A nice fine day today, but I wonder how long it is going to last.  Last week, it was being indicated in the longer range weather forecasts that today the high pressure system which we have been fortunate enough to experience for the last few days is going to break down under the influence of a mass of arctic air moving its way south. So it appears that we may be subject to a bout of rain and perhaps even snow slowly sinking  from the north towards the end of the week. This has quite a practical implication for me as I want to get as much of the routine gardening (mainly edging, gully and border clearing) done whilst the weather is fine.  Meg and I were a lttle delayed this morning but eventually we got our act into gear and got into town by car, where we picked up the newspaper. Afterwards, we pereginated to our ‘normal’ park bench where e chatted with a couple of regulars, all of us enjoying the sunshine whilst we can, but conscious of the fact that some unpleasant weather is on the way. Then we popped home and finished off the other half of the beef joint that we cooked in the slow cooker yesterday.

As the weather was set fair, I thought I would make a start on the garden tidy-up. As I was assembling my garden tools I was visited by a little furry friend (the local cat who has adopted us – Miggles) so evidently the cat had to have some of its treats. Then I had to look out for the set of handtools which I particularly use in clearing my borders and gullies. The biggest of these is evidently some edge clippers whch I try to keep sharp and in good condition – I tend to put WD-40 or its equivalent on the blades both before and after use. Then I have two or three particular tools without which I would be lost. The most important of these is a weeding tool which has a bit of a swan-neck and then a deep V-shaped notch in its working end. I also have a dandelion rooter which has a long shaft, much needed as dandelion roots can be very long and persistent. Finally, I have a really stout stainless steel trowel. I find I use these three tools constantly and I take care to look after them before I put them away for the night. I ought to mention last but not least are those kinds of gardening gloves that have a fairly ‘grippy’ coating on the front – this enables one to get hold of a weed and give it a long, slow tug in order to clear the roots from the soil. Once I started on my task, I never cease to marvel at the versatility of the human hand which I use to sieve the surface of the soil as well as removing weeds by their roots. I have deliberately set myself rather limited objectives so that I do not absolutely exhaust myself on ‘Day One‘ and I managed to achieve a clearance of one third of the long border by the side of our green communal areas at the front of the house.

Perhaps I do not need to mention that in all of my gardening activities this afternoon, my efforts were supervised at all times by Miggles the cat. After leaping about in the sunshine as though to capture imaginary beasts, the cat decided to show off by climbing as far as it could up the ‘acer campestre‘ (field maple) I planted some years back. When the cat got to the stage where each branch swayed perilously and was in danger of shedding the cat back to earth, Miggles turned around and decided it was time to beat a retreat before a bout of lying around in the sun. Then it was obvious that it needed to sit on a patch of cleared earth about 9″ in advance of where I was working. I rather think the cat thinks that some strange beastie is going to appear from the earth and weeds as the border gets cleared and is getting itself in a good position to leap on it. After an hour, I packed up my tools, had a nice cip of tea and left the cat to walk up and down the patch of fresh earth I had just cleared ( a pettern of behaviour I have witnessed before. More of these activites tomorrow, I am sure, if the weather holds up.

There are hints tonight in advance of further peace talks tomorrow in Turkey and Russia and the Ukraine are edging towards each other. Each side has conceded an ‘easy’concession – the Ukrainians are indicaing that a ‘neutral’ i.e. non-NATO Ukraine could be on the cards whilst the Russians have claims to take over the wjole of the country. The really difficult bit to negotiate is how much of the east of the country to cede in exchange for peace. As it is now, Zelenskyy has said he was seeking a ‘compromise’ with Moscow over Donbas, the region which has been partly controlled by Russian-backed separatist groups since 2014. 

