Everything got off to rather a delayed start today. Our next door neighbour called round to explain that a large van was due to be delivering some furniture to him today and whilst the van was in place, it would block the exit of our car. This did delay us for about half an hour but we did eventually get underway and made our trip to the park. Today we christened a new coffee flask as our old and battered one has been in almost constant and daily use for the past three or four years and was quietly giving up the ghost. Some of the internal insulation was evidently breaking down as the exterior was getting warm (which it should not) and I also felt that the contents seemed to taste a bit strange. I have had a spare in stock for a long time now so it was a case of ‘out with the old and in with the new’ The new flask performed flawlessly and the coffee seemed to taste good as well so the replacement proved timely. Although the sky was fairly clear, the temperature had plummeted a fair deal and it was 3 degrees when we left the house. Sitting on the park bench subjected us to the occasional icy blast so we drank our coffee quickly and made for home. The park was deserted apart from a few, brave dog walkers but Monday is normally a pretty quiet day even in the best of weathers. Although Meg and I were wrapped up fairly warmly, we had not availed ourselves of any woolly scarves of which I am sure we have enough but we have not got into the habit of wearing them whilst the weather has not been particularly cold. But we are having a sharp ‘snap’ for the next day or so, so we are resolved to wrap up normally when next we need to.

So it was case of getting home and getting some warm soup inside us as soon as we could. Then we finished off the chicken legs that we started yesterday. I did a bit of an experimentation today and it worked out fine. After searing the chicken, I popped it into the oven for a good hour and a half doused in a tin of chicken soup, supplemented by some white lasagne style sauce. Then towards the end of the cooking process, I removed the meat from the thighs, leaving behind the skin and bones and then doused the meat with a goodly dollop of honey and mustard sauce that I espied in the supermarket when I last went shopping. This was then finished off in the oven and served with some Cavolo Nero and a baked potato. I think I must chalk this up as one of my success stories and I almost certainly will try this recipe again the next time we have chicken on the menu. This afternoon was a quiet afternoon in which I was engaged in getting my household accounts up-to-date. This fairly tedious task was accomplished with no undue problems and as always, I resolve to attempt to do my regular ‘book-keeping’ every few days instead of leaving it for a month.

Meg and I have started watching operas on YouTube, ‘Endeavour’ on the IT hub and some series on the BBC I-player. However, we are finding that we are having quite a lot of buffering problems after an hour or so which could be due to a host of factors or could be a case of ‘throttling’ to prevent overuse. However, a little search of the web has found a website called ‘FireStickTricks’ and the first thing they recommended was a simple ‘restart’ of the Firestick which I have tried and I will see if that cures any of the problems we have been experiencing (which needless to say, are frustrating in the extreme when you are half way through a long program) There are other suggestions which involve the use of a VPN (Virtual Private Network) but I will not go to the expense and trouble of doing this unless I absolutely have to.

The teachers have today voted for strike action – some 90% of teachers voted for the strike and they exceeded the 50% turnout equired by law for a ballot to come into force. The teachers have voted to go on strike on 1st February and thereafter one day per fortnight for the next month or so. But the headteachers’ ballot only achieved 42% threshold and therefore their ballot does not count. However, the union representing headteachers may well rerun their ballot as the initial one may well have been adversely affected by the postal disputes just before Christmas – and, of course, the mood is worsening all the time. Both teachers and nurses seem to have very similar complaints apart from the real cut in their standard of living now inflation has reached 10% and that is a toxic mix of low pay and excessive workloads. One imagines that the government may be more worried by the impact of striking teachers which is bound to affect more members of the public than a train strike or a border staff walk out.

Today being a Sunday, I got up reasonably early and ready for my walk alone down into town to collect our Sunday newspaper. But I had a special reason for looking forward to this morning as I was going to test out out the CD player for which I had constructed a special little carrying case attached to a spare belt. So I put in the two AA batteries that are needed to make it truly portable and set off on my journey. The reviews that I had read of this particular piece of kit ranged all the way from ‘Brilliant’ to ‘The worst thing I have ever bought’ but with many more favourable than unfavourable reviews. One of the more negative reviews opined that the volume of the player did not drown out the noise of passing cars and this quite a bad fault. But with my rather limited experience of listening to music on the go, the very last thing that a sensible pedestrian needs to have is a unit that drowns out sounds of an approaching car and I would have thought that this is a recipe for a disaster in the making if pedestrians were to cross road oblivious to the sound of an oncoming car. Anyway, I found that the player worked beautifully and its claims to be ‘jog proof’ were fully justified as it dod not skip or miss a beat. I thoroughly enjoyed Brahm’s ‘A German Requiem‘ which is not really similar to the traditional requiem which follows the format of the liturgical mass for the dead. In the case of ‘A German Requiem‘, the text is written in German and draws from texts from a Lutheran Bible and does not follow the more usual format of a requiem at all. In the main, though, I shall deploy this unit by by bedside attached to a DC power supply and loaded with a favourite CD for when I need it. This morning we did have a plan to meet up again with our University of Birmingham friend in Waitrose, but we got a text before we set off saying that he could not make it this morning. So being all prepared to go somewhere, we made for the Lickey Visitors centre to avail ourselves of a little walk. This was not a bad idea in itself but being a fine day at about 11.00am on a Sunday, the car parks were full to bursting and we only manged to get parked, afer some peregrinations, when another car conveniently left a space for us. So we decided that this would be a reasonably place to visit (and the large cafe adjacent to it) but only on a nice quiet day.

