Today we started off our day somewhat earlier than intended as the carers were scheduled half an hour later than is normal. But we got ourselves up and breakfasted and then started to look forward to the day ahead. On Saturdays, we normally meet up with some of our ‘granny gang’ of friends in Waitrose but the weather seemed rather gloomy and miserable. Nonetheless, we wrapped ourself up in waterproofs and prepared to make our our journey down the hill in a slight drizzle. Just as we were preparing to go, we received a telephone call from one of the parishioners with whom we often had a chat when we used to attend the evening service each Saturday evening. This is now beyond us but we were delighted to get the news from our friend who hails from the North East and whose Geordie accent serves to remind me that my mother went to a teacher training college in Newcastle upon Tyne where I visited her in my half term breaks from boarding school in Bolton in Lancashire. Shortly after our first telephone call, I received another from our friends down the road who had very kindly baked me a cottage pie. This will go in the oven tomorrow and will give us at least two servings of meals so was a wonderfully kind gesture. We made contact with two of our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria who, like ourselves, had braved the rain although it was quite tolerable on the way down. Whilst in the cafe, we also received a telephone call from some of the friends from our sojourn in Winchester and this was wonderful to receive. But there was a slight problem in that when I was chatting excitedly with my friend, the conversation could be heard by others in the cafe and I was informed by another patron, politely, that I should keep the phone close to my face so that the rest of the cafe were not forced to listen to our conversation. I was a little mortified by this experience as I, too, do not like to overhear telephone conversations either whilst I am on a train or, for that matter, in a cafe. So I made the hurried excuse to my friend making the call that I had to go and then apologised to my fellow coffee drinker explaining that I was receiving rather than initiating a call. However, one learns by experience and in future, unless the telephone call is short and vital, I will not any longer accept calls in the cafe. And so we prepared to make our way home, starting off a little late as we had been delayed by the phone call but half way back, the heavens opened and we both got absolutely drenched in an intense shower. I was glad that I had taken the precautions of us both getting clad in waterproof outer clothing but nonetheless when we arrived home, we were both pretty wet. Fortunately, the two carers for Meg helped her to change not only her outer clothing but also her underwear which the rain had penetrated and I needed to go and change into another pair of trousers. Nonetheless, I warmed Meg up with some tomato soup in a cup and then started to prepare the lunch. This was an altogether thrown together affair but turned out to be quite a delicious meal. We had some remains of stir fry vegetables plus remnants of spaghetti plus some remains of a tin of Irish stew which Meg and I had for dinner last night. Then I parboiled one large potato and one large onion, cut into small squares and then finished off with some olive oil and a blast of brown sauce. I do not know what you would call a mixture like this but it provided us with a very tasty meal, appropriate for a wet Saturday afternoon. After lunch, our friend popped around with the cottage pie that we had been promised and this was gratefully received. Our friends could not stop long as they were on their way out but it is always nice to receive a visit like this.

Whenever a new government is formed, the first job of the new Prime Minister is to form a cabinet. On this occasion, there were no real surprises and practically everyone slotted into the ministries that they had shadowed whilst in opposition. Today, the new Cabinet is due to meet for the first time and I am sure that it will be an educating experience for them all. I have often imagined that were I to be a newly elected Prime Minister in a Labour government, my very first act would be to inform the Cabinet that they had just been elected upon the rejection of the polls of a most sleaze and scandal-ridden government and therefore if there was the slightest whiff of scandal surrounding any of them, the new Prime Minister would not defend them whatsoever and they would be out of office before their feet could touch the ground. Now it appears that Keir Starmer had said just that or something very similar informing the cabinet they were elected to ‘serve and not to be self-serving’ which sounds like a slogan but no doubt is repeated often these days. There is a phrase attributed to New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, that one needs to ‘Campaign in poetry, govern in prose’ and many of the political commentators are eagerly awaiting he first pronouncements of the Prime Minister to see if he is making the successful transition from a campaigning politician to the new role of a Prime Minister. So far, I must say that all of Keir Starmer’s announcements seem absolutely ‘on the ball’. He announced that as Prime Minister of the four nations, he would be visiting each in the next few days before going off to a NATO meeting to be held in the US. Then he said that he would convene a meeting of all of the regional mayors, irrespective of political orientation, to work out how he could support them to regenerate their regions. He also made the point that he was not a tribal politician and intended to govern for the whole nation which you would expect all new Prime Ministers to say but might actually be carried into action in the new administration.

So yesterday being Election Day, the whole day was in effect a long wait until a few seconds after 10.00pm when the exit poll predicting the final result was published by all of the media simultaneously. The exit polls are normally very accurate but this year a new methodology was being deployed. Although the percentage of the electorate voting for Party X or Party Y can be forecast with a great deal of accuracy, mapping this onto the actual seats won is a much more complicated exercise. In this particular election, the Labour Party deployed a strategy to particularly good effect which was not to pile up votes in places like the traditional mining areas where extra votes did not mean extra seats. Rather, the strategy was to try to deploy the resources so that that seats were regarded as winnable got more resources. In the event, the model produced quite a good fit between the exit poll and the final result.

