Yesterday, I awoke to a dark, gloomy and rainy day with the temperature only at 2° and not predicted to rise much to about 9° later in the day when we may have a little sunshine after lunch. The weather reminds one of the old country description of February as ‘February fill dyke’ as it was the month in which there was a lot of precipitation of either rain or snow. In either case, the ditches were filled with plenty of water which country people realised was helpful to get the ground in good condition for the sowing season. In my gardening days, I think that parsnips could actually be sown in February but they have a long germination period and I think I used to soak them for 24 hours before sowing the seeds in clumps of about 4. I have particular memories in the days when we used to have a very long garden devoted to a lot of vegetables that I used to keep parsnips in the ground until Christmas day. If there had been a frost, then the cold had converted the natural starches into sugar and gave parsnips a wonderful sweet taste and before today, I have actually prised them out of the ground so that they were ready to cook for the forthcoming Christmas day. They could often grow to a foot in length as I remember but the parsnips that you buy in the shops today tend to be short and stubby. Meanwhile, the long shadow of Epstein dominates the political landscape and the news this morning is that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has moved out of Royal Lodge under the cover of darkness to avoid unwelcome publicity whilst the police are seriously considering and assessing the case against Peter Mandelson for  criminal prosecution for having alerted his ‘friend’ Epstein of forthcoming cabinet moves to combat the then growing financial crisis, behaviour which some might almost describe as treasonous. The day did not hold much in store but may well turn out to be a very ‘domestic’ day as my son and I continue with our cleaning out of the ‘hobbit holes’ and shopping beckons later on in the afternoon. There is some speculation in the trans-Atlantic press that Donald Trump realises that he may well lose both mid-term and end-of-term elections so is positioning the Republican party to de facto ‘steal’ of the next election. Already some Republican states have acceded to White House demands to hand over voter registration lists and the strategy seems to be that if they find a single case of fraud in the Democratic vote then the whole election might be deemed invalid and handed to the Republicans. All of this violates the US Constitution, of course, but the Republicans will stop at nothing to seize and then to retain political power wherever they can exert the slightest degree of leverage and one fears for the worst. Court rulings against the Republicans can be appealed against over and over again until a case reaches the Supreme Court which is stuffed full of Trump nominees and typically (but not absolutely always) complies with the Trump agenda.

When my son and I cleared out the third of our ‘hobbit holes’ (giving access to storage space in the eaves of the house), it became a voyage of discovery. When I was busy in the ‘conference attending’ part of my academic career which was generally to read (and have published ) papers which formed the basis pf my PhD, the conference organisers would give you a little brief-case size canvas bag with various useful things inside such as the schedule of events if there were a variety of presentations offered at the same time. I always accepted such bags (as did everybody else) but when I retuned home, I junked most of the contents, filed away the useful bits I wanted to retain and kept bag itself which had only had a few days use. Well my son and I stopped counting when we go to fourteen and even this excludes some of the leatherette briefcases. Another real ‘find’ was a case which contained various items relating both to my employment and leisure activities before I attended university having left school at the age of 16 and therefore not attending a sixth form) For example, I found the letter of appointment when I joined the scientific civil service at a salary of about £368.00 pa and there are probably other documents which I am loathe to discard. A third general  category of items could well  be donated to a museum of computing because I had a whole volume of 3.5″ floppy disks (and there ma even have been some 5.25″ floppies as well) Some of these are the final versions of the software that I wrote and which got sold off as an adjunct to some  statistical books and it could well be that the floppies contain my original source code (written in Turbo Pascal) There were also several boxes of slides which I used to take along to various conferences as the conferences in those days always had a slide protector but not necessarily a computer as we are talking about pre-Power Point days. So these materials have left in a pile on my landing and will await a time when I can go through them item by item and decide whether to ultimately retain or discard.

After I had made myself a quick ‘fish-on-bread’ style of lunch, I did my weekly shopping which was augmented by the ingredients for a meal I am going to prepare over the weekend. A combination of clearing out activities in the morning, shopping in the afternoon and then a trawl through some of the remaining newspapers before our green bins (= paper based items for disposal) get collected first thing in the morning has left me feeling quite tired at the end of the day. I may have an early night tonight as I have the excitement of a dental appointment tomorrow but at least there is the Rugby to which  to look forward in the early evening. The first encounter of a new series is always very interesting because teams typically have the opportunity to promote some players and to retire others who have come to the end of their careers. On addition, coaches have always been working on revisions of both strategy and tactics during the ‘close’ season and this first game is the first opportunity to see to see how this planning works out in practice.

The pretty grim domestic news that broke yesterday was some of the continuing fallout from the release of the Epstein documents by the FBI in the United States. Peter (Lord) Mandelson is already shown in some strange photographs (eg in his underpants with a woman) and seems to have been the recipient of up to $75,000 from the disgraced paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein but more was to be revealed. Sir Keir Starmer is set to chair a cabinet meeting today as police assess allegations his former US ambassador Lord Mandelson leaked sensitive information from the heart of government to Jeffrey Epstein. The Met are investigating allegations of misconduct in public office after emails appeared to show conversations between the ex-cabinet minister and paedophile financier about political matters, while the former was business secretary in Gordon Brown’s government in 2009. The messages were about plans to tax the bonus of ‘top’ bankers so here we have the release of sensitive political information from which others could benefit financially. The messages were revealed as part of the latest tranche of Epstein files released by the US Justice Department. Ella Marriott, Commander of the Met, said they would be reviewed to determine if they meet the criminal threshold for investigation. It had always been well known that Mandelson was always seeking out the company of the rich and famous and had been sacked from at least two Labour governments beforehand. So, there were some in the Labour Party who always distrusted him and the shock and horror exhibited by former colleagues was manifest in media interviews during the evening. Mandelson would never dare show his face in the House of Lords and probably intends to be a ‘sleeping’ one. But although Keir Starmer would like Mandelson to resign from the House of Lords and even has his peerage removed, the latter is complex and may even require an Act of Parliament. Under the 2014 House of Lords Reform Act, Mandelson could resign from the Lords and relinquish his peerage. But this would not strip him of the title – he would still be free to call himself Lord Peter Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool. There is another way he could go quietly without resigning. His current leave of absence from the Lords lasts until the end of the parliamentary session in May. He is no longer US ambassador, the reason for his absence, so he needs to come back and retake the oath in the Lords in the next session. If he does not do so by the end of that next session, his membership automatically lapses. But again, he would keep the title. No doubt, when there are next reforms to the House of Lords, the procedures for expelling an errant peer will be revised and brought up-to-date but the procedure as it stands at the moment is not a straight forward one. Nor is the scandal confined to Peter Mandelson as yesterday ‘The Times‘ published a photograph of Epstein which appeared to show him grappling with or at least attempting to kiss a girl lying on a sofa and one of Epstein’s hands appears from my reading of the photo trying to insert itself into her clothing which is compromising in the extreme (but strangely this damning photo does not appear elsewhere in the media despite its publication the day before in ‘The Times’)

