Thursday is my shopping day and things were slightly fraught this morning as I needed to cope with the sequelae of an overnight temperature of -6 degrees, plus the fact that a crucial access road that we use to get around Bromsgrove is blocked off which means that I have join a traffic queue of two thirds of a mile long to get anywhere. But these annoyances having been negotiated, I got the shopping done expeditiously and then joined queues to get back home again. When the weather is as cold as this, I have started to put on a windscreen protector on the car, held in place by rubber mats and these always help to allay the worst of the frost. Then it is a case of hot water in a specially designated long-spout watering can to clear the windscreens before I set off. Today, dawn was just about breaking as I left for the supermarket but by the time I got there it was half light. I tell myself that with a bit of luck, if the sunrise starts about two minutes earlier per day, then I might manage the trip to the supermarket in the light next week when I do the weekly shop. I had just about got back when the carer allocated to us on a Thursday turned up one hour earlier than we really wanted or needed – the carer herself realised that the start time they had allocated here was probably wrong and had texted them to this effect but the information had not really got through to those responsible for the staff allcation each day. The carer on a Thursday is a Pyschology graduate so we often have extended chats about matters which of interest to us both. Once she had departed, the sky was blue and the air was clear so we decided to make a trip to Droitwich to our favourite cafe where we indulged in our usual pot of tea and a bacon butty on large, chunky brown bread. We normally finish our little trip to the shop run by Worcestershire Association of Carers and today was no exception. We did purchase one item which was quite a pretty silvered dish which I bought as a present for our friend who is going to be 90 years old tomorrow. If she does not happen to like it, I am sure she will have a relative to whom she can pass it on. We may or may not see her tomorrow but if not there is always Saturday and failing that, next Tuesday.

This afternoon, I wondered what film I might try to access in order to keep Meg entertained. After a false start, I thought I would try and see if YouTube had a suitable Thomas Hardy film and found ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘ which is a story that I know reasonably well. We watched about one half of the film but, as it is quite a long one, decided to cut it short about half way through so that we can watch the second half another day. When Meg and I used to go on extended holidays in January in Salobreña, Southern Spain I located a copy of this Thoms Hardy novel in the hotel’s book collection and read it avidly. I was particularly interested in the final few pages because the sister of Tess and Tess’s one time ‘amante’ walk up the slope of a hill in Winchester called West Hill, half way up which is Winchester gaol. In this gaol Tess is to be executed and the pair observe the black flag flown when there is an execution. Now it happens that King Alfred’s College which was to become the University of Winchester (where I worked for ten years) is built on the slopes of West Hill and I used to walk through the grounds of the West Hill cemetery (more of a park than a cemetery these days) on my way to college. So I feel that there is quite a connection between the final pages of the novel and the scenes over West Hill that I used to walk and knew quite well.

Last night, the vote took place on the government’s Rwanda bill and, as I had anticipated, many of the Tory rebels drifted away from voting against their own government when it came to it. In popular parlance they had ‘bottled it’ and the government won by a fairly comfortable majority. The bill having got through the Commons now passes to the House of Lords which is where the fun is going to start. One of the (very few) virtues of un unelected second chamber in our parliament is that members are not always looking over their shoulder having to appease an electorate who might might turf them out if they did note vote the ‘right’ way. Consequently, the House of Lords has many independently minded members, irrespective of party, and the whipping system is very much more light touch than the Commons. So the Lords may not feel they could refuse to pass the bill but they might pass so many amendments that it emerges an entirely different creature from the one that was passed to them by the Commons. The Commons then has to decide which, of the probably many, amendments to accept or reject and then the consitutional game of ‘ping-pong’ starts in which the bill is batted backwards and forwards between the Lords and the Commons. My own feeling is that the Bill is probably doomed and the Lords will have no truck with any legislation that will make the UK a laughing stock and the only European country apart from Russia and Belarus that does not accept the jurisdiction and the rulings of the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights – nothing to do with the European Community but largely drafted by British lawyers at the end of the second World War)

Today we got ourselves up and breakfasted, with the assistance of the pair of regular carers who are proving to be a great boon at the moment. This morning, we had in mind to attend the Methodist centre which we have not requested since before Christmas. After New Year, the centre was closed for a week and then last Wednesday, we were otherwise engaged in the club organised by AgeUK on the second Wednesday of each month so this was our first visit for some time. We sat at a table with a patron of the centre with whom we have sat before and had some interesting conversations before he left us. We were then joined by one of our Tuesday crowd of Waitrose friends and we learnt that a special birthday was in the offing, specifically a 90th birthday next Friday. I must say that our friend is being quite sprightly for a 90-year old and I am amazed how she manages to keep so active. For example, I asked her if she had any domestic or cleaning help but she informed me that she is still all doing all of her own housework. I may be wrong in this but I think she is still an active member of a local choir as well.

