We are really into the typical November weather being wet and blustery – but not particularly cold as yet. We are always pleased to see our domestic help whose day it is each Wednesday and I gave her a little present of some homemade soup (carrot and basil) for her to try. We went off to collect our newspaper and then started on a couple of visits that we needed to make. The first of these was to a furniture store which is set up so that individuals wishing to furnish a home can do at a minimal cost. Most of the furniture and household artefacts is donated by individuals who wish to de-clutter their own house but are more than happy to see any unwanted goods go to a good home and not end up in landfill. I particularly wanted to acquire a small occasional table to go into the corner of a room and as soon as Meg and I walked into the cavernous type rooms in which the furniture was stored, we saw something that caught our eye. This was a miniature drop leaf table which was oval in shape but the two sides folded down to create a small rectangular top. The wood was a mahogany or rosewood type of wood and it was in pretty good condition but with some minor scuff marks. What was particularly attractive was a tooled leather insert for the table top so this added to its charm. I needed this table to put a little table lamp upon it so after a little hunt around, we discovered a smallish table lamp but with an attractive ‘autumn leaves’ lampshade. I put the lamp on the little drop leaf table to see how they looked together and was then delighted to purchase the two of them together for £20. Then we went on the road to collect a purchase for the George store internal to Asda where I had ordered and paid for a little item on line and could pick it up at out local Asda store. As soon as I got the little dtop leaf table home, I could gave it a really good wipe down with a clean sponge and some warm soapy water and was pleasantly surprised by how restored it looked. I do have a little bottle of one of those special ‘scratch remover’ types of fluid which I have very successfully used in the past to renovate furniture and remove minor scuffs and the like. I then hunted around in my box of old light bulbs and discovered that I actually already had in stock a 60 watt mushrrom shaped bulb which Marks and Spencer had sold some years before calling it a ‘peach’ light. I wanted these items for a particular place in the corner of the room where I have created a little music and relaxation centre for the benefit of both Meg and myself when the occasion arises. The overall effect of the renovated little table with an interesting design of table lamp upon it, complete with its ‘soft light’ bulb, have created an effect far in excess of what i could possibly hope for when I woke up this morning. So I now have a little occasional piece which absolutely fulfills the function I had intended for it which was to create some warm and welcomingly looking relaxation space. The purchase from Asda was an occasional lamp with a small wooden base and a linen look shade of which I actually have another to illuminate a spare corner and this has now been pressed into service to illuminate the CDs which now have pride of place in an adjoining bookcase. So I have now managed to achieve what I wanted at minimal expense and hardly any ‘running around’. There was also a bonus to this in the mid afternoon. My son was just leaving the house and I mentioned to him that the CD component of the miniature hifi systm I had inherited from him seemed to be on its last legs as whether it started to play a CD disk or not was decidedly ‘iffy’. With a thumb he wiped clean the plastic lens cover to the laser unit with the player. This seemed to work short term but to make sure, I popped into the garage and located an absolutely brand new, and therefore clean, paintbrush which I use to give the lens cover a good clean. This has evidently been effective because I had a Renato Scotti (Italian soprano) disk in which the first track would not play but it would from the second track onwards. After my cleaning efforts, it now worked first time so that was another bonus to the afternoon.

This afternoon, Meg and I had a regular i.e. timetabled, telephone appointment with one of the doctors from our practice. We spent a lot of time discussing some of Meg’s medication which seems to be unavailable so he is going to try to expedite this or prescribe another. His advice was all a bit general but I was pleased that he seemed as concerned about my health as well as that of Meg as it is important that I am kept going to keep ‘the whole show on the road’.

November was heralded last night by some exceptionally strong winds and heavy rain and much of this persisted throughout the day. Having picked up our newspaper, we battled our way through the rain in the Waitrose carpark and even had to resort to an umbrella to ensure that we were not absolutely soaked on our way into the cafe. There, we met up with seasoned World Traveller and one of our regular pre-pandemic regulars and we enjoyed our weekly chat. We chatted about how our friend quite regularly played bowls and she was telling me about a recent match with a team from Solihull which the Bromsgove team expected to lose but actually won, much to the disgust of their opponents who responded by handing out a heap of sarcastic comments. They also say that croquet can be a vicious game with many undercurrents but I have never played the game so all of this is news to me. Finally, we made our way home and then I prepared for my weekly Pilates class which involved battling with the elements again. It was not too bad walking down to my class but the heavans seemed to open when the class was over so it was a pretty unpleasant walk home. The afternoon turned out not to be a restful one because as soon as lunch was completed and the dishes washed up and put away then our hairdresser came along, quite promptly, and Meg was due to have a perm which actually takes up a lot of the afternoon. We commiserated with our hairdresser whose father had died yesterday afternoon. Hw was a ripe old 96 year old and his death was anticipated but it is always a bit of a shock when the event actually occurs.

