Yesterday being Sunday, we woke up just a tad early and were delighted that we both seem to have had a fairly restful night. I was pleased to say that I had enough time to have a shower and put the various preparations in place before the couple of carers called around at 8.00pm. Whilst Meg was watching the Politics programmes, I was preparing breakfast and so did not catch up with as much of the comment as I would have liked but then we got an extremely welcome phone call from our University of Birmingham friend to meet up for a coffee. We knew that the weather forecast was not very propitious but nonetheless took a chance on the weather and made our way in the spitting rain. I had taken with me, as I promised, some of the Civil Service Commission examination papers dating from about 1963 which I had taken and which eventually secured me a position in the Central of Information in London. Our friend was going to take these home and peruse them at his leisure and then try to infer whether standards had risen or fallen in the sixty years since they were first set before the intending applicants. On the way back home, though, the skies opened and Meg and I got absolutely drenched, practically to the skin. Fortunately the carers were there waiting for us upon our return and they themselves were a few minutes early so whilst they stripped Meg off and put her in dry clothing, I did the same for myself and we both hoped that exposure to a bit of a rain would not subject us to any deleterious consequences.

Yesterday afternoon, as we had our pre-planned, our Irish friends called around with a fully cooked meal for our enjoyment. We would normally entertain each other in our respective houses but now it is too difficult for Meg’s wheelchair to get over the threshhold of their front door so we decided that it would better if our friends came round to us and they very kindly suggested they would they us to a cooked meal. This worked out extremely well and we dined on a newly roasted chicken, mashed potato and broccoli. I had already bought some apple pies so we had this with ice-cream as our dessert. Our friends bought a bottle of Chilean Malbec with them so we enjoyed this as well as helping to finish off some of the Cava which I had left over from our wedding anniversary (but protected by a wine stopper) Then we repaired to our Music Lounge and I explained to our friends some of the various bits of furniture we had acquired since their last visit to our house. This included our latest captain’s chairs, the little two man sofa we acquired some months ago, the story behind the Flemish tapestry we acquired from the Worcestershire Association of Carers and culminating in the beautiful leather sofa which forms a beautifully intimate space where we could all sit and chat. I played them the Joan Baez track which had made such a profound impact on us only yesterday and then we caught up on all sorts of things including health matters relating to all of us, aspects of folk music and our mutual opinion of what we felt about the way in which the present Labour leadership is accepting gifts from wealth donors in which receiving the gifts, even if technically within the rules generates, the most terrible ‘optics’ for the Labour party and the kind of bad publicity which could easily have been avoided if only they had shown a little more temperance and self-restraint. But is this asking too much of the present generation of politicians? Our friend told us that Joan Baez had died soon after her last tour in which Meg and I had actually attended in Central Birmingham and I was dismayed by the news. Buy on consulting Wikipedia and its edit history, I discovered that as of two weeks ago, Joan Baez was still alive and aged 83. I am sure that when she does die, the event is bound to attract at least some attention from today’s media. We enjoyed each other other’s company so much this afternoon and hope to be able to repeat it more often. Our friends commented how the new hair style that our regular hairdresser had given Meg suits her down to the ground and makes her look years younger – if only!

I suppose that I ought to feel fairly happy that Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump by about 3% in the opinion polls. But there is a massive snag about this lead because it could be that Harris is piling up more votes in places that will not necessarily swing the election. In the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, a popular epithet was ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – in other words all other issues fall into insignificance compared with how well off people are, or rather feel themselves to be. Trump is trusted more than Harris on the economy, probably because he has sold the idea that he is a ‘successful businessman’ who therefore ought to understand how the economy works. Harris is closing the gap on the economy but there is a lot of convincing to do. Although some of the economic indicators such as inflation are heading in the Democrat’s direction, Americans in the mass do not feel better off. In other words, after years of sharply rising prices (a box of eggs costing two and a half times more than they did five years ago as what was $2 is now $5) So an interesting paradox occurs at this point which is that it is perception of one’s standards of living whatever economists say which becomes the crucial political fact. So the sad fact remains that unless Harris is able to convince voters of her economic credentials, the presidency seems to be heading Trump’s way. But there are some interesting things that sharp followers of the American elections might look out for. Pennsylvania is said to be a key battleground with the parties practically level and Harris might not gain it. But North Carolina which has consistent but small Republican majorities may be heading the Democrats way thanks to the resurgence of the black vote in the rapidly expanding suburbs of that state and so capturing this state could carry the election for Harris. Some analysts are of this view that the race to win North Carolina is the tightest of the whole contest and winning this state might prove to be critical.

Yesterday, Saturday, did not start off particularly well. Meg had been very restless after she had been put to bed the evening beforehand and did not properly get off to sleep until nearly three hours later at about 10.15. She needs a fair amount of supervision when she is in this restless state as she throws off her bedclothes and I have to restore a semblance of order. Consequently, we were somewhat tired this morning and got up an hour later than we normally do and after this restless night, there was a fair amount of attention that Meg needed. The two carers though, were very good and I was relieved to see them as they took over at 8.00am. Today we make one of our bi-weekly trips down to Waitrose where we meet up with the ‘granny gang’ as I call our little gathering but I also take the opportunity to get one or two things from the store when I buy only some of the things that I know the store sells. On one occasion when I saw a male employee checking the stock on the shelves with his hand-held computer and asked him if they still sold ‘Extract of Unicorn Hoof Oil essence” because they used to stock it in their section on exotic goods in a little brown bottle. Half way through searching the database for the product, which he thought he remembered, his brain registered the fact that unicorns do not exist, then neither does ‘Extract of Unicorn Hoof Oil essence’ and so he stopped his search forthwith.

