We had a different set of routines for today so up to a point we were running to catch our own tails, as it were. In the morning, we had another video consultation for Meg and this took up most of the morning as it happened, although we were given the opportunity to have a break and a cup of tea in the middle of it! When all of this had been completed, we still needed to collect our daily ration of newspapers so we thought we do the unthinkable and collect the newspapers in the car (which we did), and then we made our trip to the park and a brief sit down and the briefest of walks before we return home in the car. On a Friday we used to make ourselves a ‘risotto’ but as this was principally a rice-based dish, we had got into the habit of doing another fish dish in its stead. But now I have discovered something called ‘Cauliflower Rice’ which is cauliflower florets made up into a rice-like consistency but with a minimal amount of calories. So I made a risotto using the cauliflower rice as a substitute, some kippers which were boiled in the bag and the other usual ingredients (onions, peas, yogurt) and the result was ‘OK-ish’ but I have made better, I must admit. In the afternoon, after a good read of the newspapers, I devoted myself to getting my accounts in order. Although it is not strictly necessary, I tend to write my transactions into a large ‘day book’ and then I have a complete written record of what I did and when. However, I not maintained my records for a long time so it took me an hour or so (the best part of the afternoon) to get all of this done. I am now firmly resolved to attend to my records a little more assiduously in the future. In the early evening, I had a video call with a Hampshire friend – we discussed mainly the American elections about which my friend is extremely knowledgeable but a domestic crisis intervened so we had to cut short our call and resume at a later date.

Being a Friday night, we are relaxing before the normal fare of end-of-week comedy. More unintentional comedy is being provided by Donald Trump who has apparently posted a tweet to a satirical news site that claimed that the whole of Twitter was being shut down to slow the spread negative stories about Joe Biden. The satirical website then claimed that the Twitter boss had smashed “as many computers as he could” with the help of a robot programmed to use a sledgehammer. It looks as though Trump eventually saw his mistake. The article ended by saying that “after hearing the Twitter employees talk about critical theory, the robot got woke and began attacking all the cis white males”. And as the president said ‘This has never been done in history‘ (You couldn’t make it up, if you tried!)

There seem to be two big political stories in town tonight. The first of these is the Brexit negotiations in which Boris Johnson has declared that negotiations are at an end.  The consensus view is that this is but the last stage in a last-minute stand-off and, in practice, a deal might be achieved at the very last moment in which Boris Johnson will claim victory and the rest of the supine British press will agree. The second story is, of course, the huge row between Manchester and Whitehall with Manchester refusing to be pushed into Tier 3 of lock-down categories, like Liverpool. The central government will always have the upper hand here as they control the purse strings but there is a feeling that the bitterness created by this dispute will last for a generation. One can understand the frustration of Manchester in this respect as moving to a more complete lock-down means that many businesses in the hospitality business will close down never to re-open. On the other hand, despite its protestations, it appears that the government is actually working on a variant of the ‘circuit-breaker’ approach and we might see a sort of ‘circuit-breaker lite’ appear that will be timed to coincide with half-term and will last for some 2-3 weeks.

Today, the weather is fine i.e. we are in the tail-end of a high pressure system which is gradually moving away. We are also not in a lockdown at the moment, being in Tier 1 – BUT this may well change in a few days time. Apparently, the good burghers of Worcestershire have been called into Whitehall to discuss why the whole of Worcestershire should not be placed into Tier 2 as there appear to be high rates of infection of COVID in both Bromsgrove (121 per 100,000) and Wyre Forest (=Kidderminter, Stourport) which is 87 per 100,000 whilst the rate for the county as a whole is about 94/100,000. The fellow feeling of the rest of Worcestershire is self-evident as they are arguing furiously that Bromsgrove and Wyre Forest should be regarded as separate from Worcestershire and put into Tier 2 leaving the rest of Worcestershire (and their businesses) alone. It looks as though Bromsgrove (and Wyre Forest) will almost certainly be put into Tier 2 early next week but we shall know soon enough. As the rate of COVID increase is 50% in the past week, then this seems to me to be a cast-iron certainty. When our friends invited us to have some coffee and cakes with the last week, it looks as they knew what was coming – to be honest, they are very well-informed about local matters and affairs.

