Today was one of those beautiful days – almost spring-like with some bright, sunny weather but not too hot and with no prospect of rain until a lot later in the day. We walked straight to the newspaper shop to pick up our newspapers but ‘The Guardian‘ was missing so we needed to pop into Waitrose to pick up a copy. At the same time, we picked up a carton of ice-cream which we seem to be constantly running out of these days. And so we made our way to the park having a chat with one of our park regulars en route. Then it was coffee and biscuits as normal but we didn’t meet with any of our other regulars as they are either on holiday (or preparing for them). Whilst on the subject of holidays, Meg and I hope to be able to get to Rome on a pre-booked holiday in late September. I still think the chances are only about 50:50 but if the Rome holiday falls down, we thought to we would develop a plan B. Of all of the picturesque locations through England and Wales, we have never actually been to the Brecon Beacons in mid-to-south Wales. So I did a quick internet search and was pretty impressed by the publicity put out by the Brecon Beacons National Park. If the Rome trip does fall over, we thought we would try the Brecon Beacons for about 5 nights or so. We would probably make Brecon or Abergavenny our base and then sight-see from there. In addition, it is only just over 70 odd miles from Bromsgrove and quite accessible via the M5 and M50 so relatively reachable. If the weather is poor rather than good, we may even improve our chances of getting a last booking in one of the local hotels.

This afternoon, being a fine afternoon and as I was well supplied with petrol for the lawnmower, I had allocated this afternoon as a lawn mowing day. This worked out fine and as the sky was getting slightly overcast, paradoxically this helps with my mowing as it becomes easier to discern the last ‘track’ of the wheels and therefore one starts in the correct position for the next row of the cutting. After I finished the mowing, the sky clouded over a little and we got a few minute spots of rain so I started straight away on the second little job of the day. This was to take the three 40kg bags of blue slate chipping and get them over into their ultimate position. I utilised an enormously useful little garden trug on wheels which belongs to my daughter-in-law but really comes into its own when you are transporting large (ie heavy) objects around the garden. So I got the three bags of slate humped down the steep steps which affords access to Mog’s Den and laid one of them in some of the bare areas that needed to be covered. This is much easier than it sounds because you just get the bag into position, cut it open, spill out the contents and then use a boot or a gloved hand to get the slate clippings the way you want them. After our tea, the rain started a long, constant drip and I was delighted as that is what the garden (or rather the plants) needs right now. Then, with a sickening ‘thud’, I realised that I had to wheel our two large grey wheelie bins into a position at the end of our road so that they can be collected early tomorrow morning. (As we live a road which is ‘private’ to us and we are responsible for its maintenance an so on, the refuse vehicles will not come down – and they might not be able to negotiate the 90º bend in any case) By the time I had taken one full and very heavy wheelie bin to the end of the road, I calculated that it was a distance of 120 yards – so by the time I made the journey there and back two times, I reckon I had covered 480 yards which is more than ¼ mile in the rain. Tomorrow we are going to treat ourselves to a little trip to Droitwich (incidentally, that is the town in which my mother was born but that is a long and complicated tale going back to 1911 which I will not go into now) We have two treats in store. The first of these is a trip to our favourite hardware store (‘Wilko‘) where we can stock up on cosmetics, kitcheny type things, stationary, gardening things, etc. Then we are going to have lunch in a kind of ‘Olde Worlde‘ type cafe in which they specialise in putting on a roast dinner with all of the trimmings once a week on a Thursday. So we have booked our slot for a beef dinner – the food is just simple, home prepared food with nothing fancy but served at an incredibly cheap price. The locals are always friendly and everyone chats with each other as well, which is a bonus!

