I thought that today was going to be a cold and bright day and so put a little bit of protection on the car windscreen last night. But actually, it was not really needed as although the day was bright and clear, there had not actually been a heavy frost last night. I have one of those screen protector thingies which only takes a few seconds to put into place and certainly helped to take the sharp edges of whatever frost there was last night. We got up a little late this morning because Meg had a rather disturbed night last night but after we had breakfasted and watched a modicum of the news about the release of hostages in the Gaza/Israel conflict, we made our way via the newspaper shop to Waitrose. The newspaper shopped was closed which did not surprise us a great as the newsagent himself is in a local hospital and his wife has got him and her own aged mother to deal with, apart from trying to run a business which means getting up incredibly early as it opens at about 7.30am. We met up with two of our regular friends and we had quite a good laugh with quite a lot of black humour in evidence. After we had taken leave of our friends, we parked in the top half of the town because I thought I had seen some rather good, collectable china that matched up with a piece we already own. I have one small side plate of this design which I think, technically, is called Roslyn china vintage victorian Imari style and dates from about the 1900’s. In a local charity shop, I saw three larger side plates, a soup tureen and a serving platter and I think that on the web, these would each sell in outlets such as Etsy for anything between £5-£10.00 apiece. I paid £10.00 for these all five quite large pieces and I had taken along my own small side plate to ensure that the designs matched up and my memory was not playing false tricks upon me. So now we have in stock a set of rather good pieces which will be excellent for the occasions when we entertain and wish to serve up mince pies, Christmas cakes and other nibbles that will benefit from a nice display. A quick consultation on the web revealed the following: ‘Imari porcelain is a term for a colored style of antique Japanese porcelain, named after the seaport Imari on the island Kyushu, Saga, in Japan, from where the porcelain first was shipped to the West starting at the beginning of the 17th century. Exquisite, elegant, and of the highest quality, Imari porcelain is highly respected in Japanese culture and is one of the pride and hallmark of Japan. The two true masters in the antique Imari trade are the Japanese and the Chinese artisans’ To be fair, I do not think I have purchased any genuine Japanese or Chinese pottery as the illustrations on the web indicated that it is ‘Imari stye made by Reid for Roslyn China’in the potteries and seems to date from the 1920’s or 1930’s. It does seem to be the case from the illustrations that these fall into the categories of ‘collectables’ or very probably, as in our case, fine bone china that is not used every day but is brought out just for special occasions.

After we had lunched on quiche and sprouts (supplemented by some chestnuts as I noticed a pouch in our local supermarket) we settled down to watch the film again of ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ We have seen this about twice before but is a compelling story. We were about 30 minutes into it when the the YouTube ‘froze’ and I wonder if this because so much is being downlaoded on a Saturday afternoon. We listened to a Mozart Piana Sonato (No.16 – probably the most famous) and then resumed the YouTube to see if the transmission had ‘unstuck’ itself. Fortunately it had and we watched the film right through to the end with fascinating moments occurring towards the end of the film when the Italians occupying a Greek island surrended and their erstwhile German allies turned on then amd massacred most the of the Italian garrison. This is a part of history which I suspect is largely unknown and untold in the English history books.

The Tories are tearing themselves apart over the vexed issue of migration and the ‘stop the boats’ campaign with which they are becoming fixated. Now in an interview with The Times, Home Secretary James Cleverly warned people not to ‘fixate’ on the Rwanda migration scheme, adding that he has become frustrated with the heavy focus on the issue, and that it should not be seen as the ‘be all and end all’. Probably what Cleverly says is quite sensible and certainly when the Sky News data analyst looked at all of the data concerned with migration then the scale of those arriving by small boats is a very small proportion of those who are arriving, post Brexit, quite legally. Most of the migration is fuelled either by students or by people entering the labour force, particularly with in the health and social care sector. It is a little publicised fact that migrants because of their age profile (i.e. not in receipt of old age pensions or expensive healthcare provision) tend to contribute proportionately more in taxes and to receive proportionately less in benefits than the indigenous population – in other words the migrants once they enter the workforce subsidise the rest of us rather more than the other way around.