So British Summer Time (BST) officially started at 1.00am this morning and we are now entering the period known officially as ‘Daylight Savings Time’. All of this means that we now have lighter evenings to which to look forward but at the (slight) cost of slightly darker mornings. The principal task this morning is also to adjust various clocks throughout the house. Fortunately, our computers and radios automatically adjust themselves but I have to remember to adjust the central heating clock (our previous controller used to do this automatically but our current model does not). There is always one device which I can never quite remember how to adjust and in my case, its the oven clock but everything else, as far as I remember, has been adjusted. I seem to think that there was a movement some time ago to go onto what is called ‘Double Summer Time’ i.e. putting the clocks forward by two hours which incidentally aligns us with continental Europe.  Actually, in 1968, a three-year experiment was conducted with British Standard Time, keeping the clocks fixed throughout the year on GMT+1. However, the dark winter mornings were unpopular, particularly in Scotland. In 1971, MPs voted to return to the system that endures today. Yet the debate continues about transferring to Single/Double Summertime (SDST) – the current convoluted buzzword. Research showed an 11.7% reduction in road casualties between 1968 and 1971. An extra hour’s light in the evening is thought to offer savings of up to £35m in fuel costs. Crime rates also drop with longer evenings. What is interesting, in these post-Brexit days, is that the idea has never sprung to the fore again but as the energy crisis hits us it may force its way up the agenda in the foreseeable future. Having got up early, amended our clocks and fuelled myself with some instant porridge, I set off for our Sunday newspaper and there was not a soul around (just after 8.00am) as I set off – I suppose all sensible people were busy trying to recoup their extra hour in bed and even the usual accompaniment of joggers and dog-walkers seemed to be absent. On returning home. we watched the ‘Sunday Morning’ show which is a regular Sunday morning fixture and I prepared our elevenses for later on in the morning. I then received a text from my son who was returning from a rail trip and with whom I had an arrangement to pick him up from the station. This Meg and I did but all not gone particularly well on this particular rail trip (booking offices not open when they should be, scheduled trains not running and similar kinds of misfortunes) so our son was not a particularly happy bunny when we picked him up. Then Meg and I went for our ‘normal’ Sunday morning walk to the park and ran across a few of our ‘park regulars’ this morning before we returned home to cook Sunday lunch.

The Ukrainian war is not often a source of amusement but one particular series of incidents is hitting the newspaper columns of papers such as the Sunday Times. At the airport serving Kerson, Moscow first ordered Russian troops, armour, attack helicopters and logistical support vehicles to occupy the airport on February 27. A Ukrainian drone filmed them as they moved in and then opened fire, damaging several helicopters. Undeterred, Russian commanders moved in more helicopters and scores more vehicles. Ukrainian artillery answered with a massive, concentrated bombardment against the airfield on March 7. Footage released by the Ukrainian military shows dozens of flashes lighting up whole sectors of the airfield in rapid succession, with rockets blowing apart the vehicles stationed there. The attack wiped out at least 30 helicopters and dozens more armoured vehicles To cut a very long story short, the Russians have reinforced the airport on ten occasions. Each time, there has been an Ukrainian air strike destroying helicopters and other military equipment. A Russian commander, Lieutenant General Yakov Rezantsev, promptly put himself in the front line to work out was happening – and was promptly taken out by Ukrainian attacks. The Ukrainians themselves cannot believe just how unbelievably stupid the Russian tactics have been. This may be the result of a cultural trait in which the Russian military blindly follow orders and there is little room for any independent ‘thinking’. By contrast, the Ukrainians have shown themselves to be flexible, adaptive and fast-learning and hence the successes that they are enjoying against vastly superior Russian fire power.

Last night, Meg and I attempted to watch some opera videos on ‘YouTube‘ and each of these attempts resulted in disaster (some 5 seconds of video followed by two minutes of ‘buffering’) As my son called round today, we thought we would investigate what was going wrong, as I suspected that resetting the router during the week had not helped matters. But this afternoon, everything worked as one would have expected so I suppose I was just unlucky to have hit a patch of very low connection speeds last night.

The start of another beautiful day without a cloud in the sky. It is a wonderful sight to look out of our upper storey windows and to behold a vista of beautifully cut lawns – but, of course, they are a reminder that they have to be kept that way with a weekly mow. I am also reminding myself that now some of the hard work of spring cleaning the garden actually starts. The basic mowing having been done, the next major task is to edge the lawn and to clear the gullies. I have found over the years that using the edging tool to cut off overhanging grass strands is one thing but the way that our garden is, there are quite a few neighbouring areas and gullies that also have to be cleared. I have found over the years that the best way to do this is by adopting a semi-prone position i.e. lying on one’s side and then utilising a lot of handwork by pulling our perennial weeds by the roots. In the worst affected areas of the garden, this can be a combination of nettles, bamboo and even ivy not to mention varieties of other creeping weeds. When I used to weed my next door neighbour’s garden on a ‘grace and favour’ basis, I once heard a narvellous piece of advice how to get rid of ‘gound elder’, a particularly pernicious type of weed introduced by the Romans I believe and with a habit of reproducing itself from a fragment about as small as half a thumbnail and with a habit of insinutaing itself round the roots of legitimate plants like roses. The advice I had heard was ‘move house’ – in the absence of this, one had to persist for about five years or even more in order to eradicate this pestilent weed from your beloved borders. I am telling myself that I need to do about 20-30 minutes day regularly each day but I evidently need to be self-disciplined about this. As is so often the case with these projects, I intend to start on this ‘tomorrow’. Meg and I walked down to the park today and we occupied our normal bench, admiring the flowering blossom unfolding on the trees in front of us. I left Meg on the bench to save Meg’s legs somewhat whilst I collected the newspaper and then we slowly walked home, enjoying the sunshine whilst it lasts but conscious of the fact that in a few days time, the warm spell will end and we shall have to get used to some icy arctic blasts early on next week. When we we were in the park and knowing that following the ‘Six Nations’ we were going to have women’s international rugby, we thought that a treat was to follow. However, the first scheduled match was between England and Sotland and started at 12.00 midday so we realised that we should just about be in time to watch the second half. As the half time score was someting like 38-5 in the favour of England, it was hardly going to be a competitive second half- or a particularly absorbing one.  The Scots made a few bold approaches but seemed to lack the killer punch to make it across the try line at all in the second half.

