Last night and this morning have not run particularly smoothly. Last night Meg was awake all of the evening and although I tried to get an earlier night I was kept awake until about 1.00 in the morning. Then Meg awoke me at about 5.00am so I finished off with only four hours of sleep and consequently have felt like ‘death warmed up’ during most of the day. There was a large band of rain sweeping up the country but, fortunately, at the time that we came to make our journey down the hill to Waitrose, the band of rain had largely passed over just leaving gloomy clouds in its wake. In the store, we were pleased to meet up with two of our friends and we had our normal pleasant chat. To he musical nonagenarian chorister friend, we related the following story with some relish. Late yesterday afternoon, Meg and I found a programme on Beethoven celebrating the life of the great composer. Now most depictions of Beethoven show him with rather scowling features and certainly not a tranquil face at rest. The programme that we saw yesterday revealed the reason why. After he had achieved a degree of fame, it was decided that a bust of Beethoven be made (to be displayed somewhere in Vienna I wonder?) This procedure involved applying a kind of thick plastic wax or paste in some depth to the whole of Beethoven’s face and in order to breathe two large straws were inserted through the wax into his nostrils. Beethoven found this procedure particularly unpleasant (as I suspect we all might) and when the wax was removed and ultimately converted into a mould for a bust of the great man, he is depicted with a huge scowl, or rather a grimace. So the images that we have of Beethoven displaying a scowling or tempestuous air about him might ultimately all derive from the face mask. Another little nugget that came from one of the musicologists contributing to the programme was that after failed attempt to make a lasting liaison with the opposite sex, in which Beethoven was always unsuccessful, his music seemed to make a great leap forward. So the musicologists thanked all of the various women, usually of aristocratic lineage and beyond Beethoven’s league, for the fact that they had all turned him down (usually citing his ugliness and strange habits) and had thus helped Beethoven to write even more masterpieces.

After we had got Meg home, we had our late morning call complete with a third young care assistant who was shadowing as part of her training, and then we prepared for these care workers to depart and for the ‘sit’ call to commence. The carer allocated to the ‘sit’ call who we have known from some weeks back came along and we discussed some medications that I might be able to buy to induce some sleep in Meg this evening, given that the doctors are loathe to prescribe any sleeping aids whatsoever. So when I went out on the road this morning, I went into our local herbalist to find something that the carers have recommended based upon their clients and/or relatives so I purchased a bottle of something which may or may not help. All of these sleep supplements are a fantastic price but I suspect that they trade upon the fact that once deprived of sleep for some time one becomes almost desperate. Whether these preparations will work in conjunction with Meg’s other medications, I cannot tell and it may be that they are a complete waste of money but I feel that I have to make the effort because I cannot continue indefinitely only getting four hours of sleep a night and with the medical profession unwilling to help.

Gareth Southgate has resigned this afternoon and I suspect that whilst there may be some regrets, much of the footballing public will feel it is time for a new broom. What is ironic that some of the more avid followers of football are making the point that the individual talents of the squad seem quite manifest but often they fail to be displayed as soon as they pull on an England shirt. The point has been made by more than one commentator, that the players seem to manifest good performances for their individual clubs but these are often only brought to fruition in an England team when they are brought on as a substitute with ten minutes to go. Personally, I feel that we need to develop a more aggressive, penetrative style of football that runs at and takes on the opposition. The worst thing that I witnessed in the current England was the sight of three England players passing the ball laterally to each other in their own third of the pitch. So in the words of the old fashioned expression, perhaps it is a case of ‘Nothing venture, nothing gain’

Tomorrow is the day of the King’s speech in Parliament. The King’s Speech is a speech written by the government and delivered by the Monarch at the State Opening of Parliament. It marks the beginning of a new parliamentary year, or session, and is an opportunity for the government to set out its legislative agenda for the coming month. Tomorrow might be particularly interesting for us to observe which bits of legislation will receive a degree of priority and which will be sidelined. I foresee at least one defeat for the new Labour government. When they have the opportunity, the SNP has announced plans to table an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for the government to scrap the two-child benefit cap. There are so many of the new Labour MP’s who agree with the SNP that this is one of the best ways to alleviate child poverty that I foresee either a massive rebellion or a Labour retreat. Rather than risk a revolt at the very start of a new Parliament, the new Labour government must be able to find a way to prioritise this item of spending rather than resorting to the formula of lifting the benefit cap ‘when conditions allow’.

So last night whilst fortunately for me, Meg was soundly asleep, I settled down to watch the England vs. Spain Euro finals match. After the end of the first half, I thought that it was a fairly evenly matched competition with Spain probably having the slight edge. But after half time, it was a different story. The Spanish went ahead with a well deserved goal although it did appear to me that there was a woeful lack of marking of the Spanish forward who seemed to have a clear run at goal. Then the Spanish played much better football but then England managed to score an equaliser. For about 10 minutes, it looked as though we had a real match on our hands as England pressed forward perhaps confident that a second goal would secure them the match. But this did not last and the Spanish started to overwhelm the England team with much superior football and then scored the winner some four minutes before full time and not leaving enough time for England to mount a counter strike. So at the end of the day, the Spanish victory was very well deserved as they had played much better football not only in this match but throughout the whole competition and were therefore worthy winners. Why we can only play ‘properly’ with an attacking intent when we are a goal behind and not throughout the whole of the match is undoubtedly a topic that will engage acres of newsprint and much discussion but points to the fact that a very cautious and defensive strategy is never going to win you a football competition although it might work for a single match.

