Well, here we are at the start of another week and we wonder what this week will bring for us. It was a bit of an indeterminate day today with a fair bit of cloud but with a mild temperature and only the modicum of wind. As we walked down to collect our newspapers, we bumped into the friend of a friend outside the park and then, once inside the park,  a little gaggle of 5-6 of us (including ourselves) met and  exchanged pleasantries and then, as the weather turned cooler, we all made for home. We generally turn on the rolling news programmes on the TV when we return home and as anticipated, the airways were full of the reaction to the way in which the Metropolitan police handled (mishandled!) the vigil held by women on Clapham Common. One particular image has gone around the world i.e. a slight 5′ 2″ physics student pinned to the ground and restrained by several burley police officers. All of this, of course, in a vigil which was designed to honour the memory of a woman who had been killed by a serving police officer as well. There are more idiosyncrasies attached to this event as well. There just happens to be a huge bill being presented to Parliament today (the rather ungainly entitled ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill‘) which is a portmanteau type of provision designed to gave the state and the police many more powers than they already have. Before Saturday’s vigil. the bill seemed to aimed at Extinction Rebellion type protests as well as the current concerns about what to do with the statues all over the country erected to ex-slaver traders and which many now wish to see removed. It has been pointed out in Parliament that there are several references to offences against property in the new bill but nothing which would address the concerns of the omen who feel unsafe on the streets of our cities and towns. A senior minister has defended plans to increase sentences for violence against statues, amid rising fury at the government’s failure to tackle violence against women – the Tory Police Bill, to be debated in the Commons today, will allow judges to hand down sentences of up to 10 years for damaging statues based on their ’emotional, symbolic value’. There are some who argue that in the UK legal system offences against property tend to attract high penalties than offences against the person but I haven’t managed to track down any evidence for this oft-quoted remark.

As it was a beautiful afternoon I decided to give the car a wash as it hasn’t had a wash for a couple of weeks. When we bought it new, we did have a special treatment to help protect paintwork against things like bird droppings (which can be a particular nuisance if you happen to park the car in the wrong place) Anyway, I was particularly pleased that the car seemed to get itself cleaned particularly easily today – I suspect the trick is not to let it get too dirty in the first place. I have had the same large container of car shampoo for several years now but it seems to do its job OK- one particular car washing aid I have which is particularly useful is a smaller size watering can with a very long spout (designed, I imagine, to water handing baskets and the like). This I use to deliver a small but constant steam of water to wet the car before I get going with a soft brush (and then a multi-fibre mitten).

Tonight, many European countries (Germany at first, followed by France, Italy and Spain) are pausing their use of the AstraZeneca vaccine over fears that it might be implicated in a number of incidents of blood clots after people have received the vaccine. This is probably excessively cautious as there will always be a certain (low) proportion of blood-clotting in the population as a whole, vaccine or no and so the epidemiologists have to ascertain whether there is (a) an excess of blood clotting and (b) whether there is a causal relationship with the vaccine in any case.

Tomorrow afternoon will be quite full of video calls. First we are going to have a natter with one of my Hampshire friends/colleagues. It transpired that we inhabited the same haunts of Manchester but separated by a few years so we never actually met whilst we were both working there. Then we will FaceTime some of our oldest ex-Waitrose friends as we do every Tuesday afternoon. They, like us, are making some plans as to what they might do in a few weeks time when the lockdown starts to ease. But the news from Europe is now grim. Italy, France, Germany nd Poland are now all in the grip of a third wave of the pandemic and their failure to vaccinate enough of their population in time means that the third wave is proceeding apace. Can we be isolated from this, I ask myself?