There is some news emerging this evening which suggests that Boris Johnson is courting several ‘speakers circuits’ which, if he is engaged and carries on with a variety of speeches for several years, could generate him an income of millions of pounds. I suspect that as he a supreme narcissist, Boris Johnson would not welcome a re-entry into the British political scene if it were not possible for him to be top dog anymore. Given the likely defeat of the Conservatives in the next election in two years time and then a possible ten years in opposition, I do not see Boris Johnson as being at all attracted to this type of political role so it would not surprise me if he were to walk away from British politics. Meanwhile, in the domestic British scene, a lot of attention is bing directed towards the feisty performance of Suella Braverman in the House of Commons yesterday. She actually gave vent to an infamous phrase the effect that the public needs to know which party is serious about ‘stopping the invasion’ of migrants on the southern coast of the UK. The use of the word ‘invasion’ has generated howls of protest but there is a massive political divide at work here. Members of the ERG (members of the European Research Group) who crowded in to the Commons yesterday to give support to the Home Secretary were ecstatic about the use of the use of the phrase whereas the counter-reaction was that this was deliberately inflammatory language designed to appeal to certain sections of the electorate. Even Braverman’s own deputy, the immigration minister Robert Jenrick has argued that he would not use language like this which has the effect of demonising some very distressed migrants.

The population as a whole are being ‘softened up’for some very wide ranging tax increases in the forthcoming budget in just over two weeks time. The Treasury has let if be known that they have ‘agreed on the principle that those with the broadest shoulder should be asked to bear the greatest burden’ and this effectively stamps out Liz Truss’s trickle-down economics. A further warning is being given that ‘given the enormity of the challenge, it is inevitable that everybody would need to contribute more in tax in the years ahead’ So it is pretty evident that a fairly hostile reaction is going to be expected from the nation’s elite but they have had it pretty good during the last twelve years of a conservative governnment and can probably stand the pain. One way or another, the country has got to find some £40-£50 billion and evidently this has got to come from somewhere if it cannot be borrowed. Although the public sector has already been cut to the bone, there is chatter of still more public sector cuts, probably to be achieved by only offering pay rises of 2% (when the inflation rate is 10%, so an effective 8% cut in pay).

Attention next week will switch to the American mid-term elections in a society which is bitterly divided. It is possible that the Republicans will be able to take control of both the House of Representatives and also the Senate which will make any Democratic legislation almost impossible to achieve in the next two years. The Republicans, many of whom believe that Trump was defrauded of the last Presidential election, are also seizing control of the electoral machine in various states which means that the Reublican party will control all aspects of the eletoral processes and even deny their own State legislators any oversight in the case of either fraud, malfeasance or voter suppression (which is quite likely in Republican controlled areas)

After a dullish start, we thought today was going to turn out to be quite a mild day. We popped into our local, friendly newsagent and I opined to the newsagent’s wife that I really didn’t like the month of November and although tomorrow is the first of the month, in my mind November is always the month to be lived through rather than enjoyed. But she informed me that it was her husband’s birthday towards the end of the month so that was something to which she could look forward. When the couple were getting me my newspaper, and thinking of our previous conversation, I remarked ‘Towards the end, then’ – but the newsagent thought I was referring to his life as a whole and remarked that he intended to live for a few more years yet! We all had a giggle at this misunderstading and then we progressed on to Waitrose where I needed to pick up a few things. I noticed that in the self-service coffee machine area, they had a notice informing customers that the ‘free to Waitrose customers’ was due to resume at the end of the week. I expressed my pleasure to one of the long standing staff members and they told me that although it involved more work for the staff keeping the machines topped up and maintained, they knew that it did pull the customers in. In the past, some customers had abused this system just popping in for a ‘free coffee’ so when the service resumes, one is going to have to swipe one’s Waitrose card to legitimise the free drink. Obviously, this was good news for us and the pandemic had evidently caused the demise of the service a year or so back but it is always good to see things resume. We had our normal comestibles and drink of coffee in the park and admired the autumnal colours, which is always a source of delight. On the way back home, we called by the house of our Irish friends on the main Kidderminster road as we had not seen them for a week or so. They had been away on an ‘instant’ holiday on a pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi – a trip in which Meg and I intended to participate before the pandemic and the travel restrictions put paid to our plans. But our friends told us that we had been saved from ourselves as the trip had proved quite arduous for some of the elderly and disabled members of the pilgrimage. Apparently, there was a lot of walking involved and in Assisi, in particular, up some quite steep hills which was too much for some. So Meg and I were relieved that this was a potential disaster avoided and, for once, home might be the better place to be.

