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.

Today was the day when we were to attend the funeral of our newsagent from whom I have bought a copy of my newspaper each day for about the last three years or so. We got up in plenty of time, knowing that it was one of the scheduled days when the carers were due to call around. They did do so but two hours late by which time we were all up, washed, dressed and breakfasted. I am not sure what had actually happened this morning but we have to cope with carers turning up at unpredictable times. The weather was bright and cold with quite a strong chill wind factor, so it was not a particularly pleasant day to be outside. Nonetheless, we treated ourselves to a coffee in Waitrose knowing that we needed to SatNav our way towards the crematorium in Redditch for a service scheduled for 12.30. We gave ourselves a certain amount of ‘getting lost’ time but the crematorium was not as far as it could have been and there was fast dual carriage access to it nearly all the way from Bromsgrove. We got there half an hour before our scheduled slot but fortunately there was a warm and comfortable waiting room although we were certainly the first to arrive. Eventually the rest of the crematorium party turned up and I assumed that as our newsagent hailed originally from Bangladesh (although it was still pre-partitioned India at the time of his birth) that many Asian relatives would be in attendance. But most of the attendees seemed to relatives of the newsagent’s wife and I think that I was probably the sole representative of his customers. I recognised a couple of his nearby shopkeepers in attendance and the whole funeral party was about 25-30 all in all. It was quite an emotionally charged experience because his wife was particularly distraught and broke down into floods of tears whenever she embraced her relatives and indeed ourselves. I gained the impression, though, that she was delighted that we had made the effort to attend and we were pleased to have done so. The service had no particular religious elements but a lot of recollections and tributes to a life well lived. I think that his wife was so particularly upset because our newsagent’s wife and the newsagent himself were running their business, six days a week until his death in late November. I think that he may have worked at the age of 80 until only about a couple of weeks before he died (of asbestosis). So he and his wife had no retirement to speak of and of course his wife had been suffered the deprivation of both her husband and her employment within an incredibly short space of time. This did make me recall when we attended a funeral of the wife of our next door neighbour in Hedge End, Hampshire. After the funeral, as Meg and I were having a quick walk around some of the pleasant walkways in the estate where we used to live, we were recognised by a lady who was also at the funeral. She told us a story that she and her husband managed ‘The Hungry Horse’ restaurant (in a converted barn but owned by a brewery) The story that we were told by this lady was that husband died on a Tuesday, I think but the brewery felt that they needed a couple to take over the running of ‘The Hungry Horse‘ so the lady who was talking to us explained how she lost her husband, her job and her accommodation within about four days (which sounded traumatic then and still does today).

This afternoon, Meg and I were going to give ourselves the treat of watching the film of the Thomas Hardy novel ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ and this took up most of the afternoon. This version was the one with Julie Christie and Terence Stamp but I think I have seen a later version which I enjoyed just a little more. The scenes of the Dorset countryside are always stunning of course as well, as well as the evocation of mid 19th century rural life.

As we suspected, now that the House of Commons has reassembled after the Christmas recess, there is a lot more movement on the resolution of the Post Office ‘Horizon’ scandal. It looks as though the Business Minister and the Justice Minister are talking to each other, and to the judiciary, about the ways in which appeals and compensation can be fasttracked across at least 700 sub postmasters and perhaps even more. I feel that the the policians have realised, a little belatedly, that ‘normal’ politics has failed as it has taken a TV program to highlight to the public what has actually been known for years. The Sophie Ridge show this evening on Sky News was almost completely devoted to this issue and I would imagine that MPs of all parties want a resolution to what is being called the greatest miscarriage of British justice of all time. Even the Liberal Democrats (who supplied ministers to oversee the Post Pffice at the time of the coalition government) hardly covered themselves in glory, believing the Post Office but only now claiming (as Ed Davy is doing) that they have been lied to. But this is political naivety of the highest order – big powerful corporations will routinely lie to protect their commercial interests and the politicians should be are of this and be able to ask searching questions.