Today was the day when our son and daughter-in-law were flying off to Jersey on holiday. Yesterday was evidently spent in packing up and they left by taxi at 7.30 this morning. It is always reassuring when we receive a text from them to say that they have landed safely and got to the hotel which is their favourite holiday haunt. They did communicate the news, though, that the airports seemed particularly quiet so presumably ‘stress points’ such as getting through security is so much easier when there are fewer people around. We eventually got ourselves organised and set off for our daily walk but we knew that timings were always going to be a little tight as Tuesday is my ‘Pilates’ day. On our way down the morning, we ran across some of our oldest friends who are off on holiday to Ireland for a fortnight so we must get used to not seeing them for quite a while. As time was tight, we went up to our normal park bench but decided to pick up our newspapers later on in the day so that we could save a little bit of time. On our way back, we saw a lady who is the neighbour of our friends and we have often had brief snatches of conversation with her but never any conversations in depth. She has quite recently lost her husband who had been ill for quite some time and we often wondered if the opportunity arose, then we would invite her round for a cup of tea (or something stronger) in our garden if the weather is fine for next week. As she is a French lady who was a teacher of French in one of the local schools and Meg had lived some of her early adolescent years just outside Paris, then I am sure we will have quite a lot to chat about once we get to seize the opportunity to get to know each other a bit better. I remember telling her the story of the (female) French Minister for Culture ( think) who had somehow acquired a cat. This cat seemed a rather truculent character who was constantly mewling wanting to be put you. Once put outside, though, the cat seemed to adopt a truculent and obstreperous attitude and seemed to want to get back inside again. The big problem was what the cat should be called (it appeared nameless when given to the French minister) Anyway, the most appropriate name for the cat was quickly chosen given its behaviour and characters – namely ‘Brexit‘!)

After we got home, I had a quick 5-minute turnaround before I walked down to into town for my weekly ‘Pilates’ session. There were only three of us regulars today but I felt I had a fairly good workout considering that I have been nursing a sore back for the past few days. This was acquired in the most unfortunate of little incidents – I had been undertaking my little 5-minute routine of stretches that I normally perform first thing in the morning when I sneezed hard in the middle of a stretch and gave myself a right ‘jerk’ at just the wrong moment. Fortunately, it is settling down now after a day or so and I discovered (as my Pilates teacher confirmed) that a regime of walking is pretty good for helping a sore back to repair itself (and a prolonged period of sitting is actually quite bad for it).

After lunch, I made a little trip out by car as there were some errands that needed it. The first was a trip to the garage in order to pick up a gallon of prime petrol which I need for the lawnmower. It only takes two gallons a year and so is incredibly economical but I do now know that in order to guarantee yourself some ethylene free (and trouble free) lawn mowing, it is a good idea to get the most expensive petrol on offer and to overcome the ethylene problem by adding a special petrol stabiliser to it. Anyway, that will see me all right until the end of the season. The next job along was to call in at Asda to collect another three bags of blue slate chippings to provide some finishing touches to Mog’s Den. Normally, I ask for some lusty young men to help me get these into the car but in view of the absence of the same, I made do by a high loading trolley and then a quick heave into the back of the car (without, I think, doing further damage to the old back). Then it was on to the newsagent to pick our our newspapers (much later in the day than normal) The minute I got back we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends as we normally do each Tuesday evening and we made some tentative plans for a face-to-face meeting for tea and cakes in the forthcoming week if the weather is still set fair.

It proved to be quite a bright and breezy day today with just a hint that showers might come along later in the day to disrupt things. After a somewhat delayed start whilst we did some household jobs, Meg and I started off walking late down to the park. On our way down, we met some of our church friends and we were very pleased to see them because we had not coincided for a couple of weeks. They were just off on holiday for a week so we quickly told them all of our news and they sped off to spend a week in a forest retreat somewhere. Meg and I progressed as far as the park where we bumped into one of our daily park friends and we chatted for a few minutes before I went off to collect our newspapers for the day. We tend to ask ourselves unanswerable questions such as ‘If you are flying in an aircraft from west to east faster than the rotation of the earth, do you actually get younger? Which army in the Second World War actually exhibited the most discipline when confronted with civilian populations? Did the Americans know that Japanese codes had been deciphered and therefore they had forewarning of the attack on Pearl Harbour’ and so on and so forth.Then it was a leisurely walk homeland a lightish lunch before we settled down to watch the Olympics. In particular, we watched the British team secure a gold in the Eventing (Equestrian) category – the first time we have secured a gold medal in this event since 1972 – fifty years ago. I think it was an Olympics game some time ago in which we were enjoying success in cycling, rowing and equestrian events when an Australian commentator remarked, with a degree of feeling,’What is about you Brits? You only win things in the Olympics when you are sitting down!‘ This was a wry observation but quite amusing when you think about it.

This afternoon, I had two little jobs I had set myself, neither of them particularly onerous. Firstly, I had ordered through Amazon a mini-dustbin in which I am going to store a large bag of grit which I had previously ordered and had in stock. This involved making a little brick platform so that the little dustbin (and my storage chest) sit a little proud of the rest of the surface to keep themselves clear of water, slugs and the like. I then had a couple of bags of blue slate clippings which I put down and these spread fairly thinly, so I think I need to pop down to Asda where I can pick up an extra three bags of slate for £9.00 and thicken up the layers of slate that I spread this afternoon. Then inside for a cup of tea and a pleasant little job. I buy rapeseed oil in 5 litre containers for a specialist little farm in Staffordshire where the whole family business is growing the rapeseed and then producing and clarifying the oil itself. I have a series of empty glass cordial bottles and my 5-litre supply fills ten of these but I find it useful just to be able to grab another bottle of oil when I run out. I share the oil with my domestic help as well.

