The significant event of today was to be a procedure upon one of Meg’s eyes to be conducted in the local community hospital so all of our planning and activities today were focused on that appointment which is quite early in the afternoon. We breakfasted and so on at a slightly later hour, both having slept in a little which was pretty useful for both of us given that we have lost some sleep over the past few days. We got ourselves off to the Methodist coffee club where we enjoyed tea and teacakes at a very reasonable price but did not avail ourselves of sitting on the ‘Chatter and Natter’ table as there was no one around that we immediately recognised and we had to keep an eye on the time in any case. Just as we were leaving, we got a phone call from the social worker who was evidently responding to a long email that I had sent her yesterday evening in response to a prompting by the doctor. I have to say that the meeting with the social worker that has been fixed for next Tuesday may prove emotionally traumatic for both of us but we will cross that particular bridge when we come to it. Having got back from our coffee break, Meg and I were glued for a little to watching the Boris Johnson evidence to the COVID-10 enquiry – I would dearly like to have seen more of this but the lunch had to be prepared so that we could make the journey in plenty of time to the local hospital. There Meg’s eye was treated with a special laser treatment which she seem to carry off with aplomb and no visible distress. I,though, was obliged to wear a special pair of dark glasses in case of any laser rays strayed whilst in front of the machine. So we got Meg back home before dark, which was a bonus for us. I got the bins out ready for collection in the morning and we carried on watching the Johnson evidence. Meg was hurling epithets at the sight of Johnson and I am sure that these sentiments chimed with many of the bereaved families well in evidence both within and also without the enquiry centre. Later on this evening, we will no doubt get a full and edited summary of the Johnson appearance and performance, briefed as he was by some of the expensive lawyers that money can buy paid for by the Cabinet Office!. The one early point that Johnson made that had me spitting teeth was that Johnson was arguing that the BSE (‘Mad Cow’ disease) episode had greatly exaggerated the potential number of deaths, which he could very clearly remember but, very conveniently ‘could not remember’ arguing that COVID was also likely to be a gross exaggeration (which it was not).

In the late afternoon, we received a very welcome invitation to visit our friends in Oxfordshire for a pre-Christmas meal and invitations such as these are always wonderful to receive. We started off trying for Monday (routine checkup for Mike), could not make Tuesday (social worker visit), Wednesday was also fully committed (pre-planned visit from Meg’s specialist nurse) and finally settled on Thursday when we have a pre-arranged call from the doctor but can probably get this accommodated just before we set off to Oxfordshire. At this time of year, of course, we have always to have an eye on the weather not to mention the traffic conditions but the present cold snap seems to have moderated somewhat and we have a brief respite of a few days before the next adverse weather hits us. Apart from the intense media interest on the COVID-19 enquiry, the government has today published its ‘Emergency’ legislation designed to rescue its Rwanda policy of exporting asylum speakers to the African continent. The legislation is designed to overcome legal challenges e.g. by declaring in the legislation that ‘Rwanda is a safe country’ but for the life of me I cannot see how declaring something in an Act of Parliament causes it to become somehow true. The bill will pander to the Tory right wing who want to see us leave the European Court of Human Rights (nothing to do with the EU but set up after WW2 with the active involvement of Winston Churchill no less). The government is trying to steer a middle course by not withdrawing from the Court but by declaring it will not abide by some of its rulings. How this will work, I do not know but I do not see the proposed legislation getting through even our own House of Lords without significant watering down which will infuriate the right of the Tory Party even more. The extreme Brexit/erstwhile UKIP party who have now transmogrified themselves into the right wing of the Tory Party are the people that an ex-Tory PM (John Major) once described as ‘bastards’ and forced them to back down with a ‘back me or sack me’ ploy which tactic Risho Sunak would not dare to deploy because he probably realises he would be quickly toppled. Now that I have our Music Room exactly the way I want it with a complement of comfortable or restored furniture, I feel a little bereft. I no longer have the excuse of looking out for a charity shop saying that I am just looking for one thing or another. However, I will say that having got such extraordinarily good results from the ‘Leather Sik’ leather polish which I have utilised recently to such good effect that I have been tempted to supply myself with the parallel product, made by the same manufacturer, but designed for vintage wood furniture. The reviews seem to be almost universally good so I have a supply coming in a few days time which I have no doubt can be well utilised in our recently restored ‘Captains’ chair which Meg uses every day in our hall to help her don her outdoor clothing.

