One of Meg’s carers turned up yesterday afternoon with a rather unusual request, namely did I have a paint scraper? As it happened, and quite amazingly, I managed to put my hands on a new paint scraper relatively quickly. My young carer needed to remove some tinting material from the front windows of his car and as this is not legal he intended to remove it. I assembled together a range of materials (brillo pads, cream cleaner, scouring pads etc) that I thought might assist him and he together with a fellow care worker they were going to undertake their repair work. It was only when I did some research on the internet I came to appreciate that tinting is allowed for the back windows of a car but not the front. The weather this morning is gloomy and overcast and it had evidently rained overnight. This we did not mind too much as Wednesdays are the days when our domestic help calls around and it is always good to have a chat with her. But the principal appointment this morning is with an OT (occupational therapist) who is calling round by appointment to assess a series of aids to help to manage Meg’s condition. We know that the appointment is this morning but we do not have an exact time so we need to be in for all of the morning. If the weather brightens up this afternoon which well it might then we might treat ourselves to a trip in the park later on. My niece got into contact with me to indicate that she could not get through to this blog so this is taking some investigation – for some reason, the domain name which is fully paid up and in date will not point to the relevant server so I have support tickets in place with my website provider to provide a solution to why something that has been working for months if not years has suddenly decided to go belly up. In the meanwhile, here is an address to which the domain name is meant to point and this might help readers of this blog to get through to it: https://mch-net.info/wordpress This morning, i made a lightning visit down into town to collect our newspaper and whilst in the store, I happened to notice our window cleaner who was on the top of a tall ladder cleaning the windows of a building opposite the supermarket. I was tempted to call out a greeting but restrained myself on the grounds that whilst on the top of a ladder, he could hardly turn round and wave. I am reminded that when we undertook a statistics exam at the end of our second year in university, we were given to a graph where we had to interpret the results. The graph was entitled ‘Death to Window Cleaners by Age’ and demonstrated a generally ‘U’ shaped curve with deaths being quite high when window cleaners were in their 20’s but then dropped markedly when they were in the 30’s and 40’s. Then the death rates started to rise again as taw window cleaners were in their 40’s, and 50’s reaching a peak in their 60’s. The explanation which I supplied to the examiners (together with most of the rest of the 200 of us) was that whilst they were young, the cleaners were somewhat more daring and liable to take risks with their ladders. Then as they got older and acquired wives, children and mortgages they tended to be sober up somewhat and be much more risk averse. As they aged, so almost inevitably they started to lose their grip and their balance and hence the death rates rose steadily as they aged. However, this was a totally incorrect answer. We discovered via a friendly examiner some time later that the correct answer was there was insufficient data to form any conclusions from the data that was supplied and therefore any answers that we might give were completely in the realm of speculation and not at all warranted by the data sets with which we were supplied.

There is a group of activists entitled ‘Led by Donkeys’ which likes to use bill boards and other visual methods to lampoon political figures. In their latest stunt, Liz Truss was captured storming off stage during a book promotion event, after she was interrupted by a remote-controlled banner mocking the comparisons made between her and a lettuce. The former prime minister was pledging her support for Donald Trump when the sign rolled out in the background, featuring a photo of a lettuce with googly eyes, which read: ‘I crashed the economy’. The whole point of this stunt was a comparison that was made during Lizz Truss’s ill-fated premiership between her shelf life and that of a lettuce (in point of fact, the lettuce won) Lizz Truss is trying to endear herself to the American right where her style of free-market economics might find some adherents. However, she is constantly lampooned by the British media and I suspect that she dare not show her face at venues in Britain lest even more fun be poked at her.

With the American elections approaching, I have decided to bookmark some relevant websites that I think I will find especially useful. But first, on my Thinkpad laptop, I have downloaded the DuckDuckGo browser which has very prominent for preserving online privacy and not allowing cookies or websites to have your IP details. I have used this before and its search facilities for simple items seem to be as good as Google. Once the browser was installed I did pay a subscription to the New York Times (which has a very heavily discounted price to new subscribers of only £20.00 for the first year) as its has excellent election trackers. To complement these, I am also bookmarking two other liberal-inclined websites in CNN and MSNBC so I have the three websites available to me very easily and quickly by just using the DuckDuckGo. This curiously named browser, I discover, is really named a children’s game of ‘Duck..Duck..Goose’ and I do not know whether it has been popularised in any parts of the UK. I seem to remember that at the time of the last Presidential elections in 2020 I did something similar and then got rid of all of the bookmarked websites when the elections were well and truly over. But I have the feeing that this time around, the US elections might drag for months with challenges in the courts and Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters refusing to accept the result.

There have been two particularly gruesome cases which have come to light recently in which evidently very ill and disturbed patents with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, after being in their local hospital, are then released ‘under the care of their GP’ But the individuals in question seem to have refused their medication, failed to keep appointments and then have gone on to kill by stabbing individuals in broad daylight. The acute services, and this applied equally to mental as well as to physical health concerns, do a good job but after the acute phases of their operations have been conducted they then discharge individuals ‘back into the he care of their local GP’ This is the point at which our health services completely break down. We are led to believe that a person who has had perhaps multiple instances of an acute mental illness or disorder with then fail to take their medication and are supposed to wait patiently at the end of a telephone for several minutes to try to arrange an appointment with their doctor, which in the first instance is a telephone consultation. Now this is not going to happen and typically does not, the overall problem being that we know how to treat acute episodes or conditions but problems of a more chronic nature are left to fester. We know from our own family experiences that this is the weak point in the system and it is far easier to state the problem than to attempt to resolve it. Our GP services are under such pressure that there has been talk of limiting the number of patients that can be seen in one day (say to 25 rather than the 40 which I think is more the norm). Even pay itself, although an irritant, is not the complete answer which really lies in the fact that we need many GPs in the system. The government is trying to alleviate this problem by recruiting ‘Physician Associates’ who are individuals with some biological background who are then a crash course in medicine and thrown into the front line. We have seen this before with ‘Teaching Assistants’ in schools and the thinking behind this all is eventually to attempt to cheapen the resource total as a whole by recruiting only half trained staff. Now many of these newly recruited staff no doubt do an excellent job and routine conditions may be easy to treat but there is a worry that more complex or complicated conditions will not be diagnosed or treated. The long term solution would be to rapidly expand our medical schools and of course in the short term we could recruit more from our European neighbours – but this is no longer a feasible option after Brexit. Without wishing to sound xenophobic, I read recently that approximately one half of the new jobs created in the UK recently have been filled with personnel of either Nigerian or Indian origin between 2019 and 2023. I somehow do not feel that replacing the predominantly white labour force supplied to us by our continental neighbour and replacing them with personnel from the Asian and African continent is what those who voted for Brexit intended.