But this election was a momentous one. The Labour party have had a lead over the Tories of about 20 percentage points for about a couple of years now and nothing seems to have altered substantially, even over the course of the campaign, So the exit poll suggested a landslide and this is what eventually transpired. Naturally I watched the exit poll and shortly afterwards I was joined by my son and we watched the results unfold until we finally made it to be at just 5.00am this morning, just after the Labour party had actually gained enough seats to be guaranteed for becoming the next government. The end result was a really dramatic win for the Labour Party who gained 412 seats whilst the Tories slumped to 121, having lost 250 seats during the night. What really ‘did’ for the Tories was the fact that the electorate seemed determined to get rid of the Tories at any price. Hence the intervention of the Reform party helped to ensure that Conservative support was drawn away allowing the Labour candidates to flourish. Also, there was a dramatic collapse of the SNP in Scotland who were reduced to a rump of just 9 seats whilst the Liberal Democrats had their best showing for decades coming in with 71 seats. Several very high profile Tories failed to be elected including Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, Penny Mordaunt, Jacob Rees Mogg and Liz Truss but Jeremy Hunt just about survived. I think 12 Cabinet members failed to be elected which was a record in itself.

Having crept into bed at 5.00am. I managed to get about an hour and a half’s sleep under my belt before I got up to start to prepare for the care workers. Then, after breakfast, we pushed Meg down the hill and we had a coffee with our University of Birmingham friend. The it was a case of getting up the hill in time for the carers, a quick meal of fish fingers and we settled down to watch the comings and goings along Downing Street. Immediately after an election, evidently the media interest is focused on which minister is to get which jobs. As expected, most of the shadow cabinet were appointed to the ministries that they had been shadowing for about the last year so this means that they can really hit the ground running. No great surprises have been forthcoming this afternoon but although we see would be cabinet ministers walking the walk to the front door of No. 10, it is only several hours later that the actual names of ministers appointed to individual jobs is released.

The new House of Commons is going to be a very interesting experience for everyone involved. First we might mention that with a really large majority, the possibility arises of all kinds of factions and groupings with the governing party, leaving apart the payroll vote. The payroll vote is generally of the order of about 100 and this means that five sixths of the much reduced Tory party will have a job shadowing the new government. Many of these shadow ministers will be inexperienced and one wonders what kind of job they will make of opposition. On the other hand, the Select Committees will now be dominated by Labour MPs as the select committees are chosen so that they roughly reflect the House of Commons as a whole. So I imagine that several of the investigations that the Select Committees will now undertake may make many of the ‘great and the good’ who come under the scrutiny of a select committee quake in their boots. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has now, at the eighth attempt, been elected as a Westminster MP and is threatening to do whatever further damage it can to the Tory Party. The Tory party itself is going to have the trauma of selecting yet another leader as Rishi Sunak will only stay on as leader until a successor can be appointed. The mood of the country is rather equivocal because on the one hand there was a massive desire to get rid of the Tories but there is no great love for the Labour Party itself. No doubt, the Labour Party will have a small period of grace but I suspect that goodwill towards the new government will very soon evaporate. The Labour Party, if it is sagacious, will attempt to explain to the electorate what a terrible mess has been bequeathed to them by the outgoing government now that they have had a chance to examine the books in great detail. But almost certainly, the new government will not be able to satisfy the many expectations for a radical change that many people are expecting. The reaction of business and the stock exchange itself will be interesting to observe once the markets fully reopen next Monday but the Labour Party has, so far, done a reasonable job in persuading the business community, that they can make a better job of managing the economy after the damage that ex-Prime Ministers such as Liz Truss managed to achieve. And, of course, how will the new government fare in relationships with the USA particularly is Trump is re-elected?

And so, at long last, election day has dawned at last. Having said, I was mildly surprised that no comment of an overtly political nature was allowed by OFCOM rules on Election day itself, to try to ensure a completely level playing field across all the political parties. There is an argument which is gaining currency today, though, that if there is an evident interference for example through Russian ‘bots’ to display fake news about the election, then the BBC and other broadcasters should be allowed an instant rebuttal of the same. I had always thought that the newspapers, in particular, used Election Day itself to urge the electorate to use their votes in a particular way but it looks as though the application of the OFCOM rules means that all overt political comment must cease by the end of the eve of the election itself, only dates from a few years ago. This has led to a situation in which the really dramatic eve-of-election poll as published by YouGov last night can only have the most limited of impact. This particular poll is predicting the biggest majority for any political party since 1832 (about which claim I am sceptical by the way) but I suppose that any discussion of this result must be squeezed in the time slot between publication on the one hand (5.00pm on Sky News) and the timing when the Ofcom rules comes in to effect which I think is polling day itself i.e. 12.00 midnight. So the impact of any poll is subject to a seven hour window if my reading of the situation is correct. However, I have trawled the web using American search engines and they are reporting polls predicting a Labour victory in the greatest of details. There is even one detailing the seats in my immediate locality which are likely to ‘go red’ including the neighbouring towns of Redditch, Stourbridge and Worcester whilst Bromsgrove itself is predicted to be (just) a Conservative hold. David Dimbleby is reported as saying that election night exit polls are the worst thing ever to befall elections as all of the fun and excitement is removed from the night itself. I am inclined to agree but only partially – the pleasure that remains is seeing hated figures of the party that one did not vote for gradually losing their seats one by one throughout the night. It seems as though the whole world is waiting to see Liz Truss bite the dust but this might not happen and is scheduled for very late at night (i.e. about 4.00am) for when it is likely to happen.