We had our lunch at midday,finishing off the beef which we started yesterday. To make a change from the almost daily baked potato, I prepared some carrots and the portion for Meg I glazed in some honey just at the end of the cooking process so she was highly appreciative of this. This afternoon, I finished off the little projectI had set for myself which was to catalogue and document the CDs that I have relocated into our little ‘music room’. Last night, Meg had gone to bed early so whilst I was on my own, I took the opportunity to arrange all the 50 CD’s in alphabetic order and to write the composer and their composition into a little booklet I was saving for the purpose. Then I typed up this information into a HTML table I had composed on the computer in order to create a type-written version. This all worked out fine and I did literally a ‘cut-and-paste’ job from my printout into my little booklet which is now residing, ready for reference, on top of the CD’s. In order to make sure that the glue had done its work, I took the whole booklet and put into under one of the legs of our (heavy) kitchen table for half an hour to make the pages were well and truly stuck.

This afternoon, Suella Braverman is having to appear in the House of Commons to asnwer questions about the deteriorating situation at Manston processing centre in Kent, described by the chief inspector of prisons as ‘dangerous’ and inhumane. It appears that Braverman has been ignoring the advice of officials and may well have acting illegally by detaining asylum seekers more than the 24 hours specified by the legislation, all of this in order not to move the asylum seekers onward to hotels which is a policy she privately deplores. At the same time, if the Speaker of the House of Commons allows this, Braverman may now have to answer questions about the reasons for her resignation. She has now admitted to six further occasions of transgressions and has issued a long letter to MPs and the media to explain her past activities. All we can say at this stage is that the storm clouds are rapidly gathering over the head of the Home Secretary and critical, of course, is the reaction of the Tory backbenches where there is already some unease.

Today was the day when the clocks go back one hour, so a certain amount of clock adjustment is required around the house. Some appliances such as our computers and the DAB radios fortunately adjust themselves but some do not so I have to trail around the living rooms to get our clocks adjusted. This went off without a hitch, after which I walked on down into Bromsgrove to the newspaper shop in order to pick up my copy of the Sunday Times. This having been done, Meg and I breakfast in front of the Laura Kuennsberg show where the Suella Braverman episode received a certain amount of attention but the interrogation could have been more intensive- after all, bringing back a Home Secretary who confessed to a breach of security after six days (when they themselves are in charge of the security services)is quite something, after all.

Yesterday, I had a bit of a brainwave and decided to undertake a bit of a reconfiguration. I took the mini hifi stero system which used to inhabit some space on a kitchen table and relocate it, and some of the attendant CD’s, into a quiet corner of one of our downstairs living rooms. This has made a pleasant area to relax if one wanted to just play CDs and/ or listen to ClassicFM in a different living space to the television. I have ensured that I have the CDs to hand but may well get them into an alphabetical order and record them in a little book. When I have some spare time, I will get the CDs catalogued so that we can lay our hands on what we may wish to listen to with the minimum of searching. I cooked and ate the Sunday lunch on my own as Meg was not feeling particularly well and took to her bed in the middle of the day. After some hours of rest she got up and I got her to try out my newly created music corner so that she could have some relaxation that did not involve manipulating the Sunday newspapers or watching the television.

The attack on the house of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives in the US Congress continues to horrify. The assailant is reported to have cried out ‘Where is Nancy?’ after breaking into the Pelosi residence and subsequently fracturing the skull of her husband with a hammer. This ‘shout’ is rather redolent of what the mob said when the Capital Building was stormed and it was intent on locating both Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, the then Vice President. Did they intend to kill them, if they had been caught, I wonder? I can predict that the Democrats will argue that this is what happens when political consensus breaks down and there is no middle ground in American politics any more. I would predict that the Republicans will argue that the intruder was mentally deranged and ‘nothing to do with them’. We will see in the days ahead, which account has most salience or ‘traction’ as the modern political analysts would say.

In the late afternoon, a middle aged couple knocked on our door and were seeking some information about our immediate environment as they were thinking about buying the bungalow across the communal green area. This was actually quite useful as I could give them first hand information about how the BioDisk system worked and how it is maintained by the Resident’s Association. They seemd quite impressed by what they had seen but they still had another property to view so how close they are to coming to a positive decision, I cannot really say. I gave the couple one of my business cards and indicated that I would be happy to answer any further queries that might have if they wanted to email me. In a case like this, I suspect the agents are not particularly helpful to would-be purchasers so I was happy to give them whatever information they needed in order to come to an informed decision. Of course, people look at properties in different ways but I think that one thing that impressed them was the amount of space afforded by the loft which is practically the same as the footprint of the entire house.

