety of those on the extreme right who had come ‘tooled up’ i.e. armed and ready for the fight, fuelled by alcohol as well. So we get the bizarre spectacle of a group of proto-fascists, some of whom were displaying a fascist-style salute applauding Winston Churchill who had led the war effort to defeat fascism. Some of the commentaries in the newspapers were saying that the government are ‘losing the plot’ not with respect of keeping order on the streets but also in managing (mismanaging) the coronavirus crisis, not to mention how to manage the lockdown. The number of COVID-19 deaths in the UK – over 41,700 as compared with 22 in New Zealand and zero in Vietnam both of whom displayed swift and decisive action with evidently beneficial results.

This afternoon was the afternoon for the ‘chopping down’ of the dead ceanothus tree. It took about 20 minutes or less to chop down but about an hour and a half to reduce all of the smaller branches into disposable twigs whilst the larger elements of the branches and trunk I have saved and may well be able to utilise these in Mog’s Den as a sort of mini-embankment to help to stop the downward drift of forest bark. I had also ordered for myself from Argos an outdoor garden toolbox but not ticked the right box which meant that I should have made a journey of some 30 miles round trip to another Argos store to collect it. I cancelled the order (successfully and with a refund available quite promptly) and immediately re-ordered it but this time with a small delivery charge (which I worked out I would have paid in petrol anyway) This arrived halfway through the afternoon and I have still to populate it with the requisite tools – a task for tomorrow.  I am also busy taking the rust off an old horseshoe which got delivered in a bag of farmyard manure a year or so back. I have tried this renovation trick and it works up to a point – tomorrow, I will finish it off with the ‘half a potato’ treatment which certainly does work (the oxalic acid in the potato loosens the rust, and dipping it in salt gives mild abrasive action as well) I will report on my success or failure tomorrow.

Quite a lot of ‘un-lockdown’ activities start tomorrow morning – I suspect that many people will react as though the ‘un-lockdown’ is complete whilst a few will still be quite nervous in entering into ‘normal’ retail shops again after the best of three months internet shopping.

There is a definite feeling of ‘letting go’ evident when we made our walk down to Bromsgrove this morning – in theory, some of the liberalisations of shops are to start on Monday next but, no doubt, some employees may be in shops installing the ‘social distance’ measures (if they have not already done so) in time for Monday morning. Also, today is the day when two single households can form a ‘bubble’ so it should be possible for a grandchild to see one grandparent – but not two grandparents, if I a have interpreted the rules correctly). Again, we did not encounter any of our typical friends this weekend but often people have a very different pattern of interaction on Saturdays so this is not a source of surprise. The numbers of children using scooters seem to be rising exponentially (I suppose it is so much easier in a park rather than on a pavement where I believe it is legal but the person riding the scooter has no rights of way. But try explaining that to a 6-year old!)

After lunch, I had set myself the task of checking my beet seeds for germination and ‘cleaning up’ the vegetable tubs in which they were sown. I should explain that in the area of Mog’s Den adjacent to the path, I imagined this to be an excellent place for some easily accessible vegetable sowings. In practice, though, the tubs had attracted a number of round holly seeds (whether dropped in or blown by the wind I cannot say). So I set myself the task of removing each of these holly seeds by hand and decided that I use a pair of what are called Long-Nosed Pliers ( sometimes, Snipe-Nosed Pliers) and these proved to be excellent at the task – but better than attempting to do it by hand with clumsy fingers and thumbs. I used the same pliers to thin out the germinated seeds to one every quarter of an inch or so but subsequent thinnings become so much easier. [Incidentally, I am never happy with the philosophical underpinnings of thinning out seedlings because you are, in effect, saying ‘You are a little weakling so you will have to be sacrificed to increase the chances of survival of your already much stronger sibling’) I call this the Fascist tendency in gardening and it does run counter to my general world view that it is not morally right to dispose of the weak to assist in the survival of the already strong! But I am pleased to report that my method of scarifying the seeds with sandpaper and then soaking overnight seems to have worked exceedingly well, so I must remember to utilise this technique in my regular fortnightly sowings.