After we had lunched, I consulted yesterday’s TV schedules to see if there was anything good that we might have missed that we could view on catch-up TV. There was an historic ‘Peter, Paul and Mary’ broadcast (mainly 60’s and 70’s folk group) and although this was tolerable, it was not absolutely to Meg’s taste. So whilst on the i-player.I did a search for our favourite folk singer, Joan Baez and found an early 60’s concert that she had played to a British audience. The track of ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ was so poignant it actually brought tears to my eyes. But thinking about a British audience and, no doubt, their dark sense of humour, Jan Baez sang the old folk-singing standby of ‘Airn’t it Grand to be Blooming well dead’ I thought I would run off the lyrics to this and relay it the ‘grandiloquent granny gang’ when next we meet on Tuesday next. The i-player then went on to play a concert by Pete Seeger and this was interesting as there was a radical slant to each of his songs. He explained, between tracks, that folk music was not meant to be played in concert halls but was music ‘that had never gone away’ and so often reflected the tribulations and the concerns of the underclass and underprivileged in American society. Afterwards, we decided to search YouTube for a Joan Baez concert and found one recorded in London in 19655. This was doubly interesting because the audience members looked like Meg and I when we first met in 1965 and there was a preponderance of sweaters, hair parted down the middle like Joan Baez (and Meg herself) and ‘designer clothes’ were a thing of the future. One of the tracks from this is such a powerful statement of liberal values (‘There but for fortune – go you or I’) that I noted its position in the track of the concert and then played it to the two young carers who give Meg her tea time call. I would normally do this but these two young people get on exceptionally well with Meg and myself and are have a very sympathetic nature so I thought they would appreciate the sentiments. Needless to say, they are never heard anything like it with Joan Baez’s amazingly clear diction and emotional import so the two of them sat on our new settee absolutely transfixed as I hope that they would be. After this tea time call, we often to see what YouTube available on our FireStick in the main lounge has to offer – and sometimes we vacillate between comedy such as ‘Yes Minister’ or an orchestral concert of which there are many. But whilst we were in the mood for Jan Baez’s music I did a search for Violetta Parra (an outstanding Chilean folk singer) who performed an exquisite rendition of ‘Gracias a la Vida’ (‘Thank you for life’) after which she committed suicide by firing a pistol into her skull. We also searched for Mercedes Sosa who perhaps has an even finer voice and rendition of ‘Gracias por la Vida’ than either Joan Baez or Violetta Parra. Then we were amazed to find a crossover concert which Sosa and Pavarotti had recorded together and their songs were full, as you might imagine, of Latin passion and emotion. We finished off the day by watching a gala performance in front of invited celebrities of Dame Edna Everage which really was tremendously witty and amusing. The most amusing parts of the Barry Humphries routines were when he played the part of ‘Sir Les Patterson’ the Australian Cultural Attache. By Humphries’ own account, the character of Patterson first appeared in a one-man show that he performed at the St. George leagues club in Sydney in January 1974. Appearing in the guise of the boorish, loud-mouthed and uncultured Patterson, Humphries claimed to be that club’s own entertainments officer as he introduced the next act, Dame Edna Everage. As Humphries recalled, ‘I understood later that many members of the audience thought Les was genuinely a club official, which says a lot for his charm and sincerity’

It looks as though the whole notion of accepting hospitality donations for one’s own clothing is starting to hit home with the PM, Keir Starmer. As the political class are wont to say ‘the optics of this are terrible’ and this is now reluctantly recognised. Sky News reports today that Ministers now acknowledge that the past few days have seen constant distraction, whether about free clothes, gifted football hospitality and how Downing Street itself is operating. Criticism of Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to take £16,000 of clothes from a Labour donor, and donations for his wife’s wardrobe, has been raging in the newspapers. After digging in for days to defend it, the leader’s team bowed to pressure, announcing that neither the prime minister, nor his deputy Angela Rayner or chancellor Rachel Reeves – both also revealed to have taken donations for clothes – will do so in future.

Yesterday, Friday, was a rather gloomy day and when the mornings are so much darker, it is a little bit more difficult to rouse ourselves first thing in the morning. But after the two cheerful carers had called and got Meg up, washed and dressed and then we had some breakfast, I hit the phone to get onto our doctors to book a flu vaccination appointment. I have been receiving text messages from our local surgery regarding vaccinations and when I telephoned them at 9.30 I was amazed to discover that I was No. 1 in the queue which makes a change. I booked both Meg and myself in for both the new RSV vaccine as well as the regular flu jab. For a reason best known to itself, the Government is making the RSV virus available to all of the population aged 75-79 and Meg and I come into this category. I wondered why the 80 plus group were not being offered the vaccination and discovered this. The over-80s are under-represented in medical research and so part of the issue is reluctance of over-80s to volunteer for the trials. Often they are less likely to be eligible to volunteer or the trial may be designed in a way that’s harder for an older person to take part. So there is limited data on the effectiveness of the new RSV virus on the over 80’s but also there is some research evidence that it benefits 75 years olds much more than 60 year olds. This sounds suspiciously like a cost saving exercise and makes one wonder whether the government would not mind excess deaths from whatever cause in the 80+ age groups as this will relieve pressures on the Health Service. Mid morning, we received a visit of the Eucharistic minister from our local parish church who we have not seen for a week or so now. Afterwards, we made our way into town, picked up a copy of our newspaper and then paid a by now traditional visit to ‘The Lemon Tree‘ cafe where we treated ourselves to the Friday bacon sandwich. Then we rather had to rush up the hill, no mean feat, to ensure that we got back in time for the late morning call which we did by the skin of our teeth. Just after we had breakfasted I received a text from EE, our phone provider that my two yearly contract was expiring that day. Eventually, I managed to speak with a human (which is quite rare these days) in order to secure continuity of our contract. As it happens, we have historic contracts for our broadband with BT and for our mobile phone with EE. Now BT has taken over EE so over the phone I was offered a new combined deal which looks on the surface somewhat better than our two combined bills and has Netflix and AppleTV thrown in as part of the deal but I am not sure how this will work with our existing FireStick but we shall see. I must admit that this morning I was more concerned to have absolute continuity of supply and this seems to be the case and I am hopeful that I should be able to go down to the EE shop in town next Tuesday (when I have a ‘sit’ service for Meg) where I may be be able to discuss the upgrade of my iPhone which is now two years old at a fairly minimal cost.