Some particularly poignant news is emerging in the aftermath of the bombing of the theatre in Maiupol where about a thousand refugees were sheltering (incuding some transported there from a local hospital). A woman who survived the bombing of a theatre in Mariupol has said she believes the panic of the crowd rushing to escape killed more people than the strike itself. The building sheltering more than a thousand civilians in the besieged southern Ukrainian city was bombed by Russia on 16 March. The blast killed around 300 people, authorities in the country have said – which would make it the war’s deadliest attack on civilians. Mariupol resident Maria Radionova, 27, who was among those who made it out alive, has told of the chaos as the bomb hit. Today, President Biden has been in Poland, pledging more support to the Ukraine and also positioning more American troops in the Nato territories that border Russia. He has been making the quite legitimate point that whilst Putin actually wanted and tried to engineer a weakened and divided NATO, he now has the absolute reverse on his door step.  Although there is a certain amount of rhetoric in all of this, what divisions may have existed in NATO now appear minimal. The ‘volte-face’ by the German government when they decided on a much energetic and funded defence strategy is of enormous significance and the Japanese are also considering changing their traditional defence policies in the light of Putin’s aggression. Signals from the Russian Government is that they may attempt to concentrate their energies on the eastern Donbas region where Russia has been supporting secessionist Russian-speaking militia since the detachment of Crimea. Western analysts are thinking, in effect, ‘words are cheap’ and let us see what, if anything, happens on the ground.

Well, you never know what a day is going to bring, as we shall see. Today is my son’s birthday and he was going to call round and do a little bit of work in his office here before catching the train to London via Birmingham New Street and he was teaming up with a long standing friend before they went off on a rail tour together. I have had a sniffle for a day or so but I was reminded that so did my friend down the road before he tested positive for Covid. I had intended to give my son a big hug on his birthday (what else?) but a little voice inside me  said that I ought to test myself first in case the sniffle was more than that. So I tested myself for COVID  and was dismayed to test positive. My wife tested herself and she was negative. My son also tested himself and he was positive. According to the natrional data (a random sample conducted across the UK) the number of infections in the UK has risen by 1 million in the last week and is now 1 in 16 (and as high as 1 in 9 in Scotland) I know that this is a virus that we have to learn to love with from this point on – nonetheless, I cannot suppress a rumbling anger at the government who, utterly beholden to a libertarian right ideology are dismantling controls, testing and testing as rapidly as they can whilst infection rates are soaring. Hopefully, many of the cases will turn out to be mild and transient but I have seen estimates that ‘long covid’ type symptoms can persist in anything from 10%-50% of cases, which to my mind is unacceptably high. So now I am having to change some of my plans for the weekend. Tomorrow night, after church, we intended to go to a concert in our local Anglican Church, St. Johns,  at which domations were to be sought to help victims of the aggression in Ukraine. After that, we had been invited to go the house of a mutual friend for a little bit of supper. So I had to write a quick note to my friend saying that Meg and I would not be attending church, or the concert or her little ‘soirée’ all of which is a disappointment to us. But I think it would be massively irresponsible to go ahead with our social engagements as though nothing had happened.

This afternoon was the planned afternoon for the start of the ‘big mow’ of the communal green area in between our houses which is about 500 square yards followed by our own individual lawn. At the start of the season, the mower evidently has to be ‘oiled up’, followed by a check of the air filter and a filling with high-quality petrol well-primed with fuel stabiliser to prevent any ethanol attracting water from the air to contaminate the fuel. After all of this preparation,the mower started at the very first pull of the starting handle which is not bad when it has been idle for about 150 days. I started today’s session with the blades set on the highest of the five ‘notched ‘ settings, but as as I tend to mow the large area twice (once in one direction and then another at right angles to it), I notched the height down a position after the initial run. The mower ran very sweetly, both for the communal area in the front of the house and then for our own lawns which are about 50% of the size of the former. I am pleased to have made a start as all of my neighbours seem to have been mowing for a week or so now.