We always look forward to Tuesdays as it is the day when we meet up with our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria. But first, I had a little delight in store for myself. When Meg and I were out on the road in Bromsgrove High Street nearly a week ago, I popped by chance into the AgeUK furniture shop where they had on display a rather magnificent ivory leather traditional armchair. This was even been offered at a price which had been reduced but, with Meg’s concurrence, we decided to go ahead and buy this because Meg has a very wonderful, and comfortable, leather armchair which is very snug and inherited from my son but my own seating arrangements have hitherto been considerably less comfortable. So the new armchair was delivered yesterday and I gave it a quick dose of renovating polish, of which I still have a supply. I did up-end the chair and discovered it is an Italian make of chair by a firm with the name of Rosini (one ‘s’ which seems a little unusual) Consulting the web, I discovered that new models sold by this manufacturer have a guide price of $720 and the chair I have just purchased looks in practically brand new condition. But having renovated it last night, I did not actually start to use it until this morning and I must say that I am more than delighted with our purchase. It fits well into our colour scheme, is superbly comfortable and fulfills all of the needs that I could ever wish for it. It is not a reclining model but this is of no consequence but from my reading on the web, it is evident that the materials used in its construction really are of the highest quality with some small but extremely stlish wood trim and leather that looks as though it has hardly had much wear at all. So this completes the furnishing of our Music Room because I can think of nothing else that I either want or need to make everything complete.

This morning after a disturbed night, I needed to write a Web-based application form to request a telephone conversation with the doctor to discuss Meg’s condition – after several abortive attempts at establishing contact, I eventually got a phone call from a GP at about 6.00pm tbhis evening. The advice was not particularly helpful given the scale of the problems that Meg (and I) are facing but in the short term I have been used to double the low initial dose of some medication and to write a long email to the social worker who is looking after us to explain in detail what our current circumstancs happen to be. On a happier note, when we eventually got to Waitrose this morning after an attenuated night’s sleep, one of our number had a bowls match and another an appointment with an occupational therapist this morning but we were delighted to spend some happy time with the third member of our little group. She had very kindly acquired for me the contact details of an ouuteach organiser at the Methodist Centre who is trying to establish a supportive club each Thursday mornimg. I need to write to her giving her our full support and indicating that if she were to be successful, we would be enthusiastic and regular patrons of any new service. We shall see our friend again on Saturday, all being well. Later on this morning, one of the care workers detailed to call around to release me to undertake some Pilates showed up. She happened to be the fifth different face we have seem on five occasions but today I felt too tired and worn out to actually undertake any Pilates so I stayed with her and Meg during her two hour stay. It turned out that she orginally from Peru and as our son had spent a year at a Mexican university, we developed a range of some interesting conversations. My Spanish, which I have not had the opportunity to speak for quite some time, came back so we had some intereting little conversations some in English and some in Spanish and Meg managed to contribute to this when her memory recalled the words. So whether we shall see this person again is an interesting question but it did make the two hours actually fly by, particularly as I needed to stay close to my mobile to get a telephone consultation phone call which seemed to quickly go to voicemail after only two or three rings which was frustrating in the extreme.

Later on in the afternoon, Meg and I delved into Amazon Prime and we started to watch the David Lean production of ‘Passage to India‘ This had a stellar cast but we decided not to watch the whole of it in one go but rather split it into two halves. So at what we hope to be an appropriate juncture, we exited our viewing and hopefully will pick up the rest of it in a day or so. The cinematography and views of India are stupendous and we found that this film actually absorbed us for much of the later afternoon. We then caught up a little on the Sky News current affairs transmission before we start to have our evening spot of a light tea and then a viewing of the Sky News Sophie Ridge program of the Politics Hub which we enjoy each day and watch for as long as we can before it is time to think of our bedtime preparations for Meg which often take about an hour.

Various things delayed us this morning but we had nothing to really rush about for so getting up a little later than planned did not distress us. However, it was a really gloomy day and raining quite hard – however, if the weather had been a tad colder then the precipitation may have fallen as snow so under the circumstances we were not dspleased. After our normal breakfasting, we made tracks to go to Droitwich despite the weather. En route, I made three attempts to call in at a variety of retail outlets to pick up a copy of ‘The Times‘ but failed every time so I came to the conclusion that perhaps the print run and/or distribution had been a victim of the weather. When we got to Droitwich and got Meg into the wheelchair, we nearly came a cropper. The roads en route to Droitwich had been pretty flooded but absolutely passable and when in Droitwich, I though I espied a low kerb and promptly drove the wheelchair off it. But I had been deceived because the drain water was level with the kerb itself and what T thought was flat was a bit of a drop. Fortunately, I grabbed hold of Meg before she went flying forwards and whereas normally I hold on to her hood to prevent such an occurrence, today Meg had her hood up. But the ‘kindness of strangers’ intervened again and we went to our favourite cafe where we were greeted warmly by the Catholic lady who always looks after us very well. We ordered a pot of tea and one bacon butty between us and I must say that this was some of the nicest bacon I had ever tasted. So we had a wonderful little repast and were going to make a little trip into areas of the town but instead were quite pleased to get home. By this stage, it was not too far short of 1.00pm so I pressed on making the lunch whilst Meg watched TV in the Music Room. We had a very tasty of chicken for our lunch, dining in the kitchem as we always do and I popped out into the Music Room for something. Hearing a loud ‘thump’ I knew that Meg had had a fall on the kitchen fall – although we tell her constantly never to to try to walk unaided or ‘the staggers’ will intervene and a fall is very likely to ensue. This is what had happened and there a fair amount of blood on the floor and on Meg’s jumper. It looked as though her glasses frame (fortunately not the glass within them) had impacted her eyebrow causing quite a deep gash which had bled quite profusely. Fortunately, our son was in the house upstairs working away but heard the commotion so he helped to get Meg onto her feet and cleaned up the floor and the clothing but without attempting to do anything about the cut itself (about two thirds of an inch long and quite deep) At this stage, it was pretty clear that we needed to attend the Minor Injuries unit in the local community hospital.

