I overslept a little yesterday so spent a lot of the early morning desperately trying to catch up with myself. This December seems to be absolutely racing away and although I am reasonably well prepared for Christmas with decorations done, trees in place and Christmas cards all posted, I still feel that there are precious few days left before the Christmas festivities begin in earnest. I have started taking my iphone to bed with me and the evening before I received a most welcome text. In the days when Meg and I used to walk down regularly to the park we often bumped into a couple who lived about five miles away but nonetheless used to come to the park to exercise their dog and so we got into deep conversations with them. This husband of the pair was an avid repairer of all things electrical and electronic and used to lend his skills to an organisation called ‘Men in Sheds’ where retired men occupy themselves with al kinds of repair activities. Now this couple were very kindly towards Meg and myself and we went out with them on at least a couple of occasions sharing meals in some of our favourite locations in the county. Now the husband seems to be a regular reader of this blog send me a most wonderful text saying that as this was the first Christmas without Meg, would I like to pop over to see them for a festive drink? I replied enthusiastically in the affirmative and also enquired whether I might take my Droitwich friend along with me which would be fine. In the days between Christmas and New Year, I suspect that the whole of the country will be on vacation as it were so the opportunity will be grasped to see families and friends wherever they might happen to be. I am hopeful that I might be able to make a visit down to Oxfordshire to see my very good friends who live down there but this is yet to be arranged. The day is shaping up to be a very busy one with some commitments bumping into each other. 

There is a recently published report which indicates that some £11bn was spent by the government during the COVID-19 crisis in what turned out to be fraudulent transactions. To some extent, the Conservative party was to blame for this because they fast-tracked any applications with known links to the Conservative party and ‘due diligence’ there most certainly was not, particularly in the case of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). Much of this turned out to be sub-standard and needed to be destroyed and practically none of the money fraudulently obtained was recovered. The government said the sum is enough to fund daily free school meals for the UK’s 2.7 million eligible children for eight years to put this sum into context. Meanwhile the main COVID-19 enquiry is still taking evidence and one would hope that lessons had been learnt ‘for the next time’ but it would not be a surprise to discover that the country is still woefully unprepared.

Later on in the morning, I went along to my local dentist and, given that I had been sort of fitted in as emergency appointment, I was delighted to be seen my normal (Irish) dentist who was visibly upset when I informed her about Meg’s death, made even poignant by the fact that she used to treat both of us and was very kindly to Meg the last time we had a dental appointment together. My dentist replaced the lost filling with a temporary filling which will serve the purpose until late in January when I have a scheduled dental appointment and she will then replace the temporary filling with a permanent one. I was also pleasantly surprised not to be charged for this either. I gleaned the following information from the web: ‘If a temporary filling is provided as part of a more comprehensive course of treatment that includes permanent fillings or other procedures, the entire treatment plan will be charged under Band 2, which covers all necessary fillings. You only pay one charge for a complete course of treatment, even if you need multiple visits to complete it’ I cannot remember the last time I visited a dentist without paying at the end of it. I returned home via Waitrose where I had my customary cup of coffee. Whilst in the store, I popped along to the ‘drinks’ section and there saw a bottle of Negroni which I promptly bought. A classic Negroni uses three equal parts: gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, stirred with ice and garnished with an orange peel or slice for a bitter, herbal, and slightly sweet Italian cocktail. So I was thinking of buying the ingredients and making it up from its constituent parts but  at least by buying it already mixed in a bottle, I can work out if family and friends quite like this cocktail. After I returned home, I noticed that the returns parcel had been correctly collected by DPD and then I prepared to go to Pilates. Once located in the car park, I realised with some dismay that I had forgotten to bring some £1 coins with me for the parking fee so  raced home, got the money and then back again only to be about 1-2 minutes for my class where we had all barely started. Next week, of course, will be my Santa Claus event (quite traditional by now and complete with the distribution of bottles of damson gin) My class members and I exchanged Christmas cards and then I returned home to heat up some of the dinner I had prepared yesterday and then had a welcome chat with my Droitwich friend before she went off to her works Christmas meal event in the centre of Birmingham. Later on in the afternoon, my chiropodist will call around for a postponed visit and then I need to prepare myself for getting to my local church (early, to secure a parking place) ready for the annual Christmas Carol concert to be followed by cups of tea and mince pies in the adjacent parish hall. Then I have arranged to phone a friend late in the evening so it has been one of these days when it has been all go but tomorrow promises to be a lighter schedule – I may well spend some of the time packing up things for my Yorkshire trip which will start on Friday.

It is very dark when I wake up in the morning in these days of the winter as we count down towards 21st/22nd December after which time the mornings should start to get a smidgeon lighter each day as the days start to lengthen again. The news media is full of the terrible slaughter that has taken place at Bondi beach in Australia where a father and son gunman have opened fire on a Jewish crowd celebrating Hanukkah killing 15 people which is the latest in a series of world-wide incidents. This rise in antisemitism must surely be linked with the conflict in Gaza which certainly does not justify what might be seen as reprise killings but the media are silent on this point. But the relationship is not an easy one to analyse. Experts point out that antisemitism was already widely prevalent before the bloody conflict in Gaza, provoked by the Hamas attack into Israel of October 2023, polarised opinions across the world. The most lethal attack against the Jewish community in the US, for example, came in 2018, while in 2023, Michael O’Flaherty, the director of the EU’s agency for fundamental rights, described such hate as a ‘deeply ingrained racism in European society’ that posed an existential threat to the continent’s Jewish community. But there is no doubt that such trends were intensified dramatically by the conflict in the Middle East. In the US, the Anti-Defamation League reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest since its records began in 1979. For the first time, a majority ‘contained elements related to Israel or Zionism’. The Community Safety Trust recorded 4,296 instances of anti-Jewish hate across the UK in 2023 – double the previous year – and the most ever documented. There were 3,528 in 2024, the second-highest annual total. Perhaps because of this complexity and its evident sensitivity, such relationships are under-reported and not analysed in depth. But there is always a problem in the way in which news gets reported in the media where there is a concentration upon the televisual focusing on real events in the world rather than the underlying reasons for such disturbances. In past decades, we used to have a concentration upon ‘strikes’ where the media loved to concentrate upon heaps of uncollected rubbish (in the case of the classic local authority dustbin men’s strike both historically and also today in Birmingham) whereas the underling cause of the dispute, usually relating to the falling real value of wages, does not lend itself to such a televisual appeal. To be fair to the BBC, there are often discussion programmes on Radio4 and some late night discussion programmes that attempt a more intelligent discussion of ’causes’ or stories behind the news but I suspect that these are watched by a very small minority of people.