Meg and I thought we would seize the moment and go off to Droitwich to the little cafe we frequented about a week ago and when we knew they put on a special last dinner once a week. So we popped in to have our morning coffee and to put it our oder for lunch later on in the morning. Then we did our round of charity shops which seem to have proliferated in profusion over the last year or so and we bought a very fashionable type of cardigan for Meg which will go well with some of her kilts and, on the spur of the moment, I bought myself a felt hat which fitted me perfectly and which will be used on fine days if I feel inclined to leave my black leather Australian bushman type hat at home. When we eventually got ourselves seated for lunch, we were treated to the most enormous meal you could imagine. The roast was turkey and we each had about 4 thick slices, a mountain of stuffing, carrots, sprouts, roast potatoes and gravy. We neither of us felt that we were going to manage to eat it all but I packed away almost all of mine and Meg ate most of hers as well. There seemed to be a supply of regulars who turn up week after week – perhaps they do not need to eat anything else for the rest of the week, given potions like that. Then we popped into the local Waitrose to buy some odds and ends that we knew were not coming in tonight’s order.

Last night before I eventually rolled into bed I thought I would consult the American website, MSNBC, which I now know was created as a result of a merger between Microsoft and NBC in 1996 (but perhaps is not very widely known, or even accessible, in the UK).  I found a fascinating analysis on that website which served to dampen my optimism at the prospect of a forthcoming Joe Biden election. The analysis examined the contest between Clinton and Trump in 1996 and then the context between Biden and Trump in 2020 in several of the key ‘swing’ states. The analysis was making a comparison at the same point in the electoral cycle i.e. about three weeks out and the startling thing was that Hillary Clinton was typically appearing to be beating Trump by an even greater margin than Joe Biden is at the moment – and then she still lost! This does give pause for thought. However, there are two important differences, the first being that four years ago, America was not in the middle of a pandemic with hundreds dying every day. Also, the news broke 12 days before the election that Hillary Clinton’s email records were about to be investigated again by the FBI with a suspicion that they might reveal evidence of corruption. This added to a very volatile and unstable situation for Clinton which led to her eventual eclipse in the polls – even though she did win several million more votes in the popular vote (but not, evidently, in the Electoral College) and the rest is history. The final point that I shall make about American politics is that as well as observing the Presidential race and the contest for Senate seats, the composition of several state legislatures could well ‘tip’ from Republican to democrat. Given that the Republicans typically pass legislation that makes life difficult for black people to vote (‘voter suppression’) then Democratic victories in some of the contests for the state legislatures could help to redress this balance. So another thing to keep my eye on!

Today has turned out to be quite a busy day, as it turned out. The day before our Waitrose order is delivered, we always have to spend a certain amount of time updating it and, even so, there are always one or two things that you forget. Consequently, we popped into our local Waitrose store to buy one or two things of which we have run out before the order arrives tomorrow evening. Then home to prepare  our, by now, traditional curry which we shared with our domestic help (who loves them!) This afternoon as the weather was set fair, I thought I had better ‘gird up my loins’ and go and get the grass cut, which activity takes some 40 minutes for the large communal grassed area we have in front of our house and then some 20 minutes for our own lawns to the rear. This proceeded satisfactorily and I am completing how many cuts are needed before the end of the season – one or two? The last cut of the season I try and time to be as near to November 5th as I can and it is always a bit fiddly in that the hour has generally gone back so I have to press on before the light fades. I am always scrupulous in ensuring that I have not petrol left in the mower to ‘clog’ up things during the winter, so in the last cut of the season I am generally walking up and down, over-mowing the already cut areas whilst muttering to the mower ‘Die! Die!’ as I am waiting  for the last drop of petrol to be consumed. Then the season’s oil has to be drained out which is always a bit tricky. I try to ensure that I have a previously emptied tin can, shaped to provide a rudimentary lip before the old oil is stored in a bottle waiting for the next time that I go to the tip to dispose of it safely.

Today has been a day free of ‘video calling’ but I have one call arranged to call an ex-De Montfort University friend on Saturday and am in the middle of an email exchange to get something sorted out to video call an ex- University of Winchester colleague some time tomorrow. I am hopeful that once I get all of my systems and contacts set up, video-calling friends will become easier and easier once you have an agreed time to talk to each other.

Last night, before I went to bed I thought I would just do a quick check on the American media CNN and MSNBC to see what the polls in the American media were saying. The MSNBC results seem to be particularly detailed, giving Jo Biden a lead of 10.5% but also showing an indication of how individual polls were reporting in each of the swing states. Again, the majority of these reported that Joe Biden had a lead but the MSNBC reporting seemed to be highly ethical in that it would indicate ‘lack of sufficient data’ if the poll size looked too small or somewhat suspect. I thought I would also look at the massively pro-Trump Fox News to have a look at their spin which, as you might expect, was to generally agree that size of the leads but then to argue that the polls might have ‘over-sampled’ the Democratic vote. The big problem with all of this is that the intention to vote reported to an opinion poll is one thing, actually getting your vote into the system, regarded as valid (i.e. not excluded) and actually counted is quite another thing in a system where ‘voter suppression’ is so rife. On Election Day itself, we will be able to compare the opinion poll forecasts and what the actual counted votes reveal and I forecast quite a large discrepancy in the case of the Democratic vote.