After the Iceland delivery had been made and all the items put away, Meg and I watched an amazing and disturbing documentary broadcast in primetime on BBC2. It was presented by the historian David Olusoga and was entitled ‘The UnWanted: the Secret Windrush files‘  It showed good documentary evidence that successive British Governments had all contributed to the increasingly ‘hostile environment‘  experienced by members of the Windrush generation (the ‘Empire Windrush’ was the steamer that brought the first influx of Jamaican migrants to our shores in 1948. What follows is a review by Amelia Gentleman which is hard to summarise so I reproduce it in full below:

As the Empire Windrush made its way from the Caribbean to Britain in 1948, politicians in Westminster were frantically scheming about how they could prevent a ship carrying hundreds of black immigrants from docking in the UK. The Labour prime minister Clement Attlee described it as an “incursion”. A meeting of the government’s economic policy committee discussed whether it might be possible to divert the ship to East Africa, and make its passengers (a well-qualified group of electricians, mechanics, welders and carpenters) take work there, picking peanuts. Eleven Labour MPs delivered a letter to Attlee warning that “an influx of coloured people” would “impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned”.

Anyone who thought that the introduction of the hostile environment was one of Theresa May’s few clear, tangible accomplishments will need to reconsider. It turns out that even this unpleasant creation is not something she can claim as her core legacy since it had already been 70 years in the making.

Although the postwar government estimated Britain needed 1.3 million extra workers to help rebuild a country shattered by five years of war, officials turned out to be more welcoming to ex-SS soldiers from Germany than British subjects from the Caribbean. In his powerful film, The Unwanted: the Secret Windrush Files (BBC Two), the historian David Olusoga manages to explain complex immigration law and decode dense documents from the government archives in an arresting way. He pulls out devastating passages from forgotten files to showcase the hostility of successive governments to non-white settlers.

Everything begins with the British Nationality Act of 1948, which confirmed the right of all British subjects to move freely and live anywhere they liked within the newly created Commonwealth. But the act, Olusoga argues, was intended to ensure frictionless travel for the large white populations of Canada and Australia. “No one imagined that black and brown people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies would use their rights under this act to come and settle in Britain.”

Incriminating archival material reveals the scale of official panic about immigration and the underhand measures taken to discourage residents of Britain’s colonies from settling. Crucially, politicians wanted to restrict access without actually appearing to be racist. The film exposes their shameful contortions as they scrabbled around to justify their prejudices.

We learn how ministers in the 1950s commissioned researchers to come up with reasons for concluding that non-white immigration was problematic, with senior civil servants instructing dole officers to conduct secret race surveys to see if there was any truth in the assumption that migrants were coming to live off the welfare state, and asking police chiefs around the country leading questions such as: “Is it true that they are generally idle?”, “Do they have low standards of living?”, and “Are they addicted to drug trafficking and other types of crime?” Winston Churchill was obsessed by the “considerable” number of “coloured workers” employed by the Post Office, and, by 1955, was suggesting to ministers that they should fight the next election on the slogan “Keep England White”.

This gradual tightening of immigration legislation exploded in the hands of Theresa May’s government last April, with the Windrush scandal – when thousands of Caribbean-born citizens, legally settled here since childhood, found that they had been silently transformed into illegal immigrants, and threatened with deportation, detained, sacked from their jobs or made homeless.

Olusoga shows how the roots of the scandal lie in a single line from the 1971 Immigration Act, which put the onus on individuals to prove that they are here legally – something so many people were unable to do, with devastating consequences. “Who keeps receipts from the 1970s?” Anthony Bryan asks, explaining how he was detained for five weeks and booked on a flight back to Jamaica. A letter from the Home Office to his lawyer demands more proof: “Your client has stated that he has been resident in the UK since 1965. As such, the evidence submitted must be continuous, and cover the entirety of the 51 years that your client has claimed to reside in the UK.”

The most moving parts of this film are the interviews with three Windrush victims (all of whom helped expose the scandal in the Guardian). “It was a country I was proud of, but now I don’t think I feel proud of it,” Sarah O’Connor says, after being wrongly classified as an illegal immigrant, despite her 51 years in the UK. “At times I got so low I wanted my life to end.” Sarah died before the film was finished. No one could feel proud of Britain after watching it.

Today was a much better day than yesterday although some rain was promised for later on in the day. In the park, we met our good friend, Julie, who we have not seen for several days now so it was particularly good to have a long chat for about half an hour and get up-to-date on each other’s comings and goings. Julie has been busy with her golf, we had been busy with our fence and tree activities. At lunchtime, we treated ourselves to some special smoked haddock fishcakes from Waitrose which were expensive but delicious. I am sure you can make them for yourselves but it’s a bit fiddly unless you make them in quantity (which I might be tempted to do in future). This afternoon, I had set myself the task of applying the second and final coat of light oak paint to the fence-cum-handrail but this time I was a bit better prepared. In my garage tidying up activities, I discovered that we had two decorators masks we had bought some time previously and one of these proved to be excellent. As it happened, the weather conditions proved to be absolutely ideal for the task in hand as it was reasonably warm and sunny but there was quite a strong swirling wind that kept all of the VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) at bay. Then in the late afternoon, we had a heavy but not very prolonged shower, so I was relieved to get my painting done on time. Readers of yesterday’s blog will recall I was waxing lyrical about a particularly specialised spade which I had recently purchased and utilised and it might well be that it makes a good father’s day present for other acquaintances of ours – we shall see.

