The remnants of the storm which raged overnight were still somewhat in evidence this morning. There was quite a (hat-removing) wind that was in evidence and the temperature was on the cool side. We picked uo our newspapers and then popped into our local Waitrose where we needed to buy birthday cards for family members needed in the next few days. Then it was into the park and we met up with our Birmingham University friend. We had an interesting discussion about things historical and particularly the way in which certain presenters very much have the ‘common touch’  and manage to convey well the importance of history to our everyday lives. After that, it was a fairly unpleasant walk home as the wind intensified but we managed to regale ourselves with a curry that we prepared for lunch.

This afternoon we had a typical lazy afternoon, largely concerned with reading our newspapers.The news rooms have been filled, though, with the case of the young woman who has gone missing and subsequently a member of the Metropolitan police has been arrested amid a lot of conjecture that he was responsible both for her abduction and her murder. The fact that occurrences like these are so rare has not helped to dispel the widespread feeling of unease, not to say fear, experienced by the majority of young women if they have to venture out at night. It goes shout saying the men do not share similar fears, nor in general do they need to. But to act as some kind of corrective, we are being reminded tonight that of the women murdered each year, most of the blame can be attributed to a partner or an ex-partner and not a complete stranger.

Whilst thinking about the whole brouhaha surrounding the Meghan and Harry interview with Oprah Winfrey, the question came into my head whether Roman society was inherently racist (given that the Romans were great colonisers) I genuinely did not know the answer to this question but the consensus view is that whilst the Romans referred to the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa as ‘Aethiopes‘ (from which we derive the designation Ethiopians?) The answer was quite surprising. The conventional historical view is that the Romans did not have a racist social structure – their ‘slaves’ were largely drawn from other European and Mediterranean peoples and were therefore ‘white’ (The story was told to us in primary school that when a couple of young Anglo-Saxon children were shown to the Pope of the day and with their long blond hair and blue eyes were said to be ‘Angles’, the Pope is reputed to have said ‘Surely, not Angles but Angels’) In Roman Society, black people were not excluded from any profession or strata of society  and there are quite a lot of illustrations of black individuals (and traces of black DNA) found in places as far as Hadrian’s Wall. But there has been a counterblast in a book entitled ‘The invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity‘ in which the author says that, contrary to prevailing opinion, the roots of racism we have experienced in the west does have its roots in Antiquity and specifically in Roman and Greek Society. The problem with all this is that white historians have generally found little examples of classical racism whereas black historians show the reverse. So does historical truth lie in the ethnicity of the historian? Whilst admitting that one always has to ask for whom the historian is writing and for what purposes (e.g. see the way in which Tudor propaganda systematically besmirched the reputation of Richard III), it is somewhat troubling  if one is a seeker after truth and trying to find ‘the answer’ to a question.

Meanwhile, the unwinding of Brexit is chugging in the background, but generally out of the public gaze. Last week the Chancellor accepted the OBR’s forecasts of a 4% reduction in national income once the full effects of Brexit are felt. Far from sovereignty driving prosperity, the government’s forecaster seems unpersuaded that the much-vaunted regulatory freedoms of Brexit will do anything to offset this macroeconomic damage. Quietly, a Vote Leave prime minister and chancellor have accepted that so-called project fear was right all along. The consequences for household incomes are bad, but so is the impact on the public finances. The OBR forecasts that tax receipts will hit £1,038 billion by 2025-6. But without the economic drag anchor of Brexit, revenues would have been around £42 billion higher. As we always suspected, the effects of Brexit and the pandemic are so intertwined, that it will be difficult for the professional statisticians to attribute which effect to which cause. But I am reminded, as we were talking about Roman society, that in order to distract the population from rioting and expressing its discontents, the roman elite of the day used to engage in ‘bread and circuses’ in order give out a free distribution of food and throw some general public spectacles to divert the gaze of the population to the true source of their discontents.

Unfortunately for him, the Treasury disagrees.