I spent a certain amount  of time catching up on the news from our domestic help and then treated myself to a rather belated breakfast of porridge. Then after being immersed in some of the daily news, I ventured into town to brave the biting cold wind and the rain carried with it to pick up a copy of my newspaper. I got some money out of the ATM in anticipation of the weekly shopping to be done tomorrow and then looked around my local ‘Poundland’ but did not manage to find the things for which I was looking and so I drove home in order to prepare for Pilates. I was particularly glad to get home afterwards as the weather is so unpleasant and so raided my freezer  and found some spare curry which just needed a heating up in the microwave. After a nap I the afternoon, I caught up with the news of the day  which was Peter Mandelson had anticipated that he was shortly to be thrown out of the House of Lords and accordingly had resigned  his membership of the upper chamber even as Keir Starmer and the Labour cabinet were preparing legislation to terminate his membership had he not quit of his own accord.  Now the only remaining question in Mandelson’s spectacular fall from grace is the question of how and whether he is stripped of his peerage. I think the sense of outrage is so strong in our political classes that it is quite possible that a one clause bill could be quickly passed through Parliament to actually put this into effect. It is now almost certain that the Metrooilitan police are considering whether actual crimes have been committed and the one piece of legislation that is being used is probably ‘Misconduct in Public Office’ which describes pretty well what has been going on. The only possible line of defence that Mandelson could deploy is to argue that the FBI evidence is all ‘faked’ but presumably it is possible to resurrect Bank Archives in a case s serious as this to prove the authenticity of the FBI data dump. But whilst so much attention is being paid on this side of the Atlantic, on the other side there is also a search for the ‘smoking gun’ which might directly  implicate Donald Trump. But whilst a ‘smoking gun’ may well exist, it is certain that the Trump regime will fight tooth and nail to ensure that this never sees the light of day and when Trump finally falls, it may well be that critical files have been completely deleted by the FBI or have mysteriously gone missing. In a regime so ideologically committed as the present Trump regime, it is almost inconceivable that the power centres that be will stop at nothing to protect Donald Trump from having to leave office in disgrace or to face gaol and so justice may never actually done. In the evening I had a couple of episodes of ‘Yes,Prime Minister’ to which to look forward and there is also a biography of the life of Mozart which suggested itself on YouTube to complete my evening’s viewing. 

The breaking news overnight was the resignation from the Labour party of Lord Mandelson in order to ‘save further embarrassment’ In truth, he probably jumped before he was pushed because the latest news, quite apart from the infamous photograph of him crouching over the prone body of a young woman. Bank account transfers are published which show that Mandelson was given $75,000 (about £55,000) by Epstein but for what we know what, apart from the fact that Mandelson was lobbying the Treasury to reduce the top rates of tax levied on bankers. Mandelson denies ever having received the payments, in effect trying to argue that the bank statements were ‘fakes’ but this seems the thinnest of excuses and the Labour party would probably have expelled him forthwith in any case. The evening before yesterday was spent quietly going through a pile of old newspapers to retain significant press-cuttings and I am also re-purposing an old but empty diary-com-day-book by tippex-ing out the out-of-sequence dates so that days/dates align with 2026. Also, I have just been shown how to make a ‘to do’ list for oneself using WhatsApp in a particular way so I will see if I can put this into effect later on in the day. More disturbing news emerged this morning about what you might call ‘sinking’ Britain. The rates for the incidence of measles is soaring and the UK has lost its WHO listing as a country where measles has been all but eliminated. This puts us alongside Austria, Spain and some Eastern European  countries such as Uzbekistan. This is important for the UK because vaccination rates have been dropping slowly for years. By September 2025, only 84.3 per cent of children aged five had received both doses of the MMR jab, far below the target of 95 per cent. Because measles is so infectious, doctors often refer to it as a canary in the coal mine for low vaccination rates. It seems as though vaccination rates were declining even before COVID hit us which added a further twist to the downward spiral. Most worrying and not surprisingly, vaccination rates are dropping most in the most deprived areas – and Birmingham is quite badly affected with a rate of only 75.5% of children having received the MMR before their fifth birthday and this is way below the recommended rate of 95% This week has no particular appointments to bear in mind apart from the fact that I have a dental appointment on Thursday and a boiler service on Friday which is hardly earth-shattering. On the other hand, the ‘Six Nations’ rugby season opens on Thursday so this is a treat to which I can look forward. One little thought that I came across recently is this little pearl of wisdom ‘Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.’ We can be our own harshest critics but on the other hand there is such a thing as self-delusion where we try to convince ourselves that we are better than we are at doing particular things. At this time of year, the newspapers are full of advice how to turn one’s life around and these usually focus on diet/exercise. I remember with a wry smile seeing in my local Aldi where they stock up on exercise-related merchandise in January a tea-shirt which read ‘Remember that exercise is not just for January’ which does make one ponder how many good intentions have fallen by the wayside within a month of the start of the year.