The Russians will focus on the ‘liberation’ of Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region after mostly completing the first phase of its military operation, Moscow’s defence ministry has said. It claimed that Russian-backed separatists are controlling 93% of Luhansk and 54% of Donetsk – the two areas that make up the Donbass. This will eventually be an extremly hard decision for the Ukrainian government to have to take i.e. wheher to cede some of the country to protect the integrity of the rest of it. One thing that is certain is that when the immediate conflict is over, the rest of the Ukraine will be so well armed that Russia might never be tempted to try and enlarge what gains it manages to make in the present conflict. In a kind of thought experiment, if the Russins were to ‘control’ the whole of the Ukraine, they would have to have some kind of miliary vehicles (tanks, armoured personnel carriers) patrolling the streets. But if every single Ukrainian house were to have an anti-tank missile ready to be fired, then do the Russians have any hope whatsover of actually holding the Ukraine? There are also some reports tonight that a Russian general may have been killed (or possibly just injured) by his own troops. Even if this is ‘untrue’ I am sure that many Ukrainians will believe it to be true and will take heart from it.

I had set my alarm to be awakened at 6.30 so that I could have a leisurely breakfast and get to my supermarket of choice by 8.00 in the morning. This worked out very well and I managed to access an ATM for some cash and arrive at the supermarket some 30 seconds after opening time. I think I was about the second or third person in the store but shopping is an almost pleasant experience when you are not having to dodge other shoppers. The shopping have been done, Meg were all set for a little day out to Pershore which is even signposted as a ‘historic Georgian town’. The ‘Visit Worcestershire‘ website indicates that Pershore is an unspoilt, picturesqe market town. The website continues and is fulsome in its praise by declaring that ‘Pershore is famed for its elegant Georgian architecture, magnificent Abbey and the charming River Avon flowing parallel to the High Street.’ We had not read the website before we went and I think we were assuming that it was a bit like Alcester, the town we visited last Thursday but on a larger scale. I must say that our first impressions did not really match up to the hype. Perhaps we got off to a bad start by following the signs to a local carpark which also served an Asda supermarket and although we availed ourselves of a coffee and toasted teacakes in the vicinity of the carpark we really should not have bothered. ‘Ye Olde Worlde Teashoppe” it was not and, I suppose we should not jumped at the first watering hole that we found but taken the time to make a more discerning choice. We wandered up and down the High Street but somehow it failed to make any kind of favourable impression on us. I think that next time we visit (if we do) we should set out to visit the mediaeval abbey and then attempt to walk down by the River Avon, both of which I suppose we should have done today. Not immediately finding anywhere that would offer us the kind of light lunch we would want in the middle of the day, we decided to cut our losses and have lunch at home. On our way home, I stopped off at a garage to get a six-litre plastic can filled with fuel for the lawnmower. As the lawnmower is very frugal, I do not mind buying it the best quality fuel but as it was, then  6.5 litres of the highest quality fuel cost over £11.00 but at least this is only twice a season. Tomorrow is the day for the first mow of the season which is always rather hard work and of course one always the psychological fear once the mower has been dormant for the past six months then will it start and keep running. My next door neighbour who is generally a day or so later than I am to mow has beaten me to it this year but I am hopeful that by tomoroow afternoon, all of the hard work has been done. 

News of the Ukrainian war is still filling the airwaves but one particularly dramatic image is the fact that the Ukrainan navy have managed to destroy a Russian landing craft near the coastal city of Berdyansk, as the country marks one month since the invasion began.  Pictures appear to show fire and huge plumes of smoke rising into the air near the Sea of Azov port, which has been under Russian control since 27 February. In a statement on Facebook the Ukrainian navy said it had destroyed the Orsk landing ship, a loss not confirmed by Russian authorities. There is an amusing twist to this story as apparently the Russian media had filmed the ship off-loading military equipment as part of a propaganda effort. However, in so doing, the propaganda film indicated the exact location of the ship which was then a target for the Ukranian navy. Two other ships were also damaged and were seen ‘slinking away’. This may be a very small incident in the overall course of the war but the boosts to morale amongst the Ukranian fighting forces must be immense. NATO has been meeting today in Brussels and the urgent question is to work out how to get usable weapons into Ukranian hands so that they can defend themselves. Boris Johnson has pledged 6,000 extra missiles and the UK-supplied anti-tank missiles (fired, I believe, from the shoulder of a single soldier) seem to have been used to devasatating effect. The Ukrainians are asking for tanks and for fighter jets but NATO and other European nations seem to be concentrating on getting weapons into the hands of the Ukrainians that they can use with minimal training in order to slow down, or ameliorate, the worst effects of the assault upon their cities. Some really disturbing news is that Mariupol City Council has claimed that 15,000 residents from the Levoberezhny district have been forcibly deported to Russia. 

