Today was the day when we had determined that we were going to visit Meg’s Uncle Ken in Rhos-on-Sea, Old Colwyn. But first we got up after a good night’s sleep and then had a marvellous breakfast, as we have by now come to expect from this particular Holiday Inn hotel. We had been informed by one of Ken’s relatives that we needed to have a negative lateral flow test before we entered the residential home. In the event, although we said we had both tested negative, the residential care staff did not seem to be unduly concerned. So we had a long chat with Uncle Ken in his own room and then decided to join the coffee morning that was taking place in the lounge downstairs. We arrived just at the end of the ‘coffee session’ and they were now preparing for lunch. But we got into conversation with a Methodist Homes for the Aged chaplain who seemed to be an almost permanent fixture of this particular home so he very kindly got us a coffee. He had had a varied and interesting career starting off as a maths teacher before becoming a methodist minister and then rising through the Methodist hierarchy. We exchanged some notes of an ecumenical flavour and then we took our leave of Uncle Ken. As we were only 5-6 miles from the town of Conwy (Conway in English) that we know well, we made our way to our favourite restaurant which is up a flight of stairs and not always attracting a lot of the normal ‘street’ trade. We imagined that it would be teeming but it was only about one third full so we were delighted to avail ourselves of one of their lunches. I had a pea and ham risotto and Meg had a salmon pasta – we swapped meals half way through and found then almost too abundant for us to do justice to them. As part of the music in the background that was being played, one of the tracks was the cabaret classic ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ I got into conversation with the waitress who was evidently enjoying the music and told her the story of  Eve Graham who sang this number to a nightclub (in which I worked as a barman)  stuffed full with about 1,000 people one Christmas Eve with such effect that everybody stopped dancing and/or drinking just to listen to this stupendous performance. Eve Graham became part of a group called the ‘New Seekers’ whose most famous claim to fame was to turn the Coca Cola jingle into the World beating ‘I want to teach the world to sing, in perfect har-mon-y‘ In 1972, the New Seekers took a follow up song to this to No. 2 in the Eurovision Song Context. Eve Graham is still alive and performing but she has let the world know that the singers did not accumulate any real riches afer their evident successes as so much money was creamed off by managers, agents and the like. After I told the waitress of my slight connections with the music world, I also pushed my luck and asked if I could retain the small 275 cl bottles in which we had had some elderflower cordial. I told her that these bottles were like gold dust as I needed about 20-30 for the damson gin which I still have to bottle.She agreed and let me have several more bottles which they would otherwise have thrown away. Not having a bag to carry them away in, I casually enquired if they had a spare bag behind the bar and was promptly supplied with quite a substantial jute bag which they just happened to have spare and very generously donated to me.

After lunch, we proceeded along the High Street in Conway to buy some things of which we were quite short, not least some fresh milk for our bedroom cups of tea. When I got back to the car, I looked in the boot and realised with some dismay that the file with a lot of booking information and sat-nav directions in it, I had left behind at Uncle Ken’s residential home. I managed to consult the Sat Nav history to get us back to the care home which was not too far distant, Fortunately, I then retrieved the file I had left in Uncle Kens room and so we could then make our way back the hotel bedroom for a bit of a rest and afternoon tea.

The Prime Minister’s adviser on Ethics, Lord Geidt, resigned yesterday with the briefest of resignation letters. But the mystery hs deepened today as Downing Street has published Lord Geidt’s resignation letter a day after he unexpectedly decided to step down. In his letter he said he had been asked to offer a view on ‘measures which risk a deliberate and purposeful breach of the ministerial code’. We shall have to wait and see what more there is to this story as the hours unfold but it looks like another brick in the wall around Boris Johnson has been removed.

