It was our normal Sunday morning routine this morning in which I collected our Sunday newspapers early on and then got back in time for the Andrew Marr show. I was expecting a lot of cross examination of Liz Truss concerning the Boris Johnson ‘decoration expenses’  and Andrew Marr tried his best (which was not very good) When asked if Boris Johnson had personally stopped a leak enquiry (about the leak of plans for a second coronavirus lockdown because it would have implicated a close friend of his fiancee, Carrie Symonds), he got the reply ‘I think this is a complete load of Westminster tittle-tattle that people simply don’t care about” which is of course not a denial but the typical ‘throw sand in the face of the enemy’ tactics that all politicians deploy when they are being evasive or do not wish to tell the truth – which is nearly all the time. Then we drifted down to the park where we met up with our University of Birmingham friend and we discussed all kinds of matters concerning our local Severn Valley railway (upon which we are going to make a trip in about 2-3 weeks time) Then we were joined by a mutual friend who is generally very well-informed on matters and likes to keep abreast of news and current affairs. Our conversations roamed over (a) the changing and preferred shape of womens’ bodies (b) the current political scene (c) efficacy and ‘risks’ associated with the current crop of vaccines. Our conversations are like that, but Meg and I needed to get home so after we had put the world to rights, we started for home to cook Sunday lunch which we did.

The afternoon, as every Sunday afternoon, we devoted to a good read of the Sunday newspapers but I did break off in the late afternoon to put a supply of Growmore (for a quick tickle) and ‘Blood, Fish and Bone’ (for a longer lasting fertiliser) around the privet hedge plants that our gardner and I chopped down to about half their height during the week. As the hedge has received a bit of a bashing, we thought it would be a good idea to give it a bit of feed at the start of the growing season to encourage the denuded top to ‘green over’ – which I hope it will within about three weeks. I am conscious of the fact that a certain amount needs doing in the garden to get it fully ship-shape but we need a spell of fairly good weather before I commit myself to a daily half hour or so in the garden.

As the pandemic is ravaging the towns and cities of India and our TV screens are filled with heart-rending images of individuals who are denied admissions to hospitals (and who have practically run out of oxygen anyway) and cemeteries that have overflowed into any adjacent land and which is now burning with a succession of funeral pyres, according to Hindu rites. The UK is going to send off a supply of ventilators which is part of a consignment of 600 items which the UK is sending to India. Perhaps this only a symbolic gesture but we do have a vested interest, given the links and history between the UK and India, in making sure that India receives as much help as possible. I am reminded that the Victorian middle classes worked out that it was in the interests of the already privileged to give the working classes a clean water supply and good sewerage system. It is often said that Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’ husband, died of typhoid fever but more modern medical research has pointed out that Albert suffered several bouts of illness towards the end of his life. A modern diagnosis is that he died of Crohn’s disease which precipitated an ulcerative perforation of the bowel leading to septicaemia and a rapid death.

Last night, I decided to put (or try to put) Windows 7 onto my IBM ThinkPad. All seem to go well untilI was asked for the product code but after a bit of an internet search I found a product code relating to an educational version and this seemed to satisfy it. All seemed to go well until, at the final stage, a Windows logo appeared on the screen and after a long wait, I concluded it had frozen. So I left it (and the word on the net indicates that you sometimes to have leave things for an hour or so to resolve) and went to bed. First thing this morning, nothing seemed to have happened so I pressed the power switch on the Thinkpad and the existing installation of Windows 7 loaded. (If you consult the internet, lots of installations seemed to hand at the point that I experienced) Having got Windows 7 up, I got an informative little message saying that Windows 10 had encountered an error, failed to load and now the whole machine was being reset to the condition it was in before the installation.I am sure this little story has been repeated thousands of times by other Window users trying to upgrade. I was not surprised – but quite pleased it left my machine in a useable state after all.

It was another fine bright day in this wonderful spell of weather we have been enjoying. It was a bit cooler than yesterday with a cooling breeze but nothing to spoil our enjoyment. We ordered some more clothes from John Lewis (to be delivered in a day or at no charge to our local Waitrose) and then made our way to our normal bench. There we met with one of our regular friends and we congratulated her on her recent birthday (in her mid-70’s) In the expectation that we may see her, I had included in my rucksack a large bottle of my own damson gin. As it was happened it was her birthday last Thursday when we didn’t get round to going to the park – the cafe in the park (run by people she had known for decades) had made her a present of a lovely large cake and she had other treats on the day itself. As it happens she is only about three weeks older than I am so we keep a check on well (or badly) we are doing for our age. We expected to see our University of Birmingham friend but we had a ‘no show’ – at least initially. However, as we were walking home he caught up with us in his car – we hadn’t coincided earlier as he had an appointment in Kidderminster just down the road. We admired his lovely Saab car, now about 14 years old but since Saab went bust, our friend has his car serviced by an independent garage who mage to get hold of Saab spares when they need to without too much difficulty. We chatted by the side of the road for several minutes but will have a more comfortable assignation tomorrow when we meet in the park.