 The British political scene is showing signs of complete fracture. In Northern Ireland, a type of ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown has been announced lasting a month. Wales has banned all visitors from affected areas in England, the Scots are imposing tighter ‘lock-down’ rules than the English 3-tier system, many northern local authorities are pleading/demanding with central government the they receive much more financial resource before they will consider being moved from ‘High’ to ‘Very High’.  In other words, the UK looks a complete mess at the moment as the national consensus has broken down with the Labour Party now supporting a 2-3 week circuit breaker for the UK whilst many Tories (on the right) want even fewer restrictions than we have at the moment. The situation does seem to be evolving day-by-day and it does appear that it will only be a matter of time (days?) before a type of ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown will be announced for the UK…

It was an interesting, and somewhat different, kind of day today. At 9.00 am I had arranged to Skype one my Hampshire friends and this went ahead as planned, with the technology behaving itself as it should. My friend had worked in the same area of Manchester as I did back in 1969 but we were separated by a few years. Nonetheless, we spent a very pleasant hour going down ‘memory lane’ of significant points in our teaching career with our experiences when we first starting teaching, through the interesting encounters we had in validating degrees with the body known as CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards) to our more recent encounters with students and interesting colleagues. We are going to Skype at fortnightly intervals from now on but it’s possible that our interests will intensify as the American elections draw nigh. Then Meg and I walked to the park on a most beautiful day – sharp, bright and cool with plenty of almost warm autumn sunshine. In the park, we met with our Italian friend with whom we had a very interesting conversation – mainly reminiscing about the operas which we had been to see in the locality, sometimes in each other’s company. We also ‘tut-tutted’ about those people, fairly few in number and invariably younger than us, who did not seem to observe any degree of social distancing. On the way home, the weather had got more and more cloudy and it felt as though some rain might be imminent. Then we had a fairly quick turn around as I needed to walk down to Pilates with one of neighbours. When I got into the class, I announced that we all ought to be grateful to Present Trump as he announced that he was going ‘to kiss the guys and the beautiful women- a big fat kiss‘ So we worked out that if we had been present in Donald Trump’s rally in Florida last night we would have been thrown a face-mask (which we were not to wear) and then shoulder-to-shoulder (no social distancing) whilst Donald Trump threatened to kiss us all. You couldn’t make it up, could you? In the late afternoon, I had another fascinating Skype video link with one of my ex-University of Winchester friends and we exchanged news and gossip – we are going to repeat this exercise every week from now on.

The government have consistently claimed that in their response to the COVID-19 crisis they have always ‘followed the science’  However, tonight it has emerged that the SAGE committee advising the government (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) has recommended some weeks ago that there should be a 2-3 week ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown similar to what we had experienced in March/April. Whether or not this would include school children is not completely clear but presumably so as there is talk of the coinciding with the half-term break in any case. The government has chosen not to follow this advice (fearing the enormous costs, job losses, difficulty of re-starting the economy and so on) and consequently the virus seems to be spreading at an enormous speed. The Labour Party has now clearly aligned itself with the scientists and so there is now a clear split in the political consensus. The Labour Party view will not prevail because a sizeable faction of the Conservative party want there to be radically less restrictions (at what cost to the health of millions?) I feel, personally, that the intellectual arguments must align with those who argue for a rapid ‘circuit-breaker’ type of lockdown, although the costs (financial, emotional) or undoubtedly enormous. But if we had less restrictions, then the hospitals will be over-whelmed and people will die in their  tens of thousands. As I said last night, the government’s present policy of three-tiers seems ‘too little, too late’

In the American elections, it does appear that Joe Biden might be 11% points ahead – according to the BBC poll of polls. But of course, this might be a misleading statistic as there is no point  in piling up votes in California which is always Democratic anyway. The crucial factor seems to be the lead in the swing states (equivalent to our ‘marginal constituencies’) which is tending to be in Biden’s favour by anything from 2%-7% (although Ohio is leaning towards Trump still) As all the states have their own electoral laws and voting arrangements there is plenty of scope for ‘voter suppression’ (making sure your opponents can’t actually get to the vote) at which the Republicans seem to be particularly adept. One tactic is to exclude anybody who has been convicted of any offence (e.g. for possessing marijuana 40 years previously) or to make sure that in the predominantly black areas, the polling stations are so few and far apart if it is not physically possible for all of the opponents to vote on the day. To see what I mean. look at the following fragment gleaned from the web

Last week Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, ordered counties to close extra drop-off sites for absentee votes until they have only one each. The move means that the 4.7m residents of Harris County, which surrounds Houston, will all have to converge on the same drop-box if they wish to cast an absentee vote in person.