We lunched on some chicken thighs which I had previously seared in some hot oil and then cooked in the oven supplemnted with a tin of chicken soup and some white sauce. When we have a meal of chicken thighs like this, we always cook them ‘whole’ but then remove the leg bone and the fatty skin before we dish it up. Although the skin can be delicious, I prefer to keep our meal relatively fat-free and today, the meat seemed full of flavour so I will do the remainder of them tomorrow. I had also bought some sprouts but after a parboil, I popped them into the oven with a drizzle of cooking oil and some poured-over honey to make them a little less ‘sprout like’ and these, too, fulfilled their potential. Tomorrow I intend to experiment with a bottle of some honey mustard which I bought on spec to tart up a chicken meal somewhat.

Although not receiving a great deal of publicity, I was intrigued to come across the following. A former Conservative minister has quit the party and thrown her support behind Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘competent political leadership’. Claire Perry O’Neill, who was part of Theresa May’s cabinet and an MP between 2010-2019, said the Tories are too ‘beholden by ideology and self-obsession’ to deliver the change the country needs. I suppose the story has not received much publicity as it did not come from a serving cabinet member or even an MP. But is is an interesting reflection of the fact that the Labour Party has a large lead in the opinion polls and many Tories are now resigned to the fact that there is no way in which the government can ever claw its way back sufficiently to win the next election which must take place within the next 18-24 months. I find her comments interesting in that the Conservative party has not, until recently, been an especially ideological party and you could say had at their heart a type of pragmatic managerialism. But with various sensible MPs being driven out of the party by Boris Johnson and their place being taken by those of a proven Brexit purity, the present Conservative government seems to be a UKIP party in all but name, having adopted the hardest of all hard Brexits. Research by the Centre for European Reform, a think tank, estimates that over the 18 months to June 2022, UK goods trade is 7% lower than it would have been had Britain remained in the European Union. Investment is 11% weaker and GDP is 5.5% smaller than it would have been, costing the economy £40 billion ($48.4 billion) in tax revenues annually.

Today has been a wonderfully enjoyable day so far. The weather was a bit cold and miserable outside and in view of the occasional showers, we were not at all tempted to go for a daily walk. Instead we had a leisurely breakfast aided by our morning ‘concert’ Since I have installed my new Panasonic mini hifi system in the kitchen with easily accessible CDs by the side of the unit, we often treat ourselves to a ‘de facto’ concert whilst we are preparing breakfast, eating it and then washing up afterwards but Saturday morning is a bit of an exception as the presenter on ClassicFM is Aled Jones. I must say that I knew him as the famous boy soprano but according to the Wikipedia entry, Jones became famous for the cover version of ‘Walking in the Air’, the song from Channel 4’s animated film The Snowman, based on the book by Raymond Briggs. The record reached number five in the UK charts in 1985. I don’t know how much influence the presenter has in conjunction with the producer but I found Aled Jones choice of music and presentational style completely consistent with my own tastes. I do not have many dislikes apart from what I call ‘te-tum-te-tum’ type music and there is a bit too much William Walton as well, but generally I am pretty content with what ClassicFM has to offer during the day (and occasionally during the night as well) Today we met with our University of Birmingham friend by arrangement in the Waitrose coffee bar and had over an hour of really informative chat with each other. We both had some little pieces of electrical equipment we are going to let each other have use of when we next meet, which is probably tomorrow. We also had the opportunity to chat with one of our pre-pandemic friends who used to be a very serious fell walker before some of the infirmities of old age struck us down. We exchanged experiences that we both had in our youth (me on one occsion only, our acquaintance much more often) of ‘skinny dipping’ – so called because the only bathing suit you have on is your own skin. Meg and I treat ourselves to whatever is on special offer from the Waitrose bakery and today we had chocolate muffins which turned out to be absolutely delicious so we must repeat the experience when we can. When we returned hom, we had some tomato and pepper packet soup and then I got cooking the lunch time meal. On a Saturday, this often is what emerges from the depth of the freezer and on this occasion it was some beef mince, mixed with some fried onions and then made a bit more moist with some onion gravy and a dollop of the cheap brown sauce that I frequently use to tart up what stews or mixtures I am cooking at the moment. The bit of rioja we had left over from a few days ago also went down pretty well.