As I write this blog, we decided as it was a terrible night on the television to see a YouTube production of Verdi’s Rigoletto. The two principal singers are Luciano Paraotti and Ingvar Wixell (the Swedish baritone) and this production was evidently made when they were very much in their prime. The production is a German one and as one might expect, the quality of the singing (naturally), the quality of the acting, the staging, the camera angles and so on are of the very highest standard. Rigoletto is one of those operas which is full of really good tunes (and no doubt the Italian audiences would come away from a production singing or humming many of them). Anyway, when there is a really stunning aria, I break away from my blog and soak up some of the glorious moments from the production – this is a sort of multitasking becausse it is quite easy to listen to music and blog at the same time.

This afternoon was the final of a women’s rugby competition between the two best teams in the tournament who happen to be England and France. We knew this was going to be a tough match and the two teams having quite easily beaten the opposition in the course of the tournament were fairly evenly matched. Having said that, the French had vastly superior scrummaging, better backs, a somewhat more imaginative approach to their forward play – but still lost. To be fair, both teams displayed some nervousness and the kicking at goal meant that some easy attempts at goal were fluffed. In the event, both the French and the English teams had a conversion where the conversion ball hit the post and then, just, slid inside. The English forwards were pretty brutal in an effective but not particularly pretty fashion. The French were only about 3-4 points behind about 10 minutes before the end and could have sneaked the game but the English team managed to snaffle balls away from their line, get it upfield, force a series of penalties from the French and eventually won the game. So neither team played particularly well and the windy conditions did not help.But I would not have been disappointed if the French had gone on to win the final because in many ways they did everything right – but not at the crucial moments as did the English team (e.g.by scoring the only try of the match about 60 seconds before the end of the first half of the match)

If I had to make a guess at the stories dominating the Sunday newspapers tomorrow morning, it will be one or both of the following. For a start, the row over who paid for the ‘over the top’ refurbishment to the PM’s Downing Street flat, fuelled by a particular animus between Boris Johnson himself and Dominic Cummings (the Brexit ‘master mind’ and at one time the principal advisor to Boris Johnson) will occupy a great deal of space and attention. And secondly, there is a culture war going on as Oxford Street shoppers are heckled over face masks as thousands protest coronavirus rules in London. But we have now passed the point where more than half of the population have received at least one dose of vaccine.

Another beautiful day today to wake up to. Meg and I were a little delayed because Friday is the day when our domestic help calls around and we took the opportunity for her to work some magic wonders on Meg’s hair which is getting a bit ‘out-of-control’ until we have it done a week on Tuesday. I asked our domestic help  to make over Meg’s hair so that when we went to bed this evening, I would feel I was climbing into bed with a different woman (and I think she succeeded.) As we were a bit later that we would have liked, we  picked up our newspapers and then tried to occupy one of our preferred ‘top’ park benches but they were already fully occupied. So we made do by sitting and looking over the lake which is, of course, what we used to do at the start of the year. But then, on our way home uo the hill, we ran into both of our closest (Catholic) friends and to cut a long story short, we have invited them both round to have a nice English cup of tea (or something even stronger) next Monday afternoon. We are just hoping, of course, that the weather holds out until then but it is true to say that once we have a high pressure established like this, they tend to persist for quite a few days (I think that low pressure systems ‘bounce’ off them) We do not mind the weather being a tad cooler so long as we do get completely rained off. Actually, we intended to have a similar little ‘soiree’ last Christmas time but evidently one of the COVID-19 lockdowns intervened.

Our domestic help has forwarded me a recipe for rhubarb gin which sounds simple enough to make. According to the recipe, as well as rhubarb some orange peel is involved and a rather exotic ingredient of either a vanilla pod or some vanilla bean base (which I must admit, I have never even heard of) I have been sent the Jamie Oliver recipe and all seems straight forward but I never thought of baking the rhubarb to release ? enhance? some of the flavours. As we have a small clump of rhubarb growing, I might as well as make it something useful and, at least, I have all of he gear such as Kilner jars and sterilising fluid.