Today was the day when we were due to travel to North Wales but there was a lot of running around to do before we got underway. Apart from the last minute packing including the laptop on which this blog is written, there were several urgent jobs to be done. One was to take the five sacks of hedge clippings that had been stored waiting for the day upon which gardening waste is collected. I was relying upon the fact that the empty bungalow has a practically empty bin apart from the grass mowings that the relatives are doing weekly to keep everything looking tidy. I was in luck and managed to squeeze my five sack fulls of clippings into their garden waste bin ready to be hauled to the end of the road. Then I had to get the document upon which I had been working ready for despatch but it required one more signature from a really obliging neighbour as a witness. Then all was ready so we shot into town and picked up our newspaper before dashing to the Post Office to get my document posted and ‘into the system’.  I realised that in my panic to get things packed quickly, I had forgotten some toothbrushes and toothpaste but this was quickly remedied by a dive into one of the many cosmetic type shops in the High Street and finally we set off, some ten minutes before the time I had scheduled for ourselves. The first half of the journey was uneventful and we had a pit stop at a halfway point where we ate some of our own elevenses on some benches meant to be used exclusively by Starbuck customers but nobody moved us on. In the second half of the journey, we encountered a fairly large traffic jam because of some roadworks south of the Langollen turn off but once this was put behind us we get to the hotel at about 12.30 after a journey of 97 miles.Then we dumped everything into the room, did a quick unpack and then had a quick freshen up and then made for our Country Club restaurant a couple of miles down the road at which we arrived some three minutes before our appointed luncheon time. We had a wonderful meal starting off with some starters (liver pate, wild mushrooms) which we shared and each had a panfried sea bream served with seasonable vegetables. We found this meal incredibly filling and satisfying and I quaffed a point of a dark local cask beer, vaguely reminiscient of a porter, which again I really enjoyed.

Meg and I enjoyed crashing out this afternoon and I must say, the Holiday Inn room that we have lived to all of our expectations. It is certainly large enough and well appointed and all of the systems seem to work as we would wish. We have been absorbing the news during the day of the fact that the flight of sylum seekers being sent to Rwanda for ‘processing’ was finally abandoned last night after a legal challenge by the European Court of Human Rights. Naturally our Home Secretary (Priti Patel) has been spitting teeth and there are all kinds of threats that we should withdraw from this court. But not many people realise that this court has nothing to do with the European Community which we have just left but its origins were in the early 1940s when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill raised the idea of a ‘Council of Europe’. In the wake of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, the idea behind the Council of Europe was to set up an international organisation to promote democracy, the rule of law and human rights. This was eventually to become the European Court on Human Rights. British lawyers were very much involved in the discussions of principles and the shaping of the Court. The European Convention on Human Rights was signed in Rome on 4 November 1950 and the UK was the first signatory to the Convention. The Convention entered into force on 3 September 1953. So all in all, if Britain were to leave such a court that we had helped to establish then Britain’s standing in the world would reduce our moral status almost to vanishing point. The whole of the Good Friday Agreement which has brought peace to Northern Ireland is underpinned by the ECHR so it is doubtful if the UK could withdraw without threatening the whole of this agreement. Nonetheless, some Tory MPs are calling for the UK to withdraw. As I write this blog, a story has broken in the last minute that Boris Johnson’s ethics adviser, Lord Geidt, has resigned after saying there was a ‘legitimate question’ over whether the PM had broken ministerial rules over Partygate. He had threatened to do so a week or so ago and was evidently agonising over his role and function but he is now No. 2 in the queue to resign from this position.

Today was always going to be a really ‘action packed’ day and so it turned out to be. As Tuesday is my Pilates day, then we know we would have to have a quick turn-around so that I can be ready to walk down into town. So Meg and I went straight down to Waitrose by car expecting to see some of our friends and acquaintances. In the event, no sooner were we sitting down having our coffee and comestibles, than we bumped into a friend of our pre-pandemic friends who we have now got to know quite well. Then the wife of our pre-pandemic friends turned up so soon the four of us were busy chatting away at a table. As there was a photograph of some members of the Order of the Garter in my newspaper, I told the story of how King Edward III who founded the Order of the Garter was the recipient of several titters when a garter slipped from a lady’s leg (thigh?) whereupon he put it around his own leg and spake (in normal French) “Honi soit qui mal y pense. (‘Shame on anyone who thinks evil of it’.) This story is probably apocrypal and I may have mis-remembered some elements of it but it is essentially correct. I seem to remember my mother telling me the origin of the phrase whilst I was still quite young (and not into lady’s garters or any other kind) After this jollity, we were joined by a wheelchair associate of ours who had heard the peals of laughter and wanted to be a part of it. In the midst of all this jollity, Seasoned World Traveller turned up and I gave him a press-cutting I had been carrying around with me. Then I espied a particular friend of ours who teaches Politics and History at Bromsgrove School who was stuck in the middle of marking. I commiserated with her, explaining that the prospect of marking about 75 assignments at 45 minutes for each one making a total of 50 extra hours of work that had to be handed back within days was not a happy memory. This generally meant several late nights until about 3.00am armed with tea and biscuits which was not good for one’s waistline. When faced with a lot of irrelevant material (a common failing when students do not know the answer to the question but fling together random facts rather like mud at a wall hoping that some of it might stick), I was reminded of the schoolboy who answered thus. In a Religious Studies examination when asked for a list of the 10 commamdments he indicated that he had forgotten them but he could (and did) reproduce a list of the first thirty kings of Israel. So eventually, we left for home having met five of our acquaintances in one place.