The political sphere today is full of gossip. In the Suella Braverman case, a lot depends on how quickly she reported the breach of the regulations as she tries to give the impression that this was fairly rapid. But an email has come to light in which some two hours after the original transgression she had asked the unintended recipient of the message to ‘ignore and then delete’ it. Whether the breach was self-reported or whether it was enjoined upn her by the Cabinet Secretary,amongst others, is a contended question. Meanwhile, in the Sunday Times, there are some jaw-dropping accounts of the behaviour of Liz Truss when she was Foreign Secretary. By all accounts, she made it her absolute and overriding priority to make a photo opportunity in which she figured prominently, even if, for example, this meant leaving the leader of New Zealand waiting to greet her on the airport’s tarmac whilst Liz Truss was scurrying around trying to get her photoshot taken.

Today was dull and overcast but not particularly cold. We were a little delayed this morning because I had some problems updating the payment system on a photos website which acts as a host to our 50th wedding anniversary photographs and videos. Fortunately, I found a solution to this as well as eventually locating the specialised and personalised name that I have acquired in order to access the website and which I had temporarily forgotten. Whilst I was at it, I thought I would have a dig around my system and my websites to discover some of my original wedding photos and music. Some five years ago now, I retrieved our book of wedding photos (all in black and white in 1967) and successfully digitised them all. But I had a massive stroke of luck because out of the photo album fell a little page of lined notepaper which was the organists original notes of the music that was played. We had remembered some of these pieces but not all. But, armed with the list of music, I could then go onto the web and find MP3 tracks of music that could have well been the original so this, at the time, was a very successful venture. However, by putting the music tracks on one website and the wedding photos on a rolling display on another website, it is possible to see the original wedding photos with the ‘original’ music playing in the background. This is evidently not the same as a video of the original but is a very good substitute which means that if anyone is sufficiently interested, they can see the original photos of which there are only 13 in number but accompanied by the mp3 ‘soundtrack’ with some program notes on each of the six pieces of music that we had chosen and some background to each one. I do not make a habit of looking at these websites very often but it does mean that I tend to forget the URL’s so it is rather good to refresh my memory once in a while. To sort of test this out, I got J S Bach’s ‘Wachet Auf‘ to play along whilst I was writing this blog but I still have to remember how to move from track to track.

Once we had eventually got ourselves going, as it were, we picked up our newspaper and made it to the park. We didn’t bump into of our regulars in the park but this was not a great surprise to us so after our elevenses we got home and made a pasta type meal out of bits and peces that we had in the fridge. Saturday afternoons are always a little quiet because we start to go to church at 5.30 and then have a bit of supper when we return at about 7.00pm before we settle down to either watch an opera or another video that takes our fancy. Tonight is the night when the clocks go back and this means that in the afternoons and the evenings it will be really dark, to which I do not look forward. At this time of year,though, I cannot wait until December 21st has come and gone as it is means it will then be getting lighter at 1-2 minutes a day. We have quite a few social engagements throughout the month of November to help the autumn pass a little more quickly. Thinking ahead to Christmas, though, I have managed to secure a booking at our favourite hotel in Harrogate not in the week before Christmas which would be horrific but in the week before that. We have decided to extend our stay from our normal three days to four so we may be able to see more family members this time around. In fact, given the success of the ‘family tea’ which we had for my sister’s 80th birthday, we could do worse but repeat this little event but I will consult a bit further on this.

Earlier in the day, I had been in email correspondence with one of my Hampshire friends who had accepted my offer to stay overnight with us in late November – he is breaking his journey in order to pay to visit to Leek in Staffordshire to research some family history. Because a distant cousin of ours who lives in Australia and has a lot of reseearch on my father’s side of the family, we will probably have quite a lot to share with each other. My mother’s side of the family tree is somewht murky but I can disclose the interesting but tangled story of my mother’s side of the family tree when my friend come to visit.