At the start of the week, there are a variety of phone calls that I must make and one is very conscious of the fact that Christmas and the New Year (quite rightly) wipes out a lot of time at this time of year. I am thanking my lucky stars that I managed to order a good supply of my routine medications because running out over the Christmas period does present a happy prospect. When I return from Yorkshire next weekend, I only have two clear days and this reduces to one if you were to discount Christmas Eve itself so I am contemplating a really early start to my Christmas day meal shopping although it is only a case of picking up bits and pieces. As the day has gone on, it has developed into one of those days when I have seen either telephoning or texting all day long.  I made a couple of telephone calls in the morning, both of which I assumed were going to be ‘tricky’ but in the event turned out OK. One call was to my dentist as a filling dropped out of a molar recently and my next dental appointment is late in January. I telephoned for advice and was originally informed that  could go and get a temporary DIY tooth filling kit from the High Street – fortunately, the receptionist found a spare slot for me the following day so I did not have to act on her advice (which is incredibly dangerous because you can seal infection in and make a problem much worse) The rest of the day has been in texting left, right and centre – some texts have been to friends but most have been to members of my family to inform them of my arrival and departure times when travel to Harrogate next Friday. I felt that I needed to give family members a few days notice so that I can try and fit in some meeting time with them – as it is, they all seem frantically busy at this time of year. One of my nieces gave me some good advice as to what sort of Christmas present to buy for my sister when I hope to see het on Saturday. It has been one of those days today when with a layer of heavy black rain clouds, it seems to have been dark all day, even before 3.00pm in the afternoon. Nonetheless, my texts have borne some fruit and I have got on with some domestic jobs like the washing. Tomorrow is going to be a kind of day heavily weighted towards the end of the day as my chiropodist is due to call around late in the afternoon after a postponed visit today and then I have the carol service in my local church followed by tea and mince pies following which I need to dash home for a scheduled telephone conversation with a friend later on in the evening.

Amazingly enough, we seem to be getting some positive news about the Ukraine talks being held in Berlin. Sky News reports that after the Ukrainian team held talks with US officials Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Ukraine’s top negotiator described talks with the US team in Berlin as being constructive and productive. Rustem Umerov added that real progress has been achieved, and he hopes to reach an agreement that will bring us closer to peace by the end of the day. The American team led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were said to be  working extremely constructively to help Ukraine find a way to a peace agreement that lasts. The Ukrainian team is reported to be enormously grateful to President Trump and his team for all efforts they are putting in. It comes after Kyiv handed an updated peace proposal to Washington last week, consisting of 20 points instead of the initial 28-point plan Donald Trump’s team had proposed.

First of all, I would like to issue an apology to regular readers of this blog as it appeared to be’down’ for the best part of the day on Saturday, 13th December, 2025. The problem related to a domain name issue which is now fortunately resolved and I am relieved that all is working correctly. But I am very aware that things can, and do, occasionally go wrong and having put so much investment into these blogs (for more than five and a half years now) I would be loathe to lose the lot. So readers may not know that I have always maintained a parallel ‘back up’ copy of the blog which is written completely in .html (Hyper Text Mark up Language) and maintained on a completely different server and this is always accessible should the first site go down, as it did recently. But readers will need to take a note of the address of this back-up, text based version where you just pick the day that you wished to read from one of a series of tables and the results are practically the same. This address needs to be written down and kept in a safe place so that you can always see this if the ‘main’ site goes down. The address is quite a simple one and it is
http://mch-net.uk
and you can always copy and paste this link into the browser of whatever technology you happen to be using which is typically ‘Safari’ in the case of iPads and iPhones. So that has got the ‘housekeeping’ out of the way and my apologies once again to regular readers. The night before yesterday I went to church as normal for a Saturday morning and gave (and received) a Christmas card from one of the regular parishioners who regularly sits near me in the church. In the morning, I did not have my usual visit from my University of Birmingham friend so I intend to walk down into town and post the remaining cards that I hand deliver and then my Christmas card duties are done for this year with a supply to hand for regular callers to the house and for anybody who sends one to me  who had been left off the list. Although I sent a Christmas containing some photos to the mother of my Droitwich friend, what I have read on the web is chilling. From what I read, it reckoned that the card might take 2-4 months to arrive and there was a 50% chance that it would never arrive at all and that I really should have sent it via a Courier service such as DHL and not relied upon the South African postal service at all, which is notoriously unreliable (and bankrupt, by some accounts). So I have a backup plan which is to put the two photos in some of my own webspace where they are accessible once you know the web address which I will give to my friend to forward to her Mum. Actually, I spent a large part of the morning constructing the files to make the website to protect the website. Although there are simple website protection tools, they are easily hacked and therefore the industry standard is to use two files one of which contains the encrypted password and is stored in a different (and not accessible folder) so the user has to know the correct path from the server to this location and you generally need to use another piece of software to help you do this. At the end of the morning, though, I got the website protected in the way that I wanted and am generally quite pleased but it did take me some time to do this.