Today being Saturday is the day when we attend church, leaving the house at about 5.30. I am looking forward to the day when we can do this in the light rather than the dark. But first, we treated ourselves to some more classical music tracks this afternoon. Because our ‘normal’ CD storage racks are quite full, when we buy new CDs we tend to put them in a bundle in some of our numerous bookcases and here it is easy to forget all about them. So it proved to be today and we found two CDs which we thoroughly enjoyed. The first of these was ‘Duets from Fmous operas’ whilst the second was similarly famous operatic arias so this proved to be a wonderful little bonus for us. By the way, as though we do not have enough classical CDs, I have recently developed a real liking for Mozart piano sonatas (as well as the well-known concertos) and last night was lucky in an ebay auction where I acquired a CD for 99p plus postage. I suppose that certain music lovers have in the past acquired huge libraries of classical CDs but now they have the technology to have digital versions which are much more space saving as well as searchable in a way that CDs are not- hence they are disposing of them at prices that might be a fraction of what they initially paid for them.

In about a fortnight’s time, no doubt, the ‘6 Nations’ Rugby season will start and at weekly and fortnightly intervals, we can be treated to a feast of matches. On ‘playing’ weekend, we can have two matches on a Saturday and one on the following Sunday and I still enjoy this so much more than football which I rarely watch. I find the arm wrestling and shirt pulling totally off-putting and in my view (evidently not widely shared) I would give a yellow card for the first offence and a red for the second every time I witnessed this. Incidentally, I think the women’s game might be more enjoyable to watch as it is a bit more ‘positional’ and a bit less of the brute physicality that characterises the men’s game.

It is always rather nice to get to the end of the week and, moreover, the weather was relatively kind to us today. Once Meg and I got ourselves turned around, we got into the groove of a more normal routine which involves collecting the daily newspaper, popping into Waitrose to pick up some supplies before we finally made it to the park. We had taken some coffee with us but to be honest the park was a little on the chilly side so we drank our coffee pretty rapidly and then made a hasty retreat for home. There we resorted to an old standby which is a mugful of a packet chicken soup which helps to restore us if we feel a little chilled. Today, for lunch, we had some fresh sea-bass (well, bought yesterday) and just served this on a bed of salad leaves. The beauty of a lunch like this, apart from being healthy, is that it only takes about 10 minutes to cook and there is a minimum of washing up to do as well. We treated ourselves to half a glass of white wine which goes particularly well with the fish and the salad but there are times when these screw top bottles come into their own if you only want to imbibe a little. Last night I experimented with falling asleep to the sound of Brahm’s Requiem on my newly acquired little Bush CD player and this seemed to work well. Later on, I hunted aound in my supplies of little electrical ‘gubbins’ and tried the experient of a small standalone speaker designed to work with a laptop which I had acquired some years go. This worked fine and although the maximum volume that be achieved is not high, this is fine if the intention is to have a just-audible system whilst you are drifting off to sleep. So this, too, was a bonus because even though the earphones are fine, they do tend to drift off your head (out of your ears) as a result of the ways in which we move around as we sleep.

This afternoon, it has emerged that Donald Trump’s Corporation (but not Donald Trump himself) as been fined $1.6 million which is the maximum allowed by the New York legislation. This will seem like a fleabite given the size of the other assets owned by or controlled by Trump himself. By itself, this would not seem much a setback for Donald Trump. A judge could only impose a fine on the Trump Organization after its conviction last month for 17 tax crimes, including conspiracy and falsifying business records. However, there are several other legal battles in the offing including one in which Trump has been charged with some of the responsibility for the death of a police officer who had died attempting to delay or obstruct the mob which rampaged through the Capitol building some two years ago. Donald Trump is facing a host of legal actions and naturally is claiming that every court case against him is just a witch-hunt or a Democratic party conspiracy but it seekms likely that all of these legal actions will damage him in his bid to regain the White House. Evidently, although he has declared himself a candidate, the Republican party will need to adopt him as a Presidential candidate and this well prove to be problematic if a series of adverse court judgements are hanging over him.