Last night whilst I was playing with my new HP computer, I found a way of getting my old DOS statistical software to work under Windows 10. I downloaded a specialist piece of software called DosBox which enabled my old software to run. I had to find out how to ‘mount’ a specific folder after which the software would run. I even found a way to configure it so it utilised more of the screen surface and was centralised. One piece of software I was glad to resurrect was a program I had written called EzeStats After development, this was eventually bundled with a statistics textbook ‘Jon Curwin and Roger Slater with Mike Hart: ‘Numeracy Skills for Business‘(Chapman Hall, 1994) Having looked at this piece of educational software some decades after it was written, I was struggling to remember exactly how I did it. This is what I think I did. I utilised a simple text editor to write the words for one screenful of information. Assuming I could work with 80 characters a row x. 25 lines, each screen could contain 2,000 characters. But each character occupied two bytes – the first was the ASCII code of the character itself and the second was  a colour encoding for that particular byte (making 4,000 per screen). I think I then utilised a utility called ‘Paint’ (nothing to do with the Windows program of that name) which enabled you to ‘paint’ the foreground (or ‘ink’) and the background ( or ‘paper’) for each screen. Some screens asked you to choose a character which gave an answer to a tutorial type of question – to capture the responses and to send you to the screen which told you whether you had the correct answer or not, I think I used a batch file which could send you back and forth amongst the various pages. Somehow, all of these pages get stitched together (perhaps via the batch file) and then I think I used a program to take a batch file and turn it into an executable file (.com or .exe) This is how I think I did it all, but it certainly still runs incredibly slickly and I think the entire tutorial course runs to about 40 screens of information, all stitched again into a fast, colourful and incredibly concise little system – I think the total size of the two main .exe files only cane to about 20k in total (and the public domain version of the MicroStats program was only about 37k). Those were the days when memory was expensive and programmers had to make every byte count!

We woke up this morning to a really bright and beautiful morning but not one we could enjoy in the usual way. We were somewhat delayed this morning by the arrival of the Waitrose order which had to be unpacked and then put away. We were aware of the fact that Mike had an appointment for a CT scan in the Kidderminster treatment centre (some 14 miles day distant) at midday – so we needed to alter our routines somewhat. We went down in the car to pick up our newspapers and then had to pop into Waitrose in order to return a garment to John Lewis via their Waitrose network.  Actually, this bit worked pretty well as the original delivery note contained a returns address and a QR code. All we needed to do is to get onto our John Lewis’s account get a RMA code, then include it in the packed and readdressed parcel and hand it in to Waitrose. I already had an email acknowledging the safe receipt of the returns package back into the system and a refund will no doubt shortly follow. The we went back home by car and had some elevenses in our front garden (delightfully sunny). I then went by car to Kidderminster and got there about 10 minutes early, got scanned very quickly and was back home at only a few minutes after 1.0pm. In the afternoon, we decided to make a trip out to Marks and Spencer’s in Longbridge (on the site of the old Austin assembly line) to do some clothes shopping for some much needed items for Meg and then got home in the mid afternoon. It was a glorious day and we had to forego our normal walk to the park but hopefully, the high pressure system will persist for a day or so yet so we have a nice clear day tomorrow, all being well.

There seems to be something going wrong with our various friends computer systems at the moment. Some of the regulars who we FaceTime or Skype seem to be having a variety of computer problems which means that we haven’t been able to communicate with each other over the last few days. The modern technology is wonderful when it works but systems can be a nightmare if things start to go wrong – we are hopeful that these problems will soon be  sorted out so the we can start to chat again.

There is a World Climate summit organised I believe by the Americans in which various leaders are appearing to pledge allegiance to new emissions targets. To get the ball rolling, as it were, Jo Biden has agreed to cut greenhouses emissions by 50% by the year 2030. The interesting question is whether both China and the USA as the earth’s two biggest polluters will be able to generate the changes needed in our whole economy and ways of living to achieve meaningful objectives. One suspects that the Chinse government, once it puts it’s mind to it, might be in a better position to deliver than the Americans. The Americans are apparently concerned that the Chinese might be a long way ahead of them in the deployment of solar technologies. Whilst some argue that  as the Chinese who have access to cheap capital and labour, then it is no surprise that they dominate some 60& of the available market in ‘solar’ technologies’. But a better explanation of China’s success in solar is that the energy industry prioritises low costs and China excels at cost-cutting and scaling — not just from cheap resources but from a superior ability to innovate manufacturing processes to drive down cost and scale quickly, known as process innovation. One also wonders whether Jo Biden can push the necessary legislative procedures through Congress at the moment as there are so many vested interests still in the energy industries.