Thursdays are my shopping day but when the carers arrived, Miggles our adopted cat, spied his opportunity and speeds like a greased lightning though the opened front door. So a topic of conversation with one of the carers this morning was household pets and I asked if she had any. The list started off with two dogs and then proceeded onto two ferrets, six ducks, one snake.. after this, I rather lost the will to live. I asked the carer if she had a small holding to house these animals but she had not so I have to assume this menagerie is housed within a normal domestic house. After I had got Meg up and I had got her breakfasted, we did not have too long to wait before the (Asian) carer came along to do her sit with Meg whilst I go shopping. We got onto the subject of Ravi Shankar and sitar music – Meg had the opportunity to go to see him play in Manchester when we were students but Meg had ‘flu’ at the time (and I scarcely knew Meg) But I do wish I could have known about and seized the opportunity to see Ravi Shankar whilst I could – I am talking about late 1965. So I left the carer and Meg listening to sitar music broadcast on YouTube whilst I went shopping and was amazed to see they had not had too much of it by the time I returned home from my shopping. Then it was a case of a gentle unpacking and more conversations with the carer. I generally ask the question to which I already know the answer, the question being What is your children’s favourite meal? To children of all genders and ethnicities, the answer always seems to be ‘pasta’ and we found the same to be the case when we were having a meal with our Spanish friends in Stratford, as I remember.

The weather is pretty variable today, making it somewhat difficult to ascertain whether or not we should have a walk outside this afternoon and if so, to where? We decided to resolve the situation by treating ourselves to an opera this afternoon and forgetting about a walk altogether. So we are currently listening to a version of Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto‘ with astoundingly good singing. This is a very modernistic production with a minimalist set but very clever use of lighting and a few clever stage props. Now I am a bit divided about this. On the one hand, I do recognise that a minimalist set forces the attention onto the quality of the singing without any distractions, as it were. On the other hand, I am rather a traditionalist. The main scenes are meant to be set in a plush palace on the one hand and a run down inn by the water’s edge on the other and it is rather difficult to imagine these with a minimalist set. Also, whilst the heroine (Gilda) who is Rigoletto’s daughter is meant to be appear young and virginal, the soprano playing the part I suspect is east European but she rather looks as though in a previous career she might have thrown the discus in the reconstructed East Germany as she is so large. I do not intent to detract from the quality of her singing which is divine but opera is visual as well as auditory and one would hope that there is some semblance of connection between the two. Nonetheless, I am really enjoying the singing, conflicting though my emotions might be.

Fascinating things across the Atlantic are about to unfold. All kinds of pressures are being brought upon Jo Biden to persuade him to withdraw as candidate for President but he is receiving support from some quarters. There is a report late this afternoon that if Michelle Obama could be persuaded to stand, she could beat Donald Trump quite easily but she herself has long expressed the desire not to enter party politics. On the other hand, I wonder if the great and the good of the Democratic party could persuade her to stand to save the nation?

Today we woke up to a gloomy day, it having rained during the night which ought to please all of us gardeners. We knew we would have a rather truncated this morning as our hairdresser was due to call around mid morning so we did not have any concrete plans for the morning. Knowing that the hairdresser was scheduled to call around, we utilised one of those ‘dry’ hair washing products that you can utilise when a normal washing is difficult. After the hairdresser called, we had to come to an assessment whether this product had actually worked or not but were only about 50% satisfied with the result. So we resolved to consult with our band of care workers to see if a more normal wash is possible on the days when the hairdresser is scheduled to call. We watched the Politics Today programme on BBC2 where at least one senior Tory, Mel Stride, is conceding that the Tories have probably lost the election and the Tory party needs to reconcile itself to a period of time in opposition. If the Labour party wins by a landslide, which some polls are predicting, then it takes a landslide to get rid of a landslide so it may well be that The Labour party may be able to enjoy two terms in power (and therefore the Conservatives, the similar amount of time in opposition) As over the decades, the Tories have been so often the governing party and the Labour party in opposition, it is an interesting question how far the Tory party can be an effective opposition – it is a role that hardly any of the Tory MPs that remain will have experienced and I suspect that to be cut off from the levers of power and all of the perks that go with it, Opposition might prove to be psychologically very difficult for the modern Tory party. Of course, there will be a change of leader and it will be interesting to see how many of the ‘hard right’ and ‘red wall’ seats survive the election. As most of the more liberal Tories were thrown out of the party by Boris Johnson when they refused to toe the line over Brexit, then what ‘flavour’ of Tory MP remains after the election is a very open question. The care workers were scheduled for a late call tis morning, so Meg and I squeezed in a meal of quiche followed by delicious yogurt before the care workers made their mid-morning call. Then because of scheduling which is all a bit bizarre, they were due to call back within the hour which would have been ridiculous. So after the care workers phoned in to their base, this was re-timed for one hour later which is a bit better for us. Meg and I decided that we would go down into the park for a little afternoon breath of fresh air and so this we did, although at the hour that we went, the park was pretty deserted and we had a fairly quick trip, a drink of cordial and some crunchy bars and then made for home.