The COVID news stories are developing as well. The principal story this evening is that under pressure from many Tory MPs amongst others, the Test-and-Trace app has been ‘tweaked’ so that, basically, it will ‘ping’ fewer people than previously which save them (and the economy) from further self-isolation. This move has been on the cards for several days now but I have to smile at the  ‘chutzpah’ of the government. Basically, if you have a measuring instrument (‘Test-and-Trace‘) that gives you results that you don’t like or are inconvenient then just adjust the measuring instrument. Mind you, the Tories have form in doing things like this. At a time when the rising unemployment rates were a matter of deep political significance, the government kept on changing the definitions of how the unemployed were counted. The first two changes to the rules actually increased the claimant count but the Social Security Advisory Committee found the unemployment definition had been changed 20 times between 1979 and 1988, and that almost every change reduced the number of people defined as unemployed.

The second major change that has come into effect basically allows people to enter the UK without a quarantine if you have a double vaccination and come from a major European country  or the USA. No doubt, the government is hoping that other European countries will reciprocrate but this is a huge question. In theory, Meg and I are due to go on holiday to Rome in late September but unless the Italians change their quarantine policy in a reciprocal fashion, then our holiday looks in jeopardy.

The 1st of the month and I even forgot to say ‘White Rabbits! White Rabbits! White Rabbits! ‘ which we used to say as kids on the first day of the month. Although there was no Andrew Marr show to dash back to from the paper shop, nonetheless I went down early the morning and treated myself to a good selection of Mozart as I walked. Often, I see a combination of dog-walkers and/or joggers on a Sunday morning but not today, so I suppose that the holiday season is kicking in with a vengeance. I was back by 9.00am and we indulged ourselves in watching some of the Olympics whilst we at our breakfast. I think the major point of interest was the fact that Max Whitlock retained his gold medal for his performance on the pummel horse in the men’s gymnastics. He had to put down a stunning performance (which he did) and then watch another eight competitors try to better his performance. We also gained a silver medal in one of the swimming relay races and one of the team, Duncan Scott, has won in these games a gold and three silvers and this is more medals won at a single Olympics[pics than any other British competitor. Finally, Charlotte Worthington won a gold medal in the BMX bike freestyle competition narrowly beating the American – what what was particularly noteworthy about this was the fact that Charlotte had to ‘crowd fund’ to help fund her passage to the Olympics. One has to make a comparison with rowing which has incredibly well funded but with scarcely any medals to show for it (although, to be fair, we seem to have secured an extraordinary number of 4th places – way above the average for other nations but still leaving us bereft of medals).

Meg and I had a very conversation rich morning this morning. For a start, we walked to the park and occupied our normal bench and in no time at all we we were joined by five of our park ‘regulars’ Part of the time we were discussing a Wikipedia entry I had run off for one of our acquaintances under the search term ‘economical with the truth’ – it was used prominently in the ‘Spycatcher‘ affair in which Margaret Thatcher had tried to stop publication and/or dissemination of the ‘Spycatcher‘ book in the UK and sent Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, to the Supreme Court of New South Wales to, in effect, ‘lie’ for the government. Since then, it has passed into the political discourse and is seen whenever the government is trying to be evasive or does not want the whole truth of any particular situation to  be revealed. Then on our way up the hill, we bumped into one of those ‘over the garden fence’ type conversations with a near neighbour. We had liaised quite a lot with each other when we had a joint interest in trying to preserve a small wood (by the side of our house) which was eventually chopped down to make room for a 18-house development which has taken place next to us. After chatting about plants and dogs, we carried on our way and met with the lady who lives just around the corner and who is a manager in one of the local supermarkets. We chatted with her and her partner about the price and availability of housing in the area because the minute a house is built or put on the market. As a case in point a four bedroomed house has just been out on the market for 450k but despite the fact it had only been on the market for three days, there were already three people with their own houses sold and money in their hands forming a queue in order to buy it. We were interested initially ill this property because Meg and I had always considered our present house to be our second last house and we thought that in the fullness of time, we might downsize and get nearer to the town (but sill within the orbit of our friends) and make sure the house is perfectly adapted to our needs as we get older.