After lunch, I spent certain amount of time trawling through some of the Pilates books that I possess to see if any of them have a chapter on ‘relaxation’ tecnniques. I did find one chapter which may well prove fruitful and it only took a few seconds with a search engine to discover more fruitful sources (but I am slightly wary of these given the amount of rubbish found on the Web) However, these might prove useful if they are well ilustrated and if one or two techniques will work for me, if not for other people. Meanwhile Sky News is full of dire news from the NHS ‘battlefront’ Patients are dying and staff are broken – as workers say it doesn’t get much grimmer than this. The human toll at the sharp end of the worst health crisis in Scotland’s NHS history continues to escalate to dangerous levels. Families, who have lost loved ones on trollies in overcrowded hospital corridors, have told Sky News that it is like a ‘disaster zone’ where staff are fighting a losing battle and the ill are treated like ‘animals’. It is estimated that between 40 and 60 lives are being lost every week as a direct result of this emergency.

Meanwhile Boris Johnson is still lurking around, making money and positioning himself for a come-back as Conservative party leader. But he only has a majority of 7,200 in his Uxbridge constituency and some of his allies are suggesting that he may agree to give an undertaking of ‘good behaviour’ in return for being awarded a much more secure seat. But it has also been suggested that he would prefer to stand in Uxbridge and fight and, were he to do so, then it is anybody’s call whether or not he would be defeated if the opposition prties form a united front to attempt to remove him.

Today is my supermarket shopping day and I aim to get to the supermarket about one minute before it opens. However, it had been raining heavily for most of the night I would guess and the traffic on the roads seemed horrendous this morning, with queues at very single junction and ‘pinch point’ So having got some money out of a nearby ATM, I was quite fortunate to be only one minute late when I got to the supermarket and it seemed to be extremely quiet compared with past weeks. Fortunately, I found practically everything that I wanted but the delay in getting to the supermarket and then back home again meant that I seemed to be running late most of the morning. We were delayed by another event but this was quite a pleasurable one. Knowing that I can generally browse ebay and get a classical CD for only £2 or so, I had decided to get myself a ‘good’ version of Handel’s Messiah. The version that caught my eye, and which I bought, was Georg Solti conducting, with Kiri Te Kanawa as the lead soprano and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. When this arrived a few days ago, I really enjoyed it as the rendition was bright and vivacious (befitting of a baroque piece) and Kiri Te Kanana exhibited her usual brilliance in the recording. Once I had bought this CD which was recorded in the mid-1980’s I noticed that another rendition was available (and even cheaper) and this was the version conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham in 1959. So I did what I have never done before and bought another version of the same piece of music. Beecham had written some of the program notes and he pointed out that the original score of The Messiah has been lost so no one really knows how large the orchestra was likely to be but it is surmised that it would be principally strings with a small woodwind section of oboes and bassoons and even less brass and percussion. So Beecham had used the score adapted by Sir Leon Goossens who is regarded as one of the finest woodwind players (on the oboe) that the country has ever produced. But this version of The Messiah was so different from the later one. For a start, it seemed much richer in texture, played at a slower pace and evoking adjectives in one’s mind such as ‘majestic’. The ‘Alleluja’ chorus in which the brass and timpany are given full rein is a wonder to which to listen. Although the two recordings are both fine but so very different, how does one choose between them? I suspect that I will do on the basis of mood and if I play it around Christmas or on a Good Friday, I will choose the Beecham version but the Solti version if my mood if somewhat lighter.

As it was raining pretty hard throughout the morning, Meg and I decided to eschew any walks in the park and we lunched on a curry kindly provided for us by our domestic help yesterday. After lunch, I decided to give a good trial to the little Bush CD-player which was advertised as ‘jogger proof’ and which I got brand new at a knockdown price from my peregrinations throughout eBay. This took 2 x AA batteries and it performed flawlessly. I had imagined, in my naivety, there would be a couple of plastic tabs built into the unit through which I could thread a tape and hence around my neck for when I walk into town on my own and require some diversion. However, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ so I did a good raid of our bathroom cabinet where I found a stout plastic case with dimensions very conveniently just a centimetre or so wider and longer than the dimensions of the player. This I have threaded onto a belt which I rarely use and it now means that when I undertake a walk on my own down into town, I can have the player performing away effortlessly in the little bag hanging from my waist (and covered by a jumper in any case). I then did some research to see how long the batteries would last and the answer was about six hours which is long enough for every train journey or even flight I am likely to undertake. But details were given of the power supply that should be used and I raided my supply of two Nokia phone chargers, differently rated as it happens, to see which would be safe to use. I did a bit of research on the web to see if I could could a charger of higher or lower amperage and assumed that a smaller amperage would be safer but this is not necessarily so. Apparently devices will only draw as much power as they need but attempting to draw ‘less’ might make the unit overheat which is not a good thing. The idea now is that I can use a DC power supply when I am listening to whatever I want to in bed (and to which I can fall asleep) whilst I will reserve the batteries for my (musical) forays into town.