Of course, we are very much in ‘the day before voting’ mode all today and the party leaders traditionally call upon their core voters to turn out and vote as well as trying to persuade last minute undecideds. It has emerged this after that ‘The Sun‘ has come out to endorse Labour which is the first since since 2005 i.e. 19 years ago so this is a turn up for the book. Even the ‘Sunday Times‘ was forced to admit, grudgingly at the bottom of the third paragraph of their Leader, that the Labour party ‘deserves to be given its chance’ so this was their endorsement. An election I remember very vividly was the election of October, 1964 which Harold Wilson eventually won with a majority of three. As I was then the office junior and one of my duties was to distribute newspapers around the offices of the Reference Division of the Central Office of Information which was the ministry in which I then worked,I could glance at all of the newspaper headlines and I remember what ‘The Times‘ had to say after 14 years of continuous Tory rule. The feeling then was very much what is the feeling is now i.e. after 14 years it was time for a change. ‘The Times‘ opinion for that crucial election was that the ‘Labour Party’ might be ‘the better but the riskier choice’ Tomorrow, no doubt, I will be able to read what ‘The Times‘ thinks of a similar situation some sixty years later. As it happens, I remember Election Day which I think was on about October 3rd, 1964, very vividly. This is because I had just started work at the Central Office of Information in London a week or so earlier and I was working in the Reference Library (which today would be called the ‘Information Centre’) Our boss actually had a portable radio on a strategically placed desk and we were all theoretically at work but in practice we were avidly listening to the results as they rolled in from the Tory shires all on that Friday afternoon. Immediately after the election of the Labour government, there was immediate speculation against the pound and a massive flight of capital as the government and the Bank of England desperately tried to save the currency with the necessity to undertake a devaluation. I remember that every night as I walked to the Tube Stations the news placards would read ‘Fight to save the £ – Latest’ and they were tense days indeed. The final YouGov projection has just been published by Sky News with the news that the Labour party may have a majority of 212 seats and have the greatest proportion of seats since 1832! I think this is probably an overstatement of the actual result but as I write there are less than 29 hours to go before the exit poll is announced a few seconds after 10.00pm tomorrow night.

We were looking forward to today for two principal reasons. Tuesdays are the day when we meet up with our friends in Waitrose. Also we were looking forward to the journey down the hill using the new wheelchair recently supplied to Meg. As we suspected, the larger wheels at the back (12″ rather than 7″) both made the ride somewhat smoother and also made the negotiation of kerbs somewhat easier as well. We got down the hill in less than 20 minutes so the new chair must have made some kind of impact. But when we got to Waitrose, some kind of domestic engineering crisis had befallen the cafeteria and it was closed until the problem was resolved. We made the best of a bad job and fortunately finding some spare cups in the little bag we carry with us managed to avail ourselves of the free coffee that Waitrose offers to its customers on production of the store card. One of the friendly staff took pity on us and helped us negotiate some special arrangements but we were obliged to sit outside and we had the traffic noise with which to contend. Nonetheless, we had the opportunity for some social contact with each other, not under the best of circumstances and as we were all ready to depart, they got the cafe open again after an obligatory clean down. As the carers were due to make an earlier mid-morning visit this morning, we were obliged to leave a tad earlier than we had intended but still got up the hill in time. Then the carers called and after seeing to Meg, one of them stayed on as it was her Tuesday ‘sitting’ session. I had made Meg some chicken soup as she was complaining of the cold a little and persuaded the carer to have some as well as she had not had any breakfast. Then I went out on the road, as I needed to get some petrol for the mower and get some cash from an ATM. Getting the petrol was straightforward but for the mower, I always buy the highest quality and octane) that there is to reduce the ethanol addition which can absorb moisture and cause problems in petrol mowers. This having been done, I entertained the carer with a bit of my family history (which she was keen to know) and then pressed ahead with our normal Tuesday lunch which is haddock fishcakes and microwaved vegetables. Whilst I had been out, the wheelchair for which I had successfully bid on eBay before I had been informed hat the NHS were going to supply a wheelchair arrived incredibly well packed. I have unpacked this largely but it sill needs the footrests fitting in which may prove a little complicated but we shall see. The wheelchair happens to be exactly the same make and model as the NHS supplied one which is interesting as the manual supplied with the NHS model will cover both machines. The carer helped me to give Meg some lunch although Meg did not seem very hungry today and we did not manage to get much food inside her. After lunch, the weather seemed set fair and I had just bought the petrol I needed, I decided to squeeze in a cutting of the front lawns before the mid afternoon carers arrived. I was praying for them to be late and indeed they were as one of their jobs and schedules had been re-timed. Under the circumstances, though, I was delighted to get the lawns cut and the mower cleaned up before the carers arrived. Incidentally, I always spray the underside of the mower hood with a WD40 preparation and I have started to do this quite liberally as it seems to prevent the grass sticking on subsequent mows and this makes for a smoother and more trouble free mow all round.

Last night after Meg seemed to soundly asleep, I indulged myself a little by watching the last few minutes of the Portugal-Slovenia match in the Euro finals. Normally my sympathies are with the Hispanic teams (including Portugal) but today they seemed to be playing in rather a pedestrian fashion (like England) and the Slovenes seemed to be playing with more spirit and enterprise. So as the extra time progressed, my sympathies switched and now it was time for the penalties.In the penalty shootout, the Portuguese goalie was stupendously good saving each of the first three Slovenian penalties. I do not not think I can ever remember seeing a goalkeeper save three successive penalties before and the penalties were all good shots. But from this point on, Portugal could claim quite an easy victory all, when in all honesty, it looked as though Slovenia had played the better football. I joked with one of the carers today that when England play Switzerland over the weekend, they will probably play the better football and lose rather than playing their normal lack lustre game that they then go on to win.