All of today, there have been a lot of political machinations as the Rwanda bill is due to have a critical vote this evening and there is always the possibility that the bill as a whole might be lost. Last night, the right wing rebels of the Conservative party forced two votes on amendments the import of which was for the government to not comply with any judgements of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The rebels secured a vote of about 70 on the first and 60 on the second but it was relatively easy to rebel because with the Labour Party supporting the government in rejecting the amendments they were bound to fail – which they did as those voting to reject the amendments was the vast majority of the House of Commons of over 500. Knowing that the amendments could never succeed, the right wing rebels felt that they could vote against their own government with impunity but two deputy chairmen of the Conservative party resigned just before they voted in favour of the rebel amendments. The political commentators have got very excited about these results thinking that Downing Street may well feel that the Bill is effectively lost but this is rather to misread what is going on. The right wing rebels are trying to exact as many concessions from the government as they can and so on an elaborate game of ‘chicken’ is going on. The rebels are demanding that they be invited into Downing Street to argue with the Prime Ministers and his advisers holding the threat of defeating the Prime Minister on a core piece of legislation. As this is essentially a game of chicken, many of the rebels will not actually do so if it means that the bill as a whole is lost but this is all part of the bluff and counter-bluff of politics. The rebels are using rather weasel words not saying that they are going to vote against the government but saying that they are ‘prepared to consider voting against the government’ which, of course, gives the wriggle room to not actually lose the Bill as a whole. The result should be known at about 7.00pm this evening but may be later in the evening.

This afternoon, we engaged in our normal diet of a bit of comedy with ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘ taking the pride of place. Today’s episode was concerned with the machinations of a possible tobacco rise in tobacco tax where the relevant figures quoted were that 100,000 people a year would die of smoking related diseases in return for a return to the Treasury of about £4 billion in revenue. This episode may well have reflected some of the political machinations that were alleged to have taken place when some of the East European economies liberalised after the demise of the ‘Iron Curtain’ The story that I have heard is this. Senior executives of the tobacco industry met with senior civil servants of the country which may well have been Hungary. The tobacco industry chiefs let it be known that they privately knew that tobacco smoking killed a lot of people, even though this was denied in public. They then argued to the Hungarian civil servants that it not be a good idea to tax tobacco too heavily. It was much more sensible to let people smoke, stay alive and pay their due quota of taxes and then die, shortly after retirement, so that the State would not then be responsible for the heavy costs of pensions and healthcare for the elderly. So the tobacco chiefs argued that in purely financial times, it was more advantageous for the newly developing economies to collect the taxes whilst they could and then not be too unhappy about lots of people dying of smoking related diseases before the state incurred the heavy burdens to the tax payer of paying for people to survive too long. In any event, this argument seemed to succeed because the taxes were never actually levied on the tobacco companies (whose arguments must have proved to have been very influential)

Today being a Tuesday, we enter into our normal routines but today was going to be a little different. Although we generally meet with our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria twice each week, we knew that one of our number who has recently lost her husband was probably going to be heavily involved in the sequelae following a death in the family and when we met with her yesterday, she let us know that she might not make it today. Neither did any of our usual companions so Meg and I had our coffee alone, which is quite an unusual experience for us these days. We knew that today the airways were going to be full of the investigations of the Post Office scandal as well as the ongoing debates about the Government bill to expedite the transportation of refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda. Although the transmission of some of these investigations started off early, we knew that we would have to wait until later to get to the juicy bits. When we returned from our morning excursion, the care worker turned up but about 50 minutes too early but I did manage to go and attend my Pilates session, albeit for only 45 minutes instead of the allotted 60 minutes. I left Meg in the care of the Peruvian-born care worker, listening to Joan Baez (the Mexican-American folk singer who made her reputation in the 1960’s) One of her signature songs, which I must admit I do not really know that well, is ‘Diamonds and Rust‘ which is said to be a commentary on her relationship with Bob Dylan when it was breaking up. The symbolism lies in the fact that diamonds are meant to ever-lasting and indestructible whereas rust is the absolute opposite. Meg and I did go to see Joan Baez in Birmingham when she was staging one of a host of farewell concerts and we bought one of her earliest CDs which her ‘roady’ was selling in the foyer. One of the outstanding tracks upon this is her version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun‘ which many will know from the raucous ‘Animals’ version. But this version is sung by a 17-18 year old Joan Baez, accompanying herself on a guitar and singing (in Spanish) with the utmost precision and clarity. How many realise that the full story of the ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is the lament for a sister who falls into prostitution, the ‘House’ in question actually being a brothel. When I got back fom Pilates, the YouTube had given rise to other folk singers of a similar ilk, including I think Mercedes Sosa- I think that Meg and the care worker had had quite a good time together but of couse I was not present to witness it. Then it was a case of getting our lunch prepared of fishcakes and microwaved vegetables before settling down for the afternoon. But we had an phone call from our social worker and this necessitated emails that needed to be forwarded as well as a host of domestic jobs that could not wait any longer.