Watch out for all of the dirty tricks that will be played out for us, particularly in states such as Florida and Texas!

Today’s blog will be a return to ‘normality’ following the excursion of yesterday’s blog down memory lane – forgive the self-indulgence. Today was a ‘spitting’ kind of day in which it was not actually raining as such but there was plenty of water in the air and a type of drizzle. Having collected our newspapers, we had a fairly soggy sojourn on our park bench but got into an interesting conversation with a lady who we recognise who regularly comes to our area of the park and who recognised us. We had an interesting conversation but had to rather curtail it because everyone was getting a little cold and miserable but no doubt there will be other occasions for a more extended chat. I did not mention that yesterday we attempted to Skype (but eventually Zoomed) Meg’s great-niece and her husband living at the moment in Seattle. We spent more than an hour chatting with each with other with family matters and politics being the main topics of conversation – we arranged to have another video-chat on the day after the election in the USA to which we are both looking forward in a macabre sort of way. Actually, all of the focus is on the presidential election but one-third of the Senate seats come up for re-election and it is just possible that the Republicans who have a very narrow lead in the current Senate lose that lead and the Democrats could end up with a lead of one. The American constitution (which we studied at university) is predicated upon a system of checks and balances and it does not often happen that the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives are ALL governed by the same party. Of course, there is till the countervailing power of the Supreme Court which could well have an extra ‘conservative’ nomination approved in the next week or so, leaving the balance of Conservatives to Liberals of 9:3. With an important case shortly to come before the Supreme Court (whether to exclude pre-existing conditions from the Americans ‘Affordable Care Act‘) then the composition of the Supreme Court can have a direct effect upon millions of Americans. So I shall try and follow the senate elections with as much interest as the presidential elections – remember, you read it here first!

Today has been a more technological kind of day. Last night, I managed to get Zoom installed upon my Mac and now I have to learn how to use it! One way or another, I have arranged for a good friend and ex-De Montfort University lecturer who runs her own research consultancy to get into contact next Saturday, so if I get that working OK then I will have most of my most significant contacts accessible on either FaceTime, Skype or Zoom. Tomorrow, for example, I have Skype slots to talk to ex-Winchester colleagues, one at 9.0am and the other at 4.40 (after my Pilates class) As the second wave of COVID-19 gathers pace, ‘winter draws on’ (a phrase once banned by the BBC) and the ability to meet people in the flesh diminishes, the uses of social and technological communication assumes a new level of importance.

As I write tonight, the UK is to be divided into three-tier lockdown levels – medium, high and very high alert levels. Much of the South and a half of the Midlands area in the medium-risk level, whilst much of the North and the North-East are to be placed in the high-risk area and Liverpool will be placed in the very high-risk area. Reluctantly, the central government appears to be conceding that the national test-and-trace regime is not fulfilling its potential and no wonder why when it was subcontracted to Serco and did not utilise the real expertise which the local authorities have ‘on the ground’. It does appear that a metropolitan i.e. London based government is laying down an almost colonial-style regime for the North and the Midlands – who are reacting with a degree of fury. Once totally locked down (as in Liverpool) then the night-time economy will ‘de facto’ cease and the workers will have to survive (or starve) on two-thirds of the national minimum wage (whilst paying 100% of their mortgages and food bills) There is a palpable degree of anger and frustration in the country tonight and a feeling of rampant unfairness. The Nightingale hospitals (emergency large scale industrially built hospitals) are being readied again and the NHS stands on the point of being overwhelmed again (if hospital admissions double every week or so) There is a feeling that ‘something has to be done’ but my own feeling is that it is ‘too little, too late’ I must admit to feelings of dismay when I ty to observe social distancing in my daily walks to the park whilst being dismayed by the scenes of what happens at pub turning out time with hundreds of young people, not generally masked and not observing any social distancing whilst the police stand by helplessly. (Just a thought – I said to the lady in the park today ‘Why don’t they use police horses like the way the used to police large crowds at football matches’ and then I saw a clip of videotape in which the police were doing just that in Liverpool!) But again – too little, too late! 

