Today we were particularly intererested in the arrival of our domestic help becase I was anxious to get her opinion on my newly acquired piano stool. Her opinion was that it was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship and I had probably acquired quite a bargain – so to celebrate this I played her the part of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, the Cardinal Newman hymn which is actually incredibly easy to play once realises that the key of F has a ‘B flat’ in it so you have to remember to press this black key when needed. I had to have quite a quick conversation with our domestic help because I had an appointment with a nurse in the doctor’s surgery. This turned out just to be just the routine taking of a blood sample but I also handed in a series of blood pressere readings that I have been keeping on the instruction of the surgery and which will be scanned and appended to my record. I have a little book in which I (sporadically) make a record of things like blood pressure readings and when I glanced back over some of my historical records, I discovered that my blood pressure is lower than it was about eight years ago so this is quite good news. As the appointment at the surgery hardly took any time at all, Meg and I made up a flask of coffee and made our way to the park where it was certainly pretty warm compared with the last few days. We drank our coffee but did not linger as we might have got uncomfortably hot in the midday sun but instead came home to coook dinner. Our domestic help had very kindly made a special tuna paella for us so we were more than happy to add a variety of salad ingredients to this and to enjoy a communal meal, once I had heated up the paella in the oven.

This afternoon, we had a pleasant surprise half way through the afternoon. Our domestic help had left us and then called in at her favourite little charity shop, not on the High Street and not too far away from us. There she had found an incredibly useful tool for the bathroom which is actually called a ‘safety step stool with handrail’ These devices are evidently to be used to assist people getting into/out of a bath or shower but I also gather they have another use which is to help people negotiate quite
a steep step in a caravan. Our domestic help thought it would be tremendously useful to assist Meg and I getting into the shower and she grabbed it for us whilst she could. Naturally, we have accepted this with a profusion of thanks and got it installed in our bathroom where we can give it a good roadtest tomorrow morning. It was a brilliantly sunny afternoon so we had a line-full of washing left out until it was well and truly dry and then it was a case of folding it all up and putting it all away. I know that some people put their washing outside almost whatever the weather and we are not quite as assiduous as this but evidently we must make use of the sunshine whilst we can.

Surveying some of our social committments in the next few days, tomorrow is going to be a definite Waitrose day. This is because we will in all probability see our University of Birmingham friend tomorrow morning. We also think that several of the gang that meets on Tuesday mornings may well be there tomorrow so we are looking forward to all of that. Of course, in the late afternoon, we go off to church and then it will be a case of racing home and installing ourselves in front of the TV in order to see ‘Today at the Test’ as the England v. Australia is very finely poised and could go either way although the pessimistic side of my nature tells me that the ability of the English cricket team to throw away a potentially winning situation by rash shots or failing to hold catches is unparalleled. Next Friday, we are going to have the daughter of some of the friends we recently made at the Age Concern club (which we attend on a monthly basis) to call around so that we can give each other a bit of mutual support in the care that we can offer to our family members (parents in her case who are getting a little frail)

There is a now infamous incident in which a Berkshire headteacher with an unblemished record when her school was suddeny regraded from ‘outstanding’ to ‘unsatisfactory’ committed suicide. Her family believes stress associated with the inspection was a major factor in her death. The tragedy prompted many teachers to call for changes to the inspection system and the end of the one-word grading system. The school was reinspected on 21 and 22 June and assessed as good in all categories, the second-best rating. But the whole point of the controversy is whether Ofsted is justified in giving a ‘one word’ overall categorisation to a school such as ‘good’ or ‘unsatisfactory’ I am sure it is possible to do what was done in Higher Education quality assessments a few years ago in which the course was given a quality score (from 1 to 4) across each of six dimensions, 24 being a ‘perfect score’ (and anything in the range 22-24 being regarded as excellent)

Thursday is my shopping day so I was up bright and early to do my weekly shopping. In common with a lot of the population, I think I tend to rotate across the normal range of joints to have for our principal Sunday meal and thereafter in the week. So the choice revolves between beef, pork, ham and bacon joints, chicken and lastly lamb. I mention this last because it maybe a result of the supermarket in which I shop but lamb seems to be becoming a luxury item having been a staple meat for UK households over the decades. Today, just out of interest in the freezer sections of the supermarket I decided to make a quick mental note of the range of meats available. I did find some lamb shanks at quite an expensive price but adjacent to it, I found 17 manifestions of chicken in a variety of guises and, no doubt, with all kinds of gunk added to them to make them relatively more palatable. I suppose all of this is quite evident when you explore how long it takes for the various types of animal to mature before slaughter. In the case of chickens the modern factory farming gets from a chick to slaughter in 40 days whereas lamb takes five or six times as much with a minimum of 210 days. Also you cannot ‘intensively farm’ lamb: sheep eat grass and need a lot of space and sheep require lots of looking after compared with chickens. I had not really given this topic too much thought but I am pretty sure that most supermarkets used to have freezers full of lean New Zealand lamb and this seems in equally short supply, these days. Once I got the shopping unpacked and Meg up and breakfasted, the day was rather gloomy so we decided not to go out this morning. Instead, I cooked a fairly early lunch, not having cut the lawns yesterday, and I wanted to have a go today before things get out of hand. I consulted my weather app and no rain was forecast and so after we had lunched, I set to work with a vengeance and got everything cut in accordance with my schedule.