Today turned out to be quite a full day. As it is a Friday, it is the day when our domestic help calls round but she was feeling a little under the weather so we offered her one of our various preparations to have along with her customary cup of tea, hoping that this might sustain her. We started off on a trip to Droitwich which we often make on a Friday but having started out on the right road, soon realised that we would not have time for a visit if we wished to return home by 12.00pm midday. Our Eucharistic minister from the local church had arranged to visit us just after she had playing at a funeral and we realised that we had better move on to ‘Plan B’ Accordingly, we went to our local Waitrose which was quite full of ‘oldies’ for a Friday morning and thought it best to do things this way so that we could arrange to be at home when the minister called around. Whilst in the cafe we received some not very pleasant news from some of our Catholic friends who live just down thw road. The husband already had one suspect eye and the other was running into severe problems so several visits had to be paid to the local specialist hospital to ‘patch him up’ It looks as things are slightly improving but he had to exercise a condiderable degree of caution to ensure that he lay on the ‘correct’ side for so many minutes an hour which is more easily said than done. Just before we went out onto the road, I thought I would study the configuration of my newly commissioned IBM Thinkpad and, in particular, ascertained the number of USB ports which it sported. This proved to be two which is quite a small number and one is located immediately over the other making it quite difficult to use two devices as frankly, they might not fit. In the past I had bought a little USB port extender which was only a few pounds years ago and this little device plugs into one of the ports but effectively extends the number of ports from one to three. Now one of these was used so that I could utilise a cordless mouse, whilst another provided a home to one the small, less than thumb-nail size flash drives that you can buy this very cheaply these days. This provided me with another 114 GB of storage which is not that much these days but I also had in stock a 500GB Samsung credit card sized flash drive which I had intended to use as a backup at one time or another but other solutions had been found. I thought this was an excellent time to bring this into use as the original hard size of the IBM being so dated was incredibly small and the new drive would multiply the existing hard disk by a factor of 12.5 times. This fitted very neatly behind the open lid of the ThinkPad that I was kicking myself that I had not thought of it before but there we are. When I left my employment at Leicester Polytechnic, we had a computing laboratory filled full of Olivetti M24s (an IBM clone) with admittedly dated hard disks of some 20MB each. When I calculated the number of machines by the number of laboratories by the number of universities, I calculated that the little credit card flash disk I had brought into use would have supplied one half of all the laboratory based computers in all of the universities and institutions of higher education throughout the UK in 1997. Of course, we are now a quarter of a century later on but it still quite a thought that the storage space I had brought into use this morning was some 25,000 times greater than the typical computer memory size in 1997.

Just before lunch, the Eucharistic minister called around and we had another very satisfying little meeting and mini-service. Afterwards we lunched on a bought haddock pie and then got ready for our little venture out this afternoon. Some of Meg’s medication was proving problematic to source as the Lloyds Echo service which delivers to the door had indicated that we needed to contact our doctor to see if alternate medication could be prescribed. I phoned through these supply difficulties to the surgery who passed a message on to the community pharamcist. I got a telephone call late in the morning from this person who said that a new prescription had been issued and I could go to my local pharmacy who could then supply. This sounded suspiciously too simple and so it proved.When Meg and I got to the pharmacist, they could not find us anywhere on the system. So I was directed to go next door to our own doctor’s reception areas who eventually gave me a piece of paper with three sets of six digit numbers on it which I should then take back the pharmacy. They informed that that the request had been placed ‘on the spine’ and could I give them Meg’s NHS number to get access to the system. Eventually, after a wait of some 40 minutes and having incurred a car parking charge of £1.80 we got the medication that we wanted/needed but at the cost of considerable frustration. This well exemplifies that when you have a failure in quality of a transaction, it is nearly always at the point when systems interface (or fail to properly interface) with each other.

Last night was an interesting ‘first’ for Meg and myself. Our very good University of Birmingham friend was travelling to Coruña in Northern Spain via Barcelona and then was due to meet our best Spanish friend in a large cafe near to the hotel which everybody knows, called ‘Manhatten’ I made a WhatsApp call at 6.30 which would have been 7.30 in Spain so it was long enough for our two friends to establish contact with each other and to chat for half an hour before I called. This WhatsApp video seemed as satisfactory as it could be under the circumstances but the cafe was somewhat noisy and it was difficult for our friends to hear us although we could hear them quite clearly. The WhatsApp contact did not last too long because of these communication difficulties but at least I now had proof that they had actually met up as they intended. We shall have to wait until Sunday for a full debrief to see how things went but I University of Birmingham friend had lost no time in seeing some of the sights of Coruña and seemed to be enjoying the city (and the hotel, next to the sea) Our Spanish friend send me a text apologising for not speaking for too long but I said we would correspond longer by email, which we generally do in any case.

So my normal shopping day has dawned yet again and I ensured that I got to the ATM outside a nearby supermarket, dashed into the supermarket itself for one or two things that I can only get there and finally did my shopping getting home before 9.00am. The second tranche of help is scheduled to come today so that I can get out on the shop and do the shopping that I need to do for things I cannot get as part of my routine shopping. So far, so good – the care assistant came on time and I got out on the road but most of the things for which I was looking I could not actually find so the whole shopping trip was a little frustrating. So then I got home rather late, unpacked the shopping eventually and then set about preparing a vegetable curry for lunch. This turned out to be bigger than I expected and although I cook a little pasta for Meg, I avoid this and just use a couple of broken up water biscuits to provide me with the little bit of carbohydrate that I need. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised that Meg managed to eat up all of her dinner because I felt that I had probably prepared too much. It started off with a couple of onions to which I added some fragments of beef, tomatoes, mushrooms, frozen peas, an apple, some sultanas and some left-over gravy and the trouble is that whilst each ingredient is not that much, they too tend to cumulatively add up to quite a large meal.