I set off early for the newspapers this morning with the expectation that I would be back in time for the Andrew Marr show which starts at 9.00 am. I give myself the treat to listening to some tracks of Bach and Mozart loaded years onto my (massively outdated) iPhone 4 which I just use nowadays as a type of MP3 player. As it happened, the first track was the cantata  ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring‘ which was played on solo trumpet and organ – as such, it did remind me of my old and good friend Clive who played this on his trumpet at our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations three years ago. Sadly, Clive died earlier on this year, just before COVID-19 really hit us hard so I shed a silent tear in his memory.

As I was on my own and in a reminiscent mood, I wondered when my interest in classical music was first aroused. It certainly was not the influence of my mother for whoever I located and tried to play some classical music on the radio, I would invariably get ‘When are you going to turn that incessant row off?‘ Our family dog did not appreciate my attempts to practice on the violin because on one of the occasions I brought the violin to practice at home, our mild mannered little dog threw her head right back and howled like a wild prairie wolf. So I would have to thank the influential music teacher who taught me at Thoirnleigh College, Bolton where I boarded for three years whilst my mother went off to train to be a teacher in the mid-1950’s. His name was ‘Jock’ McGovern and as a Catholic priest was entirely untrained as a teacher. However, he had some interesting teaching styles and tricks. Each week we would have two music lessons -on of the first of these we would do the conventional elemts of musical education (staves, types of notes and so on) On the second lesson of each week, we were taught the life of a great composer. We were told the story of the composer’s life and then played some fragments of music that we would always associate with him e.g. ‘Fingal’s Cave’ for Mendelssohn, ‘Eine  Kleine Nachmusik‘ for Mozart. Our homework was always the same – from our rough note books we had to copy the story of the composer’s life into the lined pages on the left hand side of our ‘neat’ book whilst the fragments of music were copied onto the musical staves on the right. And then we were asked to draw, with the lightest of touches and using coloured crayons,a collage of scenes from the composer’s life (e.g. The father and son on horseback in Schubert’s ‘The Erl King‘ ) I have to tell you now that as a 11-12 year old (boys) we absolutely hated doing this activity as it made us think we were being infantilised and treated like little primary school children. But – this is the extraordinary thing. After over 60 years I can call to mind almost every one of those stories, complete with illustrations and, of course, the musical fragments that were completely lodged in my memory. All of this was done without the benefit of an ‘modern’ educational theory – ‘Jock’ just devised the system himself (I subsequently, though, read a tribute to him after he died a few years and other generations of school children has been equally inspired) I thought I was quite good at music always getting a mark of about 95%. Only later did I discover that the lad who came bottom of the class got a mark of 92% and the top mark was 99%. By all thinking we had got good marks, did that make us perform better?  What Jock was not was an effete, tender-skinned aesthete – quite the reverse. He was a stocky, rough-and-tumble Glaswegian with a temper that was violent and effervescent – hence we both respected and also feared him somewhat. The school was rife with stories of how Jock has chased a miscreant schoolboy all over the school yard striking him with a violin bow (or trying to) for some misdemeanour. This I did not witness, but the following incident I did witness. The ‘runt’ of the class was a little lad whose (surname) was Harrison and who could never remember the difference between a sharp and a flat. In exasperation, Jock seized hold of Harrison who was facing away from one hand and with one hand under the base of his skull, raised young Harrison several feet off the floor, saying to hime ‘Now, Harrison, a sharp RAISES a note‘ Then he released his fingers and when Harrison crumpled to the floor, he shouted ‘And a flat LOWERSs a note‘ ( I surmise that Harrion never every forgot that distinction ever again) Jock had a 650cc Norton motorbike and there was rumour that Jock had killed an elderly pedestrian whilst driving at 80mph on Blackburn New Road. In the days when car indicators were a little pop-up sliver of plastic, Jock had a special pair of gloves that had a metal contact between thumb and forefinger. Together with the batteries stored inside the glove, the motor cyclist could give a flashing indication of when they were about to overtake by extending their arm and activating the light by repeating pressing and releasing his fingers. We are naturally intrigued by this (in 1957). To conclude, Jock once gave the 40 boarders and 20 religious staff a 20 second lesson. ‘Well, we are going to try some Gregorian Chant this evening. You all know how staves work but this stave only has four lines, each note is a crotchet, a dot doubles the length of the note and every note is a tone apart. Off you go!‘ and so all 60 of us sang Gregorian chant perfectly after the minimum of instruction. My only concluding comment is that somebody of this ilk would not survive for 2 weeks in a course of teacher training and now he would be thrown out after such a series of transgressions.But think of the generations of students that this man had inspired over the years – is there no room for the unconventional in today’s educational system – I must ask the question! I attach a link to an obituary of this remarkable man:

