So last night, although we have waited a week for it, GB has its first medal at the Winter Olympic games – and it was a gold. The winner, Matt Weston, had been leading throughout the competition and, in a competition where the difference between competitors is measured in hundredths of a second, he increased the lead over his nearest rival to 0.88 second in a near faultless final run. GB has done quite well in this event in the past but to put Weston’s achievement into perspective, Weston is the first individual male British competitor to win gold at a Winter Olympics since figure skater Robin Cousins in 1980. So it seems hard to believe that we have had to wait for nearly half a century to achieve  another individual men’s gold medal. Britain had high hopes of a medal in both the curling and also the ice dance events but we have nothing but disappointment so far.  In the political world, the Epstein affair is still yielding surprises. We now learn that Epstein had installed some spy cameras in his private office and some grainy film is now emerging of young women and Epstein alone in his private office. The survivors had always claimed that it was one of their fears that the activities in which they were forced to engage would have neen captured on film and their worse fears appear to have been confirmed. Some of the Congressional hearings n which Trump administration members are supposedly being held to account are turning into pure farce. The most notable person to give ‘non-evidence’ was Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, who when faced with survivors ,who were allowed to attend the Congressional hearing, refused to even look at them or to apologise to them, Instead she answered questions with a rant about how well the Dow stock exchange index was doing  under Donald Trump’s presidency or enquired why the questions that she was asked were not also asked of a previous (presumably Democrat) Attorney General. The extent of the cover-up is now becoming clearer day by day as absolutely none of the names of the rich and powerful (apart from perhaps one foreign sheikh) have been released whereas name, addresses and even photos of some victims has somehow escaped the redaction process despite the strictures of the Epstein Transparency Act passed by Congress. It is now being said that the scale of the cover up now exceeds the infamous Watergate. In the UK, ‘The Guardian’ has explained the massive asymmetry in the US political system where Trump and his acolytes lie repeatedly whereas his opponents who tell the truth are vilified. The key asymmetry can be spelled out simply. Trump pays little or no regard to the conventional bounds of truth or honesty. His documented tally of false or misleading statements runs into the tens of thousands: the Washington Post registered 30,573 such statements during Trump’s first term in the White House, an average of 21 a day. In a single interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes earlier this month, Trump spoke falsely 18 times, according to CNN. To hold him to account for this dishonesty is to cast yourself as an arbiter of truth, which creates the instant and obvious expectation that you yourself must be truthful. Here, then, is the asymmetry: he can lie, but his critics cannot. Later on today, there is an expectation that my son and daughter-in-law will call around to watch the England vs. Scotland Six Nations rugby match collectively to which I can look forward with pleasure. Scotland were beaten in their last match by Italy which the simultaneous ascendancy of Italian rugby and the parallel decline in the performance of the Scots. Meanwhile Welsh rugby is in a dire state. Tens of thousands of tickets for Wales’ three home fixtures in this year’s Six Nations have still not been sold. The matches at Cardiff’s 74,000-seat Principality Stadium usually sell out or reach high capacity for a tournament that has traditionally been a highlight of the Welsh sporting calendar. On Friday morning there were 15,300 unsold for Sunday’s clash with France; 6,700 left for Scotland and 27,000 for Italy’s visit in March, according to the WRU’s official ticket site. This is an almost unprecedented situation for Welsh rugby which have traditionally been regarded as one of the stalwarts of the game.

Life has a certain unpredictability and so it turned out this morning. Although cold, we had a clear blue sky and some sun shining for the first time in days so I decided to resume my erstwhile habit of walking down into town (avoided for the last week or so when it has been so wet) because although  my left knee is a little dodgy I feel that walking as a gentle exercise is a good practical therapy. During the course of my walk, my path happened to cross that of a post-lady and I was emboldened to ask her why both she and her maLe colleagues were often to be seen in shorts even in the depths of winter. She did not mind in the least answering my question and she explained to me that both postmen and post women in wet weather might experience wet flapping trouser legs and wearing shorts was the best way of avoiding this. All of this made absolute sense so there is a little mystery of life solved for me. After I got to Waitrose, I hunted out a supply of bran buds (not bran flakes) as I know from the past that the Waitrose product probably comes off the same production line as the market leader but at two thirds of the price. I had recently read an article on the importance of fibre to gut health but I could not find the ideal product but had to settle instead for wheat flakes, enriched with bran ad sultanas with which I will have to make do. As I had my coffee, I got into conversation with a young lady also enjoying her free cup of Waitrose coffee. We opened the conversation by admiring each other’s scarves (hers was that of an Arsenal supporter, mine the ‘de rigeur’ accoutrement for Manchester University undergraduates in 1965.) She was a graduate of Durham University but had studied French and German so we found ourselves swapping stories about our experiences of Vienna (in which she had a student placement) It will be fascinating to see if we will other chance meetings in which we can explore our experiences of other European cities.