Meg and I caught some snatches of the proceedings of the House of Commons committeee that was cross questioning some of the Fujitsu executives. An apology of sorts was issued but in response to detailed questions, the Chief Executive of Fujitsu and of the Post Ofice were both tending to say the some thing along the lines of ‘It was before my time.. I have no direct knowledge…There are a mass of complex documents through which we are trying to wade to make sense of the past…’ and so on and so forth) Although not directly questioned on this, it does appear that the Post Office knew of the errors and bugs in the software for quite some time but were of such a mindset that it looked as though they could not believe that the software that they had commissioned was at fault. But two little nuggets did emerge from the questionning. One was surely that the senior executives at the Post Office must have noticed that there was suddently a dramatic rise in the number of ‘deficits’ in the sub postmasters’ accounts but the (now) chief executive argued that the number of prosecutions and investigations had stayed fairly constant over the years, which surely be the most blatant lie. Another fact to emerge is that crucial documents are either said to be ‘missing’ or even ‘shredded’ which either suggests the utmost venality or else incompetence in equal measure) No doubt, this will run and run.

Yesterday, I stumbled across a website that I found intriguing. A tester of laptops was making a comparison between the old, but incredibly sturdily built IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad laptops on the one hand and a modern, but cut-down-to-a-price Dell laptop on the other. The commentator could not hide his disdain for the more modern Dell laptop which was constructed using not very high quality plastics that flexed and creaked when leant upon whereas the Thinkpad was built like a tank. The thrust of his argument was that an ‘old’ machine built to high standards and with high quality components would prove to be a ‘better’ machine than its more modern counterparts that, despite more recent processors, chips and other components may well fail before the much older machine. Certainly, to a journalist who was bent on bashing out his/her 1000-2000 words a day the legendary quality of the keyboard on the older Thinkpads would make the journalist reluctant to abandon their ‘older’ and ‘inferior’ machine in favour the ‘newer’ and ‘superior’ one.

We knew from the weather forecast that today was going to start off as a cold day but as we were getting ourselves up,washed and dressed then we had the sudden flurry of a snow shower which was not really anticipated for this part of the country. It did not last for very long but was just enough to give our driveways a good covering but one, once the sun started to shine, we felt would soon melt. After we had breakfasted, we thought that we would make a trip into Droitwich which is our normal pattern for a Monday. We knew that we did not have a totally uninterrupted morning because we were expecting visits from the nurses who care for Meg’s condition in the late morning so we decided just to make a visit to Waitrose and to treat ourselves to a bacon butty as it was the start of a really cold snap. This turned out to be quite a good move because we made contact with one of our normal Tuesday crow who was there in Waitrose with a friend. This friend, once we had got into conversation with her, had been an embroiderer for several years so although it is a subject about which I know practically nothing, we could still find some points of contact. For example, I mentioned that Meg’s cousin was a superb quilter and in her time had taken part in exhibitions of the quilter’s art at, I belive, Westminster Abbey or a similar venue of note. Then we got home and waited for the visit of the two specialist nurses and who then spent some time with us, one with Meg and one with myself, whilst we discussed a whole range of issues concerned with the management of Meg’s care.

This afternoon was going to be a quiet afternoon but we had a delayed lunch of ham, beans and baked potato after which we wondered what current news was on offer today. This was the first opportunity that Rishi Sunak could take to inform the House of Commons of the necessity, as he saw it, to take military action against the Houthi rebels of Yemen. After what many regard as the disastrous intervention of Tony Blair in the Iraq war, a convention arose in the House of Commons that before, or as soon as practicable, before military interventions took place the House of Commons needed to be informed and take a vote, if necessary. When David Cameron had it is mind to commit UK forces to the conflict in Libya, this was vetoed by the House of Commons which many hoped would be a precedent for the future. But here we have another Conservative Prime Minister informing Parliament about a military action that had already taken place. On tis occasion, as the Leader of the Opposition, Keir Armer, was supporting the stance taken by the Prime Minister, then Parliament would not have withheld its approval but there is some concern, not least amongst Liberal Democrat and Scottish Nationalist MPs that we have been here before and whatever the military justifications appear to be, it could well be the case that the UK action in joining the Americans may well to help to spread the Israel/Gaza conflict further around the already volatile Middle East.