Fortunately, although it was raining hard, we managed to get Meg into the hospital in the wheelchair and as I had Meg’s NHS number in my wallet, managed to get her booked in and then into the hospital system. We did not have to wait too long to get seen by a Triage nurse who took some particulars. Then we got seen by a medic and a nurse (whether the medic was an A&E specialist I am not sure) After some quick neurological tests for head injuries (which all proved negative), he applied some of that special ‘glue’ to the cut and then some varystrips to help the edges of the wound to stick together. I had one or two almost Kafka-esque conversations with the medic along the lines of ‘Have you mentioned these falls to your GP and what did he say?’ ‘Yes and he made a diagnosis of lack of core strength’. The medic made eyes at me and asked if we had been referred to the falls clinic, to which I responded that I did not know that such a clinic existed as it had never been mentioned in any of our previous transactions with the NHS. By sheer coincidence, earlier on that morning, I had made an appointment for about ten days time to have an annual review of Meg’s condition and so all of this ncident can be discussed then. The one silver lining to the cloud is that a report of the patching up done at the hospital will automatically wing its way onto Meg’s case notes so perhaps the GPs might apply their mind to this particular problem that we have, given that Meg falls about once a day and sometimes more frequently than that. For good measure, she fell again whilst getting out of the car on the way home so that is quite enough for one day.

There are going to be two days of ‘immigration issues’ in the House of Commons – today being legal immigation and tomorrow illegal immigration. The Home Sectetary is under enormous pressure from his right wing to do everything possible to curb immigration but in the meantime, the care and hospitality sectors are desperate for the workers which just do not seem to be forthcoming from the indigenous population (probably because the wages are too low for the levels of responsibility that have to be deployed and retail outlets like supermarkets offer an easier way to earn one’s wages.)

We thought that the weather might not be very good today so we had two plans projected for the morning. If the morning had been bright, crisp and clear we would have wrapped up warmly and then gone for a venture in our local park, armed perhaps with some soup in a flask and some comestibles. But the weather was dull, overcast and raining, so we had no hesitation in adopting ‘Plan B’ This involved going to Waitrose in Droitwich some seven miles distant. The advantage of this was that we could park with no charge, pick up a copy of our Sunday nespaper and then get a ‘free’ coffee which is a service Waitrose offers to its cardholders. There was a certain degree of debate whether my exchange of the voucher for the Sunday newspaper constituted a purchase or not. I argued that it did as the value of the voucher gets passed through the tills as though it were a cash purchase but on checking, it seemed that the Waitrose policy is that this is not the case. Nonetheless, the staff stretched a point for us so we proceeded to the very basic coffee drinking area. Although pre-Covid, this store had its own little cafeteria, this did not survive the lockdown so we had to make do with perching on one of the three or four bar stools in front of a shelf which passes for the coffee facility. We got into a friendly Christmas style conversation with another couple having their repast and, rather surreptitously, ate a banana and some biscuits to go with our coffee. Then we had to make a fairly smart progress towards home as our chiropodist was due to call today at 11.45. But she turned up an hour late as she had forgotten the time of our appointment, her own phone being almost out of action because of a broken screen. So this made things even after we had a mistaken appointment time last Monday, I think it was. The minute we got back from Droitwich, we put the ‘breast of chicken in a tin’ into the oven suspecting that it would take well over an hour to cook. When everything was ready, we dined on chicken, roast potato and broccoli leaving enough of the chicken left over for two further meals.

Meg and I had come to a decision to give ourselves the experience of watching ‘The Way’ on Amazon Prime. We first saw this film over a month ago but thought it was well worth an extra watch. The plot consists of a son with a distant relationship with his American father who died in the French Pyrenees whilst undertaking the ‘Camino de Santiago’. The son is cremated and his father decides to complete the Camino on his son’s behalf leaving a few of his son’s ashes at each important staging post. En route, he encounters variuous travelling companions so the journey as a whole has its little escapades. Watching the film for a second occasion was full of little surprises and delights when there are little details that escaped you the first time around. The film is also incredibly poignant and Meg and I felt watching the film again was quite an emotional experience. We know Santiago de Compostela pretty well but never in our younger days considered doing the Camino do Santiago officially but as well as this particular film, there has been at least one TV series based upon pilgrims’ experiences as they undertake the journey via one of the several routes all of which are several hundreds of kilometers in length.