In the late afternoon, Meg and I engaged in some gentle gardening. Meg busied herself deadheading the Lavatera which is in full bloom immediately outside our kitchen window. I engaged myself getting rid of some of the weeds in Mog’s Den before they could do their worst.Weeds is a slight misnomer because it was actually old bits of nettle root which engaged my attention and so I  ensured that I had on a pair of really thick rubber gloves before they got pulled. I have also some ‘spare’ gardening tools which I keep in Mog’s Den (a spade and a couple of long handled hoes which get ‘hung’ by well-placed hooks previously inserted in an old ash tree which is now covered in ivy which serves to hide the tools from public view) These needed a bit of renovation so I set to work with a wire brush, some Brillo pads and a scourer restore them to a decent condition.

Well, today was a very different kind of day. Although Meg and I have a TV in our bedroom and very often watch Newsnight and similar programs in the evening while we are getting ready for bed, we hardly ever watch the TV first thing in the morning. However, this morning proved to be the exception because as soon as we woke up and were ‘compos mentis‘ we realised from the news broadcasts on our bedside radios that Team GB had won the mixed triathlon – the first time this event has ever been part of the Olympics schedule. So we turned on the TV straight away and we did not have to wait for too long before we were rewarded with a very full video summary of the race form start to finish. So Meg and I just sat on a large blanket chest that occupies a position at the foot of our bed and watch the whole race as it unfolded. It did not detract from the enjoyment of it watching a summary of it like this – although Team GB were the pre-race favourites, this did not mean that they held the lead at all times and indeed the at the various ‘transitions’ from one phase of the race to the next the lead did keep changing according to the strengths of the individual competitors in their various disciplines e.g. some were much better cyclists than swimmers and so on. So the way you watched the race unfold was by observing the gap in seconds between the first and second.We really enjoyed all of this but I did delay us for the morning. [Actually, as I was writing this blog, the BBC compilation program was showing the whole of the Mixed Triathlon completion again so I stopped blogging in order to watch it all over again – and it was just as exciting the second time around]

Eventually, Meg and I after a delayed breakfast walked down into town and we decided to adopt our normal routine which because of my isolation we had not managed for about a week. Everything worked brilliantly, actually, because as we approached our usual bench one of our regular crowd was already there. No sooner had we served ourselves with some coffee than our University of Birmingham friend showed up and I departed to collect our Saturday complement of newspapers. On the way back, I met up with Meg and two (male) companions and then another married couple who know us well stopped by and we had a very pleasant chat as we had not seen each other for about a week or even longer (this seems quite a long time when you are used to bumping into people nearly every day) So we set off for lunch quite late – so late, in fact, that we did not really have time to cook a conventional lunch so we made do with a cheese-and-biscuits followed by ice cream type of lunch. 

After lunch and a bit of a rest, we suddenly realised that we were scheduled to FaceTime our oldest ‘Waitrose’ friends. We knew that we had a lot to chat about, not least because they wanted to know the results of the medical investigations that were performed on me on Thursday. We were able to give them some reassuring news  that whilst multiple non-life threatening conditions had been found, the endoscopists had found no evidence of any cancer which is always the fear at the back of one’s mind. so I live to fight another day – although with our friends on FaceTime and in the park I did joke that whilst they were sticking various instruments into various orifices, at least I meant to successfully fend off the stake through the heart with which I felt be threatened at any moment. So we would had a long and very informative chat with our friends that went on for about an hour and twenty five minutes. Then we broke off to have a cup of tea and biscuits before we got ready for going to church at 5.30.

When we got home, we had our normal Saturday evening tea of a really good Waitrose soup and then turned on the TV to see if we could get any of the latest Olympics news. Whilst idly channel-hopping, we found we were half an hour into one of the best films of Pride and Prejudice ever made – it was the 2005 version with Keira Knightley, Donald Sutherland, Judi Dench etc. I think this production was nominated for several Oscars. In face, I think one of the best (and wittiest) lines in the whole film comes from the lips of the paterfamilias, Mr. Bennet, who having seen three of his daughters get married off or at least affianced, said about his other two daughters: ‘If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, for heaven’s sake, send them in. I’m quite at my leisure!’

