Today was a different Sunday, as it turned out. I went and collected our newspapers and then, in place of the Andrew Marr show, I indulged myself in watching a bit of Olympics action. This was the concluding stages of the Women’s Road Bicycle Race and it turned out to be very exciting as a young, unknown Austrian rider broke away from the pack (45 kilometres out?) and eventually secured her gold medal as she built up an assailable lead.  We had a lunch date in Oxford with two of our oldest friends so we set off in plenty of time, got parked in a reasonably secure location and then found our way to the restaurant. We had allowed ourselves plenty of ‘getting lost and parking time’ but still arrived at the restaurant a good half an hour early so we had a leisurely cup of coffee whilst we waited for our friends who turned up absolutely on time. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about so we had a good enjoyable chat. The restaurant was a Thai restaurant which our friends had used before and we enjoyed our food but there wasn’t very much of it. So we decided after lunch to have a coffee and a pastry in a different venue –  that part of Oxford is stuffed full of interesting little cafes so it was no problem to find somewhere and carry on chatting. As has become customary between us, we exchanged some little gifts of home made produce – our friends gave us some of their own home-made honey which is always absolutely excellent and in turn we exchanged some of our damson gin which I suggested they do not drink as such but try as a flavouring in ice-cream or yogurt. I am told by some of the recipients of our damson gin that using it as a flavouring gives excellent results but that is something that we ourselves must try. And so it became time for us to part and we made good progress getting back to Bromsgrove in what seemed a very space of time (probably just over an hour)

When we got home, we had received a message from our gardener who we have about once every three weeks to see if he could come along to help to fix our ‘honeysuckle’ arch. Basically, this is a timber construction where the support posts have rotted at ground level. I am going to act as our gardener’s ‘gofer’ or at least a second pair of hands. The plan is to lay the honeysuckle flat on the ground,  chop away the rotten parts of the support posts and then relocate them into the ground making the while structure lower than before. Then we will try to relocate the honeysuckle over the re-sited posts and the job will be done. All of this sounds so easy to do in theory but I wonder how it will work out in practice, I have some specialist post-setting concrete (purchased earlier) so I hope this has not degraded over time as I have stored it under the eaves of the house which is quite, but not absolutely dry.  This job has got to get completed by the end of the morning as tomorrow afternoon I need to drive to the Worcester Royal  Infirmary to have a COVID test before the investigations on me start on Friday. 

In the early evening, the whole family (myself, Meg and our son and daughter-in-law) spent some time in the quiet of the evening talking about some of our knowledge of, and reminiscences, of the songs of the 1960’s. But a little bit of background is in order. Meg and I met at Manchester University in the mid 1960’s. The Faculty of Technology of the University (later to become its own University – UMIST) had its own Student Union facilities which was the whole of one floor (‘J’ floor) of a large Victorian building. There they had a folk singing evening every Sunday singing songs by ‘The Seekers‘, ‘Peter Paul and Mary‘ and singers of a similar ilk. Meg and I used to really enjoy these evenings and occasionally we were treated to songs sung by Anna Ford, the president of the Owens Student Union who later went on to have a distinguished career as an ITN newscaster. To supplement this picture, I then worked a cocktail barman in the only nightclub in Manchester called ‘Tiffany’s‘ They had a resident band with an unbelievably 1950’s name (‘Ross Mitchell and Les Nocturnes‘) However, they had two incredibly good female vocalists  – Eve Graham (brunette) and Lynn Paul (blonde) who later became part of the ‘New Seekers‘ This group recorded the world famous ‘I’d like to teach the World to Sing’ and eventually represented the UK  in 1972 in the Eurovision Song Context coming in at second! So that is the connection (in fact the only connection) that Meg and I have with the world of folk/popular singing – but that is why we know and remember some of these songs. I must confess to a particular liking for ‘Foggy Dew’ which is a traditional English song song first recorded in1959 but best known for the version by Roger Whitaker.

The weather is evidently on the turn and when we woke up this morning, there was quite a breath of fresh air when we popped our noses out of the back door. There were occasional smatterings of rain throughout the early morning but not the prolonged and sustained downpour for which we had all been hoping. So we decided to make our journey down into town by car just in case the heavens opened – but as it happened, they did not. Having collected our newspapers, we then bumped into our University of Birmingham friend so we all dived into Waitrose to have our mid-morning coffee. As it happened, we had quite a lot to catch up on with various happenings throughout the week so we spent quite some time explaining the various things we have been up to in the last week. We explained that next week is going to be a little fraught for us because I have to Worcester for a COVID-19 test, then three days of isolation before I have some investigations performed on me next Friday. So I think the week ahead may be a little ‘chewy’ bit just has to be managed one day at a time.