When we got home, I prepared some of the elements of the quickie meal of fish fingers which we have upon my return from Pilates. Then immediately this was over, I needed to check over the document I as preparing that needed some signatures on it. Fortunately, my next door neighbour proved to be more than obliging and so I have all of the elements in place to have my document dspatched in the morning. Then I had to have a quick change of clothing into something vaguely respectable as I had been ‘volunteered’ for membership of the parochial church council which was meeting for its inaugural meeting tonight at 7.00pm. One of the chief items of business in the evening was to elect a Chairman and a Secretary. After an embarrassed pause in which no-one was willing to step forward, I made a suggestion which helped to ease the logjam. Instead of a permanent chair ‘person’ I suggested that we think of electing a Chair and a Vice-Chair (of different genders) so that one perosn could grow in to a role and take over after a year of observation and  experience of the meeting. Quite quickly, having gone round the table to introduce ourselves and indicate what we could offer to the Council, a Chair and a Secretary seemed to emerge quite quickly and we are are going to meet again in some 2-3 weeks time to refine some of the draft documents we had in front of us as models for our constitution so that we can fashion a Council in our own image. Tonight, of all nights, I had to miss ‘Today at the Test‘ where the England team had pulled off one of the most stunning of victories. Some 299 runs needed to be scored and the BBC Sports website gives us a summary: On a breathless final day at Trent Bridge, Bairstow made the second-fastest century by an England batter in Test cricket as the hosts strolled to what should have been a challenging target of 299 from 72 overs. Bairstow’s outrageous hitting in the spell after tea took him to three figures from 77 balls, only just missing the England record of 76 balls that has stood for 120 years. He was eventually out for 136 from 92 balls, having clubbed 14 fours and seven sixes in front of a delirious full house. Unfortunately attendance at the church meeting means that I missed seeing a summary on one of the most exciting day’s cricket in decades.

This morning, Meg and I spent a certain amount of time sorting out what clothes we intend to take away with us when we make our journey to North Wales starting on Wednesday. This really did take not too much sorting out as it was case of which top ‘goes with’ which skirt and we know that certain combinations work very well. So we have our Wednesday/Thursday kit sorted out as as well as our Friday/Saturday kit. According to the weather forecast, the temperature in certain parts of Englnd may well exceed that of Hawaii as it seems that a plume of hot air over Spain is being pushed northwards towards the UK.  Eventually, we decided to go and collect our newspapers by car as we needed to buy a few provisions from Waitrose. Whilst there,we  were tempted to buy a ‘butterfly’ mixture of seeds and bulbs for, as it happens, I just happen to have a little plot of spare land in Mog’s Den into which they can be sown.  Once we got onto our bench seat, we made our number with Intrepid Octogenerian Hiker who was still completing his 9-12 kilometres a day as he has been doing for months now. We had not bumped into him for a week or so now but he still seemed hale and hearty – as always, he did not linger too long as his muscles get cold if he stops too long and he is eager to get on this way. After we had exchanged gossip with him we met a couple of our elderly Irish friends who had just returned from a cruise and I suspect might be preparing for another one. They were planning a trip down the Rhine and the tour company with which they are booked picks them up coach from Bromsgrove bus station and once their luggage is loaded, the next time they see it is when they are in their cabin in their cruise ship. To avoid all UK airports sounds fantastic so I think this may be an option well worth exploring. When we returned home, we cooked ourselves a fairly rapid midday meal of unsmoked gammon, baked potato and some Hispi cabbage and very tasty we found it.

When I was doing a tidy up of Mog’s Den yesterday, I was exploring some of the things that I had evidently rescued and after some months of benign neglect, were now busy growing away in some of the large pots I have distributed up and down the quite steep sides slopes of the den. When I examined one of the pots more closely, I realised that it was a lilac tree or bush which was about a metre tall. So I have made some space for it next to the much a larger lilac tree on the patio that was bought for me a couple of birthdays ago and which flowered for the first time this year. Apparently, it is a characteristic of lilac trees that they take about 2-3 years to flower but the specimen I have just discovered will no doubt respond to a bit of TLC, some fertiliser and a somewhat more regular watering.  Later on the afternoon, our next door neighbours popped round, by arrangement, to take a spot of afternoon tea with us. We wanted to show them the correspondence into which I had entered with the solicitors of the vacant bungalow across the communal green area from us. Like us, they were fairly amazed that we should have been put to so much trouble and reinforced our own view that the solicitor should have pressed their own clients much harder to supply all of the details of the property which they were trying to sell.