We are getting into the pattern of ordering our ‘main’ shopping from Waitrose but this has the slight snag that although we have a sort of priority at Waitrose, we are not part of the government-sponsored priority scheme for those who are registered as shielders. Hence our orders are always for about eight days ahead and it is not very easy to work out what you will have run out in 8 + 7 days time. So, I have got into the habit of using Iceland which has a more limited range but with much shorter ‘slot’ times, generally a day or so ahead and a much lower limit to qualify for free home deliveries. So I was pleased to be able to book an Iceland slot for tomorrow night which will help to fill in the gap before my more major order is delivered from Waitrose in just over a week’s time.

it looks as though my Ceanothus (Californian Lilac) I used to obscure the view from my study of a blank brick wall has actually died. At first. I imagined that my neglect of water was to blame – but a few internet searches reveal that they have an average life expectancy of 10-15 years and this one had lived for 12.5 years! Tomorrow, I shall have to engage in the sad task of chopping down a 2-3 metre high tree and disposing of its carcase. It also seems that ceanothus has sold out of every nursery in the country so I may well have to wait for a few months until they are re-stocked again.

The authorities are worried that this weekend we may see demonstrations and counter-demonstrations from the BAME communities and the extreme right. The Home Secretary (Priti Patel) and the Justice Minister are revising plans to have emergency courts and immediate gaol sentences if we get into the situation in which violent clashes occur. There is a lot of pent up aggression on the streets of London and other large cities – and this may just be the start of a violent summer. I hope I am wrong but I have a foreboding that having let the demonstrators have their head last weekend, there will be quite a crackdown this weekend and the situation may rapidly escalate out of control. Let us hope I am completely wrong!

Today was a very cloudy and overcast day with the rain constantly threatening – so it was not a surprise that in our daily walk to the park we did not encounter any of our friends. We did pick up the newspapers, though, in what is becoming an established pattern. We were anticipating several deliveries today from quarters and none of them disappointed, The first of use was a very special spade made by Spear and Jackson that goes by the wonderful name of a ‘Tub Draining Tool’ – the ‘Tub’ is short for Tubular and the whole is manufactured of an extremely strong high strength carbon/manganese steel epoxy coated to reduce rust. What is special about these types of spade is that they are specially designed to make short work of digging fencing posts, moving deep-rooted shrubs or breaking up hard and stony soil. Whereas a normal spade is about 8* wide and 11″ long this is narrower (at 6″) but with a blade that is 50% longer (at 16″) Because of the weight and the design, these types of spade quickly cut through tree roots, submerged concrete, rubble and bricks (which we have a-plenty in our garden) The Amazon reviews included several from landscape gardeners who reckoned it was the most useful spade they had ever bought so at £25.00 (delivered) I thought this was quite a bargain and snapped it up. The next delivery along was the hornbeam tree (‘Carpinus Betulus‘) which I bought complete with a planting stake, tree tie and special root fungus. It arrived in superb condition at 2 metres in height in a special cardboard box and I resolved to try and get it planted this afternoon, which I did. However, the weather was exceptionally windy and not the best in which to try to plant a tall tree but planting was the least of my difficulties. I had already half prepared a planting hole but in making this deeper to receive the tree, I encountered a huge stone which must have been about 18″ x. 10″ at exactly the spot in which I had planned to plant the tree (Now you might appreciate why a specialised digging spade comes in useful) Having got this stone extracted successfully, I then proceeded to drive on the support stake only to be met with more resistance (this time, a Victorian brick in exactly the wrong spot) This seems like Sod’s Law x 2 – but all ended well with the tree well and truly planted, watered and in just the right position. It should grow at the rate of 1-2 ft per year which will help to screen us from the neighbour’s garden. Earlier in the afternoon, I had had a pre-arranged telephone consultation with my cancer surgeon, this being two years after my successful operation. He is going to get a blood test organised for me (but I have to go to a local hospital to get the blood sample taken) and a CT scan – all as part of routine monitoring to check all is well. Thank God for the NHS!