The Greensill affair rumbles on with revelations that David Cameron lobbied the Treasury so much that he was in danger of morphing from ‘Dodgy Dave’ to ‘Desperate Dave’ as he sought, repeatedly, to get the Treasury to favour the firm which was now employing him (and which eventually went bankrupt) At the same time, Boris Johnson has been revealed as almost being at the beck and call of James Dyson (vacuum cleaner manufacturer who was an ardent Brexiteer but who eventually took his business off to Singapore to lower his costs) What is some concern to some senior civil servants is that Boris Johnson shows himself as being susceptible to exchanges of messages via WhatsApp – as such, these are not ‘meetings’ and therefore are not subject to the Ministerial code of accountability and so on. The combination of these types of stories seem to ensure that the Tory party seem to be the absolute party of sleaze – not that they care as the public does not seem to mind so much apparent sleaze as the Tories are so far ahead in the opinion polls. It is a strange world!

Today started off as quite a gloomy and overcast day and the temperature seemed to have dropped markedly since yesterday. We had plans to make a little trip this afternoon so we hoped that the weather would gradually improve in the afternoon. Knowing that we were going to make a trip out, having collected our newspapers we popped into our local Waitrose for two purposes. We had made some online clothing purchases for Meg from John Lewis and organised delivery (at no charge in our local store) Although the order was theoretically ready for collection on late Thursday afternoon (and hence, Friday morning actually) I got a text to say it was ready for collection this morning, which was very welcome. At the same time we picked up some sandwiches and biscuits ready for later on in the day. We had organised a fairly early lunch for ourselves and set off for Coughton Court (a nearby National Trust property) by 2.00pm, having had to call off and fill the car with petrol. As it happened, we got to our destination, guided by SatNav about 25 minutes before our timed entrance but we were still greeted with open arms and allowed in. By this stage of the day, the weather had brightened considerably and once having negotiated our entrance we went straight to the outdoors cafe, not least for the pleasure of having an outside snack once again conscious of the knowledge that we were helping the National Trust finances anyway (admission being gratis for National Trust members) Then we went on a most pleasant woodland walk, encompassing a walk by the river Arden and feeling ‘at one’ with nature. A particular feature of Coughton Court which has impressed us greatly is their use of natural materials to enhance the nature of any walks you undertake. Thus at various information points, the message was provided  by the expedient of writing the message (black paint, white background) on the ‘slices’ taken from a large tree which had fallen (imagine slicing a carrot and you will get my meaning) Also, any large branches are used to provide natural edging materials for the paths in the woodland walks so the whole experience is an incredibly naturalistic one. Having got most of the way through our intended trip we espied a strategically placed bench upon which we gratefully sat ourselves. We had taken a couple of portable chairs with us because we know from experiences in the past that suitably placed benches can be short supply so we had equipped ourselves not only with portable chairs but also a tarpaulin in case we needed to camp out on the grass. So we sat and drank coffee, ate some absolutely delicious rice cakes coated with an orange and dark chocolate topping and observed the distant rooks – and a flight of birds that seemed to soar a little like raptors but which we couldn’t really identify. So we had a delightful day out, only encountering the normal rush hour when we returned to Bromsgrove at about 5pm in the afternoon. 

As indicated in last night’s blog, the two crucial decisions that I was expecting today actually came late last night. Looking firstly at the collapse of the plans for a European Super League for elite football clubs, it looks as though ‘fan power’ from below has caused the whole project to collapse – demonstrations at grounds all over the county displayed the sentiment that the ‘beautiful game’ was being expropriated from them. The government having said that it was going to create an enquiry into the whole affair, it is not going to abandon it but is probably using this as an occasion to engineer some changes in the structure of the industry in the UK. It is interesting to note that no German clubs were involved, nor could they be, as fans are entrenched much more in the ownership of their clubs. Whether any of the elements of the German model can be used in the UK is a moot point as so many British clubs are now owned, or controlled, by oversees companies, owners and entities. (As an aside, the Brexit slogan of ‘take back control‘ is particularly apposite here but not from European institutions but from other varieties of an aggressive and rootless capitalist model that can buy and sell football clubs whatever the ultimate wishes of their fan base. Who ‘owns’ a football club – the fans ‘morally’ or the large commercial interests ‘legally’?) 

The second interesting question is the ramifications of the ‘Guilty’ verdicts in the George Floyd case in the USA. The view is being strongly expressed that this court case is only the start of a very long road for the institutional racism which permeates American society (or at least American police forces) to be addressed. Of course given the American legal system there is still a long process of appeals to follow and a gap of eight weeks before sentencing so the verdict is one one battle in the course of a very long war. Some of the ramifications of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement are washing up onto UK shores as well because black people in the UK justice system are probably not treated as well as they should be.