In the afternoon, I spent a certain amount of time spreadsheeting some of our finances so that we could make some plans for the post COVID era. It looks as though our planned trip to Rome in late September is now looking more ‘on’ than ‘off’ and we have also an offer from the tour organiser to forgo one day’s vacation but to fly from Birmingham rather than Bristol. We will have to see, of course, whether Italy is still enforcing five days of quarantine to travellers from Britain but there is about seven weeks to go before the flight is scheduled to depart. The skies were still threatening a little this afternoon but I was determined to try to get the lawns cut before we left for church at 5.30 this afternoon. I was fortunate because although time was tight, I still managed to them cut in time. Then it was our customary attendance at church on a Saturday evening, Up  until now, we have been having to book in for the service every week but now we have booked in the ‘last’ time as all of the data for this week  will form the template for the weeks to come so the attendance record will ‘roll on’ week by week. Outside church, we managed to have a brief chat about the week ahead and they were not to be surprised if they didn’t see us as we have to self-isolate from Tuesday to Thursday. 

It is being reported tonight that UK airports have been the busiest they have been since the start of the pandemic but the system of COVID-19 testing ( or showing that you have been tested) is taking a wait of at least two hours. What is not clear is whether people are actually missing their flights because of these enforced delays or whether the airlines themselves are having to reschedule their flights. I suppose that it was fairly predictable that having been subject to pandemic restrictions for the best part of 500 days, people are desperate to get away particularly as the schools have just broken up.  From the brief snatches of videotape I have seen, it looks as though airports might become a magnificent venue for the spread of the virus. Some members of the SAGE committee are showing their exasperation with the present government strategy. One of them broke ranks yesterday and argued strongly that the government attempting to generate herd immunity by letting the virus rip through younger sections of the population (20-29 year olds) by giving free reign to the nighttime economy of pubs and nightclubs was immoral. On the other hand, there is a glimmer of hope that the infection rate may have peaked and may just about be starting to fall consistently. The amazing thing is that the government is starting to lose its popularity but still seems to be ahead of the Labour party in the opinion polls.

Tomorrow should be an interesting day for us as we are meeting some old friends for a lunch date in Oxford (we will ‘sat-nav’ the restaurant to find it OK) I only hope that there are not devastating storms and floods because Hampshire, where we used to live, seems to have received a real battering since the hot weather broke down and the almost inevitable flooding now occurs. I must say the I am really looking forward to a period of prolonged rainfall – but I say this from the rather smug position of having all of my lawns cut, all my plants planted and the garden in generally good order and receptive to being trained upon! 

What a very strange day today has been! We spent some time chatting animatedly with our domestic help who had given us a miss last week as she was busy with family matters and had to give us a miss. Anyway, as soon as we could, we went off to town and the weather is just starting to moderate itself from a very hot and sticky heat to something a degree or so less but with breezes that are almost cooling. We knew that we had to get home and have a fairly rapid lunch because it was absolutely vital that I get down into the local branch of HSBC which I did by about 1.20. As we shall see, the timing is quite important here because I explained to one of the two staff on duty in the branch of the bank that I needed to get in touch with the HSBC Safeguarding team. I explained that both myself and the treasurer of our residents association had hung on the phone for about 40 minutes without making any contact and could they help. The local staff were fairly sympathetic and let me have access to a desk and a phone to telephone their HQ. All in all, I waited for about 25 minutes and then made contact with the Safeguarding team – this appears to be a big drive against money laundering, fraud, scams and other internet-based ills. I managed to convince the Safeguarding team of my bona fides but then needed to be put onto their  internet banking team as myself and the treasurer had not used (or forgotten) our log-in details. This time, I was put on hold for about 40 minutes although, in theory, it was only a transfer from one department within HSBC to another. Eventually, though, I got through a real live person but again the staff member had to be called who had then to give of all of her codes to establish her identity as well as mine. The upshot of all of this was that I finished off with our little business account verified, my user-name communicated to us (as I set it up 12 years ago and not used it, I had forgotten it) and when I returned home, I would be sent a password through my email. Once I get this part done at home (and I haven’t tried it yet), I then need to get onto my account details and fill in an on-line questionnaire which, once completed, I have to print off on my own printer. Then I have to take this completed document back to the branch where they have to scan it using their own scanners and their own secure lines for transmission to their HQ. So we will have to see how all of this works out. All in all, I was in the branch office for 1½  hours and the staff joked with me that they would provide me with a bed if I needed one. I then had to race to my own bank to get some money out of the ATM (and this worked as it should have done). Finally, I had to go and get my Pilates session paid for by card – I had tried to set up an online payment system but as the bare sort code details and account number generated a Germanic sounding back name and my own bank informed me that the payee details were not recognised by this system, I decided that this might prove foolhardy to set up with ‘iffy’ details. Although I had paid for a couple of hours parking, I only had about two minutes of legitimate parking time so I had to sprint (well, walk briskly) to ensure I did not end up with a parking fine.