There seem to be three big political stories in town tonight. I didn’t see the Downing St. briefing this evening but apparently, Matt Hancock briefed with the news that 70%-80% of people who tested positive for the COVID-19 virus were not displaying any symptoms. If validated, one can only feel uneasy about this. The major story was the first stats from the test-and-trace regime in which one-third of the people referred to the system would not give (for whatever reason) details of their contacts. If you take the view (which I do) that those refusing details of contacts may have something to hide, then this hardly bodes well for a system that is meant to be our salvation out of lockdown. And finally, there is the real cat-fight between Priti Patel (the Home Secretary) and a group of BAME Labour MP’s who have written to her to say that the views she had expressed on racial abuse she had experienced in the past do not qualify her to make pronouncements on the types of abuse suffered by many of the BAME communities over the decades. Of course, Priti Patel is still responsible for clearing up the Windrush scandal but one wonders if she ever will- sometimes there is no love lost between the Asian and  other BAME communities who have shared such different life experiences.

Today was an intermediate day, weather-wise – we wondered if we were going to get a smattering of rain and indeed we did get a few drops later in the day. Today was a little unusual in that having collected our newspapers and had our usual supplies in the park, we didn’t encounter any of the ‘usual suspects’ for a chat on the way home. But before I forget, I must mention one of the best ‘mot-justes‘ that I have heard for a long time, and this coming from the lips of Meg. When we were discussing the fate of the statue of Edward Colston, the notorious slave owner which was dragged from its plinth and dumped unceremoniously into the harbour in Bristol recently, Meg made the remark ‘May he rust in peace‘ to which I added (‘or in pieces’) but, in truth, Meg’s comment was far more funny.

Just before lunch, I thought I would give my new fence/handrail its first coat of point – by sod’s law, it started smattering with rain within 10 seconds of my starting but soon stopped. The first coat took about 3/4 hour to complete and I think the results are going to be OK. Certainly, the timber doesn’t look as untreated and has a more mellow appearance. Meg likes the overall appearance of it but I am not absolutely sure. I think I will reserve judgement until the second coat is applied and then it has had a chance to ‘age’ for a bit. I still have the option of adding a bit of external varnish to it if I think that will improve it overall. The rest of the afternoon was taken up with tidying up various things within the garage, left rather strewn about when I was assembling various woodworking tools to secure the top handrail. I was eager to get finished by 5.00 pm so that I could see what Boris Jonson had to say for himself in the light of the latest revelations.  Tomorrow is going to be quite a busy day as I am expecting several deliveries from Amazon and also the delivery of a 2-metre hornbeam tree that has been on order for nearly a month now but ought to be with me by tomorrow. It will come complete with fixing stake and helpful root fungus so I will try and plant it immediately if it is not absolutely pouring down. Late on this evening, I took delivery of the latest Waitrose order which soon got put away. But the joys of internet shopping – I discovered that the two items of ‘Fishy Fish pie’ I had ordered turned out to be two tins of dog food! I shall try one out on Miggles the cat tomorrow and give the other away.

The astounding political news is the revelation that in the opinion of Prof. Neil Ferguson, one of the most influential of the modellers of the pandemic crisis that if the Johnson government had locked down a week or so earlier than one half i.e. 25,000 lives could have been saved. If I were the surviving relative of one these ‘unnecessary’ deaths, I really do not know how I would feel. It is too early to say whether this revelation has fed back properly into public opinion but it seems astounding that the Conservatives are still ahead – just – in the opinion polls. How is that possible, I ask myself, after having been responsible for so many deaths of the population? It now seems likely that as well as the politicians, several critical errors were made by the scientific community. According to the BBC Radio 4 statistics programme ‘More or Less‘ it seems that the modellers did not take fully into account the fact that the infected numbers seemed to be doubling every 2-3 days (not 4-5 as they thought) or take into account that much of the UK infection came from the rest of Europe and not directly from China. Also, it has emerged today that government advisers did not anticipate how high deaths would be in care homes as they were acting on the assumption that the residents would be shielded. Nor did they build into their model that many care-home workers were employed by agencies and would move from care home to care home thereby contributing to the spread of the virus.