Well, I suppose it is some kind of landmark to have reached day 400 in these blogs – who would have thought I would pass this milestone when I started well over a year ago. Today was always going to be a ‘chewy’ kind of day because in the morning I had to finish off helping our gardener finish off lowering the height of the golden privet hedge which surrounds i.e. screens our BioDisk. This was accomplished on time and when we sat on our front garden bench and surveyed our work we were pleased with the result i.e. the hedge is delightful (it wouldn’t be the first time gardeners try to lower the height of a hedge and its gets wavy or sloping) Now it is this size, we are going to give it a bit of a tickle with some Growmore fertiliser or perhaps some Blood Fish and Bone.Our gardener was pleased with the result as well and we think that the bare top may well have greened over in 3-4 weeks time as we have pruned this particular privet at just the right time of year. Of course we could do with a skyfull of rain because at the moment, the earth is starting to look incredibly parched. So to recoup on a little bit of time, we took the car down into town and collected our newspapers and then went onto our normal ‘top’ bench expecting to see our University of Birmingham friend. After some three-quarters of an hour, we reckoned that he was not going to turn but as soon as we got to our car, another park friend with whom we had been chatting caught up with us and told us our friend was sitting on one of the lower seats, also looking and waiting for us. What hadn’t helped is that the local authority had erected a temporary tent type arrangement whilst they are doing some work on a drainage pipe or something similar – as it happened, this tent completely obscured or view each from the other and hence we missed. Anyway, we caught up with other and had a few jolly moments of conversation before making our way home. We won’t see each for several days now as we off to Coughton Court (National Trust property) tomorrow and our friend is engaged in tennis matches here and there so we will probably not see each other again until Saturday (quite a long time for us park regulars!)

In the mid afternoon, I thought I had better get to work mowing the lawns, even though the fine weather had suddenly become rather overcast and gloomy. Still, I got the lawns all done in good time as I like to keep a regular weekly schedule at this time of year. Just before I started on the lawns the doorbell rang and it was a computer technician bringing me a reconditioned HP laptop. Although it is not a very highly ‘specified’ machine, even when new, it does have Windows 10 on it, 4Gb of memory and a hard disk sufficient for my needs. The idea is that I run my statistical software on this machine as well as resurrecting my PhD written in  very old version of Word and needing modern machine to access it. When I was offered a laptop like this for £99.00, I thought that the offer was too good to miss so the machine duly arrived. Naturally, I haven’t had time to play about with it yet but the technician helped my get my Outlook email account up  and running. We both of us had a quick bash at running my Dos-based statistical software without a great deal of success – it looks as though I may have to get a DOS-emulator on the machine as thought I was going to play a DOS-based game. However, I am sure this has been done lots of time before so it will just take a little playing about time.

We are just on the brink of two big news stories breaking in the next day. One of these is going to be the jury returning to give their verdict in the George Floyd case in the next day (probably) and there is a lot of tension in the air to see what result is going to be returned. Anything other than ‘Guilty’ is likely to start the most intense black backlash right across America (as to British eyes, this is an an ‘open-and-shut’ case) but we shall have to wait and see.(Stop Press: Guilty on all 3 counts)The other more domestic issue is the case of the new ‘European Super League’ where it appears that at least two of the six English clubs (Chelsea and Manchester City) are on the verge of pulling out of the whole scheme – which might start to collapse in the same way that a stacked pack of cards does once you remove of the critical ones. Stop Press: Al 6 English clubs (led by Chelsea) have now pulled out of the proposed new Super League – which is now effectively ‘dead’.

We always knew that the pattern of day was going to vary from the norm today and so it proved. By a prior arrangement, our gardeners who help us with ‘big’ pruning jobs were going to come along and reduce the height of the the privet hedge around our BioDisk by anything up to a half. Accordingly, I went down into town by car in order to pick up our daily supply of newspapers and that went fine – I got back in time to help our gardener after Meg and I had had a quick breakfast. My role was to act as a ‘gardener’s mate’ and as the cutting was being done, I was on hand to dispose of the privet cuttings in large 1-tonne sacks. We managed to get half of the job done today and second half will have to wait until tomorrow. After our gardener left for the job he had booked  for the afternoon, Meg and I had a light lunch and then we walked down to the park in the mid afternoon. The light on the trees shows the park in a subtly different light to that we get in mid morning  and evidently the visitors to the park differ as well. As the weather was so fine, we actually saw quite a distribution of sun-dresses on display in the park this afternoon – a sight we have yet to behold on one of our morning walks. After we got home, we enjoyed a nice cup of Earl Grey sitting on our bench at the front of our house which receives a full blast of afternoon sun.  As I walked around our garden over the weekend, I realised that there some areas where I really need to get to work, clearing out some weedy patches before the rains come (which they inevitably will) and any latent weed seeds go absolutely mad.