The rest of the day developed in an interesting but not unexpected direction. My Droitwich friend phoned me to tell me that after she had dropped her sons off to school she found in the wet and the mud a man’s wallet. Although the contents were absolutely sodden. my friend managed to discern what she thought was a current address and wondered if I could make a trip round to the street, which about a mile away, to tell them that the wallet had been found. We thought the house number was 95a but in the chosen street, the house numbers only went up to 47 so I tried 15a (with no success) and then 5 (with no success), a postman and then a neighbour who lived in the  street for ages all without success. When I got home, I phoned 101 (the non emergency contact number for the police) who were not very helpful, suggesting I travel to Worcester some 15 miles away where, if the wallet was unclaimed, they would keep it and then destroy it after 3 months. When I enquired about a more local police station, I was informed that there was one next to the fire station but there was a grey door near to the fire station for the use of the police but no counter service – however, it was possible that a policeman might speak to me if I wanted to hand in a lost wallet. I am amazed that a town the size of Bromsgrove is so under-policed but there we are. But my friend called around in the late afternoon and after I minutely examined the contents we managed to find a more current address and my friend and I delivered it back to its owner. The owner was disabled (blind) but his wife was so relieved and burst into tears of joy. We were so pleased to get it back not the hands of the owner but there were evidently irreplaceable family photos, a driving licence and a variety of cards that might have been almost impossible to replace. Then my friend and I went shopping in Asda for her son’s birthday party and we bought some high quality sausages as a special treat as well as chocolates and cards for the lucky son whose birthday it was. In the evening, I was invited to make up the numbers at a little impromptu birthday party for one of the sons of my friend. We had a jolly time, eating some of the really high quality sausages we had just purchased in the afternoon, indulged in birthday cake and finally opened cards and presents. It was actually an enjoyable experience for the four of us and the fact that my friend and I had successfully restored the lost wallet to its rightful owner filled both of us with a great deal of satisfaction – and something to celebrate as well.

It is so nice to have the month of January behind us and to be at last in the month of February. Certain dates stick in the mind and one of them is 2nd February which is traditionally known as ‘Candlemas’ This used to be regarded as the very last day of the Christmas cycle although  I think a lot of the traditions associated with this Christian feast day are not now observed. On this day, candles used both in the church and also domestically were blessed and, of course, they symbolise life being brought into the world. One of the traditions that may survive until today is in Hungary where children dress up as bears, eat honey and generally celebrate the glimmerings of the end of winter. Knowing that yesterday was going to be a busier day than normal socially, I tried going to bed a little earlier but woke up again after an hour or so (and then got up and toddled about a bit) so the idea of getting an early night did not quite work out. Later on in the morning, I am due to go round to have a coffee with a parishioner who used to call round regularly and give spiritual comfort to Meg when she was alive but has now been ill herself. Although I will get the news later on, she appears to be responding to treatment and on the mend which is very heartening. In the afternoon, my son is due to call around as well and I am pleased that we can put the final arrangements in place before we go off to Worcester at the end of the month to arrange for the final stub of my mortgage to be redeemed. I attended the church service late on Saturday evening and ran into an incredibly cheerful lady who hails from Liverpool and who always manages to be in an irrepressible good humour although she has been diagnosed as suffering from leukaemia. Also sitting behind me in the pews was the Treasurer of the church committee on which I used to serve and our meeting was quite fortuitous. This is because the Church used to have a system  of envelopes in which to make donations to the church split between first and second collections and used in slightly different ways. I used to have a standing order for the first of these collections and make a weekly donation in money for the second but these old arrangements are being swept away and replaced by enhanced digital methods of making donations. As well as relieving one of the weekly chore of always remembering one’s collection money, the digital collection does ensure that the church can reclaim the tax that has been paid upon it and this has the effect of increasing the donation by 20%. My donations have all been a little awry since my finances were in a certain  degree of turmoil following Meg’s death but now everything has settled down a bit, I am in a better position to regularise my donation method. As you might imagine, practically every front page of the Sunday newspapers has been dominated by that ‘infamous’ photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (ex Price Andrew) crouching on all fours over the body of a prostrate girl and whilst there is no caption, date, or context supplied for the photograph it looks both unusual and damning at the same time. There is a renewed call for Andrew to be stripped of his peerage and the Government are urging him to return to the USA to answer questions about his affiliations with Epstein but this is not going to happen.  The US Department of Justice has released only 3 million of the 6 million pages of material associated with the Epstein affair but they say that they are complying with the law passed by Congress to hand over all material. They were allowed to redact the name victims in order to protect their identity but the actual practice has been partisan in the extreme because the names most commonly redacted are the rich and powerful perpetrators of the sex acts performed with underage girls (including Donald Trump) Meanwhile, as was demonstrated in one video released yesterday, we have the bizarre appearance of a page of allegations in which the whole of it has been redacted including the name of the victim although according to the letter of the law, the actual details of the allegations should be made public and not redacted. There is still a lot more to be revealed by an examination of the 3 million pages of evidence that have been released and one suspects that the most damning of material has probably been retained. There is such a mountain of evidence and therefore ‘smoke’ that surely there must be an underlying ‘fire’ but as it America’s rich and famous that are implicated not confined to Donald Trump, one wonders if this material will ever see the light of day. Needless to say, because of the ‘Statute of Limitations’ (usually five years) none of the rich and powerful perpetrators will ever be prosecuted apart from Epstein and Maxwell (and Epstein committed suicide, or was murdered in jail)