Although you might have thought that we had had enough rain to last a lifetime, it is still remaining as I got up yesterday morning and the prospect is actually for more rain and for the weather to become colder. So although we are practically half way through the month of February, we still have some weeks of wintry conditions to endure. That having been said, I am relieved in a strange kind of way that Meg, my wife of nearly sixty years, died when she did last May because trying to push her out in the wheelchair in these wet conditions had she lived would have been miserable for both of us, As it was, I managed to push her out every day in her wheelchair protected by a huge Russian manufactured heavy weight blanket and we managed it several times a week so the weather must have been more clement at this time last year. In fact her last trip out was exactly a week before she died and she was asleep much of the time but when I look back  on events, I am amazed that we (both) managed to achieve these trips out. Although the weather is gloomy, I have a couple of social visits in store for the morning one of which is to reconnect with my University of Birmingham friend and we are scheduled to have a coffee together in my favourite little coffee bar which I frequent at the end of the week before I go to have lunch with my Irish friends. There is some shopping which urgently needs to be done in the morning so I have the prospect of quite a busy day. Yesterday, I pointed out the ‘cri de coeur’ that Sky’s political correspondent had made regarding the non-regulation of the internet to which her teenage daughters were exposed. But after the example of Australia, it does now appear that several European countries are now appreciating the potential harm offered to adolescents. I read this morning that France and Spain are promising laws to ban child access to social media as early as this year whilst Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy, and Slovenia have proposed similar legislation. So it now appears that a head of steam is building up in favour of a ban on the use of social media for the under 16’s (although, once implemented, no doubt a way will be found round it) Nonetheless, the signs of encouraging although I suspect it is a sign of ‘too little, too late’ After all, the combined financial power of big tech is enormous. As of late 2025 and early 2026, the combined financial power of top US tech companies—(Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla)—significantly exceeds the nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of most nations. Together, these seven firms have a combined market capitalisation of roughly $22.4 trillion, which is about four-fifths the size of the entire U.S. economy and larger than China’s GDP. These figures are absolutely staggering once one stops to contemplate them and even if most nations on earth tried to take collective action against ‘big tech’ they would not be able to match them in terms of sheer financial muscle.

In the late morning, although it was pretty cold and miserable, I took to the High Street in order to buy two pairs of trousers, one of my trusty pair having a tear in on of the legs and I thought that the trousers 8-10 years old were not worth repairing. So I went to my usual outfitters on the High Street and was fortunate to buy two pairs of cargo trousers, one colour a kind of dark olive green which is officially described as ‘Moss’ and the other being black. I did have a cursory search for shirts but only found one in my size not worth purchasing Then I  popped off to the ‘Gifts of Love’ cafe where I was greeted as always by the proprietor and we exchanged some stories with each other whilst indulging in coffee and cake until my University of Birmingham friend turned up, all by prior arrangement. After we had engaged in an entertaining morning in which I brought my University of Birmingham friend up to date with all my news of my comings and goings and then went home. I had been invited out for lunch with my Irish friends and so I popped down the hill and spent a very happy time with them, having both a lunch and then an extended chat for most of the afternoon. We have not had the opportunity of an extended chat like  this since the Christmas  break and the bad weather that we are experiencing means that I see them less often by chance than I used to do when I was pushing Meg up and down the hill in her wheelchair.

The campaign group Palestine Action have had a victory of sorts in the High Court. The Court ruled that on two criteria the ban on the groups demonstrations could have been said to have been disproportionate. We did see the bizarre spectacle of the police having to arrest hundreds of supporters who were holding up signs saying indicating their opposition to genocide as such an act was said to be in support of a terrorist organisation. The sight of elderly and sometimes members of religious groups being labelled as terrorists and liable to up to 40 years of imprisonment certainly appeared to be disproportionate to members of the liberal population. However, the government will certainly appeal and the ban on Palestine Action’s activities continues until an appeal is heard by the Court of Appeal and this case will probably end up in the Supreme Court and will perhaps take months to resolve. One powerful argument is that the normal criminal law should be utilised for evident acts of violent protest and that therefore labelling Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is itself disproportionate. But to many people, including myself, it seems odd that the state feels the need to label the holding of a placard as support for a terrorist group but this is the way that the legislation has been framed.  One is left with the distinct impression that the action taken against protestors seems to be an attack upon political opinions held by group members with which the government disagrees and evidently the Court judgement today indicates  that it had come to the view that the human rights of Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association was threatened by labelling Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

After my long and very fruitful video-call with my friend in Hampshire the other night, I had texted a couple of friends down the road  suggesting that we might meet for a coffee in the next few days. The evening before last, my Italian friend replied apologising that she had not been in touch before, but she had experienced quite an arduous three quarters of an hour session with her local (private) dentist and felt rather unwell as a result of it all. I sympathised because this does sound a long time for a dental treatment session and I told her about my own recent experiences where I had been massively overcharged but managed to rectify the situation. My friend is still in the business of selling her house so that she can eventually live nearer to her daughter but she does not have a buyer in prospect at the moment. My Italian friend and I go back a long way and, of course, she knew Meg very well so  was appreciative of the chat and we will probably do it on a weekly basis from now on. Another wonderful surprise was an invitation from my Irish friends down the road for a lunch in a day or so and, as it happens, we have quite. lot to talk about with each other as we have not had a really good long chat since Christmas time which is fast receding into the difference. It is fairly well recognised that much of Donald Trump’s demeanour is due to an excessively narcissistic personality (as well as impending dementia) so I decided to undertake some internet researches to ascertain how common what is termed NPD (Narcissistic Personality disorder) might be in the general population. What I learnt was not only information about the condition itself but how toxic the condition could be for those caught up in relationships (marriage, friendship, work colleagues) for those interacting with persons who exhibit NPD. My internet researches revealed the following. NPD is estimated to affect approximately 0.5% to 5% of the general population, making it a relatively rare clinical diagnosis, although some studies suggest higher lifetime prevalence rates up to 6.2%. It is more commonly diagnosed in men (50-75% of cases) and often appears in early adulthood. While estimates vary, it is generally believed that 1 in 20 people (5%) may exhibit traits. In mental health clinics, the prevalence is higher, with estimates ranging from 2% to 6% of patients seeking help. Many experts believe the condition is under-diagnosed because individuals with NPD rarely seek treatment, often appearing only when co-occurring issues like depression or substance abuse arise. While full NPD is relatively uncommon, narcissistic traits are more frequently observed, especially among younger adults. In the same researches there was often practical help for those caught up in a relationship with those exhibiting NPD. The bulk of the advice was to get away from the person and not try to ‘reform’ them as such efforts nearly always ended in failure. Moreover, a failure to get out of a relationship could have severe adverse consequences for both the mental and physical health of those who were having to cope with relationships in which the other partner was exhibiting NPD. I found this quite fascinating material as I do not think it is widely appreciated (not least by myself) how toxic NPD could be for those who get caught up in its trail.