After I had had a smidgeon of a much delayed lunch (ice-cream based as usual) I popped round to see my next door neighbour with whom I had set up a little arrangement to have a chat over some issues. There are some matters of mutual concern to our two adjoining properties so we had a very useful discussion (lubricated by a wonderful bottle of cooled ‘Newcastle Brown‘ I must say) 

Earlier on today, I just caught snatches of some of the opening ceremony from the Tokyo Olympic Games. My own personal feelings are that it is rather ridiculous to have the Olympic Games held with no audiences, a majority of the host community opposed to it and the possibility of the most massive of ‘super-spreader’ events. From the bit that I saw which was the cauldron lighting ceremony lit by a young Japanese athlete. This seemed incredibly tastefully done and I must say I was impressed by the simplicity and the elegance of it all. Whether my views of the Olympic Games will change over the next week or so it is hard to say – the whole could end in disaster if more than a small number of athletes actually do get infected with COVID-19.

Every so often I get up early and whilst the temperature is comparatively cool, I review my finances, including savings plans and saving ‘pots’. So I spent an hour or so this morning getting things in order to my satisfaction. Then it was breakfast, a shower, (and ditto for Meg) and then we walked down to the park together. Instead of throwing away yesterday’s Guardian, I have started to take it with me so that having parked Meg on one of our favourite benches and partaken of our coffee she can read it. Then  I pop off and get today’s newspapers. Upon my return it was a fairly leisurely stroll home and lunch – except it was so hot we just made one of our favourite mélange of tinned fruit (apricots), yogurt, ice cream and a drizzle of honey. We felt that we would be better to leave our main cooked meal until this evening, which indeed we did.

This afternoon, my much delayed consignments of extra plants arrived from the online company. I have purchased a Buddleia which I know is almost a weed-like plant (think of railway sidings) but this particular one is somewhat unusual in that the horticulturalists maintain that they have grafted three colours of Buddleia onto a common rootstock. I suppose these are white, pink and purple so we will have to see if it fulfils its promise.I made a little wigwam of canes to support it as one or two of the fronds had suffered a bit in transit but overall, it looked in pretty good condition. Then I had ordered two more little bulbs that were almost thrown in as an afterthought and were being sold off for £1.00 each. One of these was an miniature orange canna lily which, I must admit, I have never actually seen before. The other was an orange peony and, as before, I have never actually seen an orange peony before either. Having got these three plants planted, I had three more little tasks to perform. One was to put some sulphate of iron around the roots of my recently planted hydrangea. In theory, this ought to turn the whole plant into a really vivid shade of blue (such as you often see by the seaside) Whether this works or not, only time will tell. The second little job was to adapt one of my staves such that I could add an additional support to one of the steps leading down into Mog’s Den which appeared to be slipping downhill a little. I have done this sort of task lots of time before and everything worked OK.  The final little task was to transplant another bit of mint from a neglected part of the garden to my newly established mint bed.  I then have just one more little seed sowing job in front of me. Whilst I was in Poundland the other day, I bought to my amazement (for £1.00) a packet contains six different type of spicy and aromatic herms i.e. Serrano Chilli, Coriander, Japanese Greens, Chilli Cayenne, Cinnamon Basil and finally Pak Choi (Chinese cabbage).I honestly cannot see many of these seeds germinating but if I get half a dozen plants from each variety of seed, the venture will have been well worth while.

There are two bits of COVID-19 news this evening. The first is that more than 600,000 people have been ‘pinged’ by the Test and Trace app in the last week and they therefore have to stay at home and self-isolate. This is creating mayhem in the economy with supermarkets being quite badly hit as delivery drivers are not available. The government is so worried about this and tonight they have published a list of sixteen sectors where fully vaccinated workers do not need to quarantine provided they also take a daily test which proves negative – and. these exemptions will only run to the 16th August in any case. Many different parts of the economy are being adversely affected  tonight – but Test and Trace is only just doing its job and do we want to get on top of this pandemic or not? The second major areas concern is that rates of infection are now very high amongst the (unvaccinated) 20-29 year olds and some vaccination points are returning vaccine to their headquarters perhaps destined for ultimate destruction because not enough are. coming forward. to be vaccinated.