I set off to walk down the hill and took the opportunity to hand deliver my last four cards on my journey down. I had a coffee in the store and then on my back met a very old lady that Meg and I used to see regularly in our walks in the park – actually, I believe that her husband had worked in the Parks and Highways department and they had a bench with his name on it in the park. This old lady was 90 and very, very frail so I took her arm so that she could walk round to her next doot neighbours and hand deliver her Christmas card to them. Then I walked her back home as I was fearful that although the distance  was not great, she could have fallen if not given a friendly arm to assist her. Then when I got home, I rested for a while and then served myself some of the huge chicken stew meal that my Droitwich friend and I had prepared the day before. I started to watch the latest version of ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ starring Martin Clunes who was excellent in this role. but I only watched about half an hour of the film because my son and daughter-in-law called around and chatting with them took priority over film-watching and dinner-eating. We discussed some aspects of Meg’s final illness and then made sure that we had all of the arrangements for our Christmas meal as we are sharing the preparation between us and I am to be responsible for the starter and some of the sweets. The week ahead is to rather a truncated one. On Tuesday, I shall certainly attend the carol concert to be held in my local church if only because we have the promise of mince pies and a cup of tea immediately after the event in the parish hall and I will seize the opportunity to socialise a bit. Although Wednesday is now my regular shopping day, I shall be leaving to go on my Yorkshire trip on Friday and will be away until the following Monday so I probably need to run down the supplies of food that I do have in stock. Thinking ahead to the week immediately before Christmas, we have a Pilates class on the Tuesday before the ‘big day’ so I need to ensure that I have supplies of damson gin bottled up so that I can do my traditional Santa Claus appearance in the class. I normally wear some of the outfit underneath my normal trousers so that I can undergo a quick change whilst we are having our traditional ‘relaxation’ at the end of the class. Fortunately, the numbers are quite small so I am hopeful that I still have enough damson gin in stock from a couple of years ago. Taking a Christmas present up to my sister can probably wait until I actually get up there as it will so much easier to buy something on the spot in Harrogate. Although I do enjoy seeing part of my Yorkshire family, I shall still be alone in a hotel bedroom for the three nights of my stay and I do appreciate that at Christmas time my wider family are exceptionally busy themselves with a host of other activities which all seem to cluster at about this time.

The evening before yesterday, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself that I had got my Christmas cards into the system but had got up at 5.00am to make sure I had got the job done. Consequently, I decided to have an earlier night to catch up on lost sleep so got into bed and started watching ‘NewsNight’ on BBC2. There was a very rational and sober discussion from a variety of experts that the UK and Europe were standing on the verge of war with Russia and in many ways we had to prepare ourselves for the type of conflict that our grandparents had experienced during WW2. The fact that the current American administration was turning its back upon Europe and that Putin was prepared to invest huge amounts of money and military strength to gain comparatively little were indications that we could not afford to ignore. We know that Russia is constantly probing the defences of other European societies which have been somewhat slow to respond. The reasons are not hard to find: after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the cold war, European societies have, in generally, taken the ‘peace dividend’ and invested the money largely to support domestic political agendas such as the health needs of an ageing population. But we are now in a situation in which all European societies need to radically increase their defence expenditures as the Russian desire to regain control of its ‘lost’ empire and to weaken the EU is not in doubt. China is standing in the background and quietly helping Russia to achieve its aims so we have to understand the impact of contemporary global politics. But the Ukrainian war has taught us that the nature of conflict is rapidly changing and various military concepts such as using the air force to prepare for a subsequent ground invasion have to be rethought. We now live in the age of attack by drone  and Ukraine has to deal with over 180 attacks each day of which about 20% actually hit their target. Allied to this, we now have cyber warfare and we must be aware of the fact that the UK’s data connections by cable under the North Sea are fairly easily capable of being damaged by Russian craft. So the argument currently runs that it is only be military strength that Russia can ever be deterred and the threat to Europe is real and growing daily.

One of the interesting by-products of this blog is that I can look back a year and see what I was doing this time last year. I found that almost to the exact day, I got up early at 5.00am to write the same number of Christmas cards, the arguments about a flu epidemic were just as prominent and I was even cracking the same observations about the truncated first lines of Christmas carols.  In fact, history was repeating itself so exactly that I needed to do a double check to make sure I had not go the year wrong in the examination of my blog although I probably have got the Christmas tree erected and the decorations done a few days earlier this year. The month of December seems to be racing away and it seems remarkable that Christmas Day itself is less than a fortnight away. I have a carol service to which to look forward in the coming week and afterwards there will be coffee and mince pies in the church hall which is an opportunity that I shall seize to try to maintain my social contacts, which otherwise might start to slowly diminish.