We now only have a day and half of the election campaign yet to run. I saw a Treasury spokesman banging about tax as usual and their argument was that as Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor had not explicitly ruled out a particular tax then the Labour party must be intending to introduce it. Again, we got the £2,000 per household figure trotted out again together with some tax changes which the Labour party has already ruled out so the Newsnight interviewer was driven in exasperation to accuse the Try Minister of a lie which is a word not to be lightly used these days. There has apparently been an enormous increase in the numbers of postal votes this time around and there is quite an ugly situation in Scotland where postal votes have been sent out in the middle of a holiday period and there is a Royal Mail dispute to complicate matters so it is an interesting question whether these factors bubble away for a bit and then explode after the event, particularly of a seat is won by a handful of votes and the delayed postal vote would have made all the difference. I also think that non-registered voters attempting to vote on Thursday without photo ID may well prove to be quite a big story as the election analysis unfolds.

The day started off gloomy and we knew that we would probably have to stay at home for most of the morning as we anticipated that a wheelchair was due to be delivered to us this morning. After the care workers failed to arrive at the appointed hour, we received a telephone call from the care agency explaining that they were short of staff after a couple phoned in sick. We were offered the option of the manager himself if I were to assist him and since this constituted a wait of only half an hour instead of an hour and a half, this we readily accepted. So the care agency manager and I worked as a team and just before our tasks were completed, the wheelchair arrived. We had a minimal amount of unpacking of it to do and so we could hoist Meg into it. At first sight, it is probably going to prove to an excellent improvement for us. The diameter of the wheels on our current wheelchair is 7.5″ whereas the rear wheels on the newly supplied chair are 12.25″ which is some 60% bigger. This will mean that apart from the extra resilience of the tyres, the larger rear wheels will make the job of mounting/dismounting kerbs when they have not been dropped sufficiently so much easier. In addition, the new chair came complete with a pressure cushion and this lifts Meg that much higher on the ground, thus helping to keep her feet clear of obstacles. So far, we have only wheeled Meg around the house but tomorrow being a Tuesday will probably be the acid test when I wheel Meg down for one of our weekly coffee meetings. The chair is made locally and the materials used in its construction seem quite high so I am very grateful to the powers that be for supplying it. I have actually checked out that this is Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust which is evidently funded by the NHS and not by local authorities. However, I do intend to send a note of thanks to our doctor whose completion of the form evidently hit ‘all of the right buttons’ because once the form had been submitted, then the wheelchair was supplied relatively quickly. I had heard horror stories of a wait of up to 18 weeks and hence I am more delighted that the service has been provided so quickly. Having said that, I have found motorists and pedestrians to be remarkably accommodating when they have observed me pushing Meg in her conveyance up and down the local highways. I suspect that this tolerance is much more than might be accorded to young mothers with children in buggies as the children are so much lighter and the mothers so much younger and fitter than applies to Meg and myself.

Last night there was much excitement, if that is the right word, over the England v. Slovakia football match. Slovakia scored a goal in the first half whilst the performance of England, a step up from the recent past but not a great deal better, was generally regarded as dire. Six minutes of injury time were to be played and the commentators were all gloomily discussing the consequences of an early England exit from the competition having been well and truly beaten. For some reason, the England players do not seem to run at the competition and I wonder if they are really frightened by them all or do not have the skills or the speed to get past them. The English players constantly pass the ball sideways to each other in their own third of the pitch and progress up the pitch is painfully slow. The whole nation was just about reconciled to a humiliating England defeat when the almost local (Stourbridge) hero, Jude Bellingham, produced the most stunning overhead kick to score an equaliser. Then injury time was played and the England captain, Harry Kane, scored the winning goal with a header one minute into injury time. So we had the extraordinary spectacle that England has scarcely had a shot on goal for some 95 minutes and then produce two goals in two minutes to win the match. So the speculation that the England manager must go immediately was stilled for the moment but will no doubt start all over again at the point at which we will get beaten by the Swiss when we meet them in a few days time. This is must have been one of the greatest ‘get out of jail’ performances of all time and one wonders how long the England team can survive if they play as poorly as this.

The United States Supreme Court, stuffed full of Trump nominees have issued a ruling concerning whether Trump should be immune from prosecution for the attacks upon the Capital building after the last election. The Court have made a ‘non-decision’ which is actually a decision saying that Trump would be immune from prosecution for ‘official’ acts but not for ‘unofficial’ acts and the case is to be sent back to lower courts. This case will not get through the system before the presidential elections in November and has therefore played right into Trump’s hands. If re-elected and a further court case is decided against him whilst he is in office, he will just dismiss the charges against him. The separation of powers (between the executive, legislative and judicial arms of government) are flagrantly not working in the American constitution as they should and it looks as though, once again, Trump has stared into the abyss and got away with it.

Beth Rigby, the renowned Sky News political correspondent, is arguing that the shape of the final results on Thursday will very much depend on how the recently formed Reform party fare. They are currently only some 4 percentage points behind the Tories (at 16% whilst the Tories are on 20%) but, of course, it all depends on how the vote pans out in individual constituencies around the land. There are only two and a half days left now for any bombshells to land and I am waiting for them to be launched shortly.