Today is a day when two events are taking place on the same day – the first of these is Mother’s Day (or more accurately ‘Mothering Sunday’) and the second is my daughter-in-law’s birthday. So we have masses of cards, presents and calls coming into the house associated with either one celebration or the other. I was a little puzzled why ‘Mother’s Day‘ appeared so early this year – I tend to think of it as a Sunday near to March 25th (the ‘Feast of the Annunciation’) but I find after a little more investigation that the date (in the UK) is the fourth Sunday of Lent. Therefore, if Easter is early, then Mothering Sunday will also be early so that is one little mystery solved. Today being a Sunday, we engaged in our normal Sunday morning routine. I get up an hour earlier and then stroll down to collect our Sunday morning newspapers, getting back in time for the Andrew Marr Show which I am hoping might be particularly illuminating this morning in view of the fuss that is taking place over the Metropolitan Police’s catastrophic handling of the vigil taking place last on Clapham Common to commemorate the murder of the girl by a serving police officer.  As I was making my way home complete with newspapers, I tend to take a banana with me to sustain me until I get breakfast. When I came to disposing of the banana skin I remembered an old ‘tip’ and decided to use the banana skin to give my walking boots a quick wipe. Although this sound odd, it is quite well documented that the large amount of potassium in banana skins is the beneficial agent when it comes to shine up leather. Incidentally, the same trick works with rubber car mats (not the cheaper plastic variety) – it appears that the natural oils found in banana skins are very similar to this occurring naturally in rubber products which may be drying out. This is all strange yet true – fortunately, at that hour in the morning, there was none around apart from the occasional jogger to see me cleaning my boots with a banana skin. On my journey down into town, I treated myself to a little concert on my trusty old iPhone – this time, I was playing J.S. Bach’s B Minor Mass and parts from the Matthew Passion. So all in all, I quite enjoy my little trips on a Sunday with a ‘free’ concert thrown in. We walked down to the park and there we met with some of our usual ‘park’ friends – as we all know what parts of the park we inhabit and congregate in, we tend to coincide more often than not. Needless to say, yesterday’s Rugby match (between England and France) was a great talking point. After a while, Meg and I struck for home and we bumped into one of our church friends who told us that we now had a priest to take services when we next go in a couple of week’s time. Nobody seems to know anything about him (not that that should matter at all) but it looks as though he has been installed in the presbytery already. Of course social contact with him and with fellow parishioners is bound to be limited until we are in further stage of lockdown.

This afternoon, as you might expect, was devoted to watching a 6-Nations rugby match – this time between Ireland and Scotland. It was a hard fought match and only decided in the last five minutes when the Irish clawed themselves ahead – it never ceases to amaze me how many rugby matches are decided in the last fine minutes or so of a game.

In the late afternoon, Meg and I decided to see if we could see anything that Mary Beard might have produced on the subject of ‘race’ in Roman society. We did find a well-illustrated lecture by Mary Beard which was fascinating and answered some of our questions indirectly. Whereas the far right in both Britain and America tend to look to antiquity for the ‘roots’ of white western civilisation, Mary Beard manage to dispose of the most facile of their arguments. She showed that how many statues although often displayed in museums as white marble, at least initially many of them would be coloured (garishly according to present day sensibilities) in which we can infer the skin tints and tones of ‘typical’ roman citizens. In short, there is quite a lot of indirect evidence that Roman society was relatively open and cosmopolitan and also with a degree of social mobility for some. For example, one gravestone found near South Shields shows that the person who had their monument erected for him had married one of his slaves who therefore became his wife (almost impossible to think of similar events happening in past centuries in the UK when slavery was still legal)

Today turned out to be a fairly typical Saturday. The big storm which had swept across the UK from the Atlantic had done its worst but there were still the remnants of some following winds and rather lowered temperatures. We picked up our complement of Saturday newspapers, replete with supplements ready for a good read later on today. And so we made our way to the park which seemed a bit more empty of children on bikes and dogs which is normally the case for a Saturday morning. There we met with our normal crowd of park habitués – we tend to sit on the same benches every day and as people pass us by, they stop for a little chat. In this colder weather, the older amongst us have realised that it is not a good idea to stand for too long nattering  as our knees get set and our bodies get cooler so most of the passers-by just stop for a few minutes to exchange gossip of the day. Nearly all of us have been jabbed by now and some of us are awaiting our second dose of the vaccine in about 3-4 weeks time. We are all making tentative plans for the things that we intend to do during the summer when the lockdown has been alleviated. However, many of us of us are working out the people (generally relatives) that we would like to meet up with again as soon as we can and the crucial date is March 29th which is two weeks on Monday. On that date, up to six people drawn from two households will be allowed to meet in an open space such as a garden, so I imagine that many people will take that opportunity.