As I anticipated in last night’s blog, the story about a footballing European Super League has really taken off and hit popular consciousness. It is interesting to see that fans, politicians, footballing authorities and the like all seem to be united against this new ‘plan’. The driving force seem to be American owners and American investors who are using the model of the National Football League in the USA to erect  similar structure (i.e a fixed group of clubs with no promotion or relegation). Not being a particular footballing fan, I do not pretend to understand the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of all of this but whose who do follow football much more closely than I all seem to be appalled. The word I have used most often is this whole debate is ‘greed’ and it is interesting that the people most interested in promoting this new League seem to be investors as the share prices of some of the elite clubs who may join any such new League has actually arisen. We may see periods of internecine conflict as it is quite possible that any players playing in such a Super League may be banned by UEFA (European football authority) from representing their country in European competitions. 

In terms of  the evolving political scene, it is interesting to see that India has now been added to the ‘red’ list of countries i.e. travellers from a country have to be quarantined immediately on entering the UK. This is no doubt related to the fact that the ‘Indian’ variant of COVIFD-19 may well be causing quite a degree of private concern. It appears without being unduly technical, the Indian variant of the virus appears to incorporate a double mutation which makes it more likely that it can evade some of the defences afforded by our vaccines whilst at the same time having increased transmissibility – some epidemiologists are suggesting that it could become the dominant strain before the end of June (not too far away)

Here in the West Midlands, there is a fascinating contest for the post of mayor – both candidates (Andy Street, the incumbent Conservative mayor and Liam Byrne, his Labour opponent) both agree the result might be incredibly tight. There are two competing ‘narratives’ only one of which will prove to be correct. One narrative is that the traditional Labour voters only abandoned Labour because they didn’t care for Corbyn and they wanted to ‘get Brexit done’ and therefore they will return to the fold. The alternative narrative is that these traditional labour voters are now within the conservative camp and are unlikely to return. The election itself is on Thursday, 6th May and whatever the result is will probably have quite a degree of significance for the national as well as the local political scene because it will be a test of whether remnants of the ‘Red Wall’ of traditional Labour seats still exists or whether Boris Johnson and the present Conservative party have actually ‘captured’ this important part of the electorate.

Today being a Sunday, I walk down to the newsagents on my own first thing in the morning, treating myself to a little concert of my trusty old iPhone as I go. Then it’s a case of having some breakfast on our knees whilst we watch the Andrew Marr (politics) show at 9.00am. At least we seem to have the overkill coverage of the royal funeral out of our system and, perhaps, nowadays we are starting to see the resumption of ‘normal’ news items and political discourse. Meg and I enjoyed a pleasant walk down to the park this morning where, after a little wait, we made our contact with some of our regular friends and we chatted about what we are all going to do in the week ahead. Compared with past weeks, this is going to quite a busy week for Meg and I but, no doubt, we will treat each day as it comes.  On returning home, there was a Sunday lunch to prepare and although we had some beef cooking in our slow cooker, there always seems quite a lot to prepare such as onion gravy as well as the heavy cooking vessel to clean out. Eventually all was done and we started to look forward to a lazy afternoon, reading the Sunday newspapers which, as you might expect, were quite full of details and analysis of the funeral of Prince Philip in St. Georges’s Chapel, Windsor, yesterday afternoon. In the eary part of the afternoon, my daughter-in-law was busy planting out some seeds and, in particular, some sunflower seeds on the one hand and sweet peas on the other. Sometimes, these get sown a little too late but we trust with the fine spell of weather we have just had, the timing is just about right. However, I think we are all starting to feel the absence of a proper rain-shower by now. It seems to be weeks now since we have had a really proper downpour and the gardens, whilst looking very colourful at the moment, are surely in a state when a sky-full of rain would be appreciated. Tomorrow our gardeners who come about once a month are coming by for a special  attack on a large privet hedge we  have surrounding our BioDisk. This has grown enormous over the years and its width as well as its height is making it difficult for us to keep it under control.So we are going to reduce its height and girth by about between a third or a half  and I am sure that were will be quite a volume of material to dispose of. We are resigned to the fact that our hedge might look pretty ravaged for a while but then we can rely upon some new growth to give us a green top once again.