I had a lovely surprise in the middle of the day, which I was not expecting and hence it was so much more enjoyable. My Droitwich friend found she had a couple of hours free in her domestic schedule after dropping her boys to various engagements so she came around and we cooked a South African chicken stew meal together. This was wonderful but we have a lot left over for other meals in the next day or so, After she had left, I raced into town and took advantage of the free parking to visit a photoshop where I asked them to produce a couple of prints of my Droitwich friend and I – the first with Meg and her own aunt when we first met over four and a half years ago and the latest one being the two of us cooking a meal together more recently. These two prints I have despatched with a letter to my friend’s mother in South Africa where I am sure she will appreciate it. I  took the opportunity to post some neighbour’s cards on the way but was disappointed that what I hope to be the last post at 4.00 in the afternoon was actually collected at 11.40 this morning. The postal service has lost a lot of business now that people use email and social media but we are now getting a pretty shocking service at sky-high prices.  In the evening when I anticipate going to church when I return I shall catch up on some lost TV viewing such as ‘Question Time’ which I missed this week. I know that I shall not see some of my regular friends in the next day or so as they have commitments elsewhere so I need to find some jobs with which to busy myself. When I was down in town earlier on this morning, I bought myself a double issue of the ‘Radio Times’ which I generally do at this time of year because you get a good guide to all of the films and special programmes broadcast over the Christmas period. I thought my bill at the supermarket checkout seemed a bit high and then I looked at the price of the ‘Radio Times’ I could understand why as the cover price was £6.50  It is said in the publishing industry that the advertising rates in the Radio Times are sky high for this particular issue because unlike other periodicals it is consulted often and regularly over the two week period by several family members. But I was also tempted into buying an issue of ‘The Sun’ because they were advertising a free guide to all of the TV programmes over the Christmas period as well (and the ‘Sunday Times’ might also put out some special guides when I use my token to pick up my copy of it.

The day before yesterday was an interesting one, as starting in the mid afternoon. I decided to make a start on my Christmas card list, which although I have address labels in a file ready to be printed off is still quite a venture. First I located my file and had to update it and reorder it somewhat as almost inevitably there have been some deletions to it. Then I printed off 40 address labels on 4-5 sheets and this helps to automate the process somewhat although sometimes there is not an absolute match between the address and the label and the address over runs a little onto the following label. Then it is a case of going through the labels systematically, taking care to choose religiously themes cards  for those who would particularly appreciate them, more internationalist type of cards (generally a Dove of Peace) for particular individuals and then all points in between. In the morning I had tramped up and down Bromsgrove High street seeking out the displays of Christmas cards in the charity outlets – at Christmas time, I always want to support a charity in the appropriate way. I wanted in particular some religious cards for those who would appreciate than most highly but found them to be almost non-existent. Altogether, I think I located about 3-4 of ‘sort of’ religiously themed cards out of a total of about 80 but none of classic paintings of the Madonna and Child which is often the subject of Christmas cards and I suppose that if I want these in future years, I am going to have to buy them from some more specialist suppliers. I put an address label in each card before sealing it up and then ensure that I have a sender’s label on the outside in case old contacts have died or moved and the card needs to get returned. I was about a third of the way through this task when my Droitwich friend got into contact and we decided to cook a meal together which we did, collaborating in our usual fashion. Because my friend has spoken of me to her mother in South Africa, I thought I would send her a special little letter to enclose with a Christmas card indicating what firm friends we have become, helping each other with life’s little vicissitudes and I also spent some time locating and making two particular photos one of which is Meg and I and our friend and her aunt taken some four years ago and the other one my friend and I after we had just cooked a big meal together. I got up particularly early (at about 5.00am yesterday) to get the remainder of the cars written and ready to be posted the Post Office later on today which I succeeded in doing in the late morning.. The cards for my Yorkshire family I will take with me when I travel north to Harrogate in a week’s time. It looks as though I have just caught the deadline for cards to be delivered to Spain in time for Christmas as the dates of 11-12 December are mentioned, whereas the date for guaranteed delivery of second class mail here in the UK is December 17th so I have beaten this deadline by some five days.  I spent a certain amount of time today making sure that my address file is up-to-date so this is all ready to roll for next year. I must say that I think that I got the cards processed extremely expeditiously this year although, of course, I concentrate upon those that have to catch the mail whilst nearby friends and neighbours can be left until a little later. I must confirm that there was a slight pang  for each card that  signed which was ‘Mike’ on each card  rather than ‘Mike and Meg’ as has been the case for the past 57 years. There were a couple of instances as well where ex-neighbours of ours in Hampshire would not have heard about Meg’s passing in May so this needed an added note of explanation. 

A few photographs have been released from the Epstein files in the USA but there is nothing to suggest any illegal or indeed impropriety. But it is being pointed out that these are but a drop in the ocean because there are believed to be over 95,000 images in total and the legislation passed by both Houses of Congress gives the relevant authorities until December 19th, i.e. one week more to release the vast bulk of the material. I would anticipate that when the files are released, some will be held back on the grounds of ‘national security’ and I would not be surprised if an enormous amount of redaction (i.e. blacking out of embarrassing material) will have taken place. Given the litigious nature of America society, there may well be a flurry of court battles lying ahead of us as well. There is a very balanced and well-argued analysis in ‘The Times‘  published the headline ‘Brexit made us poorer and it is getting worse.’ by the economist Emma Duncan. The latest analysis indicates that GDP per head (the best measure of prosperity) is in the range of 6%-8% lower than if Brexit had not happened and that figure is about £3,000 for each of us in the population. The authors of the paper are highly respected and analysts are drawn from Stanford University, the Bank of England, King’s College London, the German central bank and the University of Nottingham. What makes the analysis so powerful though is that the paper utilises a ‘bottom up’ as well as a ‘top down’ approach by looking at the performance of companies that were most exposed to the EU compared with those companies whose exposure to the EU was much less. This, too, mirrors the picture obtained by looking at the macroeconomic data. The article concludes that we shall never make up the ground that we have lost but there is a very strong conclusion that borderless trade with the EU would bring large economic benefits. Those who think that Brexit has been a failure outnumber those who feel it has been a success by 61% to 13% but the politicians seem loathe to grasp this particular nettle and re-establish better trading links with the EU. The Reform party are so far ahead in the polls that the Labour seems like the proverbial ‘rabbit dazzled in the headlights’ and will not dare to make anything except the most tentative (and inconsequential) moves back towards the EU.