Quite a lot of COVID-19 news has surfaced today. For a start the number of (first) vaccinations has now reached 23.6 million which by my calculations is over 50% of the adult population. One would have thought that there would been much celebration at passing the 50% milestone but. if this has occurred, I have missed it. The number of new infections is down to about 6,000 a day which is approximately one tenth of the daily rate announced at the height of this phase of the pandemic (last January). In the last two weeks of March, however, is looks as though the UK is due to receive some extra batches of vaccine and therefore the rates of vaccination might increase dramatically. Various vaccination centres have been put on maximum alert to greatly accelerate the rate of vaccination and asked to ready their staff in preparation for this. There is a target to get all adults inoculated by the end of July but it is quite possible that with an acceleration of the rate, all UK adults may be vaccinated by early June. In today’s ‘The Times‘ an analysis has been reported that the cost of the lockdown is some £18 billion per month in GDP. So every month earlier that the vaccination target is brought forward should more than pay for the costs of the vaccines themselves. Of course, there is ‘many a slip t’wist cup and lip‘ as they say but we do, as a country, seem to be a long way ahead of any of our fellow European countries. The last set of comparable figures that I have seen published put the UK at 34% but the average for Spain, Italy, France and Germany is about one fifth of this (at 7%) Of course, there is always the possibility that new variants may arise (against which our existing vaccine will not be very efficacious until they have had the chance to be reformulated)

This afternoon proved to host one of the most exciting rugby matches in years – in this case between England and France. Had the French won, they would have been on-course for the ‘Grand Slam’ i.e one team beats all of the others in the competition. The French certainly had the better of the first half and actually scored their first try after about 80 seconds of the match in a piece of brilliant French flair and opportunism. The French led at half-time but the English gradually overhauled the French in the second half. However, they were still behind three minutes before the end when Maro Itoje (who had a terrible game against Wales conceding a clutch of penalties) squeezed over the line and was adjudged by the TV official to have just about grounded the ball, thus earning the try which secured victory.

Tonight there have been disturbances in South London as several women’s groups were planning a vigil in honour of Sarah Everard (murdered by a serving police officer). The vigil was not allowed by the police despite promises by the organisers to social distance – but a lot of women turned up to the vigil in any case only to run into clashes with the police. Under the circumstances, the police probably ‘called this one wrong’ even though mass gatherings are against the law under current COVID regulations.

Today started off as a beautiful fine day – Meg and I enjoyed our walk down into town where we picked up our newspapers and one or two little items from Waitrose which is on our way back. We seemed to have been running a little bit earlier today and we made our way to our benches overlooking the park, knowing that we would have some time to wait before any of our acquaintances showed their faces. However, the weather started to worsen and some squally wintry showers swept along to spoil our enjoyment and we even had a brief smattering of hail for good measure. Whilst we were waiting, we were passed by a young Irish mother we have chatted to before – we have some things in common because she attends the same church as do we but normally for the Sunday morning rather than the Saturday evening services, so our paths have not crossed for quite some time. Then our Birmingham University friend hove into view and several other people we have come to know quite well. One is an elderly gentlemen of 87 years who is quite remarkable because he walks for at least 8 km per day (even more by the time he gets home) His progress is checked on a ‘smart’ watch so he knows just how far he has walked and a GP daughter keeps track of him remotely. Our acquaintance had had a career in Export sales and in the course of his work had worked in both Kuwait and in Cairo. You never know what interesting lives people have led until you ask them of course, but I never fail to be surprised by the interesting facts that emerge from our gentle questioning. Later, we were joined by one of regulars (who happens to be a wheelchair user) so I was pleased that she stopped her chariot in time and did not run me over (which was quite a possibility) Some others joined us so we finished up as a little gaggle of six but by now the weather was turning against all of us so we decided universally that we had better strike for home.

This afternoon was devoted to some routine domestic matters. One thing I do at this time of the month is getting my accounts in order (I record transactions in a large ‘day book’ and then reconcile this with my online statements) This was a task quite soon accomplished so we returned to our newspapers to complete the afternoon. Earlier this morning and still preoccupied by ‘back up’ routines, I had a bit of a lateral thought and thought that I would use the memory card recently populated with my backup data in a different way. On checking that I had plenty of space in the external drive attached to the portable that I have, I thought I might as well as put a backup on there as well as on the hard-disk drive of the portable itself. So I now have my most recent backup on 2-3 different media in 2 different locations so were disaster to strike, I should be able to restore my files fairly easily.

As  greater proportion of the population get vaccinated nd the weeks roll by, so data is starting to accumulate concerning the efficacy of the vaccines. The number of people vaccinated is now over 23 million in the UK. There have been a few reports of people suffering blood clots just after receiving the vaccine but the WHO and others hasten to reassure us that that there seems to be no causal link with the AstraZeneca vaccine. Whilst cases in the UK are falling very rapidly, the rates in central and in Eastern Europe seem to be rising quite rapidly. It could be, of course, that all countries are a slightly different stage in the life cycle of the pandemic but it is surely reassuring that the data is generally moving in the right direction in the UK. Infections are up very slightly compared with a week ago but the number of fatalities is 61 less than a week ago when it was 236. I will personally feel a little happier once we have Easter out of the way and hope that the ‘R’ rate has not been forced higher by the great influx of schoolchildren going back to school this week. The Easter break may well give us all just a little bit more breathing space.