This afternoon, I started to make arrangements so that I could start to write this blog in one room but finish it off in an other, including the bits where I transfer it to its WordPress site and also a text version to my own personal website. For a reason I cannot explain, the normal FTP process did not work (either of the two FTP clients that I have) in our main lounge although the FTP worked flawlessly using a much older FTP transfer program that has been around literally for decades and which works fine on the re-commissioned IBM TbinkPad. I was trying to think of ways around this glitch and got the laptop to rest itself on a couple of occasions when suddenly the problems that I had disappeared. As I have been transferring programs over by FTP literally for years, why the glitch should have happened and then cleared itself, I shall never know. In the meantime, I am rather enjoing a YouTube rendition of most of the major Mozart pinao concertos (Nos 20-27 inclusive I think) which for me is always a pleasant way to sepnd an afternoon. Late in the afternoon, Meg’s social worker made a call to ascertain how the new care arrangements were working out. I gave what I thought was an honest response which was mixed – some overall satisfaction but a bit of dismay that the first care worker would not have known (or have the physical strength) to cope with Meg if she had staggered and fallen which is an almost daily occurrence. Today, though, I particularly wanted to watch the ‘Politics Live’ program which starts after midday on BBC but was so tired that I fell asleep right at the start of it and probably only saw about a minute or so before my need for sleep overwhelmed me.

There is quite an interesting political row going on at the moment because a Labour MP, representing Stockton on Tees, asked the Prime Minister why 30% of the children in his constituency lived in poverty. The new Home Secreatry was heard by many to say quite audibly ‘Because it is a sh*thole’ The Times, to its credit, prints out the offending word in full and the Home Secretary is having to climb down and to make a semi-apology – but it is indicative of the mindset of prominent Cabinet members in today’s Britain.

Last night, I spent a certain amount of time (probably too much) getting my IBM ThinkPad up to scratch and managed to solve the lack of access to emails problem (the date had been set a week too late and this causes a certificate to indicate invalidity) But then I encountered some frustration installing some antivirus which would not work on this old version of Windows before a certain of ‘chat’ argument with a script monkey eventually involved me being promised a refund and a cancellation of the subscription. So I could do with a bit more sleep tonight. On the more positive side, I have the feeling that my session at Pilates was beneficial as my back seems a little less ‘locked’ and a tad more mobile so perhaps a regime of some stretching and some gentle exercise is just what is required. Today we decided that we go out for the morning to the quaint little market town of Alcester and I had made a booking yesterday in our favourite hotel on the high street which offers an incredible value pensioner’s lunch and where the staff know us well. Our venture up and down the High Street with Meg in a wheelchair was interesting. I must say I had not noticed the number of high kerbs, difficult entrances to shops and, in one case, an entrance that was practically too narrow for us to get in. Still, I managed using the little ‘tip’ levers on the back of the wheelchair which will raise the front wheels a few inches to help you get the front wheels on the kerb. After that, there is a degree of brute force required to get the whole wheelchair and its occupant on to the pavement. I have also learnt that it is often advisable to tackle things backwards rather than forwards – this way, the occupant of the wheelchair can only fall backwards into the chair and not forwards (and potentially out of it) Having said that, I found passers-by to be immensely helpful if they sensed that I needed some assistance. But just to show how unexpected things can occur, we made our way to our favourite coffee bar only to discover that the entrance step was so high and steep there was no way we could use this favourite haunt. So we patronised another one that we have used before and this had the advantage of a huge loo for such a small cafe which was a bonus for us. Then we came to my favourite hardware store but the entrance to this was so restricted and the passage ways so narrow that I had to leave Meg outside whilst I made a quick dash inside to get the black tape I wished to purchase. So our experience of the charity shops was somewhat mixed today although I did find that shoppers inside seemed incredibly accommodating and did not seem to exhibit any annoyance when Meg had to be circumnavigated past them. And so we made our way to the hotel where we knew there was a small flight of stairs but we left the wheelchair at the bottom and navigated the way to our table on foot. Meg had some haddock fishcakes and I had a beef lasgne, both served with salad and they were as delicious as always. The lady who is the regular waitress in there knows us well by now and offered some assistance with doors and the like whilst we getting in and out. So although I was not counting on receiving such help, it was very welcome when it was provided and was always gratefully received.