A Labour MP (Dawn Butler) has taken  Boris Johnson to task for misleading the country. As she  says:   

I am disappointed that the prime minister has not come to the House to correct the record and to correct the fact that he has lied to this House and the country over and over again.

The deputy Commons speaker was asked repeatedly to withdraw her comments but she refused. She then had to withdraw for the rest of the day (actually only an hour as the Commons is going into recess for the summer) but Dawn Butler is unrepentant arguing that:

I have been thrown out of Parliament for saying what we all know: Boris Johnson has lied to the House of Commons and the country over and over again.

Under the rules of Parliamentary etiquette, one MP is not allowed to call another a liar so one must either withdraw the offending remark (even if true?) or be suspended from the House of Commons

Today we were determined to keep on where we left off last night so we carried on with a spate of tidying up and and de-cluttering of the house. The only trouble is that in my zeal I have ‘put’ my newly acquired Philips razor in such a safe place that I cannot now found it so I am having to fall back on a trusty old reliable which is past its best but at least it works. Then our plan was to walk down to Waitrose, treat ourselves to a coffee, pick up our newspapers and have a gentle stroll back. However the ‘best laid plans of mice and men‘ as the Scottish poet Robbie Burns would have said – by chance we bumped into two best friends who live down the hill and they had just come back from giving their grand-daughter a walk in her buggy. As we had a lot of news to catch up on, we all repaired to their delightful back garden for an impromptu ‘chin wag’. Actually, we had a lot of news to impart of one sort or another, including some medical investigations that I am going to have performed on me in about eight days time so I will issue a communiqué on that later on. We must have spent the best part of an hour and a half chatting about this and that and drinking some lovely ice-cold drinks. In this very hot weather, we are all finding that we are taking every excuse to keep ourselves well hydrated – and even the plants in the pots need a drink of water some 2-3 times a day.

After we had walked home very much in the heat of the day, we had a fairly prompt lunch as I knew that I needed to get into town to visit one of the local banks before about 3.30 in the afternoon (when branches tend to shut) Our little group of houses are formed into a Resident’s Association and we manage our own financial affairs (which is just principally maintaining the communal Klargester BioDisc system and the surrounding roadways). We have a business account with a local bank (HSBC actually) and have had reasonably good service from them for the last ten years. But now under the latest banking regulations, we have to prove who we say we are and this is proving problematic. Our treasurer has been hanging on the phone for 40 minutes with the message ‘All our operatives are busy at the moment but your call is important to us..‘etc. So having drawn a blank, he passed the torch over to me and I too had a 40 minute wait without success. We decided that I would call in at the branch to see if I could get anyone to sort us out – difficult as the local branch does not handle business accounts any more but we might be able to use their private lines to get through to the unit that wishes to check our credentials. When I got into the bank I was confronted with a row of self-service machines but absolutely no staff anywhere in evidence. But then I saw a notice to say that owing to staff shortages they would not have anyone available after 2.30 in the afternoon and please come back at 9.00 tomorrow. So that was an absolutely wasted journey but I took the opportunity to pick up our newspapers and buy some ‘good’ ice-cream from Waitrose. I say ‘good’ ice-cream because all of the shelves had been stripped bare of conventional ice-cream leaving only the specialist ice-creams to be bought.

After I got home and put my purchases away and then looked around for my mobile phone which I could not find anywhere. Trying desperately not to panic, a thorough search (including the car) did not reveal a positive result. In desperation, I telephoned Waitrose to see if my phone had been left there and handed in but this drew a blank. I thought of telephoning my own number only to receive a ringing tone (nowhere inside the house) and a message that the number was not available. At this stage, my son intervened – his solution was to stand right outside my car and call my mobile. With great delight I can say that we both heard it ring – my phone had evidently slipped out of my pocket and fallen down the gap between the two front seats where even the bright red of the case barely  revealed its existence. The feelings of despair if you have ever lost your mobile phone are hard to exaggerate. It is not just the voice calls that one receives (very few in my case) but the text messaging is vital from all kinds of agencies, particularly the medical and health related ones who use it to give appointment details. Also, to access many bank and savings accounts these days, the mobile is used to send an OTP (OneTime Password) to access a particular account so your mobile suddenly has become completely indispensable.