We have just spent a very pleasant hour chatting with one of my ex-Hampshire friends. As well as being a fund of good stories (and a repository of a great deal of knowledge) he used to work for IBM which means that if I can struck on any little computing issues, my friend and colleague can generally supply me with the answers!

The remnants of the storm which raged overnight were still somewhat in evidence this morning. There was quite a (hat-removing) wind that was in evidence and the temperature was on the cool side. We picked uo our newspapers and then popped into our local Waitrose where we needed to buy birthday cards for family members needed in the next few days. Then it was into the park and we met up with our Birmingham University friend. We had an interesting discussion about things historical and particularly the way in which certain presenters very much have the ‘common touch’  and manage to convey well the importance of history to our everyday lives. After that, it was a fairly unpleasant walk home as the wind intensified but we managed to regale ourselves with a curry that we prepared for lunch.

This afternoon we had a typical lazy afternoon, largely concerned with reading our newspapers.The news rooms have been filled, though, with the case of the young woman who has gone missing and subsequently a member of the Metropolitan police has been arrested amid a lot of conjecture that he was responsible both for her abduction and her murder. The fact that occurrences like these are so rare has not helped to dispel the widespread feeling of unease, not to say fear, experienced by the majority of young women if they have to venture out at night. It goes shout saying the men do not share similar fears, nor in general do they need to. But to act as some kind of corrective, we are being reminded tonight that of the women murdered each year, most of the blame can be attributed to a partner or an ex-partner and not a complete stranger.

Whilst thinking about the whole brouhaha surrounding the Meghan and Harry interview with Oprah Winfrey, the question came into my head whether Roman society was inherently racist (given that the Romans were great colonisers) I genuinely did not know the answer to this question but the consensus view is that whilst the Romans referred to the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa as ‘Aethiopes‘ (from which we derive the designation Ethiopians?) The answer was quite surprising. The conventional historical view is that the Romans did not have a racist social structure – their ‘slaves’ were largely drawn from other European and Mediterranean peoples and were therefore ‘white’ (The story was told to us in primary school that when a couple of young Anglo-Saxon children were shown to the Pope of the day and with their long blond hair and blue eyes were said to be ‘Angles’, the Pope is reputed to have said ‘Surely, not Angles but Angels’) In Roman Society, black people were not excluded from any profession or strata of society  and there are quite a lot of illustrations of black individuals (and traces of black DNA) found in places as far as Hadrian’s Wall. But there has been a counterblast in a book entitled ‘The invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity‘ in which the author says that, contrary to prevailing opinion, the roots of racism we have experienced in the west does have its roots in Antiquity and specifically in Roman and Greek Society. The problem with all this is that white historians have generally found little examples of classical racism whereas black historians show the reverse. So does historical truth lie in the ethnicity of the historian? Whilst admitting that one always has to ask for whom the historian is writing and for what purposes (e.g. see the way in which Tudor propaganda systematically besmirched the reputation of Richard III), it is somewhat troubling  if one is a seeker after truth and trying to find ‘the answer’ to a question.

Meanwhile, the unwinding of Brexit is chugging in the background, but generally out of the public gaze. Last week the Chancellor accepted the OBR’s forecasts of a 4% reduction in national income once the full effects of Brexit are felt. Far from sovereignty driving prosperity, the government’s forecaster seems unpersuaded that the much-vaunted regulatory freedoms of Brexit will do anything to offset this macroeconomic damage. Quietly, a Vote Leave prime minister and chancellor have accepted that so-called project fear was right all along. The consequences for household incomes are bad, but so is the impact on the public finances. The OBR forecasts that tax receipts will hit £1,038 billion by 2025-6. But without the economic drag anchor of Brexit, revenues would have been around £42 billion higher. As we always suspected, the effects of Brexit and the pandemic are so intertwined, that it will be difficult for the professional statisticians to attribute which effect to which cause. But I am reminded, as we were talking about Roman society, that in order to distract the population from rioting and expressing its discontents, the roman elite of the day used to engage in ‘bread and circuses’ in order give out a free distribution of food and throw some general public spectacles to divert the gaze of the population to the true source of their discontents.

Unfortunately for him, the Treasury disagrees.