There are interesting stories today that Russia may be on the brink of a civil war. Speculation started once the Wagner leader, Prigozhin, is now rumoured to be in St. Petersburg rather than in Belarus where he was supposed to be in some kind of exile. These kinds of stories are always speculative in the extreme and it can be difficult for us in the West to read the runes of what is actually happening in Russia but I think it can be said that cracks are appearing in what used to be thought of as a state in which Putin was in absolute control. Naturally, the Ukranians are immensely interested in any evident weaknesses in the invading power but there is still a lot of hard fighting to be done in the Ukranian war and the promised advance seems to have been a very slow and difficult affair. But I have a suspicion that if the Ukranian military keeps its nerve, there may well be a tipping point in which the morale of the Russian soldiers suddenly collapses. There was a story told in the early days of the war that the Ukrainians, when they had captured young and very frightened Russian soldiers, used to sit them down with a cup of tea and then toss them a mobile phone with the ‘order’ that they telephone their mothers and tell them exactly what had happened to them. This story must have ‘had legs’ as the journalists used to say, because Russian families seemed to be fully aware of what had happened even though to organise anything like a protest movement would have been incredibly dangerous.

Tomorrow our domestic help is due to call round, having postponed her day from last Wednesday until tomorrow. As it happens, we both have little surprises for each other and I have been given a hint that tomorrow may be a bit of a culinary treat for us, but I have no real idea what it is apart from the fact that our domestic help is the most excellent of cooks. In turn, I want her honest opinions on our recent furniture acquisitions and I value her opinion highly. Our domestic help and I tend to share a common weakness that if we something that we like in a charity shop, naturally at a reasonable price, then we cannot resist making a purchase. In particular, we both rather like buying things that, with a bit of restoration, can be really turned around and we both take pleasure in seeing the results of our labours.

Since I acquired my electronic organ, I have tended to scour eBay for the kinds of books that have been put together for the benefit of learners and are usually simplified classics. I got my latest, and very last, book through the post today and it looks incredibly well used over the years – and well worth the £3.39 I paid for it. Today’s booklet details 100 ‘classics’ which have been simplified somewhat and abridged such that one gets the principal theme of the piece on one double page. I think I can recognise the vast majority of the pieces in the latest book so as my skills develop (and if they do), I will have a lot of material to give me pleasure over the months and years ahead.

Today the weather was set somewhat more fair but the humidity seemed to build up as the day wore on. This morning, Meg and I needed to have a passport photo of Meg taken in connection with some legal work so we actually chose another car park which minimised the amount of walking that Meg needed to walk along the High Street. As we were about to leave the photo shop, we received a very welcome phone call inviting us for coffee in Waitrose at the other end of the High Street. We made our way via one or two charity shops and were very pleased to see our friend being gradually restored to health after his recent bout of illness. One of the slight frustrations of life is that when our present car experiences a low type pressure in any of its four tyres, a symbol appears in the car’s information system as a constant reminder to get something done about it. What I have learned, through some experiences in the past, is that once the tyres are correctly inflated, the ‘flat tyre’ symbol does not disappear but one has to locate the appropriate setting in the controls (buried some way down) and then re-initilise it. This happened today and after I had checked out my tyres, I then had to come home and consult the web to find out how to reset, and thus eliminate, the warning symbol. After all of this, we decided to forget about the grass-cutting which we normally do on Wednesdays because we were expecting a long and important telephone call this afternoon.