Later on in the morning, I made sure that I attended my Tai Chi class which I was glad to do as I had missed last week’s session. Afterwards, I was a little disappointed that my bank manager friend with whom I normally chat with over coffee had to dash off to transport his wife somewhere but today was one of the days in the month when a couple of police did their stint in the community centre by sitting down and having a coffee whilst making themselves available to anybody who might need the kind of advice that the police are able to give. I enjoyed chatting with them for the best part of an hour and they were explaining to me how decades or so they go to a shop lifting incident and they could get the whole incident processed within an hour or so whereas today the necessary bureaucracy takes up the rest of the shift. We exchanged quite a lot of stories about modern day police work and others from the ‘chatty table’ joined in. After they had left, I dropped into conversation with a couple who had married to each other for 62 years and who both had a wicked sense of humour which has, no doubt, kept them going over the years. We had some interesting conversations about the wife’s role in acting as a mentor/adviser in the local mental hospital in Bromsgrove. I had often heard people talk about Barnsley Hall and so did a bit of a search on it history. Barnsley Hall in Bromsgrove was a major psychiatric facility and mental hospital that operated from 1907 until 1996. Originally established as a county lunatic asylum to relieve overcrowding at Powick Hospital, it treated patients with various mental illnesses and epilepsy. The site was largely demolished in 2000, and is now a housing development.  After these interesting chats, I collected my newspaper and then came home and cooked myself a meal of salmon, potatoes and sugar snap peas.

I have always had a high regard for Beth Rigby, the chief political correspondent for Sky News. But today she had dropped out of her normal job reporting politics and wrote a personal piece how she was coping with overseeing the work of her two teenage daughters, as they were now part of the internet generation, replete with smart phones and social media in abundance. She writes that she is probably known best as Sky News’s political editor, but also a mother to two teenagers aged 13 and 16. They were babies born into the age of the iPad, the smartphone and social media and have grown up in what I call the digital Wild West. Like the Wild West frontier of the 19th century, this technological frontier of the 21st century is rapidly expanding, lawless, and lacking in institutional regulation. It is populated by some good actors and many bad ones. That’s why she could completely sympathise with the parents now screaming to the politicians that they want to turn it off and stop under-16s using social media. It is a conversation that has been turbocharged by Australia’s decision in December to bring in a social media ban for under-16s and a series of landmark trials brought by parents in the US to hold the world’s biggest social media companies responsible for harms to children. I found this whole story a brave one to write but she must have felt that the whole dilemma is one bursting with significance but one in which the politicians always seem to be several months behind the tech giants.

Everything was delayed yesterday morning as I got up later than normal – at least it was light when I eventually hauled myself out of bed. The evening before, I had engaged in a (very) long video call with a close friend from Hampshire – we often have a long chat about once a month as we always have a lot to say and to share with each other. His wife is very poorly at the moment and although the diagnosis differs, many of the external manifestations of the illness mirror that of Meg who passed away nine months ago now.  So we share practical and emotional support for each other as there are things in ‘normal’ life (apart from caring for our respective spouses) that need to be done. One particularly practical issue to be done involves utilisation of the ‘Power of Attorney’ to the full as my friend had not fully appreciated (nor did I at the time) that the ‘Power of Attorney’ is automatically made null and void at the point after which the loved one has passed away. So this is one of the really practical tips I have managed to pass on as I am some months ahead of my friend on what are essentially similar care trajectories. Incredible to relate, my friend and I were actually chatting non-stop for the best of three hours non stop until tiredness overwhelmed us and we had to make for our beds. This morning, I have been sending some texts which has further delayed me. But later in the day, I should have had a hospital appointment but the day before  I had received two texts, one saying that the appointment had been cancelled and to expect a new appointment date through the post. The second text reminded me of my appointment time but told me to ignore the text of the appointment had been cancelled in the meantime (which it had). So I just get a feeling it is going to be one of those ‘itsy-bitsy’ types of days where nothing quite falls into place into place the way it had been planned but at least the weather is quite mild and, despite rain in the air and it being a bit gloomy, the temperature is about 8° which is not too bad for this time of year. One can also see the first glimmers of spring vegetation start to appear such as the Forsythia bush which often sports an array of small yellow buds/flowers at this time of year.

Later on in the morning, I went down to the Methodist Centre near the centre of town and was delighted to see one of my old Waitrose coffee drinking pals on her own so naturally I joined her. She was one of the group of originally about eight of us who have now shrunk to about 2 (including myself) but we a pleasant chat today. I As she is a key-holder, it looks as though she will has responsibility for opening up the premises first thing on a Wednesday morning so it now looks as though we might coincide at a regular time each week. Tomorrow is my Tai Chi class which I missed last week so this is worth reconnecting with. I have switched my weekly shopping day to a Wednesday rather than a Thursday and without having to make provision in terms of alcohol or food for any special meals was actually quite delighted to have a shopping bill that was about £20 lighter than has been the norm recently. I have just seen a clip of film in which Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney general was before the House Judiciary committee and was asked to explain why it was that the names of perpetrators of sex crimes were nearly always redacted whilst names (and contact details  and n some cases photographs) of victims were not redacted. The Committee was shown unequivocal proof of this in a series of placards held aloft by survivors who were allowed to attend the meeting. Bondi was asked to apologise to the victims present in the court but pointedly refused to do instead claiming that she refused to participate in this political theatre and went off another rant about a completely unrelated matter. The chairman of the Committee is a Republican but when witnesses refuse to answer a question, he just moves on to the next part of the business which makes a farce of the whole proceedings. One cannot imagine the Chair of a Select Committee in the House of Commons letting a key witness not answer or evade a question but, of course, American politics is so divided that none of the normal rules seem to apply. So when members of the Trump administration are asked to account for their actions, they blatantly lie or evade the questions asked, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence, and they are then never subject to any sanctions by the Committee chairman which rather negates the whole purpose of having a committee hearing in the first place.