The spell of fine weather continues, so it is a case of enjoying the spring sunshine whilst we can. Although Great Britain generally enjoys a ‘north atlantic’ style of weather system in which storms and weather systems sweep across the country, we seem to be enjoying a high pressure system over most of continental Europe. As we know, high pressure systems tend to persist as other low pressure areas ‘bounce’ off them, so that it seems that we will enjoy this good weather for a good few days yet. This plays into our personal plans quite well as tomorrow we intend to make a trip out to another small market town in Worcestershire (Pershore) to see what delights it has to offer. The big day in my personal calendar is this Friday, March 25th, This is for two reasons, the most important being that it my son’s birthday. We shall see some of him this Friday because he is working a little from his ‘office’ which he has in our house and then from mid-day onwards, I am going to run him to the station so that he can go down to London, staying with a friend overnight, whilst the two of them join another party of ‘rail enthusiasts’ starting from Paddington, I believe, and going off to Paignton. I have another reason to have Friday marked in my personal calendar because it is the date when I traditionally start the grass mowing. As experienced gardeners will know, once one starts the season of grass cutting, a hormone is released from the cut grass which stimulates further growth. I tend to delay this first cut as long as I can because I know  that once I start, I am then on a weekly regime. The first cut of the season is always quite an arduous one because one has to have the blades set as high as possible and the overall effect always looks a little untidy. This is because I do not have a conventional grass collecting mower but a ‘mulching’ mower in which the grass is cut, thrown upwards and then cut a second time on the way down. When the grass is a normal length, the cut pieces are mulched into the surface of the grass. I have to ensure that I start off with a gallon of freshly drawn, high quality petrol (hopefully low in ethanol) whih will see me through for the first half of the season.

This morning was always going to be a slightly ‘chewy’ morning as we have two appointments in the middle of the day and we had to hold ourselves in readiness for a telecommunications engineer who was coming to check our internet connections/router/ASDL box and he was due any time between 8.00am and 1.00pm. Meg and I made a lightning visit by car  to get out our newspapers collected on time and the engineer called us, when we were on the way home (and fortunately could pull in at the side of the road to receive the call) and we were to expect him in 10-15 minutes time. When he arrived he gave our system a good check over and fortunately it was in the best of heart even though router is a little ‘old’ by today’s standards. As our internet provider, PlusNet,  had ordered the inspection they were going to pick up the bill. We received some good advice as to whether or not we could convert our existing landline to an add-on with our existing PlusNet package- but this is a duscussion for another day. We started to watch the Chancellors ‘Spring Statement’ in which there is particular interest this year as inflation is rapidly rising and the OBR is forecasting the greatest reduction in living standards since modern records began. More of this later, no doubt  At about 1.15 I took the car into town as I had a routine optician’s appointment. We always greet each other in the same way which is ‘I cannot believe that it a whole year since our last appointment‘ and then spent a certain amount of time, before we got down to the serious business of an optician’s appointment of discussing our university experiences. I was pleased to learn that my eyes have shown no signficant changes in the last year so as my mother had a history of glaucoma at my age, this is good news. As I was in town already, I popped into the Asda supermarket to buy a few things that I know I can only get in that store so this was a good opportunity. By the time I got home, I was in no mood to cook a conventional lunch so we treated ourselves to a hefty cheese and pickle sandwich as by this time, it was late in the afternoon.

A senior Putin advisor has reportedly resigned from his post and fled Russia. Whether this is an isolated event or the start of a steady stream of ‘rats leaving the sinking ship’ we shall just have to be patient and see.