After we got home, the news channels were devoted to the Chancellor’s Autumn statement, about which there had been quite a degree of speculation. The headline figure was a 2% cut in the National Insurance contribution, in effect a tax cut, to be effective from next January. This seems to point towards an election in May – or at least keeping some options open for a May election. There was some financial support for industrial investment to help to grow the economy but quite unusually these days, this is quite a long term project and the full effects might not be felt for 5-10 years. Actually, the amount taken by the state in taxes is the highest it has been since 1948, which is particularly ironic for a Tory government. The interesting question is whether people will feel better off after a reduction in the National Insurance – afer all, inflation whilst falling is still an indication that prices are still rising. In the late afternoon, it was our day to get our wheelie bin pulled out to the end of our access road ready for emptying first thing in the morning. I have a particular dislike of doing this in the absolute dark and hence like to get it down before nightfall which is about 4.00pm these days. On my way back, I was greeted effusively by Miggles, our adopted cat who followed me down the road and into the back of the house where he can receive his normal treats ouside the back door. If I had been female and the cat hd been an all over black, the mediaeval mind would have cast me as a witch and the cat as her ‘particular’ or a demon in disguise. I am not sure if cats typically trot around after their owners but Miggles cetainly does in my case (even though we are not the owners)

Today was an interesting day in lots of ways with both its successes and also some frustations. But let us start with the success first. When I was up in the middle of the night (not an uncommon occurrence) I looked towards the IBM ThinkPad computer which I had purchased a couple of years ago, primarily to run DOS based and some Windows specific programs but which I have not taken the opportunity to use recently. On the spur of the moment and after a certain amount of fiddling about to get it to start (switching it on in the source plug is quite a good idea) I got it to spring into life again. There was a certain amount of BIOS settings to update as well as supplying a password for the router but fortunately this managed to work out well and I found, with a certain degree of satisfaction, that I could access my usual email and the FTP program that I used to use regularly to upload files into my webspace worked as well. The thing about IBM ThinkPads is that they are built like a tank and are luggable rather than portable, being incredibly well built but heavy to boot. However, I envisaged that I might be able to write text as I wished whilst working in the Music Room as this would be so much easier to use than the iPad which is incredibly ‘iffy’ for writing large volumes of text. But more of this later.

We got ourselves into Waitrose relatively early and waited for some of our friends to appear – and two of the regular three turned up in due course. The thing is that we all enjoy each other’s company tremendously and look forward to our little Tuesday morning cabals and today was no exception. But we needed to be home relatively early for a particular reason. After a protacted series of dicussions with Social services, the first of a 2 x 2 hour tranche of care for Meg looked as though it was going to be supplied. The person who was due to call around today was to be with Meg whilst I go off for a Pilates session and when I actually got down to my session, I was treated almost like the prodigal son. After a gap of several weeks, I am pleased to say that the exercises to which I am well used over the years were not too much for me and, impressionistically, I have the feeling that my back is somewhat the better for it. The acid test will be tomorrow morning, after a good night’s sleep. But for now, I am resolved to try to do about 5-10 minutes a day of stretches and the trick is to try to build them into a regular routine.

This afternoon, after lunch, I got the ThinkPad set up in the Music Room and assumed that everything would work well but was soon to be disabused. For whatever reason, I could not now get through to the web but I have a suspicion that it might be out-of-date free antivirus software that is causing the problem. I have uninstalled what may be the offending program but I shall have to wait until later to conduct some more tests and see if I have been succussful. At least I managed to write some of this blog in the Music Room on the ThinkPad, FTP it to my website (which takes seconds) and then I can carry on in our lounge on my Mac portable. Tomorrow may well prove to be an interesting day for both of us. I have made a booking in our favourite hotel in the quaint little Georgian town of Alcester that we intend to visit tomorrow. Basically this is just one long High Street but stuffed full of really good quality charity shops from which it is almost impossible to emerge empty handed. Another attraction is one of those old fashioned hardware shops that seem to stock every gadget and kitchen utensil you can imagine and tomorrow I will probably stock up on their rolls of strong, black Gorilla tape which is streets ahead of the opposition. We always enjoy the meal out as well as the lasagnes are always baked from homemade ingredients and are both piping hot and delicious – in the middle of the day during weekdays but not weekends, the restaurant puts on a restricted ‘pensioners’ menu which is such good value that I suspect that the proprietors hardly make any profit on it all. And then, to round off the day, we hope to make WhatsApp contact by a videolink to a cafe in Coruña where we hope that our University of Birmingham friend and our oldest and dearest Spanish friend finally meet up with each other. Occasionally today, I have managed to get snatches of the COVID-19 enquiry and this week, it is the turn of the technocrats to amplify their evidence – yesterday it was Sir Patrick Vallance (Chief Scientific Adviser) and today it was Sir Chris Whitty (Chief Medical Officer) Both of these have given the opinion that Boris Johnson had a fundamantal failure to grasp scientific concepts and were often bemused by the data he was given, even wanting to ‘twist’ the data to his own political preconceptions. It was said yesterday that Johnson, in particular, could not really understand the difference between linear (normal) and exponential growth and if this is true, one despairs at the quality of the current political elite and the type of education to which they have been exposed.