We awoke yesterday morning to the news that had actually broken the day before that the United States has seized a large Venezuelan oil tanker, claiming it to be part of their campaign (or is it a war) against the narco-terrorists. It had been evident for some time that the Trump regime will do whatever it can to destabilise and bring down the Maduro government which it claims stole the last election in that country. What I find so disturbing about the whole of this story is the absence of any international outcry against the United States but just a shrug of the shoulders and a sort of tacit recognition that ‘might is right’ and that the US can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants without the rest of the world community hardly expressing an opinion. Of course, Trump and Putin share the same world view, redolent of the 1950’s, that the two ‘great powers’ had complete dominion over developments in their own back years and sought to have a belt of client or non-hostile states surrounding them (Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall in the case of the USSR and the Caribbean and Central America in the case of the USA). Returning to domestic matters, we now seem to be at the start of a ‘super flu’ epidemic in the country and it is interesting to see what advice is being given to counteract it. One thing that the experts are saying is that remedies such as the consumption of garlic tablets and Vitamin C do not seem to be particularly effective. But what is being said by the experts may seem common sense but is probably not widely known. The most important is to have a good night’s sleep to help the body’s natural defences, followed by a good diet and plenty of hand washing throughout the day. I discovered a very useful link which I sent off to my Droitwich friend (we do our little bit to keep ourselves healthy and keep ourselves going)  but accidentally sent the same link off to one of my nieces who is a teacher in Yorkshire She replied to the effect that her school has had unprecedented numbers of people off with flu and seasonable ailments with 140 being off quite recently). Later on in the morning, our domestic help called around as did our son and we all excitedly spoke about our Christmas plans. Our domestic help brought with her a bag of little Christmassy type decorations, some of which were added to our already decorated house instead of going to the charity shop. We spent so much time chattering away that a lot of the morning was spent and we realised that we had better get on and get our normal jobs done. Today our routines are slightly different because my Tai Chi class has finished for the Christmas season so we did not mind spending the extra time with each other and helping each other with Christmas decorations. In the course of all of this, I have now made sure that I have two candles ready  to be lit in the event of other power outages because as we rely upon some overhead power lines that are susceptible to bad weather. Part of me wonders why in an advanced industrial society like Britain we are relying at all upon overhead power lines in a built up urban environment and I imagine that it was cost-cutting on somebody’s part years ago for which we are all paying the price today – but that seems to contemporary UK these days.

Now that the house is well decorated up, I am starting to think about my Christmas card lost. Several years I tried to ‘automate’ this process somewhat by making a Word document that uses a template that, in theory, positions each address onto a peel-off label. Last year, I made sure that I had purchased a good supply of these labels and that I now exactly where to find them as I released a portion of space in my filing cabinet so that I have all of the Christmas card writing materials in one place. I see that I purchased labels last year at almost exactly the same date last year and I also need to ensure that I have an adequate supply of my own address labels as I traditionally put one of these inside each card and also on the back of the envelope so that the card can get returned if it does not reach the intended recipient. The list itself also has a more macabre function because it could be used to inform everybody who needs to know in the event of a death. In the past, we have sometimes only learnt of the death of quite a treasured neighbour after a gap of weeks and even months if relative are having to rely upon entries in diaries and address books of the deceased person.

The news media is full of warnings about the flu crisis that seems to be have struck early this year and to be particularly severe. I heard one analysis that suggested that a particular severe variant of ‘normal’ flue was circulating with remnants of the COVID-29 virus and other seasonal viruses. The advice that was being promulgated, apart from the obvious requirement to et vaccinated seemed surprising in some ways.The importance of a good night’s sleep so that the immune system could regenerate and repair itself would not be a thought at the front of many people’s minds and to this, we need to add the importance of a good diet and, of course, plenty of hand washing and the minimisation of unnecessary social contact. The residents doctors (previously called junior doctors) are staging a series of strikes for better pay and working conditions but public sympathy for them is remarkably down which is not surprising as the new Labour government gave them a pay increase in excess of 20%. A strike actually could not have come at a worst time and it could be that many resident doctors will not join the strike on this occasion.The doctors are arguing that in real terms, their pay has declined over the years which is undoubtedly true. `But the same is true for many groups of workers in the economy and real living standards have not risen for decades. Real wage stagnation means wages are not keeping pace with inflation, leaving workers’ purchasing power flat or declining, a significant problem in the UK since the 2008 financial crisis, driven by low productivity growth, shifts in labour market power towards employers, and events like austerity and the cost-of-living crisis, leaving workers much worse off than historic trends. This stagnation is worse in the UK than in many other nations, with some workers earning thousands less annually than they would have if pre-crisis growth rates continued.