According to the weather forecasts, today was meant to be a bright and sunny day but it certainly didn’t start that way being somewhat cloudy and what I might call ‘brooding’ – however, the sun burnt through the cloud later on and we had quite a warm and pleasant day. On our way to the park, we were delighted to see some friends we had not seen for a day or so, so it was lovely to gossip and exchange news with each other. The park seemed to have more than its normal share of groups of mothers entertaining their pre-school offspring, so it does look as though this is part of a trend. On our way up the hill, we stopped to admire several of the front gardens which are at their best at the moment – yesterday, we had liberated some poppy seed heads from a venue where they were growing wild and unrestrained. I need to go onto the web, which I will shortly, to get some up-to-date advice as the best way to store poppy heads and their seeds. In the afternoon, it had been my intention to empty a dustbin which we have in an outside corner to rearrange its contents (largely things like gardening gloves, twine, supports of various kinds) but I didn’t quite get round to it. Instead, I hunted around for a small bag of pea gravel which I still had in an odd corner. I then divided this into four and carefully introduced it around the base of each of the supporting posts of my new fence/handrail. That having been done, I then located my tin of used motor oil which had been emptied from the mower and was waiting for the next trip to the local authority tip to dispose of it safely. In this case, I allowed the oil to penetrate the pea gravel and then gave it a light tamping with a flat stone I had to hand. The theory behind all of this is that fence posts always rot at ground level due to the combined effect of soil-based microbes, oxygen and moisture. Anywaything that can be done to eliminate these conditions will assist the treated timber posts to survive even longer. Having got this task completed, I then opened the tin of light-oak external wood paint as recommended by our painters & decorators and painted a sample timber with it. The results were quite good i.e. the natural grain of the timber still comes through without the timber taking on an orange-y suntanned hue (sometimes seen on American presidents we know well). As this experiment has worked well, the full painting job can be done tomorrow – and the gloss paint when it arrives might just make a good job look even better but we will have to wait and see.

It looks as though the government has bowed to the inevitable and realises that it not possible to get all children back into school before the end of term. There is also talk of trying to get secondary pupils back into school in September, if possible. David Blunkett (ex-Labour education secretary) was suggesting that with a lot of national will (as displayed by building the Nightingale hospitals in exhibition centres) we could get schools working again. His solution was to use a combination of reducing social distancing from 2m to 1m only for school children, using every inch of space e.g. school halls and gyms, using a shift system (e.g. 7-1, 1-6) or similar. You would have to give teachers a great deal of local autonomy for this to work and giving autonomy to teachers to try innovative solutions is the last thing in the government’s mind!

According to Sky News ‘New figures show around half of primary schools in England reopened to more children last week, as the government scrapped plans for all pupils to return before the summer holidays. According to the Department of Education, around 659,000 children attended an education setting last Thursday, 6.9% of all pupils who normally attend.’

There are certain dates that stick in one’s memory and today’s date is one of them. It was the date, exactly two years ago, in which I had a bowel cancer operation  (technically a ‘low anterior resection‘) to remove a polyp that had turned cancerous. At the same time, I was given an ileostomy, subsequently reversed about four weeks later. Well, here I am to tell the tale – the survival rate over 5 years is about 80%. The one incident that sticks in my mind is as follows. My surgeon asked me, just before the operation ‘Now Mr. Hart – are there any questions you would like to ask me just before the operation?‘  I replied ‘Yes – I just have one question: when you are holding the diseased portion of my bowel in one hand and the rest of my body in the other, can you make sure you throw away the right bit!‘ To which, the surgeon replied,’I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know what question you are asking me?‘ I replied saying that it was all meant to be a joke but it had backfired. But that is enough of that.

Today, the weather had brightened and Meg was particularly looking forward to her walk to the park as she had missed yesterday. I left Meg on the park bench whilst I went to collect the newspapers and noted, upon my return, that about a dozen young mothers with attendant 2-4 year olds had assembled in the open air or in the park’s bandstand and were organising the children into ball throwing games. (This seemed to involve throwing a ball into a large sheet which was then pulled taut so that the ball  was propelled into the air and children then had to chase after it) The whole affair had evidently been organised but whether it was spontaneous or part of a pre-school group, I couldn’t really tell.

This afternoon, after lunch and a rest, I decided that the lawns needed their weekly cut, although to be honest, they had hardly displayed any growth after the dry spell we would have had for the last few days. But things do look a little neater now. I had intended to start painting my newly erected fence/handrail into Mog’s Den but I was suddenly beset with doubts that the paint I had been recommended by our decorators could turn out to look awful. So as to not ruin it, I had decided that it might be better to paint a spare timber that I have to see how it looks and whether the natural grain of the wood is enhanced (which I want) or disguised (which I don’t want). But I never got round to this because we had a long chat with our next-door neighbour who is recovering from some angina pains and with whom we have not had a chance to catch up on his latest news for several days now.