I suppose in last night’s blog that I should have commented upon the fact that this blog is now 500 days since its inception which is about a year and a third in total – it is amazing how quickly the time has flown. Today has been very much ‘the day after the day before’ as I have been recovering from yesterday’s medical investigations which, whilst not being particularly traumatic, were certainly invasive – so I am taking life in the slow (slower?) lane for the next day or so. Today was a particularly rainy day about which we were relieved – it is quite easy to feel smug when the rains come but you are basically ‘gardened up’  and you are quite happy to let the rain work its magic on recent plantings. We spent some chatting, as is customary, with our domestic help who visits us once per week. In truth, we do discuss cooking, diet and many lifestyle things with her and I suspect that we learn a lot more from her than she does from us. This morning we went down to Waitrose by car and treated ourselves to our customary coffee and what-have-you. We explained to the regular staff who know us well why they had not seen us for several days. Then I went round the store buying a few things that I knew I had omitted from our weekly order and a few extra things that I intend to try out and substitute for other parts of our weekly diet. In particular, I need to avoid anything with seeds in it so I am trying to get used to some new variety in our normal diet.

This afternoon, as it had been raining quite hard, I devoted myself to getting my accounts and bank statements up-to-date and reconciled – this is a task I should really do once a week but occasionally things get let slip and I have a few weeks to catch up on. The trick is to get a regular day each week, I suppose, so I suppose I had better develop some better housekeeping habits from now on. Next week, I intend to seriously get our house de-cluttering underway but, as always, this is evidently easier said than done. I think I am going to start on two fronts simultaneously – excess clothing upstairs on the one hand and excess books downstairs on the other. I somehow think the excess clothing will be an easier problem to solve – if it hasn’t been worn in the last two years, then it can probably go to one of the abundance of charity shops that have {eventually) reopened along the Bromsgrove High Street.

The COVID situation is interesting, to put it mildly. One the one hand, it looks as though the amount of ‘Test-and-Trace’ referrals is reducing. But as Sky News reports:

While the government dashboard shows reported cases fell by a third in the week to 24 July, new data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows the real trend was in the opposite direction. The ONS estimates that almost 952,000 people in the UK were infected during that week – a rise of more than 14% on the previous week. The ONS does random tests every week of large numbers of people, whether or not they have symptoms. This gives the most comprehensive picture of the UK situation because it includes asymptomatic infections

Now this is all very interesting. On the one hand, one part of the government machine is showing data that might appear to show the infection situation is improving. One the other hand, the government is in possession of data from the authoritative Office of National Statistics (ONS) which shows that the situation is much worse than would be good for public consumption. Incidentally, the ONS data is reinforced by the survey of water treatment facilities which also shows that the incidence of the virus is much worse than might be imagined. So it looks as though the 3rd wave of the virus is far from over. It is possible that infections could absolutely soar – at one stage, 100,000 new cases was mentioned. On the other hand, if people continue to wear masks, socially distance and take recommended precautions (including the now prominent messages on the importance of good ventilation) then the infection rate could be put into a ‘real’ reverse and eventually decline. There are many implicit agendas going on here. One is that the government is not too unhappy in high infection rates amongst the young to eventually achieve a level of herd immunity whilst the summer months are with us and before COVID cases coincide with the ‘normal’ winter flue patterns which, combined, could put the NHS under almost intolerable pressure.

Some interesting American political developments are in the offing. It looks as though Donald Trump’s tax returns must be handed to Congress according to the US Justice Department. This does remind one of Al Capone – wasn’t he eventually ‘done for’ by his evasion of tax returns? The parallels are striking.

Today was the day of my medical investigations and I promise you that I am not going to dwell on medical maters whatsoever. However, there is one little incident which ardent readers of this blogg might be able to identify as having been written about 18 months ago. My son kindly took me to Evesham hospital some twenty miles distant which is evidently being used as a unit for the conduct of clinical investigations well removed from other potentially virus-threatened major hospitals in the area. My little incident was as follows. When I got into the hospital system, I was ‘received’ by a male nurse whose role was to take my particulars, go through my medical history and other formalities. I happened to mention to him that last time I had had such a procedure in the hospital in Kidderminster, the analogous role was performed by a little Spanish nurse who announced her name has ‘Amparo‘. Upon learning she was Spanish, we conducted a conversation in Spanish (which was not very good on my part, first thing on a Sunday morning) This is how the conversation went:

Me: I know what I would rather by doing at 7.00 on a Sunday morning.

Amparo: Yes, me too.

Me: What you rather by be doing then?

Amparo: I would like to be tucked up in bed snuggling up to my husband!

Me: And so would I – No (desperately thinking in Spanish) – I mean snuggled up in bed not with your husband but with with someone else’s husband. No – I mean snuggled up in bed with someone else’s wife. No – I meant snuggled in bed with my own wife.