I got Meg into bed by 8.30 last night and was thus able to spare some time to get my accounts and finances up-to-date which was very satisfying. I try to ensure that I have a ‘daybook’ of all of my bank transactions which does have the advantage of being able to find past transactions very quickly and it also has the bonus of making me check each entry to ensure that nothing nefarious has taken place. This morning our son called round to do some work and he was not a happy bunny. His magnifient archive of rail related material was being given a new ‘functionality’ which actually meant that a lot of archive material was deficient or difficult to access. So he was in the process of transferring his entire collection to a photo archive called SmugMug. Despite the odd sounding name, this firm has a brilliant reputation and I actually knew of it because my own 50th wedding anniversary photos, as well as some other collections, are stored on it. I decided to do a little bit of research and found the following claim made by the firm, which I do not disbelieve: ‘All SmugMug photos and videos are stored at Amazon S3 for their 99.999999999% durability. If you have uploadeded 10,000 photos at Smug this means on average, Amazon will lose 1 pic every 10 million years.’ Nonetheless, despite the excellent functionality, our son still had a lot of background meta information to get updated on some thousands of files which he may have to do bit by bit. Actually, on the subject of upgrading I heard some news on ClassicFM which made my heart sink. ClassicFM announces that they were upgrading their service on January 2nd to DAB+ and the old DAB signal is to be discontinued. As it happens, I have several DAB radios scattered throughout the house and listen to ClassicFM whichever room I happen to be in. Now at a stroke, these radios are being declared redundant or I have the option of returning to a hit-and-miss and ‘hissy’ type signal of FM service. So in the name of progress one gets a worse service than one has been accustomed to over the years – unless, of course, you had bought a DAB+ radio in the last few years.

After we had breakfasted this morning, we fell into our normal Monday routine which is to pick up our newspaper and then make for our favourite cafe down the road in Droitwich. There we were greeted warmly and indulged ourselves in a huge pot of tea and a big bacon butty on chunky brown bread. We find that the way they make it in the cafe, one bacon butty is sufficient for the two of us- one each would be overwhelming. After we left, we made for the local Waitrose where we picked up some supplies and then started to make a somewhat delayed lunch. I had one particular little chore in mind for this afternoon which was to give our new car its first wash. This is the time when normally, you can give a car a minute examination to find any particular flaws but none have been detected so far. I decided to split the car washing routine I have developed over the years into a series of separate operations. The first of these is a ‘pre-wash’ in which I use a specialised watering can with a very long delivery arm (designed for hanging baskets) and I find thus useful for accessing all parts of the car e.g. the roof. Then I intend to streamline my car washing operations as I may have been slightly too fastidious over the years and now I need to simplify operations, not least to save my back from further assaults. I did a quick washing operation, shot inside to do the lunch and then did some of the finishing off bits (a final wipe down with a large car cleaning mitten as well as cleaning the windows with a specialised glass cleaner). These new operations helped me to save a little time but I need to add some refinements to next time. But I did notice a little sticker in the top corner of the windscreen which once I had gone on the web to give me an explanation is the information that the car has already been treated before delivery with one of those supposedly specialised treatments to help protect against tree sap, bird droppings and other misfortunes.

One of our afternoon routines is to access the music section of YouTube and let its algorithms serve up to us some of our favourites. One of the options this afternoon was a Dutch ensemble by the name of Voces8 whose renditions of Bach and Handel are superb. The performers all turn up in their everyday clothes i.e. not formally attired as though for a concert. The camera work focuses on the concentration and dedication showing on their faces and we are quite happy to hear their renditions again and again. One piece leads to another and we saw a version of ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ but with the parts normally played by flutes being played by a couple of performers on recorders and again, the effect was stunning. Many of these recordings are made in quite spartan Lutheran style churches where I am convinced that the acoustics are incredible because there are not any soft furnishings to absorb and muffle the sound. I must ask some of our musical friends whether this my conjecture is on the right lines.