Last night, Meg and I attended a really enjoyable Twelfth Night’ party with our Irish/Anglo-Indian/French friends down the road. There were eight of us altogether which is a very nice number for a party of this type and, at a suitable time in the meal, we all ate a portion of the special cake which our French friend had prepared especially for this occasion. One of our Irish friends found the token hidden inside the cake and so awarded the title of ‘King’ for the night and was allowed to choose his ‘Queen’ (actually his wife) for the night. We had lots of delicious food, much of it traditional to the occasion and so Meg and I went home, well satisfied but some two hours after Meg’s normal bedtime. So we were not unhappy to sleep in a little this morning, particularly as we might have quite a busy day (for us) tomorrow. So after a delayed breakfast, Meg and I got ourselves ready and then popped down to Waitrose for a Sunday morning coffee – we did not expect to see any of our usual friends there on a Sunday morning but no matter. Once we got home, we dined on some chicken thighs, jacket potato and beans and what we had intended to be a scaled down meal after we had been feasting all last night, proved to be a somewhat bigger meal than we thought we would like.

After lunch, we accessed ITVX hoping to see the factual program made by ITV about the Post Office ‘Horizon’ (computer system) scandal but this composite program did not seem to be on offer so Meg and I viewed the last of the four docudrama programs broadcast during the week. This was itself factually based and one of the extraordinary things to emerge after 90+ appeals were made to the Court of Appeal was that of the £56 million awarded by the Court, something like £44 million would accrue to the lawyers (and their ‘funders’) only leaving the claimants with about £20k each which in no way covered their losses of earnings, businesses and so on. But this story continues to evolve and has made the main lead of ‘The Sunday Times‘ this morning. The latest evidence seems to be that over 700 sub postmasters have been sanctioned (some even serving gaol sentences) and a government enquiry is still proceeding. It also appears that the vast majority of the wronged sub postmasters have to appeal to the Post Office with the burden of proof upon themselves that they have been badly treated after which, presumably, they would have to apply to the Court of Appeal to get convictions annulled before we have even started to talk about compensation claims which could take years. Given that this scandal has already taken 20 years to get to this stage, the largest ever miscarriage of justice in the UK, the scene is being set for legal battles for years and years into the future. According to Sky News this afternoon, the government is ‘considering’ shortcutting these procedures but this might take special legislation. I would have thought that the government could have allowed a Private Member’s bill and passed an Act within a day were it to be so minded and certainly the imminence of a general election may concentrate minds. But of course, this might be crowded out by other concerns (the Rwanda scheme, floods etc.) to name just two. Late on this afternoon, I watched part of the Lorna Kuennsberg interview with Rishi Sunak, where the Prime Minister was pressed quite hard over a range of issues, including the truth of the observation that Sunak was initially lukewarm about the Boris Johnson ‘Rwanda’ scheme. Naturally, there was a lot of waffle and obfuscation and I witnessed Kuennsberg do what I wish many more interviewers would do and repeatedly say to their interviewee that they were not answering the question and putting the heart of the question to them again. Of course, we got more deflection, evasion, answering a question that was not asked and every other trick in the book to avoid a direct answer to an embarrassing question. It is no surprise that the population is losing faith with the political process when politicians (all stripes) refuse to answer direct and simple questions that are put to them – and I am sufficiently cynical to imagine things will not change after a change in government.

Living near the top of a fairly small hill, I can only imagine how people feel who live at the bottom of hills where water congregates. The flooding which was predicted to happen only once a decade or so is now happening almost every year and, of course, this is all attributable to climate change. I felt today that people who were suffering traumas in their lives as a result of the recent cost of living crisis and chronic health concerns have got quite enough to cope with without flooding added to their difficulties. But one has to point out that local authorities have bowed to pressure from builders and allowed all kinds of building on land regarded as a flood plain so perhaps we should not be surprised. I wonder to myself whether more work could be done ‘upstream’ so that farmers might allow their land to be flooded when occasion demands (at a cost) so that more major damage was not done downstream.