There are certain photographs of historical events that live on in our collective memory. Many will remember the images of people in business clothing falling from the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, shortly before the towers collapsed. Or, going further back in US history, the photo of soldiers raising a US flag on the battlefield on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, during the final stages of World War II in the Pacific. It looks like there’s another image for the history books now: the photo Evan Vucci, a photographer for the Associated Press news agency (AP), took of Donald Trump seconds after Trump was shot in an assassination attempt during a rally on Sunday. Already, people are comparing the photo to the iconic flag raising picture from WWII. A user of social media platform X called it the ‘Iwo Jima picture of this generation.’ Renowned The New Yorker magazine pointed to similarities too. It is easy to see where the comparison comes from. Trump’s raised fist and his facial expression, accentuated by the blood splatters across his cheek, can be read as a declaration of defiance in the face of adversity. And then there’s the flag itself, the center piece in the Iwo Jima image, and the perfect patriotic background to Trump’s ‘I am still standing’ gesture. However, to my mind there is something that does not ring quite true about the image that is being flashed across the world. For a start, the sky was not a startling blue but a little overcast. Secondly, I do not actually recall an American flag flying ever so conveniently just over the image of Trump defiant fist pumping the air and mouthing ‘Fight! Fight!’ I am sure that the photographer opportunistically took his moment to capture an important image, But without saying that the resultant image has been doctored or even enhanced, I suspect that some judicious rearrangement of certain elements of it have been made perhaps with the photographer unconsciously aware of the ionic Iwo Jima image. If one decomposes the image – a flag, a wounded but defiant hero exhibiting strength in the fact of an assassination attempt- then it all seems a little too good to be true. I do not suscribe to conspiracy theories as such but if the Republican party in their wildest dreams had thought of an image that exemplified Trump’s heroic status, then they could hardly have bettered the image that has now been flashed around the globe.

Last night, I needed to ‘help out’ the care agency by being the second pair of hands to help to prepare Meg for bed in the evening. I was not a particularly happy bunny by being asked to do the same again this morning but fortunately with a carer with whom I find it easy to collaborate. Staff shortages/illnesses are being blamed for the absence of staff but the cynical side of my nature wonders wether the absence of a second carer last night might be football related and the absence of a carer this morning hangover related. However, I am pleased that this Euro competition is now well and truly over and in the near future we have the Olympic games to be held in Paris to entertain us. I do have the feeling that advance publicity about the Olympics is incredibly sparse this time around, perhaps because they are to be held in France. But normally there is quite a lot of news in the build up to the Olympics, highlighting the anticipated successes of locals.

After breakfast this morning, Meg and I went on our way to the park. We called in at our Italian friend down the road but she was not in but fortunately another set of church friends from down the road happened to be in so I could return the dish in which a cottage pie was baked for us. In the park, we had a conversation about football with a local dog walker and were then passed by a group of an older woman and two younger females walking their collective dogs. When the elder female cast an admiring comment about Meg’s hat, I explained that it was very similar to the hat worn by Tonya (played by Geraldine Chapman) in the classic film of Dr Zhivago. I briefly went through some of the plot of the film and how Zhivago was torn between two women – the blond Lara (Julie Christie) and the brunette Tonya. The film ends with Zhivago on a tram espying a woman who he believes to be Lara on the streets of Moscow. He struggles to get off the tram and runs to try to keep up with the blonde Lara only to have a heart attack and to die before he could actually meet up with her again. The older lady explained that she had wept buckets at the conclusion of the film and the younger females thought they might try and see if they could view it for themselves.

Last night, Meg appeared to be soundly asleep and I got to bed at about 11.00pm. Later in the night, I got up and idly turned on Sky News only to be greeted with the news that Donald Trump had been shot and wounded in one of his ear lobes at a Republican national really in Pennsylvania. Images soon emerged of Trump bloodied but unbowed fist thumping the air and shouting ‘Fight! Fight!’ These images of a bloodied but not seriously wounded ex-President are like manna from heaven for the Republican cause and already the iconic images of the ex-President on his feet and not seriously wounded are dominating the airwaves and, no doubt, social media as well. Sky News to its discredit managed to get hold of two rabid Trump supporters who immediately blamed Joe Biden, the Democrats and the (liberal) CNN network for the shooting. They were so foul-mouthed that eventually Sky had to cut them off. The gunman himself had climbed onto the roof of a neighbouring building, was spotted by some of the rally participants but who used a semi-automatic rifle to fire a volley of shots – he was almost immediately shot dead himself by Secret Service snipers who identified the direction of fire. As I listened to the news and digested the implications of it all, it became clear to me within seconds that this would hand the White House directly to Donald Trump. My initial thoughts have been confirmed by subsequent political analysts on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the most thoughtful of the American commentators has made the point that all of the Trump supporters will be energised to come out and to vote for their wounded hero whereas the reverse is probably the case with Joe Biden. So this will be enough to edge the vote in several of the key swing states without a single voter changing sides as it were. But it is also quite likely that several uncommitted or wavering voters will now certainly vote for Trump and I read today that after Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded in 1981, his poll rating went up by 8 percentage points. The dead gunman has been identified as a young man who was a registered Republican voter which ought to scotch some of the conspiracy theories that the Democrats has master minded the entire assassination event. In the hours and days ahead, more might emerge about the motives of the would be assassin but having been shot dead by Secret Service snipers needless to say he was unavailable for questioning. So it was a heavy heart that I eventually trundled off to my bed knowing that we shall see the slow but sure progress of Donald Trump to an almost certain victory and I ponder what this might mean for our own security, the future of Ukraine and goodness knows what other bloodletting will now take place in a deeply polarised USA. Joe Biden has done all of the right things phoning Donald Trump who he called ‘Donald’ and as one might imagine there is universal condemnation expressed by the world’s political leaders. In a moment of sadness, I am driven to reflect that when members of the American ‘left’ are shot they tend to be fatally wounded (JFK and his brother Bobby, Martin Luther King) but when members of the political right are shot at they tend to survive (Governor Wallace of Alabama, Ronald Reagan and now Donald Trump) You have to conclude that those who try to shoot left-leaning leaders are better shots than those who attack right wing leaders. Amongst some of the blood curdling analysis following a Trump re-election, we have the following. According to one analysis, a resurrected Trump will ‘energise the left which could lead to massive civil unrest and possibly deaths — particularly if he tries to make good on his threat of mass deportations. It is possible that Federal agents are deployed to towns and cities to do the job, but many of them flatly refuse to participate in what feels to them like a modern-day re-enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. They are joined by Democratic mayors and hundreds of thousands of Americans who are willing to form human chains around homes and neighbourhoods to keep the agents out. But Trump does not back down, and governors in red states call out the National Guard to break through the protests. Many are hurt, some are killed, and riots ensue.’ This may sound to be over dramatic but there is a feeling that we have not seen anything yet and a further Trump presidency, bolstered by the Supreme Court in its pocket, will ‘go after’ those perceived to be the enemies of the nation i.e. anyone who does not subscribe to the ‘Make America Great Again’ narrative.