One of the facets of our political life is the fact that there is a general belief in accountability and that our rulers should answer questions honestly, truthfully and without equivocation. But whenever a question is asked of one of our political leaders either in in government or opposition, it is rare that the question ever gets answered. Even the same set of ‘facts’ can be presented in different ways  and I was conscious of this during the time of my academic life when I taught research  methods. Let us imagine that in a survey of public opinion, we had a response in which 50% did not know or had no opinion on a topic, 25% were opposed to it and another 25% were in favour of it. Let us say the topic was a ‘road widening scheme’ and given the response pattern  given above it would be possible to argue that  or that ‘75% were in opposed to the scheme or had no opinion one way of the other’ or that ‘ 75% were in favour of the scheme or had no opinion one way of the other’ Both responses would actually be an accurate reflection of the answers to the question and for this reason I used to counsel that questions avoided a ‘soggy middle’ but forced respondents to chose by using four categories such as, in relation to a hypothetical road  widening scheme, ‘very much opposed’, ‘somewhat opposed’, ‘somewhat in favour’ ‘very much in favour’. Questionnaires are often very badly designed, in any case, and may serve a quasi-political purpose rather than a truth-seeking objective.

Harold Wilson, the famous veteran Leader and Prime Minister in the 1960’s, coined the phrase that has stuck ever since and it is ‘ a week can be a long time in politics’ This is as true today as ever and we might add that a day can seem a long time as well. After the Mandelson revelations and his subsequent disgrace, the future of Keir Starmer has appeared to be on a knife edge as the perpetual question arose as to why Mandelson was ever appointed to be British ambassador to the US in the first place. After his Chief of Staff and then Director of Communications resigned yesterday, the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland called upon Starmer to resign. If this was meant to be a ‘coup’ and the calculation was that other prominent figures  would join the call for a resignation, then the coup failed. But we knew that there was a meeting of the Labour Party in the early evening and the mood threatened  to be ugly. But one by one, members of the Cabinet, including the PM’s principal rivals, tweeted their support for Keir Starmer and in the evening meeting with the Parliamentary labour party, Starmer came out fighting for his political life and gave, by all accounts, a barn-storming performance which had the effect of staving off any potential rebellions at least for now. The trouble is that any possible contender has problems  to face – Andy Burnham is not yet in the Commons, Angela Raynor is still embroiled with the Inland Revenue dealing with unresolved tax affairs,  with the Health Secretary Wes Streeting tainted by his close association with the disgraced Peter Mandelson. There is no appetite for an immediate change of leader so the party will limp on until the local elections in May. At these, the Labour party may well be slaughtered at the hands of Nigel Farage and the Reform party so the possible of a change in the Labour leadership may well be delayed for a month or so. An interesting view of the whole fallout from the release of the Epstein files is that it appears that those who are suffering are the ‘good guys’ and not the perpetrators of the sex crimes themselves. In the 3 million files that have been released in the US there have been a whole slew of redactions (i.e. crucial names blacked out) and it appears that the names of those redacted are nearly always the rich and powerful who have a lot to hide whilst the names and details of the victims themselves has sometimes been left slip in the redaction process. It has been calculated in the New York Times that Trump’s name is mentioned some 38,000 times in 5,300 separate files/documents but anything remotely critical is either redacted or else withheld in the 3 million documents that the FBI is refusing to release. So the Epstein Transparency Act passed by Congress is subject to a highly partisan release process. In one case, it looked as though a list of possible fellow collaborators with Epstein was released in error and then immediately withdrawn but some of he American liberal media may have managed to make some screen grabs of this critical FBI list before the document was withdrawn. The volume of material is so great that it is probable that the names of the vast majority of rich and powerful men drawn into the Epstein empire and engaging in sex with underage girls will never be revealed and, of course, they have been protected by the American state itself (at least in the short term)

The morning turned out to be quite an engaging one. For  a start, our domestic help turned up and also my son and daughter-in-law as well. These three had not managed to meet since before Christmas so we all had a rather jolly time whilst we told ourselves what had been going in our respective lives. I popped down into town to pick up a newspaper and get some cash out of an ATM before it was time for my Pilates class. We have been joined by a new class member who has taken the place pf one of long established class mates who has recently moved down to Hampshire to live near her daughter. My trip down to my Pilates class had a rather unusual twist to it. The nearby car park is run by the local authority and their ticket machines accepted payment by card or, in one location, by cash. I always pay my £2 for two hours parking fee by cash because  the card reading option seems complicated and I am regularly stuck in a queue behind people who are trying to work it out. So having put in my coins, they did not seem to properly engage within the machine and when I pressed the ‘Green button’ to issue a ticket, I was given the ‘free’ ticket which is used for a free 30 mins. So it appeared I had lost my money but I consulted the instructions  and pressed a red button which gave me back my coins. After I got my ticket, though, I repeated the cycle but by pressing the red button I finished up with the machine disgorging me five £1 coins over several iterations until evidently that which had been blocking the machine had cleared itself. As I currently  spend anything between £5-£10 a week on car parking charges, since I no longer have Meg’s Blue Badge upon which to rely, I accepted this little free gift with some joy although no doubt other citizens of the town will have been frustrated to have lost money in a mal functioning machine. After  I returned home, I heated up the last remnants of a ‘boeuf a bourbignone’ cooked last weekend and watched some of the Winter Olympics where we are still awaiting a medal of description and have come fourth in a couple of events. The next day I was due to go to hospital for a routine check on my ears but had received a text cancelling the appointment and asking me to wait for a new appointments letter. The original appointment was for the early  afternoon  when trying to find car parking space is extremely difficult so I am hoping that a re-timed appointment slot will be earlier inn the day. Car parking charges are nearly always a nightmare as the last time I went to hospital, the time had just edged into the second hour and hence I was charged £4.00 which seems a lot for a stay of 61 minutes.