We have not had much time today with our TV viewing to read the Sunday newspapers in any real depth but we know that next week, Boris Johnson is due to evidence for at least 1-2 days to the COVID-19 enquiry. Witnesses who are called to give evidence to the enquiry have already supplied a fairly lengthy written statement and these are always self-justificatory. But one wonders how penetrating the questions from the barristers in the enquiry are likely to be. It is by now fairly well documented and admitted by Matt Hancock, at least, that if the lockdown had been initiated some three weeks earlier then thousands of lives would not have been lost. This bald statement seems dramatic in the extreme and it is probably the case that the COVID-19 may well have shortened the lives of many elderly and infirm people who might have not had a great deal of time left to them in any case. But when Meg and I walked down to the local park during the pandemic, we witnessed old and sick people being ushered into the back of an ambulance whilst tearful relatives waved a goodbye to them as the ambulance departed, probably knowing that they would not see their aged relatives ever again. This was true also of Clive, the aged gentleman we know very well from our daily walks who even played ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring‘ on his trumpet on the occasion of our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations.

Politically, Keir Starmer has come out in praise of some of the reforms of Margaret Thatcher, to the astonishment of many of his MPs. Whether this gain him any extra votes from previously ‘soft’ voting Tory voters is uncertain but I have a feeling that this praise of Thatcher was both unnecessary in purely vote winning terms and also, more seriously, likely to badly misfire.

Today being a Saturday, we are looking forward as always to seeing our normal little band of friends in Waitrose but first things first. I had a much better night’s sleep than the night before and so consequently, we got up to a little late to the coldest day of the winter. But I have done two things to mitigate this. The first is that I am getting into the habit of protecting the car windscreen each morning with a thinnish plastic windscreen film held in place by a couple of car mats. This system is both simple to put into place and really effective, so I am pleased about that – if things get too complicated, there is a temptation to ignore them. Secondly, before I came to bed last night, I had a portion of porridge oats and the relevant milk/water mix prepared in the saucepan such that we can very quickly have a hot and sustaining breakfast in the morning. As soon as I got up this morning to make our early morning cup of tea, I gave our newly restored dining chair its second last coat of specialist spray as it only takes just over a minute to do this. After we had breakfasted, Meg and I made our way down to Waitrose and, in no time at all, got down for our elevenses. Today, as the weather was so cold, Meg and I treated ourself to something special which was two cups of hot chocolate and a bacon butty which we shared between us. We felt that our bodies appreciated this little treat as we are currently in the coldest day of the winter and then our friends arrived. Amongst the topics of conversation this morning, was the way in which different nationalities have their own favourite remedies which, in the case of the French is a liberal utilisation of suppositories. I have noticed that in Flemish culture, there seems to be a great reliance upon throat sprays to treat all kind of winter cold-and-flu symptoms – we in England, tend to rely upon pills. At about 11.30, we got a telephone call from our Eucharistic Minister who had turned up to the house at 11.30 (but I had thought our appointment was 12.30 and had evidently mis-remembered it) So we shot off quickly and got back to the houuse as soon as we could. We always enjoy these little sessions because apart from the strictly spiritual part of our meeting we always spent some time discussing family matters and also musical issues where a lot of our tastes coincide. When the minister left us, we quickly had to jump up and make ourselves our Saturday lunch which in this case was some low fat beef mince cooked with some onions in an onion gravy and then complemented with a baked potato and some fine beans.

We started off the afternoon looking at a YouTube concert and then realised with a sickening thud that I left our consignment of the Saturday edition of ‘The Times‘ (lots of supplements at the weekend) in the cafe at Waitrose, no doubt as a result of quickly getting up in response to the phone call. So Meg and I got in the car and popped into the cafe to ask whether my left-behind newspapers had been handed in. They had not, so with a heavy heart, I bought another set but then when I got back to the car to throw them on the back seat, I found out that I had already put the newspapers there this morning. So I popped back into Waitrose where they know me well and negotiated a refund for the second set of papers I evidently did not need. When we got home, Meg and I treated ourselves to an old Yorkshire tradition which is Christmas cake with a hefty slab of white cheese (Wensleydale or Stilton) which is a delicious combination if it has not already been tried and often given away by the wives of publicans to their regulars in the pubs of Yorkshire (well they did decades ago but sometimes traditions do not survive) I then made a quick phone call to our Italian friend down the road to see if she was at a loose end in these wintry condition. As it happened, she had a dose of gastric flu from which she often suffers (she told us) at this time of year. But she appreciated my phone call and then we promised that in the next few days ahead we would get together for a tea and a chat in either her place or ours. I also had a long and informative email informing me of the latest medical news about the wife of one of my University of Winchester friends. This all sounded very serious but my friend and I are in frequent touch with each and give each other whatever mutual support and advice that we can. On Sundays, we generally meet up with our University of Birmingham friend but we have a fair idea that he may be up in Yorkshire with his latest squeeze but we are going to fill our day with a visit from our chiropodist (even on a Sunday) in the late morning. If the weather is fine and clear, we may go along well wrapped up to the park and take some hot soup along with us when we may bump into some of our park friends and acquaintances.