A couple of days ago, I received a communication from the Government to participate in the Family Resources Survey. This entails making ourselves available for an interviewer to call round to the house and to ask us both questions about all kinds of things I would imagine and as a token of appreciation for our efforts, we have been a voucher of £10.00 to cash at the Post Office. I happen to believe that surveys of this type are important for the government to get more comprehensive pictures of how families actually do live so we are happy to participate. I need, though, to make some phone calls to get all of this activated. Upon our return home, we received a really pleasant surprise. Our Irish friends who have just returned from holiday have invited us for a Sunday lunch and we have a lot to catch up between us. As it is difficult for Meg to travel, our friends are going to call round to our house and are going to be bringing a Sunday lunch with them so this is an occasion to which we can look forward with a great deal of pleasure. After our Friday lunch of a fish pie, Meg and I wondered if there were any decent films on the TV and were rewarded with a showing of ‘Born Free’. This is a 1966 British drama film starring the real-life couple Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers as Joy and George Adamson, another real-life couple, who raised Elsa the Lioness, an orphaned lion cub, to adulthood. The theme music from this film is very well known and we are enjoying the film but with an idea that it all might end in tears at the very end. The young lioness, Elsa, matured into a fully grown animal and then it was realised that she would eventually have to be released to fend for herself. But the emotional tension comes in the film when the Adamsons come to realise that a hand-reared lioness has no hunting skills and would probably perish in the wild from other predators. After several not very successful attempts to ‘re-wild’ Elsa, the Adamsons eventually succeed in then go off on a holiday. Upon their return, they return to camp near the point where they had released Elsa but there was no trace of her so, sadly, they are starting to make tracks for home. Just at the point of maximum despair, they fire a rifle shot in the air and Elsa hears this and reappears together with a litter of her own cubs. They then spend a very joyful afternoon in each other’s company before Elsa and her cubs return to the wild as they are ‘Born Free’. So this was a very emotionally compelling film and a nice way to spend a Friday afternoon.

Yesterday, Thursday, is my shopping day so I needed to remember to buy cat food without which, Miggles our adopted cat would be left bereft. I find that as a male cat he has rapidly transferred his affections towards the young female carers one of whom, at least, is a ‘cat’ person and showers him with affection. Whilst on the subject of being showered with affection, I remember well when we used to visit Almuñécar, a small town on the coast of Spain east of Malaga. Here Meg and I got off the beaten track and discovered a little coffee bar where they happened to serve some hot chocolate which I think was some of the finest to be had in Spain. The little coffee bar was stuffed full of locals, practically all female, and a six month male baby was being passed around from one neighbour to another. The child had a beatific look on his face as well he might as he was passed from loving bosom to loving bosom. An elderly gentleman was leaning against the bar and I asked him, in Spanish, if he was the father of the child. The answer, as I expected, was that he was not so I asked him to whom the child belonged and got the most wonderful response that this ‘child belonged to all the world’ This puts me in mind of the wonderful expression originating I believe in India that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ We had hints of this when we lived in Hampshire. We had to buy a house in a hurry and bought one in a Close in the district of Hedge End. Living in the Close were several children from the age of 4 to about 10 and they all played together much of it on their bikes and in and out of each other’s houses. The various mothers took care of whatever child happened to be around and put an elastoplast on them if they fell off their bike, for example. When it came to the Millenium celebrations, we closed off the Close with some strategically relocated traffic cones and then utilised a little green area the developers had provided nearby. Here we set up our Millenium party with lots of garden chairs and trestle tables. The mothers provided the face painting for the children whilst the men used their car batteries and extension cables to provide us with some music. We all bought supplies of beer, wine and ‘street food’ to eat in our hands and the communal atmosphere was wonderful to experience. Having said that, the children grew up, went to university and moved away and the whole communal atmosphere faded. Meg and I acted as surrogate grandparents for a couple of children whose father was a doctor and mother was a midwife and who lived about two or three doors away. Again, these children were in our house quite a lot and we enjoyed their company tremendously. When we came to leave, there was much crying and heaving of shoulders as the young children, on their way to school, had to say goodbye to us and in fact the whole departure process was incredibly emotion filled.

After lunch, we had our normal monthly session with the chiropodist who calls around once a month and then settled down to complete our viewing of the Trump ‘Heist’ programme which was quite an eye opener. I do not suppose it takes very long for disillusionment with the current government to set in. Today it has been revealed by the Sky News Westminster Accounts project, which tracks the flows of money through the political system, that since December, 2019 Keir Starmer has received more than £107,000 in freebies ranging from invitations to top flight sporting events and, of course, the donations for his wife’s clothing which hit the headlines recently. What is so disappointing about all of this is that on Day One of his premiership, Keir Starmer could have set the tone and declared that the slightest whiff of scandal or indeed impropriety would result in instant removal of the miscreants from their post. Instead, by accepting all of these gifts which is two and a half times the amount claimed by the next highest recipient, a terrible impression is created and some Labour MPs are already expressing their unhappiness. Sir Keir ignored warnings from some in his senior team that the issue of freebies could cause him political damage while in opposition. Senior Labour figures are incandescent that the story about freebies for the Starmer family has dragged on for days, and ministers going out with different and often contradictory explanations. Firstly, I think it was Harold Wilson who said that the Labour party had to be a moral crusade or it was nothing and accepting these huge amounts of money looks as though the leader of the Labour Party is in office for his personal gain. There was a golden opportunity to draw a line under the undoubted sleaze of past Conservative governments (particularly the Johnson government) and this has been missed. It also feeds into the dual narrative that all politicians are just in the game for their own personal profit and also that they ‘are all the same’ Accepting money from the football industry is particularly dangerous as the government is seeking to exert a degree of control over it. There is also a strong case that the PM and his spouse should receive a personal clothing allowance given their public appearances instead of having to rely upon a wealthy donor. Other societies seem to manage these affairs reasonably well but accepting a clothing allowance from a wealthy donor does not go down well in this era of people being forced by necessity to shop in charity shops for their own clothing. It looks as though the government could do with much sharper political antennae to ensure that issues like this do not arise. Keir Starmer could have put the issue to bed much more easily by clarifying what is necessary for the performance of one’s role (and clothing comes into this category) and that which he should personally pay out of his own pocket. Senior figures in the Labour Party such as Harriet Harman are already expressing their disquiet and going on the airways to imply that Starmer should have realised the political damage and sought a solution much earlier.