So we awoke yesterday to a temperature of 6° which has been the norm for the few days, but needless to say, it was raining again. In case this seems like the longest period of rain that anyone can remember, they would be right unless they were aged about 130. Researchers at the University of Reading recorded 25 straight days of rainfall at the start of the year – the lengthiest unbroken run since records began nearly 120 years ago. I suspected that a shift in the position of the jet stream may have something to do with this persistent spell of rain and my hunch proved to be correct. A southward shift in the jet stream frequently causes persistent rain, particularly in the UK and Europe, by acting as a ‘conveyor belt’ for low-pressure systems. This shift allows wetter, unstable air to travel directly over regions, often causing them to stall and creating prolonged wet, windy conditions. So there we have it but I suppose I have to thank my lucky stars that this did occur when I was pushing Meg up and down the Kidderminster Road in her wheelchair as last year the weather seemed reasonably dry. Sometimes, the Spanish used to experience ‘febrero loco’ or ‘mad February’ in which  towards the end of the month there would be a spell of fine weather associated with  a period of high pressure. As we might imagine on the political front, we are in an era of the Prime Minister trying to restore relationships with this fractured parliamentary party by making suggestions as to how the vetting procedures might be improved. Some may be tempted by the American experience where important positions have to be approved before a special oversight committee. But practically all of the members of the current Trump regime went through public hearings but although some outrageous things were revealed which indicated unsuitability for the post (e.g. the Defence Secretary was a ‘Fox News’ anchor man and had the most limited of low-ranking experience in the army) but the Republicans voted ‘en masse’ to approve of the posts in any case. So even this method of vetting has proved fallible and we shall have to wait and see what changes Keir Starmer is going to suggest. An interesting trial is due to open in a court in Los Angeles, later on in the day. The social media companies are collectively being accused addictive by design, a bit like tobacco and cigarettes were in the 1980s.They will face around 22 ‘bellwether’ lawsuits, i.e. test cases, with lawyers considering the testimonies of more than 1,500 people when launching the action. Of course, the action will not succeed given the power and influence of the social media companies who will deploy the argument that they are just publishing platforms and have no control over the content of what is actually posted on line (apart from rather ineffectual controls which are meant to protect children) I have no doubt that these concerns  are also felt in the UK which is a why a proposal is under consideration for smart-phones to be banned for under 16’s. I have always found it amazing that what is called the Main Street Media staffed by well-trained journalists who are used to check and verify their stories before publication are at best, ignored or at worst, disbelieved. Meanwhile, at least some of the population are of the view hat anything they read on social media is probably  correct and his allows for conspiracy theories and the likes of the anti-vaccination movements to flourish. Apart from sustained efforts by schools and parents to address this problem (which many do not) the tech companies will be always be one step ahead and this is even before we start to unleash the impact of artificial  intelligence (AI) models. When I used to both research and to lecture on quality management issues, I was often frustrated to find that a group mind-set tended to dominate the algorithms used by the search companies such as Google.  So in response to a search query such as ‘What are the arguments against Total Quality Management’ I would get responses such as ‘The arguments against Total utility  management are misplaced due to …’  but I do concede that a similar  query today gives a somewhat more nuanced response (perhaps under the impact of AI itself).

Yesterday was an unpredictable sort of day. I needed to get some items in the post today which I did as a matter of priority and then I went off to visit my dentist, not to receive a course of treatment but to query the cost of the treatments I received last Thursday. My son and I talked over the cost of the treatment I had received last Thursday which was basically one filling which required sone drilling and then what one might one call a renovation of some older fillings that required some attention but not replacement. My son and I consulted  the internet to discover that there are three payment bands ranging from simple inspections to more complex interventions such as crowns and dentures for NHS dental work Basically, as the charges seemed so high I suspected that I had been charged at the Band 3 rate rather than the Band 2 rate and I telephoned them on Thursday afternoon to initiate a query but with the response that the dentist would be consulted and then they would get to me (which they did not) So today I turned up at the dentist with some NHS documentation explaining that I thought  I may have been inadvertently overcharged and they agreed immediately giving me a refund of 75% of the bill. In other words I had been charged four times as much I should have been and so a refund was charged back onto my card. I am going to wait until later in the evening to check  whether the refund has found its way back into my account where it is sorely needed to pay my central heating servicing bill. Finally, the domestic political news has been pretty remarkable today insofar as Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff resigned yesterday, his principal Communications Director resigned this morning and the Scottish Labour Leader, Anas Sarwar has publicly called for Keir Starmer to step down. Starmer is due to address the Parliamentary Labour party in the evening and the mood within the party may well determine whether the prime minister is forced out or lives to fight another day.