http://mch.iblogger.org/jock.html

Meg and I had a somewhat different routine this morning because we had been invited to stop by at some of our friends in the Kidderminster Road thinking that a more stringent lockdown might soon be on the cards. We collected our newspapers, replete with supplements and then called by at Waitrose to pick up a bottle of wine. We then spent a most enjoyable hour and a half with our friends who treated us to some beautiful sandwiches and portions of cake whilst we chatted and joked away until we had to make our way home and prepare lunch. We treat ourselves on a Saturday to some Waitrose sausages which we bake in the oven and then have with (pre-prepared) carrot and parsnip mash before settling down to a solid afternoon’s reading of the Saturday newspapers. Halfway through the afternoon, I nearly leapt out of my chair with excitement when it was announced that Donald Trump had been admittted to hospital with a fever and I concluded that COVID-19 must be wreaking an unholy vengeance. I was soon to be disappointed, however, because there seemed to be a remarkable lack of attention to Trump being hospitalised – that is because they running a ‘review of the week’ program and the news of what was happening to Donald Trump related to the events of last Saturday and not today. So I sighed and carried on. I am preparing a metaphorical crate of brown ale which I will have by the side of my chair which I shall slowly consume as the American election results roll in (on what, for us, will be Wednesday, 4th November as the Americans are at six hours behind us) By tradition, my son has generally joined in these usually all-night election binges but he is now resolutely refusing to have any more to do with them. This is because every time he has sat down with me to watch the election results roll in, the side that he is not supporting is making all of the electoral gains. Hence, I am blamed for putting a jinx on whatever election we decide to watch together so I will have to do it on my own (although I may text some fellow election-night junkies) By consulting Google, I have discovered why the American presidential elections are traditionally held on a Tuesday. The assumption was that you attended church on the Sunday, travelled the quite large distances to where you are going vote on the Monday but knowing that Wednesday was sacrosanct as it was market day. So in the course of time, Tuesday became the best available day and was subsequently written into the constitution. I haven’t manage to work out why it should be the Tuesday following the first Monday in October, though.

Yesterday, an anticipated parcel arrived from Amazon which was yet another Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad. I treated myself to another one because this particular one is only 11″ in length (the iPad is 10″) and it does this by dispensing with a numeric keypad. It also makes it much easier to transport together with the iPad if we are putting it in a travel case of any kind.  I followed all of the instructions to make the Blue tooth pair up and nothing seemed to happen. As I was preparing to reinstall the former keyboard, the connection suddenly seemed to work and hey presto! For only about a tenner, the keyboard is about as cheap and Chinese-y as it is possible to get but various key combinations work as they should (to give you the ‘Home’ button and the shutdown) so I am more than satisfied. The batteries should last at least a couple of months and perhaps even more – and it really is amazing how much more proactive you can be on an iPad when you have a proper rather than a virtual keyboard with which to work.

Tonight was the first night of returning to church for the 6.00 pm service (our former pattern) and it really did seem as strange as we thought it might. The congregation was limited to 36 and well spaced out (i.e. only every other row of pews and only 2-3 in each pew). I have to say that the atmosphere was not really there at all (although it had been present in similar circumstances in the much smaller church at Harvington) but I am sure we will get used to it in time. We saw the friends with whom we had spent coffee in the morning in church and I duly signed as Mr. B. L. BeZub for which I am sure some divine retribution will shortly be forthcoming. Tomorrow night, we are looking with great anticipation to speaking with a great-niece in Seattle and seeing how the Americans are coping with things…

As predicted, it was a brighter but colder day this morning so we really have the feeling that autumn is upon us. We collected our newspapers as usual and swung by Waitrose in order to pick up some bottles of tonic water which had inadvertently been left off our shopping list. Then off to our usual comestibles in the park although this time we had been treated to some delicious sausage rolls, handmade for us by our domestic help. Then on the way home, we waved to our friends who live at the bottom of the hill and communicated to them our news that we had got ourselves booked in for the church service tomorrow evening. As it happens our friend will be one of the people who needs to check us in and out of the church to ensure that we are one of the select 36 who has been booked in. We will, of course, be asked to quote our names so I thought that I would call myself Mr.B. L. BeZub to see what the consequences might happen to be. Because it looks as though we might be in some tighter degrees of lockdown early next week, our friends have invited us to have a socially distanced  with them tomorrow morning, to which we are looking forward (as always)

We had to have a fairly rapid lunch when we got back and sometimes I used to make a salmon risotto – but have got out of the habit so as to avoid partaking in too much carbohydrate (aka rice). But today I thought I would try a little culinary experiment. The supermarkets sell these days packets of what they call ‘cauliflower rice’ which is, as the name suggests, a rice-like foodstuff made from the finer florets of cauliflower which has much lower levels of carbohydrate than rice. So I prepared some kipper fillets (boil in the bag) and then made a risotto out of the cauliflower rice, onions, peas, kipper fillets, grated cheese and yoghurt. The experiment worked – I will try this again another week.