Yesterday was the day when our domestic help calls around and her arrival is always greeted warmly, needless to say, with a steaming great mug of tea. She and I are both devotees of charity shops and we have to restrain ourselves from over-impulsive purchases although there are occasions when we succumb to temptation. I had asked our help to look out for some napkins which she did happen to see in one of her visits so these were gracefully received. In return, I had organised the delivery of a plate glass kitchen surface protector because we had just replaced one of ours which had cracked but I managed to secure an identical one. The day was a very gloomy one but no rain was forecast so Meg and I made a trip down to collect our newspaper and some bread but did not tarry in the park, preferring to get home and have our elevenses at home this morning. Some months ago, I had got into the habit of cooking a risotto once a week but have got out of the habit. But yesterday, I decided to cook a risotto for us, and we find that some smoked mackerel fillets makes for a wonderful meal. We always tend to cook a little too much but our domestic help absolutely loves our risotto so I am more than happy for her to have an overflow portion of this which she can heat up for a quick lunch whilst she is dashing between jobs. We actually did make rather too much for our own needs so I was delighted to send off our domestic with some home cooked goodies. On our journey down into town, we were delighted to bump into our Irish friend who we have not seen for over a couple of weeks now. She explained that they had both been away in Ireland on a family holiday which does explain why they were not at home when I hand delivered an anniversary card to them as I knew that their wedding anniversary was within a week or so of our own. We exchanged some rapid news about the health of our respective partners and promised that we would meet up when we could in the next few days when we could exchange a lot more news with each other. After we returned home, it was time for the late morning call from Meg’s carers and actually we were a few minutes late in our walk back. In mitigation, although we do have a spreadsheet detailing the times of the visits and the names of the carers, this tends to change on a daily or even an hourly basis as little crisis events occur that have to be managed. A case in point was one of the carers for Meg who should have turned up yesterday but did not. We got a message that she had been involved in a near-miss motoring accident and was quite badly shocked by the incident and unable to work. Naturally, when she turned up today I was sympathetic and made her a cup of sweet tea which she was initially loathe to accept, indicating that she did not really have the time. Anyway I insisted that she have some tea and I explained to her not to be alarmed if she experienced a ‘delayed shock’ syndrome as this can occur some 24-48 hours after the initial incident had occurred. She had not heard of delayed shock so I tried to reassure her that if she did experience some symptoms in the next day or so, they would be transient and would pass. Lots of rest and hot, sweet tea is probably beneficial as well. So the question is raised ‘Who cares for the carers?’ One could extend this ad infinitum saying ‘Who cares for the carers of the carers’ and so on in an ever-widening circle. Still on the subject of carers, when our carer called this afternoon, he recounted to us rather a sorry tale of woe as he had apparently been subject to an assault by a near neighbour, recently discharged from prison, of a relative. The lad was not seriously hurt but his nose might require a bit of further attention from the medics to straighten the cartilage a little. I asked him if he had been to the police but reckoned that things might be worse for his relatives if the aggressive neighbour decided to take reprisals against the rest of the family. I was very sympathetic but could not offer any real advice in this difficult scenario.

Late on this afternoon, we started watching with a fascinating horror the first half of a documentary on Channel 4 entitled ‘Trump’s Heist: The President Who Wouldn’t Lose‘ Evidently, the whole documentary is an expose of the machinations of Trump to attempt to prove the last election was ‘stolen’ from him. What was the extraordinary was the number of close aides and former Trump supporters who became increasingly worried and disillusioned by the behaviour of the former President. I shall leave the second half of the two part series to an afternoon viewing with Meg but it is rather compulsive viewing. What is perhaps so surprising to us on this side of the Atlantic is the way in which the Republican party had completely ‘hitched its wagon’ to the Trump star and are quite willing to give him their support.

I was intrigued by a story I read in the Huffington Post but which has not found its way into the UK media as yet. The impact on UK businesses from Brexit’s red tape is only getting worse as time goes on, a new report has found. According to Aston University Business School, the value of UK goods exported to the UK was 27% lower – and imported goods 32% lower – compared to what the economy may have looked like if Brexit had not happened. Leaving the single market officially in January 2021 has had a ‘profound and ongoing’ impact on Britain’s trade with the EU, according to the economists’ modelling. The variety of exported goods has also declined, with 1,645 fewer types of British products sent to every EU country and many manufacturers no longer sending their produce to the bloc. Trade with smaller states further from the UK have been most impacted, the authors found. Workers in farming, clothing, wood and paper manufacture have particularly struggled with the post-Brexit red tape, as they grapple with the new time-consuming safety checks and extra labelling requirements. In fact, annual exports to the EU are now 17% lower while imports are 23% lower than they would have been if the UK had not left the EU. The report also suggested the impact is only getting more severe as time goes on, rather than levelling out, as the authors spotted a ‘noticeable worsening of EU-UK trade’ in the last year. So although none of this is a real surprise to many of us, I do not think that the deleterious effects of Brexit worsening over time is really fully appreciated by any of the political class.