Last night, when I had a bit of time to myself, I was intrigued to attempt to discover the value and provenance of the better of the piano stools which I purchased yesterday. Finding the value of piano stools via eBay is not necessarily an easy thing to do. There are several offered for sale but they are almost inevitably put into an auction where one can only surmise what the final selling price is likely to be. But more importantly, and given the nature of the items, they always seem to be offered on a ‘collection only’ basis and they always seem to be at least one hundred miles away from the Midlands. So my efforts in this direction initially scored a blank. I then consulted a veriety of websites to attempt to ascertain the kind of wood from which the stool was made and narrowed my options down to deal, cherrywood and mahogany. I think that mahogany was probably the best match but one can never be sure about such things. Finally, I hit on a vein of websites which were showing antique piano stools and this avenue of approach seemed a lot more fruitful. Looking at how the stool I had bought fitted into the general panorama of what I say displayed, I am now pretty certain that I have acquired a vintage Edwardian piano stool, manufactured about 1900 and which, in an antique dealer’s shop, would probably start off from £150 upwards. If attempting to buy one of these items through a straight eBay transaction, I think the price may lay in the range of £70-£120. But putting together a series of clues, I suspect that I am now the proud owner of a piece of vintage furniture worth considerably more than the price I paid for it. When I get somebody a bit more knowledgable than myself, it will be interesting to see if my guestimate and/or judgement is confirmed.

This afternoon, I had a long and important telephone call, by prior arrangement, with Worcestershire Association of Carers. This organisation acts both as a voluntary organisation with its own mission and agenda but also acts as an agent for Worcestershire County Council when it is in ‘assessment’ mode. The conversation was about an hour and a half long and generally fruitful as my contact made some suggestions some of which she is going to action and others of which I might be able to action myself. All of this may mean that there a range of sources of help and advice to assist with my wife’s health condition which may eventually prove helpful to us but I think that it may be several months before any real benefits manifest themselves.

Tonight there is going to be a program on the TV celebrating the life and achievements of Florence Nightingale. I remember well when I was attending a Total Quality Management conference in Sheffield when I was accumulating papers for my PhD that the floor was given to a Japanese TQM expert. His lecture started with words to the effect that speaking to a British audience, we did not need to be reminded about the life and career of Florence Nightgale, the great English….At this point, most of the audience was expecting to hear the words ‘nurse’ but instead the Japanese academic spoke the words ‘social statistician and nurse’ It is instructive for us now to appreciate that Florence Nightingale gave us the pie-chart and several other graphical representations that have become the bread-and-butter of modern statistics, perhaps well known to all school children. I am wondering, and will no doubt soon find out, whether this is reflected in the program this evening.

Tuesdays follow a regular and predictable pattern and today was no exception. By the time we were up and breakfasted and our daily newspaper collected, we made common party with three of our Waitrose regulars. I suspect that we all look forward to this chat and discussion of common problems and we generally have a good laugh, one way or another. Today, I was reminding them of a couple of stories from our Manchester days when I found myself in the office of the Professor of Surgery at Manchester University. To this day, I do not know and cannot remember how I bypassed the rest of the NHS systems and bureaucracy but the point of this story is that the estemmed professor operated on a lump in my neck and missed by over an inch. When confronted with the evidence, some weeks later, I was advised to go away and forget all about it which I did. But the next time I bumped into the Professor was when I was a census enumerator and he was ‘on my patch’ living in a large villa overlooking Platt Fields park in Manchester. The story that did the rounds was the fact that the Professor had large and alcohol fuelled dinner parties where a dozen people or more would be seated around a large dining table. During the course of a dinner, the Professor’s pet monkey was apt to swing from a chandelier over the table, urinating in long trails across the dinner table. If guests remonstrated with the Professor, they were informed that the monkey’s urine was biologically pure and would do them no harm so they should just carry on and enjoy the rest of the dinner. I am just recounting the story that I heard from more than one source but can honestly attest that I was not actually a witness to the events in question but why should people lie about such a thing? After we took our leave of each other, Meg and I did a little shopping in Waitrose and then returned home so that I could get changed into my Pilates gear. I walked down into town leaving some five minutes earlier than usual so that I could call in at an ATM for some living money. Then I popped into a stationers and bought a couple of erasable biros which the website I was consulting yesterday informed me was the best way to write out your own musical scores. I then popped into our local Age Concern used furniture shop and within seconds found exactly the thing that I had set my heart upon which was a specialised piano stool – the sort with the lid which lifts up so that you can store your music inside. When I enquired about the price, they were a little nonplussed within the store as this item had only been donated literally a few minutes before I walked in. Hence they did not have a chance to do the sort of consultations to put a price upon the stool and they then then informed me that they had a second one as well. The first stool was absolutely delightful and was a very traditional design with well turned carrying handles and a really expensive flock seat cover. The second was a bit more predestrian and was covered in a crimson brocade although I would preferred green. When it cane to pricing them up, I thought that the superior one was a little underpriced and the second one a little overpriced and although I tried to bargain for a better price if I bought the two, they did point out that they had only just been donated and seemed to be eminently saleable. I concurred with this and bought the two of them, knowing the better one would be a superb match for my recently acquired Technics organ and even the second was quite a nice piece of furniture. Then I went and did my one hour of Pilates and after walking home and cooking dinner, excitedly told Meg my good news.