After watching the Lorna Kuennsberg programme on BBC1, I made my way down the hill to pick up my copy of the Sunday newspaper and a little something to take along with me when I visited my friends for coffee. As both of my friends are very keen and competent musicians, we spent most of our time chatting about things  musical both locally and also in terms of what we had seen both in the locality and also on TV. Both of my friends were just returning from their walk when  I arrived and evidently they are doing this to keep themselves in good shape and I am hopeful that they can both give me a return visit as soon as the latest tranche of treatment is successfully completed. My friend had read a reference to the town of Salobreña in this blog where Meg and I often stayed as clients of Saga and they themselves had visited the hotel and swum in the hotel’s pool so we exchanged some happy memories of the hotel. I have on my computer a folder of two years of holiday  snaps taken in and around Salobreña  so when my friends call around this will be interesting viewing for us all. I got home and my son had just arrived for a weekend visit so we chatted for over an hour after which I went ahead and cooked myself a conventional ‘meat and two veg’ type of meal. The rest of the day is probably going to taken up with going through a pile of recent newspapers to extract articles of interest. Looking at my local ‘rag’ I was appalled to discover that Bromsgrove’s target for housing developments had been increased by 85% whereas nearby Birmingham, with a lot of acreage of available brown land, had been decreased by 31%. I am only too aware that building is going on all absolutely all around my house at the moment but I suspect that central government has responded to pressure from big building firms because whether it was Green Belt or not, the building is taking place on what used to be flat and easy-to-develop farming land (in the past populated by rabbits, pheasants and sometimes badgers).

The evening before yesterday saw the ‘final’ release by the FBI of the Epstein-related documents which were in total some 3 million pages including 2000 videos and 180,000 images. Although the FBI said this release was final, they have in the past admitted to possessing six million pages of information so by their own admission they are only releasing one half of what they hold. Probably quite by accident, some pages of allegations were released implicating Donald Trump in the probable acts of sex with underage girls but these pages were almost immediately withdrawn once the ‘mistakes’ had been realised – but not before some journalists had made some screen grabs of some of the most damning material. The liberal American media (independent journalists who are funded by subscriptions from their viewers – a mile away from X and TicToc) are broadcasting these with a certain amount of both glee and frustration. To be absolutely fair to Trump and his coterie of extremely rich and influential Americans (Bill Clinton, Elon Musk etc) all of the material released and discussed is in the form of allegations and hearsay evidence. So none of this would probably pass muster in any court case but I did wonder to myself whether, although tittle-tattle s regarded as hearsay evidence, what is the legal position once this reaches ‘avalanche’ proportions? The answer in the UK is this…hearsay evidence can be admissible even when there is an ‘avalanche’ of it, provided it meets specific legal requirements, exceptions, and procedural safeguards. While the general rule is that hearsay is inadmissible, courts in the UK (under the Criminal Justice Act 2003) and in civil proceedings (under the Civil Evidence Act 1995) have broad discretion to admit such evidence, regardless of volume, if it is in the ‘interests of justice’. But I wonder what American courts would make of all of this?  What is called the Main Street Media generally steers clear of this type of material until or unless it can be proved beyond reasonable doubt – after all Trump is suing the BBC for broadcasting (admittedly in the wrong sequence) things that he recorded as having said in the insurrectionist attack upon the White House when he was disputing the fact that he had lost the election in 2020. One can understand the caution of the main broadcasters and, of course it is responsible journalism to make sure that a story is verified before publication but it is this very fact that has allowed sections of the American elites to get away with the absence of scrutiny over the years. The more ‘the lid’ is successfully kept on unfavourable news, the harder it is for justice to prevail as was the case in the Post Office scandal about which I wrote recently. Anyway, watching all of this stuff in the middle of the night and again this morning has made me run extremely late this morning but I am fairly relaxed about that as there is nothing pressing that absolutely needs to be done today. The High Street beckons so that I can pick up my copy of ‘The Times’ which is important as it contains a guide to all of the stuff worth watching TV in the week ahead. When I went down into town, somewhat later than planned, I actually bumped into one of the sons of my Droitwich friend who was on his way to a hockey match in which he was playing, having had (presumably) Saturday morning school. After that, I made a quick visit to the supermarket to pick up one or two items that I had forgotten in my main shopping and then, upon returning home, cooked myself a ‘meat and two veg’ conventional meal for the first time in several days now.

During the next hours and days, it is inevitable that as journalists all over the world are intent upon poring over the latest Epstein file releases. Also each country will pick up those releases of most interest to people in their own particular country and here, in the UK, it is anything to do with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Apart from the photograph, shocking enough on its own, we see the kind of detail Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson never wanted us to see. It is embarrassing and exposing. We have known for some time about the closeness between the Yorks and Jeffrey Epstein but if genuine these emails give us a new level of insight, about their interactions with the convicted paedophile, what they shared with him and just how much they saw him as a friend and close confidante. From the emails we can see he was apparently welcomed into the fold and the inner sanctum of their palace life. Offered the chance to come into Buckingham Palace in September 2010, invited to Andrew’s birthday party at St James’s Palace in February 2010, all after his conviction for soliciting prostitution in 2008 and his release in 2009. From the discussions about him lending them money and the exchanges about Andrew being set up with women, you can see he was clearly trusted with their innermost secrets. It is the obsequious tone with which they write to him which will inevitably anger the victims. It feels like Andrew and Sarah were dependent on him, whether for money or contacts. It appears Epstein had made it that way, made himself invaluable to them, which chimes with Sarah Ferguson’s claim last year that she had to appear loyal because he was blackmailing her. The Sunday newspapers tomorrow may well have a field day although it remains an interesting question how much is revealed by the time they go to press on a Saturday afternoon and how assiduous they are in trawling over the mountain of material. Even more murky is the payment made to the husband of Lord Mandelson, ex-ambassador to Washington and it is very unclear why Epstein should be paying over these monies. Epstein sent thousands of pounds to Lord Mandelson’s husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, to help pay for his osteopathy course fees of £3,000+, according to emails included in the files. Another salacious detail is that Bill Gates is reported to have acquired a sexually transmitted disease from a Russian prostitute supplied by Epstein – Gates then asked Epstein for help to acquire some antibiotics which he could surreptitiously give to his wife so that the infection was not passed onto her. This incident apparently was a factor in their subsequent divorce. There is undoubtedly a lot more to be revealed in the days ahead.