After breakfast, we received a phone call from our University of Birmingham friend and were delighted to go down and meet up with him in Waitrose. It was a beautiful day today so after our coffee, Meg and I and our friend went to our favourite bench in the park so that we could enjoy a breath of fresh park air. After that, we made our way up the hill just in time for the late morning call from Meg’s carers after which I needed to crack on with lunch. We had the second half of a beef joint cooked some weeks ago and preserved in the freezer and ate this alongside some spring greens and a baked potato. Then I settled Meg down in front of one of the ‘Pilgrimage’ programme that we have seen before (the journey through Portugal to Fatima) but Meg can hardly remember it from the first time we viewed it so this was worth a second viewing. Today, I have been informed by the care agency that they cannot supply a second helper to help to put Meg to bed this evening so like last night, I am obliged to be a second pair of hands. There is actually quite a lot to be done in the ‘putting to bed’ routine so I am not a particularly happy bunny about all of this. Tonight, of course, the Euro Finals are to fought out between England and Spain which I fully expect England to lose. So after we have got Meg put to bed, I shall have to arrange our little portable TV by Meg’s bedside and watch the match from there although it is always possible that Meg may fall asleep halfway through the match. The pubs across the nation have been given permission to stay open until 1.00am so that the English nation can either rejoice in the England success or, more likely, drown its sorrows.

Last night I had just watched the 10.00pm news on BBC1 when it was announced that there was to be an edition of ‘NewsNight‘ on BBC starting at 10.30 and it was to be a special edition as it was to be the very last programme hosted by Kirsty Wark after a continuous run of some thirty years. The first part of the program was a detailed examination of the Joe Biden saga and whether it was opportune for the Democrats to attempt to replace him as a candidate after his recent gaffes. To call the president of the Ukraine, President Putin and his own Vice President, Vice President Trump may just be interpreted as an odd verbal slip but here we are talking about the person who is to lead the most powerful nation on earth for the next four years. As an aside, one wonders what the Chinese must be making of all of this because the top echelons of Chinese society are quite meritocratic – the thought that someone with the mental agility of either Biden or Trump leading China must be unthinkable to the Chinese leadership. The second half of NewsNight was devoted to several tributes paid to Kirsty Wark by ex Prime Ministers and fellow journalists who all paid tribute to her professionalism, calmness ‘under fire’ when things went wrong in the studio and kindnesses shown to younger and less experienced colleagues. Kirsty Wark is retiring at the age of 69 and a run of thirty years which is a remarkable achievement. She is not retiring absolutely completely, though, and she will anchor her first episode of Front Row – which puts creative industries in the spotlight – on 13 August at Edinburgh Fringe and she will then present one edition of the programme weekly from Glasgow. This seems an excellent way to enter semi-retirement, as it were and one has the feeling that NewsNight will never be quite the same again.

Today started off gloomy and cloudy but no actual rain was forecast which is just as well as today was the Bromsgrove Carnival day. Many of the principal roads in the town are coned off for the processions timed to take place between 12.00pm and 4.00pm and a lot of the town do turn out to watch the spectacle. We wondered if our journey down to Waitrose would be impeded at all but as things turned out we made it at our usual time but met up with three of our friends as is customary on a Saturday. Then it was our customary journey up the hill after our elevenses and our journey home was punctuated by two conversations, one with a couple that we used to see regularly in the park in our COVID expedition days and the other being a neighbour who we know principally as the friend of friends. Once we got home, the carers called around for Meg and then I proceeded to make a kind of stir-fry with chicken pieces and a mixture of vegetables served on a bed of rice. As is customary, I prepared slightly too much so have some left over to enhance further meals.

Today is very much the feeling of the ‘day before’ the Euro Cup Finals due to take place tomorrow evening between Spain and England. Many of the population are persuading themselves that England might actually win the competition but I must say that I think this is unlikely in the extreme. The Spanish have consistently shown themselves to be playing excellent football right throughout the competition and they are still basking in the glory of the stupendous goal scored by their 16 year old teenager during the week although he himself will be turned seventeen today. My own prediction is that Spain will win the match 3:1 and on the basis of their form so far, they certainly deserve to do so. Having said all that, strange things can sometimes happen in Finals. It is possible that the Spanish might be more nervous than they should be and make some simple mistakes, although this is unlikely. Based upon English performances so far, it is quite possible for England to put in a mediocre performance and still win by a single goal in an individual act of brilliance. And it is the case that in football matches, the best team do not always win – if the game is still a draw after extra time which is a possibility then the English record of taking penalties might make them a slightly better than evens odds on this occasion. Some of our carers, whose houses are near to a pub, have told us that when England score the pub goes mad with shrieks of delight and the celebrations can be heard even down the road. Before we leave the subject of football altogether, the England manager Gareth Southgate is reported as saying he wants to win Euro 2024 to bring ‘temporary happiness’ to ‘angry country’ which is surely the case.