Meg and I had a bit of a lie-in this morning, which we quite appreciated. Normally our day starts some time after 6.00am when the carers come along at about 7.00am but at the weekends, we do our own thing so we enjoyed the extra hour in bed. Mid-morning, the parishioner from our local church came along to conduct a little service for us and this visit is always very much appreciated. Apart from the religious elements, we always have a chat about things and our parishioner is pretty knowledgeble about things in the locality so this is useful for us. After she had departed, I popped Meg into the car and we trundled down the hill to pick up a copy of our daily newspaper. In about a week or so, we will resume service with our regular newsagent but first there is a little matter of his funeral to attend. This is to be held in the Redditch crematorium but is at 12.30 where it conflicts with a doctor’s appointment (face-to-face) which we have. Although I do not like cancelling appointments with doctors given the long times one has to make an appointment in advance (currently the best part of three weeks) but under these circumstances, I feel we have no alternative. I always attempt to buy something a little different for our meal at midday on a Saturday and for today I had bought what was labelled as a ‘lamb hotpot’ Apart from some sliced potato on the top and some miniscule portions of carrot, it was mainly a lamb mince. So I think I must not be seduced by so called ‘ready’ meals but revert to my current practice of always cooking our meals from our own ingredients. In the early afternoon, our domestic help and her husband called around, by prior arrangement, to pick up a spare freezer which we had in our kitchen. This had belonged to my son and his wife and we had no real use for it so it has been relocated to a good home. When we had a large house in Leicestershire, we did allow ourselves the luxury of a second fridge in the garage but I seem to remember that instead of trading it in we decided to make it a ‘yogurt and beer’ fridge. In those days, we had a yogurt maker which was just a plastic box type of thing that supplied a minimal amount of heat to the contents. We used to make up our own yogurts with a bit of yogurt to supply the culture and then, I think, some condensed milk and some flavourings. It enabled us to eat lashings of yogurt quite cheaply. We also made our own beer, in keeeping with most of the male population in the 1970’s when the Chancellor of the day relaxed restrictions upon home brewing and many men went mad with their supply of half height plastic dustbins and some ready made kits, of which the best that I remember was called ‘Tom Caxton’ I used to make a lager and also a barley wine which blew your head off when I made it with double the amount of sugar (to approximately double the alcohol content) We all grew out of that fad, eventually, but it was fine whilst it lasted.

Before our little Epiphany party this evening, the thought flitted across my mind whether there was any easily improvised fancy dress that I might sport this evening. My first thought was to create a kind of doublet-and-hose in the manner of a mediaeval king, utilising a pair of Meg’s tights and then one of her kilts made double in its middle by the strategic use of abelt (the ‘doublet’ part) It did not take me too long to reject this idea as insufficiently realistic and lacking in effect so then I hit upon the idea of constructng a crown, in either silver or gold, from some paper doylies.On looking at our fast depleting store of such items, I only had one gold doyly left and no silver ones so this idea soon bit the dust. I am not averse to a bit of dressing up on occasions, the boldest of which was a pair of skimpy flame-red briefs worn under my Father Christmas outfit and flashed at the end of my turn. This is captured as a bit of video on my phone and on the basis of that we were offered a free coffee and a light meal (gratis) when I revealed this bit of video to a friendly cafe owner in La Coruña in Northern Spain. I must say that I have not been tempted to attempt the same here in Bromsgrove for fear of being arrested on the spot, at the very least. So I think that tonight, we shall just content ourselves with taking along a bit of ‘fizz’ to help the evening along.

The weather forecasters are preparing us for a spell of cold weather that may last as much as a whole week. It looks like a high pressure area stuck over the county which will give us clear skies by day but frosty nights and temperatures that drop below freezing at night. Now that we are forewarned, I will get my tried-and-trusted windscreen protectors in place so that if we need to go anywhere in the morning, I shall not have to do a massive defrosting job on the car.