The Chancellors Autumn Statement has now been upgraded to a ‘full budget’ and will take place on November 17th. It will be a model of financial rectitude, not to say austerity. One way or another, the Chancellor is going to have to find at least £40bn to fill the black hole and another £10bn to reassure the markets. Rumours at this stage is that nothing – Defence, NHS, pensions – will be spared so we shall shortly experience Austerity Mark II (Mark I being the Osborne version some Chancellors ago)

Today started as a rainy and blustery day where a storm was evidently working its way up the country. Meg and I had made a tentative arrangement to meet with our University of Birmingham friend in the park today but after a quick text and telephone call, we decided to meet in a cafe aong the Bromsgrove High Street to which we often repair when the weather turns foul. So we met in the cafe and had a good old natter about some of the students we had known in our teaching careers. I told our friend the story how one of my students, a very bright nurse who worked in the Infection Control/Quality Control unit at Leicester General Hospital, offered me some consultancy which was to lay the groundwork for what was to become my PhD. At the time, John Major had just taken over from Margaret Thatcher and he was actively searching for his one ‘big idea’ which would delineate his premiership from that of Margaret Thatcher. Major’s idea was ‘the Citizen’s Charter’ and its sibling ‘The Patient’s Charter’ (the position of the possessive apostrophe is significant but we will not go into that just now) A major source of discontent was the amount of time that patiemts had to wait in outpatient clinics before their appointment started and so this was one area in which quality improvement might be implemented. I devised a short but sharply focused questionnire which was administered to every single patient in all specialities and my job was to analyse the data statistically and to provide a series of reports by consultant so that hospital managers could implement some quality improvement strategies. This led to a series of papers and when De Montfort University changed its PhD regulations allowing a member of staff to write a PhD around a series of published papers, this was an opening that I could not afford to ignore. So the papers were written, presented to international conferences, a PhD was written around them and this led eventually to a new job at the University of Winchester. The point of all of this is that the initial opportunity was opened up for me by one of my students and to her, I shall be eternally grateful.

After we had our coffee, I took the opportunity to get some printer paper from the stationers on the High Street and also to get some cleaning products from one of the cut price stores. The weather had turned absolutely glorious by this stage in the late morning and as it turned out, we could well have enjoyed a turn in the park. But we are always happy to chat with our friends. Then it was a case of getting home and cooking our usual Friday meal of sea bass served on a bed of lettuce which is both quick and nutritious. In the afternoon, I went through a series of newspapers most of which seemed important at the time (all the events surrounding the death and subsequent funeral of the Queen) but could now safely be junked. However, I did find one or two health-related articles at the bottom of the pile which are certainly worth a good re-reading, filing away and then to be consulted regularly. One of these related to a recently published book in which the authors (who had worked in Worcestershire as it happens) were advocating a way in which one’s ‘hunger hormones’ could be tamed that would eventually help to tackle related problems of obesity, diabetes and related health conditions. From the account and four page excerpt given in ‘The Times’, this sounds a very interesting and no doubt evidence-led approach so I have orderd my copy of the author’s book which should be arriving tomorrow and which I shall study with some care and perhaps attempt to implement.

Halfway through the afternoon, I read my emails and am delighted that one of my Hampshire colleagues has accepted my invitation to stay overnight with us on a night in late November whilst he on his way northwards to engage in a little research into family history. With the pandemic, we have not seen each other for years and have a lot to catch up so we are looking forward very much to his visit. A week later, Meg and I will hopefully to be attending an ‘Old Fogies’ lunch time get- together which will be the first for several years after an pandemic-induced abstinence. This meeting, too, has to be re-arranged twice as every time we settle on a date on a Wednesday, a rail strike seems to be announced for the same day so that efforts to find a communal date for us together has been frustrated. One video clip which is emerged this afternoon is the new Prime Minister, visiting a South London hospital in which one of the patients berates him and tells him that he should pay the nurses more and then he replies that the government is trying to achieve this is then told ‘Then you must try harder’ I suspect this clip will ‘go viral’ and I would be surprised if it did not find its way into the major news broadcasts this evening.

Thursday is my shopping day so I got up early, got some cash out of the ATM and then stayed in the car whilst it was raining heavily until it was time for the supermarket to open at 8.00am. Then it was the normal whiz around and I collected the newspaper on the way home and finally made it home just after 9.00pm. After we had breakfasted and unpacked the shopping, the weather started to brighten somewhat so we made up our coffee and elevenses snacks and set off for the park a little later than normal. As today was quite a wet day, we had not expected to bump many of our regulars and indeed we did not but nonetheless we appreciated the fresh air, the walk in the park, the changing autumn colours and so on. I suspect that the full glory of the autumn colours may well come in a week or so after we have had some frosts. Yesterday afternoon, our University of Birmingham friend called round with an offer of some cake which may well have been some birthday cake – we made an arrangement to meet in the park tomorrow, weather permitting, but if the weather is absolutely terrible we do have a favourite coffee bar (not necessarily Waitrose) to which we can repair as we have done on Fridays in the past.