This afternoon, Meg had another medical consultation via a ‘webbed’ link and, like last week, the technology worked well and the consultation filled all of its objectives. At this rate, one wonders whether one will ever see a doctor in the flesh ever again as I am sure that this type of video consultation will rapidly become the norm. Then this evening we had a wonderful FaceTime chat with one of ex-Winchester colleagues giving us lots of news about our respective families (and some not altogether welcome medical news as well)

Later on in the afternoon, I read a long and fascinating email from one of my Winchester friends who, as it happened, had worked at the ‘toastrack’ domestic science college to which I made reference in last night’s blog. He had a welter of fascinating stories about his early professional life as a lecturer in Manchester and as I am going to Skype him in a few days time, no doubt we can exchange a lot of stories about the parts of Manchester that we had both known so well – but separated by a period of about five years so we did not actually overlap. On Sunday evening, Meg and I are going to Skype a great-niece (aunt’s daughter?) who is currently in Seattle so we are going to exchange lots of news about both families, and then I suspect political news. Although we get a lot of political news from the army of correspondents, it is always interesting to see what people ‘on the ground’ are actually thinking. As you may have noticed, we are trying to keep in touch with more and people by Skype or FaceTime which helps to keeps us sane in the strange times in which we are living.

Finally, we are all getting prepared for more stringent measures, to be announced on Monday. These have been very heavily trailed so far (support of up to two-thirds wages for those whose businesses are forced to close, a three-tier local lockdown system, perhaps some restrictions on travel into/out of the worst affected areas). It will now come as no surprise as the government have been ‘preparing us’ and, perhaps, the sooner the better!

I woke up rather early this morning – well, just after 4.00 am to be precise. I surmised that the Pence-Harris vice-presidential debate might be over by now and very often the media likes to announce a ‘winner’ But on this occasion, there seemed to be no such conclusion and when I listened to subsequent analysis, it seemed that a 0-0 draw was the best approximation. The most exciting point of the whole debate was a large black fly that seemed to embed itself in Mike Pence’s hair and could not extricate itself for the last 10 minutes of the encounter. Of course, Donald Trump tweeted that Kamala Harris had been a mass of evasions (but both candidates evaded some awkward questions). Tonight, as I blog, it looks as Donald Trump may be on the verge of pulling out of the next debate with Jo Biden. It appears that commission organising the debate in Miami on 15 October said it would have to take place remotely after Mr Trump tested positive for coronavirus and therefore it would have to be a virtual i.e. remote debate. Trump has refused this and is trying to renegotiate the timetable with Jo Biden refusing at this point. If Trump does pull out of the second televised head-to-head he will be shooting himself in the foot and handing the moral high ground (and the political ground) to Jo Biden who has just to keep on saying ‘no’ to any renegotiation of the timetable. Again, I have the feeling that this one might rumble on for several days.

On reading my emails this morning, I had a very pleasant surprise. One of my closest Winchester friends had read my blog in which I was reminiscing about the first house we bought on the edge of Platt Fields Park in Manchester. It transpired that his first teaching job In Fallowfield, Manchester at a college with a really innovative design which was known as ‘Domski’ and also the ‘toastrack’ This is because it did resemble a huge toastrack thrusting into the sky with a poached egg i.e. circular building at its base. It housed students studying domestic science and offered courses such as ‘Hotel and Catering Management’ I suspect that in organisational terms it straddled the divide between technical i.e. further education and higher education – it probably offered OND’s and HND’s and the latter would qualify it as higher education. My first teaching job was at Elizabeth Gaskell College of Education and that there was a course in Institutional Management in that college – in the eye of the public Domski and Elizabeth Gaskell College were often confused with each other, perhaps because most of the student body was female. As part of our ‘party scene’ in my first year at Manchester University, we certainly regarded the Domski students as ‘one of us’ as we did the students from the College of Commerce at All Saints and the Northern Royal College of Music which were later to become Manchester Metropolitan University. Whilst on a student theme, my heart is beginning to feel for those students, particularly at Manchester Met who have got themselves to university only to be faced with a bill for £9,000, only on-line tuition and an inability to go out, even to buy food on some occasions. A son of an acquaintance of mine had abandoned his course at Liverpool University where he could only see his tutorial group about once every three weeks and decided to save himself a packet of money (which he doesn’t have anyway) to live and study at home and then go off to Birmingham University to where he has transferred himself. Normally, one would say that the experience common in the UK to go away to university adds a degree of depth to student development but under these extreme circumstances, perhaps there is a logic to staying at home (and close to home comforts, not to mention food!) and then have the occasional face-to-face contact in one’s local university, only a bus ride away.