One of the really big political stories is the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol by ‘Black Lives Matter‘ protestors over the weekend. Although this was undoubtedly an illegal act, it is fascinating to see how our political leaders have responded to it. Instead of an ‘illegal but understandable’ tone, Boris Johnson and Priti Patel’s first instincts have been to condemn what they have termed ‘thuggery‘. But would the citizens of Bristol really want to see re-erected a statue of a man who was responsible for the transportation of 84,000 slaves of whom 19,000 died in transit? I turned to the web to see if there was any legal opinion as to whether or not you find a jury that would actually convict anybody in the climate of today. One wonders whether the government actually has thought of the embarrassment that would be caused by pursuing a conviction in the post  ‘Black Lives Matter‘ days. I did find the following legal opinion (which with I concur, actually) but it will be interesting to see what transpires. The leader of the Bristol City Council hit an interesting tone when he suggested that the statue might be fished out of the Bristol dock but the council had many other priorities at the moment! Here is the legal opinion:

Anyone prosecuted for causing damage to the Colston statue is likely to be tried in Bristol. Even if the case were to be transferred away from Bristol my view is that, whatever direction a trial judge might give, it would be extremely difficult to find a jury with at least 10 members willing to convict them for the destruction of a symbol of slavery.

The weather did not bode particularly well this morning as there was a smattering of rain. After the Andrew Marr show, I made my way on my own to pick up the Sunday newspapers as Meg was not feeling very well and decided to spend some extra time in bed this morning. Lunchtime included a good portion of spinach – some Dutch clinicians have discovered that a deficiency of vitamin K is often exhibited in those who succumb to the coronavirus so it is well to keep our consumption of broccoli, spinach and particularly kale on the menu from now on. After lunch, I set myself the task of cleaning up some plastic storage boxes that I use previously to grow veg in – this is all part of the rationalisation of my garden tools outfit. This sounds a deceptively simple task but the boxes I have seem to have hidden curves and ridges in them which means that no longer do you think you have one surface cleaned when other springs into view. The overall plan is to keep all gardening utensils neatly stored away so that the boxes themselves are not an eyesore and contribute to a feeling of clutter. Miggles the cat was my constant companion and whenever I had completed one box and lined it with cardboard (to keep it pristine) the cat would insist on occupying it and giving it her seal of approval.

Last night, we watched the Life of Pi on the TV (story of a young boy. shipwrecked alongside some zoo animals of which the most prominent is the tiger) We had both seen it before and enjoyed it the second time around – but if you go on the web, there is an amazing amount of philosophical explanation as to which of the two accounts to believe (as depicted on the film or a sanitised version, without the zoo animals, given to the Japanese investigators of the shipwreck) Unusual and enjoyable, all the same.

The Sunday newspapers are full of speculation that the government is desperately keen to end the lockdown as soon as possible because there is a prediction that 3 million jobs could soon be lost unless the lockdown is eased quickly. But the public mood is quite interesting because three times as many people feel that that the end to the lockdown may be preceding too rapidly as want a quick end to the lockdown. I suppose there is a feeling that having come this far, then why risk the rapid emergence of a second (and more brutal?) 0r  and/or third wave for the sake of a week or so? However, it is true to say that other European countries seem to be on a faster trajectory to end lockdowns than is the case in the UK – there does seem to be a long ‘tail’ to the statistical distribution and fears that the ‘R’ rate is already exactly 1.0 in the SouthWest but greater than 1.0 in the North West (which would mean that start of exponential growth in those regions) The consensus view is that the only sensible course to follow is to allow liberalisation only if there is an excellent ‘test and track’ regime in place to immediately pounce on any hotspots. However, we now know that the ‘test-and-trace’ service is woefully incomplete and will only be fully functional in September. This implies that too rapid an end to the lockdown is an incredibly risky venture – but then it was the same bunch of politicians who have progressed with Brexit which again is an enormously risky undertaking.

The other big political story this weekend is the continuing ‘Black Lives Matter‘ protests taking place in cities in the UK and, indeed, globally. I find it fascinating that it not just members of the BAME communities that are out on the streets but the protesters seem to be drawn from every section of society – it seems from the broadcast images that there are as many white as there are brown or black faces. Of course, the original spark that lit the flame was repulsive (a white police officer kneeling on the neck of a black person squeezing the life out of him for seven minutes whilst being filmed doing so).