Well, today was the not best of days  as we shall discover. At various times last night, I was testing our computer systems to see if internet access had been restored- at my sons suggestion, I turned the router off and then back on again but all of this was to no avail. Via 4-G on our phones, we got onto PlusNet to see what could be done. This included a HELP! call to PlusNet who informed us that the connection down as far as our socket seemed to be OK. My son nd I started work on this lot at 6.15 this morning and we managed to ascertain (lthough my son is much technical than I) that the problem lay in our router. As a complicating factor, as I am taking over this account I ha out in a new email contact and password so we were wondering whether some kind of conflict had been set up and hence we kept on getting ‘failure to authorise’ messages. My son got onto PlusNet and they tried to guide him through what we could possibly do – we had to resort to a bent paper clip and a reset back to factory settings on a number of occasions. At the other end, they thought that we would have to gave recourse to a BT engineer to sort us out. Then between us, my son and I (more him than me) decided to access the router diretly though its own IP address which is a set of four numbers. Eventually, after quite a long wait  we had to go through the procedure of an admin password and then my son remembered (or had got written down somewhere) the routers own password that we had used when we set up the sysem about 8 years ago. After a wait of about a minute or so we found that our internet access had been restored. In the meanwhile, we still have an engineer booked between 8.00am and 1.00pm tomorrow so we decided not to cancel this particular call.This is becaise we think that we can probably port our landline number across to PlusNet which, if it works OK, will save us about £25.00 a month. The person at the other end of the phone (the PlusNet employee)  thought we could ‘probably’ port our number over but we thought it would still be worthwhole to talk with an actual telecoms engineer before we take a decision. So all of these shenanigans took us the best part of four hours but we felt a little exhausted, but relieved, one we had got things fixed. Last night’s blog had already been written ain a text editor so it was a simple job to cut a cut-and-paste  followed by a ‘publish’ button.

Meg and I decided decided that we should still have some to get into the park so we went and occupied our normal bench. Then we met up with out University of Birmingham friend as well as Seasoned World Travellor but we had a little chat before all going on our various ways, as we all had other things to do this morning. I then walked down to my weekly Plates session but we were a little light today with only three of us. The after an hours stretches, it was a stroll up the hill and a lunch of fish cakes. This afternoon, I felt pretty exhausted what wih the potential after-effects of vaccination jab No. 4 and all of the turmoils of this morning. It was a pretty warm day when I walked down for my Pilates, so in retrospect I could have dispensed wit a jumper.

Some news coming out of Kyiv, which is probably just propaganda, is that some 220 Russian troops are refusing to take part in the invasion (presumably, further pushes into the cities which may involve fighting almost hand-to-hand and street by street.)  We know that the morale of the Russian conscript forces is quite low in various places. Another argument that is being used to buttress the first argument is that the Ukranians are putting it about that the  whole invasion can almost be over in some 2-3 weeks. Evidently, there are some major towns such Mariupol that may be considered a lost cause. But In Kyiv and Lviv which are incredibly stoutly defended, the amount of resistance is inspiring. There have been one or two video clips of the population coming out ‘en masse’ to confront the invading tanks which rather than advancing just retreat. An American tank commander has expressed the view “That’s a lack of training. You’ve got to get off the roads to maneuver. The roads are death traps, particularly for armored vehicles, particularly when you’re fighting people that have good anti-tank systems, and the Ukrainians do have good anti-tank systems.” Moreover, I suspect that the British and others have been piling in shoulder-held anti-tank missiles into the Ukraine in in great volumes and this has helped to even up the score somewhat.

This blog may be delayed for several hours as my Internet Provider is having multiple problems right across the country so I wonder if the network hs been subject to a massive cyber attack – one always fears the worst but in the meantime, I am working off-line and may be able to resume a normal post later on. It has been announced in several places that the 2nd booster (4th jab in total) will be available for the 75+ age cohort and I got a text to that effect asking me to make an appointment at my local surgery. But rather than doing that, Meg and I took ourselves off to the huge walk-in centre where we have received our previous jabs. This is a fairly large theatre-cum-Arts centre which was re-purposed to be a vaccination centre at the start of the pandemic and has remained so ever since. When Meg and I got there, we were greeted by one of our neighbours who had been volunteering there as a steward for ages. The centre was practically deserted so Meg and I did not have to queue but were vaccinated (by the Pfizer vaccine, like last time) so we should be well and truly topped up. We had to wait for an obligatory 15 minutes to make sure that we did not keel over after the jab and then went to a local supermarket primarly to access their ATM (as parking is available straight outside). This having been done, we went off to collect our newspaper. The newsagent had been so taken with the story that the Russian cosmonauts going to the International Space Station had somehow got their spacesuits to be decorated in the colours of the Ukranian national flag (blue and yellow) that he had taken a photo of this from one of the newspapers and posted it in his window! I wonder if the Russian TV authorities dare show their valiant cosmonauts getting to the space station dressed in the Ukrainian national colours or whether they will substitute some ‘still’ photographs from their archives and swiftly move on. One way or another, I have a suspicion that the Russian public will find out. As we were parked near the newsagent’s shop, we wondered w]hether to try out a new sort of cafe which is almost adjacent. Actually, it is not a cafe as such but is the base of a sandwich operation which they distribute to local workspaces and of course some people pop in to buy them fresh. We discovered they got to the shop at 4.30 in the morning to start preparing their ingredients. They had a couple of tables in there so we thought as we had had a fairly full morning that we would call in and sample it. The actual shop turned out to be a little cold as people came in off the street the whole time and the door was left open but we spent several happy minutes chatting with the proprietor and establishing some connections. It turned out that they may have distantly related to or least long term friends with our our newish next door neighbours so it was a case of, as they say, ‘wheels within wheels’. In about ten days time, we shall to frequent the reopened café in our local Waitrose where we are liable to bump into more friends. This afternoon, Meg and I thought we would have a quiet afternoon reading, just in case either of us started to feel a little worse for wear after our jabs this morning, but apart from the faintest suspicion of a soreish left arm, so far so good.