Meg and I were up a little late this morning but nonetheless we had just about got ourselves up with our breakfast prepared in time to watch the Lorna Kuenssberg show. In advance of the Autumn statement (mini budget), both the Chacellor of the Exchequeur and the Shadow Chancellor were being interviewed. The one telling point in either of the two interviews is when Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, was asked to explain why he is taking all of the credit for the halving of the rate of inflation but was taking none of the blame for the rate of inflation having risen to about 11% in the first place. The answer in both cases is the fact that the rapid rise in oil prices caused the dramatic rise in the rate of inflation but the subsequent fall in the oil price and in fuel prices has resulted in the rate of inflation now being halved. This whole little episode does rather expose the hypocrisy of the modern politicians who blame ‘world events’ when the economy takes a massive downturn but always take the credit when the economy improves. After the politics show was over, we received the expected telephone call from our University of Birmingham friend who was suggesting that we meet up for our weekly cup of coffee together. Our little meeting today was actually quite important because our friend is due to travel to Coruña tomorrow and is going to meet up with our long standing friend who teaches at the University there. Our University of Birmingham friend is booked into our favourite hotel and he and our Spanish friend are due to meet in a large cafe just down the road from the hotel, all of which we know very well. I had spent a certain amount of time ensuring that I had a photograph so that the our two mutual friends would recognise each other when they were to meet in the cafe which is a large circular building on the edge of one of the squares in Coruña and is a very well known landmark. Whilst we were in the Waitrose cafeteria, I did a little experiment and our University of Birmingham friend and I ensured that we could have a videochat with other via WhatsApp. So when our two friends do meet up, I am going to contact them half an hour after they are due to meet so that we can have a little three way or even four way chat if Meg can be brought into the circle. I also took the opportunity to pass on some practical information and useful phrases if our friend follows our suggestion and takes a trip by train to go off to Santiago which is only 30 minutes away by fairly fast train. By the time we got home, it was nearly 1.00pm so I had to rush out feeding the cat (who often lurks around until he/she sees us reappear in the car) and then put a prepared chicken breast meal in the oven to cook for at least an hour. I enhanced a little gravy that I had left over with a chicken stock cube and the resulting meal was quite delicious, probably because some of the skin had been roasted nicely in the oven.

After lunch, we engaged in our diet of a little bit of the current news, dire as it is, before watching the next episode of ‘Outnumbered’. We then thought we would treat ourselves to a viewing of ‘The Inspector Calls’ which is a favourite J B Priestley play/film and which I thought we would probably get it via ITVX. All we could find was a ‘paid for’ version and this happened for a second version that we wanted to watch. I found a BBC colourized version which was unwatchable because the film was badly out of focus so we abandoned this. Eventually, though, we did find a version of the play which is not subject to a charge so it is playing away in the background, Meg watching it and I am actually blogging. By using a brass trivet which we have had in the family for a long time and a small table from one of our nest of tables, I have managed to make myself the equivalent of a little ‘escritoire’ so that I can sit in my newly acquired carver chair, blog away and still keep an eye on the TV playing away in the corner of the room. In the fullness of time, it might be that I can find a slightly more specialised and suitable piece of furniture, but in the meantime, I have an arrangement at just the right height, under which I can tuck my knees and then type away productively at my leisure.

We have no particular appointments as such next week, but there are several things to which we are looking forward. On both Tuesday and Thursday, we should be receiving the first of 2 x 2 hour tranches of assistance arranged via social services so that I actually have time to get our weekly shopping done and also see if it is possible to start to reattend my Pilates class after a gap of some weeks. On Wednesday, we will be visiting our Irish friends who live down the road and in the early evening, of course, should be video chatting with our two sets of friends as they meet up in Spain.

I happened to be up in the middle of the night last night and received the not very welcome news that one of our oldest friends in Spain had died a couple of days ago. Narciso was married to one of our Erasmus students and was incredibly kind to me when I spent a term teaching Information Technologqy to Public Administration students at the Complutense University in Madrid. Narciso was a very good friend to me when I was in Madrid and on several occasions invited me to dine with him at the little technology company that he owned in a village near to the University. Little incidents stick in one’s mind the most memorable being my infelicities with the Spanish language. He was offering me some whisky before the lunch and asked how much I wanted in my glass – half remembering some cowboy ‘B’ movies, I extended two figures and tried to say ‘two fingers’ which in Spanish is ‘dos dedos’ But I made a mistake with the initial consonant andt asked for ‘dos pedos’ which actually means ‘two farts’ Narciso was sufficiently polite apparently not to notice! He was an incredibly erudite scholar and at one time was a full Professor in Sociology in the University of Montreal being equally at home with Spanish, French or English. In fact I seem to remember he read Proust in the original French by way of relaxation. We spent a wonderful Christmas Eve meal one evening a decade or so back and more recently spent a couple of equally enjoyable evenings with Narciso and his wife when we were having a stay in Madrid. Quite by chance, the hotel in which we were lodged was only about half a mile from his flat and so was easily accessible to us. I do not know his exact age but suspect that he was something between five and ten years older than I am which would make him mid 80’s. So that is another life long friend who has departed recently, leaving behind only memories but always happy ones.