I had a very pleasant surprise this morning as our son called round to make me an impromptu present. This was a scarcely used Pure DAB+ radio that he just happened to have as a spare and he thought that I could probably make use of it (on the condition that I threw one of my older and now defunct radios away) The ‘Pure’ was amazingly simple to tune into the stations that I wanted (Radio 4, Classic FM, Radio 3 and Radio 4 Extra) and I had it installed in the kitchen and playing away in no time. As this is a relatively modern DAB radio receiver, this has the advantage of the rolling display so that when a track is playing on ClassicFM that you vaguely recognise but cannot quite a name to, then the additional program information supplies this for you. After what I thought was going to be the trauma of the move of ClassicFM to DAB+, our household has survived this transition pretty well but I think that some of this is due to the happy accident that on the receivers that could no longer receive ClassicFM I could retune to the station on FM and the location of the radios just happened, fortuitously, to be in areas of good reception without the dreaded FM hiss and whispering that can bedevil FM transactions on occasions. This afternoon, as is quite normal for us these days, Meg and I enjoyed some rather fine baroque classical music tracks by courtesy of YouTube. The algorithms that they deploy generally choose some linked tracks so that you are never quite sure what track is going to follow its predecessor but it is nearly always something that we enjoy. Over the months, both Meg and I have started to appreciate the music of Fauré more and more which we find relaxing and to which we can listen over and over again without ever getting bored by it.

Today we drop into our normal Sunday morning routine. As the weather is threatening to be quite cold for most of this week, I thought I would start us off with a big bowl of porridge – I have quite a good supply of oats available in my store cupboard for when the cold weather strikes. We got ourselves plonked in front of the Lorna Kuennsberg show and, apart from an interview with David Cameron the Foreign Secretary, I immediately fell into a doze. This is not an unfamiliar pattern for me each Sunday morning but when the show was over, we got ourselves ready for our weekly visit to Waitrose where we were due to meet with our University of Birmingham friend. We both arrived promptly on cue and we had our customary chat which is going to have serve us well for the best part of a fortnight as next weekend he plans to be away in Yorkshire. Our friend is growing a beard and it is at the stubbly stage so far but perhaps when we see him again he will be sporting something somewhat bushier. We did a little bit of shopping whilst in the store and then came home to cook the Sunday dinner. We had a piece of unsmoked gammon chugging away in our slow cooker but once cooked, we tend to cut it into two equal portions and one portion, once cooled, goes into the freezer for consumption in the weeks ahead. I made a good onion gravy and we had the gammon with baked potato, primo cabbage and tomato. Although I had probably cooked too much for Meg she ate it all up and commented how delicious it all was (with which opinion I concur). Whilst on food related items, I realised that I had about three bags of 4 baking potatoes in stock, all bought from Aldi, and I needed to use them up in the correct order. Aldi are deploying a policy, in common with other supermarkets, of removing ‘Best Before’ or ‘Use By’ dates from their fresh fruit and veg. The argument of the supermarkets are that this reduces waste and shoppers should be discouraged from buying (and wasting) too much. The general advice given out there is that the consumer should trust their own judgement whether or not food is ‘fresh’ or not and, besides, some type of fruit mature at different times and have differing keeping qualities. So I went onto the web and discovered that the codes that Aldi is for their stock rotation and takes the form ‘xxyy’ where ‘xx’ is the week number and ‘yy’ is the day number of that week. I am sure that many Aldi customers will know this already but I am sure that there is a goodly number who do not, so at least I have discovered something for myself that will prove useful.

The forthcoming week should be an interesting one for those interested in the political process. The government will be attempting to make progress with its bill to force asylum seekers onto planes with the destination of Rwanda. The published bill goes as far as the centre and left of the Conservative party will tolerate but the right wing of the party has published a lost of amendments, the effect of which if pushed into law, would force the government to disregard the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights. It is probably slightly less than a 50:50 chance that the amendments will be accepted but what I have discovered on the web is the following: Under international law, states cannot invoke domestic law to avoid their international obligations. Even if a power was given to disregard judgments or interim measures in national law, this would not prevent the international legal obligation from still standing. Of course, any Bill eventually passed by the Commons will never make past the current House of Lords and then a battle of ‘ping-pong’ would start with the Commons which may or may not be resolved before an election later on this year. A second item of interest next week is the fact that the Fujitsu executives may be forced to give evidence to the enquiry into the Post Office scandal and I believe that Tuesday is the day to look out for. This might well be a blood sport day for those of us who wish to see the guilty parties brought to account. On the other side of the Atlantic, the ‘caucuses’ are due to start in the Presidential elections and the first of these is in Ohio on Monday next (but because of time zone differences we would not hear anything significant until Tuesday). Democratic and Republican nominees are determined through primaries and caucuses that take place over the course of an election year. While Democratic and Republican primaries are on the same day in some states, others hold the events on separate dates. This is a novel part of the American democratic system which has no real parallel on this side of ‘the pond’ but the whole point is that candidates can very rapidly both gain (and lose) support depending on their appearances and performances in the primaries. On the Republican side, there is a small chance that an alternative to Donald Trump might appear whilst on the Democratic side, there must be hopes that almost any candidate must appear better than Jo Biden who seems to many to be too old for a second term.