The day before yesterday, in the evening, we had a power cut starting at 7.30pm in the evening. It is rather scary when absolutely everything goes black around you but I knew where a torch and quite a powerful flashlight were kept and managed to locate them correctly. By chance, I had taken off the windowsill an ornamental candle in a brass candlestick which I was wondering whether to deploy near Meg’s tribute but I lit the candles around this and utilised the other candle as a source of light. Then I started on this blog which runs off the battery power in the portable for a few hours. The thing about power cuts is that if you know you are going to experience a power outage at a particular time, then you can organise supplies of hot water, locations of torches and so on beforehand but when it strikes suddenly, as during the hours of darkness, then you have to rely upon your memory as to where your strategic resources happen to be. I managed to locate a battery powered radio fairly readily which I have tuned to ClassicFM to give a bit of company. With the aid of my mobile phone, I have managed to ascertain that the National Grid knows that 73 properties are affected in my area – in some ways, I wish there were more because I suppose the engineers will be working initially on the largest pools of outages and the number of 73 might be on the small side and left until last. According to the National Grid, they estimate that the power might be off until midnight but I wonder whether this is rather an optimistic projection and the outage may persist until well into the morning. Although the electronic ignition on the gas cooker will not work, I should be able to light the gas with matches and I think I will heat up some water and then prepare a flask of soup in case I get cold during the night This I did and had some soup and then the power was actually restored at 10.45 so the entire power cut had lasted over three hours. This might not sound a very long time but when you are in the middle of it and in a very dark house you never know how long it is going to last. Sometimes when emergencies strike like this you have neighbours around who look out for each other, but both of my immediate neighbours are away. I texted my Droitwich friend (in the dark!) but we did not manage to make a connection, I imagine the power outage having something to do with it. The following morning, she offered me a ‘sleepover’ which I certainly would have accepted if the power outage had lasted for hours rather than for days. Fortunately, on this occasion I was well prepared but I can well imagine some older people being terrified and confused if left alone in a very dark and cold house and not knowing when it was going to end.

There is a fascinating and extended article about the connection (if any!) between declining adolescent mental health and the growth in social media. In Australia, a ban on the use of smart phones has now come into force for the under 16s. The big problem is a dearth of really good scientific evidence as whatever correlations are found are incredibly small (and correlation does imply causation in any case) The Sky News article concludes that we may have conceptualised the problem the wrong way around. It is not that social media causes depression; it is that adolescents with depressive symptoms interact differently on social media. Banning social media for this is like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, as it will remove the benefits without necessarily treating the problem. Instead, we need to rethink the way children are treated by society more generally, giving them fun and freedom so they are not pushed towards screens. As the Nature review of ‘The Anxious Generation’ concluded: ‘We have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research.’ As someone who has often connected the rise in social media with adolescent mental health, this is certainly food for thought. I would surmise that it is probably critical for educators to themselves get ‘on top’ of the social media and then instruct those that they teach/instruct on intelligent use of social media but this is much more easily said than done.

Our Tai Chi classes have finished for the Christmas period but our tutor invited all the members of the various classes that she teaches to a coffee and mince pies get-together in the late morning. I got there a couple of minutes after the scheduled time and then experienced something that was too common in this particular venue- there were 31 females and two males including myself and, as on other occasions, they were deep in conversations about grandchildren, Christmas arrangements and so on and I only knew by sight one or two of the people there in any case. So I did my best to engage in social conversation with my immediate neighbours but without much success and was not particularly unhappy when the while little party broke up. So then I drove home to pick up my shopping bags before doing a mid-day weekly shop at Aldi where I bought one or two extra things that I thought we might need for Christmas, such as a Christmas pudding. The rather grim news at the moment is that the ‘flu season has arrived early this year and the latest strain appears to be both more virulent and also more infectious that in past years. Already  hospital admissions are 8,000 up compared with previous years and the hospital authorities think that we are nowhere near the peak Some 17 million vaccinations have already been given but that still leaves quite a large portion of the population unvaccinated. I am very glad to be up-to-date on both the ‘flu and the COVID vaccination but my Droitwich friend had the most tremendous run-around trying to find a pharmacy with stocks left so that she could herself vaccinated, which I am pretty sure that she did in the end. On the radio, the news bulletins were explaining that ‘flu should not be treated lightly and can lead to complications with the heart, lungs and further bacteriological infections such as pneumonia.

Yesterday morning I got up just after 6.00am but had gad a rather attenuated night. This is because primarily BBC were showing the classic Hitchcock film of ‘Psycho’. I watched until the critical shower room scene that everyone remembers from the film and then carried on watching the rest of it as I had never seen the whole full length pf the film before. Shot in black and white, this was Hitchcock at his best, of course. I generally have a look to see if there is a pressing news story and the Ukraine conflict may be nearing towards a resolution on Trump’s terms. The Europeans are trying not to offend Trump (to preserve the small amounts of American military aid?) but are desperately trying to mitigate the worst aspects of the Trump plan which gives Russia practically everything that it wants. If America walks away from this conflict, which America may still well do, then we are left with the grim prospect of most of Europe vs. Russia and a war than rumbles on for ever and a day. Meanwhile, America is struggling with the imposition of the Trump tariffs that are having unpredictable consequences for many American companies. Much has been written about the trade war of 2025 – plenty of ink spilled about the drama in the White House and the economic consequences playing out across the world. Far less has been said about another of the profound impacts Donald Trump’s tariffs have had on businesses across America: they have left many of them utterly befuddled and deeply confused. The problem is not just that firms are now having to pay a whole load of tariffs on stuff they are importing. It runs deeper than that: in many cases those firms are struggling to work out how much those tariffs ought to be. All of this reminds me of two almost fundamental truths which are often forgotten. The first of these is that government by simplistic slogan is not really government at all – a very sage American politician out his finger on this dilemma a long again with the memorable phrase that one ‘needs to campaign in poetry but to govern in prose'(i.e. translating rhetoric under actual workable policies takes detailed and sustained hard work) The second truth is that tinkering with any part of a system such as the modern industrial state often has unpredictable consequences. Herbert Spencer, one of the founding fathers of sociology, gave the very prosaic example that an artisan trying to remove a small cockle (dent) from a metal teapot and may accomplish this only at the expense of another dent appearing elsewhere. But one does get the feeling that particularly in modern day America, the consequences or modelling of policy changes has not been done. This, of course, is what a well-functioning civil service ought to be doing if they are not decried, radically reduced in number or replaced by ideologues with no real expertise in running anything. My Droitwich friend and I exchanged some texts in the morning because we were going to snatch a little time together this morning but one of her sons has woken up with a high temperature which evidently has to be her first point of concern.  So after I had got up, exercised and showered, I threw some things into a bag, some pharmaceutical and some soups,  which might prove useful for her son to help alleviate his fever and then made my way down to Droitwich. By good fortune, my friend had  a free 15 minute slot as any commitment had been moved around and so we could have a quick elevenses with each other whilst I handed over what I had brought, Then it was a case of getting back to Bromsgrove and setting off for my Pilates exercises. It was so blustery that I lost my hat on several occasions on the way from the car park to the exercise studio were our class is held. Afterwards I returned home and made a sort of stir fry consisting of onions, peppers and tomatoes and I also threw in sone cocktail sausages left over from the party. Then I  parboiled some broccoli and added these to the stir fry together with some onion gravy. All of this  made for a satisfying lunch on a foul and rainy day.