The news from the Ukraine continues to depress. Practically every report that we see from the Ukraine contains the proviso at the beginning that ‘the following report contains material that you may find distressing’ Every war has its own particular catalogue of horrors but it is now recognised that the battle for Mariupol, crucuial for the Russians to link up the Crimea with their eastern heartland such as Donetz, is practically being razed to the ground. The Russians had apparently transported several of the surviving inhabitants to ‘safety’ in Russia where they going to be dispersed to far-flung Russian towns and probably the equivalent of gulags or concentration like camps. I find it amazing, and appalling, that the rockets fired by the Russians have such destructive power – for example, it appears from the video images that it does not take too much rocketry to completely wreck a whole block of flats or even flatten a shopping centre. It is said that the Russians have targeted not only an Art Gallery but also a school and a residential home for the aged in which the combined casualty toll has got to be huge. The Russians had offered the surviving inhbitants of Mariupol a surrender and transport to places outside the city – but the offer was promptly rejected as the Ukranians argued the Russins could not ever be believed. However, the city is effectivly encircled and tonight it looks, literally, like a fight to the death for the remaining Ukrainan military forces. So by the morning, the most heart-rending decisions have to be taken either to surrender to the Russians or die.

Being Sunday, it was my day to get up a little bit earlier and go down to collect our Sunday newspaper. On occasions such as this, when I need to leave the house early, I treat myself to one of those ‘2-minute’ porridge sachets that are prepared very quickly. The variety that I am using actually encourages you to first empty the sachet into a microwavable dish and then to fill up the packet according to the guidance line with milk. As you might imagine, you have to do this with a certain degree of care but saves having to get another measuring vessel to measure out the milk. As usual, I got down into town and then back again in order to watch the 9.00am politics show on BBC1 with Sophie Raworth. After Meg and I had both breakfasted and got out ourselves ready, we popped down into town by car and then frequented our usual bench – but a bit of a cold wind sprung up for somewhere making us a little uncomfortable. Then I did something I have only managed to do twice (including this morning) in the last two years which is to knock my coffee cup over and deprive myself of a drink. After this minor calamity, we strolled down the hill where we made contact with Seasoned World Traveller who often has his coffee on on an outside table – but he, like us, doesn’t like it if the terrace is teeming with people. I popped inside to order ourselves some cappuchino and a treat which was a slice of cheese on toast which we both enjoy (warm and filling). Inside the café, a father was buying an icecream for his daughter and having a splash of raspberry sauce drizzled over it. I informed him that we were young, we used to call this ‘monkey blood’ so whether this priceless bit of information was passed onto the grateful recipient, who can say. As we were in the car, we stopped outside the house of our Irish friends and this proved to be very fruitful for us as they spotted us from inside the house and popped out for a chat. If the weather bodes fair and we can find a mutually acceptable time, we will look forward to inviting them around for a spot of afternoon tea. When we actually got home, we had a phone call which was a really pleasant surprise. It was our French friend from down the road and I think she had heard from somewhere that Meg and I were going to go to the concert being held in the parish church at the bottom of the hill (with no entrance charge but collections being taken for the Ukrainian relief fund). After the concert was over, our friend who is very ‘communautaire’ as the French put it, is going to have a little soirée in her house to which we were invited, together with some of her neigbours with whom we are already friendly but we have not seen for a week or so and some other friends, one of whom is a Spanish speaker (so, perhaps, quite interesting for Meg) It is always nice to get an invitation like this and we are looking forward to it enormously.

When we look at our planning board  in the kitchen which details all of our forthcoming commitments for the week(s) ahead, we see that we have quite a heavy week this week with appointments for haircutting, footcare and a routine eye appointment. Also, I do not like to give the grass its first ‘cut of the season’ until on or about 25th March as once you start, it will be a weekly cut from now on. I need to ensure that I have supplies of freshly drawn, high quality petrol as well as some petrol stabiliser which prevents the ethanol which is ofen as much as 10% of petrol these days absorbing water from the atmosphere and not being friendly to the petrol engines you have in lawn mowers. So I have the whole of the week to get these ingredients in place. Tomorrow morning, Meg and I may well pop off to the vaccination centre to see if we can get Booster No. 2 (I qualify for this, but Meg is on the cusp so that may/may not accept her tomorrow).