Today was the blustery day in which a large storm moved across the Atlantic and hit the UK with high winds and attendant rain. As it turned out, the weather was somewhat blowy when we walked down into town and it did turn out to be one of those days when you had to hang onto your hat because it was in constant danger of blowing away. We needed to pop into Waitrose to get one or two things that we had run out of before the order arrives between 9.0-10.0 tomorrow morning. Whilst there, I exchanged some information with one of the friendly staff who mentioned that she had now seen another person we used to see regularly who is a history teacher in a local school. She had a beautiful baby boy who is now old enough to be at nursery so our friend (of our supermarket friend) was returning to work. I gave our friendly supermarket assistant one of the cards that I keep in my wallet to pass onto our mutual acquaintance because I would like to reestablish contact after a year. At the very least, she can read our blog to see what kinds of things we have been doing in the last year.  And so we made our way to the park but by this time the wind was blowing quite hard. We did not really anticipate seeing our University of Birmingham friend in the park today because he had only had the vaccination at the day before and may have been feeling under the weather. As it turned out, we did not see our friend but we did receive a telephone call informing us that he was having a big computer problem back home and he was trying to get it fixed remotely – the best of luck in this venture. Eventually a gust of wind blew my cup of coffee off our little portable stool so we thought we had better make for home – there was hardly anybody in the park to speak of anyway. But just before we left, we bumped into another local who frequently walks in the park and she had often noticed us (and even stopped for us in her car on one occasion) So, again, I passed over my blog details because she and her husband were quite regular bloggers so it might be quite interesting to have a look at what each other is saying.

When we got home, we had a quiet afternoon reading and then a little parcel arrived from Amazon. This was a superior quality memory card I had ordered from Amazon which was very frequently recommended as one of the best quality one could buy and was the first choice for many professional photographers (including our own son, so I discovered in a subsequent conversation with him at memory cards) This particular one (a SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB cost me a shade under £16.00) and I immediately used it to make a complete backup of my main computer system. I was pleased to see that the entire 32GB of my system was backed up in 18 minutes which means it was writing at almost 2GB a minute or about 32Mb a second which is fast enough for me, as it happens. This particular memory card claims to have a ‘limited’ lifetime warranty but SanDisk do offer a service that if the data on the disk cannot be read or recovered, then they will recover if for you using their own specialised facilities within a two-year window from the date of purchase. I think this sounds quite a good deal really, considering the not exorbitant amount of money that the memory card cost in the first place.

Tonight it has been reported that the test-and-trace regime is now costing us £37 billion (£22 billion + another tranche of £15 billion handed over the the Chancellor). This has been branded by the Public Accounts Committee as ‘staggering‘ and ‘no clear evidence‘ that it had cut coronavirus infections. Just to put into context, this extraordinary amount of money is approaching one half of the projected cost of the HS2 hi-speed link between London, the Midlands and the North. So here we have one system, the test-and-trace regime largely handed to the private sector and recognised as ineffective and an extraordinary waste of money. Meanwhile the vaccination programme performed by the NHS, i.e. in the public sector, is an astounding success. To my mind, there could not be a clearer illustration of the fact that really big and universal systems are best left to the state to organise and not left to the vagaries of the private sector. One interesting quote is provided by Lord Macpherson, who until 2015 was the most senior official at the Treasury, and called it ‘the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time‘. But do the public really care about this enormous waste of money – after all, the Tories are still ahead in the opinion polls so it doesn’t appear that wasting money on a colossal scale has any adverse consequences.

Today was a beautiful day, at least to start off with, and Meg and I enjoyed a really pleasant walk down to collect our newspapers. However, it was not so much a case of ‘now is the time for the turtle dove to be heard in our land‘  but rather one gets used to the whirr of the lawnmower as the population gets geared up for the spring. Whilst in the newsagents, I indicated that I had managed to solve one of the great mysteries of life i.e. how is it that the newsagent can sell a bar of Cadbury’s Bournville dark chocolate for £1.00 whereas Waitrose sells the same bar for £2.00? The answer lies in the fact that although the bars look alike (width x. height) they nonetheless differ in their height or depth i.e. the Waitrose bar is twice as thick and consequently has twice as much chocolate and the commensurate increase in price.So now we know. In the park we met with our Birmingham University friend who, as it happened, had received his jab the day before and was feeling a little under the weather. We conveyed our condolences and told him that when he died from the after-effects of the jab, we would go to the local cemetery in order to pick up some flowers which we would then recycle for his own funeral – he was very grateful for this offer. We also met another long-standing park friend who is a wheelchair user but it transpired that during her working life she had been an NHS manager in a small local hospital, now long since closed down and the site developed as a housing estate. We also engaged in some gossip about other park acquaintances that we all know well but prefer not to get into arguments with, if we can avoid it. The park was pleasantly quiet today and we met a few friends of friends as well as the variety of dogs some of whom we are starting to recognise.