Amparo: Are you sure ? You seem to be getting awfully mixed up between my husband, someone else’s husband, someone else’s wife and your own wife!

Me: (weakly) Yes, I’m sure…

We had a giggle together and promptly went on to forget the whole incident (apart from the blog of course) Now my whole point about reporting the story now becomes plain. The nurse who was inducting me at Evesham hospital happened to be – the husband of Amparo! He shot off to get his phone and showed me a photo of Amparo so that I could confirm her identity. Then, to add to the surprise, he showed me a photo on his phone of their little boy that they had had about six weeks beforehand.  So in some ways, this was a most amazing coincidence – and yet in some ways not given that nursing personnel tend to marry each other. 

Tonight, as I was still in a recovery mode (my son having collected me and brought me home from Evesham) I decided to crash out and indulge ourself in a re-run of the film of Brideshead Revisited. Whether I want to be regaled with the cavortings of the British upper classes is another thing, but the film was shot at Castle Howard in Yorkshire and some of the cinematography and story lines are superb. Given the paucity of good films during the summer season, I was more than happy to indulge myself for once.

The COVID news today is quite interesting – and disturbing. For a start, the number of cases has risen for the second day in a row. This makes the recent 4-5 day dip in new infections seem to be only a temporary dip. More disturbing is the fact that monitoring of wastewater sites (sewers and the like) has shown marked increases in the virus in the last month. People shed fragments of coronavirus through daily activities like going to the toilet and blowing their nose, and these subsequently show up in the surveillance of wastewater at sites throughout England. This sounds like a very indirect method of measuring the virus but when you stop to think about it, it seems a remarkably comprehensive way of measuring the distribution of the virus. The BBC website reveals that: ‘Generally, the more people with COVID-19 in the community the more viral RNA (ribonucleic acid) will be shed into wastewater,” the report says. “Therefore, the concentration in wastewater is indicative of the prevalence of COVID-19 in the community..’ In the meanwhile, the fact that we are going to let in lots of travellers from other parts of Europe and the USA is raising some serious concerns amongst some sections of the scientific community who are more than worried that new variants might be imported. After all, we have been there before (as in the case of India)

This afternoon, my daughter-in-law took Meg along to Webb’s to divert her whilst I was having my hospital visit. Webb’s just down the road is a remarkable institution – although starting life as a garden centre at which it still excels it has expanded into all manners of household goods. it has several interesting sections such as a cookshop selling kitchen utensils and a range of homemade local products.It will also sell you a range of household pets (rabbits, fish) if you prefer. But one of the start attractions is a riverside walk with a delightful calm atmosphere and many interesting shrubs, trees and flowers which are now in full bloom.

Today I was carrying on with my isolation procedure and fortunately it was quite a fine day. This morning I had a telephone conversation with a financial adviser who had also advised my son and daughter-in-law recently. This turned out to be quite a brief telephone call and confirmed that the long term plans I had been putting in place were quite sound, so this turned out to be very reassuring telephone call. We have arranged another one for several months ahead to check that everything is still sound so we can now make progress with some degree of confidence. The rest of the morning was a fairly restful affair – we watched the dressage in the Olympic Games in which the British rider gained a bronze and were mightily impressed by the way in which the horses, in particular, performed their particular routines. This afternoon I needed to take the car down to our practice surgery in order to hand in a sample for analysis – fortunately, if you can get in and out of the car park within 15 minutes than you can do this without charge.  I had a little job to get done this afternoon which was to clean up a storage box which I keep down in Mog’s Den – the whole idea of this was the I could keep some essential tools dry and easily to hand so that I would not be constantly running in and out of the garage for any gardening requisites that I happen to need. I always seem to need a handy supply of green garden twine to hand, plus a little pair of scissors, so that plants can get tied up in plenty of time and before the wind and rain can batter them down. I had almost completed this little cleaning up job when the thunderstorm and hail rolled across the garden so, not for the first time, I had to do a rapid clearing up and retreat into the garage to finish off my little cleaning job. Needless to day, the minute I had finished, the storm clouds rolled away and we got a wonderful burst of late afternoon sunshine which 1s often the way. 