There is a news story on the Sky news channel tonight which indicates that we may be on the brink of a European super league in football. This would ‘cream off’ the biggest and the most successful football clubs but it is said that it would have a ‘seismic’ effect upon the rest of the game. It means that our national leagues would be decimated and the whole financial edifice of football thrown into disarray. Wether is is going to happen or not and whether it would have the dire consequences proposed is a moot point. But I suppose one can be pretty certain that if the money, players, TV rights and the rest of the footballing paraphernalia is siphoned off to follow a ‘super league’ then this is going to have a massively destabilising effect on the rest of the game.

The ‘Greensill’ scandal as I suppose we now have to learn to call it continues to evolve. Perhaps the root cause of all of this was when governments did not trust the impartiality of the civil service any more when they their favoured policies were found to be over ideological and/or impractical. There was then a move to make sure that senior civil servants could be ‘seconded’ to private industry (presumably follows the mantra ‘public sector bad, private sector good‘) in order to better ‘appreciate’ the world view of those in private industry. This has led to a revolving door between the civil service and private industry (senior civil servants retiring and immediately taking up lucrative jobs in the sectors they were meant to be regulating whilst senior figures in the private sector are jetted into positions of responsibility within Whitehall) The culmination of this was the revelation tat the senior civil servant in charge of the Government procurement programmes, presumably with a budget of billions of pounds, was simultaneously allowed to held a position in a private firm whilst also being still within the civil service. Perhaps it is not at all surprising that words like ‘sleaze’, and ‘cronyism’ are increasingly bandied about but the Main Street Media does not seem too concerned about it (assuming that politicians of both major political parties are equally culpable) and this only lowers the confidence of the general public with the body politic even further.

Well, it was a beautiful bright day today and Meg and I were delighted to stroll down to town in the spring sunshine. We picked up our supply of Saturday newspapers (particularly full with a variety of Saturday supplements) and made our way to the park where we were happy to coincide with our University of Birmingham friend. All the upper benches were occupied so we had to ‘make do’ by sitting by the side of the lake but the morning was to prove not without incident. The resident black-headed gulls on the park were joined by a heron which was evidently very much larger. Consequently, the heron was being constantly mobbed and dive-bombed by the gulls but it was a bit like a David and Goliath contest. When the heron had been pestered for several minutes he took flight and headed in the direction of the flock of gulls who instantly scattered. After a little while, things settled down and the cycle of constant mobbing followed by a delayed retaliation repeated itself. There is some debate amongst the park cognoscenti  whether the heron we say today is the habitual ‘Henry the Heron‘  we used to see months back but was distinguishable because he had rather a gammy left foot (whether genetic or the result of an accident we do not know). Whilst we were laughing and joking in the park, I told them the story of a conversation I had had with my friendly Asian newspaper shop owner. I told him that I was feeling a bit tired that morning (it was a Monday) because over the weekend I had flown to Barcelona and back as I was representing the UK in an international athletics competition. Having arrived home, I then ran all of the way from my house to our Pilates studio in a one-piece bright pink ‘onesie’. My friendly shopkeeper was very sympathetic to my plight, even though I told him that none this had actually happened but was all portrayed in a particularly vivid dream I had had the night before. My park friends who know me well were of the opinion that the detail of running through Bromsgrove in a bright pink ‘onesie’ was probably correct and I was probably just in a state of denial over it all.

This afternoon was dominated by the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh which was a scaled down affair because of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. I must say that with 750 military from various branches of the armed services, it did not feel initially like a particularly scaled down event but the number of guests allowed inside St. George’s Chapel, Windsor was restricted to 30 who were all members of his immediate family. The funeral had been planned by the Duke himself over several years. One of these highlights of the funeral was the fact that Philip had designed his own custom-built Land Rover to carry the coffin at his funeral. The modified Land Rover Defender TD5 130 chassis cab vehicle was unveiled two days before the service. The duke first began the long-lasting venture to create the bespoke hearse in collaboration with Land Rover in 2003, the year he turned 82. He made the final adjustments to the vehicle in 2019, the year he turned 98. The Defender was made at Land Rover’s factory in Solihull in 2003 and Philip oversaw the modifications, in collaboration with the company, throughout the intervening years. The duke requested that the original Belize Green bodywork be switched to Dark Bronze Green, a colour used for many military Land Rovers. The service itself was one of stark simplicity and was suitably poignant. The Queen had to sit alone and with all the members of the royal family as obliged to wear a mask. Under the circumstances, this was just as well because a certain amount of the naturally felt grief would be obscured by the mask and the television cameras were certainly not visually intrusive. One has to say that the whole funeral was probably a case of ‘less means more’ and one felt that the Duke of Edinburgh had the sort of scaled down service of which he would have approved. As an aside, and without wishing to sound particularly nationalistic, I must say that the English are extraordinary good at arranging events like this at spectacularly short notice. Of course, the last event of a similar nature was the death of Diana, the Princess of Wales and on that occasion, too, the whole funeral was organised in about a week. I know that these things are well rehearsed and also that they have manuals of ‘timings’ (down to the second) to coordinate the various activities. Having said all that, I still think that the English? British? tradition of organising pageants at short notice is probably second to none in the world. Because of the the media onslaught, I feel I know a lot more ‘facts’ about the Duke of Edinburgh than I did previously – for example, one particular story is that as a baby he was stowed away in an orange crate and smuggled aboard /rescued  by a British ship after the Greek royal family (with baby Philip) was forced to flee from Corfu.

