We were looking forward to today for two principal reasons. Tuesdays are the day when we meet up with our friends in Waitrose. Also we were looking forward to the journey down the hill using the new wheelchair recently supplied to Meg. As we suspected, the larger wheels at the back (12″ rather than 7″) both made the ride somewhat smoother and also made the negotiation of kerbs somewhat easier as well. We got down the hill in less than 20 minutes so the new chair must have made some kind of impact. But when we got to Waitrose, some kind of domestic engineering crisis had befallen the cafeteria and it was closed until the problem was resolved. We made the best of a bad job and fortunately finding some spare cups in the little bag we carry with us managed to avail ourselves of the free coffee that Waitrose offers to its customers on production of the store card. One of the friendly staff took pity on us and helped us negotiate some special arrangements but we were obliged to sit outside and we had the traffic noise with which to contend. Nonetheless, we had the opportunity for some social contact with each other, not under the best of circumstances and as we were all ready to depart, they got the cafe open again after an obligatory clean down. As the carers were due to make an earlier mid-morning visit this morning, we were obliged to leave a tad earlier than we had intended but still got up the hill in time. Then the carers called and after seeing to Meg, one of them stayed on as it was her Tuesday ‘sitting’ session. I had made Meg some chicken soup as she was complaining of the cold a little and persuaded the carer to have some as well as she had not had any breakfast. Then I went out on the road, as I needed to get some petrol for the mower and get some cash from an ATM. Getting the petrol was straightforward but for the mower, I always buy the highest quality and octane) that there is to reduce the ethanol addition which can absorb moisture and cause problems in petrol mowers. This having been done, I entertained the carer with a bit of my family history (which she was keen to know) and then pressed ahead with our normal Tuesday lunch which is haddock fishcakes and microwaved vegetables. Whilst I had been out, the wheelchair for which I had successfully bid on eBay before I had been informed hat the NHS were going to supply a wheelchair arrived incredibly well packed. I have unpacked this largely but it sill needs the footrests fitting in which may prove a little complicated but we shall see. The wheelchair happens to be exactly the same make and model as the NHS supplied one which is interesting as the manual supplied with the NHS model will cover both machines. The carer helped me to give Meg some lunch although Meg did not seem very hungry today and we did not manage to get much food inside her. After lunch, the weather seemed set fair and I had just bought the petrol I needed, I decided to squeeze in a cutting of the front lawns before the mid afternoon carers arrived. I was praying for them to be late and indeed they were as one of their jobs and schedules had been re-timed. Under the circumstances, though, I was delighted to get the lawns cut and the mower cleaned up before the carers arrived. Incidentally, I always spray the underside of the mower hood with a WD40 preparation and I have started to do this quite liberally as it seems to prevent the grass sticking on subsequent mows and this makes for a smoother and more trouble free mow all round.

Last night after Meg seemed to soundly asleep, I indulged myself a little by watching the last few minutes of the Portugal-Slovenia match in the Euro finals. Normally my sympathies are with the Hispanic teams (including Portugal) but today they seemed to be playing in rather a pedestrian fashion (like England) and the Slovenes seemed to be playing with more spirit and enterprise. So as the extra time progressed, my sympathies switched and now it was time for the penalties.In the penalty shootout, the Portuguese goalie was stupendously good saving each of the first three Slovenian penalties. I do not not think I can ever remember seeing a goalkeeper save three successive penalties before and the penalties were all good shots. But from this point on, Portugal could claim quite an easy victory all, when in all honesty, it looked as though Slovenia had played the better football. I joked with one of the carers today that when England play Switzerland over the weekend, they will probably play the better football and lose rather than playing their normal lack lustre game that they then go on to win.

We now only have a day and half of the election campaign yet to run. I saw a Treasury spokesman banging about tax as usual and their argument was that as Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor had not explicitly ruled out a particular tax then the Labour party must be intending to introduce it. Again, we got the £2,000 per household figure trotted out again together with some tax changes which the Labour party has already ruled out so the Newsnight interviewer was driven in exasperation to accuse the Try Minister of a lie which is a word not to be lightly used these days. There has apparently been an enormous increase in the numbers of postal votes this time around and there is quite an ugly situation in Scotland where postal votes have been sent out in the middle of a holiday period and there is a Royal Mail dispute to complicate matters so it is an interesting question whether these factors bubble away for a bit and then explode after the event, particularly of a seat is won by a handful of votes and the delayed postal vote would have made all the difference. I also think that non-registered voters attempting to vote on Thursday without photo ID may well prove to be quite a big story as the election analysis unfolds.