Exactly as the weather forecasters had predicted, today was a showery and blustery type of day which was unpleasant enough without being thoroughly miserable. Our domestic help calls around on a Wednesday so we always have a good chat after the obligatory cup of tea as soon as she arrived. She had bought us some extra Christmas baubles with which to decorate the tree again next year so we need to put them away in the loft adjacent to all of the other Christmas paraphernalia. Eventually, and a little bit late, Meg and I decided to make up a flask of coffee and make our way to the park, sitting on our usual bench. The park was practically deserted and although the sky seemed sunny enough when we set off, by the time we were sitting on our bench it was pretty cold and unpleasant. So we drank up our coffee fairly quickly and decided to beat a hasty retreat to home where we regaled ourself with a cup of chicken soup which is always a good way to warm up and fill the gap before we cook lunch. This was a simple affair of quiche, white cabbage and a tomato+onion mixture which was actually quite tasty. Later in the day, some much delayed purchases arrived from ebay, originally scheduled for last Saturday but only actually arriving today.

In the Commons, a very prominent Brexiteer (and hard right winger) has lost the Conservative whip i.e. been suspended. Prominent backbencher Andrew Bridgen is no longer a Conservative MP after he compared the COVID vaccine to the Holocaust.
Mr Bridgen claimed COVID vaccines ‘are causing serious harms’ and said the programme was ‘the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust’. This statement has been condemned on all sides of the House so although he has been making anti-vaccination comments for some time, now it is evident that he has crossed the line of acceptability. Andrew Bridgen was the MP who led the fight against Theresa May’s attempts to reach a workable Brexit solution and is generally regarded as the moving force behind installing the hardest of Brexists possible, going far beyond that which was actually required to follow the wishes of the electorate as expressed in the referendum. What I think is interesting is the way that loud-mouthed self-opiniated populists such as Andrew Bridgen ever got elected to the House of Commons in the first place and should be allowed to wield the degree of political influence that they have. It seems remarkable that any MP could put himself at odds with the whole of the scientific community and then deny the evidence that thousands of lives have been saved by vaccines all over the world. To try to be fair to the MP, he must have a logic or a line of reasoning to come to the conclusions that he has but on the face of it, it seems to be a bizarre and extraordinary outburst and expelling him from the Tory party seems the only cause of action. One wonders whether the existing PM is actually quite glad to get rid of one of the coterie of extreme right wingers who have wrought so much damage on the country (and who John Major once in a famous outburst publically called ‘the bastards’ and then faced them down with a ‘back me or sack me’ election to cement hs own position as Prime Minister).

A huge statistical argument has been rumbling on for the last few days concerning the number of ‘excess deaths’ that are are being recorded over recent months. The College of Emergency Medicine has put out the figure that between 300-500 people a week (more than the average death rate per week) are dying but this figure is hotly disputed by the government (I wonder why?) Most independent data analysts are doing their own calculations and these are largely supportive of the figures published by the medics themselves whilst The Times this morning, in their headline figure, suggested that excess deaths may actually be nearer to 1,000. The reasons are not hard to see as during the COVID pandemic there was a huge backlog of undiagnosed and untreated conditions that are now coming to their grim conclusion. In addition, the enormous pressures that hospitals are now facing including waits in ambulances sometimes exceeding 24 hours almost inevitably are taking their toll on the population. These figures roughly approximate to a jumbo jet or a trainful of people dying every week – what is perhaps surprising is the absence of a huge outcry over the implications of these figures. Steven Barclay, the Health Secretary, has admitted that the situation of perhaps 50,000 excess deaths in 2022 is ‘extremely concerning’ but will only admit to the fact that the situation is very difficult to analyse (true!) and that other European countries are also experiencing post-pandemic excess deaths. But at the end of the day, it does look as though the pandemic on top of years of underfunding has contributed, as The Times has argued today, towards the worst excess deaths totals since 1951.