Friday is the day when our domestic help calls around and the night had been pretty frosty last night so I felt that a good saucepan of porridge was called for. When the temperature drops sharply, Meg and I get into porridge-making mode and it does help to set us all up for the day. Then I took some delight in showing our domestic help both the Imari style pottery of which I managed to acquire some extra pieces at the weekend and also our newly restored dining chair. This has had several treatments already and I will probably only give it one or two more before I call it a day. I have a specialised polish which one sprays on and then immediately wipes off wih a soft cloth. This way, it only takes about a minute and a half to complete the job and I think I am quickly approaching the point where I have achived the end result that I want and further treatments are no longer warranted. After we had breakfasted and chatted for a while, we popped into our local Waitrose for a swift coffee (meeting no one that we knew, it being a Friday) and then made our way into Droitwich. Once safely parked we banked a couple of cheques and then made our customary visit to the shop of Worcestershire Association of Carers in which, unusally, we found nothing to take our interest. We are now quite well supplied with the cushions and cushion covers that we need so the point is coming when we need to search no more. Having said that, I needed some material to make a ‘flatter’ style of filling for cushion covers in order to make some seat pads. I actually did find a seat pad filling from an unusual source i.e. our own garage. In the past, I have carried around an old towelling dressing gown which I have carried round in the boot of the car in case I ever needed to lie on the ground to make a running repair to the car. With our latest car, I decided that this dressing gown had outlived its usefulness so I proceeded to give it a wash and dry. After that, I filled it carefully into the square shape of one of my spare cushion covers and it does the job almot perfectly without the enormous expense of a foam insert filling. Finally, we made our way to our favourite coffee shop where we were booked in for a Christmas lunch at 12.30pm. When this arrived it was absolutely enormous. Meg and I enjoyed a meal of five slices of turkey breast, stuffing, pigs in blankers, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots and sprouts. This was so enormous that Meg and I could only manage about three quarters of this huge plateful but we did complement the whole of the meal with a good class of Argentinian Malbec.

As we had practically finished our neal, we were approached by a lady who asked if she coukd share our table as she really rather liked the tub shaped seats that we around our table. We were more than happy to oblige and quickly got into conversation about the towns in which we grew up, world affairs, politics and goodness knows what else. I think we found each other good company so we were both quite happy to let the conversation flow where it might. We told her how much we had enjoyed our Christmas dinner whereupon she felt emboldened to approach the proprietor to see if he could rustle up another one at short notice and without having been pre-booked. This he did and the person sharing the table was soon tucking in to what was an enormous lunch. In our case, we were so full that we took the option of a simple trifle, not having the inclination or the space for more conventional Christmas pudding. On the subject of things culinary, Meg and I made quite a discovery yesterday evening. I was exploring a cupboard which we use as an ‘overflow’ cupboard at this time of year, primarily for Christmas fare and discovered a complete Christmas cake, complete with icing and with its package, including a sealed cellophane, completely intact. It had on it a ‘use by’ date of mid-January of this year and one’s first impulse was to actually throw it away. Instead, I opened it and we removed the marzipan and soft icing leaving behind a moist fruit cake. We assumed that, at best this might be very dry and at worst it might have gone rancid. We intended to try some of this cake out with a carton of custard but tested it first to make sure it had not ‘gone off’ To our complete surprise, it was one of the most delicious fruitcakes we have ever tasted. I mentioned this to our hairdresser who mentioned a tradition to us that one layer of a wedding cake be retained and consumed at the birth of one’s first child, presumably about a year later. Intrigued, I decide to consult wider opinion on the web and this is what I discovered. The web source stated ‘Fruit cakes can generally be stored for up to a year in the freezer. But they could probably last for even longer. This is because the alcohol prevents mould and kills bacteria and the sugar helps to preserve the cake for longer. The dried fruit in the Christmas cake has low water activity’ so perhaps our experience is not so out of the ordinary, after all.

So the regular Thursday routines have popped round again. Today I made sure that Meg and I had all of our ablutions done after which Meg stayed in bed (as is usual on a Thursday) whilst I go off to do the weekly shopping. Under the regime that started last week, a care assistant comes around on a Thursday morning primarily so that I can complete my shopping activities. The assistant who called around this morning is the fourth different person we have had but she seems a jolly little soul and quickly struck up a rapport with Meg and myself. I had a feeling that this particular relationship was going to turn out quite well and, indeed, after I had returned from my venture up and down Bromsgrove High Street,it seemed that the last couple of hours had proceeded satisfactorily from everyone’s point of view. I took the opportunity to visit our local Poundland store where I purchased a couple of rubber, but not particularly heavy, carmats. I have an intended use for these not inside the car but to provide a little bit of weight to hold the anti-frost screen securely on the windscreen on the car if the weather forecast indicates that it is going to be a cold night. Last night, I think it was near freezing or just below but tonight is going to be even colder and so before it got really dark, I popped out to get the protection in place. I am trying to get this done in just a minute or so because if the routine is rapid you feel more inclined not to neglect it.