The day started off gloomy and we knew that we would probably have to stay at home for most of the morning as we anticipated that a wheelchair was due to be delivered to us this morning. After the care workers failed to arrive at the appointed hour, we received a telephone call from the care agency explaining that they were short of staff after a couple phoned in sick. We were offered the option of the manager himself if I were to assist him and since this constituted a wait of only half an hour instead of an hour and a half, this we readily accepted. So the care agency manager and I worked as a team and just before our tasks were completed, the wheelchair arrived. We had a minimal amount of unpacking of it to do and so we could hoist Meg into it. At first sight, it is probably going to prove to an excellent improvement for us. The diameter of the wheels on our current wheelchair is 7.5″ whereas the rear wheels on the newly supplied chair are 12.25″ which is some 60% bigger. This will mean that apart from the extra resilience of the tyres, the larger rear wheels will make the job of mounting/dismounting kerbs when they have not been dropped sufficiently so much easier. In addition, the new chair came complete with a pressure cushion and this lifts Meg that much higher on the ground, thus helping to keep her feet clear of obstacles. So far, we have only wheeled Meg around the house but tomorrow being a Tuesday will probably be the acid test when I wheel Meg down for one of our weekly coffee meetings. The chair is made locally and the materials used in its construction seem quite high so I am very grateful to the powers that be for supplying it. I have actually checked out that this is Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust which is evidently funded by the NHS and not by local authorities. However, I do intend to send a note of thanks to our doctor whose completion of the form evidently hit ‘all of the right buttons’ because once the form had been submitted, then the wheelchair was supplied relatively quickly. I had heard horror stories of a wait of up to 18 weeks and hence I am more delighted that the service has been provided so quickly. Having said that, I have found motorists and pedestrians to be remarkably accommodating when they have observed me pushing Meg in her conveyance up and down the local highways. I suspect that this tolerance is much more than might be accorded to young mothers with children in buggies as the children are so much lighter and the mothers so much younger and fitter than applies to Meg and myself.

Last night there was much excitement, if that is the right word, over the England v. Slovakia football match. Slovakia scored a goal in the first half whilst the performance of England, a step up from the recent past but not a great deal better, was generally regarded as dire. Six minutes of injury time were to be played and the commentators were all gloomily discussing the consequences of an early England exit from the competition having been well and truly beaten. For some reason, the England players do not seem to run at the competition and I wonder if they are really frightened by them all or do not have the skills or the speed to get past them. The English players constantly pass the ball sideways to each other in their own third of the pitch and progress up the pitch is painfully slow. The whole nation was just about reconciled to a humiliating England defeat when the almost local (Stourbridge) hero, Jude Bellingham, produced the most stunning overhead kick to score an equaliser. Then injury time was played and the England captain, Harry Kane, scored the winning goal with a header one minute into injury time. So we had the extraordinary spectacle that England has scarcely had a shot on goal for some 95 minutes and then produce two goals in two minutes to win the match. So the speculation that the England manager must go immediately was stilled for the moment but will no doubt start all over again at the point at which we will get beaten by the Swiss when we meet them in a few days time. This is must have been one of the greatest ‘get out of jail’ performances of all time and one wonders how long the England team can survive if they play as poorly as this.

The United States Supreme Court, stuffed full of Trump nominees have issued a ruling concerning whether Trump should be immune from prosecution for the attacks upon the Capital building after the last election. The Court have made a ‘non-decision’ which is actually a decision saying that Trump would be immune from prosecution for ‘official’ acts but not for ‘unofficial’ acts and the case is to be sent back to lower courts. This case will not get through the system before the presidential elections in November and has therefore played right into Trump’s hands. If re-elected and a further court case is decided against him whilst he is in office, he will just dismiss the charges against him. The separation of powers (between the executive, legislative and judicial arms of government) are flagrantly not working in the American constitution as they should and it looks as though, once again, Trump has stared into the abyss and got away with it.

Beth Rigby, the renowned Sky News political correspondent, is arguing that the shape of the final results on Thursday will very much depend on how the recently formed Reform party fare. They are currently only some 4 percentage points behind the Tories (at 16% whilst the Tories are on 20%) but, of course, it all depends on how the vote pans out in individual constituencies around the land. There are only two and a half days left now for any bombshells to land and I am waiting for them to be launched shortly.

Today being a Sunday, we enter into ‘Sunday’ routines which means watching the politics programmes from about 8.30 onwards. In theory, today being the last Sunday before the election, Laura Kuenssberg was interviewing the Prime Minister and although she kept pressing him about the hurt felt after years of falling living standards, we got the familiar litany of dire warnings about what would happen were a Labour government to be elected. I really do feel that the Tories whole mindset seems to be that they have a God-given right to be elected and anything else is regarded as an abomination of nature rather than a normal ‘cycle’ of politics. When I was first employed o the scientific civil service, my then boss seemed to have the most ‘non-politically’ partisan view of politics because he seemed to regard each ‘side’ as though they were football teams. I can now almost hear him now saying ‘Well that lot have had a go for a number of years so let the other lot have a go for a change’ Having said that, I do feel that the British populace as a whole is less knowledgable about the political process than many of our continental neighbours. In one of the community studies which was required reading when I was a student, there was a sign in a pub mentioned with great approbation declaiming ‘No Politics, No Religion – no good friends all!’ Although this is a gross generalisation, I do have impression that with a more developed cafe culture, our continental neighbours can and do have more sophisticated political discussion without falling out with each other. I think that part of the problem is that the British electorate are kept quite ill-informed about the political process and are quite frankly bored with the very mention of politics. In days gone by, there used to be an element of the school curriculum called ‘Civics’ but this has long since disappeared. I think that successive governments have strongly discouraged any kind of political education in schools and colleges whatsoever fearing that the young might be subject to ‘political indoctrination’ by idealistic young teachers. As part of the Business Studies curriculum in my academic career, we often had a subject called something like ‘British Political Landscape’ in which we would teach subjects like how Parliament works in passing legislation, what is meant by the ‘separation of powers’ and so on. I found the reaction of my students to be interesting. At first, they argued that they knew hardly anything and cared even less and they were not looking forward to this part of he curriculum. But once exposed to some elementary facets of the British Constitution, their eyes were opened (at least a little) and they did start to tell me that they quite enjoyed the subject if only because something that was a totally closed book to them was gradually opened and they used to tell me that the more they knew, the more they felt that they wanted to know. But of course, we have the best part of four more days to live through before voting starts next Thursday. The critical moment in the forthcoming week is going to be a few seconds after 10.00pm next Thursday night when voting is officially closed and, by tradition, the very first exit polls about the forthcoming result can be published. These exit polls are pretty accurate as a whole because the sample is large and the question asked is not how do you intend to vote but rather how did you actually vote (or not vote) in today’s election.

