Today was a blustery type of day but we did not hasten to get down into town because it was the day when our domestic help calls around and there are always a few things for us to chat over. One of the things that we needed to do was to check over the ‘systems’ for our small guest bedroom in anticipation of tomorrow when our frind is coming to visit us from Hampshire and is having an overnight stay with us. Once we were good and ready, we collected our newspaper and then went to Waitrose primarily to provision ourselves with some wine and beer in anticipation of tomorrow. As we were in Waitrose, Meg and I availed ourselves of the ‘free coffee’ facility that is starting again for its own customers (but was withdrawn for the duration of the pandemc for understandable reasons). In the late morning, a package arrived courtesy of the Post Office which was a Panasonic mini hifi system which I bought from a seller on eBay. I had previously bought a Pure DAB radio replacement for one of my defunct ones from this same seller on eBay and hence had every confidence in him as a seller. After lunch, it was quite an easy job to wire up the speakers and I soon got the CD and the Bluetooth functions working as they should. The sound quality is excellent for my ears and although several reviews of the system (and even the seller himself) said the volume was not particularly loud, it was certainly loud enough for us where the system is located on one of kitchen work suraces tucked away neatly into a corner. The one slight disappointment was that I could not get the radio functions (FM + DAB) to work because it evidently needed an aerial/antenna which was not supplied with the system. This is ‘nice to have’ but not essential to me as I shall be using the CD or Bluetooth 90% of the time, if not more, but I dropped a quick note to the vendor to see if the aerial had been omitted by mistake. It turned out that it had not as this was how the system was supplied when he acquired it during the pandemic so I shall pop down to our local radio/TV store to get a working aerial. At the same time, the vendor had inadvertently left a copy of a ‘Dire Straits’ CD in the tray and thinking this might be precious to him (it as!) I promised to get it back to him in the post. This afternoon, as you might imagine, Meg and I have listening to opur new ‘toy’ and having treated ourselves to some masses/motets by Byrd and Tallis, we then followed it up with some renditions of the Mozart Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 21 which was needed to fill a slight ‘hole’ in our collection and which arrived this morning.

I will not go into the minutiae of what is happening upon the Parliamentary front except to make the following observation. The public as a whole, if they think of what happens in Parliament, think of the ‘Yah-Boo’ of politics which is exhibited in Prime Minister’s Question Time and other occasions when business is discussed ‘on the floor of the house’ But much more significant are the Select Committees which have a membership proportional to the voting strength of the political parties in Parliament but with Chairs some of which are drawn from the Opposition parties. When MPs are working in committee, they are capable of questionning ministers in much more forensic detail than is possible in the whole House and Ministers and civil servants often squirm under the impact of detailed questionning, much of it coming from their ‘own’ side. Today both the Chancellor of the Exchequeur and the Home Secretary have have to endure sustained and detailed questionning at the hands of select committes and neither,by all accounts, acquitted themselves particularly well. Suella Braverman, for example, could not explain how ‘safe and legal routes’ are actually working.

Giant-slaying is back in vogue in the football World Cup as Japan have beaten West Germany 2-1. There are enormous parallels, which must surely be just coincidences, between Argentina’s defeat at the hands of Saudi Arabia and Germany’s defeat by Japan. Both Argentina and Germany scored first and through a penalty in both cases. Then, in another coincidence, their oppenents scored two goals in quick succeession only to hang onto their lead with desperate efforts until the full-time whistle was blown. Every match seems to have extended way beyond its allotted time as officials have added on extra minutes not just for injuries but for red and yellow cards, substitutions, excessive goal celebrations, VAR interventions and so on. In fact, the England game against Iran went for almost 30 minutes beyond the normal 90 minutes. Evidently, FIFA has made some policy decisions but it does not look as though the effects of this have not been properly modelled. Rugby League has a hooter that sounds on the dot which seems eminently sensible.

We are truly into November-ish type weather this morning as the wonderful autumn spell that we have been enjoying has finally come to an end and we return to what we might term more normal autumnal weather. As it is a Tuesday, we have fallen into our normal Tuesday routine which involves having a coffee in the Waitrose coffee bar. There, as we expected, we bumped into one of our Tuesday regulars where we have our customary chat and contemplate the fact that the Christmas is almost upon us where we will be assailed on all sides to buy perfume, chocolate and goodness knows what else. Once we had our elevenses, we made for home where we caught up with some of the news of the day. Then it was a case of getting into my Pilates ‘gear’ (in other words my track suit bottoms) before I walk down for my regular class each Tuesday – our class is a small but regular group of four with myself and three ladies. Fortunately, the showers held off whilst I walked down and had my class bfore I walked back and we had a late lunch at about 3.0pm. At home, I am engaged in a a little project in which I am having some success so far. I am trying to create some open boxes/containers which hold the CDs I have relocated to populate our newly commissioned music room. This involves trying to find a narrow shoebox or any box which is just a tad over 5.5 inches wide. I then do a certain amount of covering with grey duct tape to give the CD boxes a more uniform appearance as well as strengthening any parts that have needed to be cut or adapted to shape. So far, I have successfully made three of these storage boxes and am half way through adapting a fourth – it is one of those kinds of activities which is reasonably satisfying as you can do it whilst watching TV which is showing any content that is less than riveting in the background.