Last night, Meg and I had been invited out to have some ‘nibbles’ with our Catholic friends who live down the road and it turned out to be quite a gathering all in all. We have three sets of friends who live in close proximity to each other and another acquaintance who lives half way down the Kidderminster Road and with whom I have often discussed all things relating to Honda (principally cars and lawn mowers) So we formed a jolly little group and our hosts had laid on the most wonderful spread for us – I joked with her that if this was nibbles, I did not know what a full scale banquet would look like. So we spent a wonderful three hours with good company, good food and good drink – it was the kind of evening to which one looks back with a glow of pleasure. This morning we breakfasted as normal and having picked up our newspaper went for our regular Tuesday morning Waitrose coffee bar treat. Whilst we were there, we were soon joined by one of our pre-pandemic friends who is a Tuesday morning regular and finished off having a fascinating conversation with her. In the course of our conversation, it transpired that we both have a love of Brahm’s ‘German Requiem’ and then our friend told us some fascinating things about her own musical history. She had been part of a regular choir in Kidderminster until only few years ago but told us an interesting story about her son who had a career as a music editor with Decca. When Decca was winding up that side of the music business some years ago, her son had acquired a fair quantity of classical CDs which found their way into the possession of his mother i.e. our friend. She also let slip a fascinating story about her brother who served in Germany at the end of WWII – presumably BAOR (British Army of the Rhine) There her brother was friendly with a young Welshman who had a very good singing voice and to to whom he gave every encouragement to have some professional training and subsequently to pursue a singing year. This young Welshman was Geraint (later, of course) Sir Geraint Evans who was one of the most outstanding singers and teachers of his generation. I vividly remember a master class that he gave to young singers of one of classic Mozart operas – probably Don Giovanni but I do not remember exactly which opera it was. On our way out of Waitrose today, we met with a couple of ‘park’ friends with whom we often used to chat when they busy exercising their dog. We have not coincided for several weeks now as our park walks have diminished a bit from the everyday affair that they used to be. But we had an interesting little chat and a joke or so – so much that the Waitrose staff knew that we were back in town (and actually quite liked the sound of people laughing and enjoying themselves in the vicinity of the cafe as they reckon it reminds them of the pre-pandemic times and is good for business).

Today is my regular Pilates day which is only one hour in the whole week, I know, but one that I very rarely miss. Our instructor is quite gentle with us and once or twice in a six weekly session we have the luxury of a complete session of relaxation for the last five minutes. I generally succeed in almost falling completely asleep but a just a little of my brain keeps watch over the rest of me so when the five minutes is up, I know it is time for the session to end. The receptionists in the centre where the Pilates session is held let me know how much they enjoyed the damson gin so kindly provided by Fr. Christmas at the last Pilates session before Christmas and word has been passed down the line that at least one of my Pilates class members who has moved to a different day would quite appreciate some gin which she always used to get each year. So there are now at least two extra people who have let me know how much the gin is apprciated so I may always have a bottle or so kept ‘spare’ in my rucksack in case I happen to bump into people who would appreciate it.

The ambulance workers are due to strike tomorrow and some talks are proceeding in the HQ of the TUC to have some degree of coordination of all of the public sector strikes. This might mean that we are heading for a general strike in all but name. Meanwhile the Government is pressing ahead with legislation to ensure minimum levels of service agreemnt, in effect denying the ability to strike of certain groups of workers. William Rees-Mogg was interviewed in the House of Commons but refused to admit the proposed legislation would lead to nurses, ambulance workers and junior doctors getting the sack which is the whole point of the sanctions that lie behind the legislation. This legislation may never see the light of day but ‘timing is everything’ so it is pretty evident that the government is trying fairly crude tactics to bully the striking workers into submission which is only likely to inflame the situation and not bring it to an early end.

Today dawned bright and clear and it has all of the potents of being quite a fine day. I had a good night’s sleep last night, partly due to the fact that I tried an experiment which worked really well. I have a little legacy Sony DVD/CD player bought many moons ago but not really brought into much use until now. But last night, I had Brahm’s German Requiem playing gently in the background. The trick always of course is to set the level of the music sufficiently high to hear it if one wants to but at a sufficiently low level to fall asleep and this seems to work like a dream, so to speak. The little Sony is rechargeable so there are no cables involved to trip over and it just gets recharged in the morning. Before breakfast, I tried to contact a bank (nameless, but a High Street brand) in order to activate and solve a query but I was informed that there would be a wait of about 20 minutes so I followed their advice to try again later. After we had breakfasted and seen to some routine emails, we went down into town to pick up our newspaper and also made a lightning visit into Waitrose to pick up some last minute supplies. Then there was a walk round the lake in the park but, as it was such a fine dy, it might have been better for us to have prepared a flask of coffee and occupied our normal park bench. Over the last week or so with the interruption of Christmas and th New Year, we have rather got out of our normal park walk activities as we have sometimes succumbed to having coffee in the Waitrose coffee bar. So we had our elevenses back home and then cooked ourselves a conventional Monday type lunch. As part of the more general New Resolutions package, I am trying (and not for the first time) to train myself to do without sugar (evidently) and sweeteners in any tea or coffee drink that I make for myself. I have to say that the tea I usually drink just tasted like so much hot water so I looked at the contents of our pantry cupboards and discovered that I had some different teas to try out. We happened to have quite a large jar of ‘Rooibos’ tea (presumably Dutch/Afrikaans for ‘red bush’) which is not really a tea at all. It is caffeine free and a host of health benefits are claimed for it but these all tend to be at the ancdotal level rather than backed by any authoritative science. However, it probably does no harm and once you get used to the flavour, it is unquestionably superior to the alternative. So I will stick with this for a week or or to give it a good trial.

The Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, announced that the government intended to block book 2,500 places in residential homes and in hotels at a cost of about £200 million. Even in Parliament, Steve Barclay, was attacked by members from his own side when it was pointed out that other countries were coping with these winter pressures so why could not the UK? Another question raised in Parliament to which there was no real answer was that given the known shortages of staff in the care sector, where the extra staff was going to come from to cater for the needs of of those occupying the 2,500 places? There was some vague talk of increasing recruitment from overseas but presumably this would run foul of the Brexit philosophy and the notoriously underpaid social care sector would not meet the quite high income ‘bar’ that would be migrants would have to face. Another part of the policy that appeared farcical was the announcement that A&E departments could be augmented by ‘modular units’ which sounds suspiciously like a ‘PortaKabin’ solution to expand A&E bit without any plan to deal with the staffing issue. The talks with the health sector unions to halt the next wave of strikes came to nothing and was not even mentioned by the Health Secretary in his statement to Parliament. This does sound more like a bit of sticking plaster to close a gaping wound. As the government are even now publishing plans to make certain industries (such as health) agree to Minimum Service Levels or to be sacked, then the prospect is being raised that instead of increasing staff levels, the Government solution to the crisis is to talk of sacking the striking nurses and junior doctors. Will this ever come to fruition, one asks oneself.

The other big story, largely as the result of an initiative by Sky News, is the publication of a large database indicating the sources of extra ‘income’ that accrue to MPs other than their Parliamentary salary. The information released is jawdropping as in the current parliament some £183 million has gone, quite legally, into the pockets of MPs. In one case, Sky News discovered that nobody had heard of a company donating hundreds of thousands to Labour MPs on a visit to its registered address, while the office of another company that donates to 24 Tory MPs was shut and apparently out of action. As Sky news say ‘More than £183m has flowed into the British political system during this Parliament, straight from wealthy individuals or companies, and into the bank accounts of political parties, all-party parliamentary groups, and the campaign funds and constituencies of government ministers and MPs from all political parties.’

Today was a different kind of Sunday. As I had rather a disturbed night’s sleep last night, I did get up at a reasonably early time and then walked down into town to pick the Sunday newspapers. There was quite a sharp cold feel to the day but it was not actually raining and I had regaled myself with one of those little packets of ‘instant’ porridge oats before I ventured out. But when I got back, I tuned into the Laura Kuennsberg show but probably as a result of last night’s interrupted sleep I very promptly fell asleep and slept for the best part of a couple of hours. Meg had slept in whilst I was walking down into town but then we had to get up, dressed and breakfasted before we could make the best of the day. Our University of Birmingham friend phoned up to ask whether we intended to coffee together but I explained that we both felt a little rough today so we would postpone our next meeting until about next Friday. So the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon was left to a slow and lesiurely read of the Sunday Times which I rather enjoyed. We had a light lunch of some pork loin which was already cooked and deep frozen so it was just a job of making some onion gravy to make it spring into life again.

We are all awaiting for tomorrow when the Government announces a plan to release the log jam caused by ambulances queuing up ouside A&E departments across the length and breadth of the country becuse there is ‘nowhere’ to go for those adjudged medically fit for discharge. At this stage, all must be speculation but a plan, which Mr Barclay will announce on Monday, is understood to be aimed at block-buying up to 2,000 care home beds in Care Quality Commission-approved facilities over the next four weeks. There may well be other parts of this strategy as well but these may be longer term. One of these is called the ‘virtual’ ward. Virtual wards are in place in many parts of the country, for example, supporting people with frailty or acute respiratory infections. The NHS is introducing more virtual wards to support people at the place they call home, including care homes. In a virtual ward, support can include remote monitoring using apps, technology platforms, wearables and medical devices such as pulse oximeters. Support may also involve face-to-face care from multi-disciplinary teams based in the community, which is sometimes called ‘Hospital at Home’. Whether all of this is to be seen as just a sticking plaster or the start of a much more sensible strategy remains to be be seen. There is often a mantra put about that ‘you do not solve a problem just by throwing money at it’ but in this particular case, the government is doing exactly that at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds (and I suspect that eventually if this policy is to have any chance of uccess we are actually talking about billions i.e. thousands of millions).