After lunch, Meg and I decided that we would make our way down into town to collect our recently purchased furniture. Although the front of the Age Concern shop is on the High Street, it is not at all evident where the access to the store is via a rear entrance – but there evidently must be one so that the store can get its collections of furniture delivered. After a bit of fishing about, we did find the rear entrance and collected our acquisitions. Once we got them home, we kept them on the dark brown entrance mat that we have just inside our front door because this would be a qood site for them to be cleaned up. I started off with a bucket of warm soapy water and this is all they really required although later on, in the full light of day, there may be a call for some slight renovation with my bottle of ‘scratch cover’ fluid. I then ensured that each of the hinged seats were screwed up tightly, as I surmised that the hinges had not seen a screwdriver in decades. The older piece needed lining with some anaglypta wall paper of which I have a stock for cupbord lining purposes and now the two pieces have pride of place in our newly refurbished music room.

So Monday morning dawned as a fairly gloomy and rain bespattered day but we had no real projects that we had to undertake today. But by yesterday’s and today’s post, some very interesting mail arrived for me. They are principally a set of organ manuals for beginners (where I managed to get a job lot for six parts of a series via eBay). But most prized of all was a collection of carefully curated classical pieces for beginners such as myself acquiring or developing keyboard skills. There are quite a lot of these booklets in the world ‘out there’ evidently designed for children aged 8-14 (I would imagine) so that they can get the satisfaction of playing some of the themes from the well known classics but with a simplified format. Some of these are almost babyish in that they actually have the names of the notes written inside the circular shape of the notes themselves. But they serve their purpose to get you going – I suppose the best analogy is armbands that you put around the arms of young swimmers to give them a little bit of assistance (buoyancy) until the need for them is past. Some of these pieces I am really going to enjoy tackling once my skill levsls have improved a little and they are a ‘delight’ to be enjoyed down the line as it were. In the meanwhile, I have been learning ‘Morning’ from the Peer Gynt suite which I imagine is a well known tune, recognised by us all. I have tried a little experiment today, as follows. Looking on the web, I found a site here I could download a .pdf of some ’empty’ staves. Then I followed the advice I found elsewhere on the web to transcribe some of my tunes onto my own staves. The reason here is that I wondered if I could make my own musical scores a little less ‘baby-ish’ and I also considered that I might be able to add some of my connotations for fingering once I start to practice doing this properly i.e. using all of the fingers of my hand and not just picking out notes with an index finger which is what I have done so far.

After we had breakfasted, I collected our newspaper and then we swung by Waitrose for a few essentials. The car park was absolutely teeming, so much so that after circling around a few times we had to go on another errand and then try the car park a few minutes later. I suspect that it is a combination of the wet weather on one hand and a funeral in the local church on the other which leads to temporary overcrowdings like this. After lunch, I busied myself with making myself a piece of ‘storage’ furniture. One of the interesting things stocked at amazingly cheap prices in our local Poundland are adhesive floor tiles where you get about half a dozen for £1. There are two designs that I always like to have in stock, one being a type of wood laminate design and the other being a black and white tile design and both of their have their uses if deployed with care. This afternoon, I wanted to liberate a magazine rack for which I had other intentions. With the spare floor tiles enhanced with some black ‘gorilla’ tape, I made a pretty decent looking and quite strong storage box into which I could decant the former contents of the magazine rack. This I could then use to house some of the collection of piano song books I have accumulated in the last week or so so that I can ensure that everything is neatly put away but also quite accessible when I need to try my hand at something.

As many motorists have suspected, fuel prices tend to rise like a rocket when external events such as the war in Ukraine drive up prices but only fall back to earth very slowly ‘like a feather’ when the whole sale price softens. The net effect of all of this is that Asda and Morrisons, in particular, have been accused of extracting a lot more profit via their petrol stations and consequently being fined (only a ‘rap across the knuckles’) by the Competition and Markets Authority. Retail prices are now providing a 6p of profit per litre to the supermarket giants and almost £1bn has been extracted from the public via higher prices. There is some speculation that the supermarkets themselves are tryng to service mountains of debt incurred when ownership of them changed hands and as we have come to expect, it is nearly always the supermarket’s customers who have to pay the bill.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the right wing Conservative and arch Brexiteer is being investigated by Ofcom for his role in the so-called news channel of ‘GB News‘ An OfCom spokesperson has indicated that they are investigating whether this programme broke OfCom rules, which prevent politicians from acting as newsreaders, unless exceptionally, it is editorially justified. Certainly, the claim to be solely a ‘news’ channel is somewhat tendentious when the only ‘news’ avalable to the public is one from an extreme right wing perspective. One can only surmise that these channels are actually following the examples of Fox News in the United States where the sole ‘raison d’etre’ is to promulgate a right wing agenda rather than keeping an audience objectively informed.