There are two bits of news which are attracting attention this afternoon. The first of these is a YouGov national opinion poll of public opinion which is showing that only 32% of those polled think that Brexit was a good idea and 56% think it was wrong. This is particularly interesting as it puts both major political parties out of step with the public’s view. There is a growing realisation that Brexit ‘is not working’ and, perhaps the feeling as well, that it is not likely to work either. If a trade deal with the USA could be negotiated, then this might give the Brexit project a fighting chance of success but at the moment, most of the deals negotiated amount to pretty small beer. A trade deal has been negotiated with Australia which many commentators are predicting will be a bad deal for the UK. It is widely acknowledged that most of the trade deals negotiated by Liz Truss when she was the Foreign Secretary were really ‘cut-and-paste’ jobs for deals that were already in place but were just repackaged and had a ‘Brexit’ label stuck on them for presentational purposes but nothing all that substantial had actually been renegotiated. Why all of this matters is because of the disastrous failure of the Liz Truss ‘experiment’ to borrow out way into economic growth and where international investors refused to lend us the money. One of the most evident ways to achieve economic growth is to allow for more immigration to fill skill shortages and to establish a new trading relationship with the nearest big economic blog i.e. the European Union. But when the Sunday Times indicated that some in the UK Treasury were contemplating an arrangement with the EU such as Switzerland enjoys, there were immediate howls of protest from the Brexit press and Rishi Sunak was forced to make an instant statement to the CBI (which he happened to be addressing the next day) that anything like the rumours were remotely being considered. Nor would such measures pass through the House of Commons as presently constituted.

The second big new story is the news that in the World Cup, Saudi Arabia – a rank outsider, ranked as No. 51 in the world – has just beaten Argentina 2-1 when Argentina was one of the fancied teams to actually win the competition. The delight in Saudi Arabia, a neighbouring country to Qatar with easy access to it, has just declared a day’s public holiday in celebration. This ranks as one of the biggest shocks in the whole history of the World Cup, although every single World Cup produces one or two surprises. More disturbing news was that a female Welsh supporter was actually denied entrance to the match against the USA just because she was wearing a multistriped hat in favour of LGBT+ rights. I think that the supporter managed to smuggle herself inside the match anyway but it does tell you something about the mindset of the Qatari/FIFA footballing authorities to take action as draconian as this.

As we anticipated, today was wet and windy and, I suppose, we had plenty of warning that this was going to be our weather for the next few days ahead. Before we went out, I busied myself with taking an old shoe box which fortunately was narrower than most and happened to be exactly the right size, to the millimetre, to accommodate a collection of CDs. So I prettified this up by covering the sides in a grey ducktape so that it exactly matches the other cardboard box I have similarly processed. Then I went and rounded up the other Mozart CDs I have in the normal storage units and populated the new CD box I have just created. As I have about two dozen Mozart CDs, I made some little index cards dividing the whole into piano concertos/symphonies/woodwind concertos/operatic arias and I finished off with a compilations section. With the two little CD boxes sitting side by side on the kirchen unit and nicely indexed, I can rapidly put my hand on a suitable CD as the spirit takes me. We ventured out and collected our newspaper and then popped into our local Waitrose to pick up a few supplies. After that, we wondered whether to make a trip around the park but we bumped into our Irish friend so we chatted for a few minutes in the rain and then decided to go home and have our elevenses there. Then we decided to have a fairly early lunch (which was easy to prepare)and thought that when it was over and we were all washed up, we might devote putselves to the second half of the football match between England and Iran.