As I was eating my lunch, I tuned into the Parliament channel  and was just in time to witness a very rare event which a bill put forward by the Liberal Democrats to open negotiations with the EU to secure greater market access for the UK which had resulted in a tied vote of 100:100. It was supported by the minor parties such as the SNP and the Greens, and the Conservatives voted against.  But although the official policy of the Labour party was to abstain there were sufficient Labour ‘rebels’ to ensure that the bill was passed. The Deputy Speaker of the Commons was in the chair and she evidently knew (or was informed by the clerks in the House) that in the event of a tied 10 minute rule, past precedent is that it is allowed to go forward with the casting vote of the Speaker to allow time for further debate. Now the Labour party could allow this to go forward by granting it time within the parliamentary timetable or effectively allow it to die through lack of time, but it will be interesting to see which way the wind blows on this particular issue.  Tonight, there are a couple of episodes of ‘Yes Minister’ repeated on BBC4 which I have probably seen before but are well worth watching on a subsequent occasion. I am always amused by the fact that most episodes depicted have a kernel of truth about them because the script writers were fed with some salacious stories in a weekly lunchtime meeting and whilst no doubt the stories were elaborated a little for the sake of good comedy and entertainment, they are not completely fictitious either. I also tuned in the evening before to my daily repeat of ‘Rising Damp’ by the obscure channel ‘That’s TV’ which showed iconic comedy from past decades. But it is now been taken off ‘Freeview’ and is only available on a subscription channel for £10.00 a month ( and I suspect will get hardly any takers). Judging by some of the reactions to this change that I have read about, several people (including myself) who have got used to their daily fix of classic comedy are now both deprived and distraught!

This morning, I got up after a disturbed night’s sleep. I suspect that I was a little, as they say, over-tired so I got up in the middle of the night and viewed most of a film on Prime Video into which I rather got absorbed after which I slept like the proverbial log. Then on entering the kitchen I was confronted with the food left over from last night’s party most of which I would never normally buy nor eat (such as sausage rolls, cocktail sausages themselves, some fancy fairy cakes and so on) Apart from buying too much, I think I ended buying the kind of food that young people attending the part would like rather than in accordance with my own preferences so I sent an urgent text to my Droitwich friend for some advice and assistance with how to cope with my surplus. If it were unopened, I could always have donated it to a food bank or one of those collection baskets that supermarkets have in the front of their stores these days, but this is not the case. Yesterday for the party, I indulged myself by wearing my good Batic (Indonesian dress shirt) for the first time in abut thirty years. I have to admit it was a tight squeeze but still just about wearable and evidently, it is just the kind of thing to wear on festive occasions. If I succeed in keeping myself on the slim rather than the stocky side and lose another inch or so, then it is probably worth preserving for another year. I commented to my friends last night that how many of us can still wear clothes first worn some 30 years ago and one then remarked, wryly, that would have been impossible in her case as she was only 28! But these are a delightful set of young people and we are resolved not to let the whole of another year pass before another occasion presents itself, perhaps as early as New Year. As I was mentally preparing myself to do my Pilates exercises, having a shower and thinking about the day ahead the doorbell rang – and it was my Droitwich friend, squeezing in 15 minutes after dropping her boys off at the local school. To say she was like ‘manna from heaven’ is no exaggeration because she leapt upon some of the excess party food, some of which she froze and a goodly portion of which she took so that her boys can have relevant snacks whilst at school. My friend and I are well used to collaborating well with each in the kitchen and she knows the location of everything in the kitchen like the back of her hand so between us, we got everything organised into to be eaten today, to be frozen and to be handed onto her boys. I was excitedly chattering about the party and after talking last night about other relationships that had broken down, we spoke of the affection that we have for each other and how fortunate we were both were to enjoy each other’s company. She is going to be insanely busy, not least because a new client her firm had taken on was proving to be particularly demanding but we made tentative plans to see each other again in a few days time, probably at the end of the week  when work pressures may have diminished somewhat.