This morning, after we had listened to the news, we turned the radio onto ClassicFM where they have started playing some Christmas music. Personally, I feel that they should have held off until Sunday which is the start of Advent and, I suppose, can be said to be the starting gun for the commencement of Christmas. We are still November until tomorrow and I do not like these celebrations to start too early. On the radio, they played the Christmas carol ‘Away in a manger’ and this reminded me of a comedy sketch some time in the 1970’s.The sketch reminded people that at about this time really wide-screen cinema was starting to make its presence felt (was it called Todd-AO or something similar?) but many cinemas had to cope with chopping off a bit of the left hand side and the right hand side of the transmission. So, chopping off the first and the last letters of some well known Christmas carols we have things like ‘Way in a mange’ and also ‘hen shepherds watched their flocks by nigh’ and so on and so forth. This has become a little of a family joke over the years as we sing ‘Way in a mange’ when called for.

After we had lunched, we enter our normal TV routine. It looks as though as ‘Outnumbered‘ has now run its course so Meg and I watched an old episode of ‘BlackAdder‘ which I must say neither of us found particularly funny. But after this, we tuned in to some of the COVID-19 investigations being broadcast live and this afternoon were treated to Matt Hancock, who as Health Secretary was a crucial player at the start of the pandemic. Various accusations of ‘lying’ have been thrown backwards and forwards with nothing definitive being as yet proved. The leading counsel for the enquiry keeps issuing what in boxing terms might be a probing ‘jab’ but so so far has failed to deliver anything like a knock out blow. The enquiry as a whole, though, is meant to learn the lessons for the future and a discovery that politicians may be lying to each other as well as to the public is hardly a revelation. In fact, I have often wondered about politician’s relationships with ‘the truth’ – as they have dissembled for years and years and will never give anything other than an evasive answer to any question, then perhaps none of these revelations in the enquiry will come as a great surprise.

Tomorrow will thankfully be 1st December and I shall be glad to have got the month of November out of the way (I feel the same about February) I am always happy to get 21st December out of the way because at the very least it should then start to get lighter by 1-2 minutes a day. I find that once we get into the run up to Christmas, all of the glitter and trash associated with Christmas not particularly heartwarming. There was a campaign in the 1950’s as I remember to ‘put Christ back into Christmas’ which rather ignores the fact that early Christianity actually appropriated Christmas for their own purposes. But of course, apart from Christian traditions there are similar mid-winter festivals (Hannukah, Eid, Divali and so on) and most of them have the theme of light fighting against the darkness. Yuletide and similar mid-winter festivals all pre-date Christianity and I always marvel at the ways in which our earliest ancestors managed to get the timing of their mid-winter festivities as accurate as they are. There may have been ‘naturally occurring’ clocks such as the sun appearing in the centre of two erected stones but I am sure archeologists and pre-historians have a much more sophisticated explanation.

We knew that we had no particular commitments on today so Meg were I looking forward to our visit to the Methodist coffee bar centre on which I think we missed out last week. As this centre does not open until 10.30, we decided to go out on the road before we had our morning coffee and parked the car at the top end of the High Street. Then we got Meg into her wheelchair and trundled around a few of the three or four charity shops that cluster around that end of the High Street. We were on the lookout for some cushion covers and after a fruitless search of the first few were eventually successful in obtaining half a dozen and also half a dozen fabric placemats that are sufficently large that they will serve as a small table cloth which is also what we wanted. Eventually, we got to the Methodist Centre where we bumped into two or three people that we already knew, two of them being part of our normal Tuesday crowd in Waitrose and the other a parisioner from our local church. We were greeted very warmly when we made our way through the double doors into the centre and although the ‘chatty’ table was already full, the other patrons of the coffee centre made room for us on the large table so that we could join them. We treated ourselves to some teacakes as well as our customary tea/coffee and had some jolly chats with some of the people around the table. One of them had actually worked in Harrogate for a couple of years as a civil servant so we had some topics of mutual interest to commence our chats before we moved on to other issues. Meg and I stayed for about an hour and Meg remarked how much she had enjoyed our social encounters in the morning (as indeed had I) so we journeyed back home in good heart. We had a fairly conventional lunch of ham, fine beans and baked potato but for one reason or another, it seemed particularly tasty today (perhaps because of the onion gravy I had prepared) so we were pleased to have dined well, in our opinion.