Today turned out to be rather a quiet Saturday. We knew that we were going to receive a visit from a Eucharistic minister from our local church but she was not due to arrive until after 10.30 am so we played some good music from YouTube until she arrived. After our little service this morning, we realised that we really needed to call into Waitrose to collect our weekend copy of ‘The Times‘ During the week, we sometimes call in at a local garage to pick up our copy of the newspaper but bitter experience has taught me that at the weekends, some of the supplements tend to be missing from copies supplied to the garages and although we throw some supplements away on sight (such as the ‘Style‘ section) there are others such as the ‘Culture‘ section that details all the radio/TV programs for the week ahead together with some book reviews so this is quite important to us. So we popped into Waitrose and afterwards paid a visit to our erstwhile local newsagents to see what progress they were making with reinstalling the supply of newspapers. The employee looking after the shop did not seem to know much about anything and I was given the standard ‘wait for two weeks’ reply which I was given last week, so I shall give it another week to try to reestablish my regular order. The previous newsagent always kept of a copy of my newspaper in the back of the shop for me so that I never run short as I am hoping to establish a similar system with the new owners.

After we had a lunch of chicken and mushroom pie, bought as a new line from ‘Aldi‘, we settled down to an afternoon of TV watching, principally trying to access catch-up TV. But it proved to be one of those frustrating afternoons where nothing quite worked. We tried to watch some past episodes of ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘ on BBC iPlayer but it was subject to constant buffering pauses which eventually made the whole episode unwatchable. In frustration, we turned to ITVX to watch the ‘Mr Bates and the Post Office: The Real Truth‘ but this, too, was full of buffering problems so we had to abandon this after a while as well. I suppose it must be our internet connection that might be to blame but it might be massive demand on a cold winter afternoon causing the problems and who can say? So, in some desperation, we trawled up and down the available channels hoping to find a half decent film and settled on ‘Shirley Valentine‘ which I might have seen decades ago and am not convinced that I really want to watch again but beggars cannot be choosers. I suppose every once in a while, one gets a really chewy type of day and so it was today. Meg had a rather unsettled afternoon which did not really help things along but tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow morning, we are going to meet with our University of Birmingham friend in Waitrose and we need to brace ourselves for what is going to be quite a cold, hard week. There is snow threatened next week with some creeping from the North and more advancing from the South but here in the Midlands, we might just escape the worst of it.

The Post Office scandal story continues to evolve and one where it is actually going to end. Apparently, it is the case that any fines that have to be paid to regulatory agencies cannot be regarded in conventional accounting terms as a tax deductible expense but the Post Office have been doing this, thus enhancing the size of declared profits (and also the bonus of the chief executives which is based upon this level of profits) The Post Office argues that its dealings with HMRC, they were under the impression that any fines liable were a tax deductible expense. The point is being made is that if the Post Office were a private company, the chief executives’ heads would have to be served up on a platter to appease outraged shareholders but in the case of the Post Office, there is only one shareholder, namely the Government. As is nearly always the case for these type of scandals that emerge at the end of a working week, one looks to the Sundays for a more in-depth exposé so I will look forward with particular anticipation to tomorrow’s editions. I must say that the more I think about the Government solution to this problem, the less convinced I am that another solution could not be sought. If one were to recruit, say, ten retired High Court judges and give them each a case load of about a hundred, surely the thousand cases could be processed in just a few weeks. I may be wrong in this but I seem to think that if the Government wished to pursue a large number of miscreants (e.g. the poll tax, football hooligans ‘en masse’ and other demonstrations,the Northern Ireland Devlin courts and so on) then it has in the past instituted a large number of special procedures to cope with this. It seems possible that governments can create special courts if a large number of prosecutions are required but acquittals seem to be a different matter altogether.

Today being a Friday we pop into our Friday routines. As Friday is one of the days when the two, always cheerful carers, call around to attend to Meg, I was pleased to see them absolutely on cue. I was rather appalled when one of them told me that she was feeling a little tired as yesterday she had started work at about 6.00am in the morning and not finished until 10.40 at night. What makes things even worse for carers, especially first thing in th morning, is that they have to cope with rush hour pressures when there always seem to be huge queues of traffic through Bromsgrove first thing in the morning. What is going to make things worse is that a major trunk road that runs through Bromsgrove and is used by a lot of the resident population, is being subject to a £ multi-million upgrade and, in the opinion of many of the residents of the town and the local newspaper, this may mean months of disruption with no discernible benefits in the meanwhile. Then the carers left and our domestic help arrived so it proved to be quite a busy morning. But we did manage to sort out some old clothing to lighten the wardrobe a little which means that we will pay a visit to our local charity shop before e’er long to dispose of the same. After we had breakfasted and then chatted, our University of Birmingham friend phoned to arrange a coffee rendez-vous in Waitrose, which, of course, we accepted with complete alacrity. After we got home, we had a quiet half hour on our newish two-seater settee before I cooked a lunch of haddock pie which is a fairly typical Friday dish for us.