Late on this afternoon, the Government has published its proposal to overturn critical parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol – an international treaty which Boris Johnson had both negotiated and agreed to. So it appears that we may be on the edge of a trade war with the EU given the plain illegality of what is being proposed. However, the UK government is arguing that the Northern Irish situation is a ‘genuinely exceptional situation’ and because of this, the UK feels it feels it can disregard a treaty which it itself had signed. One has a suspicion that all of this may be just be playing ‘hard ball’ in negotiations with the EU but the legislation will have to  pass through the House of Commons first. This is by no means certain, because a significant numbers of MPs opposed to Boris Johnson many feel that this is a step too far and refuse to vote for the legislation in the Commons. Then, of course, the legislation will almost certainly fail to pass through the House of Lords. One does get the suspicion that ‘normal’ government has been suspended and that Boris Johnson will pursue whatever policies will feed the appetites of his own fervent Brexiteers. So anything that seems to pick a fight with the EU or draconian measures to deal with asylum seekers will  automatically throw ‘red meat’ to whatever supporters or voters he needs for his survival.

Today being Sunday, I walked down as usual to collect our Sunday newspapers. Knowing that our friend from Oxfordshire is coming in about 11 days time, I was trying to look at a familiar journey through the eyes of a visitor and noticed how green things were, taking one thing with another. On the way back, as I was crossing the road with a sustaining banana in hand, a car stopped for me and the lights flashed. When the window was wound down I then realised it was our Irish friends from further up the road. We had a snatched conversation for a few seconds before the traffic built up behind and we both had to resume our separate journeys. After the Sophie Raworth show at 9.00am and yet another apologist for Boris Johnson, we started to make preparations for our journey down into town. I prepared our normal flask for our elevenses  and then devoted some time to tidying up a table in our dining room that I use as a bit of overflow workspace and from where we occasionally FaceTime some of our friends on the iPad. This was a useful 15 minutes whilst waiting for Meg to get ready which were well spent so I can carry on and make it even more ship-shape in the next day or so. It rather looked as though a bit of rain might threaten, so Meg and I indulged ourselves by going down to the park by car. The park was teeming with 3-4 year olds on a medley of scooters, bikes and tricycles and we were lucky that the seat we were going to sit on was vacated for us just a minute or so before we arrived. We bumped into one of our regulars who whizzes all over the place at very great speed in her wheelchair but we had not seen her for about a week or so. After she left us, we walked down the hill and we made contact with Seasoned World Traveller. I had read an article in yesteday’s Times that I suspected might be of interest to him so I said that I would rescue it from the ‘vertical’ filing system and keep it in my rucksack ready for the next time I see him. Then it was a quick ride up the hill  and I started to think about the lunch that we were going to have. Fortunately, it was easy to prepare as I had taken the frozen half of a joint cooked some weeks before and all I had to do was to prepare some onion gravy, cut into slices and Voilá.

After lunch there was documentation I had set myself the task of completing and fortunately this seemed to be unproblematic. I needed to consult some government websites but these seemed to be well written and error-free as well as being easy to navigate so I was pleased to able to complete my task relatively quickly. As I had now had a bit of time in hand and the weather was set fair, I thought I would tackle some of the really overgrown bits of Mog’s Den. This is the sliver of land (more of a triangle actually) which was gifted to us when we settled the line of our boundary fence and which I am making into a sort of ‘wild’ garden. But the plum tree is manifesting a fair bit of fruit this year and some of the Vinca major (Greater Periwinkle) is doing a great job of providing some colourful ground cover where nothing else will grow as it is so shaded. A bit of benign neglect can sometimes yield some nice surprises. But not having tended Mog’s Den this season meant that some really tall weeds had gone somewhat rampant. These were largely rose bay willow herb and nettle and being shallow rooted I managed after half an hour’s work to effect quite a change. The idea is to do a little bit each day so that when our friend – a keen gardener- comes to stay with us, then Mog’s Den will look a little less of a wilderness. I am hopeful that after a bit of turning around, this little plot of land will stay pretty maintenance free.  