Yesterday, Meg and I slept in a little later than intended. This might have been due to the darker mornings and to the fact that the previous late afternoon, we had a breath of fresh air whilst I got the back lawn cut whilst Meg (and Miggles, our adopted cat) supervised operations. I was very relieved that the mower seemed to be behaving itself as on a previous occasion I felt that it misfired occasionally but the mowing proved unproblematic so perhaps a jet had cleared itself or there had been some moisture in the petrol.

After we had returned from our Tuesday meet-up with our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria, it was practically time for the carer to call for Meg’s late morning call. But an unforeseen emergency prevented one of the carers to be able to call so, as is quite common these days, I assisted the one carer who did manage to attend. Afterwards, this young carer was due to stay on as it was Meg’s ‘sit’ call which releases me to go out on the road and do some much needed shopping. It transpired that this young carer had got a GCSE A star for in music so she was quite happy to listen to the Fauré which is one of our perpetual favourites on YouTube when Meg would appreciate some soothing music. I needed to go and fill the car with petrol and this was absolutely straight forward and then I planned to visit an adjacent Halfords to purchase some motor oil for the mower. The last occasion I did this in the spring, I popped into the store, saw what I wanted, purchased it and was in and out of the store in two minutes. But today was a bit of a nightmare. I could not find the lawn mower and garden machinery oil despite scouring the shelves with every kind of motor oil imaginable. Not being able to find it, I enlisted the assistance of one young store assistant who was putting together a bike. He could not find the oil and neither could two other assistants who had to be approached in the search for this very standard product. Eventually, the computer was consulted and not only could the assistants not find the motor mower oil but also they claimed that it was not available in their regional warehouse either. This was a very standard product and is like going into a supermarket and not being able to buy any butter. Eventually, on returning home, I went onto the internet and am going to have delivered in a day or so what I had hoped to pick up easily locally today. As there was a beautifully sunny afternoon on Tuesday and the mower seemed to be performing satisfactorily, I managed to get the big communal grassed area in front of the house mown whilst Meg watched from her wheelchair. Then after going inside for a spot of afternoon tea, Meg and managed to watch the first. of a two part biography of Mozart which was first broadcast on Monday evening but was easily available on BBC iPlayer on Tuesday. The second part will be broadcast next week so this is another thing to which we can look forward.

In the US, Donald Trump has escaped from a second assassination attempt as someone was about to take a pot shot at him whilst he was playing golf on his own gold course in Florida. This has made me wonder about the fates of several presidents and prominent politicians and to the best of my knowledge, there seems to be quite a remarkable difference in outcome according to whether one is a Republican or a Democrat. The three most prominent and noteworthy assassinations of Democrats were of course President John Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, all of whom were shot dead almost immediately. The Republicans with whom I am familiar start with George Wallace who was a declared racist governor of Alabama and after he was shot, he was confined to a wheelchair. Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt and might have died were it not for prompt treatment in the local hospital to which he was rushed. Now we have Donald Trump who had a close shave (almost literally when a bullet grazed his ear)and has now been in the sights of a gunman even if not actually shot at. So the rather facetious question that I ask myself is why prominent Democrats get killed outright but prominent Republicans seem to evade death? It could be that those of a Republican persuasion ‘en masse’ own more guns, have more practice and are better shots than Democrats but it is an interesting question nonetheless. It is perhaps interesting that a cursory Google search reveals nothing on this topic which might tell us something about how the algorithms that are utilised by the principal search engines are constructed. I can remember my frustrations when I was trying to research the internet for arguments against TQM (Total Quality Management) but every time I tried a search term such as ‘arguments against Total Quality Management’ the vast majority of what was thrown up in searched were arguments in favour of TQM or sometimes an article that would read that arguments against TQM are misplaced).Returning to the assassination attempt (which seems to have been carried out by an individual without fixed views who has voted both Democrat and Republican) I have a horrible foreboding that this may actually help to bolster up the Trump campaign. Harris may have a slight lead in the polls overall but there is no point in piling up votes in places of California that are always going to vote Democrat anyway. In the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, it could be that the candidates are neck and neck. But the portion of the electorate that has to be persuaded to abandon Trump are the white male non educated rural voters and it could well be that in this particular demographic, a sympathy vote for Donald Trump may appear now that he seems to have survived two assassination attempts. The nightmare mare scenario for the United states remains quite a likely option that Harris wins the elections by the narrowest of margins which the Republicans refuse to accept and then we have the groundwork for a civil war in America (at the worst) or months of political stalemate whilst courts argue out individual results (at best). If the latter were to happen, appeals would eventually be made to the Supreme Court which as it now has several Trump appointed nominees appointed to it (for life) would probably gift the disputed elections to the Republicans.

Being a Tuesday, we join with a group of regulars for a coffee and a natter in our local Waitrose cafeteria. We explain to them all what a brilliant little concert we had enjoyed last Saturday morning and we had actually run across a fellow parishioner from our local church despite the concert being held in the large Anglican church which serves as a ‘de facto’ performance space for the town of Bromsgrove during its annual festival fortnight (which has now ended)