The heatwave continues – can one have too much of a good thing? In about 2-3 days time, the heatwave may break down in a series of thunderstorms and I think we can’t wait until this happens. We got some of our daily jobs done and then decided to take the car into town and treat ourselves to a coffee and a pastry in Waitrose. I have been looking at the display of flowers and plants stocked outside the store and eventually, I was tempted by a fuchsia which advertised itself as a hardy variety and goes by the magnificent name of Alice Hoffman. Looking at prices on the web, I think that the Waitrose price of £6.50 is quite reasonable so I have given this pride of place immediately outside our back door. We do have a large earthenware pot outside but the sunflower we had planted in there failed miserably and so I was delighted to give it a good home. I made sure that it had a good soil preparation of ‘Blood, Fish and Bone‘ (my fertiliser of choice, being completely organic) Now that Mog’s Den is all ‘gardened up’, I am now at the stage where I can do little things to tidy up the overall. Today, I found an innovative way to hang a series of miniature garden tools which I use constantly down in the den. These miniature tools were sold in the hardware section of Aldi sone years ago and I find them to be excellent. They are designed to be children’s versions of adult tools so they are generally about one third size of these and I would estimate one tenth of the weight their adult-counterpart. Why I like them so much is that as lightweight and miniature tools, they can be operated one-handed. Anyway, I have a small triangular spade, rake, lawn rake, brush and shovel and I have got them either hanging off garden fence and cunningly hidden in my little ‘wood store’ of staves and useful timber so that it is almost impossible to discern they they are there- this makes them accessible and also concealed so that the whole site appears to be much less cluttered. After we returned home after our Waitrose repast, it was already quite late so we did not allow ourselves a walk in the park so we came straight home. As it was so very hot inside the house, our appetites were well and truly depressed and we made do with a hearty bowl of soup followed by a choc-ice (Waitrose produce them in packs of eight and they are excellent)

After the completion of the external work on Mog’s Den, I now have another great project in life which might take months to achieve. That is, I want to do a radical de-cluttering and throwing away of the surplus ‘stuff’ accumulated over the years. When I recall the last four houses in which I have lived (including this one) then the following pattern emerges – 14 years, 10 years, 11 years, 13 years.  You can see that there is an evident pattern here in that I have moved house on average once every 12 years and, of course, when you move, you throw away an awful lot of stuff you have accumulated over the years and never actually used. When we moved from Bromsgrove to Hampshire, I think we filled three skip fulls and I can honestly say that I have never missed anything that got thrown away. The obvious place to start is on my collection of academic books and doing a quick count of one shelf followed by a multiply, I suspect that I have over 500 books accumulated over the course of a teaching career. I did make some enquiries as to whether I could find a ‘good home’ for some of these rather than consigning them to landfill and I did find one organisation that would have taken them all – but only after I had catalogued them and given full bibliographical details on each one. As this would take at least 40 hours of continuous work, I think you can see why I never got round to it. Apart from books, though, I am trying to reduce clutter wherever I find it (which is all over) but I probably need to spend at least one hour a day for months to get to where I want to be.

In the late afternoon, I engaged in a little horticultural experiment. I have discovered in my collection of vegetable seeds some dwarf beans and some sugar snap peas. These are beyond the stated date on the back of the manufacturer’s packet so I have filled a couple of yogurt pots with five seeds in each. With a bit of TLC and some regular watering and observation, I may strike lucky. Certainly, the beet seeds I sowed about eight days ago are now showing through, so I am just waiting for them to grow large enough to thin out to about one per inch.

Today I needed to make an early start because I needed to be at our local Health Centre for (another) routine check – eyes this time. That seems to have gone OK apart from the fact that drops are put in your eyes that expands the pupils which means that driving is not an option. I then took the opportunity to pop into Asda to collect a few things that only Asda sells, then went down the High Street In Bromsgrove to pick up some cosmetics products, called in at the newsagents to collect the daily ration of newspapers and finally popped into Waitrose to pick up some wine, beer and ‘party food’. When we saw our immediate next door neighbours the other day, we invited them round to share either a beer or a cup of tea with us in the garden at 3.00pm this afternoon. It was a question of seizing the moment, actually, because the fine weather will not go on for ever and our neighbour has a part-time employment during the week and is seeing his own family at the weekends. So it was rather a question of ‘now or never’- any way our neighbours came around and we had a really pleasant couple of hours discussing neighbourly type things such as the improvements we have made to our various gardens and our little projects for the future. As our parasol shade had been nibbled to bits by the local, hungry mice whilst stored in the garage, we had to relocate our garden table and chairs into the shade provided by the leas of the house. But we had a wonderful time, particularly as I treated our neighbours to a zero alcohol beer provided by Waitrose where the brewers have performed a magnificent job in keeping practically all of the flavour of a conventional beer whilst removing all of the alcohol. After our neighbours had left, I spent a certain amount of time in the late afternoon creating drainage holes in the last of the (plastic) oak-barrel shaped planters I had acquired recently. Making drainage holes is actually s little complicated as first I make a small pilot hole with a bradawl, then widen it with a small hand-drill, then widen it a bit further using a large heavy duty screwdriver and finally finish off by using a pair of small utilitarian scissors in which I keep the blades shut but a circular motion which actually widen my drainage holes to the desired aperture size.