After we had had our lunch, I discussed with Meg the various little furnishing projects with which we have engaged whilst populating our Music Room with some appropriate furniture. In the main, we want our furniture to be both aesthetically pleasing but also functionally useful so sometimes, we feel the need, for example, to complement some of the items with seat pads in the case of wooden furniture. I hane not actually seem any seatpads in evidence at any of the charity shops but cushion covers seem to be fairly well represented in some of the shops. I then have to deplay a little ingenuity to make sure that I have a filling for the seatpad which is not too plump and ‘bouncy’ which can occur if you choose only a cushion for the purpose but I am quite pleased by the improvisations I have made on the past. In particular, I am very pleased with the items I have managed to adapt both our captain’s chair, our carver chair and now our recently acquired dining chair.

Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQ for short) are generally very knockabout affairs which has become almost farcical recently as the anticipated questions, answers and jokes all seem to bear the hallmark of being well rehearsed beforehand. I only caught some of the résumés of todays PMQ as reported on Sky News but it did appear that Keir Starmer was using humour to devastating effect and, if I can read body language correctly, Richi Sunak seemed wounded by it. Keir Starmer was making the valid points that on immigration, NHS waiting times and the overall level of taxation, Rishi Sunak had promised to bear down on each of these but in each case the figures had gone up rather than down. In a thinly veiled reference to derogatory language used by James Cleverly, Keir Starmer jibed ‘It is ironic that he has suddenly taken such a keen interest in Greek culture. But he is clearly become the man with the reverse Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to… maybe the Home Secretary can help me out with this?’ This last reference was not lost on MPs as the Home Secretary was recently heard to mutter that the constituency of Stockton North was a ‘sh*thole’ although a sort of semi-apology has already been made concerning this. The select committee hearings are generally quite good to watch when civil servants as well as politicians are held to account. The red-wall Conservative MP Lee Anderson asked Home Office bosses about the number of failed asylum seekers that had been deported. What followed was excruciating because it was completely evident that they had no idea. At first there was a mumbled ‘We will have to write to you about this’ but when Lee Anderson persisted with the question asking for any kind of estimate e.g. in the last month or last year, then there was an embarrassed silence and shuffling of papers and answer came there none. There are two possible explanations here, one of which the officials had no idea at all whilst another is that they did not dare admit that the answer was zero i.e. that none one had actually been deported.

Regular readers of this blog will need no reminder that today being Tuesday, it is the day for our regular ‘get together’ with our little glee club in the Waitrose cafeteria. After we had got ourselves up and breakfasted, we swung by our local newsagent, only to discover that the shop is still closed, which does not bode very well. The five of us, including Meg and myself, all arrived at about the same time and in no time at all were deep in recollections of one sort or another. For those who are a little bit older, I was quite interested in seeing what they could remember of WWII as I was born two days after the war ended. The eldest of us who was 5 in 1939 had fairly clear memories of how the whole family used to decamp to a special little building which might have initially been an outside toilet but was now cleaned out, whitewashed probably with distemper and equipped with a bed for when the bombing raids were on. One little snippet that came out of all of this was how Birmingham city centre as well as Coventry, were attacked and bombed during the war but the scale of any destruction was kept well hidden from everybody both not to dishearten the civilian population but also to not allow any information to seep back to the Germans lest they be encouraged to think that their bombing raids were more successful than they were. As the veteran Labour politican, Denis Healy, used to say ‘In war, the first casualty is truth’ I also recall talking to an old lady in the park when we used to visit the park regularly and she used to tell us that her family nearly had a direct hit from German bombers deep in rural Wocestershire. The full story was that when the English fighter planes attacked the slower German bombers, the latter used to jettison their bombs anywhere in order to make good their escape and hence the bombs falling in rural Worcestershire. Before we headed for home, we called in at our local AgeUK charity shop which has a little local branch not on the High Street. I was on the lookout for cushions and/or cushion covers but did a quick reconnaisance inside and emerged with one cushion with a fox motive, a second bigger and fluffier cushion and a little ceramic owl to accompany the others that we have of a similar ilk.

Today is my Pilates day and under a new arrangement about which we still have to give a final judgement, a carer called to sit with Meg for a couple of hours whilst I went off to undertake my Pilates session. My back feels as though it needs some Pilates type stretches and this was evident to my teacher the minute I walked into the studio door. When I got home, the carer looked fairly exausted and I am not sure that she had an easy time supervising Meg in my absence. I received a telephone call from one of the managers of the care agency who insisted that all of his staff had received training what course of action to take when someone under their supervision falls whereas each of the three separatae carers that we have experienced to date denied that they had any training at all. I have a feeling that this story is going to run and run as people with Meg’s state of healh fall regularly whereas the care agency say they are not competent to deal with these situations. Of course, this is an incredibly grey area not susceptible to any easy solution. After we had our delayed lunch, I tuned into a concert upon which I had stumbled last night. It started out with a YouTube search for Faure: Cantique de Jean Racine and then proceeded with a couple of renditions of this, followed by several other choral works of a similar nature and Meg and I enjoyed this concert tremendously. I have made myself a sort of cushion pad for my newly restored dining chair, assisted by the fact that I had some cushion covers with an autumnal woodland scene already in stock. This morning, before Meg made her entrance into our Music Room, I gave the dining chair a quick burst of polish on the original leather hoping that the shine will build up. This is so fast and easy because you spray from a distance of 6″ away and immediately polish off and buff with a clean cloth.