Before I entered my third year at Manchester University, there was the business of the summer vacation to negotiate. The previous year’s employment at the cardboard box factory seemed closed to me as they were not in a recruiting mode. So to get a job, one waited until the very first edition of the ‘Manchester Evening News‘ was published a few minutes after 12.00pm. You then scoured the job vacancies column, ran to the nearest telephone box with a pile of 6d’s and then made one’s way to the factory offering employment. So it was, I ended up with a line of about 10 men in the yard of the Greengate and Irwell Rubber company in Salford which manufactured the casings for those large cables that carry power supplies and the like. The hiring process was a little like the Biblical parable of the overseer and the vineyard as the foremen went down the line indicating who they were going to hire and who not. The man next to me desperately needed the job as he had about 9 children to support but I needed a job and got hired at the rate of £10.50 a week which was about half of the wage at the cardboard box factory for much harder work. There was a strange arrangement whereby one had to work a compulsory hour’s overtime each time in order to bring the wages up to about £12 which after stoppages came to about £10.50 for the week. As an unskilled labourer, we manipulated those huge drums of cables you often see by the roadside when new cables are being laid and to get it around the many corners you had to rock the whole drum, stick a metal pipe under one of the retaining bolts which would make the whole drum judder and twist a little and repeat until it was round the corner. The factory was practically underground and the machinery in it absolutely Dickensian – I doubt there was a single piece of machinery in it constructed in this century. I also got a job as a cocktail barman at Tiffany’s ( a Mecca establishment) which was a very expensive venue (over £50 admission price at today’s prices) but decked out with a fabulous Hawaian stye bar that ran down the whole of one wall of the premises. There was a resident band who played the popular tracks of the day – for example, this is where I first heard Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ which helps to date my period of employment. There was a resident band of one male singer and two female singers who we thought were actually very good. In subsequent years, these two girl singers who by now were in their late 20’s had joined a band calling itself ‘The New Seekers‘ and as such they actually made it to No. 2 in the Eurovision Song Context which was held in Harrogate in 1972 i.e some five years later. They actually recorded for Coca Cola the song ‘I want to teach the world to sing’ which was used extensively as an advertising track but the singers themselves made hardly any money out of it. The night club was run by a couple of ex-dancers who had moved into management having won the equivalent of ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ some years earlier with a rendition of ‘Slaughter on 10th Avenue’ They were snobbish in the extreme but hired me because they rather liked the idea of employing an ‘Old Swan Harrogate’ trained cocktail barman on their staff. The turnover of staff was tremendous and in the end I worked there for so long that I became quasi-management, helping with stock takes and the like every two weeks. I used my earnings to finance the purchase of photocopies of crucial articles for my third year studies, arguing to myself that I would never do any academic work on a Friday night so I might as well earn some money and use the money on photocopies. Meg and I got married in the September of our final year which might be a source of some surprise. But I had been working for 3-4 years before going to university and did not go until I was aged 20 rather than 18. Similarly Meg had spent some of her childhood in France and so both of us felt so much ‘older’ than our actual contemporaries. We rented a modern maisonette over a row of modern shops and two of our flatmates from the previous two years moved in with us and helped us defer the rent. We furnished the whole of the maisonette by frequenting a local auctioneer who was very kindly and looked after us ensuring that his gavel came down at just the right point so that we could secure the purchase for our desires. In fact, one of the captain’s chairs we now have was bought from the auctioneers and we furnished the whole house for some £70 which is £1800 in today’s money but, of course, we had no debts of any sort. Rather than worrying about our finals, we were more concerned with getting a mortgage from the City Council to purchase a terrace house overlooking Platt Fields Park. This cost us £1995 but we could have secured a cheaper and lesser property not overlooking the park for £1400. What we paid for this house represented twice the average earnings but mortgages were hard to get in those days. However, the ratio of house prices to average earnings was then about 2:1 but must nowadays be nearer to 12:1. Our son was born right at the end of our final year so we both ended up with 2(i)s, a child and a house before we embarked on postgraduate careers both having been awarded SSRC studentships, Meg at Manchester University and myself at Salford University where I read an innovative new course in the ‘Sociology of Science’. Unfortunately, Meg had to abandon her MA course to look after our son in his early years but this experience was not uncommon amongst academics who married each other, as we discovered in staff room discussions when working at Leicester Polytechnic.

By the way, this autobiographical exegesis is going to end at this point and my normal style of blog will resume from the next entry onwards.

Yesterday and being creatures of habit, we watched the Sunday morning Politics programmes, had breakfast and then made our usual journey to the park, having picked up a copy of the Sunday newspaper at Waitrose first of all. Now that we have had ‘Last Night at the Proms’, I always have the feeling that summer is well and truly over. The jingoism prevalent at the Last Night of the Proms irritates me in these post Brexit days but a witty conductor’s speech can occasionally make up for this.