For a variety of reasons, I got up an hour earlier yesterday morning and I actually feel a lot better for it. I had quite a lot of domestic jobs to get done this yesterday so an early start is always a good idea. I texted some good friends and then turned on ‘ClassicFM’ to hear ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ being played, the Rodrigo masterpiece. When I saw my Droitwich friend yesterday we devised an interesting little scheme together. Neither of us likes wasting food but buying/cooking for one it sometimes happens that we both ‘overbuy’ fresh produce. Of course the supermarkets sell things in packaging which caters for the normal 2+2 family so that we have decided that when we meet, we might  go through each other’s fridges and share the fresh produce which might otherwise go to waste. We will have to see whether this works out such a good idea in practice as it does in theory but as it is we occasionally cook meals together so we may be able to cut down on food waste between us. I performed my usual trick the other day of snuggling into a nice warm bed, determined to watch ‘Question Time’ on BBC1, having noted its start time. What I actually did was to fall asleep one minute before it started and to wake up when it only had about one minute left to run but I can always get it on iPlayer a day or so later. In the US, we have seen a fairly remarkable event these days which is the Republicans and the Democrats actually coming to an agreement with each other over some financial measures to be passed by the Congress. Donald Trump has endorsed a spending deal negotiated by US Senate Republicans and Democrats that would stave off a government shutdown and temporarily fund the Department of Homeland Security. The move comes as the US reels from the deaths of two protesters at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. ‘Republicans and Democrats have come together to get the vast majority of the government funded until September while extending current funding for Homeland Security’, Mr Trump said in a Truth Social post on Thursday evening. He said he hoped members of both parties would cast a ‘much needed Bipartisan YES vote’. The two sides have agreed to separate homeland security funding from a bigger spending bill and fund the Homeland department for two weeks while they debate Democratic demands for curbs on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The deal follows a Democrats’ vote to block legislation to fund the DHS on Thursday. They have been pushing to remove funding for the DHS, of which ICE is a part, from the $1.2tn government spending package after the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday. There are some signs that Trump appreciates that his shock troopers (the ICE almost quasi-military force) have been going about their task with an excess of zeal and the subsequent push-back from Democratic cities and States is damaging him badly in current opinion polls. The two deaths of civilians in Minneapolis are certainly concentrating minds and pulling people back from the brink, I am pleased to say.

I also discovered a medical finding of some significance today as dementia patients do not seem to develop cancer as a co-morbidity and vice versa. This has led researchers to wonder whether there is something that can traverse the ‘blood-brain’ barrier and a significant findings has occurred. Recent research, including a study published in Cell in January 2026, has provided strong evidence for an inverse, bidirectional association between cancer and dementia, suggesting that cancer survivors have a reduced risk of developing dementia, and vice versa. This curious link’ indicates that the biological processes behind one disease may protect against the other. The study revealed that some tumours release a protein called cystatin-C (Cyst-C) into the bloodstream, which can cross the blood-brain barrier. Once in the brain, Cyst-C binds to amyloid-beta plaques (the hallmark of Alzheimer’s) and activates microglia (the brain’s immune cells) to destroy them. You might think that if one barrel of the shotgun does not kill you then the other one might. But it does raise the possibility of new methods of attacking Alzheimer’s which is the biggest source of death in the UK currently. Later on in the morning,  I visited my favourite haunt for coffee on a Friday morning and was actually tempted to boy one or two things of the offerings on display as well as my coffee and cake. Whilst in the vicinity, I also paid  a visit to a local cosmetics cut-price store and was fortunate to purchase a few items which are not available in other supermarkets in the first place. In the afternoon, I arranged an appointment with the bank from which we acquired a stub of a mortgage to arrange for its complete repayment. My son and I always had it in mind that we should have a day together in Worcester and a meal out whilst we went together to see the mortgage adviser in the bank. Evidently, I have to ensure that I have all of the relevant documentation  with me which will include Meg’s will and death certificate and then by paying off the mortgage, at least I will not have the burden of a mortgage  payment each month so my son and  are sure this is a wise move to make.

The big news that yesterday afternoon saw the release of a vast tranche of Epstein related material. The US deputy attorney Todd Blanche has says the Department of Justice is producing ‘more than three million pages, including more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images in total. That means the department produced approximately 3.5 million pages in compliance with the act’. This will evidently take the media days to analyse and one can only presume that there is no ‘smoking gun’ or incredibly damaging information in the files or else the Department of Justice would probably have redacted or deleted it but, no doubt, there are members of the American elite who will feature somewhere in the papers. We shall have to be patient and wait for some days for damaging (to some) photos to be revealed but the sheer volume of material is astounding. It looks as though ex-Prince Andrew, for one, will feature quite widely as well.

So January  is gradually drifting away leaving only February as the winter month which is the most to be feared for bad weather. I do consult my calendar once a day to note with a certain degree of pleasure how the amount of daylight is increasing by about 2 minutes every day. February and March are quite good bonus months as well because the way in which council tax bills usually paid spread the payments over ten months rather than twelve gives one a little of a extra money for a couple of months before new payments of all sizes and shapes clock in next April. When I awoke yesterday morning, I consulted my iPhone /emails for messages and was delighted to receive an invitation to coffee from a Catholic friend of mine who used to call round and give spiritual support to Meg for the last year or so of her life. My friend was very well herself but I think is now well on the road to recovery but I will get all of the latest news, no doubt, in a day or so.