Today is the day when we go down the road to make contact with our Waitrose friends. We were particularly glad to see our chorister friend who is in her 90’s but who we have not seen for a couple of occasions so a smidgeon of worry about her was arising within us. She had been finding the walk down to town a little arduous possibly because her medication had been altered. We told her about ‘The Lemon Tree’ which might be a slightly shorter journey for her so we said that we would like to see her on Friday if that is a little easier for her to access. It was a beautiful day today and so the journey up and down the hill was quite a pleasant one today. Meg has a sitter today so that in theory I can attend Pilates – in practice, there is something else urgent for me to attend to and such was the case today when I needed to pay a visit to our local Post Office.On the occasions that i go there, I always seem to be behind someone in a queue whose Post Office transaction is long and complicated and today was no exception. But on the way home, I did the quickest of tours around our local Salvation Army and relieved them of a wall clock which I badly need in the upstairs bedroom where I have relocated the radio which displayed the time next to my bed downstairs.

You would imagine that pushing Meg and up down the hill would be quite arduous but not is all that it seems. Going on the downhill sections is a breeze if the slope is gentle but when the slope is more severe I have to use my triceps to ensure that the Meg and the wheelchair do not tun away with me. You would have thought that pushing Meg up hill would be difficult but this is only true for the (thankfully few) steeper sections. If there is a slight incline upwards then the weight of my body pushing Meg up the hill is not stressful. Also, since I have invested in my Hi-Vis vest (bright yellow) I am pretty sure that motorists are more inclined to stop and let me cross the road. There is a special unit that you can buy which affixes to a rear bar of the wheelchair (although ours does not have one) and this is a battery driven power wheel which gives particular assistance on going up hill.I have considered this but think that the benefits might be outweighed by the costs. I will not need the unit when going downhill or up very moderate uphill sections so the unit would only come into its own on the more steep uphill sections. Also it would add to the weight of the whole and possibly make it less manoeuvrable, particularly over kerbs so I am coming to the view that what initially looks like a good idea but not be overall.

I heard fragments of an interview in which Elon Musk and Donald Trump were forming a mutual adoration society with each other. Not only did I find this odious but I wonder whey the Main Street Media give it any airtime. The BBC reported some of the interview comments but then added that it was ‘fact checking’ some of the claims that Trump had made. But the BBC did not announce any of the results of the fact checking and I wonder when they are going to publish or release the same (I suspect never).

Last night, I watched (or rather dozed through) the closing ceremonies of the Olympic games in Paris. This was conducted with traditional French flair and at the end of the ceremonies there was the traditional hand over of the Olympic flag to the next host city which is going to be Los Angeles in the USA in 2028. All of the American razzmatazz was in evidence in the hand over ceremony and I don’t think I will enjoy the excess of Americana to which we will be exposed in four years time. The commentators are saying this morning that the Olympic games will not return to Europe for at least sixteen years (the next two games to be held in USA and then Australia in 2028 and 2032) and in 2036 it will probably be the turn of the Asian continent to host the games. I would imagine that after years of striving and then succeeding in their various disciplines, many of the athletes may experience a massive ‘post-Olympic’ blues. I remember the feeling after I had working hard for my finals in 1968 and suddenly, all you have been working for has realised. There is some concern that whilst Team GB have exceeded the last Olympic medals haul by 1, the number of gold medals gained is markedly down. But there have been several instances in both athletics and swimming where the margins between success and victory have been incredibly small. Just as a small end note to the Paris Olympics, one of Meg’s carers told me with a certain amount of glee that some 300,000 condoms have supplied for the use of approx 5,000 male athletes which works out at 60 per athlete. If it was a female planner ordering these supplied, I wonder if she was suffering from an excess of caution – on the other hand, if it was a male planner, it might have been an excess of optimism. I wonder if we will ever know what proportion were actually used?

Today being a Monday, Meg and I are to make a trip to ‘The Lemon Tree‘ which is now a part of our Monday morning routines. The care workers are due to call half an hour earlier today in their late morning comfort call so I am advancing our normal timetable by half an hour. It looks as though two tremendously hot days are in prospect for us followed (hopefully!) by some thunderstorms. So thunder was rolling across the sky when Meg and I were preparing our venture out but the thunderclouds had rolled on once we actually got underway. The weather, though, was incredibly humid and after our tea and toasted teacake in our newfound cafe, we got home to the relative cool of the house. The push up and down the hill had proved to be so humid that when we got home, I needed to change into a tee shirt and shorts, putting my other clothes straight into the wash. On the way home, I acquired a wonderful little (red) Squirrel Nutkin badged for the Rothsay Manor hotel in Ambleside, which is a little toy/plaything that may help to divert Meg on occasions. We could not really fancy a conventional cooked meal so I took the cold beef which was cooked yesterday and made a salad of it using grated carrots, tomato and choose. To the grated carrots I add a few walnuts and soma sultanas to make it all a little more interesting and appetising.