Today has been a very interesting day for a variety of reasons. After a cup of tea in bed on a Sunday morning, the bedside radio was tuned to Radio 4 and we started passively listening to the ‘Sunday’ program devoted to religious affairs although the program defines itself broadly. This morning, there was a discussion with funeral directors concerning the most popular pieces of music both requested, and played, at funerals. Some were judged to be somewht inappropriate such as ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ unless it was very specifically requested by family and friends. This got me wondering what hymns I would like at my own funeral and, as it happens, in church last night before the service started I was glancing through a section at the back of our hymn book which was ‘Hymns for Particular Occasions’ I turned to the section on funerals and found a favourite of mine which was ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ written by John Henry Newman. This is one of the nearest that we have to a local Catholic saint (although there are others associated with Harvington Hall, just down the road from us) The point about this hymn is that the lyrics could easily be transported from one religious ethos or denomination to another and are not particularly mawkish or over sentimalised which can be the problem with Victorian hymns. Searching on the web, I found both an interesting rendition of the hymn sung by the choristers of Arundel cathedral and after not much searching, the sheet music associated with the hymn. This is a fairly simple melody which I can easily practise in my right hand mode and so I may be in a position in a few days time to play on my newly acquired organ one of the hymns that I would to have played at my own funeral. This is all slightly less macabre than might appear at first sight as hymn tunes are fairly simple, not to mention sonorous pieces, and they really do sound better when played with the gravitas of an organ rather than a more tinkly sound of a piano.

We had arranged to meet with our University of Birmingham friend in the park at about 11.00am and, fortunately, the weather brightened a little so we engaged in our Sunday morning chat, visited on our usual bench by a variety of dogs who associated people sitting on benches with titbits. After about half and hour or so, we both went to our house where we had invited our friend round for a traditional lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Fortunately, I had done some vegetable preparation beforehand and had some onions cooked until they were translucent so that I could quickly prepare an onion gravy. All of this meal worked out just as I wanted – I even located four remaining Yorkshire puddings that were popped in the oven to complement the rest of the dinner. No sooner had the meal been consumed and we had started to think about our post prandial coffee when I received a telephone from one of my ‘oldest’ friends. I use ‘oldest’ in both senses of the word because this lady is now 96 years old and we used to attempt to see each other once a year until the pandemic put paid to all of that. Secondly, we were colleages in the Central Office of Information where we met in 1964 so our friendship goes back practically sixty years. She has now moved from where she used to live on the South Coast to Dorking where she can be so much nearer to her one son (who of course, is now retired, needless to say) Our friend is a most remarkable lady and has an amazingly interesting professional life – at one stage, she had even worked in an office adjacent to Alan Turing but I must remember to ask her if she ever actually met him. Anyway, I regard this as one of my actual links with history. Our friend was a very good pianist before the arthritis got to her a few years ago and I think she has an LRCM Licentiate as a professional qualification. Knowing her proficiency in piano, I told her of my ventures into keyboard instruments first via my Casio keyboard and latterly through my Technics organ, only acquired last Sunday. So I played our friend the only piece of music I have absolutely committed to memory and can play without a fluff which is the Largo from Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Our friend recognised it instantly and sang along with it, as I played which was quite an interesting experience. As soon as we get a telephone call from our friend’s son, I want to organise it so that we can have a meal as soon as we can organise it. In the past, my son and daughter-in-law have enjoyed the past lunches that we have had together in Central London so as soon as we make some practical arrangements and coordinated diaries we will journey along to see our friend as soon as we can. The whole point here is that a 96 year old can be carried away almost by a puff of wind so we are particularly anxious to keep on meeting with each other as long as our health and faculties survive.