Halfway through the afternoon, I got a telephone call from the hospital where I was due to have some investigations on Friday afternoon – however, could I go in a day early and get into the hospital for tomorrow afternoon rather than Friday. I had to get do a quick check with the rest of the family to make sure that they could still take me and bring me back from these procedures so all being well that means one day less waiting. I suspect a certain amount of mis-communication has been taking place because the initial telephone call inviting me along to the procedure indicated Thursday, the official letter when it arrived said Friday and now we have another urgent call to reinstate the Thursday. To be fair, juggling appointments in these COVID days must be awkward with a combination of patient ‘no-shows’ and any other emergency events that throw the best laid plans awry. 

The political news today is that the government intends to lift quarantine restrictions from the EU and the USA if it can be demonstrated that they have had a double vaccination – to be effective from 2nd August. What is the great unknown is whether other countries will reciprocate in a similar way – at the moment, for example, if you want to go on holiday to Italy (which Meg and I do, in late September) then as things stand at the moment we would have to quarantine ourselves for five days out of a ten day holiday. But to be fully reciprocal, we would want the Italians to let us holiday without quarantine in the same way that Italians will be able to do when coming to England. The other major change is that the government is intending that as from 16th August, double vaccinated people who are ‘pinged’ by the Test-and=Trace app will not be under a legal obligation to self isolate or to undertake a COVID test unless they are exhibiting symptoms. This is all part of the gradual winding down of the COVID regulations but, of course, if we were to have a sudden upsurge in infection rates then all of this might have to be put into reverse very rapidly.

I have been thinking a little about the tremendous efforts that some of our Olympic athletes have made in order to compete in the games and, in particular, the ways in which training regimes might impinge upon the lives of other family members (e.g. conveying offspring to far-off swimming pools that might open early to accommodate a training session for would be Olympic athletes). Does one have to be self-centred to an extraordinary degree  (and be massively ‘selfish’) to fulfil one’s ambition? (The same thought applies to prominent academics who might have acquired their PhD through the dedication of other family members who sacrificed their own careers for the sake of another family member?)

Today has been a very strange day in lots of ways. I suppose you could say that it started off in a unique way as in a slightly wakeful patch in the wee small hours of the morning, I decided to come downstairs and turn the TV on in order to catch up with the latest news from the Olympics. No sooner had I turned the television on but I caught the closing stages (about the last 5 seconds) of the 100m men’s freestyle swimming in which Team GB got both gold and silver – this is the first time that this has happened since 1908 which is evidently 113 years ago. After the commentators had recovered their poise, the coverage switched to the women’s triathlon and this was equally exciting in its own way. Georgia Taylor-Brown has won silver for Team GB in the women’s triathlon, despite a flat tyre, caused by hitting a pothole, in the final lap of the bike race. She lost 20 seconds and dropped to fifth place although at that stage, the gold was within her grasp. She gradually clawed her way back through the runners in front of her and gradually overtook one of her best friends to eventually claim silver. So it was quite an eventful night – at that point, I took to my bed for the rest of the night.

Today I have been subject to self-isolation which I have to keep up for three whole days until I have my investigations next Friday afternoon. It is rather a strange experience to not even walk as far as the park which I have done every day for approximately the last 500 days. Fortunately, the day was the kind of day when you never knew whether it was going to rain or not. It was a little overcast and we had the slightest smattering of rain this morning but it did rain a bit more systematically – but not as heavily as we would have liked – later on this afternoon. This morning between 8.00 and 9.00 the power was cut off across our immediate neighbourhood. We had been given plenty of advance notice about this but the burglar alarm in my neighbour’s unoccupied house was squawking in a kind of alarm mode once the power was eventually restored. Our neighbour had let us have a front door key  together with her daughter’s telephone number and the code  to activate/deactivate the burglar alarm. I let myself into my neighbour’s house with a degree of trepidation and was relieved when the code deactivated the alarm so it was not screeching all day. I think these systems might turn themselves off after 20 minutes but I did not wish that any internal batteries got exhausted.

As it has been wall-to-wall Olympics for most of the day, this has helped to alleviate the strangeness of keeping myself to myself all day long. The pre-paid vouchers that I have for my daily supply of newspapers were taken down to the newspaper shop by my daughter-in-law and activated so we have enough reading matter for the day. Tuesday is the day which The Times devotes itself to medical issues and I read the results of one research finding to the effect that if you exercise regularly you run less risk of developing cancer – even if you have currently do have a cancer, then regular exercise can get to alleviate the symptoms. So this is another press cutting for the files.