I had asked my son, who has always been a keen photographer, to consult his digital collection of photographs to see if any of the pre-digital era family photographs had been scanned and had found its way into his collection. He did unearth four, two of which were seaside snaps and can be dated and were probably taken on a beach in the Gower peninsular, South Wales when we visited  Meg’s cousin for a family holiday. But I was interested in one of Meg and myself atop a mountain and the question arises whether we could apply our collective memories to ascertain which  mountain it was and a possible date. Putting our heads together, we have concluded that it could be Snowdon, Wales’s highest mountain and was evidently taken in mid-summer. I think we can discern in the background Lyn Glaslyn, the most prominent, high-altitude lake (Blue Lake) situated directly below the summit and apparently, according to the internet, now a favourite for wild water swimming. This particular lake sticks in my memory because my son and  actually swum in it. The full story is that we ran into a couple  of young German girls with whom we ascended Snowdon in one direction and we decided to stick together as walking companions on another route down the mountain. On the day in question, it was an incredibly hot day and when the German girls espied the lake they exclaimed that it would be a good idea if we all went for a swim (which was probably incredibly dangerous given how cold the water was) We explained that we did have our swimming trunks with us but the young German girls exclaimed that we should not bother with that and promptly completely stripped off and ran into the lake. My son and I felt obliged to follow their example but I know that Meg declined the offer and we certainly did not stay too long in the water as it seemed freezing cold. But to return to the family photograph, we think we can date it to the late 1970’s because of our hair styles and I have a bandage on my left knee. I had been involved in a bizarre accident on the Leicester Polytechnic campus in 1973 when a runaway car, whose driver had fainted, ran me over smashing up both of my knees and taking two of my students on its bonnet through some iron railings. Although I made a pretty full recovery, my left knee occasionally caused me some discomfort as it still does to this day so the bandaged left knee helps to date the photograph. But now I am not so sure as I search the internet for images of the cairns which are the trig points for both Hellvelln and Snowdon and our photograph matches neither. Although we have a lot of photographs still to be unearthed in our final assault on a ‘hobbit hole’, the vast majority of these are likely to show Meg and myself plus son in deep snow and dressed in cagoules and anoraks taken at Easter time which is the time of the year when we typically used to take a holiday in the Lakes. Easter was our preferred time because it was always so crowded during the summer months but it will be interesting to see what we manage to discover. Once this is done we will scan them in using our scanner which has always done a good job in the past and I will ensure that I always crop then to the same dimensions so that they can easily be displayed in the software (HTML code) that I was using very recently.

I decided yesterday morning, almost on the spur of the moment, although the thought has been in my head for some time, to attend the service at my local church for 8.30 on Sunday morning service rather than the service at 6.00pm on Saturday evenings. This turned out to be quite an inspired decision because I knew several of the congregation by sight and, as a bonus, at the end of the service they had opened the parish hall where those who wished to could assemble for a chat over a cup of coffee. I got into conversation with a man who was not only a keen walker but also very knowledgeable about American politics so we shared views with each other about the American body politic. I also got into a conversation with a young mother who was occupying the pew in front of me nursing her very well behaved seven month old baby so we thought we would probably carry on chatting next week. So I have decided to undertake a switch from the Saturday evening to the Sunday morning service if only on a Saturday driving to the church in the driving rain and then shooting in and out of the church in the dark means that here is no time to socialise. So given that my reasons for attending church are as much social as they are theological, I think that a switch of times will prove to be very beneficial for me. After I had returned home, my son called around as he indicated that he would and we discussed things like family finances with each other which was very useful. For the rest of the day whilst we have the Winter Olympics to occupy us, I actually prefer something a little more mind engaging. Yesterday evening there was a film about the life of Emily Brontē of which I only have scantiest knowledge so I suspect that this is one of the transmissions where I can be wrapped up in a warm bed and view it on the bedroom TV.

The political news that emerged during the day was the resignation of Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Tt is true that many of the Labour Party backbenchers had been calling for his head and McSweeney himself takes full responsibility for advising the choice of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. That having been said, the mood the House of Commons as a whole was that there needed to be scapegoat and it is probable that McSweeny went before he was actually pushed as even Keir Starmer appreciated . And whilst constitutional niceties still remain, it is the Prime Minister’s responsibility  to take what advice is offered but then not only to act decisively but to take responsibility for decisions, even they turn out to be wrong, or at least misplaced. No doubt this resignation will be discussed deep into the night but it may be a case of ‘too little, too late’ to save the fate of Prime Minister.

You might have thought that given the outpourings from the White House, the material could not sink to such low depths but what has happened in the last day takes ones breath away. A video has been posted depicting the ex-President Obama and has wife as apes and the video stayed current for some twelve hours before it was taken down as a ‘mistake’ The explanation given is that the White House was trying to portray politicians as animals from Disney cartoons with Trump naturally being the ‘king of the jungle’ whereas the Obamas were designated as apes at the end of the clip. Initially the clip was defended by the White House and only when there was complete uproar across the political spectrum including one black American senator was the clip taken down. When Trump was questioned about this, he said he had seen the earlier part of the clip and approved it but conveniently not the later sections including the racist taunt but does one believe anything that Trump says? Before the post was removed, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended it and said the depiction formed part of a longer video depicting various politicians as animals saying that this is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King. She pleaded that the fake outrage be stopped  and that the White House should report on something today that actually matters to the American public. Trump himself acknowledges that a mistake has been made but blames it all on an over-enthusiastic White House staffer and had refused to apologise for the content if the clip. Mr Trump has a long history of attacking Mr Obama, his predecessor as president, and was a vocal proponent of the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory. The theory cast doubt on Mr Obama’s birth in Hawaii, asserting that he was actually born in Kenya, and therefore ineligible to hold the office of president. Mr Obama produced his long-form birth certificate in 2011. In 2016, Mr Trump publicly accepted that his predecessor was born in the US. I personally have only once seen something as completely offensive as this. Early in my career as a teacher of sociology, I taught some ‘Race Relations’ and put on a series of voluntary videos on race and world religions which were shown at lunchtimes. These were completely voluntary but the students flocked to them and the students  enthusiastic response to my efforts actually forced a change in college policy and I was happy to explain my actions before a special meeting of the Academic Board of the college of education in which I worked. I do remember, though, that  one white member of the Board thought that my efforts were totally unnecessary because the only ethnic minorities that her students would ever meet in small English rural towns were members pf the gypsy and travelling community ( and ‘they were white in any case’) But as part of my researches, I did discover some examples of racist literature attempting to draw comparisons between black people and apes by drawings of caricatures side by side attempting to discern similarities between the two (I did not show any of this material in my own courses) naturally both I and the world have moved on in the last half century, one would have hoped. Meanwhile, I watched some of the opening of the Winter Olympics last night broadcast from Cortina in Italy but the Winer Olympics does not grab my attention as much as their summer counterparts. But I have to say that, like others, I do enjoy the opportunity to watch sports such as curling and the British team (largely Scots I would think) have got off to a flying start by winning each of their first five matches.