So here we are starting the second half of the year – I am sure that time passes so much more quickly once one gets older. Today we were due to see our University of Birmingham friend in the park for another long chat but we had a bit of a rush around at first. I am trying to extend my repetoire of classical (one hand) tunes and found in a little book for beginners I had purchased recently the ‘Ode to Joy‘ (from Beethoven’s 9th) This was so simple, only being a few notes all of which were practically adjacent to each other, so it was no surprise that I learnt the first half of it very quickly indeed – the second half is going to need a bit more work on my part but not much. Eventually we got to the park just about on time and had a long chat with our friend. Then as we departed for lunch, I knew that I needed to pick up our Saturday newspaper and then make our way to the local comprehensive hardware store. I was on the lookout for about a metre and a half of that golden-brown lighting flex as the standard lamp that we acquired recently had evidently been rewired with some white fittings and white flex and the latter looked completely inappropriate. At the hardware shop I managed to buy a stake to provide some more support to our Lavatera (‘Mallow’) which is bending over somewhat and needs support so that it does not end up horizontal rather than vertical. The hardware store is normally completely comprehensive but they did not stock the shade of cable I needed. They recommended a small, specialist electrical shop which is in the centre of town and somewhat difficult to access – nonetheless, I got there,managed to park just about only to find the little shop closed. So Meg and got home and heated up our fish pie which was not consumed the other day and I tried an innovative little vegetable mix to go with it. I happened to have half a packet of French beans in the fridge, so I took these and threw in a handful of petit pois and then did them in the microwave.Then I did a quick toss with some slices of chorizo ham in a saucepan and complemented these with some of the little plum tomatoes which I microwaved and then popped into the oven together with the fish pie. All in all, it was very enjoyable meal.

After we had had a bit of lunch, I searched a little in my ‘electrical’ things in the garage and was fortune to find just about the right length of some brown lighting cable. So then I set to work, rewiring the plug with a more appropriately coloured flex and then I spliced the flex onto the existing flex using techniques that I often deployed as a teenager but had not deployed for about sixty years. But this all worked out just as I wanted – the job went without a hitch and I was fortune in that my new installation was just what I wanted but with 4″-5″ of flex to spare. After this, we had a little rest as in the late afternoon we go off for our weekly visit to the church service. The TV this evening seemed to be full of the kind of things that we did not particulaly want to watch so we may treat ourselves to a bit of an opera located on YouTube.

There is a lot of concern about Thames Water which seems to combine a toxic mix of terrible service to customers, all kinds of pollution discharges with enormous levels of debt, huge payouts to investors and an ownership conglomeration that includes OMERS – an private equity company (23%), the Universities Superannuation Scheme, (19.7%) BT Pension Scheme (13%), the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (9.9%), the China Investment Corporation (8.7%) and the Kuwait Investment Authority (8.5%). Even a right-wing Conservative government is prepared to consider nationalisation as a solution but this raises questions as to whether the existing investors should be rewarded with UK taxpayers money. I am left wondering whether public ownership for once is not the panacea to all of this mess. The prime problem appears to be an out-of-control private investment mix hardly supervised by a very weak regulatory regime in OFWAT. So I am left to wonder whether it might be better to considerably beef up the powers and performance of the regulatory agency with sackings if necessary and with a remit to force the investors to increase the levels of investment and reduce the levels of dividend dramatically to realise the results that privatisation was meant to achieve when the water industry was first nationalised. The ‘nationalisation’ solution seems to be receding a little into the background this weekend and no doubt some tough things are being said in private to the owners and management team of Thames Water but will the tough words be enough to secure the necessary result? After all, supplying water is a natural monopoly and to receive a good water supply should almost be considered a human right but it rather shows what happens to predatory capitalism if not carefully supervised and regulated.

Today is the day that I have been saving up to talk about for some days now but I wanted to delay until today. My little story started a few days ago when our domestic help sent me a photo of a Technics Electric Organ (c. 1983) which she had spotted in a charity shop in Cannock, Staffs. When I asked her about the selling price, she replied that it was £70 which I could scarcely believe. But then I got bitten by the bug and wondered if any were for sale locally on eBay and, quite by chance, I found one in an auction that had a starting price of £15.99. I wrote off to the seller to make some enquiries about the machine and it transpired that the seller lived in Derby and was willing to transport within reason to addresses in the Midlands. Accordingly, I entered the auction last Saturday about two or three minutes before the auction was due to end and I knew that there no other publically announced bidders – but who knows how many people like myself might be lurking in the wings. To cut a long story story short, having entered the auction and at a price higher than the initial bid price, it turned out that I was the only bidder and so secured the instrument for the bid price of £15.99 (although, I did find out,indirectly, that the seller had tried at a higher price without success the month previously) After some more email consultations and a telephone call, the seller told me that he and his father could deliver the organ in their VW Passat on Sunday morning for a petrol charge of £25.00. So the pair turned up and ‘installed’ the organ and we entertained them with tea, biscuits and a chat. They turned out to be a fascinating and interesting pair – the father played the organ and his father had been a local preacher whilst the son played the guitar. But as well as supplying the organ, they also let me have a whole series of some 17 songbooks designed for young learners to play simplified versions of various tunes (usually only with the right hand). Naturally, I was absolutely delighted with my purchase. Most people would not have the space (floorspace, noise volume) or the time for such an instrument and the organ itself was probably manufactured by Technics some time shortly after 1983, when it would have had a new selling price of about £1450. Now it happens that Meg and I have plenty of space in our new ‘music room’ and the noise would not inconvenience any neighbours. Whether we have the time or not is a moot question but at least we can do things in small snatches rather than hours at a time. So far, about from one hymn tune, I have just about mastered one tune which is the ‘largo’ from the 2nd movement of Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony’ which is very well known to many listeners. Once I consult my various books, I hope to be able to master about one new tune a week – and then in one year I should have fifty under my belt.