This afternoon’s news is dominated by the joint attack by British and American forces against the Houthis rebels in Yemen who had rather indulged themselves attacking shipping in the Red Sea. Whatever the justifications for the retaliatory attacks, it has certainly extended the Middle East conflict beyond the confines of Israel-Gaza which is the fear of many foreign affairs commentators. Of course, this may have the effect of reducing the strength and/or the resolve of the Houthis but I do get the horrible feeling that this may go badly wrong for the West. It is being said that the Houthis are acting as proxies for Iran as they both have Shia populations and have an undying hatred of Israel. Our University of Birmingham friend and ourselves were discussing all of the ramifications of this as we were having our coffee this morning. We often find that our independently derived opinions are often quite closely aligned on issues like this. We both agreed with each other that whilst Israel has the absolute right to defend itself, the ‘kill-ratio’ of Palestinian versus Israeli lives lost might now be running at a rate of about 10-1. The net effect of this may well be to stir up resentments and hatreds for decades in the future. If a Palestinian youth, aged 10, lives for 75 years beyond an age of 10 then by this calculation, this is as long as the state of Israel has been in existence which is also 75 years from 1948 to the present. The South African government has recently taken the step of accusing Israel in the International Court of Human Rights of the crime of genocide. There is a panel of distinguished judges drawn from a series of nations who may well take years to both hear the case and then to make a final and definitive ruling. But there is a possibility that they may come to an interim and provisional judgement (perhaps on the grounds of ‘Is there a case to answer’) within quite a short space of time measured in weeks and this may have the effect of requesting the state of Israel to call for an immediate ceasefire. Israel itself will probably ignore such a ruling but the position taken by the UK and the American governments is much less certain so this may prove to be quite an interesting development in the whole conflict. Actually, I would have preferred to be watching any further coverage of the Post Office scandal but I suppose the continuous media such as Sky will always have the tendency to follow something visually exciting (such as war planes being launched, bombs being dropped) rather than something as dry and undramatic such as the examination of a Post Office witness.

There is a current news item which gives one pause for thought. A survey by the British Retail Consortium this year found levels of shoplifting in 10 major cities had risen by an average of 27% compared with 2022, costing businesses £1.76 billion over a 12-month period. It is also reported that some supermarkets are equipping their staff with body cameras to capture images of shop lifting. This is surely a sad commentary on the state of affairs in contemporary Britain but even my local Aldi has resorted to putting special anti-theft devices, which used to be reserved for bottle of spirits, to be now utilised on joints of meat that used to be the weekend roast. The staff in my local Waitrose infom me that shoplifting has risen substantially but they tend to know who the main culprits are by now. But they have resorted to utilising special security staff at the weekends rather than during the week (when presumambly the staff are less busy and therefore shoplifters easier to spot and to challenge)

Today was one of those days with quite a lot packed in. We got up reasonably early so that I could get my shopping done on time. This went reasonably well apart from the fact that one of the local access roads was closed so the queue of traffic down the Kidderminster Road was two thirds of a mile long just before 8.00am this morning. When I got back, I eventually got some of the shopping unpacked and a carer for Meg turned up but an hour earlier than was scheduled. She was a pleasant lass who seemed to have had a hard life so far with lots of family illness with which to contend. Nonetheless, she was quite intrigued by the book of ‘The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse‘ and I left Meg and her discussing it whilst I busied myself with putting the rest of the shopping away. Then we knew we were going to have a race around because we need to fit in a dentist’s appointment (one for Meg and one for myself) before fitting in a doctor’s appointment for a review visit. I seemed to be in plenty of time for the dentist only to discover when I arrived at our parking spot that I had forgotten the wheelchair, removed from the boot to make way for the shopping bags. So I dashed home at breakneck speed, recovered the wheelchair and made it to the dentists only one minute late. I was somewhat dismayed when we arrived that there was a huge step insurmountable by the wheelchair but when we got the door open, one of the patients located a nearby ramp which we used to gain access. I explained to the dentist that we were on a tight timetable and she was very, very good and turned Meg around and I in record time. Meg’s teeth were fine which is par for the course and I had a decaying filling replaced which the dentist managed to do in two minutes flat, explaining nicely that it was on the NHS and would only cost me £70! Then we got down to the doctor who phoned me when I was in the carpark getting the wheelchair out of the boot and I explained I would be along in a minute. The doctor, who knows Meg’s history reasonably well, had a student sitting in with her and gave us quite a good consultation. She listened with a synmpathetic ear to the things that seemed to be working well as the things not working so well. The upshot of all of this is to remove two items of medication from the pills Meg has been taking for some time, working on the theory tht the more pills you take, the more likely it is to add to disruption of brain chemistry precipitating falls which may (or may not) be accurate. Anyway, supreme pragmatism rules and the doctor and I decided to discontinue the two items of medication assuming that they were not having much effect. Then we went to our local garage to pick up a copy of the daily newspaper and we returned home, quite late by now, for lunch. Lunch took a time to prepare because I seared off the remaining chicken thighs and then added the meat to a pot pourri of vegetables conisting of onions, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, petit pois and supplementd by an apple, sultanas and a smidgeon of brown sugar. All of this made a dinner larger than I intended and far too much for the two of us so quite a lot of it saved for a future occasion when we may need to prepare and consume a meal in a hurry.