This afternoon, we sent ae email to Meg’s cousin in Bolton, wondering with the easing of the lockdown situation whether we might make a flying visit to see the family in early April. As it happens, the weekend we were thinking about is going to be quite busy with family reunions so we are probably going to settle for a date some time in May. This might suit our purposes quite well because it is my birthday towards the beginning of May so it may well be that we have a family reunion which includes a little birthday celebration at the same time. However, it is a thought that a lot of population think they are ‘safe’ because they have received one dose of the vaccine and there may be lots of family reunions and events all over the country. Then this might have all of the ingredients that we need for another surge of the virus.

After the Harry/Meghan interview, Buckingham Palace has tonight released but a terse but incredibly well-written statement. This indicates that they will tackle the issues raised, particularly racism, within the family and offering their continuing love and support. To my mind, this hits absolutely the right note and shows a degree of dignity and restraint – with absolutely the right words chosen for the occasion. The interesting question is whether the media is going to keep this particular story rumbling on and on or whether the public as a whole will get bored with it and public attention moves elsewhere. After all, there is an expression in the newspaper world that yesterday’s newspapers become today’s fish-and-chip wrapping paper.

One of the government health ministers (Lord Bethell) has tonight given his opinion that nurses are well-paid for the job they do.  While he praised the ‘heroics’ of health workers during the pandemic, he said they had secure jobs that many people would ‘envy’. Given that a government re-shuffle is on the cards, this sounds like one of the most inopportune things that  a government minister might admit to. Of course, the whole question whether nurses are to receive a pay-cut (given that a 1% pay increase when the rate of inflation is more than this) is still under active political discussion. It seems very likely that the government are going to receive a bloody nose over this particular conflict.

Late on this afternoon, we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends, as we generally do on a Tuesday evening. We exchanged news of the various ventures which we can both look forward in the next few weeks. Our friends had got a trip booked in July to see both York (where Meg and I, incidentally, decided to get married) and then Harrogate (where I lived as a child from the age to 5-17) Meg and I don’t have any trips planned as such but we might make a lightning visit to see Meg’s cousins in Derby some time in April (i.e. after some restrictions end on March 29th)

Today had a morning characterised by what I think you would call ‘watery sunshine’ – the temperature was quite mild and our walk down to collect the newspapers was  reasonably pleasant, particularly because as you go, it is just possible to discern which perennial shrubs and trees are starting to bud. My observation of this process is that many plants and shrubs may start in the late autumn and then undergo a halt in early spring, perhaps anticipating a late frost or snow and then suddenly burst into life with a flying start when the days lengthen and the temperature warms up. Just before I get onto our park bench meetings, today was the day in which you could legally sit down with a friend on a park bench and enjoy a cup of coffee – without the ‘excuse’ of the park bench bench being a necessary break in the middle of exercise which was the legal regime under which we have been operating since the start of the current lockdown. In fact, Channel 4 news devoted to a little item to the joys of the park bench and how it had (and will) continue to be the ways in which we can meet with old friends now that coffee shops and pubs are generally closed (as yet) to us. Anyway, we met with our Birmingham University friend and had a really useful chat about how we were going to manage our gradual ‘unlockdown’ transactions from now on. At least a couple of our park acquaintances met up with us and we chatted about how much we were enjoying the mildish weather, particularly as the children have returned to school today and the park had returned to a quiet and relaxing haven after the bustle of the weekends. There were several little things we had wanted to chat over with each other but this is not always possible when you are joined in conversation by others and then it is time to go home.

Today, I carried on looking at bits of my computer system and which I could usefully prune, move elsewhere and/or make part of my backup routines. Over the years I have collected  a range of pen drives as the price has dropped dramatically over the years. I found one that was a SanDisk Extreme 32GB and when I checked out the current price, Amazon were selling it for £8.99. So I reformatted it and used it as an additional backup source for my system. I reformatted it to a MAC format and then was amazed that I could easily get most of my important files on it, writing at the rate of 2.34GB per minute and this only using the slow-is USB 2.0 rather than the more up to date and faster drive (on more modern machines than mine) which is USB 3.0. So at the end of the day, I do now have three backup systems – one being Apple’s own Time Machine, a second being a conventional and recently purchased Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and the third being the flash drive. In the course of poking around in my system, I found an audio file (and subsequently, on the web some movie files) of our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations in 2017. So Meg and I enjoyed watching these again, some 3½ years after the event. There were three video clips which were of great interest – one being of Meg and her observations on 50 years of marriage, one of me telling a range of tall (and largely true) stories and a third of ours who was a close friend, now deceased who came along to our celebrations and played some Handel for us on his trumpet. So this took a fair amount of time but we enjoyed looking at it was well as the range of photos which we took on the day itself.