I am sure that Bromsgrove is not an atypical town but the branches of local banks are disappearing like snowballs in June, as they say. The latest to announce closures across the whole of the country is Santander which has just announced a closure programme. Santander has announced plans to close 44 bank branches, placing almost 300 jobs at risk. The lender said its move was a continuing response to the changing needs of its customers as more people bank online. News of the fresh closures come less than a year after it revealed plans to shut 95 sites. Santander UK said its latest decision would leave it with just 244 full service branches. The company revealed a list of the locations affected and the dates when closures are due to take place and I rapidly consulted the list to find, to my relief, that my own local bank was not one of those scheduled for closure. But even when one does walk into a local branch one is consulted by machines and encouragement to undertake transactions on-line but I have had occasions when even the in-house facilities do not work as intended and one is forced to seek the attention of the one (or sometimes two) staff who are still employed in branch. I started banking with what was then called the National Giro and that was 57 years ago but the banks have kept changing their ownership over the decades so I wonder if I must number amongst some of their oldest customers? I can understand how the banks are keeping pace with technological changes but there must be a whole tranche of elderly people who are not conversant with smart phones and the like and for whom day to day banking must be a nightmare. Occasionally, I meet up with a friend when I do Tai Chi who used to be an ‘old fashioned’ bank manager and we reminisce about the days that we remember from a long time ago. The political news this morning is dominated by Keir Starmer’s visit to China which is, no doubt, important but is earning our prime Minister the soubriquet of ‘Never here, Keir’ In the days of the former Soviet Union, leaders hardly any made any trips abroad because, when they did, this is when a putsch was organised against them (and those with long political memories will recall that Margaret Thatcher was in Paris when the same thing happened to he and she lost a crucial vote in a leadership contest by a couple of votes).

After I had breakfasted, I was just a little too late to get to my Tai Chi class on time but I went off to do my weekly shopping which had been postponed from yesterday. Then I popped around to the Methodist Centre hoping to catch up with my bank manager friend but he was evidently not in the class this week  so I chatted briefly over a teacake and a coffee with some people on the ‘chatty’ table. Then I needed to race home to unpack the shopping and I treated myself to some magnificent pork sausages that I was tempted to buy. After lunch, I realised that I needed to go and collect my daily newspaper and I also made a return trip to the supermarket because  I needed to exchange the furry cloggies I had bought recently for other ones as the ones I had purchased recently had a flaw in the retaining strap which caused it to detach and evidently I wanted a good and not an imperfect pair. Both of the German supermarkets, Aldi and Lidl, have a concept of the ‘centre aisle’ which contains all kinds of normally quite high quality household goods which may be sold off through the supermarket chain  and the slogan to remember is that ‘when it has gone it has gone’ So some real bargains are to be had by purchasing things from the centre aisle but one has to make sure that the article was needed in the first place and not just a white elephant In the USA, the Democrats are starting show a bit of political muscle in a showdown with the White House Democrats are starting to use a bit of backbone in an attempt to avoid the excesses of the Trump ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) policies. Democrats have blocked a US government funding package, bringing the prospect of a shutdown closer. Senate Democrats had threatened to block the wide-ranging spending bill in their fight with the Trump administration about its immigration crackdown. They have been pushing to remove funding for the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, from the $1.2tn government spending package after the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday. Donald Trump told his cabinet earlier that he was optimistic of avoiding a shutdown. The bill must be passed by midnight on Friday to avoid a government shutdown. In the state of Maine, the Governor has discovered that many of the 200 people taken off the streets by ICE agents appear to be here legally. So a real fight-back against the excesses of ICE appears to be underway and already there are signs that Trump might actually acknowledge that the behaviour of ICE units in randomly picking up supposed illegal migrants is actually causing Trump real political damage  and we are starting to see some slight modification of policies in action.

A couple of days ago, I was flicking through the columns of the newspaper. before going to bed only to discover that the doyen of BBC correspondents, Mark Tulley who was the BBC’s Indian correspondent had died only the day before. I had not heard the news announced on the BBC as I thought it would have been but my son had heard about it. Mark Tulley lived his life half in England and half in India but actually preferred India as a place in which to live and was fluent in Hindi. But he had interesting domestic arrangements with a wife here in England and a quasi-wife, a fellow journalist with who he lived in India for the other half of the year and who actually spoke better Hindi than he did, according to the obituary. When people in India asked where the BBC offices were, people were puzzled but when asked for Mark Tulley’s house, they knew it (and I think the BBC actually transmitted from premises above his living accommodation) I seem to have been listening to Mark Tulley for decades and it is very hard to think who could replace him but he was 90 years old and I suppose could not go on for ever. He had quite a ‘plummy’ English accent but I think India had lost a very good friend and advocate for the sub-continent and I, for one, will miss him (as was the case with Alastair Cooke and ‘Letter from America’ in times gone by)

There is a report from the BBC American correspondents that they have never known America to be as divided a society as the USA is today. Evidently, in Minneapolis the community are forcing Trump and the ICE agents to moderate their brutish, para-military invasion of their streets and communities whilst in neighbouring red (i.e. Republican) and Trump supporting states the response to the judicial murders seems to be a shrug of the shoulders and the attitude ‘What do you expect if you take a gun to a rally?’ But the Minneapolis victim had a gun which was legally licensed and which he was entitled to carry with him almost anywhere. It is an extraordinary facet of America that although firearms are strictly prohibited in the passenger cabin of airplanes at US airports, they can be legally transported in checked baggage if they are unloaded, locked in a hard-sided container, and declared to the airline at check-in. Despite these regulations, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has intercepted a record number of firearms at airport security checkpoints in recent years, with over 6,600 guns stopped in 2024, approximately 94% of which were loaded. We are also experiencing polarisation in our own society although not yet on the scale seen across the Atlantic. The forthcoming by election in Manchester is a case in point because it could be that Labour who have held this seat since before the second  World War (i.e. for some 80-90 years) may be challenged and lose the seat to Reform on the right and be squeezed by the Greens under their dynamic new leader on the left. It is being predicted that Labour could actually come third in this election which might trigger an attempt to get rid of Keir Starmer as Labour Leader.