When we tuned in at what we thought was half-time, the first half was still in progress as the Iran goalkeeper had been injured in a clash (with one of their own players) and they had evidently tried to treat him on the pitch instead of making an immediate substitution. England were leading 3-0 at this stage and we assumed that the second half would be anything but exciting football given the half time lead. In the event, England won the match with a scoreline of 6-2 but the second Iran goal was awarded in injury time after a video review and looked doubtful to put it mildly. But politics had made its influence felt both before and during the match. The England team had wanted to wear a ‘one love’ LGBT+ armband but afer a lot of tense and fraught negotiations with FIFA, the ruling came down that the wearing of such an armband would result in a penalty to the players or at least the captain by the issue of a yellow card before the game had actually started. Then a second yellow card during the match would mean the automatic issue of a red card which would mean the offending player would be sent off and would miss the next match. In the face of this pressure the England team and probably the Welsh also decided to forego the armband but they did ‘take the knee’ without an objection from FIFA. The Iran team were even more conflicted, however, and they made the symbolic protest of not singing their own national anthem and refusing to celebrate the goals that they did score. These actions might be severely sanctioned once the World Cup is over so, I believe, the Iran players showed a lot of bravery in the stance that they took. Tonight, we have decided to break our resolution not to watch much of the football because it is Wales versus the USA and we would like to see a bit of giant-slaying take place.

Immediately after lunch, we took delivery of a piece of furniture I had espied in our local Age Concern shop and which I had noticed last Friday on my way to Pilates. This piece was rather hidden away in a corner and I suspect that if it had been given a more prominent position, it would have been snapped up very quickly. The piece was designed, I think, to accommodate a music centre or similar and inside had three shelves with two decorated glass doors which have given the whole quite a quality look. I gave the whole a good rub down with a damp sponge cloth and then finally gave it a treatment of furniture polish and it now has a pride of place in our music room. The intention is for me to store CDs and other associated audio equipment inside. The top of the unit had evidently been marked by having a music system placed on because you can still discern th marks made by the loudspeakers. But I have ameloriated this by putting a nice piece of crochet work on the top of the piece and relocating a little lamp onto the unit so that we now have aa array of occasional lighting which gives the whole music room a quiet and relaxed air. Meg and I celebrated all of this by listening to Janet Baker singing Bach cantatas (recently redicovered in the raid on my other collections of CDs)

It was quite a fine day today and although there were expectations of rain later in the day, we could still enjoy quite a fine morning. I walked down into town early to collect my newspaper, as I always do and then we made our way to the park. There we bumped into one of our regular friends but missed the other one. The park café had suffered a small fire and as the fire crew complete with appliance (one must learn not to call it a fire engine anymore) had cleared the café and its environs of all customers then our friend had abandoned his walk early. We had a chat with our regular friend and then made our way up to our ‘normal’ bench where we enjoyed our coffee and had a chat with another couple that we meet quite regularly in the park. Then it was a journey back to the house where I had a Sunday lunch to cook. We had some beef cooking in a slow cooker but there is always a certain amount of extra clearing up to do once I have washed out the (gravy) slow cooker container and prepared some onions to make a decent onion gravy. We typically cook the whole of a small joint but when it is removed from the slow cooker we usually halve it. One half, when cooled, goes into the freezer for another week whilst the ther half provides us with 2-3 days of meals. This pattern that we have evolved ensures that we have sufficient protein for our needs but at the same time means that we are not consuming too much red meat which the health professionals tell us we should only eat in moderation.

This afternoon, I spent a certain amount of time searching through some of my CDs so that I can have a choice selection of Mozart to have by my side in the kitchen. The various first Mozart Piano Concerto that I have heard in its entirety was Concerto No. 23 which was bought for me by an old friend (who has since died) some time in the early 1960s. Since then I am particularly fond of Concertos 20 and 21 but it is is possible that I already some CDs of these but I have to some hunting around to find them. But I found the Mozart Clarinet Concerto which again is a favourite and I also discovered the Horn concertos and the Oboe concerto so these, too, have been added into my little boxed collection which is already about two dozen long.

I have not taken any interest in the World Cup but I have noticed, with a certain grimace of pleasure, that Qatar lost its opening match against Ecuador, 2-nil. Apparently, it is the first time that a host nation has ever lost an opening match of a World Cup and I suspect that the host nation will not survive. I wonder how long the football competition can take place before some politics intrudes with a vengeance. The England team are going to wear rainbow arm bands and perhaps even ‘take the knee’ but I wonder whether the extreme heat, despite ‘air-conditioned stadiums’ will eventually take its toll and make a mockery of the competition as a whole. I might make an exception of not taking much interest in any of the football when I see that Wales are playing the United States in their opening game tomorrow evening. If Wales could possiby eke out a draw, then this would count as a moral victory at least but I am not holding my breath.