Meg and I intended to watch some of the evidence being given to the Post Office scandal enquiry by a Post Office investigator who turned out denying that he had any technical knowledge of any defects in the system before accusing sub postmasters of theft. Occasionally, there appeared to be a type of plea bargain in which the threat of prosecutuon was removed if the ‘deficits’ were repaid. A question that I have asked myself is whether, if these bugs and errors were random, whether any sub postmasters found themselves with credits i.e. more money in their account than they should have done. In the most minor of ways, though, I have an inkling of how large corporations work. When working as a barman for Tiffanys in Manchester, one of the Mecca group, we had the old fashioned tills that had a kind of clockwork operated totalising function which the management, and only the management, had to manipulate on each till at the end of the night. The Mecca system at the time was that any credits (i.e. more money than there should have been) were retained by Mecca whereas any deficits had to be put in out of one’s own pocket. This could mean that if, for example, you had mistakenly given the change from a £1 note instead of a 10 shilling note, then the whole of one’s tips for the evening could be wiped out and this did happen to me once or twice. But Meg and I got rather diverted onto a concert and thought that we could probably catch up with the Post Office enquiry proceedings at a later time. Next Tuesday and Wednesday may well be fascinating days because Fujitsu themselves are due to give evidence and one can only wonder to what lies, obfuscations, denials and evasions we will eventually be subject. As opposed to Parliamentarians, the members of large corporations are not used to such a degree of public scrutiny and, no doubt, they will be flanked by an army of lawyers and may well have had ‘rehearsal’ sessions before the hearings to establish what their line is going to be. Nonetheless, it is a bit of a spectator sport to watch some of these personnel squirm when put under the spotlight of a public enquiry.

Today would appear to be a ‘lighter’ day than either yesterday or tomorrow. The carers for Meg were scheduled to come around at 8.00am this morning but Meg was quite keen to get up and going so I washed her and dressed her myself, just leaving the carers to do a little bit of finishing off when they arrived. The two who come in the morning are a very cheerful pair and we have a good laugh and a joke with them – they jolly Meg along although she did not need much of it this morning. After they had got Meg into our Music Lounge and made her a cup of tea (the second of the morning), they noticed some of the keyboards (the Casio and the organ) so I played them a snatch of Offenbach’s ‘Barcarolle‘ to demonstrate a little of my (one finger) prowess on the system. I do not really have the time to practice much these days but I do have one or two favourites and I refresh my memory of them every so often. Today being the second Wednesday of the month, it is the day when AgeUK put on a special club day so Meg and I braved the incredibly cold weather to go to a new venue. We have been ousted from the previous one by a Mother and Baby group so today we are meeting for the first time in the Bromsgrove Rugby Club HQ where they have a nice large hall even exceeding in size the village hall we have been accustomed to by now. Today was not a wholly satisfactory experience for Meg and I or for any of us for that matter because one volunteer had to do everything on her own (making the teas and coffees, introducing the activity which did not amount to much as it happened) but in a gathering of 2-3 dozen souls altogether, one really needs about 2-3 volunteers rather than one struggling singlehandedly. We left a little early and then cooked a chicken dinner or ourselves of chicken thighs, broccoli and jacket potato. Meg always professes not be very hungry and always suggests that I serve her a smaller portion but nonetheless she ate it all up and expressed her satifaction with it all.

In the early afternoon, I got Meg down for a rest which I am sure that she needed after braving the colder weather outside this morning. It was fortunate that Meg could take a rest because the dentist who we are due to visit tomorrow has been nagging me to fill in the three online forms which have to be completed before any treatment will be given but has to be done within 24 hours of your treatment day so this all takes a bit of time. I must confess that I ticked nearly all of the boxes unread as nothing has altered since last time and the system records all of your past entries in any case. We are going to have a bit of a rush around tomorrow because we have the shopping to do, then the dentist’s appointments and then a doctor’s appointment, postponed because of Monday’s funeral. People who are recently retired often remark that they do not know how they had the time to go to work and I know how they feel.