I have come across an American website called ‘Alternet’ and on this website there is an article asking the question why the media is not calling out the evident and growing signs of dementia exhibited by Donald Trump. His behaviour, outbursts, speech patterns and grasp on reality are now leading to a slew of commentators asking questions about Trump’s hold on reality but the same concern has not made it yet to this side of the Atlantic. One commentator has observed that his description of his departure from the White House as a ‘peaceful’ transfer of power, his insistence that the group that mounted the assault on the Capitol was relatively small, and his boast that attendance at his January 6 rally preceding the assault was larger than the crowd Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the National Mall for his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech all point to a presidential candidate who is seriously unhinged. Amongst various claims are that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, is ‘very smart.’ That whales are being killed by windmills. That he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. That the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. We could go on but the Democrats are certainly tapping into this growing feeling by using the term ‘weird’ to describe both Trump and his coterie. Even Republican strategists are concerned that Trump does not seem to be campaigning in the crucial ‘swing’ states where the latest polls put Kamala Harris some 4% ahead. It is also being said that Trump cannot cope with the fact that he is being outgunned not just by a woman but by a black woman (and Trump in characteristic stye has attacked her racial origins rather than her policies) Kamala Harris does not come with the same baggage as did Hillary Clinton at the time of the last presidential elections and now that Biden has departed from the race there is only one old (and increasingly senile) candidate left in the race.

I was a little distressed to learn today, that Graham Thorpe who died recently had suffered from a major anxiety and depression two years ago and attempted to take his own life. His recent demise may have been related to this but the full facts have just been released by his widow. For some reason, perhaps unexplored, cricketers are particularly prone to depression but I cannot be sure of the causal factors or triggers in this case. As a more general point, whereas sportsmen and women by definition are in a good physical shape when they are in their prime, I wonder whether their pursuit of their sport pushes their bodies to the limit and whether they consequently die younger than the rest of the population? I have read of some respectable research that indicates that famous sports stars, singers, dancers and actors all tend to show that the price for making it big in performance terms may be a shorter life.

After a good night’s sleep, Meg and I enter our Sunday morning routines. After the carers had got Meg up and we had breakfasted, we turned on the TV to get the last embers of the Olympic Games, the normal political programmes being off-air whilst we are in the midst of a holiday service. Then we had a visit from our Eucharistic minister and as we tend to do, we discussed with dismay the fate which is likely to befall our parish. It looks as though as part of a regional reorganisation, the number of services will be reduced from three at the weekend to one on a Sunday, attendance will fall dramatically, income will consequently fall and our whole parish looks as though it is going to enter its death throes. This is a source of some distress to the particularly committed church members but is a syndrome which is common across many denominations in the UK at the moment. After our visitor had left, we got together some elevenses, walked down to pick up our Sunday newspaper and thence to our usual bench in the park. We came across one acquaintance who we see most Sundays but our University of Birmingham friend had domestic commitments this weekend. We cooked some beef in the slow cooker and so had a lunch of beef, cabbage and baked potato. The beef was tasty enough but I often find the flavour improves the following day. After lunch, Meg and I tuned in to the ‘Pilgrimage’ programme which we often view on a Sunday. A group of celebrities of diverse faiths and none engage in the pilgrimage and today we viewed the route of St. Colomba. This might be thought of as a Catholic pilgrimage but according the Scotsman, Saint Columba is arguably Scotland’s most popular saint and certainly its most adaptable, ecumenical and all-purpose one, equally beloved of Roman Catholics and Wee Free Presbyterians. What I find interesting about the modern day pilgrims is that you can see the group engaging in physical, emotional and to some extent spiritual explorations as they journey. In today’s program, we have a practising Catholic, a lapsed Catholic, a Sikh, a Muslim, a pagan and a Jew. But in no way does the program attempt to convert pilgrims from their current belief systems but in practice, each participant seems to find their own pre-existing beliefs to be renewed and even reinforced. There is sometime in the pilgrimage for everyone – for example, the paganist could point to the ancient ‘stones’ that had been erected in pre-Christian times but which had to some extent been Christianised in that the religious/spiritual significance of the stones were incorporated into the early Christianity. Other pilgrimage programmes have explored the route to Santiago de Compostela, Fatima and North Wales.

In some ways, the riots that we have been experiencing in some of our communities could not have happened at a worse time. The political elite are all taking their summer holidays and the Paris Olympics is providing diversions for many. The response of the government seems to have worked, however. Massively reinforced policing, almost instant court cases and terms of imprisonment of up to ten years seems to have turned the tide. At one level, I applaud the activities of the government in responding to these riots and one can only wonder what the response of the Tories would have been if they still in power. The modern Tory party has drifted more and more rightwards and one can imagine that at least some members of the Tory party might be somewhat ambivalent about the attacks that are made on asylum seekers and other ethnic minority communities. It is sad to say that one level the riots have succeeded in one of their objectives because I have heard more than one member of an ethnic minority group say that they feel threatened and frightened in contemporary Britain. But one wonders after a period of imprisonment, what effect will this have on the mentality of the rioters? At least part of me is inclined to argue that the government is convicting people of being stupid and ignorant. One of those convicted said to the police that he had no idea what ‘Far Right’ (or Left for that matter) actually meant. Perhaps in our society, it is left to the probation service to help in the re-education process of those convicted and imprisoned. In Chinese society (and even in Saudi Arabia) there follows a process of ‘political re-education’ and although we in the UK might be repulsed at these measures, the point remains how we are to deal with the aftermath of the riots. The education secretary is going to generate changes in the curriculum to encourage school pupils to have a much more critical attitude to what is read on the internet and to spot ways in which fake news can be spotted and counteracted. But the genie is now out of the bottle and with the increasing influence of artificial intelligence, one wonders how easy it is even for those who are ‘internet savvy’ to spot fake news, let alone those at school. In general terms, I think that the government is on the right lines in doing what it can to counter the effects of social media but national governments are pretty powerless to be able to act unilaterally against the impacts of it. There is a complete irony in that Elon Musk, the owner of social media platform X, has claimed civil war is ‘inevitable’ in the UK as pockets of violent disorder continues to break out across the country. But if any western country is on the brink of civil war, one would imagine that the USA should be the first to be considered in this category.