The COVID-19 data for today is interesting in that UK records 23,511 new coronavirus cases and 131 more deaths. This means that the new cases is sharply down (for the seventh day in a row) but the death rate is sharply up and is the highest rate since mid-March. Government scientists are slightly puzzled by all of this but some tentative explanations are as follows. It could be that in the recent hot weather spell, people spent more time outside and this helped to reduce the amount of ‘free-floating’ virus in the air. Also, I have seen it argued that as Scotland got knocked out of the Euro finals quite early, then this, too, helped reduce the crowds following the match on TV’s in pubs and squares. In yesterday’s Times, I read with interest that ‘it is well known that schools are massive reservoirs of infection for the COVID virus and now that schools have closed for the summer vacation, this may help to avoid further infection‘ The bland statement that it is ‘well-known’  that schools are a reservoir of infection is certainly not one that would be admitted by the government. The government ‘line’ has always been that schools are safe places for the children within them – but the government have been deliberately vague, silent or contradictory on the fact that the adults who work in or near schools (teachers, teaching assistants, admin staff, some catering staff, anyone visiting the school, parents at school gates and so on) might have been massively at risk by insisting that the schools should re-open and the Tories seemed insistent upon this whatever the consequences (which subsequently, we may learn, has helped to fuel the infection rates)

Today was the day when our gardener was going to call on us at 9.00am and, between us, we were going to repair the archway trellis, replete with a heavy honeysuckle, that had become both overgrown and also unstable as each of the supports had rotted at the point where it made contact with the soil. This proved to be a much more demanding – and heavy – job that either of us had anticipated. The first thing that had to be done was to give the honeysuckle a radical pruning and this took about an hour and was the easy part. Then we decided to dig (or rather dig out) four new fence post holes. Rather than using a thin narrow spade which is typically used in operations of this type, we used a specialised tool which I already happened to possess. This was an augur which is like a giant corkscrew and operates in a very similar fashion. If you are working on virgin, un-stony ground then this tool will work exceptionally well. Its diameter is just slightly larger than that of he average fence post and, I general, you get a lovely clean hole in which the new post is located and which requires the minimum of specialised fencing post concrete (‘postcrete’). But this is the point where we ran into problems. Evidently the original fence erectors had used concrete and about 5-6″ down we met this layer of concrete. In order to circumvent this  we needed to deploy a large, heavy metal 2-metre tall implement (it might be called a wrecking bar but I cannot be sure.) This tool has a wedge shape on end and a point on the other and it requires a certain degree of concentrated thumping with this to make an impression on the concrete. We eventually broke through with a combination of thumping and hammering with a sledge hammer and of course we needed to do this four times over. You would have thought that all we had to do was to pop the structure into its seated holes but nothing in life is this straightforward. We soon discovered that the old and thick honeysuckle branches  acted in much the same ways as metal ties on a bridge – at one point we had the ‘support’ hanging in the air over the support holes with the thick branches holding everything up. So we then had to identify which branch was providing the most impediment and started on a policy of snipping these right around the structure. Eventually, we got the structure more-or-less in place and more-or-less  stable before we started to make the structure a bit more stable by the simple expedient of getting some old Victorian style building bricks, bashing them into several large pieces and then using the irregular pieces as wedges around each post. Then we started to pour the fence post concrete around each post and finished off by tamping down with some of the decorative stone which was already in place. So what with the screwing, the thumping and the heaving around, I had an intensely physical morning which I did not particularly want. Still, we got the job done and as it been postponed on at least 2-3 previous occasions we were mightily pleased to get it done at last. We just want the concrete to stabilise and harden now – the gardener filled his wheelbarrow with water and sloshed around the while structure just before the tidying up part. 

This afternoon, I was scheduled to go off to Worcester Royal Infirmary to have a COVID-19 test of the PCR type (before my investigations on Friday) I got there in plenty of time and was actually half an hour early but there were only about a couple of cars in front of me so it did not seem to trouble the staff. The entire swabbing procedure takes place inside your own car and went more or less to plan. I must admit then when the nurse was taking the throat swab I gagged several times as it touched the vagus nerve (which makes to retch if you touch it) but one way or another she got her sample. Then it was a swab up each nostril and although this was unpleasant, it was not massively so and therefore I could be on my way home very quickly – I actually got home before the swab procedure was theoretically to have taken place. 

I spent the afternoon by a certain degree of quite pleasant ‘pottering’ in the garden. I managed to rescue and support a bit of a red campion that I had in an obscure corner of the garden. But the principal thing that I did was to resurrect one of those plastic contraptions designed to grow a multiplicity of herbs and actually planted acorns in it (14 in total) I think these might be my own acorns and I do not recall having gathered them but they have been in a clear glass jar in the garage waiting for a suitable moment at which to be planted, We shall see!