There is not much in prospect for Meg and I this week although we are expecting a close friend from Hampshire to come and see us on Thursday and to break his journey ‘up north’ by staying the night with us. If the weather is fine on Thursday, we can always do a little tour of Bromsgrove and the park but if the weather is windy and squally, we will have enough time to entertain us with filling in the news of what has happened to us in the past few years. Our friend is going to research some of his family history and, in return, I might show him some of our own researches in this area. I always thought of myself as ‘born and bred in Yokshire’ but in practice, a distant Australian cousin on my father’s side has devoted a lot of time and energy to researching that side of the family. I find now that rather having my roots in Yorkshire, my forebears actually can be traced back to a West Midlands bicycle manufacturing company who prospered in Wolverhampton. I have even a photograph which is incredibly valuable because it shows the family name prominently displayed above an exhibition stand in which the latest models of bicycle were being put on show. So I discover that I am actually a Midlander through and through which means that I have had to have a sudden reversal of self-identity since the information has been known to us.

Today dawned as a beautiful bright day with a clear blue sky but I think we will have to make the best of it today because for the few days we can expect a succession of squally type weather being driven across the Atlantic. I think it is true to say that New York is feet high in snow at this very moment. So having collected our newspaper, we made for our normal park bench and had our elevenses and then wandered down to see our usual park friends who were having a coffee in the park’s own coffee bar. The weather was quite fine enough to stand around and chat which we did before making our way home for Saturday lunch of quiche. Just before lunch, I decided to give some of our CD collection a good examination to see what might be lurking there that we had forgotten about. We have some discreet little CD units which hide away in one corner of our living room but access to them is rather occluded by a settee and other items of furniture so it is not particularly easy to browse without a good light and making space for oneself. Having said that, I had a very successful 20 minutes or so because I managed to locate a cooy of Beethoven’s 9th which I thought I had somewhere but could not immediately locate. Having found this, then by the act of searching for it, various other CDs came to light which I was pleased to rescue. Some of these were Bach CDs but there were also examples of Mozart operatic arias as well as several items of baroque which I pleased to let see the light of day again. After lunch, I managed to locate in our garage an empty cardboard box the dimensions of which happened to be almost exactly right to press into service as a way of keeping my newly rediscovered CDs in one place. So I spent some time covering this in some (grey) ducktape which gave it a sort of neutral appearance and then filed away the CDs taking the opportunity to create some index cards to remind me of the various categories and now I have it sitting available but unobtrusively on one of our kitchen working surfaces. After lunch, I played some of the Bach CDs on our newly acquired little Boombox CD player and I still continue to be amazed how a piece of equipment for which I paid so little is giving us the quality of the sound that it does. I surmise that the size of the speakers has a lot to do with it but certainly the reviews of the product when I was contemplating its purchase often mentioned the good quality of sound that it produces. As I was making us a swift cup of tea before we paid our weekly visit to Church, an extraordinary little thing occurred. I happened to turn on ClassicFM and the music track that was being played was the Bach double violin concerto. I stared at the machine in some disbelief as the last track I had played on the CD was the same Bach double violin concerto. For a few seconds, I wondered how it was possible for the CD to be still playing although it was tuned to Classic FM and then I realised that it was one of the extraordinary coincidences that sometimes occurs when a piece is broadcast which you have just played a few minutes before.

I would not say that I was one to revel in the misfortunes of others but some news did emerge today that gladdened my heart. The chief executive of Rochdale Boroughwide Homes which was the social housing organisation in which the two year old died after exposure to black mould was today forced out of his post. Only a day or so, he was refusing to resign and the housing assocation were even expressing complete confidence in him until it was announced today that his position had become ‘untenable’. If one was of a cyncical bent, however, one could argue that the Board had sacked their chief executive in order to save their own skins. There is now a pressure group building up to argue that after this incident, black mould should be treated as just as hazardous as escaping gas with a concomitant duty to make repairs within hours rather than weeks.

The football World Cup is starting in Qatar tomorrow and, I must say, that I could not be less interested. Controversy has erupted again before the competition has actually started. The president of football’s international governing body FIFA says the West should not criticise Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup – adding that European nations should instead apologise for their own histories. The president of FIFA attempting to buttress the choice of Qatar is adding fuel to the flames with a comment that ‘For what we Europeans have been doing around the world in the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.’ I have a feeling that all of this is going to end badly, even including the football.