Having successfully negotiated my first year at University, we now tended to specialise and my regime was to concentrate upon Sociology and Social Anthropology. But we still studied some cognate subjects of which one was Comparative Politics where we studied the French, German and Russian political systems. At the end of year examinations, we were expected to retain some knowledge of the British and American political systems and the end of year examination was designed so that one could have questions that ran across all five political systems. This was so wide and vast in its scope that I think I made a conscious decision to not revise part of the syllabus as otherwise I felt my knowledge base ran the risk of being wide but incredibly shallow. But the second year of my undergraduate career had a pronounced political tinge to it as events unfolded. The Vietnam war was in full swing and the Student Union offered a ‘teach in’ whereby distinguished academics came along to debate the subject all day long and we often missed other lectures in order to attend it. The concept of the teach-in was an American import, I think, but the whole university was highly politicised at this time. For example, the president of the student’s union was Anna Ford who became well known in later years as a news reader and TV presenter whilst another president of the Students Union became editor of the Communist mouthpiece ‘The Morning Star’ and one of my fellow sociology students was to finish up as editor of ‘The Scotsman’ having made his career by editing the Student newspaper which was then called ‘The Independent’ and came out weekly with a circulation, I believe of about 20,000. But the biggest political event of the year was the Labour government’s debacle over raising the fees of the overseas students who attended our universities. At the time, overseas students paid the same fees as the rest of us and this was an almost derisory sum but the government decided to raise the fees for overseas students five fold. The university practically came to a halt as protests of various kinds were undertaken. As I was an avid reader of ‘The Guardian’ at that time, I had collected s series of press cuttings which were taken over by the Students Union and ‘blown up’ to create poster and campaigning materials. The university instituted several ‘ad hoc’ committees where the university came together as one body and we had the interesting experience that would never be countenanced these days when I chaired a particular sub committee one of whose members was the Professor of Geography and another of whom was one of my Social Anthropology tutors. Student protest and ‘sit ins’ were very much the order of the day in the mid 1960’s but in the campaign against the raising of the overseas student fees we acted completely constitutionally and organised a huge lobby of the UK Parliament. As one of the protagonists in this whole debate, I was allowed to be part of a small delegation that were ushered into a committee room of the House of Commons to make our case. This was quite an experience in itself as the technology at the time meant that a microphone was placed above one’s seat and one spoke in a normal voice but the whole of the committee could hear one’s contribution without a voice having to be raised. We did not bother with lobbying Conservative MPs who backed the action of the government but only those on the Labour back benchers. Having said that, the whole of our protests and completely constitutional practice did not result in a single change of policy in any of our details. We were led to reflect why Labour governments engaged in these kind of measures for which there is no popular appeal and which only seem to harm the rest of their agenda – the debate that we have over withdrawing the winter fuel allowance for pensioners is very much cut from the same cloth. In the university life, the Rag Week was a highly important event and generally took place just after the university had some mid-sessional examinations and where the tutors were busy marking and were quite happy to let their students have their head for a week. In our time, we raised £20,000 in Rag week and if we were to translate that into current values we would be talking of an amount of about £½ million pounds across all of the Manchester colleges. The Rag week took in students not only at Owens College (the main body of the university) and ‘The Tech’ (that was later to become the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) Some of the students performed impresssive money raising stunts – for example some of our number went down to Regent’s Park Zoo and captured a famous golden eagle known as ‘Goldie’ and kept it in a student flat at the top of a large residential student block known as the Fallowfield Tower after the Manchester suburb where it was located. All hands were on deck to help in this venture so the Biology students were enlisted to go and capture some mice to feed the beast whilst the electrical engineers rigged up a pirate radio station from the top of the tower. One of the really amusing stunts at the time was to paint footsteps from the statue of Queen Victoria in Piccadilly Square to the nearby public conveniences in a curving arc and then back up the statue again. Rag Day itself was given to the procession of floats which thousands of the townspeople came out to witness and to contribute money. As students, we also given to an all day drinking spree. In fact, it was at a Rag Day ball that I first really got together with Meg and we became an ‘item’ although we only tended to really go out once a week and to enjoy the occasional coffee with each other during term time.

On Sundays we fall into our normal routine which is the Politics programs at the start of the day followed by a visit to Waitrose for the purpose of picking up our Sunday newspaper and where we met with our University of Birmingham friend. Then after we return home and I cook the Sunday dinner, we view another episode of ‘Pilgrimage’ which somehow seems especially appropriate for a Sunday. After lunch, we completed our viewing of ‘Goodbye, Mr, Chips’ (which had an especially poignant ending) followed by the full length feature film of ‘Dad’s Army’

My first year at Manchester University was quite hard work and I typed up my lecture notes every single night. This had the advantage that at the end of the year I had a comprehensive (and much sought after) series of lecture notes that could be further day-glo’d or annotated and, in any case, fixed their content in my mind. We allowed ourselves to slip out to a local pub sometimes for an occasional half pint at the end of the day and for a bit of relaxation but the main focus of our leisure activities, apart from the Student Union, was the institution of the student party. At this time, in 1965 in Manchester there were no night clubs to speak of largely because of the very repressive policies of the then Chief Constable. I did in subsequent years work as a barman at Tiffany’s, run by Mecca but the admission charges were very steep (at about £55 per person at todays prices, £2.00 then) So the student party was ‘the scene’ of the moment. The pirate radio stations were to come along later – Radio Caroline was founded in 1964 but could be received in the Medway towns for example. So the music that we had consisted of portable record players and collections of Beatles and Rolling Stones records. Via one of my flatmates, I did listen to and acquire a taste for the folk songs of Joan Baez, a Mexican-American folk singer, well known for her protest songs but not particularly well known in 1965 in the UK. But party goers brought along their LP’s and someone acted as a DJ whilst the rest of us drank cans of beer, bottles of cheap wine and occasionally stuff sold cheaply from a barrel in some off-licences such as peach wine. The satisfying party always consisted of three stages. The first stage consisted of much drinking and the occasional bit of dancing if space would allow. This stage went on until about midnight after which there was always a certain degree of pairing off and this stage could last from a few minutes until about 3.00am in the morning. The final stage consisted generally of us sitting around on the floor, nearly always in semi darkness and engaging in arguments and discussions in which we believed in the Latin tag ‘In vino veritas’ This is a Latin phrase that means ‘in wine, there is truth’, suggesting a person under the influence of alcohol is more likely to speak their hidden thoughts and desires. For example, I remember having a very long and completely inconclusive discussion with the girlfriend of one of my school friends whether a true understanding of society and social conditions was best appreciated by a study of the social sciences (my position) or by a study of Literature such as Balzac and Dickens. Neither of us convinced the other but the argument went on for a long term. We had quite an interesting pecking order when we came along to discuss and argue with students on other courses. In general terms we quite liked the lawyers and the town planners with whom we could always have a good discussion but a low opinion of medics who we felt, with some justification, were unable to talk about anything much outside of their field of study. This was interesting, really, as the medics were generally much better qualified than we were in terms of A-level grades. So the party petered out by about 6.30 or 7.00 or certainly dawn when one would make one’s bleary way home. But one usually had a great sense of satisfaction when all of one’s thirsts and desires physical and intellectual had been satisfied. Now one of my flatmates also rode an Lambretta scooter as I did but mine was in Leeds and his was in Croydon. We decided that I should collect my Lanmbretta from Leeds and we would then share it on a 50:50 basis. This proved to be invaluable at the weekends because we very quickly discovered that whoever had the scooter that night got the girl (who being streetwise, realised that a male with transport could give one access to a generally empty flat for the evening) The one of us who did not have the scooter stayed behind quietly drinking the night away as it were. All of this was, of course, in the autumn term and although I had been introduced to Meg we were not actually going out with each other until about February of the following year when we paired off at a Rag Ball during the rag week celebrations in Manchester. Meg and I gradually made our parties a little more sophisticated by having cheese and wine but we were to discover that scraping off ground-in cheese after a night’s activities gradually took the shine of all of this. At one famous, or perhaps infamous, party (as our fame and address seemed to spread) we had more than 70 people crammed into nook and granny of a three bedroomed terrace house. After this, we rather felt that we had done the ‘partying’ bit and got it out of our system but as the popularity of our parties grew, we had to introduce a ticketing system and a series of whistles by the means of which we as the host could mobilise support from each to throw out gatecrashers, the more so if they were completely unknown to us. One occasion, we took a very drunk stranger that no one knew and hung him over the fence overlooking Platt Fields park outside our house. In the morning he had disappeared but we did not know how. We even had a party at out house in Leeds when my mother happened to be away for the weekend but this, too, turned out to be a disorderly event and was yet another reason to have done with partying. But in many ways the part of the party scene I enjoyed the most was the lengthy discussions in the wee small hours of the morning when we were anxious to put the world to rights.