Today the media has been dominated, as you might expect, by the Meghan Markle interview which was shown on the American media overnight and is going to be shown tonight on ITV at 9.0pm. Very much is being made of the fact that one member of the Buckingham Palace outfit had speculated as to the skin colour of the yet unborn baby and everybody (particular Oprah Winfrey) had reacted to this as though it was the purest expression of racism! On the hand hand, it could be that the person uttering the remark was imbued with a racist ideology but an alternative explanation is that a courtier of liberal views was expressing delight that the British royal family was modernising by including mixed heritage members within it. Anyway, I am thoroughly bored by the whole media blitz and attention and the programme has not even been broadcast yet.

Back to school today for millions of school children under some conditions (e.g. lateral-flow testing 2-3 times a week to be continued at home, face mask wearing for senior pupils etc.) I believe that some members of the SAGE committee are already of the view that this is bound on the ‘R’ factor (pushing it up from 0.6 to 0.9?) but, in any case, Easter beckons  quite soon and provide a bit more respite.

The weeks roll by and yet another Sunday morning has dawned. I get up half an hour earlier on a Sunday morning and this gives me time to get up, showered, dressed and breakfast prepared before I trot down to get our supply of Sunday newspapers. I generally enjoy these trips down into town because I give myself a little concert on my trusty old iPhone – in this case a good dose of J.S.Bach’s ‘Brandenburg Concertos’ (full of early 18th century ‘joie de vivre‘) After our customary viewing of the Andrew Marr (politics) programme, Meg and got ready to wander down into the park and see who we might meet. As it is ‘back to school day’ tomorrow, we anticipated that the park would be less populated by young children – perhaps the coolness of the weather has something to do with it. We met a couple of park friends and enjoyed a scintillating conversation on the subject of computer ‘heat sinks’ before we struck for home. We had a largish ham joint cooking away slowly in our slow cooker but the Sunday lunch traditionally takes a little longer to prepare as there is onion gravy to prepare amongst other things.

This afternoon proved to be a typical Sunday afternoon for us. We spent a lot of the afternoon reading the print off the Sunday newspapers with a David Attenborough wildlife program on the television by way of passing interest. When we looked out of the window, it seemed to be a glorious Sunday afternoon – very inviting for a walk if we hadn’t already got our exercise done for the day. We treat ourselves to a re-run of Thursday night’s ‘Question Time‘ which is broadcast on the Parliament Channel at 6.00pm each Sunday. Tonight, we are going to treat ourselves to a roam through YouTube and hope to be able to get a viewing of an opera – tonight, hopefully, we will try and find and play Mozart’s ‘The Marriage of Figaro‘ That ought to set us up for the week (if only because the arias keep running through your head for a day or so after the viewing)

The political story that is running on and on (which we thought it would) is the 1% pay deal offered to the nurses – after they had been promised at least 2.1% a year or so back and this had been built into both government spending projections and even legislation. What must give the government pause for thought is that according to an opinion poll in the Observer, some 72% of the population think the nurses should be offered more than 1% (i.e. what would actually be a pay-cut in real terms once inflation, council tax rises and the like are taken into account). A clear majority of Conservative voters/supporters feel that the offer of 1% is too low so surely there must be a screeching ‘U-turn’ on the cards, particularly as there are local elections coming up on Thursday, 6th May which is not too far off once we get Easter taken into account. But I read tonight that the organiser of a protest over the proposed 1% pay rise for NHS workers has been handed a £10,000 fine by police. This is because about 40 people had gathered in contravention of current lockdown legislation but even so, this works out at about £250 a head! Perhaps the organiser ‘had form’ and had already been warned by the police but a fine of £10,000 for a first offence (if it were) seems to me to be unduly harsh.  There is always the possibility that the organiser could appeal and have this fine adumbrated or massively reduced but we shall have to wait and see.

As we enter March, we start to think of birthdays and the like as our son’s birthday and that of our daughter-in-law are fast coming into view – and what to do for celebration in these days of (just about) lockdown? Evidently, we can’t go out for a meal so we decided to treat ourselves to a communal fish-and-chip supper on a date that bisects the two birthdays. I also have an eye on the end of the month because March 25th is the day that I traditionally like to think of as the start of the mowing season which involves getting new supplies of petrol, engine oil and so on. Once you start the mowing process, you have to carry on at approximately weekly intervals not least because of the act of mowing releases a hormone in the grasses which stimulate them to keep on growing. The first cut of the season is always a bit off a pig anyway as the grass is so tufty and I have to do it on a high setting to get the job done. But we have a bit more bad weather to face yet as there seems to be a horrendous Atlantic storm heading our way which is going to hit us with high winds and plenty of rain about next Wednesday.