Today was a cold but bright day but first thing I had to get the weekly shopping done, postponed from yesterday. I had always assumed that in my regular supermarket, Thursday mornings would prove quieter than Friday mornings but this morning I found far less traffic on the way there and the store was pretty quiet when it opened at 8am this morning. Once the shopping was done, I collected our newspaper on the way home and then had a leisurely unpack once I had got home and cooked our normal poached egg for breakfast. As the day seemed fine, we suspected that some of our normal park friends would be lurking around and indeed one of them was. Whilst we were busy having a chat we were joined by our Lickey friends who proved a mine of useful information. This is because the ‘husband’ part of our friend has probably forgotten more electrical and audio knowledge that I ever possessed in the first place so I managed to tap his brains about one or two little audio/electrical things in which I have been engaged. It is always good to chat with people more knowledgeable than yourself so that you can pick up tips and hints about things that you could never sort out on your own. After a pleasant chat we struck for home and after watching a little of the ‘Politics’ catchup on the week’s happenings, I cooked our normal Friday meal of sea-bass served on a bed of salad and this worked out as tasty as always. Whilst I was cooking the meal and as we were eating it, we treated ourelf to a listen of Bach’s ‘B-Minor Mass’ which just arrived on a CD through the post this morning. This was part of a boxed set with the Matthew Passion, John Passion and the Christmas Oratorio all under the baton of John Eliot Gardiner, one of the foremost conducters of baroque music. This is the last of my current ‘splurge’ of buying really cut-price CDs but the boxed set of nine quality CDs (Deutsche Grammophon)was offered at a price that I felt I could not afford to ignore.

A seasonal item is reported on the Sky News website which is quoted below.
The average cost of a Christmas dinner for four people comes in at £34.28 – based on an average of ingredients across five supermarkets (Aldi, M&S, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Morrison’s). Ingredients included: Turkey, potatoes, pigs in blanket, stuffing, gravy, brussels sprouts, parsnips, carrots, cranberry sauce, peas. For all of the above, M&S came in as the most expensive, at £58.60 – with Aldi the cheapest at £23.53. But as data also found that Brits waste around 27% of their food, and with 73% of the UK enjoying a Christmas dinner last year, this means UK households are spending £107,024,533 on wasted food.

As might be expected, there is still a massive amount of comment and discussion about some of th economic pain inflicted upon the population in yesterday’s Autumn Statement. Real disposal income is due to drop by 4.3% in the next 12 months, followed by a further cut of 2.8% the year after that. So there should be an average cut of over 7% in the next two years which will wipe out the increase in living standards that has occurred over the last eight years. The government itself is arguing that the recession should be shallower by postponing some of the cuts in public expenditure until after the next election (itself, as massive ‘elephant trap’ for any incoming Labour government) What is very uncertain at this stage is how the various public sector unions will react, given that many of them have strike plans in place for the autumn. The mood of the country at the moment is quite understanding as the real pay of personnel working in the public sector is lagging behind the private sector and indeed there has been a cut in real wages dating from the ‘austerity’ years of George Osborne. So it is not inconceivable that that there might be a ‘de facto’ type of general strike if many of the public sector unions decide to strike at the same time. It is fairly evident that Christmas is going to be grim time for many and the New Year even more grim for most of the population. The Institute of Fiscal Studies is of the view that the UK has entered a ‘new era’ of higher taxes. One might think that the current drop on living standards might be as temporary as a couple of years. But Paul Johnson of the IFS is saying that ‘The truth is we just got a lot poorer. We are in for a long, hard, unpleasant journey; a journey that has been made more arduous than it might have been by a series of economic own goals’ It is no wonder that we have arrived at this point when a combination of the damage done by Brexit (according to the OBR), the costs of the pandemic,the dramatic rise in energy costs following Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and the disastrous consequences of ‘Liz Truss’ economics are all combined together.