The Olympic Games ends today and a dramatic closing ceremony is promised to us by the French in the Olympic stadium. Team GB ends with 65 medals (14 golds, 22 silvers and 29 bronzes). They top their Tokyo tally by one, although did win eight fewer golds than in 2021. But to my recollection, there seemed to be a large number of events in which the British athletes were literally pipped to the post by the smallest possible margins. The next Olympic games are to be held in Los Angeles in the USA and I can only see our medal total going down in four years time as the numbers of family and friends must reduce compared with Paris.

This morning dawned as rather a gloomy day but the weather forecasters tell us to expect two or three days of really fine weather in a mini heatwave before a succession of Atlantic storms are destined to sweep across the country. After we had got Meg up and breakfasted, we set forth for our Saturday morning trip down to Waitrose to see our friends and indeed saw two of them but the third was absent so we hope that she is in good health. After we had made our up the hill and the carers had attended to Meg, I set about preparing our Saturday lunch. I had bought a large chicken, bacon and leek pie which I divided into half as is my wont, cooking one half of it today and freezing the rest for later. Immediately after lunch, I consulted the TV schedules to see if any good films were being shown. Fortunately, there was one which I had seen in a documentary before but not seen the actual film. This was a wartime story entitled ‘The Man who Never Was’ and was the story of one of the greatest acts of political deception instituted by the British during WW2. Basically, the plot was to deceive the Nazis that an intended invasion was to take place through Sicily by taking a corpse, given it an authentic British identity (including papers signed personally by Churchill himself) and then letting the body, released from a submarine, to be carried by the tides to be deposited on the beech of Huelva, near Cadiz in Southern Spain. Here it was almost certain that the body and the briefcase containing papers attached to it would be handed over to the Germans who would then assiduously check out all of the details to attempt to ensure that they were not being duped. The British intelligence officers had done such a thorough job of filling in the ‘back story’ that upon a German agent checking what was possible in London, the identity of the body (actually a European vagrant) was confirmed and so the deception was successful. To my mind, the documentary when it was broadcast several years ago was even more exciting than the film but it is always interesting to see ‘true’ stories as it were.

Returning to the American political scene after a day or so, I note that one opinion poll (which might be a very small and aberrant one) gives Kamala Harris a lead of 8% over Donald Trump. Whether this poll is an accurate indication of public opinion or not, it certainly shows the direction of travel because the Harris campaign has certainly been energised of late whereas the Trump campaign seems to be going nowhere. One of the attack weapons that the Democrats are deploying is that of sarcasm and humour and I feel that the American political system is probably more used to frontal attacks rather than wit or sarcasm. Donald Trump’s running mate, J D Vance has been the object of particular mockery, one of the attack lines being that he uses eyeliner as though he was desperate to attract attention at a disco. But the more serious charge is that it is claimed that he once had sex ‘with a couch’ Now this letter claim is interesting because upon fact checking it is probably untrue. But the political damage arises from the fact that many of the American public do believe that it could be true and herein lies the force of the attack. The Democrats are persisting with their attack line or should I say, attack word, the Republicans are ‘weird’ and this appears to be having an impact. Probably one of the greatest attack lines of all time relates to the incredibly tight race between Nixon and Kennedy in the 1960’s. Richard Nixon, who of course eventually made it to the presidency was defeated by Kennedy. Nixon was one of those men who grow a beard exceptionally strongly and really needed to shave twice a day. But in one famous television broadcast, Nixon had forgotten to have a second shave for that day and when he appeared on TV had a slightly dark and sinister appearance to his jowls. The attack line from the Kennedy camp was ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’ and reinforced the view that Richard Nixon was not to be trusted and thus deserved another soubriquet which as ‘tricky Dicky’ In the British political system, wit and humour is much appreciated in the House of Commons on both sides of the political divide. The master of this was undoubtedly Denis Healey, the veteran Labour politician who once described Margaret Thatcher as ‘Atilla the Hen’. Another political opponent was Geoffrey Howe who had a rather dreamy and languorous appearance although he was actually quite a smart cookie, as the Americans say. Denis Healey said of Geoffrey Howe that to be attacked politically by him was like ‘being savaged by a dead sheep’ One knows that these attacks are hitting their target when opposition laughs as much at the joke as one’s own side. One of the best opponents of the art of the amusing ‘bon mot’ was the Labour MP Tony Banks who made his reputation as a wit on the Labour back benches. Eventually, he was given a junior position in the Government as a junior minister for sport and his observation upon this was ‘I am completely gobsmacked. It is a bit like going to heaven without having to die first.’ In fact, it does not take much searching on the web using the search term of ‘the wit and wisdom of Tony Banks’ to find a whole slew of the amusing put downs of which Tony Banks was the master.

There is a hint in some of the American media that Trump might be exhibiting some of the first signs of dementia, or at least a degree of paranoid behaviour. Such is the opinion of an American psychiatrist but I am pretty sure that American psychiatrists are barred by the code of ethics of their own professional association not to diagnose at a distance but this principle seems to be more honoured in the breach than the observance. But even on a straight political level, Trump does not seem to be conducting a ‘normal’ political campaign. Three months from election day itself, one would imagine that there would be lots of visits to the crucial ‘swing’ states but Trump seems to be holed up in his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida rather than campaigning in the normal way. Trump has recently claimed that he has drawn a bigger crowd than the celebrated Martin Luther King in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech but this may be yet another indication of Trump’s delusional grasp of reality.