Considering that this is the first day of ‘Freedom’ when all (or nearly all) of the pandemic restrictions have been removed, the images and messages have been as mixed as they come. One could expect that the TV crews would be present at night clubs where at 1 minute past midnight, everyone could in theory enjoy themselves and there were lots of shots of throngs of teenagers singing, dancing (and no doubt exhaling billions pf particles of virus) Meanwhile, the night club staff themselves were  all masked up! I heard some ‘vox pop’ from the city of Leicester where the virus has struck particularly hard and no doubt to give a sense of balance, we had one interview with a boutique owner who had thrown away her mask and hoped it would never return (‘because it made you look as though you were ill’) and another with a local barber who was going to wear a mask himself and was going to insist on it for all of his customers (because he was frightened of the potential of the virus to bounce back) The confusing messaging continues apace.Whilst nightclub owners might have been filled with joy on Day 1 of their ‘liberation’ their joy would have been short-lived as the government announced that from the end of September all entrants to nightclubs and other crowded spaces would have to show evidence of having been vaccinated twice. What are the manpower implications of policing all of this, I ask myself? Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has announced (from Chequeurs, where he is self-isolating) that all critical care workers will not to have self isolate after being ‘pinged’ try the Test and Trace App but presumably they will have to give themselves a ‘Lateral Flow’ test every day. The Americans are advising their citizens that none should consider visiting the UK as the rate of infections is now so high.It looks as though the UK infection rate is one of the highest in the world and is mainly amongst the young, unvaccinated portion of the population. The infection rates are somewhat alarming – approx 45,000-50,000 per day (which is 10x. the USA incidence) and this rate may rise to as much as 100,000 now the end of lockdown has occurred. The one saving grace is that the rate of new infections is rising extremely rapidly, the rate of admission to hospitals whllst increasing rapidly, are at a lower rate than when the pandemic was raging.

The hot weather continues today and we knew from the start that we were going to be in for a scorcher – or as the famous comedian Harry Enfield used to say when presenting a weather forecast from a generally hot country, it was a case of ‘Scorchio’ all over the place. I walked down to our  newsagents early on as I normally do on a Sunday but sometimes the newsagent is shut for 5-10 minutes and so it was this morning, Whilst waiting outside, I noticed that the newsagents had to post various messages warning schoolboys from the local school against the pilfering that had evidently taken place when a crowd of them had entered the shop. This sort of adolescent behaviour is not unknown in sweet shops particularly of the smaller variety with Asian proprietors (who are seen as fair game?) I suspect that what happens is a group of schoolboys enter the shop and whilst one is making a legitimate purchase and the shopowners attention is diverted then other members of the crowd help themselves. So now once the headmaster of the school and the police had been informed, it was just a case of reminding any would be miscreants that their faces might be recorded on CCTV. I spent a few minutes with the Asian proprietor, commiserating with him over his troubles and hoped that he had nipped the problems in the bud. Then it was a walk home and a viewing of the Andrew Marr show (who should have had Sajiv Javid as a guest but we had a substitute as the Health Minister himself is having to self isolate for at least 10 days) After this, we were prepared to walk down to the park, which we did complete with suitable head gear as the temperature must have been approaching the 30° mark by now. In the park, we were delighted to meet with our University of Birmingham friend and another mutual regular and we spent some time chewing over the immediate political situation and how the pandemic response was likely to develop. Then we were joined by another of our regular park-walking couples and we exchanged views over the best ( and the worst) of low alcohol and other forms of beer about which we are rather fantasising in the heat.  Then it was homeward bound and a case of rescuing the Sunday roast from the slow cooker and preparing the meal for our Sunday lunch -although the hot weather certainly plays its part in depressing your appetite.