Today is not quite the twelfth night of Christmas but certainly the day before and the time when we had scheduled our Christmas decorations to come down. Our domestic help calls around on a Friday and as she helped us to put up the decorations a fortnight ago, we enlisted each other’s help to take them all down again. Principally, we have to ‘undress’ our silver Christmas tree and then put it and the baubles safely away. This does involve eventually accessing the loft where all of the Christmas decoration is stored in a nicely accessible time, ready for the same thing again in 50 weeks time. After the Christmas tree and other decorations were removed, we had two little cribs (one we have had for years, the other a traditional set which we bought just before Christmas) and these are now all put into away in the bottom of a wardrobe in our spare bedroom, again easily accesible for when we need them again. I always have the same rather conflicting feelings about this time of year, the first of which is a certain amount of relief that Christmas and Christmassy things have all been out away for another year. But it is also true that our hall which provided a home for the Christmas tree looks rather stark at least for a few hours once it gets restored to normality. Actually, it is not actually the case that Christmas type things are absolutely over because we still have our Epithany/Reyes Magos/Galette des Rois little party tomorrow evening with three sets of friends (plus ouselves) joining forces for a little fiesta celebrating Twelfth Night in a very continental fashion. As we had spent a fair proportion of this morning putting away our Christmas decorations, we decided just to have a quick visit down the road to the Waitrose cafeteria to pick up a newspaper and to have our morning coffee. None of our regular friends were there but we would not expect to see them there until tomorrow morning in any case. On the way down into town, I popped into my newsagents to enquire if there any details about the funeral we wish to attend on Monday. The young lad in the shop was an employee of the new owners i.e. not family, and did not know anything about the funeral arrangements. But he phoned the owner for me and I spoke with her, giving her my mobile number and requesting to be kept informed about what time the funeral was due to be.

Over the past four days, ITV has been screening a docudrama entitled ‘Mr. Bates vs.the Post Office’ illustrating in 4 one hour episodes one of the biggest scandals and miscarriages of justice in modern times. Basically, the Post Office introduced a new computer system called ‘Horizon‘ which was not fit for purpose and when shortfalls were wrongly identified by the system, the sub postmasters had to make up the deficit from their own savings. This caused many of them to lose their business, their houses and resulted in a plethora of wrongful convictions and some suicides. After the series of four programmes had been transmitted, ITV published a documentary (rather than a docudrama) to show ‘the real story’ This was shown last night but I thought it would be good idea if Meg and myself could view this on ITVX this afternoon. But it was not yet listed on the schedules so Meg and I started to watch the final and concluding episode, first shown last night. But then the doorbell rang and it was our hairdresser calling round for a routine appointment. Although we had her on our planning board and I reminded Meg that she would along this aftenoon, we both forgot that she was coming. She has many clients of a similar age and health status to ourselves and we always receive sympathetic treatment from her hands.

One little job which Meg and I can do together relates to the Christmas cards we have received over the festive season. We used to throw them away quite quickly but this year we have retained them all and we think that a re-reading of the various bits of family news would be a pleasant task for the days ahead. One thing that we often do at this time of year is to work out which relatives and friends we wish to see and in which order. Then we need to make a little planning calendar so that we can schedule who we go and visit in the weeks to come. Of course, we are assuming that the weather will continue to be kind to us but I am always sustained by the fact that the days are getting longer by a smidgeon every day. But the factor that may prove problems for us in seeing friends and relatives is the local flooding situation. Worcestershire and Gloucestershire seem to be particularly prone to flooding and although some local flood defences are in place, these are often tested to (and sometimes over) the limit. To illustrate this, a town quite near to us, Bewdley, is very prone to flooding and a TV report showed some local residents who where arguing that an extra course of bricks (or even two) on the local flood defences could make a dramatic difference for them.