Later in the morning, I decided to try my luck at the so-called ‘chatty table’ in the local Methodist Centre near the centre of the town. I was more fortunate in my choice of people with whom to chat than has been my experience recently. When I sat down, the first person with whom I chatted had arrived too late to enter the ‘Strength and Balance’ class so was treating herself to a coffee. It transpired that she had spent quite a lot of time in Ireland and she very much preferred the sense of community and friendship that had found in that country. Nonetheless, we compared notes of our own experiences of (Catholic) education and compared notes of how we both had felt badly treated on occasions.  Then this lady left and continued my conversation with her friend who also attends the sane Tai Chi class that I normally attend on a Thursday. She was explaining to me how she had been rehearsing a eulogy that she was due to give on the occasion of the funeral of her godfather with whom she had been very close for decades – closer, in fact, than some members of his own family. She had experienced several decades of marriage before her husband had run off with a younger  women which does, unfortunately, sometimes occur and she explained to me how she had lived her life after that traumatic event. After all of this, I popped into Waitrose in order to pick up my newspaper and a birthday card and then made my way home where I expected to see my domestic help – but she had been called into a sudden ‘Team’  meeting at her normal place of work so had to leave a bit earlier than planned.

Today, history has been made with the legal confirmation of the very first female Archbishop of Canterbury. Dame Sarah Mullally has been confirmed as the first-ever female Archbishop of Canterbury, some 1,400 years after the role was created. The ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral in London also confirmed the 63-year-old as the first woman to assume the spiritual leadership of the Church of England in its nearly 500-year history. Dame Sarah, who is a mother-of-two, is now officially the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. Her personal story is quite an extraordinary one as she had previously been the UK’s Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) from 1999 to 2004, serving as the youngest person in that role at age 37. A former nurse and NHS leader, she was made a Dame Commander in 2005 for her contribution to nursing. It is extremely rare for any individual, of either gender, to become the chief officer of two completely different organisations and it will be interesting to see if she can rise to the challenge of leading the Church of England and the Anglican Communion as a whole. This is because the Archbishop of Canterbury is automatically regarded as Head of the world wide Anglican communion but the churches in some countries take very different stances towards even the ordination of female priest (let along bishops and archbishops), LGBT+ rights  and even some theological divisions such as evangelical versus ordinary members of the Church of England.

Yesterday morning, I got up rather later than I had intended because I indulged in watching a late night offering on Sky Arts. Normally, I would not stay up late, but Sky Arts does not have a catch-up facility like  BBC or ITV so it is necessary to stay up late or record the programme. The programme was entitled ‘Mozart’s Women’ and was good but not that good. Strangely, they did not give a rendition of Cherubino’s ‘Voice che sapete’ which is sung by the love-sick teenager to the Countess in ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ and is incredibly well known. So today I am rather running to catch up with myself but my son is coming round to see me for half an hour after his swimming session and then I have Pilates in the middle of the day which I try never to miss. Last night, there was also a Panorama programme on the Post Office scandal. Although I watched several of the cross-examinations live, last night’s programme was hard hitting and very well researched. It focused on several individuals who, when the enquiry does report, really should be prosecuted and probably spent a considerable time in gaol for the misery they have caused. The programme fingered, as it were, an ex-Chairman of the Board, a lawyer, a computer expert, a civil servant, an ex-managing Director, and the senior manager in charge of bringing prosecutions. The most egregious example of wrong doing was Venables, an ex-Managing Director who conveniently ‘could not remember’ receiving several emails informing her of the problems exhibited by the Horizon computer programme and the fact that many prosecutions could be fatally flawed as it was known that accounts in the Post Office branches could be altered manually by Fujitsu, te Japanese software company who were responsible for writing and maintaining the code of Horizon. Venables, who incidentally was an ordained Church of England priest, personally removed from the privatisation prospectus a sentence which indicated that the Horizon system might not be as robust as claimed. Withdrawing relevant information from a prospectus is plainly against the principles of commercial law but the government and the Post Office Board were desperate to ensure that a privatisation could go ahead. If Venables had allowed the critical sentence to remain in the prospectus, then the whole privatisation would probably have to have been pulled, and a false prospectus was promulgated to keep the privatisation on track. I think it is unlikely that any of those responsible individuals will see the inside of a gaol. The enquiry as a whole has to report next year and then there will be a delay whilst the Crown Prosecution service considers the findings of the report as a whole. Prosecutions will be years down the line and lawyers of those guilty can argue that with the passage of time, it will be hard to establish legal liability. A fine is always possible and perhaps a judicial ‘slap on the wrist’ but I doubt whether the jail sentences inflicted upon sub-postmasters will ever be applied to their culpable masters and seniors.

The day was a quiet one today but I had Pilates in the middle of the day which I was keen to attend as I missed the session last week. I found a couple of extraordinarily interesting health articles in ‘The Times’ in today’s issue. The first of them was exploring the link between the menopause, subsequent hormonal changes and the fact that Alzheimers is twice as common in women as in men. The crucial intervening variable seems be a certain amount  of ‘grey matter’ in the brain which has been shown to shrink in the case of menopausal women and to have shrunk in Alzheimer’s patients. This grey matter seems to affect cognition, emotion, depression and more besides but evidently the science is still evolving in this area. The second article was an examination of the relationship between gut health and cognitive functioning. This is an area of science which some have dubbed one of the last unexplored frontiers of science – we have known for years that that there are brain-like cells in the gut and there are some subtle communication processes between them. Here again, the science is still evolving and we are left with a situation in which we are dealing with probabilities and not certain certainties. So it is possible to have a healthy life style, be careful over food and drink and to exercise regularly and still develop a cancer (although the possibility is reduced.) Conversely, it is possible to have the unhealthiest lifestyle, diet etc and not to develop a cancer of degenerative condition (although again, the probabilities are decreased) The point is that articles in ‘The Times’ are usually very well researched and referenced back to recently published scientific reports which gives these accounts a degree of credibility.