Today, Parliament has been dominated by the PM’s announcement of a rapid pardoning and compensation for the sub postmasters in the scandal which is now shaping up as the biggest scandal in Britain’s judicial system. None of the politicans came out of it well from any political party and all of the major parties seem to have believed the corporate lies of the Post Office instead of the heartfelt pleas of 700 sub postmasters. I learned last night of two further developments, each jaw dropping in their particular way. The first of these was the chief archiect of the now infamous ‘Horizon’ system was indicating that he would only give evidence to the official statutory enquiry if he was awarded immunity from prosecution. One cannot bargain with a statutory enquiry (which has the force of law in this case) and if he fails to present himself and to answer questions under oath, then he will almost certainly be found to be in Contempt of Court and then jailed. The other amazing thing that emerged from ‘Newsnight‘ last night was that about one third of subpostmasters was of ethnic minority status and treated appallingly by the Post Office. Some time in the past, someone had drawn up a crude racial classification scheme with terms such ‘Negroid type’ and then sub categories within each into which they tried to classify the ethnic minority postmasters. The Post Office now claims to be horrified that such a thing was done in its name but it surely was. Although there is now massive political pressures on the political elite to ‘do something’ about this scandal, I am not really convinced that passing a new law is the best way forward. There is a massive constitutional principle at stake here as politicans are directly overruling the decisions of the courts. A better solution might be a special panel of retired judges to fast-track all of the appeals within about a week and in this way the integrity and impartiality of the judical system is maintained. But we are living thrpough unprecedented times in all of this.

What an interesting day today has turned out to be. Meg and I always look forward to a Tuesday because it is the day when we meet up with our Waitrose friends for a communal natter. Today, though, we were somewhat thwarted in our usual get-together because the cafeteria in Waitrose was having a problem with its hot water supply and under the strict regulatory regime that Waitrose operates, the cafeteria was forced to close. But one of the staff who we know well took pity on Meg and myself and gave us a free cup of coffee and a pastry on the house for which we were duly grateful. Although we pay higher prices in the store than elsewhere, there are often some goodies thrown in our direction which, evidently, reinforces our loyalty towards the store. We did meet up with a couple of our friends but we had to content ourselves with standing in a convenient little corner of the shop to have a chat with each other. We learnt that the husband of one of our number had died in the last week which would normally seem to be quite a traumatic event for his wife and family. But he was in his 90’s and suffering from Alzheimers so after a brief stay in hospital, followed by his demise, I think, this came as a blessed release for him and other family members. It was a very cold day today but Meg and I thought that we would make a flying visit to the major Aldi where the products that we were looking for were completely out of stock. So I took the opportunity to buy some other bulky items which will lessen the load a little for when I do our main shopping on Thursday morning. After we returned to our house, we had a perfect storm of little happenings all of which complicated our entrance into the house. An Amazon delivery van had been making a delivery and it blocked our turning into our immediate driveway. Once this had been prompted to get out of the way I had to cope with ‘Miggles’ our neighbourhood adopted cat sensing some breakfast was in the offing and desperate to get inside the house whilst I was getting Meg out of the car and coping with two bags of shopping. Then the care assistant turned up a little early but we did not mind too much because this particular care assistant hails from Peru and we get on well with her. She revealed that having been exposed to some fragments of operatic performances on YouTube (on our smart TV) she and her partner rather fancied a trip to the opera and they had got themselves booked in to see ‘La Boheme‘ at English National Opera. She knew nothing about the opera or the story line so we have her a quick reprise plus a viewing of a rendition of ‘Your tiny hand is frozen‘ (Que gelida manina) so that when she goes to the opera, she will have some idea what is in store for her. I told her that she would need a good supply of handkerchiefs and/or tissues to cope with the dramatically sad ending (which always reduces me to tears or to ‘eye glistening’ at the very least. I then shot off to do my Pilates class (which is why the carer had turned up in the first place) but only managed about three quarters of an hour of this but my instructor and two class mates treated me a little like the prodigal son as, unfortunately, I had to miss last week’s Pilates class. So after a swift return home, we dined on fish cakes and microwaved vegetables, our normal ‘quick’ lunch after I get home after my Pilates class.

This afternoon did not entirely run to plan either. Last night, I had listened to an Andre Rieu concert on Sky Arts and I wanted Meg to sample one of these. These concerts of generally light classical music and some well known popular music pieces are put on with a maximum of showmanship and audience participation. They are certainly not to everyone’s taste and I can imagine some classical music purists rolling their eyes in horror. But these concerts are enormously popular in the Netherlands and elsewhere and I believe that it is necessary to book for months or even years in advance to attend one. But after one has watched for a little, the enthusiasm and emotion of the audience gets to the viewer and you find yourself carried along by the whole experience. So it was today and what was meant to be a ten minute taster turned out to be a whole afternoon’s viewing of a concert held in the main square of Maastricht. One interesting innovation was taking a choir and little orchestra from one of the South African townships and then having some play something simple but effective (an orchestral version of Pachobel’s canon) which must be an incredible experience for the kids themselves and may well have brought some resources from a moneyed European audience into their home communities. One cannot imagine anything like that from a British musical entrepreneur but it works magnificently well with a Netherlands venue and audience. The nearest equivalent is Gustavo Dudamel who has nurtured a young classical orchestra from some of the poorest areas of Venezuela to give lively (ie often standing-up) performances.