Today being a Sunday, we enter into ‘Sunday’ routines which means watching the politics programmes from about 8.30 onwards. In theory, today being the last Sunday before the election, Laura Kuenssberg was interviewing the Prime Minister and although she kept pressing him about the hurt felt after years of falling living standards, we got the familiar litany of dire warnings about what would happen were a Labour government to be elected. I really do feel that the Tories whole mindset seems to be that they have a God-given right to be elected and anything else is regarded as an abomination of nature rather than a normal ‘cycle’ of politics. When I was first employed o the scientific civil service, my then boss seemed to have the most ‘non-politically’ partisan view of politics because he seemed to regard each ‘side’ as though they were football teams. I can now almost hear him now saying ‘Well that lot have had a go for a number of years so let the other lot have a go for a change’ Having said that, I do feel that the British populace as a whole is less knowledgable about the political process than many of our continental neighbours. In one of the community studies which was required reading when I was a student, there was a sign in a pub mentioned with great approbation declaiming ‘No Politics, No Religion – no good friends all!’ Although this is a gross generalisation, I do have impression that with a more developed cafe culture, our continental neighbours can and do have more sophisticated political discussion without falling out with each other. I think that part of the problem is that the British electorate are kept quite ill-informed about the political process and are quite frankly bored with the very mention of politics. In days gone by, there used to be an element of the school curriculum called ‘Civics’ but this has long since disappeared. I think that successive governments have strongly discouraged any kind of political education in schools and colleges whatsoever fearing that the young might be subject to ‘political indoctrination’ by idealistic young teachers. As part of the Business Studies curriculum in my academic career, we often had a subject called something like ‘British Political Landscape’ in which we would teach subjects like how Parliament works in passing legislation, what is meant by the ‘separation of powers’ and so on. I found the reaction of my students to be interesting. At first, they argued that they knew hardly anything and cared even less and they were not looking forward to this part of he curriculum. But once exposed to some elementary facets of the British Constitution, their eyes were opened (at least a little) and they did start to tell me that they quite enjoyed the subject if only because something that was a totally closed book to them was gradually opened and they used to tell me that the more they knew, the more they felt that they wanted to know. But of course, we have the best part of four more days to live through before voting starts next Thursday. The critical moment in the forthcoming week is going to be a few seconds after 10.00pm next Thursday night when voting is officially closed and, by tradition, the very first exit polls about the forthcoming result can be published. These exit polls are pretty accurate as a whole because the sample is large and the question asked is not how do you intend to vote but rather how did you actually vote (or not vote) in today’s election.

Tomorrow, I am looking forward to the delivery of a wheelchair for Meg and naturally I am hoping that it may make the journey down into town somewhat smoother for Meg. Of course, it is always possible that whatever is delivered is less suited for this purpose than the very basic wheelchair that we purchased months ago and have been using ever since. We have to make ourselves stay in all morning until it is delivered some time in the morning between 9.30 and 12.30. I have also been thinking about what a potential solution might be to the absence of a pavement linking the road where we live to the main Kidderminster Road. Nothing is going to happen for quite some time because the relevant County Counsellor is on holiday for the next two weeks and even if she were to take action immediately upon her return (which I doubt) then she would probably request that the equivalent of the Borough Engineer’s department make an assessment of the situation. In the meantime, though, I think I may have come up with a solution to the problem which would not involve narrowing the road or taking land from neighbour’s fronting the roadway, each of which is not practicable. In the carpark adjacent to our local Waitrose, there are dedicated ‘walking zones’ in which once one has parked one’s car one can walk to the store presumably in relevant safety. Borrowing from this idea, I wonder whether a pedestrian or cycle ‘pathway’ could be marked out on the road so that we could walk in this area when necessary and passing motorists could intuit that they were meant to give us a wide berth. As a kind of thought experiment, I wondered that if we had brought the problem of a lack of safe walking space to the relevant authorities and we were injured by a passing motorist, whether the local authority could be fined a massive amount for failing to ensure our safety – particularly as Meg is a wheelchair user. We will have to see what happens and I do not intend to bring this solution to the attention of the pavement/road authorities immediately as I want to see what their solution might happen to be.

For lunch today, we had a slightly experimental meal which turned out fine. I had bought some chicken breast pieces and these I seared off and then immersed in a korma sauce before serving with a baked potato and some broccoli. This made for a very nice meal but it would have been improved if I had not left the korma sauce on a little too long and it was in danger of burning and sticking onto the pan.

The day dawned bright and clear but the carers were a little delayed this morning which meant that we had to get breakfast over in a bit of a rush before we started our journey down into Waitrose where we met up with our normal ‘gang’ of three old ladies making five of us altogether. Rather cheekily, I asked one of the three who I know is a fairly keen gardener if she had any mint growing in her garden and could she possible let me a small root of it. Although mint is meant to grow absolutely prolifically, it never seems to do so in my garden so I was hopeful that if I had a root of mint it would spread. Our friend not only brought me quite a large root of mint in a pot but she also made a present (to all three of us) of some strawberries grown in her garden as she did last year. These gifts were gratefully received and we will certainly have the strawberries for our tea this evening.