Tomorrow, I am looking forward to the delivery of a wheelchair for Meg and naturally I am hoping that it may make the journey down into town somewhat smoother for Meg. Of course, it is always possible that whatever is delivered is less suited for this purpose than the very basic wheelchair that we purchased months ago and have been using ever since. We have to make ourselves stay in all morning until it is delivered some time in the morning between 9.30 and 12.30. I have also been thinking about what a potential solution might be to the absence of a pavement linking the road where we live to the main Kidderminster Road. Nothing is going to happen for quite some time because the relevant County Counsellor is on holiday for the next two weeks and even if she were to take action immediately upon her return (which I doubt) then she would probably request that the equivalent of the Borough Engineer’s department make an assessment of the situation. In the meantime, though, I think I may have come up with a solution to the problem which would not involve narrowing the road or taking land from neighbour’s fronting the roadway, each of which is not practicable. In the carpark adjacent to our local Waitrose, there are dedicated ‘walking zones’ in which once one has parked one’s car one can walk to the store presumably in relevant safety. Borrowing from this idea, I wonder whether a pedestrian or cycle ‘pathway’ could be marked out on the road so that we could walk in this area when necessary and passing motorists could intuit that they were meant to give us a wide berth. As a kind of thought experiment, I wondered that if we had brought the problem of a lack of safe walking space to the relevant authorities and we were injured by a passing motorist, whether the local authority could be fined a massive amount for failing to ensure our safety – particularly as Meg is a wheelchair user. We will have to see what happens and I do not intend to bring this solution to the attention of the pavement/road authorities immediately as I want to see what their solution might happen to be.

For lunch today, we had a slightly experimental meal which turned out fine. I had bought some chicken breast pieces and these I seared off and then immersed in a korma sauce before serving with a baked potato and some broccoli. This made for a very nice meal but it would have been improved if I had not left the korma sauce on a little too long and it was in danger of burning and sticking onto the pan.

The day dawned bright and clear but the carers were a little delayed this morning which meant that we had to get breakfast over in a bit of a rush before we started our journey down into Waitrose where we met up with our normal ‘gang’ of three old ladies making five of us altogether. Rather cheekily, I asked one of the three who I know is a fairly keen gardener if she had any mint growing in her garden and could she possible let me a small root of it. Although mint is meant to grow absolutely prolifically, it never seems to do so in my garden so I was hopeful that if I had a root of mint it would spread. Our friend not only brought me quite a large root of mint in a pot but she also made a present (to all three of us) of some strawberries grown in her garden as she did last year. These gifts were gratefully received and we will certainly have the strawberries for our tea this evening.

I was up a bit in the middle of the night and engaged in a couple of things that I would not really have time to do during the day. The first thing was to update my ‘potteries-and-chairs’ website which has photographs of our furniture acquisitions that we have used to populate our Music lounge. This needed some images adding to it and some editing of the content but at the end of the day I have a gallery of the eleven pieces of furniture we have bought and restored over the past few months. I also have a brief description of the ‘provenance’ of each piece so that I am reminded from whence it was bought and some details of its history, if I know it. So this website is now complete as is the complement of furniture to which it relates. The second thing that I did during the night was to do a quick internet search to see who has responsibility for the maintenance of footpaths throughout the borough. I then ascertained the name of our local councillor and wrote him an email complaining that I needed to push Meg in her wheelchair down the roadway of a local road where there is no pavement but which road is heavily populated with traffic as it is a ‘de facto’ ring road. I requested that the local authority take some action to remedy the danger to myself, not to mention other motorists, when they are faced with the obstruction of a wheelchair being pushed down the road. To my amazement, I got a very sympathetic and almost immediate response to my email, sympathising with my current difficulties. But despite what I have read on the internet, I was informed that both the pavements as well as the roadways are the responsibility of the County Council and therefore of the County Counsellor who would be away for the next two weeks. Nonetheless, my email was being forwarded on to her and I shall be fascinated to see what action, if any, will be taken. I have a fair idea that I already know the answer. Because no pavement was provided some twenty years ago when the houses were built, then the only solution would be to narrow the road (which is not going to happen) or to take a slice off the front of other people’s gardens (which is also not going to happen). So my best guess is that the County highways engineering staff may make an on-site assessment and will conclude that there is nothing that we can do and we have to grin and bear it. But, on the other hand, if a disabled person is pushed down the centre of a busy highway because the local authority cannot or has not provided a pavement, will they be liable for massive damages in the event of a subsequent accident or injury? I have no great hopes in this direction but it is still quite a fascinating exercise to see what excuses the county council will provide to excuse their own deficiencies. But the county counsellor involved also has responsibility for ‘welfare issues’ as well as being a cabinet member, so i wonder what will emerge (but I am not holding my breath)

Once we had returned from our trip out this morning, I contemplated what should be prepared to accompany the quiche I had scheduled for our lunch today. In the end, I boiled a large potato cut into small pieces and then made a salad which turned out to be quite a wise choice given that I did not really want to have a cooked meal today. After we had our lunch and done the washing up, I took Meg outside and I busied myself planting out the root of mint which our friend had so kindly donated to me. I am resolved to water it daily until it establishes itself- to encourage it to get established, I cut the shrub down to two thirds of its original size and hope that this and a bit of TLC will suffice to get it going.