After lunch, it was a question of getting some plants in position in Mog’s Den now that the construction work has been done. The first thing I wanted to plant was my ‘pussy willow’ but in its preferred location I had to abandon my plans as the roots from a neighbouring silver birch (which we planted about a decade ago) ran transversely across my preferred spot. So I put in a Hydrangea which I bought from Asda a few days ago but I intend to give this one some special treatments (which I happen to have in stock) to turn it bright blue – as they often are at the seaside. One of the special treatments is to add ‘Sulphate of Iron’ (of which I just happen to have a supply in stock) but I also think that Epsom salts and a few rusty nails might be called for, I had better consult the web to see if I can find a few gardener’s tricks to help me in this venture. Then I went ahead and planted my pussy willow in one of the tubs I had bought earlier (and ensured that it had drain holes) and I am hopeful that if all goes well, I should have a showy display of catkins at the end of next winter and in the early spring. Finally, I split the Penstemmon that I have in another part of the garden and I trust that this will grow and multiply and provide a perennial splash of colour. So basically, I had got the planting done that I needed to do and all that remained was to give several good waterings (which I did immediately, of course) and several other times in the course of a very hot evening. 

In the early evening, the rooms inside the house were so unbreakably hot (timber framed houses like ours are famed for preserving heat) that the whole family retreated to the outside to savour some of the cooler air of the evening. We regaled ourselves with some stories from the joint family holidays we have held together in various regions of Spain – for one reason or another, these have not always worked out well. For example, we spent one family holiday in Barcelona but our son had an incredibly bad episode with his back and spent most the holiday on the bedroom floor. Our daughter-in-law helped me to identify one of the plants which is growing particularly well in Mog’s Den but which we can’t identify. The phone app identified it as ‘Chinese privet’ but we think it may well be a Forsythia. A close examination of the leaves (and its probable parent) tomorrow might help to identify it.

The hot weather continues – today has clocked in at 29°-30° which is in the mid 80’s F. Knowing that the weather was going to  very hot today, I reversed my normal  routines and decided to garden in the morning and collect my newspapers afterwards. Today was the last day in which I was going to do anything approaching ‘heavy’ construction work. But the first job I had to do was to get some willow edging by the side of my curving path. I found the easiest way to accomplish this was to make a narrow and deep slit with a long bladed spade. I then inserted the willow edgings and hammered them in using a block of wood. But what started out straight finished off being a little bit wavy but I did not have the heart to pull them out and start all over again. Then I started on my major task which involved removing about 2″ of soil from a section about two yards long by one yard wide. This having been, I then deployed my last remnants of builders sand (that is one fewer sack left hanging around), seated the three flags I had managed to rescue from other parts of the garden and did some final bits of levelling up. I then filled the interstitial spaces with some blue slate clippings recently  purchased from Asda. Actually, this was quite a fine one with somewhat smaller pieces and I must say the smaller pieces made the finishing job easier as well as being aesthetically more pleasing. So overall, I was quite pleased with my morning work although you can always perceive the imperfections. The rest of the family who were busy enjoying their elevenses even descended down the tortuous series of steps and cast a judgement on the overall finished product.  From now on, it should be just a pleasant job to put my planters into position, fill them with a mixture of topsoil and compost and populate them. I am going to put the recently arrived pussy willow in a particular corner plot and tomorrow plant my hydrangea (recently purchased) in one and plant some ‘Penstemmon‘ (split from a large mother plant) in the other. 

I walked down the park on my own, hugging the shaded areas (Meg gave our walk a miss not feeling too well this morning) There I encountered our University if Birmingham friend and another of our park regulars – we had a fairly long and quite a deep discussion about how we had overcome particular problems in the course of our lives. One thing is sure and that is we are going to regard ‘Freedom Day’ next Monday with a kind of fascinated horror. None of us feel in the slightest bit ‘liberated’ and in practice the rate of infection is now 54,674 which is a 5.4% increase over the day before.  The WHO is regarding what is going in the UK as a terrible experiment as basically we are trying to achieve herd immunity by allowing  the virus to let rip amongst the younger, not yet vaccinated part of the population. Tonight, we learn that the Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, has tested positive for the virus even though he had already received both is vaccine jabs. He has reported is symptoms as ‘mild’ but the interesting question is to work how many other people, including the PM, were in his near vicinity within the last few days.  Another unintended and unanticipated consequence of letting the virus ‘rip’  is that the ‘Test and Trace‘ app is now ‘pinging’ more and more people requesting that they self isolate. This is having major effects of the staffing of some of our utilities – for example, London’s Metropolitan line has been suspended and East Yorkshire bus services have been cancelled and some private sector employers are reported to have major difficulties with staff shortages. There has been talk of making the app a little less response by tweaking the software but so far, these calls have been resisted.