Keir Starmer is reported as saying that there is a ‘mountain of mess’ left by the preceding government. Up to a point, this always happens, I suppose, because difficult decisions are left by an outgoing administration, particularly one that is well predicted to lose the election because they are not unhappy for a new government to clear up the mess that they have bequeathed. Crucial decisions have not been taken in time which means that we have the current scenario in which prison places have not kept pace with the longer sentences and the ways in which courts are currently sentencing, no doubt under a steer from the Tory government. So any incoming government would have to face this problem and the very short term solution is to release non violent prisoners after they have served 40% rather than 50% of their sentence. This sounds like a ‘sticking plaster’ type of solution but, of course, depends upon there being a probation service to cater for newly released prisoners. But after a period of privatisation which was almost universally acknowledged to be a disaster, after seven years the probation services were returned to public control. A longer term solution to the problem of insufficient prison places might be to empty most of the gaols housing female prisoners who tend to be in gaol for child neglect and addiction types of problems rather than violent crime ‘per se’ and to fill the newly emptied gaols with a male rather than a female population. This suggestion may well have merit but must rank as a medium term rather than a short term solution to the present crisis.

We sort of look forward to Fridays because we tend to make a journey down the hill to see friends in Waitrose. This morning after Meg’s carers had got her up and dressed, we had our normal breakfast of porridge and toast and then started to think about our journey down the hill. We received a phone call from our University of Birmingham friend and so we happily made an appointment to meet in the cafeteria which we did. Our 90 year old chorister friend also turned up so we had a nice little chat which made our day. Tomorrow, though, although Saturday is one of our normal meeting days, tomorrow it is Carnival day and so a lot of the local roads are going to be closed to allow for the processions and floats to take place. I spoke to some of the staff in Waitrose who were not looking forward to tomorrow morning because the store and its cafeteria and the immediate environs are populated by crowds of onlookers who use the facilities in Waitrose without necessarily spending anything. I think that I think that we may try to make our way through the crowds and get to Waitrose if we possibly can but it is possible that our path is blocked by the crowds who have come to watch the procession so we have to be prepared to turn back if we cannot reach our destination. After we had returned home, the late morning carers made their call and then we concentrated upon lunch which is a (bought) fish pie baked in the oven and supplemented by vegetables, I decided to make a mélange of vegetables starting off with some fried onions and complemented by some diced up tomato, mushroom and parboiled beans with a squirt of tomato essence to enhance the taste. This worked out fine and then we started to contemplate how the afternoon would pan out. I had in mind that the front lawn badly needed a haircut not having been cut for I think a couple of weeks now and the clover and vetches were starting to go mad. There was a large black cloud overhead but I judged that it would probably move over and we would not get rained on. I cut the lawns first on a North-South direction and then a transverse cut in an East-West direction but half way through the first cut, we started to get some spots of rain. So I relocated Meg to inside the porch and then after the first cut, we had a few refreshments which I had put outside ready for ‘half time’ Then the weather started to brighten a little and I managed to get the second half of the cutting job done without getting ourselves wet. After we had got ourselves indoors, we knew that we were going to treat ourselves to watching yesterday evening’s ‘Question Time‘ which we knew we would be able to get on the BBC iPlayer. We watched the programme with quite some interest today if only because they seemed to have a very interesting set of panellists in the programme last night without the usual political ‘knock about’ and this made for a much more interesting programme.

Last night, a lot of media attention was focussed on the fact that Joe Biden was going to conduct a press conference and the American press and media really wanted to know how Biden would perform without an autocue. There is a head of steam building up with the American Democrats to try to replace Joe Biden as their candidate but nobody is quite sure how to administer the ‘coup de grace’ or find a way of persuading him to step down. So tonight’s performance was going to be regarded as critical. But the press conference was to be preceded by end of Nato meeting press briefing and here Joe Biden performed the most enormous gaffe, With the Ukrainian president by his side, Joe Biden referred to him as ‘President Putin’ before correcting himself. A little later on, Biden referred to his own Vice President, Kemala Harris as Vice President Trump. Now Joe Biden is fairly notorious for his verbal gaffes but with the increased media scrutiny, this was about the worst possible time to perform gaffes like these. I had been watching NewsNight and the American drama critic, Bonnie Greer, seemed to change her mind from lukewarm support for Biden to the expression of a view that he really ought to go now. But Joe Biden is absolutely determined to stay as a candidate believing that he and he alone has the ability to beat Trump. His problem now is that every sign of infirmity, large or small, feeds into an established narrative – one that tells the story of a stubborn old president, cosseted by a government machine not listening to a growing crescendo of concern for his mental fitness. If the Democrats are going to move to replace him, there is now only a very small window of opportunity to do the deed – commentators are of the view that a move against Biden has to be made within a fortnight or it will be all too late and the Democrats will have to be reconciled to Joe Biden as a candidate and an almost certain election victory in November by Donald Trump.

Keir Starmer has probably enough reason to be satisfied having been invited into the Oval Office of the White House and having an hour long discussion with Joe Biden in which the Brits (unlike the Americans) always like to utter the sentiment of a special relationship. But Starmer’s problems are likely to mount the minute his feet touch the ground back in the UK with immediate problems crying out for solutions such as the threatened loss of thousands of steel jobs in Wales, the absolute crisis in our prisons which are completely full and the necessity to end the junior doctors dispute. But in the first week of the new Labour government, most ministers seem to have made a promising start.