After lunch today, Meg and I listened to ‘Any Questions‘ and its companion programme ‘Any Answers‘ on BBC Radio4 and, of course, this is the last edition before voting day next Thursday. There seemed to be a view shared by the audience members and also by many of the panellists that a six weeks election campaign was too long given that in the past, we have managed a General Election quite happily after a three week campaign. But this time around , there still seem a very large number of undecideds who do not feel inclined to vote for either of the two major political parties. I think that the proportion intending to vote for the two large parties is at an all time low and of I had to make some predictions for next Thursday, it would be that turnout will be down (on there might seem to be little point in voting if the outcome already seems clear) and/or that the smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Reform might receive more votes than they anticipated at the start of the campaign.

Today being a Friday, we had no particular commitments or engagements in mind. Last night, after Meg had been put to bed we decided to put our little TV into position so that Meg and I could both view the last ‘Question Time‘ before the election. To make myself comfortable, instead of sitting on the chair by Meg’s bedside, I lay on the ‘Z’ bed I have besides Meg’s bed but then I promptly fell asleep whilst Meg stayed awake for the whole of the broadcast which was not quite what I had either intended or desired. Then I was up in the middle of the night making Meg comfortable but at least we got off to a proper sleep by about 12.30 I think it was. This morning, our son called around and knew of my computer problems with the laptop in our Music Lounge. Instead of looking for a non-existent WiFi switch on the externals of the machine, he decided to go down a very different diagnostic route. By going through the Settings and then the Device Manager, he determined that the WiFi had been turned off for some obscure reason – but by turning it on, the whole laptop and the WiFi was made operative and thus was restored to rude health. After breakfast, I made a quick phone call to the Wheelchair service to check whether the model being delivered next Monday will be ‘fit for the purpose’ of conveying Meg over the bumpy pavements in our locality and received a rather ambiguous response so we shall just have to be patient and wait and see what turns up after the weekend. I sent a quick text to our University of Birmingham friend to ascertain whether we might meet for coffee this morning. We decided after a quick telephone call to meet in the park so I left a few minutes early to go down the hill in order to get supplied with our copy of the daily newspaper before we turned back up the hill to occupy our normal park bench before we had a rendez-vous with our friend. Although I had judged that Meg might be warm enough with a gilet to go down to the park, a cool wind got up in the middle of the morning and Meg was getting a little cold so I had to resolve to make sure that Meg always had enough warm clothing to cope with exigencies of this kind. When we returned home, I revived Meg with some chicken soup and the carers made their late morning call. Then I set about getting the lunch prepared which was a (bought) fish pie and some spring greens to accompany it. After lunch and having consulted the television schedules, I noticed that Lawrence of Arabia was being broadcast, seemingly for hours on end. The interesting thing about the film was there seemed to a shot of Lawrence on his camel in the desert after which I dozed for a few minutes but when I made myself fully conscious again, the film was still showing Lawrence on his camel in the desert – I have a shrewd suspicion that if I were to doze even more, the scene would be absolutely the same when I woke up.

All elections campaigns have their moments and one of them arose today. Without making a politically partisan point, I think that the government rather rushed through the election arrangements and had to abandon several important pieces of legislation (one of the most important measures to be lost was the loss of the bill to prevent no-fault evictions) This meant that all the political parties had to have a massive scramble to get all of their candidates in place to fight the forthcoming election. Given this mad rush, which was quite avoidable if the whole timing of the election had been handled in a more sensible way, then it was almost inevitable that some candidates would be selected without the necessary prior checking and therefore some manifestly unsuitable candidates would find their way through onto the party lists. This happened in both the Labour and the Tory party but in the case of the Reform (ex-UKIP) party with no proper party machinery in place then the selection of candidates was anything but thorough. Nigel Farage tried to claim that the firm hired to do the vetting of prospective parliamentary candidates had not done their job with due diligence but I am not sure that this explanation will really wash. So yesterday and today, we have a videoclip emerging that shows a Reform party activist suggesting that the British army be issued with rifles who could then use any incoming asylum seekers as ‘target practice’ whilst they were coming ashore. The same activist also used a vile racist slur aimed at the Indian parentage of the prime minister who has actually responded in the strongest terms. The prime minister said he hated repeating the bigoted insult directed at him by a supporter of Nigel Farage’s party, but said as a father of two daughters it was important to challenge ‘corrosive and divisive behaviour’. The comments were so evidently racist that the Essex police are now investigating the whole episode to see if a criminal offence has been committed. On the other side of the Atlantic, we have seen the first televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, called at Jo Biden’s request. Jo Biden apparently performed so disastrously in this televised debate that the Democrats are in absolute despair and are wondering whether it is possible, even at this very late stage, for Jo Biden to be persuaded to withdraw. Actually, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump have been officially endorsed as their respective party candidates and so the Democrats are urgently considering the options that they have to make sure that Joe Biden does not actually become their candidate. Because of their party rules, it may be impossible to replace Joe Biden but one pollster has argued that the Democrats have five candidates each one of whom was capable to defeating Donald Trump. This particular story will certain run and run in the days ahead.