Today our domestic help called around as a change from her usual day on a Wednesday and it is always good to see her and to have a chat. Last night, Meg had a rather disturbed evening so the night’s rest was not as restful as it could be. I had recommended our newly found cafe, ‘The Lemon Tree‘ to our domestic help and she had taken along three of the residents of the home where she works for a treat in the form of a knickerbocker glory. We met up with our University of Birmingham friend, as we did last Friday and our conversations are always something to which we look forward. However, we shall not be seeing him for about ten days as he has some family obligations this weekend and then is off for a continental holiday to do what I suspect is some delightful walking in the mountains. Our son and his wife are also away for the next ten days so I will feel a little bereft so I must find other some diversions to take my mind off the absence of a holiday. Meg and I used to have a holiday in late September to coincide with our wedding anniversary and Meg’s proximate birthday and then a winter holiday in late January in the inter-semester period when I was at work in the university. Our last holiday was planned to be in Porto in Portugal at just about the time that the pandemic struck us all down so I suppose it is the best part of five years since Meg and I actually holiday together, abroad at least.

With the Olympic Games approaching their end stages, I have been thinking about how the athletes cope with success and with failure. One of the lessons that must be very hard to learn is that success or failure is not always due to one’s own efforts but what is happening around you. This was dramatically illustrated in the case of Josh Kerr, the British 1500 metre runner who had his sights solely set on securing a gold medal. He was so intent on beating his long time rival (which he did) and actually ran a personal best, securing both a UK and European record, that he failed to notice an American who made an amazing last few seconds sprint to secure the gold medal and beat Kerr by 0.14 second. My point here is Kerr achieved a silver despite putting practically a ‘gold medal’ performance. Similarly, in many Olympic sports a medal might be secured, even a gold medal, because a very near competitor made a critical error which cost them the ultimate title. The gold medal winner in these cases is unlikely to say that possession of the gold medal was not due to his or her own performance but was due to the failure of a rival. So the wider point I am making here is the behaviour of others around you may help to account for ultimate success or failure. After I had submitted my PhD thesis and was waiting for the critical three month period in which the thesis was being tread and evaluated, I typically walked to the college where I worked at a distance of about a mile. So I had plenty of time on my own to contemplate whether I was going to succeed or to fail and so I had to keep asking myself, as someone who has enjoyed a modicum of academic success in my lifetime, how I was coping with the prospect of failure. After all, it is easy to cope with success but for how many of us is it difficult to cope with failure? At the time, one of my best academic colleagues, a much younger but brilliant young scholar who was just on the point of submitting his own PhD, gave me an excellent piece of advice. I must confess this colleague had a very wise head on young shoulders and he advised me that it was not unusual after a PhD had been submitted and examined that some additional work had to be done, for example a particular chapter to be rewritten. So it proved to be in my own case as my examiner towards the end of what I thought was a successful ‘viva voce’ defence of the thesis mentioned that he had looked in vain for evidence of ‘Fourth generation evaluation methodologies’ Of these I had never heard (nor had the other two examiners either) so I did undertake an additional piece of fieldwork, wrote a chapter incorporating the aforementioned methodologies and was duly award my PhD after a total research time of only about 2-3 substantive years. I was subsequently to discover from a lecturer at Birmingham University who I knew from my conference circuit days that this particular External Examiner invariably asked his examinees to go the extra mile as they say and to make revisions and or augmentation of the submitted viva. In some ways, this made me feel better once I learned this as I am of the view that the quality of a PhD is of the Chief Examiner who approves it rather than the actual university which awarded it. But I have known some excellent colleagues in my time who have had a setback in their ‘viva voce’ examination (as indeed I did) but who subsequently did not go on to complete their PhD although I am sure they were both very worthy candidates. Earlier in my life, I had attempted to climb the Three Peaks of Yorkshire; (Pen-y-Gent, Whernside and Ingleborough) where you are regarded as competent by the Leeds and Bradford hiking club if you can complete the entire three mountain ascent/descent and the distances between them within a twelve hour period. My first two attempts to do this ended in failure but I was successful in my third attempt. I think the choice of a good walking companion was crucial in this respect because I was a fast starter but a slow finisher whereas my companion (best man at our wedding) was the reverse. Consequently, I got us around the first part of the trek and my companion the second half so again, this reinforces the point that success may depend upon the people around you as well as your own individual efforts. For the ‘Thee Peaks’ of Yorkshire, pone had to sign in with a starting time to a log book in a little cafe in Horton-in-Ribblesdale which was the starting point. Hence, it could be judged whether you had completed the round maintain trip within twelve hours and, if so, could purchase a little plaque to hang somewhere in one’s house if so inclined.

Last night, I watched the UK runner, Josh Kerr, whose ambition it was to land a gold medal in the 1500 metres. Although he was in the lead with a few metres from the tape, he was so intent on beating his long time rivalI(which he did) that an American runner ‘snuck up’ on the outside with an incredible sprint to secure the gold medal for the US. Later on in the evening, I took the opportunity to Skype my University of Winchester friend and we were chatting with each for the best part of a couple of hours. We share a lot of notes as well as emotional support concerning the condition of our respective wives who both have long term health conditions and we had not been in touch for some weeks and hence the long Skype call. So it was fairly late when I got to bed but Meg and I both seemed to have quite a good night’s sleep. This morning, being a Thursday, is my shopping day and it was not long after breakfast when our sitter arrived, a young psychology graduate with an incredibly sunny disposition, so I got the shopping sone and then we took Meg into the kitchen so that the carer and myself could put the shopping away.