I took the opportunity whilst I was on the road this morning to call again at the house of the disabled person whose wallet I managed to restore to him the other day. In my desire to find the identity of the owner I had taken out a membership card to an organisation that catered for disabled people hoping that by this route I could find an address. So I had inadvertently left the card out by the side of my computer so I wrote a little note explaining why I had taken it out of the wallet in the first place. The wife of the disabled person was delighted to see me again and to receive back the precious card so I now feel my task of returning the wallet and its contents is completed. In the afternoon, we witnessed the Wales vs. England rugby match and it is true to say that this rather mirrored the rugby on France vs. Ireland the previous evening where France predominated. At half time England were leading 22:0 but the Welsh did not help themselves by acquiring two yellow cards (and hence down to 13 men) within a minute o so of each other. Cards are issues following an infringement of the rules and these might be either a cynical disregard for the rules or a burst of over-enthusiasm leading to an infringement.  Welsh rugby has been going through  a lean period for the last few yeas and perhaps a defeat was of no real surprise. The English team were good but against such inferior opposition it was a little hard to judge how effective they eventually turned out to be. The next match is against Scotland for the Calcutta Cup next weekend but Scotland were beaten by Italy so that team might not prove to be any stern opposition to the English  pack. I actually missed going to church in the evening as I was rather taken over watching the rugby match and we also have the Winter Olympics in Italy which takes up most of the scheduled broadcast for most of the evening. So far the British team are doing well at curling and there are always a host of other sports with lots of thrills and spills to absorb the attention. n terms of domestic political news, the Mandelson affair will continue to dominate the Sunday newspapers and no doubt the political programmes in the morning. The latest focus of attention is the amount of an enormous pay-off given to Mandelson at the point where he was sacked as the British ambassador to the US and any amount awarded to him suddenly seems massively inappropriate.

Yesterday was the opening night of the Six Nations international rugby competition to which I always look forward and we were treated to France vs. Ireland on a rainy night in Paris. The French were superb with fast-flowing  and quick-running rugby and overwhelmed the Irish in the first half and were actually three tries up and 22:0 at half time. So it looked like a very one sided contest but then the Irish came back strongly in the second half and scored a couple of tries and nearly a third but were actually no match for the French on the night. We now look forward to the England vs Wales match on Saturday but this starts quite late at about 5.00pm I believe so may cause a clash with my church-going routine. Last night saw an innovation at which the heart actually sinks and this is ‘in match’ adverts which is an innovation which I am sure was more or less inevitable but we all wanted to postpone the evil day. Actually, I have to say it was done reasonably well but this first experiment was being monitored by all kinds of bodies. Only one advert was shown and there was a split screen with both the advert and the match being visible although the sound priority was given to the advert. The advert was timed to appear during so called ‘dead’ time during the match when the scrum was being set or if anyone was receiving medical attention. But although the advertisers would see last night’s experiment as a success, it is undoubtedly the thin edge of the wedge and it is possible  to envisage this technique being deployed on all types of commercial TV transmissions within quite a short space of time.

The hold of the Prime Minister on power looks increasingly tenuous and some real words of wisdom are being spoken by the Labour peer Harriet Harman who was at one stage deputy leader of the Labour Party and who I would  have liked, personally, to have seen as leader. In conversation with Sky’s Beth Rigby, these are her thoughts The Labour peer told the political editor Beth Rigby: ‘I think it is so serious for Keir Starmer. I do not think it is inevitable that it will bring him down. But it will bring him down – unless he takes the action, which is really necessary for him to take, and that is this: firstly, he has got to stop blaming Mandelson and saying that he lied to me Because actually he should never have been considering him in the first place. To say he lied to me makes it look weak and naive and gullible. So it is just completely the wrong thing. He should be reflecting on why he made that appointment, not angry at the evilness of Peter Mandelson. He should also be thinking about a real reset in Number 10, because what you need from your team in Number 10, is people who share your values and your principles and who will help you be the best prime minister you can be, according to your true self. Clearly, that is not what happened because the Keir Starmer, who was DPP [director of public prosecutions], would never have appointed somebody like Peter Mandelson to represent the country.’ These are very sensible comments and do show Starmer a way forward. Probably one of the most important things that can be done is to appoint a Chief of Staff (principal adviser) who is very much in tune with the attitudes and the values of the rank and file of the parliamentary party and not seen as remote and aloof.  After a few days and some changes of staff and advisers, it is possible that Starmer can limp on at least for the time being and whilst there is no very evident successor in sight.