Today seemed to be one of those action packed days what with one thing or another. Last night, both Meg and I enjoyed a good night’s sleep – as Meg was naturally tired when the carers put her to bed last night, there was no need to deploy the ‘TV’ solution of keeping her entertained for an hour or so before she eventually settled down. Tonight, though, is the last ‘Question Time’ before the election next Thursday and so this might be particularly valuable to listen to, if only to hear the audience reaction to the nostrums of the politicians. Today, though, after Meg was up and breakfasted, we enjoyed a ‘sit’ session with a carer she knows quite well, whilst I went off to do our weekly shopping. The carer and I helped to unpack things and put them away at the end of her shift and then it was time to think about lunch, I fried up some onions, peppers, petit pois and fragments of beef, before putting them into some onion gravy that I had already prepared and served on a bed of rice. Whilst I was preparing the meal and as we were eating it afterwards, Meg and I stumbled across the second half of the film ‘Sink the Bismarck’ which was a classic black and white war film made in 1960. I would have seen this film for the first time soon after it was made as the boarding school I attended typically had a film each Sunday evening. The interesting thing about this film was it was advertised as a ‘fact based’ film and it did seem more like a documentary than a classic war film. What I found particularly poignant, was the reaction of the English crew when the Bismarck was first located, then attacked and then sunk. When the ship sank, there was no great celebration but a feeling of sadness – after all, in a conflict of this nature, it could have them that perished. I suppose that as the film was made only fifteen years after the end of the war, there were all kinds of details from people’s memories of the event that could be incorporated into the film. So there was no great celebration and one has to contrast this with the sinking of the ‘Belgrano’ in the Falklands conflict which was greeted with the one lone headline in one of the redtop newspapers of ‘Gotcha!’ Around lunchtime, I received two phone calls, each one of them welcome. The first was from the Wheelchair service who had informed us by letter that our request for a wheelchair had been submitted on a form filled in by one of the GPs and was receiving consideration. So a wheelchair should be arriving some time on Monday morning and although it seems churlish to look a gift horse in the mouth, I need to check with the service that the wheelchair will be sufficiently robust to cope with the now notorious Bromsgrove pavements.The second phone call was from the specialist nurse who looks after Meg and I and who is always available for consultation in the event of an emergency. This nurse is both kindly and incredibly supportive and tends to act as an advocate for us when we need to navigate some of the intricacies of the care system. She is due to pay us a visit on 1st August and although this is some time away, she will try if she can to give us a phone call either once a week or once a fortnight. So I kept her up-to-date with various developments and pleased to report that we are currently on a type of plateau as we meet with and try to resolve little niggling problems.

This afternoon, as the weather was fair but a little windy, I managed to locate Meg in the back garden whilst I spread five bags of forest bark type weed suppressing mulch on the principal flower bed outside our kitchen window. I woke up a little ‘achy’ this morning after the gardening exertions of yesterday and the same thing may happen this evening but it is nice to get these little jobs done and to improve our immediate environment whilst we can. Just before we went out, I got an email from the firm who supplied my laptop and to whom I had explained the absence of wifi and internet. I received the advice just to press the ‘WiFi’ button back on again except there isn’t one to be seen. Just to make sure, i consulted the manual for the machine and no wifi button is specified for this particular model although it is quite a common feature on most laptops. So when I get time, I suspect that I need to write another email to the laptop supplier, sending him a pdf of the manual to convince him there is no wifi switch to be turned on and so I am still at a loss to know what to do.

Last night was the last of the debates between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and as might be imagined, Rishi Sunak felt that he had nothing to lose. So he came out fighting, using his normal attack lines which was taxation on the one hand and immigration on the other. The absolute perfect irony about all of this is that immigration and levels of tax are at an all time high under the present government so one is tempted to utilise the expression of ‘pot calling the kettle black’. The vultures are already circulating over not, as yet, politically dead career of Rishi Sunak. Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker will launch a bid to become leader of the Conservatives should they lose the election on 4 July as expected, it is understood. Steve Baker was the well known vociferous supporter of Brexit and achieved some prominence in helping to engineer the downfall of Theresa May as Prime Minister. But there are several other ‘big Tories’ who are covertly campaigning already to replace Sunak – provided, of course, that they do not lose their seats in the first place.

We knew that today was going to be quite a full day as our social worker and the care agency manager were scheduled to call around in the late morning to give another formal assessment. But first of all it was our time to connect with our domestic help who was as cheerful and helpful as always. We will not see her now for a couple of weeks because she is going with her husband and some friends for a week’s holiday in Valencia. We have visited this city on one or two occasions when we took a train journey just to see it when we were on holiday in Southern Spain. We tend to know these towns by their railway stations and by their cathedrals which are the things that stick in our mind. We also visited near Valencia a development called, I think, the City of Arts and Sciences built neat Valencia after a tremendous flood some time in the 1950’s. The City of Arts and Sciences is replete with what look like the modernistic buildings you might expect if (in the style of 1950’s comics) you were a visitor to Mars. In the complex there is an opera house as well as a science museum and much more besides but, all in all, well worth a while whilst in then vicinity of Valencia. So in the late morning, we had a visitor from the social worker and the care agency manager and everything went off with no surprises but in order to cope with Meg’s needs, there was a need for a tweak here and there.