I was pleased to say that Meg and I enjoyed a good night’s sleep last night which is always welcome these days. But last night was a quite extraordinary night in terms of the Euro finals because England actually qualified for the final. England’s opponents were Holland who took a lead with a brilliantly taken goal. But there was a fairly instant riposte in the form of a penalty awarded to England that made the scores equal. But England dominated the first half and played football which was far more attacking and less tentative that we have become used to over the competition to date. In the second half, the Dutch came back and the second half did not have the excitement of the first half and England seemed to be flagging somewhat. Then there was an inspired substitution and a player from Aston Villa, Ollie Watkins, was brought on. Less than ten years ago today, English football’s ‘quiet man’ Ollie Watkins was playing for Weston-super-Mare in front of a few hundred fans. But last night, with one second to spare in the full time period and before extra time threatened, Ollie Watkins scored a stupendous goal to rocket England into the finals on Sunday where they will meet Spain. I think that on the run of play, England deserved to win last night as apart from the two goals they scored, they had one goal disallowed for offside and on occasion the ball was cleared by a Dutch defender literally bouncing on the line. A video replay does show that the centre line of the ball had crossed the centre line of the goal line but the relevant rule is that the whole of the ball has to be over the line before a goal can be awarded.So England played as the Italians, Spanish and French have played throughout the tournament and one has to ask the question that if they were quite capable of playing like this, why had they not played like it before? However, this is tournament football and one has to prepared for a long haul and a change of tactics and personnel to meet the challenges of particular opponents so suddenly, Gareth Southgate who was regarded as the national villain when it appeared that England was on the point of exiting the competition has suddenly been transformed into a national hero. I suspect that Spain should quite easily win the final on Sunday and are probably the much superior team. Having said that, England start off as underdogs which is always a good position in which to start and the Spanish, finding that they are expecting to win, may well find that nerves gets the better of them and a crass mistake is made. In football, it is is not always the best team that wins and we have seen quite often in this competition that an inspired moment of brilliance can rescue a team from a generally mediocre performance. Our friends in Spain have texted me and are delighted to have England in the final although they are hoping that the Spanish prevail.

Today being a Thursday, it is my normal shopping day and I managed to get all of this done and back home within the hour which was my intention.Today was a somewhat lighter week than normal and I try to be fairly careful not to over buy as I hate throwing away food which has gone over its date. I managed to get everything I needed except that the bars of ‘dark’ chocolate which Aldi sells were sold out leaving behind masses of white and milk chocolate bars which the discerning shoppers seem to ignore in favour of the dark chocolate. Having said that, it is always quite a satisfying experience to get the shopping done and put away before the weekend. The day has been a rather indeterminate day today so Meg and I had to wonder how we were to spend the afternoon. If the weather had been a little finer and warmer, then Meg could have sat outside in the wheelchair whilst i cut the front lawn but I judged that today might be a little too cold. So instead, we decided to view again a YouTube presentation of a documentary called ‘A World without Beethoven?’ which we have seen before but is well worth a second viewing. The care workers’ schedules are somewhat misaligned this afternoon and I ha had to phone up the car agency to ensure that there was not a one hour gap at one point in the afternoon followed by a five hour gap later on. However, they did respond favourably to a phone call requesting a change but I am left in the position of not knowing exactly who is going to turn up this afternoon or when which makes life a little difficult to organise.

Now that we are one week on since the General Election, it is time for a little contemplation. There are times in our national political life, when the nation is evidently yearning for quite a dramatic change and the dates that come to mind are the huge Labour victory at the conclusion of WWII, Harold Wilson’s narrow victory in 1964 bringing to an end 13 years of Tory rule, Margaret Thatcher’s famous victory in 1979 and Tony Blair’s in 1997. And the statistics for 2024 are still mid blowing in that the Labour gained 412 seats and an overall majority over all other parties of 174. This, too, ranks alongside the other dates mentioned as the point of a decisive shift in British politics. But what the future holds can follow one of several scenarios.On the one hand, the Labour party can make a determined and consistent start to repair the ‘state of the nation’ because there is now an almost universal recognition that most of our national institutions from the health service to local government to our transport systems are in urgent need of repair. If this is done with a degree of commitment as well as basic competence and with no overarching scandals, then the Labour Party may be in power for at least two five year terms. On the other hand, who would have thought that a Conservative majority of 80 seats could have been turned around so dramatically in a five year period? Some Conservative thinkers are arguing that if a dramatic change can happen in one time period then it can be reversed some five years later although I think this is unlikely in the extreme.

Wednesday is the day when our domestic help calls around but we were particularly pleased to see her this week as she had been off on holiday to Valencia. This holiday started off being anything but restful as the flight was diverted because of bad weather to Alicante some two hours down the coast by coach when it eventually arrived two and a half hours late. So it seems to have been a nightmare journey to get there and not particularly restful either. But before our domestic help arrived, I polished up our captains’s chairs with orange oil which removes dirt and dust and gives a lovely sheen. Our domestic help had not actually seen our latest acquisition which arrived two weeks ago but just after she had left us for the day so I explained how I had got it renovated and it now forms an almost matching pair with the one we bought as students in 1967, as far as I remember. This latest chair was actually intended for our lounge to pair with the desk where I have a laptop but the delivery time took so long that I espied the tub chair in the meantime. Now, though, I am quite happy for the newest chair to form a pair in the Music Longe and they actually do complement each other. After the carers had come and then gone, we had our normal chat with our domestic help and then I was ‘released’ so that I could spend a certain amount of time buying some non-food items I cannot get from my normal supermarket. But whilst on the High Street in Bromsgrove, I did acquire two more cushions, one being small and functional whereas the other has a squirrel motif, complete with a squirrel tail as an attachment if you can see what I mean. Whilst in the same same charity shop, I also acquired two more soft toys, one being a little teddy who has already the name of ‘Henry’ whilst the other is a little bunnikins upon whose name Meg has not as yet, decided. After I had got our lunch out of the way (the last of the cottage pie enhanced with other vegetables) we wondered how the afternoon was going to shape out. An ominous black cloud seemed to threaten and if we were to go anywhere, it would not be very far. In the event, I felt that the back lawn badly needed a cut and although the rain threatened, I got Meg in her wheelchair round to the back and thus I managed to het the back lawns cut after nearly a fortnight which was just as well. In the meanwhile, we seem to have acquired a goodly crop of purple leaved clover, so this, too, is crying out for attention as soon as the weather is fine and I feel I have the energy to do it.