I think that tomorrow’s Sunday newspapers are going to provide a fascinating read. Boris Johnson, the great libertarian and populist, is now in a position where the majority of people think that progressing with the lockdown will be unsafe, two thirds of us will still carry on wearing face mask and the infection rate is soaring. We now have a situation where much of the UK population is doing what it can to protect itself without feeling ‘liberated’ and whilst the right wing of the Tory Party may appear to show some delight, did they anticipate the way in which the ‘Test and Trace‘ app will create so many problems for employers? The question is whether the Sunday Times  is still going to support the government or whether they will throw their weight behind some reformulation of policy (otherwise knows as a ‘U’ turn)

Another day dawns but the news from the continent appears to be terrible with, as I blog, over 120 dead and 1,300 people missing across Germany and Belgium. The fine weather which we are having is due to a high pressure system over the British Isles – but this so called ‘blocking high’ makes low pressure systems bounce of it and hence there has been a huge low pressure system locked over Germany and Belgium which has resulted in huge floods. Although the local population are used to flooding periodically, the suddenness and ferocity of the rainstorms has taken everybody by surprise. Although one should not jump automatically to conclusions, this extreme weather pattern allied with what is happening in Canada, the USA, Japan does lead one to conclude that climate change is ultimately responsible. Whilst the loss of  life is terrible beyond all measure, this might be a ‘wake up’ call for Europe as a whole so suddenly we may see massive political pressure for changes at a societal level.

We were a bit slow getting going this morning, for reasons a bit difficult to explain. If Meg and I wake up between 5.30 and 6.00 we pop downstairs and make a cup of tea and in no time at all, we have slept for another two hours and suddenly we are running late. We walked down into the park this morning but one could sense the weather was getting hot, hot, hot and we were actually quite pleased to seek out the shade of the trees in the park. We did have a brief conversation with one of our park ‘regulars’  and she chatted with Meg whilst I went off to collect our newspapers – but she was keen, understandably  to seek out the shade again once I had returned form the newsagents. So Meg and I were quite keen to get back home reasonably quickly as I was going to have a telephone consultation with one of the practice nurses at 2.00pm and we needed to lunch before hand. She actually phoned up at 1.45 when I had just dished up our meal but fortunately was not on the phone for too long.

This afternoon was scheduled to be lawn-cutting day and everything ran to plan, although I was a little late starting. When this had been completed, I carried on with my mini-construction work in Mog’s Den. Today, all I had time to do was to peg a board into position to help to mitigate the effects of the sloping ground. Then I enriched the very poor soils with some spare compost I had in a bag – at least I think it was compost! Into this I sowed my mint seed and I have to say that mint seed is about the finest seed must be the finest and smallest seed it is possible to imagine. One sprinkled it into the ground rather than sowing it as otherwise it would disappear beyond trace. Tomorrow, I have in mind the last major bit of ‘heavy’ work in Mog’s Den but not incredibly heavy in the scale of things. I am going to scrape off about 2″ of soil from the last remaining ‘bare’ area. Then I have two half -size paving slabs to put in place – they are probably only about 45cm square so they should cause no particular problem. I have a little bit of builders sand left over which will help to ‘seat’ them nicely. I have decided to leave them 1-2 cm proud of the surrounding area on his occasion but I have some blue slate chippings to surround them and when all is done, the completed surface should be completely level.

The COVID-19 news this evening seems terrible to me. Yesterday, there were 51,870  new cases and 49  more deaths and all of this only three days before the so-called ‘Liberation Day’ on Monday next. The Chief Medical Officer is now saying that we are in for a ‘scary’ time. The ‘R’ number is between 1.2 and 1.3 and the latest wave is showing about a third increase over the week. Something like 57% of the population admit to feeling anxious about the end to the lockdown next Monday and 64% of the population are going to carry on wearing face masks even from Monday onwards. Travel to and from France its looking increasingly problematic – not exactly France being moved from amber to red but nonetheless people returning from France must now quarantine themselves. This may well effect tends of thousands of people and the government has done little to prepare the population for this. Of course, there is a massive trade-off going on here but put at its crudest, it is non-lockdown for some businesses (like pubs) but at the expense of an increasingly large number of infections some of them leading to death (or an unspecified number of long COVID cases) As the great social theorist R H Tawney remarked several decades ago ‘Freedom for the shark equals death for the minnow‘ and whilst not being exactly zoologically correct, the sentiment surely applies to what we see unfolding before us at the moment.