Two technological things to report from yesterday, beginning with the positive. When the carer came to sit for Meg, this released me to go into town where I popped into our local audio dealers where I purchased a ‘signal splitter’ (which enables you to run two TV aerial cables from the same wall point) and a couple of little connectors with which to connect together some lengths of aerial cable. This being done, I brought into use a little portable bedside TV inherited from my son but now utilised for when Meg is been put to bed. The TV is installed on a little table and brought close to the bed and the bedside chair which means that both Meg and I can now watch TV close to her bedside. So last night, Meg and I finished off watching what remained of the Sky Politics hub which was shortly followed by the football. Whereas the night before, Meg had fallen asleep whilst playing programmes off the laptop, tonight she stayed awake until the end of the football, although to be honest it was the kind of match best forgotten rather than remembered. So it was not far short of 10.00pm when Meg set herself down to sleep and I think she slept fairly soundly throughout most of the night. Shortly before the evening shift of carers had arrived, the second pair of blackout curtains arrived so that now coverage of the relevant lounge windows is complete. I had a bit of a struggle with the ‘finials’ (ball decorations for the ends of the curtain pole) but managed to get them on just in time. And now for the negative bit of technological news. For a reason I cannot understand, the Wifi and consequent internet access has completely disappeared from the Lenovo laptop I purchased last January and which I use every day both to blog whilst Meg is otherwise occupied but also to read emails and the like. But without internet access I can do nothing of any value as Emails and FTP are also impossible. As the machine although refurbished is on a 12 month warranty, I wrote off to the firm which supplied it asking for a repair and/or replacement under the terms of the warranty. So far, I have not received a reply (which is perhaps not surprising – firms are always willing to sell you new stuff but returns and warranties just represent a cost to their business) so we shall have to wait and see what happens. As always, I will have to adapt my working day to the circumstances in which I find myself.

In the election coverage, the story about betting on the predicted date is gathering apace.The BBC Newsnight programme reported last night that up to 15 Tories have been implicated in this venture and at least one Labour Party candidate is being drawn into the mire, having bet that he would lose his own seat. The trouble about all of this as one respondent in a ‘vox pop’ opined the other day ‘they are all the same’ which of course they are not. I think the Labour party should mount a counter offensive to deny that they are all the same but it does seem that the sleaze infecting the modern Tory party is now being associated with all political activists. Tonight is the final head-to-head between the two contestants for Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and I really do feel that voters remember the last encounter that they say so I think tonight’s debate is going to take on a particular significance. But Rishi Sunak is having to defend the actions of the members of his own party who have engaged on questionable betting exercises which means he has less time to bang on the drum of his traditional themes which is that electing a Labour government inevitable results in higher taxes.

As we are still in the middle of a warm spell of warm weather, I had Meg outside in the garden whilst I engaged in the last of what I call ‘heavy’ gardening. This involved clearing out a gully which represents the border between lawn and flower bed. I then lined the gully with folded black plastic (sacks), weighted it down with a variety of smooth pebbles used for a similar purpose in the past and now reclaimed and then finally gave it a topping of cream coloured stone of which I just happened to have one spare bag. Tomorrow, I can engage in the much less heavy task of spreading some of my weed control (formerly forest bark) to give the bed immediately outside our kitchen window a more finished appearance.

Meg and I had a good night’s sleep last night, which was very good news for the two of us. Yesterday, I had a rather inconclusive consultation with one of the GPs from our practice because I wondered whether there might be some medication to help Meg sleep better given that she is awake all of the day and is tending to have rather broken nights of sleep. The GPs seem reluctant in the extreme to prescribe any kind of sleeping tablet and made the suggestion, that I considered a little fatuous, that I try to keep Meg entertained for an hour after she had been put to bed at 7.30. Nonetheless, I tried to follow the advice of the doctors and after Meg had been put to bed, I rigged up a little bedside table upon which I placed one of my laptops within an easy viewing distance. Sitting also by the side of the bed, I managed to get the Sky News Politics Hub programme that runs from 7.00pm-8.00pm running via the internet. When this was concluded, I followed it up with the repeat of Channel 4 news which is broadcast an hour later 9 from 8.00pm-9.00pm (on Channel 4+1) So I followed the doctor’s advice and managed to access these two programmes which would be normal viewing for us in any case. By the most supreme of ironies, Meg fell asleep within minutes of my accessing the first programme and stayed asleep all during the night as well. But as a ‘proof of concept’ I was pretty pleased that I got this ‘diversionary tactic’ in place and tonight will be even more critical as England are due to play their final group stage match this evening, the broadcast kickoff being from 8.00pm.

This morning, Meg and I trundled down the hill to meet up with our usual Tuesday crowd. We knew that we had to get back in time to coincide with our carers which we did with about half a minute to spare. One of the carers was due to stay on for a two ‘sit’ stay with Meg whilst in theory, I go off and do Pilates. But I got Meg and the carer installed outside the back of the house as the weather was so beautiful together with some soothing cold drinks before I departed for town. There were two things I needed of which I managed to avail myself of the first whilst the second was ‘out of stock’ – these things are always annoying when I have made a special journey to obtain the same and access to the shops is so limited for me. But I got home to find Meg and the carer engaged in reading some children’s books and they seem to have had a reasonable time together. As the weather was so warm this morning, cooking was the last thing on my mind so I had already taken some frozen mackerel out of the freezer and then threw together a mackerel salad which Meg and I ate outside. The carers made their mid afternoon call ridiculously early which extend the time that Meg as to spend between now and bedtime but we got Meg comfortable in front of the TV and we are watching a bit of a Mozart piano concerto this afternoon. I am expecting a delivery of certain items from Amazon which I could do with this evening but they are indicating a delivery time between 5.30 and 7.30 which may be a bit too late for me to bring them into use. One of the anticipated deliveries is an extra pair of blackout curtains which I could really do with this evening but I suspect will arrive a little too late. Tomorrow we need to prepare ourselves for an early start (vagaries of the scheduling of the care company) but we are also anticipating a review visit by the Social Worker who has not seen us for several months now and the manager of the care agency. There are a few things to be discussed but I trust nothing too contentious at this point of time.