The COVID-19 enquiry is providing some interesting moments today. Michael Gove, a senior minister at the heart of the government at the start of the pandemic has revealed his innermost thoughts, via a WhatsApp exchange with Dominic Cummings, the PM’s chief adviser. Gove has admitted in a WhatsApp messages, dating from 4 March 2020, that: ‘We are f up as a government and missing golden opportunities….I will carry on doing what I can but the whole situation is even worse than you think and action needs to be taken or we will regret it for a long time.’ Gove even offered a formal apolgy indicating that the lockdown was delayed too long and that initial decisions about a testing regime were not thought through. Some of us did think this at the time, of course.

It was a very dull and gloomy day and when it was not actually raining, it was threatening to rain. So Meg and I did not get up particularly early and it took us a certain amount of time to get ourselves going. We knew that we had a ‘luncheon’ date with our Irish friends down the road at midday so we did not rush about unduly but after we had our post breakfast cup of tea, we decided to go out onto the road somewhat early to do a little shopping before alighting on our friends. We set off about 45 minutes early and first sailed by our local newsagents thinking that they might not be open and they were, indeed, closed. We then made our way to the furniture store called ‘New Start‘ where there is always a collection of furniture and household items, either donated (as we have done in the past) or available for sale. Now that I have brought my IBM ThinkPad into commission in our Music Room, I felt the need for a more substantial dining-room type chair which I could use to seat me at my new little workstation. When I got to the store, my eye alighted on a couple of ‘bowed’ chairs a little similar but of inferior quality to the captain’s chair I restored recently. Buut I did not need two chairs but only one so I rejected this option and was on the point of leaving when I espied a single dining room chair with what seemed to be a leather seat and back which I thought would suit. But the chair looked superficially in poor condition because the leather on the seat seemed to be full of heavy boot print marks where staff in the store had evidently stood upon it to pile up other furniture on top of each other (it is that kind of store) Nonetheless, I asked a price and was offered it for a tenner and the staff very kindly took it out and put it in the car for me. They had no change for a £20 note in the store so I consulted the contents of my little purse in which I store loose change and discovered that I actually actually had the tenner in loose change which somehow made it appear more affordable for me but more of that later.

We got to our friends just about on time and were especially pleased to be joined by another near neighbour who is a French widow but extraordinarily lively. For example she is still driving everywhere and even had to leave our little impromptu meal in order to go off and do a bit of teaching in Spanish for an old friend of some 20 years duration who she does not even bother to charge for her time. Our friends thought that in view of the abysmal weather, it was not appropriate to give us sandwhiches for lunch so she had cooked a cottage pie for us which was both wonderful and welcome. This was finished off with cheese and then a delicious homemade desert and coffee so we felt that we had a really wonderful time with our friends. Meg was starting to feel the strain a little although our friends are incredibly thoughtful and kind so we returned home in the mid afternoon knowing that we would all be inviting each other into our respective homes in the course of the forthcoming festive season.

Upon our return home, I got Meg settled and then gingerly removed the dining chair from the back of the car. In the course of removing it, I noticed a label which indicated it was of Italian manufacture but also the seat and front/back were 100% leather materials. On getting the chair inside the house and subjecting it to a more minute examination, I noticed that there was a slight smattering of minute paint drops on the seat and back, of the sort that might happen if you were painting the ceiling and had not adequately covered up the furniture beforehand. I did a query on the web with the search term of ‘removing paint spots from leather seats’ and discovered that this is by no means a rare phenomenon. The advice ranged from how to cope with water-based paint drops (just washing up liquid in solution),to a vinegar treatment and finally what the Americans called rubbing alcohol for more severe oil-based paint droplets. I tried the simplest solution first of a bowl of hot water with a good squirt of washing up liquid applied using a spontex type sponge and was delighted that this simple approach seemed to do the trick for me. Later on tonight, I might give it a further treatment and then having exploited the contents of our cupboards, a treatment with some leather preservative which I was fortunate enough to have in stock. After I had got Meg to bed, I could not resist the temptation to utilise the specialist leather spray I had found (going by the name of ‘Leather Silk‘). I have got to to say that the results were absolutely stunning and it is hard to believe the transformation that has been wrought. I wish now that I had taken a ‘before’ photograph so that I could take an ‘after’ photo to show how dramatically the chair has been improved. A quick search on eBay shows me that similar items in ‘faux’ or PU-leather(i.e. leather substitutes and not genuine leather like this one) would sell for about 5-7 times the price that I actually paid for it. This brings the total of items I have restored and/or given a new lease of life to 6 in the last few months.