Today was another early start but fortunately not quite as early as yesterday. Nonetheless, I was up with the lark and set off for a neighbouring hospital an hour before my appointment time, knowing that the rush hour could be terrible at this hour of departure. But my fears were a little groundless because I arrived at my appointment slot for a routine scan half an hour before my allocated slot. The ward clerk informed me that I would not be seen for quite some time so I went off in search of some reading matter as I had not picked up today’s newspaper on the way out. I found in the hospital’s coffee bar a bookcase of donated books. In the midst of the usual trashy novels, I did find a James Herriott ‘All Creatures Great and Small‘ which was a book full of episodes each only a few pages long and where you could dip into and out of it quite easily. This suited my purposes very well and eventually I was seen a little before my appointment time. I have had several of these scans before so I am well used to the routine by now and it seemed over and done with pretty quickly. So I shared a quick joke with the radiologists and was then on my way home, collecting my daily newspaper en route. When I got home and had a mini-breakfast, we learned that it was going to be the Autumn (ie. Financial) Statement at 11.30 so we did a few emails and things before it was time for the broadcast. So much of this had been leaked in dribs and drabs there there were hardly any announcements that were in, in fact,new. But the data analysts evidently looked at the published OBR press releases which, in its way, tells its own story despite what political spin the politicians manage to deploy. What was revealed was that ‘Household Disposable Incomes’ are heading for their biggest fall on record. Also it appears that the long-awaited analysis of the public finances by the OBR suggests it will be 2028 before incomes recover to their 2021-22 level. So the country as a whole is in for a couple of really hard years. To ‘sugar the pill’ a little, both pensioners and benefit recipients, should be getting increases next April which are raised in accordance with the current inflation rate which of the order of 10.1%. So we are in the position where some people might appear in money terms to be getting better off whilst in real terms inflation means that real incomes are falling for many. So in just eight weeks, the government has shifted from wanting to roll out the biggest tax cuts in 50 years to taking the country’s tax burden to its highest level since the Second World War. The point being made by some commentators is that the Budget appears to be more like a Labour budget than a Conservative one but the the £55 billion budget ‘hole’ is being paid for by tax increases (largely financed by allowances being held steady which actually increases the tax rate as inflation takes hold) and spending cuts. A bit of extra money (in money terms, not in real terms), is being found for both the education and the health budgets.

We had a fairly early lunch and then I walked down to the doctor’s surgery to play my part in the education of medical students. I was ‘interviewed’, if that is the right word, by a couple of young female medical students, both in their first year of their studies. They were meant to be taking a sort of social history but I think the intention is to get them used to real patients before they actually have to treat them. We chatted for more than half an hour about some of the things in which I been engaged since my own retirement and some of this entailed me going down memory lane about our pleasurable experiences, both working and on holiday, in various parts of Spain. The senior family doctor came in after about half an hour in order to bring our session to an end – I hope the students got out of it that which was intended by the session and I trusted that they would give a good report to their supervising doctor of our discussions. When I got home, I found the house deserted which worried me not a little before I realised that Meg was probably next door with a neighbour. So it proved to be, so I stayed next door chatting with our very kindly neighbour before returning Meg to our own home.

Returning to the Autumn Statement which is monopolising the news headlines this afernoon, there is a jaw-dropping change of tack. There are big immediate tax rises that many including Tory backbenchers will hate (£7.4bn worth in the next financial year, for example). But this is offset by an incredible £9.4bn of additional spending on energy help, school budgets, social care and the NHS. But at the same time an enormous ‘elephant trap’ is being placed before a potential, incoming Labour government. Many of the really savage cuts are scheduled for a date immediately after the next election so the global figures for cuts may help to reassure the money markets. But will an incoming Labour party feel obliged to honour these huge spending cuts or not – if not upheld, then a Labour party may be crippled by the financial markets before it even starts to put its own policies into effect.

Today was the day, twice postponed because of rail strikes, when the collection of former colleagues known as ‘The Old Fogies’ met for a meal in Winchester. Meg and I got up early and left the house at 7.45, prepared to zoom around the M42 motorway to get to Birmingham International railway station. Because the motorway can so congested first thing in the morning, we left an extra haf an hour to cope with the anticipated crawl due to motorway congestion. In the event, we got there about 40 minutes early which was time enough to get the car parked and ourselves into the system ready for our train at 9.30. We found our allocated seats and had to turf out some people who were occupying them but hadn’t made a booking. The journey was very straightforward and the weather and countryside looked beautiful in the late morning. Towards the end of our journey, we got into conversation with a young man whose job was computer security and had a fascinating little chat – our only regret was that we had not started chatting to him earlier rather than the last 15 minutes or so. When we got to Winchester, we were an hour in advance of our booked meal time so Meg and I strolled down the hill into town and the restaurant proved quite easy to find on the High Street. We got there half an hour early and instead of hunting for a another coffee bar nearby, we stayed in the brasserie and drank coffee until the rest of our party arrived. We turned out to be nine in number all in all and we were delighted to see our friends after an absence of about three years. We had a decent meal and as were dividing up the bill at the end of the meal some of us were reaching for cash but the whole brasserie was cashless so we paid on credit card (which I must say made life a lot easier) Towards the end of the meal, at my suggestion, we each took the floor to explain in a few minutes what significant event had taken place in our lives. For example, one of my previous colleagues had sold his house and was moving into a flat to be much nearer to children and grandchilden in South London. Others mentioned things like pacemakers being fitted (three of us, as it happened) and as you might expect, the years had taken a certain toll of several of us over the years but none of us had had a serious illness but just enough to slow us down somewhat. After the main meal, Meg and I and two other colleagues departed to a local Wetherspoons which has the advantage of nice round tables around which it is so much easier to have a conversation where we can all take part and without too much ambient noise but with a noggin of some nice ale to make the conversation flow. We drank and chatted until half an hour before our train was due to depart and so we took our leave and walked back to the station, although by this stage the weather had turned a little squally. As we approached Birmingham International and we standing around in the vestibule ready to alight from the train, we stopped at an intermediate suburban station. After a halt we crept along at an incredibly slow pace and the train manager informed us over the intercom that we were experiencing severe speed restriction (for an unspecified reason) After these halts and creeping along, we took about half an hour to limp into Birmingham International all in all. By the time we did get out, it was raining cats and dogs which meant locating the car in an ill-lit carpark an unpleasant experience. The heavy rain persisted all the way home and fortunately we did not make a wrong turn around a roundabout which is not a difficult thing to do when the weather conditions and visibility were so poor. So we were very pleased to get home and enjoyed a nine tin of mushroom soup which always seems appropriate on occasions like this.