Before we came out today, I received a text from one of my church friends indicating that church services were to resume in about a couple of weeks with a type of ‘rolling start’ but a booking system was being introduced so that would-be worshippers can ‘book their place’ several days beforehand. It looks as though things ought to be in place by ‘Palm Sunday‘ which will be on Sunday, 28th March i.e. in three weeks time. I got onto the church’s website to download some particulars of the new procedures that we have to follow before we can attend services again and I am glad that things are starting to move again. It looks as though a new priest may be installed before the Easter celebrations start but so far information is exceedingly sparse.

Because we were slightly late this morning we popped into the park first of all where there was a mini ‘gathering of the clans’ – well six of us anyway. The conversation got a little esoteric e.g. how likely is life on other universes? At what stage after the ‘singularity’ (i.e. the ‘big bang’ which may have started off the universe given that it is still expanding) did the laws of Newtonian physics start to apply? – the consensus view is that can be measured in milliseconds but needless to say, all of this is conjecture by the cosmologists. Anyway, we were fairly relieved to break off from these lofty not to say esoteric discussions, collect our newspapers a little late (although they had been kept in the back room for us) and so on up the hill. On the way home, we bumped into two more of our church friends and, again, we swapped whatever information we had concerning the resumption of services.

I had a heavy ‘computing’ afternoon where all finished very well in the end. The Apple operating system contains an app (‘Time Machine‘) which, once running correctly, will save backups hourly for the past 24 hours, daily for the last month and then weekly for all previous months (with the oldest being deleted when your backup disk becomes full). Although this seemed to be working OK for the first few days after I specified it be saved on my newly acquired portable drive, then I kept getting error messages to say that Time Machine had encountered errors and could not save. A quick search of the web indicated that the backup disk needs formatting in a particular way (Apple has about three different types of format, just to be confusing) Then I couldn’t ‘unmount’ the disk (make it invisible to the operating system) or reformat it so the whole disk seemed to have become useless. I was just on the point of packing it up and sending it back to Amazon and make a claim for a new one when I suddenly had a brain wave and managed to get it reformatted in the way I wanted on an ‘old’ i.e. legacy Mac that I have. In the meanwhile, I pressed an a former (very high quality) backup drive into action (made by a firm called GTech) and this seemed to work like a charm i.e. just as it should. Then I used the newly reformatted 2TB drive to store backups of most of my ‘every day’ files which must go aback about 20 years by now (e.g. all of my old lectures and teaching materials that I really ought to throw away but can’t at this stage!) Things seemed to back up more quickly than I might have imagined (I managed nearly 1½ Gbytes a minute using only USB 2.0) so I am well pleased. So now I have a Time Machine system which seems to be working the way I want and a more ‘personalised’ backup system if there is anything I desperately need to get hold of. Hopefully, everything will be fine from this point onwards with no more hassle.

Tonight, we were going to treat ourselves to a Mozart opera (‘The Marriage of Figaro’) via YouTube but it would clash with a police series which we are watching on Saturday evenings, so we need to postpone that pleasure until tomorrow night. 

There is a big row going on tonight over the pay-rise to be awarded to NHS staff i.e. 1% when the rest of the public are having a pay freeze. What is making the nurses and others so angry is that they had been promised a pay-rise of 2.1% (which only just about compensates for inflation) and Teresa May had indicated that this would be covered by the NHS revenue settlement announced in June, 2018. So having had expectations raised, they have now been dashed on the grounds that ‘we can’t afford it‘ which wears a bit thin when £22 billion had been spent on a barely function ‘Test-and-Trace’ regime. Again, the Sunday newspapers might play an interesting role if they carry opinion polls which the government might choose to ignore, being several points ahead of Labour following a ‘successful vaccine rollout’ bounce for the Tories.

Another cold day beckoned but we set forth with our usual vim and vigour, not least because walking at a certain speed helps one to keep warm. We collected our newspapers and made straight for the park where there was quite a gathering of the clans. We met up with our Birmingham University friend, another person who is a wheelchair user but who is often in the park with her battery-powered chariot which has fair turn of speed on it, and finally more friends of friends. Our conversation started off with a discussion of lithium-ion batteries such that we surmised would power mobility vehicles. From this we moved onto a discussion of lithium-ion battery technology (inspired by the impressive figure for the wheelchair performance) and came to a kind of consensus from things we had read in various places  that it was less stressful to the battery of e.g. a mobile phone to give it two charges from 30%-80% rather than one complete charge from 0-100%. Like many of these issues, there is ‘street knowledge’, ‘informed knowledge’ (depending upon how good your internet sources have proved to be) and a sort of ‘everyday knowledge’ which that strange amalgam we carry round in our heads. On our return, I set to work preparing a risotto which I often prepare and eat on Fridays and prepared for a nice restful afternoon.