The media today has been dominated by the brutal murder with a crossbow of the wife and two daughters of a racing commentator (who I shall not name) The commentator worked for both the BBC and also for Sky News so perhaps this helps to explain why the story has received so much prominence. But we are not talking about inner city violence here but murders in the suburban streets of Bushey, Hertfordshire which is not too far distant from whence my daughter-in-law was born and raised. The police have taken the unusual step of naming and publishing a photograph of their chief suspect and I suspect that this story is actually going to run and run.

The runners and riders for the expected contest for the next leader of the Tory party has begun in earnest. It appears that Kemi Badenoch has twice the support amongst members of Suella Braverman and naturally comes from the right of the Tory party. It is said that Kemi Badenoch, who is reputed to be hyper aggressive, would start a fight even if there was no one else in the room. But the more interesting story is the method of electing a new leader. There is quite a structural dilemma when political parties ask the membership to endorse or to vote upon the choice of party leader. The Tory constituency parties are always well to the right of the parliamentary party in the same way that the constituency parties of the Labour party are well to the left. So we have the situation, epitomised by the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn where most of the parliamentary party do not support the leadership imposed upon them by the membership. The same situation might be mirrored in the Conservative party where many on the right, particularly in the ‘red wall’ seats lost their seats leaving a more centrist inclined parliamentary behind. So the question becomes whether the Tory party will try to amend their own rules before their next leader is selected as otherwise they may be saddled with a right winger (such as Badenoch) who although popular in the party as a whole does not command the support or indeed loyalty of members of the parliamentary party. Meanwhile, in Parliament, the task continues of the ‘swearing in’ of new members who can choose one of a range of religious texts upon which to swear including the New Testament or bible for Christians, the Tanakh for Jews, the Quran for Muslims and the Guru Granth Sahib for Sikhs. Jeremy Corbyn was caught on a Commons microphone giving his opinion ‘this is a load of nonsense’ whilst he was awaiting his turn to affirm or to take the oath. I feel that Corbyn diminished himself in my eyes by this statement, particularly when the new government is trying to develop higher standards of integrity than that exhibited in recent Parliaments. It will be interesting for us to observe in view of what Starmer may well have said to his newly appointed cabinet what the Labour party view is to be when one of their number fails to maintain the requisite standards of integrity that we would hope would become the new norm.

We always look forward to Tuesdays as it is the day when we meet up with our Waitrose friends. We had to keep a sharp eye open for the weather as there were some showers early on in the morning but fortunately they had largely ceased and did not impede our journey down the hill before we met up with our friendly crew at about 10.30am. Fortunately, we were under no time pressure this morning and so could make up the hill in a more leisurely fashion once after elevenses were over. On the way home, we received a telephone call from the manager of the care agency to ask if I could assist the one carer who was due to call later on this morning as they had some staff shortages. With this I concurred but once I had Meg home and settled and given her a ‘smoothie’ drink, I received another call from the manager of the car agency. It looked as though every road into Bromsgrove was gridlocked and therefore the scheduled carer would be delayed, as he was by half an hour. It looked as though there might have been a police incident (which might have been someone threatening to throw themselves off a pedestrian footbridge onto the dual carriage way below) which had caused a total close of the A38 trunk road that runs down the east side of Bromsgrove and which can create total traffic chaos if the traffic on it is disrupted. Today was, in theory, my Pilates day and I had in intended to make a quick visit to town to buy some essentials whilst the carer was sitting with Meg but in view of the traffic disruption and his lateness in arriving anyway we had to change our plans. So I cooked a lunch for Meg which was our customary fishcakes and some stir fry vegetables left over from yesterday. Today whilst in the supermarket, I decided to indulge ourselves with some oven chips which I doubt I have bought for a decade or so but which I suddenly fancied and thought that a small quantity of them would not cause us any significant harm. We had a wonderful of these with our lunch, served as the Dutch are liable to do with a dollop of mayonnaise (which sounds a bit bizarre but the Flemish cultures seem to like their chips this way)

There is an extraordinary post-election story emerging today. Reform UK are coming under pressure to provide evidence its candidates at the general election were all real people after doubts were raised about a series of hopefuls who stood without providing any photos, biographies or contact details. Reform insists every one of its 609 candidates on 4 July were real, while accepting that some were in effect ‘paper candidates’ who did no campaigning, and were there simply to help increase the party’s vote share. However, after seeing details about the apparently complete lack of information about some candidates, who the Guardian is not naming, the Liberal Democrats called on Reform to provide details about them. As the election was called at an unpredictable time, we knew that Reform UK being such a young organisation would have a real scrabble around to try to find candidates. I suppose the other political parties where Reform UK were standing could provide information to the Electoral Commission if an investigation is to made about the candidates who did not bother to attend for their own count and this might help to document how many of the candidates were real or phantom. But of all of the types of stories liable to arrive at election time, this is one of the more bizarre.