Once we had got ourselves up and breakfasted, we made our way to the Waitrose cafeteria to see our Saturday friends and were happy to see a couple of them. It was a little rainy and blustery this morning but nothing to dampen us too much in the journey across the car park. After we left Waitrose, I called in at a large general hardware store that sells all kinds of useful things. I particularly wanted to get a little tray of tea lights which is not something that one buys every day. But whilst hunting for these items, I passed the car accessories aisle and availed myself of a couple of car cleaning brushes and some some new sponges ready for what I hope to be a more regular car cleaning routine ( whilst I am still in the ‘new car neurotic’ stage). After lunch and a dose of our regular comedy, Meg and I are treating ourselves to a YouTube offering of Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’. There were several renditions from which we could choose but we avoided the ones in modern dress and chose one we have seen before where the singing is superb and the subtitles are particularly clearly displayed. One of my favourite lines from the opera is the response of Don Giovanni when asked by his servant, Leporello, how he could be so unfaithfull to so many of his conquests. The reply will delight misogynists everywhere when the Don replies that to be faithful to any one of them would be unfaithful to all of the others! But the opera is essentially a morality story because in the final scenes of the opera, Don Giovanni is dragged off to the flames of hell as punishment for his various misdeeds, not least the killing of the father of one of his early conquests.

The conflict in Gaza seems to plumb new depths. Today, it looks as though there is a (forced) evacuation of one of the largest hospitals in Gaza and, presumably, the patients are having to make their escape from the hospital by foot. Of course, there is an increasing clamour for there to be a ceasefire and a return of the hostages. But in the face of overwhelming military superiority, the hostages are one of the few assets with which Hamas can counteract the onslaught. No doubt, the hostages are all held deep in the many tunnels in which case Israel has a massive problem. Are the tunnels bombed outright, thereby condemning many of the hostages to death? Or does there have to be hand to hand fighting within the tunnels? One cannot predict how all of this will end. Also a 2 state solution would imply that Israel abandon the left bank of the Jordan captured during a the 6 day war in the 1960’s – if you were to look at a map of Israel and exclude the desert areas, then this West Bank must equate to at least a 50% increase in the land that Israel holds compared with the 1948 boundaries. Can one see the Israelis giving up at least one third of the land of Israel that they regard as God given? So it looks like a stalemate or a fight to the death in which practically the whole population of Gaza is either killed or forced into a permanent exile. Who then will govern the ruins that remain of Gaza? Presumably, the Americans could put an end to all of this within days but then Israel could well threaten to use their nuclear weapons if America abandoned it. The Americans in a pre-election year will not do anything that might threaten election prospects in any case. Hence the reasons for my profound pessimism.

Today being a Friday was the day when our domestic help calls around which is always a joy for us. We had great pleasure in showing her our latest (and probably last) furniture acquisition which was the occasional chair that I had purchased at a good price from the local AgeUK shop on Bromsgrove High Street. I have given this chair both a clean up and a treatment of orange oil with a subsequent buffing up although it was in a pretty good state when it was purchased. Having taken a photograph of it, I then used the Google Images app to find similar images of it and I now have a fairly clear idea how it can be described. It is, in all probability, a repro Sabre Leg Regency style Carver chair when I match up the images of my photo with the images found by Google. It is were a genuine vintage chair, it would sell for about £1,000 but if I were to buy one new, as a piece of ‘modern’ repro furniture, it would retail for about £220 which is over 10 times what I actually paid for it. It has been brought into use twice already since I have spruced it up to its final condition so I am highly delighted with it. The day had dawned fairly bright and clear as a beautiful autumn day but after we had got up and breakfasted, we set off for Droitwich to our normal cafeteria. Here we treated ourselves to a big pot of tea and one huge bacon butty between us. In the cafe, there were a group of four friends celebrating a birthday so the whole cafe sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and we were all treated to a little piece of birthday cake. After we had left the cafe and as we were conveniently parked, we popped into the Worcestershire Association of Carers charity shop and I found two items for Meg which I think she will find particularly useful. One is a skirt in a very pleasant floral design and a very reputable make and the one was a long and quite colourful long cardigan which is particularly useful to start to wear in the late afternoons after the sun has gone down and it starts to get a little chilly.