As it happened, I got anything but. I thought to myself ‘I’ll just run off an (internet) article before I sit down to a cup of coffee only to find the printer completely dead. As it was working fine yesterday and he only thing that had happened overnight was an operating system update, I immediately came to the conclusion (wrongly, as it turned out) that the refinements of the operating system could not cope with out-of-date printer drivers so I tried to download some more. When I looked at them, though, the file was 9 years old and I thought it would be a  bad idea to replace current drivers with 9-year-old ones so I abandoned that line of investigation. I then wondered what price a new printer would be but the current model I own is out-of-stock at Amazon (superseded?) As I have a supply of toner ready to hand, I thought I would explore a range of comparable printer models  who use the same toner cartridges but this too drew a blank. Eventually my son and I solved the problem by getting rid of my little USB extender I was using to extend the number of slots beyond four and this proved to be my salvation. But USB slots quickly run out when you have keyboard in one, a printer in another, a scanner in a third, backup disk in a fourth and none left for memory drives and the like. One has to be careful in whipping USB plugs in and out in the case of external drives in case data is in the process of being written so you have to ensure they are completely quiescent and then (on a MAC) ‘unmount them’ i..e making them invisible at least temporarily to the operating system. Also I have decided to be a ‘good boy’ and not use any hub extenders at all but rather do a bit of judicious swapping (e.g. printer for scanner and vide versa) when required. I DO have powered hub but this adds to the clutter not to say confusion in a table of cables behind the computer so I am going to see if I can make out with the system supplied quota of four. As it happened, this took all afternoon to sort out so restful it certainly was not. At least I am now slightly bettered informed about what happens when you allow USB ports to proliferate and what to do about it.

At the risk of being somewhat trivial, there have been some stunning photos released from Mars as the ‘Perseverance’ trundles its way across the Martian surface. There again, a friend of mine did send me another photo, ostensibly from Mars in which a lot of little creatures who look as through they  were dressed in potato sacks are lined up in front of a banner which stated, in bold letters: ‘F***k off’ and then another banner stating ‘Go Home’. I thought that was wonderful and wondered how it had been staged  before it was released onto the world.

Finally, there’s good news about the Brazilian variant of COVID-19 as the ‘sixth’ person (who had failed to fill in a record card) has now been located. This, in theory, means that it should be possible to contain the Brazilian variant before it goes rampant but, of course, it might be lurking in lots of other parts of the country as well. One of our church friends caught up with us, very excited, as she was due to be ‘jabbed’ later on in the day. I think most people experience a sense of relief once the vaccine is actually in their arms.

Today was another cold day in the current spell of cooler weather with the thermometer just above freezing, but only just (about 4°) Tomorrow is going to be cold as usual and we have a few days more before the weather gets a little milder over the weekend. One would think we would be used to pretty cold weather at the start of March but we had got used to a few glorious days of spring-like weather a few days ago and I suppose we have got a little spoiled because of it. We collected our newspapers and sought friends and friends of friends in the park and we had a jolly good chat until the weather got to all of us (as we are standing around socially distancing) and so we made for home. I was telling our friends of an embarrassing incident that we had when we were students in 1968. Below the maisonette that we rented was a series of little stalls in some converted shops and one of them was a haberdashery stall, run by an Asian lady. At that time, we needed, in order to effect a minor repair, some knicker elastic (it is called ribbon elastic today) and it was on sale for 1½d a yard (i.e. the old money) We explained that we only needed a foot and the stall-holder told us ‘That’s all right – I will sell you a foot’ So she carefully measured it out, wound it round into a little ball and popped it into a little brown envelope. So we were asked to pay ½d  – we handed over our 1d and got ½d in change. We felt a little embarrassed about this transaction even at the time – ½d is worth approximately a fifth of the modern day 1p coin.