This evening, the Euro football competition will continue with France vs. Spain. being played tonight as the Holland vs. England match will be played tomorrow night. For some reason, the strongest European teams were all put on one side of the draw which is why we see a semifinals without Germany or Italy, the previous winners. The match this evening could well prove to be a more exciting contest than the final itself which will be played next Sunday and I wold not like to predict a winner. I expect Holland vs. England will be another nail biting contest but on the evidence of England’s play so far I would be amazed if they got past Holland. Sometimes the finals can prove to be of an anticlimax as both teams are nervous and a little tentative, not wanting to make a critical mistake and so sometimes the semi-finals present us with a more exciting spectacle. No sooner do we have the Euro finals out of the way than we will have our airwaves filled with news of the Olympics to be held in Paris.

Meg and I have started to watch the Parliament channel this afternoon as it is the first meeting of the newly constituted House of Commons. The very first job of the House of Commons is to elect a Speaker but before this takes place, an MP is selected to make a speech to the whole house before the Speaker is actually voted into his position by the House. The task of electing a Speaker starts off with a speech which, by tradition is given to a fairly junior but promising MP who, by tradition gives a very witty and amusing speech which is not interrupted but starts off the proceedings in a rather lighthearted fashion. This is always quite an entertaining tradition which is well worth watching but it is also the occasion in which the new Prime Minister makes his very first speech as Prime Minister to the House of Commons as a whole. Then follows the swearing in of each individual MP which evidently takes up quite some time. There are various procedures associated with a new Parliament one of which is to acknowledge and attest to the ‘Father of the House’ (the longest serving male MP) and also ‘Mother of the House’ who is the longest sewing female MP. The Mother of the House is actually Dianne Abbott which is quite fascinating given the way in which the Labour party to their shame kept her out of their fold for so long but she has now been restored to her rightful place in the Commons. Initial speeches are made both by the Father and the Mother of the house who pay tributes to their immediate predecessors and these speeches are also lighthearted and jocular in tone before the more serious business of politics resumes when the formalities have been completed.

And so Monday morning dawned but not after a particularly happy night last night. Meg had been put to bed at 8.00 pm in the evening but could not or would not go to sleep until about 12.30 in the morning. Having been kept all yesterday evening, I was not in the best of moods today as well as being desperately tired – when the carers called round for their late morning call, they had to arouse me because I had fallen asleep in the armchair through sheer exhaustion. But the day seemed quite a fine one so we managed to make our trip to the park for our elevenses. In comparison with the last two days, I went both down and back at a fairly leisurely pace and as it is a Monday, we did expect to see any our park acquaintances today. After the carers had made their late morning call, I busied myself with a small stir fry of onions, peppers and tomatoes to enhance the cottage pie which we started yesterday and we ate this with a portion of runner beans (said to be stringless but I could not resist a quick flash down the length of the beans with my very sharp peeler).

Today we are in the early days of the new Labour administration and the media (as well as I myself) are interested how the new ministers are approaching their tasks, given the enormity of the task facing them. Today is the day when Rachel Reeves as the very first female Chancellor of the Exchequer is making her first major speech in the role. It appears that an important part of the growth agenda is to stimulate more house building and local authorities are having targets first given to them (and then withdrawn) by the previous administration. In order to do this, extra attention is being paid both to ‘brown’ and also to ‘grey’ land. The latter category is land which is technically classified as green (e.g. as part of the rolling fields of the countryside) but is actually pretty scrubby and non-descript. So a planning revolution is being planned but this might not be easy as might be thought. On the one hand, there are always those who live in quite pleasant surroundings and whose last desire is for new housing, especially so called ‘social’ housing, on their doorstep so this constitutes one barrier to be overcome. The point is being made today is that Labour MPs who have traditionally represented urban and large city constituencies might now find themselves elected to a constituency with a largely rural hinterland. So the new tranche of Labour MPs themselves may find themselves in the middle of planning decisions where their party and government are eager to pursue one policy (new house building) but the constituents who have elected them, perhaps with quite a small majority, have some very different ideas. In addition to this, as is evidenced by the spate of new house building literally all around us in Bromsgrove (even the fields at the back of us now being developed), building new houses without the appropriate infrastructure of roads, schools, medical facilities, local retail outlets and the like is a recipe for disaster. So much new housing is built all around us but with no extra road provision for the 2.5 cars per household (Mum, Dad and eventually teenage children) that I envisage that in some 5-10 years time. Bromsgrove may be the first town in history to be utterly gridlocked during the rush hours. I can quite vividly remember about ten years ago walking down the Kidderminster road shortly after 8.00am in order to attend an early doctor’s appointment and, even then, I walked to the end of the Kidderminster Road reaching the end of it before the slow moving traffic (if I had been in a car) This situation has worsened in the last ten years and will worsen again dramatically when the new houses being built all around us come on stream. The official advice, by the way, from Worcestershire County Council who model the traffic flows and provide the data for planning applications, is that they are assuming that many people will walk or cycle rather than going by car and this is being built into their model. But there is no evidence that these behavioural changes are in effect occurring. I do not suppose that Worcestershire in general and Bromsgrove are very aberrant in this respect and I suspect that the situation in which I found myself (practically gridlocked into one’s own streets during rush hours) is mirrored in many if not most parts of the country.