After our Eucharistic minister had called around yesterday, as she is so musical and had such a wide repetoire, I managed to find a Handel aria ‘Waft her, angels, through the skies’ which is an piece from a little performed oratorio called ‘Jeptha‘, composed in 1752. YouTube provided us with three filmed versions of this and we delighted in the tenor performance. As a follow on, though, there was a concert of other Handel pieces performed, I think, by a Dutch ensemble on period instruments but the singing of the soprano was absolutely breathtaking – so much so, that I am resolved to listen to it on several more occasions. This evidently acts to gladden the spirit after the succession of depressing news if you tune too much into Sky News these days. We have witnessed recently rows of babies in Gaza taken out of their incubators and laid out in a row because there was no power left to power their incubators. The Israelis are claiming that Hamas are operating a command and control headquarters from underneath the principal hospital in Gaza and this justifies them entering the hospital complex with their tanks. Some automatic weapons and other munitions have indeed been discovered but the world is still waiting for definitive proof of the tunnel complex and command-control HQ which was the justification for the Israeli incursion into the hospital in the first place. Althpugh there is a United Nations attempting to gather evidence of a war crime, it is the case that some countries – including the United States, Russia and Israel — do not recognize the court’s jurisdiction, and the ICC does not have a police force to execute arrest warrants. So the world shall never know whether we are witnessing a war crime unfolding daily on our TV screens or not.

We pop into our usual Thursday routine today as Thursday is our shopping day. I was up reading my emails in the middle of the night and received some rather distressing news about the illness of a wife of one of my Hampshire friends who is currently in hospital. I have offered what advice and support I can but when we live a great distance apart, this is always electronically mediated and a poor substitute for face to face contact. We may Skype each other in a day or so so we can exchange information a little more easily. The shopping went off easily enough and I pop into a local branch of a neighbouring store to purchase a particular variety of wheel cleaning brush but, as so often happens, this design is now discontinued so I have to a make a compromise over what is available. Once I got the shopping home, it was a case of getting Meg up and washed and dressed and the shopping put away before we anticipate a visit from the Eucharistic minister who is calling round from the local church. As she is so musical, we swap some musical stories and. as she plays the cello, I asked her which famous cellist was her favourite. I mentioned the name of Rostropovitch and she had actually gone round to the stage door when he visited Birmingham and had a little chat with him. We were expecting further visit at midday from a team who may be offering both us some practical support after what seems to be weeks of negtiations, financial and otherwise, with Social Services. This organisation was scheduled to call around for a preliminary assessment but we received a telephone call to say they had heavy colds so this particular visit was going to be scrubbed and they were due to call around for their first visit next Tuesday, so that I can (hopefully) go off and recommence my Pilates sessions which have had to be abandoned for the last few weeks. For lunch, we used up a bought chicken pie that we had in stock and just had this with some sugar snap peas as neither of was feeling particularly hungry.

As you might imagine, both the visual and the printed media are full of analysis of two recent political events, the first being the comprehensive rejection of the Government’s Rwanda scheme to deport migrants and the second being a huge rebellion by Labour MPs who descided to vote for a SNP amendment calling for an immediate ceasefire rather than the Labour party’s own motion which called for a exended pause. For many MPs this was evidently a real conscience issue rather than a wholesale rejection of Labour party policy as a whole. All in all, 56 MPs sided with the SNP and I think there were 8 shadow cabinet members who automatically lose their portfolios after ignoring a three line whip. The Rwanda issue is amazing in many ways as the Government, rather than backing down in the face of a comprehensive defeat in the Supreme Court, are determined to press ahead with a new Treaty with Rwanda which ought to be legally binding. The government has indicated that it will legislate to say that Rwanda ‘is a safe country’ which seems to be to be a ridiculous piece of legislation. If the House of Commons were to vote that the moon was made of green cheese, then a vote would not make this so. Also, the Tory party, again appeasing its own Right Wing, is threatening to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights. But this is a smokescreen as those threateened with deportation to Rwanda (and from there back to the countries from which they fled) are protected by several interntional treaties, the whole body of international law and about four pieces of domestic legislation. The government is making noises about ignoring all of this body of international law but were it to do so, the UK would become a pariah state and our influence and standing in thr world would shrink to zero. Even if legislation is passed in the House of Commons, it is extremely problematic whether the Lords would pass a motion which allowed Britain to break so many international treaties. The normal pattern of ‘ping pong’ between the Lords and the Commons would run out of time in the present Parliament. All of this is even before any flights which would be subject to even more interventions by the High Court, Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court (again). In short, I think there is an incredible amount of bluff and bluster going on but the more sober assessments in the quality press is of the view that further attempts to refine the arrangements with Rwanda would be doomed. For example, in the past the Courts in Rwanda have rejected 100% of all of the applications from Afghans who have come before it, with no legal representations or written court judgements. For this reason, our own Supreme Court are not all convinced that judicial pocesses in Rwanda would reach the standards of probity we have come to expect in the UK and how is the UK government to ensure that the Rwandan court adopt these enhanced standards of probity in the future?

Next week, our University of Birmingham friend is due to make a visit to Coruña in Northern Spain. Meg and I would really loved to have been with him but it would probably have been a step too far with Meg’s frail state of health. Our friend is going to meet up with our long standing and oldest friends in La Coruna and no doubt can give bring our friends up-to-date about the situation here at home.