Yesterday we looked forward to seeing our domestic help who had delayed her session with us from Wednesday to Friday. After catching up news, we visited our favourite cafe but had to dash up the hill to be in time for the carers’ late morning call. Then we discovered some fish pie which I had prepared some time ago but made for a very satisfying Friday meal. This morning we were delighted to visit out local (large) Anglican church which is being used for a ‘free’ concert venue as part of the Bromsgrove festival. We are treated to a pot pourri of organ and piano pieces followed by some welcome tea and biscuits.

Now we come to my early days at Manchester University. I was lodged with three other lads, with two of whom we subsequently shared a flat and I am still in contact with them. The third has moved out of our orbit, so to speak and I believe had a successful career in a Canadian IT firm. Once we had got over the trauma of registration (it took me a week with one thing or another), work started in earnest. There were about 200 of us I think who all studied the same four subjects of Economics, Economic History, Social Anthropology and Politics/Government. I remember quite vividly the various first seminar which I attended which I think was in Social Anthropology and the tutor asked a question of the 8-10 people in the seminar group. There was a pause of several seconds before anyone spoke but several thoughts raced through my mind. This was that I felt I had undergone a struggle to get to university having left school at the age of 16, having had two civil service jobs which I had evidently given up to go to University and then, of course, I had studied for my ‘A’-levels completely on my own. So as it is said that your life flashes before your eyes if you are drowning, so I felt that I had done so much to get to university and I was not going to let the opportunity of a University education pass me by. So I started to give my answer to the question and another of the students replied to me after which point the two of us were labelled as ‘talkers’ and argued with each other throughout the year whilst everything else stayed more or less silent. I must clarify at this point what when I say ‘argued’ I do not mean in the disputatious sense of the word. But in logic and critical thinking, an argument is a list of statements, one of which is the conclusion and the others are the premises or assumptions of the argument. I was also conscious of the fact from my little ‘Teach Yourself Logic’ which I studied intensively is that it is possible in Logic and Philosophy that in an argument between two participants it is possible to arrive at knowledge which in a sense is new knowledge for one or both of the parties. And so I carried on in my university career being conscious of the fact that it was quite possible that your own thought processes when articulating a position can be clarified in the course of argument/discussion with others. I have one or two abiding memories of my first year at Manchester. One of these is that the University Economic History department used to think of itself as a world leader in the subject which may have been true thirty years earlier with some distinguished scholars but now I got the impression that they were living out their former glories. So during the course of the year, I think I wrote at least five longish essays in Economic History and we were directed to go straight to the journals in Economic History to get to the heart of particular debates avoiding anything so mundane as a textbook. So when it came to the Economic History examination at the end of the first year which happened to be the first examination in the timetable, I felt reasonably well prepared and confident. To my absolute horror, every single essay that I had written failed to be represented on the Examination paper so I got the horrible feeling which does not happen very often when you read the first question on the paper and say ‘No’ to oneself before proceeding to read the rest of the paper. I do not think I have ever felt so much like absolutely bursting into tears – I had spent probably half of my first year researching and writing Economic History essays and I felt I could not answer a single question on the paper. When I shared this experience with others on the course, one explained that he was in the tutorial group of the Professor who had actually written the paper so that the contents of it came as no surprise. After this experience, I vowed to myself that I would never let this happen to any students that I might happen to teach in the future and therefore I always gave students an indication of the areas upon which a question was going to be asked so that ‘examination question spotting’ should not have to be a concern of students. In the event, at the end of the first course of the course, I achieved a Third in Economic History and a Third in Economics (the curse of having achieved an ‘A’ at A level and assuming I knew it all already) But I achieved a First in Sociology/Social Anthropology and a First in Politics/Government so it was fairly evident where my strengths did and did not lie. Sociology seemed to be the more interesting of these choices then but nowadays I would probably have chosen the Politics/Government option (but it was more like constitutional history rather than Politics as we know it today) The huge intake divided into the specialisms of Economics, Economic History, Politics, Sociology, Social Administration and several more besides. In practice, in the first year when we had mass lectures, one tended to know other students who were part of ones party going set rather than students who were to later follow one pathway or another. But the University Union had a very lively debating society, the debates being an opportunity to offer entertaining and witty contributions. I remember one very talented student of German (who failed his examinations) providing the lead-off debate on the subject of ‘Do children enjoy their childhood more than adults enjoy their adultery?’) But these debates that started at about 12.30 had to be terminated by 2.00pm when the afternoon lectures resumed.