One of the things that I enjoy about the New Year, is that once we get over the winter solstice on 21st December, the nights are getting lighter to the tune of about a minute and a half a day. In the past, I have actually searched the web where it is possible to find a calendar which details sunrises and sunsets for each day of the year. I have just consulted a quick on-line version which tells me that sunrise is one minute earlier tomorrow and sunset two minutes earlier making tomorrow three minutes longer than today. Of course it is true that some of the population suffer from ‘SAD’ (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and, in severe cases, I believe that people have recourse to light boxes, although this is not true in my own case. But as January proceeds, it is possible to think about some seeds that take a long time to germinate and are best planted out in early March. Parsnip is the seed that most springs to mind and I do not think that the seed keeps well from one year to the next so I may have to think about sourcing some as soon as they are in the shops and think about getting them going a window sill. After we had several Christmas card with messages inside to the effect that we must meet up as soon as we can in 2023, Meg and I are thinking about friends and relatives that we really must must make an effort to see and thinking about what emails we need to send and in what order. We still have a couple of our Christmas wreaths hanging outside our front door and these have not yet been taken down. One of them will probably end up on the grave of our domestic help’s relatives whilst the other we have, in the past, put on the grave of Tolkein’s mother, who happens to be buried in the churchyeard of our local church.

Today was a fairly typical Saturday apart from the fact that it was wet and blustery most of the day with only the occasional intermission. We got ourselves off to town eventually having breakfasted and then picked up the (voluminous) Saturday newspapers. As you might expect, many of the newspapers are full of health related issues at the start of the New Year when,no doubt, a lot of the population have over-indulged themselves on a surfeit of carbohydates and are full of good intentions about exercise and fitness regimes. But there was a very interesting article by an eminent neurosurgeon on the subject of how to improve your memory and brain at any age. Dr. Sanjay Gupta has argued in a recent book that the brain ‘is the most enigmatic three and a half pounds of flesh in the known universe’ The Times has published an easy guide to the 12 easy steps to achieve your brain functioning and this advice seems to be well-rooted in the science so I might be tempted to go ahead and buy (and intensively read and absorb) the whole book. Some of the advice is sort of intuitive (such as not only avoiding sugar but also artifical sweeteners) but other advice less so, such as the importance of brushing and flossing teeth daily or even twice daily. We made for the Waitrose café because we had arranged to meet up with our University of Birmingham friend and we also encountered one of our park friends that we have not seen since before Christmas. I suspect that there is a universal sigh of relief that we have Christmas and the New Year behind us so that we can get on with our more conventional daily and weekly routines. Having said that, we were delighted to get a telephone call from some of friends down the road who are inviting neighbours in for a drink and nibbles next Monday evening so we are looking forward to this as it may be the last of this round of Christmas get togethers.

We returned home to have a lunch of some chicken, ham and leek pies which I decided to sample when I bought them and then froze them before Christmas. These turned out to be pretty tasty and I just served them up with white cabbage and some tomatoes. This afternoon, apart from a good read of the newspapers, I spent some time getting my accounts up-to-date. I entertained myself whilst I was engaged in this task playing a CD on a little portable CD/DVD player I had bought several years when I was seeking to illustrate both the music and our original wedding photos using the USB port when we were putting on some little demonstrations on the occasion of our 50th anniversary (now wih another six years further on). This is a very useful bit of kit but because I have not used it a great deal, I need to keep consulting the manual online to find out how to utilise certain functions.

As of yesterday, it looked as though the Republican party would never elect a new party leader/Speaker of the House of Representatives but it took a total of 15 votes to do it. However, this is only the start of what is going to be a very ddisruptive period in American politics. It is being said that Kevin McCarthy had so make so many concessions that perhaps he has to feel whether he still possesses two kidneys. Donald Trump himself was telephoning some of the ultra conservatives to get them to support Kevin McCarthy. The latter had offered so many concessions to the small cohort of ultra-conservative Republicans who had blocked him for days as he had promised them plum, hugely influential committee positions, and promised to change the rules governing his stability. A certain amount of manhandling og some Republican congressmen could also be seen. So it looks as though the whole of the american machine is in the hands of these ultra conservatives, may of whom supported the physical insurrection and rampage through the Capital building some two years ago now.

The Prince Harry saga rumbles on and on. Many quite sympathetic observers are making the point that all families can recall occasions when there might have been severe rows and disagreements at some time over the years. At the same time, the well known saying to ‘not wash ones dirty linen in public’ comes to mind and the commitment and the slagging of the members of one’s own intimate family is hardly the way to effect a reconcilation. Certainly, all of the outpourings does have all of the indications of a very troubled mind. But polls for American news organisations have indicated there is more sympathy for Harry and Meghan’s plight with the US public than the UK. However, this sympathy may be shortlived as one headline has dubbed Prince Harry as the ‘Prince of Wails’ which might be hardhitting but accurate. Personally I think that too much attention has been paid to this saga and a dignified silence on the part of Buckingham Palace is probably the best response.