The Suella Braverman saga rumbles on, as you might expect. In Parliament, requests are being made to the Speaker that Suella Braverman attends the Commons to answer questions about inconsistencies in the accounts that have been given of the security breach. In particular, was there was one breach or multiple breaches? Were the papers that were shared totally to do with immigration or did some of them involve security matters? Did the Home Secretary volunteer the breach (as she indicated in her resignation letter) or was she hauled before a group which included the Cabinet Secretary as well as the Chairman of the Conservative Party? There is a little twist in the story this afternoon as David Blunkett, a one-time Labour Home Secretary, is of the view that members of the security and intelligence services may feel disinclined to share secrets with their nominal ‘boss’ if they fear that these secrets may leak. This worry is shared by some Conservative MPs as well and the smattering of Tories concerned about Braverman means this is is not simply just confined to the opposition parties. The point is being made that some of our allies and information sources may be reluctant to share information with us if the Home Secretary has a poor reputation for probity. Another question that I have asked myself is this. Surely at the time of her appointment some senior security staff have given her a briefing (read ‘tutorial’) on how to conduct communications when you yourself are in charge of Britain’s intelligence and security communities. Was this initial briefing, refused or waved aside? Assuming that Braverman was properly briefed upon taking up her post, then has she either forgotten it or has she chosen to ignore it? The Bravermans and the Patels of this Conservative party have in the past shown a scant regard for the niceties of ministerial behaviour and they may both have been promoted beyond their competence. In addition, reports have emerged (on the BBC website) suggesting that, as attorney general, she was investigated over the leak of a story involving MI5. So it looks as though she may have ‘form’ in this respect. But the ultimate protective factor is that they belong to the extreme right of the Conservative Party and therefore Sunak may wish to hang on to Braverman in order to appease the right of the party.

This afternoon, I decided to repeat my recent soup making activities and so I have made some carrot and basil soup. I was a little short of coconut milk but have substituted some soya milk in it place. I have just had the briefest of tastes of this and am moderately pleased with it but despite starting off with some fried onions, as most recipes suggest, I feel that it is a little on the thin side. So having transferred it from the soup maker into a saucepan, I think I am going to try a little powdered potato as a thickening agent and see how much of a difference this makes. When I went shopping this morning, I bought some celery as well as a swede so in the days ahead I know I can prepare a traditional ‘winter root vegetables’ soup which I have tried often in the past and where I have always achieved good results. If I see any celeriac on the supermarket shelves, then this has a wonderful reputation as a warming winter soup. Also, of course, there must be masses of pumpkins around ready for the autumnal festivities so this is something else with which to experiment in the days ahead. If I want to be more adventurous, there is also a pumpkin and ginger soup for which Jamie Oliver has a recipe which I have seen on the web.

We are still enjoying a spell of weather which is about 2-3 degrees warmer than the average for this time of year as a plume of warm air from the Sahara is being swept northwards. I suspect this is going to last for a day or so at the most, so it is a case of enjoying the mild weather whilst we can. Today is the day when our domestic help calls around and we always help each other with little gifts of food if we have an excess whilst cooking. Today, we have received a little present of some brioche which we are going to enjoy with some suitable accompaniments for our supper this evening when we come to prepare it. Meg and I made our usual trip to pick up our newspaper and then made for our usual bench in the park. There we communed with a variety of dog walkers as is our wont and then returned home to prepare a simple lunch of fishcakes.

This afternoon I busied myself with one of the more mundane but necessary tasks which is to get the labels off a collection of 200cl wine bottles with which our domestic help keeps me well supplied. These bottles are the ideal size for containing my damson gin when it comes to bottled in about mid to late December (in time for Christmas) This apparently simple job has its complexities. The neck of the bottle often has a little metal ring that needs to be cut off. As for the main labels, they do not just float off but have to be tackled with tough thumb nails and a variety of other implements. There are a variety of glues used and even the labels themselves sometimes separate into a top plasticised layer and a lower paper layer to which the glue has adhered. But over the years, I have learnt how to get a supply of really clean bottles that are ready for bottling when the time comes.

Now that one conservative prime minister has had to resign after a few disastrous weeks, there are a variety of articles to put the recent economic debacle into context. One that I have read helps to contextualise what is been happening : ‘The Brexit cult that blew up Britain’ and there are several others explaining how Trussonomics (Liz Truss version of economic theory) has failed so spectacularly (as, indeed, Rishi Sunak constantly predicted in the Tory leader election hustings but only a minority of conservative members believed him). The article explains how in the course of a decade a group of little-known politicians, fringe think tanks and outspoken media figures helped to drag the Tory Party to a Brexit-loving, free-market embracing,low-tax juggernaut. In this analysis, Brexit itself was only a stage in a much wider libertarian vision and the Brexit referendum would have been a defining moment. But the Brexit success only emboldened the libertarian right and then Boris Johnson had delivered Brexit into their laps, they were not unhappy to ditch Johnson and to enthusiastically to endorse Liz Truss who had espoused liberterian ideas for a long time. As Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, London has observed ‘They felt their moment at come at last.. This would prove that Brexit had not been a ghastly mistake but a fantastic opportunity. But, of course, as it was always based on fantasy, it was bound to collide with reality’ Now that this experiment has been shown to comprehensively fail, some of the extreme libertarian right are just saying, like a millenial cult, they feel that their theories have not been disproved but just badly implemented by an incompetent political operator (Liz Truss). Like other cults when asked to explain why the ‘spaceship’ did not arrive, they explained that they had just got the timing wrong and the ‘spaceship’ would arrive later.