After the Greenland debacle, it appears that Trump may be backtracking on some of his more outrageous policies. The local head of the ICE operations in Minneapolis has removed from his post (after the two shootings which can probably be classified as murder) and Trump has agreed that Federal and local law enforcements officials do collaborate on a joint report into the ’causes’ of the unrest. The citizens of Minneapolis are taking to the streets in their thousands day after day and so the Republican party as a whole may be coming to experience  that the ICE operations were conducted without any of the degree of professionalism or indeed training that was required. So it has possible that the USA has arrived at a turning point but at a tremendous cost to its social fabric and institutions. Back in the UK, a massive storm {Chandra} is sweeping the country and flooding is reported to be quite widespread. Most of the South of England as well as the Pennine district of the North appear to be the worst effected. However, the West Midlands seems to be relatively unaffected which makes a change as Atlantic storms often seem to track across the middle pf the country. The Scandinavians have an expression that ‘there  no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing’ but this implies that one can protect oneself completely using the appropriate winter clothing. But what appears to be a major source of danger to the general public is the combined effects of wind and rain in which trees and large branches fall upon power lines, block roads and railway tracks and occasionally even cause death and injury by falling on top of cars. It may be that under the impact of climate change, warmer air is carrying potentially more rain and, on a personal level, it seems that even on quite short journeys one is more likely to see evidence of surface flooding and local drains and culverts unable to cope with essentially quite moderate degrees of rainfall.

When I awake in the morning, I have a routine as I drink my early morning cup of tea, put on ClassicFM and start to compose some of the blog to be published on the following day. As I write at the moment, they are playing the Mozart clarinet concerto first heard when I was about 13 and in bed suffering from ‘Asian ‘flu’ which was then sweeping the country and I have never forgotten it. The sheer exuberance of it is calculated to lift anyone’s spirits on even the worst of mornings. I am conscious that I often write about the ‘bad’ things that are happening in America but last night’s news was jaw-dropping.I was following the eminent ex-NewsNight journalist, Emily Maitlis, who was giving an interview to James O’Brien on LBC but picked up in a Sky News video clip. She had discovered that hundreds and probably thousands of completely undocumented flights are taking pace after suspects are scooped off the streets by ICE agents, taken to deportation centres and then transported by plane to hell-hole prisons in El Salvador without ever coming before a court in the USA. Many of these are USA citizens but probably the ‘wrong’ skin colour and hence ‘liable’ to deportation. A description of these prisons was found on the internet and ‘hell-hole’ is an accurate description. El Salvador’s ‘hell-hole’ prisons, most notably the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), represent a, extreme, maximum-security system designed to detain tens of thousands of alleged gang members under severe conditions. Opened in 2023 by President Nayib Bukele, the facility is part of a massive crackdown on gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18, intended to be a permanent, ‘living nightmare’ for those incarcerated. Located in Tecoluca, CECOT is designed to hold 40,000 inmates, making it one of the largest prisons in the world. The facility features 11-metre-high concrete walls, electric fencing, and is designed to be inescapable. Prisoners sleep on bare metal bunks without mattresses or sheets. They are subjected to constant surveillance, no outdoor time, and no communication with the outside world. Reports suggest that once inmates enter, they are not expected to leave, with some officials telling incoming detainees they will never see sunlight again. International observers and reports, including a November 2025 Human Rights Watch report, describe the environment as a site of torture, abuse, and potential war crimes. Inmates have reported being packed shoulder-to-shoulder, forced to sit motionless, and subjected to violence. There are reports of inadequate food, little to no medical care, and, in some cases, the denial of water. Fungal skin diseases and untreated infections are rampant. People who have heard about these absolute atrocities happening in America are warning us that this is fascism started in 1930’s with the extermination of the Jewish ghettoes and scooping people off the streets and deporting them with no due process has a terrible parallel. It also being said that this is what Nigel Farage and a Reform government would do if elected and if this sounds completely far-fetched then the American scenario sounds equally far fetched – except that we know that it is happening. There will be Congressional mid-term elections held in the USA in about November. but the amount of damage to be done to the American social structure is incalculable. And one has to ask the question whether the average American citizen shrugs their shoulders and thinks that we did vote as a society for illegal immigrants to be deported so now we have a government that is doing it. What is so terrifying about the process is that people who are scooped off the street and detained then have to prove that they are Americans and have the right to be in the USA and sometimes these papers are not as accessible to people as they ought to be (after a house fire or a forced eviction for example where even precious documents can get lost)

The breaking political news yesterday was the defection of Suella Braverman from the Tories to the Reform party. This has come as no real surprise to anybody because, whilst a standard bearer of the right, she did hold the office of Home Secretary. But she was sacked twice and failed in a leadership bid for the Tory party, after which she rather kept herself to herself. She has terrible reputation for the bullying of staff and, in particular, junior staff and her demeanour was such that she had to be sanctioned for this behaviour whilst a minister and it was claimed that she often shouted at and harangued civil servants if she did not get she wanted. My own take on this is that any minister who engages in this type of behaviour and who cannot argue their case probably should never have been promoted to a ministerial office in the first place. It is reported that Braverman feels like she has ‘come home’ and increases the number of ex-Tory MPs who have defected to Reform UK to eight. Braverman has poured vitriol on her former party and has made the following declaration after hr defection – ‘I am calling time. I am calling time on Tory betrayal. I am calling time on Tory lies. I am calling time on a party that keeps making promises with zero intention of keeping them. Britain is indeed broken. She is suffering. She is not well. Immigration is out of control. Our public services are on their knees. People do not feel safe.’ So the Braverman vitriol, previously reserved for her opponents, is now heaped upon her former colleagues.

The government has announced plans for far-reaching reforms of the police services in the UK. The principal reform is a dramatic reduction in the number of police forces from 43 to about 12 which may may be too dramatic a reform but only time will tell. In effect, we are seeing the end of county forces and the emergence of regional units which given the mobility of the modern criminal gangs is probably a worthwhile reform. At the same time, Facial recognition technology is to be rolled out across England and Wales to help all police forces, under sweeping reforms announced by the home secretary. The minister also announced in the Commons that all forces across England and Wales will be given artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help reduce the amount of time that officers must spend behind a desk, allowing them to be on the beat more instead. Finally, the shake-up will create a new National Police Service (NPS) to fight the most complex cross-border crime and there will be other far-reaching reforms as the Home secretary wants to create a licence to practice for police officers similar to the one for doctors, and to give herself the power to remove a chief constable for poor performance.