Before the two by-election results which will be a week on Thursday, Boris Johnson has evidently engaged to two policies designed to throw some ‘red meat’ to the most fervent of his supporters. One of these is the Northern Ireland Protocol  where one senior Tory has told Sky News that planned legislation on the Northern Ireland Protocol is ‘clearly not in the national interest but is about appeasing the ERG’. ERG is the ‘European Research Group’ and is a group of Tory MPs radically opposed to anything remotely European. The other policy is to take asylum seekers and to transport them to Rwanda – the policy of transporting such individuals to ‘darkest Africa’ is seen as a masterstroke by some of Johnson’s supporters. But an appeal against the first trasnportation of refugees to Rwanda will come before the Appeal Court tomorrow.

Today was a fairly typical Saturday but the day started off fairly bright, albeit breezy, so there was no reason for us both not to enjoy our walk onto the park. I popped into town to collect our newspapers by car and then we were ready for our walk. Before I left, I had exchanged some emails with our erstwhile colleague from the university of Winchester who is coming to stay with us in about 12 days time but in the meantime, we are getting a little more focused on our trip to North Wales starting next Wednesday. I did a quick web search and discovered a pub in Old Colwyn that seems to offer good but reasonably priced meals in the middle of the day so if we do not find anything else locally, we always have the postcode of an eating place that we might visit. The thing about pubs that offer food is that they typically have a reasonably sized car park which can make life easier than having to find a car park adjacent to a restaurant.  We walked down into the park and enjoyed our coffee on the park bench and were soon joined by our University of Birmingham friend. After we had chatted for a few minutes we were joined by our Seasoned World Traveller friend but then it started to spot with rain so we all repaired to the shade of a nearby tree which afforded us some respite. Then we had quite a discussion about the accuracy of blood pressure monitors and whether they should be deployed before or after taking blood pressure medication. All three of us males had been given somewhat differing modes of advice by our various surgeries and clinicians so we attempted to pool our knowledge and best practice. After all of this quasi-medical discussion, we walked slowly up the hill and prepared a salad for ourselves that was fairly easy to throw together. Then we had a quietish afternoon, knowing that we were going to attend our normal church service in the early evening.

According to Sky News, the government are shortly to intervene in the nation’s food habits. This is always a particularly tricky area for government because if they leave things to the untrammeled operation of the market (which is the natural default state for members of the Tory party) then we will be fed a diet high in salt, sugar and junk foods which are cheap to produce, profits are high and the nation’a health suffers dramatically (with increased incidences of diabetes, cancers and othet degenerative diseases) Intervene in the market, though, and the government’s critics will decry the operation of a ‘nanny state’ and the regulation of a market place which looks and feels somehow more ‘socialist’. A report due to be released on Monday contains recommendations to expand free school meals, impose a long-campaigned for salt and sugar tax, and introduce GP prescriptions for fruit and veg. At the same time, we will be urged to increase our consumption of ‘responsibly sourced venison’, increase the consumption of food from algae proteins, and encourage technology to help cattle produce less methane. This all sounds well and good but I suspect that some of the wilder recommendations (eating not just venison but ‘responsibly sourced venison’ however we are meant to ascertain that on the supermarket shelves) will be absolutely trashed by the Tory supporting ‘middle-brows’ of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Then we will be left with a policy which is high on aspirational details but low on any practical policies. All of this is happening at a time when most of the population are cutting back on food in order to fund sky-high energy bills and the temptations to fill oneself with cheap but junk food must be considerable for the poorest parts of the population.

In the Ukraine war, there is intense street fighting in the strategically important city of Severodonetsk. It looks as though the Ukrainians are rapidly running out of ammunition and the Russians are fighting in the only way that they seem to know how. It is reported that Moscow is using 1960s era 5.5-tonne anti-ship missiles against land targets.  When employed in a ground attack role with a conventional warhead they are highly inaccurate and can therefore cause significant collateral damage and civilian casualties. The conventional military opinion at this stage in the war is that the Russians are likely to be successful in their policy of blasting their way into urban settlements but at the cost of many losses both to themselves and also to the Ukrainians. It may be that Russia is resorting to older technology because it is running hort of more modern and more precise missle systems. On the other hand, overwhelming and occupying a city is one thing, but holding on to it for any length of time is much more problematic and may take many more troops than Russia is prepared to commit.