I was up a bit in the middle of the night and engaged in a couple of things that I would not really have time to do during the day. The first thing was to update my ‘potteries-and-chairs’ website which has photographs of our furniture acquisitions that we have used to populate our Music lounge. This needed some images adding to it and some editing of the content but at the end of the day I have a gallery of the eleven pieces of furniture we have bought and restored over the past few months. I also have a brief description of the ‘provenance’ of each piece so that I am reminded from whence it was bought and some details of its history, if I know it. So this website is now complete as is the complement of furniture to which it relates. The second thing that I did during the night was to do a quick internet search to see who has responsibility for the maintenance of footpaths throughout the borough. I then ascertained the name of our local councillor and wrote him an email complaining that I needed to push Meg in her wheelchair down the roadway of a local road where there is no pavement but which road is heavily populated with traffic as it is a ‘de facto’ ring road. I requested that the local authority take some action to remedy the danger to myself, not to mention other motorists, when they are faced with the obstruction of a wheelchair being pushed down the road. To my amazement, I got a very sympathetic and almost immediate response to my email, sympathising with my current difficulties. But despite what I have read on the internet, I was informed that both the pavements as well as the roadways are the responsibility of the County Council and therefore of the County Counsellor who would be away for the next two weeks. Nonetheless, my email was being forwarded on to her and I shall be fascinated to see what action, if any, will be taken. I have a fair idea that I already know the answer. Because no pavement was provided some twenty years ago when the houses were built, then the only solution would be to narrow the road (which is not going to happen) or to take a slice off the front of other people’s gardens (which is also not going to happen). So my best guess is that the County highways engineering staff may make an on-site assessment and will conclude that there is nothing that we can do and we have to grin and bear it. But, on the other hand, if a disabled person is pushed down the centre of a busy highway because the local authority cannot or has not provided a pavement, will they be liable for massive damages in the event of a subsequent accident or injury? I have no great hopes in this direction but it is still quite a fascinating exercise to see what excuses the county council will provide to excuse their own deficiencies. But the county counsellor involved also has responsibility for ‘welfare issues’ as well as being a cabinet member, so i wonder what will emerge (but I am not holding my breath)

Once we had returned from our trip out this morning, I contemplated what should be prepared to accompany the quiche I had scheduled for our lunch today. In the end, I boiled a large potato cut into small pieces and then made a salad which turned out to be quite a wise choice given that I did not really want to have a cooked meal today. After we had our lunch and done the washing up, I took Meg outside and I busied myself planting out the root of mint which our friend had so kindly donated to me. I am resolved to water it daily until it establishes itself- to encourage it to get established, I cut the shrub down to two thirds of its original size and hope that this and a bit of TLC will suffice to get it going.

After lunch today, Meg and I listened to ‘Any Questions‘ and its companion programme ‘Any Answers‘ on BBC Radio4 and, of course, this is the last edition before voting day next Thursday. There seemed to be a view shared by the audience members and also by many of the panellists that a six weeks election campaign was too long given that in the past, we have managed a General Election quite happily after a three week campaign. But this time around , there still seem a very large number of undecideds who do not feel inclined to vote for either of the two major political parties. I think that the proportion intending to vote for the two large parties is at an all time low and of I had to make some predictions for next Thursday, it would be that turnout will be down (on there might seem to be little point in voting if the outcome already seems clear) and/or that the smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Reform might receive more votes than they anticipated at the start of the campaign.

Today being a Friday, we had no particular commitments or engagements in mind. Last night, after Meg had been put to bed we decided to put our little TV into position so that Meg and I could both view the last ‘Question Time‘ before the election. To make myself comfortable, instead of sitting on the chair by Meg’s bedside, I lay on the ‘Z’ bed I have besides Meg’s bed but then I promptly fell asleep whilst Meg stayed awake for the whole of the broadcast which was not quite what I had either intended or desired. Then I was up in the middle of the night making Meg comfortable but at least we got off to a proper sleep by about 12.30 I think it was. This morning, our son called around and knew of my computer problems with the laptop in our Music Lounge. Instead of looking for a non-existent WiFi switch on the externals of the machine, he decided to go down a very different diagnostic route. By going through the Settings and then the Device Manager, he determined that the WiFi had been turned off for some obscure reason – but by turning it on, the whole laptop and the WiFi was made operative and thus was restored to rude health. After breakfast, I made a quick phone call to the Wheelchair service to check whether the model being delivered next Monday will be ‘fit for the purpose’ of conveying Meg over the bumpy pavements in our locality and received a rather ambiguous response so we shall just have to be patient and wait and see what turns up after the weekend. I sent a quick text to our University of Birmingham friend to ascertain whether we might meet for coffee this morning. We decided after a quick telephone call to meet in the park so I left a few minutes early to go down the hill in order to get supplied with our copy of the daily newspaper before we turned back up the hill to occupy our normal park bench before we had a rendez-vous with our friend. Although I had judged that Meg might be warm enough with a gilet to go down to the park, a cool wind got up in the middle of the morning and Meg was getting a little cold so I had to resolve to make sure that Meg always had enough warm clothing to cope with exigencies of this kind. When we returned home, I revived Meg with some chicken soup and the carers made their late morning call. Then I set about getting the lunch prepared which was a (bought) fish pie and some spring greens to accompany it. After lunch and having consulted the television schedules, I noticed that Lawrence of Arabia was being broadcast, seemingly for hours on end. The interesting thing about the film was there seemed to a shot of Lawrence on his camel in the desert after which I dozed for a few minutes but when I made myself fully conscious again, the film was still showing Lawrence on his camel in the desert – I have a shrewd suspicion that if I were to doze even more, the scene would be absolutely the same when I woke up.