Tonight, England are playing in the final in their final group game against Slovenia. After the pedestrian and somewhat faltering start that England have made so far, the English fans and the English public are hoping that England play with a bit more fire in their bellies. It is only when you observe the approaches of other countries to their football do you realise how cautious and indeed boring the current English game happens to be. The Scots were beaten with only 20 seconds to spare the other evening after ten minutes of injury time. A very similar occurrence happened last night when Croatia were playing Italy. Although the two sides seemed fairly evenly matched, it is probable that the Croatians had the edge. But then there was an Italian break away in the eighth minutes of injury time and a stunning Italian goal was scored which resulted in a rather unlikely Italy win. Croatia now come bottom of their group and are eliminated but of they had managed to hang on for a few seconds more and not have a crucial lapse of concentration, they they might still be in the competition as part of the last 16.

The Tory High Command have finally decided that will disown their two candidates caught on trying to bet on the timing of the General Election before its announcement where they are arguing an ‘error of judgement’ rather than a malfeasance. But it looks as though this latest revelation of Tory sleaze might be finally being reflected in the opinion polls although we may have to wait for a day or so before we can be a bit more definitive about this. One of the dropped Tory candidates is vowing to fight on and to clear his name but a dog fight between a local candidate and the Central HQ must be music to the ears of the opposition parties. We have today received a manifesto from the Labour Party which is a bit late as it is only nine days before the election and the postal votes were sent out about a week ago. But this is part of a pattern – as long as I can remember, the Tories have got their manifesto out first and the Labour party manifesto is always on the late side.

Today very much feels like the morning after the night before. Yesterday evening, I semi-assembled the blackout curtains which I have bought for our downstairs living room/bedroom hoping that by cutting out the dying rays of the sun, it might induce Meg to get to sleep when the carers put her to bed at 7.30pm. I had ordered some blackout curtains at a reasonable enough price but found that they were not quite wide enough so have promptly had to order some more. Then I ordered an expanding metal pole upon which to hang the curtains but as the whole of this arrangement has to be at least 10′ long, it is cumbersome in the extreme to get it into position even lodging on our existing curtain supports. Last night, though, should have blocked out 80% of the bright sunlight and I have now decided to keep the whole caboodle in place rather than carrying on with my original plan which was to erect and dismantle it each day. Although Meg seemed to fall asleep reasonably quickly, I got to bed at shortly before 11.00pm (after watching Scotland lose by a single goal to Hungary with a breakaway goal scored in the 40th second of the tenth minute of injury time) But Meg was awake at this time and stayed awake for the next hour and a half until she had been made comfortable which procedure takes the best part of three quarters of an hour. Eventually, I crawled into my pit only to be awoken by Meg at 4.40 in the morning thus cutting my available sleep time considerably. I was very relieved to see the care workers when they did turn up at 8.00 and I was thoroughly relieved to have them take over, being a bit like a bear with a sore head. I contacted our GP surgery to see if I could request some medication to help me to get to get to sleep and even more to stay asleep and have to fill in a form to get a telephone appointment. When the call did come through in the late morning, the response was as I expected but not what I wanted to hear. The doctors seem extremely reluctant to prescribe any sleeping aids and argue that when they work they serve to get people off to sleep but will not necessarily keep them asleep. So basically, I have to think of my own solution to the problem. The only thing that the doctor did suggest was that although the care workers should put Meg to bed at about 7.30 I should endeavour to keep her awake so that when she does go to sleep, it will be for longer. the doctor’s ‘solution’ was to entertain Meg with a TV or something similar to divert here for some hours. This sounds very simple but given the layout of our room is not at all practicable as the TV is un-viewable from the angle of the hospital bed in the other half of our ‘L’-shaped lounge. I have today ordered an extra 15m length of coaxial cable to see if I can bring into use a small portable TV that Meg could view whilst propped up in bed but this will not arrive until probably late tomorrow so we may have two more nights in which I am going to have to induce Meg to sleep throughout the night.

Today being a Monday but quite a sultry and humid day, we decided to visit the park in the mid morning and this little visit worked out fine but we did not meet (or really expect to meet) any of our normal park acquaintances. We got back in plenty of time for the carers and the (unproductive) telephone consultation with the GP and then proceeded to make a lunch out of yesterday’s beef and some cauliflower I had in the fridge. To avoid the cauliflower smelling out the whole of the kitchen I boiled it with quite a lashing of brown sugar on top of it and then served it with a packet of cheese sauce which I was pleased to find in my stock cupboard. This turned out to be absolutely delicious and much nicer than I anticipated that it would be, the only downside being that I promptly fell asleep after reading my portion of feeding Meg hers.

Earlier on this morning and this afternoon, we have been watching a programme made by Deutsche Welle’ which I have discovered is the German equivalent of the BBC World Service. What was being offered to us today by ‘DW’ was a magnificent hour and a half documentary over the influence and playing of Beethoven’s 9th symphony across the world. In one Asian country, perhaps Japan, it is performed each year with a cast of 10,000 singers and the political impact and use made of this work is stupendous. This is one of those films that one can watch again and again as there are all kinds of facets to this documentary which can be explored over and over again. This afternoon, we anticipate that we may be able to enjoy a spell in the garden now that I know that the weather will be fine. After a fairly humid and close start, the sun is going to break through and there is every indication that today we shall have the highest temperatures of the summer so far, as the country as a whole is ex[experiencing a ‘mini’ heat wave. Again, this is due to the changing position of the jet stream which seems to govern so much of our climate these days.