Today started off with an interesting knock at the door from a team from BT OpenReach who had come along to see what could be done about the blockage in the ducting that they had identified which means that we cannot yet install some superfast broadband via a fibre cable. Three large vans turned up but eventually they got to work at the site around the corner next to our neighbour’s garden fence where the blockage had been identified. After an initial lack of success they identified the source of the problem. This is a common problem with which they have to cope most of the time. When a fence post is being erected, whatever digging tool is being used may well damage the ducting. There is generally a telecommunications cable of some kind within this but when the concrete for the fence post is inserted into the hole, it enters the ducting and then blocks it off. Having got the problem identified, they managed to rectify it and put a rope through it (so they said) so that when the installation comes along in a week or so’s time, all they have to do is to attach the cable to the end of the rope and then pull it through. Then it will go as far as the access point outside our house, be taken inside the  house and then the engineer will install the new fibre cable into a router that they will supply and then, if all goes well, we ought to have superfast broadband. When Meg started our walk down into the park, the men were still working away but had just completed their work (successfully) upon our return. We bumped into our Italian friend just down the road and then in the park met up with our University of Birmingham friend. He had phoned me up earlier in the morning asking if he could borrow again some ‘Teach yourself Spanish’ books which I had lent to him before but now he wanted to extend his knowledge. I also had a couple of travel guides (the kind copiously illustrated with photos of interesting things to see in whatever region of Spain you visit) so our friend could delight in leafing through these as well. We also met up with Seasoned World Traveller who hunted us out and we continued our discussions of what makes people tick – unusually, we did not broach the subject of politics in any shape or form today. Once we returned home, we had a meal of fish to which we often treat ourselves on a Friday which is seabass cooked for three minutes on one side, two minutes on the other (with some capers) and then served directly onto a small bed of crispy salad.

After lunch, we knew that it was lawn cutting day again but at least we had a wonderfully fine afternoon. Once the lawncutting had been completed, Meg and I treated ourselves to a little bit of afternoon tea in the garden. Then I had a recently purchased sweet pea to plant and fortunately, I already have the trellis in place by the side of the house. Then I needed to tie back a rose in the front garden that was in danger of falling over in the high winds but I suspect given the age of the rose, I will need a much longer stake in time. I also gave my recently planted clematis plants a bit of support and hope to train them to occupy the space previously occupied by a much older plant, now deceased. Whilst at the front of the house, I saw our neighbour and invited him and his wife around for tea late on Monday afternoon. What I want to do is to show them the email correspondence I have recently had with the vendor’s solicitors for the vacant house across our communal green area. As the solicitors are in Guildford,Surry and the house was sold through the Purple Bricks agency we are speculating whether the purchaser has used the internal photographs of the house but has not actually seen the garden and the environs of the house. An ‘old fashioned’ estate agent would have shown people around and answered a lot of questions but I have every indication that this is not what has happened on this occasion.

During the day I have been in email correspondence with one of my ex-University of Winchester friends who has recently retired. She has visited the house before and gave me a lot of practical and useful advice and support when I was ill some four years ago now. So she accepted a long standing invitation to come and stay with us for a day or so, so having booked her cat into a cattery all is now organised for her to visit in about two weeks time. Although we have been in regular email contact over the years, it is so much nicer to have a face-to-face so that we can catch upon all of the news that we wish to impart to each other.

This turned out to be an interesting day for reasons that will become apparent. But being a Thursday, it was my normal ‘shopping’ day but I must say that things seemed extraordinarily quiet this morning, for reasons I cannot immediately discern. As we intend to go away in the middle of next week, I made the shopping into a very ‘light’ week as I hate shopping for food only to throw it away a few days later. The shopping having been done, I returned home for a quickie breakfast and then wrote a quick note to Meg’s Uncle Ken in North Wales to remind him that we were due to visit him in a week’s time. When we started to think about our walk, it was evidently a very indeterminate type of day, weatherwise, and we were unsure whether little spots of rain were threatened and whether we were due to experience a more serious downpour. By the time we got ourselves ready for a walk in the park, it had already stated to spot with rain so we had to reluctantly dive back inside the house and don some outerwear. By the time we were firmly seated on our park bench, it started to rain quite steadily so I did what I have never done before. I took our poured out coffee and put back into the flask. Then we headed for the bandstand, knowing that it would give us respite from the rain for sufficient time for the rain to blow over. Sheltering under the bandstand roof, there was a motley crew of individuals all sheltering from the rain. We had small children and dogs as well as an adverising board for a local radio station and a presenter who was awaiting a person running across England to raise money for diabetes research. When the rain ceased, we struck out for home and I previously prepared some veg to have with our quiche at lunchtime. I had pre-prepared some little sticks of carrots and parboiled them with some petit pois. Then, when we got into the house, we finished off the cooking of the veg and then gave them a quick stir in some hot olive oil, to which we added a spoonful of runny honey. This makes a fairly boring vegetable mix a bit more exciting and we enjoyed it very much with our quiche.