All elections campaigns have their moments and one of them arose today. Without making a politically partisan point, I think that the government rather rushed through the election arrangements and had to abandon several important pieces of legislation (one of the most important measures to be lost was the loss of the bill to prevent no-fault evictions) This meant that all the political parties had to have a massive scramble to get all of their candidates in place to fight the forthcoming election. Given this mad rush, which was quite avoidable if the whole timing of the election had been handled in a more sensible way, then it was almost inevitable that some candidates would be selected without the necessary prior checking and therefore some manifestly unsuitable candidates would find their way through onto the party lists. This happened in both the Labour and the Tory party but in the case of the Reform (ex-UKIP) party with no proper party machinery in place then the selection of candidates was anything but thorough. Nigel Farage tried to claim that the firm hired to do the vetting of prospective parliamentary candidates had not done their job with due diligence but I am not sure that this explanation will really wash. So yesterday and today, we have a videoclip emerging that shows a Reform party activist suggesting that the British army be issued with rifles who could then use any incoming asylum seekers as ‘target practice’ whilst they were coming ashore. The same activist also used a vile racist slur aimed at the Indian parentage of the prime minister who has actually responded in the strongest terms. The prime minister said he hated repeating the bigoted insult directed at him by a supporter of Nigel Farage’s party, but said as a father of two daughters it was important to challenge ‘corrosive and divisive behaviour’. The comments were so evidently racist that the Essex police are now investigating the whole episode to see if a criminal offence has been committed. On the other side of the Atlantic, we have seen the first televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, called at Jo Biden’s request. Jo Biden apparently performed so disastrously in this televised debate that the Democrats are in absolute despair and are wondering whether it is possible, even at this very late stage, for Jo Biden to be persuaded to withdraw. Actually, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump have been officially endorsed as their respective party candidates and so the Democrats are urgently considering the options that they have to make sure that Joe Biden does not actually become their candidate. Because of their party rules, it may be impossible to replace Joe Biden but one pollster has argued that the Democrats have five candidates each one of whom was capable to defeating Donald Trump. This particular story will certain run and run in the days ahead.

Today seemed to be one of those action packed days what with one thing or another. Last night, both Meg and I enjoyed a good night’s sleep – as Meg was naturally tired when the carers put her to bed last night, there was no need to deploy the ‘TV’ solution of keeping her entertained for an hour or so before she eventually settled down. Tonight, though, is the last ‘Question Time’ before the election next Thursday and so this might be particularly valuable to listen to, if only to hear the audience reaction to the nostrums of the politicians. Today, though, after Meg was up and breakfasted, we enjoyed a ‘sit’ session with a carer she knows quite well, whilst I went off to do our weekly shopping. The carer and I helped to unpack things and put them away at the end of her shift and then it was time to think about lunch, I fried up some onions, peppers, petit pois and fragments of beef, before putting them into some onion gravy that I had already prepared and served on a bed of rice. Whilst I was preparing the meal and as we were eating it afterwards, Meg and I stumbled across the second half of the film ‘Sink the Bismarck’ which was a classic black and white war film made in 1960. I would have seen this film for the first time soon after it was made as the boarding school I attended typically had a film each Sunday evening. The interesting thing about this film was it was advertised as a ‘fact based’ film and it did seem more like a documentary than a classic war film. What I found particularly poignant, was the reaction of the English crew when the Bismarck was first located, then attacked and then sunk. When the ship sank, there was no great celebration but a feeling of sadness – after all, in a conflict of this nature, it could have them that perished. I suppose that as the film was made only fifteen years after the end of the war, there were all kinds of details from people’s memories of the event that could be incorporated into the film. So there was no great celebration and one has to contrast this with the sinking of the ‘Belgrano’ in the Falklands conflict which was greeted with the one lone headline in one of the redtop newspapers of ‘Gotcha!’ Around lunchtime, I received two phone calls, each one of them welcome. The first was from the Wheelchair service who had informed us by letter that our request for a wheelchair had been submitted on a form filled in by one of the GPs and was receiving consideration. So a wheelchair should be arriving some time on Monday morning and although it seems churlish to look a gift horse in the mouth, I need to check with the service that the wheelchair will be sufficiently robust to cope with the now notorious Bromsgrove pavements.The second phone call was from the specialist nurse who looks after Meg and I and who is always available for consultation in the event of an emergency. This nurse is both kindly and incredibly supportive and tends to act as an advocate for us when we need to navigate some of the intricacies of the care system. She is due to pay us a visit on 1st August and although this is some time away, she will try if she can to give us a phone call either once a week or once a fortnight. So I kept her up-to-date with various developments and pleased to report that we are currently on a type of plateau as we meet with and try to resolve little niggling problems.

This afternoon, as the weather was fair but a little windy, I managed to locate Meg in the back garden whilst I spread five bags of forest bark type weed suppressing mulch on the principal flower bed outside our kitchen window. I woke up a little ‘achy’ this morning after the gardening exertions of yesterday and the same thing may happen this evening but it is nice to get these little jobs done and to improve our immediate environment whilst we can. Just before we went out, I got an email from the firm who supplied my laptop and to whom I had explained the absence of wifi and internet. I received the advice just to press the ‘WiFi’ button back on again except there isn’t one to be seen. Just to make sure, i consulted the manual for the machine and no wifi button is specified for this particular model although it is quite a common feature on most laptops. So when I get time, I suspect that I need to write another email to the laptop supplier, sending him a pdf of the manual to convince him there is no wifi switch to be turned on and so I am still at a loss to know what to do.

Last night was the last of the debates between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and as might be imagined, Rishi Sunak felt that he had nothing to lose. So he came out fighting, using his normal attack lines which was taxation on the one hand and immigration on the other. The absolute perfect irony about all of this is that immigration and levels of tax are at an all time high under the present government so one is tempted to utilise the expression of ‘pot calling the kettle black’. The vultures are already circulating over not, as yet, politically dead career of Rishi Sunak. Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker will launch a bid to become leader of the Conservatives should they lose the election on 4 July as expected, it is understood. Steve Baker was the well known vociferous supporter of Brexit and achieved some prominence in helping to engineer the downfall of Theresa May as Prime Minister. But there are several other ‘big Tories’ who are covertly campaigning already to replace Sunak – provided, of course, that they do not lose their seats in the first place.