Overnight, we awoke to what must be good news. Yesterday evening, the police were intimating that they might have to attend up to 100 Far Right demonstrations or more accurately confrontations right across the country. But the government and police are determined to crack down hard on this Far Right thuggery and already some of the rioters have appeared before courts and have been sentenced to quite hefty prison sentences. The government machine is also publishing the mug shots of those given a custodial sentence and the hope is that this will act as a deterrent to demonstrations in the next few days ahead. But what happened last night was remarkable. It looks as though Anti-racist groups as well as ordinary citizens had come out in force to defend their communities against Far Right attack. In particular, as the Far Right were intending to target hotels in which it is known that asylum seekers have been given accommodation, then the anti-racist groups had managed to assemble great numbers in front of the hotels and other Far Right targets to form a massive human shield. So when the Far Right did turn up, it was not in the anticipated numbers and they seemed powerless to vent their ill-will when faced with the massed ranks of the individuals across the country. So they generally slunk away without causing any of the mayhem that we have come to expect in the past few days and the government, police and most of the rest of the country must be breathing a massive collective sigh of relief. So far, the Government strategy of confronting the Far Right with immediate force and judicial sanctions seems to be working but of course we shall have to see what happens in the weekend ahead. The more cynical amongst us are crying out for some rain (as indeed it has rained today) because this always seems to have a dampening effect upon those who wish to continue the rampages of the past few days. The government is also intending to pursue those who use the social media to promote random acts of violence across the community and are also trying to hold the social media companies themselves to account but I doubt that they have the wherewith all to challenge the social media companies head on.

In the late morning, we spent a certain amount of time watching the Olympics. We witnessed some sailing although it is a little difficulty to discern what is going on at times, quite a lot of the mens spring board diving (at which the two Chinese athletes excelled) and our two divers made a bit of a hash of things after their success in the synchro diving and finally some Taekwondo which did not interest us greatly. Then I pressed on with making a stir-fry of a fairly traditional nature for me (onions, sweet peppers, fragments of ham ends, tomatoes, petit pois, some gravy leftovers, a diced apple, some sultanas and a dessert spoonful of brown sugar, served on some basmati rice and with a big dollop of yogurt. I always tend to make a it too much of this mixture but I can always eat up the rest as a bite of supper. After that, having enjoyed ‘Pride and Prejudice’ so much over the last few days, we followed it up with ‘Sense and Sensibility’. This was a complete film but we watched the first half of it and will follow up with the second half tomorrow.

On the other side of the Atlantic, it looks as though Kamala Harris is slowly starting to pull ahead of Donald Trump in the race to the White House. One particular tactic of the Harris team, particularly after the choice of a running mate for Harris, is to poke fun at Trump, repeating the observation that he and his coterie are weird. Politicians can often cope with direct attacks but to be made fun off or be ridiculed, they all seem to find very difficult.There are some indication s also that Trump and the Trump campaign is imploding, or at least finding if difficult to cope with attacks made upon them. Trump’s running mate, Vance, attended a meeting of Republicans the other day which was very sparsely attended and his past pronouncements on women has made him the object of ridicule. Trump himself seemed to be promising that if Christians voted for him, they would never need to vote again – all of this adds to the sense of weirdness and unreality.The whole election, though, will be decided by comparatively few voters in about half a dozen swing states. It is almost certain, though, that if Trump loses the election narrowly, he will cry cheat, refuse to accept the result and bring out his supporters onto the streets. So we may see something approaching a civil war after the November elections.

Today is the day when our domestic help generally calls around but this week her visit to us was being postponed until Friday. So after breakfast, I popped down into town to collect our newspaper and then Meg and I made our way to the park, where we consumed our elevenses. On the way down the hill, we chanced across our Italian friend and had a few words with her about the crash across the road from her house before we made our down the hill. On the way we received a call on our mobile from one of the occupational therapists so I was having to conduct quite a lengthy conversation with her on the one hand whilst steering Meg down the hill in the wheelchair on the other. The upshot of all of this is that we are to expect a visit from one of the OT team next Wednesday so we will need to prepare ourselves and make sure that we are ‘at home’ for when she calls. There are a few issues that we need to discuss but I am glad that we are actually getting a face-to-face visit as there is a limit to what can be communicated over the phone. When we got home, one of our neighbours had pushed a copy of the local newspaper through our front door where the crash that we witnessed last week was the front page news. Having passed the crash site several times in the past week, I have now calculated that if we had arrived on the footpath some two seconds earlier than we did and if the crashed car’s steering wheel had veered to the right rather than the left then Meg and I would almost certainly have wiped out by the oncoming car. The other experience in my life that was vaguely similar to this was the incident that occurred in 1973 when I was employed at Leicester Polytechnic where I was moving from a lecture in one part of the campus to a seminar in other building. The Polytechnic campus straggled a main road and at a ‘T’ junction, the driver of a Hillman Imp fainted at the wheel, crossed straight over the ‘T’ junction and sent me flying (breaking both legs in the process) and carrying the two students with whom I was conversing on its bonnet through some iron railings and piling them against the wall of an adjacent building. Meg’s father to whom we recounted the accident in all of its gory detail asked the rather naive question why I did not jump out of the way in time. We had to point out that a car travelling at 40mph is covering approx 60 feet per second and as I saw the car crossing the centre line of the road I had approximately a quarter of a second to jump out of the way. This was just about enough for my brain to register to my legs to not continue walking forward and thus I was dealt a glancing blow and thrown in the air and out of the way of the body of the car which probably saved me from even more serious injury. I have a further two instances where the coordination between eye and brain assumes some importance. At Leicester Polytechnic, there was installed what was known as a ‘pater noster’ lift which resembles a series of cubicles strung together in a long elliptical chain and which made its progress up and down the building. To use the lift, one was meant to approach it and then step into it (to ascend) or of it (when alighting at the appropriate floor) Sometimes, if one was in a hurry, there was great temptation to jump onto a rapidly ascending cubicle but by the time one’s eye had judged this and the brain activated one’s jumping muscles, then the pater noster lift had ascended by several crucial inches by the time you actually arrived at. Consequently, one had to learn to ‘over jump’ i.e. to jump to where you learnt to judge the cubicle had actually arrived rather than one’s first sight of it. We also had a paster noster lift installed at Salford University where I studied for my MSc and where the Duke of Edinburgh as Chancellor was called upon to open a new building where the lift was installed. The story was often told how some adventurous postgraduate students stood on their heads as the cubicle went ‘over the top’ (which was itself quite a nerve wracking experience) to the astonishment of the visiting royal party to whom the innovative new lift was being shown. One of these lifts was installed at Newcastle University and it had the most tremendous crash but in July when all of the student population had departed – but if the lift had been populated there would have been several casualties. The Health and Safety Executive immediately slapped a ‘stop’ order on all of these lifts throughout the country and subsequently they were judged to be too difficult to maintain or dangerous to operate so they were withdrawn throughout the country. A second instance of ‘eye and ‘brain’ concerned running for a bus where one made a leap for the wide platform towards the rear of the bus. Again, one had to learn to ‘overjump’ as the bus had moved on a foot or so by the time your body actually arrived at it. I am sure there must have been accidents all over the country with people running for and not quite catching their intended targets.