It does appear that tonight we can only be a few days from more stringent degrees of lockdown. The latest figures for positive testing is 17.540 with 2,000 recorded in the last week in Nottingham alone. The hospitals are filling up rapidly with COVID-18 cases and they are seeing hospital admissions jump by about a quarter in one day. However, there is still quite a lot of capacity in the hospitals at the moment and the death rate is not very high – the more ‘nightmare’ scenario is when the younger populations who have the virus inflict it upon he older populations who will soon fill up all of the hospital beds and then die in great numbers. We are, as the politicians keep saying every day, at a ‘critical juncture’.

Today was quite a fine day, as the weather forecast indicated it might be, so we had different plans for the day. We knew that we could go off and do several things whilst the weather was set fair so we decided to visit Droitwich, which is a few miles to the south of us and which we used to visit fairly regularly. We made a telephone booking in our favourite cafe/restaurant and then set out having collected our newspapers from our regular little shop on the way out. Once we were parked in Droitwich we decided to call in at a little, old-fashioned ‘Olde World Teashoppe’ that we have visited before the era of the COVID virus. Once we arrived, they had all of their systems in place and we pointed our NHS test-and-trace app at the QR code to get ourselves signed in (which all worked perfectly).  Meg ordered an Earl Grey Tea whist I ordered a Mocha coffee which turned out to be the nicest Mocha that I have tasted anywhere. We both treated ourselves to toasted teacakes and felt massively profligate (having restrained from eating too much carbohydrate recently). The cafe proprietor was a very jolly soul and in no time at all the cafe as a whole soon joined in the general merriment. Once a week they put on a special roast dinner at an incredibly reasonable price so we asked for one of their menus/cards so we can book a meal in advance if we so fancy it in a week or so. In fact,Meg and I remembered that when we had eaten there in the upstairs portion of the cafe, we had met a family who came from the area of the Potteries in which she was brought up so there was a lot of wandering memory lane on that occasion. Then we re-parked the car so as not to fall foul of over-assiduous parking wardens and made our way through the town for our lunch date. Although we had booked previously expecting the cafe to be teeming, it was in fact fairly empty so Meg and I ordered a lasagne (which I have to admit was delicious), and they very obligingly swapped the chips element which we did not fancy for some ciabatta bread with garlic butter. After lunch we called in a large ‘Wilkinsons’ hardware store (trading as ‘Wilco’ throughout the Midlands) at which we tend to replenish our supplies of cosmetics and stationery (although gardening, motoring, decorating and kitchenware etc. was available to us had we felt so inclined).

Just round the corner from the hardware store is a shoe shop from which Meg had bought a fantastically comfortable pair of boots about a year ago which she has worn most days on our journey to the park. So we thought that as shoes do not last for ever, it might be a good idea to see if they had any more of the same make. As it happened, they did not have that particular manufacturer’s line in stock but they did they did have some even better ones so Meg was more than delighted to have a new pair of boots (belated birthday present) In my own case, I have a pair of incredibly comfortable walking boots but when I examined them by turning them upside down the heels had worn away to practically nothing. I did a quick calculation that tended to suggest that I must have walked the best part of 1,000 kilometres in them so I thought I would see what the shop had on offer. Eventually, we were passed onto the proprietor himself who was extremely knowledgable about his stock and he found me a pair of Italian walking shoes (which looked good I must say) and these I was more than happy to purchase on the understanding that they might well last for 2,000 kilometres. I have to say it was a real delight to get that degree of personal attention which is all so often lacking in modern shops but the attention that we received was certainly an excellent way to build customer loyalty.

Tonight is the US vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence (solid, white, conventional American male) and Kamala Harris (brought up in California where she became the district attorney – the son of an Indian Mother and a Jamaican father). Normally vice-presidential debates do not attract a great deal of interest, but this time around there is a lot of interest. In the case of Mike Pence, it is quite possible that he might have to take over the Presidency if Donald Trump were to fall over in the next four weeks or at some time in the next four years should Donald Trump actually win. But much more likely is that Joe Biden will win but because of his age be content as a one term president which would lead the field open to Kamala Harris to become president ( the first woman president for the USA) in four years time.The debate starts at 2.0am GMT so I shall have to wait until tomorrow to see who draws blood!