Tomorrow is going to be quite a full day as I cannot afford the luxury of a lie-in but need to get up early to go for a (routine) scan in one of our local hospitals. Again, the road system between Bromsgrove and Redditch is bound to be quite congested. After that, I am going to postpone my normal weekly shopping for a day as in the early afternoon I am due to go down to our local GP practice to play the part of a ‘patient’ in a practical session designed to allow medical students in training interact with with some actual patients before they have to do it for real once they are in post. Tomorrow, of course, the Budget is due to be presented to Parliament but most of the major elements of this seem to have been systematically leaked in order to prepare public opinion that I doubt we will be surprised by very much. First thing in the morning, I heard that Donald Trump had decided to stand again but it will be interesting to see what the reaction to this is going to be in the USA as the recent elections leave Trump no reason to celebrate as most of his endorsed candidates fared less well in the elections than their unendorsed counterparts.

Today started off as a dull, miserable day with a smattering of rain which by now we have come to expect. Nonetheless, we knew that today was the day when we generally bump into people that we know when we pop into Waitrose, once we had picked up our newspaper. It was raining pretty heavily by the time we got to the car park but nonetheless we made our way indoors when, in no time at all, we were joined by one of our park friends and another of our pre-pandemic Waitrose friends. We spent a pleasant half an hour chatting and then saw one of our Irish friends who lives down the road and pops into Waitrose as though it were a local corner shop. We got updated about some building work that our friend was having done and true to form, the builder seems to have started his job and then shot off to attend to several other jobs that he seemed to have on the go. For some reason I have yet to discern, builders typically display this manner of working – I suppose it is sensible if you anticipate a delay in getting some much needed supplies or materials but it seems to make an apparently simple job much more drawn out than you thought it was going to be. Whilst in the Waitrose coffee bar, I received a very interesting telephone call from one of the senior doctors in our local medical practice. He quickly reassured me that there was nothing wrong but was seeking to enlist my help in the training of young medical students. Students have to be exposed to ‘real’ patients at some time in the later stages of their training and my role is to act as ‘the patient’ whilst they get a history of medical and attendant social conditions. I did this some years ago before the pandemic and, on that occasion, it was a long telephone conversation with, I think, a female medical student. Although I volunteered to do a session over the telephone or on the web, I shall actually be paying a visit to the practice premises where I will be ‘interviewed’ by one or more students. Actually, I remember the senior doctor very well because when I was recovering from an operation some years ago, he paid me a house visit and dressed the operation wound for me. I remember this well because I often think that doctors do not have a lot of these hands-on skills themselves as things like wound dressing are performed by nurses rather than doctors themselves. I remain poised to spring into action next Thursday afternoon when is the time for the scheduled session.

I have spent some time this afternoon messing about with a Pure DAB radio which seems to be playing up recently – it seems to get stuck on one station and nothing you can do will switch it to another station. Although it sounds hard to believe, the radio does not actually have an off-off switch but a Power switch (labelled ‘Bluetooth’ just to confuse the average user even more, even though the Bluetooth function which I have not tested out is actually accessed through another button ‘Source’) The Pure H4 power switch actually switches the radio into a very low power ‘Standby’ mode which displays the date and time whilst the radio part itself is switched off. By some experimentation and consulting the manual (the original having been lost but it was fairly easy to locate on the web), it now does appear that the Power Switch is not what you might think of as a normal on-off switch so I have resorted to unplugging the power lead from the back of the unit and looping around the aerial when the radio is not in use. Although as the American computer scientists might say this is a ‘kludge’, of which the official definition is ‘a software or hardware configuration that, while inelegant, inefficient, clumsy, or patched together, succeeds in solving a specific problem or performing a particular task.’ Actually, whilst being very wordy this is an exact description of what I have performed but at least it worked for a time before finally going wrong again.