This afternoon, Meg and I were just settling down to enjoy the last episode of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ when the doorbell rang and it was hairdresser who had arrived to cut Meg’s hair and my own but which I had failed to put on our planning board. The hairdresser and I put our heads together and we scoured the internet to find a special hairdressing bowl so that Meg’s hair can be washed ‘in situ’ the morning before the hairdresser actually arrives. Our hairdresser had been coming to us for the best part of fifteen years now and so knows our situation intimately so it is easy for she and I to collaborate to give Meg’s hair the attention that it needs. Meg and I have a planning whiteboard in our kitchen upon which we mark up forthcoming appointments but on occasions, the writing of a new entry can rub out an existing one and I think this must have happened on this occasion.

Tuesdays are our traditional Waitrose gathering days and today was no exception. I was particularly pleased to welcome back our inveterate fell walker who had been confined to her own house after a fall had rather incapacitated her shoulder. On the other hand, one of our other regulars did not make it into our company today and this is always a source of concern less she has a bout of illness. After our elevenses and the purchase of some excellent low alcohol lager which is stocked in the store, we made our way home getting ourselves for our ‘sit’ visit which is, in theory, is devoted to my Pilates session. In practice, I tend to go out and do some crucial non-food shopping in the High Street. I had a particular mission today which was two fold. First I needed to go to the Post Office to return a watch I had purchased back to Amazon as when it arrived, the hands were almost unreadable across the face of the watch and distinctively different to the illustration on the web. Amazon now has a system where one takes the item to be returned back to the Post Office where, facilitated by the QR code on one’s iPhone, it gets returned directly to Amazon and a refund is offered immediately. Then I needed to go onto the High Street to buy myself a new watch as my previous one seems to have given up the ghost after about seven or eight years of daily use. There is a stall on the High Street that sells cheap watches and I needed to make an instant decision between a dark face with silver hands and a white face with black hands. On the spur of the moment, I chose the latter so I now have a watch which looks exceptionally plain but is absolutely functional and has a warranty both on the watch and also on the battery. I was also pleased to be able to purchase a watch with a leather (rather than a metallic) strap already attached and so I dashed back home again. Then it was time for a quick burst of watching the diving on the Olympics before I prepared our conventional lunch for a Tuesday of fishcakes accompanied by microwaved vegetables. The afternoon turned out to be very fine so immediately lunch was over, I seized the opportunity to take Meg into the back garden and to get the back lawn cut. This we managed to do before the care workers were due to arrive to organise Meg’s afternoon comfort call after which Meg and I resumed our viewing of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ on the BBC iPlayer, the first part of which we so enjoyed yesterday.

I have been reflecting upon the wave of riots sweeping the country in which the Far Right have taken the opportunity to capitalise upon the discontents in the country as a whole. To my mind, there seems to be quite an association between the towns and cities experiencing the riots and the Brexit ‘Leave’ voting areas – Hampshire and Surrey are hardly going up in flames. The common factor is evidently those communities that have felt left behind and the last government’s rhetoric of ‘levelling up’ never seriously addressed these inequalities. The most that levelling up seemed to achieve was to invite one deprived community to vie with another for some limited funds to improve town centres which hardly started to address the scale of the problem. Like many others, I am appalled at a personal level at the levels and scales of violence we have seen displayed nightly on our TV screens and I also am in favour of the policies that the present government is adopting of having enhanced role for the courts in quickly arresting, charging and convicting those guilty of the rioting. However, it must be said that these policies are treating the symptoms rather than the causes of the present discontent. The question has to be asked whether once the rioters have been dealt with appropriately and expeditiously by the courts, what is being done to remedy the more fundamental causes. I am reminded of a remark associated with an early 20th century reformer that his aim was ‘to drain the swamp, not pull people out of it’ and of course what is implied here is a massive shift in the economic and social fabric of the country which I do not think is part of the agenda of the modern Labour party even with its huge majority. I have always found it interesting that when asylum seekers were dispersed to various hotels in towns and cities across the country, those communities were chosen in which not only were costs kept down but also the communities so chosen had the least amount of political power to resist. For example, Stoke on Trent and the Potteries have experienced a fairly massive decline over the past few decades and it is perhaps no accident that areas such as these often housed both asylum seekers on the one hand and were the highest voting Brexit areas on the other. So the affluent middle classes may feel quite justified in throwing up their hands in horror at the rioting that has been experienced but their communities have not been asked to accept asylum seekers in their midst. There are many communities in which asylum seekers are accepted by the local community and the indigenous population has made the greatest of efforts to make asylum seekers welcome but it is equally the case that this is not universal.