No sooner had I got myself up and showered and was coming down the stairs when the central heating engineer came to have a look at my boiler. This young man is absolutely excellent and has excellent diagnostic skills and we had previously supplied him with the make and model number of our boiler should  he need to order any parts in advance. As the water level and pressure seemed to drop when it should not, he had suspected a faulty valve so had brought the relevant spare with him and after half an hour he left with the boiler hopefully restored to good health – but we shall have to see over the next day or so. I made a trip to my usual supermarket to pick up one or two things for tonight’s meal and then made my way to a car park from which I journey out to see my friends/acquaintances in one of the local charity shops where I am regaled with a coffee and a slice of homemade cake. Whenever it is raining, which is was yesterday, the car parks always seem exceptionally busy and it took a fair bit of loitering before  a space was released. Then  I collected  my newspaper with a similar long wait for a car parking space. After I returned home, I cooked a fair quantity of mushrooms which I had on some toasted sourdough bread and then watched some of the liberal American media on YouTube, analysing the latest release of the 3 million papers released last Friday. One particular contribution by an independent  journalist was quite illuminating.  She had investigated Epstein’s background in some detail and tried to wok out how as a college dropout who was teaching maths in an academy acquired the positions of influence and wealth that he did. Quite a convincing case was made of the connections between Epstein, and Ghislaine’s father  Robert Maxwell who had intimate connections with MOSSAD (The Israeli intelligence service) as well as the American intelligence services (in all probability) Is it just coincidence that Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein both died  as a result of ‘suicide’ but in highly contentious circumstances and the very light sentence accorded to Epstein himself and the translocation of Ghislaine Maxwell to the least arduous type of prison regime also require some explanation. After this viewing, I popped  outside  to close the back door gate which had been open to grant access to the central heating engineer. But the bolt securing the gate would not fasten correctly which sometimes happens when gates drop a fraction and/or wooden frames swell. So I needed to unscrew and then relocate the bolt retainer about 1/4″ upwards which did the trick perfectly. Although this sounds a simple job, in fact all went well but sometimes even simple jobs have complications.

Yesterday was one of the most momentous days in British politics since the Profumo crisis in 1963, more than sixty years ago, when Profumo was caught lying to the House of Commons over his affair with Christine Keeler, a mistress shared with a Russian attaché, and which occasioned him resigning in disgrace. This is all of the sequelae to the Mandelson affair where it has become apparent that Mandelson, whilst in the Cabinet, shared state secrets with the disgraced paedophile Jeffry Epstein. Keir Starmer promised a full explanation to the House of Commons how Mandelson ever came to be appointed to be the British ambassador to the USA in the first place. I now rely upon the excellent summary provided by Beth Rigby in Sky News because her summary of events is masterful. There’s no understating it – the Mandelson scandal has become into a full-blown political crisis for the government, with the prime minister once again in a precarious position. Anger among Labour MPs is palpable. They are angry over Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US – despite admitting yesterday he was aware of Lord Mandelson’s ongoing association with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. But Labour backbenchers are also furious at the government’s attempt to prevent some files being released on national security grounds – as well as files that might embarrass its relationship with the White House. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch accused the prime minister of a ‘cover up’. As yesterday afternoon wore on, it became clear that it was not going to wash with Labour MPs – and in a climbdown for the government, a compromise was broken, with files referred to parliament’s independent Intelligence and Security Committee, who will decide which files to redact. It was the PM’s own former deputy, Angela Rayner, who led the calls for this change. And some other files will be delayed, after the police asked the government not to release anything that could prejudice their investigation into Lord Mandelson. The absolute root of the problem is the whole question of political judgement and that is fuelling calls for Keir Starmer to be replaced – it is already being said that he is ‘toast’ and many feel his days are numbered. Although the political dictum is that ‘advisers advise but ministers decide’ it is undoubtedly the case that Starmer did not heed the warnings that Mandelson might prove to be a troublesome choice as ambassador – after all, he had been sacked twice before from Labour cabinets but no doubt felt that he could bounce back from any adversity. But on this occasion, his disgrace is so absolute that he will become a non-person, politically. So as well as what turns out to be appalling judgement in appointing Mandelson in the first place, under intense and quite forensic questioning by Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, Starmer was forced to eventually admit that he knew of the association of Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein even after the latter was shown to be a convicted paedophile. Upon this admission, there was an audible gasp from the back bench Labour MPs who deserted their PM almost to a man and the government was forced by back bench pressure to abandon an amendment which meant that some information would not be supplied to the whole House of Commons on security grounds. Instead the House of Commons insisted that a full disclosure should be made but sensitive security information only given to the Intelligence and Security Committee and not the whole House. The whole point here is that once a Prime Minister has lost trust n such na spectacular scale, it is very hard to regain it. By jetting off around the world, Keir Starmer may have built up credit with other world leaders but he has neglected his own back yard to his peril (and, incidentally, this can happen when one’s majority is too large)

The weather yesterday was blustery with freezing rain and altogether unpleasant to be out. The principal appointment I had in the middle of the day was a dental appointment where one filling needed to be replaced (as it had dropped out) and a further two renovated in some way. But I was so shocked at what I was charged that I feel impelled to call the dentist to see if I have charged the correct price or not. The actual quality of the treatment received has been excellent and, as the years have progressed, I feel that the anaesthetics involved have improved dramatically. One used to be left with a numb one half of the mouth for several hours and then normal sensation gradually returned but nowadays the actual side effects appear to be minimal. I have been instructed to only eat out of one side of my mouth for the next day which is understandable as amalgams have to gradually harden but today that was quite easy to arrange as I lunched on sone quiche with a stir-fry mix of onions, peppers, tomatoes and  mushrooms which was quite a sloppy consistency and did not require any real chewing.

Viewing of the newscasts this afternoon  confirms that the fate of Keir Starmer lies in the balance. The opposition parties evidently relish in their attacks on a ‘wounded’ prime minister but it might be the case that sheer Machiavellian politics takes over and the opposition parties might privately wish for a wounded and disabled prime minister to remain in place as a more beatable opponent in the May elections – and the general election which is still years off.  Even the deeply unhappy Labour MPs have no real desire or stomach for a leadership contest at this particular time so it might be that Keir Starmer limps on as a diminished figure with no real authority over his troops any more until such time as the parliamentary party thinks he needs to be replaced as party leader. I am always conscious of the famous remark attributed to one of Napoleon’s generals who was questioned about loyalty to his leader. His reply was to the effect that ‘I will be loyal to my Leader to the end – until the time is ripe for treachery’ and the same sentiment is probably abroad in the current Labour Party where the mood is said to be like a tinderbox and a rebellion on almost any issue quite likely.