After this delayed start to the morning, I exercised with my Pilates routines but it took a longer than usual as I kept stopping to have a mull over the conversations that we had with some of Meg’s carers in the party last night. This gave me quite a lot of food for thought, and certainly information was shared with me that made me count my blessings as it were. The morning was punctuated by the arrival of Global Health Insurance Card (which used to be called our EHIC card) that I was pleased to receive. Even more welcome was a card from the daughter of one of Meg’s cousin who is now deceased) and we thought that as families , we would try and get together in the Spring when the weather is improved and we can make the journey up to Bolton in Lancashire. Although it is quite a long way, it is practically motorway door to door once we get onto the M5/M6. So we exchanged texts with each with a bit of chatter about family news. I walked down into town and, in Waitrose when  was having my cup of coffee I bumped (separately)  into two of my church friends, one of whom had been quite seriously ill but who is now recovering (I think) but she was wearing a mask to keep infections at bay. Then I returned home and supplemented some meat and graced with carrots and petit pois to make a heartwarming type of winter stew which I really enjoyed.  Tonight, after studying the TV schedules there is going to be a programme on the civilisation of the Aztecs in which I am always interested as our son spent a pre-university year in Mexico. The programme starts at 9.00pm so I think it is a case of jumping into bed at 9.00 so that I can drift off to sleep, should I so wish, when the programme concludes. My son has returned from holiday so it will be nice to catch up with news with him after his early morning swim. My own coffee drinking  activities tomorrow are likely to be curtailed as two of our little group are in hospital and the third is probably off playing bowls so I may text her to check her availability. But my Droitwich friend and I have been in touch again with a telephone call at the end of a day’s work so although we are both busy doing lots of things with different people, we still find a bit of time to be in touch with each other. Having had a quietish day to recover from the excitement of the party activities yesterday, not to mention the clearing up afterwards, I think that tomorrow needs to be a Christmas card day as I need to get the international cards sent off as soon as I can.  I generally send off about 40 cards but I think my list may well be a bit shorter this year as, unfortunately, there has been some diminution in my Christmas card list this year.

The night before last, I was thinking over what preparations were still needed to made for the party to be thrown for Meg’s carers the following day. One thing that I did do was to adorn Meg’s little memorial with a collection of candles and tea lights- two of these being holders which I think I was quite fortunate in finding in a charity shop down town and the other two that I had retained for use in the study without actually bringing them into use. So I arranged for these to be lit so that I could study the effect when all of the curtains were drawn and the lights tuned off. To illuminate Meg’s photo atop her ashes, I had one of those pencil type torches which would stand on its end and illuminate Meg’s photo which then made quite a pleasing montage. Having got the photo into my phone, it was then quite an easy job to send it off to a variety of family and friends which I then did. After I had indulged myself in this way, I turned my attention to the little Casio electronic organ which I purchased before Meg’s death in a vain hope that we could sit side-by-side and play simple tunes together. This never happened and I managed to play a few simple tunes with one finger of one hand but I wanted to remind myself of the other tunes and melodies built into the unit. There are 99 of these and some are Christmas carols whilst others are well known pieces of classical music. If you know what you are doing (and it takes some fumbling about without the misplaced manual) you can even get a melody playing and then change the predominant melody to a variety of orchestral instruments such as flute, harp, oboe, clarinet, trumpet and so on. So in order to impress my guests with my (simulated) playing and in order to re-familiarise myself with all of this, I was playing about with it until midnight when I tumbled into bed. The following morning, I also had to remind myself how to use ‘Alexa’ on my TV although it sometimes interacts with the smart speaker I have in the kitchen and they tumble over each other at times. In the morning, I started to wonder whether I had got enough glasses and so on but with various rummaging’s about last night, I managed to locate some spare serviettes, serving plates and so on. Two of the carers are going to turn up an hour early to help me prepare for the start of festivities at 3.00pm so I will leave putting out the food until we can perform this little ask together. Meanwhile I have been zinging texts plus photos around al this morning since I got up although it is making things run a little late. But, for once, I have other things to push the dire political news to one side.  I am quite conscious of the fact that some of my friends (two coffee mates, one living down the road, and my next door neighbour all seem to be ill or having an operation which is not the ideal start to a festive season)

Having gone down into town to collect my newspaper, I called in to see my neighbour and to explain that we might have a multiplicity of cars on our drive. His wife was due to have a hip replacement last Tuesday but this has been rescheduled for two days before Christmas which does not sound a fun time. The helpers arrived an hour late but with a mountain of food but eventually guests started to arrive and we finished off with a total of nine altogether including myself. I showed our guests the Christmas trees and the three cribs and then we settled down for a drink. When all were assembled, we stood around Meg’s little memorial in the Music Lounge and we drank a toast to her, wishing her a happy Christmas. The party started off in our Music lounge and I gave a quick burst of some Christmas carols and then some Mozart and Beethoven built into the system. When it came time for food, everything was displayed in the kitchen so I encouraged people to load up their plates  and then to peregrinate to the dining room as it so much easier to eat food and to drink whilst sitting around a table. There we stayed for the rest of the afternoon/evening and they regaled me with everything that happening in their professional lives (and sometimes their personal lives as well) So we carried on until about 8.00pm when the party came to a natural conclusion and, as we had had such a good time in each others company, we resolved not to wait for another year but to hold another party probably at about the time of New Year. Then there was a mountain of food to put back into containers but practically all went back into the packaging from whence it came and I sent an urgent text to my Droitwich friend to help me to come and consume some of it, not least because her hungry teenage sons would appreciate a lot of the things in their own school-time breaks.

Whilst thinking about the totality of social relationships, I started wondering about the ways in which the ancient Greeks conceptualised what we could call ‘love’ But the ancient Greek language conceptualised what we would in modern times could love by referring to four concepts. These are Agape (unconditional, selfless love), Eros (passionate, romantic love), Philia (deep friendship, brotherly love), and Storge (familial, natural affection) The last of these categories  does not find expression in modern English but Eros gives rise to ‘erotica’,  Agape (which is translated sometimes as love and at other times as charity – brotherly love is perhaps an appropriate) and Philia which gibes rise to nouns describing a person as a Francophile (appreciating at a deep cultural level all. things French) All of this is quite interesting to me if only the word ‘love’ is a very broad and elastic concept. This is made even more complicated when male bus conductors used to call male passengers ‘love’ but, of course, the rest of the population, usually resident in the North of England, knew what was meant ( but that meaning do not coincide with any of the categories designated by the ancient Greeks)