Today was the blustery day in which a large storm moved across the Atlantic and hit the UK with high winds and attendant rain. As it turned out, the weather was somewhat blowy when we walked down into town and it did turn out to be one of those days when you had to hang onto your hat because it was in constant danger of blowing away. We needed to pop into Waitrose to get one or two things that we had run out of before the order arrives between 9.0-10.0 tomorrow morning. Whilst there, I exchanged some information with one of the friendly staff who mentioned that she had now seen another person we used to see regularly who is a history teacher in a local school. She had a beautiful baby boy who is now old enough to be at nursery so our friend (of our supermarket friend) was returning to work. I gave our friendly supermarket assistant one of the cards that I keep in my wallet to pass onto our mutual acquaintance because I would like to reestablish contact after a year. At the very least, she can read our blog to see what kinds of things we have been doing in the last year.  And so we made our way to the park but by this time the wind was blowing quite hard. We did not really anticipate seeing our University of Birmingham friend in the park today because he had only had the vaccination at the day before and may have been feeling under the weather. As it turned out, we did not see our friend but we did receive a telephone call informing us that he was having a big computer problem back home and he was trying to get it fixed remotely – the best of luck in this venture. Eventually a gust of wind blew my cup of coffee off our little portable stool so we thought we had better make for home – there was hardly anybody in the park to speak of anyway. But just before we left, we bumped into another local who frequently walks in the park and she had often noticed us (and even stopped for us in her car on one occasion) So, again, I passed over my blog details because she and her husband were quite regular bloggers so it might be quite interesting to have a look at what each other is saying.

When we got home, we had a quiet afternoon reading and then a little parcel arrived from Amazon. This was a superior quality memory card I had ordered from Amazon which was very frequently recommended as one of the best quality one could buy and was the first choice for many professional photographers (including our own son, so I discovered in a subsequent conversation with him at memory cards) This particular one (a SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB cost me a shade under £16.00) and I immediately used it to make a complete backup of my main computer system. I was pleased to see that the entire 32GB of my system was backed up in 18 minutes which means it was writing at almost 2GB a minute or about 32Mb a second which is fast enough for me, as it happens. This particular memory card claims to have a ‘limited’ lifetime warranty but SanDisk do offer a service that if the data on the disk cannot be read or recovered, then they will recover if for you using their own specialised facilities within a two-year window from the date of purchase. I think this sounds quite a good deal really, considering the not exorbitant amount of money that the memory card cost in the first place.

Tonight it has been reported that the test-and-trace regime is now costing us £37 billion (£22 billion + another tranche of £15 billion handed over the the Chancellor). This has been branded by the Public Accounts Committee as ‘staggering‘ and ‘no clear evidence‘ that it had cut coronavirus infections. Just to put into context, this extraordinary amount of money is approaching one half of the projected cost of the HS2 hi-speed link between London, the Midlands and the North. So here we have one system, the test-and-trace regime largely handed to the private sector and recognised as ineffective and an extraordinary waste of money. Meanwhile the vaccination programme performed by the NHS, i.e. in the public sector, is an astounding success. To my mind, there could not be a clearer illustration of the fact that really big and universal systems are best left to the state to organise and not left to the vagaries of the private sector. One interesting quote is provided by Lord Macpherson, who until 2015 was the most senior official at the Treasury, and called it ‘the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time‘. But do the public really care about this enormous waste of money – after all, the Tories are still ahead in the opinion polls so it doesn’t appear that wasting money on a colossal scale has any adverse consequences.

Today was a beautiful day, at least to start off with, and Meg and I enjoyed a really pleasant walk down to collect our newspapers. However, it was not so much a case of ‘now is the time for the turtle dove to be heard in our land‘  but rather one gets used to the whirr of the lawnmower as the population gets geared up for the spring. Whilst in the newsagents, I indicated that I had managed to solve one of the great mysteries of life i.e. how is it that the newsagent can sell a bar of Cadbury’s Bournville dark chocolate for £1.00 whereas Waitrose sells the same bar for £2.00? The answer lies in the fact that although the bars look alike (width x. height) they nonetheless differ in their height or depth i.e. the Waitrose bar is twice as thick and consequently has twice as much chocolate and the commensurate increase in price.So now we know. In the park we met with our Birmingham University friend who, as it happened, had received his jab the day before and was feeling a little under the weather. We conveyed our condolences and told him that when he died from the after-effects of the jab, we would go to the local cemetery in order to pick up some flowers which we would then recycle for his own funeral – he was very grateful for this offer. We also met another long-standing park friend who is a wheelchair user but it transpired that during her working life she had been an NHS manager in a small local hospital, now long since closed down and the site developed as a housing estate. We also engaged in some gossip about other park acquaintances that we all know well but prefer not to get into arguments with, if we can avoid it. The park was pleasantly quiet today and we met a few friends of friends as well as the variety of dogs some of whom we are starting to recognise.