News is emerging this evening about Sir Philip Putnam who was the previous principal civil servant in the Home Office and who was suing the Home Office for constructive dismissal. It has been announced that an out-of-court settlement has been reached and Sir Philip was to be awarded more than £1/3rd million after it was acknowledged that he had been subjected to a campaign of bullying and abusive behaviour. The Standards chief Sir Alex Allan found that Ms Patel had broken the code governing ministers’ behaviour and ruled according only for Boris Johnson to not accept his findings (and thereby exonerated Priti Patel) whereupon he promptly resigned. My own stance on this if she had the intellect to argue her case, she would not have to resort to bullying and obscene language. Every time I see her on the TV I am reminded that she was the communications director of James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party which then transmogrified itself into UKIP. Eventually she found a natural home in the right wing of the Conservative party here she is quite popular with the rank-and-file (although there are rumours that she is destined for the chop in the next government re-shuffle, probably forthcoming in June). I am reminded of the minister in the first Labour Government who was not given a new portfolio in the Labour Administration from 1945-1950. He sought an an interview with the (very headmasterly) Prime Minister, Clement Attlee who, when asked why he had not offered a new ministry to the disappointed politician merely drew on his pipe and uttered the immortal words ‘Not good enough!” And that was that. However, since then we have a legion of ministers who have shown the most astounding incompetence but still retained office (they are all right wingers needless to say) The most outstanding example was Chris Grayling (popularly known amongst MPs as ‘failing Grayling’) whoo is estimated to have cost the taxpayer some £2,778,072 (i.e. nearly 3 billion pounds) in a succession of eleven failed ventures.

There is some dark talk tonight of yet new variants of COVID-19 that have emerged in the last few weeks. These are always worrying in the extreme, not least because they appear to be ‘super-infectious’ and seem to have evolved by evading all of the current vaccines.It is possible (as with the ‘flu vaccine) to reformulate the current range of vaccines to cope with these new variants but in the meanwhile even more variants might appear. The one real answer seems to jump hard on even a single case that appears. For example, Auckland in New Zealand discovered one case of the virus appearing and immediately put the whole of the city in lockdown for several days (it goes without saying that New Zealand is coping with its COVID-19 pandemic much better than we are). But to be slightly more positive, we are now up to 21 million having received their first ‘jab’ which is practically 40% of the adult population. Meg and I are counting off the days until April 12th when we are scheduled to receive our second dose of the vaccine and about three weeks after that, our immune status should be as high as it can be.

After we got up this morning, there was an item on the Radio 4 ‘Today‘ programme which was genuinely uplifting. It was an interview with the well known singer/songwriter/benefactor Dolly Parton. She had taken her own song ‘Joline, Joline, ‘Joline‘ and had re-worded it so that it was rendered as ‘Vaccine! Vaccine! Vaccine! Perhaps many people know by now the Dolly Parton is an exceptionally shrewd businessman as well as being a huge benefactor. She has started an ‘Imagination Library‘ in 1995 and, starting with her home state of East Tennessee, the program distributes 1 million free books a month to children at each month from birth to the age of 5. It has been calculated  that 100 million books have already been given away FREE and not for nothing is Dolly Parton just as well known for being ‘The Book Lady‘ as for her country and western prowess. Dolly Parton donated £1 million dollars to the ‘Moderna’ vaccine program but she had only just today received her jab because she did not want other people to think that she was ‘jumping the line’ (i.e. queue). This is all quite inspirational stuff really – there are still millions of Americans who need to be convinced about the benefits of accepting the vaccine.

Today was a ‘grey’ day and the Midlands seemed to be swathed in a a cold mist which was not incredibly cool as there was no accompanying wind to increase the chill factor. Nonetheless, we picked up our newspapers in the normal way, meeting on the way one of park friends who is in his mid 80’s but still walks about 7-8 kilometres a day (but monitored at a distance by his daughter who can keep track of him, presumably via an Apple-type watch) We hope that we can sustain ourselves with such an energetic daily routine when we are his age but we can but hope. When we got home, it was straight on with cooking the mid-day meal and then watching the news unfold on the television. Today was Budget Day but a lot of this had been trailed beforehand in any case – I think the real surprise, though, was that the furlough scheme was going to be extended until September (as well as the £10 supplement to Universal Credit). I suppose it is quite easy to be a popular Chancellor of the Exchequer if you are still in the ‘giving out lots of cash’ stage but tax rises are on the way in a year or so. This will be done by the old-fashioned expedient of not increasing the actual tax rates but rely upon freezing the income tax threshold levels which means that owing to ‘fiscal drag’ more and more people get drawn into greater contributions of tax from 2025. After that, there is a prediction that the tax burden borne by the population will be the highest since the 1960’s and corporation tax will be increased  in a year or so to a rate which is higher than now but below the level of other G7 countries. We all knew that the expenses created by the pandemic would have to be paid for how somehow. The other major story is the Nicola Sturgeon evidence before a Scottish parliamentary committee but this is is labyrinthine and tortuous to put it mildly and who is lying about what is difficult to disentangle.