Every so often, there is a news story the impact of which might turn out to be enormous. A case was being discussed today of a two-year old who had died and the coroner had stated that an important contributory cause of his death was the black mould found throughout the flat where the child lives. The TV pictures made the mould problem appear to be enormously bad but this is not an uncommon problem in badly built and madly maintained housing, some of it in the public sector. So the impact of this coroner’s report may mean that literally thousands of families throughout the land can argue much more strongly with their landlords that the mould problems that they may be experiencing really do need to be remedied and, presumably, there is now a good legal precedent to reinforce the tenant’s right to live in a mould-free house or flat.

Today was one of those horrible misty type days in which the rain seems to be constantly hanging in the air but not actively raining. My morning was brightened up, though, by the arrival of a present to myself which I could not resist, courtesy of Ebay. After I had made an offer and accepted a counter offer, I purchased a set of the complete works of J S Bach on 160 CDs for £29. In order to make sure this was not inordinately bulky, the publishers had put each CD into a simple slip sleeve and then grouped the works into boxes : Orchestral/Keyboard/Cantata 1/Cantata 2/Vocal/Organ. This then takes up 45cm of space in a storage cabinet but stored in the conventional jewel cases, it would have been so much more. Fortunately, I have managed to find quite a long review on the web which details how, and how well, the publishers went about their task. They have tried, where possible to record on period instruments or on instruments as near to a period instrument as can be found. Much of the Cantatas have been especially recorded for this collection and the orchestras and performers are generally well known and not obscure in the extreme. In a collection as large as this, there are bound to be some ‘turkeys’ but the review I have found does an extremely good job in signposting the excellent, good and just satisfactory parts of this collection. Well, the long autumn and winter evenings might seem less gloomy now that I have plenty to which to listen.

Meg and I had a bit of a run round this morning. After we had picked up our newspaper, we popped into Waitrose for some essential supplies – then it was onwards to the railway station to pick up the tickets for our journey to Winchester next Wednesday. These I have still to check but I would be surprised if they were not all OK. When we got home, we watched a little of the Politics program which is always aired on BBC2 at midday and then I went off to prepare lunch. Whilst I was preparing this, I decided to play the next CD along in the little collection I have just filed and catalogued – and, in addition, I am still glorying in the excellent quality of reproduction in the BoomBox I have just purchased. The CD that fell into my hands was a special one celebrating the 400th anniversary of the death of Palestrina and when I played it, I was transported by both the beauty and the quality of it. I remember my music master at school telling us that Palestrina was the father of modern music or at least the father of polyphony but in one’s mind’s eyes, it would have been easy to have imagined yourself inside a cathedral whilst the sound reverberated around you. This I will especially remember if I want a CD to play which is completely relaxing. We must have had this particular CD for years but I do not remember actually playing it before. Possibly it was one of a ‘job lot’ that we often buy in a charity shop which we shop in regularly when we visit Harrogate but it was an absolute find for us, in any case.

This afternoon after lunch, I started to tackle the pile of junk mail which had built up rather in the last week or so – it is certainly a good habit to throw away junk mail day by day if you get into the good habit. Quite a lot of it, I need to open if only to make sure that the pre-printed name and address inside are cut off the enclosure and then shredded and I finished off the afternoon with two piles of paper. The much smaller and leaner one is the bundle of things that definitely need to be filed whilst the larger, fortunately, is just for the outside paper bin which is due to be emptied shortly.

I cannot resist an occasional consultation with the CNN website to discover the latest election update in the US elections. Quite amazingly, the gap between Republican and Democrats is only 8 seats as the Democrats have 204 and the Republicans 212. So the Republicans are only 6 seats away from the ‘magic’ number of 218 which would give them control of the House of Representatives but I suspect that a week ago nobody would have predicted a result as close as this. Normally, there is a big swing against the governing party in the mid term elections but the ‘big swing’ has not materialised this year as it appears that voters have recoiled from the prospect of electing Republicans, avid Trump supporters, who are still denying the validity of the last Presidential election which was won fair and square by Joe Biden.

The British and French have signed an agreement that will allow British border officials into French control roooms (and, presumably, vice versa) in an attempt to reduce the impact of asylum seekers crossing the channel in a variety of dinghies. Nobody thinks that this will prove to be a ‘magic bullet’ but with the addition of more UK cash and the impact of worsening seasonal weather, the flow across the Channel might be slowed somewhat.