Politically, we are now in a position where there are now less than ten full campaigning days to go before the General Election on July 4th. Personally, that date cannot come soon enough and I am waiting for the ‘bomb shell’ which is bound to explode in the days before the election is actually held. My son and I have joked with each other that the revelations of further Tory sleaze in which prominent Tories, including their own campaign director, have been accessed of betting on the date of the general Election on the basis of ‘insider knowledge’ – the political equivalent of ‘insider trading’ could have planted by the Labour Party. These revelations are going to keep dripping through for the next few days but I suspect that all kinds of ‘surprises’ e.g incriminating bits of videotape or interviews held years ago that might prove to be useful as a type of hand grenade to be lobbed towards the enemy. The latest attack line of the Tories is to argue that Keir Starmer is associated with the policies of Jeremy Corbin, the left wing Labour leader, on the grounds that they were in the same shadow cabinet together. I am not sure that this will cut much ice with the electorate as a whole but is used as a constant attack line together with the accusation that a Labour government will undoubtedly put up taxes.

So today being a Sunday, we enter into our Sunday morning routines which this morning started 40 minutes earlier than we would have liked because the scheduling of the care workers was timed for 7.20 rather than 8.00am. Nonetheless, with the light mornings, we awoke shortly after 5.00am so entered our morning routines about an hour earlier. Two friendly and jolly care workers, both with families (so it shows they are of a certain age by which I mean they have acquired several years of experience which, to my mind, is very important) turned up this morning and got Meg up and going. Then it was a case of getting our breakfast of porridge and toast down us and then I shot down to our local Waitrose to pick up my copy of the newspaper. Normally, I have a quick glance around to see if I can avoid the predations of the car park attendants who penalise those who have not paid the relevant charge and then see if I can sneak in for is essentially a two minute stay within the store. But as from tomorrow morning, Bromsgrove council are about to change their policy so that people can have a half hour parking without charge which will be excellent for those people like myself who like to pop into and out of the store. Once I had collected the newspaper, it was almost time for the Eucharistic Minister to attend from our local church and as we have not seen her for a couple of weeks, her visit was even more welcome than usual. We got told a horrible hospital story involving the death of a near relative which I will not go into for the moment but entering hospitals these days does not always mean that you will emerge intact. Then it was time for us to prepare our coffee and comestibles ready for a journey down to the local park. We were just on the point of departure when our University of Birmingham friend phoned and we coincided on our ‘normal’ bench and had a very happy hour of discussions, as is our pleasure at the weekend. Then we had to make the journey up the hill and I was conscious of the fact that we did not dare to leave our carers outside and we made it with one minute to spare. In the meantime, I am reflecting that I have about another week left of trundling along with our trusty little wheelchair that has served us so well for the past several months but I am hoping the somewhat bigger wheels on the new chair when it arrives will serve their purpose.

We lunched together on some beef which I had roasting in the slow cooker for several hours this morning. When I cook a joint like this, I take the cooked jaunt and immediately divide it into two halves, one half being for immediate consumption and the other destined for the freezer so that we can have it on a future occasion. To save time, I just did a baked potato, a tomato and some sugar snap peas with the same and it was very tasty, Meg enjoying it pretty as much as myself. Now I am going to report on an exceptional happen chance of good fortune, or the avoidance of misfortune, that has happened to me. When Meg and I started to bring into use the lounge which we now call our Music Lounge, I needed to somehow bring the TV into the end of the room where our armchairs are located. Rather than asking an aerial technician to install a new aerial point, I hit on the expedient of buying an extra long TV cable of some 15 metres in length which effectively transfers our TV viewing from one end of the room to another. So far, so good but I have noticed in the last week or so that we are getting a lot of digital dropout on Sky News which is a channel we actually watch quite a lot these days. I did not know whether the fault in the TV reception on Sky was a TV problem or an aerial problem but I resisted one solution which was to retune the television. To see if the problem lay in the aerial I tried a little experiment on a small portable TV and found that Sky News worked perfectly at the other end of the room. Seeing that it did, I came to put the correct aeriel leads back into place. Then on the floor in the midst of other cabling I noticed what seemed to be a spare aerial lead which, upon connection, worked perfectly. So after all, the cable I must have been using was connected to nothing at all so the TV must have been working without the benefit of an aerial which I find hard to believe. At the end of the day, though, I now have access to Sky News which I thought I would have to forego just before the culminating days of the election campaign. Needless to say, I am now a very happy bunny and am still left a little puzzled how the wrong cable had been connected in the first place.

It seems remarkable that only eleven days out from the General Election that the Tories appear once again to be mired in sleaze. We now have a total of four prominent Tories who appear to have bet on the likely date of the election before it has been officially announced, two of them being candidates in the election. It may be that even more names might come to light in the next day or so and prominent Tories such as Michael Gove are now saying this has the appearance of another ‘partygate’ in which it appears that rules which must be obeyed by the many are ignored by the Tory few. And now another embarrassing snippet of news has come to light. One of the prominent aides to the Home Secretary when addressing a gathering of Young Conservatives in April has been recorded as saying that the Rwanda policy (of deporting asylum seekers there) is a ‘crap’ policy – and even the Home Secretary in his former days used similar disparaging terminology in the past although he now sees fit to deny this. That these allegations are now seeing the light of day must be a nightmare to the organisers of the Tory election campaign – although the chief of the campaign is himself one of the accused.