This afternoon, I busied myself with one file tidying and I started on one of Meg’s old medical files. Some of this stuff went back for more than 15 years so it was a case of seeing what could be safely be junked straight off into our green bin, those documents that had to have identifiers removed and shredded and that which it is prudent to retain even if for historical purposes. This is but part of a much longer process of tidying up files but I intend to keep up this good work until a lot of junk has been removed. At 5.00pm, we Zoomed some of Meg’s cousins in Derby and this time we were joined by another family member still in Cheltenham so it was good to have a kind of family get-together. We find these occasions quite enjoyable so we are going to repeat the exercise at about fortnightly intervals from now on.

Various European societies (principally France and Germany) are now re-tghinking their opposition to the AstraZeneca virus. Although it was subject to a lot of ‘black’ propaganda, we now have the evidence from the several millions vaccinated in the UK over its effectiveness in stopping the rate of infection, keeping people out of hospital and so on. Given that the UK is so far ahead of other European societies in the vaccination race, it now looks as quite a re-think is going on in Europe but decision makers do not like to admit that they were actually wrong or mistaken!

We wondered how today was going to turn out as the skies were initially grey and looked somewhat threatening. But once we got underway, the sky gradually changed from a freezing fog grey to a light blue and it turned out to be quite a pleasant day. I left Meg in the park in the company of our Birmingham University friend and walked quickly on my own to pick up our daily supply of newspapers. Upon my return, I found a little gaggle of friends, friends of friends and those of us who just happen to be exercising at about the same time of day every day. We laughed and joked for a while and then we get onto the more serious business of discussing backup technologies and strategies for the computers that we own. We swapped some bits of information and then departed as soon as the park police (actually two very young PCSOs – Police Community Support Officers) – were spotted in the distance from our vantage point and we judged it diplomatic to gradually start to disperse and make tracks for home.. It was a delightful walk home with some pale spring sunshine and a promise of some more to come in the days ahead. Although it was only about 1-2°warmer than yesterday, it felt a lot warmer as the wind had dropped. But I gather from the weather forecast that I have just heard that the weather is going to get colder and the winders stronger and keener in the next few days so we had better not greet the arrival of spring too soon.

We know that tomorrow is going to be a big day, politically as the two main events of the week unfold. One of these is the Budget which is more or less predictable (and has been predicted  or at least well-trailed) But the other much more explosive issue is going to be the evidence that the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, will give to a committee of the Scottish parliament. If she has found to be lying or at least ‘economical with the truth‘ then she may be found to be in breach of the Ministerial Code which would normally lead to a resignation. Whether this is going to happen tomorrow or in the few days that follow, only time will tell but it looks as though Nicola Sturgeon will  have the fight of her life tomorrow. I think it would be a pity if one of the most effective of the current generation of politicians (and one who has had a ‘good pandemic’) were to fall at this stage. There is a saying attributed to Enoch Powell, though, that ‘all political careers end in failure‘ (actually part of a much longer and less snappy quote) but of course this is a truism, usually determined by an election or a ‘defenestration’ (literally death by throwing someone out of a window but now used in a much more metaphorical sense vide what happened to Margaret Thatcher).

Tonight as I am writing this blog there is a wildlife programme on the television in the background when the young female commentator was commenting on the problems of an impala buck having to defend his territory during the mating season. The commentary that came floating over the airways explained ‘mating with fifty females whilst keeping an eye over your shoulder for any potential challengers can be quite an exhausting business‘ with which sentiment I can only say that I agree. I utter a silent prayer that I was not born into a religious tradition in which I might have be re-incarnated as a impala at stud – there again, envy is one of the most destructive of emotions. But in the same nature program, I did learn that 50% of black rhinos are killed in fights with other black rhinos but I suppose for an animal of that size there are not many natural predators.

Tonight, we FaceTimed some of our closest ex-Waitrose friends and caught up with each other’s news for the week.It should only be about four weeks to go before we can (legally) meet in an open space somewhere – perhaps in the garden attached to the residential block where our friends live. We are not in the business just yet of making too many active plans at this stage but we will wait until we are about a week to go before we make firmer plans.Tomorrow night, we are going by appointment to have a Zoom call with Meg’s cousins in Derby so that will be another opportunity to catch up news but this time with much more family-centred news. 

There is slightly better news on the Brazil variant of the virus this evening. Apparently, the one missing case has been narrowed down to one of a batch of 379 kits despatched out so with a certain degree of foot-slog, the miscreant person who has tested positive but failed to fill in the record card may well be identified – for all of our sakes!