In the afternoon, I knew that I needed to send a long and detailed reply to a solicitor who was representing the relatives of our neighbour who lived ‘across the green’ from us and died last August. The solicitor had submitted a lengthy list of questions on matters generally related to the ‘drainage field’  and associated access pipes and roadways. A lot of these questions could have been answered if the relevant documents had been supplied to the solicitor in the first place. But this involved sorting through historic files and then the computer to see if I had these documents as a PDF. The documents were quite various and included things such as the legal agreement that we and a couple of our neighbours had signed giving us a mutal purchase of the drainage field, the Klargester BioDisk and all of the associated roadways and fences. In addition, we had been gifted a long sliver of land by the previous owner of the field upon a new mini-estate has been built. Several years ago we had needed to establish exactly where our boundary line lay because it had been very vague in the past (‘following the tree line’) but once we had been gifted this land, it needed a trust agreement establishing joint ownership and then registration with the Land Registry. So all in all, I needed to supply a variety of legal instruments, location maps, Land Registry TP1 forms and the like so that the conveyancing could go ahead. But the lady across the green from us who had died had all of these documents in her possession but it looked as though they had never been bundled up with the rest of the legal documents or handed over to the solicitor. So it ws evident from the list of questions that the old lady’s relatives did not really know what they were selling so it took several hours of work for me to indicate who owned what and in what proportions. This whole venture took several hours of concentrated work and I was not best pleased, particularly as I had offered to discuss any practical details of these deals with the neighbour’s relatives but they brushed off us off indicating that they knew all that they needed to know (which was evidently not the case) So at end of the transmission of several documents to the vendor’s solicitors, I did indicate my displeasure at having to spend hours of work to establish who owned what when it was not my place to do so. But at least, the hard work is now done and I await a response from the solicitor with interest.

We knew that today was going to be a messed around day as we had a telephone consultation scheduled with the doctor for this morning and we had been told to hold ourselves in readiness for the call some time between 8.30 and 12.30 which is a long time slot.  We were actually phoned up at about 9.30am and altogether, the consultation lasted the best part of half-an-hour, which I suppose is an improvement over the more general 10 minutes and we felt that we had a fairly satisfactory session. Knowing that doctors typically take your blood pressure if attending face-to-face, we thought it would be a good idea for Meg to have some up-to-date readings before we chatted with the GP. We had recently bought a new blood pressure monitor for ourselves as we suspected that the one we have had for years may be becoming unreliable.So I took two sets of blood pressure readings, one with the old machine and one with the new before our consultation with the doctor. The upshot of all of this is that out doctor in a telephone consultation wanted us to take a week full of observations and then get them into the clinic so that one of the doctors can decide whether any medication is called for or not.

By the time we had done all of this and greeted our domestic help who was here for her weekly session, we then set off for the park as it was quite a beautiful fine day. On our way down to the park, we were pleased to run across our Italian friend who was busy poring over the innards of her car. But all she was doing was adding some oil to her trusty Toyota Corolla. She and her neighbour who we we know well by sight were marvelling how clean and orderly the engine appeared even though the car was approximately 17 years old so we went on our way to the park. There we were joined by our University of Birmingham friend who had been busy in a community ‘repair’ shop where anybody who wants can bring along a household appliance that just requires a bit of attention to get it functioning again. This sounded like an excellent idea but the only trouble is that there were more volunteers offering their time and skills to repair household items than there were clients bringing along objects for them to repair. It all sounded like a sound idea but its long term future does not seem assured.

This afternoon we were expecting a visit from a gentleman who for some years now was doing some of the ‘heavier’ gardening for us (such as shaping and trimming bushes and the like) We knew that he had been incredibly ill having collapsed in a garden whilst he was working and consequently had spent several weeks in hospital receiving multiple blood transfusions. When he got home, he had had a whole series of domestic misfortunes and when our domestic help had run across him by accident in the High Street in Bromsgrove, it seemed as though a cup of tea and biscuits and a shoulder to cry on might prove timely. So our gardener called around and we spent a certain amount of time inside the house talking over the issues that had affected him. Eventually, the clouds rolled away and there was a burst of sunshine where we all sat outside and our friend could admire our patio which of course he had seen countless times as he worked in our garden but he, like us, were amazed at the variety and appearance of the patio once we had engaged in a radical clean up of the paving stones two or three weeks ago. As our gardener has been a horticulturist nearly all of his life, I took the opportunity of rescuing a shrub that was being grown in a large pot in the recesses of Mog’s den. He identified it for us as a hazel shrub/tree – now all we have to do, is to find a nice location for it. I cannot remember how I came by it except to say that I often rescue viable little shrubs and trees without always knowing what they are. We finished off our afternoon exchanging contact details so that we can keep in touch on a regular basis.