If we thought that we had intractable political problems here in the UK, then France is about to undergo probably years of turmoil. President Macron called elections to ‘see off’ and neutralise the far right in the French political system. But what has emerged has been an electorate divided into a left coalition of about 160 seats, Macron’s centrist party of about 140 seats and the far right National Rally associated with Le Pen with about 120 seats. So whether a Prime Minister can be chosen who will command the support of the majority of the parliament and whether any legislation can be passed under similar circumstances is an open question. Most commentators are of the view that just before Paris (and France) hosts the Olympics, we have the spectacle of a major Western European society which is in political deadlock for weeks if not months. But Belgium survived for over a year I think without a functioning government and whereas the civil services in these societies can ensure that ‘normal’ life can carry on, major decisions that need to be taken are avoided. So far in France the PM has offered to resign but President Macron has refused to accept this so we have a ‘lame duck’ prime minister in power in our nearest neighbour for the for seeable future. And although the political scene in the USA looks increasingly unstable, Jo Biden is resisting all attempts to suggest that he should step down. One has to raise the question that were he to be elected and just about ‘compus mentis’ to be the next President of the USA, would he remain sufficiently robust both physically and mentally to serve for a further team of four years? There was a rumour that Michelle Obama was been called upon to run as one projected poll suggests that she could beat Trump by 11 percentage points. But so far, she has indicated no desire to enter the political arena but I do wonder if she could be persuaded.

The weekends are characterised by the care workers coming to us 30 minutes earlier than usual which means that the minute I awake, some time after 5.00am it is time to get up and get things ready (like myself showered) before the care workers arrive. Today were two trusty workers but their conversation with each other is often dominated by how the day’s schedules are going to work as workers on zero hours contracts phone in as sick and therefore unavailable whilst one of the younger care workers has crashed her car for seems to be the umpteenth time. We did not mind a fairly early start because we can start to watch the political programs starting with Trevor Philips on Sky News and continuing with Lorna Kuennsberg on BBC1. There is a story going on the rounds that Laura Kuennsberg as a closet Tory was looking ‘sick to the stomach’ when it became evident that the Tories were being wiped out in the small hours of Friday morning. Perhaps stung by this criticism, she apparently had a go at a prominent Tory politician on her show this morning but I must confess I was asleep during most of it and therefore might try and view it on catchup. On BBC One’s Sunday the former health secretary – who is widely expected to put herself forward as a contender to be the next Tory leader – said the Conservatives needs to ‘act on those values’ in the party which voters support. Alluding to the meagre 121 seats the Tories took in the election, Kuenssberg asked Atkins: ‘What went wrong with your values then?’ Atkins replied: ‘We know that the country, actually, is instinctively Conservative, if you look, people want lower taxes.’ To this, Kuennsberg retorted ‘Do you think the country is still instinctively Conservative when they booted you out? You’ve got your worst defeat ever.’ I think the whole tenour of this exchange to be quite instructive. Most commentators are of the view that the Tory defeat (with the exception of the ‘Brexit’ election won by Boris Johnson with a majority of 80) is actually part of a long term trend in which the modern Tory party is losing touch with the electorate. Indeed, William Hague, the one time Tory ‘wonderchild’ and one time leader made the point in ‘The Times‘ on Saturday that if the electorate had been confined to those under the age of 60 then the Tories would have lost practically every seat in the country. But the Atkins view of the world is that is an aberration for anybody in the world to actually vote anything except Conservative and cannot start to imagine why they have lost support amongst most social groups in the country – apart from the retired population, of course, who have benefited from the ‘triple lock’ preserving the value of their pensions.

After we had breakfasted it was not too long before the Eucharistic minister came from our local church as she generally does each Sunday, when she can. Today, she and her husband were feeling a little distraught as they had lost two more of their very deep and good friends with whom they have treked up hill and down dale in their younger days. We commiserated with each other that this was a symptom of our position in the life cycle but I think she had two funerals that she felt she wanted to attend within the next week. At the same time as an organist and a cellist, she is quite heavily engaged in one or two concerts over the Bromsgrove festival period. As some of these performances are in the early evening rather than the afternoon, they are not really accessible to Meg and myself at the moment but, having said this, our 90 year old chorister friend that we meet regularly in Waitrose, was going off to attend an organ concert this weekend. We received a telephone call from our University of Birmingham friend on the strength of which we decided to go and meet with him for a coffee later on in the morning. This was a real bonus for us because the weather forecast seemed to indicate that we would have a succession of showers right throughout the morning and we did not wish to repeat the experience of yesterday when we were soaked to the skin. However, the day seemed to look as though it was set fare so we raced down the hill at a great pace of knots, had about twenty minutes with our friend and then had to be make it equally quickly up the hill in order to bee in time again for our carers. We then lunched on the wonderful cottage pie that our friends has prepared for us and delivered to us yesterday and then spent the early part of the afternoon watching some Michael Portillo ‘railway-cum-travelogue’ programs that are still reasonably interesting.

There is an interesting political point which I have not seen made elsewhere. Quite a lot is being made of the point that the Labour party despite having won 420+ seats did this on a vote share of (in round figures) 34%. The Tories share of the vote was 24% and the Liberal Democrats 12%. Some of the consequences of ‘FPTP’ or First past the Post’ or ‘winner take all’ approach in the current electoral system is that if a vote is spread widely and not concentrated upon particularly areas we have seemingly ridiculous consequences from the point of view of connecting votes cast with seats gained. So in this election, the Lib Dems secured 12% of the vote and 72 seats and Reform took 14%, but only five seats. The Green Party also emerged with four MPs, despite having 7% of the total vote. But the figure concentrating minds is the low vote share gained by the Labour Party with a huge majority of seats. But to mind, we are now living in a society in the ‘First past the Post’ system might suit a society such as 1950’s Britain where the political landscape was dominated by taw two huge monolithic parties of Tory and Labour. But we are now living in a multiparty democracy with two centrist parties, Labour being Centre-Left and the Tories being Centre Right. But we also have an overtly right wing party in Reform and a more left wing party in the Greens, together with nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and a smattering of Independents throughout the country. So we may now start to see the start of some serious discussions about voting reform and proportional representation but I am not holding my breath.