Now that we have a Rishi Sunak cabinet in place, I was a little puzzled when Suella Braverman, the disgraced Home Secretary who was forced to resign by using her own personal phone to transmit government documents (strictly against all of the IT protocols for how government communications should be handled). However, we now have the full story. The Rishi Sunak government, rather than being a model of integrity, has shown itself to be the beneficiary of a squalid back-door deal in which Braverman promised to support Sunak and to bring votes with her in exchange for being reinstated as Home Secretary. The cabinet secretary, Simon Case, as well as Alistair Graham, former chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said there were questions over whether her appointment was appropriate, especially because the breach was not examined by an ethics adviser. I have a feeling that this one is going to run and run – but already there is an air of sleaze hanging over the new government. As he was appointed the UK’s 57th prime minister behind closed doors by 200 or so Conservative MPs, this will invariably raise questions about his democratic mandate – for this reason, Sunak is sticking very closely to the 2019 electoral mandate.

Today is the day when Rishi Sunak has been formally appointed as the Prime Minister and so the rest of the day is going to be devoted to the comings and goings in Downing Street when new Cabinet positions are offered and then accepted or rejected. According to the weather forecasts, today was going to be a beautiful fine autumn day and so it proved. Although Tuesdays are my usual Pilates day, this week it is half term so we knew that there were no Pilates classes scheduled for today. So I offered Meg the opportunity to go out somewhere for the day as the weather was so fine. We went down to Waitrose and had our normal jolly conversations with three of the (by now) Tuesday crowd. One of the older ladies that I know quite well, I asked if she would like to live in a society where she could have three or four husbands. After a moment’s reflection, she replied that would not be a first preference because ‘I could not handle two husbands at once!’ I thought this was an interesting reply. In the past few days, I have been sent a WhatsApp picture of Larry, the Downing Street cat, who is technically a ‘Brown and White Tabby’. He looks as though as though he could be the father of Miggles, our ‘adopted’ cat who visits us regularly. In the WhatsApp photo, Larry is shown sitting outside the door of No. 10 and the following words are attributed to him : ‘I am getting another one today – it is another rescue. I take them in for a few months until I can find them a permanent home. I hope this one will be OK but the last one was a nightmare!’ When the reporters are queuing up outside 10 Downing Street waiting for an important announcement or arrival of a visiting head of state, the cat is often the subject of much attention. Larry’s most recent appearance was with Liz Truss when she was greeting the Danish prime minister on the steps of No. 10. As she bent down to stroke Larry, he shrugged off her approaches and walked briskly away which is probably how the rest of the population felt. The assembled reporters and photographers thought this was probably an omen for the future – and events were to prove them right. Larry outlasted prime ministers David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and, as of Thursday, the six-week tenure of Liz Truss.’The King has asked me to become Prime Minister because this nonsense has gone on long enough’ Larry the Cat wrote in a now viral tweet from an unofficial account hours before Truss announced her resignation.

After our jollities in Waitrose, we set off to visit Alcester, a pretty little Georgian town which we particularly like and is only about 15 miles distant. It is characterised by a range of superb charity shops and, true to form, we bought a new skirt for Meg and a new shirt for myself. Alcester also contains one of those wonderful little hardware shops that seems to stock everything you could possible think of and I bought the three bottles that they had in stock of a ‘scratch’ cover. These were the light, medium and dark varieties so with a little judicous mixing, you could get an almost exact shade for whatever you wanted to treat. I have found this product particulatly useful in the past for restorative work on dark furniture not confined to scratches but any little blemish. We had already booked a meal in one of the local hotels which does a most magnificent ‘pensioner’s lunch’ and we both had a root vegetables lasagne complete with a generous side serving of salad. This is always a most satisfying and enjoyable meal, after which we were happy to journey home.