This afternoon, we sent ae email to Meg’s cousin in Bolton, wondering with the easing of the lockdown situation whether we might make a flying visit to see the family in early April. As it happens, the weekend we were thinking about is going to be quite busy with family reunions so we are probably going to settle for a date some time in May. This might suit our purposes quite well because it is my birthday towards the beginning of May so it may well be that we have a family reunion which includes a little birthday celebration at the same time. However, it is a thought that a lot of population think they are ‘safe’ because they have received one dose of the vaccine and there may be lots of family reunions and events all over the country. Then this might have all of the ingredients that we need for another surge of the virus.

After the Harry/Meghan interview, Buckingham Palace has tonight released but a terse but incredibly well-written statement. This indicates that they will tackle the issues raised, particularly racism, within the family and offering their continuing love and support. To my mind, this hits absolutely the right note and shows a degree of dignity and restraint – with absolutely the right words chosen for the occasion. The interesting question is whether the media is going to keep this particular story rumbling on and on or whether the public as a whole will get bored with it and public attention moves elsewhere. After all, there is an expression in the newspaper world that yesterday’s newspapers become today’s fish-and-chip wrapping paper.

One of the government health ministers (Lord Bethell) has tonight given his opinion that nurses are well-paid for the job they do.  While he praised the ‘heroics’ of health workers during the pandemic, he said they had secure jobs that many people would ‘envy’. Given that a government re-shuffle is on the cards, this sounds like one of the most inopportune things that  a government minister might admit to. Of course, the whole question whether nurses are to receive a pay-cut (given that a 1% pay increase when the rate of inflation is more than this) is still under active political discussion. It seems very likely that the government are going to receive a bloody nose over this particular conflict.

Late on this afternoon, we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends, as we generally do on a Tuesday evening. We exchanged news of the various ventures which we can both look forward in the next few weeks. Our friends had got a trip booked in July to see both York (where Meg and I, incidentally, decided to get married) and then Harrogate (where I lived as a child from the age to 5-17) Meg and I don’t have any trips planned as such but we might make a lightning visit to see Meg’s cousins in Derby some time in April (i.e. after some restrictions end on March 29th)

Today had a morning characterised by what I think you would call ‘watery sunshine’ – the temperature was quite mild and our walk down to collect the newspapers was  reasonably pleasant, particularly because as you go, it is just possible to discern which perennial shrubs and trees are starting to bud. My observation of this process is that many plants and shrubs may start in the late autumn and then undergo a halt in early spring, perhaps anticipating a late frost or snow and then suddenly burst into life with a flying start when the days lengthen and the temperature warms up. Just before I get onto our park bench meetings, today was the day in which you could legally sit down with a friend on a park bench and enjoy a cup of coffee – without the ‘excuse’ of the park bench bench being a necessary break in the middle of exercise which was the legal regime under which we have been operating since the start of the current lockdown. In fact, Channel 4 news devoted to a little item to the joys of the park bench and how it had (and will) continue to be the ways in which we can meet with old friends now that coffee shops and pubs are generally closed (as yet) to us. Anyway, we met with our Birmingham University friend and had a really useful chat about how we were going to manage our gradual ‘unlockdown’ transactions from now on. At least a couple of our park acquaintances met up with us and we chatted about how much we were enjoying the mildish weather, particularly as the children have returned to school today and the park had returned to a quiet and relaxing haven after the bustle of the weekends. There were several little things we had wanted to chat over with each other but this is not always possible when you are joined in conversation by others and then it is time to go home.

Today, I carried on looking at bits of my computer system and which I could usefully prune, move elsewhere and/or make part of my backup routines. Over the years I have collected  a range of pen drives as the price has dropped dramatically over the years. I found one that was a SanDisk Extreme 32GB and when I checked out the current price, Amazon were selling it for £8.99. So I reformatted it and used it as an additional backup source for my system. I reformatted it to a MAC format and then was amazed that I could easily get most of my important files on it, writing at the rate of 2.34GB per minute and this only using the slow-is USB 2.0 rather than the more up to date and faster drive (on more modern machines than mine) which is USB 3.0. So at the end of the day, I do now have three backup systems – one being Apple’s own Time Machine, a second being a conventional and recently purchased Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and the third being the flash drive. In the course of poking around in my system, I found an audio file (and subsequently, on the web some movie files) of our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations in 2017. So Meg and I enjoyed watching these again, some 3½ years after the event. There were three video clips which were of great interest – one being of Meg and her observations on 50 years of marriage, one of me telling a range of tall (and largely true) stories and a third of ours who was a close friend, now deceased who came along to our celebrations and played some Handel for us on his trumpet. So this took a fair amount of time but we enjoyed looking at it was well as the range of photos which we took on the day itself.