What I had not fully appreciated until the last few days is that I had always thought of the piano and the organ as basically very related instruments with one being very much the younger brother of the other. But I now know that it is not as simple as this. For start, the piano is a percussive instrument in that the key strikes a string and a note is emitted which then dies away. The organ, though, is essentially a woodwind instrument (or electronically simulated) in which air is blown through a pipe. When you press a key, the note is sustained for as long you keep a finger pressed upon it. Also a full scale piano has some 77 keys but the modern keyboard instruments (and the one which Mozart composed upon) only have 61 keys. But organs typically have two or more manuals, each of about 44 keys (three and two-thirds octaves) plus an octave supplied by foot pedals. Hence the Technics instrument I have just acquired has the equivalent of 61 keys or five octaves but the lower octave is supplied by foot pedals and the upper one is supplied by one manual being offset about one octave higher than the other. The reason for this arrangement is that organs have two or more ‘voices’ for example with one manual sounding like a trombone or other wind instruments such as a clarinet whilst the other may well have flutes of various sizes and strings. Typically, the upper manual provides the melody and the lower the accompaniment but this is not invariable. So evidently, I have a lot to learn but tonight I have moved onto a simplified version of ‘La Donna è Mobile’ from Don Giovanni by Mozart.

Today we were pleased to meet with our University of Birmingham friend in Waitrose after he had a bout of illness. Hopefully, we will be sharing a Sunday lunch together and are helping him on the road to recovery but we had rather missed him whilst he was out of action and are especially pleased to be back in contact with him.

Today has been quite a day as will be evident when this blog develops. But the day started off, as Thursdays always do, with presenting myself at the doors of the supermarket via an ATM so that I could start shopping immediately the shop opened. I managed to get practically everything that I wanted bar some icecream which we have been consuming in quantity as the weather has been so warm. Then it was a case of getting everything home, unpacked, the breakfast prepared and finally elevenses prepared for a walk in the park. So far, so good. But after our visit to the park, we decided to pop by the local store which both receives and resells furniture and household goods which goes by the name of ‘New Start‘ In the past, I have both donated and occasionally bought some goods from there and today, I was particularly in search of a standard lamp which would be consistent with the rest of our decor and which would also act as a source of illumination for my newly acquired keyboard. There was a little cluster of standard lamps and lampshades in one corner of the premises and after consultation of Meg, we decided on one particular unit making sure that we had an appropriate lampshade and fittings. Then I left Meg alone with the standard lamp whilst I did a roam around looking to see if anything would serve as a piano stool. I did need something that was almost exactly 20″-21″ in height so armed with a tape measure I looked high and low to see if I could find anything suitable. In the event, my search was fruitless so I collected Meg complete with standard lamp and then I went to get it priced up and paid for. At this point, my troubles started. I reached into the pocket of my gilet where I have my debit cards stored in one wallet and my money in an improvised note holder – but both were missing. So I did the rounds of looking at every place in the store that I had been, assuming that whilst I was lifting furniture around, the two money holders must have fallen out somewhere. After a fairly thorough search, I left the standard lamp behind in the office and Meg and I made our way home to pick up my wallets which I thought I must have left at home. But when I got into the house, they were nowhere to be found, so I assumed that I really must have lost them both in my exertions in the furniture store. So Meg and I made a journey back to the ‘New Start‘ warehouse here I explained to the manager what I had lost and then I engaged in a really thorough search of anywhere it was at all possible they could have been. They were nowhere to be found, so thoroughly disconsolate and trying hard not to panic, Meg and I made our way home. Then another frantic search ensued and I was so relieved that I had taken my two money wallets and left them by the side of the computer at home i.e. not in their usual place. By this stage, it was practically 2.00pm amd Meg and I had had no lunch. So we threw together some cheese and biscuits which we consumed voraciously together with a smidgeon of our remaining icecream. Then Meg and I made our back to the furniture store for the third occasion both to inform the staff that I had found my wallets and then to pay for and bring home the standard lamp. On the way home, we got a call from our mobile from our chiropodist whose appointment we had forgotten about in the panic but fortunately for us, she was able to phone again and fit us in later in the afternoon.