There is a report that had surfaced today whose import is that Russia has committed nearly all of the war crimes that humanity has ever seen. Also, for the second day in a row, Russia says it has launched a hypersonic missile, which is capable of striking targets 1,250 miles away at a speed 10 times the speed of sound. One wonders whether in the years ahead, the western powers will try and keep Russia in such an economic stranglehold that attacks like that on the Ukraine will no longer be possible. But to be pessimistic, once nuclear weapons and hypersonic weapons have been invented, they cannot be disinvented.  

Another fine day beckons, so Meg and I are resolved to make the most of it. Today was always going to be quite a full day what with one thing or another. Whilst Meg was occupied showering, I went through some bathroom cabinets to rescue what duplicates we have of shower requisites and diverse other cosmetic type things to donate to an Ukraine appeal. As the bag was so heavy, we felt we had better go down to the insurance company organising the appeal and parked, semi-illegally, for the minute or so that it took to drop off our goodies (and they were teeming with material) The newsagent’s wife tells me that she herself had donated two carrier bags full, one of groceries and the other of toiletries in the last day or so. Apparently, the ‘cake sale’ raised £750 which the insurance company were going to match, thus doubling the total. All of the donated goods are going to go to the premises of the ‘Worcester warriers’ rugby club where they are going to be sorted and appropriately parcelled up. From there, they are going to be transported to the Poland-Ukraine border for distribution where they are needed – presumably in Poland itself. as they have 1.1 million refugees. I imagine and hope that there is a massive collective effort going across Europe to assist those who the Russians accuse of being ‘Nazis’ and ‘Fascists’ There is a terrible appropriation of terminoloty here as Vladimir Putin is himself a fascist autocrat, one who imprisons democratic opposition leaders and critics. He is the acknowledged leader of the global far right, which looks increasingly like a global fascist movement. Ukraine does have a far-right movement, and its armed defenders include the Azov battalion, a far-right nationalist militia group. But no democratic country is free of far-right nationalist groups, including the United States. In the 2019 election, the Ukrainian far right was humiliated, receiving only 2% of the vote. This is far less support than far-right parties receive across western Europe, including inarguably democratic countries such as France and Germany. Meanwhile, back at home, there was a prayer service for Ukraine organised by the borough council and a local baptist church (in the bandstand, which we often occupy when we are being rained upon). Next week, in our local Anglican church (the biggest in the town, complete with a clock and steeple) there is going to be a concert at 7.00pm next Saturday evening with attendance ‘free’ but donations sought to go the Ukranian relief effort. I presume that local musicians and choristers are giving their services free and I do not know what the programme will be. It must be the things that the musicians know well and do not need to rehearse and, under the circumstances, one would be very forgiving of an under-rehearsed performance.

Our friends in the park were explaining to us recently how Russia possesses, and had deployed, a new type of missile known as a hypersonic missile. Cutting the technicalities to a minimum, these missles are fired into space and then drop to earth, presumably with a satelite guidance system onto their target at speeds which are Mach 4 i.e. four times the speed of sound. By way of comparison, a bullet from a high velocity rifle might travel at twice the speed of sound. Because of their speed, these weapons are almost impossible to guard against as no missile tracking system can track them or lock onto them. When they hit the target, they have enormous destructive power (imagine a small meteorite hitting the earth) before we even start to consider their explosive charge. Russia has claimed it used a hypersonic missile to strike a large weapons depot in western Ukraine. It marks the first time a Kinzhal – or ‘Dagger’ – missile has been deployed since Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine, according to Russia’s Interfax news agency. So this help to explain why the cities of the Ukraine are being pulverised as it were.

As a follower of ‘Six Nations’ rugby, one of the biggest upset in the history of the competition took place this afternoon. Italy has participated in the competition and played 36 matches without a victory until now. But in their match against Wales  at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff this afternoon, the Italians were actually leading the Welsh until 12 minutes before the end. Then the Welsh scored and it looked as though the match was all over. Then in the last few minutes of the game, the Italians scored an incredible ‘break away’ try which was easily converted  to give the Italians a one point victory. It is fair to say that the Italians have been steadily improving game by game but they have never even come close to beating an opponent until this year. The Welsh gave away a lot of needless penalties  and one can only be extremely glad for the Italians to have gained a victory against anyone at last. The competition as a whole can only benefit from this, of course, even though Italy still occupies the bottom slot in the table.