Today the media has been dominated, as you might expect, by the Meghan Markle interview which was shown on the American media overnight and is going to be shown tonight on ITV at 9.0pm. Very much is being made of the fact that one member of the Buckingham Palace outfit had speculated as to the skin colour of the yet unborn baby and everybody (particular Oprah Winfrey) had reacted to this as though it was the purest expression of racism! On the hand hand, it could be that the person uttering the remark was imbued with a racist ideology but an alternative explanation is that a courtier of liberal views was expressing delight that the British royal family was modernising by including mixed heritage members within it. Anyway, I am thoroughly bored by the whole media blitz and attention and the programme has not even been broadcast yet.

Back to school today for millions of school children under some conditions (e.g. lateral-flow testing 2-3 times a week to be continued at home, face mask wearing for senior pupils etc.) I believe that some members of the SAGE committee are already of the view that this is bound on the ‘R’ factor (pushing it up from 0.6 to 0.9?) but, in any case, Easter beckons  quite soon and provide a bit more respite.

The weeks roll by and yet another Sunday morning has dawned. I get up half an hour earlier on a Sunday morning and this gives me time to get up, showered, dressed and breakfast prepared before I trot down to get our supply of Sunday newspapers. I generally enjoy these trips down into town because I give myself a little concert on my trusty old iPhone – in this case a good dose of J.S.Bach’s ‘Brandenburg Concertos’ (full of early 18th century ‘joie de vivre‘) After our customary viewing of the Andrew Marr (politics) programme, Meg and got ready to wander down into the park and see who we might meet. As it is ‘back to school day’ tomorrow, we anticipated that the park would be less populated by young children – perhaps the coolness of the weather has something to do with it. We met a couple of park friends and enjoyed a scintillating conversation on the subject of computer ‘heat sinks’ before we struck for home. We had a largish ham joint cooking away slowly in our slow cooker but the Sunday lunch traditionally takes a little longer to prepare as there is onion gravy to prepare amongst other things.

This afternoon proved to be a typical Sunday afternoon for us. We spent a lot of the afternoon reading the print off the Sunday newspapers with a David Attenborough wildlife program on the television by way of passing interest. When we looked out of the window, it seemed to be a glorious Sunday afternoon – very inviting for a walk if we hadn’t already got our exercise done for the day. We treat ourselves to a re-run of Thursday night’s ‘Question Time‘ which is broadcast on the Parliament Channel at 6.00pm each Sunday. Tonight, we are going to treat ourselves to a roam through YouTube and hope to be able to get a viewing of an opera – tonight, hopefully, we will try and find and play Mozart’s ‘The Marriage of Figaro‘ That ought to set us up for the week (if only because the arias keep running through your head for a day or so after the viewing)

The political story that is running on and on (which we thought it would) is the 1% pay deal offered to the nurses – after they had been promised at least 2.1% a year or so back and this had been built into both government spending projections and even legislation. What must give the government pause for thought is that according to an opinion poll in the Observer, some 72% of the population think the nurses should be offered more than 1% (i.e. what would actually be a pay-cut in real terms once inflation, council tax rises and the like are taken into account). A clear majority of Conservative voters/supporters feel that the offer of 1% is too low so surely there must be a screeching ‘U-turn’ on the cards, particularly as there are local elections coming up on Thursday, 6th May which is not too far off once we get Easter taken into account. But I read tonight that the organiser of a protest over the proposed 1% pay rise for NHS workers has been handed a £10,000 fine by police. This is because about 40 people had gathered in contravention of current lockdown legislation but even so, this works out at about £250 a head! Perhaps the organiser ‘had form’ and had already been warned by the police but a fine of £10,000 for a first offence (if it were) seems to me to be unduly harsh.  There is always the possibility that the organiser could appeal and have this fine adumbrated or massively reduced but we shall have to wait and see.