Sky News is reporting today severe disquiet at the way that the new ‘deportation to Rwanda’ policy is working out. A Home Officer worker has reported they feel ashamed to work for the government because of its plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. They told us there is ‘disbelief’ at the policy within their department – likening it to a form of human trafficking. The worker – who we have agreed to give anonymity to – has been in the asylum department for a number of years and spoke to us exclusively just days before the first flight is due to leave. They told us: ‘We should offer sanctuary and provide safe haven for those who need it but it feels like we are taking part in human trafficking – transporting people against their will and paying another country to take them‘.

Tuesday is always the day of my Pilates class so this rather dictates how the morning will pan out. Meg and I have decided that whatever the weather, we will always pop down into Waitrose by car every Tuesday morning because this is the way in which we can bump into some of our pre-pandemic friends. We got down to Waitrose in plenty of time and, in truth, we were a little too early for some of our regulars. But by arriving early, we did make contact again wth a young mother who we used to see regularly in our our pre-Covid days. We have seen her once by accident in the past two years but as we used to chat about twice a week, this was one social contact that I have rather missed. The ‘baby’ she had more than two and a half years ago is now aged 3+ and consequently is at nursery school. Our friend is a teacher of politics and modern history in one of the local schools and in the past I have off-loaded a lot of my somewhat dated politics books onto her so that she could either use them herself, donate them to the school library or even let some deserving students have them if they would prove useful. Naturally, as this was the ‘morning after the night before’ we spent some time discussing last night’s vote on the leadership of the Tory party where the result was announced at about 9.00pm last night. More on this later, though. After we had been in the café for about an hour, we were joined by two of the friends that we were expecting to see in the café this morning. The four of us were soon joined by a mutual friend so we formed a jolly little table of five of the erstwhile regulars. Then Seasoned World Traveller hove into view so I split my time talking politics with him and more gentle banter with our friends on the other table.

Now for a discussion of last night’s vote. This needs to be contextualised in a way that is evading most of the commentary found on the media. When the vote was announced, it was evident that Boris Johnson was always going to win it but the margin of the scale of the rebellion against him was the subject of much speculation. Of the 359 Tory MPs, one has to be aware that some 160-170 of them are already on the government payroll. This means that if they voted against Johnson and were successful, they would be voting themselves out of a job. For this reason, we could anticipate that the vast majority of the ‘payroll’ vote would vote in favour of Johnson and their own jobs. Subtracting the ‘payroll’ faction from the electorate leaves about 199-200 ‘non-payroll’ MPs. The vote against Johnson was 148 votes which means that 3 out of even 4 ‘non-payroll’ MPs voted  that they had no confidence in the PM. Although the MSM (Main Street Media) have not really undertaken this analysis, I was delighted to see that Channel 4 news were forcibly making this point and confronting a ‘Red Wall’ Tory MP with these unpalatable truths to which he had no reply or response. For this reason, most of the informed commentary who have worked out that Johnson received a lower proportion of supportive votes of either Teresa May or  Margaret Thatcher and both of these resigned very shortly after a damaging vote although, like Boris Johnson, they had mathematically ‘won’ the vote. So a lot of the discussion today has been on the political rather than the mathematical implications of the vote. The conclusion is that the Tory party is very, very badly split at the moment and divided parties do not win general elections. Most of the opposition parties are silently rubbing their hands in glee, watching the Tories tear them themselves apart with ‘blue on blue’ personal attacks on each other already taking place.

My Pilates class took place as normal today. When I got home, I cooked a meal of smoked hake which we served on a bed of salad. The beauty of a meal like this, apart from its health-giving properties, is that it is incredibly quick and easy to prepare and with the minumum of washing up afterwards. In the middle of the day, I was delighted to get a phone call from one of my Hampshire friends. He had just returned from a business-cum-vacation trip to Portugal that sounded anything like restful. He had been delayed in the airport on the way out for five hours and then the hotel he was intending to stay in had an out-of-hours service by the time he arrived where the system seemed to fall over. So it seemed like quite a stressful time and makes me wonder whether things will have improved by September when we may (or may not) make a trip to Coruña in Northern Spain after an absence of some 2-3 years.