Today was another fine and bright day, albeit a little cooler than yesterday. Nonetheless, we enjoyed our walk down into the town, chatting with one of our church friends en-route. When we eventually got to the park, we had a good old chat with our University of Birmingham friend who we had quite missed over the last few days as he was off playing tennis which is his grand passion during the summer months and when lockdown conditions apply. Then we were joined by another of our regular acquaintances  and our conversations turned to the subject of the statistics pertaining to the various vaccines. As always, we didn’t arrive at any really firm conclusions but I suspect that we like to test out our understanding of the issues through discussions with each other.

This afternoon turned out to be quite busy with one thing or another. I had spent some time yesterday evening preparing the 27 labels that I needed for the newly bottled damson gin and now needed to label up the bottles with them. I had intended to do all of these in one fell swoop but I only did half a dozen as I got diverted into taking some of the labels off the mini-wine bottles with which my neighbour keeps me supplied. As a couple of new empty bottles turned up in my porch today, I went round with a full bottle of damson gin by way of recompense and was shown round some of the various improvements that my neighbour is gradually making to his back garden as the weather permits. After I had done some damson gin bottle housekeeping, I decided that our dining room in which we have an iPad (and miscellaneous computer-y type things) badly needed a tidy up and I was half way through this exercise when I was interrupted by a telephone call. The call came through from the son of our ex-Leicester Polytechnic colleague who had died recently (in his mid 90’s) wondering whether we could attend the funeral in a couple of weeks time. We have other commitments that are unmovable on that particular day so we have accepted, gratefully, the offer of a videolink into the funeral service proceedings. In return, I scanned a photo that I had managed to find and send it off to Leicestershire with the observation that we are not sure exactly when the photo was taken. We now know that it could not have been later than 1982 as that was the date upon which our ex-colleague retired but I suspect that it was a year or so before that which would make it 1980. The clothes and hair of the 10 of us look very 1970’s but the trouble is that academics (like us) were never fully up-to-date with the latest fashion trends so what we are wearing when the photo was taken was probably newly fashionable 5-10 years before that. Through the good offices of my daughter-in-law, we tried get a copy of the .jpg file printed on glossy (photo) paper but their printer refused to play ball. Anyway, the photo has now been transmitted and can be added to the family’s own collections (and recollections) of their late father.

Tomorrow afternoon is going to be the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh. To be honest, Meg and I have never been particularly interested in royal celebrations – in fact, the day that Charles and Diana got married, we were shopping for furniture in an almost deserted Leicester city centre. But I think tomorrow might be quite a special occasion and probably worth a watch. Having received my MSc at the hands of the Duke of Edinburgh just some three days after his mother had died, I do feel now that I was the fortunate recipient of the Duke’s sense of duty in that he turned to turn to perform his duties as Chancellor of Salford University. I saw the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, being asked today what he thought the Duke’s reaction would be to his own funeral. He opined that the thought the Duke would probably have said ‘Oh, just get on it with it‘ which does sound exactly the sort of thing that the Duke would say.  Apparently, the Duke had planned his funeral down to the minutest detail, including the specially designed LandRover which is to bear his coffin through the Windsor castle grounds as far as the chapel.

Just to end on a really gloomy note, the latest COVID-19 news, despite a reduction in the ‘R’ number, has some worrying features.The new Indian variant of the COVID virus that’s been detected in the UK has all the hallmarks of a very dangerous virus. It has two new significant mutations in the spike protein that help it infect cells and evade the immune system. Some 77 cases have been discovered in both England and Scotland and it is probably the spread of this variant which is leading to spiralling rates of infection across India.