As we enter March, we start to think of birthdays and the like as our son’s birthday and that of our daughter-in-law are fast coming into view – and what to do for celebration in these days of (just about) lockdown? Evidently, we can’t go out for a meal so we decided to treat ourselves to a communal fish-and-chip supper on a date that bisects the two birthdays. I also have an eye on the end of the month because March 25th is the day that I traditionally like to think of as the start of the mowing season which involves getting new supplies of petrol, engine oil and so on. Once you start the mowing process, you have to carry on at approximately weekly intervals not least because of the act of mowing releases a hormone in the grasses which stimulate them to keep on growing. The first cut of the season is always a bit off a pig anyway as the grass is so tufty and I have to do it on a high setting to get the job done. But we have a bit more bad weather to face yet as there seems to be a horrendous Atlantic storm heading our way which is going to hit us with high winds and plenty of rain about next Wednesday.

Before we came out today, I received a text from one of my church friends indicating that church services were to resume in about a couple of weeks with a type of ‘rolling start’ but a booking system was being introduced so that would-be worshippers can ‘book their place’ several days beforehand. It looks as though things ought to be in place by ‘Palm Sunday‘ which will be on Sunday, 28th March i.e. in three weeks time. I got onto the church’s website to download some particulars of the new procedures that we have to follow before we can attend services again and I am glad that things are starting to move again. It looks as though a new priest may be installed before the Easter celebrations start but so far information is exceedingly sparse.

Because we were slightly late this morning we popped into the park first of all where there was a mini ‘gathering of the clans’ – well six of us anyway. The conversation got a little esoteric e.g. how likely is life on other universes? At what stage after the ‘singularity’ (i.e. the ‘big bang’ which may have started off the universe given that it is still expanding) did the laws of Newtonian physics start to apply? – the consensus view is that can be measured in milliseconds but needless to say, all of this is conjecture by the cosmologists. Anyway, we were fairly relieved to break off from these lofty not to say esoteric discussions, collect our newspapers a little late (although they had been kept in the back room for us) and so on up the hill. On the way home, we bumped into two more of our church friends and, again, we swapped whatever information we had concerning the resumption of services.

I had a heavy ‘computing’ afternoon where all finished very well in the end. The Apple operating system contains an app (‘Time Machine‘) which, once running correctly, will save backups hourly for the past 24 hours, daily for the last month and then weekly for all previous months (with the oldest being deleted when your backup disk becomes full). Although this seemed to be working OK for the first few days after I specified it be saved on my newly acquired portable drive, then I kept getting error messages to say that Time Machine had encountered errors and could not save. A quick search of the web indicated that the backup disk needs formatting in a particular way (Apple has about three different types of format, just to be confusing) Then I couldn’t ‘unmount’ the disk (make it invisible to the operating system) or reformat it so the whole disk seemed to have become useless. I was just on the point of packing it up and sending it back to Amazon and make a claim for a new one when I suddenly had a brain wave and managed to get it reformatted in the way I wanted on an ‘old’ i.e. legacy Mac that I have. In the meanwhile, I pressed an a former (very high quality) backup drive into action (made by a firm called GTech) and this seemed to work like a charm i.e. just as it should. Then I used the newly reformatted 2TB drive to store backups of most of my ‘every day’ files which must go aback about 20 years by now (e.g. all of my old lectures and teaching materials that I really ought to throw away but can’t at this stage!) Things seemed to back up more quickly than I might have imagined (I managed nearly 1½ Gbytes a minute using only USB 2.0) so I am well pleased. So now I have a Time Machine system which seems to be working the way I want and a more ‘personalised’ backup system if there is anything I desperately need to get hold of. Hopefully, everything will be fine from this point onwards with no more hassle.

Tonight, we were going to treat ourselves to a Mozart opera (‘The Marriage of Figaro’) via YouTube but it would clash with a police series which we are watching on Saturday evenings, so we need to postpone that pleasure until tomorrow night. 

There is a big row going on tonight over the pay-rise to be awarded to NHS staff i.e. 1% when the rest of the public are having a pay freeze. What is making the nurses and others so angry is that they had been promised a pay-rise of 2.1% (which only just about compensates for inflation) and Teresa May had indicated that this would be covered by the NHS revenue settlement announced in June, 2018. So having had expectations raised, they have now been dashed on the grounds that ‘we can’t afford it‘ which wears a bit thin when £22 billion had been spent on a barely function ‘Test-and-Trace’ regime. Again, the Sunday newspapers might play an interesting role if they carry opinion polls which the government might choose to ignore, being several points ahead of Labour following a ‘successful vaccine rollout’ bounce for the Tories.