Now that I got the lamp home, a certain amount of restoration was called for. The stave (vertical) part of the lamp was a kind of fluted deal or mahogany and seemed to be in reasonable condition. But the base part had some surface wear and I thought I would need to do some restoration on it. After a thorough clean, I then applied some of the ‘scratch cover’ stain that I keep in stock for occasions such as these. As I suspected, I managed to make quite an improvement althpugh imperfections still remain. But once the whole standard lamp was in its preferred position, complete with a rather good shade I was pleased with the overall effect.

The Committee of Privileges is now naming those MP’s (including, amongst others, Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg) who publically criticised the committee likening it to a kangaroo court. The House of Commons is now being asked to approve a report in which
it is emphasised that members ‘should not impugn the integrity of that committee or its members or attempt to lobby or intimidate those members or to encourage others to do so’ but it may take a newly reconstituted Committee of Privileges to work out whether the public critics of the Committee should be subject to any sanctions. All of this, of course, shows that the shadow of Boris Johnson still hangs over the Sunak premiership and he is finding it difficult to shake it off.

Today turned out to be quite a full day, what with one thing or another. We had anticipated that our domestic help would call around today but when I consulted my phone, I see that we had a text switching things to Friday for this week. Ths did not matter to us a great deal as I had a scheduled eye appointment today for my annual check. I am always quite pleased when this worked OK which it did. The ‘puffer’ test showed that the pressures in each eyeball were not excessive which is one of the first signs of glaucoma. Also, my vision had hardly altered at all over the past year and, if anything, my presbyopia is increasing which makes it easier and easier to read things at a distance (like car number plates) but at the cost of being a little more short-sighted. All of this is due to the eyeball changing shape gradually as one ages but it is always reassuring that one’e eyes are OK for the next year. I am pretty sure that next Spring, I have to renew my licence and can therefore tick the ‘eye sight’ box with complete confidence. However, my optician tells me that many people do not answer this question truthfully when they have to fill in the licence renewal form and I think that there are no ‘spot checks’ on this to show people are telling the truth – until they have an accident, of course, in which case the police might do an instant eyesight test. We got back from the opticians with whom we have been with for at least ten years now and then, as it is a Wednesday, watched Prime Minister’s Questions which was the usual ‘yah boo’ style of politics. Once this was over, I started to prepare the elements of lunch so that we could eat just after 1.00pm as I needed a somewhat longer afternoon. This all worked out fine and it meant that I could start to cut the lawns (which is now a regular Wednesday job) just after 2.00pm. The sky was cloudy and a little threatening but I was relieved to get all of this before the weather changed.

After a cup of tea and a bit of a well-earned rest, I needed to put out our bins abd it is the week for both the green one (paper) and the brown one (garden waste), I also have a little arrangement with my next door neighbour that each week I make myself responsible for taking the bins to the end of the road (kerbside) ready for emptying. Tomorrow morning, once emptied, my neighbour pulls them back again for us. We have a line of holly trees along one side of the house and during the hot weather, holly leaves have been dropped in profusion so the path had got quite messy. So I used a combination of a blower and a shovel to dispose of a lot of the excess leaves as the garden waste bin was being emptied tomorrow. As I was taking our bins out, my new neighbour from across the green was also processing his bins and he had been busy putting his garage to rights. He had some cupboard carcases which he wondered that I might make use of but these I did not need. At the same time, there were one or two little things about the house which he wondered I might know. On spotting a big, heavy safe in the garage, my neighbour told me that there was also one in the loft but he did not know the key combination. I wondered whether 0000 or 1234 might be the default so he was going to have a little play. Also outside the house and on a surface near to their garage door, there was a fairly ancient ‘key safe’ receptable which was locked and, of course, we did not know the combination to open it. It did have a telephone number on the case, though, so if the manufacturers are still in existence, they might be able to help. As it happened, it was our neighbour’s birthday earlier in the week and a family member had bought for him a nice bottle of rioja. Our neighbour very kindly made me a present of it which was very gratefully received. The rioja happened to be one of our favourites as well so this doubles the pleasure for us. As both of us bobbled about inside the garage, some gentle rain started to fall so this vindicates the decision for me to get my outdoor jobs done in good time.

An interesting political scandal has blown up this afternoon. A candidate to be the Tory Mayor of London, Daniel Korski, has quit the race after an allegation was made in The Times, earlier on in the week, that she had been very evidently groped whilst trying to give a presentation in Downing Street. The incident was written up in graphic detail and no details were spared by the woman, Daisy Goodwin, making the complaint. But she says that she had tried to file a formal complaint in the Cabinet Office but this had been made difficult. More the the point, the Tories knew of the allegations as part of their vetting process but still allowed the candidature to progress. Needless to say, the Labour Party are saying that this shows exactly what are the values of the current Conservative party and are milking the embarrassment for all it is worth.