Kamala Harris has now chosen her Running mate for VP, a relative unknown called Tim Waltz. But he has already made considerable waves by attaching the appellation of ‘weird’ to Donald Trump and his coterie and this notion of ‘weirdness’ is certainly gaining a lot of traction. At the same time, doubts are being cast upon Trump’s mental facility not to mention his emotional outbursts and there even some hitherto loyal Republicans who had hitched their wagons to the Trump star who are now seriously thinking of ‘unhitching’ them. Whereas a month ago the Republicans looked strong and united and the Democrats in complete disarray, the positions seem to have completely reversed and the Trump camp is showing some indications of starting to panic. The view that Trump is himself too old and his mental health as problematic is gaining quite a lot of ground. Of course, there are three months to go before the election in November and much can happen between now and then. But it has to be said that the Harris campaign seems to be slowly gaining ground whilst the Trump campaign is slowly losing support.

The day started off a little overcast this morning but after we had Meg up and breakfasted it looked as though the weather was set to improve. Just before we did the breakfast washing up, we decided to treat ourselves to a little relaxation to see that the YouTube algorithm has got to offer us and we were given a rendition of Mozart Piano Concerto No 24 which we actually know quite well but didn’t realise it until we heard it once more. YouTube is a constant source of delight to us with the occasional irritation that you can be ten minutes into a performance and then the display ‘freezes’. This happened twice to us this morning and I generally back out of YouTube altogether and then pop back in again to see if the internet connection has reset itself which it quite often does. It makes a bit of change to the succession of depressing news from the wave of violence sweeping the UK and the wall-to-wall Olympics. So after breakfast, we decided to engage in our new ‘Monday routine’ which involves a longer walk than usual and includes the ascension of a small hillock upon which the local Anglican church is built and where the cemetery path leads into town. We took the opportunity whilst traversing the High Street to get to our local bank where we could access its ATM and then proceeded on the ‘Lemon Tree‘ cafe which is a new find for us. When we got into the (deserted) coffee bar, the grandmother of the two girls who now run the shop greeted me and said she recognised my voice from last week at this time. It turns out that we were both members of the our church’s parochial council although I have had to resign from the same. We then chatted quite a lot about our various experiences in catering where I could recount some stories from the various part-time jobs I had at the Old Swan hotel in Harrogate. Then we were a little short of time so had to make a rapid exit for home but got a telephone call from the care agency when we were half way home asking us if we could make do with one carer rather ham two in the middle of the day as their schedules had been thrown into disarray by a local road closure. But when we got home, the two care workers were already waiting for us as they had used their SatNavs to negotiate a way round the road closure. By the way, this type of event does not seem that unusual and there seems to be some kind of traffic problem for the care agency staff at least once or twice per week.

This afternoon after lunch, Meg and I thought we needed a break from the Olympics and sought out a version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ on either YouTube or the BBC iPlayer. We had to navigate our way around clips from the film or ‘paid for’ versions on YouTube. We did start to watch an American made version on YouTube so the acting so unbelievably bad we actually wondered whether the whole thing was a parody and was designed to be laughed at rather than enjoyed. So it was relief that we found on iPlayer the Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle version which is regarded by some as the definitive and finest version ever made. The actors playing the part of both Mr and Mrs Bennett senior are also excellent in their way and added tremendously to our enjoyment. There were some wonderful lines delivered with real panache which showed off Jane Austen’s wit to the fullest. The pomposity of Mr Collins is brilliantly portrayed and one can imagine Jane Austen giggling to herself when she put the words into her character’s mouth. When I was 15, I was exposed to ‘Emma’ and although I enjoy the book now, I certainly did not then. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether Jane Austen’s work is a little too subtle for adolescents unless one has a very skilful teacher of English literature. Once when I was in a Winchester bookshop, I saw a book evidently written in the Austen style called ‘The unexpurgated Jane Austen’ and this was hilarious. The style of the dialogue mimicked Austen’s beautifully but there were some wicked lines in it. I remember the conversation between Jane Austen and her publisher in which the latter was admonishing the author by indicating that phrases in it such as ‘That ****** [obscenity] Mr Bingham’ really had to be excised before publication.

Now that the British general election is well and truly over, my attention is very much engaged with what is happening over the water. Kamala Harris is holding last interviews on Sunday to test the chemistry with her final vice president contenders as she gears up to announce her 2024 running mate in the next 48 hours. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro will meet with Harris at her Washington DC residence,The New York Times reported. Harris’s final meetings are intended to test the chemistry with the prospective veeps before heading out on the campaign trail. They all hail from states considered to be battlegrounds this November, giving them an edge in the selection process. Walz, Kelly and Shapiro have been highly visible across cable news in the past few weeks, defending Harris’s record and taking on the traditional VP role of attack dog. Walz in particular has had success by labelling Republican rival Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance as ‘weird’ in reaction to Vance’s old comments – describing Democratic politicians as childless cat ladies’ and arguing that Americans with children should have more influence at the ballot box – resurfacing. Meanwhile Senator Lindsey Graham has a clear message for former President Donald Trump: Stop targeting Vice President Kamala Harris over her race and focus on her political record instead. In a recent interview on Fox News Sunday, the South Carolina senator, who has long supported Trump, expressed concern over the former president’s ongoing attacks on Harris’ race and heritage. Graham made it clear that his issue with Harris is her ‘bad judgment, not her background.’ So, here’s what I would say to President Trump, Graham advised, as reported by Business Insider. The problem I have with Kamala Harris is not her heritage; it’s her judgment. Every day, we’re talking about her heritage and not her terrible, dangerous liberal record throughout her entire political life.’