This afternoon, we have passively watched the comings and goings on Downing Street which always makes the political journalists drool with excitement over who is in/out or up/down. As expected, Rishi Sunak has made a very conscious effort to draw a cabinet from all sections of the party and not just reward his natural and loyal supporters which was the mistake made by both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss before him. So far, the Cabinet seems to have been filled with people of some talent. Beth Rigby, the Sky News chief political correspondent did repeat the oft-repeated comment that Boris Johnson filled his cabinet with ministers best described as ‘B formers’ whereas the Liz Truss cabinet was said to be composed of ‘C formers’ The only appointment that I think is a great political mistake is to offer the recently resigned Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, the post of Home Secretary again. Suella Braverman is not known for the quality of her intellect and is a ‘rabid’ right winger who has confided that her secret dream is to see a plane load of asylum seeker and refugees transported to Rwanda and never seen again. As a historical footnote, we used to transport convicts to the then colonies from approx. 1700 until 1850 but one of the definitions of a true Conservative is that they are always ‘looking backwards into the future’.

Today was going to be the crunch day for the election of a new party leader for the Conservative party but more of that later. It did not look as though there were any imminent showers forecast for the morning so after breakfast, we set off to collect our newspapers. Unfortunately, there was a sign on the newsagent’s window to indicate that he was closed for the moment to deal with a crisis of some sort so Meg and I went to the park and had our elevenses, admiring the beautiful autumn colours as we went. We always have a cloth buried deep within the rucksack to wipe the park bench clear of any rain water, after which we thought we would circulate back to the newsagent to see if he had opened by then. As it happened, it was but he was still unsupplied with newspapers as his distributor has once again let him down. It appears that a crucial employee has gone sick and that leaves all of the regular clients of local newsagents in the lurch. So we popped around to Waitrose where we knew that we could pick up our copy of The Times and took the opportunity to buy some extras. We got back home just after the Politics programme had started on BBC2 because it was interesting to see what Penny Mordaunt was going to do, now that Boris Johnson has withdrawn from the race. We knew that an announcement was to be made by the Chairman of the 1922 Committee at 2.00pm and at one minute before the appointed hour, it seemed that Penny Mordaunt had withdrawn, having failed to make the minimum of 100 nominations. What was interesting about all of this was that one of her most loyal supporters on the Politics programme was adamant that Penny Mordaunt had definitely reached the required minimum of 100 so she was obviously either lying to us or lying to herself. Evidently, her credibility is now in tatters but that is what happens when you are over-enthusiastic in your support.

After lunch, the news media was dominated by the news of the ‘election’ of Rishi Sunak as his was the only valid nomination received by the 2.00pm deadline. Although Boris Johnson and even the Mordaunt camp claimed that they had met the 100 threshhold, one of the Channel 4 reporters revealed that the number of pledges exceeded the number of MPs by about 30. In other words, the figures had been inflated by the various camps and given that politicians of all stripes are constantly manipulating figures to tell favourable stories (and dare I say Tory politicians more than most) it was hardly a surprise that the figures did not add up. But now we have the first Hindu PM elected and also the youngest for two centuries which was quite a surprise. All the formalities will occur tomorrow when Liz Truss formally attends the Palace to tender her resignation to the King, shortly followed by Rishi Sunak who will be asked to form the next administration. All of the talk at the moment is one of ‘unity’ and bringing the Tory party together but I dare say that this will least for about a week before the factionalism and infighting will start again. Rishi Sunak will avoid the self-evident error of not appointing people of talent across the party (both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss only appointed people they thought were ‘one of theirs’ and this was particularly evident in the appointments made by Liz Truss) Nonetheless, there is a deep well of hatred not to say resentment amongst erstwhile Boris Johnson supporters who feel that Rishi Sunak was the person who dealt Johnson the fatal blow by resigning from the Johnson cabinet when he did.

This afternoon, I received a telephone call from my friend in South Oxfordshire and we are going to arrange a ‘dinner date’ in his house, probably in about a month’s time. This we will look forward to but like other things we have to agree mutually convenient dates. In this morning’s emails, I was pleasantly surprised to hear from one of my Hampshire colleagues who is going to attend a family event in Liverpool in late November. We are in the proceess of arranging a date in Novenber when we might meet and my friend hasn’t quite decided whether to make the journey by car or by train. If he decides to travel by train, then I can arrange to meet him at Birmingham International which is quite an easy journey for me to make by car (M42 permitting). There is also the possibility that he might have the time available to make an overnight stop with us as well. In the second week of November, we are due to have an ‘Old Fogies‘ lunch in Winchester so I am pleased that the social diary is filling up quite nicely for November. November is one of those months without the charms of October on the one hand yet Christmas is still some way off in December so it just a month to be lived through. Nonetheless, it looks as though Meg and I will have quite a few social engagements to which we can look forward.